The Cartography of Death:
Critical Essay
   
Tom Engelhardt

Courtesy: The Nation, Oct 23, 2000 v271 i12 p25

Certainly...get him hanged! Why not? Anything--anything can be done in this country.
                    --Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

So here we are, barely into the next century, and the indications couldn't be better. Peace and prosperity rule. Forget World Wars I and II, the Nazi death camps, the gulag, Hiroshima, even Vietnam. Forget that whole last benighted century of ours, that charnel house of darkness in the heart of the West, or the Free World as we called it, until, ever so recently, the whole world was freed. That's old news. It was old even before the "short Twentieth Century," which began amid nationalist cheers in August 1914, ended early as that wall in Berlin came down. It's hard to believe now that in 1945, after Europe's second Thirty Years' War, the civilization that had experienced a proud peace, while dominating two-thirds of the planet, lay in ruins; that it had become a site of genocide, its cities reduced to rubble, its fields laid waste, its lands littered with civilian dead, its streets flooded by refugees: a description that today would be recognizable only of a place like Kosovo, Chechnya or Sierra Leone.

What a relief, when you think about it; more so if you don't: Mass death, massacre (every acre of it), the cleansing of civilian populations, the whole bloody business has finally been handed back to the savages in countries nobody who counts really gives a damn about anyway. After all these years, we face a world in which genocide happens in Rwanda or East Timor, slaughter and mass rape in the cesspool of the Balkans, which hardly qualifies as Europe anyway, or in African countries like Congo--and most important of all, they're doing it to one another. Even when it comes to nuclear matters, the MAD policies of the two superpowers have been deposited in the ever-fuller dustbin of history (though most of the weapons linger by the thousands in the same hands), and the second team, the subs, have been called in. Now, Indians and Pakistanis have an equal-opportunity chance to Hiroshimate each other without (at least initially) involving us at all.

We always knew that violence was the natural state of life out there; that left to their own devices they would dismember one another without pity. We've more or less washed our hands of mass death, the only remaining question being: If they slaughter each other for too long (or too many gruesome images appear on our TVs), do we have a moral obligation to intervene for their own good?

With history largely relegated to the History Channel and hosannas to the Greatest Generation, the disconnect between the exterminatory devastation of 1945 and our postmillennial world of prosperity seems complete. So it's hard to know whether to respond with a spark of elation or with pity on discovering that a few intrepid writers--Mark Cocker, Adam Hochschild, Jonathan Schell and Sven Lindqvist--have begun an important remapping of the exterminatory landscape of the last centuries. (As an editor, I should add, I have been associated with Hochschild and Schell.) Interestingly, none of them are professional historians; and I hesitate to call them a grouping, for they seem largely ignorant of one another's work. Yet their solitary efforts have much in common.

They have taken remarkably complementary journeys into the West's now largely forgotten colonial past. Considered as a whole, their work represents a rudimentary act of reconstructive surgery on our collective near-unconscious. They are attempting to re-suture the history of the West to that of the Third World--especially to Africa, that continent where for so long whites knew that "anything" could be done with impunity, and where much of the horror later to be visited upon Europe might have been previewed.

Worried by present exterminatory possibilities, each of these writers has been driven back to stories once told but now largely ignored. Three of the four returned to a specific figure, a Polish seaman-turned-novelist who, as a steamboat pilot in the Congo, witnessed one exterminatory moment in Africa and on the eve of a new century published a short novel, Heart of Darkness, based on it. Of the four, only Hochschild has done original historical research. But that, in a way, is the point. They are not telling us new stories but reclaiming older ones that have dropped from sight, and so re-establishing a paper trail on extermination without which our modern moment conveniently makes no sense.

In Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold, Mark Cocker, a British environmentalist, tracks a well-documented history of the conquest and extermination of tribal peoples, which he presents as a single, multicentury, planetwide exterminatory pulse. His tale, filled with "an infinite elaboration of cruelties," begins with the Spanish destruction of the Aztec empire in the early sixteenth century, then explores the English extermination of the Tasmanians and the US conquest of the Apaches, before ending in the early years of the twentieth century with the German near-obliteration of the Herreros in Southwest Africa.

