Not to dismiss the doomness of this, but it’s not new sadly. This is the way of the west and has been for a long time. Something positive I can take from the present though, I feel like the west is in its weakest and most precarious position in a long time, where like 30 years ago they had this shit totally on lock.
Because, after all, we must resign ourselves to the inevitable and
say to ourselves, once and for all, that the bourgeoisie is condemned
to become every day more snarling, more openly ferocious, more
shameless, more summarily barbarous; that it is an implacable law
that every decadent class finds itself turned into a receptacle into
which there flow all the dirty waters of history; that it is a universal
law that before it disappears, every class must first disgrace itself
completely, on all fronts, and that it is with their heads buried in the
dunghill that dying societies utter their swan songs.
Not to dismiss the doomness of this, but it’s not new sadly. This is the way of the west and has been for a long time. Something positive I can take from the present though, I feel like the west is in its weakest and most precarious position in a long time, where like 30 years ago they had this shit totally on lock.
I will never stop Aime Cesaire-posting:
“First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is [removed] and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery. And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.”
may I join you
—Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950)