HITLER's Holocaust has horrified three generations. "It will never happen again," they said; but it did. Fifty years later, genocide returned to Europe in the former Yugoslavia; in between, it visited south-east Asia, South America, the Middle East and parts of Africa.
It was to Africa, to the centre of the Sahara Desert, that Sven Lindqvist travelled to undertake a literary and philosophical quest for the 19th-century origins of European racism and genocide. "Europe's destruction of the `inferior races' of four continents," he says, "prepared the ground for Hitler's destruction of six million Jews in Europe."
His starting point is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written in the closing months of the 19th century, from which he plucks trader Kurtz's advice to the Society for Suppression of Savage Customs: "Exterminate all the brutes." This phrase was not just a literary creation; it, or words to that effect, Lindqvist found, were part of the philosophical ethos of the time. Through diligent detective work, he discovered them in the erudite works of such 19th-century savants as the anatomists Georges Cuvier and Robert Knox, geologist Charles Lyell and philosopher Herbert Spencer, of anthropologist J.C. Prichard evolutionist Charles Darwin, and others.
His book exposes the atrocities and murder executed by the famous explorers and expeditions of the last century as they cut bloody swathes through the peoples of Africa. But British public opinion was on the side of those who were "bringing civilisation and trade to the savages"; debates, lectures and articles supported them.
Lindqvist blames the anthropologists. In 1864, he writes, the Anthropological Society in London held a debate on the extinction of the "lower races", where it was agreed that their eradication was necessary for progress. Darwin's doctrine of natural selection, one of the most influential scientific theories of the time, justified their demise, indeed showed that it was inevitable.
Darwin himself was appalled when he witnessed the blood and guts of "extinction" in South America and Tasmania in the 1830s, but forty years later, in The Descent of Man, he saw this eradication as an unavoidable part of evolution: civilised races would eliminate the intermediate forms such as gorillas and the savage races.
But who were the "savage races", asks Lindqvist? Were they those with dark faces? Many people, he replies, believed that "every race was inferior and more depraved than the white race; and among the white `races', all were lower than the Anglo-Saxon race". Plus ca change . . . Racism, he says, was an essential part of renewed European imperialism.
The book that influenced Hitler, Politische Geographie, was written by the anthropologist Friedrich Ratzel in 1897 to endorse Germany's colonial ambitions in Africa. It was conceived in the same intellectual climate as obtained in Britain and provided the link between genocide in both centuries.
Revising the history of the African explorers or the legacy of Darwin can, even in this enlightened age, draw down opprobrium. Only five years ago, when Frank McLynn exposed Stanley et al in Hearts of Darkness, he was accused of prejudice and sanctimonious finger-wagging by a reviewer in the Independent on Sunday. As for the Darwinians, you question any aspect of the theory of evolution at your peril.
For me, a mystery surrounds Lindeyist's book. He went to the Sahara to write it, carrying a laptop computer and one hundred disks which contained "the core of, "European thought" collected through years. of study. He wanted to be completely alone until he understood what he already knew.
During this sojourn in the wilderness he suffered greatly from heat and sand and the horrors of Saharan hotels and buses. Accounts of his travels are interspersed in the book; but towards the end these intermissions became grotesque nightmares or hallucinations. Was this due to physical trauma or mental anguish? And might he not have found the same solitude in a comfortable forest hut in northern Sweden or on an island in Clew Bay?