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ABSTRACT
Using a comparative lens, this article explores patterns and crimes of empire, uncovering long-hidden continuities of extreme imperial-colonial violence. Specifically, it looks at five seemingly discrete (yet linked) historical episodes (in both fascist and non-fascist states) - across a long historical trajectory from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. This article argues that, seen in a comparative light, fascist extermination is best conceived as an exacerbation of a genocidal pattern inherent in Western civilization. It also argues that these historical examples demonstrate the unexpected and unsettling continuities of imperial-colonial violence and crimes of empire, in both discourse and praxis - linking histories often thought of as totally unrelated. Finally, it suggests that American westward expansion, the brutal treatment of American Indians, and the settler colonial trope of ‘Indian wars’ were used as inspiration, justification, legitimation, and/or a model by other like-minded imperialists from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Carroll P. Kakel, III is a research historian and Lecturer in Modern History at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Liberal Arts. He teaches and writes history from imperial, global, and transnational perspectives. He is the author of two books: The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and The Holocaust as Colonial Genocide: Hitler’s ‘Indian Wars’ in the ‘Wild East’ (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). He obtained an MA in Holocaust Studies (2004) and a PhD in Modern History (2009) from Royal Holloway, University of London.
Notes
1 David Day, Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 3, 5–6, 8, 182.
2 Peter Iadicola, “Controlling Crimes of Empire,” in “Resistance to State Crime: Post-Conflict Justice Modalities,” special issue, Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, and World Order, vol. 37, no. 2 (2010): p. 98.
3 Wars of aggression are wars that violate the territorial integrity or political independence of other nations or states. See Peter Iadicola, “The Centrality of the Empire Concept in the Study of State Crime and Violence,” in William J. Chambliss, Raymond Michalowski, and Ronald C. Kramer, (eds.), State Crime in the Global Age (Devon: Willan Publishing, 2010), p. 34.
4 The precise definition of genocide is, of course, a matter of intense debate among scholars, policymakers, and human rights advocates. Following Raphael Lemkin’s original 1946 definition, I understand genocide, simply put, as the “criminal intent to destroy or cripple permanently” a group of human beings. See Raphael Lemkin, “Genocide as a Crime under International Law,” The American Journal of International Law, vol. 41, no. 1 (1947): p. 147. It is, very much, a form of warfare against unarmed civilians. It includes immediate death from direct methods of killing such as mass shooting, gassing, or bombing, as well as slow death from indirect methods of killing such as starvation, malnutrition, exposure, exhaustion, and disease. Perpetrators can demonstrate a specific intent to destroy a target group in whole or in part. They can also demonstrate a knowledge-based intent. Under this understanding, even if the perpetrators do not set out to kill the victims, their actions or policies are considered intentional, nonetheless, if the perpetrators could have reasonably expected that these actions or policies would result in widespread civilian deaths. For an especially informed and up-to-date discussion of the evolution of the concept of genocide, see Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction. 3rd ed. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), pp. 11–51.
5 Following the sociologist Martin Shaw, ethnic cleansing serves as genocide’s territorial and spatial dimension. It is one of the methods of genocide (rather than a separate category). Martin Shaw, What is Genocide?, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), pp. 81–83.
6 Iadicola, “The Centrality of the Empire,” p. 33.
7 For a study that shows “how genocides can result from the normal functioning of Western civilization,” see Christopher Powell, Barbaric Civilization: A Critical Sociology of Genocide (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2011). As Powell carefully and rightly notes, “Not every genocide has resulted from Western civilization, nor is this civilization unique in producing genocides.” Powell, Barbaric Civilization, p. 3.
8 Frederick Jackson Turner, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays, with commentary by John Mack Faragher (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 31–3, 60.
9 Ibid., p. 230.
10 Quoted in Alan E. Steinweis, “Eastern Europe and the Notion of the ‘Frontier’ in Germany to 1945,” Yearbook of European Studies, vol. 13 (1999): p. 61.
11 Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 64.
12 Steinweis, “Eastern Europe,” pp. 57, 61. For more on the Ratzel-Turner dialogue, see Jens-Uwe Guettel, “From the Frontier to German South-West Africa: German Colonialism, Indians, and American Westward Expansion,” Modern Intellectual History, vol. 7, no. 3 (2010): pp. 524–5, 535, 539.
13 Quoted in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), p. 96, emphasis added.
14 Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 15.
