“EXTERMINATE ALL THE BRUTES”

 

The following appeared in The New York Times Book Review

 

August 18, 1996

“EXTERMINATE ALL THE BRUTES”
By Sven Lindqvist.
Translated by Joan Tate.
Illustrated. 179 pp. New York: The New Press. $20.


By Raleigh Trevelyan



THIS short book throws out a number of provocative statements, each of which could be a theme for lengthy debate. The title comes from that chilling scrawl at the end of Kurtz’s report on the “savage” tribes of the upper Congo River in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and refers — to put it succinctly — to the author’s contention that the antecedents of the Holocaust lay in European, particularly British, imperialism: “After Darwin ... racism was accepted and became a central element in British imperial ideology. ... It became accepted to shrug your shoulders at genocide.” There are passing glances elsewhere: at the hunting down of Indians in Argentina in the 1830’s; at the total disappearance of Tasmanian aborigines; at the elimination of the natives of the Canary Islands by the Spaniards at the time of Ferdinand and Isabella; at the massacre at Wounded Knee, for which Anglo-Saxon antecedents in the United States are blamed. Some of Sven Lindqvist’s arguments are echoes from Hannah Arendt; but there are differences.

My hackles began at first to rise, since I am English, was born under the raj and am convinced that those of my family who served in India did so selflessly, with affection for its people and respect for its culture. I noted that the author is Swedish, and that the Congo was a special preserve of King Leopold of the Belgians. But hackles subsided somewhat when I discovered India is barely mentioned in the book. Mr. Lindqvist is chiefly concerned with the scramble for Africa in the 1880’s and 90’s, in relation especially to “Heart of Darkness” and the gas ovens.
In fact “Exterminate All the Brutes” is a kind of travel book, by a man widely known on the Continent for his travel writing. He is on this journey alone, crossing the Algerian Sahara, either by bus or hitchhiking. The journey does not end in what was the Congo, as one might expect, but at Zinder, some way from Lake Chad. He has a heavy suitcase and a word processor packed with gruesome data of imperialist crimes and damningly racist quotations from Victorian writers. He says he is always frightened when traveling, and brooding on atrocities gives him nightmares: “There are toads for dinner. Live toads. I wake just as I am to bite the head of a toad. It is still throbbing in my hand.” I found some of this irritating, but he describes the desert beautifully, and his account of a sudden sandstorm makes it indeed something to be frightened about.

By Jove!

“Heart of Darkness” gave me nightmarish dreams too when I first read it: the looming dread, cannibals, the inscrutable jungle, the shriveled heads around Kurtz’s hut. “The horror! The horror!” I find it odd that Mr. Lindqvist does not quote these words, which are just as famous and alarming as “Exterminate all the brutes!” — though more ambiguous. Conrad makes his narrator, Marlow, interpret them as an affirmation, a moral victory, as though Kurtz with his last gasp had realized the “colossal scale” of his vile desires. Maybe they did not quite fit Mr. Lindqvist’s thesis, which in part appears to equate individual abominations and cruelties with the policies of governments. But he is good about the effect such critics of imperialism as H. G. Wells, R. B. CunnInghame Graham and Charles Dilke had on Conrad, and on Conrad’s own experiences that developed into Marlow’s account. He virtually ignores the heroic death in 1873 of David Livingstone and his exposure of the Central African slave trade, but rightly lambastes the odious Henry Stanley, whom he sees as sharing some characteristics with Kurtz. He also points out that Kurtz was made to be half English and half French; Conrad wrote, “All Europe went to the making of Kurtz.” This I suppose deals with my objection that the Congo was Belgian. All the same, mass murder there caused an outrage in England, even if, as Mr. Lindqvist says, “Queen Victoria had other things to think about than a few baskets of amputated hands in the Congo” — one being her impending jubilee in 1897, which he regards as an episode of “unequaled arrogance.”

