Colonialist violence is the root cause of genocide of both the body and mind through the erasure of non-European cultures.

What if any is the difference between colonization and genocide? Prof Mignolo: There is a difference, though I never really thought of it. The first thing that comes to mind is that genocide is a consequence of colonialism. Another question is can this be claimed for all genocides? Prof Tlostanova: Holocaust, for example. Prof Mignolo: Ooh. Let’s start the other way round. One of the features of coloniality is its connection to economy based on dispensability of human life, which is seen as a commodity: you sell sugar or you sell slaves. Genocide means we do not care. Therefore, genocide is possible because certain human lives are dispensable. Iraqi lives are more dispensable than American lives. Holocaust, however was based on stripping human life of legal rights, as Hannah Arendt writes. So it was not about the dispensability of human life in terms of economy but it presented bareness of life in relation to the state and law. For white European bourgeoisie Christians the really horrible part of holocaust was not the crime itself but the fact that it was committed against white people using the technique Europe learned in its colonies. Economic dispensability of human life that build the system of the economy liberals and Marxists call capitalism came back on the level of the state. Jews were internally inferior. I will not say that all genocides have been a consequence of coloniality, but I would make these two connections. The third one could be Rwanda. There colonialists, especially of the second wave after the Enlightenment created the idea of national identity. Before there existed communities of faith, not of birth. Genocide there was therefore a consequence of conditions colonialists left behind. We could think of other genocides … How can we think Stalin’s genocide? Prof Tlostanova: I was just thinking about it. It was not framed in racial terms, though many scholars today question this. They ask if Stalin’s genocides were connected with people’s ethnic origins and race or only with class. There was no racial discourse in Soviet Union but crimes were often committed on racial grounds – nobody has ever put Russian in jail for nationalistic reasons while all other nationals were imprisoned, if their belief in the Soviet idea was not strong enough. I think it was based on race although it was masked as a class fight. Prof Mignolo: So there is the underlying notion of dispensability of human life as an economic category, while genocide on the level of the state also includes the idea of elimination of an enemy. Be it Hitler’s Aryan state or Stalin’s communist state. Prof Tlostanova: But Hitler tried to make Jews economically efficient as well. In concentration camps there was the McDonald’s logic – before Jews were killed they took everything of use and value from them – clothes, hair, teeth … Stalin made enemies build things, sometimes useless. They have built the Moscow State university. What about the genocide as a tool for eradication of culture or religion? Prof Mignolo: I think this in included in the notion of dispensability of the human life – be it organs or something else. Another thing is if these are used to present the enemy you want to eradicate. Islam or the criminal inside the society, or the Communists in the US during the Cold War. There seem to be two types of genocide – one motivated by economics – and here we do not have the notion of an enemy … it is just a tool. Prof Tlostanova: You do not kill on purpose, it is a consequence of use. Prof Mignolo: Yes, you have a horse to work or you have a slave to work. He is not your enemy – on the contrary, it is useful – it is a tool. You buy it, sell it, use it. A different kind of genocide is when you have to eradicate. However, eradication does not necessarily imply genocide. In colonial Peru there was eradication of ideology. They did not kill, they just converted to Christianity. They wanted to conquer souls. Prof Tlostanova: That is why I think coloniality is wider and deeper than genocide. You can leave people alive but you wipe everything out of their minds to put something else there. In a way this is also a genocide – you leave them their physical lives but you take away their inside … Prof Mignolo: We call it epistemic lobotomy. Now that I think of, the cleaning of ideology might had been a fore-runner of Hitler’s work. Except that Indians of the time were not the menace for Christian theologians like Jews were for Hitler. Christians are very clear of who their enemies are – at that moment in history it was Islam and Protestants. Catholics controlled the game but they wanted a dangerous enemy eager to destroy them – this was also the Bush discourse after the 9/11. Prof Tlostanova: This is a very American discourse. It is the only way how to keep America together and form its national identity. To be together against someone. In Europe I think there is bigger common base of religion, roots, culture …