The Dutch king and queen attending Holocaust Remembrance Day. This solemn occasion has recently become controversial, as many in Dutch society have expressed views that certain groups, including Moroccan-Dutch citizens and Muslims, should not participate in these commemorations.
By Karim Bettache – May 11, 2025
Notice the pattern: all world wars are the West’s handiwork and most genocides were committed by Europeans – Let’s start seeing Western “civilization” for what it truly is.
The 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day arrived with predictable fanfare—solemn ceremonies, flowery speeches, and sanitized history packaged for comfortable consumption. Yet beneath this carefully constructed narrative lies a blood-soaked truth: May 8th, 1945 marked not only Europe’s liberation from fascism but also the day colonial powers unleashed genocidal violence against the very people who had helped defeat the Nazis.
We must confront the devastating hypocrisy of this moment. The Western powers that positioned themselves as champions of freedom and humanity were practicing the same (if not worse) barbaric fascism in their colonies that they claimed to have defeated in Europe. The only difference? The victims were brown and black bodies, not white European ones.
This selective moral outrage defines Western imperialism. When Hitler enacted his racial theories in Europe, it eventually became unacceptable. Yet these same European powers had been implementing identical racial hierarchies, concentration camps, mass killings, mass rapes, and territorial expansion in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East for centuries—with full impunity and self-righteousness.
This hypocrisy persists today in grotesque forms. In the Netherlands, Holocaust Remembrance Day—supposedly dedicated to reflecting on the horrors of fascism and genocide—has been weaponized into a tool of exclusion. Zionist organizations systematically block Dutch citizens of Moroccan descent from speaking at commemorative events, with Dutch politicians actively enabling this discrimination. The bitter irony is unmistakable: a day meant to honor the fight against fascism has transformed into a showcase for the very exclusionary practices that characterized fascism itself.
In fact, the Netherlands—the European nation that collaborated most efficiently with the Nazis—now tells the descendants of those who fought against fascism that they are not welcome at remembrance ceremonies, cynically labeling their participation “antisemitic.” The cruel paradox is complete: those who suffered colonial violence under European powers find themselves erased from the very narrative of remembrance they helped create through their resistance and sacrifice.
Killing 45000 Algerians in a single day
The historical record is damning. On the very day Europeans danced in the streets celebrating Nazi defeat, French colonial authorities were slaughtering up to 45,000 Algerians in Sétif, Guelma, and Kherrata. Their crime? Daring to believe that the “freedom” and “self-determination” so loudly proclaimed by Allied propaganda might apply to them too.
Algerians had marched peacefully that day, unfurling what would become the flag of their future liberation movement and carrying banners with the seemingly uncontroversial message: “Freedom for the people” and “Long live free and independent Algeria.” The French response was immediate and devastating—bombing villages, burning communities to the ground, and enabling settler violence that butchered and raped men, women, and children.
This wasn’t an aberration but the standard operating procedure of colonial domination. Indeed, what we witness today in Palestine—the bombardment of civilian areas, the systemic sexual abuse, the casual dismissal of indigenous lives—is merely the latest chapter in what Europeans have inflicted for centuries across Africa, Asia, and the Americas: a blueprint of occupation, dehumanization, and wholesale destruction perfected over hundreds of years of colonial practice.
The victims liberated Europe from its colonial auto-immune disease: the ultimate historical irony
When France fell to Nazi Germany, tens of thousands of Algerians, Moroccans, Senegalese, and Vietnamese joined the fight to liberate France—not out of loyalty to their oppressors, but in desperate hope that defeating fascism abroad might finally break their own chains at home. The bitter irony cuts deep: the victims of Europe’s colonial fascism were sacrificing their lives to save Europe from the same colonialism that had simply turned inward and begun devouring Europe itself.
You read that right—Europe’s colonized subjects bled and died to rescue their tormentors from colonialism’s auto-immune disease, as the imperial violence cultivated across the Global South for centuries finally rebounded to consume its creators. The ultimate historical tragedy: the colonized dying to save the colonizers from themselves, only to be rewarded with massacres for daring to ask for the same freedom they had helped secure for Europe.
Despite negotiations between French authorities and Ho Chi Minh to address post-war Vietnam’s future, and despite victory of the left (including communists) in French elections of November 1946 — that wonderful “Western Left”—France chose reconquest over liberation. Whether led by the right, center, or left, whether secular or religious, from republic to republic, France clung desperately to its empire from the Mekong Delta to the Casbah of Algiers.
The uncomfortable truth is that the Second World War was fundamentally an inter-imperialist conflict—just as the First World War was—a brutal struggle between Western powers scrambling for domination, influence, resources, and territory. When we notice this pattern, that all world wars are the West’s colonial handiwork and that most genocides were committed by Europeans, we start to see Western civilization for what it truly is: a uniquely destructive force of nature and likely the end of humanity if not stopped. The evidence speaks for itself—from the Holocaust to the Belgian Congo, from Dresden to Hiroshima, from Algeria to Vietnam—Western powers have perfected industrial-scale death while marketing themselves as civilization’s guardians.
Resisting colonialism
Indeed, the colonized were used as cannon fodder while their own aspirations for self-determination were systematically crushed. Even Western heroes like Winston Churchill—celebrated as bulwarks against fascism and loved by “anti-imperialist” George Galloway who just cannot stop praising him —were themselves deeply racist, believing in the same racial hierarchies that underpinned Nazi ideology. Churchill’s responsibility for the Bengal famine that killed millions reveals the selective application of humanity in Western historical narratives.
The parallels to current events are impossible to ignore. Today’s genocide in Gaza follows the exact colonial template established in Algeria 80 years ago. Palestinian resistance, like Algerian resistance before it, is stripped of all context and painted as “pure evil” or “barbarism” rather than the inevitable response to decades of settler colonialism, apartheid, and occupation.
History shows us that liberation is possible, but only through sustained resistance. Every founding leader of Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN) traced their revolutionary commitment back to the May 1945 massacres. The Vietnamese and Algerians ultimately defeated French colonialism in the 1950s and 1960s, and the Vietnamese went on to defeat the American military in the 1970s.
This year also marks the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference of 1955, when newly independent nations of Africa and Asia united to challenge Western domination. This spirit of solidarity among the formerly colonized—the awakening of the Global South—remains the most powerful weapon against imperial hegemony and needs to be revived.
Reclaiming history
We must reclaim these hidden histories and recognize a fundamental truth: German fascism was defeated not just by Western armies but by millions of colonized peoples who fought and died for a freedom they themselves were denied. From Algeria to Vietnam, from India to the Philippines, it was the colonized who paid in blood for Europe’s liberation while receiving bullets rather than freedom in return.
The ongoing Palestinian struggle stands in this proud tradition of resistance against colonial fascism. And just as the Vietnamese and Algerians ultimately prevailed against seemingly insurmountable imperial power, Palestinians and their allies will eventually defeat those who oppress them.
Palestinians will be free—not because history guarantees justice, but because the determination of an oppressed people to live in dignity has proven, time and again, to be more powerful than the most sophisticated weapons colonial powers can deploy against them.
Prof. Karim Bettache acquired his BSc and MSc in psychology at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and his Ph.D. in psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has worked as a postdoctoral fellow with the cultural psychologist Professor Chi-yue Chiu and as a lecturer for Monash University. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor for the Faculty of Social Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
He specializes in cultural, political, and social psychology. His work attempts to connect individual psychological phenomena (e.g., racism) to broader sociopolitical and historical developments of human societies (e.g., colonialism or capitalism). Hence, his work strongly overlaps with a multitude of social sciences such as sociology and the political sciences.
