This is Aby Osceola.
She is from the Seminole Nation.
Her story goes deep into the history of this continent.
She reminds me of my mother.
But despite the resemblance, they each come,
although through not totally unrelated events,
from different strands of history.
Aby's role is played by Caisa,
a Swedish actress
of both Colombian and Native American ancestry.
It is said
that the Seminole Nation never signed any treaty
with the United States government.
That's why they are called "the invincible tribe."
But for now, it is about another story.
In that larger story, there are three words
that summarize the whole history of humanity:
civilization, colonization, extermination.
These words run forcibly through Western world history,
the same way they drill to the core of U.S. history.
And it's not so much about winners and losers,
or between conqueror or conquered,
nor between colonist and colonized.
The forces involved here are less visible than gunfire,
class property, or political crusades.
But they are no less powerful.
Entire civilizations in the Western Hemisphere
were wantonly destroyed, setting the Western world
on a path of greed and destruction.
For history is the fruit of power,
and power is crucial to the story,
which then always becomes, at best,
a story about those who won.
And clearly, this needs to be challenged...
...for it is about who we are today.
About what we have become as a people.
And on what side of history we are.
What side of the truth.
A certain view of history contends
that the historical narrative is just one fiction
among others.
It is not.
There is no such thing as alternative facts.
This is the day we fight.
Chieftain Yah-Ho-Cuchee,
we must leave.
We are the ones who arrived latest here.
Kwame-Micco,
we are family now.
-You stay. -Yes.
But family is not meant to bring harm.
They bring harm to our nation.
Not you.
It's better we surrender.
So you and your people can have time to run and hide.
This is our land.
The white man wants our land.
We will fight.
Together.
Or we will die together.
And it will be a great honor.
Hink-lah-mas-tchay.
All is well, then.
I do not want to spill Seminole blood,
kill Seminole children,
Seminole women.
Give us back the American property you stole
from our good fellowmen planters and settlers,
and I'll let you move to the Indian Territory
the U.S. government has provided for your people.
You call human beings your property?
They're slaves.
You steal land.
You steal life.
You steal humans.
What kind of species are you?
-This kind.
"All Jews and Negroes ought really to be exterminated.
We shall be victorious.
The other races will disappear and die out,"
said the White Aryan Resistance in 1991, in Sweden.
2016, 25 years later,
a well-known Swedish department store
wanted something new for its Christmas catalog.
The store wanted to pay tribute
to what Sweden is today: a largely multicultural society.
To wear St. Lucia's white gown,
a popular 18th century tradition,
it chose a nine-year-old dark-skinned boy.
The innocent boy had a shy smile on his lips.
It was the smile, more than anything else,
that was not taken well.
In Sweden, one of the most tolerant countries in Europe,
like everywhere else in the world,
hate is on the rise again.
We have people coming into the country,
or trying to come in, we're stopping a lot of them.
These aren't people,
these are animals.
This is not immigration, this is invasion.
You need to be afraid,
because they are coming for you.
We have to do something to increase our birth rate,
or the vacuum that's created will be filled by people
that don't believe in our values here in Western civilization,
and we're seeing it happen in the Netherlands
and all across Europe, and that's a lot about...
The white establishment is now the minority.
We wanted to do a good impression.
It's respectful.
You will not replace us!
In reaffirming the greatness of our nation,
we understand that greatness is never a given.
It must be earned.
It is time for us to realize that we are too great a nation
to limit ourselves to small dreams.
Much time has passed
since Jefferson arrived for his inauguration.
The years and changes accumulate.
But the themes of this day he would know:
our nation's grand story of courage
and its simple dream of dignity.
We are one nation, and their pain is our pain.
Theirs dreams are our dreams,
and their success will be our success.
Though we march to the music of our time,
our mission is timeless.
Together,
we will make America strong again.
We will make America wealthy again.
We will make America proud again.
We will make America safe again.
And, yes, together,
we will make America great again.
-Thank you. God bless you. And God bless America.
Thank you.
God bless America.
We sometimes make mistakes.
We have not been perfect.
But if you look at, uh, the track record, as you say,
America was not born as a colonial power.