She also had the Sudan to think about, he says. In 1898 General Kitchener’s Maxim guns wiped out the brave Mahdists at Omdurman. Few people wondered, he continues, why 11,000 Sudanese died and only 48 British. “No one asked, why few or none survived of the 16,000 wounded Sudanese.” While it is true that the victory was ecstatically welcomed in England, this is another simplification. In his typically dismissive way he describes Winston Churchill’s brilliant account of the battle, in which he took part, and his remorse and horror as “outmoded” and “old-fashioned.” Churchill wrote: “lt seemed an unfair advantage to strike thus cruelly when they could not reply. . . Valiant men were struggling on through a hell of whistling metal, exploding shells and spurting dust — suffering, despairing, dying.”

One of the most shameful episodes in the history of the British Empire in the 19th century is included among illustrations here: the King of Ashanti being made to kiss the feet of British officers. Mr. Lindqvlst also writes of the exterminatlon of the Tasmanians, hunted by the settlers like kangaroos. It was the shock of this “train of evil” in Tasmania, as Darwin called It, that helped to start the great debates among British writers on the ethics of colonization and colonial wars. Some of these debates were connected to the new, controversial theories of evolution. Some writers cited here were crackpots, but quotations from more celebrated and humane men like Herbert Spencer, Benjamin Kldd and Darwin are decidedly selective. Thus Darwin Is paraphrased as saying that the intermediate forms between the primates and civilized man are “gorillas and savages.”

So how does this relate to the Holocaust? Mr. Lindqvlst In very few pages throws his fireworks Into the ring. The Germans had begun to envy the British and French empires. They were being left behind; they needed Lebensraum. In South-West Africa they managed to grab a section of the continent, where they ruthlessly demonstrated that they had mastered “the art of hastening the extermination of a people of ‘Inferior culture,” as exercised already by “Americans, British and other Europeans.” They next turned their attentions to the agricultural areas of eastern Europe, and the opportunity came for Hitler in World War II. But there were too many Jews In Poland and the Ukraine, In some places as many as 40 percent of the population, “superfluous eaters” to be got rid of. True, there were mass murders of Jews In past centuries, 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.” According to the Lebensraum theory, the Jews were essentially “a landless people, like the stunted hunting people of the African interior.” Auschwitz, Mr. Lindqvlst says, was “the modern Industrial application of a policy of extermination on which European world domination had long since rested.”

It Is no wonder that “Exterminate All the Brutes,” now translated Into English by Joan Tate, has caused heated controversy In Sweden. It Is also worth noting that It was written before the genocidal wars in Bosnia and Rwanda. Mr. Lindqvlst may claim his book is not a contribution to historical research. Even so, If he had expanded his Ideas on Imperialism and written just a lIttle more about his travels (leaving out the dreams), it could have been far more explosive. His story about a crazy French officer who thought he was a black chief, near Lake Chad, Is a fascinating parallel to “Heart of Darkness.” The British are quite used to being attacked for their hypocrisy and arrogance, and the debate about our empire, right or wrong, is by no means over. If there are people like me who are proud of at least some of our colonial achievements, it does not mean that we go along with Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden,” inevitably quoted here as evidence against us.

Raleigh Trevelyan is the author of “The Golden Oriole” and the forthcoming “Companion Guide to Sicily.”

Holdwater: A revealing article on further British examples of "genocidal oppression" is below

Three recent books - Britain's Gulag by Caroline Elkins, Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson, and Web of Deceit by Mark Curtis - show how white settlers and British troops suppressed the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s. Thrown off their best land and deprived of political rights, the Kikuyu started to organise — some of them violently — against colonial rule. The British responded by driving up to 320,000 of them into concentration camps. Most of the remainder — more than a million — were held in "enclosed villages". Prisoners were questioned with the help of "slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes". British soldiers used a "metal castrating instrument" to cut off testicles and fingers. "By the time I cut his balls off," one settler boasted, "he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket." The soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked "provided they were black". Elkins's evidence suggests that more than 100,000 Kikuyu were either killed or died of disease and starvation in the camps. David Anderson documents the hanging of 1,090 suspected rebels: far more than the French executed in Algeria. Thousands more were summarily executed by soldiers, who claimed they had "failed to halt" when challenged.

