Exterminate All the Brutes (2021) s01e03 Episode Script

Since its first appearance
in East Africa,
the human species has been
on a long migration first to Asia
and then to central Europe.
This process, lasting for multiple
thousands of years,
can be considered as the premise
of globalization.
On these roads,
the circulation of the most vital
and decisive commodities would permit
the survival of the human race
and its adaptation on the planet.
And along these roads,
for better or worse,
silk of course would circulate,
but also religion, language, refugees,
artists, technology and pandemics.
People create families, tribes,
nations.
Sometimes, they need
to protect the family,
defend the tribe,
increase the nation's resources.
Sometimes it's just about surviving.
Other times,
it's for the wrong reasons.
But, whether for protection
or conquest,
for preservation or profit,
these acts might require being armed.
And over the centuries,
we lost our purpose,
and then our bearings.
EXTERMINATE ALL THE BRUTES
Part III
KILLING AT A DISTANCE
OR
HOW I THOROUGHLY ENJOYED
THE OUTING
At the beginning,
the very powerful Moguls,
whose empire was founded
in 1526, in India,
were more developed
than any European state.
But they had no ships able
to withstand artillery fire
or carry heavy guns.
Instead of building up their own fleet,
the Moguls chose to purchase defense
services from these European states.
This extremely lucrative commerce
would lead to the creation
of the first multinational
corporations ever.
The British East India Company
and The Dutch East India Company.
Meanwhile the Chinese
had already discovered gunpowder
and had already cast the first cannon
in the mid thirteenth century.
But they felt so safe in their part
of the world
that they refrained from participating
in the naval arms race.
So, the backward and poorly resourced
Europe of the sixteenth century
would acquire a monopoly
on ocean-traveling ships
with guns capable of spreading
death and destruction
across huge distances.
Europeans became the masters
of cannons that killed
long before the weapons of their
opponents could reach them.
The art of killing at a distance
became a European specialty.
Meanwhile,
in the so-called Third World,
small arms were still able
to measure up to those in Europe.
The standard weapon
was a muzzle-loaded,
smooth-bored flintlock musket,
which was also manufactured
by village blacksmiths in Africa.
But these weapons were slow
and difficult to handle.
They emitted puffs of smoke, that
revealed where the marksman was.
To say nothing of the fact that he also
had to stand up while reloading.
The musket was
a frightening weapon
for those who heard it
for the first time.
But its range was only a hundred yards.
So the colonial wars of the first half
of the nineteenth century
were lengthy and expensive.
Prussia replaced its muzzle loaders
with the breech-loaded Dreyse rifle.
This was tested for the first time
in 1866
in the Austro-Prussian war
over hegemony in Germany.
In 1884,
Hiram Stevens Maxim,
who also invented the mouse trap,
manufactured an automatic weapon
that was light to carry and fired
nine rounds per second.
It was used by the Germans
in East Africa in 1888
and by the British in 1893
during the first Matabele War.
At the same time,
steel had become so cheap,
it could be used for the manufacture
of arms on a large scale.
In Africa and Asia local smiths
could no longer make copies
of the new weapons as they did
not have access
to industrially-manufactured steel.
At the end of the 1890s, the revolution
of the rifle was complete.
All European infantrymen could now
fire lying down without being spotted,
in all weathers, fifteen shots
in as many seconds,
at targets up to a distance
of a thousand yards,
confirming the myth
of the white man's invincibility.
Unfortunately, their bullets
were not always efficient
against "the savages
and fanatical tribesmen",
as they called them, for they
often continued their charges
even after being hit four
or five times.
The answer was the dumdum bullet,
or expanding bullet,
named after the factory
in Dum Dum outside Calcutta.
The lead core of the dumdum bullet
explodes the casing,
causing large painful wounds
that do not heal well.
The use of dumdum bullets
between "civilized states"
would soon be prohibited.
They were to be reserved
for big-game hunting
and non-white unarmed populations
in colonial wars.
At Omdurman, in 1898,
the whole new European arsenal
was tested
against a numerically superior
and very determined enemy.
One of the most cheerful
depicters of war,
Winston Churchill, later winner
of the Nobel Prize for Literature,
was the war correspondent
of The Morning Post.