Well, actually, it was.
America was born as a colonial power.
And this fact is a difficult one to admit,
for it bears the fatal capacity to disrupt the core story
we have been told all these years
and the very foundation of this country.
It's not an easy story to tell.
Because the story still continues today.
A story of the search for purity and for a godly kingdom.
A story of survival and violence.
A search for origin, 400 years after the voyage
that is said to have made the nation.
1962, Brooklyn, New York.
This is me in the middle. The author.
I'm not sure how I ended up here,
although I might have my suspicions.
This is British explorer Henry Morton Stanley
on the Congo river.
This is me with Henry.
My parents are working there
for the newly independent Republic of Congo,
like a few hundred other Haitian nationals
hired by the UN to replace the Belgians
who had fled their former colony.
New York, 1964.
My brother Hébert and me
on our way to public school P.S. 138 in Brooklyn,
between Nostrand and Rogers.
First time in the snow.
My mother and my cousin came down for the picture
before going to their factory jobs
in the Garment District.
On our way to Congo again,
after General Mobutu's 1965 coup.
Despite his crimes,
Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga
would remain a welcome guest everywhere
for the next 30 years.
It helps when you are one of the richest men in the world
and you control an extravagant assortment of copper, uranium,
cobalt, diamonds, and gold.
We traveled a lot, because of another dictator.
But it doesn't feel like an exile.
I am with family.
I am an immigrant from a "shithole country,"
like he said.
There is this one short, simple sentence
that sums up the history of the Western world
and the European continent.
At the turn of the 20th century,
a Polish writer named Joseph Conrad,
who often thought in French but wrote in English,
succeeded in putting it into words
in his novel entitled Heart of Darkness.
This sentence, spoken by Kurtz,
the main character of Conrad's book,
will be the last on the civilizing task
of the white man among the savages of Africa.
And this sentence says nothing about Europe
as the original home of humanism,
democracy, and welfare.
It says nothing about anything to be rightly proud of.
It simply tells the truth we prefer to forget.
The English word, "exterminate,"
from the Latin "extermino,"
means "drive over the border to death, banish for life."
The object of the action is seldom a single individual,
but usually whole groups, such as quitch grass,
rats,
or people.
The term "brutes," of course,
reduces the object to its mere animal status.
Africans have been called beasts
ever since their very first contact with Europeans,
who described them as "rude and beastly."
It is in the 17th century
that Thomas Hobbes said to a friend,
"Some men are of so cruel a nature
as to take a delight in killing men
more than you should to kill a bird."
This is Sven Lindqvist,
a man I now call a friend.
He wrote the book entitled Exterminate All the Brutes.
This is also his story.
Sven told me...
in an Algerian town in the desert, named Salah,
the Scottish explorer Alexander Gordon Laing
was attacked and robbed.
He had five saber cuts on the crown of his head
and three on the left temple.
The one on his left cheekbone fractured his jawbone
and slit his ear.
A dreadful gash in his neck scratched his windpipe,
and so on.
Laing was attacked in January 1825.
But fear is timeless.
"A man may destroy everything within himself,"
wrote Conrad.
"Love and hate and belief, and even doubt.
But as long as he clings to life,
-he cannot destroy fear."
Fear always remains.
Perhaps in fear we seek an increased perception of life,
a more compelling form of existence.
I am frightened, therefore I exist.
The more frightened I am, the more I exist?
There was a land named Tsenacommacah,
which means "densely inhabited land."
It was a powerful confederacy of more than 30 nations
led by Wahunsonacock,
better known as the father of Pocahontas.
On May 14th, 1607,
a hundred and four English men and boys
landed on Tsenacommacah,
on the bank of the Powhatan River,
and decided to establish a settlement.
But soon enough, it was very clear
that they lacked a supply line
and proved unable or unwilling to grow crops
or hunt for their own sustenance.
Military leader John Smith
threatened to kill all the women and children
if the Powhatans would not feed and clothe the settlers,
as well as provide them with land and labor.
The leader of the Powhatan Confederacy,
Wahunsonacock, entreated the invaders.
"Why should you take by force
that from us which you can have by love?
