Scan barcode
A review by akemi_666
War with the Newts by Karel Čapek
4.0
Hey everyone on goodreads, this book is about imperialism, capitalism and fascism, not human nature. Learn your history. Stop universalising the position of the coloniser. It's actively harmful to all the people in the world who have never stolen the land of others and reduced them to a proletarian existence. This book was written after world war 1, at the peak of western disillusionment in liberal humanism and the colonial project. The newts are a stand in for indigenous communities, fragmented and displaced by market forces, treated like raw resources, armed with tools and knowledge, to eventually foment decolonial struggle. The fact that the newts are silent for 90% of this book is a satire on orientalism, wherein white academics would write about coloured folk, without any of their input, whatsoever. By treating this book as a document of human nature, you're all doing the same. You've effaced the newt and sided with the imperialists.
K bye.
nb:
However, I understand the ending in an ironic light. One of the first things the imperial powers do is outlaw the newt dance. It is one of their many attempts to efface newt culture. Without this culture, isolated in breeding tanks, the newts have no culture but that of their human colonists. Their outcome is that of the social world they inhabit, which has been thoroughly infused with bourgeois values. They have no culture but that of the oppressors.
Capek died in 1938. He did not live to see the outcome of decolonisation. He did not witness the many cultural revivals that swept through the Caribbean, North and South America, India, the Pacific and more.
Capek was writing in the interwar period, commenting on interwar trends, from the position of someone clearly an ally to decolonisation, before its global spread. This is not a book on human nature; it's a book on racist ideologies propagated at the height of imperialist exploitation and global violence.
K bye.
nb:
Spoiler
Capek ends the book on an interesting note. The newts, who from the beginning are understood as mere mimics of human beings (their superiors), end up colonising humans and reducing them to newt-like status. I think this is where Capek is misread as an author of human nature, with the innocent newts coming into consciousness through violent subjugation of the other.However, I understand the ending in an ironic light. One of the first things the imperial powers do is outlaw the newt dance. It is one of their many attempts to efface newt culture. Without this culture, isolated in breeding tanks, the newts have no culture but that of their human colonists. Their outcome is that of the social world they inhabit, which has been thoroughly infused with bourgeois values. They have no culture but that of the oppressors.
Capek died in 1938. He did not live to see the outcome of decolonisation. He did not witness the many cultural revivals that swept through the Caribbean, North and South America, India, the Pacific and more.
Capek was writing in the interwar period, commenting on interwar trends, from the position of someone clearly an ally to decolonisation, before its global spread. This is not a book on human nature; it's a book on racist ideologies propagated at the height of imperialist exploitation and global violence.