"Nothing like the battle of Omdurman
will ever be seen again,"
wrote Churchill in a book published
after the experience.
"It was the last link in the long chain
of those spectacular conflicts"
"whose vivid and majestic splendor
has done so much to invest war"
"with glamour."
"This kind of war was full
of fascinating thrills", he wrote.
"The morning of September 2, 1898,
the following occurred."
"The white flags were nearly
over the crest."
"In another minute, they would
become visible to the batteries."
"Did they realize
what would come to meet them?"
"They were in a dense mass,"
"2800 yards from the 32nd Field
Battery and the gunboats."
"The ranges were known.
It was a matter of machinery"
"The mind was fascinated
by the impending horror."
"I could see it coming.
In a few seconds,"
"swift destruction would rush
on these brave men."
"They topped the crest and drew out
into full view of the whole army."
"Their white banners made them
conspicuous above all."
"As they saw the camp
of their enemies,"
"they discharged their rifles
with a great roar of musketry"
"and quickened their pace."
"It was a terrible sight"
"for as yet
they had not hurt us at all,"
"and it seemed an unfair advantage
to strike thus cruelly"
"when they could not reply."
Churchill found the enemy's plan
of attack wise and well thought-out,
except for one vital point.
It was based on a fatal underestimation
of the effectiveness
of modern weapons.
Within the space of five hours,
the strongest and best-armed savage
army yet arrayed
against a modern European power
had been destroyed and dispersed,
with hardly any difficulty,
comparatively small risk,
and insignificant loss to the victors.
Thus, ended the battle of Omdurman,
the most striking triumph ever gained
by the arms of science
over barbarians, wrote Churchill.
At Omdurman, no British soldier
expected to be killed,
for this was only a sporting element
in a splendid game.
The industrial development of firearms
was playing an important role
in US colonization as well.
As a war president, George
Washington thought it unreasonable
to rely on foreign weapons.
With generous start-up funds,
lucrative long term contracts,
and heavy tariffs on foreign imports,
he literally jump-started
the US arms industry
into becoming
the world's first arms manufacturer.
The very first corporation established
by the United States
was the Springfield Armory
in western Massachusetts,
founded in 1777.
It soon introduced standardized,
interchangeable parts
and assembly-line production,
key factors in the takeoff
of the industrial revolution in the US
and its establishment
as a capitalist, imperialist state.
And having more arms allows
more expansion.
More expansion means more wars,
for which you then need more arms.
A profitable chicken and egg bonanza,
in a totally incestuous relationship
between military industry
and governments.
The so-called Monroe Doctrine
became the order of the day.
At its core, in 1850,
it was a mere commitment
to keep the Americas North
and South safe
from European colonizing ambitions.
Over the years, from President
Theodore Roosevelt
to John F. Kennedy
and Ronald Reagan,
the doctrine came to cover
any perceived threat
to US interests around the world.
Overseas domination became
the goal.
As reverend Josiah Strong argued
in 1885
in his best-selling book "Our Country",
"as a superior race, the US had
a divine responsibility"
"to control the world."
There is something
we need to talk about,
something that keeps bothering me
and that we cannot leave
out of the present story.
Especially because it represents,
in a troublesome way,
the symbol of all evil.
It is something odd,
hidden deep behind two words:
Hiroshima, Nagasaki.
It was said that it was a war
against fascism.
It was said that it was to prevent
further American deaths.
But hundreds of thousands died.
The accounting is irrefutable.
In a chess game, the objective
is to checkmate the opponent's king.
All other pieces then become collateral.
Their respective value depends
on the strategic value
you assign to them.
In the present case,
the King is an emperor.
And Japanese deaths will provide
the collateral.
Shock and awe.
A massacre determined
by an algorithm.
It came at 8 o'clock
on August 6th 1945.
Nobody was expecting it.
They were pawns in a sordid game.
Killing at a distance had just
taken on a new meaning.
No explanation required.
No cries tolerated.
No pity.
Surrender or death at best.
An endless wasteland of dead people.
For it is a massacre,
not a heroic act.
Why wasn't it ever called
a war crime?
Is it because those
who dropped the bombs
are those who got to name the deed?
