Globalizing technologies is one of the issues that played a role and for example served to intensify relations among Anglo-Americans and indigenous populations. The 1820s and 1830s witnessed the economies and technological transformations that historians have coined the "market economy" and "Industrial Revolution," respectively. The right to compete for advancement in the marketplace became the touchstone of American “freedom" during this period. The 1994 Rwandan genocide finally changed the way in which we think genocide occurs because it encompassed hatreds that rested on colonial resentments, revenge massacres since 1962, assassinations of political elites, gender and reproduction, and mystifications. The latter also had in common with the Nazi Genocide that a leading motive was a conspiracy theory.

The stigmatization of the involvement in the French Revolution of the common people - has endured throughout most of the past two hundred years. Those who stood out against this trend tended to do so, during the nineteenth century, by idealising popular action into that of `the People' viewed at a comfortably abstract distance, and during the twentieth century by adopting a Marxist vocabulary and perspective that in its own way was just as idealising. This focused on the supposedly progressive stance of certain groups, and the importance of perceptibly modern social classes such as wage-earners and property-owning peasants, rather than artisans, sharecroppers or migrant labourers. In immediate political terms, however, the French Revolution was a failure. A decade of conflict, both external and internecine, ended with a lapse into military dictatorship that prolonged the external war through another fifteen years, before returning the throne to the brother of the man who had held it in 1789. Internal and external struggles across that whole generation cost Europe well over a million casualties.

However not only the French Revolution, but colonial encounters as we further will see, up to WWI and the Nazi Holocaust, exemplified how artificial classifications between groups of people, even if their preexisting similarities are clearly more dominant, may be "naturalized" through the use of propaganda. And, as globalizing technologies allow for easier and rapid transmission of misinformation, these "naturalized" perceptions of the "other" group  produce and/or intensify political, social, and economic cleavages which carry the potential for genocide.

In the wake of Michel Foucault, numerous historians have analyzed the process by which, in the course of the nineteenth century, the "punitive festival"of execution  before the French Revolution replaced by the Guillotine, came also the  secret executions, out of sight of the public, and by the rise of the prison as a place of confinement, a laboratory for developing "techniques for the coercion of individuals" unknown up until then." The principle of confinement was now forced upon Western societies. Alongside the introduction of modern prisons came the creation of institutions of forced labor for "lazy vagabonds," the poor, the marginal, and prostitutes-and, at the time of the Industrial Revolution, even for children. During the first half of the nineteenth century Great Britain built a vast network of "workhouses" in which hundreds of thousands of people were interned.

Other changes were also introduced at this time. Barracks, no longer the preserve of an aristocratic military elite, were adapted to the needs of modern armies, the armies of the democratic age, the full power of which had been demonstrated by the mass levying of troops of 1793. Factories, around which new towns were built, sprang up with impressive speed. These prisons, barracks, and factories were all dominated by the same principle of enclosure, the same imposition of discipline upon time and bodies, the same rational division and mechanization of labor, a social hierarchy, and the same submission of bodies to machines. Each of these institutions testified to the degradation of work and bodies that was an inherent feature of capitalism. The entire existence of the Nazi concentration camps in fact was also marked by a constant tension between work and extermination.

Nineteenth century Europe was truly convinced that it was accomplishing a civilizing mission in Asia and Africa. At the time of decolonization, the imperialist culture was stigmatized, violently rejected, and subsequently forgotten; it never became the subject of in-depth analysis, and today remains still largely repressed. Yet the intelligibility of the twentieth century would be considerably enhanced if that amnesia lifted, for then the link between National Socialism and classic imperialism would no longer be obscured as it is at present. To several analysts of the thirties and forties, however, it was certainly perfectly clear. Ernst Junger was reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a Wehrmacht officer in Paris in 1942. Contemporary events conferred a definite topicality upon this tale about the colonization of the Congo, which described "the switch from a civilizing optimism to total bestiality." In his diary, Junger noted that the story's hero had "recognized the strains of the overture to our century."

