That is not at all what I am saying.

I have no issue with the claim that colonialism was horrific (it was) or the fact that it was racist (which it also was). Nowhere in my prior comment did I object to that aspect of the article (which is totally fine).

What I am objecting to is the labeling of Jewish victims of the Holocaust as “white” in a historical context in which Jews were being racialized as other (as a distinct racial category that was non-white/non-Aryan) as well as the erasure of the (similarly) racist motivations that underpinned Nazism.

The article’s assertion that people are empathetic to Holocaust victims because the victims were white is simply an incorrect and ahistorical take. It also conveniently ignores continued anti-Semitism which persisted well after the Holocaust (and which still persists). More realistically, the UK, the US, and other countries ignore colonialism because of their own complicity in such behavior. While there was significant anti-Semitism in the US, UK, etc., the fact that the allies liberated the death camps and were not complicit in these atrocities made it easier for these countries to portray themselves positively by much more forcefully rejecting Nazism (which also allowed for the history of anti-Semitism among allied countries to be de-emphasized). In addition, far fewer individuals were exposed directly to the horrors of colonialism; in the case of WWII, a much larger portion of people (allied soldiers) directly saw the aftermath of these horrors and thus were directly confronted with this evil. Furthermore, many of the survivors emigrated to these countries, and the Jewish community put in significant effort to record this history and raise awareness of these atrocities; the creation of museums dedicated to the Holocaust, the publication of the stories and personal experiences of the survivors, etc. were all the result of significant efforts by the Jewish community to make people aware of these things; and these were communicated in the languages that these countries speak. In the case of colonization miles away where the victims have no means of communicating with citizens of the countries engaging in such colonization, there is certainly a gap in the ability to be heard and raise awareness. On top of this, I think the motivations are also pertinent to people’s differing reactions; atrocities committed out of greed (to steal land, resources, etc.) is in many ways more easily understood (though still wrong and evil) than atrocities committed purely out of hate and a desire to annihilate/destroy for no other purpose than to completely wipe out an entire people.

In addition to these issues, it is not necessary to create such a comparison to assert the evils of colonialism. I believe that this article does far more to trivialize the Holocaust and to equate victims of the Holocaust with their persecutors than it does to effectively call out the evil and brutality of European colonialism. In that sense, the article works more in service of promoting anti-Semitism and a misunderstanding of history than it does to advance any sort of reconciliation, remuneration, restitution, and correction by any of these countries for the atrocities they committed in colonialism.