Historians will undoubtedly look askance at the way Cocker sweeps disparate events over so much time and space into a relatively timeless "global war" and a single "European ideology of conquest." The sophisticated, oppressive, hardly "tribal" Incan empire (brought to ruin in a matter of months by Francisco Pizarro and several hundred conquistadors) might not seem to have much in common with the scattered thousands of Apaches who fought a guerrilla war against Mexico and the United States three centuries later. Yet Rivers of Blood's chilling tales (including the struggle between London's Royal College of Surgeons and the Royal Society of Tasmania over who would possess the body of the last Tasmanian man) are not only riveting but manage to suggest a convincingly unitary way of reimagining global history. If the acted-upon were disparate, the exterminatory urge of the West over centuries had a remarkable sameness to it.

The statements of a conquistador, "I took no more notice of a hundred armed Indians than I would have of a handful of flies"; of an English bushranger who would just "as leave shoot [Tasmanians] as so many sparrows"; and of German settlers in Southwest Africa that "any white man who has lived among natives finds it impossible to regard them as human beings at all in any European sense" come to seem more than superficially related. Cocker's staggering but distinctly conservative estimate of a "casualty list" of 50 million dead from 400 years of tribal conquest coheres, historically speaking, because he makes it possible for us to imagine such aggregate figures as part of a single exterminatory quest. That, in turn, makes the following comparison illuminating: The figures "dwarf the entire sum of deaths during the First World War and were certainly greater than all European losses during the Second World War," the Holocaust included.

Cocker describes the impoverished Spanish conquistadors as, in his vivid phrase, "plundering units" in search of gold and status in a strange new world of heathens. What they "discovered," it might be said, was their own freedom from restraint in such unexpected surroundings. (This aspect of freedom--as a release into untrammeled possibilities of violence--is seldom emphasized in histories of the Americas.) Most conquering Europeans would be plundering units; some of them larger, better organized, better equipped and more centrally controlled than others but each group, after a fashion, freed from restraint and with loot, land and slaughter on the brain. In his new book The World and the West, the distinguished historian Philip Curtin chews over whether in various cases imperial conquest was driven by the desires of home governments or the impetuous acts of men-on-the-spot; for Cocker such distinctions pale to insignificance, given the relative uniformity of the history he relates.

In our own strange new world, where we also are being freed of certain constraints, we need nonhistorians like Cocker, drawn to similarities, to remind us of the unbelievable yet eerie sameness of the landscape we've crossed to get here. He traces, for instance, what Curtin calls a "weapons gap" in land warfare between the West and the rest to an earlier date than Curtin might. Cocker sees the armored Spaniard on an armored warhorse as the tank of that moment and so reminds us of how, from the first, technological superiority was mistaken for moral superiority. The ability to kill on a mass scale, whether with sword of steel or machine gun, would again and again be mistaken for a God-given--later genetic--moral imperative to do so.

The centrality of Europe and its North American settler society to the past half-millennium of history makes it hard to recall what a periphery, a barbaric outcropping, Europe had long been when, in the fifteenth century, its first warships ventured down the coast of Africa and across the Atlantic. Armed with cannon, those vessels were themselves, Curtin reminds us, not purely of European origin: "Western mariners arrived in Asia with ships whose design was borrowed partly from Asia, guided by astronomical and algebraic knowledge and magnetic compasses even more clearly Asian in origin." One has only to read of the arrival of the first crusaders in Jerusalem in Amin Maalouf's splendid The Crusades Through Arab Eyes to be reminded of how barbaric the knights of Europe of an earlier era had looked to people of a high culture. The invaders were feared--much as Europeans would later fear tribal peoples--as murderous, cannibalistic, dirty savages.

