Max Ajl: The great Martiniquean poet Aime Césaire saw quickly and presciently the uses and misuses to which Europe and the U.S. were putting the acts of the Nazis. In 1950, Césaire argued in A Discourse on Colonialism that those crimes were “colonialist procedures” visited upon Europe. But it was the location and not the act that was the transgression. The issue was that the Nazis had broken the shop-window of European humanism and laid bare what lay behind it. Césaire suggested that to build a mausoleum only big enough for the memory of Jewish suffering and of Nazi crimes did not represent a real reckoning with European history. To set up a memorial only for Jewish victims could suggest that only Jews had been victims. It represented one more colonial procedure of refusing to solve “the problems it creates,” and of choosing to “close its eyes to its most crucial problems,” branding Europe, as Césaire did, “decadent” and “stricken.”
As he continued, “So-called European civilization … as it has been shaped by two centuries of bourgeois rule, is incapable of solving the two major problems to which its existence has given rise: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem.” The colonial problem, of course, was a problem of racism.
Finkelstein is clear that the Nazi holocaust belongs to the same family of crimes as the U.S. crimes against the Vietnamese and Native Americans. In raising reparations of many kinds within the same frame, he brings together Black suffering, indigenous genocide, Nazi crimes and U.S. war-making abroad. More here.