JavaScript is disabled in your web browser or browser is too old to support JavaScript. Today almost all web pages contain JavaScript, a scripting programming language that runs on visitor's web browser. It makes web pages functional for specific purposes and if disabled for some reason, the content or the functionality of the web page can be limited or unavailable.

Wednesday, August 13, 2025

The Boomerang Effect

by

20140802

How might we make sense of the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion in Gaza? What knowl­edge and ex­pe­ri­ence can we bring to bear on the sit­u­a­tion from Caribbean colo­nial his­to­ry?

One place to look is the writ­ings of the late Mar­tini­quan Aim� C�saire and his pow­er­ful book Dis­course on Colo­nial­ism. Born in 1913, C�saire was a gift­ed thinker who com­plet­ed his stud­ies in France and was a lead­ing light of the Caribbean di­as­po­ra in Eu­rope.

Some de­scribed the book as "a de­c­la­ra­tion of war." Oth­ers spoke of it as a "third world man­i­festo." Its cen­tral the­sis was: what is the im­pact of colo­nial­ism, not sim­ply on the colonised and their own so­ci­eties, but on the colonis­er them­selves?

Writ­ten soon af­ter the end of World War II, Dis­course on Colo­nial­ism spoke to the West from an an­ti-colo­nial po­si­tion and con­sid­ered rea­sons for the moral and spir­i­tu­al col­lapse of Eu­rope that led to fas­cism, Nazism and the Holo­caust. There are two key ob­ser­va­tions amongst many in the book that might be most per­ti­nent to cur­rent Is­raeli ac­tions.

The first is colo­nial­ism as a sys­tem of "pro­le­tari­sa­tion." By this con­cept C�saire ex­plained how in the con­struc­tion and lat­er con­tin­u­a­tion of a sys­tem of dom­i­na­tion and sub­or­di­na­tion, colo­nial­ism pre­pared the ground for cap­i­tal­ism. It did this through the cre­ation of "false con­scious­ness" with­in both the colonis­er and colonised.


Related articles

Sponsored

Weather

PORT OF SPAIN WEATHER

Sponsored