Everyone knows that European nations brutally colonized and subjugated much of the rest of humanity from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century and—through a combination of disease, war, enslavement, dispossession and deliberate genocide—pushed many human communities around the globe to the point of near-extinction.
Everyone knows this—so what's the point of thinking about it now? What's the point, specifically, of revisiting Sven Lindqvist's 1992 book, "Exterminate All the Brutes"—about the history of European colonial genocides?
The point is not to learn something we didn't already know. As Lindvist says at the very outset of his book: "It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions." (Tate trans. throughout.)
The conclusion we may be forced to draw now, thirty years later, is that this history and this book have a lot more continuity with our own era than we care to admit—that those things that "everyone knows" may still be unfolding before our eyes.
Lindqvist too, in his book—after all—makes no pretense to be uncovering new information. Nor does he even claim to be offering a perspective that was inaccessible to the contemporaries of the events he describes.
Indeed, much of the reason we even know about the colonial genocides today is because a number of European writers wrote about what was happening at the time with horror, despair, and outrage—and tried to stop it.
The notion that European colonialism was a criminal and predatory enterprise cloaked in false humanitarian rhetoric was no novel discovery of our own enlightened era. It was notorious among European social critics even as it was occurring.
As Anatole France wrote with bitter irony in 1905: "The white kingdoms joined issue over the extermination of the red, yellow, and black races, and for the space of four centuries gave themselves up madly to the pillaging of three great divisions of the world. This is what is styled modern civilisation." (Roche trans.)
To be sure, Lindqvist cites at length a number of nineteenth century European theorists of racism and social Darwinism who openly called for the extermination of the "lesser breeds without the law" (in Kipling's phrase).
But he also engages throughout his book with a counter-tradition of European critics of imperialism. And he could well have multiplied examples.
Lindqvist documents convincingly that the nineteenth century European colonial enterprise intersected in a troubling way with the emergence of new theories in biology. The naturalist Georges Cuvier shocked the educated world at the dawn of the century by suggesting for the first time that a whole species could go extinct.
This notion of extinction provoked in Cuvier's contemporaries a feeling that we would call existential dread. He paraphrases Balzac's reaction to the great geologist's demonstrations: "He calls forth destruction, death becomes alive; in a kind of retrospective apocalypse we experience the terrifying resurrection of dead worlds."
It's a vision that haunted Byron as well. His theologically provocative and heterodox mystery play Cain grappled with an early English translation of Cuvier's theories. Byron thought that the theory of innumerable past extinctions heightened the stakes even further for the problem of evil.
But by a hideous twist of logic, Cuvier's merely descriptive claim that extinctions could occur was gradually perverted, over the course of nineteenth century scientific thought, into a normative claim that "lower" species must perish to make way for the "higher"—and from thence it was no great leap to conclude (as even Darwin seemed to at times)—that the same held true for "lower" types of humankind.
What's worse—Lindqvist demonstrates that even as Europeans were developing these pseudo-scientific theories of biological annihilation—they were putting them into practice against both animals and humans. Which perhaps should not surprise us; "For it was precisely that reality," Lindqvist notes, "which had once given rise to the theory."
Lindqvist cites H.G. Wells as another European writer who saw this process of annihilation unfolding and denounced it for what it was. Paraphrasing an 1893 article of Wells's, he writes: "human beings have swarmed all over the globe and shoved one species of animal after another over the edge of the precipice. Not just the dodo, but hundreds of families and species. [...] The annihilation of the bison was swift and complete. Seals, Greenland whales, and many other animals are faced with the same cruel destiny."
The theme of the War of the Worlds, Lindqvist reminds us, was merely to extrapolate from this line of thought the question: what if the same should happen to human beings? Even more to the point—what if the same thing should happen to white European human beings that they were presently inflicting on the rest of the Earth's inhabitants—human and nonhuman alike?
Lindvist is not the first writer to see a link between the callous way in which 19th century European civilization dispatched animal species and the way in which it treated other human beings. The same theme is explored throughout W.G. Sebald's work—whose books remind me strangely of Lindqvist's in places (which I mean as a compliment to both writers).
