European notions of “inferior races” underpinned genocidal practices—from Tasmania’s colonial massacre to the eugenic theories that laid the groundwork for the Holocaust, with Gaza reflecting longstanding colonial templates: the dehumanization, the framing of civilian lives as disposable, and the use of authoritarian control not an anomaly, but a continuation of historical patterns of racialized violence
The year 1492 was a pivotal year in many ways. Spain’s Catholic Monarchs, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, commissioned Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the New World, conquered Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in western Christendom, and issued the Edict of Expulsion, giving the Jews the choice of converting or leaving. Seven years after the ethnic cleansing of Jews, the Spanish state gave Muslims the same choice in 1499.
Granada’s fall and the expulsions marked the Christianisation of Al-Andalus after nearly 800 years (711-1492) of Muslim rule over the Iberian Peninsula. It was the culmination of Christian Spain and Portugal’s campaigns, or Reconquista, to recapture the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslim Moors. The Nasrid kingdom’s downfall in the Iberian Peninsula became a cornerstone of Spain’s national identity and the Catholic Monarchs’ cultural and religious homogeneity project. The Reconquista destroyed the Iberian convivencia, the peaceful coexistence of Christians, Muslims, and Jews.
The unified Spain in 1492 created the nation-state, with centralized means of violence against internal and external enemies, amid the European Renaissance and the emergence of political modernity. It was primarily Christian on a continent that thought of the nation in terms of culture and race. An estimated 70,000 Jews converted to Christianity to remain in Spain, but would soon be accused of insincerity.
The Spanish Inquisition to European Imperialism
The Inquisition in Spain, Portugal, and Spanish colonies, including Mexico, targeted ‘conversos’, the Jews who secretly continued Jewish religious practices after being compelled to renounce Judaism and convert to Catholicism. The Ottoman Empire welcomed an estimated 50,000 of the 130,000 Jews in 1492 as they fled to its North African and Balkan provinces. About 80,000 crossed into Portugal. It was the latest in a series of Jewish expulsions from Europe in the 15th century.
In the book ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim’, academic Mahmood Mamdani argues that the modern state’s history can also be read as that of race, with internal victims of state building and the external victims of imperial expansion of European political modernity. Mamdani cites German and American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt’s study on the Holocaust and writes that it stood apart as she situated the Holocaust in the imperial history of genocide.
Arendt sketched the history of European settlers killing off native populations, understanding the history of imperialism through the workings of the institutions of racism and bureaucracy forged during European expansion into the non-European world. The political devices of imperialist rule—race and bureaucracy—were discovered in South Africa, Algeria, Egypt, and India. Mamdani calls the New World Arendt’s blind spot and writes that both racism and genocide occurred in the American colonies earlier than in South Africa.
Ideologies of Extermination: Tasmania, Colonial Wars and Modern Atrocities
Slaughter, disease, and dislocation led to the near decimation of Native Americans and modern history’s first recorded genocide. The 19th-century European thought reflected the idea of imperialism serving civilization by clearing ‘inferior races off the earth’. In a May 1898 speech, British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury said that nations can roughly be divided into the living and the dying. Mamdani notes Hitler was nine years old then, and the European air was ‘soaked in the conviction that imperialism is a biologically necessary process which, according to the laws of nature, leads to the inevitable destruction of lower races.’Mamdani calls Tasmania, an island the size of Ireland, the paradigmatic example of this conviction. The natives were first massacred in Tasmania in 1804, a year after European colonists arrived there. Tasmania’s last original inhabitant died in 1869. The Maoris of New Zealand and the Herero of German South West Africa faced the same fate as the natives of Tasmania.
Mamdani calls Tasmania, an island the size of Ireland, the paradigmatic example of this conviction. The natives were first massacred in Tasmania in 1804, a year after European colonists arrived there. Tasmania’s last original inhabitant died in 1869. The Maoris of New Zealand and the Herero of German South West Africa faced the same fate as the natives of Tasmania.
By the 20th century, Europeans began to distinguish between civilized and colonial wars. They applied the laws of war to wars among the so-called civilized nation-states. The laws of nature applied to colonial wars. The Europeans saw extermination of the lower races as a biological necessity. Swedish author Sven Lindqvist writes in ‘In A History of Bombing’ that bombing originated as a war method considered fit for use only against uncivilized adversaries.