Also bureaucracy played a crucial, role in the genocide of the Jews of Europe. The extermination process relied on the bureaucracy as its essential organ of transmission and execution. The wissenschaftliche Soldaten or "soldiers of science," as the Third Reich dubbed statisticians, neither conceived nor were responsible for Nazi policy, but they were its instru¬ment.64 It was the bureaucracy that organized the application of the Nuremberg Laws, the census of the Jews and the partial Jews, the expropriation of Jewish property within the framework of measures for the "Aryanization" of the economy, the herding of Jews into ghettos and their subsequent deportation, the management of the concentration camps and the killing centers. This bureaucratic apparatus played an essential role in the implementation of Nazi crimes without ever calling into question the charismatic radicalization of the regime. The mechanism of Nazi decision making underwent major changes during the war, moving from the passing of laws (Nuremberg, 1935) to the issuing of written but not published directives and finally to giving oral orders (for setting the gas chambers in operation). But even when it had abandoned the practice of legal formalization, Nazism still needed a modern, efficient, and rational bureaucracy. Once the killing centers were in operation, following the wave of massacres that had accompanied the blitzkrieg in the East, this army of executives welded to their desks became the heart of the system for destroying the Jews. The propaganda and publicity for the first anti-Semitic measures taken against the Jews (the autos-646, the Nuremberg Laws, the Aryanization of the economy, and the pogroms of the Kristallnacht) were replaced by the coded language of the operations of extermination, which was strictly based on administrative jargon, according to which the murder was referred to as the Final Solution (Endlosung), the executions were "special treatment" (Sonderbehandlung), and the gas chambers were "special installations" (Spezialeinrichtungen). The bureaucracy was the instrument of Nazi violence, and that instrument was an authentic product of what must be called the civilizing process (an expression borrowed from Norbert Elias but with conclusions diametrically opposed to his), which included such features as the sociogenesis of the state, administrative rationalization, state monopoly over the means of coercion and violence, and drive controls. That is why Adorno regarded Nazism as the expression of a barbarity "written into the very principle of civilization.

The string of developments that connect Nazism, two centuries later, to the modern prison promoted by Bentham's "Panopticon" and to the guillotine first used during the French Revolution can now be seen in a different light. Nazi violence integrated and developed the paradigms that underlie those two institutions of Western modernity.

In Principles of Political Economy, Mill stressed that the West Indies were not countries in the Western sense of the term, but "the place where England finds it convenient to carry on the production of sugar, coffee, and a few other tropical commodities." Alexis de Tocqueville, who certainly saluted the aristocratic "pride" of the Indian tribes of America and deplored their massacre, nevertheless declared that they "occupied" that continent but did not "possess" it. They lived amid the riches of the New World like temporary residents, as if Providence had afforded them no more than a "short-term use" of it. Tocqueville went on to say that they were simply there "waiting" to be replaced by the Europeans, the legitimate proprietors of the land.' In his correspondence he suggested that the westward expansion of the United States was a model for the colonization of Algeria,' where "total domination" was the natural goal of the French armies, in comparison to which the destruction of villages and the massacre of their Arab populations were merely "regrettable necessities."

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, a work published in 1951 but containing several texts written during the war years, Hannah Arendt identified European imperialism as an essential stage in the genesis of Nazism. The episodes of nineteenth century colonial violence seemed to her to prefigure the crimes that were perpetrated a century later against Europeans, particularly the Jews, who were the victims of a genocide conceived as an operation of racial purging. In part 2 of her book, titled "Imperialism," she described the nineteenth-century policies of colonial domination as the first synthesis between massacre and administration, a synthesis of which, in her view, the Nazi camps produced the ultimate form. Modern racism (justified in the name of science) and bureaucracy (the most perfect embodiment of Western rationality) originated separately but evolved along parallel lines. They came together in Africa. The conquest of this continent, achieved with modern weaponry and planned by the military and civilian bureaucracy, revealed a hitherto unprecedented potential for violence.

When the European mob discovered what a "lovely virtue" a white skin could be in Africa, when the English conqueror in India became an administrator who no longer believed in the universal validity of law, but was convinced of his own innate capacity to rule and dominate, ... the stage seemed to be set for all possible horrors. Lying under anybody's nose were many of the elements which, gathered together, could create a totalitarian government on the basis of racism. "Administrative massacres" were proposed by Indian bureaucrats, while African officials declared that "no ethical considerations such as the rights of man will be allowed to stand in the way" of the white rule.

