On 12 January, the day commemorating the 1904 revolt of the Herero people against German colonialism, Olaf Scholz’s government announced that it would intervene in the International Court of Justice to oppose South Africa’s charge of genocide against Israel. The move sparked widespread indignation.

The following day, the Namibian presidency published a forceful statement condemning the decision.

“On Namibian soil, Germany committed the first genocide of the 20th century,” the statement said. “In light of Germany’s inability to draw lessons from its horrific history, President Hage G. Geingob expresses deep concern with the shocking decision.”

It is worth dwelling on the word “inability.” Many who condemned Germany’s decision accused it of “failure.”

Germany, they argued, has a sacred responsibility to humanity for its role in World War II. It has failed in that responsibility.

But if Germany’s decision is a failure, then its actions are an aberration, a deviation from some expected historic norm.

“Failure” substitutes open complicity with omission. It replaces the systemic with the particular.

Instead, Germany’s position demonstrates that, despite the horrors that German imperialism has inflicted on humanity in the 20th century, the German ruling class has been able to preserve fascism’s ideological and material basis.

Rather than a “failure,” then, German policy represents a remarkable success. It testifies to the great resilience of the colonial mentality.

And it makes clear that moral condemnation – or, worse still, self-designated “guilt” – is an inadequate framework by which to establish accountability for the crimes of imperial and colonial domination.

Wretched legacy

Germany’s stance is a gift for those of us who consider ourselves anti-imperialists. It dismantles one of the central ideological defenses of the imperial order.

For decades, Europe and North America have worked to cleave Nazism from the colonial tradition that birthed it. The singular evil of the Holocaust became the wellspring of the Germans’ singular “guilt” – a mechanism that both laundered the wretched legacies of the wider colonial world and obscured the threads that bound its sordid history to the present day.

If Nazism stood alone in the annals of human barbarity, then everything else could be cast to the side: the exterminations, the enslavement, the famines, the plunder.

The genocide of the Herero people – and Germany’s flagrant inability to address this legacy – provides an immediate rebuke. It was in modern-day Namibia that Germany’s Imperial Chancery recorded perhaps the first use of the term Konzentrationslager – the concentration camp – to describe an instrument of mass extermination.

Among other abuses, inmates were tortured, starved, worked to death, condemned to disease, and subject to medical experiments. Most were women and children.

As cruel punishment for the 1904 revolt, Germany killed some 65,000 Herero people in four years and over 10,000 Nama people who also dared rise up against its domination. It was in Namibia that Germany honed the tools that it would turn against Communists, Jews, Roma, Sinti, homosexuals and people with mental illnesses just a few decades later.

But the subjugation of Namibia furnished just part of that wretched toolkit.

Hitler’s “Wild West”

Adolf Hitler sought to conquer the “Wild East” and build a slave nation of the Slavs – a people who, by virtue of their past abuse by leaders like Charlemagne, gave the etymological root to the word “slave.” Hitler envisioned a settler-colonial project that would secure “living space” for Volksdeutsche – or “members of the German nation” – and obliterate the “Bolshevik subhumans.”

He found a template in US “manifest destiny” and its project of westward expansion.

In 1928, Hitler remarked approvingly how US settlers had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage.” Hitler would create a “Wild West” to Germany’s East.

In this way, Nazism carried forward the European colonial tradition against the greatest threat that had yet emerged against it: the Soviet Union.

The Soviet counteroffensive not only crushed the dreams of the Third Reich and liberated Europe from fascist imperialism. It also cast a permanent shadow on the mythos of German “guilt.”

The Soviet Union was, after all, the Germans’ first target. Hitler promised that Germany would stand as the “bulwark” of the West against Bolshevism – a position that, for a time, found broad support among the Western ruling class.

Through its war of extermination and enslavement, the Nazi colonial project claimed an estimated 27 million Soviet lives.

Through deliberate starvation, disease, mass executions, it massacred 3.5 million Soviet prisoners of war, considering them to be Untermensch – or subhuman. Auschwitz was first built for them.

Germany systematically exterminated one in four Belarussians, often by forcing entire village populations into barns and churches, setting them on fire, and shooting anyone who dared to escape. The crimes are too ghastly and numerous to recount here.

