The central mechanism is reciprocal: each act of domination, each torture inflicted and humanity denied in the colony, corrodes the colonizer's own civilization, instilling brutality, cynicism and moral callousness back home. The colonizer who gets used to seeing the colonized as an animal tends himself objectively toward becoming an animal; the barbarity is not quarantined abroad but seeps into and degrades the metropole.
View Hitlerism not as an aberration from European civilization but as colonial practice applied to Europeans: what Europe cannot forgive is not the crime itself but that it was committed against white people rather than against Arabs, Indians and Africans. This reframes fascism as the logical extension of methods Europe already accepted when the victims were non-European.
No contact between conqueror and conquered under colonialism produced a genuine civilizing exchange; the equation colonization equals civilization is a lie concealing an economic relation of forced labor, theft and profit. Between the colonizer and the colonized there is room only for the relations of master and slave, not communication or cultural gift.
Césaire cites the respected scholar Ernest Renan writing that nature made a race of workers (the Chinese), a race of tillers of the soil (the Negro) and a race of masters and soldiers (the European), and that each should be kept to the function nature assigned. The point is that such explicit racial division of labor was stated openly by a celebrated humanist intellectual, not whispered by cranks, showing how respectable European thought underwrote conquest.