The notion of "living space" was not a Nazi invention. It was simply the German version of a commonplace of European culture at the time of imperialism, in the same way as Malthusianism was in Great Britain. The idea of a "living space" inspired a policy of conquest and was invoked to justify the goals of pan-Germanism. Meanwhile, Malthusian theories were regularly used to legitimate famine in India-which some observers of the time accepted as "a salutary cure for overpopulation."" The concept of "living space," as much as the "population principle," postulated a hierarchy in the right to existence, which became the prerogative of the nations, or even "races," that were dominant. The _expression "Lebensraum" was coined in 1901, under Kaiser Wilhelm, by the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904) and had become part of the vocabulary of German nationalism well before the advent of Nazism. It resulted from the fusion of social Darwinism and imperialist geopolitics, and stemmed from a vision of the extra-European world as a space to be colonized by biologically superior groups. For Ratzel, the "living space" was essential in order to reestablish a balance, in Germany, between the industrial development, which was by now irreversible, and agriculture, which was thereby threatened. In their colonies, the Germans would reestablish harmonious relations with nature and preserve their vocation as a people wedded to the land." Under the empire of Kaiser Wilhelm, the idea of Lebensraum inspired a current of pan-Germanism and was the basis for a widespread demand for a Weltpolitik, international policy, that would assign Germany an international position comparable to that of France and Great Britain. The expectation that this would be brought about by a policy of colonial expansion in the East, in a world populated by Untermenschen, was taken for granted by many nationalist Germans as early as the end of the nineteenth century, when the notions of Mittelafrika (central Africa) and Mitteleuropa (central Europe) started to be associated as two indissociable aspects of German foreign policy. The symptoms of a vision of the world such as this, which attributed "a civilizing mission" in eastern Europe to the Germans, are easily detectable in the work not only of Heinrich von Treitschke but also of the young Max Weber.

The Altdeutscher Verbund (Pan-German League), founded in 1893, was the central dispenser of propaganda for this colonial project. By the end of the nineteenth century, several of its representatives had elaborated plans for a Germanization of the Slavic world, which in some cases implied marginalizing, in others expelling "non-Germanic" populations. Some of these plans-for example those elaborated in the geographer Paul Langhans's Ein Pangermanistisches Deutschland (1905) were linked to legal measures of racist if not eugenic inspiration (prohibiting mixed marriages, enforcing sterilization) that paved the way for the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. During World War I, all the necessary conditions for beginning toapply these pan-German programs seemed to be in place.

In the early twenties, the volkisch writer Hans Grimm produced a novel titled Volk ohne Raum (A People Without Space), which popularized the idea of "living space" and was extremely successful. In his novel, Grimm, who would join the German National Socialist Workers Party in 1930, recounted the tale of Freibott, a German who had traveled to German West Africa and who, having helped to repress a native revolt, remade his life far from all industrialized towns, in contact with a still uncontaminated nature that was a replacement for the German forests that were already surrounded by factory chimneys and criss-crossed by motorways. Needless to say, the corollary to this Germanic paradise in South-West Africa was the strictest racial segregation. In 1920, the last German governor in Africa, Heinrich Schnee, organized the production of an ambitious Deutsches Koloniallexicon (German Colonial Lexicon) in three volumes, to which he contributed an article entitled "Verkafferung" ("Kaffirization"), meaning "the regression of Europeans to the cultural level of a native" ("kaffir" being a disparaging term for a black African). In order to prevent such degeneration as a result of life in the bush, contact with colored peoples, and, above all, sexual relations with the indigenous population-which would inevitably lead to diminished intelligence and lower productivity-Schnee advocated a regime of racial segregation.

The Nuremberg Laws of the Nazis shocked the Europe of the 1930’s because they were directed edge the right of the White American to destroy the red man but perhaps give him credit for having acted as the instrument of Providence in carrying out and promoting the law of destruction" (note "red man" in lowercase letters and "White American" in upper case). Bendyshe then added some general remarks relating to the American experience: "Some morbid philanthropists, who have formed associations for the preservation of these races, attribute their extinction to the aggression by fire and sword inflicted upon them by the settlers, and the deadly diseases that the latter introduce. Although to some extent this may be the case, it simply confirms the effects of a more powerful law that dictates the inferior race will eventually be swallowed up by the superior."" Alfred Russel Wallace, along with Darwin the founder of the idea of natural selection, also contributed to the debate. He reaffirmed the same law of "the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life," the inevitable consequence of which is "the extinction of all those low and mentally undeveloped populations with which Europeans come into contact." 27 As he saw it, this law explained the disappearance of the Indians in North America and Brazil and of the Tasmanians, Maoris, and other indigenous populations in Australia and New Zealand. He went on to produce a biological justification of imperialism:

Wallace was to develop his ideas on the extinction of inferior races in a chapter of his Natural Selection (1870), in which he even predicted the conclusion of the process in a distant but foreseeable future, when "the world is again in¬habited by a single, nearly homogeneous race."'

