Original subtitles

In kindergarten, I realized that the world

was not what I was told it would be.

The dogma, the theatrics, were now transparent.

Killing and enslaving other beings,

created a dilemma for the Roman Catholic Church.

The compromise...

freedom for the savages, the Indians.

Slavery for the barbarians, the Africans.

Brought by force, and pushed to death.

A state-sponsored genocide.

The 18th century was called "The Age of Revolutions."

But one usually thinks of the American Revolution,

not the Haitian Revolution, which played a central role

in the collapse of the entire system of slavery.

The silencing of the Haitian Revolution

is part of a narrative of global domination.

The debt owed to Haiti still remains to be paid.

Since its first appearance in East Africa,

the human species has been on a long migration,

first to Asia, and then to Central Europe.

This process, lasting for multiple thousands of years,

can be considered as the premise of globalization.

On these roads,

the circulation of the most vital and decisive commodities

would permit the survival of the human race

and its adaptation on the planet.

And along these roads, for better or worse,

silk, of course, would circulate,

but also religion, language, refugees, artists,

technology, and pandemics.

People create families, tribes, nations.

Sometimes, they need to protect the family,

defend the tribe, increase the nation's resources.

Sometimes, it's just about surviving.

Other times, it's for the wrong reasons.

But whether for protection or conquest,

for preservation or profit,

these acts might require being armed.

And over the centuries, we lost our purpose,

and then our bearings.

-Fire!

At the beginning, the very powerful Moguls,

whose empire was founded in 1526 in India,

were more developed than any European state.

But they had no ships able to withstand artillery fire

or carry heavy guns.

Instead of building up their own fleet,

the Moguls chose to purchase defense services

from these European states.

This extremely lucrative commerce

would lead to the creation

of the first multinational corporations ever,

the British East India Company

and The Dutch East India Company.

Meanwhile, the Chinese had already

discovered gunpowder

and had already cast the first cannon

in the mid-13th century.

But they felt so safe in their part of the world

that they refrained from participating

in the naval arms race.

So the backward and poorly resourced Europe

of the 16th century would acquire a monopoly

on ocean-traveling ships, with guns capable

of spreading death and destruction

across huge distances.

Europeans became the masters of cannons

that killed long before the weapons

of their opponents could reach them.

The art of killing at a distance

became a European specialty.

Meanwhile, in the so-called Third World,

small arms were still able to measure up

-to those in Europe.

The standard weapon was a muzzle-loaded,

smooth-bored flintlock musket...

-...which was also manufactured

by village blacksmiths in Africa.

But these weapons were slow and difficult to handle.

They emitted puffs of smoke

that revealed where the marksman was.

To say nothing of the fact

that he also had to stand up while reloading.

The musket was a frightening weapon

for those who heard it for the first time.

But its range was only 100 yards.

So the colonial wars

of the first half of the 19th century

were lengthy and expensive.

Prussia replaced its muzzle loaders

with a breech-loaded Dreyse rifle.

This was tested for the first time in 1866

in the Austro-Prussian war over hegemony in Germany.

In 1884, Hiram Stevens Maxim

who also invented the mousetrap,

manufactured an automatic weapon that was light to carry

and fired nine rounds per second.

It was used by the Germans in East Africa in 1888,

and by the British in 1893 during the First Matabele War.

At the same time, steel had become so cheap,

it could be used for the manufacture of arms

on a large scale.

In Africa and Asia,

local smiths could no longer make copies of the new weapons

as they did not have access to industrially manufactured steel.

-At the end of the 1890s,

the revolution of the rifle was complete.

All European infantrymen could now fire

lying down without being spotted,

-in all weathers.

Fifteen shots in as many seconds

at targets up to a distance of 1,000 yards,

confirming the myth

of the white man's invincibility.

Unfortunately, their bullets

were not totally efficient against "the savages

and fanatical tribesmen," as they called them,

for they often continued their charges

even after being hit four or five times.

The answer was the dumdum bullet,

or expanding bullet,

named after the factory in Dum Dum outside Calcutta.

The lead core of the dumdum bullet

explodes the casing,

causing large, painful wounds that do not heal well.

