I have just finished reading Sven Lindqvist’s “Exterminate All The Brutes”, with thanks to my dear friend Daniel Brown, who alerted me to the existence of this book. Its author traces two things: his obsession with that phrase that provides the title of his work – and his travels to and through a land where a litany of odious events took place, acts of barbarism committed by French colonialists that have been largely erased from collective memory.
Written in 1990 (first published in Swedish and translated into English six years later) it addresses issues Europe has never properly grappled with. As a result the continent now finds itself in the throes of another violent shake to the extreme right, as exemplified by the Dutch parliamentary elections in November 2023 and others before it. The result may have been particularly shocking to those still steeped in the carefully self-manufactured mythology about the Netherlands being this place of tolerance and openness, while it so clearly is anything but.
In many parts of Europe, from Russia where it sits at the heart of government, to Brexit Britain; in Italy where it rules in a diluted form; to France, Germany and the Netherlands where it is making major inroads, the extreme right or indeed outright fascism is on the rise. And with it comes, as Lindqvist writes “… The same hatred of aliens. The same preparedness for violence…” And the same mass propensity towards amnesia, very specifically amnesia about the European colonial projects, in which (attempted) exterminations played a central part. From the Dutch in what is today Indonesia to the settlers across the United States, death followed European colonists wherever they set foot.
It was said earlier this year: with the Russian colonial invasion of Ukraine, Europe’s holiday from history is over. But there has been a much longer holiday from history, one that was fuelled by the amnesia I just mentioned. In fact, it is more accurate to call it cowardice.
Lindqvist starts his book like this: “You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.” Which is what he sets out to do in a way that is concise – the book consists of 169 taut paragraphs – frank, brutally honest and sometimes puzzling; the dream scenes he inserts here and there feel like they may have been intended to add depth to the story but they act more like interruptions.
The phrase that gave the book its title comes from the novella that Joseph Conrad wrote at the tail end of the 19th century, a small book that has given rise to films like Apocalypse Now and invited harsh criticism from the great novelist Chinua Achebe and others. It will probably be busy finding its feet for a good while to come. Lindqvist uses the phrase to build his central argument: the civilising mission Europeans had arrogated to themselves to spread around the world was an exercise in cultural vandalism, mass murder and genocide.
The list is long, very long. From the disappearance of the Guanches, who lived in the Canary Islands before the Spanish arrived there at the end of the 15th century, via the Tasmanians who were mercilessly hunted down and killed by British settlers in the first half of the 19th century to the unspeakable atrocities meted out to the people of Congo in the name of the Belgian King Leopold II and the genocide of the Herero and Namaqua peoples by the German colonial invaders of Namibia early 20th century, the history of European expansion around the world is one of utter physical and cultural destruction.
The self-serving gloss that that covered these murderous practices was the one that Europeans still enthusiastically cover themselves in: civilisation. The French were most explicit in it – la mission civilisatrice was sometimes so thorough that it left few people to civilise – but all colonising nations were thinking along the same lines: we are superior, they must either be brought up to our level or die. Kurtz, the main character in Heart of Darkness writes a lofty treatise about civilising the people that surround him but scribbles this at the end of his paper: “Exterminate all the brutes!”.
Genocide and greed are the main drivers here, not some undefined and fundamentally racist idea about uplifting other people. It was not a superior civilisation that subjugated supposedly ‘lesser’ peoples on four continents outside Europe. It was the fact that the Europeans brought guns, with which they could steal the land and ruin peoples’ way of life, take away their livelihoods and take over their economies. A similar triptych of white supremacy, murderous disposition and the ability to see and treat living human beings as commodities marked the transatlantic slave trade.
Lindqvist argues, and I agree with him, that the atrocities Europeans committed around the world became the template for similar events in Europe itself. Germans involved in the Namibian genocides effortlessly found their way into the party of the Nazis. Russia’s violent colonial expansion into Central Asia has fed straight into its genocidal behaviour in Ukraine*. Colonialism is the template here, not unlike French behaviour in Algeria or indeed British behaviour towards the Irish, who fled an engineered famine on their island in the 19th century. Just like Stalin engineered famines in Kazakhstan and Ukraine and various governments in the Horn of Africa deliberately caused mass starvation in the 1980s. Rarely, if ever are famines accidents; they are political creations.
*As an aside, there is a remarkable similarity between the Nazis’ view of Ukraine and Ukrainians and that of Russia: as a land and a people to be used, without the right to decide who and what they want to be.
While Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness, Captain Paul Voulet and Lt-Col Julien Chanoine tore through the Sahel with their ‘Central African Expedition’. Lindqvist takes a more or less similar route and travels overland from Algeria to Niger, where the French expedition committed its worst atrocities. It lends poignancy to the book: Conrad knew nothing about Voulet’s existence but Kurtz commits the same acts of horrific cruelty in fiction as Voulet does in actual fact. His and Chanoine’s blood-soaked expedition to reach and conquer Lake Chad is the subject of a recent BBC documentary by the Nigerian-British activist Femi Nylander.
The poignancy of this story only increases knowing that Niger this year became the last in a string of countries where military coups have resulted in French troops remaining there (more than six decades into independence) being asked to leave. And while this is unfolding in the Sahel, Europe is descending yet again into a morally degenerate far-right morass. Lindqvist will not see the rest of these events unfold; he died in May 2023.
So deeply has European colonialism embedded dependency in African psyches that the thought has taken root (in Bamako as well as Bangui and Ouagadougou) that salvation and delivery from the aftermath of the presence of one European colonial power requires the presence of another: Russia, every bit as ruthless and callous and cruel as the one chased away. The massacres have already begun, in Sudan, in Mali and in the Central African Republic. Signed: Wagner, the mercenary outfit recently formally folded back into the Russian military establishment.
So deeply embedded is the notion of racial superiority in European psyches that they genuinely seem to believe that the horrors they are currently re-evoking through the ballot box (because of their desire to have ‘all the brutes’ removed from sight if not from the face of the earth) will somehow fail to visit them this time. They are wrong. Again, Europe sets itself on a path to self-destruction and this time there will be no Big New Kid on the block to bail them out, as was the case in 1945. In fact, that 1945 Kid (the USA of course) is in danger of murdering its democracy and succumbing to its very own brand of fascism if it makes the mortal mistake of electing Donald Trump back into the White House. I am today far less sanguine about European democracies’ ability to contain resurgent fascism, compared to when I wrote my little treatise on it five years ago. Amnesia and ignorance are not accidents; they are deliberate choices.
Conrad’s book – and Lindqvist’s in its wake – have been criticised for reducing Africans to innate objects. By and large, they do not speak; they are mere props, a backdrop to the all-consuming White Male Psychodrama. In Conrad’s case, the criticism is fully justified. Heart of Darkness not only lets Marlow, the narrator, speak about the Congolese in a way that is unacceptable by any standards, it also presents Kurtz’s descent into violent madness as the central great drama of the story – not the catastrophe that Europeans and their greed deliberately caused by invading, pillaging and raping Congo, causing millions to die. It clearly had not occurred to Conrad to imagine that there would be Congolese with their own stories to tell about what was being done to their country.
Lindqvist’s, I feel, is another case, in that he is addressing Europeans and Europe. He convincingly builds the argument that the Holocaust, that supposedly unique pinnacle of evil, was not the one-off event it is always presented to be. It was, in fact, an integral part of Europe-driven events that started in the Canaries four-and-a-half centuries earlier and never really stopped. It happened in ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s and it is happening right now in 2023, when we are witnessing yet another another brutal colonial invasion, this time by a fascist-run state, Russia. The fuel remains the same: ethnic/racial superiority, the morbid mental acrobatics required to dehumanise The Other and a willingness to kill. And elsewhere in Europe, eight decades after the Holocaust, voters are electing to take their continent violently to the extreme right – again. Social media like Facebook and Elon Musk’s plaything “X” play a particularly sinister – I would argue downright evil – role in this. Their algorithms protect fascists and sanction those that call them out. I have repeatedly been the object of their dangerous nonsense. The ill winds coming through these formerly social media constitute a clear and present threat to democracy and the rule of law, unless and until we claw back control.
And Lindqvist’s book is there to remind – in very precise terms – those pushing Europe to the extreme right of the exact content and consequences of their choices. They only have to look to Ukraine and they will see what is in store – perhaps not yet for them but most assuredly for their children.
Tags: Amilcar Cabral, Apocalypse Now, Belgium, book-review, Canary Island, Captain Paul Voulet, Central African Republic, Chinua Achebe, colonialism, Congo, Donald Trump, Exterminate All The Brutes, Fascism, Femi Nylander, Geert Wilders, Guanches, Heart of Darkness, history, imperialism, india, Joseph Conrad, Kazakhstan, Kurtz, Leopold II, Mali, Marlow, Namibia, Niger, Russia, Sven Lindqvist, The Netherlands, Ukraine, United States
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