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.

XREF: Connects to colonial histories and the long arc of settler violence through subsequent centuries.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 932