Sven Lindqvist's "Exterminate All the Brutes": A Journey into the Roots of European Genocide and the Dark Depths of Human Nature

Dr Omar Altalib: What I liked about the book is the description of the Algerian desert towns. Regarding European colonialism, there are interesting tidbits of information but it does need to have a stronger unifying theme

United States on Apr 30, 2023

Amazon Customer: Well educated book all should read

United States on Jan 01, 2023

Grandma Alice: Breaks my heart. We are thus. Lindquist describes in language both poetic and scholarly the brutal path taken through the lands of others by "civilized" forces in the name of progress.The colonizers have all been murderers. Belgian, French, English, Spanish, German, American, and more. Kurtz continues to exterminate even to this day. The connecting threads are well laid out, all the way to Nazi Germany and beyond. Highly readable.

United States on Sep 21, 2021

Poor audience member: 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...

United States on Jun 28, 2021

KimP: 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.

Canada on Jul 12, 2019

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

United Kingdom on Sep 03, 2015

Francis Glorieux: 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

Canada on Apr 13, 2015

Ilya Grigorik: Exterminate All the Brutes is brief and disturbing; Sven Lindqvist unveils the realities and moral convictions we have almost completely repressed. Just as the author suggests, the book shatters the image we have of ourselves, but even more importantly, it is distressing how relevant his ideas and Conrad's `Heart of Darkness' are in the world today - again.

The title of the book is taken from Joseph Conrad's 1902 classic novel - Heart of Darkness. In it, the main character, Kurtz, goes to Africa to bring progress and culture to the uncivilized continent. He is dispatched to Africa as an ivory procurement agent, and as the story develops the reader is confronted with the unreal brutality of the colonial rule. Conrad's work intertwines the themes of `light of civilization' and `darkness of barbarism' and makes reader realize the hollowness of these phrases as Kurtz surrounds himself with chaos and mayhem. Sven Lindqvist develops this theme as he traces the imperial history of European colonialism and condenses it to a single sentence: "Exterminate all the brutes." European world expansion, he claims, and the employed tactics of extermination are the truths we like to forget....

United States on Nov 25, 2006