Belief in commerce’s pacifying virtues collapsed only when colonial violence came home to Europe

Evidence

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific reverse shock: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers around the racks invent, refine, discuss. — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 20 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Of this: that at the very time when it most often mouths the word, the West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism-a humanism made to the measure of the world. … One of the values invented by the bourgeoisie in former times and launched throughout the world was man - and we have seen what has become of that. The other was the nation. It is a fact: the nation is a bourgeois phenomenon. … Exactly; but if I turn my attention from man to nations, I note that here too there is great danger; that 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 truth is that this policy cannot but bring about the ruin of Europe itself, and that Europe, if it is not careful, will perish from the void it has created around itself. … They thought they were only slaughtering Indians, or Hndus, or South Sea islanders, or Africans. They have in fact overthrown, one after another, the ramparts behind which European civilization could have developed freely. — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 247 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial destruction of other cultures undermines the colonizer’s own civilization — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 247; European fascism returned colonial violence back upon the European bourgeoisie — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 20; Violence at home, not colonial violence abroad, discredited belief in commerce’s pacifying virtues — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 33

Related

• Colonial destruction of other cultures undermines the colonizer’s own civilization (similarity 0.87)
• Violence at home, not colonial violence abroad, discredited belief in commerce’s pacifying virtues (similarity 0.85)
• European fascism returned colonial violence back upon the European bourgeoisie (similarity 0.82)
• Colonizing civilizations are morally corrupted and inevitably breed fascism (similarity 0.81)
• European civilization is judged decadent by its own inability to solve the colonial problem (similarity 0.80)
• European colonial atrocities were rehearsals for fascist violence at home (similarity 0.80)
• Bourgeois destruction of the nation-state empowered the mob to liquidate the bourgeoisie itself (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial histories are internal to the identity of the colonizer nation (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• European fascism returned colonial violence back upon the European bourgeoisie #corroborates (0.85) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 20
• Colonial destruction of other cultures undermines the colonizer’s own civilization #expands (0.78) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 247