Naming is power, said Trouillot.
Two days after the bombing
of Nagasaki, President Truman said:
"The only language they seem
to understand"
"is the one we used to bomb them."
"When dealing with an animal,
treat it like an animal."
"It's totally unfortunate,
but it's still the truth."
Indeed, there is no more to say.
We know now what the task truly is,
for Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's
"Heart of Darkness",
as well as at the battle
of Omdurman:
"Exterminate all the brutes."
Take the cup!
OK, great!
Why don't you take off your shirt?
Not you, Henry! The young man.
Can you translate for him?
Good. Make him look more natural.
Yeah, native, blending in.
You know what I mean?
Okay. Change position.
Really?
You want to just lay down like this?
Well, at least take the cigar.
Take the cigar!
Okay. Boy!
Hey you, boy!
Look at him!
Mira lo, por favor!
Of course, I know
he doesn't speak Spanish.
Put a hand on your hip.
Like this.
You see? Perfect!
Change position.
Both of you stand up.
Pick up the rifles. Him too.
One each. Okay, and put the gun
on your shoulder.
Well, help him with it! Henry
Don't tell him, show him!
No. You know what?
Put it on the other side.
Yeah. Now, Henry,
look at the distance,
you are looking at the Nile river
over there.
Be inspired, show some passion.
The whole world has been waiting
for you.
That's it! Awesome!
Yep. Classic Stanley.
He tends to over-dramatize
every so often. Can't help it.
The man changed my name
from Ndugu M'hali to Kalulu,
because it sounded better.
I have never told him
how I enjoy his company sometimes.
But occasionally,
he can be quite a bully too.
He brought me with him to Europe
and America, as his butler, officially.
But when alone, we were just friends.
Go figure.
The fearless explorer
and the "Noble savage".
That in the press he called me
his "infant cannibal",
should've tipped me off.
I have been a good soldier all my life.
The perfectly well-educated pupil
of a Western humanistic civilization.
I thought that to be mature was
to be knowledgeable,
smart, sophisticated, and gracious.
I was educated to believe that some
types of behavior were acceptable,
and others were not.
And that when I had done wrong,
I had to learn from that experience.
My parents taught me that,
as a black person,
I should never find myself
on the wrong side of the tracks.
I learned to behave.
I learned to be sociable,
presentable, congenial.
I had to negotiate daily with an
intimate, unnamed, and vulgar enemy,
infatuated with a superiority complex,
let's say, like Frank T.J. Mackey.
I will not apologize
for what I need.
Or Jordan Belfort.
I have been a good soldier
and a good learner.
But I could never really fathom
what it actually means
to be "superior",
logically degrading everybody else
as "inferior".
A singular assumption,
to say the least.
Visiting Europe, I discovered people
who genuinely thought
and were naively convinced that
they embodied the world.
The whole world.
And in that world, I was assigned
the role of a footnote.
Or at best, like in most Hollywood
movies, a supporting role
with guarantied death and careless
disposal by some wild beast,
sometime before the third act.
Go back!
Back across the log!
Get Jimmy outta here!
- No!
- Gotta run, Jimmy!
Run!
Joseph Conrad's book
"Heart of Darkness" was influenced
by the battle of Omdurman.
Conrad starts the novel
with what has been called
the toolbox of imperialism,
which involves
the ship's guns that fire
on a continent,
the railway that facilitates
the plundering of the continent,
the river steamer that carries
Europeans and their weapons
into the heart of the continent.
This new era in the history
of imperialism also became
a new era in the history of racism.
Europeans started mistaking
military superiority
for intellectual
and even biological superiority.
That's when things turned nasty.
No one had to pretend anymore.
Please, look over here!
You there!
Could you move a bit to the right?
And you! Not you! Don't move.
You, a little to the left.
Now, give him a hand.
No! You give him "A" hand, I said!
Well, then, you take another hand
and you, this one, hand and hand.
Excellent! OK, so the big guy,
with the towel head,
you can just move back a bit.
Perfect.
Excellent. I think that's it.
I like that.
Can you just uncross
your arms, please?
- Why?
- You want to know why?
It makes you look defiant.
That's why.
