Exterminate All the Brutes (2021) s01e04 Episode Script

A guy walks into a bar
"My name is Christopher Columbus,"
he yells, "And I now own this bar."
From now on, I call it:
"Hispaniola Lounge".
Among the black patrons,
nobody says a word.
Only the black barman, shakes his head:
"White people"
EXTERMINATE ALL THE BRUTES
PART 4
THE BRIGHT COLORS OF FASCISM
LAND WITH PEOPLE
THE MYTH OF PRISTINE WILDERNESS
Land with no peoples does not exist.
The idea that America was virgin land
or wilderness inhabited by non-people
called savages is a myth.
Only through killing and displacement
does it become uninhabited.
Before the arrival of the British,
North America was a continent
of villages, of nations,
of federations of nations.
Between 1814 and 1824,
a big chunk of land between today's
Florida and Kentucky
became the private property
of white settlers.
The first permanent US colonial
institution was established.
First named
the Office of Indian Affairs
and placed within
the Department of War.
We are less than two centuries old.
But no nation has ever been
more strongly stirred
by the knowledge of its own story.
We are the product of many strains,
and many visions.
And yet we see that story as
essentially one heroic adventure.
Photocall
at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation
South Dakota, 1891
The bid for independence by what
became the United States of America
was nourished by the ideas of freedom,
democracy, and equality for all.
But these ideas
were difficult to reconcile
with the reality of dominance
of one race over another,
much less with genocide,
settler colonialism, and empire.
To reconcile rhetoric with reality,
a new model had to emerge.
The birth of something new:
the birth of the US American race.
A new people born of the merger of
the best of both worlds:
the Native and the European.
Not a biological merger.
God forbid!
But something more ephemeral,
implying the dissolving of the Indian.
A process that would exclude
Native Americans and Afro-Americans
from participating,
unless as foils.
"You have there the myth of
the essential white America,"
wrote D. H. Lawrence
about James Fenimore Cooper's
frontiersman character Deerslayer.
"All the other stuff, the love, the
democracy, the floundering into lust,
is a sort of by-play", he writes.
The essential American soul is hard,
isolate, stoic, and a killer.
It has never yet melted."
The Navy SEAL team members
who carried out the assassination
of Osama bin Laden on May 2nd, 2011
were reporting in real time
to President Obama,
Secretary of State Hilary Clinton,
and other officials
in their sealed "Situation" Room.
NO PHOTO FINISH
Following the operation,
the "New York Daily News" commented:
"Along with the unseen pictures of
Osama Bin Laden's corpse,
intelligence officials' reasons for
dubbing the Al Qaeda boss 'Geronimo'
remain one of the biggest mysteries of
the Black Ops mission."
But it was not a mystery to the
US Navy Seals, or to Obama or Clinton,
and especially to any Native American
who heard it.
Geronimo, or by his real name,
Goyathlay,
was one of the greatest adversaries
the colonizing Army had confronted
in their "kill anything that moves"
march across the continent.
Geronimo is revered as a great
freedom fighter by the Apache people
and by all Native Americans.
The choice of the code word "Geronimo"
for a US enemy
was not a mystery to the military,
who also use the term "Indian country"
to designate enemy territory.
"Indian country" and "in-country"
are military terms,
like other euphemisms
such as "collateral damage"
for killing civilians
or "ordnance" for bombs,
that appear in military training
manuals and are used regularly.
CLEAR-IN-ZONE
UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE
ALTERNATIVE PROCEDURES
VIOLENT EXTREMISM
"Indian country" and "in-country"
mean "behind enemy lines."
UNLAWFUL COMBATTANTS
ADMINISTERED TERRITORIES
BULK PERSONAL DATASE
HARSH TACTICS
BRUTAL TREATMEN
UH-60 BLACK HAWK
All US wars re-enact fundamentally
the "Indian Wars.
H-34 CHOCKTAW
BELL-UH1 IROQUOIS
OV-1 MOHAWK
AH-64 APACHE
LOOKHEED AH-56A CHEYENNE
CH-47 CHINOOK
Counterinsurgent warfare
was the way of war.
