Discourse on Colonialism

Césaire argues that colonization works to “decivilize” and “brutalize” (35) the colonialist by turning him towards escalating violence. He compares this violence to an “infection” (35) that leads Europe towards “savagery” (36). Colonization not only perpetuates violence towards colonized people but also incites Europeans to act violently towards one another. The bourgeoisie are surprised by this connection between violence abroad and violence so close to home. Yet this is the case with Nazism, which Césaire says emerges from violence abroad and which many Europeans do not see in connection with colonialism. Césaire believes that the “very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century […] has a Hitler inside of him” (36). This humanistic Christian bourgeois is like Hitler in that he experiences “the crime against the white man” (36) and uses colonialist methods against other Europeans in the perceived attack on whiteness.

Césaire explains that he chooses to discuss Adolf Hitler at length because his political force is a response to capitalism’s creation of widespread inequality. He believes that Hitler’s extreme ideas about superior races are no different than that of Ernest Renan, a French humanist philosopher who has once written in his book entitled La réforme intellectuelle et morale: “We aspire not to equality but to domination” (37).