15 Alan Taylor, “Land and Liberty on the Post-Revolutionary Frontier,” in David Thomas Konig, (ed.), Devising Liberty: Preserving and Creating Freedom in the New American Republic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 85.
16 Bruce Lenman, Britain’s Colonial Wars, 1688–1783 (Harlow: Longman, 2001), p. 230.
17 Quoted in Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, The American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 133.
18 Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America 1500–2000 (New York: Viking Penguin, 2005), pp. x–xi, xiii.
19 Quoted in Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 248.
20 Quoted in Joyce Appleby, Thomas Jefferson (New York: Henry Holt, 2003), pp. 108–9.
21 Quoted in Theda Purdue and Michael D. Green, The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears (New York: Viking Penguin, 2007), pp. 125–6.
22 Quoted in Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier of the American West 1846–1890 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), p. 63.
23 Quoted in Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), p. 283.
24 Quoted in Francis Paul Prucha, (ed.), Documents of United States Indian Policy, 3rd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), pp. 102–3.
25 John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 21, 201.
26 Russell Thornton, “Population History of Native North Americans,” in Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel, (eds.), A Population History of North America, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 9–50.
27 Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History, 228. During the Philippine–American War (1899–1902), when anti-imperialists in Congress charged that US subjugation of the Filipinos was a crime, Lodge forthrightly responded that if that was true, “then our whole past record of expansion is a crime.” Quoted in Walter L. Hixson, American Settler Colonialism: A History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 171, emphasis added.
28 Quoted in Richard H. Immermann, Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Ben Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 142, emphasis added.
29 W. G. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism 1894–1945 (London: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 7.
30 Sandra Wilson, “The Discourse of National Greatness in Japan, 1890–1919,” Japanese Studies, vol. 25, no. 1 (2005): pp. 35–51.
31 Quoted in Akira Iriye, Pacific Estrangement: Japanese and American Expansion, 1897–1911 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 44.
32 Hyung Gu Lynn, “Malthusian Dreams, Colonial Imaginary: The Oriental Development Company and Japanese Emigration to Korea,” in Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen, (eds.), Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projectss, Practices, Legacies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), p. 25. On Korea, also see the important landmark study: Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).
33 Quoted in Mark R. Peattie, “Japanese Attitudes Toward Colonialism, 1895–1945,” in Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie, (eds.), The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 89.
34 James Bradley, The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War (New York: Back Bay Books, 2009), pp. 217–52, 330–1.
35 Holger H. Herwig, The Demon of Geopolitics: How Karl Haushofer “Educated” Hitler and Hess (Lanham: Roman & Littlefield, 2016), pp. 17, 31–2, 157.
36 Sidney Xu Lu, “Colonizing Hokkaido and the Origins of Japanese Trans-Pacific Expansion, 1869–1894,” Japanese Studies, vol. 36, no. 2 (2016): pp. 260, 262.
37 On the frontier development of Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido, see Katsuya Hirano, “Settler Colonialism in the Making of Japan’s Hokkaido,” in Edward Cavanagh and Lorenzo Veracini, (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), pp. 327–38.
38 Ibid., p. 332.
39 Jinhee Lee, “‘Malcontent Koreans (Futei Senjin)’: Towards a Genealogy of Colonial Representation of Koreans in the Japanese Empire,” Studies on Asia, vol. 3, no. 1 (2013): p. 138 36, p. 143.
40 Wilson, “The Discourse of National Greatness in Japan,” pp. 38, 45, 48.
41 George Steinmetz, “Imperialism or Colonialism? From Windhoek to Washington, by Way of Basra,” in Craig Calhoun, Frederick Cooper, and Kevin W. Moore, (eds.), Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power (New York: New Press, 2006), pp. 141–2.
42 Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism: A Short History, trans. Sorcha O’Hagan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 1, 3.
43 Quoted in Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 192.
44 Quoted in Jens-Uwe Guettel, German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism, and the United States, 1776–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 2.
45 Ibid., pp. 1–2, 122–3.
46 Dominik J. Schaller, “From Conquest to Genocide: Colonial Rule in German Southwest Africa and German East Africa,” in A. Dirk Moses, (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), p. 297.
47 Conrad, German Colonialism, pp. 38–42.
48 Dominik J. Schaller, “Genocide and Mass Violence in the ‘Heart of Darkness’: Africa in the Colonial Period,” in Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 345–64.
