Exterminate all the brutes!

The line appears in Joseph Conrad’s novella *Heart of Darkness* (serialized 1899; book 1902) as part of the papers of Mr. Kurtz, an ivory agent in the Congo whose idealistic “civilizing” rhetoric collapses into genocidal brutality. Marlow, the narrator, examines Kurtz’s report for the “International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs,” which is written in an elevated, humanitarian tone. At the end, however, Kurtz has scrawled a postscript—“Exterminate all the brutes!”—a shocking reversal that exposes the violent logic underlying colonial “mission” language and Kurtz’s own moral disintegration in the Congo Free State setting that echoes late-19th-century atrocities.

“Exterminate all the brutes!” crystallizes Conrad’s critique of imperialism’s capacity to turn moral grand narratives into instruments of dehumanization. The word “brutes” reduces colonized people to animals, making mass violence seem permissible, even necessary. Placed as a sudden postscript to a supposedly philanthropic report, the sentence functions as a grotesque punchline: the “civilizing mission” is revealed as a mask for domination and extraction. It also marks Kurtz’s psychological collapse—his rhetoric no longer even pretends to restraint—while implicating the broader European system that rewards such ruthlessness. The line’s bluntness is part of its force: it is the naked endpoint of an ideology that begins with euphemism.