"Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide

Nobody should read Heart of Darkness without reading this first. As a keystone for Raul Peck’s new TV series, the past becomes even more relevant today.

A convincing essay about what makes genocide possible and how one genocide can easily lead to another. As a person of Jewish descent, I’m not often comfortable hearing or reading that other genocides may have similarities to The Holocaust, not because those similarities don’t exist (because, of course, they do) but rather that I am always wary of the possibility that any rationale (no matter how well presented) might diminish the severity of that particular genocide. Nevertheless, I found Lindqvist’s essay fair and persuasive. While showing the historical trail that led to The Holocaust, a trail that killed people in other parts of the world as brutally and psychopathically as the Jews in Europe, Lindqvist does seem to eventually suggest something of a distinction between The Holocaust and many other genocides: the probability of a Jew being left alive to act as a slave was less than someone of another ethnicity at that time. Jews were meant to merely die. Therefore, this fact places The Holocaust in the same category as the killing of the Armenians by the Turkish government, the killing of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda, and any other mass murder where many members of a particular ethnic group are meant merely to die (such as Bosnian Moslems in Serbian controlled Bosnia). Having said that, it certainly does not diminish one’s nausea upon reading of the earlier genocidal conditions in the Congo and the Americas. Being a slave under those evil conditions is beyond intolerable. The “take home” message of the book (for me) is “what difference does it make in the end?” what the similarities and the differences between genocides are — genocide arises from the very depths of human weakness. We already know this fact -- now we must act to stop it wherever and whenever the disgusting rhetoric which feeds it is voiced and to make heard the voices of those who, because of genocide, cannot speak. This book makes that goal clear and imperative.

Very interesting read. A combination of travel book and essay on genocide. Too often we see events in isolation, almost as if to quarantine them from contextual and historic scrutiny. The only place where I'd slightly disagree with the author is in his focus on more recent antecedents to genocidal behaviour that African and Tasmania. It has a much older disgraceful history. One thinks of de las Casas and the Short Account, and of other genocides lost to history. But I found his reseach provoking and amazing that much of the writing was done in dusty hotel rooms in the Sahara. I travelled that way in the 1970s and it brought back the images and encounters vividly

Reading Lindqvist’s book will alter your assumptions on human history and the meaning of genocide. A surreal adventure story—a post-modern revision of Paul Bowles—married with a history that explains the roots of white supremacist thinking.

This is vivid and convincing. If you want to face some crucial truths about the way the world has taken shape, this book is completely helpful. I’d even say it’s necessary to understand the material in this book to understand how non-Western cultures view the West.

This rating is not in reference to the book, which is excellent, but the audiobook, which is abysmal. The narrator seems to be trying her best, but her best is awkward stutters and stops, inconsistent pacing, detractive fluctuations in volume, frequent mispronunciations, etc. Statements in the text are often pronounced as questions, to boot. Elsewise, the audio quality is among the lowest tier of audiobooks I’ve listened to. This one’s further marred by shoddy editing — the recording doesn’t lack the narrator’s foibling, often featuring the same section of misspoken text repeated several times. Not sure what’s going on, but I can’t recommend the audiobook at all.On the other hand, the book itself is awesome and iconoclastic. History in vignettes tied to the root theme of exorbitantly extractive colonialism and associated violence (to its most terrible end), colored in with dream journal entries and memories. The way Lindqvist writes feels like the way I think, if more organized. Give it a read and consider checking out the eponymous HBO doc directed by Raoul Peck, which so many others have already plugged.

The book was so much better than the documentary.

Will the continuation of this historical approach, continuing to be practiced by self-appointed, 'Superior' Nation States address and reverse Western Capitalism's 'suicidal,' self righteous, Financial Growth, Fanaticism destroy our Earth?I doubt it!

the book answered t the description, love it and definately recommend the seller!

This book was extremely eye opening. Lindqvist discusses history in a manner that’s fair and approachable to everyone. I’ve already ordered two more of his books.

I knew that book which I consider as one of the major history books of the last 20 years.I bought it to offer it to a friend