Original subtitles

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.