Why should you destroy us who have provided you with food?
What can you get by war?
What is the cause of your jealousy?
You see us unarmed
and willing to supply your wants,
if you will come in a friendly manner,
and not with swords and guns, as to invade an enemy."
Smith's threat was carried out.
After all, he worked for the Virginia Company of London,
a for-profit enterprise.
War against the Powhatans started in August 1609,
and their elimination was the order of the day.
Sven tells me,
"You already know enough.
So do I.
It is not knowledge we lack.
What is missing
is the courage to understand what we know
and to draw conclusions."
For we know now when the story started.
We know now when race, color, and blood
became institutionalized for the first time.
We saw it taking form with the Crusades
when the Christian kingdoms of Northern Spain,
together with the church leadership
and other European monarchies,
decided to take over Muslim-controlled trade routes
to the Far East.
The ultimate goal of the church
and the European rulers
was never just about winning souls to Christianity.
It was also about gaining wealth and power
through annihilation.
In 1478, the pope approved
the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition,
which had to investigate the cleanliness of blood
of Moorish and Jewish converts.
Clean blood was Christian European.
Unclean blood was savage, non-Christian.
This is the origin
of the ideology of white supremacy.
For the first time in the world,
the concept of race based on blood
was used as law.
White supremacy made it possible for Europeans
to think it was acceptable
to enslave or exterminate other peoples.
That led to the mass deportation of Jews from Spain in 1492,
and Muslims in the following decades.
It happened with the forced deportation
of more than ten million Africans
from the human motherland.
It happened to Native peoples
in what came to be called the United States of America.
And again, in the 20th century, without any contrition,
it happened during the Holocaust.
The road to Auschwitz was paved
in the earliest days of Christendom.
And this road also leads
straight to the heart of America.
The Germans have been made
the sole scapegoats for ideas of extermination
that are actually a common European heritage.
There was a discussion in Germany in the '70s
over the question,
"Is the Nazi extermination of the Jews unique or not?"
All historical events are unique
and not copies of each other.
But they can be compared.
There are similarities and differences
between the extermination of the Jews
and other mass murders.
I have seen these images before.
They are always the same.
Everywhere, in ancient and modern times.
The ridicule of their display.
It is their banality that gets me every time.
No one points out
that during Hitler's childhood,
a major element in the European view of mankind
was the conviction that inferior races
were by nature condemned to extinction.
The truly charitable attitude of the superior races
consisted in helping them on their way.
All German historians participating in this debate
seemed to look in the same direction.
None looks to the West.
But Hitler did.
He had found his models.
Of course, one man alone did not singlehandedly engineer
the killing of more than six million Jews.
Hundreds of thousands of enablers
were also there to plan, execute,
or to simply profit from it.
Renowned industrialist Henry Ford gave the Nazi party
all the profit from cars sold in Germany.
And every year, an additional 350,000 dollars
was allocated for Hitler's birthday.
Heil!
While millions of others committed themselves
to remaining silent.
Wait, wait.
The essence of this story is fragile.
It requires renunciation of all prejudices.
Modesty and humility are needed here.
Why do I bring myself into this story?
Where do I fit in it?
As a filmmaker,
I am compelled to stay hidden in the background.
Restrained, moderate, balanced,
judicious, neutral even.
You learn to avoid becoming the subject of your film.
It's not about you.
Unless the story is bigger than you.
In that case, you go for broke.
Neutrality is not an option.
And those who seek history with an upbeat ending,
redemption, or reconciliation, may search in vain.
Such a conclusion cannot be expected.
In the late 15th century,
Europeans started to colonize the New World.
Crossing the Atlantic, Columbus, an Italian,
landed on an Island that he claimed for Spain.
In 1497, John Cabot, also an Italian,
claimed another territory for the king of England.
In 1500, Pedro Álvares Cabral, a Portuguese,
serving his own king, reached Brazil.
Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed through a piece of land
to find the Pacific. He claimed it for Spain.
Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese,
also did the same for Spain
and died on his way around the world.
The Italian Giovanni da Verrazzano
followed the coastline of North America
for the king of France,
and got a bridge named after him in New York.