I'm just saying.
Keep it that way, for all I care.
"Does the West have the will
to survive?", asked a US president.
The question itself is perplexing.
Clearly, I am not included
in his concept of the West.
Unquestionably, to belong
to the "right civilization" does bear
some entitlements.
I might be wary of white institutions
in general,
and of the religious ones
in particular,
but for some reasons I was attracted
to the idea of joining the Boy Scouts.
My best friend and neighbor
in Leopoldville,
the son of a French doctor,
was a boy scout.
Robert knew all the regulatory moves.
He even had a code name, Red Raven.
Because he had red hair.
He taught me the signs, the knots,
and even tightly kept secrets.
The idea of a brotherhood
of the like-minded captivated me.
But not as much as the idea of owning
a multi-task pocket knife
and being allowed to dare make
unsafe fires in the woods.
Baden-Powell is the founder
of the Boy Scouts.
During the 2nd Ashanti War
in 1896,
two days march away
from the capital, Kumasi,
as the commander
of the advance troop,
he received an envoy offering
unconditional surrender.
To his disappointment, he did not have
to fire a single shot at the natives.
To get hostilities going,
the British then planned
extreme provocations.
They arrested the king of Ashanti,
King Prempeh,
together with his whole family.
The king and his mother were forced
to crawl on all fours
up to the British officers sitting
on crates of biscuit tins,
to demonstrate their subjugation.
But still, this time as well,
the British unfortunately found
no use for their weapons.
Baden-Powell writes to his mother:
"I thoroughly enjoyed the outing,"
"except for the want of a fight,"
"which I fear will preclude our getting
any medals or decoration."
This is young and ambitious
Georges Cuvier.
On January 27, 1796,
Georges has just arrived in Paris
to hold his first lecture at the newly
opened Institut National de France.
He is 26.
Cuvier was sensational.
He spoke of the mammoth
and the mastodon.
Remnants of these huge elephantine
animals had recently been found
in Siberia and North America.
Cuvier demonstrated that they did not
belong to the same species
as either the Indian
or the African elephant,
but constituted species
of their own, now extinct.
Now extinct.
Those were the two words
that horrified the listeners.
Because in the eighteenth century,
people still believed
in a ready-made universe
to which nothing could be added.
And perhaps even more important
to mankind's peace of mind,
nothing could be subtracted from it.
All of God's creatures, once created,
could not disappear
from his universe.
"What then was the explanation
for these gigantic bones"
"and strange animal-like stones that
had puzzled man since antiquity",
asked Cuvier.
Cuvier's idea, that there could
be species that had died out,
gave rise to such resistance
that it took over a hundred years
to become accepted.
But how they had died out and why,
he did not explain.
In 1850, the great liberal philosopher
Herbert Spencer,
yes, that Spencer, wrote:
"Imperialism has served civilization"
"by clearing the inferior races
off the Earth."
"The forces which are working out the
great scheme of perfect happiness,"
"taking no account
of incidental suffering,"
"exterminate such sections
of mankind as stand in their way."
"Be he human or be he brute,
the hindrance must be got rid of."
Here the human being was expressly
placed on an equal footing
with the animal,
as an object for extermination.
One could take Spencer's fantasies
of annihilation
as personal eccentricities,
explained perhaps by the fact that
all Spencer's siblings had died
when he was a child.
A calm and comforting conclusion.
Enter Robert Knox.
Knox had studied comparative
anatomy with Cuvier in Paris.
He was a Scot, had served
as an army doctor in South Africa,
and had founded a school
of anatomy in Edinburgh.
Can the dark races
become civilized?
"I should say not," says Knox.
"All we know, is that since
the beginning of history,"
"the dark races have been the slaves
of those lighter-skinned."
Of course, what he meant exactly
by "dark race" is not easy to answer.
Are the Jews a dark race?
The Gypsies?
The Chinese? One could ask.
"I feel disposed to think
that there must be a physical,"
"and consequently, a psychological
inferiority in the dark races",
asserted Knox.
"The texture of the brain is, I think,
generally darker,"
"and the white part
more strongly fibrous,"
"but I speak from
extremely limited experience."