The British anthropologist Benjamin Kidd declared in Social Evolution, one of the most widely diffused late-nineteenth century summaries of social Darwinism, that it was utterly pointless for the white man to demonstrate his philanthropic virtues and his Christian ethics, since it was despite himself, thanks to an anthropological and historical law as inevitable as it was pitiless, that he was causing the end of the "savage peoples": "Whenever a superior race comes into close contact and competition with an inferior race, the result seems to be much the same," whether reached "by the rude methods of wars and conquest (or] the subtle, though no less efficient, methods with which science makes us acquainted."So no purpose was served by attempts to elucidate the causes of "the extinction" (machine guns or diseases). Needless to say, the discourse of the British naturalists was matched by their colleagues in France, where social Darwinism exerted considerable influence on the development of anthropology. In 1888, Edmond Perrier wrote:

Human races owe their spread on earth to their superiority. Just as animals disappear before the advance of man, this privileged being, so too the savage is wiped out before the European, before civilization ever takes hold of him. However regrettable this may be from a moral point of view, civilization seems to have spread throughout the world far more by dint of destroying the barbarians than by subjecting them to its laws."

It was Tasmania, the smallest of the Australian islands, that, toward the end of the nineteenth century, focused the fantasies of the imperialist culture. Edifying proof of this is provided by a book called The Last of the Tasmanians, in which James Bonwick, a sort of Bartolomeo de Las Casas of the Victorian age, recorded the various versions of the apology for genocide purveyed by the colonial press and literature of the time.The demographic decline of populations brought about by the arrival of the colonists, with all their unknown viruses and infections (smallpox, measles, malaria, venereal diseases) the effect of which was to propagate epidemics and cause sterility, was inevitably interpreted by Western observers as confirmation of selectionist theories. An abundant literature in the main European languages set about introducing scientific categories for codifying the law of "the fatal impact" of civilization upon "savages." It was without doubt a "demographic law" that M. Marestang was attempting to prove in the Revue scientifzque in 1892: "All inferior peoples put in contact with a superior people are fatally condemned to perish." In I909, E. Caillot was writing along the same lines in a work entitled Les Polynesiens orientaux au contact de la civilisation:

When a people has remained stationary for so long, all hope of seeing it advance must be abandoned. It is bound to be classified among the inferior nations and, like these, is condemned to die out or be absorbed by a superior race.... That is the implacable law of nature against which nothing can prevail, as has repeatedly been established by history: the stronger devours the weaker. The Polynesian race did not manage to scale the rungs of the ladder of progress, it has added not the slightest contribution to the efforts that humanity has made to improve its lot.

The writings of Darwin are not altogether free of Eurocentric features of this kind, and there can be no doubt that, right from the first, Origins of Species (1859) was regarded as the decisive scientific justification for imperialistic practices. It is now generally accepted that Darwin cannot be considered responsible for social Darwinism because of the affiliation that its representatives claim, using terms that are in many cases exaggerated or even distorting. However, to postulate a total separation between the two would be equally false. Despite its rejection of polygenicist theories of the origin of the species, the Darwinian view of the extra-European world was, as Andre Pichot puts it, a singular, basically very Victorian mixture of "the morality of the catechism" and "an utterly soulless colonialist racism.

Darwin always shared his own age's dominant view of "inferior races," which were regarded as "living fossils," vestiges of a past destined to disappear as civilization progressed. In his "Notebook E" we find a passage dated December 1838 that would not have been out of place in Mein Kampf "When two races of men meet, they act precisely like two species of animals-they fight, eat each other, bring diseases to each other, but then comes the most deadly struggle, namely which have the best fitted organization, or instincts (ie. intellect, in man) to gain the day. The following year, he noted in his diary "a mysterious factor: wherever the European settles, death seems to persecute the aborigine."" This is a reference to a Western stereotype that Darwin did not invent but that he did not manage to avoid and that recurs constantly in those of his works that preceded the elaboration of his theory of natural selection. The theory, however, then enabled him to convert that "mysterious factor" to which he had alluded in 1839 into a veritable scientific law. In The Descent of Man (1871), he described the death of the natives of the British colonies as the inevitable consequence of the impact of civilization, which he took to be confirmation of his theory of natural selection. In short, he had no hesitation in applying the latter to a social phenomenon, thereby introducing a biologization of history and sanctioning the popularization of social Darwinism. Darwin meditated upon "the struggle between civilized nations and barbarian peoples," comparing the extinction of the "savage races" to that of the fossil horse, which the Spanish horse replaced in South America. His argument continues as follows: "The New Zealander seems conscious of this parallelism, for he compares his future fate with that of the native rat, now almost exterminated by the European rat.

