'Exterminate All the Brutes': Four-part documentary on white colonialism, genocide.
Josh Hartnett stars in Raoul Peck's experimental hybrid docuseries for HBO about colonialism and genocide in Africa and the Americas. “We would prefer for genocide to have begun and ended with Nazism,” muses filmmaker Raoul Peck in the voiceover that steers his four-part hybrid docuseries Exterminate All the Brutes (HBO). “This would indeed be most comforting.” But genocide was made a prerequisite for the establishment and expansion of America — a fact as obvious to some as it is unacceptable to others. Drawing on the work of historian Sven Lindqvist, from whose 1992 book (and a line from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) Peck takes the title of his project, the I Am Not Your Negro director argues that, though guns, germs and steel played their crucial parts in the Western colonization of Africa and the Americas, it was a 19th century idea that the extinction of “inferior” races was part of the “natural” course of history that gave Europeans ideological cover to annihilate or brutally exploit the peoples native to those continents. The West won, he asserts, because it was willing to wipe out entire civilizations.
But that summary belies the beauty, the intimacy, the creative leaps, even the whimsies in Exterminate All the Brutes, which approaches the history of European colonialism — starting roughly in the late 1400s, when Columbus set sail and Spanish anti-Semitism and Islamophobia solidified the unscientific concept of race as blood-based — with an essayistic stream of consciousness, especially in the docuseries’ first hour. Peck also employs meta-reenactments — many starring Josh Hartnett (the series’ only recognizable actor) as a kind of colonial Zelig who pops up in the American West and in Africa — to reinforce the continuity between exterminations across the globe, as well as to reinstate the shock of an individual killing, even when real-life victims number in the millions. In a similar technique, Peck often zooms out on photos of victims — say, of a Native American child who’s revealed to be surrounded by dozens of fellow Brown students forced into Christian schools (in a practice that often involved abducting children from their parents) — in an effort to memorialize both the tragedy of the one and the group.
With Exterminate All the Brutes, Peck seeks to shift our perspective, again and again — to get us to see the founding of America as inherently genocidal, to situate race relations today within a centuries-old exercise of homicidal racism and soul-destroying greed and to sit with the mind-boggling amount of suffering that European and American colonial powers inflicted. When a time-lapse graphic illustrates the 12 million captives taken from Africa to the Americas, for example, it moves slowly enough for at least an iota of that oceanful of needless torture to sink in. (“Trading human beings — what sick mind thought of this first?” asks Peck in his forceful, lyrically aphoristic prose.) In case we’ve grown inured to seeing white men kill Black and brown tribespeople — a script passed down to children in the form of playing “Cowboys and Indians” — Peck has Hartnett’s colonizer murder a group of Black men in modern-day clothes in seemingly contemporary Africa, perhaps to see if the different context makes historical genocide feel any more morally shocking, any less an inevitability.
| by Anonymous | reply 24 | April 20, 2021 2:19 AM
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How tiresome.
Still desperate for daddy to say he was wrong. Can’t just move forward.
| by Anonymous | reply 1 | April 11, 2021 3:36 AM
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Who are you talking about r1?
| by Anonymous | reply 2 | April 11, 2021 3:40 AM
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Ok I'm watching it now and the explanation of the Crusades is not accurate. It's framed as white European aggression against the innocent Muslims. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
| by Anonymous | reply 3 | April 11, 2021 3:45 AM
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Yawn! Just more anti-white/anti-America propaganda from the far-left (i.e., Hollywood).
| by Anonymous | reply 4 | April 11, 2021 4:32 AM
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Muslims conquered, subdued and enslaved Africa and Asia long before Europe knew it existed. To say nothing of the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the 8th century. But ignorant racists have always had a rather blinkered worldview.
| by Anonymous | reply 5 | April 11, 2021 4:37 AM
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I don't think I can watch this. Humanity have treated each other horribly, and watching it is just a bit much for me at the moment.
