Sven Lindqvist - Exterminate All the Brutes: One Mans Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide

ALSO BY SVEN LINDQVIST

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The Myth of Wu Tao-tzu

One Mans Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide

Sven Lindqvist

Translated by Joan Tate

To Olof Lagercrantz
who traveled with Heart of Darkness
and Etienne Glaser
who was Adolf in Hitlers Childhood

All Jews and Negroes ought really to be exterminated. We shall be victorious. The other races will disappear and die out.

White Aryan Resistance, Sweden, 1991

You may wipe us out, but the children of the stars can never be dogs.

Somabulano, Rhodesia, 1896

This is a story, not a contribution to historical research. It is the story of a man traveling by bus through the Saharan desert and, at the same time, traveling by computer through the history of the concept of extermination. In small, sand-ridden desert hotels, his study closes in on one sentence in Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness: Exterminate all the brutes.

Why did Kurtz end his report on the civilizing task of the white man in Africa with these words? What did they mean to Conrad and his contemporaries? Why did Conrad make them stand out as a summary of all the high-flown rhetoric on Europes responsibilities to the peoples of other continents?

I thought I had the answer to these questions when in 1949, at the age of seventeen, I first read Heart of Darkness. Behind the black shadows of disease and starvation in the Grove of Death I saw in my minds eye the emaciated survivors of the German death camps, which had been liberated only a few years earlier. I read Conrad as a prophetic author who had foreseen all the horrors that were to come.

Hannah Arendt knew better. She saw that Conrad was writing about the genocides of his own time. In her first book, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), she showed how imperialism necessitated racism as the only possible excuse for its deeds. Lying under anybodys nose were many of the elements which gathered together could create a totalitarian government on the basis of racism.

Her thesis that Nazism and Communism were of the same stock has been well remembered. However, many forget that she also held the terrible massacres and wild murdering of European imperialists responsible for the triumphant introduction of such means of pacification into ordinary, respectable foreign policies, thereby fathering totalitarianism and its genocides.

In the first volume of The Holocaust in Historical Context (1994), Steven T. Katz has begun a demonstration of the phenomenological uniqueness of the Holocaust. On some of his seven hundred pages, he speaks with contempt for those who have instead emphasized the similarities. Sometimes, though, he is more tolerant and says, Their approach might be called, nonpejoratively, a paradigm of similarity; mine, in contrast, is a paradigm of distinctiveness.

The two approaches seem to me equally valid and complementary. My desert traveler, employing a paradigm of similarity, finds that Europes destruction of the inferior races of four continents prepared the ground for Hitlers destruction of six million Jews in Europe.

Each of these genocides had, of course, its own unique characteristics. However, two events need not be identical for one of them to facilitate the other. European world expansion, accompanied as it was by a shameless defense of extermination, created habits of thought and political precedents that made way for new outrages, finally culminating in the most horrendous of them all: the Holocaust.

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.

Tademait, desert of deserts, is the deadest area of the Sahara. No sign of vegetation. Life all but extinct. The ground is covered with that black, shiny desert varnish the heat has pressed out of the stone.

The night bus, the only one between El Gola and In Salah, with a little luck, takes seven hours. You fight your way to a seat in competition with a dozen or so soldiers in crude army boots who have learned their queuing technique in the close-combat school of the Algerian army in Sidi-bel-Abbs. Anyone carrying under one arm the core of European thought stored on an old-fashioned computer is obviously handicapped.

At the turnoff toward Timmimoun, hot potato soup and bread are served through a hole in the wall. Then the shattered asphalt comes to an end and the bus continues through roadless desert.

It is pure rodeo. The bus behaves like a young bronco. With windows rattling and springs screeching, it rocks, stamps, and leaps forward, and every jolt is transmitted to the hard disk I have on my lap as well as to the stack of swaying building blocks that are my spinal disks. When it is no longer possible to sit, I hang on to the roof rack or squat down.

This is what I had feared. This is what I have longed for.

The night is fantastic beneath the moon. Hour after hour, the white desert pours past: stone and sand, stone and gravel, gravel and sandall gleaming like snow. Hour after hour. Nothing happens until a signal suddenly flares up in the darkness as a sign for one of the passengers to stop the bus, get off, and start walking, straight out into the desert.

The sound of his footsteps disappears into the sand. He himself disappears. We also disappear into the white darkness.

The core of European thought? Yes, there is one sentence, a short simple sentence, only a few words, summing up the history of our continent, our humanity, our biosphere, from Holocene to Holocaust.

It says nothing about Europe as the original home on earth of humanism, democracy, and welfare. It says nothing about everything we are quite rightly proud of. It simply tells the truth we prefer to forget.

I have studied that sentence for several years. I have collected quantities of material that I never have time to go through. I would like to disappear into this desert, where no one can reach me, where I have all the time in the world, to disappear and not return until I have understood what I already know.

I get off in In Salah.

The moon is no longer shining. The bus takes its light with it and vanishes. The darkness all round me is compact.

It was outside In Salah that the Scottish explorer Alexander Gordon Laing was attacked and robbed. He had five saber cuts on the crown of his head and three on the left temple. One on his left cheekbone fractured his jawbone and divided his ear. A dreadful gash in his neck scratched his windpipe, a bullet in his hip grazed his spine, five saber cuts on his right arm and hand, three fingers broken, the wrist bones cut through, and so on.

Somewhere far away in the darkness is a glimpse of a fire. I start lugging my heavy word processor and my even heavier suitcase in the direction of the light.