Mr. Kurtz Comes to America

Mr. Kurtz Comes to America

by Ron Jacobs / September 5th, 2014

Joseph Conrad is responsible for some of the best writing on imperialism’s darker side in the English language. The jungles of Marlowe and Kurtz in his classic novel Heart of Darkness remain some of literature’s ugliest manifestations of European hubris and white racism ever written. Conrad’s characters are so well contrived they have become metaphors for the imperial economic and cultural system of domination that is championed by its kings and rulers as much as it is maligned by its victims and those opposed to its machinations. The sheer brutality of the rational yet insane Kurtz represents the reality of colonialism at its most murderous. Kurtz’s statement at the end of the novel, “Exterminate all the brutes!” is the most succinct take on colonialism and imperialism’s final solution to challenges from their subjects that exists.

Furthermore, that statement represents not only a solution for Kurtz and his real life inspirations and imitators; it also represents the history of European subjugation of the planet. This is why essayist Sven Lindquist used it for the title of his classic on the history of imperialist racism, Exterminate All the Brutes! Likewise, a new history of the United States from Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, titled An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, discusses and illuminates what may be the most obvious and complete expression of Kurtz’s sentiment—the genocidal destruction of the indigenous peoples of North America. This genocide was close to total. Entire nations of people were killed off, their cultures denied, and their lands stolen. The physical methods undertaken in the course of this destruction gave new definition to the term brutality. The philosophical underpinnings of the centuries’ long endeavor provided a spiritual and epistemological rationale for the brutality.

Virtually all history has elements that are never pretty, never uplifting, and rarely mentioned by most historians. This book is one such history.

The saga Dunbar Ortiz chronicles is one born in resistance to European and American colonialism and imperialism. From the struggles against the early British settlers in New England and Virginia to the final catastrophes at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, Dunbar Ortiz never flinches from the truth. Because it is a history of the United States, and given the fact that the United States was created on land absconded from the people living on and cultivating the land when the settlers arrived, it is also a history whose primary definition is that resistance. Early on, the comparison to the more modern settler states of South Africa and Israel is made. However, it remains clear that the land called the United States is the template for settler colonialism. This history makes it clear that this process is not only about land, it is also about the total erasure of those being replaced from human memory. Undertaking such a project involved a combination of murderous militarism, psychological manipulation and the creation of a myth that told the settlers any killing they undertook against the natives was blessed by God, no matter how cruel a form such killing took.

More:
http://dissidentvoice.org/2014/09/mr-kurtz-comes-to-america/#more-55588