Original subtitles

There is this one, short simple sentence

that sums up the history of the Western world.

"Exterminate all the brutes."

Free land was a magnet that attracted European settlers.

But as a system, it requires the elimination of the natives.

White supremacy made it possible for Europeans

to think it was acceptable to enslave or exterminate

other peoples.

The Congo adventure was pure looting.

Where's my rubber?

Belgium's king, Leopold II, instituted

a monopoly on rubber and ivory.

And ordered all natives to supply labor and products

without payment.

Why do I bring myself into this story?

Neutrality is not an option.

There is no such thing as alternative facts.

In kindergarten, in Haiti,

there was this allegorical image of Saint Francis of Assisi

on the last page of our reading book.

It didn't matter that St. Francis was obviously white.

At the time, I was still unaware of any civilizational

or racial differences.

I didn't even know

that such differences were possible.

Besides the fact that he was a saint, and I was not.

I knew as much about saints

as I knew about copulation and bees.

My ideas of religion, priests, or God

was at best naive, if not reckless.

I truly believed that all human beings were basically,

in some sort of natural way, brothers and sisters.

It was in this euphoric state

that I was sent to primary school,

a Jesuit institution.

On the very first day,

I got into a fight with another boy.

We were both sent to the head priest

to be disciplined.

While waiting for what I thought would be an appeasing pep talk

and reconciliatory handshake,

I had no doubt that the outcome would be peaceful.

I loved my world of serenity and understanding.

To my surprise, the head priest came in,

took a dry ox muscle hanging from the wall,

and, without a word, whipped us raw

with three lashes each.

I was so stunned that I didn't cry.

Minutes later, alone in the schoolyard,

I realized that the world was not what I was told it would be.

The rituals, the dogma, the theatrics,

were now transparent.

I decided that I was not going to be an imbecile in that show.

Especially if it involved saint, priest, and whip,

in that order.

Then, I stopped believing in God altogether.

I knew a man.

I knew him well enough to be able to call him a friend.

He was a scholar. One of the brightest.

One day, I learned of his death

after ten years of daily struggle.

A cardiologist inserted a malfunctioning pacemaker

in his heart

that would destroy its functions.

By the time they realized the mistake, it was too late.

Michel-Rolph wrote an extraordinary book,

Silencing the Past. A masterpiece.

The work of a lifetime.

By deconstructing the dominant narrative,

he changed everything.

Knowledge is power.

But "history is the fruit of power," says Trouillot.

Whoever wins in the end gets to frame the story.

On July 4th, 2012,

Trouillot passed away in his sleep

at his home in Chicago.

This is his story as well.

"Remember the Alamo," they say.

"But remembering can be quite selective," writes Trouillot.

Human beings participate in history

both as actors and as narrators.

Among the actors,

we find General Antonio López de Santa Anna,

a Mexican national hero, who, in his lifetime,

is said to have participated in more battles

than Napoleon and George Washington combined.

In his eventful career,

the Alamo was just a brief interlude

in a long streak of defeats and victories.

By the middle of February 1836,

his army had reached the crumbling walls

of the old mission of San Antonio de Valero

in the Mexican province of Tejas.

Some 200 American slave owners and militiamen

now occupied the Spanish mission,

nicknamed "the Alamo."

They refused to surrender to Santa Anna's superior force.

-On March 6th,

General Santa Anna blew the horns

that Mexicans traditionally used

to announce an attack to the death.

According to the celebrated story,

when it became clear that the choice

for the 189 Alamo occupants

was between escape and certain death

at the hands of the Mexicans,

Commander William Barret Travis drew a line on the ground.

Those men who wish to stay...

will cross the line and stand with me.

The others may go...

with my blessing.

Supposedly, everyone crossed.

Except, of course, the man who conveniently escaped

to tell the story.

I didn't survive Russia and Waterloo

to die in this desert.

Obviously, a Frenchman.

Santa Anna's troops broke through the fort,

killing most of the defenders.

A clear victory.

But a few weeks later, on April 21st at San Jacinto,

Santa Anna fell prisoner to Sam Houston,

the freshly certified leader

of the secessionist Republic of Texas.

Houston's men had punctuated their victorious attack

on the Mexican army with repeated shouts

of "Remember the Alamo! Remember the Alamo!"

With that reference to the old mission,

they doubly made history.

