[lbo-talk] For David Brooks

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Tue May 11 20:16:38 PDT 2004


For David Brooks and others who think Iraq was a good idea, but has some how gone wrong.

``The original Kurtz had been educated partly in England---as he was good enough to say himself---his sympathies were in the right place. His mother was half-English, his father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by and by I learned that, most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had intrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. And he had written it, too. I've seen it. I've read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found time for! But this must have been before his---let us say---nerves, went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which---as far as I reluctantly gathered from what I heard at various times---were offered up to him---do you understand?---to Mr. Kurtz himself. But it was a beautiful piece of writing. The opening paragraphs, however, in the light of later information, strikes me now as ominous. He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, `must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings---we approach them with the might as of a deity,' and so on, and so on. `By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,' etc., etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence---of words---of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lighting in a serene sky: `Exterminate all the brutes!'....''

(Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad)

CG



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