SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: By turning peoples into objects, lands into spoils, Europe has barbarized itself.

Translated from French

What if Europe, in colonizing the world, had also damaged itself? What if the work of decolonization began first from within, in our gaze, in our words, in our habits of thought?

These are the questions posed by Aimé Césaire in his *Discourse on Colonialism*. By turning peoples into objects, lands into spoils, Europe has barbarized itself.

First lesson of this text: a civilization is judged by the way it treats those it might seek to crush.

Second lesson: language is a battlefield. Césaire attacks words that numb, like those “civilizing missions” which, in reality, are a methodical enterprise of dehumanization. He imposes an iron discipline on us: to name with precision. For to misname the unacceptable is to allow it to come to pass under the cover of respectability.

Third lesson: the universal is not a mask of variable geometry. There are no human rights that stop at borders or skin color. To accept that some are “less human” than others is to permit the destruction of the entire edifice of our dignity.

The fourth lesson, finally, is that indifference is complicity. Colonialism thrives in the habit and comfort of consciences that accommodate distant suffering. As soon as another’s life becomes a statistic or a “file,” we prepare the bed for future barbarities.

To read Césaire today is an act of absolute vigilance: it is to refuse the reification in all its forms, whether economic or security-driven, and to hold all of humanity as the sole measure so as never again to let force become law.