Indeed, Knox says
that he had done an autopsy
on only one colored person,
which somehow does demonstrate
the limitations of his experiments.
Thomas Jefferson found it
inconceivable
that one single species
could disappear from nature.
But nevertheless, more than 99 percent
of all species have already died out.
Most of them in a few catastrophes
that came close to wiping out all life.
This is the scope of our story.
As a young student, Charles Darwin,
regarded as the father
of evolutionary biology,
heard Knox's controversial lectures.
In his book "On the Origins
of the Species," published in 1859,
he would demonstrate
that all species adapt
to their environment
through natural selection.
Darwin argued in favor of a common
origin of all human races.
Although his thesis as such neither
confirmed nor denied Knox's
and others' ideas regarding
any hierarchy within mankind,
his theory of evolution
was clearly useful to the racists.
After Darwin, race became the decisive
explanation in far wider circles.
Racism was accepted and became
a central element
in British imperial ideology.
After Darwin, it also became accepted
to shrug your shoulders at genocide.
If you were upset, you were just
showing your lack of education.
Genocide began to be regarded
as the inevitable byproduct
of progress.
And prejudice against alien peoples,
which had always existed,
was now given organized form
and apparent scientific validation.
"Meanwhile," added Darwin,
"regarding future life, each person
will have to judge for himself."
In just a few years the surface
of the Earth will be quite changed.
A new era is dawning that will
multiply the undertakings of man.
Light is consuming the darkness.
Let me introduce to you now,
my dear colleague Dr. Frederic Farrar,
who has been recently elected
a fellow at the Royal Society.
In his major book "Systema Naturae",
the great Swedish botanist
Carl Linnaeus discriminates,
with his usual acuteness,
the intellectual
and moral characteristics
of four great human families.
The Homo Americanus,
the Homo Europeus,
the Homo Asiaticus,
the Homo Afer.
Yet, we believe that these
and all other races
may be reduced
to three great classes or divisions.
Savage, semi civilized and civilized.
Only two races, the Aryan
and the Semitic, were civilized.
The Chinese belong
to the semi civilized,
as they had once been brilliant,
but suffered
from "arrested development".
The savage races have always lived
in the same ignorance
and wretchedness.
They are without a past
and without a future,
doomed, as races infinitely nobler
have been before them,
to a rapid, and inevitable extinction.
Out of all their teeming myriads,
never have they produced
one single man
whose name is of the slightest
importance to the history of our race.
History starts
when man starts to write.
Take a specimen
from the hundred million of Africans,
not one of the most degenerates
such as the Hottentots,
but a real, pure-blooded Negro.
What hope was there
that he could be civilized?
How dare you think your heritage
is better than mine? Asshole!
The great majority of Negroes
will go under in a decline
from which only a few can be saved.
- Many races have disappeared.
- You are insane!
Please, gentlemen, ladies,
let's be civil.
Show some respect.
After all, it's just science.
Fuck you. Fuck you. Two times.
These races, the lowest types
of humanity
and presenting
its most hideous features
of moral and intellectual degradation,
were doomed to go under.
And I call them irreclaimable savages.
Irreclaimable savages!
Irreclaimable savages!
What did actually happen
when knowledge, industry,
and enlightenment exterminated
the inferior races?
Darwin, who had traveled to South
America in his younger years, knew.
He had seen General Rosas' men
in Argentina,
butchering Indians, smothered
in blood and vomit.
He knew how eyes were gouged out
when an Indian had sunk his teeth
into a thumb and refused to let go,
how women were killed,
and prisoners made to talk.
He had a name for it. He called it
the "struggle for life".
- Last name?
- Trouillot.
- First name?
- Rolph-Michel.
- Ready?
- Sure.
Like Roxanne, Michel-Rolph
and Sven,
I too have my nightmares as well.
Churchill said after the war:
"We are in the presence
of a crime without a name."
But Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer
of Polish-Jewish descent,
had already created that name
in 1943.
Combining the ancient Greek "genos",
which means race,
tribe, clan and the latin "cide",
which expresses the notion of killing,
Lemkin invented the word genocide.
At the New York Public Library,
in the Raphael Lemkin collection,
in Reel 3, Box 2, Folder 1,
there is a list of the world's
genocides throughout history.
