Original subtitles

This is Aby Osceola.

She is from the Seminole nation.

Her story goes deep into the history of this continent.

She reminds me of my mother.

But despite the resemblance, they each come,

although through not totally unrelated events,

from different strands of history.

Aby's role is played by Caisa,

a Swedish actress, of both Colombian and Native-American ancestry.

It is said that the Seminole Nation

never signed any treaty with the United States government.

That's why they are called the invincible tribe.

But for now, it is about another story.

In that larger story,

there are three words that summarize the whole history of humanity:

civilization, colonization, extermination.

These words run forcibly through Western World history,

the same way they drill to the core of US history.

And it's not so much about winners and losers,

or between conqueror or conquered, nor between colonist and colonized.

The forces involved here are less visible than gunfire,

class property, or political crusades.

But they are no less powerful.

Entire civilizations in the Western Hemisphere

were wantonly destroyed, setting the Western World

on a path of greed and destruction.

For History is the fruit of power.

And power is crucial to the story.

Which then always becomes at best, a story about those who won.

And clearly, this needs to be challenged.

Some guys care a lot for me

But my excitement they can't ban

Because I still await my primitive mate

We've had a date since the world began

My prehistoric man

For, it is about who we are today.

About what we have become as a people.

And on what side of history we are.

What side of the truth.

A certain view of history contends that the historical narrative

is just one fiction among others.

It is not. There is no such thing as "alternative facts".

EXTERMINATE ALL THE BRURES

PART I

December 1836, Seminole and Maroons encampment (today's Florida)

This is the day we fight.

Chieftain Yah-ho-Cuchee, we must leave.

We are the ones who arrived latest here.

Kwame-Micco, we are family now. You stay.

Yes, but family is not meant to bring harm!

They bring harm to our nation! Not you.

It's better we surrender.

So you and your people can have time to run and hide.

This is our land.

The white man wants our land.

We will fight together.

Or we will die together. And it will be a great honor.

All is well, then.

I do not want to spill Seminole blood,

to kill Seminole children, Seminole women.

Give us back the American property you stole

from our good fellowmen planters and settlers

and I let you move to the Indian Territory

the US government has provided for your people.

You call human beings your property?

These are slaves!

You steal land... You steal life... You steal humans.

What kind of species are you?

This kind!

CHRISTMAS CATALOGUE

"All Jews and Negroes ought really to be exterminated.

We shall be victorious.

The other races will disappear and die out,"

said the White Aryan Resistance in 1991, in Sweden.

2016, 25 years later, a well-known Swedish department store,

wanted something new for its Christmas catalog.

The store wanted to pay tribute to what Sweden is today:

a largely multicultural society.

To wear St. Lucia's white gown,

a popular 18th century tradition it chose a 9-year-old dark-skinned boy.

The innocent boy had a shy smile on his lips.

It was the smile, more than anything else, that was not taken well.

In Sweden, one of the most tolerant country in Europe,

like everywhere else in the world,

Hate is on the rise again,

This is genocide on white people.

You make me puke.

When do we start deporting those foreigners?

We have people coming into the country or trying to come in

and we're stopping a lot of them...

These aren't people. These are animals.

ANIMALS

This is not immigration, this is invasion.

You need to be afraid, because they are coming for you.

We have to do something to increase our birth rate

or the vacuum that's created will be filled by people

that don't believe in our values here in Western civilization

and we're seeing it happen in the Netherlands and all across Europe...

The white establishment is now the minority.

Things will only change, unfortunately, when we'll resort to a civil war.

Doing the work the military regime didn't do, killing about 30 000!

KILLING

We want to make a good impression. It's respectful.

Because we don't want to look like a filthy Romanian or something."

FILTHY

You will not replace us!

THE DREAM

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation,

we understand that greatness is never a given.

It must be earned.

It is time for us to realize that we are too great a nation

to limit ourselves to small dreams.

Much time has passed since Jefferson arrived for his inauguration.

The years and changes accumulate.

But the themes of this day he would know:

our nation's grand story of courage and its simple dream of dignity.

We are one nation and their pain is our pain.

Theirs dreams are our dreams and their success will be our success.

Though we march to the music of our time, our mission is timeless.

Together, we will make America strong again.

We will make America wealthy again.

We will make America proud again.

We will make America safe again.

And, yes, together, we will make America great again.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.

Thank you, God bless America.

We sometimes make mistakes.

We have not been perfect.

But if you look at the track record,

as you say, America was not born as a colonial power.