"Even before the full impact of the industrial age," writes Curtin, "non-Western societies had to take account of the Westerners as they appeared from the sea on the shores of every continent, offering trade and accompanied by missionaries offering Christianity." There are worse places than hovering off the many coasts of the globe--as each of these books does--to begin to reimagine the origins of our world. As the Swedish travel writer Sven Lindqvist puts it in one of many eloquent passages in "Exterminate All the Brutes," "Preindustrial Europe had little that was in demand in the rest of the world. Our most important export was force. All over the rest of the world, we were regarded at the time as nomadic warriors in the style of the Mongols and the Tartars. They reigned supreme from the backs of horses, we from the decks of ships." It takes some readjustment to think of Europeans as modern Mongols, rapaciously eager to slaughter and rule. Whatever our politics may be, we are the results of--and cannot help but have absorbed--a more glorious vision of the players in that imperial pulse that shook the globe.

How, Cocker asks, could Cortez's conquistadors look upon "the corpse-choked waterways and stinking ruins [of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan] and drink toasts to their achievement? What enabled them to see the ruthless dismemberment of one civilisation as somehow the fulfillment of their own?" By the time you finish his book--or Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost--you find yourself anchored off another coast entirely and so more capable of imagining an answer to those questions. Among all the rights established in Western Europe and the United States over many centuries, it was the unspoken right to exterminate "inferior" peoples--which sprang from religious fanaticism, a lust for gold and the technological imbalance mistaken for a more general kind of superiority--that may have most shaped global history.

King Leopold's Ghost (which I edited) is an account of perhaps the most staggering single case of extermination--and forgetting--on record. The Congo Free State, more like a state of absolute license, was possibly the strangest colony of the nineteenth century, possessed not by a country but by one avaricious man, Leopold II, King of the Belgians. Hochschild estimates that under his twenty-three-year "rule" and that of his successors, 10 million or more Congolese were exterminated--slaughtered, mutilated (Leopold's troops infamously took hands as evidence of deaths inflicted), starved, worked to death or worn down and left prey to disease. Leopold, who never set foot in "his" colony, was nonetheless a plundering unit of one, backed by a white-officered private army, a congeries of plundering units engaged in an implacable search for ivory and then, to sate the world's industrializing tastes, rubber.

A vast tropical gulag, "awash in corpses," the Congo became a global cause celebre, the object of the first great human rights protest of modern times. Mark Twain, Conan Doyle and Roger Casement were among the many who raised voices or pens to denounce king and colony. And yet by the time Hochschild stumbled across an obscure reference to these events, the greatest killing fields of the previous century had been forgotten by all but a few scholars. In an age when the Holocaust had become part of the school curriculum, this earlier one had nearly been eradicated from memory.

Yet there was an irony here, for it was not strictly true that the annihilating fury of those plundering units in the Congo was nowhere in sight. An account by one eyewitness--Joseph Conrad's short novel about Kurtz, Inner Station Chief and mad civilizer-turned-plunderer-and-murderer--had been read by countless students who were taught that this was great literature, not grim history; that it revealed the heart of evil, not a staggering genocidal moment. Yet Conrad's experience in Africa had given him a powerful sense of the scope of Leopold's imperial project. "All Europe," he wrote famously, "contributed to the making of Kurtz." As Hochschild shows, Conrad's most horrific fictional descriptions, including the severed heads that decorate Kurtz's house, closely paralleled things he had seen or heard about (just as, Cocker tells us, in Tasmania one settler kept a pickle tub to preserve his collection of Tasmanian ears, while an officer in the Apache wars had typically "framed a pair of Indian ears and used a scalp as a lamp mat").

In an essay in Harper's Magazine, "The Unfinished Twentieth Century" (soon to be published as a book), Jonathan Schell also turned to Conrad's novel in considering the exterminatory possibilities of our own moment. Surveying the century "of the Somme, of the Gulag, of the Holocaust" and of the atomic bomb, he wonders at a certain implicit optimism among historians ready to call it "short" and so suggest "that the tide of bloodshed has reached its high-water mark and is now receding." What if August 1945 had spawned a new exterminatory age tied to, but not faintly held within the bounds of, that foreshortened century?

Schell heads back through three crucial Augusts--August 1991, when the gulag world of Russian Communism ended; August 1945, which began the nuclear age; and finally August 1914, "the Somme," which inaugurated extermination industrial-style in the heartland. The shock of it was staggering. By November 1914, a permanent trench line already stretched from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border, and the slaughter had been prodigious. Only three months into World War I, the original British Army in France was all but wiped out. As historian Paul Fussell has written of this descent into hell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, "At the beginning of the war [in August], a volunteer had to stand five feet eight to get into the army. By October 11, the need for men was such that the standard was lowered to five feet five. And on November 5, after the thirty thousand casualties of October, one had to be only five feet three to get in."

