Nazism and Stalinism

The rise of Nazism took its cue from Stalinist totalitarianism and, like Stalin, Hitler styled himself as leader

During the first third of the 19th Century, in the colonial setting, Britain exterminated the indigenous population of Tasmania. Between 1830 and 1877, the United States invented ethnic cleansing, or rounding up and moving ethnic groups (“tribes”) from one corner of the continent to another. In the mendaciously named Congo Free State (1885-1908), in just two decades, the Belgian monarch’s personal administration wiped out half of the population (10 million) through forced labour. At the turn of the 20th Century, in the Second Boer War, Britain perfected the concentration camp. The German Empire applied all these methods for perpetrating the genocide of the Herero and Nama (1904-1908) in south west Africa (today’s Namibia). During the southward expansion of the Russian Empire at the expense of the Ottomans in the 19th Century, St Petersburg successfully employed ethnic cleansing

to expel Muslims (for instance, from Bulgaria in 18771878), and genocide for eradicating Circassians (1864) in what nowadays is Russia’s Krasnodar region in the Caucasus. Meanwhile, accelerating industrialisation and technological development in Europe and North America put at politicians’ disposal weapons of mass destruction (armoured trains, machine-guns, barbed wire, tanks, war planes or howitzers). Reflecting on these developments, the industrialist and banker based in Warsaw (then in Russia), Jan Bloch, wrote a six-volume work, abridged into English as Is War Now Impossible? (1899). According to him, a clear awareness of the deadly potential of these technologies of mass slaughter should prevent any future war in Europe. However, these weapons of mass destruction were deployed during the First World War, in combination with the aforementioned colonial practices of “population management,” as “justified” by the then prevalent racist view that some groups of humans are “inferior.” The Eastern Front was the bloodiest, longest and most widely moving. It extended for 2,000km from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and shifted for 1,500km from today’s eastern Poland to the Caucasus. In this war zone, all the pre-war empires were destroyed (Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Empire, Russia) and replaced with brand new polities. While in the West war came to an end in 1918, in the East it lasted until the mid-1920s. The wholesale destruction of the established state structures, genocidal-scale losses of population (including the Ottoman genocide of Armenians and Assyrians in 1915), forcing millions of civilians to move