Well, actually it was...

America was born as a colonial power.

And this fact is a difficult one to admit.

For it bears the fatal capacity to disrupt the core story

we have been told all these years and the very foundation of this country.

It's not an easy story to tell.

Because the story still continues today.

A story of the search for purity and for a godly Kingdom.

A story of survival and violence.

A search for origin 400 years after the voyage that is said

to have "made the nation."

1962, Brooklyn, New York.

This is me in the middle. The author.

I am not sure how I ended up here.

Although I might have my suspicion.

This is British explorer Henry Morton Stanley. On the Congo river.

This is me with Henry.

My parents are working there for the newly independent republic of Congo,

like a few hundred other Haitian nationals,

hired by the UN to replace the Belgians who had fled their former colony.

New York, 1964.

My brother H�bert and me, on our way to public school P.S. 138 in Brooklyn.

Between Nostrand and Rogers.

First time in the snow.

My mother and my cousin came down for the picture,

before going to their factory jobs in the Garment District.

On our way to Congo again, after General Mobutu's 1965 coup.

Despite his crimes, Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga,

would remain a welcome guest everywhere for the next 30 years.

It helps when you are one of the richest men in the world

and you control an extravagant assortment of copper,

uranium, cobalt, diamonds and gold.

We traveled a lot

because of another dictator.

Nelson Rockefeller, future vice president of the US

visits Fran�ois Duvalier, July 1969.

But it doesn't feel like an exile.

I am with family.

I am an immigrant from a "shithole" country, like he said.

There is this one short simple sentence,

that sums up the history of the Western World and the European continent.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a Polish writer named Joseph Conrad,

who often thought in French but wrote in English,

succeeded in putting it into words in his novel entitled "Heart of Darkness".

This sentence, spoken by Kurtz, the main character of Conrad's book,

will be the last on the civilizing task of the white men

among the savages of Africa.

And this sentence says nothing about Europe

as the original home of humanism, democracy and welfare.

It says nothing about anything to be rightly proud of.

It simply tells the truth we prefer to forget.

The English word "exterminate," from the Latin "extermino,"

means "drive over the border to death, banish for life."

The object of the action is seldom a single individual,

but usually whole groups, such as quitch grass, rats, or people.

The term "brutes," of course, reduces the object to its mere animal status,

AN OUTPOST OF PROGRESS Hugo Vieira da Silva, 2016

Africans have been called beasts

ever since their very first contact with Europeans

who described them as "rude and beastly."

It is in the seventeenth century, that Thomas Hobbes said to a friend:

"Some men are of so cruel a nature,

as to take a delight in killing men more than you should to kill a bird".

This is Sven Lindqvist.

A man I now call a friend.

He wrote the book entitled: "Exterminate all the brutes."

This is also his story.

Sven told me:

In an Algerian town, in the desert named Salah,

the Scottish explorer Alexander Gordon Laing, was attacked and robbed.

He had five saber cuts on the crown of his head and three on the left temple.

The one on his left cheekbone fractured his jawbone and slit his ear.

A dreadful gash in his neck scratched his windpipe; and so on.

Laing was attacked in January 1825.

But fear is timeless.

"A man may destroy everything within himself, wrote Conrad.

Love and hate and belief and even doubt.

But as long as he clings to life, he cannot destroy fear.

Fear always remains."

Perhaps in fear we seek an increased perception of life?

A more competing form of existence?

I am frightened; therefore I exist.

The more frightened I am, the more I exist?

There was a land named Tsenacommacah,

which means "densely inhabited land."

It was a powerful confederacy of more than 30 nations, led by Wahunsonacock,

better known as the father of Pocahontas.

On May 14, 1607,

104 English men and boys landed on Tsenacommacah,

on the bank of the Powhatan River, and decided to establish a settlement.

But soon enough, it was very clear that they lacked a supply line

and proved unable or unwilling to grow crops or hunt for their own sustenance.

Military leader John Smith threatened to kill all the women and children

if the Powhatans would not feed and clothe the settlers

as well as provide them with land and labor.

The leader of the Powhatan confederacy, Wahunsonacock, entreated the invaders:

"Why should you take by force that from us which you can have by love?

Why should you destroy us, who have provided you with food?

What can you get by war?

What is the cause of your jealousy?

You see us unarmed and willing to supply your wants,

if you will come in a friendly manner,

and not with swords and guns, as to invade an enemy."

Smith's threat was carried out.