49 Jürgen Zimmerer, “The Birth of Ostland Out of the Spirit of Colonialism: A Postcolonial Perspective on the Nazi Policy of Conquest and Extermination,” Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 39, no. 2 (2005): pp. 208–11.
50 Jürgen Zimmerer, “War, Concentration Camps, and Genocide in South-West Africa: The First German Genocide,” in Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller, (eds.), Genocide in German South-West Africa: The Colonial War of 1904–1908 and Its Aftermath, trans. E. J. Neather (London: Merlin Press, 2008), p. 59.
51 Benjamin Madley, “From Africa to Auschwitz: How German Southwest Africa Incubated Ideas and Methods Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe,” European History Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 3 (2005): pp. 429–64.
52 For support for this view, see Jürgen Zimmerer, “Colonialism and the Holocaust: Towards an Archeology of Genocide,” in A. Dirk Moses, (ed.), Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), p. 67.
53 Herwig, The Demon of Geopolitics, p. 144.
54 Friedrich Hossbach, “Hossbach Memorandum,” 10 November 1937, Minutes of the Conference in the Reich Chancellery, 5 November 1937, reprinted in Max Domarus, Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations 1932–1945—The Chronicle of a Dictatorship, Volume Two: The Years 1935–1938 (1962; Wauconda: Bolchazy-Carducci, 1990), pp. 962–72.
55 Like historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki, I understand fascism as a modern global phenomenon, focused on a basic compatibility between the Italian, Japanese, and German historical experiences. And like Yoshiaki, I emphasize the central role of imperialism and empire in the making of fascism and World War II, a war whose origins are best understood in the broader, longer-term context of “competing imperialisms.” See Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Grassroots Fascism: The War Experience of the Japanese People, trans. Ethan Mark (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), especially Ethan Mark, “Translator’s Introduction: The People in the War,” pp. 1–39.
56 Charles Bright and Michael Geyer, “Where in the World Is America? The History of the United States in the Global Age,” in Thomas Bender, (ed.), Rethinking American History in the Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 81.
57 Christian W. Sprang, “Karl Haushofer Re-examined: Geopolitics as a Factor of Japanese-German Rapprochement in the Inter-War Years,” in Christian W. Sprang and Rolf-Harald Wippich, (eds.), Japanese–German Relations, 1895–1945: War, Diplomacy, and Public Opinion (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), pp. 146–8.
58 Keiichi Takeuchi, “Japanese Geopolitics in the 1930s and 1940s,” in Klaus Dodds and David Atkinson, (eds.), Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 75, 84.
59 Quoted in Francis Pike, Empires at War: A Short History of Modern Asia Since World War II (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), p. 85.
60 Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 4.
61 Sandra Wilson, “The ‘New Paradise’: Japanese Emigration to Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s,” The International History Review, vol. 17, no. 2 (1995): pp. 249–86.
62 Quoted in Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 98.
63 Ibid., p. 105.
64 J. Victor Koschmann, “Constructing Destiny: Royama Masamichi and Asian Regionalism in Wartime Japan,” in Sven Saaler and J. Victor Koschmann, (eds.), Pan-Asianism and Modern Japanese History: Colonialism, Regionalism, and Borders (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), p. 189.
65 Quoted in Bradley, Imperial Cruise, pp. 318–9.
66 On Japan’s fascist empire, see Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie, (eds.), The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
67 On Japanese war crimes during the Asia–Pacific War, see Yuki Tanaka, Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997). For a more recent overview of Japanese wartime brutality in the context of Japanese ideologies of race, see Mark Felton, “The Perfect Storm: Japanese Military Brutality during World War II,” in Cathie Carmichael and Richard C. Maguire, (eds.), The Routledge History of Genocide (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), pp. 105–21.
68 Jones, Genocide, pp. 100–2.
69 Felton, “The Perfect Storm,” p. 107.
70 In 1924, Haushofer visited Adolf Hitler and Rudolph Hess, Hitler’s private secretary, in Landsberg Prison where they were serving time for their part in the failed 1923 Munich putsch. During his visits, Haushofer held “seminars” to “educate” Hitler and Hess in the theories of Lebensraum and geopolitics. Not surprisingly, many of Haushofer’s ideas found their way into a new book titled Mein Kampf (My Struggle), which Hitler dictated to Hess during their Landsberg incarceration. Herwig, The Demon of Geopolitics, pp. 90–102.
