One dynamic i really love on Twitter

Person: The Holocaust happened & is bad

Left Twitter: wow i guess you don’t care about other genocides? It’s not even the worst one. Why do you privilege Jewish lives over others? How can you not realize the Holocaust has a history??

The entire discipline of Holocaust Studies & Genocide studies exists to historicize & understand the concrete, embedded historical & social causes at issue here. & understanding the war that killed between 75-100 million people in 6 years historically is a main goal.

Every major scholarly monograph on the Holocaust & fascism for at least 25 years, and in reality going back to the 40s, has discussed its connections to colonialism, imperialism, eugenics, America, nationalism & white supremacy.

It’s one of the most insufferable dynamics of twitter that people on here blame the subject matter at hand or people discussing it for misconceptions they have from simply not having done the homework.

Another irony is that in their attempt to critique the straw man of fascism or the Holocaust being sui generis in history—a position no one who studies it holds—people often posit their own simplifications of historical directionality that end up being more ahistorical.

For example, as ‘Hitler’s American Model’ & much other literature documents, Hitler drew upon Jim Crow laws, & the reservation system. These, however, themselves drew upon concepts & systems that already existed in Europe, & their colonies.

For example, in Europe already existed notions of hierarchies of european culture & religion, Christendom, ‘the great chain of being’, ‘civilization vs. barbarism’ & the notions of anti-Judaism, Islamophobia & the Orient.

In addition, the enclosure movement & the European monarchies, & the way it treated women, marginalized people & the ‘other’ on the exterior, already existed.

It was drawing on the social basis & techniques of enclosure, combined with the ideological resources mentioned before it, which formed the basis for the infernal & brutal apocalypse of settler colonialism & slavery in the Americas.

These, in combination with the specific structures of slavery & settler colonialism —itself which mobilized or erased european linguistic, religious & other ties—became the autonomous structures of white supremacy & colonialism.

These then became re-imported *back* into Europe. Since all of this was going on as the world became globalized, this was already trans Atlantic in nature, and indeed even being exported to the so called ‘periphery’ in other forms.

This occurred for emancipatory counter movements too—for example, the mobilization of the French Revolution’s ideas in the emancipatory Haitian revolution, itself heavily influenced european thinking, as much as they’d like to deny it.

Eugenics was an international movement from its beginning, with sites in Germany, Italy, France, England, the US, and elsewhere, and it was bidirectional in influence, drawing on the above ideological resources plus nascent statistics, biology & historical animal husbandry.

The plantation system—a mode of production based on torture & extractivism—was a combined European heritage of the British, Dutch, French, Spanish, & Portuguese, both at home in forms in Europe, as well as in Africa & the Americas.

Concentration camps are an invention of the British in the Boer War, but predecessors to them, as well as their infernal cousins—Reservations, had existed in various forms since settler colonials began their genocide & imperialist states warred with each other.

The prison system was the product of British, American, & Dutch, ‘reformers’ from Quakers penitentiary to Bentham’s Panipticon, but drew on long-standing ideas in Protestantism & liberalism.

Federici’s work documents the role of women, marginalization, the other, enclosure & extraction in the rise of capitalism & primitive accumulation & its deployment elsewhere.

Mbembe demonstrates how the figure of the slave became the archetypal legal, cultural & ontological basis for the dispossession of workers (in conjunction with the above).

Al McCoy, Catherine Rosenthal, Ed Baptist & Sven Beckert have all documented how the torture, labor management, legal codes, surplus bloodily extracted in plantations & colonial fortresses became the basis for the rise of modern capitalism in its other forms.

The work of M Rueff & D Ramey Barry, in conjunction with the above, documents the extensive relations of slavery to the price & wage system, and to the sheer capital & infrastructure of capitalism.

Anti-Jewish laws existed in almost all the empires & states of Europe, the Mediterranean & surrounding areas for more than two millennia. These took religious, linguistic, political, ancestral, economic & other forms. Most major countries expelled Jewish diaspora at one point.

Co existing with these were Laws, decrees, campaigns & crusades against Islam, heretics, witchcraft, other, ‘barbarians’, nomads. These became formalized with the rise of distinct ethnolonguistic configurations & modern states, what later would be called nation states.