As actors, the Texans captured Santa Anna

and neutralized his forces.

As narrators, they give the Alamo story a new meaning.

What they didn't say is that General Santa Anna

quickly recovered from the upset

and went on to be the leader of Mexico four more times.

But this is not what history will remember.

General Santa Anna indeed lost the battle of the day,

but he also lost the battle he had won at the Alamo.

How much can we reduce what happened

to what is said to have happened?

Does it matter whether events are fact or fiction?

Most Europeans and North Americans learned more

about the history of Colonial America

and the American West from movies and television

than from books.

The Alamo? That was a history lesson

delivered by John Wayne on the screen.

What does it mean for our collective experiences?

Do we even wish for a common history?

Does it really not matter

whether or not the Holocaust is true or false?

Does it really not make a difference

whether or not the leaders of Nazi Germany

planned and supervised the killing of six million Jews?

If six million do not really matter,

would two million be enough?

Or would some of us settle for 300,000?

If there is nothing to be proved, or disproved,

what then is the point of the story?

The history of America is being written in a world

where few little boys want to be Indians.

In 1492, neither Europe as we know it

nor whiteness as we now experience it

existed as such.

Here is the story we have been told.

Christopher Columbus was born to a Genoese merchant family,

and as a trader at sea, joined other European navigators

competing for gold and other lucrative commodities,

a market long dominated by Muslim traders.

It was no secret that the Earth was spherical,

and Columbus believed a shorter, more direct route

could be used to reach valuable exotic spice islands.

Columbus sold the idea to the Spanish monarchy,

and off he sailed with three ships

headed directly west across the Atlantic.

Instead of the bustling ports of the East Indies,

Columbus came upon a tropical paradise

populated by the Taíno people,

what is now Haiti.

-Then, from the Iberian Peninsula,

came merchants, mercenaries, criminals, and peasants.

They seized the land and property

of Indigenous peoples

and declared the territories to be extensions

of the Spanish and Portuguese states.

These acts were confirmed by the monarchies

and endorsed by the papal authority

of the Roman Catholic Church.

That's more or less the official story.

And through that official story,

a new vision of the world was created...

The Doctrine of Discovery.

The extent of the demographic catastrophe that followed

is without equivalent in world history.

Within 100 years, over 90 percent

of the original population of this continent

would be wiped out.

Despite large-scale massacres, torture,

and other inconceivable atrocities,

the great majority of these people

did not die in battle.

Most died of disease, hunger, and inhuman labor conditions

because their social organization

had been wrecked by the white conquerors.

Bartolomé de las Casas,

the first ordained priest to officiate in the New Indies,

was one of the witnesses and a chronicler

of this catastrophe.

Killing and enslaving other beings,

thought to be equally human, created a dilemma for him.

Bartolomé de las Casas

believed both in colonization

and in the humanity of the Indians.

He was torn between the symbolic and the practical,

incapable of reconciling the two.

Instead, he offered a poor and ambiguous compromise

that he would later regret,

freedom for the savages, the Indians,

slavery for the barbarians, the Africans.

Colonization won the day.

The 17th century saw the increased involvement

of England, France, and the Netherlands

in the Americas and in the slave trade.

The 18th century followed the same path

with an added touch of perversity.

The more European merchants and mercenaries

bought and conquered other men and women

in the Americas,

the more European philosophers wrote and talked about Man.

Meanwhile, there was no single view of Blacks

or of any non-white group, for that matter.

All assumed that, ultimately,

some humans were more so than others.

Viewed from outside the West,

the Age of Enlightenment was a century of obscurity.

In the Western conception,

Man was primarily European and male.

Everyone else was at the lowest level

of this hierarchy.

I have no complaints.

I just want to understand.

Trading human beings,

what sick mind thought of this first?

Brought by force and pushed to death.

Slavery.

Or "the trade," as they refer to it euphemistically.

A state-sponsored genocide.

What does this say about a civilized world?

No. I have no complaints. I just want to understand.

What if, from the beginning,

the story was inaccurate?

What if it was not just a question

of vocabulary or interpretation?

Perhaps a case of collective borderline personality disorder?

Okay.

Let's go.

-What?

What about the boat?

Boat's probably stuck in Matadi up the river.

I need to join my parish.

I'm already two months late.

So?

Wait!

Wait!

Come on! Let's go, let's go!