"Some things are so evil that it's
enough that they simply happened,"
said the man.
"They don't need to be given a second
existence by being retold."
He took a drag on his cigarette.
"That's what I think on some days,
anyway," he went on.
"Other days, I think the opposite."
The past has a future we never expect.
One of the fundamental ideas
of the nineteenth century
was that there are races, peoples,
nations and tribes
that are in the process of dying out.
Or as the Prime Minister of England,
Lord Salisbury expressed it
in his famous speech, in Albert Hall,
on May 4th, 1898:
"One can roughly divide the nations
of the world into the living"
"and the dying."
"The weak nations become
increasingly weaker"
"and the strong stronger."
It was in the nature of things
that "the living nations
will fraudulently encroach"
"on the territory of the dying".
He spoke the truth.
During the nineteenth century,
Europeans had encroached
on vast territories around the world.
The word genocide
had not yet been invented.
But the matter existed.
Joseph Conrad may not have heard
Lord Salisbury's speech.
He had no need to.
Conrad could no more avoid hearing
of the ceaseless genocide
that marked his century than any
of his contemporaries could.
It is we who have suppressed it.
We do not want to remember.
We would prefer for genocide to have
begun and ended with Nazism.
This would indeed be most comforting.
For sure the nine-year-old Adolf Hitler
was not in Albert Hall either
when Lord Salisbury was speaking.
He had no need to.
He knew it already.
The air Hitler and all other Western
people in his childhood breathed
was soaked in the conviction
that imperialism is a biologically
necessary process which,
according to the laws of nature,
leads to the inevitable destruction
of the lower races.
It was a conviction that had already
cost millions of human lives
before Hitler provided
his highly personal application.
But in the mid-nineteenth century,
the Germans had still not exterminated
any people.
So they were able to look more
critically on the phenomenon
than other Europeans did.
In Southwest Africa in 1904,
the Germans demonstrated that
they too could master an art
that Americans, British, and other
Europeans had exercised
all through the nineteenth century,
the art of hastening the extermination
of a people of "inferior culture".
Following the North American example,
the Herero people were banished
to reservations
and their grazing lands were handed
over to German immigrants
and colonial companies.
For over two decades, their leader,
Samuel Maherero,
had signed one treaty after another
with the Germans
and ceded large areas of land
to avoid war.
But just as the Americans
did not feel bound
by their treaties with the Indians,
the Germans did not think that
as a higher race they had any need
to abide by treaties they made
with the natives.
As in North America, the German plans
for immigration presupposed
that the natives were to be relieved
of all land of any value.
When the Hereros resisted,
General Adolf Lebrecht von Trotha
ordered their extermination.
Every Herero found within the German
borders, with or without weapons,
was to be shot.
But most of them died
without direct violence.
The Germans simply drove them into
the desert and sealed off the border.
One didn't yet talk
about "the final solution",
but that was what one had in mind.
In the official account of the war,
the German officers wrote:
"The army earned the gratitude
of the whole fatherland."
"The sentence had been carried out,"
"and the Hereros had ceased
to be an independent people."
Eighty thousand human beings died
in the desert.
The few thousand left were sentenced
to hard labor
in concentration camps.
A new concept of incarceration
invented in 1896
by the Spaniards in Cuba,
anglicized by the Americans,
entered German language
and politics.
Paul Rohrbach wrote in his best-seller
"German Thought in the World",
published in 1912 that:
"Existences, be they of peoples
or individuals who do not produce"
"anything of value, cannot make
any claim to the right to exist."
We believe that married people
who have transmissible diseases
should not have children.
No couple who has the disease
of feeble-mindedness or insanity
or epilepsy should have children.
The over infatuation
with genetic purity
An impressive amount of energy put
into the classification of people
A pathological obsession
for the concept of race
that scientifically does not exist.
Despite the careful staging,
one gesture, an unexpected gesture
of irritation,
not foreseen by the director
of this strange display,
will betray the masquerade
and restore dignity.
What is sure, is that
their way of life is threatened.
Has he indeed any right to exist?
Does she?
Do they?
But after all we know now,
indeed, who is to judge?
To be continued