|
nice debaser:
colonialism was just a phase of euro-development, in the way that the extermination of native americans was a phase in american development, the genocide of the armenians was a phase in the turkish nationalist project and the holocaust was a phase in the unfolding of german-ness----all aspects of shouldering the white man's burden i guess, accepting the unintended consequences of showing backward elements what civilization looks like.
and the history of white men who heroically shouldered that burden is made up entirely of folk who had "toughened up" in the face of racist discourse--yup--they sure didnt allow themselves to imagine that their particular forms of racism were in any way problematic and they too could look to just the kind of absurd pseudo-history of domination that you outline in no. 69 and arrive at the same conclusion: we are toughened up and racism is only a problem that affects the weak and unmanly---our forms of colonialism are ok because we are more efficient at domination than were, say, the mongols. see, we care about the environment and all the things it includes, even those backward elements many many many of whom will have to die as a function of the bildungsroman of euro-boys that has been visited upon them. it is obvious that these backward elements only have importance as occaisons for the Long Manly March of european "civilization": why folk who were pressganged into working and often dying for european need for industrial raw materials should have been grateful for the chance they got to participate in a Historical Narrative of Consequence, to be rescued from the Historical Obscurity that they otherwise would have been born into, lived through and died in. "we" did "them" a favor. where is the fucking gratitude? why didnt these backward elements ever seem to understand that they only matter--hell, they only exist---to the extent that they have had the great good fortune to be assimilated into History.
where is the gratitude?
where is the "thank you for allowing us to matter?"
it's always the same: we give and give and give and what do we get?
we give them jesus, we give them jobs in those nice mines, in those nice rubber plantations, in those nice colonial export-oriented agricultural formations we were beneficient enough to develop and bestow upon them...and are they grateful? hell no: backward elements continue to confuse colonialism with a form of domination.
what is to be done?
maybe kutz was right: exterminate the brutes.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|