Annihilation Lies at the Heart of Europe: Sven Lindqvist and 'Exterminate All the Brutes'

This is a discussion of Sven Lindqvist's elegantly written " 'Exterminate All the Brutes: One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide" (1992), translated from the Swedish (New Press, 1996). This book is a study of European colonization of the world, especially in the 19th century, and the place of ideas of systemic racism, hierarchy, and violence in European colonization. Lindqvist argues that extermination lies at the heart of Europe; neither colonization nor extermination were peripheral to European expansion, and European intellectuals laid the groundwork for such colonization with their firm commitment to ideas of hierarchy (where some people were simply condemned to be savages and die as such) and racism. Lindqvist rejects implicitly the idea that one can distinguish between good and bad colonialisms, just as he rejects attempts by other Europeans and especially the English to scapegoat Germans. Racism was in fact critical to English imperial ideology.