These are just two examples of at least 20 such atrocities overseen and organised by the British government or British colonial settlers; they include, for example, the Tasmanian genocide, the use of collective punishment in Malaya, the bombing of villages in Oman, the dirty war in North Yemen, the evacuation of Diego Garcia. Some of them might trigger a vague, brainstem memory in a few thousand readers, but most people would have no idea what I'm talking about. Max Hastings, on the opposite page, laments our "relative lack of interest" in Stalin and Mao's crimes. But at least we are aware that they happened.

In the Express we can read the historian Andrew Roberts arguing that for "the vast majority of its half-millennium-long history, the British empire was an exemplary force for good ... the British gave up their empire largely without bloodshed, after having tried to educate their successor governments in the ways of democracy and representative institutions" (presumably by locking up their future leaders). In the Sunday Telegraph, he insists that "the British empire delivered astonishing growth rates, at least in those places fortunate enough to be coloured pink on the globe". (Compare this to Mike Davis's central finding, that "there was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to 1947", or to Prasannan Parthasarathi's demonstration that "South Indian labourers had higher earnings than their British counterparts in the 18th century and lived lives of greater financial security.") In the Daily Telegraph, John Keegan asserts that "the empire became in its last years highly benevolent and moralistic". The Victorians "set out to bring civilisation and good government to their colonies and to leave when they were no longer welcome. In almost every country, once coloured red on the map, they stuck to their resolve".

There is one, rightly sacred Holocaust in European history. All the others can be denied, ignored, or belittled. As Mark Curtis points out, the dominant system of thought in Britain "promotes one key concept that underpins everything else - the idea of Britain's basic benevolence ... Criticism of foreign policies is certainly possible, and normal, but within narrow limits which show 'exceptions' to, or 'mistakes' in, promoting the rule of basic benevolence". This idea, I fear, is the true "sense of British cultural identity" whose alleged loss Max laments today. No judge or censor is required to enforce it. The men who own the papers simply commission the stories they want to read.

Turkey's accession to the European Union, now jeopardised by the trial of Orhan Pamuk, requires not that it comes to terms with its atrocities; only that it permits its writers to rage impotently against them. If the government wants the genocide of the Armenians to be forgotten, it should drop its censorship laws and let people say what they want. It needs only allow Richard Desmond and the Barclay brothers to buy up the country's newspapers, and the past will never trouble it again.

Holdwater: Motives for why Pamuk was picked on is examined here; note how the above author labels this trial as "anachronistic brutality," but says nothing about similar freedom of speech curtailing laws in France, Switzerland, Belgium and Austria, when they pertain to "genocide deniers."

 

"Nick" Elaborates on the Turks' Suffering

 

...While you all witter on about the Armenian genocide it is conveniently put aside that Muslims were also suffering; since the early 1800 as the Ottoman empire contracted, millions were evicted from the Crimea, Balkans and Caucusus with great suffering and pain. For example — in the mid 1800s about 1.2 million Abkhaz and Circassians were "cleared"- to use the phrase of an American missionary to describe the actions of Russo-Armenian troops in 1915 — from their homelands. They were put on boats and sent to Turkey. In the process one third died of murder or disease. In this one event you have a catastrophe of similar proportions to the one suffered by Armenians. During and immediately after the Bulgarian wars in 1876 about 200,000 Bulgarian Muslims died. In the 1820s Erivan province had a Muslim majority, by the turn of the century Muslims were a small minority. From 1912-1915 alone there were 500,000 Turkish refugees from the Balkans entering Turkey. After the Turks lost Eastern Anatolia to Russia in 1915 the Ottoman government enumerated about 850,000 Muslim refugees but in reality it was probably over a million. It is a meaningless exercise to talk of Armenian genocide and not to discuss these other factors. If we are in the business of apologising then others should be expressing regret also; Russians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Greeks and, yes, even Armenians.

Excerpted from a guestbook

From: NICK
Date: 11/23/1999

 

 

 In the process of clamping down on all these revolts, Russia has even managed to attempt genocide at least twice.

