EPISODE 3 Now we bring the story of race and racism right up-to-date. Some of the 20th Century’s early genocides, particularly those in Armenia and the Belgian Congo, represented a new, mechanized phase of state-sponsored racial slaughter. During the genocide in the Congo, 10 million African people – almost half the entire population – were butchered by King Leopold’s men. For the first time, details of the massacres were made known to people in Europe. These accounts were so lurid and horrifying, that some Europeans, perhaps for the first time, started to wonder who were the ‘civilised’ - and who were the ‘savages’. Shortly after the demented carnival of self-destruction that was the First World War, there was a widespread and palpable awareness of the dangers that might arise from racist ideologies. The League of Nations had been created as a forum where peaceful solutions to conflicts between nations – and races - might be found. At the Paris Peace Conference, the Japanese delegation had tried to persuade all nations to sign up to a Race Equality Proposal, which would have established for states and individuals a right in international law guaranteeing “just treatment in every respect making no distinction, either in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality.” But for leaders of the former colonies, there was too much at stake to concede the principle of racial equality: The Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes thwarted the proposal, knowing that it would have jeopardised his “White Australia Policy”. The Americans, whose southern states still operated the racial separatist policy known as Jim Crow, were similarly unimpressed. As a consequence, an important opportunity was missed - and the proponents of racist ideas were given a further boost after the election of the Nazis in Germany. Of course, Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ and the Holocaust that it produced has profoundly affected ideas about race ever since. Yet in many respects, the Nazi’s programme was merely a late Teutonic entry into a well-established European bloodsport, since in the colonies, the same programme of violence, segregation, demonisation, inferiorisation, and enslavement that had been applied by the Nazis was already in force. In places as far apart as Namibia and Tasmania, European colonialists had long presided over concentration camps, and legally enforced programmes of eugenics. Despite this, bizarrely, the impact of the colonial on the political, economic and cultural shape of the modern world is often completely overlooked. The French writer Jean Baudrillard became notorious for his apparently counter-factual claim that the first Gulf War “never happened”. Yet today, it is commonplace to read allegedly learned accounts of everything from the economic problems of Africa to the educational under-achievement of black schoolboys in Britain and the United States without any reference whatever to the colonial experience. Like Baudrillard’s Gulf War, it is as though the Empire “never happened”. We show how Nazism was, as the historian Mark Mazower puts it, “colonialism re-applied to Europe”. In the immediate post-war years, the United Nations did sign up to the principle of anti-racism, and after some soul-searching, scientific institutions became much more sensitive about the potential use and abuse of scientific disciplines for racial purposes. Yet to examine this question by looking solely through the prism of the Holocaust can distort perceptions of racism. The Holocaust is racism given its most extreme and tangible expression. But just because genocide isn’t unfolding before our very eyes does not mean that racism is any less pervasive than it was at the time of the Nazi’s programme of genocide. This is not to say that scientific, social and cultural ideas about race and racism have not been reshaped in the years since Auschwitz. Further changes in our understanding of what racism is followed the political upheavals of the 1950s and 60s, which effectively brought Europe’s colonial era to an end. There was unease during the ‘waves’ of post-war immigration from the colonies to the ‘Mother Countries’ of Europe, but it’s usually assumed that things have become “better”. We are all more ‘tolerant’ and more ‘liberal’. Yet, of course, racism has never really gone away. Today, few people are willing to pronounce themselves ‘racist’: even the extreme right-wing British National Party insists that it is not a racist party. Yet everywhere, evidence of discriminatory practices in the workplace persists. Across Europe, racial attacks are on the rise. European academics continue to publish papers based on the evidence of ‘intelligence tests’ which purport to prove that Africans are intellectually inferior. Neo-fascist parties across Europe command more electoral support than at any time since the War. Despite the carnage of the Holocau