White Supremacy's Origin & Mission: "Exterminate All the (non-white) Brutes"

I just finished watching Raoul Peck's four-part documentary "Exterminate All the Brutes." It documented the process and effects of European colonialism in the Americas, Africa, and South Asia.

Peck is a Haitian-born film maker who directed the award-winning film "I Am Not Your Negro." Time Magazine called his latest effort perhaps "the most politically radical and intellectually challenging work of nonfiction ever made for television."

Peck himself describes the documentary's topic as nothing less than the deep origins of the ideology of white supremacy. He says his film is intended to "counter the type of lies, the type of propaganda, the type of abuse, that we have been subject to all of these years."

Whitewashed History

The perpetrators of such falsehoods are not merely right-wingers like Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump. They're the worst, since they actively advocate whitewashed "Patriotic History" lest white civilization be exposed as basically avaricious, racist, and genocidal.

However, unwitting culprits also include would-be progressives who find it understandably difficult to face up to unquestionable historical fact.

Over the last week or so, the latter were exemplified for me in the reactions of two very smart and well-intentioned friends responding to the topic at hand. One of them felt compelled to leave half-way through the first episode of "Exterminate. . ." He commented as he left the room, "This is just too violent for me. It's all too gratuitously graphic."

The second reaction had come a week or so earlier in another context. In my blog, I had lamented the magnitude of what David E. Stannard has called The American Holocaust. It wiped out more than 100 million Native Americans in a single century.

In response, my second friend countered that the deaths were overwhelmingly due to diseases the Europeans introduced. Hence the deaths were mostly inadvertent and unintentional. The colonizers, said my friend, preferred to have the indigenous alive in order to enslave them.

While I could sympathize with my first friend's feelings, I couldn't agree with his conclusions and reactions. Peck's film shows that nothing depicted on screen (or even portrayable there) could possibly equal the actual violence of the historical events the documentary so compellingly recounts. There was nothing gratuitous about it. No matter the blood and gore, it remained inevitably understated.

As for the "inadvertent" slaughter of Native Americans. . . That's emphatically not the story that Peck tells. Nor is it supported by what we know about the nearly endless list of American Indian wars, and historical events such as the Indian Removal Act, and the "Trail of Tears," along with the declarations of famous Indian fighters like Andrew Jackson and George Custer.

Peck's Argument

But Peck's argument goes far beyond Indian wars and Stannard's American Holocaust. It recapitulates the whole of European history.

According to Peck, three words summarize that saga. They are civilization, colonization, and extermination. That's where the film's title comes from. For Peck, the project of the civilizers and the colonizers is clear. It was to exterminate all the brutes - meaning all the non-whites who inhabited the resource-rich territories lusted after by comparatively resource-poor Europeans.

The natives were considered brutes by Catholic theology, by notions of "progress" and eugenics fostered by Darwin's evolutionary theory, and by the macabre success of mass-produced guns and canons in crushing the poorly armed pre-industrial opponents of the colonizers. That gory achievement enabled Europeans to complete their circle of theological inference with confident invocations of divinely approved "manifest destiny."

Next Page  1  |  2

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).