Author | Sven Lindqvist |
---|---|
Translator | Joan Tate |
Language | English |
Subjects | Colonialism, Genocide, Racism |
Publisher | New Press |
Publication date | April 1, 1996 |
Publication place | USA |
ISBN | 978-1565843349 |
Translated from Swedish "Utrota varenda jävel" |
Exterminate All the Brutes by Sven Lindqvist is a historical and philosophical investigation of the roots of European colonialism, racism, and genocide in Africa. The book takes its title from the infamous phrase used by the character Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's 1899 Heart of Darkness .
Lindqvist explores the history of European racism from the late eighteenth century to the twentieth century. In the same vein as Edward Said's Orientalism , Lindqvist contextualizes Conrad's Heart of Darkness and examines the impact of European explorers, theologians, politicians, and historians on the development of racist ideologies. Lindqvist's aim is to help readers comprehend the horrific statement "Exterminate all the brutes" by tracing its roots back to European colonial policies. Lindqvist's argument echoes that of Hannah Arendt's 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism but his approach is unique in that he blends his artistic and biographical insights to create a distinct perspective. [1]
Historian Adam Hochschild writes the introduction to the book, where Lindqvist explores the history of European colonialism in Africa, from the earliest explorers to the genocides of the 20th century, examining the ways in which European imperialism relied on the dehumanization of African people and the creation of a racist ideology that justified their exploitation and extermination.
The book looks at how this ideology was reinforced through popular culture and literature, such as the work of Conrad, and argues that it continues to shape contemporary attitudes towards Africa and its people.
Lindqvist draws on a wide range of sources, including historical accounts, literature, and personal experience, to analyse the legacy of colonialism in Africa and its ongoing impact on the world today.
The work was Lindqvist's favourite among his books. Its title is taken from a phrase uttered by the murderous racist imperialist Mr Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella Heart of Darkness . As a boy, Lindqvist had seen a photograph of the emaciated corpses at Buchenwald concentration camp. He stated that the image of Nazi atrocity and the novella came together in his mind, and in Exterminate all the Brutes he argues that Hitler grew up in a time when the whole of the Western world was "soaked in the conviction" that imperialism was a biological necessity that inevitably destroyed "the lower races". Lindqvist argued controversially [2] that this had already killed millions in genocides before Hitler's application of the principle to white people, and noted that his book had resulted in academic study of the "effect of colonial atrocities on Nazi crimes". [2]
The book was first published by Bonnier in Swedish in 1992 as Utrota varenda jävel . [3]
The first English translation, using Conrad's original English phrase "Exterminate all the brutes" as its title, was published in New York by New Press in 1996. [4]
The book has been translated into Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Croatian, Russian, Polish, Kurdish and English. [5]
Lindqvist's book Exterminate all the Brutes is included in Jan Gradvall's 2009 Tusen svenska klassiker ("A Thousand Swedish Classics"). [7]
Lindqvist continued to examine the history of colonial racism and genocide in the books The Skull Measurer's Mistake (Antirasister: människor och argument i kampen mot rasismen, 1996), A History of Bombing (Nu dog du: bombernas århundrade, 2001), [2] Terra Nullius (2007), [2] and Intent to Destroy (Avsikt att förinta, 2008). [8]
Dramatizations of the content have been performed on stage in Sweden and France. [9] In the spring of 2020, it was announced that the filmmaker Raoul Peck based a documentary series for HBO – about the history of European colonialism – on, among other things, Lindqvist's book. The award-winning television series "Exterminate All the Brutes" is eponymous with the book. Lindqvist appears as himself in the series cast. [10]
Heart of Darkness is an 1899 novella by Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad in which the sailor Charles Marlow tells his listeners the story of his assignment as steamer captain for a Belgian company in the African interior. The novel is widely regarded as a critique of European colonial rule in Africa, whilst also examining the themes of power dynamics and morality. Although Conrad does not name the river on which most of the narrative takes place, at the time of writing, the Congo Free State—the location of the large and economically important Congo River—was a private colony of Belgium's King Leopold II. Marlow is given a text by Kurtz, an ivory trader working on a trading station far up the river, who has "gone native" and is the object of Marlow's expedition.
Racism is discrimination and prejudice against people based on their race or ethnicity. Racism can be present in social actions, practices, or political systems that support the expression of prejudice or aversion in discriminatory practices. The ideology underlying racist practices often assumes that humans can be subdivided into distinct groups that are different in their social behavior and innate capacities and that can be ranked as inferior or superior. Racist ideology can become manifest in many aspects of social life. Associated social actions may include nativism, xenophobia, otherness, segregation, hierarchical ranking, supremacism, and related social phenomena. Racism refers to violation of racial equality based on equal opportunities or based on equality of outcomes for different races or ethnicities, also called substantive equality.
White supremacy is the belief that white people are superior to those of other races and thus should dominate them. The belief favors the maintenance and defense of any power and privilege held by white people. White supremacy has roots in the now-discredited doctrine of scientific racism and was a key justification for European colonialism.
