In a potent lecture called “The Shoah after Gaza” Pankaj Mishra notes that for “most people outside the West … the Shoah did not appear as an unprecedented atrocity” (you can watch it here or read it in the London Review of Books). Contrary to the West’s typical framing as a gruesome failure of civilized norms or a profound rupture in history, non-Westerners saw Nazi atrocities as continuing a centuries-long pattern. Mishra usefully calls this long-recurring pattern “racial apocalypse”.
Critics like Aimé Césaire recognized the kinship between the genocide of Jews and the standard practices of colonization (“They tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples“). George Orwell saw it, too. His closest experience of totalitarianism was in his five years serving the British Empire as a police officer in Burma. In an article attacking racialism and fearing that winning the war might extend British imperialism, Orwell wrote that “Hitler is only the ghost of our own past rising against us. He stands for the extension and perpetuation of our own methods.”
Mishra detects “a belligerent version of ‘Holocaust denial’ among the elites of former imperialist countries, who refuse to address their countries’ past of genocidal brutality and plunder.” Instead, “popular West-is-best accounts . . . continue to ignore . . . the obvious connection between the imperial slaughter of natives in the colonies and the genocidal terrors perpetrated against Jews inside Europe.”
My own education in Britain provided no insight into the scale of that “imperial slaughter.” In Late Victorian Holocausts, historian Mike Davis reports that the British Empire’s policy-driven famines killed 12 to 29 million people in India—two to five times more than the Nazi Holocaust (four to ten times if scaled for equivalent population; more details on hushed-up liberal holocausts here). Davis writes that the supposedly civilized British rulers imposed the “Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 to outlaw private relief and the only offical aid offered was at horrifyingly harsh hard labor camps (with fewer daily calories than Buchenwald). But that counts only the direct famine deaths. Recent scholarship using overall mortality statistics estimates that British imperial policies in fact led to 100 to 165 million “excess deaths in India between 1881 and 1920.” That’s a Nazi-scale Holocaust every two years for four decades. Belgium’s atrocities in the Congo (with an estimated death toll of 10 million) have been called a “hidden holocaust,” but surely that phrase fittingly describes certain episodes in Britain’s mass-murdering history.
This racial atrocity denialism feeds what Mishra calls “one of the great dangers today”: the hardening of the global “color line.” He quotes W.E.B. Du Bois, who in 1903 declared the racial “color line” the central problem of international politics. More than a century later, that’s still true, but few among Western elites seem aware of just how deeply racial hierarchies are built into the world’s systems. We can sketch global racial resource gaps by comparing World Bank metrics for nations that are majority white against those of color. Citizens of nations of color are 39 times as likely to be in extreme poverty and 12 times more likely to die before the age of five. The average income per capita in nations of color is one-seventh of majority-white nations. Scholar of global inequality Branko Milanović reports that Africa’s median income is only one-twelfth that of the Global North. That’s how much less Black lives matter in terms of tangible resources.
Nor are there credible means to materially make amends for the history of racial apocalypse or to close ongoing racial resource hierarchy gaps. The UN’s Olivier De Schutter says current development methods will take 200 years to end poverty at the $5 per day level. That’s eight generations to the get the largely nonwhite global poor to just 1/8th of what white nations currently consider a minimally acceptable poverty level (the US poverty line is $40 per day). As presently structured, global markets are built to perpetuate these historic disparities. They have no mechanism for closing racial resource gaps. For instance the current “global economic architecture annually extracts $2 trillion of net financial flows from the Global South to the Global North,” writes professor Fadhel Kaboub of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. The UN says “3.3 billion people now live in countries where debt interest payments are greater than expenditure on health or education.”
Colonialism is far from over. It still materially shapes our lives. We who are now blessed with the benefits of rich-nation infrastructures may have had no hand in hideous historic harms that built them, but we nonetheless reap the fruits thereof. Our standard of living is the crystallization of vast past spoils and the ongoing “slow violence” of an international infrastructure of suffering (like the “modern-day slavery” or child labor that mines the cobalt in your smartphone). While we can’t change that history, surely, we must act to stop extending its horrific impact into the future. Unless we vigorously counter the workings of global markets, they will extend implicit imperialism and “computational colonialism” for several centuries.
As we daily see the ghastly cruelties that are being inflicted on civilians and children in Gaza we must also note that our ordinary market-led resource allocation systems are a continuation of colonialism by economic means. The material priorities they enact are so criminally bad that in 2022 there were 150 million kids were stunted by malnutrition. Mishra notes that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights “is suffused with the fear of repeating Europe’s past of racial apocalypse.” Gaza and the global color line are the plainest proofs that the realities of patterns of imperial oppression and racial apocalypse have never disappeared.