In World War I, those ships returned to hover off the coasts of Europe; the weapons gap came home with a vengeance; the machine gun made its way back from the colonies; the first experiment in annihilation by what we would now call a weapon of mass destruction, poison gas, took place; and war itself was ceded to technology and the machine. In that modest space between opposing trench lines lay the killing fields that threatened to wipe out a generation of young men. All this, being utterly unexpected by Europeans on either side, represented the shock of the new. Yet the thousand Hehe tribesmen slaughtered in 1891 in today's Tanzania by a German military surgeon and a few African troops with two machine guns; the 11,000 Dervishes who bravely died without getting within several hundred yards of the English Maxim guns, repeating rifles and gunboats at Omdurman in 1898; and myriad Tibetans, Afghans, Congolese and others would have recognized "the Somme."

There was a simple fact of World War I. Men could no longer attack in sizable numbers successfully across open terrain. The withering fire of that American invention, the machine gun, prevented it, a fact, as John Ellis wrote in his classic monograph The Social History of the Machine Gun, quite evident to those who cared to look at events in Africa. There, small numbers of white men had used machine guns with amazing results. ("Whatever happens, we have got/the Maxim Gun, and they have not," went the apt line from a Hilaire Belloc poem.) As the Times of London editorialized of a British punitive expedition against the Asantes as early as 1873, "If by any lucky chance Sir Garnet Wolseley manages to catch a good mob of savages in the open, and at a moderate distance, he cannot do any better than treat them to a little Gatling music." Ironically, as Ellis points out, exactly because the machine gun was "associated with colonial expeditions and the slaughter of natives," it was "by definition regarded as being totally inappropriate to the conditions of regular European warfare."

The hidebound military elites of Europe never seriously considered relying on "a little Gatling music" in the strategic planning for war on their continent, where it was assumed that the brave (white) soldier, not some killing machine, would carry the day. Imagine the shock when at the Somme and elsewhere, Europeans fell in their thousands like so many Africans. A sense of racial superiority was, however, so ingrained that even when the same weapon did the same damage in both places, the link between slaughter in the colonies and annihilation at home was largely ignored. Annihilation arrived in the heart of Europe de novo, untainted to the end by the lives and deaths of savages.

In his Harper's essay, however, Schell comes to rest not at that first shocking August of slaughter but in 1899, at the moment when Conrad's Heart of Darkness appeared in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, while all Europe looked expectantly toward a century of Progress. In Conrad's vision, and so implicitly in colonial Africa, he finds both the roots, and a prefiguration, of that coming century--of the death camps that would sprout in Europe; of bureaucrats who would carry out exterminatory orders against whole peoples or classes; even, in Kurtz, of the sort of globally annihilatory thinking that would reappear in 1945 attached to weapons capable of carrying out the task and would allow strategists to plunge into planning for the obliteration of whole continents. Of the dead Kurtz, Conrad's stand-in, the narrator-seaman Marlowe, says, "I had a vision of him on the stretcher, opening his mouth voraciously, as if to devour all the earth with all its mankind." As Schell concludes, "The technical means for destroying the species lay far in the future, but the psychological and moral preparations, it appears, were well under way in 1899." Put another way, even if we refuse to map the paths of history, they may map us.

And yet, clear-minded as Conrad was on the imperial project, his charting of the world had something deeply confused at its heart. Given Europe at the time, it would have been startling had he not seen savagery and moral blankness as contagions spreading from primitive Africans to Europeans. The Africa he imagined from his brief passage through it was another country, sure to drag down the civilized (that is, white) to primordial levels of passion and violence that Europe had passed through eons earlier. Conrad could not conceive of a world in which Africans would not be relegated to the riverbanks, so many cannibals nonsensically grunting and shaking their spears. Who knows, of course, what he might have thought or written had he lived to the end of World War II, when the death camps were liberated, when his beloved Europe, along with Japan, had become pre-eminent examples of lands in which anything could be done. Before 1914, though exterminatory thought had been part of everyday European life, the obliteration of Europe itself, hence of "the human race," had generally not. It took the bomb--though used against nonwhites--to make that fully plausible.

