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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 U.S. 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...

...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.

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.

Hink-lah-mas-tchay.

All is well, then.

I do not want to spill Seminole blood,

kill Seminole children,

Seminole women.

Give us back the American property you stole

from our good fellowmen planters and settlers,

and I'll let you move to the Indian Territory

the U.S. government has provided for your people.

You call human beings your property?

They're slaves.

You steal land.

You steal life.

You steal humans.

What kind of species are you?

-This kind.

"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 nine-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 countries in Europe,

like everywhere else in the world,

hate is on the rise again.

We have people coming into the country,

or trying to come in, we're stopping a lot of them.

These aren't people,

these are 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, and that's a lot about...

The white establishment is now the minority.

We wanted to do a good impression.

It's respectful.

You will not replace us!

You will not replace us!

You will not replace us!

You will not replace us!

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, uh, 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'm not sure how I ended up here,

although I might have my suspicions.

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 Hébert 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.

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 20th 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 man 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.

Africans have been called beasts

ever since their very first contact with Europeans,

who described them as "rude and beastly."

It is in the 17th 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 compelling 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 14th, 1607,

a hundred and four 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 their 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 deportation 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.

The Germans have been made

the sole scapegoats for ideas of extermination

that are actually a common European heritage.

There was a discussion in Germany in the '70s

over the question,

"Is the Nazi extermination of the Jews unique or not?"

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.

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.

Of course, one man alone did not singlehandedly engineer

the killing of more than six million Jews.

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.

Heil!

While millions of others committed themselves

to remaining silent.

Wait, wait.

The essence of this story is fragile.

It requires renunciation of all prejudices.

Modesty and humility are needed here.

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 15th 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 Álvares Cabral, a Portuguese,

serving his own king, reached Brazil.

Vasco Núñez 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 Verrazzano

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 Waldseemüller,

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.

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 21st century,

the elimination of the Native is consciously,

or unconsciously, wired into the process.

This is a story,

not a contribution to historical research.

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 U.S. 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 have 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.

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 the definitive elimination

of most existing forms of African autonomy

and self-governance.

At the conference,

Belgium's king, Leopold II,

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.

"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's 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. Please, please don't do that.

The Congo adventure was pure looting,

Leopold II running the numbers.

Plundering bodies, plundering resources.

The draining of a whole continent.

A multi-billion-dollar heist.

Ten 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 argue.

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's 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 burn out all the animal in her!

No!

I'll make her completely human!

No, no! 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.

Do 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.

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 abuse,

a justification for eternal immunity.

No modesty is necessary.

Nor is doubt a requirement.

The ultimate privilege.

In Columbus' travel journal,

there is a description of the first sighting of land.

All modern nation states

claim a kind of rationalized origin story.

-So help me God. -So help me God.

-So help me God. -So help me God.

The United States is supposedly a nation of immigrants.

What if from the beginning...

the story was told the wrong way?

And through that official story,

a new vision of the world was created.