In a note in which he quotes the naturalist Poepping, he describes "the breath of civilization as poisonous to savages." A few years after the publication of The Descent of Man, the Austrian social Darwinist Ludwig Gumplowicz, for whom politics was simply an "applied science," abandoned the metaphors of his master and explained more precisely how it was that civilization revealed itself to be "poison" to "savages." He reminded the reader that the Boers considered "the men of the jungle and the Hottentots" to be "creatures" (Geschopfe) that it was permissible to exterminate as game (die man wie das Wild des Waldes ausrotten darf).

At the turn of the century, social Darwinism, eugenics, and theories of natural selection were to flourish particularly vigorously in America, where they were used to justify the genocide of the Indians and the rise of the United States as a major power on the international stage. In 1893 the historian Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his famous lecture on the significance of the frontier in American history. In it, he used the frontier, the source of two essential principles of the American nation, democracy and individualism, as a metaphor for progress, "the meeting point between savagery sented the limes or boundary of pi ward it wiped out backward in wild man must cease to exist. Tij cist J. K. Hosmer interpreted the to the rank of a major power as c mission of the Anglo-Saxon cultu English language, and English principle features of the political, the human race."

One of the most enthusiastic and convinced partisans of social Darwinism and white supremacy was the president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, who in The Winning of the West wrote that he considered the Anglo-Saxons to be a branch of the Nordic race and interpreted the conquest of the American West as a prolongation of the expansion of the Germanic tribes, celebrating it as "the crowning achievement of this powerful history of racial development." 46 In the wake of Francis Galton and his work Hereditary Genius, Madison Grant proceeded to move beyond social Darwinism and adopt a biological determinism in which "natural selection" was to be replaced by an "artificial selection" of races. According to Grant, the destruction of the Indians had pointed the way, by showing that an effective policy for the elimination of the weak, those unsuited to civilization, and "degenerates" would eventually make it possible to "clear out the undesirables who fill our prisons, hospitals, and psychiatric asylums."

But in nineteenth-century Western imaginary representations, it was Africa that became the favorite screen for the projection of colonial fantasies. Africa was a continent conquered but still strange and mysterious, totally exotic, the exploration of which was felt to be and was represented as a descent into meeting point between savagery and civilization.

J. K. Hosmer interpreted the accession of the United States to the rank of a major power as confirmation of the civilizing mission of the Anglo-Saxon culture: "English institutions, the English language, and English thought should become the principle features of the political, social, and intellectual life of the human race." His colleague Josiah Strong announced a new era, that of "a final competition between the races," the natural consequence of which would be American hegemony." One of the most enthusiastic and convinced partisans of social Darwinism and white supremacy was the president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, who in The Winning of the West wrote that he considered the Anglo-Saxons to be a branch of the Nordic race and interpreted the conquest of the American West as a prolongation of the expansion of the Germanic tribes, celebrating it as "the crowning achievement of this powerful history of racial development."

In the wake of Francis Galton and his work Hereditary Genius, Madison Grant proceeded to move beyond social Darwinism and adopt a biological determinism in which "natural selection" was to be replaced by an "artificial selection" of races. According to Grant, the destruction of the Indians had pointed the way, by showing that an effective policy for the elimination of the weak, those unsuited to civilization, and "degenerates" would eventually make it possible to "clear out the undesirables who fill our prisons, hospitals, and psychiatric asylum.

But in nineteenth-century Western imaginary representations, it was Africa that became the favorite screen for the projection of colonial fantasies. Africa was a continent conquered but still strange and mysterious, totally exotic, the exploration of which was felt to be and was represented as a descent into "the darkness of the earliest times." As such it attracted the attention of writers, scholars, missionaries, adventurers ... It provided an ideal mirror for the world that the West had "invented": a continent that, unlike India-which polarized the attention of a European culture obsessed by the Aryan myth was quite naturally perceived as the refuge of primitive and savage humanity. The place attributed to the Africans in the racial typology established by Paul Broca, the founder of the Societe Anthropologique de Paris, is by now well known." But it will perhaps be helpful to record the view expressed in the works of the British anthropologist William Winwood Reade, an explorer and great traveler now remembered for his lengthy correspondence with Darwin, for whom he provided extensive material for The Descent of Man.