The use of dumdum bullets between civilized states

would soon be prohibited.

They were to be reserved for big game hunting

and non-white unarmed populations in colonial wars.

At Omdurman, in 1898,

the whole new European arsenal was tested

against a numerically superior and very determined enemy.

One of the most cheerful depicters of war,

Winston Churchill,

later winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature,

was the war correspondent of the Morning Post.

"Nothing like the Battle of Omdurman

will ever be seen again," wrote Churchill in a book

published after the experience.

"It was the last link in the long chain

of those spectacular conflicts

whose vivid and majestic splendor

has done so much to invest war with glamour.

This kind of war was full of fascinating thrills,"

he wrote.

The morning of September 2nd, 1898, the following occurred.

"The White Flags were nearly over the crest.

In another minute,

they would become visible to the batteries."

"Did they realize what would come to meet them?

They were in a dense mass,

2,800 yards from the 32nd Field Battery

and the gunboats.

The ranges were known. It was a matter of machinery.

The mind was fascinated by the impending horror.

I could see it coming. In a few seconds,

swift destruction would rush on these brave men.

They topped the crest

and drew out into full view of the whole army.

Their white banners made them conspicuous above all.

As they saw the camp of their enemies,

they discharged their rifles with a great roar of musketry

and quickened their pace."

"It was a terrible sight,

for as yet they had not hurt us at all,

and it seemed an unfair advantage

to strike thus cruelly when they could not reply."

Churchill found the enemy's plan of attack

wise and well-thought-out, except for one vital point.

It was based on a fatal underestimation

of the effectiveness of modern weapons.

"Within the space of five hours,

the strongest and best-armed savage army

yet arrayed against a modern European power

had been destroyed and dispersed

with hardly any difficulty, comparatively small risk,

and insignificant loss to the victors.

Thus ended the Battle of Omdurman,

the most striking triumph ever gained

by the arms of science over barbarians,"

wrote Churchill.

At Omdurman,

no British soldier expected to be killed,

for this was only a sporting element

in a splendid game.

The industrial development of firearms

was playing an important role in U.S. colonization as well.

As a war president, George Washington

thought it unreasonable to rely on foreign weapons.

With generous start-up funds, lucrative long-term contracts,

and heavy tariffs on foreign imports,

he literally jumpstarted the U.S. arms industry

into becoming the world's first arms manufacturer.

The very first corporation

established by the United States

was the Springfield Armory in Western Massachusetts,

founded in 1777.

It soon introduced standardized interchangeable parts

and assembly line production, key factors in the takeoff

of the Industrial Revolution in the U.S.

and its establishment

as a capitalist, imperialist state.

And having more arms allows more expansion.

More expansion means more wars,

for which you then need more arms.

A profitable chicken-and-egg bonanza

in a totally incestuous relationship

between military industry and governments.

The so-called Monroe Doctrine

became the order of the day.

At its core, in 1850, it was a mere commitment

to keep the Americas, North and South,

safe from European colonizing ambitions.

Over the years, from President Theodore Roosevelt

to John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan,

the doctrine came to cover any perceived threat

to U.S. interests around the world.

Overseas domination became the goal.

As Reverend Josiah Strong argued in 1885

in his best-selling book Our Country,

"As a superior race,

the U.S. had a divine responsibility

to control the world."

There is something we need to talk about.

Something that keeps bothering me,

and that we cannot leave out of the present story...

especially because it represents,

in a troublesome way, the symbol of all evil.

It is something odd, hidden deep behind two words.

Hiroshima. Nagasaki.

It was said that it was a war against fascism.

It was said that it was to prevent further American death.

But hundreds of thousands died.

The accounting is irrefutable.

In a chess game, the objective is to checkmate

the opponent's king.

All other pieces then become collateral.

Their respective value depends on the strategic value

you assign to them.

In the present case, the king is an emperor,

and Japanese deaths will provide the collateral.

Shock and awe. A massacre determined by an algorithm.

It came at eight o'clock on August 6th, 1945.

Nobody was expecting it.

They were pawns in a sordid game.

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

No explanation required.

No cries tolerated, nor pity.

Surrender or death at best.

An endless wasteland of dead people.