In "Exterminate All the Brutes" Sven Lindqvist offers an initial disclaimer: His "story" is not a "contribution to historical research." This proves a less modest statement than might first appear, for he begins--and ends--the body of his text with this audacious paragraph: "You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions."

Intent though he may be on telling us what we "already know" or could find out in the local library, Lindqvist has no intention of doing so in a familiar way. As a result, the 179-page travelogue between those two mirror paragraphs is anything but easy to categorize. His is a work that should (but probably won't) enter curriculums everywhere. It is a journey into our history but also into his dreams; into Africa but deeper into Europe; into the self but also various collective selves; into the present but only through the past. He starts with "Exterminate all the brutes!" the mad notation Kurtz scrawls "in an unsteady hand" at the bottom of his eloquent report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. Like a determined preacher wresting a sermon line from the Bible, Lindqvist then runs it to earth, excavates it and in the process suggests a different way of mapping our exterminatory journey into "darkness."

Lindqvist is not a youthful traveler. Born in 1932, the year before Hitler took power in Germany, he set out a decade ago, at the end of Schell's truncated century, "to disappear into [the] desert...and not return until I have understood what I already know." It proves an eerie journey, literal and figurative at once, the two in his hands sometimes being hard to tell apart.

"The night is fantastic beneath the moon," he writes (in translator Joan Tate's elegant English) on his way by the only night bus from El Golea to In Salah. "Hour after hour, the white desert pours past: stone and sand, stone and gravel, gravel and sand--all gleaming like snow." He is jammed between Algerian conscripts. The bus has no springs. He is carrying an old computer that, he claims, contains "the core of European thought." The bus "rocks, stamps, and leaps forward, and every jolt is transmitted to the hard disk I have on my lap as well as to the stack of swaying building blocks that are my spinal disks."

Clearly, he is some kind of tourist, but to where? When I open my world atlas, I find the road to In Salah and, despite the author's near obsession with Conrad, it's far indeed from the Congo (though, as he reminds us, officers from his country once proudly staffed Leopold's colonial army and were received by their own king with honors). His route, in fact, lies through "the deadest area" of the Algerian Sahara, where life is "all but extinct." It's exactly the sort of exotic nowhere, if you don't happen to live there, toward which European explorers once headed unerringly, an extreme of exotica like Mecca or Lhasa or either pole. Someplace, once upon a time, to be "discovered" and then conquered.

As it turns out, since most of Africa was a European killing ground--this is the real zone of deadness for Lindqvist--he can't but cross the historical path of some punitive expedition; in this case, a French one, which had its own Kurtz-like character, Capt. Paul Voulet, who was to lead an absurd foray to capture and ravage an area already possessed by the French. Given to slaughters of women and children, he madly planned his own bizarre mini-empire in the heart of Africa. ("I am no longer a Frenchman. I am a black chief," he proclaimed.) Turning his guns murderously on a fellow officer sent to fetch him home, he was finally killed by his black troops. An official inquiry in Paris reached the only verdict possible: "Voulet must have gone mad in the African heat." After all, primitive Africa did that to white men.

Lindqvist portrays himself as an anti-Voulet, a kind of historical clown traveling ineffectually into the blinding light of the African desert, the heart of brightness, you might say. The very opposite of a plunderer, he lugs his computer with its precious "knowledge" (though what exactly is on that hard drive he never tells us) through a sandstorm in which he expects to die. He unveils himself in Chinese underwear experiencing life in "small, sand-ridden desert hotels" or working out in an In Salah gym, always contemplating his own fear and the visible humanity of those living in this vivid, if impoverished, nowhere. He is the most harmless of men, and that perhaps is the black joke of this book, for he bears a terrifying legacy. And where he's really traveling (in passages that alternate with his Saharan journey) is ever deeper into his own European past, into an exterminatory darkness that his ancestors projected onto other lands and their "inferior" peoples as a savagery that had to be eradicated.