After all, he worked for the "Virginia Company of London",

a for-profit enterprise.

War against the Powhatans started in August 1609

and the elimination was the order of the day.

Sven tells me: "You already know enough.

So do I. It is not knowledge we lack.

What is missing is the courage to understand what we know

and to draw conclusions."

For we know now when the story started.

We know now, when race, color, and blood

became institutionalized for the first time.

We saw it taking form with the Crusades

when the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain,

together with the church leadership and other European monarchies,

decided to take over Muslim-controlled trade routes to the Far East.

The ultimate goal of the Church and the European rulers

was never just about winning souls to Christianity.

It was also about gaining wealth and power through annihilation.

In 1478, the Pope approved

the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition,

which had to investigate

the "cleanliness of blood" of Moorish and Jewish converts.

"Clean blood" was Christian/European;

"unclean blood" was savage, non-Christian.

This is the origin of the ideology of white supremacy.

For the first time in the world,

the concept of race based on "blood" was used as law.

White supremacy made it possible for Europeans

to think it was acceptable to enslave or exterminate other peoples.

That led to the mass deportations of Jews from Spain in 1492,

and Muslims in the following decades.

It happened with the forced deportation of more than ten million Africans

from the human motherland.

It happened to Native peoples

in what came to be called the United States of America.

And again in the 20th century,

without any contrition, it happened during the Holocaust.

The road to Auschwitz was paved in the earliest days of Christendom.

And this road also leads "straight to the heart of America."

TRIUMPH OF THE WILL Leni Riefenstahl, 1935

Olympiastadion, Berlin

A people which does not hold with the purity of its race, perish!

The Germans have been made the sole scapegoats for ideas of extermination

that are actually a common European heritage.

Racial researcher, Berlin, 1930

There was a discussion in Germany, in the seventies, over the question:

is the Nazi extermination of the Jews unique or not?

Geneticist, Berlin, 1930

All historical events are unique and not copies of each other.

But they can be compared.

There are similarities and differences

between the extermination of the Jews and other mass murders.

I have seen these images before.

They are always the same. Everywhere. In ancient and modern times.

The ridicule of their display.

It is their banality that gets me every time.

FANATICISM, EXPLOITATION, SLAVERY, CONQUEST, CONTEMPT FOR ALIENS

Then the outcome will not be the victory of Jewry,

but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.

Blackfeet Indian communities of Montana

as documented by Walter McClintock (1870-1949)

No one points out that during Hitler's childhood,

a major element in the European view of mankind was the conviction

that "inferior races" were by nature condemned to extinction.

The truly charitable attitude of the superior races

consisted in helping them on their way.

All German historians participating in this debate

seemed to look in the same direction. None looks to the West.

But Hitler did.

He had found his models.

HOME MOVIES Eva Braun, 1940-1945

Of course, one man alone did not single handedly engineer

the killing of more than 6 million Jews.

G. Krupp receives the golden medal of the Nazi Party, 1940

Hundreds of thousands of enablers, were also there to plan, execute,

or to simply profit from it.

Renowned industrialist Henry Ford gave the Nazi party

all the profit from cars sold in Germany.

And every year,

an additional 350 000 dollars was allocated for Hitler's birthday.

While millions of others, committed themselves, to remaining silent.

Madison Square Garden German-American Bund's Rally, February, 1939

If you ask what we are actively fighting for under our charter,

first, a socially just white, Gentile ruled United States.

Second, Gentile-controlled labor unions,

free from Jewish Moscow-directed domination.

- I want some music. - I'm not against it, Klutzky.

MOLOCH Alexander Sokurov, 1999

The essence of this story is fragile.

It requires renunciation of all prejudices.

Modesty and humility are needed here.

IT'S NOT ABOUT LOVE Raoul Peck, 1997

THE YOUNG KARL MARX Raoul Peck, 2017

THE SCHOOL OF POWER Raoul Peck, 2009

I AM NOTYOUR NEGRO Raoul Peck, 2017

Why do I bring myself into this story?

Where do I fit in it?

As a filmmaker, I am compelled to stay hidden in the background.

Restrained, moderate, balanced, judicious, neutral even.

You learn to avoid becoming the subject of your film.

It's not about you. Unless the story is bigger than you.

In that case, you go for broke.

Neutrality is not an option.

And those who seek history with an upbeat ending,

redemption, or reconciliation, may search in vain.

Such a conclusion cannot be expected.

In the late-fifteenth century,

Europeans started to colonize the New World.

