---
title: '<cite class="book"><q>Exterminate All the Brutes</q></cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-07-11T11:34:24+00:00
url: /quotes/exterminate-all-the-brutes/
categories:
  - Uncategorised

---
> 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. 

> Perhaps in fear we seek an increased perception of life, a more potent form of existence? I am frightened, therefore I exist. The more frightened I am, the more I exist? 

> 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. 

> What should I do during my remaining time? Tönnesen would have answered, <q>Nothing.</q> He believed that to be born is to jump off a skyscraper. But life is not like jumping off a skyscraper. It&#8217;s not seven seconds you have, but seven decades. That is enough to experience and achieve a good deal.
> 
> The shortness of life should not paralyze us, but stop us from diluted, unconcentrated living. The task of death is to force man into essentials.
> 
> That was how I felt when I was still not yet thirty and had a long way to go down to the paving stones below. I did not even see them. Now I can see them rushing up toward me and feel myself falling headlong.

> The direct cause of death was usually disease, but the underlying cause was this: the Indians were far too numerous to be of any economic value within the framework of the conquerors&#8217; society. 

> Does not Adam Smith&#8217;s law still apply today? In the long run, will a society that is unable to maintain the right to work be able to maintain the right to live? 

> Why did the weed spread more quickly and effectively in the colonies than any other European plants? Was it really through its moral and intellectual superiority that the European rat exterminated other rats? 

> It is we who have suppressed it. We do not want to remember. We want genocide to have begun and ended with Nazism. That is what is most comforting. 

> It is like losing your foothold in a great love affair. What will happen now? I have no idea. All I know is that I have just thrown myself out into it. 

> Eventually the facts trickled out. Of course, educated Frenchmen knew roughly, or even quite precisely, by what means their colonies were captured and administrated.  
> Just as educated Frenchmen in the 1950s and 1960s knew what their troops were up to in Vietnam and Algeria.  
> Just as educated Russians in the 1980s knew what their troops did in Afghanistan, and educated South Africans and Americans during the same period knew what their <q>auxilliaries</q> were doing in Mozambique and Central America respectively.  
> Just as educated Europeans today know how children die when the whip of debt whistles over poor countries.  
> It is now knowledge that is lacking. The educated general public has always largely known what outrages have been committed and are being committed in the name of Progress, Civilization, Socialism, Democracy, and the Market.