The 1492 expulsion birthed a genocidal ‘exterminate all the brutes’ impulse

Evidence

That spasm of violence was not the first time groups of humans slaughtered groups of other humans in battles over land and resources. But this is the period, argue Sven Lindqvist and Raoul Peck, that gave birth to the impulse, which would repeat again and again in the subsequent centuries, to “exterminate all the brutes” in the name of civilization, progress, and piety. And, not coincidentally perhaps, 1492 was the same year that Christopher Columbus’s ships set sail to cross the Atlantic, bringing with them a globalization of these tools of pious annihilation. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 932

Categorization

• XREF: Lindqvist’s ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’ thesis connects to the reader’s earlier work on how justificatory rhetoric enables systematic violence — parallels the sacrifice-as-stabilizer thread.