Because man cannot live by hoops alone, we periodically swerve off the road
and talk about other things. Relax, it's not the election. Rather, we'd
like to recommend a remarkable book we've just finished reading called Exterminate
All The Brutes, by Sven Lindqvist.
A deceptively small book, it packs a wallop. The book deals with two major
themes: 1) understanding what influenced Joseph Conrad to write Heart Of
Darkness and why he employed the line which Lindqvist took for his
title, and 2) the idea that 20th century genocide in Europe was an inevitable
outgrowth of 19th century genocides in European colonies. He makes a
fairly persuasive case.
And in case you think this is just some dumb PC argument, you should consider
closely how Darwinism comes off in this book. It's as useful an
argument as the Creationists could find, assuming they overlook the role of the
missionaries.
Most disturbingly is his expectation that it will happen again, and since he
wrote it in 1992, and we see what happened in the Balkans and Rwanda, obviously
he was right.
Anyway, it puts a lot of things in a very interesting light, and along with The
Rape of Nanking and Songlines is, in some ways, among the
most important books written in the last 25 years.