01x02 - Who the F*** is Columbus?

[bunniefuu]

Ahatti, 1492

Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 1960

In kindergarten, in Haiti,

there was this allegorical image

of Saint Francis of Assisi,

on the last page

of our reading book.

It didn't matter that St. Francis

was obviously white.

At the time, I was still unaware of any

civilizational or racial differences.

I didn't even know that such

differences were possible.

Besides the fact that he was

a saint and I was not.

I knew as much about saints as I

knew about copulation and bees.

My idea of religion, priests, or God,

was, at best, naive if not reckless.

I truly believed that all human beings

were basically,

in some sort of natural way,

brothers and sisters.

Saint-Martial Seminary School Location

Port-au-Prince, Haiti

It was in this euphoric state,

that I was sent to "primary school,"

a Jesuit institution.

On the very first day, I got into

a fight with another boy.

We were both sent to the head

priest to be disciplined.

While waiting for what I thought

would be an appeasing pep talk

and reconciliatory handshake,

had no doubt that the outcome

would be peaceful.

I loved my world of serenity

and understanding.

To my surprise, the head priest,

came in,

took a dry ox muscle hanging from

the wall and, without a word,

whipped us raw,

with three lashes each.

I was so stunned that I didn't cry.

Minutes later,

alone in the school yard,

I realized that the world was

not what I was told it would be.

The rituals, the dogma, the theatrics,

were now transparent.

I decided that I was not going

to be an imbecile in that show.

Especially if it involved saint,

priest, and whip in that order.

Then, I stopped believing

in God altogether.

EXTERMINATE ALL THE BRUTES

PART II

I knew a man.

I knew him well enough to be able to

call him a friend. He was a scholar.

One of the brightest.

One day, I learned of his death.

After 10 years of daily struggle.

A cardiologist, inserted a

malfunctioning pacemaker in his heart,

that would destroy its functions.

By the time they realized

the mistake, it was too late.

Michel-Rolph wrote an extraordinary

book: "Silencing the Past."

A masterpiece.

The work of a lifetime.

By deconstructing the dominant

narrative, he changed everything.

Knowledge is power.

But "history is the fruit of power,"

says Trouillot.

Whoever wins in the end,

gets to frame the story.

On July 4th, 2012,

Trouillot passed away in his sleep

at his home in Chicago.

This is his story as well.

THE ALAMO

John Wayne, 1960

"Remember the Alamo, they say.

But remembering can be quite

selective, writes Trouillot.

Human beings participate in history

both as actors and as narrators.

Among the actors, we find

General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna,

a Mexican national hero,

who in his lifetime,

is said to have participated

in more battles than Napoleon

and George Washington combined.

In his eventful career,

the Alamo was just a brief interlude in

a long streak of defeats and victories.

By the middle of February 1836,

his army had reached the crumbling

walls of the old mission

of San Antonio de Valero

in the Mexican province of Tejas.

Some 200 American sl*ve

owners and militiamen,

now occupied the Spanish mission,

nicknamed the "Alamo."

They refused to surrender

to Santa Anna's superior force.

On March 6, General Santa Anna

blew the horns

that Mexicans traditionally used

to announce an attack to the death.

According to the celebrated story,

when it became clear that the choice

for the 189 Alamo occupants

was between escape and certain death

at the hands of the Mexicans,

commander William Barret Travis

drew a line on the ground.

Those men who wish to stay will cross

the line and stand with me.

The others may go,

with my blessing.

Supposedly, everyone crossed,

except, of course, the man who

conveniently escaped to tell the story.

I didn't survive Russia and Waterloo

to die in this desert.

Obviously, a Frenchman.

Santa Anna's troops broke through the

fort, k*lling most of the defenders.

A clear victory.

But a few weeks later, on April 21,

at San Jacinto,

Santa Anna fell prisoner

to Sam Houston,

the freshly certified leader

of the secessionist Republic of Texas.

Houston's men had punctuated their

victorious attack on the Mexican army

with repeated shouts of "Remember

the Alamo! Remember the Alamo!"

With that reference to the old

mission, they doubly made history.

As actors, the Texans captured Santa

Anna and neutralized his forces.

As narrators, they give

the Alamo story a new meaning.

What they did not say is that

General Santa Anna quickly recovered

from the upset and went on to be

the leader of Mexico four more times.

But this is not what history

will remember.

General Santa Anna indeed

lost the battle of the day,

but he also lost the battle

he had won at the Alamo.

How much can we reduce what happened

to what is said to have happened?

Does it matter whether events

are fact or fiction?

Most Europeans and North Americans

learned more about the history

of colonial America and the American

West from movies

and television than from books.

The Alamo? That was a history lesson

delivered by John Wayne on the screen.

What does it mean for our

collective experiences?

Do we even wish

for a common history?

Shoah Memorial

Berlin, Germany

Does it really not matter whether

or not the Holocaust is true or false?

Does it really not make

a difference whether or not

the leaders of n*zi Germany planned

and supervised

the k*lling of six million Jews?

Jean Bercu, deported in February 1944

at the age of 4.

If six million do not really matter,

would two million be enough,

or would some of us settle

for three hundred thousand?

If there is nothing

to be proved or disproved,

what then is the point

of the story?

HOME MOVIES

Peck family

The history of America is being

written in a world

where few little boys want

to be Indians.

In 1492, neither Europe

as we now know it,

nor whiteness as we now experience

it existed as such.

Here is the story we have been told:

Christopher Columbus was born

to a Genoese merchant family,

and as a trader at sea,

joined other European navigators

competing for gold

and other lucrative commodities,

a market long dominated

by Muslim traders.

It was no secret that

the Earth was spherical

and Columbus believed a shorter,

more direct route could be used

to reach valuable exotic spice islands.

