Gérard Bensussan Interview | Alex Gilbert #267

Gérard Bensussan is a philosopher and professor emeritus at the University of Strasbourg. He will publish Des Sadiques au cœur pur. Sur l’antisionisme contemporain (Hermann) in March, referencing Sartre: “The antisemite is a sadist with a pure heart.”

Is Colonialism a Form of Nazism?

A journalist, Jean-Michel Aphatie, recently explained—gleefully, as if delighted to shock the bourgeoisie—that during the French colonization of Algeria, roughly between the 1830s and 1860s, there were hundreds of instances akin to Oradour-sur-Glane, the village whose inhabitants were methodically massacred by an SS division in June 1944. I recall that this potentially “genocidal” unit of measurement, Oradour, was also used by Gilles Deleuze in the 1970s when he associated it with the founding of the State of Israel, which, he wrote, was accompanied by many Oradours. Let’s move on.

There are several troubling aspects to this kind of argument—an argument that is not new and which Aphatie merely spices up with his self-satisfied bravado. This discomfort, this unease, makes it difficult to respond appropriately, with precision and accuracy. Factually, what Aphatie says to support his Oradour claim is true (unlike Deleuze’s assertion, which is factually incorrect), yet the comparison remains illegitimate. Why?

The French colonization of Algeria was particularly atrocious and cruel (suffocations, massacres, ruthless repression), and its victims were numerous. Entire villages were indeed annihilated. These facts must be acknowledged without reservation or evasion.

What, then, is wrong with such reasoning (colonization = Nazism)? It is the failure to take into account what we might call the intention behind these major historical episodes—the constellation of decisions, actions, programs, and declarations that shape an overarching situation and allow it to be named. In the case of colonization, the colonizer saw himself as a benefactor to the colonized peoples. This was the most persistent trope of colonial propaganda. Indigenous peoples were considered “backward,” minors of sorts, and were to be guided toward moral autonomy, toward a kind of cultural “majority” that would enable them to become equal participants in an individual and collective emancipation—through and toward the Republic, its “values,” and the civic statuses it granted. This “civilizing” ambition—regardless of the illusions and crimes it entailed, as we understand them today—necessarily inhibited any fully executed project of annihilation. The French in their colonies, the British in theirs, and others (and I do not ignore the differences among these experiences in their empirical diversity) did not intend the total extermination, to the very last, of the populations under their rule. They even often believed—whether in good or bad faith—that they could, perhaps against their will, turn them into future citizens of an expanded national community. This ideological program was openly displayed, articulated, reiterated, exhibited—as proof of the virtue and benevolence of the civilizing-colonizing mission.

By contrast, the extermination plan for the Jews of Europe had to remain ultra-secret, confidential, hidden even in the words used to describe it. This secrecy was essential to its full success. The Holocaust is not merely the sum of massacres, deaths, and victims. On a purely quantitative level, many other mass crimes could justifiably be compared to it. It is the intent to eradicate that makes it absolutely specific (this specificity is not equivalent to uniqueness; the Rwandan genocide, for instance, belongs entirely to this same genocidal intent).

Colonization did not operate under this paradigm of total mobilization of all available material means for a single goal—not to win a war or secure a conquest, but to complete an annihilation, to fulfill an intent.

Is it really so difficult to admit that, yes, of course, the colonial conquest saw unspeakable atrocities, the destruction of traditions and populations—but that this was not the Holocaust? That it does not need to have been the Holocaust for us to recognize the criminal scale of colonization, the ferocity of its repressions, and the injustice of the ethnic-political hierarchies that sustained its dominance?

Is it, on the other hand, so difficult to acknowledge that, yes, of course, no radical exterminatory intent shaped colonialism in its overall historical project, and yet terrible crimes were committed in the name of its ambition?

In other words, is it possible to practically reject the so-called “competition of victimhood”—that is, to simultaneously recognize both the radical exterminatory specificity of 20th-century genocides and the criminal nature of colonialism, as we can understand it today with historiographical knowledge and historical hindsight?

If this possibility were closed off—if this dual recognition, rooted in common sense and sound reflection, became socially, politically, and culturally impossible—then a terrible fracture would emerge, profoundly degrading democracy, its spirit, and its vitality.