In 1863, Reade published Savage Africa, a long account of his travels brimming with geographical and ethnological data, descriptions of tropical forests and vast lakes, and also careful observations on local mores, rounded off by a chapter devoted to the "redemption" of this continent. After declaring that, faced with populations lacking both written language and any kind of culture, slavery was "a necessity," Reade predicted the future that awaited the continent, following a long period of French and British colonization." Under the rule of these colonial powers, the Africans would transform their continent into a kind of garden, building towns in the depths of the forests and irrigating the deserts. After completing their task of inoculating this "elixir vitae into the veins of their mother" and restoring her "immortal beauty," the Africans would be able to depart from the historical stage. Reade's conclusion ran as follows: "In this amiable task they may possibly become exterminated. We must learn to look on this result with composure. It illustrates the beneficent law of nature, that the weak must be devoured by the strong." Reade described this extermination in typically British understated and sober terms, which in his final pages even took on bucolic and nostalgic overtones. His book ends with a touching portrait that is worth recording: young girls seated on the banks of the Niger, described as a river as romantic as the Rhine, tearfully read a story entitled "The Last of the Negroes."

This huge debate on "the extinction of inferior races," which were described sometimes as "declining," sometimes as "dying," and were inevitably condemned to make way for Western civilization, continued throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Analyzed retrospectively, it emerges as an extraordinarily rich arsenal of racial stereotypes-formulated in the language of science, morality, and the philosophy of history-that was part of the culture of imperialist and colonialist Europe. Far more than that, though, it illustrates the attempts to rationalize and provide ideological legitimation for a vast project of conquest and genocide." Far from being the terrain of scholarly debates, concepts such as these deeply pervaded the political language of the period. In 1898, the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, divided the world into two categories, "living nations and dying nations,"  and two years later Kaiser Wilhelm II delivered a passionate speech in which he urged the German soldiers sent to China to repress the Boxer revolt to exterminate the Boxers with all the violence shown by the Huns led by Attila. Such discourse, unimaginable in relation to a European nation, reflected the practices commonly pursued by all the colonial powers.

In 1904 the repression of a revolt by the Hereros in what is now Namibia assumed the aspect of a veritable genocide. General von Trotha, the chief officer in command of the operation, proudly claimed responsibility for issuing an "annihilation order" (Vernichtungsbefehl) that became famous. The German authorities decided to take no prisoners among the combatants and to do nothing for the remaining women and children. These were simply moved away and abandoned in the desert. The Herero population, which in 1904 had numbered about 80,000 people, had been reduced to fewer than 20,000 one year later. Similar methods were employed to put down the Hottentot revolt and resulted in halving the population, from 20,000 to 10,000.

 In the course of the following years, General von Trotha was to declare in several articles that the extermination of the Hereros had been a "racial war" (Rassenkampf) waged against peoples "in decline" (untergehende Volker) or even "dying" (sterbende). He explained that in this struggle, the Darwinian law of "the survival of the fittest" proved to be a more pertinent guide than international law." In the debates that took place in the Reichstag (German parliament) at the time, the Nationalists loudly voiced their approval of the annihilation of the "savages" and "beasts" revolting in Africa against colonial rule, while the Socialists, though anxious to avoid mixed marriages in the colonies, stigmatized such episodes of violence, which reduced the German imperial army to "a level of bestiality worthy of its victims." Those debates prove that notions such as "racial warfare," "extermination," and "subhumanity" were widespread in Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm as a result of colonial policies.

The Nazi war against the USSR illustrates the historical links between the Hitlerian weltanschauung and the European colonialism of the nineteenth century. The German blitzkrieg of 1941 condensed all the aims of the Nazis, among which the desire to eliminate the USSR and Communism was indissociable from the acquisition of Lebensraum, a "living space" for Germany in eastern Europe. The Nazi General Plan Ost (General Plan for the East), developed cooperatively by several research centers using the services of numerous geographers, economists, demographers, and specialists in the "racial sciences,"  envisaged the German colonization of the territories extending all the way from Leningrad to the Crimea. A few alterations were made to this plan after the beginning of the blitzkrieg against the USSR and before the collapse of the Wehrmacht in 1943, but its major objectives remained clearly defined. The first stage involved evacuating-through the deportment or elimination of about 30 million to 40 million "racially undesiable" (rassisch unerwunscht) Slavs; over the next thirty or so years, about 10 million Germans and ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche, Deutsclistdmmige) were gradually to be installed, to colonize the conquered territories and rule over the Slavs, who would be reduced to slavery (Heloten). The extermination of "races" judged to be harmful, such as the Jews and the Gypsies, was part of the overall plan and was to be completed during the conflict." In November I94I, during the German offensive against the USSR, Goring, in the course of conversations with the Italian minister of foreign affairs, Galeazzo Ciano, said that he foresaw that 30 million Soviet citizens would be affected by famine in the course of the following year.

