Raoul Peck’s revelatory documentary Exterminate All The Brutes dispels the American dream
TV Reviews Exterminate All The Brutes
In 2009, President Barack Obama declared that “if you look at the track record… America was not born as a colonial power.” This isn’t just false; it’s the product of a dream. Director Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro) delivers a forceful wakeup call in his masterful four-part documentary, Exterminate All The Brutes. The series traces America’s imperialist history back to its roots in European colonialism and genocide, and at every point along the way, Peck confronts and dismantles the mythical American dream. This “dream,” in reality, was exploitation masked as exploration. Already populated lands were invaded not “discovered,” and indigenous nations were forcibly relocated and outright massacred as the invaders spread across the continent.
Peck serves as the narrator for Exterminate All The Brutes, and his tone is rarely soothing. Through a combination of archival footage, Hollywood movie clips that recall the searing work of Marlon Riggs, scripted interludes, and animated scenes, Peck batters us with devastating and harsh truths. It’s not the American story even the most liberal-minded among us wants to accept as our undeniable past. Yet, it is, and Peck thinks enough of his audience that he doesn’t hold our hands. He describes how, after Christopher Columbus’ fateful arrival in 1492, 90% of the Indigenous population died from violence and disease in a little more than a century. That’s 55 million human lives gone, but there’s still debate over whether to continue honoring Columbus with a national holiday.
History is usually the first victim of a myth. Peck demonstrates how Western colonialism dehumanized Indigenous people as violent “savages,” and enslaved Africans as subhuman “brutes,” fit only for bondage, first as slaves and later as inmates in America’s prisons. This was intended to soothe guilty white consciences. Even whiteness itself was a European creation that not-coincidentally put those of European descent at the top of a human hierarchy. Some people are more equal than others, a perverse concept that George Orwell would later satirize in Animal Farm, and some people weren’t even people at all because of the color of their skin. America clothed itself in bright robes of freedom and democracy, which barely hid the Indigenous people whose land was stolen and the enslaved people upon which the nation built its vast wealth and power.
“Exterminate all the brutes” is the “very simple method of rule” that ivory trader Kurtz proposed in Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart Of Darkness. It’s also the title of historian Sven Lindqvist’s 1992 book, which inspired Peck’s exploration of Europe’s horrific past in Africa. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History Of The United States, a 2015 American Book Award winner, provided the foundation for examining America’s deliberate genocide of the land’s original inhabitants. Peck doesn’t shy away from comparing manifest destiny to similar genocides in Nazi Germany and 1990s Rwanda.
The documentary feels fresh and current next to the ongoing debate over America’s past and iconography. Former President Donald Trump and Senator Tom Cotton have specifically attacked The New York Times’ 1619 Project for daring to challenge a whitewashed American mythology, one Trump would defiantly promote last year during a Fourth of July speech in the Black Hills, an area sacred to the Sioux. He boasted that “Americans are the people who pursued our manifest destiny across the ocean, into the uncharted wilderness, over the tallest mountains, and then into the skies and even into the stars.” Before the colonists arrived, this land wasn’t simply wild, untamed space. For millions, it was home, a home that was violently seized from them. Obama promoted a benign myth of America, one of a slow but steady march toward equality for all, but Trump embraced the country’s brutal history with sinister glee.
Trump seamlessly fits into the docuseries’ history of white supremacy. It goes beyond his declared affection for prominent American slave owners such as Andrew Jackson and Robert E. Lee. Peck, who was born in Haiti, describes himself as “an immigrant from a shithole country,” a pointed reference to one of Trump’s more repulsive comments. This view of Haiti, of non-white people in general, is consistent with colonial thinking, and Trump is the most openly colonial president in recent history. Peck juxtaposes past bigots and colonizers with Trump asking an audience in Poland in 2017 if “the West has the will to survive,” to defend its borders and preserve its “civilization from invaders who would subvert and destroy it.”
