‘Exterminate All The Brutes’ by Sven Lindqvist

It’s not rare for the title of a book to be a quotation but it is rare for that quotation to be indicated by punctuation, for the writer to want to clearly attribute those words, that sentence, to a different person’s voice…

It’s rare, too, for me to want to race through a book just because it’s so fucking upsetting I want to be out the other side…

Sven Lindqvist’s 1992 text (here translated by Joan Tate) is a harrowing, a horrible, and an essential read. Split into 169 small sections (ranging from a sentence or two up to no more than around a couple of pages), ‘Exterminate All The Brutes’ offers a brief history of genocide… So, yes, it’s as harrowing and as bleak and as pointedly depressing as that would imply.

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‘Exterminate All The Brutes’ explores the antecedents and the previous iterations of mass and targeted colonial violence against others and contextualises  (recontexualises?) the world’s most famous (infamous?) genocide – the Holocaust – as merely one more roll of the genocide die in a pattern and a European habit dating back centuries…

Lindqvist doesn’t lessen or diminish any of those horrors, far from it, he instead draws attention into the sad and awful frequency of gross, inhumane cruelty, stating and demonstrating the complicity of all Europeans, all (ex?) colonial states, in all latter genocides.

So that which the English, the Portuguese, the Belgian, the Spanish (etc etc etc) did before, the Germans eventually did, too…

And, except for those few cunts among us who genuinely are white supremacist scum, most of us agree that the death and tortures of countless humans whose lives are just as valid and meaningful as our own ¹ should not be treated as if nothing, as if meaningless, as if just the cost of doing business, as if as if as if…

It happens. Shit happens. Genocide happens. It’s happened before, it’s broadly agreed to be happening now in multiple places (a second source here) and – as Lindquist shows here – and this is why the book is so ultimately fucking sad – it’s probably going to happen again…

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I can’t remember who said it or exactly what the quote was, but a while ago I read a phrase that either cited humanity, civilisation or capitalism as “a history of spoilation”, and in Lindqvist’s text², he documents and proves the horror, the horror of European expansionist policies and the death by violence, bacterial/viral infection and displacement into inhospitable terrain that has been enacted wherever the colonialists have decided to co-opt.

There are the famous earlier genocides – what the Spanish did in Central America, what the Americans did in North America, what the British did in Australia, what the Belgians did in the Congo – but there are the less famous but equally as brutal examples from even more closer to the 20th century; what the Australians did in Tasmania, what the Argentinians did in Patagonia, what the French did in Algeria…

Wherever empires were forged, people were killed.

People were fucking tortured and murdered and executed and starved to death and put into concentration camps and forced into the desert or the mountains or tiny tiny islands or “reserves” which often mirrored the boundaries of the easily farmable or resource-containing land, and it happened and it happened and it happened and we know about it and it never stopped happened it and we know about it but all that knowledge means fucking nothing because it happens it happens it happens…

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It’s a fucking relentless book, even – as it is – punctuated by asides where Lindqvist describes a trip he’s making across the Sahara while working on/thinking about this project (close to the sites of some colonial atrocities and never far from the physical and material risks of being in/close to the desert).

Other asides from the main thrust of the text are what could be descriptions of dreams but could also be retellings of myth or folklore (or both) or could even be imagistic pieces of brief dreamlike fiction… These sections aren’t explained, and often evolve out of things – buildings, landscapes, people – that Lindqvist sees on his travels or discusses in his writing. There are parallels, parallels, parallels, just as there are parallels between everything.

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The title of the book is taken from Joseph Conrad‘s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, an out-of-time novelisation of the 1979 film Apocalypse Now (directed by the sometimes acclaimed actor Nicholas Cage’s uncle), with the action set in the Belgian Congo rather than during the American invasion/partial occupation of Vietnam. Kurtz, the colonial official sent to keep colonial business interests running and functional, concludes a report sent to his superiors with the four words Lindqvist uses to title his book.

Lindqvist writes about the realities of late 19th century colonialism, and the Belgian Congo in particular, but also the surrounding regions, and the – for want of a better phrase – blood-thirsty psychopaths who European powers sent out there to kill and kill and kill and exploit for money.

The narrative of Heart of Darkness is compared to the historical record, people like Kurtz are described and explored, actions like his – some worse, some the same – are looked at, so too is the manner in which these acts of genocide were reported in the European press, and how Darwin’s theories were quickly applied by absolute pricks to try and justify mass slaughter.

Lindqvist looks at how all news is inherently propaganda, how there is no such thing as a neutral text of any form, how knowledge is repressed, how violence is treated as if it’s forgotten when it’s anything but, how all of these cruelties and murders and abuses were – are – treated as fine because they’re far away and the people they’re happening to don’t look like the “us” of the (historic) globs of the socially conservative European masses…

Christ.

Fucking Christ.

The world is an absolute fucking mess, a horrendous fucking state of affairs with cruelty and violence and murder fucking everywhere.

We can’t escape it, our society is so fucking wracked with the booty of centuries of reprehensible behaviour that there’s not much that exists that is safe of any kind of legitimate critique…

In England we still have a fucking monarchy and an unelected fucking chamber of fucking lawmakers. That’s an aside, perhaps, but we’ve made no fucking progress is what that means, no fundamental change.

We’re stuck stuck fucking stuck and we’ll be stuck – those of us who don’t dance in the torrents of blood and money – watching and witnessing all of this without ever fucking doing fucking anything about it.

We’re fucking complicit, in the end, unless we’re actively dismantling it. I’m not actively dismantling it, you’re probably not actively dismantling it, no one I know irl is actively dismantling it and most fucking people seem to not fucking want it dismantled.

There is murder and violence at the core of fucking capitalism and we can pretend it isn’t with our fucking our fucking our fucking consumer goods and books and good intentions and bullshit.

Everything is a fucking mess. This is a rotten, rotten, horrible society.

I will end this with the final, 169th section of ‘Exterminate All The Brutes’ in its entirety:

“You already know that. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions.”

The conclusion is that we’re morally fucking fucked. But what the fuck are we meant to do with that, Sven??????

<sup>1. I realise that me, the depressed loser blogger scott manley hadley saying this may ring hollow, as my life has absolutely no meaning and I barely tolerate existing in it, but I think this phrase/verbiage has enough cultural weight for it to be clear I don’t mean my own shit life, as I know that being able to hate your life while still having sufficient food, water and shelter (and a pet dog and two KORG synthesisers and too many books and some great shoes) is an absolute luxury. Personally, my life lacks meaning because of my own terrible decisions that actively get in the way of me having a satisfying and enjoyable life; but that doesn’t mean that other people would hate my life as much as I do and I know many people have broadly similar lives and – incorrectly – claim to find meaning (or don’t care about its lack) in empty, vacuous tedium. Christ. ↩

2. going back thru thisbefore I post it (well, schedule it for tomorrow morning) I remembered where I heard this phrase – it was in one of the speeches at the Malcolm Lowry conference I attended mid-breakdown in 2017. I wrote at length about that conference in the essay ‘under the lectern’ in my – imo – phenomenal 2020 non-fiction masterpiece the pleasure of regret, available from Broken Sleep Books via this link.↩</sup>