Date: Sat, 24 May 1997 19:43:24 -0500 From: Louis Proyect <leata-AT-EarthLink.NET> Subject: M-I: "Exterminate All the Brutes" While Kipling was writing "The White Man's Burden," Joseph Conrad was writing Heart of Darkness. That leading expression of imperialist ideology appeared at the same time as its opposite pole in the world of writing. Both works were created under the influence of the battle of Omdurman. Already in An Outcast of the Islands (1896), Conrad had described what it felt to be shot at by naval guns. Around Babalatchi, the ground is slippery with blood, the houses in flames, women screaming, children crying, the dying gasping for breath. They die helpless, "stricken down before they could see their enemy." Their courage is in vain against an invisible and unreachable opponent. The invisibility of the attackers is remembered far later in the novel by one of the survivors: "First they came, the invisible whites, and dealt death from afar..." Few Western writers have described with greater empathy the helpless rage when faced with superior forces killing without having to go ashore, victorious without even being present. That novel had just been published when the battle of Omdurman was taking place. In Heart of Darkness, written during the patriotic delirium after Kitchner's homecoming, Conrad opens the imperial toolbox and one after another examines what the historian Daniel R. Headrick calls "the tools of imperialism": The ship's guns that fire on a continent. The railway that is to ease the plundering of the continent. The river steamer that carries Europeans and their arms into the heart of the continent. "Thunderbolts of Jupiter" carried in procession behind Kurtz' stretcher: two shot-guns, a heavy rifle and a light revolver-carbine. Winchester and Martini-Henry rifles spurting metal at the Africans on the shore. "Say!" We must have made a glorious slaughter of them in the bush, Eh? What d'you think? Say?" Marlow hears the whites saying. "We approach them with the might of a deity," Kurtz writes in his report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. He means the weapons. They provided divine power. In Kipling's verse, the imperial task is an ethical imperative. That is also how it is depicted by Kurtz, who surrounds himself in a cloud of Kiplingesque rhetoric. Only in a footnote to his torment do we see what the task truly is, for Kurtz as well as for Kitchener, at the Innter Station as well as at Omdurman: "Exterminate all the brutes." (The passage above is from "Exterminate All the Brutes", which is now available in paperback. It was written in 1992 by the Swedish author Sven Lindquist and got high marks when an English translation in hardcover first appeared in the USA. It is a study of Europe's history in Africa written in the form of a travel diary. Lindquist seeks to show that the roots of genocide first appeared in colonized Africa in the late 19th century.) --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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