Lindqvist mixes autobiography with public events. He recalls how, when as a student in England he mentioned the attacks on Hamburg and Dresden to the family he was staying with, his outraged hosts refused to believe him. But he also records telling his Chinese friends, when he was studying Chinese in Beijing in 1961, that the US would never repeat their experience in Korea, and fight a similar war in, say, Vietnam.
Nevertheless, it is the racial element in murder from the skies that preoccupies Lindqvist. In his view, the WWII allies considered the Japanese guilty as a race, but saw the Germans as victims of their Nazi overlords. Why, he asks, were Americans of Japanese ethnicity interned but not those of German origin? And why was napalm used on Japan but not on Germany? The official US government texts of the period that he cites, and that quickly answer these questions, nowadays appear too blatantly racist to be quotable. At least there has been progress in some areas.
Lindqvist also makes extensive use of apocalyptic novels from the 1890s to the 1930s that predict pointless mass destruction and the militarization of space, both of which have already come to pass.
The book is unconventionally arranged. There are no page numbers, and instead each of 399 sections, typically a few paragraphs long, is numbered. Arrows refer you to other sections, so that you can in theory follow various threads diagonally through the book. Lindqvist calls this his "labyrinth" method. Unfortunately it proves very unsatisfactory, and is no doubt more attractive to a writer than a reader. The actual organization of the book is chronological, and that is still the best way to read it. But this doesn't detract from the important and terrible material presented.
Sven Lindqvist is the author of 29 previous books. He's known to oral historians as the man who, in Dig Where You Stand, urged people to investigate the history of their own workplace. He's also written on the residue of colonialism in the African landscape and, in Exterminate All the Brutes, on the use of air power against colonized peoples.
The final impression you gain from reading this nauseating account is that the real horror is human nature itself, especially male human nature, which technological advances continue to arm with ever more destructive power.
Lindqvist believes that, in the last analysis, the present world economic order is unjust in a way that is impossible to sustain. "The injustice we [the developed countries] defend forces us to hold on to genocidal weapons" is his intransigent and provocative conclusion.
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