Peck presents an alternate reality where America’s original inhabitants do just that. Columbus arrives in a world that was new only to Europeans and before he can savor his “discovery,” the indigenous people slaughter him and his fellow invaders. This swift act of violence might’ve saved 55 million lives at the very least and prevented generations of enslaved Africans from dying in bondage, but, as Richard Pryor once said, that “only happens in dreams,” and colonizers killed millions of untold dreams in pursuit of a singular one.
Actor Josh Hartnett appears throughout Exterminate All The Brutes as “the tip of the genocidal sword of Western history.” It’s an effective narrative tool beyond the simple joke that all colonizers look alike. Hartnett plays several different characters, real and imagined. He’s at times sympathetic, menacing, and even just clueless, but always a looming threat to anyone not viewed as equal.
Peck challenges the self-serving history that the colonizers wrote themselves, but in doing so, he offers a warning for the future. L. Frank Baum is most famous for his book about a Kansas girl who has a grand dream, but few Americans know or care to remember that he frequently called for the extermination of Native Americans. After the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, when the U.S. Army killed 300 Lakota people, at least half of whom were women and children, Baum wrote, “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.”
America was willing to expunge an entire people in service of a peculiar dream, one that had proven a nightmare for millions. Does the nation still possess this “will to survive”? Peck quotes Lindqvist in the docuseries’ haunting final moments: “You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack.” What we do with the knowledge we gain from this amazing work is the question that Peck leaves unanswered.
58 Comments
This sounds brutal and amazing. Gonna have to steel myself and dive in. I haven’t watched IaNYN, but maybe this will spur me to jump into it next.And kudos to Josh Hartnett. He seems like a nice enough dude, so cool for him to get to be in something like this.
I feel like Josh Hartnett is an underrated actor — I’m looking forward to seeing if he upholds Raoul Peck’s vision
Hopefully movies like this will make large racial groups think twice about colonizing in the future. looks like it had a few negative effects
Unfortunately, Western Civilization didn’t corner the market on imperialism. Take a look at what China is doing to it’s ethnic minorities. They’re following the very same playbook Peck refers to in Extinguish all the Brutes.
The Chinese didn’t require any European playbook to exterminate the Dzungar Mongols:https://razib.substack.com/p/made-in-china
True. However, the West didn’t write the playbook either. It’s been with us as long as Mankind has been here. One of the more disturbing characteristics of our species is our tendency to label a group as “other” and then use that label to justify our actions against that group. Every empire in history has used that strategy in some form.As Peck pointed out, the concept of “whiteness” didn’t really exist before the middle of the last millennium. Before that Europeans based their prejudices on religion more than ethnicity.
Before that Europeans based their prejudices on religion more than ethnicity.
To make things even worse, it often wasn’t a replacement prejudice, but an addition.
It’s a little bizarre that American slavers forced the people they enslaved to practice christianity. I guess in their worldview enslaved people had three fifths of a soul that needed three fifths of salvation?
It was all about control. They stressed the parts of the Bible that dealt with servitude. They pretty much hammered home Genesis IX, 18–27 and Ephesians, VI, 5-7 on a regular basis as a way to convince their slaves that they’d go to Hell if they didn’t obey them.https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/
At first, they refused to convert their slaves to Christianity, because the belief was that a Christian could not enslave a fellow Christian. However, they were still potentially saving the slaves’ souls by exposing them to Christianity. Then, later, it was determined that conversion was a more effective control mechanism.
And then some of them tried to argue that the Bible was totally cool with slavery. “No honest, it is, you just have to read every second word backwards except in sentences that start with ‘R’ and you’ll see, it’s very explicit about it.”
Ethnicity is a matter of culture. “White” is not an ethnonym.
The Europeans were more than happy to discriminate against each other on the basis of nationality. Post-war Italian migrants, the Irish, calling syphilis the [insert European nationality here] disease. Alliances would be forged on religious similarities, but each country still thought they were superior. Only post-Civil Rights do they start including all European nationalities as equal (bar Jewish Europeans, because some bigotries run particularly deep).
That “alternate history” is what did happen when the vikings reached the New World. They decided to leave, to not come back, and not even think about Vinland any more.
One wonders whether a more humane, slower and less successful “discovery” might have given the Indigenous population enough exposure to European diseases to allow for recovery and immunities to spread. The reputations of so much of the later horrors skate by on the lesser numbers and the ability to blame nature for a lot of the dirty work.
