■7H THE y t ESTION OF PALESTINE There is no question o f consulting the natives o f the territory where the new society is to be given birth. What counts is that a modern European society has enough vitality and intellect to be ‘‘ magnified by this pouring out o f its exuberant activity on the outside." Such activity must be good since it is believed in, and since it also carries within itself the healthy current o f an entire advanced civilization. Therefore, Lcroy-Beaulieu ad ded , Colonization is the expansive force of a people; it is its power of reproduction; it is its enlargement and its multiplication through space; it is the subjugation of the universe or a vast part of it to that people's language, customs, ideas, and laws.1" Imperialism was the theory, colonialism the practice of changing the uselessly unoccupied territories o f the world into useful new versions of the European metropolitan society. Everything in those territories that suggested waste, disorder, uncounted resources, was to be converted into productivity, order, taxable, potentially developed wealth. Y o u get rid of most o f the offending human and animal blight— whether because it simply sprawls untidily all over the place or because it roams around unproductively and uncounted— and you confine the rest to reservations, compounds, native hom e­ lands, where you can count, tax, use them profitably, and you build a new society on the vacated space. Thus was Europe reconstituted abroad, its "m ultiplication in space" successfully projected and managed. The result was a widely varied group o f little Europes scattered throughout A sia, A frica, and the Am ericas, each reflecting the circumstances, the specific instrumentalities of the parent culture, its pioneers, its van­ guard settlers.1" A ll o f them were similar in one other major respect— despite the differences, which were considerable— and that was that their life was carried on with an air of normality. The most grotesque reproductions of Europe (South A frica. Rhodesia, etc.) were considered appropriate; the worst discrimination against and exclusions o f the natives were thought to be normal because "scientifically" legitimate;

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