Exterminate All the Brutes Summary

Lindqvist has written more than thirty books of essays, aphorisms, autobiography, documentary prose, travel and reportage..[4][3] He occasionally publishes articles in the Swedish press, writing for the cultural supplement of the largest Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter, since 1950.[5] He is the recipient of several of Sweden's most prestigious literary and journalistic awards.
His work is mostly non-fiction, including (and often transcending) several genres: essays, documentary prose, travel writing and reportages.[4] He is known for his works on developing nations in Africa and the Saharan countries, China, India, Latin America and Australia. In the 1960s, partly inspired by the works of Hermann Hesse, Linqvist spent two years in China. He became fascinated by the legend of the Tang dynasty painter, Wu Tao Tzu, who, when standing looking at a mural of a temple he had just completed, "suddenly clapped his hands and the temple gate opened. He went into his work and the gates closed behind him." [6]
His later works, from the late 1980s, tend to focus on the subjects of European imperialism, colonialism, racism, genocide and war, analysing the place of these phenomena in Western thought, social history and ideology. These topics are not uncontroversial. In 1992, Lindqvist was embroiled in heated public debate, when his book Exterminate all the Brutes was attacked for its treatment of the Second World War and the Holocaust.[4] Opponents accused Lindqvist of reducing the extermination of the Jewish people to a question of economical and social forces, thereby disregarding the impact of Nazi ideology and anti-Semitism and what they viewed as the unique historical specificity of the Holocaust.[4] Some of the harshest attacks were launched by Per Ahlmark, who declared Lindqvist to be a "Holocaust revisionist". This prompted a furious response by Lindqvist, who considered it a defamatory smear -- at no point had he ever called into question the Nazi responsibility for, or the number of dead in, the Holocaust. Regarding the original dispute, Lindqvist retorted that his main argument was correct: the Nazi quest for Lebensraum had at its core been an application of the expansionist and racist principles of imperialism and colonialism, but for the first time applied against fellow Europeans rather than against the distant and dehumanized peoples of the Third World.[4] However, he agreed that the long tradition of anti-Semitism in European and Christian thought had given the anti-Jewish campaign of the Nazis a further ideological dimension, and amended later editions of the book to better reflect this.[4]