The Moundbuilding civilization of the Mississippi collapsed without ever encountering any actual Europeans because disease was that devastating. But your hypothetical does make me think of a comparison others have made of Canada vs the US. In Canada the mounties arrived west ahead of the settlers. In both countries treaties with the natives were repeatedly broken until they were restricted to what little land the settlers would permit them, but in Canada the natives were far more willing to agree to & abide by the treaties themselves. So less warfare was possible.
“Look, we better leave. If we stick around, our ancestors are gonna murder everyone and then people will make documentaries about what assholes we were. Let the English and Spanish get that bad rap – Denmark’s got a reputation to protect!” – Leif Eriksson, 1015.
*Iceland/Norway
I don’t think the Chinese make documentaries about the Dzungar genocide. But then I suppose I wouldn’t know about most of the films made in China.
Unfortunately, the idiots who need to see and learn from this will never watch it or just dismiss it as “pinko commie BS.” I understand that history is hard, and looking into the mirror is harder, but if we ever want to have a future, we must.
Ya thats what I was thinking, I have no interest, in watching 4 hours on a topic I have already spent countless hours on during my life. I prefer reading, so a documentary needs something really exciting to get me to watch it and this just sounds like a high gloss version of the greatest hits from the history books.
So true. The first comment to pop up in IMDB was a guy lamenting how it was all “woke” propaganda. He then proceeded to try poking holes in the historical facts by claiming Portugal didn’t exist during the Age of Discovery by conflating two time periods separated by about 800 years.As the saying goes, history is written by the victors. The caveat to that statement is that history seldom resembles what actually happened. This series and the research that spawned it are trying to present something closer to what the real story is.
Portugal is a liberal myth! Wake up sheeple!
More like Portugullible, amirite?
Yep yep. America has a deep, deep fear of accountability and self-responsibility to the point that self-denialism is their go-to as long as they don’t suffer repercussions at the slightest; willing to actually seek and destroy history to avoid it. The white-washing of history easily implies these delusions of grandeur. This is also behavior you see from spoiled children who have been praised every step in their childhood by their parents.
Ever seen that one King of the Hill episode where Hank is bullied by their neighbor’s kid? “Dusty old bones; full of green dust!” ‘n all.
Exactly. They have strong beliefs about reality and the sad part is beliefs can’t be disproven even with facts. The way people feel is how they act. The thing is, they have yet to learn your feelings will lie to you.
But I think, one of the points is that even people who think they know and understand the evil in our past, don’t really know.
Not necessarily. In England recently there has been much furore over destroying statues of slave traders/owners, general warmongers etc. I realised that, as much as I consider myself an old Labour lefty, I knew nothing about these people. The true history of this country is buried by the education system.
History is brutality, regardless of culture.
america is a pretty fucked up place. other western nations have sprung out of a common ethnic and linguistic background, often through centuries of bloodshed and pointless royalty driven wars. america is different: it’s a relatively brand new version of a nation state, multi-ethnic, multi-classed, multi-lingual…and fucking geographically expansive. it’s my stupid and humble opinion the myths and stories in our history were deliberately emphasized to unify an otherwise fractured country…our founding fathers as quasi-gods of high moral standing, we’ve always been a functioning democracy, that we won WWII not the soviets, hard work is rewarded, the american dream exists, this is a ‘free country’, that we’re not an empire, that we’re always the moral nation…this list could go on forever. but people are currently and correctly waking up to the fact that large swaths of this country don’t share in that myth. their history has been ignored, downplayed, forgotten, excluded. this is making older white generations, who built an entire worldview around those myths, freak out because their identity is tied up in believing this grade school understanding of history; that america is a fundamentally good place, that these myths are true, that there’s nothing more to examine. they’re experiencing an ego death, and coupled with old age is making them irrationally angry and lash out at any alternative discussion. i would say this played a part in the rise of trumpist bullshit. and why it’s the white uneducated folks driving the lunacy we’ve been seeing. they can’t psychologically deal with the truth. someone write a history thesis about this please, thanks.
