#17 Understanding Colonialism: Death and Impoverishment Part II

The Herero and Namaqua Genocide (1904); The Armenian Holocaust (1915-1922); The Jewish Holocaust (1941-1945)

In this blog and the one that follows, I deal with 20th-century holocausts as the consequence of colonialism because they resulted from racial thinking. To be clear, I am not arguing that racial thinking led automatically to holocausts. Rather, I argue that categorising people into races and the thought that accompanies, was a necessary condition for the killing on a major scale of entire groups of people. Below, I illustrate three entirely separate holocausts with different backgrounds to each other but each was underpinned by racial thinking. 

The Herero and Namaqua Genocide 1904

The Herero and Nama genocide were a campaign of racial extermination and collective punishment that the German Empire undertook in German southwest Africa (now Namibia) against the Ova Herero, Nama and San peoples. It is considered the first genocide of the 20th century. It took place between 1904 and 1908.

In January 1904, the Herero people led by Samuel Maharero, and the Nama led by Captain Hendrik Witbooi, rebelled against German colonial rule. In August of the same year, German General Lothar von Trotha defeated the Ova Herero in the Battle of Waterberg and drove them into the desert of Omaheke, where most of them died of dehydration. In October, the Nama people also rebelled against the Germans, only to suffer a similar fate.

Between 24,000 and 100,000 Hereros, 10,000 Nama and an uncounted number of San died. The first phase of the genocide was characterised by widespread death from starvation and dehydration due to the prevention of the retreating Herero from leaving the Namibian Desert by German forces. Once defeated, thousands of Hereros and Namas were imprisoned in concentration camps, where the majority died of diseases, abuse, and exhaustion.

General Trotha stated his proposed solution to end the resistance of the Herero people in a letter, before the Battle of Waterberg:

I believe that the nation as such should be annihilated, or, if this was not possible by tactical measures, have to be expelled from the country ... This will be possible if the water-holes from Grootfontein to Gobabis are occupied. The constant movement of our troops will enable us to find the small groups of this nation who have moved backwards and destroy them gradually.

The pursuing German forces prevented groups of Herero from breaking from the main body of the fleeing force and pushed them further into the desert. As exhausted Herero fell to the ground, unable to go on, German soldiers acted on orders to kill men, women, and children.

Cloete, acting as a guide for the Germans, witnessed the atrocities committed by the German troops and deposed the following statement:

I was present when the Herero were defeated in a battle in the vicinity of Waterberg. After the battle all men, women, and children who fell into German hands, wounded or otherwise, were mercilessly put to death. Then the Germans set off in pursuit of the rest, and all those found by the wayside and in the sandveld were shot down and bayoneted to death. The mass of the Herero men were unarmed and thus unable to offer resistance. They were just trying to get away with their cattle.

The Armenian Holocaust 1915-1922

The Armenian genocide occurred at the end of the Ottoman Empire, during and after the First World War. The new rulers, described in western history as the Young Turks, decided to Europeanise the new Turkey, and to purify the nation as a single historic group of Turkish people. The Armenian and Greek populations had been part of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years. These diverse cultures; Armenian and Greek Christians, Turkish Islam, with a small population of Jews, were the forebears of present-day Turkey. The Ottoman Empire was inclusive, with many peoples and cultures finding refuge within Ottoman rule over the centuries. Every village had Armenians and Greeks living together with people of Turkish origin.

The Ottoman Court during the second half of the 19th century had been attempting to ‘modernise’ itself and its armed forces, taking loans from London and Paris. Like several ancient kingdoms across the globe in the 19th century, there were widespread attempts to defend themselves against perceived threats from an aggressive and expanding Europe. Borrowing capital was one thing but repaying the loan with interest was another, and by the end of the century, the Ottoman Empire was deeply in debt. Turkey became known as the “Sick Man of Europe”.

National Debt was used then (as it is now) to manipulate weak states in the interests of the imperial power from which the money had been lent. At the end of the 19th century, there were no external bodies like the IMF and World Bank to do the manipulating on behalf of the dominant powers, and nation-states acted on behalf of the financial markets. When countries defaulted they were threatened with invasion and colonisation, as occurred in Egypt over the non-repayment of the loan for the Suez Canal. The Ottomans too faced these threats for some years before 1914.

Once oil in large quantities had been discovered on Ottoman lands and the decision made to fuel navy warships with oil, the end of Ottoman rule was nigh. This coincided with the outbreak of the First World War; the Ottomans decided to side with Germany, which had built a railway to Bagdad. The British used the colonial armed forces with Australian troops to attempt an invasion through the Dardanelles, which ultimately failed, killings many thousands. One of the young Turkish officers present was Kemal Ataturk.

