Exterminate All the Brutes (2021) s01e01 Episode Script

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 US 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.
Some guys care a lot for me
But my excitement they can't ban
Because I still await my primitive mate
We've had a date since the world began
My prehistoric man
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".
EXTERMINATE ALL THE BRURES
PART I
December 1836, Seminole and Maroons
encampment (today's Florida)
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.
All is well, then.
I do not want to spill Seminole blood,
to kill Seminole children,
Seminole women.
Give us back the American
property you stole
from our good fellowmen planters
and settlers
and I let you move
to the Indian Territory
the US government has
provided for your people.
You call human beings
your property?
These are slaves!
You steal land You steal life
You steal humans.
What kind of species are you?
This kind!
CHRISTMAS CATALOGUE
"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 9-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
country in Europe,
like everywhere else in the world,
Hate is on the rise again,
This is genocide on white people.
You make me puke.
When do we start deporting
those foreigners?
We have people coming into the country
or trying to come in
and we're stopping a lot of them
These aren't people.
These are animals.
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
The white establishment
is now the minority.
Things will only change, unfortunately,
when we'll resort to a civil war.
Doing the work the military regime
didn't do, killing about 30 000!
KILLING
We want to make a good impression.
It's respectful.
Because we don't want to look like
a filthy Romanian or something."
FILTHY
You will not replace us!
THE DREAM
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 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 am not sure how I ended up here.
Although I might have my suspicion.
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.
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.
Nelson Rockefeller,
future vice president of the US
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 twentieth 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 men
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,
AN OUTPOST OF PROGRESS
Hugo Vieira da Silva, 2016
Africans have been called beasts
ever since their very first contact
with Europeans
who described them
as "rude and beastly."
It is in the seventeenth 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 competing 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 14, 1607,
104 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 the 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 deportations
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."
TRIUMPH OF THE WILL
Leni Riefenstahl, 1935
Olympiastadion, Berlin
A people which does not hold
with the purity of its race, perish!
The Germans have been made the sole
scapegoats for ideas of extermination
that are actually a common
European heritage.
Racial researcher, Berlin, 1930
There was a discussion in Germany,
in the seventies, over the question:
is the Nazi extermination
of the Jews unique or not?
Geneticist, Berlin, 1930
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.
FANATICISM, EXPLOITATION, SLAVERY,
CONQUEST, CONTEMPT FOR ALIENS
Then the outcome will not be
the victory of Jewry,
but rather the annihilation
of the Jewish race in Europe.
Blackfeet Indian communities of Montana
as documented by Walter
McClintock (1870-1949)
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.
HOME MOVIES
Eva Braun, 1940-1945
Of course, one man alone
did not single handedly engineer
the killing of more
than 6 million Jews.
G. Krupp receives the golden medal
of the Nazi Party, 1940
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.
While millions of others, committed
themselves, to remaining silent.
Madison Square Garden German-American
Bund's Rally, February, 1939
If you ask what we are actively
fighting for under our charter,
first, a socially just white,
Gentile ruled United States.
Second, Gentile-controlled
labor unions,
free from Jewish Moscow-directed
domination.
- I want some music.
- I'm not against it, Klutzky.
MOLOCH
Alexander Sokurov, 1999
The essence of this story is fragile.
It requires renunciation
of all prejudices.
Modesty and humility
are needed here.
IT'S NOT ABOUT LOVE
Raoul Peck, 1997
THE YOUNG KARL MARX
Raoul Peck, 2017
THE SCHOOL OF POWER
Raoul Peck, 2009
I AM NOTYOUR NEGRO
Raoul Peck, 2017
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-fifteenth 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 Alvares Cabral,
a Portuguese,
serving his own king,
reached Brazil.
Vasco Nunez 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 Verrazano,
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 Waldseemuller,
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.
GET A HOME OF YOUR OWN
EASY PAYMENTS
POSSESSION WITHIN 30 DAYS
Inherited Indian Land For Sale
Come to Nothern Kansas
Bring your family
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 21th Century,
the elimination of the Native,
is consciously or unconsciously,
wired into the process.
This is a story, not a contribution
to historical research.
Carlisle Indian Industrial
School, Pennsylvania
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 US 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 had
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.
THE MURKY SECRET OF RUBBER
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 definitive elimination
of most existing forms
of African autonomy
and self-governance.
At the Conference,
Belgium's king, Leopold the Second,
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.
Rubber Plantation
Congo, 1895
"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 is 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!
The Congo adventure
was pure looting.
Leopold the Second running
the numbers.
Plundering bodies.
Plundering resources.
The draining of a whole continent.
A multi-billion dollar heist.
10 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 agrue.
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' 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 bum out
all the animal in her!
No!
- I'll make her completely human.
- 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.
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.
AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GODS
Werner Herzog, 1972
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 abuses,
a justification for eternal immunity.
No modesty is necessary.
Nor is doubt a requirement.
The ultimate privilege.
To be continued