If Germany was compelled by “guilt” to pay reparations to Israel for decades after the war, why did its reparations to the Soviet Union cease within years of its defeat? In violation of the Potsdam Agreement, the Western occupation zones stopped their payments to the Soviets before the ashes of war had settled.

The USSR could only plug the gap with technology transfers from its own occupation zone in the East, which proved to be a major burden on the development of the young socialist state.

Not with Israel.

Konrad Adenauer, then chancellor of West Germany, spoke bluntly when he met David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, in 1960.

Adenauer said, “We will help you, out of moral reasons and out of practical politics. Israel is the fortress of the West, Israel has to develop in the interest of the whole world.”

These transfers – in the form of financial assistance, weapons sales, and diplomatic cover – continue to this day.

Here, the payment of reparations reveals itself to have a purely political character, an instrument to bolster the allies of imperialism while stifling the development of its adversaries.

If Germany is compelled by “guilt” to support Israel, then why does it not extend the same support to the Russian and Belarussian people?

Instead, Germany’s former victims have retained their historic designation as Untermensch.

“People simply die”

In 2022, German researcher Florence Gaub channeled the virulent Russophobia that exploded in her country by repeating a trope that will not be unfamiliar to the colonized. “We should not forget that, even if Russians look European, they are not European,” she said. “In a cultural sense, they think differently about violence or death… That is why they treat death differently, that people simply die.”

When a German activist asked whether the German government would consider the siege of Leningrad – which claimed 1.5 million lives in 900 days – as a genocide, Annalena Baerbock’s foreign ministry replied that the UN Genocide Convention did not apply retroactively. Of course, this statute of limitations did not seem to bind the Bundestag, which months earlier recognized a famine that struck the Soviet Union as a genocide in Ukraine, putting it on equal footing with the Holocaust in a grotesque act of historical revisionism.

If Germany is so riven by “guilt,” then why did the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) stand by the people of Palestine?

At the level of official policy, the GDR differentiated between Jews and the state of Israel – a position that would be considered anti-Semitic in Germany today.

The GDR saw that Israel was deeply imbricated in the system of imperialism led by the US. It cooperated closely with Arab countries and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) – including at a military level.

The first PLO office in Eastern Europe opened in Berlin in 1973.

The GDR considered Zionism as a “reactionary nationalist ideology of the Jewish big bourgeoisie.”

This echoed the analysis of Palestinian thinkers like Ghassan Kanafani, who showed that Jewish migration to Palestine between 1932 and 1936 included a significant percentage of capitalists – along with a sizeable proletariat. Together, they transformed Palestine’s agrarian society into a bourgeois industrialized economy with employment reserved for “Jewish labor only.”

This policy of racial exclusion “was to have grave consequences,” Kanafani wrote, “as it led to the rapid emergence of fascist patterns in the society of Jewish settlers.”

“Never again” must mean resistance

Anti-colonial thinkers understood Nazism for what it was. It was not alien to them.

They saw the coming storm and, when it passed, understood clearly what they had seen. Its ideology had already been threaded through their world.

In 1900, W.E.B. Du Bois had warned that the exploitation of the colonized world would be “fatal” to Europe’s “high ideals of justice, freedom and culture.”

Decades later, after the horrors of German colonialism had swept through Europe, the Martinican poet and thinker Aimé Césaire would repeat that warning — now as a profound indictment of European society:

They say: ‘How strange! But never mind – it’s Nazism, it will pass!’ And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack… At the end of the blind alley that is Europe… there is Hitler. At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler.

Germany’s gift to progressive forces is precisely that it has exposed the continuity of the colonial project.

Germany does not support the Zionist genocide despite the Holocaust. It supports Zionism for the same reason that it birthed Nazism.

It backs Benjamin Netanyahu for the same reason that it created Adolf Hitler. At a time of systemic crisis, both appeared as bulwarks of Western imperialism against the rebellious Untermensch, the subhumans – the people who “treat death differently,” who “just die.”

