Is Europe Redeemable?

The European colonizer of the past and present is not innocent, and will never be. Europe is irredeemable because it has, to date, not let go of this colonizer/colonized and civilized/uncivilized binary, although now it is expressed in different terms; the West, and the Global South, the 1st and the 3rd world. Cessaire says Europe is indefensible because it has produced and reproduced moral sickness all around the globe- one should never underestimate all the intellectual energies that were put in to defend the colonial argument. Take, for example, the “mutation” or the “accident” of the Holocaust. Cessaire believes that the incident of the Holocaust was not an isolated one- it was not a singular incident where a civilization went amiss or astray- rather, it orients itself perfectly with the ideals of Europe. The only difference here was the fact that the Europeans were inflicting it on themselves, rather than on the other ‘uncivilized’, ‘primitive’ peoples of the world. In this way, Europe is irredeemable because massacre in the name of progress is not recognized on the global stage as genocide, but there is a huge cry when it is reversed- when it happens to the European people, albeit being inflicted on by themselves. The history that the post-colonial subject studies in textbooks even today sympathizes with the victims of the holocaust, but tells us nothing of the suffering and the massacre of its own peoples.

Moreover, Europe is irredeemable because of the ideology of “humanism”. The yardstick of progress has always been, and still currently remains the modernity of Europe, and so reduces the rest of the world into always having to play catch up with Europe. Humanism is an ideology that although claims to be universal, was not produced in abstract, promotes a European rationality and reduces the whole world to a  cost/benefit analysis. It wipes out the world of all its value- it negates the beautiful, diverse and infinite ways of existence into one singular, mathematical, rational way of being. As a result, many decolonized regions are stuck in a rut- they have been brainwashed into believing that in order to advance, they must follow the European manner of civilization. However, what they do not realize, is that the European civilization was only possible because of the barbaric, the savage, the supremely infernal way that they abused and plundered the rest of the world that they conquered or ‘discovered’.

Europe is irredeemable because Europe continues to promote this binary, it continues to exploit the Global South through neo-Imperialism, it continues to deny the rich cultural and historical progress of the South, only because it does not follow  or lie within the European ideals of modernity. Moreover, it is irredeemable because it has instilled in the post-colonial subject so deeply Western ideals of progress that, even though they may not apply to us, we continue to chase after them. Take, for example, the dam projects of the 50’s and 60’s- even though recently decolonized regions such as Asia and Africa, that didn’t necessarily require dams immediately, they exhausted their funds building these because they were following the dominant discourse of the time- the discourse that views the industrial revolution of Europe as the mark of modernization and progress. This once again relates to the idea of humanism, where the European standard is held up as a norm, and the only way to achieve any tangible progress and to be acknowledged on the global stage is by following the ideals of European civilization, rationality and modernity.