Vyhlaďte všechny ty netvory – Lindqvist Sven (2022)

We are not lacking knowledge. We lack the courage to realize what we know and draw conclusions from it. "Exterminate all the brutes!" says the mad trader Kurtz in the famous Conrad novella Heart of Darkness. It is a cynical recommendation on how to ensure comfortable business for white colonizers with African resources. Although Kurtz is a fictional character, he embodies the European mindset of his time. A mindset for which genocide was a legitimate path to wealth and power; a mindset that was to give birth to the twentieth century along with its horrors. Truth sometimes takes the form of shards scattered all around. To catch a glimpse of it, we must step back in space and time. Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist thus embarked on a pilgrimage through the Sahara to write about the dark past of European wealth and imperial expansion. This led to the now legendary book Exterminate All the Brutes, a fascinating and brutal hybrid of travelogue, essay, and history, translated into twenty languages, which sparked controversy at the time of its publication for its determination to name the truth at the cost of its own — that is, European and Western — shame. Exterminate them.