For it is a massacre, not a heroic act.

Why wasn't it ever called a war crime?

Is it because those who dropped the bombs

are those who got to name the deed?

"Naming is power," said Trouillot.

Two days after the bombing of Nagasaki,

President Truman said...

"The only language they seem to understand

is the one we used to bomb them.

When dealing with an animal...

treat it like an animal.

It's totally unfortunate, but it's still the truth."

Indeed, there is no more to say.

We know now what the task truly is...

for Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness,

as well as at the Battle of Omdurman.

Exterminate all the brutes.

-Take the cup.

Okay, great.

Why don't you take off your shirt?

No, not you, Henry. The young man.

Can you translate for him?

Good. Make him look more natural.

Yeah, native, blending in. You know what I mean?

-Yeah, okay.

Change position.

Really? You want to just lay down like this?

Well, at least take the cigar.

Take the cigar!

Okay, boy? Hey, you, boy!

Look at him.

Of course, I know he doesn't speak Spanish.

Put a hand on your hip like this.

-Yeah, you see? Perfect!

Change position. Both of you stand up.

Okay. Pick up the rifles.

-Him, too. Yeah. One each.

Okay. And put the gun on your shoulder.

Well, help him with it.

Henry-- Okay. Don't tell him, show him.

No. You know what?

-Put it on the other side.

Yeah. Now, Henry, look at the distance.

You are looking at the Nile River over there.

Be inspired. Show some passion.

The whole world has been waiting for you.

-That's it!

Awesome!

Yup. Classic Stanley.

He tends to overdramatize every so often. Can't help it.

The man changed my name from Ndugu M'hali

to Kalulu because it sounded better.

I have never told him

how I enjoy his company sometimes.

But occasionally, he can be quite a bully too.

He brought me with him to Europe and America,

as his butler, officially.

But when alone, we were just friends.

Go figure.

The fearless explorer and the noble savage.

That in the press, he called me his "infant cannibal"

should have tipped me off.

I have been a good soldier all my life.

The perfectly well-educated pupil

of a Western humanistic civilization.

I thought that to be mature was to be knowledgeable,

smart, sophisticated, and gracious.

I was educated to believe that some types of behavior

were acceptable, and others were not.

And that when I had done wrong,

I had to learn from that experience.

My parents taught me that, as a Black person,

I should never find myself on the wrong side of the tracks.

I learned to behave.

I learned to be sociable, presentable, congenial.

I had to negotiate daily with an intimate, unnamed,

and vulgar enemy, infatuated with a superiority complex.

Let's say, like Frank T.J. Mackey.

I will not apologize for what I need.

Or Jordan Belfort.

I have been a good soldier

and a good learner,

but I could never really fathom what it actually means

to be superior,

logically degrading everybody else as inferior.

A singular assumption, to say the least.

Visiting Europe, I discovered people who genuinely thought,

and were naively convinced, that they embodied the world.

The whole world. And in that world,

I was assigned the role of a footnote.

Or at best, like in most Hollywood movies,

a supporting role with guarantied death

and careless disposal by some wild beast,

sometimes before the third act.

-Go back!

Back across the log! Get Jimmy outta here!

-No! -Gotta run, Jimmy.

-Run!

Joseph Conrad's book, Heart of Darkness,

was influenced by the Battle of Omdurman.

Conrad starts the novel

with what has been called "the toolbox of imperialism,"

which involves the ship's guns that fire on a continent,

the railway that facilitates the plundering of the continent,

the river steamer that carries Europeans and their weapons

into the heart of the continent.

This new era in the history of imperialism

also became a new era in the history of racism.

Europeans started mistaking military superiority

for intellectual and even biological superiority.

That's when things turned nasty.

No one had to pretend anymore.

Okay. Please look over here. Mm.

Please, you there!

Could you move a bit to the right?

And you! That's not you! Don't move.

You, a little to the left. Yep.

Now, you give him a hand.

No! You give him a hand, I said.

Well, then, you take another hand.

And you, it's this one. It's a hand and hand.

Excellent. Okay. So, the big guy,

with the towel head, if you can just move back a bit.

Perfect.

Excellent. I think that's it.

I like that.