Military historian John Grenier states:
"Successive generations of Americans,
both soldiers and civilians,
made the killing of Indian men, women,
and children
a defining element
of their first military tradition
and thereby
part of a shared American identity."
The chief characteristic of irregular
warfare is that of the extreme violence
against civilians,
in this case the tendency to
seek the utter annihilation
of the Indigenous population.
Kill anything that moves,
take no prisoners.
In California, hunting Indians
was both legal and profitable.
$5 a head, 50 cents a scalp.
In 1854 alone,
the federal government paid more than
a million dollars to Indian hunters.
The State reward for dead Indians
has been increased to 200 dollars.
Many of the descendants
of those settlers
are at the forefront
of the Second Amendment activists.
They say they represent "the people"
and have the right to bear arms
in order to overthrow any government
that does not in their view adhere to
the God-given covenant.
But it is a fact that the original
mandate of the Second Amendment was
to empower and authorize settlers
to arm themselves to kill Indians
and to control enslaved Africans.
Roughly three-fourth of gun owners
are men, and 82% are white.
Taken together, that's 61% of adults
who own guns are white men.
We cannot make sense of gun hoarding
and the cult of the gun
if we don't deal with
white nationalism.
And we can't deal
with white nationalism
without dealing with
United States history.
My friend Roxanne told me:
As Men of their times,
the founders created
the most perfect document ever written
for the most perfect country on Earth.
But today we can see the warts.
And they ruin the picture.
"Make America great again,"
he said.
When exactly was it great?
I mean, really great?
And for whom?
Roxanne tells me:
Thanks to slavery cotton became
the fuel of the 19th century.
Around 1831, US cotton made up almost
half of the world's production.
The elite in the South
became extremely wealthy.
The elite in the North became
extremely wealthy as well.
Sparking the Industrial Revolution.
At the beginning, the slaves had to
clean the cotton with their bare hands.
The invention of the cotton gin by
Eli Whitney would change everything.
But cotton also destroyed the soil.
So, Southerners and Northerners
plundered more Indian land.
While using slaves' bodies
as a commodity
became the most lucrative enterprise
around.
More profitable than all land, banks,
railroads, factories,
and gold products put together.
Slaves were used as collateral
for mortgage.
A newly developed tool of commerce.
Thomas Jefferson mortgaged a 150 of his
enslaved workers to build Monticello.
With a Dutch company
putting up the money.
Mortgaging people to buy more people.
A large part of Europe had abolished
slavery by 1848,
but Europeans were still silently
bankrolling the slave industry
in the United States.
"Slavery may be called
cultural genocide par excellence.
It is the most effective and thorough
method of destroying a culture,
and of de-socializing human beings."
RESISTANCE
By 1890, disarmed,
held in concentration camps, their
children taken away, half-starved,
the Lakota and Dakota survivors,
found a new form of resistance:
Ghost dancing.
It was a simple dance
performed by everyone in the open,
requiring only a specific kind of
handmade ribbon shirt
that might protect the dancers
from gunfire.
It spread like wildfire
in all directions.
Among the presumed sources
of this dance,
is a Nevada Paiute holy man
named Wovoka.
Native Pilgrims journeyed long
distances to hear Wovoka's message
and to receive directions on
how to perform the Ghost Dance,
which promised to restore
the Indigenous world
as it was before colonialism,
make the invaders disappear and
the dead warriors and buffalo return.
They danced without rest.
Occasionally,
they collapsed unconscious.
Quickly those on each side
of the fallen closed the gap
and continued dancing.
When the dancing began among
the Sioux in 1890,
reservation officials falsely reported
that Sioux leader Tatanka Yotanka,
Sitting Bull,
had ordered the people
at Pine Ridge Reservation
to perform the Ghost Dance
day and night.
Although Sitting Bull had learned
the Ghost Dance,
he lived in the Standing Rock Sioux
reservation,
miles away from the dancing,
and was not giving orders.
The dancing was spontaneous.
General Sherman, General Sherman.