The history of colonial and imperial domination has seen many Final Solutions – each limited in its barbarism only by the technological capabilities of the perpetrators and the strength of the resistance mounted against them. That is why the words “never again” ring out from Jakarta to Santiago, Pyongyang to São Paulo, Hanoi to Buenos Aires, Kinshasa to Gaza City.

Gaza is a dress rehearsal for the violence that threatens workers and oppressed peoples everywhere as the crises of our century grow in magnitude. This is the historical tendency of capitalism in decay.

Now, the contours of our century’s struggle – dimmed by decades of imperialist hegemony – come into sharp focus.

On one side, an Axis of Genocide is in formation as Germany, the US, Canada, the UK and other ramparts of the imperial order intervene on the side of extermination. On the other, we find an Axis of Resistance made up of those who know colonialism’s wretched face.

If “never again” is to have any meaning at all, it must mean joining the resistance and dismantling the imperialist system before it absorbs us into its unrelenting death march.

State Senator Joe Baldacci, D-Bangor, implored it was, “time for the Governor, the Attorney General of Maine, the Penobscot County District Attorney, and the U.S. Attorney to work on shutting these Nazis down and sending this guy back to Texas.” The Sheriff of nearby Aroostook county, Shawn Gillen, also suggested passing the buck to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) or the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Infer from their statements the character of these men — do neo-Nazis truly belong in Texas any more than Maine, and must federal agencies determine whether neo-Nazis are, “engaging in illegal activity or just doing their thing?”

That these men believe there is a place (Texas) where neo-Nazis could be free to “do their thing” as long as they don’t disturb the status quo betrays that they have an implicit, albeit unconscious understanding of their class position as settlers.

In the 1600s, settler-residents of Maine began the ethnic cleansing of the Wabanaki Confederacy. This was accompanied by pogroms and the eventual expulsion of its New Afrikan inhabitants into the early 1900s. Despite being a established in 1820 as a “free state,” in which slavery has never been legal, Maine’s economy still depended upon and contributed to the Atlantic slave trade — its weavers transformed plantation cotton into fabric, its shipyards built the ships that conveyed slaves across the Atlantic, and its timber fueled the boilers that transformed plantation sugarcane into sugar, molasses, and eventually the rum that was sold in New England’s taverns. Thus, while the state’s occupants found slavery morally objectionable, they were happy to reap its economic benefits so long as the visibly distasteful aspect occurred elsewhere. They were adamant that Black slaves should be free, so long as none of them actually came to Maine to undercut white labor. Similarly, although the Ku Klux Klan is often perceived to be a Southern or Midwestern phenomenon, Maine was a major northern stronghold for the “second” KKK until the 1930s, with some “klaverns” (local chapters) and women’s associations persisting into later decades. In the late 1970s, President Carter’s administration and the state government collaborated to deprive Maine’s remaining Indigenous tribes of the paltry federal rights available to them, through the legal decision Joint Tribal Council of the Passamaquoddy Tribe v. Morton. Although this decision resulted in a payout of $81.5 million, and the reclamation of some Indigenous land, the tribes ultimately forfeited federal aboriginal title rights that stood to benefit them much more over time. It also bound the tribes to the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act of 1980, which reduced the power of Indigenous land claims to equal those of any settler or corporation. In July 2023 the Maine House of Representatives failed to overturn Democratic Gov. Janet Mills’ veto of a proposed tribal sovereignty bill that would have restored some of the tribes’ federal rights. 

To summarize this history plainly: the only reason Maine’s overwhelmingly white population can “do their thing” today is because of the Pohlhauses of the past, who ventured out from garrisons and forts, the compounds of that time, to slaughter and economically dispossess the land’s original inhabitants. Furthermore, this dispossession is ongoing and must be maintained by the state’s current administrators. Why else would the governor fear the legal and financial implications of tribal sovereignty for nearly eradicated people? Indeed, given this history it’s apparent why Pohlhaus chose chowder-white Maine to build his compound, compared to Texas which has the most Black people of any state, and the second highest Hispanic population. Knowing these statistics, it seems strange that Sen. Baldacci would send Pohlhaus back to a state where neo-Nazis “have lots to do,” compared to having him stay in Maine where their project is virtually complete… Unless one considers that, just as Mainers of the past were fine with slavery as long as it happened elsewhere, Baldacci is fine with race war so long as it doesn’t interrupt his spaghetti dinner. Ultimately, Baldacci and Gillen’s cowardice against stating unequivocally that neo-Nazis only belong in graves reflects their absolute unwillingness to comprehend, or even think about the bloodshed and economic violence that underpins their peaceful existence. They may also have an unconscious inkling that if they deprive Pohlhaus of the peaceful enjoyment of his Nazi compound, someone might justifiably deprive them of the land, wealth and privileges they acquired through the treachery and butchery of the past.    