Map of the Armenian Genocide in 1915 By Sémhur - Topographic background : NASA Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SWBD) (public domain)Image:Armeniangenocidemap.gif by Vahagn Avedian, from the website http://www.armenica.org, uploaded on Commons by Electionworld under license GFDL. (Note: Armenica map is a clone of Map 224 (The Armenian Genocide, 1915 (after J. Naslian and B.H. Harutyunyan) in Hewsen, Robert H. (2001) Armenia: A Historical Atlas (1st ed.), University of Chicago Press, pp. 232 ISBN 0-226-33228-4Other data :Cartographic projection : UTMGeodetic system : WGS84, CC BY-SA 3.0

In the turmoil of the war, the Ottomans lost to the French and British. The Arabic lands we now call Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan and Iraq were divided as new British and French colonies in 1922 after the Treaty of Versailles implemented the Sykes-Picot agreement. Greece and the Balkan countries became independent. Finally, the Young Turks managed to establish today’s modern Turkey, after an invasion by the Greeks in 1922.

This is the context within which we need to understand the Armenian Holocaust. From 1916 onwards the cleansing of the entire area of non-Turkish peoples had begun. The Armenians were singled out, forcibly removed from their villages and led into the interior where large numbers died of starvation and cold. It is said that one and a half million people died between 1916 and 1920 in the deserts of central Turkey. People of Greek origin were also removed, but in less harsh circumstances, and those of Greek origin found their way to Greece, which most had never seen.

Turkish governments ever since have refused to accept responsibility for the Armenian Holocaust, despite the abundance of evidence.

The Jewish Holocaust 1941-1944

The Jewish Holocaust began in earnest in 1941/42. The Jewish population of Germany had begun to be more openly persecuted from 1933 when the Dachau concentration camp was opened, but the mass killing of the Jewish population did not get underway until 1941.

The Jewish Holocaust has been emphasised as the most horrific of all the Holocausts of the 20th century. Its significance goes beyond the mere numbers of Jewish people and other minorities that were killed. The Jewish Holocaust needs to be placed in its historical context and linked indelibly to Europe’s colonial past. Undeniably, it stands still as the most public and systematic application of the logics of racism.

In the 1930s and 40s, for many in closer proximity to whiteness, the Jewish peoples, their history and their culture were understood in racial terms. Although a history of Jewish culture, identity and processes of racialisation are beyond the scope of this blog, Jews, like Christians, were spread across the world and, according to ancient texts, originated from Abraham alongside people of Islamic faiths. In this sense, the religious faiths of Jews, Christians and peoples of Islam all had a single founder. It is worth noting that Jewish people had been part of European history and cultures for a considerable time. Alongside this history, anti-Semitism had emerged as a part of the cultures of Europe. So, although by the 1930s, the Jewish peoples in Germany had assimilated themselves within German culture more than most, the persecution of Jewish people itself had a long history.

Once the war broke out in 1939, however, all the European belligerents faced a common problem: how to feed their armies. The lack of food in the First World War had been one of the major causes of the cessation of the fighting in 1918. Governments had not engaged with farmers in the war effort until 1916. In 1939, however, governments mobilised farmers almost immediately. In both wars, the struggle to control Atlantic shipping was in major part about food supplies. Both sides in the wars had called up all the young men and left farms for the older people to run.

Germany was beginning to run out of food by 1941; the decision to invade and colonise the rich lands of Ukraine in the Soviet Union as a consequence of the need to capture their food-rich lands. It was under these circumstances and within the presence of dominant ideologies of racism, as I have discussed in previous blogs, that the German government decided which people they did not need. They turned to the Jews and other minority groups to eliminate them. Race theories of supposed ‘Aryan superiority’ and ‘Jewish conspiracy’ were used as a justification for the Holocaust. I develop these themes in later blogs.

One of the main reasons for the British entering the First World War was to remove the threat of German colonisation. The post-war Versailles Agreement between the British and the French was intended to neutralise Germany, so she could never threaten their empires again. Within a short space of time, Germany had lost territory. This was followed by the financial collapse and the great depression. During this downturn, Germany was threatened and humiliated as a nation and as a people; hence the attraction to fascism and Nazi ideology. Again, I develop these themes later on.

The Jewish Holocaust happened within an unusual and particular historical context. In 1918, within a European worldview, where people were seen in racial terms and colonisation was still understood to be part of the ‘common sense’ policy of strong countries, Germany was struggling to regain her lost identity as a great power. This colonial and racist element of the perspective was taken for granted as part of world reality. The Germans themselves, while they had lost the 1914/18 war, did not feel they had lost. Rather, they felt that Britain and France had sought to colonise them. Germany had been humiliated to a degree that is difficult to describe today. It was under these circumstances that the Nazi Party rose to widespread popularity with Hitler seeking to recreate was Germany as a ‘great power’ once again.

Although today we are horrified when we examine the Jewish Holocaust, and say, 'never again'. However, unless we truly examine and learn from these detailed historical circumstances in which Nazism took hold, we can never be sure that killing on that industrial-scale won’t take place again.

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Further Reading

The Armenian Holocaust:

There is a wide range of books and scholarly articles on the Armenian Holocaust. See especially Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins' of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, University of Chicago Press 1996

The Jewish Holocaust:

Of all the holocausts in recent history, the Jewish Holocaust has led to more writing and research than any other. There is a huge volume of books available. Only one is mentioned here:

Sabby Segal, Final Solutions: Human Nature Capitalism and Genocide, Pluto Press 2013

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