Colonialism’s inevitability should not justify abandoning ethics

<Conquest alone allows colonialism to begin.[6] Colonialism can only continue, however, through colonisation of the mind and the consolidation of a far-reaching ‘inferiority complex’. Colonialism ‘holds a people in its grip’ by controlling its future and by distorting and destroying its past, and by ‘emptying the native’s brain of all form and content’ (WE, 210). Once established in its position of military superiority, the colonial culture produces, through a whole range of media, an unending ‘series of propositions that slowly and subtly—with the help of books, newspapers, schools and their texts, advertisements, films, radio—work their way into one’s mind and shape one’s view of the world of the group to which one belongs’ (BS, 118). Successful colonisation leads the oppressed to identify with the world view of the oppressor. Since the colonial cultural machine leads one to believe that ‘one is a Negro to the degree to which one is wicked, sloppy, malicious, instinctual’, so then, encouraged on all sides to identify with what is white, I come to ‘distrust what is black in me, that is, the whole of my being’. ‘Voluntary’ internalisation of this distrust completes the colonial project, and re-establishes a form of slavery on a more robust footing. ‘The black Antillean is the slave of this cultural imposition. After having been the slave of the white man, he enslaves himself’.[7] Colonialism thus takes hold of a territory to the degree that it encourages ‘passivity’ and ‘despair’, if not ‘resignation’ or ‘fatalism’ among its indigenous inhabitants (DC, 82, 84). ‘A belief in fatality removes all blame from the oppressor; the cause of misfortunes and of poverty is attributed to God’, and the oppressed person is led to accept ‘the disintegration ordained by God’ and ‘bows down before the settler and his lot’ (WE, 54-55). In this way, ‘French colonialism has settled in the very centre of the Algerian individual’ and systematically pursued a programme of ‘expulsion of self, of rationally pursued mutilation’ (DC, 50). Carried to its successful completion, colonial mind-control removes even the fantasy of emancipation. ‘The settler’s work is to make even dreams of liberty impossible for the native’ (WE, 93). Even to desire an end to colonialism, in this context, would involve the libidinal equivalent of ‘suicide’.[8]>