Albert Memmi, born in Tunis in 1920, was a Tunisian intellectual who grew
up in his native land under French colonialism. He would eventually become a philosophy professor in Paris and write a best-selling autobiographical novel, The Pillar of Salt.
In 1956, he wrote a fascinating book titled The Colonizer and the Colonized, in which he insightfully describes the lasting effects of colonization on both those who conquer a foreign land, as well as those who are conquered.
The folks who study the history of colonization sometimes say that colonization is not an event but a structure. In other words, the people with the power build a social system intended to protect their power.
That colonial system does not come down until everyone, both the colonizers and the colonized together, decide that the old power structure must end.
Both Israel and the United States are colonial powers. Memmi’s analysis offers a penetrating description of both societies.
Memmi describes modern Israeli society to a T.
I believe he also sheds light on the inner resources of those Americans who embrace the ideologies of White Supremacy, American Exceptionalism and Nationalism, particularly Christian Nationalism.
And what about the American urge to control foreign governments and their economies around the world?
Below is a short excerpt for your consideration:
Accepting the reality of being a colonizer means agreeing to be a nonlegitimate privileged person, that is, a usurper. To be sure, a usurper claims his place and, if need be, will defend it by every means at his disposal. This amounts to saying that at the very time of his triumph, he admits that what triumphs in him is an image which he condemns…to possess victory completely he needs to absolve himself of it and the conditions under which it was attained…He endeavors to falsify history, he rewrites laws, he would extinguish memories – anything to succeed in transforming his usurpation into legitimacy.
How? How can usurpation try to pass for legitimacy? One attempt can be made
by demonstrating the usurper’s eminent merits, so eminent that they deserve such compensation. Another is to harp on the usurped’s demerits, so deep that they cannot help leading to misfortune. His disquiet and resulting thirst for justification require the usurpers to extol himself to the skies and to drive the usurped below the ground at the same time…
With all his power he must disown the colonized while their existence is indispensable to his own. Having chosen to maintain the colonial system, he must contribute more vigor to its defense than would have been needed to dissolve it completely. Having become aware of the unjust relationship which ties him to the colonized, he must continually attempt to absolve himself. He never forgets to make a public show of his own virtues, and will argue with vehemence to appear heroic and great…
He cannot help but approve discrimination and the codification of injustice, he will be delighted at police tortures, if the necessity arises, will become convinced of the necessity of massacres…The mechanism is practically constant. The colonial situation manufactures colonialists, just as it manufactures the colonized…
Every colonial nation carries the seeds of fascist temptation in its bosom.
What is fascism, if not a regime of oppression for the benefit of a few?…The human relationships have arisen from the severest exploitation, founded on inequality and contempt, guaranteed by police authoritarianism. There is no doubt in the minds of those who have lived through it that colonialism is one variety of fascism…
It is no more surprising that colonial fascism is not easily limited to the colony. Cancer wants only to spread. The colonialist can only support oppressive and reactionary or, at least, conservative governments. He tends towards that which will maintain the current status of his homeland, or rather that which will more positively assure the framework of oppression.