Have you read the Laura Ingalls Wilder bio, Prairie Fires? It uses her life to examine the whole history of that time. A lot of space is given to how the frontier myth is a total lie: the government used the Homestead Act to get hapless people to claim and break the land. The parcels of land that the people were given were in desert climates and not big enough to produce profitable crops. The government pushed these people into areas that were designated for future train stops to serve urban interests back east. Almost no frontier farms were successful. Then the New Deal came around and forced the farmers to stop growing crops (to correct the market effects of too much supply), which is one of the major reasons why rural farmers still skew Republican. Laura wrote her books to reclaim a childhood that was marked by pain and tragedy, and they ended up becoming symbols for a frontier myth that was never true.
Yes, this looks amazing.You know, as a pretty well-read, nearly 60-year old white man, who has spent his whole life in Baltimore city and the east coast – people of color are not a “mystery” to me – and having lived alongside people of all races for my entire life. Learning about their history through the music that I and my father played – blues and jazz, I am always surprised by my gullibility in this area. I “knew” about the horrors of slavery and the forced extinction of the American indigenous populations but until recently I still didn’t quite “get it”, if that makes sense. I would even preach to some of my less noteworthy “friends”, who poo-pooed slavery as “over” , that even up until the ‘50s, a white mob could storm into a black person’s house, hang anyone they pleased, AND GET AWAY WITH IT. “They” didn’t understand terror that generations of torture and banal violence could instill. And black people are generally very good at passing down their heritage and culture to their children and I thought that was cool; now I see it as an element of survival. And now with the trial in Minneapolis we see they are STILL GETTING AWAY WITH IT. Chauvin might just as well slung a noose over the nearest lamp post and strung George Floyd up – it was basically the same act.There is some weird part of me that somehow glossed over all the heinous acts that really went into building the bedrock of this country and so I am “surprised” at my lack of true understanding. The last few years have really opened me up to real story of America and now I have a mixed-race Grandson. And now I worry about him as he grows up, just because he is black. And his mother, my daughter, has had to have “the talk” with him already (he’s only 7 years old).I really dislike the term “woke”. But how could I have lived this long, and this way, and still be shocked by documentaries like this? Sometimes I look in the mirror and think how much of “the problem” I may have been. Just by my lack of sensitivity or caring enough to get up off of my ass and do something, instead of just talking or feeling bad about Wounded Knee or the Trail of Tears or seeing man snuffed out on the street by a killer cop.Surely I’m not the only one who feels this way. ( I hope I made this point correctly, without seeming piteous, I like commenting here and don’t want to appear foolish)
Nah, you just sound like someone who has lived in the Matrix, seeing slight glitches that are now big, bright, flashing signs and deciding which pill you will take. If you want to read a weird, crazy murder thriller that is historic (recent too!) with a hell of a twist, find the book Killers of the Flower Moon by David Gant before Scorsese makes it into a movie. I guarantee, you’ll get so angry over the gaslighting in the book (and in your life), that you’ll never think about American history the same again!
The best thing for the safety of your grandchild is to stay the fuck as far away from baltimore as possible.
Not holding out a lot of hope for you, dude. You just followed up a piece about white colonization by talking about – what a surprise – yourself.
Write what you know. This person at least seems to be growing in self awareness (ie, knowing himself), contra 98% of people on the internet, who sate their appetites writing screeds about ‘you/those people’ that they don’t know and probably never will.
As opposed to telling other people about themselves?
Oh how horrible! Someone talking about their personal experiences!
….aaaaaaaaand it’s uncharitable, performative scolds like you that are definitely helping. One of the better unforseen consequences of Covid during the George Floyd protests last year was the utter lack of shaming that went on— (incidentally, most left-shaming I’ve witnessed usually comes from insecure, white grad-student types). You want to put your body in the street to help? Great! Afraid of the virus so you want to stay home and donate money to bail funds? Great! While the right wing was trying to paint the protests as violent insurrections, the positivity and generosity people were extending to one another was remarkable and one of the most important things to emerge from all of the misery of the last year.