In 1534, Jacques Cartier
claimed another piece for France and named it "Canada."
A few years before, Amerigo Vespucci,
an Italian sailing for Portugal, had proved Columbus wrong again,
in that he had not reached the West Indies,
but what he would then call "the New World."
As a result, a German cartographer,
Martin Waldseemüller,
gave the name America to the whole continent.
From the beginning,
the extension of the United States
from sea to shining sea
was the intention and design of the country's founders.
Free land was the magnet
that attracted European settlers.
This particular form of colonialism
is called settler colonialism.
But as a system, it requires violence.
It requires the elimination of the Natives
and their replacement by European settlers.
The charge of genocide,
when applied to the United States,
has been unacceptable for a very long time.
But the evidence leaves no other choice today.
From the first settlements
to the founding of the United States,
and continuing into the 21st century,
the elimination of the Native is consciously,
or unconsciously, wired into the process.
This is a story,
not a contribution to historical research.
The nature of this historical process
is still blurred by the notion
that violence was committed equally
by the colonized and the colonizer.
But people do not hand over their land,
their resources, their children,
and their futures, without a fight.
And that fight is always met with violence.
In U.S. history, everything is about the land.
Who oversaw and cultivated it, who fished its waters,
maintained its wildlife,
who invaded and stole it.
It's about how the land became a commodity,
"real estate," broken into pieces
to be bought and sold on the market.
It is about how African bodies
became properties and source of labor,
and how poor white settlers embraced white supremacy
as a substitute for land and slaves.
The poet William Carlos Williams wrote,
"The land! Don't you feel it?
Doesn't it make you want to go out
and lift dead Indians tenderly from their graves
to steal from them some authenticity,
as if it must be clinging even to their corpses."
Without the unpaid forced labor of enslaved Africans,
a farmer growing cash crops could not compete on the market.
Once in the hands of settlers,
the land itself was no longer sacred or collective,
as it had been for the Indigenous people.
It became private property.
A commodity to be acquired and sold,
every man a possible king, or at least wealthy.
Most of the founders were also real estate men.
George Washington made his fortune
off land speculation.
Indian land.
And then, "the land" came to mean the country,
the flag, the military,
as in "the land of the free" from the national anthem.
Those who died fighting in foreign wars
were said to have sacrificed their lives
to protect "this land"
that the old settlers have spilled blood to acquire.
But the blood spilled was Indigenous blood.
This is Sven again.
He reminds me of these old-time adventurers
who explore the human species,
whatever difficulties and danger it involves,
whatever faraway travels it requires.
Definitely not a white savior.
On the contrary, he is one of these few Europeans
who dare see the beast for what it is.
Sven is a witness.
Sven traveled the world.
Sven told me stories,
some of which I already knew.
He told me about this world, about his world,
without cynicism,
which would not be inconceivable at this stage of the story.
For Sven saw my world,
lived in it,
as I lived in his.
And he wrote about it, making it palpable.
And when he delved into the horror,
I knew what he meant and what he went through.
I could trust him.
Our distinctive skin colors never were an obstacle.
And that is the way it should be.
In 1887,
the Scottish surgeon J.B. Dunlop
hit upon the idea of equipping his young son's bicycle
with an inflatable rubber tube.
The bicycle tire was patented in 1888.
Four years earlier, the Europeans
and the United States had decided
that it was necessary to regulate
the thriving exploitation of the African continent
other than by whoever got there first,
was the boldest, or the most murderous.
A situation that was naturally detrimental
to any respectable business environment.
They convened the Congo Conference
to arbitrate the looting.
The main outcome, of this "gentlemen's agreement"
was the definitive elimination
of most existing forms of African autonomy
and self-governance.
At the conference,
Belgium's king, Leopold II,
managed to secure the whole Congo
as his private property.
A territory 80 times bigger than Belgium.
Basically, twice the surface area
of Texas and California combined.
During the years that followed,
demand for rubber exploded.
This would carry incalculable consequences
for the villages in Congo.
The king instituted a monopoly on rubber and ivory
and ordered all natives to supply labor
and products without payment.
Those who refused had their villages burned down,
their children murdered, and their hands cut off.