Many versions of these laws existed in the Americas as well, with anti Jewish laws existing in some form in most places until the early 20th century. First religious/cultural & then secular in nature.

When the Nazis came to power, they didn’t have to look far for inspiration, because anti Jewish laws had only been recently lifted in most of Europe over the previous century, many said codes just reinstituted versions of these.

DuBois, for example, credits his experiences in Germany with giving him a more comprehensive view of race as having long-standing roots in Europe, when he saw ancestral, biological & racially based antisemitic prejudices & institutions.

Fanon was prescient & original in his analysis of fascism as colonialism turned inward. He also said that he learned from Cesaird that antisemitism as the kind of first warning of racist prejudices—any european expressing antisemitism intends to come for others as well.

In other words, these things were always already connected through a complex genealogy of global interconnection that resists simple typological reduction or check lists of causal importance.

There’s no rank of primacy & finding the ‘original’ source is all but impossible—what we can say is that white supremacy, settler colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, eugenics, fascism, genocide, enclosure, antisemitism & the rest share a complex long standing history.

These allow us to see both overlaps & distinctions, for example, that Naziism is one form of fascism but does not exhaust it, & similarly, both are subsets of nationalism & white supremacy, but do not exhaust those.

Good historical analysis finds both what is old & new in a particular process & event, both what it shared with other structures & what is distinct about it. Major events & processes are each validly discussed together & apart, depending on the context.

There is no single origin to fascism or the Holocaust or the particular form of the Final Solution. Economic explanations based on resource constraints or profit fail. Purely functionalist accounts of structure fail. Purely intentionalist accounts of ore planning fail.

Instead, the intentionalists are right about the core of the Nazi ideology leading to extermination, though not in a simple or obvious way. The economic accounts get it right that class & capital are important tho usually not in the correct way.

Functionalists & structuralist accounts properly analyze the history, social structures & big factors, at play.

Instead, antisemitism was the resolution to a contradiction of capitalism & the state, that could not bring itself to recognize that the very system it was meant to save was at fault for the problems it analyzed.

Drawing on a past racial, religious, & intellectual history, the figure of the Jew became slotted into this. This ideology met the on the ground realities of war, of the logistics of mass displacement & murder, and of internal colonialism.

The proximate origin of mass killing methods was the gassing of people with disabilities & the mass killing squads on the Eastern Front That were ordered to execute communist & Jewidh people with abandon.

Combined with the realities of internal deportation and the conquering of Poland & parts of Russia, the logistical task became massive. SS officers on the periphery experimented with using gas to kill Jews, and the cheapness & efficiency of the method made its way back up.

This was then generalized as a brutally efficient, and logistically comvenient method of mass extermination in the context of internal deportation, the war, the Ghetto system and so on.

The Holocaust represented a loss of resources, military force & foregone economic opportunities, showing that purely functional reasons fail. Conversely the Nazis had more than enough resources, so war time deprivation doesn’t work as an explanation either.

The Final Solution was sped up, not slowed down, in the waning years of the war, with several million people, of which 2-3 million were Jews, gassed, brutalized & shot to death in an eleven month period toward the end of ‘44, as the implementers were true believers.

There’s no one single cause here, but a complex interplay of co existing ideologies, structures, material realities, people, tactics, histories, and chances all interolaying to produce the outcomes that occurred.

Between 75 and 100 million people lost their lives in WWII in a 6 year period. Where indirect methods or foregone mortality are used as they are for other anthropogenic mass casualty events, the numbers are several orders of magnitude higher.

This was at least 3% of the world’s population, and it was, again, speeding up near the end, both in war dead, civilian deaths & deaths particularly to the genocide.

If WWII had extended as long as wars traditionally did, especially on such a global scale, it’d have quickly risked turning into an existential threat for humanity, not least because of what it produced.

Of course this has a history—a history that is well studied from which we should learn deeply—but there are many reasons it captivates peoples attention. Its scale, magnitude, pace, direction, methods, & rate were, in combination, truly horrifying.