Nonetheless, the appearance of new fascist subgroups such as Blood Tribe, which only formed in 2021, does disturb liberal settlers. It may even cause alarm for Communists and other leftists. However, to consider these groups the primary or significant fascist threat in the U.S. is at once both incorrect and chauvinist — the true threat is the U.S. police, who are the hostile garrison ensuring white control of the land. Sen. Baldacci actually lamented the possibility of violence between the state’s fascists and the neo-Nazis when he said, “This is a situation I can’t imagine any of our local law enforcement have had to deal with, and this is a situation they are going to have to deal with.”  Of course the local law enforcement officers have never had to fight themselves! 

The fraught claim that the presence of neo-Nazi groups is “new” is a frequency illusion; an erroneous framing of the present because it is happening now. Many of these groups aren’t new at all, but are the remnants, successors, and splinters of the infamous second Klan, which was a popular mass movement with millions of members and one that lasted from at least 1915 to 1950— a fact many liberals today either don’t know or would like to forget. 

Furthermore, while it may feel as if the number of groups and their activities are increasing, Blood Tribe’s hateful rallies are trite compared to the assassinations, kidnappings, and armed robberies perpetrated by groups such as The Order in the 1980s. There aren’t any more hate groups today than there were in 2011 — their numbers aren’t steadily increasing, but rising and diminishing according to the political progress and needs of ordinary Amerika. For example, due to his skin color and conspiracies about his religion, Obama’s presidency saw an explosion of new anti-Muslim and anti-Black hate groups, despite Obama doing more to globally advance these causes — by destroying Libya and conducting hundreds drone strikes against primarily Yemeni civilians — than many domestic fascist terrorists could dream. In the 1930s, groups such as The Silver Legion (Silver Shirts) and German-American Bund were founded as reactions to Roosevelt’s New Deal, despite it being a resounding death knell for revolutionary Communism in the United States. Today, the Blood Tribe and other hate groups primarily direct their venom against the LGBTQIA2S+ community, who are already reviled by one half of the Amerikan political spectrum, and wielded as a political cudgel against Global South nations by the other. Neither face of American fascism genuinely seeks liberation for the oppressed. 

Maine’s nickname, “The Polar Star State,” and motto, “Dirigo” which means “I guide” or “I direct” refer to how, in the same sense that mariners used the Polar Star to navigate, Maine should be the guiding star towards “the ideal America”, its citizens the exemplary patriots. The neo-Nazis understand and have taken this motto to heart. Even if the state’s administrators feign oblivion to the sameness of settlers and neo-Nazis, all those who seek to extinguish Amerika as the guiding star of world fascism should understand it. If there is a forthcoming war, distinct from the internal and external wars continually waged by the U.S. Empire, then its settlers, government, police, and hate groups will all be on the same side. And why wouldn’t they be? 

Pohlhaus is, after all, an ex-marine. Many terrorists just like him are active or former members of the police and U.S. armed forces. The U.S. garrison-police and armed forces are merely the foreign and domestic arms of the project of Amerikan genocide. Despite what the lofty rhetoric of high-school history teachers, so-called “Founding Fathers,” and government officials might claim, this continuous genocide is the real respresentation of Amerikan values. Settler-colonialism is the hard core of fascism, a kind of internal and domestic imperialist policy designed to annihilate the inhabitants of the land to make it available for a chosen ethnos — what the Amerikan race-scientists call “race.”

It’s no coincidence that the chosen ethos for both Mainers and neo-Nazis is the same — neo-Nazis are simply more honest about their intentions than most Amerikan politicians. They merely say aloud what Amerika does and has already done, but refuses to admit.