Lindqvist stops briefly to describe the foggara, labyrinthine systems of shafts and tunnels where water is mined as others might mine ore; all the while he's digging into the underside of Western historical consciousness. While he writes vividly on weaponry, expeditions, battles and slaughters, what he's tunneling toward is the history of "the concept of extermination": how, in nineteenth-century Europe, Progress and Civilization became so enmeshed with the eradication of "inferior" peoples.

He traces the ways science and racism fed off each other, starting with French scientist Georges Cuvier's revelation that the earth we walk upon is also a tomb for countless species no longer present. By extension, less adaptable parts of humanity, too, could be wiped off the face of the earth. "The struggle for life," in Darwin's later phrase, came to mean that extinction would be the inevitable fate of the "weaker" parts of humanity--and it was obvious enough who they were.

In the heart of Civilization, especially in the four decades of continental peace from 1871 to World War I, science, the technology of war and racism fused into a fatal brew, while extinction and extermination were married hierarchically to Progress, so that it became ordinary to say, as Lord Salisbury did in a famous speech in 1898, "One can roughly divide the nations of the world into the living and the dying." It was not a large step from there to giving Nature a helping hand in clearing the way for Progress.

Not so long ago, extermination was spoken about as a good or at least inevitable thing, and a "racially conscious" anthropologist could publicly extol the "mercy in a massacre." This was the air that Conrad (and, later, Hitler) breathed. Even in softer language about "vanishing" peoples lay a version of extermination that became part of everyday thought and, in the colonies, an invitation to do "anything" with impunity.

"Europe's destruction of the 'inferior races' of four continents prepared the ground for Hitler's destruction of six million Jews in Europe," writes Lindqvist. Even the phrase "concentration camp," "invented in 1896 by the Spaniards in Cuba, anglicized by the Americans, and used again by the British during the Boer War," entered German during the attempted extermination of the Herreros in Southwest Africa. "Any Herrero found within the German borders with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot," proclaimed Gen. Von Trotha in 1904 in his notorious Vernichtungsbefehl, or "extermination order." After their wells had been poisoned, the Herreros and their cattle were indeed driven into the desert. There, according to a report of the General Staff, "the death rattles of the dying and their insane screams of fury...resounded in the sublime silence of infinity." The few thousand remaining tribespeople were herded into concentration camps. In all this, the Germans were only following in the footsteps of the other "master races" of the era. Among those Germans trying to bring civilization and order to Southwest Africa was Imperial Commissioner Heinrich Goring, father of the future Nazi leader.

Extermination, which departed Europe coupled with Progress, arrived home on its own in August 1914, and what followed, as Lindqvist might say, we know. From the striking vantage point he offers us, the Jews simply turned out to be the Africans of Europe. "The Jewish people as a whole were to be exterminated," he writes. "In that, the Holocaust was unique--in Europe." But globally speaking, tell it to the Herreros or to the Tasmanians, those "living fossils" hunted like kangaroos before the last of them were confined to a small island to vanish. Although the term "genocide" wasn't invented until 1944, "in practice, the whole of Europe acted according to the maxim 'Exterminate all the brutes.' Officially, it was, of course, denied. But man to man, everyone knew."

Published in Sweden in 1992, Lindqvist's book was brought out here by the New Press to modest attention four years ago (proving once again how important nonmainstream publishers are). His is a guidebook for our time, a tour of a very modern hell on earth--and since that's where we've been and continue to be, whether we know it or not, admit it or not, it should be bought and studied like any Fodor's.

If the past is to be remapped, with the prevention of yet another August in mind, the excavating can't simply be left to historians. When the disaggregation of memory has reached a certain point, an emphasis on the complexity of history can itself become part of a larger kind of denial. Adam Hochschild reminds us of what an active process forgetting can be. When King Leopold was finally forced to turn "his" colony over to his (Belgian) people, the furnaces of the Congo state office burned for eight summer days, turning the colony's archives into "ash and smoke" over Brussels. In all of the West, a subtler form of forgetting has long been in place that essentially obliterated a second time those who had already suffered extermination outside the heartland.

