The Dead Do Not Die: "Exterminate All the Brutes" and Terra Nullius

334 Pages·2014·3.48 MB·English

by  Sven Lindqvist

Sven Lindqvist has published thirty books, including The Skull Measurer’s
Mistake and A History of Bombing (both available from The New Press). He
holds a PhD in the history of literature from Stockholm University, an honorary
doctorate from Uppsala University, and an honorary professorship from the
Swedish government. He lives in Stockholm.
Adam Hochschild is the author of seven books, including King Leopold’s
Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa and Bury the
Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves.
Joan Tate (1922–2000) was an award-winning translator of more than two
hundred books, including works by Ingmar Bergman, Kerstin Ekman, and Astrid
Lindgren. She was a founding member of SELTA, the Swedish-English Literary
Translators’ Association.
Sarah Death is a translator, a literary scholar, and the editor of the UK-based
journal Swedish Book Review. She won the Bernard Shaw Translation Prize for
Ellen Mattson’s Snow. She lives in Kent, England.
ALSO BY SVEN LINDQVIST
A History of Bombing
The Skull Measurer’s Mistake: And Other Portraits of Men and Women Who
Spoke Out Against Racism
Desert Divers
Bench Press
The Myth of Wu Tao-tzu

Introduction © 2014 by Adam Hochschild “Exterminate All the Brutes” © 1992 by Sven Lindqvist English
translation © 1996 by Joan Tate Originally published in Sweden as Utrota varenda jävel by Albert
Bonniers Förlag, 1992
Terra Nullius © 2005 by Sven Lindqvist English translation of Terra Nullius © 2007 by Sarah Death
Originally published in Sweden as Terra Nullius: En Resa Genom Ingens Land
by Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2005
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.
Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions
Department, The New Press, 120 Wall Street, 31st floor, New York, NY 10005.
Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2014
Distributed by Perseus Distribution CIP data available
ISBN 978-1-62097-003-4 (e-book) The New Press publishes books that promote and enrich public
discussion and understanding of the issues vital to our democracy and to a more equitable world. These
books are made possible by the enthusiasm of our readers; the support of a committed group of donors,
large and small; the collaboration of our many partners in the independent media and the not-for-profit
sector; booksellers, who often hand-sell New Press books; librarians; and above all by our authors.
www.thenewpress.com
Composition by dix!
This book was set in Scala
Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Introduction by Adam Hochschild
“Exterminate All the Brutes”
Terra Nullius
INTRODUCTION
Like many of the most original writers, Sven Lindqvist is hard to pigeonhole. He
is not exactly a historian, for his graduate degree is in literature. He is not
exactly a travel writer, for he has little interest in the colorful details that make a
place seem exotic; he always wants to direct our attention back to our own
culture. He is not exactly a journalist, for when he travels to far points on the
globe, he is less likely to interview anyone than to tell us about his own dreams.
His work does not come in predictable neatly tied packages: he travels through
Africa meditating on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness but never reaches the
Congo; he goes all the way to Australia to write powerfully about what its native
peoples endured but chooses not to interview a single Aborigine. And, for that
matter, he’s not someone on whom I, or almost any American writer, can have
the last word, for the great majority of his thirty-three books have not been
translated from Swedish.
If there is an English-language writer whom Lindqvist reminds me of, it
might be James Agee: also uncategorizable, also working in many genres, also at
times forcing painful detail on his admirers—his masterwork Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men is not easy bedtime reading. Yet that book changed and expanded
forever our sense of how to see the world, and, at its best, so does the work of
Sven Lindqvist.
If you asked most Americans or Europeans, for example, to date the great
tragic turning points of the modern era, they might say 1914, when World War I
began and we saw the toll industrialized slaughter could take, or 1945, when the
United States carried this to a new level by dropping two atom bombs on
Japanese cities. If you asked Lindqvist, I think he would say 1898 and 1911.
Why?
These dates, too, have to do with industrialized warfare; the difference is
where the victims were. The year 1898 saw the Battle of Omdurman, during
which a small force of British and colonial troops, Winston Churchill among
them, in a few hours killed more than ten thousand Sudanese and wounded
another sixteen thousand, many fatally, most of them falling victim to half a
million bullets fired by Hiram Maxim’s latest machine guns. It was the first
large-scale demonstration of what this horrific new weapon could do. Thirteen
years later, on November 1, 1911, during another long-forgotten war, an Italian
lieutenant named Giulio Cavotti leaned out of his open-cockpit airplane and
dropped several hand grenades on two oases near Tripoli, Libya. It was the
world’s first aerial bombardment.
In both cases, of course, the victims Lindqvist draws our attention to were
colonial peoples. This, I think, is the insight and the driving passion at the core
of the two books in this volume and of several of his others, particularly the
remarkable A History of Bombing—where he traces the genealogy of British
terror-bombing of German cities in World War II back to similar targeting of
civilians in a colonial war in Iraq more than twenty years earlier. To read
“Exterminate All the Brutes”, A History of Bombing, or Terra Nullius is to be
reminded of how incredibly Eurocentric a view of the world most mainstream
historians have. We are accustomed to thinking—in the famous phrase of British
foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey—of “the lamps . . . going out all over
Europe” in 1914 as a catastrophic war began and forget that they were
extinguished decades earlier for people on other continents as they experienced
European conquest.
Almost all of us educated in North America or Europe grew up learning that
