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Section 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Discourse on Colonialism, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Colonial Racism and the Moral Corruption of Europe
The Consequences of Colonial Plunder
Scholarship and Power
Class Struggle and Revolution
Summary
Analysis
The violence of colonization serves to “decivilize” and “brutalize” the people who commit it. Like a disease, colonization infects European culture, which grows hypocritical and “proceeds toward savagery.” When Europe ran out of non-Europeans to torture, Nazism arose like a “boomerang effect,” directed back on Europe itself. However, Césaire continues, Europeans fail to see that they have done the same thing outside Europe for centuries. Even the “very Christian bourgeois” European “has a Hitler inside him,” and Europeans only hate Hitler because he directed his crimes against white people. In other words, Hitler was unique only because he “applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for” nonwhite peoples Europeans denigrated as inferior. As long as Europe remains capitalist, Césaire insists, it will only reserve human rights for itself; Hitler is the logical conclusion of capitalism and European philosophy.
Césaire’s argument about the effects of colonial violence on Europeans is significant for two reasons: first, it inverts the normal, racist use of the word “civilization” to mean Europe and “savagery” to mean non-European peoples. Second, it points out the inherent instability of the endless quest for profit and power, which eventually undermines itself. However, he also clarifies that not all Europeans are directly responsible for the violence of colonialism: rather, the responsibility falls on the shoulders of the government bureaucrats, wealthy aristocrats (or bourgeoisie), and colonial settlers and soldiers who directly plotted, financed, participated in, and personally benefited from enslaving, massacring, and systematically robbing people in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Similarly, when he calls Nazism a “boomerang effect,” he absolutely does not mean that the Holocaust was inevitable or that its victims’ suffering was justified. Rather, he is pointing out that Europeans had been carrying out the same type of genocide for several centuries (first throughout the Americas, and later in Asia and Africa), and that the unfathomable horrors of Nazi concentration camps were the culmination of colonialism as a whole. The Nazis expanded within Europe because there was no territory left to exploit outside it, and within recent memory, all of Western Europe’s governments believed in white supremacism and considered it reasonable to enslave and slaughter people just because they were not white. In other words, Césaire contends, countries like France, Great Britain, and the United States had no legitimate moral authority over the Nazis, because they all committed very similar atrocities in the recent past.
Themes
Césaire quotes someone who calls for the “domination […] of a foreign race” in order to make “the inequalities among men […] into a law.” But this not Hitler speaking: it is the humanist philosopher Renan, who believed that Europeans have a God-given right to conquer “inferior or degenerate races” like “Negroes and Chinese,” whom he considered stupid, without principles, and destined for servitude. European colonial governors and religious leaders believed the same lies: that non-Europeans are Godless “incompetents” who have no human rights and leave valuable natural resources in the ground—and so need to be conquered by Europeans. Although these writers thought of themselves as defending humanity, they spouted the same lies as Hitler and defended the same conduct. “No one colonizes innocently,” Césaire concludes. Nations that colonize others are “morally diseased” and eventually produce “the negation of civilization, pure and simple.”
Césaire wants readers to see that Hitler’s beliefs were not an anomaly in Western history: some of Europe and North America’s most celebrated thinkers, like the French philosopher Renan, have believed in the exact same white supremacist ideology that Hitler put into action. This ideology has always infected American and Western European popular and intellectual culture, Césaire insists, and most of the people who advance it might seem innocuous or even benevolent. But it is a life-and-death battle for the vast majority of the world’s people, whom these white supremacists consider less than human and therefore not deserving of the same rights, protections, and privileges as Europeans. The fight against white supremacism and for racial justice was not over after World War II, nor did it end during Césaire’s lifetime—and nor would Césaire consider it over today, by any stretch of the imagination. The justifications that white supremacists of his time used for their beliefs, Césaire points out, are actually just biases attributable to European culture: while some European nations dedicated themselves to farming cash crops and extracting resources like gold and coal from the ground, for instance, much of the world found ways to live sustainably, without depleting natural resources. There is nothing “incompetent” about living sustainably, but neither side deserves to be dehumanized or slaughtered because of the way they have chosen to live. For Césaire, Europe is “the negation of civilization” precisely because it has always insisted on its own superiority, without learning to tolerate people who live and organize their societies differently.