Plus, it sounds pretty historically inaccurate - not in the sense that white people haven't done the shittiest things imaginable in the past, they have, but in the way it sounds like it's redefining colonialism as a solely white thing, which is just not true. The spread of the Arabic language throughout the middle east and north Africa is testament to that for a start.
People also only started thinking in the racial terms used currently in the past couple of hundred years as well, long after colonialism was a thing, so people didn't define themselves the way we do now, and... oh, half way through this I just can't be bothered typing anymore. I know there are people out there who care less about history and more about pushing a narrative, and there's kinda no point arguing with them, I don't think. When you're not arguing from facts, then you can't be appealed to with facts either.
Humans from every part of the world have done terrible things, and I would never discount the part Europeans played in that. But the story is so much more.
| by Anonymous | reply 6 | April 11, 2021 5:37 AM
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[quote]People also only started thinking in the racial terms used currently in the past couple of hundred years as well, long after colonialism was a thing,
According to this documentary, it started in the 1400s. That's in the first episode.
| by Anonymous | reply 7 | April 11, 2021 5:49 AM
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Interesting R7, I thought it was closer to the 1700s.
| by Anonymous | reply 8 | April 11, 2021 5:58 AM
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^oh whoops, R7 I thought you were talking about the beginning of modern racial thinking, not the beginning of colonialism.
| by Anonymous | reply 9 | April 11, 2021 6:01 AM
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So the show is built around Josh Harnett, that seems strange?
| by Anonymous | reply 10 | April 11, 2021 6:13 AM
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Hartnett actually looks part Native American. Way more so than people who claimed ancestry like Johnny Depp, Cher and Lizzie Warren.
| by Anonymous | reply 11 | April 13, 2021 12:33 AM
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[quote]Muslims conquered, subdued and enslaved Africa and Asia long before Europe knew it existed. To say nothing of the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the 8th century. But ignorant racists have always had a rather blinkered worldview.
It doesn't let White Christians off the hook; they too played a role in fucking up Africa and most of Asia. I hold TPTB of both religions responsible. And to this day their respective leaders are still hostile to one another and to the people who worship their stupid religions.
| by Anonymous | reply 13 | April 13, 2021 1:02 AM
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I don't care what other cultures did in the past or are currently doing. It doesn't minimize the negative impact that European colonization had which included mass genocide and the slave trade. Two wrongs do not make a right. I agree though that human beings in general are awful to each other and it's not confined to one race or religion.
| by Anonymous | reply 14 | April 13, 2021 1:05 AM
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Just started watching this now. Fascinating.
| by Anonymous | reply 15 | April 20, 2021 12:25 AM
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Is that Caitlyn in OP's picture?
| by Anonymous | reply 17 | April 20, 2021 12:51 AM
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[quote] It doesn't minimize the negative impact that European colonization
In fact, European colonization was a net positive to those places who were lucky enough to be colonized. It gave those people the gift of European civilization, with all its benefits.
| by Anonymous | reply 18 | April 20, 2021 1:00 AM
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People today certainly benefit from it r18.
| by Anonymous | reply 19 | April 20, 2021 1:13 AM
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Tried watching, as I generally like history, sociology, geography, etc. Made it about halfway through the first episode before all the ideological and racist crapola became too much. Too bad, as I think the time is right for this kind of vehicle.
| by Anonymous | reply 20 | April 20, 2021 1:19 AM
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I watched the first ep. and there were several historical inaccuracies in order to serve a particular agenda.
Not to say that European colonial forces weren't brutal. Of course they were. But it's a real irritant of mine when history is not presented correctly, no matter what.
| by Anonymous | reply 21 | April 20, 2021 1:23 AM
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[quote] there were several historical inaccuracies in order to serve a particular agenda.
If you have to lie to make a point in your documentary, the point you are making in your documentary probably isn't supported by facts. I'm looking at you, Micheal Moore.
| by Anonymous | reply 22 | April 20, 2021 2:04 AM
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Powerful, riveting, revealing. undeniable, a tour de force.
| by Anonymous | reply 24 | April 20, 2021 2:19 AM
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