Exterminate All the Brutes: One Mans
Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness
and the Origins of European
Genocide by Sven Lindqvist
Trawling Through The Western Psyche And Picking Up Clues...
Sven Lindqvist, a traveler and historian, paints a broad-brush history of
European colonialism, especially in Africa. Drawing his title from Joseph
Conrads 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.
Personal Review: Exterminate All the Brutes: One Mans
Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European
Genocide by Sven Lindqvist
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.
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