New York City
January 7,1891
A few days after the "battle"
of Wounded Knee
General Sherman,
how do you see the end of this revolt?
- Are there civilian casualties?
- How many savages have you killed?
Lots of familiar faces.
General. How do you keep such vigor
after such an exhausting battle?
Well, riding horses and killing Indians
do keep one crisp and fresh.
What lesson do you draw
from this campaign?
Is there an end
to these permanent revolts?
Indians must either work or starve.
They never have worked; they won't work
now, and they never will work.
But should not the government
supply them with enough
to keep them from starvation?
You're gonna pay for it?
Who shot Sitting Bull?
How is that important?
He resisted arrest, and he was shot.
- What about Big foot?
- What about him?
It is said that
they had him surrounded.
That's what the fake press
wanted us to believe.
What about Custer's regiment?
It is said that they wanted revenge.
And what about the twenty-five soldiers
killed in "friendly fire"?
Shit happens.
And why is it that you journalists
are always trying to make things
more complicated than there are?
It was a search action. We told them to
surrender and hand over their weapons.
Which they did
Well that's your version
Wounded Knee Massacre
Est. Indians killed: 300
Survivors: 51 (4 men, 47 women)
Army casualties: 25 dead
Yellow Bird, Medicine Man
Big Foot, chief of the Miniconjou
Lakota Sioux
The Wizard of Oz
Victor Fleming, 1939
Five days after the sickening events
at Wounded Knee,
Lyman Frank Baum,
a Dakota Territory settler,
who would become famous years later for
writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,
wrote in the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer
newspaper:
'The Pioneer has before declared
that our only safety depends upon
the total extermination of the Indians.
Having wronged them for centuries,
we had better,
in order to protect our civilization,
follow it up by one more wrong
and wipe
these untamed and untamable creatures
from the face of the earth."
The fact is,
the Native Americans are still here,
and this is still their home.
And despite some real individual
accomplishments,
the real fight remains the fight for
self-determination and restitution.
Anything less, will not be acceptable,
Representative Heather Keeler
Minnesota
"American Indian individuals
shall have the right to choose
his or her citizenship. And American
Indian nations have the right to choose
their level of citizenship and autonomy
up to absolute independence."
THE PAST IN THE PRESEN
The same observation could be made
about slavery.
For slavery here is a ghost,
both the past and a living presence.
And after 400 years the problem of
historical representation
is how to represent that ghost.
Something that is
and yet is not.
The fact that US slavery has both
officially ended
and yet continues in many complex forms
of institutionalized racism
makes its representation
particularly burdensome.
As long as genocide, slavery
and the exploitation of human bodies
do not convert into reparation,
whatever the form,
there will never be any peace.
As writer James Baldwin says:
"there is scarcely any hope
for the American dream,
because people who are denied
participation in it,
by their very presence will wreck it."
Galveston, Texas
August 2019
The facts are staring us in the face.
Time is not a chronological continuity,
wrote Trouillot in his book
"Silencing The Past".
It is the range of disjointed moments,
practices and symbols,
that thread the historical relations
between events and narratives.
No amount of historical debate about
any of these events,
and no amount of guilt
can serve as a substitute
for marching in the streets today.
Synagogue Shooting
What must be denounced here
is not so much the reality of
the Native American genocide,
or the reality of slavery,
or the reality of the Holocaust.
What needs to be denounced here
are the consequences of these realities
in our lives and in life today.
I witnessed death in Haiti.
Of unknown people and of friends like
or Guy Malary
both slain by CIA linked military.
But not all deaths are violent.
I accompanied my mother's passing, in a
hospital room in Voorhees, New Jersey.
She, who was the first to tell me about
Congo's assassinated Prime Minister,
Patrice Lumumba.
I made a film about him too.
And my mother is in it.
I spent 15 years of my life
in a city called Berlin in Germany.
I went to film school there.
My entry project was about the prison
of Plotzensee. A Nazi torture compound.
Not one single day when I lived there,
did I forget that this country,
which produced some of humanity's best
philosophers, scientists, and artists,
also operated one of the most
devastating scientifically-run
and engineered killing machines.