The non-European space was only semi-civilized and the object of conquest by Europeans became empires, thanks to their colonies and its laws.

Industrialization encouraged the spread of European settlers throughout the globe and especially the conquest of Africa, wherein the mission to civilize through progress presupposed its other, the primitive, dark-skinned savage whose bleak future Darwinism and eugenics foreordained. The extinction of inferior races, as much the result of administrative rationality as spontaneity, received its justification in the view that the savages would soon depart the earth as a matter of course, unable to adapt to a superior civilization and undeserving of normative ethical considerations. The belief that expansion would alleviate overpopulation, a crucial element in empire building, was not unique to Nazism. Moreover, imperialism introduced another ingredient to the Western exercise of power, conquest, ethnic cleansing, and extermination as the route to regeneration.

Finally, the mass conscripted armies of proletarianized soldiers, interventionist economies, and anonymous death of World War I derived from industrial and disciplinary techniques already in place and from imperialist practices: total war, that is, the elimination of the distinction between combatant and civilian, the racialized demonization of the enemy, concentration camps, and genocide. Yet the consequences of the war, particularly the Bolshevik Revolution, crystallized into the moment when Nazism came to the fore. In addition to creating a climate that spawned a recognizably fascist philosophy of death in which warfare and extermination became ends in themselves, the war's aftermath witnessed a populist counter-revolution, most powerfully expressed in Nazism, which co-mingled anti-Bolshevism, anti-Semitism, radical nationalism, and imperial expansion.

However one should stress the uniqueness of Nazism even as he analyzes its Western roots (for this see our article series “Hitler’s Protocols”), one could indeed ad that Nazi Lebensraum took inspiration from British imperialism and the brutality of white settlers against Native Americans. Or as Traverso recently argued in “The Origins of Nazi Violence” (2002/2003), imperialism was the real model for Nazi violence, not Bolshevism. The fusion of anti-Bolshevism and anti-Semitism that followed World War I occurred with special vigor in Germany, which, to a degree not previously seen, biologized both.

Despite the prevalence of anti-Jewish hatred in the West, only the Nazis joined the crusading spirit of Christian anti-Judaism with a biologically extreme anti-Semitism to produce mass murder on an unprecedented scale. Unlike previous colonial racism, the Nazi regime did not see the Jew as too primitive to avoid extinction, but rather as the enemy of civilization that it had to actively eradicate with every available technological, bureaucratic, and military means.

The Nazi regime sought not merely to conquer territories but to Germanize them in a synthesized version of nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism, and imperialism, all of which existed elsewhere in Europe but never entered into such a toxic combination.

So rather than understand Nazism as simply an _expression of modern bureaucratic and scientific rationality, the bond between anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism highlights the moment at which a centuries-old hatred became genocidal.

Traverso however is not successful in explaining why fascism at its most virulently racist emerged in Germany rather than elsewhere, something we have done in “Hitler’s Protocols”.

Eugenics, Traverso notes, fell on especially fertile soil in Germany, yet his insistence that eugenics was a Western preoccupation as well begs some elaboration as to how Germany came to occupy a class by itself. If class racism helps to explain the historical pedigree of Jewish Bolshevism, why then did the Third Reich seek to redeem workers but destroy the Jews? Why did the Nazi regime pursue Lebensraum in the east first, rather than the recovery and expansion of its overseas empire when the German imperial imagination, which incorporated both Lebensraum and Weltpolitik, set Germany apart from other European imperialist powers? Why, finally, did National Socialism synthesize the worst aspects of Western civilizations while other nations did not?

How in fact Globalisation trends facilitated the construction of differences within societics (highlichted further in our next series “Revenge of History”. For example the first Genocidal Regime apart from the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, provides the study of Portugal' s 16th century colonial experience which covered the vastness of Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America.

Calculating the exact number of victims that were ultimately brutalized andlor killed during the Portuguese conquistas is an obstacle that is impossible to accurately resolve. Highlighting the global and genocidal trends facilitates future studies on globalization and genocide and reminds us of the impending dangers of globalization ron amuck.

What the Native American Genocide concerns, the U.S. expansion westward indeed intensified after the development of globalizing technologies in the 1800. These globalizing technologies added to the U.S. canal system (Steamboat), railway system (Locomotive). and, eventually, the telegraph line system (tele graph) which helped generate the movement of people and ideas westward.

