When The Real Crime Began
Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism and the Dignity of the Western Philosophical Tradition

After the end of the Second World War a number of Black philosophers attacked the tendency of most European and North American observers to isolate the Nazi genocide from the history of the West. In the view of these Black philosophers, Nazism had been prepared for by the crimes of colonialism and imperialism. They also argued that many of the canonical figures of the Western philosophical tradition were implicated in these same crimes, for example, by investing in, supporting, or remaining silent about, the Atlantic slave trade or, later, imperialism. Furthermore, they claimed that the failure of philosophers and others subsequently to address this history contributed to the climate that made the Holocaust possible. Later, particularly in the 1960s, there were White historians who similarly sought to place the crimes of National Socialism within the context of Western intellectual history; one might think, for example, of Léon Poliakov's The Aryan Myth or George L. Mosse's The Crisis of German Ideology.1