Customer Reviews

"Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide

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Sven Lindqvist has created here a fascinating, disturbing collage of history, journalism, and memoir -- a sometimes surreal exploration of the European impulse toward genocide.

Lindqvist develops a few theses, but his primary one is that imperialism leads to genocidal actions, and that no slaughter is completely unique when viewed in the context of history. He writes, "Auschwitz was the modern industrial application of a policy of extermination on which European world domination had long since rested."

This is an invaluable book for anyone looking for perspective on Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" or 19th century European attitudes toward race and colonialism. It gives a damning picture not only of European actions in Africa, but of the educated European public's indifference to inhumanity. The writing is extremely clear and readable, compulsively so, because Lindqvist's technique is to offer tantalizing strands of ideas, all seemingly unrelated, and then slowly and shockingly bring them together as a whole. The organization and balance of the book's many pieces is magnificent.

There are no clear answers here. Lindqvist digs up a history most people would rather let lie. Its implications about humanity, all of humanity, are dark. But without facing them, we will never cease being accomplices to slaughter.

I purchased Sven Lindqvist's book when it first came out in 1997. The writing is pared to the bone so you can clearly see the stark reality of his discoveries in perception.

A late twentieth century European, Lindqvist travels back through colonial 19th century routes of Charles Darwin and Joseph Conrad into Africa, as a scenic observer of anthropological curiosities, almost. So, to all intents are purposes he starts off like a tourist. Dusky-faced north Africans remain outside of him, as he bumps along in buses and jostling towns and villages, carrying his laptop computer in a backpack. The natives are just the "others" he is interrogating and observing with a Western distancing mind and sensibility and going to write on and report about in his travelogue.

But having to be close to Moroccans and others, over time, slowly travelling, in old vehicles in heat and dust, closely, over long distances, he gradually becomes drawn into their world, and as he does so, winds his way down into the psychological depths of the collective western colonising consciousness. Eventually Lindqvist ends up coming to face the dark pit in the hub of the Western psyche and unveils himself as interloper, transgressor and destroyer.

In a Jungian sense, he approaches the nexus of the collective shadow of the western civilizational consciousness and finds he is not free of the spectre of the shadow of the Western "white" mind, clearly seeing the mind that went everywhere, travelling to all parts of the globe, with purpose, carrying guns, gin and bibles.

Seeing into the mind of the white aggressor he recognises that he too carries the baggage of mental superiority and arrogance. The book unwinds the revelation through various historical examples, as Lindqvist's gaze changes from standing in the white man's shoes at a distance from the "blacks", the Moslems, the "brutes"-- to the gaze of the ones witnessing their massacre, genocide and gradual absorption, or total destruction.

If you are interested to explore the existential arena further in an historical sense, you might like to pick up Franz Fanon's "Black Skins, White Masks", also.

"Exterminate All The Brutes" is a graduated revelation in the mind, soul and psyche of a western compatriot. I sympathised with his view. I had seen all the same traits in various guises in my own heart and soul, and gone "mad", like Conrad, in the looking.

To summarise, this book for me has always been an exceptional grasping of a central problem, by an exceptionally honest writer, historian, anthropologist and psychologist (although I can not name one psychologist I actually know in whose writings such baring of the soul in point-of-fact has been realized). This work is an existential journey. If you are Western, white, be prepared to meet part of yourself, and possibly weep as did Lindqvist (and I).

I lent my much-loved, marked and worn copy of "Exterminate All The Brutes" to an old family friend, a retired professor of psychology who spent many years in the Middle East and wanted to borrow my copy immediately I showed it to him several years ago. I have returned tonight to Amazon to repurchase another book as my old friend recently passed on and I don't expect the old one to turn up.

So this is a review from a long hindsight of first reading. In conclusion, one of the pivotal and most consequential points the writing gravitates to is the continuing persistence by the West of eugenics programs that go by many names.

This remains a very important book of one man's examination of the searing necessity to interrogate who and what we really are, within.

More than a decade after publication, it's message still rings like a bell.

This is the best expose of colonialism that I've ever read. The central thread is the author's musings on "Heart of Darkness" while travelling across Africa by bus, but he brings in everything from Adam Smith to Darwin to Adolf Hitler. The style is lyrical, almost poetic -- interspersed among the history are the author's nightmares, which increase in frequency as he gets closer to the end of the century. After this you'll never be able to read Rudyard Kipling the same way again.

"Exterminate All the Brutes" is a superb, short history book. I bought it for students in my World History classes--in the used-book market--when it was out of print, but now it's back and that makes it cheaper. I wish I had had it when I was working on my own book, The First Moderns (1998) The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought, which had a chapter on the invention of the concentration camp in 1895-1903 by Spain, Britain and the United States. The principal point which the author, Sven Lindqvist, makes (in the form of a memoir of his own reading, in relatively unadorned prose) is that there can have been no holocaust or holocaust-justifying in Germany in 1938-45 without their first having been holocausts and holocaust-justifying in 1860-1914 in places like Tasmania, Congo, Sudan and Iraq. Europeans have begun to understand this (the author, in fact, is a Swede). Americans--and Israelis--have a longer way to go.
-W. R. Everdell

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.

Before I read this I wasn't aware of exactly how dark the dark side of colonial history was. In this book Lindqvist methodically and calmly describes the thought-patterns that made the atrocities and genocides possible. The sheer number of people being methodically killed by 'the civilized world' was a real shocker. A must-read!

The book was in good condition for a used book and way cheaper then the university wanted it, thanks a bunch!

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.

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.

The only honest review put here was entitled "Sorry I'm White", and was written on March 21, 2000 by Jeffrey L. Thurston (Oakland, Ca USA). This is another self loathing (WE MUST APOLOGIZE NOW AND MAKE REPERATIONS!) fuzzy headed intellectual egalitarian liberal-collectivist (hey that's a mouthful!) who reduces such historical horrors such as the Jewish Holocaust to economical and social forces. Do not buy this book! Instead I recommend Professor (and Rabbi) Richard Rubenstein's "Age of Triage, Fear and Hope in an Overcrowded World (1984)" that is available from our friends here at Amazon.com used.