A few weeks ago I watched a Bad Hasbara episode where a guest repeated the summary of Fascism as ‘colonialism and imperialism turned inward’, and more recently I saw somebody paraphrase Aimé Césaire as saying ‘Nazism was nothing but colonialism turned back against the people of Europe.’

For the record, I believe that this summary is well intentioned: it invites us, as whites, to look at the European colonization of the Americas, Oceania, and Afrasia, and interpret it as a protofascist endeavor. (Indeed, the Fascists consciously took inspiration from at least some of this colonization.) Likewise, we can hardly be blamed for perpetuating this conclusion since education under capitalism is so lackluster.

With all of that being said, when we say something like ‘Fascism was just colonialism directed at other whites’, in effect we accidentally end up contributing to Eurocentrism, because Fascism affected Afrasians as well. This is not even getting into how it affected Europeans of color (e.g. Roma) or the argument over whether or not Japanese Imperialism was fascist. Various parts of Afrasia fell under Fascist occupation: Libya, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Vichy West Africa, Syria, and Lebanon, to name only the least arguable examples. Even if we choose to focus exclusively on German Fascism, the Third Reich’s influence in Afrasia was significant:

It is often overlooked that the North African campaign was fought by fascist régimes united not just by a violent vision of racially pure new societies; moreover, a stated wartime objective of Fascist Italy in the African theatre was the conquest of spazio vitale, or “living space”.

The capture of British‐controlled Egypt, Sudan, and Somaliland in the Horn of Africa was intended to complement the existing portions of [Fascist] overseas territory in Libya and Ethiopia and to round them out into a new contiguous fascist empire in which the “New Man” of fascism would emerge, steeled in permanent battle with the desert and the “natives”.¹⁴

The idea was to make Africa a breeding ground for the “white race” and to reverse the declining birthrate that Europe had been experiencing since the late nineteenth century. [Rome’s] vision thus had a major rôle to play in the rejuvenation and racial renewal of the Old Continent, which was supposedly in decline. The Desert War was thus inextricably linked to the imperial expansion of the Axis powers and their murderous biopolitics.

Adopting such a chronologically and geographically expanded perspective forces us to rethink the very definition of the Holocaust. In fact, my research is based on a widened understanding of the phenomenon. For a long time, parts of the research community and a broader public equated the Holocaust with the systematic mass murder of Jewish people that began in 1941. In recent years, however, Jewish historians such as Saul Friedländer and Dan Michman in particular have criticised this view.¹⁵

They argue that the social exclusion, deprivation, and persecution of Jews between 1933 and the beginning of the war have been pushed into the background, although they marked essential steps on the way to extermination.¹⁶

Ultimately, the [Germanic Fascists] were concerned with the complete eradication of Jewry, the people as well as their culture. Cultural, social, and physical extermination are thus to be understood as a unity. Even in the case of North Africa, where there were no mass murders but extensive antisemitic measures, one should therefore speak of the Holocaust, according to Michman.¹⁷

It would indeed be too shortsighted to understand the Holocaust in North Africa solely from its fatal result. Rather, it must be understood as a cumulative process that began with the persecution of Jewish people by the Italian and French states in the late 1930s. Based on extensive archival research, I argue that the exclusion, persecution, and partial murder of the 450,000 Jewish people living in North Africa was strongly influenced by colonial traditions of violence against Arabs and Berbers.

Per Matthew Ghobrial Cockerill:

Thousands of Jews of North African origin who were domiciled in Europe during the war were sent to the extermination camps and murdered alongside European Jews. This is confirmed, for example, by recent researchers who examined the ‘dog tags’ of various Sobibór victims, and matched hundreds of them to Jewish persons of North‐African origin.¹⁰⁶

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

These thousands of Jews were but a few of the hundreds of thousands of Afrasians that the Fascists sacrificed on the altar of capital.

It is both laudable and accurate to invite others to interpret premodern European colonialism as the prototype for Fascism, but implying that it only affected Europeans is misleading at best. The Fascists were adventurer‐conquerors with high ambitions: they wanted empires that could successfully compete with liberal ones such as the British Empire, which extended beyond Europe, hence the presence of Fascism in Afrasia. For the Fascists, conquering Europe was merely the minimum, not the limit.

Further reading: Africa and World War II