Sven Lindqvist (1932–2019)

The term "terra nulllius," for "land belonging to no one," refers to the legal fiction used by the European colonizers of Australia to take the land belonging to the various groups of Aborigines who already lived there and, not so incidentally, for whom the land had very deep significance, reflecting (to oversimplify) the creation of the world. In the book Terra Nullius], Lindqvist combines a travelogue with a look at some highlights (lowlights?) of European interaction with Aborigines: show more outright massacres, rape, introduction of diseases including venereal diseases, land theft, imprisonment, stealing half-white and other children, breaking up families, testing of nuclear weapons without moving people away, and of course, underlying everything, breathtaking racism. Towards the end of the book, he introduces a little hope with an exploration of the success (i.e., in the white art market) of Aboriginal art and music.

Lindqvist has an amazing talent to blend his travelogue with historical information, which tends to speak for itself, and with examples from fiction written by colonizers (including a book he read as a child in Sweden which characterizes Aborigines as cannibals), which also tend to speak for themselves. He also devotes some space to an analysis of the the thinking of early 20th century European psychologists and anthropologists who hypothesized freely (and incorrectly) about the origins of humanity based on what they "knew" about the Australian Aborigines. I hadn't heard of Lindqvist before learning about this book from another LTer, but apparently he has made a career of traveling to places to understand the European/white impact on the people of color living in the lands they colonized. This is a compellingly readable, if borderline polemical, book, and it spurs the reader to anger. Many of the stories he tells are appalling.

Some examples of Lindqvist's writing.

"When the natives deny the occupiers access to their records and traditions, scholarship declares they don't exist. . .

When the settler community has stolen the land from its original owners, scholarship finds the natives have no land rights." pp. 38-39

So the Aborigines were constantly being moved, not only to allow for atom-bomb tests, but also because the whites' cattle needed a particular pool of water or because the whites' company had found new mineral deposits -- or simply for their own good, so they could be looked after and learn the whites' table manners, the whites' good home cooking, the whites' working hours. The new policy after the second world war was aimed at 'assimilating' the Aborigines, which didn't imply the whites thought they had anything to learn from black people, but meant black people were to be trained to be steady wage earners and consumers on the fringes of white society." p. 163

Lindqvist makes the case for meaningful apologies from the descendents of colonizers by recounting his own encounter, as a young man, with Norwegians who accused him of benefiting from the Swedish policy of allowing the Nazis to march across Sweden to Norway. At first, he was taken aback by this, since he was only 10 in 1942, but comes to realize that "it was my own country's cowardly appeasement policy I had to thank for never having been bombed or shot at or even gone to bed hungry." He also discusses how countries can effectively make amends for past misdeeds; needless to say, saying "I'm sorry" isn't enough.

He ends the book with a broader look at the world.

"Three hundred million human beings on this planet are members of indigenous peoples who have been, or are on the way to being, robbed of their land. They are generally among the poorest and most scorned minorities in the countries where they live. Not long ago, they were considered doomed to die out. But in recent decades the indigenous peoples have seized back the initiative on a global scale." p.204

He then goes on to discuss some of these efforts, what Australia is doing, the fight to obtain German reparations for the Holocaust, and other claims for reparations. He concludes:

"When the misdeeds of the past are brought to light, when the perpetrators and their heirs confess and ask forgiveness, when we do penance and mend our ways and pay the price -- then the crime committed has a new setting and a new significance. No longer the inescapable extinction of a people, but its ability to survive and eventually have the justice of its claim acknowledged." p. 213 show less

Sven Lindqvist, Swedish writer, delivers here an original and remarkable little book putting into a new perspective the idea of genocide.

Half travel account and half historical essay, he journeys through the Sahara by bus, accompanied only by his laptop and 'exterminate all the brutes!', the infamous sentence taken from 'Heart of Darkness' by Joseph Conrad. This 'exterminate all the brutes!' is for him far more than a blunt summary of colonial policies. It's the foundation of a whole mindset show more that will, ultimately, render possible the genocides of the 20th century - including the Shoah.

