Is Europe Redeemable?

There is no question of whether Europe is redeemable or not. Cesaire clearly outlines a path for Europe's redeem-ability in his Discourse on Colonialism. However, before Europe can set out on the path to its redemption, it needs to acknowledge its crimes. 

How can there be talk of redemption when the very discourse on decolonization is laced with denial, when work detailing the crimes of the colonizer gets banned, when the colonizer still gets to act as liberator and benefactor?

Cesaire viciously and rightly so critiques the knowledge systems of the West. He highlights how the very science, and philosophy, with which Europe wants to move ahead, is entrenched in the same racism, in the same thought process which informed its colonial approach. All of this means the same thing, that the crimes which Europe has committed in the past, it is capable of committing in the future because it feels no remorse for what it has done, only seeks to justify it with what it thinks colonialism brought to the third world.  

According to Cesaire, Europe believes that it brought civilizations into contact with each other, “… Europe is to have been a crossroads, and that because it was the locus of all ideas, the receptacle of all philosophies, the meeting place of all sentiments, it was the best center for the redistribution of energy.” Even now after the colonial project has failed, even after Europe has faced the wrath of the monster it created in the form of WW2 and the holocaust; it still believes that its knowledge systems are superior, that it should be the ideal that the third world should strive for. Until it stops believing this, Europe is irredeemable, and headed towards its own destruction.

So far in reading the work of Fanon, Memmi and Cesaire, one thing becomes very clear: none of these formerly colonized people are crying for revenge or retribution, they are not begging for a reversal to how things were before colonization or a flip in the world order which places them ahead. They are demanding a freedom that despite independence is kept from them; they are asking to be allowed to move forward, to be able to create their own future, to modernize on the basis of their own definition of what it is to be modern. 

And within these demands lies Europe's redemption, to take a step back and survey the world it has created, to reject it for what they made it to be and pass it into the hands of the colonized so that they can create a future which welcomes their existence. 

Quoting Cesaire, “For us, the problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but to go beyond.” and, “It is a new society that we must create,

with the help of all our brother slaves, a society rich with all the productive power of modern times, warm with all the fraternity of olden days.”