Faster!

Keep them tight! Keep them tight!

-Go, go! Go!

Faster!

What is this?

Dammit, faster!

Go! Go! Faster!

-You there! -Faster!

You!

Stop that at once!

What do you think you are doing with those children?

What children?

These are shipments.

Shipments?

They are to be trained as soldiers by the state.

Or sold as slaves.

-Hey!

Faster!

Keep them tight!

In Columbus's travel journal,

there is a description of the first sighting of land

on Thursday, October 11th, 1492.

"At two hours after midnight, land appeared,

from which they were about two leagues distant.

They hauled down the sails,

passing time until daylight Friday,

when they reached an islet and descended."

A normal day, after all.

The isolation of a single fetishized moment

creates a historical fact.

Once discovered, the Other is allowed

to finally enter the human world.

Whatever else may have happened

to other peoples in that process is reduced,

as if by magic, to a natural fact...

they were discovered.

Show me the way, my Lord.

Let me walk along your path.

Touch my heart to fear your name, my Lord,

as to surrender myself to your glory.

Show me the way, my Lord. Let me walk along your path.

-Touch my heart--

What's the problem now? What did he do?

Nothing. Why?

My dear Rose...

may these words convey to you the fullness of my sentiments.

I hope they will find you well.

It seems so strange to walk under this unbearable heat,

when only four months ago,

I could still comfort myself in your arms.

The madness in these distant lands

is hard to describe.

I am making new experiences.

Two days ago,

I saw my first corpses. A good dozen of them,

white little bodies, floating into the darkness.

Floating as if they were just resting for a long journey.

These...

are not our choices to make.

The ways of the Lord are infinite.

I miss so much

this delicate temple

hidden in the depth of your thighs.

Any historical narrative

is a particular bundle of silences.

It is an exercise of power that makes some narratives possible

and silences others.

In this fabricated narrative, not all silences are equal.

Our job as filmmakers, writers, historians, image-makers

is to deconstruct these silences.

From its first appearances,

the word nègre, "negro,"

entered French dictionaries

with increasingly precise negative undertones.

By the middle of the 18th century,

"black" was almost universally bad.

What had happened in the meantime,

was the expansion of African American slavery.

That was the most potent impetus

for the transformation of European ethnocentrism

into scientific racism.

Blacks were inferior and therefore enslaved.

Black slaves behaved badly and were therefore inferior.

The practice of slavery in the Americas

secured the Blacks' position

at the bottom of the human world.

By the time of the American Revolution,

European ethnocentrism had merged into scientific racism

and framed the ideological landscape

on both sides of the Atlantic.

The final years of the 18th century

were called the Age of Revolutions.

But one usually thinks of the American Revolution

starting in 1763,

and the French Revolution of 1789.

Not the Haitian Revolution of 1790.

Indeed, in those changing years,

a particular group of Black slaves,

men, women, and children, would rise.

In just ten short years, they would fight

and create the nation of Haiti,

the truly first free republic in America.

The only revolution that materialized

the ideal of enlightenment,

freedom, fraternity, and equality for all.

In 1790, French colonist La Barre

wrote to his wife in France to reassure her

of the peaceful state of life in the tropics.

"There is no movement among our Negroes.

They don't even think of it.

A revolt among them is impossible.

Freedom for Negroes is a chimera."

Just a few months later,

the events would ridicule these racist assumptions.

A nation is not an act of creation...

but a process of growth.

You will take the city of Cap Haitien...

but only when it is reduced to ashes.

And even on those ashes, I will fight you.

What happened in Haiti

contradicts most of what the West

has claimed about itself.

The silencing of the Haitian Revolution

is part of a narrative of global domination.

Nevertheless, the revolution played a central role

in the collapse of the entire system of slavery

and in the liberation of Latin America.

Haiti created the possible.

The Haitian Revolution was unthinkable

even as it happened,

but unthinkable only in the framework

of a self-centered Western thought.

Unthinkable in the West,

not only because it challenged slavery and racism,

but because of the way it did so.

It was the ultimate test of the universalist pretensions

of both the French and the American Revolutions.

And they both failed that test.

Confronted with this unthinkable,

Napoleon sent 65,000 troops to reestablish slavery in Haiti.

His whole army was defeated within two years,

forcing him to renounce his American dreams

and sell all his American properties.

