Is Europe Redeemable?

Within Cesaire’s discourse on colonialism, Cesaire argues that though civilizational contact and exchange is like oxygen and prevents cultural atrophy, colonization finds itself infinitely distanced from any notion of civilization since you cannot find within it a single human value. I argue that due to the continuity of the tradition of hypocrisy, rationalization of oppression, and thingification in Europe, both in the lead up to and in the aftermath of the Holocaust, that Europe is beyond redemption. Europe's regression in other words continues undisturbed, preventing any moment where Europe actively addresses the violence and hypocrisy that dominates its conscious.

We begin with the “universal regression” that Cesaire cites which occurs at every instance of colonial violence and which guides Europe towards savagery. This savagery finds its apotheosis in the Holocaust which is clearest manifestation of a boomerang effect wherein the former accomplices of Nazism are transformed for the first time into its principal victims. Moreover, Cesaire states that the morbidity of the violence in the colonies simply proves that colonial activity, predicated upon a contempt for and dehumanization of the native has dehumanized the colonizer himself. It is the colonizer who has rendered himself an animal.

From this dehumanized state, the Holocaust confronts the tradition of European humanism and reveals the hypocrisy I mentioned earlier. To exemplify the Hitler that resides within the consciousness of bourgeois consciousness,  Cesaire cites the idealist philosopher Renan who stated that the “inequalities among men (must be made) into a law’’ in the country of a “foreign race” so as to ensure domination. Renan is cited again in a reference to how the regeneration of degenerate races by the superior races is a providential order. Beyond philosophers, we see references to Christian Reverends Muller and Barde who both discuss how without colonization the Earth’s resources left to the uncivilized peoples will go to waste. Cesaire here establishes a firm ideological substructure from which Hitler emerges and from which he does not have to deviate at all. Cesaire here has illustrated that a civilization which justifies colonization is one that is sick and bound to Hitlerism inextricably. But it is after the Holocaust that we see no significant change in European consciousness and that despite the boomerang effect having wreaked havoc, Europe remains content with defending the contradictions in its humanism and rationality. To this end, Cesaire cites French politicians Coste-Floret and Bidault who oversee the mass slaughter in Madagascar during the uprisings in the region in a time where there are calls for a return to Christian virtues.

For Cesaire, the petty bourgeois, whose thoughts are represented by the words of Jules Romains who stated that civilization has only been made by the white race or George Lapouge who stated that slavery is like the domestication of a horse, filters reality in such a way that it eliminates or “flicks away” the realities of the cultures that were exterminated by European presence. I argue, keeping the violence that was perpetuated in Madagascar in 1947 in mind, that this colonial epistemology is never addressed  by Europe and remains a key ally of the violence that continues in the colonies which demonstrates my aforementioned point that the tradition of violence and hypocrisy remains undisturbed by the image of itself that the Holocaust forces Europe to confront. In fact, 5 years after the defeat of Hitler, Cesaire cites that the European bourgeoise popularized the idea that the infusion of foreign blood into the equilibrium of French civilization is to blame for France’s current troubles. The colonized people remained for Europe the canvas upon which they would project their shortcomings and so racialist philosophy continued to be a crutch for European legitimacy. Cesaire himself summarizes my central thesis best when he says that the historical punishment of Europe is “to be condemned…to chew over Hitler's vomit.”

We are left with a Europe that becomes consumed by the contradictions and hypocrisies that plague its humanism, a humanism that when used to justify the violence in the colonies renders Europe increasingly barbaric. Despite the ultimate manifestation of the boomerang effect with the Holocaust, Europe remains tied to its plagued philosophies of humanism and rationality as its sole means sustaining its reality and its recognition of itself. In conclusion, Europe never embraced, revisited, and truly resolved what the hypocrisies of racialism that plagued its conscious which is why the racialist and outdated ideas of Levy-Bruhl are successfully revived by Roger Callois as Cesaire points out. Thus Europe can never be redeemed for what it never truly admitted.