Born in Haiti but raised from age 8 in the Congo, Raoul Peck has made a ground breaking documentary film on colonialism and white supremacy. The filmmaker’s 1991 film “Lumumba” laid bare the facts surrounding the assassination of Congo’s first and only democratically elected Prime Minister. He has now explored the ways widespread belief in the superiority of white Europeans and Americans led to genocide, the slave trade and colonial plunder and rule over five hundred years. “Exterminate All the Brutes” is a four episode television series hailed by more than one reviewer as a master work and the pinnacle of Peck’s filmmaking career. The popular U.S. news magazine Time called it a “radical masterpiece”.
Financed by the U.S. based HBO and now available only on their streaming service, the filmmaker calls his latest work an “origin story” for white supremacy. In interviews focused on the film he emphasizes that his intention was not to point fingers or accuse but to contribute to making change possible. Peck is dedicated to the conviction that armed with the truth, people’s collective action will bring about the changes needed to free us all from perpetual warfare and staggering inequality. “What must be denounced here” Peck has recently stated “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.”
Peck begins the series by demythologizing the history most citizens have been taught about the United States. President Obama’s declaration that “America was not a colonial nation” is refuted by the film’s assertion that “America IS a colonial nation.” The first episode retells the story of our “settler colonialism” requiring wars on the native American population and the appropriation of their lands and resources. Peck as narrator notes the word “exterminate” derives from the Latin words meaning, “drive out” and “boundaries”
The prevailing mythology of the U.S. as a beneficient nation of immigrants has been elaborated by those in power from the Pilgrim days to the present. The film’s themes and analysis flow from a change in perspective. “The whole vision of the film is based on changing the point of view of who is telling the story” Peck told one interviewer. The first episode dramatizes the fatal encounter of the Seminole female chief Osceola with a commander of the troops assigned to displace the tribe. “You steal land; you steal life; you steal human beings. What kind of a species are you?” Osceola asks.
In a later episode the film tells the story of the Haitian slave rebellion and the founding in 1804 of the first nation in the Americas to free all human beings on its soil. Peck reminds us that the example of the Haitian revolution and former slaves’ democratic rule in Haiti was widely feared in the U.S. In response the U.S. opposed recognition of the new nation until 1862. Some U.S. political leaders continue to portray Haiti as a “s….hole country” while their powerful northern neighbor continues to corrupt and manipulate Haitian politicians to the present day.
This film represents a powerful tool for those who are committed to this era’s project of truth telling that connects the dots of colonial expansionism with current systems that seek to maintain white supremacy and white privilege. Republican political leadership in the U.S. is mobilizing in defense of the country’s obstinate but obsolete mythology. Confronting truths long suppressed is considered a threat to their power. On April 30 Senate Minority Leader McConnell warned the new administration’s Secretary of Education that “powerful institutions increasingly subject Americans to a drumbeat of revisionism and negativity about our nation’s history and identity”.
Contrary to McConnell, there is widespread agreement in the U.S. today that if the nation is to progress in creating the multi-racial society we have envisioned its citizens must come to grips with the legacy of slavery and the expropriation and elimination of native Americans. Decades ago, James Baldwin, the subject of Peck’s previous documentary “I Am Not a Negro”, described well the film’s importance. “Not everything that is faced can be changed” Baldwin stated. “But nothing can be changed that is not faced.”
The two minute trailer for the film can be seen here:
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