Lindqvist presents a unique study of Europe's dark history in Africa, written both as a travel diary and as a historical examination of European imperialism and racism over the past 2 centuries, and confronts the roots of European genocide.

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has Kurtz at his end exclaim “The horror! The horror!” but the real horror is finding out how much of Conrad’s novella is based on real events. Real events that Lundqvist brings to light, lifting his title from Kurtz’s scrawled note on his beloved pamphlet - “Exterminate All The Brutes!”

How does genocide become “to be regarded as the as the inevitable by-product of progress?” (115)

And Lundqvist has certainly heightened my view of multiple H.G. Wells’ works (see notes added to War of the Worlds)

Some reviews point to other atrocities in an attempt to show Lundqvist’s book as one-sided, but many of those examples are internecine or nearly so, not one nation reaching halfway around the globe to subjugate or exterminate another peoples.

I’m not so sure I completely buy into Lundqvist’s wrapping up in stating the Nazis “lebensraum” was their attempt at colonialism. But I do agree with his idea that the Germans got into the colonizing game later than other nations, and his parallel that as such they didn’t get a prime spot at the watering hole like the early arrival animals did.

And I agree with his idea that the Nazis studied how other nations had gone about conducting their genocides to use as a model to cleanse Europe (see notes on Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee). As well as his contention that “We want genocide to have begun and ended with Nazism. That is what is most comforting.”

I also find the current uproar about CRT (critical race theory) curiously interesting as though it’s something new. Read Lundqvist’s book and it’s apparent that much of what CRT speaks to was around a century ago. ( )

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 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. ( )

A fierce, if meandering, set of miniature essays revolving around a trip through the Sahara, a biography of Joseph Conrad and his [b:Heart of Darkness|4900|Heart of Darkness |Joseph Conrad|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328698658s/4900.jpg|2877220], and the history of race and genocide.



Slaughter and tribalism are not unique in history, of course. Lindqvist's main thesis is similar to Aime Cesaire's in [b:Discourse on Colonialism|86598|Discourse on Colonialism|Aimé Césaire|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1343231830s/86598.jpg|83580] - the origins of the Holocaust are rooted in the techniques of war and technology of exploitation and 'murder from a distance' which were developed in the colonial empires of the 19th century.

The Enlightenment ideal of the perfectibility of humankind, combined with imperial greed and Spencer's Social Darwinism, led to the belief that the extermination of human populations is a natural, and even beneficial part of life, and one to be embraced whole-heartedly. That those who are inferior are to be civilized, that they are life unworthy of life, that they are to be slaughtered.

"Exterminate all the brutes." This is far from over. ( )

I originally read this as a companion to The Heart of Darkness. It blew me away. I finally felt like I had a big piece to the puzzle of why the Holocaust happened. It focuses on colonization and how imperial attitudes from the 19th century influenced the Nazis.