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 | | "Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide by Sven Lindqvist, Joan Tate (Translator) ISBN-10: 9781565843592 ISBN-10: 1-56584-359-2 ISBN-13: 9781565843592 ISBN-13: 978-1-56584-359-2 Paperback 1997-04-23 New Press Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Amazon.com Sven Lindqvist, a traveler and historian, paints a broad-brush history of European colonialism, especially in Africa. Drawing his title from Joseph Conrad's fable Heart of Darkness, he turns up 19th-century newspaper accounts of British massacres of wounded Sudanese rebels after the siege of Omdurman, of German concentration camps in what was once called Southwest Africa, of a Belgian captain who decorated his flower beds with the heads of recalcitrant plantation workers. These incidents were not unusual, Lindqvist writes. Neither were they thought especially brutal by their perpetrators, for, he argues, colonialism was guided by a doctrine that placed Europe at the top of the evolutionary ladder and regarded non-Europeans as a separate species bound for extinction--a doctrine that found its ultimate expression in the Holocaust. This is an occasionally gruesome and always provocative study. | ||
Product Description A brilliant and unsettling intellectual history of Europe's genocidal colonization of Africa. "Exterminate All the Brutes" is a searching examination of Europe's dark history in Africa and the origins of genocide. Using Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as his point of departure, Sven Lindqvist takes us on a haunting tour through the colonial past, interwoven with a modern-day travelogue. Retracing the steps of European explorers, missionaries, politicians, and historians in Africa from the late eighteenth century onward, the author exposes the roots of genocide in Africa via his own journey through the Saharan desert. As Lindqvist shows, fantasies not merely of white superiority but of actual extermination—"cleansing" the earth of the so-called lesser races—deeply informed European colonialism and racist ideology that ultimately culminated in Europe's own Holocaust. Chosen as one of the Best Books of 1998 by the New Internationalist, which called it "a beautifully written integration of criticism, cultural history, and travel writing, underpinned by a passion for social justice," "Exterminate All the Brutes" is a powerful reckoning with the past and an indispensable contribution to the literature of colonial Africa and European genocide. | ||
Reviews | ||
Explaining genocide: "They were going to die anyhow..." "At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races." - Charles Darwin The words "civilized" and "savage" are relative, as continually reminded by recent history and current events. Sven Lindqvist, in his spare, lucid, imaginative prose demonstrates the moral hypocricy of the "champions of civilization". Yes, this is a book that will be read with an accelerated heartbeat, more than a bit of anger and some tears amongst the more sensitive. It should also be an edifying experience even for the well read. I don't believe this book is about providing any particular group(s) with an extra burden of guilt; we all have more than our share of skeletons in our closets. The real message is, we humans, we all wallow in the same gutter. | ||
Incredibly powerful and relevant still Exterminate All the Brutes is brief and disturbing; Sven Lindqvist unveils the realities and moral convictions we have almost completely repressed. Just as the author suggests, the book shatters the image we have of ourselves, but even more importantly, it is distressing how relevant his ideas and Conrad's `Heart of Darkness' are in the world today - again. The title of the book is taken from Joseph Conrad's 1902 classic novel - Heart of Darkness. In it, the main character, Kurtz, goes to Africa to bring progress and culture to the uncivilized continent. He is dispatched to Africa as an ivory procurement agent, and as the story develops the reader is confronted with the unreal brutality of the colonial rule. Conrad's work intertwines the themes of `light of civilization' and `darkness of barbarism' and makes reader realize the hollowness of these phrases as Kurtz surrounds himself with chaos and mayhem. Sven Lindqvist develops this theme as he traces the imperial history of European colonialism and condenses it to a single sentence: "Exterminate all the brutes." European world expansion, he claims, and the employed tactics of extermination are the truths we like to forget. Preferring to externalize we look at the Holocaust as a historical aberration, a smear on the path of progress and enlightenment brought to the world by the Western societies. However, as the author points out, just as all of Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz, it would also be the European habits and political precedents that would lay the foundation for the atrocities of the Second World War. What was done in Africa, would be repeated in Europe - we know this, what we lack is the courage to face what we know and draw some conclusions. The book culminates by pointing to the Holocaust, but one doesn't have to look far to see the same principles being applied in the world today; `Heart of Darkness' is applicable to every nation, culture and ideology. `Exterminate All the Brutes' is an incredibly powerful book. | ||
A surreal examination of violence and its justification I read this book in the winter of 2002-03, as the drive to war against Iraq was at a frenzied pitch. A few months later, on the day of the final ultimatum to Saddam, just before the bombing began, I was at my sister's house visiting. From the next room my nephew lets out a loud sigh, saying "I have to wait two more hours!" I thought he was referring to some show, but he was actually referring to the President's deadline to launch hostilities. So now, in America, war has become almost a staged form of entertainment which we can enjoy with our children from the comfort of our homes. I mention this because Exterminate All the Brutes has, for me at least, many moments which touch upon the surreal thought processes which help to justify the unjustifiable. It's easy to look back at dead empires and point out their evil deeds; less settling is the knowledge that, regardless of our many technological advancements and extreme wealth, we are of a civilization (one among many) that commits and condones extreme violence against the innocent, as long as it furthers the goals of those in power who profit from it. And we the people, like willing sheep, blindly accept the lies. This book makes us look deeper at the falsehoods, with the plea that when we next hear our leadership misguiding us, we can think for ourselves and reject the guilded call to war and slaughter. | ||
Good, but not essential I read this book as an undergrad, and was moved by it. I wasn't moved so much by the analysis of genocide, which I found pretty ordinary (but useful), but by his method of drawing on literary texts from the turn of the century, and his analysis of them. After reading this text, I went out and devoured Joseph Conrad's works, and I have never looked at H.G. Wells' work again in the same way. If you are interested in this literary period, or in linking these fiction works with the thought of European genocide, then get the book. If you are only interested in the roots of genocide, then check it out in the library before you buy it, to see if it will suit your purposes. | ||
Horrifying But True Here's a unique look at the Western world's impact on Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Its told in a sort of travelogue as the author travels through the Sahara. On the way he muses over Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", in which a European issues orders to solve the African native problem by "exterminating the brutes" The details of atrocities committed against indigenous populations in the Congo and elsewhere are horrific. The format leaves something to be desired as at times you're not sure whether you're in the present or back in the past, but perhaps that's what the author intended. Keep "Exterminate All the Brutes" in mind the next time you hear someone talking about bringing civilization to the savages. | ||