Berlin.
I know these streets by heart.
Every day,
I walked under these arches
to my classes
at the Technical University.
The superimposition of time and images.
Auschwitz.
I went there too.
I wanted to see for myself.
More than anything else,
it was these details which gave me
the clearest sense of the horror.
I have seen these Images before.
In Ntarama, Rwanda, in 2003.
I took these exact same photos.
A few hundred people had been
slaughtered by Hutu militias
and government soldiers in a church.
A young man told me
about what happened.
He had been there
and had escaped through a hole.
He showed me the hole.
Still there after ten years.
Sometimes in April
Raoul Peck, 2005
I knew I had seen this picture before,
"We're staying together".
Why didn't the world react?
The argument that people didn't know.
That's not true. They knew.
We know now from intelligence records;
just how much they knew.
That within hours,
they were aware that the killing was
being done on an ethnic basis,
systematically,
that there were lists,
that the killers were going through
the capital city
choosing out people from certain
households and executing them.
They knew this.
This is Alison Des Forges.
She spent her life documenting
the horror.
She met world leaders, confronted
assassins, engaged doubters,
and denounced world institutions
hiding behind their silence.
She guided me and taught me
how to decipher the language of death
and see through the monster
hiding behind a human mask.
Alison died in an airplane accident
on February 12th 2009,
on her way to visit her family
in Buffalo.
I miss her.
I am not putting anybody on a moral
plane - what I'm saying is this:
You had a group on one side
and you had a group on the other,
and they came at each other with clubs,
and it was vicious, and horrible.
It was a horrible thing to watch.
I think there is blame on both sides.
You look at both sides,
I think there is blame on both sides.
George Washington was a slave owner.
are we gone take down the statues?
How about Thomas Jefferson?
What do you think of Thomas Jefferson?
Do you like him?
These images project a profound idea
of self.
Or of the desperation.
Lost souls on a pile of
human confusion.
The absence of any trace of empathy
and genuine humanity is unbearable.
The nightmare is buried deep
in our consciousness.
So deep
that we do not recognize it at first.
It says who you are,
It says what you have become.
The stubborn privilege of
superiority And comedy.
In times of despair, fear
and insecurity,
people are looking for saviors.
Any kind will do.
But possibly, one with easy sounding
solutions, that others will pay for.
RAPEFUGEES STAY AWAY!
NOT WELCOME
But a complex world
calls for complex responses.
With at least some minimal agreement
over the diagnosis.
We never listened to the poor.
Those who are less poor,
fear the loss of what they have.
And they are rebelling.
I am extremely happy to be here
among you, in Marseille.
We have been there before.
Without learning much.
For some reason
we thought that in modern days,
fascism would be disguised
in bright friendly colors,
so that
it would be difficult to recognize.
But it is recognizable.
The same roar when the leader speaks.
The same hatred of aliens.
The same violence.
The same projection
of wounded manhood.
The frailty of power.
The Western world is panicking.
A delirious, spiraling panic.
Complaining about a clash of
civilization,
thus displaying the limits of
superiority.
"Privilege" makes you vulnerable.
And panic, when blended with ignorance
and bigotry, creates anger.
Limitless and blinding anger.
Everyone else becomes the enemy.
The fortress becomes a prison.
Everyone else looking in at you.
People die, because they are hungry
and can't protect their own existence.
Others, because they are persecuted
or because they can't feed, protect or
care for their own children.
Meanwhile, the pornographic rich
are the new moralists.
Most disturbing are not the images.
Or even the terrifying words.
Most disturbing here
is the absence of ridicule.
And the silence of complacency.
Any hint of decency has definitely been
lost in the picture.
Murder in Pacot
Raoul Peck, 2014
We search for truth
when we should search for meaning.
The very existence of this film
is a miracle.
One day, an 18-year-old Palestinian
girl strapped with explosives
detonates herself
in a crowded discotheque in Tel Aviv.
When others think about revenge,
I think of my daughter.
What would have pushed her
to commit such a horrific act?
Would I call my child a monster?