Crossing the Atlantic, Columbus, an Italian,

landed on an Island that he claimed for Spain.

In 1497, John Cabot, also an Italian,

claimed another territory for the King of England.

In 1500 Pedro Alvares Cabral, a Portuguese,

serving his own king, reached Brazil.

Vasco Nunez de Balboa crossed through a piece of land to find the Pacific.

He claimed it for Spain.

Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese,

also did the same for Spain and died on his way around the world.

The Italian Giovanni da Verrazano,

followed the coastline of North America for the King of France

and got a bridge named after him in New York.

In 1534, Jacques Cartier claimed another piece for France

and named it Canada.

A few years before, Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian sailing for Portugal,

had proved Columbus wrong again,

in that he had not reached the West Indies,

but what he would then call the New World.

As a result, a German cartographer, Martin Waldseemuller,

gave the name America to the whole continent.

From the beginning, the extension of the United States

from sea to shining sea was the intention and design

of the country's founders.

"Free" land was the magnet that attracted European settlers.

This particular form of colonialism is called settler-colonialism.

But as a system, it requires violence.

It requires: the elimination of the Natives

and their replacement by European settlers.

GET A HOME OF YOUR OWN

EASY PAYMENTS

POSSESSION WITHIN 30 DAYS

Inherited Indian Land For Sale

Come to Nothern Kansas Bring your family

The charge of genocide, when applied to the United States,

has been unacceptable for a very long time.

But the evidence leaves no other choice today.

From the first settlements to the founding of the United States

and continuing into the 21th Century,

the elimination of the Native,

is consciously or unconsciously, wired into the process.

This is a story, not a contribution to historical research.

Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Pennsylvania

The nature of this historical process is still blurred by the notion

that violence was committed equally by the colonized and the colonizer.

But people do not hand over their land, their resources,

their children and their futures, without a fight.

And that fight is always met with violence.

In US history, everything is about the land: who oversaw and cultivated it,

who fished its waters, maintained its wildlife;

who invaded and stole it.

It's about how the land became a commodity,

"Real Estate," broken into pieces to be bought and sold on the market.

It is about how African bodies became properties and source of labor,

and how poor white settlers embraced white supremacy

as a substitute for land and slaves.

The poet William Carlos Williams wrote:

"The land! Don't you feel it?

Doesn't it make you want to go out

and lift dead Indians tenderly from their graves,

to steal from them some authenticity..."

As if it must be clinging even to their corpses.

Without the unpaid forced labor of enslaved Africans,

a farmer growing cash crops could not compete on the market.

Once in the hands of settlers,

the land itself was no longer sacred or collective,

as it had been for the Indigenous people.

It became private property.

A commodity to be acquired and sold,

every man a possible king, or at least wealthy.

Most of the founders were also real estate men.

George Washington made his fortune off land speculation Indian land.

And then, "the land" came to mean the country, the flag,

the military, as in "the land of the free" from the national anthem.

Those who died fighting in foreign wars

were said to have sacrificed their lives to protect "this land"

that the old settlers had spilled blood to acquire.

But the blood spilled was Indigenous blood.

This is Sven again.

He reminds me of these old-time adventurers,

who explore the human species.

Whatever difficulties and danger it involves,

whatever faraway travels it requires.

Definitely not a white savior.

On the contrary, he is one of these few Europeans

who dare see the beast for what it is.

Sven is a witness.

Sven traveled the world.

Sven told me stories.

Some of which I already knew.

He told me about this world, about his world. Without cynicism.

Which would not be inconceivable at this stage of the story.

For Sven saw my world. Lived in it.

As I lived in his.

And he wrote about it.

Making it palpable.

And when he delved into the horror,

I knew what he meant and what he went through.

I could trust him.

Our distinctive skin colors never were an obstacle.

And that is the way it should be.

THE MURKY SECRET OF RUBBER

In 1887, the Scottish surgeon J. B. Dunlop hit upon the idea

of equipping his young son's bicycle with an inflatable rubber tube.

The bicycle tire was patented in 1888.

Four years earlier, the Europeans and the United States

had decided that it was necessary to regulate

the thriving exploitation of the African continent

other than by whoever got there first,

was the boldest or the most murderous.

A situation that was, naturally, detrimental

to any respectable business environment.

They convened the Congo Conference to arbitrate the looting.

The main outcome, of this "gentlemen's agreement"

was definitive elimination of most existing forms

of African autonomy and self-governance.

