As Sven Lindqvist has detailed, aerial bombing was developed by Italians in Libya and Somalia.23 No one called it a war crime in the colonial circumstance. This fact was not lost on Aimé Césaire; after the Second World War, he observed that the Nazis had crossed the line not by using weapons of mass destruction but by “applying to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the ‘Arabs’ of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India and the ‘niggers’ of Africa.”24 Of course, when the Allies applied the same colonialist procedures in Europe, they spared themselves
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