Summary

The second section begins on page 35 with Césaire’s assessment of the damaging psychological affects of colonialism on the colonizer—not the colonized. Césaire claims that colonialism has brutalized and infected the colonizer, awakening in him “covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism” (35). The European continent proceeds towards savagery, which Césaire connects to the rise of Nazism in Germany. He points out that while many Europeans decry Hitler, they had tolerated Nazism when in the past it had “been applied only to non-European peoples” (36). Césaire argues that what the humanistic, Christian, bourgeois European fears and detects about Hitler is his “crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the “coolies” of India, and the...