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“Exterminate All the Brutes,” Reviewed: A Vast, Agonizing History of White Supremacy

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"A Soros-backed animal"
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"The new four-part series by Raoul Peck, “Exterminate All the Brutes,” that’s streaming on HBO Max belongs to an exceptional genre: it is, in effect, an illustrated lecture, or a cinematic podcast. ...“Exterminate All the Brutes” ... movie borrows from the work of historians—the late Sven Lindqvist and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz—all friends of Peck’s. ...The story that he tells is a vast one, a millennial one—that of white supremacy, or, more specifically, whites’ presumption to supremacy, a presumption that, as he makes clear, continues, to this day, to be asserted with violence and justified with lies. Peck ranges back to the Crusades, documenting the claims of white, Christian, European superiority as the argument for conquests in Asia. These events were soon followed by the Spanish Inquisition and its persecution of Jews and Muslims, and—at the same time—the voyage of Columbus to the New World and the genocidal destruction of indigenous peoples that his expedition, and the many explorers that followed, committed. ... As Peck says, “The road to Auschwitz was paved in the earliest days of Christendom, and this road also leads straight to the heart of America.”

Peck’s thought moves with a bold and wondrous associative freedom that takes the film from the naval superiority that enabled Europe to dominate India and China to the crucial role of industrialized weaponry in colonial expansion, and to the ultimate crime of the ultimate weaponry—the use of the atomic bomb against Japan, for which President Harry S. Truman offered an expressly racist justification. Through the misuse of the theory of evolution, the successful domination by Europe and the United States of nonwhite populations shifted, from the myth of a divinely ordained mission to the grotesque fiction of a scientific necessity. Thus, colonial wars in Africa, the elimination of Native American peoples, and the practice of slavery gave rise to the Holocaust—which then came, in the European and American imaginations, to take the place of their own crimes. Peck says, “We would prefer for genocide to have begun and ended with Nazism”—even as he traces the connection of Nazis to the rhetoric, the symbolism, and the violence of current-day white supremacists.

“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.” Throughout, he refers to the anti-immigrant hostility of the current nationalist right wing and the prevalence of neo-Nazis and overt white supremacists in the United States and elsewhere. He presents, plainly, the fulsome self-satisfaction of contemporary hate-mongering potentates. (Among the leaders he shows are Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Marine Le Pen, and Boris Johnson.) Peck calls slavery in the United States “a ghost,” explaining that “the fact that U.S. slavery has both officially ended and yet continues in many complex forms of institutionalized racism makes its representation particularly burdensome.” He looks to the prospect of reparations for Black Americans and “self-determination and restitution” for Native Americans, and considers that anything less will perpetuate and deepen past injustices."

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I quite accidentally stumbled upon the book "Exterminate All The Brutes" by Sven Lindqvist 20 years ago, upon which this series is based, and was utterly blown away by it. I'm pleased to see its ideas brought to the screen.

The idea is not to educate people as to these atrocities, but to challenge us as to how much the ideas behind them are still with us and influencing us today.

The criminalizing of immigration and thus the dehumanizing treatment and outlook towards these people comes to mind. It just came to us too easily.
 
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