This essay was originally published on 30 July 2021 for subscribers to our newsletter.

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At the risk of revealing an obsession, I’m going to return to the question of empire. This has been triggered by my reading of John Newsinger’s The Blood Never Dried, Sven Lindqvist’s “Exterminate All the Brutes” and Paul Lay’s more mainstream Providence Lost, which examined Cromwell’s imperial hankerings. The first is an impressive and exhaustive academic study of British imperialism, and the second is a truly remarkable examination of European imperialism and of how the nineteenth century gave birth to the twentieth century. There is a moral imperative for promoting these works, and it is worth quoting Nicholas Lezard’s comment on Lindqvist’s (as it appears on the back cover to Granta’s edition, in its series of “outsider classics” which I certainly will take a look at when I have a moment): “This book is important… we, our rulers, and their stooges should read it… it contains a message for our future.”

Newsinger’s study is particularly important for those of us who are British, as it is always important for people to be fully aware of their own nation’s crimes before they cast a superior and moralistic eye towards the crimes of others. The curious thing about this history is that it demonstrates the random and relatively unplanned manner in which empires evolved (Caesar, for instance, invaded Gaul to resolve his own personal problem of indebtedness, which in ancient Rome was a crime against the state). Cromwell was a significant instigator (naming the naval campaign “the Western Design” with a peculiarly modern spin), and his fleet sailed with the intention of taking Hispaniola (with the reliable support of a protestant God), but it ended in failure or almost, as it only managed to take the lesser prize, Jamaica, which turned out in the long term to be well-suited to the cultivation of sugar (the Almighty “moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform”, but didn’t notify his servant Oliver whose self-belief was irredeemably shaken). The trajectory was set and things developed from there following a cruel logic (slavery, brutality and therefore the ability to coexist comfortably and even smugly with rank inhumanity). Amongst other things, Britain was to dominate the slave trade and that colossal genocide.

Newsinger leaps forward to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which the empire takes on unbelievable dimensions, not only in terms of its actual colonies but also its subjugation of states beyond them, such as China.

Having read this, which is a quite distressing experience, you are in the right place to confront Lindqvist’s more analytical, literary and utterly original polemic expressed with the somewhat unpolemical and measured detachment of a Swedish intellectual, which of course only increases the power of his writing. He writes this book whilst travelling in the area of some of the worst atrocities that took place in Africa. He doesn’t seem to enjoy his travelling very much, and in amongst the historical stuff, he finds room to tell the reader about his discomforts and occasionally his real suffering. He travels with a computer and disks containing all his research material, which he has gathered together with supreme organisational abilities before the start of his journey (I am both impressed and envious). I think that he is a writer who has to travel in order to write. Writing in a comfortable villa in a Stockholm suburb is not for him. He writes where he has before him the descendants of the people whom the imperialists wanted to exterminate, and their entirely normal humanity is a reminder of the enormity of that intended crime.

Newsinger had a couple of interesting quotes: the Chartist and eventual socialist Ernest Jones said in 1851, “On [Britain’s] colonies the sun never sets, but the blood never dries,” and George Orwell, who had personal experience of colonial service, wrote that imperialism consists of the policeman and soldier holding the “native” down, while the businessman goes through his pockets. But Lindqvist goes much further and starts with Joseph Conrad, as the title suggests because it is a quotation from The Heart of Darkness. Paying great attention to the dates, he shows how people were aware of these horrors at the time, and some of them justified them on the basis of a crude interpretation of Darwinism, which to some extent Darwin himself agreed with (though not without a certain uneasiness). Lindqvist’s opening lines are: “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.” And in the final lines of the book, the author renews that accusation against us all, and he does it after some powerful lines which refer to one of his primary theses: “And when what had been done in the heart of darkness was repeated in the heart of Europe, no one recognised it. No one wished to admit what everyone knew.”

He has carefully established the link between the nineteenth-century genocides and the Holocaust and the quite spectacular figures for Russian dead. First they intended to eliminate Jews, intellectuals and communists (of course many Russians were all three of those things) and then eliminate another ten million to make room for settlers – the policy of Lebensraum. The rest would be used as slave labour (he also writes, “Only 3.5 percent of English and American prisoners of war died in captivity, though 57 percent of Soviet prisoners died” and the total figure for the dead Russian POWs was a staggering 3.3 million; it seems unconscionable that the West won’t admit Russia to memorial events).

Most empires think that they were the “good empire” – that they are different because they are “tolerant and fair-minded” and that they went out into the world in order to bring civilisation with them. An act of generosity. It is also quite common to end this discourse by pointing a finger at Belgium and King Leopold II who owned the Congo as a personal fiefdom. The figure of eleven million dead under his rule is both distressing and almost impossible to understand, but Lindqvist is keen to make clear that this was not an isolated incident.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the military superiority was such that a large army equipped with muskets (not spears and arrows as is sometimes thought) could not get close enough to the European invaders to be in range, because modern rifles and machine guns could kill so quickly and at such long distances. Gun boats could destroy cities, and people wouldn’t know where the shells were coming from and certainly couldn’t know what the enemy looked like. For the cities destroyed in the Yangtze River it was like an act of God – an earthquake or a flood. This is the reality of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, in which a “superior” civilisation from another planet invades Britain and can destroy at will the cities and the armies that defend them. London in the novel was experiencing the terror inflicted week in week out in some part of the world – to this day! Sirte was completely destroyed by bombing and in another Libyan city, Benghazi, there is now a slave market. This is what happens to the beneficiaries of a “humanitarian war”, and such is the civilising process of our all-powerful military hardware. Have we forgotten how to read our own literature? Wells’s condemnation of the past was also a warning to the future, but the non-fiction victims of the twentieth century were not saved by disease. They continued to be cowed and humiliated.

