Sweden - Exterminate All the Brutes et al.

Country: Sweden
Book: "Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (Utrota varenda jävel)
Author: Sven Lindqvist, Joan Tate (Translation)
Publication Year: 1992 (1997)
Genre: History/Travelogue

Country: Sweden
Book: Five Major Plays/The Red Room (Röda rummet)
Author: August Strindberg, Carl R. Mueller/ Peter Graves (Translators)
Publication Year: 2000/2010 (1879)
Genre: Drama/Fiction

Country: Sweden
Book: Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in)
Author: John Ajvide Lindqvist, Ebba Segerberg (translator)
Publication Year: 2007 (2004)
Genre: Horror

Strap in. The first half of this one is going to be a trip. Not a scenic one either.

I first heard of Sven Lindqvist when Raoul Peck adapted his book, "Exterminate All the Brutes", into a four part documentary series, broadcast on HBO in 2021. Both book and TV series chart the route from Western European colonialism in the golden age of exploration all the way to the horrors of the Holocaust.

Lindqvist’s book is framed partly as a travelogue with heavy asides into the colonialism of the 19^th and early 20^th century. As Lindqvist expounds upon his thesis, he treks through countries that skirt the Sahara desert, travelling from Algeria in the north to Niger in sub-Saharan Africa. His digressions take us from the hot house of the Congolese rain forest to the furnaces of Auschwitz.

The book takes its name from a quote in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It is the conclusion drawn by Kurtz in his report to the company on how to deal with Africa. It is, Lindqvist argues, a recommendation Kurtz did not need to make because extermination was the standard policy of European colonialism in Afirca as elsewhere. Both Lindqvist and Peck note that much is left unsaid by Conrad, because most of his contemporary audience would have been well aware of European colonial atrocities.

Sven Lindqvist

An estimated 10 million people were murdered in the Belgian Congo in the early part of the 20^th century. Many were decapitated. Some had their heads mounted on wall displays for Europeans to pose in front of for photos. Even those who weren’t killed were often mutilated, their hands being cut off and collected in baskets if they didn’t gather rubber quickly enough for the colonialists’ liking.

Atrocities committed elsewhere were perhaps less voluminous, but no less brutal. The Germans held what was almost a dress rehearsal for the Holocaust in Namibia, building concentration camps and herding thousands into the Namib desert. None returned and little more than  bones were ever found.

The British and the French committed their own atrocities in their expansive empires. As we saw when we looked at Kenya (see: Kenya), after the war, after the Holocaust, Britain went right back to its old tricks, killing an estimated 50,000 Kenyans during the Mau-Mau Uprising and burning records and denying it for decades, until the surviving records were found in a warehouse and reality couldn’t be denied any longer.

Sven Lindqvist thesis is that Hitler and the Nazis were not some aberration of history. Their actions were the culmination of everything Hitler saw and admired about the British Empire. He couldn’t go west due to the Royal Navy’s domination of the seas and so he expanded east. The idea of Lebensraum, or living space, was fully inspired by what Britain and others had done in South Africa, Kenya and Zimbabwe. Not to mention the colonisation of the Americas, which killed tens of millions of people from slaughter and disease. Although Lindqvist constrains himself largely to Africa, Raoul Peck expands his thesis to include the Americas, and the United States in particular, with his small screen adaptation.

This is not to downplay or delegitimise what took place in Germany and Eastern Europe in the 30s and 40s. These are obviously unique events in history. The problem comes when we try to ring fence the events of the Second World War and attempt to see them as isolated incidents. Yet they are not isolated. They are the natural consequence of colonialism, as well as the apotheosis of two and half thousand years of Eurasian anti-Semitism. The Holocaust did not happen in a vacuum. It is the sharp end of myriad expulsions and pogroms committed against the Jewish people since the time of the Babylonian exile.

The mantra of the post-Holocaust world is 'Never again' and yet we have allowed it to happen time and again in Cambodia (see: Cambodia) and Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. The United States killed millions in each of Korea (see: South Korea), Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos (see: Vietnam) and Iraq, as well as facilitating genocides in other countries, most notably East Timor, where Indonesia killed a third of the population (200,000 people), all funded and armed by the US.

We see the same death and wanton destruction in Gaza and Lebanon, seemingly without anybody being about to stop it, despite being the ones supplying the bombs and the bullets. We say never again because it seems so much more civilised than admitting the reality that our post-war economies are largely built on and underpinned by the arms industry. Yes. “Never again” sounds less psychotic than, “Please sir, can I have some more?”

Colonialism never really ended, it was just placed under new ownership. The European colonial empires faded after the Second World War, largely thanks to bankrupting themselves fighting the Nazis. The USA enriched itself by converting much of its defunct industry into weapons manufacture and saw no reason to stop just because there was no longer a war. Hence the Cold War. Hence the War on Terror. These are not nothing, of course, but they are vastly overstated to justify spending more than half of the federal budget subsidising the US arms industry.

There is a growing trend in right wing western politics of crying ‘they’re erasing our history’ while simultaneously denying the facts of colonial history. Or skipping over many of the salient facts of the Nazi rise to power, inspired by European colonialism and American eugencism against its black population. There are many excellent corollaries against this historic myopia.  Sven Lindqvist and Roland Peck are just two voices amongst the cacophony of writers and film makers seeking to correct the mainstream narrative. They are also an excellent point of entry into these issues. We have already met others in this project. We will meet many more.

By comparison, the work of August Strindberg is somewhat sedate. Indeed, having read one of his novels, The Red Room, as well as several of his plays, I am struggling to find much to say about him. It is the downfall of attempting to write about an author several months after reading them. Yet there is truthfully little to tell.

