The story Peck and Lindqvist tell begins not in the Americas, but in Europe in the centuries leading up to the Spanish Inquisition and the burnings at the stake and the bloody expulsions of Jews and Muslims. Then it crosses the Atlantic and plays out on a vastly larger scale in the genocide of Native Americans, as well as the so-called Scramble for Africa, before looping back to Europe during the Holocaust. This challenges how the story of the Second World War is so often told: as one of heroic anti-fascist Allies united against the monstrous Nazis. Certainly, defeating Hitler and freeing the camps, however belatedly, was the most righteous victory of the modern age. Complicating this story is the fact that Hitler spoke and wrote extensively about the many ways in which he drew inspiration for his genocidal regime from British colonialism and from the various structures of racial hierarchy pioneered inside North America.

XREF: Connects to larger genealogies of genocide and settler colonialism informing European atrocity, upending the standard heroic WWII narrative.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 880