Over the past year, as the mass destruction and killings in Palestine by Israel have been unrelenting, my mind has frequently been drawn to a specific excerpt from Joseph Conrad’s profound novella, Heart of Darkness. It is a narrative which delineates the brutality and insanity inherent in European colonialism. The excerpt I’m referencing relates to a report made by Kurtz, whose profession involves the trade of ivory and who operates a trading outpost in the heart of Africa. His “approach” progressively becomes more “unstable”—synonymous with homicide in this context. Despite his high level of education and his cultured background, Kurtz morphs into a cruel minor dictator when granted total authority over his African labourers.
Kurtz’s report, beautifully crafted according to Marlow, Conrad’s narrator, is filled with elevated language narrating the civilising and humane mission of Europeans in Africa. The report is not interrupted by any practical suggestions, except for a note scribbled at the bottom of the final page, presumably at a later time, in an unstable hand, which can be perceived as an explanation of a technique. The note, quite straightforward, ends the emotive plea to all altruistic emotions with a terrifying, luminous command, ‘Exterminate all the brutes’.
This well-known excerpt continues to hold its peculiar enlightening power as it shreds the liberal humanistic veneer that often conceals Europe’s colonial undertakings, exposing their primitive inhumanity tainted with blood beneath. The image of this quote, especially its chilling concluding line, has been omnipresent in my mind over the past year. Paying even the slightest attention to the ongoing slaughter of Palestine and its citizens, one cannot help but compare the horrifying words scripted more than a century ago, which continue to resound with terror and clarity to this day.
“I decline to condone the dreadful situation which has transformed into the norm”: What did political figures utter when presented with letters from youths depicting their reality?
The previous annum bore witnessed to the final disintegration of the notion, as tenacious yet fantastical as it was, that Western democracies are bound together by an unyielding dedication to human rights and the principles of law. The narrative that encapsulated this falsely held belief persists, but now its utter hollowness is strikingly visible in all dimensions. Assuming Israel is perpetrating a genocide against Palestinians, an inference that the International Court of Justice believes holds merit, Israel’s allies – especially the United States and Germany, those who fund Israel’s apparatus of destruction – are to some extent implicated in these crimes against mankind.
Earlier this year, when Benjamin Netanyahu was called upon to address the US Congress, a formal letter endorsed by both Republican and Democrat honchos, implored him to “articulate the Israeli administration’s perception on safeguarding democracy, combating terror, and instituting a fair and enduring peace in the precinct.” Last year, during his official trip to Israel as they scheduled their incursion into Gaza, Germany’s prime minister Olaf Scholz avowed that “Germany and Israel are bonded by their democratic constitutional status,” along with the assertion that “our responses are law-based, even under extreme circumstances.” Such formal proclamations emanate a Conradian resonance; they reverberate the “ablaze noble words” from Kurtz’s report.
Even though the leaders of the West may employ diplomatic and humane language in reports, the underlying message of inhumanity and obliteration that reverberates within that language is glaringly evident. Over the past year, it is almost impossible not to have encountered statements that could essentially mean “destroy all savages”. This became apparent when Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister, justified the halt of food, fuel and electricity supplies to Gaza by referring to the inhabitants as “human animals”. This could be interpreted as “destroy all savages”. Similarly, a video issued by the Israeli government on their official X channel, showed a released hostage declaring that no civilians in Gaza were innocent—an inference also made to “destroy all savages”. An act that required no translation was when Nikki Haley, a one-time Republican presidential candidate, branded the words “FINISH THEM” on an artillery shell funded by American taxpayers for the IDF.
The actual warfare, the obliteration of Palestinian society, and the incessant massacre of its young populace, aiming to eliminate its history and its future, mirror Conrad’s term – the strategy encapsulated within the language used.
In her poignant new work, Entering the Stranger’s World: A Perspective on Palestine and Narrative, Isabella Hammad, a British-Palestinian writer, hints at an impending pivotal shift in civilisation marked by the comprehensive failure of a fragile consensus concerning democratic values and global law. She raises a pertinent question – if both the UK and US vote against Palestinian self-determination, does it mean that the most influential countries in the Anglosphere, perhaps globally, believe that Palestinians must continue as a colonised and scattered population indefinitely? Should we infer that Palestinians should endure daily aggression, destitution in refugee settlements, and permanent political marginalisation? The global principles and forces, no longer concealed, now unfold in full vivid spectrum and in a three-dimensional perspective.
As the brutality relentlessly persists, the sight of mutilated young bodies from Lebanon and Gaza appear increasingly on our television screens, leading to the stark realisation that there is no going back. The pretence of ethical worth attached to discourses of democracy and human rights, voiced by those in positions of authority who had the chance to halt this barbarity but instead chose to accommodate it, has been shattered.
The novel ‘Heart of Darkness’, particularly the part emphasising Kurtz’s document and the hurriedly-finished addendum, remains significantly and chillingly pertinent. It uncovers the emptiness of the rhetoric of benevolent western control, and the ever-present rationale of racial dehumanisation rooted in European origins. The forces and standards that dictate the global scene, as Hammad articulates, were exposed back then, and are thus revealed today.
Prior to discussing the report, Marlow elucidates Kurtz’s history. The firm he works for is ultimately in the service of the Belgian monarch; Kurtz’s own heritage is ambiguous and of combined European descent. We learn of his British educational background; his mother was of English ancestry, his father was part-French. Kurtz is simultaneously a symbol of Europe, or what we presently term as the West, as well as a forceful denial of its cultivated self-image. Marlow informs us that “All Europe” had a hand in “the making of Kurtz”.