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Lindqvist, Sven. Exterminate all the brutes
"Exterminate all the brutes" is the Joseph Conrad quotation that obsesses Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist as he searches for the origin and meaning of genocide in Western culture. Serving as the flint stone and the title for his book, this quotation from Heart of Darkness is Kurtz's summary conclusion on how to deal with the natives in newly acquired colonies. More than one-hundred years later it still rings in Sven Lindqvist's ears, setting him off on a quest --academic, psychological, and geographical-- as he travels across northern Africa, into the history of Western philosophical thought, on his own parallel journey seeking the true and full meaning of the horror that Conrad saw in the human heart.
Though as thoroughly researched as any mainstream academic exploration, Lindqvist has made his book into something more personal. As he unearths disturbing stories and shares them, he shares his reactions, his nightmares and waking fears. He wants his readers to consider philosophically and personally, not just academically, what it is that leads societies down the road to open policies of racism and ultimately racial extermination. "Leads," not "led," because Lindqvist does not presume that these are isolated incidents, indigenous only to isolated societies and times past. Lindqvist follows the history of colonial...