Can you just uncross your arms, please?

-Why? -You wanna know why?

It makes you look defiant, that's why.

I'm just saying.

Okay. Keep it that way, for all I care.

"Does the West have the will to survive?"

asked a U.S. president.

The question itself is perplexing.

Clearly, I am not included in his concept of the West.

Unquestionably, to belong to the right civilization

does bear some entitlements.

I might be wary of white institutions in general

and of the religious ones in particular,

but for some reason,

I was attracted to the idea of joining the Boy Scouts.

My best friend and neighbor in Leopoldville,

the son of a French doctor, was a Boy Scout.

Robert knew all the regulatory moves.

He even had a code name, Red Raven,

because he had red hair.

He taught me the signs, the knots,

and even tightly kept secrets.

The idea of a brotherhood of the like-minded captivated me,

but not as much as the idea of owning a multi-task pocketknife

and being allowed to dare make unsafe fires in the woods.

Baden-Powell is the founder of the Boy Scouts.

During the second Ashanti War in 1896,

two days' march away from the capital, Kumasi,

as the commander of the advance troop,

he received an envoy offering unconditional surrender.

To his disappointment, he did not have to fire

a single shot at the natives.

To get hostilities going,

the British then planned extreme provocations.

So they arrested the king of Ashanti,

King Prempeh, together with his whole family.

The king and his mother were forced to crawl on all fours

up to the British officers

sitting on crates of biscuit tins,

to demonstrate their subjugation.

But still, this time as well, the British unfortunately

found no use for their weapons.

Baden-Powell writes to his mother...

"I thoroughly enjoyed the outing,

except for the want of a fight

which I fear will preclude our getting any medals

or decoration."

This is young and ambitious Georges Cuvier.

On January 27th, 1796,

Georges has just arrived in Paris

to hold his first lecture at the newly opened

Institut National de France. He is 26.

Cuvier was sensational.

He spoke of the mammoth and the mastodon.

Remnants of these huge elephantine animals

had recently been found in Siberia and North America.

Cuvier demonstrated that they did not belong

to the same species

as either the Indian or the African elephant,

but constituted species of their own, now extinct.

"Now extinct."

Those were the two words that horrified the listeners.

Because in the 18th century,

people still believed in a ready-made universe

to which nothing could be added.

And perhaps, even more important to mankind's peace of mind,

nothing could be subtracted from it.

All of God's creatures, once created,

could not disappear from His universe.

"What then was the explanation for these gigantic bones

and strange animal-like stones that had puzzled man

since antiquity?" asked Cuvier.

Cuvier's idea, that there could be species

that had died out, gave rise to such resistance

that it took over 100 years to become accepted.

But how they had died out and why, he did not explain.

In 1850,

the great liberal philosopher Herbert Spencer--

yes, that Spencer--

wrote, "Imperialism has served civilization

by clearing the inferior races off the Earth."

"The forces which are working out

the great scheme of perfect happiness,

taking no account of incidental suffering,

exterminate such sections of mankind

as stand in their way.

Be he human or be he brute,

the hindrance must be got rid of."

Here, the human being was expressly placed

on an equal footing with the animal

as an object for extermination.

One could take Spencer's fantasies of annihilation

as personal eccentricities,

explained perhaps by the fact that all Spencer's siblings

had died when he was a child.

A calm and comforting conclusion.

Enter Robert Knox.

Knox had studied comparative anatomy

with Cuvier in Paris.

He was a Scot, had served as an army doctor

in South Africa, and had founded

a school of anatomy in Edinburgh.

"Can the dark races become civilized?

I should say not," says Knox.

All we know

is that since the beginning of history,

the dark races have been the slaves

of those lighter-skinned.

Of course, what he meant exactly by "dark race"

is not easy to answer.

Are the Jews a dark race? The Gypsies? The Chinese?

One could ask.

"I feel disposed to think that there must be a physical

and, consequently, a psychological

inferiority in the dark races,"

asserted Knox.

"The texture of the brain is, I think, generally darker,

and the white part more strongly fibrous.

But I speak from extremely limited experience."

Indeed, Knox says that he had done an autopsy

on only one colored person,

which somehow does demonstrate

the limitations of his experiments.