Yes, it is complicated.
Today, I learned of Sven's death.
It wasn't sudden.
I knew it would happen soon.
I had learned to cope.
It's not pain that I feel.
But rage and sorrow.
Sven gave me the original impulse
for this story.
And he washed away my doubts that
such a film was even conceivable.
Up until his last day,
he wanted it to happen.
Finishing this story is now vital.
Nobody starts with a clean slate.
But the human condition also requires
that practices of power and domination
be renewed.
It is that renewal that
should concern us most.
Calling to account the so-called
legacies of past horrors,
slavery, colonialism, or the Holocaust
is only possible
because of that renewal.
And that renewal occurs
only in the present.
Only in that present can we be true
or false
to the past we choose to acknowledge,
said Trouillot.
You know
I'm not an expert in religion.
The racial industry
This is a hardline issue for people
who live in border states.
The president tries to protect
borders from an invasion."
- So you know the law?
- Shut up moron! Shut up!
45000 people a year die from
automobile accidents
American scholars have largely
abandoned
the role of public intellectuals
to pundits and entertainers.
No proof, no arguments are necessary.
It is opinions against opinions.
Shamelessly passing off impudence
as reason.
We now know that narratives
are made of silences.
While some of us debate
what history is or was,
others take it into their own hands.
In 1920,
biologist Charles Davenport,
leader of the American eugenics'
movement,
asked his friend Madison Grant, author
of The Passing of the Great Race:
"Can we build a wall high enough
around this country
so as to keep out those
cheaper races?"
Japs keep moving
This is a white man's neighbourhood
On May 26, 1924,
President Calvin Coolidge signed
the Restriction Act into law
and shut down immigration by 97%.
The door was shut for 40 years.
People tend to forget.
A political victory for eugenics.
As one congressman said,
the nation would remain
the home of a great people.
Christian,
English-speaking white people.
The open arms of Ellis Island
are now closed again.
That law closed the door on Jews
who were fleeing the Nazis.
For lack of a visa, Anne Frank died
in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
AFTERMATH
CULTURAL LOSSES
DISLOCATION
MORAL DETERIORATION
POLITICAL CHANGES
When Adolf Hitler entered politics,
the opportunities for Germany to expand
had been closed.
He had to find an alternative
closer to home.
Hitler's campaign to the East
became his very own colonial war.
In the long-term, he intended to
incorporate these agricultural areas
into the expanding German Lebensraum.
The Lebensraum, meaning living space.
According to Hitler's imperial vision,
the elimination of America's redskins,
as he called them,
was the perfect example
of a successful colonization.
Like the Americans had done, he would
proceed to send German settlers,
to replace all Jewish and Slavic
populations in the East.
The law of blood justified
the needs and the deeds.
Hitler was driven throughout
his political career
by a fanatical anti-Semitism that was
rooted in 1000-year-old tradition.
But the step from mass murder
to genocide was not taken
until the anti-Semitic tradition
met the tradition of genocide
that arose during Europe's expansion in
America, Australia, Africa, and Asia.
According to the Lebensraum theory,
the Jews belonged to an even lower race
than the Russians and Poles,
a race which could not lay claim
to the right to live.
Liquidation of the Mizocz Ghetto
(now Ukraine), 1942
It was only natural that such lower
races should be exterminated
if they were in the way.
The other Western master races
had done just that.
Same procedures apply.
Different player.
Warsaw Ghetto,
Poland, 1942
They died on their own
when the food supply was cut off.
The sad rule that
so-called inferior people died out
upon contact with highly cultivated
people was at work again.
If they did not die fast enough,
then it was merciful to shorten
their suffering.
A Nazi officer took these pictures.
Like the previous ones, they were found
in what has been called
"The Auschwitz Album".
The accounting of death.
Beneath the numbers, there are faces,
there are souls,
caught for one small moment,
by the lens of their tormentors.
And they know
They must have known.
"Unfit to work."
This is how they call
those who are put aside. To die.
This group is saved.
Momentarily.
The photographer and his prey.