For example, in the 1940s 14,000 Chechens and Ingush — 3 per cent of their entire populations — were shot and killed by Stalin’s secret police, their bodies then dumped into a pit. The act is comparable to the mass murder of Jews in the pit at Babi Yar, committed four years before by Hitler’s forces. Stalin later proceeded to ‘cleanse’ almost all 1.5 million Chechens, forcibly deporting them to concentration camps in Siberia. About 25 per cent of them died in these camps. Another 2 million Muslims in the former Soviet Union, including Dagestanis, were similarly evicted to join their dying brothers and sisters in Stalin’s death camps.[3] Eric Margolis thus notes that the Chechens are “the children of a nation that has three times nearly been exterminated by Russian genocide: in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, the last when Stalin had tens of thousands of Chechens shot and the remainder of the Chechen people deported to Siberian concentration camps.”[4]

David Damren, an Associate Faculty Member in the Department of Religious Studies at Arizona State University, provides an overview of Russia’s attempts to wipe out both the Chechen people and their Islamic faith: “During WWII, when disturbances occurred in Chechnya in 1940 and again in 1943, Stalin responded with astonishing brutality that bordered on genocide. Accusing them of still unproven collaboration with Nazi Germany, in 1944 he forcibly relocated six entire Caucasian nationalities, including the whole Chechen and Ingush populations, to special camps in Central Asia. All told, more than a million Muslims from the Caucasus were deported, with tremendous loss of life. By some estimates one third to one-half of the population of Chechen-Ingushetia alone - well over 250,000 people - disappeared after the republic was liquidated in February 1944.

(Armenians like to claim they, too, were sent to concentration camps, the kind that people get imprisoned in... but like much of the rest of what the Armenians say, it's bunk.) The rest of this fine article can be found on the Chechnya page.

 

GENOCIDES BY TURKEY'S ARMENIAN GENOCIDE CRITICS

By Bruce Fein

The Government of Turkey has been assailed by several members of the European Union, the European Parliament, and various arms of government in the United states for failing to concede that the 1915-23 treatment of Armenian subjects by the Ottoman Empire constituted genocide under terms of the Genocide Convention. One strategy for discouraging such gratuitous insults to history and justice is to demonstrate that Turkey's accusers have been guilty of the same misconduct but have staunchly resisted self-condemnations as perpetrators of genocide, in other words, they are applying a double and hypocritical legal standard for the crime of genocide.

This essay elaborates on that strategy, and demonstrates the moral selectivity of the EU and the United States in political and moral posturing over the claimed Armenian genocide.

The Genocide Convention of 1948 defines the crime as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing group members; 2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to group members; 3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; 4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and, 5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The Convention also extends the crime of genocide to reach conspiracy, direct and public incitement, and attempt to commit genocide, or complicity in the same.

With regard to the claimed Armenian genocide, strong disproving evidence can be summoned. The relocations and killings of Armenians were not based on ethnicity, but on reasonable suspicions that they were aiding and aborting the war enemies of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Indeed, at the Versailles Peace Conference, Armenians boasted of their treason to the Ottoman government and military heroics for the World War I victors, especially Russia and France. Moreover, tens of thousands of Armenians were left undisturbed during the war in Istanbul, Izmir and elsewhere in non-military sensitive zones, which shows that the Armenian relocation orders pivoted on reasonable war necessities, not ethnicity, a fundamental element of genocide. Additionally, Ottoman officials prosecuted and
punished more than 1,000 wayward soldiers for killings or abuses of Armenians.

