Exterminate All the Brutes (miniseries)

Draws a line from the colonization of the Americas and Africa to the prejudice against immigrants in the modern-day US and Europe. The view that the indigenous peoples are no more than beasts leads to the main character in Heart of Darkness discovering a document written to justify civilizing the "savages" that ends with “exterminate all the brutes.” The origin of white supremacy, the idea of clean und unclean blood, traces back all the way to the Crusades. Contempt for aliens is one of the conditions of genocide in addition to fanaticism, exploitation, slavery, and conquest.

Silencing the Past argues that “History is the fruit of Power. Whoever wins in the end gets to frame the story.” Most Europeans and North Americans learned more about the history of the USA from movies or TV than from books, putting into question whether facts matter. Christopher Columbus’s discovery of Haiti led to Europeans taking land and property from indigenous peoples and declaring them extensions of the Portuguese and Spanish states as confirmed by the monarchies and the Catholic Church, which led to the Discovery Doctrine and the wipeout of over 90% of the original population. The worldview behind colonization led to the trading of millions of Africans as slaves to the Americas, securing the blacks position at the bottom of the world.

The US and French revolutions are well-known. The Haitian one, fought by black slaves, is mostly silenced despite the central role it played in abolishing slavery. Furthermore, the defeat of Napoleon’s army by Haitians led him to abandon his American dreams and sell Louisiana to the USA, doubling its territory. Andrew Jackson made a career out of seizing native lands, culminating in the forced deportation of tribes east of the Mississippi during his presidency

The European monopoly on seaborne long-range canons and other advances in firearms increasingly gave them dominance on battlefields. Dumdum bullets proved so effective that they were banned in conflicts between “civilized” armies, but could be used in colonial wars. More arms lead to more expansion, which leads to more arms in an incestual relationship between military, industry, and government. Overseas domination became the US goal.

Heart of Darkness describes the toolbox of imperialism as the gunboat, the railway, and the river steamer. The new era of imperialism brought about a new era of racism, where Europeans mistake military for intellectual and biological superiority. Just like the Americans didn't feel they were bound by treaties made with the Indians, the Germans ignored their treaty with the Hereros in Africa and ordered their extermination.

What became the United States was nourished by the ideas of freedom, democracy, and equality for all, but that was difficult to reconcile with dominance of one race over another, much less genocide, settler colonialism, and empire. The first permanent US colonial institution was the Office of Indian Affairs, first placed within the Department of War. Americans made the killing of Indians a defining element of their first military tradition, and thereby a shared American identity. Hunting Indians was both legal and profitable. A similar observation could be made about slavery. There is scarcely any hope for the American dream, because the people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it. Nobody starts with a clean slate, but the human condition requires that the practices of power and domination be renewed. Calling into account past horrors is only possible because of that renewal.