Philip Gourevitch's harrowing tale of the Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, reminds us, in a particularly intimate and unnerving way, of where such forgetting leads. The very modern, if unmechanized, frenzy of slaughter in tiny Rwanda was the result not of primordial tribal hatreds but of a complex history of colonialism and decolonization, of "a hundred years of insane identity politics" distinctly connected to the West. As Gourevitch, the child of parents and grandparents who fled Nazi mass murder, indicates, the burden of history, the way it connects us, is real and unending. (The French, after all, provided the Rwandan mass murderers with arms; the Americans blocked action at the United Nations.) But even Gourevitch's eloquent reportage is unlikely to overcome a familiar feeling that such a slaughter, outside our world, is more like a natural disaster; at best, proof of a barbarism we've long outgrown.

Those four centuries of plundering units now seem distinctly beside the point. After all, haven't we moved on? And yet there's Goring's father and that lamp mat made of human flesh and hair to consider. In our time, though the annihilatory policies of fascist and communist regimes have been held high for all to see, slaughter has largely been disconnected from the West. The "killing fields" of Pol Pot's Cambodia, for instance, have long been decisively severed from the French and especially American war that engendered them, and from the killing fields of Vietnam (or neighboring Laos).

It's a trope of the present to call the previous century the bloodiest in history and nonetheless think of its exterminatory moments as so many detours on the highway of progress (even if the term itself is no longer fashionable). Developments in science and technology, cleansed of the last century, stagger us; an unimaginable new world, so we are told, awaits us in the global marketplace; while extermination--in a Conradian twist--has been returned to the former colonies, for which no one holds out much hope anyway. The decoupling of the two, however, is one of the great acts of memory loss in our collective history.

We carry a lethal legacy with us, whether we care to know it or not. We are, after all, powerfully affected by what we deny or forget. We still deeply confuse technological advantage with other kinds of advantage.

There's a desperate need to look with fresh eyes, capable of seeing what we already "know," without being trapped in the historian's language of complexity and balance whose opposite isn't faintly simplicity or imbalance. As a reading of Cocker, Hochschild, Schell, Lindqvist and Gourevitch indicates, we should be suspicious of a global map in which the heartland is prosperous and peaceful while the peripheries remain unaccountably savage and separate; when even the best, not to speak of the worst, acts of intervention in the savage affairs of others--from the Gulf War to Kosovo--still have the look of annihilatory campaigns of old, with casualty lists in which the thousand Hehes are replaced by Iraqis or Serbs, and those sailing ships are traded in for airships, those machine guns for cruise missiles.

Who knows what we know but can't see? Who knows what grid of exterminatory thought encases us? But let's be selfish. Let's imagine that the ships are already off the coast, that the plundering units are readying themselves. This sort of horror came back to the industrial homeland, to a world that couldn't imagine it, once. August comes around every year. It could happen again.

Tom Engelhardt, consulting editor at Metropolitan Books, is the author of The End of Victory Culture (Massachusetts) and co-editor of History Wars: the Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (Metropolitan).

IN THIS ESSAY

RIVERS OF BLOOD, RIVERS OF GOLD: Europe's Conquest of Indigenous Peoples.
By Mark Cocker. Grove. 416 pp. $30.
 
THE WORLD AND THE WEST: The European Challenge and the Overseas Response in
the Age of Empire.
By Philip D. Curtin. Cambridge. 294 pp. $27.95.
 
"EXTERMINATE ALL THE BRUTES": One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of
European Genocide.
By Sven Lindqvist. New Press. 179 pp. Paper $12.
 
THE UNFINISHED TWENTIETH CENTURY.
By Jonathan Schell. Verso, forthcoming. 128 pp. $19.
 
KING LEOPOLD'S GHOST: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa.
By Adam Hochschild. Mariner. 366 pp. Paper $15.
 
WE WISH TO INFORM YOU THAT TOMORROW WE WILL BE KILLED WITH OUR FAMILIES: Stories from Rwanda.
By Philip Gourevitch.
Picador. 355 pp. Paper $15.

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Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation
Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation
Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation
Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation
Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation Bangladesh 1971 Genocide Liberation