Compared to his Nordic counterpart, Nowegian, Henrik Ibsen, there is no comparison. Ibsen’s plays are trailblazing and full of controversy (by the standards of their day). They inspired the likes of James Joyce and George Bernard Shaw. Strindberg did inspire Tennessee Williams, John Osborne and Ingmar Bergman amongst others, but whatever impact he may once have had seems to have been diluted by the passage of time and the more liberal sensibilities of the modern day. I don’t think the same will ever be said about Ibsen, any more than they are said about Shakespeare.

Which isn’t to start some kind of international incident between Sweden and Norway (I should have that power). There is plenty that Sweden does better than pretty much anyone else (all its heavy metal for instance). Ibsen is simply a better playwright than Strindberg. That is objectively true.

The Red Room is an interesting novel and the one for which Strindberg made his name. In many ways, it is in the same vein as many of the novels we have encountered in this project: The cavalcade of characters and incidents that coalesce into the novel’s climactic scenes. It’s a satire on Stockholm society at the end of the nineteenth century that bears comparison to any number of European satirists from Swift to Graham Greene. It is often referred to as Sweden’s first modern novel.

This is where you can see the influence of Strindberg on the likes of Ingmar Bergman. Although they are in very different genres, The Seventh Seal (and, by extension, films like Wings of Desire) surely contains DNA from The Red Room. As do many of Berman’s films, of which I have seen maybe half a dozen.

You don’t have to be head over heels in love with an artist to appreciate their place in the pantheon of art. Elvis and Jane Austin, for instance, have always left me somewhat cold. And yet I can appreciate them as links in a chain to music and literature that I do like.

The same is true of Strindberg. He is not quite Dickens, but then Stockholm is not quite London. Which is no sleight. The quality of life in Sweden and its Nordic neighbours is better than Great Britain or much of the Western world.

The Red Room is based on Strindberg’s impoverished years as he tried to become a writer. Yet you feel that his avatar, Arvid Falk, is never so destitute as Oliver Twist or Little Nell or any number of Dickens’s characters. Which, again, is no sleight.

Maybe you just have to be Swedish to truly appreciate his work. And maybe it’s the Joycean in me that gravitates towards Ibsen and his pronounced influence on all of Joyce’s work. We like what we like and no one should have to make excuses for that (almost no one). So let’s leave Strindberg undisturbed where he is and move on to another Swedish author called Lindqvist.

August Strindberg

John Ajvide Lindqvist’s 2004 novel, Let the Right One In, is our first foray into horror. Ostensibly a vampire novel, it traces a series of murders in Strindberg’s Stockholm a century after The Red Room in the grime of the 1980s. Yet Let the Right One In is also about school bullying, social ostracism and the loss of the nuclear family. Indeed, the elements of vampirism are relegated to the background for much of the novel. I have yet to watch the film adaptation, but one would imagine the horror is brought more to the fore when trying to distillate a five hundred page novel into a two hour film (cf. any adaptation of Dracula).

I don’t know how much influence the book had on the Duffer Brothers, but you can certainly find the same elements in Stranger Things as Let the Right One In. The 1980s setting. The young female outcast with supernatural powers (compare Stranger Things’ El with Let the Right One In’s Eli). Despite taking place in Stockholm, Lindqvist’s novel has the same small town ambience as the fictional Hawkins, Indiana. The same is true of Dark, which is essentially Germany’s answer to Stanger Things and, by extension, Germany’s answer to Let the Right One In.

Having read (and watched) a lot of vampire fiction lately for a different project. I always enjoy how new writers add to the lore. Octavia Butler’s vampire alien species that came to Earth millennia ago in Fledgling. Vampires as feral creatures in the Mexican borderlands of the 1840s in Isabel Cañas’s Vampires of El Norte. The revenants of Neil Jordan’s 2012 film Byzantium with their long thumbnails instead of fanged teeth. Each mix and match bits of vampire myth: leaning into some; discarding others.

Let the Right One In has its own take on these tropes. Are vampires made or are they born? Is Eli even really a vampire? The elements of trans identity that one doesn’t often find in vampire literature (though I am sure that has changed in the 20 years since Let the Right One In was published).

Though to circle back to Sven Lindqvist and Exterminate All the Brutes, we should never forget the origins of vampire literature are based on anti-Semitic propaganda around the blood libel and other hideous conspiracies. When we think of the trope of the vampire repelled by the crucifix, it is a barely concealed commentary on Judaism’s perceived rejection of Jesus Christ as the one true Messiah. It is possible to reclaim these cultural items from their racist origins. However, like our colonial past, we must never lose sight of their dark origins, especially when bad faith actors seek to cloak them in long shadows.

Sweden sits up there in the near Arctic doing its thing. Like Finland (see: Finland), it doesn’t need to proclaim itself a great global power to regard itself a successful nation. Like all of Scandinavia, it has a much higher quality of life than anywhere else on Earth. People pay a much higher rate of taxation of course, but that’s what it takes to build a society built on something other than platitudes and demonstrably false soundbites. Other countries should take note, but of course they never will. Which is why we find ourselves where we currently find ourselves.

It seems like half the bands I listen to, like Opeth, Ghost, Goat and The Hives (amongst others), hail from Sweden. I have a tongue in cheek theory that like Douglas Adams’s Shoe Event Horizon, there will come a Swedish Rock Horizon, when it will become physically impossible for any rock band to come from anywhere other than Sweden. It has some great authors too of national and international importance. We are not done with Sweden. Not by a long shot. But as always, there are other places to visit. 

John Ajvide Lindqvist