All language subtitles for Exterminate.All.the.Brutes.S01E04.WEBRip.x264-ION10

My parents
taught me that

as a Black person,
I should never find myself

on the wrong side
of the tracks.

I had to negotiate daily
with an enemy

infatuated with
a superiority complex.

The industrial development
of firearms

was playing an important role
in colonization.

And having more arms allows
more expansion.

More expansion means more wars.

Europeans started mistaking
military superiority

for intellectual
and even biological superiority.

Killing at a distance
had just taken on a new meaning.

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."

Land with no people
does not exist.

The idea that America
was virgin land,

a 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.

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 the 2nd, 2011,

were reporting in real time
to President Obama,

Secretary of State
Hilary Clinton,

and other officials in their
sealed Situation Room.

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 most 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.

"Indian country"
and "in-country"

mean "behind enemy lines."

All US wars re-enact
fundamentally the Indian Wars.

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.

Five dollars a head,
fifty cents a scalp.

In 1854 alone,

the federal government
paid more than a million dollars

to Indian hunters.

Many of the descendants
of those settlers

are at the forefront of
the Second Amendment activists.

They say that 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-fourths

of gun owners are men,

and 82 percent are white.

Taken together,
that's 61 percent

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

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.

Raphael Lemkin wrote,

"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."

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!

General Sherman,
question for you, sir.

General, here, sir.

General Sherman,

how do you see the end
to 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

does 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?

Are you 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's said that
they had him surrounded.

-Huh. Huh.

Now, that's what the fake press
wants us to believe.

What about Custer's regiment?

It's said
that they wanted revenge.

And what about the 25 soldiers

killed in "friendly fire"?

Shit happens.

And why is it you journalists

are always trying to make things
more complicated than they are?

It was a search action.

We told them to surrender
and hand over their weapons.

Which they did.

Well, that's your version.

Five days
after the sickening events

at Wounded Knee,
Lyman Frank Baum,

a Dakota Territory settler

who would become
very 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.

"The American Indian individual

shall have the right to choose
his or her citizenship,

and the American Indian nations
have the right to choose

their level of citizenship
and autonomy

up to absolute independence."

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."

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.

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 Antoine Izméry
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 Plötzensee,

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.

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'm 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 it was horrible,

and it was a horrible thing
to watch.

I think there's blame
on both sides,

you look at--
you look at both sides--

I think there's blame
on both sides.

George Washington
was a slave owner.

Are we gonna take down--

are we gonna take down
the statues?

How about Thomas Jefferson?

What do you think of
Thomas Jefferson? You like him?

These images
project a profound idea of self.

Or of 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.

But a complex world
calls for complex responses

with at least
some minimal agreement

over the diagnosis.

We never listen to the poor.

Those who are less poor
fear the loss of what they have.

And they are rebelling.

MARION MARÉCHAL-LE PEN:

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.

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.

This is a hardline issue
for people who live
in border states...

The president
is trying to protect
our borders from an invasion...

Forty-five thousand
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?"

On May 26, 1924,
President Calvin Coolidge

signed the Restriction Act
into law

and shut down immigration
by 97 percent.

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.

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 a thousand-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.

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.

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.

Twenty 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 four
and five 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 architects, manufacturers,
plumbers, bankers,

to landscapers, agronomists,
and SS henchmen,

their organizational
creativeness was unparalleled.

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 atrocities
have been committed

and are being committed
in the name of progress,

civilization, socialism,
democracy, and the market.

And this
for the last thousand 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.

No.

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.

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.

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 didn't 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.

No justice, no peace!

Do not let our planet die!

Do not let our planet die!

We still
haven't seen anything yet.

This is only
the beginning of the beginning.

We are all together!
We are all here!

No, it's not knowledge we lack.