Editing Colonialism (section)

=== World War II ===
Many interpret [[World War II]] as an attempt by [[Nazi Germany]] and its allies to colonize the whole European continent, especially in the east. Historian Lorenzo Veracini writes, "The global history of colonialism can be seen as bookended by two fateful moments: European armies crossed the strait of Gibraltar in the fifteenth century to establish unequal relations of domination in Africa, and a colonial army crossed it in the opposite direction in 1936, to conquer the metropole and pursue a civil war that subjected the metropolitan populations with a violence that had been until then reserved for restive colonized subjects."<ref name=":8" />{{Rp|page=5}} Economic historian Adam Tooze posits that [[Operation Barbarossa]] is "far better understood as the last great land-grab in the long and bloody history of European colonialism."<ref name=":7">{{Cite book |last=Tooze |first=J. Adam |title=The wages of destruction: the making and breaking of the Nazi economy |date=2008 |publisher=Penguin USA |isbn=978-0-14-311320-1 |location=New York |pages=}}</ref>{{Rp|page=462}} "From the moment that Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the genocidal impulses of Nazi ideology towards both the Jews and the Slavs had taken on concrete form in an extraordinary programme of population displacement and colonial settlement."{{Rp|page=463}} [[Generalplan Ost]], the Nazi government's grand plan of settler colonialism, called for the mass murder and deportation of at least 30 million Slavs from Poland and the western Soviet Union in preparation for the importation of millions of German settlers.{{Rp|page=462-467}} The plan was lauded as a 'solution' to secure Germany's food supply for the duration of the war, unlike the previous one. Hitler repeatedly drew parallels between the colonization plan and Manifest Destiny in the United States. [[Aimé Césaire]] argues in [[Discourse on Colonialism]], "[Europeans] tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples."<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Heiskanen |first=Jaakko |date=2021-12-01 |title=In the Shadow of Genocide: Ethnocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and International Order |url=https://academic.oup.com/isagsq/article/1/4/ksab030/6380106 |journal=Global Studies Quarterly |volume=1 |issue=4 |pages=ksab030 |doi=10.1093/isagsq/ksab030 |issn=2634-3797}}</ref>