Intellectuals and ideologues are as complicit in colonialism as its enforcers.

Evidence

Therefore, comrade, you will hold as enemies - loftily, lucidly, consistently - not only sadistic governors and greedy bankers, not only prefects who torture and colonists who flog, not only corrupt, check-licking politicians and subservient judges, but likewise and for the same reason, venomous journalists, goitrous academicians, wreathed in dollars and stupidity, ethnographers who go in for metaphysics, presumptuous Belgian theologians, chattering intellectuals born stinking out of the thigh of Nietzsche, the paternalists, the embracers, the corrupters, the back-slappers, the lovers of exoticism, the dividers, the agrarian sociologists, the hoodwinkers, the hoaxers, the hot-air artists, the humbugs, and in general, all those who, performing their functions in the sordid division of labor for the defense of Western bourgeois society, try in divers ways and by infamous diversions to split up the forces of Progress-even if it means denying the very possibility of Progress - all of them tools of capitalism, all of them, openly or secretly, supporters of plundering colonialism, all of them responsible, all hateful, all slave-traders, all henceforth answerable for the violence of revolutionary action. — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 124

Categorization

• XREF: Expands the complicity model of colonial power beyond physical enforcers to the cultural/ideological laborers — a direct predecessor of Edward Said’s thesis in Orientalism that intellectuals manufacture the justifications of empire.
• DEEPTHINKING: This is a foundational statement of how ideological apparatus — ethnographers, theologians, journalists, exoticists — do the substantive work of colonialism, a dense and durable framework for analyzing how knowledge production sustains empire.

Related

• Colonialism operates through objective role, not personal intention (similarity 0.79)
• Traveler-scientists’ impersonality masked their service to colonial ambition (similarity 0.79)
• Colonialism’s engine was its underlying thought structure, not its technology (similarity 0.79)