The Holocaust intensified a colonial ideology the West already practiced elsewhere

Evidence

What I did not expect was to discover that Peck’s opus was a doppelganger story. His thesis is that the dominant story we tell about Hitler and the Holocaust—which treats that frenzy of death as so extreme that it is without historical precedents or antecedents—is flat wrong. Peck argues instead that the Holocaust was an intensified and compacted expression of the very same violent colonial ideology that ravaged other continents at other times. The Nazis then applied that ideology within Europe itself. At the heart of Exterminate All the Brutes is the claim that Hitler—the twentieth century’s most despised villain, and rightly so—was not the civilized, democratic West’s evil “other,” but its shadow, its doppelganger. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 879

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the Mirror World thesis at the center of Klein’s own argument — Hitler as shadow/doppelganger parallels the doubling device she’s using throughout this book. — connects to: Zionism rose on Holocaust sympathy to become a leading Western ideology — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 144
• SEED: The ‘doppelganger history’ angle — reading historical villains as the West’s shadow rather than its other — could anchor an essay on how nations externalize their own genocidal ideologies.