there were two great totalitarian systems of modern times, each with fantasies of
exterminating its enemies: Nazism and Communism. Lindqvist reminds us that
there was a third: European colonialism. And, most provocatively, he makes
connections between it and one of the others.
“Exterminate All the Brutes” takes us deep into the history of Western
consciousness in a search for the sources of the very idea of extermination and
finds it in many unexpected places. An early “kindergarten for European
imperialism,” for example, was the Canary Islands, where some five hundred
years ago diseases and weapons brought by conquering Spaniards reduced an
estimated eighty thousand indigenous inhabitants to zero in less than a century.
How many people who have visited these lovely islands as tourists ever learned
this? Not me. Lindqvist also introduces us to Lord Wolseley, eventually
commander in chief of the British army at the time of Omdurman, who, in this
era when British wars were colonial ones, spoke of “the rapture-giving delight
which the attack upon an enemy affords. . . . All other sensations are but as the
tinkling of a doorbell in comparison with the throbbing of Big Ben.” Then there
is the nineteenth-century birth of scientific racism, which eagerly twisted
Darwin’s discoveries to justify the idea that “inferior” races were fated to
disappear from the Earth, just like species of plants and animals gone extinct—
and implied that there was no sin involved in helping them on their way.
And finally, along came plenty of thinkers and politicians who saw this as
inevitable. In 1898, the year of Omdurman, one of them declared, “One can
roughly divide the nations of the world into the living and the dying.” Who said
this? Lord Salisbury, prime minister of Britain. And then comes Lindqvist’s
most provocative and unexpected discovery: a German thinker, Friedrich Ratzel,
an ardent enthusiast of colonialism, believed that there was a “demonic
necessity” for the “superior race” to see to it that “peoples of inferior culture” die
out. And who were these inferior people? They included “the stunted hunting
people in the African interior” (tens of thousands of whom were wiped out in
1904 in the notorious German genocide of the Herero people of today’s
Namibia), Gypsies—and Jews. Hitler had a copy of Ratzel’s book with him in
1924, when he was in prison writing Mein Kampf.
“Hitler himself,” writes Lindqvist, “was driven throughout his political
career by a fanatical anti-Semitism with roots in a tradition of over a thousand
years, which had often led to killing and even to mass murder of Jews. But the
step from mass murder to genocide was not taken until the anti-Semitic tradition
met the tradition of genocide arising during Europe’s expansion in America,
Australia, Africa, and Asia.”
Can we prove this beyond doubt? Not without knowing exactly what was in
Hitler’s mind. But I defy anyone to read “Exterminate All the Brutes” and not
see the Holocaust in a somewhat different light and the Jews, as Lindqvist
suggests, as the Africans of Europe. His bold contention has riled some more
traditional scholars, deeply wedded to the idea of the Holocaust’s uniqueness.
Unique it certainly was in scale, technology, and speed, but Lindqvist makes us
realize that it was but one of an appalling series of attempts—the others almost
all outside of Europe—to exterminate an entire people from the face of the
Earth.
Terra Nullius has also not been without its critics, chief among them white
Australians who feel that all this history of the shameful treatment of Aboriginal
peoples is familiar news by now. To some extent that’s true, but unfortunately,
as Lindqvist shows us, not true enough. The achievement of this book, while
more complex, again includes reminding us of how people in a country we
normally consider enlightened thought so much like Nazis. What would we say,
for instance, about a German theorist who, a mere half-dozen years before Hitler
took power, wrote, “The survival of the Jews will only cause trouble”? We’d say
that this person paved the way to Auschwitz. In Terra Nullius, Lindqvist
introduces us to George H.L.F. Pitt-Rivers, a British anthropologist, who wrote
in 1927 of Australia, “The survival of the natives will only cause trouble.” By
contrast, Pitt-Rivers added, “there is no native problem in Tasmania . . . for the
very good reason that the Tasmanians are no longer alive to create a problem.”
Hauntingly, Lindqvist quotes an earlier report from similarly minded researchers
who described the typical Aborigine as “a naked, hirsute savage, with a type of
features occasionally pronouncedly Jewish.”
In other ways as well, Lindqvist subtly examines how white Britons and
Australians have looked at Aborigines, showing us how their perceptions and
theories are so often a projection of white fantasies. Because women used the
same form of address for a husband’s brother as for him, for example, early
anthropologists theorized that the Aborigines practiced group sex, with brothers
owning all women in common. Because Aborigines (unlike whites) used no
corporal punishment on their children, their child-rearing was judged
inexcusably lax, and their children, half-castes in particular, were often seized
and taken from them, in order to be reared in state institutions in ways less
“primitive.”
Above all, whites eagerly promoted the reassuring illusion that because so
much of central and western Australia looked like desert, it couldn’t possibly
belong to anyone and so was terra nullius—no one’s land. “There was little
appetite for admitting that . . . every stone, every bush, and every water hole had
its specific owner and custodian, its sacred history and religious significance.” It
was far more convenient to believe that the land was no one’s, which meant it
could be used for everything from open-pit mining to testing long-range missiles
and British atomic bombs.
Lindqvist’s work leaves you changed. “Exterminate All the Brutes” first
made me fully aware of one of the real-life models for Joseph Conrad’s Mr.
Kurtz and, for a book I was then writing, set me looking for more. Two books
later, I found myself writing about the Battle of Omdurman. And no one who
reads A History of Bombing will ever again feel that the Allies of World War II
fought the “Good War.” Lindqvist opens a world to us, a world with its
comforting myths stripped away. You read him at your own risk.
—Adam Hochschild