Such methods led to a dramatic increase in profitability,
profits which helped in building, among other things,
impressive monuments
that still decorate Brussels today.
Monuments paid for with amputated hands.
"I bring you clarity,"
said the prophet,
"that you may understand
the world around you."
God tells us
that real life is after death.
The more we suffer, the more you are granted
with joys in Heaven.
Can't this wait until the end of my service?
Rubber doesn't wait!
Where's my rubber?
That's all I got today.
And why is that?
The trees have dried out.
You.
Get the basket.
No, stay, stay.
Please, please don't do that. Please, please don't do that.
The Congo adventure was pure looting,
Leopold II running the numbers.
Plundering bodies, plundering resources.
The draining of a whole continent.
A multi-billion-dollar heist.
Ten years after the creation of the Congo state,
the writer Joseph Conrad sent his first short story,
"An Outpost of Progress," to Cosmopolis magazine.
He, too, had gone up the Congo River
on one of the company's steamers.
He, too, had seen the trading post
and listened to the passengers' stories.
The story is simple.
Two Europeans, Kayerts and Carlier,
are sent to a trading post
on the banks of the great Congo River.
Apart from collecting ivory from the locals,
they don't have much to do
and have plenty of time to get bored.
Their only reading material is a yellowed newspaper
that praises colonial expansion as sacred work
in the service of civilization.
At first, the two companions believe these fine words.
But gradually, they discover that such words
are nothing but "sounds,"
sounds that lack content outside the society
that created them.
Concepts such as "virtue," "crime," or "morality"
are nothing but sounds.
Soon, Kayerts and Carlier feel that no one is watching them.
One day, they argue.
Kayerts shoots Carlier in self-defense
and does not realize until later
that in his panic, he has killed an unarmed man.
As he sits by the body of his companion,
Kayerts, for the first time, really thinks.
Like the rest of mankind,
he has gone around believing a lot of nonsense.
Left alone with their own weaknesses,
far from any public opinion, from any exterior gaze,
any human being is likely to indulge in the worst.
Conrad and Wells knew about each other
when the latter wrote The Time Machine in 1895.
Hatred and fear seize the time traveler.
He longs to kill Morlocks.
He wants to go straight into the darkness,
"to kill the brutes."
The time traveler falls asleep
as he sits there in the darkness,
and when he wakes, the Morlocks are onto him,
soft and repugnant.
He shakes the "human rats " off him...
-...and starts striking out.
He enjoys the feeling of a swishing iron pipe
smashing into juicy flesh and crushing bones.
This killing in Wells is both horrific and voluptuous.
Wells's next book, which we know Conrad also read,
was called The Island of Dr. Moreau.
Dr. Moreau uses his surgical skill
to create a kind of human being out of animals.
The first of them all to shed tears.
She is human!
I'm not beaten!
-Get everything ready. -For what?
This time, I'll burn out all the animal in her!
No!
I'll make her completely human!
No, no! No!
Dr. Moreau has created
one hundred and twenty creatures,
but he has not succeeded in creating a real human being.
The Island of Dr. Moreau is the story of colonialism.
Just as the colonizer civilizes the lower,
more animal races with the whip,
Dr. Moreau civilizes the animals with torture,
maximizing the pain in order to hasten evolution.
Just as the colonizer tries to create
a new kind of creature, the civilized savage,
Dr. Moreau tries to create the humanized animal.
Do you know what it means to feel like God?
In both cases, the means is terror.
Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now
is based on Heart of Darkness.
In it and in all the real wars,
the men representing civilization
out in the colonies were "invisible,"
not only in the sense
that their guns killed at a distance,
but also in that no one at home really knew
what they were doing.
White by birth.
A default setting.
I know this story is painful,
but we need to know it.
The happiness of one
cannot be built on the pain of all others.
There is almost always a price to be paid
further down the line.
White by birth,
a simple pigmentation variation
transformed into a source of power.
A mark of superiority,
an authorization for abuse,
a justification for eternal immunity.
No modesty is necessary.
Nor is doubt a requirement.
The ultimate privilege.
In 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!
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!
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.
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!
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.
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?
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!
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.