I am ashamed to say it: it is the Western The proof is that at present it is the indigenous peoples of Africa and Asia who are demanding schools, and colonialist Europe which refuses them; that it is the African who is asking for ports and roads, and colonialist Europe which is niggardly on this score; that it is the colonized man who wants to move forward, and the colonizer who holds things back.In other words, the essential thing here is to see clearly, to think clearly — that is, dangerously — and to answer clearly the innocent first question: what, fundamentally, is colonization?
Nearly twenty years later, when published for the first time in English, Discourse on Colonialism inspired a new generation engaged in the Civil Rights, Black Power, and anti-war movements and has sold more than 75,000 copies to date. But let us come down a step.I hear the storm. They talk to me about local tyrants brought to reason; but I note that in general the old tyrants get on very well with the new ones, and that there has been established between them, to the detriment of the people, a circuit of mutual services and complicity.We’ve made progress: today it is the possessor of the “Christian virtues” who intrigues — with no small success — for the honor of administering overseas territories according to the methods of forgers and torturers.No, Voting Democrat is Not “Harm Reduction”They dazzle me with the tonnage of cotton or cocoa that has been exported, the acreage that has been planted with olive trees or grapevines.The colonialists may kill in Indochina, torture in Madagascar, imprison in Black Africa, crackdown in the West Indies. At the end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler.They were cooperative societies, fraternal societies.And there we are, ready to run the great Yankee risk.What is serious is that “Europe” is morally, spiritually indefensible.The fact is that the so-called European civilization — “Western” civilization — as it has been shaped by two centuries of bourgeois rule, is incapable of solving the two major problems to which its existence has given rise: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem; that Europe is unable to justify itself either before the bar of “reason” or before the bar of “conscience”; and that, increasingly, it takes refuge in a hypocrisy which is all the more odious because it is less and less likely to deceive.What am I driving at?
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A. Leverkuhn Last Modified Date: August 04, 2020 . The American hour.
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In a time gone by, Leon Bloy innocently became indignant over the fact that swindlers, perjurers, forgers, thieves, and procurers were given the responsibility of “bringing to the Indies the example of Christian virtues.”No human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a class-room monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production.Multiple Hat Syndrome Part II: When It’s Not Just You AnymoreFor my part, I make a systematic defense of the non-European civilizations.“The bulldozers!
At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler.
Indochina trampled underfoot, crushed to bits, assassinated, tortures brought back from the depths of the Middle Ages!A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization.“So what? Because he deserves it: he makes it possible to see things on a large scale and to grasp the fact that capitalist society, at its present stage, is incapable of establishing a concept of the rights of all men, just as it has proved incapable of establishing a system of individual ethics. And if evidence is wanted, I could mention a scene of cannibalistic hysteria that I have been privileged to witness in the French National Assembly.I know that some of you, disgusted with Europe, with all that hideous mess which you did not witness by choice, are turning — oh!
They know that their temporary, “masters” are lying.Colonization: bridgehead in a campaign to civilize barbarism, from which there may emerge at any moment the negation of civilization, pure and simple.This being said, it seems that in certain circles they pretend to have discovered in me an “enemy of Europe” and a prophet of the return to the ante-European past.Which means that American high finance considers that the time has come to raid every colony in the world. This version published by Monthly Review Press: New York and London, 1972. To admit once for all, without flinching at the consequences, that the decisive actors here are the adventurer and the pirate, the wholesale grocer and the ship owner, the gold digger and the merchant, appetite and force, and behind them, the baleful projected shadow of a form of civilization which, at a certain point in its history, finds itself obliged, for internal reasons, to extend to a world scale the competition of its antagonistic economies.But then I ask the following question: has colonization really In another connection, in judging colonization, I have added that Europe has gotten on very well indeed with all the local feudal lords who agreed to serve, woven a villainous complicity with them, rendered their tyranny more effective and more efficient, and that it has actually tended to prolong artificially the survival of local pasts in their most pernicious aspects.And now I ask: what else has bourgeois Europe done? in no great numbers — toward America and getting used to looking upon that country as a possible liberator.Who is speaking?