The World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) is a series of international events organized by UNESCO to promote struggle against racism ideologies and behaviours. Five conferences have been held so far, in 1978, 1983, 2001, 2009 and 2021. Founded after World War II and the Holocaust as a dependent body of the United Nations, UNESCO started as soon as it was created to promote scientific studies concerning ethnic groups and their diffusion in public opinion to dispel pseudo-scientific rationalizations of racism. One of its first published works was The Race Question in 1950, signed by various internationally renowned scholars.
White guilt is a belief that white people bear a collective responsibility for the harm which has resulted from historical or current racist treatment of people belonging to other ethnic groups, as for example in the context of the Atlantic slave trade, European colonialism, and the genocide of indigenous peoples.
Leif Erland Andersson was a Swedish astronomer.
Oba Ovonramwen Nogbaisi, also called Overami, was the thirty-fifth Ọba of the Kingdom of Benin reigning from c. 1888 AD – c. 1897 AD, up until the British punitive expedition.
Sven Oskar Lindqvist was a prolific Swedish author whose 35 books range from essays, aphorisms, autobiography, and documentary prose to travel and reportage. He was educated at Stockholm University, and spent a year as a cultural attaché in Beijing, but spent most of his life as a writer, known for his persistence and independence. In the 1970s he established the public history movement Dig Where You Stand. From the late 1980s he focused on European imperialism, colonialism, racism, genocide, environmental degradation, and war. Among his best-known and most widely admired works are his 1996 discussion of racism, Exterminate All the Brutes, based on a phrase in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and his 2001 A History of Bombing, an intentionally fractured narrative written in 399 short chapters.
Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, is a French political scientist and author whose work chiefly centres on colonialism. He is best known for his book Coloniser, Exterminer - Sur la guerre et l'Etat colonial.
Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (ISBN 978-0300100983) is a 2007 book by Ben Kiernan, who for thirty years has studied genocide and crimes against humanity. In Blood and Soil, Kiernan examines outbreaks of mass violence, including worldwide colonial exterminations and twentieth-century case studies, particularly the Armenian genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin's mass murders, and the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides. The book won the 2008 gold medal for the best book in History awarded by the Independent Publishers Association. In 2009, Blood and Soil won the German Studies Association's biennial Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Book Prize for the best book published in 2007 or 2008 dealing with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in its broadest context, covering the fields of history, political science, and other social sciences, literature, art, and photography. In June 2009, the book's German translation, Erde und Blut: Völkermord und Vernichtung von der Antike bis heute, won first place in Germany's Nonfiction Book of the Month Prize.
Racism and xenophobia have been reported and investigated in Sweden. Sweden has the most segregated labor market of people with foreign background in Europe, when measured against both high and low educational level by OECD statistics. According to the European Network Against Racism, skin color and ethnic/religious background have significant impact on an individual's opportunities in the labor market.
Kvitt eller dubbelt — Tiotusenkronorsfrågan was a Swedish game show based on the American version called The $64,000 Question. It was the first game show to be broadcast on Swedish television and became one of the most watched television shows of the 1950s and 1960s. The show was hosted by Nils Erik Bæhrendtz and produced by Allan Schulman. The show was aired on SVT between 1957 until 1981. The show is one of the titles in the book Tusen svenska klassiker (2009). In each episode a number of contestants answered questions about a specific subject that they had chosen beforehand. If all questions was answered correctly they won 10.000 (SEK).
Anti-African sentiment, Afroscepticism, or Afrophobia is prejudice, hostility, discrimination, or racism towards people and cultures of Africa and of the African diaspora.
...och stora havet is the debut studio album by Swedish pop singer Jakob Hellman. It was released on February 13, 1989 by EMI.
Exterminate all the Brutes may refer to:
The Dig Where You Stand movement is an international public history and adult education movement promoting public participation in research in local history, especially labor history. It began in Sweden in the 1970s and was given its shape by Sven Lindqvist in his book Gräv där du står (1978). Following the movement's success in Sweden, it was taken up in other Western countries.
Exterminate All the Brutes is an internationally co-produced documentary television miniseries revolving around colonization and genocide, directed and narrated by Raoul Peck. The series consists of four episodes and premiered in the United States on April 7, 2021, on HBO. It premiered in the United Kingdom on May 1, 2021, on Sky Documentaries. The series takes its name from Sven Lindqvist's book with the same name, on which it is partially based, a phrase which Lindqvist in turn borrowed from Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, in which the quote "Exterminate all the brutes" appears.
American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World is a multidisciplinary book about the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and colonial history written by American scholar and historian David Stannard.
The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean is a book by Gerald Horne. It is a historical analysis of the development of settler colonialism in North America and the Caribbean in the 17th century. Sarah Barber from the Lancaster University Department of History reviews the book and concludes "Writing accessible history is never easy, and this is a laudable addition." David Waldstreicher, Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, British colonizers committed counter-revolution—revolting against crown and against the threat from below—to increase their control over land and people.
The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century is a book by Gerald Horne, a Professor of African American History at the University of Houston. The book offers a historical analysis of the development of settler colonialism in North America in the 16th century.