The so-called Louisiana Purchase

doubled the size of the United States

and, through this added power, would accelerate the conquest

of the rest of Indian territories.

The debt owed to Haiti still remains to be paid.

I fell in love in Rome.

I made my first film in Berlin.

My parents spent 25 years in Africa.

My daughter was born in Uganda

and went to school in New Jersey.

One brother works for the Seminoles,

the other won an Emmy.

My older brother spent two years in Vietnam

and even more with PTSD.

Who are we?

I have taught filmmaking from Norway to Lebanon,

and from New York to Lomé.

Who am I?

Who am I in this official, pre-approved,

Eurocentric classification?

-Non!

Oui!

Oui!

Oui!

Oui!

Oui!

I once followed a charismatic man

whom I revered, and who one day betrayed his people.

I made a film about him, too.

Who am I?

I have traveled to many places,

and have never called them my own.

And no violence was ever involved.

Places where I lived. Places where I worked.

Places where I loved and sometimes was loved.

I played war in the streets of Léopoldville.

I rode a bicycle in Katanga.

I built houses in Cuba.

Who am I?

During the 16th century,

England began its brutal conquest of Ireland

and declared half a million acres of land in the north

open to settlement.

Under British colonial rule, the Irish were regarded

as a lower species and naturally inferior.

They were descendants of apes, while, of course,

the English were descendants of Man,

who had been created by God in His own image.

The English were angels.

But Britain's Irish policies brought economic ruin

to Ireland's wool and linen industries.

The invaders became losers.

This pushed nearly a quarter of a million

Calvinist Scots-Irish colonizers

to leave Ireland for British North America.

One of history's greatest migrations.

But as foot soldiers of British empire-building,

and even before ever encountering

Indigenous Americans,

the Scots-Irish had already practiced scalping for bounty,

on the Irish.

Theodore Roosevelt said of his Scots-Irish ancestors,

"They were a grim, stern people,

strong and simple, powerful in good and evil,

relentless, revengeful, suspicious,

knowing neither ruth nor pity.

They were of all men the best fitted

to conquer the wilderness

and to hold it against all comers."

They made up the officer corps

and were soldiers of the regular army

as well as the frontier ranging militias

that cleared areas for settlement

by exterminating Indigenous farmers

and destroying their towns.

They served in slave patrols

as well as in the Confederate Army.

They regarded themselves

as chosen people of the covenant,

commanded by God to go into the wilderness

to build the new Israel.

I, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, do solemnly swear

that I will faithfully execute

the office of president of the United States...

All modern nation states

claim a kind of rationalized origin story

upon which they fashion patriotism

or loyalty to the state.

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

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

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

So help me God.

According to God's unfathomable will,

one is born as part of the elect or not.

And being elected gives you the right

to implement God's will and eliminate the native people.

Because individuals could not know for certain

if they were among the elected or not,

material wealth became the manifestation of election.

Conversely, bad fortune and poverty,

not to speak of dark skin, became evidence of damnation.

"The attractiveness of such a doctrine is quite obvious,"

commented historian Donald Akenson.

"The Natives are immutably profane and damned,

while oneself is predestined to virtue."

The Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Colony

endorsed this virtue.

Forty-one of the Pilgrims, all men,

wrote and signed the compact,

invoking God's name while planting "the First Colony."

The United States is supposedly

a nation of immigrants.

But this assumption masks a reality

of over three centuries of violence.

According to the myth, the faithful citizens

come together of their own free will

and pledge to each other and to their God

to form and support a godly society,

and their God in turn

vouchsafes them prosperity in a promised land.

But for non-European immigrants,

no matter how much might they strive to prove themselves

to be as hardworking and patriotic

as descendants of the original settlers,

they are suspect.

To be accepted, they must prove their fidelity to the covenant

-and what it stands for.

They must endeavor to embrace whiteness

and look down on descendants of enslaved Africans,

the Indigenous, and Mexicans,

none of whom, of course, are immigrants.

It was a messy night,

not Thursday anymore, but not yet Friday.

This is Howard Zinn,

probably the most decisive historian of this country.

This is Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a respected historian as well.

Her father was Scots-Irish,

and she once married a famous poet.

Howard and Roxanne are friends.

When Howard published A People's History of the United States,

it immediately became a milestone

in the deconstruction

of the official American narrative.