Furthermore, a substantial number of Armenian massacres during the war were retaliation for their massacres of Ottoman Muslims, not because of ethnicity or religion. Moreover, there was no historical animosity of the Ottoman's toward Armenians, who had climbed to peaks of official power and economic prosperity within the Empire before the World War I. More could be said against the claimed Armenian genocide, but the above sketch of contrary evidence enables a comparison with the proof of genocide charges that could be asserted against EU members and the United States. The following summarizes some of the genocide indictments that might reasonably be brought against Turkey's detractors:

1. Germany
Germany committed genocide against the Herero tribe in then Southwest Africa during its colonial occupation in the 1890s. The best evidence shows the Germans slaughtered members of the tribe because they believed they were genetically and mentally inferior. The tribe was not guilty of treason and not provoked the German savagery by its own massacres of Germans. The butchery of the Hereros was not during wartime when excesses are inevitable. Those who survived the initial German genocide revolted against their brutal treatment with the Hoitentots in 1904, but were viciously destroyed with vastly superior arms or otherwise.

2. France
Substantial evidence implicates France in Algerian genocide during 1954-62 war of independence in which more than 200,000 Muslims were slaughtered. Senior French officers who fought in Algeria have recently confessed that torture and summary executions were routine grisly instruments of French warfare. President Chirac and Prime Minister Jospin, however, have fiercely opposed a parliamentary inquiry into the genocide as exploring a subject best left to historians.

3. Belgium
Belgium is seemingly guilty of genocide during its gruesome colonization of Belgian Congo under King Leopold II. The genocide spurred the legendary book by Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. The King deliberately inflicted on numerous Congolese tribes conditions of calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part. Belgium's ugly Congo genocide has been recently chronicled in the book, King Leopold's Ghost.

4. Portugal
Portugal's apparent genocides uncurtained in Angola, Portuguese Guinea, and Mozambique during colonial years. The Portuguese sold back tribal members as slaves, and inflicted brutal conditions of slave and caused death to Angolan, Guinean, and Mozambican tribes.

5. Spain
Spain seems implicated in the genocides of hundreds of Caribbean and Central and South American peoples, like the Mexican Aztecs, and the genocide of Basques in mainland Spain. Spanish killings and enslavements of indigenous tribes and peoples are notorious, and stretched over centuries. Ditto for Spanish Basques living on the border with France. Slavery was not ended in Cuba until Spain's defeat in 1898 Spanish-American war. Spain may also have been guilty of genocide in Spanish Morocco during its colonization.

6. Great Britain
The British apparently committed genocide of the Irish during the Great Potato Famine, 1845-48. the Irish lost ½ their population from emigration provoked by starvation conditions, and the British aggravated the starvation by callous policies permitting the exports of foodstuffs from Ireland during the famine calamity. The state of New York in the United States teaches the Potato Famine as an example of genocide.

7. Austria
Austria is guilty of the Jewish Holocaust. The sole reason it escaped that hideous stigma is because of Cold War politics after World War II when it was occupied by the West and the Soviet Union until 1955.

8. Greece
Greece is guilty of genocide of Ottoman Muslims in Crete and of Turkish Cypriots in Cyprus twice, 1963-64 and 1974. The evidence of genocide is voluminous, including testimony from former U.S. Undersecretary of State George Ball and foreign reporters on the scene.

9. Italy
Italy is guilty of genocide in Ethiopia and Somalia during its colonization and war aggressions, and a co-inspirator in the Jewish Holocaust as an ally of Hitler's Third Reich.

10. Netherlands
The Dutch seem indictable for genocide of Indonesian tribes during its long colonial rule that ended only after World War II. The Dutch slaughtered and subjugated indigenous populations for economic gain and a belief in their racial and religious superiority.

11. United States
The United states is seemingly guilty of genocides of several Native American Indian tribes and blacks during slavery. The Sand Creek massacre of helpless Indian woman and children and General Phil Sheridan's fighting fighting creed that only good Indian is a dead Indian exemplifies the former genocides. The lethal conditions of black slavery captured in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin illustrates the latter genocide.

12. Australia and New Zealand
Neither country is a EU member, but both associated with its lofty ideology of moral superiority, and were former colonies of Great Britain. Both under the colonialism of the latter and during their early years of independence, these twin nations committed genocides against Australian aboriginals and New Zealand Maoris, respectively.

 

Bruce Fein is an attorney and Adjunct Scholar of ATAA

Thanks to turkisharmenians.faithweb.com