71 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999), pp. 139, 286, 304, 646. While not an admirer of contemporary American culture, or of its allegedly Jewish-dominated, liberal political system, Hitler, nonetheless, believed that “the Americans have one thing that is becoming lost to us, a feeling for the wide-open spaces. Hence our longing to extend our space.” Monologue by Hitler, 13 October 1941, quoted in David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2006) p. 293.
72 Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, ed. Gerhard L. Weinberg, trans. Krista Smith (New York: Enigma Books, 2003), p. 152. While Hitler’s Second Book was never published in his lifetime, its content was the basis for many of his speeches in the 1920s and 1930s.
73 Hossbach, “Hossbach Memorandum.”
74 Adolf Hitler, Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944, ed. H. R. Trevor-Roper, trans. Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens (New York: Enigma Books, 2008), p. 353.
75 Quoted in Norman Rich, Hitler’s War Aims, Volume 2: The Establishment of the New Order (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974), p. 327.
76 Hitler’s speech at the Berlin Sportpalast, 18 December 1940, reprinted in Domarus, Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, Volume Three: The Years 1939 to 1940, pp. 2161–71.
77 Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), p. 658.
78 An avid reader of history, Hitler “would turn to historical precedent both for understanding the world and for devising policies for the future.” See Thomas Weber, Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (New York: Basic Books, 2017), p. 85. To be sure, a large, shared Euro-American “colonial archive” was available to Nazi leaders, ideologues, propagandists, and planners. For his own part, Hitler admired the British Empire, envied Mussolini’s modern fascist colonialism, and was inspired by Turkey’s eradication of the Armenians from the Turkish national body. But above all, it was the “North American precedent” – the most successful settler colonial project in history – that was foundational for Hitler’s obsessive spatial fantasies, fantasies that drove the various genocidal projects originating from Hitler’s colonial wars for Lebensraum in Poland and the Soviet Union. For an elaboration of this argument, see Carroll P. Kakel, III, The Holocaust as Colonial Genocide: Hitler’s “Indian Wars” in the “Wild East” (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
79 Hitler, Table Talk, October 17, 1941, p. 55.
80 Ibid., August 8, 1942, p. 469.
81 Quoted in James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), p. 9. This quote is from a 1928 Hitler speech; the “cage” reference is to twentieth-century American Indian survivors of the Indian wars still imprisoned in “cages” on federal Indian reservations.
82 Quoted in Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), pp. 434–5.
83 The phrase is Ian Kershaw’s. See Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (Jerusalem, Yad Vashem: International Institute for Holocaust Research / New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 373.
84 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 254.
85 Father Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
86 Gerlach, The Extermination of the European Jews, p. 3.
87 Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 236–7.
88 Karl Korsch, “Notes on History: The Ambiguities of Totalitarian Ideologies,” New Essays, vol. 6, no. 2 (Fall 1942): p. 3.
89 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944).
90 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951), pp. 123–5.
91 Debates swirl, of course, over exactly how, as well as the degree to which, each of these enablers contributed to the Holocaust’s occurrence. For a discussion of each of these enablers, see the relevant essays in Peter Hayes and John K. Roth, (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). For the debates, see Dan Stone, Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) and Tom Lawson, Debates on the Holocaust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).
92 For support for this view, see Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (London: Allen Lane, 2008), p. 12.
93 Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies, p. 278.
94 For this argument, see Aristotle Kallis, Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe (New York: Routledge, 2009). Also see Aristotle Kallis, “Fascism, ‘License’ and Genocide: From the Chimera of Rebirth to the Authorization of Mass Murder,” in Antonio Costa Pinto, (ed.), Rethinking the Nature of Fascism: Comparative Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 227–70.
95 For sociologist Norbert Elias and other Eliasians, genocide is an aberration, a “local and temporary reversal in the overall forward motion of the civilizing process,” and a product of “decivilizing” or “dyscivilizing” processes. This explanation, as Christopher Powell observes, “ignores entirely the central part that genocide has played in European colonialism.” Powell, Barbaric Civilization, pp. 133–5.
96 The phrase is Aristotle Kallis’; see Kallis, Fascist Ideology, p. 10.
97 Davide Rodogno, Fascism’s European Empire: Italian Occupation During the Second World War, trans. Adrian Belton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 412.
98 Ibid., p. 71.