Sven Lindqvist's Exterminate All The Brutes (1992) is one of those books that is hard to classify. It is a travel memoir, a history of the writing of Joseph Conrad's seminal novella The Heart of Darkness, and a sort of history about European genocide-which occurred before it the word was coined. Lindqvist is writing the book as he travels through the Sahara desert and alternates between Conrad's story and the history of European conquest and genocide in Africa. He repeatedly makes the point that there was European genocide before the holocaust and some of the worst atrocities were carried out by the Belgium in the Congo-which is the subject of Conrad's great story. Of course the Americas and Australia are not absented from the conversation. The genocide in Tasmania was one of the more effective examples as was the example set forth in Argentina. It is a short but thought-provoking little book that raises some valid points about colonialism and genocide.
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