Without denying the unique character of the Shoah (an extermination perpetrated industrially) he focuses here indeed in demonstrating that such a massacre of a whole people would have never been conceivable had it not been for colonialism, which prepared the mentalities for such endeavour and so facilitated its application. To illustrate his point, travelling across the north African desert he refers to African examples. He retells the abject behaviours of the Europeans (eg from the Ashanti king Prempeh forced to kiss the feet of British officers to the sacking and burning of entire villages across the continent). He shows, above all, that when such attitude was coupled with the racial theories then in full bloom (from the seriously distorted work of Darwin to the work of a Robert Knox) the idea of extermination in the name of a selection (that is, genocide) became pervasive. It's then that Imperialism started to be seen as a necessary biological process, according to which 'inferior races' could only be eliminated. The fate of the Herero in South Africa, or, again, the atrocities perpetrated in the Congo under Leopold II are witnesses to such banalisation of mass murders.

The Shoah, then, shouldn't surprise us. It sure was unique by the way it was accomplished, but, the mindset that had led to it had been fermenting from long before. The destruction of people deemed 'inferior' had indeed been accepted as normal by many long before the 1940s. 'Genocide' didn't appear out of the blue under the Nazis: it came straight out of the racist and violent colonial era. The author, brilliantly and shockingly, here shows such historical continuity. A short read, but how compelling! show less

Damning counterargument first to those who suggest that the Holocaust was unique. In fact, all the European imperial powers had a long and well-developed pattern of exterminating the "lower" races that stood in their way of appropriating new lands and resources. What was new in WWII was "that what had been done in the heart of darkness was repeated in the heart of Europe." Despite being closer to home, the Germans were able to invoke the same reasons that had been used to justify without show more serious objection the extermination of the native Americans, innumerable African societies, and indigenous peoples throughout the globe.

Today, the lesson has new importance because it possibly suggests a lens through which we should understand the rise of a militant Islamic extremism from just those societies that have experienced the brunt of European and American imperialist adventuring. In the previous century it was argued that extinction or at least subjugation of lesser peoples was inevitable, indeed, "it was a philanthropic principle to kill natives; there was," [Captain Gordon Pim] said, "mercy in a massacre." Now, though, the intended victims are able to fight back in order to defend their ways of living. If they fight us here, now, it is only because we attacked them there, first, both militarily and then culturally. One can argue that such reaction is unwise, unproductive, and doomed to failure, but we should not pretend to be puzzled by why it is happening. show less

Having previously read Swedish author Sven Lindqvist's excellent and haunting travel/history book Exterminate All the Brutes, I have been eager to read this for a while now. My enthusiasm was only slightly dented by my brother's annoyance with the structure of the book. Lindqvist has divided the book into 399 sections - most only a couple of paragraphs long. The sections are arranged chronologically from the invention of gunpowder to 1999 when the Swedish edition of the book was published. show more There are 22 narrative strands, or arguments and it is possible to read the book jumping from one section to the next connected section (for example section 3 to 200 to 216), following an assigned path, or its possible to read the whole thing chronologically. Its an interesting attempt to do something a little different, and from time to time it was diverting to take a break from following a particular line of argument to see what else was happening around the time period of a particular section, but overall the traditionalist in me would have been probably been happier with a straightforward 22 chapters.

The content itself is far more than just a history. Lindqvist mixes in his own memories of childhood during ww2, his student days and thoughts and feelings about different episodes in history. We get an interesting examination of how the idea of bombing developed in fiction from the late 19th century onwards (and disturbingly enough how often it is mixed with dreams of genocide). We see the development and arguments in international law surrounding the use of aerial and then nuclear bombs. The development of different types of bombs and different ideas about how to use them is here. There is a incisive evaluation of 'strategic' bombing of civilians in WW2 including the terrible firestorms in Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo, as well as Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is not a clear cut military or technological history, but also social, cultural and legal history. There are also some powerful ruminations on violence and war and its relationship with human nature and human history. By the end, one understands that this is also, above all an implicit plea for sanity in a world that seems obsessed with possessing the ability to commit mass extinction events. show less