A last glimpse of humanity,
in this woman's gaze.
And there is no illusion.
The children are thirsty.
"Where can we have water?" they ask.
"Walk all the way to the back.
There is water, I promise,"
says the SS officer.
And so they walk.
The children, their mother, their aunt,
their cousins,
walking towards death.
In less than 20 minutes,
they will be dead.
All of them.
20 minutes, that's the time it takes to
get from the dock, across the tracks,
along the stony path
all the way to the back of the camp,
where crematoriums 4 and 5 are located.
The SS blew them all up
the day they fled.
But enough remains to bear witness.
It's time to own up to a basic truth:
the great planners and executors
of the Final Solution
were extremely well-educated.
They had college degrees,
and quite a few even PhDs.
All German production capabilities
were mobilized to create
this racial paradise.
From architect, manufacturers,
plumbers,
bankers, to landscapers,
agronomists and SS henchmen.
Their organizational creativeness
was unparalleled.
Cross-section of crematorium III
by David Olere,
SS guards
Chimney
Living area
for the slaves of the crematorium
Hair combers
Casters: gold, jewelry and teeth
Accelerator
Smoke vacuum
Outside view
IT'S NOT KNOWLEDGE WE LACK
It's not knowledge we lack.
Just as educated Frenchmen
in the 1950s and 1960s
knew what their troops
were up to in Vietnam and Algeria.
Just as educated Russians in the 1980s
knew what their troops did
in Afghanistan.
Just as educated South Africans
and Americans, during the same period,
knew what their "auxiliaries"
were doing in Mozambique
and Central America, respectively.
So educated Europeans today
know how children die
when the whip of debt and bombs
whistle over poor countries.
It is not knowledge that is lacking.
Auschwitz is just the modern industrial
application
of established extermination methods.
The educated general public has always
largely known
what outrages have been committed
and are being committed
in the name of Progress,
Civilization, Socialism, Democracy,
and the Market.
And this for the last 500 years
since the original Christian crusades.
No, it's not knowledge that is lacking.
This knowledge could be expressed
in general and in scholarly language:
"Imperialism is a biologically
necessary process
that, according to the laws of nature,
leads to the inevitable destruction of
the lower races."
Things of that kind could be said.
At all times,
it has also been profitable to deny
or suppress such knowledge.
Conrad would have been able to set
his story
using any of the peoples
of European culture.
In practice, the whole of Europe acted
according to the maxim
"exterminate all the brutes."
Officially, it was, of course, denied.
But man to man, everyone knew.
This knowledge
is a fundamental prerequisite.
That is why "the narrator"
can tell his story
as he does in Conrad's novel
"Heart of Darkness".
He has no need to count
the crimes Kurtz committed.
He has no need to describe them.
He has no need to produce evidence.
For no one doubted it.
But the way it actually happened,
what it really did to the exterminators
and the exterminated,
that was, at most, only implied.
Drop the bomb.
Exterminate them all!
And when what had been done
in the heart of darkness
was repeated in the heart of Europe,
no one recognized it.
No one wished to admit
what everyone knew.
APOCALYPSE NOW
Francis Ford Coppola, 1979
Everywhere in the world
where knowledge is being suppressed,
knowledge that,
if it were made known,
would shatter our image of the world
and force us to question ourselves.
Everywhere there,
"Heart of Darkness" is being enacted.
Black Elk,
holy man of the Oglala Lakota people,
said after the Wounded Knee massacre:
I did not know then
how much was ended.
When I look back now
from this high hill of my old age,
I can still see the butchered women
and children lying heaped and scattered
all along the crooked gulch
as plain as
when I saw them with eyes still young.
And I can see that something else
died there in the bloody mud
and was buried in the blizzard.
A people's dream died there.
It was a beautiful dream
The nation's circle is broken
and scattered.
There is no center any longer,
and the sacred tree is dead.
A people's dream died there.
Auschwitz II, Birkenau
Do not let our planet die!
Do not let our planet die!
We still haven't seen everything yet.
This is only the beginning
of the beginning.
We are all together!
No, it's not knowledge we lack.