What is civilization?
It seems to have a lot to do with race
This is an interesting claim: “They laundered all of Europe's sins through [Adolf] Hitler like some kind of fascist Jesus.”[1] “Kamil” posted that towards the end of 2022 and it only now comes to my attention through a screenshot posted on Mastodon.[2]
And it’s not wrong.
World War I spelled the end of three great empires: the British, which had overreached but continued to grow for a time[3] and persist even through World War II following which the U.S. would ultimately inherit most of; the Austro-Hungarian, which flatly did not survive the war (the first one); and the Ottoman Empire, which disintegrated rapidly afterwards[4] and which Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is widely thought to dream of resurrecting.[5] France and Britain retain some territories all around the world. Denmark notably retains Greenland.
And the colonial powers, especially the British, were as evil as any.[6] I remember seeing somewhere that Hitler learned from and adopted the repressive tactics of the British Empire. But following World War II and the Holocaust, and with the Marshall Plan, western European countries were U.S. allies, and in the sanitized Manichean propaganda of the West and the Iron Curtain, in which “evil communism” was portrayed as a monolith infecting the world from Moscow, we overlooked a lot of ugly history, like the French in Algeria, like the Belgians in Congo, like the British in a lot of places.
After all, we think of Europe as “civilized,” indeed with universal healthcare and with robust social safety nets, perhaps even more so than the U.S., which of course has its own ugly legacies of empire, native American genocide, and slavery.
Through such a lens, it begins to appear that what we call “civilization,” as opposed to “barbarity,” has more to do with whiteness than with the virtues we attribute to civilization, and indeed that what we call “barbarity” has more to do with darker hues of skin color than the vices we attribute to barbarity. I have complete confidence I am not the first to offer this observation; to offer just one example, David Graeber and David Wengrow point to lessons American Indians had to teach British colonists about so-called “civilization” in the colonial era.[7]
So it is indeed the case that Europe’s sins were many and grievous, too many and too grievous to persuasively “launder” through Hitler, except that it seems we did.
[1] Kamil, X, December 2, 2022, https://x.com/kmlsazr/status/1598715255911088145
[2] Argumento, May 18, 2025, https://hispagatos.space/@argumento/114532053313959692
[3] Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (New York: Saint Martin’s Griffin, 1994).
[4] David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace (New York: Owl, 1989).
[5] Alan Mikhail, “Why Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Love Affair with the Ottoman Empire Should Worry The World,” Time, September 3, 2020, https://time.com/5885650/erdogans-ottoman-worry-world/
[6] Sunil Khilnani, “The British Empire Was Much Worse Than You Realize,” review of Legacy of Violence, by Caroline Elkins, New Yorker, March 28, 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/04/the-british-empire-was-much-worse-than-you-realize-caroline-elkinss-legacy-of-violence
[7] ]David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021).