Culture 4

Pursuing colonial politics can sometimes be a cultural act. (…) If the representatives of cultivated and civilised peoples, for example, the European nations and the North American, come to foreign peoples as liberators, as friends and educators, as helpers in need, to bring them the achievements of culture and civilisation, to educate them into becoming cultured people, and if this happens with these noble intentions and in the right way, then we are (…) the first who are willing to support such colonisation as a great cultural mission. (1806+1906r]

Reichtstagsprotokoll from 01.12.1906

August Bebel (1840-1913) was a German politician who founded the organised labour movement in Germany, and was considered the father of German social democracy.

August Bebel's speech in the Reichstag, from which the quote comes, was a contribution to the debate on how to deal with the war of annihilation against the Herero and Nama in what was then the German colony of German Southwest Africa (from 1904 to 1908). Bebel favoured a "civilising mission": i.e. colonisation no longer as a "means of destruction” but as a “means of preservation". This way of thinking was based on a racist concept of culture and a division between “civilised” and “primitive” peoples. The self-proclaimed civilised peoples thus legitimised their rule over and education of others. There were bitter disputes among the social democrats about colonial politics (see Kautsky 1907). Eduard Bernstein and Gustav Noske were not entirely averse to colonialism, while Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Karl Kautsky were staunch opponents.

*International Press Correspondence (1928): Social Democracy and the Colonial Question.

1906