A distinguished white scholar

was for once questioning the dream

and telling the story differently.

One day, Roxanne asked Howard

why he left out parts of the Native peoples' story.

Howard listened quietly, then confessed,

"I don't know how to write it. Why don't you write it?"

So Roxanne did,

putting Native Americans at the center

and knowing that it was going to be painful.

I met Howard long before I met Roxanne.

And when I met Roxanne,

Howard had died a few years earlier.

And Howard never read Roxanne's finished book.

I learned from Howard, Roxanne, and Michel-Rolph

as we learn from our elders.

From them, I learned to favor the collective

over the individual.

To look for the "we" before indulging in the "I."

And to always place oneself within the world, not above.

Learning years.

Contrary to what has been asserted

about the birth of the United States

and its domination of the continent,

it was neither superior weapons, nor technology,

nor a superior number of settlers, nor disease,

that is to say, not "guns, steel, and germs,"

that can account for it.

The determining factor of this domination

was the willingness to eliminate whole civilizations of people

in order to possess their land.

The case of Andrew Jackson,

the seventh president of the United States,

is a telling story.

Andrew Jackson is enshrined in most U.S. history texts

in a chapter titled "The Age of Jackson,"

"The Age of Democracy," "The Birth of Democracy,"

or some variation thereon.

Jackson's family personified

the Protestant Scots-Irish migration.

He was an influential Tennessee land speculator,

politician, and wealthy owner

of a slave plantation near Nashville,

worked by 150 slaves, the Hermitage.

Jackson bought his first slave, a young woman, in 1788.

He was 21 years old.

When Tennessee became a state,

he was elected at the age of 29 as its first US senator,

an office he quit after a year

to become a judge in the Tennessee Supreme Court.

As a judge, he was in a better position

to seize Native lands.

It was in 1801 that Jackson first took command

of the Tennessee militia as a colonel

and began his Indian-killing military career.

In 1821, by then a national hero,

Jackson became military governor of the Florida territory.

In 1829, Jackson became president.

By that time, it was already clear

that this new nation called the United States of America

needed a clear and decisive policy

toward the first Americans.

It was their land, after all.

1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act.

Andrew Jackson immediately pushed through

to forcibly deport all Indigenous peoples

from east of the Mississippi

to what they would then call "Indian Territory."

The Seminoles in Florida were one of the nations

which firmly resisted.

Jackson sent in the army.

And as usual,

when a power decides to "solve" a problem,

especially if it includes the removal of whole peoples,

it turns ugly.

Quartermaster General Thomas Sidney Jesup

was made commander of that force.

He would become the embodiment

of every other henchman in history.

You will not replace us!

You will not replace us!

You will not replace us!

You will not replace us!

A treaty is an agreement signed by two nations

in order to establish borders

and conditions for their mutual survival.

But nevertheless, from 1832 to 1871,

American Indians were arbitrarily considered

to be "domestic dependent tribes,"

and as such,

any treaty had to be approved by the U.S. Congress.

Andrew Jackson said to Secretary of War John Caldwell Calhoun,

of Scots-Irish descent,

who considered slavery as a necessary evil,

"I think making treaties with Indians

is not only useless but absurd."

Indeed, to accept the term "treaty"

was to tacitly accept the notion of "nation."

During the Jacksonian period,

also called "the birth of the white republic,"

the United States made 86 treaties

with 26 Indigenous nations

between New York and the Mississippi,

all of them forcing land handovers

and including removals.

And then, they signed treaty after treaty

which were violated one after the other.

Famous French aristocrat and writer

Alexis de Tocqueville

witnessed part of what would become known

as the Trail of Tears.

He was present at the deportation

of the Choctaw people.

"I saw with my own eyes several of the cases of misery

which I have been describing.

I was the witness of sufferings

which I have not the power to portray."

"No cry, no sob.

All were silent."

Life, race, patriotism.

-What is a flag?

A piece of cloth to die for?

Or to kill for?

Explained in two words.

Hiroshima. Nagasaki.

Why wasn't it ever called a war crime?

Naming is power.

Is it because those who dropped the bombs got to name the deed?

We do not want to remember.

People create families, tribes, nations.

Sometimes, they need to protect the family,

defend the tribe, increase the nation's resources.

These acts might require being armed.

And over the centuries, we lost our purpose

and then our bearings.

That's when things turned nasty.