At the Conference, Belgium's king, Leopold the Second,

managed to secure the whole Congo as his private property,

a territory 80 times bigger than Belgium.

Basically twice the surface area of Texas and California combined.

During the years that followed, demand for rubber exploded.

This would carry incalculable consequences for the villages in Congo.

The king instituted a monopoly on rubber and ivory

and ordered all natives to supply labor and products without payment.

Those who refused had their villages burned down, their children murdered,

and their hands cut off.

Such methods led to a dramatic increase in profitability.

Profits which helped in building, among other things, impressive monuments,

that still decorate Brussels today.

Monuments paid for with amputated hands.

Rubber Plantation Congo, 1895

"I bring you clarity," said the prophet,

"that you may understand the world around you."

God tells us that real life is after death.

The more we suffer, the more you are granted with joys in Heaven.

Can't this wait until the end of my service?

Rubber doesn't wait!

- Where is my rubber? - That's all I got today.

- And why is that? - The trees have dried out.

You!

Get the basket!

No, stay, stay...

Please, please don't do that!

The Congo adventure was pure looting.

Leopold the Second running the numbers.

Plundering bodies.

Plundering resources.

The draining of a whole continent.

A multi-billion dollar heist.

10 years after the creation of the Congo state,

the writer Joseph Conrad sent his first short story,

"An Outpost of Progress", to Cosmopolis Magazine.

He, too, had gone up the Congo River on one of the Company's steamers.

He, too, had seen the trading post and listened to the passengers' stories.

The story is simple:

Two Europeans, Kayerts and Carlier,

are sent to a trading post on the banks of the Great Congo River.

Apart from collecting ivory from the locals,

they don't have much to do and have plenty of time to get bored.

Their only reading material is a yellowed newspaper

that praises colonial expansion as sacred work

in the service of Civilization.

At first the two companions believe these fine words.

But gradually they discover that such words are nothing but "sounds."

Sounds that lack content outside the society that created them.

Concepts such as "virtue", "crime" or "morality" are nothing but sounds.

Soon Kayerts and Carlier feel that no one is watching them.

One day, they agrue.

Kayerts shoots Carlier in self-defense

and does not realize until later

that in his panic he has killed an unarmed man.

As he sits by the body of his companion,

Kayerts for the first time really thinks.

Like the rest of mankind, he has gone around believing a lot of nonsense.

Left alone with their own weaknesses, far from any public opinion,

from any exterior gaze, any human being is likely to indulge in the worst.

Conrad and Wells knew about each other,

when the latter wrote "The Time Machine" in 1895.

Hatred and fear seize the time traveler.

He longs to kill Morlocks.

He wants to go straight into the darkness,

"to kill the brutes."

The time traveler falls asleep as he sits there in the darkness,

and when he wakes the Morlocks are onto him, soft and repugnant.

He shakes "the human rats" off him and starts striking out.

He enjoys the feeling of a swishing iron pipe

smashing into juicy flesh and crushing bones...

This killing in Wells is both horrific and voluptuous.

Wells' next book, which we know Conrad also read,

was called "The Island of Dr. Moreau".

Dr. Moreau uses his surgical skill

to create a kind of human being out of animals.

The first of them all to shed tears.

She is human! I'm not beaten!

- Get everything ready. - For what?

This time, I'll bum out all the animal in her!

No!

- I'll make her completely human. - No!

Dr. Moreau has created one hundred and twenty creatures,

but he has not succeeded in creating a real human being.

The Island of Dr Moreau is the story of colonialism.

Just as the colonizer civilizes the lower, more animal races with the whip,

Dr. Moreau civilizes the animals with torture.

Maximizing the pain in order to hasten evolution.

Just as the colonizer tries to create a new kind of creature,

the civilized savage,

Dr. Moreau tries to create the humanized animal.

You know what it means to feel like God?

In both cases, the means is terror.

Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now is based on "Heart of Darkness".

In it and in all the real wars,

the men representing civilization out in the colonies were "invisible"

not only in the sense that their guns killed at a distance,

but also in that no one at home really knew what they were doing.

AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GODS Werner Herzog, 1972

White by birth.

A default setting.

I know this story is painful, but we need to know it.

The happiness of one cannot be built on the pain of all others.

There is almost always a price to be paid.

Further down the line.

White by birth:

a simple pigmentation variation transformed into a source of power,

a mark of superiority, an authorization for abuses,

a justification for eternal immunity.

No modesty is necessary.

Nor is doubt a requirement.

The ultimate privilege.

To be continued...