This is Lindqvist’s point: “Two events need not be identical for one of them to facilitate the other. European world expansion, accompanied as it was by shameless defense of extermination, created habits of thought and political precedents that made way for new outrages, finally culminating in the most horrendous of them all: the Holocaust.” And one of the hardest habits of thought to shake is the reflex to look away, to not see what is in front of us, and to not know what we know.

XREF: Connects to Arendt's thesis in Origins of Totalitarianism linking imperialism and totalitarianism, and to broader scholarship on colonial-genocidal continuities.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 896