Thomas Jefferson found it inconceivable

that one single species could disappear from nature.

But nevertheless, more than 99 percent

of all species have already died out...

...most of them in a few catastrophes

that came close to wiping out all life.

This is the scope of our story.

As a young student, Charles Darwin,

regarded as the father of evolutionary biology,

heard Knox's controversial lectures.

In his book On the Origins of the Species,

published in 1859, he would demonstrate

that all species adapt to their environment

through natural selection.

Darwin argued in favor of a common origin

of all human races.

Although his thesis as such neither confirmed nor denied

Knox's and others' ideas regarding any hierarchy

within mankind, his theory of evolution

was clearly useful to the racists.

After Darwin, race became the decisive explanation

in far wider circles.

Racism was accepted and became a central element

in British imperial ideology.

After Darwin, it also became accepted

to shrug your shoulders at genocide.

If you were upset,

you were just showing your lack of education.

Genocide began to be regarded

as the inevitable byproduct of progress.

And prejudice against alien peoples,

which had always existed, was now given organized form

and apparent scientific validation.

"Meanwhile," added Darwin, "Regarding future life,

each person will have to judge for himself."

In just a few years,

the surface of the earth will be quite changed.

A new era is dawning

that will multiply the undertakings of man.

Light is consuming the darkness.

Let me introduce to you now, my dear colleague

Dr. Frederic Farrar, who has been recently elected

a fellow at the Royal Society.

In his major book, Systema Naturae,

the great Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus discriminates,

with his usual acuteness,

the intellectual and moral characteristics

of four great human families.

The Homo americanus, the Homo europeus,

the Homo asiaticus, the Homo afer.

Yet we believe

that these and all other races

may be reduced to three great classes or divisions.

Savage... semicivilized...

and civilized.

Only two races, the Aryan and the Semitic,

were civilized.

The Chinese belonged to the semicivilized,

as they had once been brilliant,

but suffered from arrested development.

The savage races have always lived in the same ignorance

and wretchedness.

They are without a past and without a future...

doomed,

as races infinitely nobler have been before them,

to a rapid and inevitable extinction.

Out of all their teeming myriads,

never have they produced one single man

whose name is of the slightest importance

to the history of our race.

History starts when man starts to write.

Take a specimen from the 100 million of Africans,

not one of the most degenerates, such as the Hottentot,

but a real, pure-blooded Negro.

What hope was there that he could be civilized?

The great majority of Negroes will go under in a decline

from which only a few can be saved.

Many races have already disappeared.

Please, gentlemen. Ladies, let's be civil.

Show some respect. After all, it's just science.

Fuck you! Fuck you. Two times.

These races, the lowest types of humanity

and presenting its most hideous features

of moral and intellectual degradation,

were doomed to go under.

And I call them irreclaimable savages.

-Irreclaimable savages!

Irreclaimable savages!

What did actually happen

when knowledge, industry, and enlightenment

exterminated the inferior races?

Darwin, who had traveled to South America

in his younger years, knew.

He had seen General Rosas' men in Argentina,

butchering Indians, smothered in blood and vomit.

He knew how eyes were gouged out

when an Indian had sunk his teeth into a thumb

and refused to let go.

How women were killed, and prisoners made to talk.

He had a name for it.

He called it "the struggle for life."

-Last name? -Trouillot.

-First name? -Rolph-Michel.

-Ready? -Sure.

Like Roxanne, Michel-Rolph, and Sven,

I do have my nightmares as well.

Churchill said after the war,

"We are in the presence of a crime without a name."

But Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer of Polish-Jewish descent,

had already created that name in 1943.

Combining the ancient Greek "genos,"

which means "race, tribe, clan,"

and the Latin "cide,"

which expresses the notion of killing,

Lemkin invented the word "genocide."

At the New York Public Library,

in the Raphael Lemkin Collection,

in Reel 3, Box 2, Folder 1,

there is a list of the world's genocides throughout history.

"Some things are so evil

that it's enough that they simply happened,"

said the man.

"They don't need to be given a second existence

by being retold."

He took a drag on his cigarette.

"That's what I think on some days, anyway,"

he went on.

"Other days, I think the opposite."

