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the First World War was a true global war

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but when we think of WWI, the first images that come to mind are British, German, and French soldiers

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in reality over 4 million non-European soldiers fought in the war

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French army at at least 500,000 colonial troops

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the colonial prehistory to the war

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how the European colonial experience established a certain mentality and attitude of war that would elevate war to the pinnacle of absolute destruction

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The Critique of Dialectical Reason

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Sartre

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an analysis of colonialism

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an unfinished war

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began in the late 50s, published the first volume in 1960

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written sixty years after the First World War

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the development of colonialism in the late 19th century represents the most advanced stage of European capitalism and imperialism

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it's in this context that the fundamental distinction and confrontation between civilization and barbarianism gives rise to a new form of war, a form of absolute war, which appears on the continent in the conflagration of 1914-1918

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there exists a constitutive relationship between imperialism, capitalism, and colonialism

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colonialism is the last stage in the development of European capitalism

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the stage in which European capitalism becomes globalized

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the relationship between violence and destruction in colonialism

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violence and destruction were integral and constitutive elements of colonialism

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colonialism had as its main purpose an economic objective

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the exploitation of resources and the conquest of lands

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"The colonial wars of the 19th century realized an original situation of violence for the colonists as their fundamental relation to the natives."

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the key term is realized

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colonialism as such is a system of violence

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the system of colonialism instituted a permanent state of war

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the institutions, mentality, and culture of colonialism was something like a state of war

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the infernal machine

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the experience of absolute and total warfare as it was later developed in the First World War was routinely understood with the analogy of a machine

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the anonymity and bureaucratization of death

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colonialism as a state of war

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1. colonialism is cosmological in the sense that it produces a universe, fundamentally a Manichean universe

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the world of colonialism is predicated on a conflict between good and evil, between civilization and barbarism

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this Manichean universe permeates entirely the relations within colonialsm and its institutions

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reappropriates Clausewitz's view of war

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not the pursuit of politics by other means

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the pursuit of economics by other means, indeed, by total means

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Clausewitz's notion of the duel

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war as the confrontation between two antagonistic parties that has the shape of a duel

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Sartre transforms this: colonist and native are in a duel, no one can intervene and so there is no political solution

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they don't struggle for political aims and recognition

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the aim of the antagonism from the point of view of the colonist, is not to reach a political solution, but extermination

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2. this Manichean universe produces an anthropological break

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it creates and depends on the constitution of a difference between the human and the other-than-human, or the inhuman

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it constitutes the natives, the colonized population, as the inhuman

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it sees them as a population which is not part of humanity

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it constitutes the enemy, the other, as inhuman

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analogy of a comparison of H.G. Wells "The Island of Dr. Moreau"

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the native is perceived as a "botched experiment"

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a failed experiment of both animality and humanity

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hatred and ferocity

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the colonist is moved to apply violence

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with not political solution

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3. what is distinctive about European racism

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understood war as a race war where the primary objective, above and beyond economic exploitation, is extinction

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colonial war presupposes a war among races and presupposes a certain hierarchy among races

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forges the constitutive difference between civilization and barbarianism

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a war which by definition has no political solution

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and is a war in which everything is permissible, indeed required, to exterminate the brutes