Themes
Although many Europeans try to forget colonizers’ morally reprehensible indifference toward non-European lives, this history cannot be erased. One French conqueror bragged of ordering people decapitated and another of collecting prisoners’ ears; a third excitedly called for “a great invasion of Africa,” and a fourth remembered his soldiers, “intoxicated by the smell of blood,” massacring thousands of women and children. Their “sadistic pleasures” must be remembered because “they prove that colonization […] dehumanizes even the most civilized man.” To reconcile themselves with the violence they commit, colonizers view and treat non-Europeans as animals, but in turn they become animals themselves. Some Europeans were even delighted that their countrymen could act out their violent impulses in colonies without punishment.
Césaire has pointed out that colonization begins with a profit motive but eventually requires violence in order to protect that profit. (For instance, in order for American and European plantation owners to profit, they implemented a violent and repressive system of slavery.) Here, however, Césaire shows what happens next: Europeans who have accepted violence against non-Europeans as a means to profit begin seeing this violence as its own reward, and they actively seek out opportunities to kill, maim, rape, and torture people in the colonies. Again, it is essential to remember that this is exactly what happened during the Nazi regime: once they started seeing European Jews as inferior and inhuman, Nazis embraced violence and murder as both a necessary tactic to rid the world of “evil” and a source of personal enjoyment. This transition from violence for the sake of profit to violence for the sake of violence, all justified by the idea that violence would improve or “civilize” its victims, is the twisted core of colonial ideology.
Themes
European colonization has destroyed successful nations on every other continent, replacing them with “force, brutality, cruelty, sadism, conflict,” and poor education. There is no genuine cultural exchange, only brutality based on “relations of domination and submission.” In short, Césaire concludes, “colonization = ‘thingification.’” Europeans claim to have achieved “progress,” but they really destroyed the “extraordinary possibilities” of other civilizations. Europe raves about building infrastructure in its colonies, but it did so by forcing millions into slavery and leaving them with “an inferiority complex.” It prides itself on growing crops for export, but it eradicated indigenous agriculture and economies in the process. Europe has not defeated “local tyrants,” but rather cooperated with them to further oppress the population. Rather than providing “civilization,” Europe has provided “proletarianization and mystification.”
Césaire’s famous formula—“colonization = ‘thingification’”—captures the essence of what he sees as wrong with colonial, racist, and nationalist thinking: it requires seeing other people as mere “things,” rather than full human beings, and it uses this perspective to justify essentially any and all violence against those people. When Europeans and North Americans defend colonialism, they usually argue that it brought “civilization” to places that lacked it—meaning that these places had no complex social structure, existing system of government, or great artistic, architectural, and intellectual achievements. This is part of “thingification,” because it suggests that people are lesser because of their societies’ different levels of development. However, Césaire points out that this is simply false—it even contradicts the history that everyone learns in primary school: Africa, the Americas, and Asia were full of elaborate civilizations that were in no way inferior to the European ones that destroyed them.
Themes
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In contrast, the “non-European civilizations” were communal and democratic. They “did not pretend” to follow principles that they never actually put into action. However, Césaire does not hate all of Europe because of colonialism, which only happened because Europe “had fallen into the hands of the most unscrupulous financiers and captains of industry.” And to advance these aims, European rulers “grafted modern abuse onto ancient injustice.” Progress in the colonized world has happened in spite of colonialism, not because of it. The people of colonized countries want things like school and infrastructure because they “want[] to move forward.” But Europe continues to stop them.
While Europeans contend that non-European countries and civilizations were (or still are) inferior because of differences in culture, history, infrastructure, and so on, Césaire points out one concrete way that Europe was inferior to the rest of the world: only Europeans decided that people who did not look like them were not human beings and used this belief to justify murdering, raping, and enslaving them. However, Césaire emphasizes that this defect in European intellectual and political culture does not make all Europeans evil people. Accordingly, it would not be accurate to say that Césaire dehumanizes or “thingifies” Europeans in the same way as they have done to non-Europeans, because he does not turn value judgments about a society into value judgments about the people who live in that society. Rather, he sees a specific group of people—the European government officials and upper classes who planned, implemented, and benefitted from colonization—as specifically morally responsible for Europe’s devastation of the world.
Themes