The past has a future we never expect.

One of the fundamental ideas

of the 19th century

was that there are races, peoples, nations, and tribes

that are in the process of dying out.

Or, as the Prime Minister of England, Lord Salisbury,

expressed it in his famous speech

in Albert Hall on May 4th, 1898...

"One can roughly divide the nations of the world

into the living and the dying.

The weak nations become increasingly weaker

and the strong, stronger."

It was in the nature of things that the living nations

would fraudulently "encroach on the territory of the dying."

He spoke the truth.

During the 19th century, Europeans had encroached

on vast territories around the world.

The word "genocide" had not yet been invented,

but the matter existed.

Joseph Conrad may not have heard Lord Salisbury's speech.

He had no need to.

Conrad could no more avoid hearing

of the ceaseless genocide that marked his century

than any of his contemporaries could.

It is we who have suppressed it.

We do not want to remember.

We would prefer for genocide

to have begun and ended with Nazism.

This would indeed be most comforting.

For sure, the nine-year-old Adolf Hitler

was not in Albert Hall either

when Lord Salisbury was speaking.

He had no need to.

He knew it already.

The air Hitler and all other Western people

in his childhood breathed

was soaked in the conviction

that imperialism is a biologically necessary process

which, according to the laws of nature,

leads to the inevitable destruction of the lower races.

It was a conviction that had already cost

millions of human lives

before Hitler provided his highly personal application.

But in the mid-19th century,

the Germans had still not exterminated any people.

So they were able

to look more critically on the phenomenon

than other Europeans did.

In South West Africa, in 1904,

the Germans demonstrated that they, too, could master an art

that Americans, British, and other Europeans

had exercised all through the 19th century.

The art of hastening the extermination

of a people of inferior culture.

Following the North American example,

the Herero people were banished to reservations

and their grazing lands were handed over

to German immigrants and colonial companies.

For over two decades, their leader, Samuel Maharero,

had signed one treaty after another with the Germans,

and ceded large areas of land to avoid war.

But just as the Americans did not feel bound

by their treaties with the Indians,

the Germans did not think that, as a higher race,

they had any need to abide by treaties

they made with the natives.

As in North America, the German plans for immigration

presupposed that the natives were to be relieved

of all land of any value.

When the Hereros resisted,

General Adolf Lebrecht von Trotha

ordered their extermination.

Every Herero found within the German borders,

with or without weapons, was to be shot.

But most of them died without direct violence.

The Germans simply drove them into the desert

and sealed off the border.

One didn't yet talk about the final solution,

but that was what one had in mind.

In the official account of the war,

the German officers wrote,

"The army earned the gratitude of the whole fatherland.

The sentence had been carried out,

and the Hereros had ceased to be an independent people."

Eighty thousand human beings died in the desert.

The few thousand left were sentenced to hard labor

in concentration camps.

A new concept of incarceration,

invented in 1896 by the Spaniards in Cuba,

anglicized by the Americans,

entered German language and politics.

Paul Rohrbach wrote in his best seller,

German Thought in the World, published in 1912,

that "existences, be they of peoples

or individuals who do not produce anything of value,

cannot make any claim to the right to exist."

We believe that married people

who have transmissible diseases should not have children.

No couple who has the disease of feeble-mindedness,

or insanity,

or epilepsy should have children.

The over-infatuation with genetic purity.

An impressive amount of energy

put into the classification of people.

A pathological obsession for the concept of race

that scientifically does not exist.

Despite the careful staging,

one gesture, an unexpected gesture of irritation,

not foreseen by the director of this strange display,

will betray the masquerade and restore dignity.

What is sure

is that their way of life is threatened.

Has he, indeed, any right to exist?

Does she?

-Do they?

But after all we know now,

indeed, who is to judge?

I have seen these images before.

The same hatred of aliens.

The same violence.

The same roar when the leader speaks.

The western world is panicking.

You will not replace us!

A delirious, spiraling panic.

People are looking for saviors.

Any kind will do.

This is not immigration. This is invasion.

But possibly, one with easy-sounding solutions

that others will pay for.

Make America great again.

We have been there before, without learning much.

The facts are staring us in the face.