Just couldn’t help yourself could you? Someone tries to reach out and have a conversation and you had to be that person.
Yeah, I was trying to avoid that. Guess you didn’t get that part.Oh well, here’s to hope – it springs eternal – I hope your snarkiness doesn’t outshine the rest of your personality as it does here.
White people are usually conditioned to look down on minorities, and their apathy is encouraged. All they did was paint black people as ‘urban criminals that are there to hurt your family’. Is it safe to say that America thrives on sociopathy?
When you look at population numbers, white people don’t really have a ‘need’ to interact, relate, or anguish with minorities. Growing up ‘white’ I had noticed the amusing amount of white people tripping over themselves when interacting with black people – so the ‘education system’ works!
What you said describes how I feel, to a T. I’m about your age, and feel like I know about history and how people of color were treated. And I’m terribly ashamed. I saw some of this series last week, what I could watch without turning away. It was horrific. I guess if us “woke” (I hate it too) white people are shocked by the in depth information presented in the series, what hope is there for the people we’re still trying to get to understand why there isn’t a White History month, when Black people get one? When I hear this I want to scream. It’s not a zero sum game you dumb asses. It’s recognizing the part that people of color played in the building of the country and the contributions they made.White History is all there has been for centuries. How the US claims to be “the greatest” is beyond me. Greatest at killing people maybe. Hell we don’t even have the self awareness Germany has. At least they’re ashamed of the Holocaust.
Wow. I would love to see this. Without HBO I’ll wait for the DVD I suppose. One thing about America’s beginnings as a country – they didn’t come here to escape persecution, or for religious freedom, or any of that. A bunch of them just formed a company so they could make money in trade. The company was eventually dissolved and lost money (I think). But the damage, of course, was done: word was spread that there was a mess of profit to be had, exploiting the “savages”, pushing them aside (or, you know, killing them) when they were in the way, and then there was that handy Triangle Trade thing, where a white man could make money at all three trading points….
It’s not the American story even the most liberal-minded among us wants to accept as our undeniable past.
This sentence seems odd to me. If someone is extremely liberal-minded, then of course they don’t want indigenous people to have been exterminated. It’s the right-wing authoritarians who look back with smiling approval on a past in which indigenous people were exterminated by European colonizers.
Dinesh D’Souza will probably have a counter-documentary made to this about how the real perpetrator was the Secret Liberal Cabal.
That’s 55 million human lives gone, but there’s still debate over whether to continue honoring Columbus with a national holidayDo people not really get what Columbus Day is about? It has nothing to do with with the actual explorer. It was created at the instigation of Italian-Americans at a time when they were an oppressed minority and the whole message was “Hey you Anglo-Saxon assholes! You wouldn’t be here on this continent if it wasn’t for one of us!” It was basically an Italian-American pride day. Granted, these days, much like the Irish, Polish, and other once-abused groups before them, Italian-Americans have “become white” over the past 50 years and aren’t really subject to discrimination anymore making the holiday redundant.
What does that have to do with not wanting a day named for Columbus?
It’s just that people don’t get the context. They think it was about the explorer himself. It’s like how in Illinois (which had/has a large Polish population) there is a Casimir Pulaski Day, after the Polish noble who fought in the American Revolution (like Lafayette, only Polish and less well known). Again, the point of the day wasn’t Pulaski himself, but that he was Polish.
The context explains the name, but it’s irrelevant to the question of whether we should change it. Additionally, you are ignoring the additional context being that Italian Americans would never have picked Columbus if the surrounding culture didn’t see him as a benign/positive figure in the first place.
That’s a valid point but I think Italians were so despised at the time that calling it “Columbus Day” made it more acceptable.