But even contemporary European critics of 19th century imperialism sensed the same connection. In Mark Twain's anti-colonial travelogue Following the Equator, he writes with deadpan irony of the Australian dingo: "He is hunted now, just as if he were a wolf. He has been sentenced to extermination, and the sentence will be carried out. This is all right, and not objectionable. The world was made for man—the white man."
In case we missed the intended sarcasm with which Twain offers this vision of extermination in the name of progress, the next page of the illustrated first edition shows a white colonist standing atop a pile of corpses of both animals and humans. "Thou Shalt Not Kill!" is written in the sky above him, beside a skeleton with scythe. Below these hecatombs of slaughtered innocents the mordant legend reads: "The White Man's World."
Lindqvist might also have cited Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, whose Satan Absolved (1899) denounces the British Empire for its depredations against both endangered animals and human communities that lack defenses against modern weapons:
From the deep Central Seas
To the white Poles, Man ruleth pitiless Lord of these,
And daily he destroyeth. The great whales he driveth
Beneath the northern ice, and quarter none he giveth,
Who perish there of wounds in their huge agony.
He presseth the white bear on the white frozen sea
And slaughtereth for his pastime. The wise amorous seal
He flayeth big with young, the walrus cubs that kneel
But cannot turn his rage, alive he mangleth them,
Leaveth in breathing heaps, outrooted branch and stem.
Blunt then goes on to discuss the fate of human populations subjected to the same process of colonial extermination:
In every land he slayeth. He hath new engines made
Which no life may withstand, nor in the forest shade
Nor in the sunlit plain, which wound all from afar,
The timorous with the valiant, waging his false war,
Coward, himself unseen.
Indeed, Blunt's critique here of imperialist methods of warfare reads a great deal like Lindqvist's discussion of the perilous "invisibility" of 19th century colonial war—invisible in the sense that the imperialist could fire upon the helpless from the safety of gunboats, without ever being seen, and—even more dangerously—invisible in the sense that he could escape any close scrutiny of his actions from the people back home.
The European colonialist of the 19th century was thus, Lindqvist suggests, the original of Wells's "Invisible Man"—whose ability to escape accountability for any of his acts had ultimately rendered him "inhuman."
Lindqvist didn't think this process of colonial "extermination" was over in his own era—and it is certainly not so in ours.
His book is more than thirty years old at this point—but in places it sounds as if it were written just yesterday. He describes hearing reports in 1992 that European neo-Nazis and white nationalists were attacking refugee camps and setting fire to asylum-seekers' homes.
"I thought that when Fascism came back," one of his acquaintances observes, "it would be disguised in bright friendly colors, so that it would be difficult to recognize. I didn't think it would come in a brown shirt and black leather. I didn't think it would be shaven heads, swastikas, boots, and officer's shoulder belts."
So too, the fascists and neo-Nazis are back in our era. And they are a lot less difficult to spot than we might have thought. They say things like "Hitler was cool" and deny the reality of the Holocaust.
Yes, fascism is back. "The same roar after every sentence when the leader speaks," Lindqvist writes; "The same hatred of aliens. The same preparedness for violence. The same wounded manhood."
The current U.S. president has moved in recent weeks to weaken or strip endangered species protections under the law. Daily he destroyeth...
He has invaded multiple countries, reviving the worst excesses of old-fashioned imperial war in Iran and Venezuela and Yemen and Somalia. In every land he slayeth...
And no discussion of colonial genocide would be complete today, alas, without an acknowledgement of what is happening in Gaza—with the U.S. government's blessing (and financial support).
Since the very start of that war in 2023, many people have likened it to the annihilationist colonial wars of the 19th century such as the Herero massacres. I resisted using that interpretive lens on the conflict for a long time, because October 7 was such an obvious atrocity, and I thought any nation would be entitled to make some effort of self-defense in its wake.
But a lot of the colonial genocides that Lindvist describes began with some attack or outrage that had been committed against Europeans. Sometimes, there was even a shocking massacre of civilians that called forth a perhaps initially legitimate (or at least predictable) military response.
But as the subsequent "war" of retaliation went on, it often congealed into genocide. Civilian populations were punished en masse in reprisal, "concentrated" into ever smaller territories, pushed onto isolated and impoverished "reserves," and then starved of resources.
As Blunt described the usual process of "retaliatory" colonial genocides, in the work already cited above:
[The subjugated populations] turn and in their anguish rend.