Lindqvist’s book should convince those who are not already convinced that we can no longer stop those seeking asylum or simply a livelihood, possibly because of one of our wars, from coming to Europe, while we attempt to devise an economic system that restores dignity to the Third World and humanity to the First World.
 

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I hope that this newsletter comes as a welcome break from the hard sell; it certainly does for me, as I am a hapless salesman. In my twenties I was an insecticide salesman in Florence for a day. The man who showed me how to do it was a genius: the first thing he would shout was, “Signora, sto facendo degli omaggi,” meaning that he was giving away free gifts, but if very occasionally the person who answered the door refused to buy the insecticide, he would successfully retrieve the “free” bars of soap, ignoring any protestations. Every half hour you had to return to the van and collect another plastic briefcase neatly stocked with the merchandise, but the briefcase I gave them back always contained all the original insecticide and none of the soap. Towards the end of that horrendous day, I came across a university professor or perhaps a trade-union organiser (in those days in Italy they looked very similar), and he was decidedly unexcited by the idea of possessing the aerosol canister. But when he saw my tired face – probably out of breath from running up and down stairs – he relented and absent-mindedly handed over the money (almost certainly his head was still back in his study with whatever he was working on). I handed him my first sale not with pride but at least with a very meagre sense of achievement. To my horror, he admitted that he really wasn’t interested in it after all and turned to go; suddenly my achievement shrank to a humiliating act of charity. Following my pleadings, he understood my pain and affecting a degree of enthusiasm accepted it and, having politely wished me good evening, closed the door. A good soul indeed.

Don’t get me wrong, this newsletter is a pleasure and not in any way comparable to that absurd experience nearly half a century ago, and I enjoyed rereading those four novels and writing about them in the previous four newsletters. If you are reading – or indeed still reading – this newsletter, I can safely say that you are interested in literature and there is nothing wrong with offering you promotions and all those other things that make the world – as it currently is – revolve upon its axis. It is that I find making much more interesting than selling, though one has to lead to the other. The genius insecticide salesman, whom I undoubtedly despised for his blazer and carefully ironed trousers, not to mention the brusque manner in which he grabbed back the bars of soap, was probably keeping an entire factory in business with all its workforce. He was and is a necessary man. I may think that his was a wasted life, and he, now also an old man and one with a villino in Piombino or Tarquinia close to the beach, would undoubtedly think the same of me.

To speak to you of other things – of other books in which I have no personal interest or at least no financial interest – is liberating. Of course I must go back to our books on other occasions, and I do believe in them because otherwise I wouldn’t have published them. It seems to me – and forgive my long-windedness, but I am arriving at some kind of conclusion – that there is something quite profound in this question of the need to work (in the sense of making a living) and the need to do something that derives from some inner need of who we are (the need to be ourselves). The balance between these two changes greatly from one society to another. But in any society someone who is willing to make sacrifices can break free and make the latter fuse with the former. Kris Kristofferson came from a moneyed family and got a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford before following in his father’s footsteps in a highly successful military career until at the age of thirty he threw all this up along with his wife and children to go and write lyrics for country music, a genre with which he had no cultural ties and his family despised. He chose to work as a janitor, and very sensibly he worked as a janitor at a recording studio in Nashville where he bumped into people like Johnny Cash.

Such examples are of course rare and are generally mythologised, but for most of us it is a matter of finding a balance between those two poles. Follow the first one too keenly, and you suppress the essence of who you are, and follow the second too keenly and you could pay a high price financially and end up in a job even duller than your previous one. And if you work in the arts, there is a further twist: you are in the business of producing material to help others with that secondary need (not everyone’s; there are also the rock-climbers, the endless travellers, the party-goers, and so on). The chances are that those who work in the arts are working in a sector that is close to their own personal passions. Even here, however, things are not that simple. How many times have we heard of the actor who is type-cast on the basis of his or her first break? Society, which liberates us to be ourselves because we become ourselves through our relationships, particularly the one with society itself, also constrains us.

Italo Svevo demonstrated this in one of his minor novels (As a Man Grows Older, I think): the narrator and his sculptor friend go to a retrospective exhibition of a famous sculptor who has recently died. The sculptor friend is very dismissive of his famous colleague, and tut-tuts his way around the exhibition. Most of the public have gone home and they start to chat to the janitor. He wonders whether these two would like to see the unfinished works which are being kept in a backroom, and the sculptor friend agrees out of curiosity. When they enter the room, the sculptor exclaims, “The man was a genius, and always hid it from us.” The moral of this little parable is that artists and surely writers too can ruin their works by wanting to please public tastes – self-imposed constrictions. In this case, if I remember correctly, academic tastes were blamed for the sculptor unintentionally destroying his own work, but I don’t think that those are the only negative influences that bear down upon an artist. In other words, this conflict persists even in artistic lives but in a different and more personal manner.
 

Allan Cameron, Glasgow, July 2021

Header image: The fifth painting in Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire series; Desolation, oil on canvas, 1836.