Colonial Bombing to Auschwitz
An Italian airplane dropped the first bomb on November 1, 1911, in an oasis outside Tripoli in what is now Libya in North Africa. In 1920, the British Royal Air Force carried out the first systematic aerial bombing against the Somalis. Germany applied the laws of war against the Western powers but not against Russia in the Second World War. As many as 57% of Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) died in German captivity as opposed to 3.5% of English and American POWs. The Germans gassed Russians before the gassings of Jews at Auschwitz.
Schutzstaffel, a paramilitary organisation under Adolf Hitler and German’s Nazi Party, escorted the men, women, and children selected for death to the gas chambers to the gas chambers. Trucks carried the infirm, and the rest marched to be disrobed before entering the gas chambers, where they were locked in and killed with Zyklon B gas.
The first mass gassings were of Russian POWs in Ukraine. In Auschwitz, Russian intellectuals and Communists were the first to be gassed. Sven Lindqvist writes The Nazi plan was to weed out some 10 million Russians. The remainder were to be kept alive as a slave-labour force. The Holocaust was the meeting point of modern Western civilization’s traditions of anti-Semitism and genocide of colonized peoples.
Colonial Racism, Eugenics, and the Continuities of Extermination
French poet, author, and politician from Martinique (Caribbean), Aimé Césaire, writes in the ‘Discourse on Colonialism’ (1951) that a ‘Hitler slumbers within ‘the very distinguished, very humanistic, and very Christian bourgeois of the 20th century’. He adds that the European bourgeois cannot forgive Hitler for applying to Europe the colonial practices previously applied only to the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the Negroes of Africa.
In 1904, the German annihilation of the Hereros in South West Africa was the first genocide of the 20th century. Mamdani writes that the German geneticist Eugen Fischer’s first experiments focused on a ‘science’ of race mixing in the Herero concentration camps. Fischer, whose subjects were Herero and the offspring of Herero women and German men, argued that ‘mulattoes,’ Herero-Germans born of mixed parentage, were physically and mentally inferior to their German parents.
Hitler, who read Fischer’s book ‘The Principle of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene’ (1921), made him the University of Berlin rector. Josef Mengele, who conducted medical experiments at Auschwitz, was one of Fischer’s students. Race branding used to set a group apart as an enemy and to annihilate it with an easy conscience was the link between the genocide of the Herero and the Holocaust.
Mamdani writes that historians have traditionally sketched only half a history: the annihilation of the native by the settler. The theorist Frantz Fanon has written how such attempts could then trigger the native annihilating the settler. Fanon wrote in ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ that the colonized man liberates himself in and through violence.
Gaza and the Afterlives of Empire
The genealogy of violence and statecraft is not merely history. It reverberates in the present. In Gaza, Israel’s relentless bombardment and blockade have produced conditions that scholars, including Israeli and Jewish voices, describe as genocidal. Entire neighbourhoods have been razed, hospitals reduced to rubble, and children buried under debris. The systematic targeting of water systems, food supplies, and electricity shows how modern states make extermination appear as security management.
Israel, which defines itself as a Jewish state, is displacing and erasing Palestinians just as Spain in the 15th century expelled Jews and Muslims in pursuit of a ‘pure Christian’ nation. It casts Palestinians as a demographic threat to justify the siege and bombardment, as European colonial powers marked colonized peoples as ‘inferior races’ to legitimize their extermination. Israel applies the colonial ideas to Gaza in the guise of counterterrorism just as imperialism perfected the tools of race-branding and annihilation in Africa, Asia, and the Americas before the Holocaust.
International law was devised in the shadow of Auschwitz to prevent the return of such horrors. But the global order has shown selective blindness. Western powers once promised ‘never again’ to genocide, but they provide weapons, diplomatic cover, and financial support to Israel. The suspension of legal and moral norms that once divided ‘civilized’ from ‘uncivilized’ has now reappeared, with civilians in Gaza being treated like the indigenous peoples of Africa and Asia under colonialism. Gaza is not an aberration but part of the long arc. The continuity lies in the way modern states dehumanize entire populations, brand them as existential threats, and mobilize means to destroy them. Gaza testifies to the unfinished reckoning with the legacies of empire, race, and genocide.