These globalizing technologies not only decreased time, shipping costs, and increased contact, but also rearranged human relations and accelerated the move towards a more industriaIized society. The removal of indigenous populations westward was a result of these globalizing technologies as U.S. expansion necessitated. Thus, as indigenous populations were splintered, the U:S. was strengthening its position as a nation-state.

GlobaIizing technologies served to intensify relations among Anglo-Americans and indigenous populations. The 1820s and 1830s witnessed the economie and technological transformations that historians have coined the "market economy" and "Industrial Revolution," respectively. The right to compete for advancement in the marketplace became the touchstone of Ameriean “freedom" during this period.

Thus, along with the "destination discourse" that had been developing since 'first' colonial contact and intensified during President Jackson's administration, globalizing technologies helped to solidify the makings of an American regime which was born of competition, difference, and expansionist determination within the North American continent.

The massacres against indigenous populations coincided with these changes as these technological advancements were interpreted by Anglo-Americans, specifically the northern middle-class, as a mark of a movement that had been sparked by divinity.

These industrial changes thus had the effect of 'branding' a society informally and formally with shared cultural and commercial symbols which marked it clearly and distinguished it from others" This proved dangerous for groups in the D.S., namely the indigenous and African populations, who did not have access to these globalizing technologies to circulate their concerns about the horrors inflicted upon them. Thus, by monopolizing and manipulating these globalizing technologies, President Jackson, John L. Sullivan, and other writers of propaganda were able to mobilize Anglo-Americans by framing the indigenous and African populations as obstacles to progress.

Thus industrial change, colonial policies of expansion and conquest, and religious and economic zeal, resulted in genocide in North America. The conditions of indigenous populations was largely ignored since their idea of freedom... which centered on preserving their cultural and political autonomy and retaining control of ancestral lands, was incompatible with that of western settlers, for whom freedom entailed the right to expand across the continent and establish farms, ranches, and mines on land that Indians considered their own.

The global and genocidal nexus in the making of the D.S. demonstrates the similarities between the genocidal activities of the Portuguese in Asia, and South America and the colonists and political officials of the North American continent. Activities of expansion have followed trends that were set by the Portuguese expeditions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although the places of 'first contact' were dissimilar.

Surprisingly, earlier historians mentioned a "well-meant program" of the U.S., yet this doesn’t explain official campaigns to destroy

The 1994 Rwandan genocide finally changed the way in which we think genocide occurs because it encompassed hatreds that rested on colonial resentments, revenge massacres since 1962, assassinations of political elites, gender and reproduction, and mystifications.

The 1994 Rwandan genocide did not only lead to 800,000+ deaths, but shattered the future of Rwanda as a nation-state that is able to compete in the global market system.

According to the CIA 2003 World Factbook, the genocide decimated Rwanda's fragile economic base, severely impoverished the population, particularly women, and eroded the country's ability to attract private and extern al investment.

However the 1994 Rwandan genocide was largely caused by the colonization of Rwanda by Germany (1885-1918) and Belgium (1918-1962). The genocidal trends culminated with the Rwandan were intensified by the Belgian colonial administration and the Roman Catholic missionaries called "White Fathers" after 1918.

But the “White Fathers” and the administration swiftly concluded, on flimsy evidence, that Tutsis and Hutus were of completely separate ethnic origin and that Tutsis were the Hutus' natural masters.

The consequence of the establishment of differences between Hutus, Tutsis, and Twas by German and Belgian colonists was not coincidental and is essential to understanding the historical cleavages that existed between the ethnic groups. That gIobalizing technologies were present and intensified the atrocities committed against Tutsis and Hutu moderates before and during the Rwandan genocide of 1994, specifically after Radio Television Libre de Mille Collines (RTLM) deepened its messages of hatred towards Tutsis soon after Presidents Habyarimana and Ntaryamira were assassinated, shows that Rwanda must be carefully guarded as it is possible that genocidal massacres could swiftly resume. That is,  ethnic mistrust and fear has been reinforced by memories f the genocide, border raids, assassination of witnesses in trials, the return of Tutsi and Hutu refugees from neighboring countries, false charges of genocide stemming from competition for and, and the unrepresentative character of the government, termed an 'ethnocracy' by some.

While preventing genocide may seem impossible, what can be deduced from this discussion is that the convergence of global and genocidal processes in a technologically advanced world, where information and awareness should be readily available, has been slow in producing policies that would be successful

In fact now, at the start of the 21 th century genocide's effects in relation to globalization should also examine the similar socio-historical foundations that terrorism shares with genocide.

 

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