Haven’t seen the show, but if you think a time traveler killing Baby Columbus would do anything, you’re nuts. Europe was badly polluted and over populated, and some resources like wood and fish were running out – if Columbus didn’t make his try, someone else would’ve.Furthermore, no European in 1492 thought of themselves as “white.” What they cared about was if you were Christian or not. After four centuries of crusades, their identity was singularly wrapped up in religion, not trying to scrape off the mud from your unwashed skin to see what “color” you were.Lastly, around 99% of the indigenous people who died were felled by infectious diseases. Nobody had any idea how those worked or why the Europeans never got a disease from the indigenous people.Therefore, as far as Europeans were concerned, after winning some major battles against non-Christians in Europe (esp the “reconquest” of Spain which is what gave Isabela and Ferdinand the impetus to fund Columbus after Portugal shut him down), they “miraculously” found a land full of gold and spices and wood for building ships AND most of the inhabitants conveniently died off from disease without any fighting necessary.What other conclusion could you draw in the 15th and 16th century except that God was on the side of the Christians (aka Europeans)? All the evidence certainly seemed to point that way. Pretty easy to sit back now and judge how “wrong” it was when every king and pope at the time was describing it as God’s proof that Europeans are the chosen people.
Nope. Europe wasn’t overpopulated in the 15th century. The Renaissance was fueled by the enormous drop in population the Black Death had created. And they also fought extensive wars against the Incan empire. It wasn’t just a roll over with everyone conveniently dead. And Europeans at the time were horrified by Columbus and his behavior.
It’s kind of weird to me how every generation seems to “discover” that America has done some bad things to African Americans and Native Americans and feel the need to teach us this unknown fact in the most edgelord way possible, but the recent generation seems to be unique in their assumption that they’re the first one to notice this. Like, do the authors of the 1619 project really think they’re the first one to bring the fact that slavery was a pretty big part of American history to people’s attention some forty years after Howard Zinn’s “The People’s History of the United States?” Does this documentary really think that there’s anything new about the fact that the country behaved abhorrently toward Native Americans some fifty years after “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee?” Like, obviously those books are hardly the last word on any of this stuff, but the sophomoric vibe I get off of these things that just assume the masses know nothing about this stuff rubs me the wrong way. People always insist that none of this stuff was in the history classes they took in school but… I kind of doubt that. I guess it’s possible that the schools I went to in the 2000s were more on top of this stuff than the norm but I highly doubt the average history class taught after, like, 1994 was really as devoid of slavery and Native American wars as people make them out to be. Frankly I suspect that if they had actually been paying attention to their classes the first time they wouldn’t be so shocked by any of this.
I think the focus on America in a vacuum is odd. America had slavery for longer as a British colony than as an independent nation. Columbus was Italian and sailing for Spain. We have to reckon with the lasting impact on real people for sure (because we are upholding those systems), but I don’t understand this insistence that we must self-flagellate for the sins of other nations, when those nations don’t give a shit. Sure, we could ditch Columbus day, but did Spain ever apologize for all of the people who were killed in its name? Has England ever apologized to America’s black population for popularizing the widespread trade and use of slaves here while we were their colony? I’m all for seeking justice but i don’t think that can happen when we’re not even identifying the issues correctly. I do think that Gen Z is in a bit of a competition over who can hate the US more, and they don’t want to hear anything good about it.
It’s not even that they’re exactly wrong on the facts but they’re presenting them in a way that’s wildly unproductive. Like, even if they do successfully manage to convince people that America as a concept is rotten to it’s core and that anything positive its accomplished is bullshit… what is anyone supposed to do with that? Do they want to just change the name of the country, throw out the constitution, and start over using a new name? That’s not going to bring the Native American population back or end the legacy of slavery. There’s a real “original sin” complex to the whole thing, they’re like evangelical Christians who have replaced “sins of the flesh” with “white supremacy” and “becoming born again” with “getting woke” and… I mean there’s probably more truth to it than there was to evangelism 1.0 but all this dogmatic obsession with terminology and generational guilt mostly just sparks needless culture wars and distracts from doing actual policy based things that will actually make practical improvements to people’s lives.
I think young activists fall into a trap of vehemently insulting people and then wondering why those people don’t become allies. There’s an expectation that people should be willing to endure hazing and meanness before being welcomed to the progressive side of things, even though no mentally and socially healthy person would subject themselves to that. It’s a movement based on a love of complaining and self-stroking; there’s no interest in solving problems or genuinely building up voting numbers.
It’s kind of weird to me how every generation seems to “discover” that anecdote=/=anecdata.