Turning Imperialism on Its Head and Treating Europeans as Africans

Precisely because the Nazi utopia of a dynamic, racially purified German empire required a war for  its fulfilment, and because that utopia was also a nightmarish revelation of the destructive potential in European civilization—turning imperialism on its head and treating Europeans as Africans—the experience of fascism’s New Order (and its short-lived allure) was forgotten as quickly as possible after 1945.

--Mark Mazower, preface to Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), xiii.