As Gaza Burns, Aimé Césaire's Words Should Haunt Us

This is the price of genocide.

A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.

A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization.

A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization.

—Aimé Césaire, “Discourse on Civilization”

A mother wept this week. “My children were killed while they were hungry,” she said. Her husband and children were among the roughly 400 people killed in the latest wave of Israeli bombing in Gaza. The resurgence of US-backed slaughter received only low-key coverage from American media. Most Republicans cheered, and most Democrats remained silent.

Israel had already been mass-murdering Palestinians in slow motion, despite the ceasefire. It had blocked all goods from coming into Gaza, including essential aid, and had cut off electricity supplies. Among other things, that forced a shutdown in water desalination which left roughly 600,000 people without clean drinking water. Malnutrition was already rampant, and children were dying horrific deaths as a result.

As the bombs fell, embattled Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was denying the reality of genocide in Gaza and smearing the left with false antisemitism charges to promote his new book. (Norman Solomon responded here to Schumer and other “liberal” apologists in the so-called “pro-Israel, pro-peace” crowd.)

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has trampled on the country’s democratic institutions so quickly that we need new tools to track him.^[1] The Chuck Schumers of this world don’t seem to understand what’s happening—to the Middle East, to the United States, or to themselves.

They would do well to read Aimé Césaire’s 1955 essay “Discourse on Colonialism.”^[2] The leftist poet, politician, and essayist from Martinique understood the corrosive effect of colonialism on societies that practice it.

American colonialism is a variation on the old theme. The US prefers not to govern its subjects directly the way European countries did. It prefers to use military threats, financial domination, and colonization by proxy as with Israel.

(Its liberal apologists insist that Israel is not a colonial project, of course, but its founders—including Ze'ev Jabotinsky^[3] and groups like “the Jewish Colonial Trust” and the “Jewish Colonisation Association”—openly described it that way. )

Proxy colonization of the Middle East, like that of Africa and Asia, is built on the dehumanization of its peoples. Césaire listed “a few small facts” that contradict that dehumanization, including “the invention of arithmetic and geometry by the Egyptians,” “the discovery of astronomy by the Assyrians,” “the birth of chemistry among the Arabs,” and “the appearance of rationalism in Islam at a time when Western thought had a furiously pre-logical cast to it.”

Since the 1950s, the footprint of American militarism has been seen in places as far-flung as Vietnam, Iraq, and Palestine. Like European colonialism, it has left

“... cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out.”

Césaire saw the coming financial colonialism, too. He quotes Harry S. Truman: “The time of the old colonialism has passed, which means that American high finance considers that the time has come to raid every colony in the world.”^[4]

Colonialism, whether old or new, destroys civilizations from within.

“(The) colonial enterprise is to the modern world what Roman imperialism was to the ancient world: the prelude to Disaster and the forerunner of Catastrophe ...”

The corruption of a nation is also the corruption of individuals. “Colonization works to decivilize the colonizer,” in Césaire’s words, “to brutalize him in the true sense of the word.” It turns the colonizer into “a classroom monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver ....”

And then,

“... at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and ‘interrogated’, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged ... the prisons [of the colonizers] fill up, the torturers around the racks invent, refine, discuss.”

Perhaps that’s where we’re headed today. Or perhaps our totalitarianism will be subtler, more “virtual.” Either way, a moral debt has been incurred. As Césaire writes, “No one colonizes with impunity.”

Liberalism’s genocide deniers should take heed of Césaire’s words about European totalitarianism—that “before they were its victims, they were its accomplices ... they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.”

“I am not talking about Hitler,” Césaire added, “or the prison guard, or the adventurer, but about the ‘decent fellow’ across the way ...”

As the killing continues in Palestine, these words should haunt them, and all of us:

“Truly, there are sins for which no one has the power to make amends, and which can never be fully expiated.”

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^[1] They include a spreadsheet of Trump’s actions since re-taking office and a Venn diagram that displays his totalitarian moves by category.

^[2] Translation by Joan Pinkham. Monthly Review Press: New York and London, 1972. Originally published as Discours sur le colonialisme by Editions Presence Africaine, 1955.

^[3] “My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they ... see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent. The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage.”

—Jabotinsky, Ze’ev, Iron Wall, 1923. https://en.jabotinsky.org/media/9747/the-iron-wall.pdf

^[4] I couldn’t verify the quote; perhaps it’s a paraphrasing.