One way of seeing the Nazi treatment of Jews and ethnic Slavs is as colonialism brought a little bit too close to home, against people who looked too similar to

One way of seeing the Nazi treatment of Jews and ethnic Slavs is as colonialism brought a little bit too close to home, against people who looked too similar to the colonizers. When directed against white people in Europe, forced labor, mass executions, and an ideology of superiority felt as abhorrent as they should have felt, but didn't, when directed against dark-skinned people on other continents. (Sure, the Irish had to become white and all, but it's plausible that invisible differences, or differences only visible to race scientists, do not afford as much emotional distance from brutality as visible ones.)