Then loud the cry goeth forth, the white man’s to each friend:
“Help! Christians, to our help! These black fiends murder us.”
And the last scene is played in death’s red charnel house.
The Saxon anger flames. His ships in armament
Bear slaughter on their wings. The Earth with fire is rent,
And the poor souls misused are wiped from the world’s face[...]
This was the story more or less of the Matabele wars. It was roughly how the Herero genocide played out as well. It began with a "rebellion," which German colonial authorities proposed to put down as a police measure. But there were also elements of the German staff who then saw in this rebellion "an opportunity to 'solve the Herero problem'," writes Lindqvist.
So too, there appear to be elements of the genocidal Israeli far-right—some of them currently serving in government—who exploited the tragedy and horror of October 7 as the pretext they long had sought to "solve the Gaza problem" once and for all.
"The decline of a species is always expressed by it being crowded into an increasingly smaller space," as Lindqvist paraphrases a nineteenth century theorist of the new "biological" apologia for genocide.
Lindqvist goes on to observe that European colonial officials put this pseudo-science into practice: "the Indians, the Hereros, the Bushmen, the Amandabele had been" dispossessed, then "crowded together" on "reserves."
I couldn't help but think in reading that of genocide scholar Omer Bartov's recent description in The New York Times of the conditions in Gaza today: "Two million Palestinians, who previously lived in one of the most densely populated areas in the world, are now confined to a third of it, trying to survive in devastated spaces lacking the most basic humanitarian infrastructure."
Bartov warns that if Trump's apparent plan goes forward to build a luxury resort over the ruins of Gaza—in which its surviving former inhabitants can at best hope to provide menial service "for the rich inhabiting what used to be their land"—then we really will be entering a new age of genocide—one in which the attempted destruction of a people "may come to be seen by some nations as the legitimate and lucrative extension of politics by other means."
Gaza is not the only alarm sounding. Trump's ongoing bombing of Iran and ceaseless threats against civilian infrastructure may still be a ways from genocide at this point—but this war is still young, it would seem—and certainly Trump has already threatened publicly to annihilate the "whole" of Iranian "civilization." An ominous sign.
And then there is the genocidal disregard and indifference with which our government beholds the results of its own decision to suspend all aid to the developing world at the start of Trump's second term. Estimates of the human cost of dismantling USAID in this abrupt way already range in the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, if not millions.
For decades, wealthy countries in the Global North have encouraged countries to uproot their local subsistence agriculture sector and other traditional industries in order to participate in the global market. This era of neoliberal reforms left many countries in the developing world reliant on imports and foreign aid to survive.
Now, having reduced them to this condition, the U.S. government cuts even this last remaining lifeline.
One is reminded again here of Lindqvist's description of the paradigmatic colonial genocide: first, people are "crowded into reserves"; then "the food supply to the reserves was cut off."
Lindqvist in 1992 was haunted by the question of what the overlords of global capitalism would decide to do once modern technology had rendered parts of the globe's population superfluous.
"Industry keeps up with automation in order to be competitive in international markets," he writes; "[...] In the long run, will a society that is unable to maintain the right to work be able to maintain the right to live?"
It seems to this day, then, that the U.S. government is still actively engaged in the longstanding European colonial project of "exterminating all the brutes"—the "extermination of the red, yellow, and black races" and the "pillaging of three great divisions of the world," as Anatole France put it.
But we are not like the imperialists of the 19th century, we think. We are so much more enlightened than people were back then. We know better. We know now that imperialism and genocide are wrong.
But—as we've seen above—people, at least some people, knew that it was wrong at the time too. All throughout the history of colonial genocide, voices of protest and cries of human compassion were raised against it—Blunt, France, Wells, Twain, Conrad, and others.
But that doesn't mean the people in power listened.
Just as it doesn't seem that the people in power are listening today.
Trump is proceeding to rule Venezuela as a neocolonial protectorate, complete with Marco Rubio governing from afar as "viceroy" in all but name.
He is proceeding to wage wars of aggression and ceaseless bombardment in Iran, Somalia, and elsewhere.
Daily he destroyeth indeed.
The last scene is played in death’s red charnel house. [...]
The Earth with fire is rent,
And the poor souls misused are wiped from the world’s face[.]
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