Oscar-nominated filmmaker Raoul Peck’s anti-West documentary is a sick retelling of history seeking to portray white Europeans as Planet Earth’s greatest monsters. Despite a pretense of originality, HBO’s four-episode miniseries regurgitates the same, tired, anti-white and anti-American blood libels common in far-left discourse for nearly half a century.
Peck based the documentary on just three sources: Sven Lindqvist’s book also titled Exterminate All the Brutes, which claims that white Europeans invented the concept of genocide; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, which recasts American history as the deliberate genocide of the Native Americans, and Howard Zinn’s 1980 A People’s History of the United States, which revises U.S. history by looking at it through a Marxist worldview.Peck seeks to deconstruct the traditional view of Western history in favor of one that fetishizes the suffering of native peoples at the hands of white Europeans. He claims that by referring to the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World in 1492 as a “discovery,” we erase the entire history of indigenous people until that point.Incoherence.From a technical perspective, the documentary has a few attractive sequences. But the final product is extremely disjointed, lurching from subject to unrelated subject with little semblance of order. The aim appears to be shocking the viewer, rather than educating them.Even the far-left Daily Beast website called “Peck’s experimental impulses, which are at the very least captivating,” eventually incoherent.Actor Josh Hartnett portrays a white everyman leading the removal of Seminoles from Florida, overseeing laborers at a rubber plantation in the Congo, and – in an especially bizarre sequence – a witness to black slave hunters taking white children away in chains. Cunningham finds these sequences odd as well, writing: “…it’s the dramatizations in particular, mostly interactions between white settlers and Black and Indigenous people, that feel especially fruitless and misplaced within the documentary.”These dramatic sequences are extremely over-the-top, as Peck hits us with the theme of “white man bad” with all the subtlety of a hydraulic battering ram. This theme is established early.Christmas As White Supremacy.In episode one, we are treated to scenes of a classic American Christmas: happy families shopping, ice skating, and opening gifts under brightly lit trees. Over these cheerful scenes, Peck ominously quotes a Swedish neo-Nazi who said that “all Jews and Negros ought to be exterminated.”Peck clearly wants to build an association in the mind of the viewer between innocent, white children enjoying Christmastime and a racist, genocidal ideology. He makes generous use of such juxtapositions throughout the four episodes.In one of the most egregious sequences, images of smiling white people having fun are interspersed with images of smiling Nazis engaged in the same activities.Peck returns to several themes throughout the documentary. The title Exterminate All the Brutes comes from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, published in 1899, in which the narrator tells the story of a journey upriver into the heart of the Congo, and the loss of civilization on the way. The line itself is spoken by the character Kurtz, a man who went insane in the jungle and made himself king of a primitive tribe.According to Peck, this philosophy is not simply the ravings of a literary madman, but rather the motivating factor for white Europeans in their conquest of...
