Colonial destruction of other cultures undermines the colonizer’s own civilization

Evidence

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

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the concept of the ‘imagined community’ of the nation and to the thesis that the nation is a bourgeois construct — useful for how later Islamophobia debates frame nation and belonging. — connects to: Colonial histories are internal to the identity of the colonizer nation; Colonial powers replaced native scripts to sever colonies from their heritage and elite. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 511; European civilization is judged decadent by its own inability to solve the colonial problem — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 5 (+13 more)
• DEFINE: Definitionally asserts that the nation is a bourgeois phenomenon, a key claim for the reader’s critical-theory toolkit.

Related

• Colonial histories are internal to the identity of the colonizer nation (similarity 0.87)
• Belief in commerce’s pacifying virtues collapsed only when colonial violence came home to Europe (similarity 0.87)
• European civilization is judged decadent by its own inability to solve the colonial problem (similarity 0.85)
• Colonization corrupts the colonizer, who becomes inured to atrocity (similarity 0.83)
• Formerly colonized peoples risk adopting the dominating discourse against themselves (similarity 0.82)
• Colonizing civilizations are morally corrupted and inevitably breed fascism (similarity 0.81)
• Colonization is fundamentally violence and plunder, not a civilizing mission (similarity 0.81)
• Césaire distinguishes genuine civilizational exchange from colonial contact (similarity 0.80)
• Colonialism can be internally duplicated within a colonized country (similarity 0.80)
• Colonialism functions as a coherent system requiring economic, political, and cultural domination. (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial domination distorts the colonized’s relationship with their own culture and traditions (similarity 0.79)
• Colonialism systematically dispossesses the colonized of resources under a justifying discourse of hierarchy (similarity 0.79)
• Cultural hybridity is unavoidable and shaped by unequal colonial power relations (similarity 0.79)
• Cultural imposition forces colonized subjects to identify against their own ancestry (similarity 0.78)
• Colonized cultures became conscripts of modernity, not fixed essences. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Colonial domination distorts the colonized’s relationship with their own culture and traditions #expands (0.85) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 421
• Colonial relations dehumanize colonizer and colonized alike #expands (0.80) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 52