Columbus sold the idea

to the Spanish monarchy

and off he sailed with 3 ships headed

directly West across the Atlantic.

Instead of the bustling ports

of the East Indies,

Columbus came upon

a tropical paradise,

populated by the Taino people,

what is now Haiti.

Then, from the Iberian Peninsula,

came merchants, mercenaries,

criminals, and peasants.

They seized the land and property

of Indigenous peoples

and declared the territories

to be extensions

of the Spanish

and Portuguese states.

These acts were confirmed

by the monarchies and endorsed

by the papal authority

of the Roman Catholic Church.

That's more or less the official story.

And through that official story,

a new vision of the world was created:

The Doctrine of Discovery.

The extent

of the "demographic catastrophe"

that followed is without

equivalent in world history.

Within a hundred years,

over 90 percent of the original

population of this continent

would be wiped out.

Despite large-scale massacres, t*rture,

and other inconceivable atrocities,

the great majority of these people

did not die in battle.

Most died of disease,

hunger and inhuman labor conditions,

because their social organization had

been wrecked by the white conquerors.

the first ordained priest to officiate

in the New Indies,

was one of the witnesses

and a chronicler of this catastrophe.

k*lling and enslaving other beings,

thought to be equally human,

created a dilemma for him.

Our Lord Jesus said:

I am the truth and the life.

I will try to speak the truth

about those from whom we

are taking the lives.

Because this is the truth:

we are destroying them.

Since the discovery and the conquest

of the Indies,

the Spanish have not stopped enslaving

torturing and massacring the Indians.

Since the very first contacts,

Spanish have been consumed

by the thirst for gold.

It is their only claim.

Gold! Gold! Bring us gold!

So much that the natives said:

"What do they do with all that gold?

They must eat it."

both in colonization

and in the humanity

of the Indians.

He was torn between the

symbolic and the practical.

Incapable of reconciling the two.

Instead, he offered a poor

and ambiguous compromise,

that he would later regret:

freedom for the savages,

the Indians, sl*very for

the barbarians, the Africans.

DISPUTE IN VALLADOLID

Jean-Daniel Veraeghe, 1992

If it is clear that Indians are our

brother in the name of Jesus Christ,

endowed with a reasonable

soul like ours.

On the other hand,

it is certain that the inhabitants

of Africa

are much closer to animals.

Colonization won the day.

The seventeenth century

saw the increased involvement

of England, France, and the Netherlands

in the Americas and in the sl*ve trade.

The eighteenth century followed

the same path

with an added touch of perversity:

the more European merchants

and mercenaries bought and conquered

other men and women in the Americas,

the more European philosophers

wrote and talked about Man.

Meanwhile, there

was no single view of Blacks

or of any non-white group,

for that matter.

All assumed that, ultimately, some

humans were more so than others.

Viewed from outside the West,

the age of Enlightenment was

a century of obscurity.

In the Western conception,

Man was primarily European and male.

Everyone else was at the lowest

level of this hierarchy.

I have no complaints.

I just want to understand.

Trading human beings?

What sick mind thought of this first?

Brought by force

and pushed to death.

sl*very. Or the "Trade"

as they refer to it euphemistically.

A state-sponsored genocide.

What does this say

about a civilized world?

No. I have no complaints.

I just want to understand.

Congo River, 1892

What if, from the beginning,

the story was inaccurate?

What if it was not just a question

of vocabulary or interpretation?

Perhaps a case of collective

borderline personality disorder?

Okay, let's go!

What?

What about the boat?

Boat's probably stuck in Matadi.

Up the river.

I need to join my parish.

I'm already two months late.

So?

Wait!

Wait!

Faster!

Keep them tight!

Faster!

What is this?

Faster!

You there! Faster!

Stop that at once!

What do you think you are doing

with those children?

What children?

These are shipments.

Shipments?

They are to be trained as soldiers

by the state. O sold as sl*ves.

Faster!

Keep them tight!

In Columbus' travel journal,

there is a description

of the first sighting of land on

Thursday, October 11th, 1492.

At two hours after midnight,

land appeared,

from which they were about

two leagues distant.

They hauled down the sails

Passing time until daylight Friday,

when they reached an islet

and descended.

A normal day, after all.

The isolation of a single fetishized

moment creates a historical fact.

Once discovered,

"the Other" is allowed to finally enter

the human world.

Whatever else may have happened

to other peoples in that process

is reduced, as if by magic,

to a natural fact:

they were discovered.

Show me the way my Lord.

Let me walk along your path.

Touch my heart to fear

your name, my Lord.

As to surrender myself

to your glory.

Show me the way, my Lord.

Let me walk along your path.

Touch my heart

What's the problem now?

What did he do?

Nothing. Why?

My dear Rose, may these words convey

to you the fullness of my sentiments.

I hope they will find you well.

It seems so strange to walk under

this unbearable heat,

when only four months ago,

I could still comfort myself

in your arms.

The madness in these distant

lands is hard to describe.

I am making new experiences.

Two days ago,

I saw my first corpses.

A good dozen of them,

white little bodies,

floating into the darkness,

floating as if they were

just resting for a long journey.

These are not our choices to make.

The ways of the Lord are infinite.

I miss so much

this delicate temple hidden

in the depth of your thighs

Any historical narrative

is a particular bundle of silences.

It is an exercise of power

that makes some narratives possible

and silences others.

In this fabricated narrative,

not all silences are equal.

Our job as filmmakers, writers,

historians, image-makers,

is to deconstruct these silences.

From its first appearances,

the word "Negre", n*gro,

entered French dictionaries

with increasingly precise

negative undertones.

By the middle

of the eighteenth century,

"Black" was almost

universally bad.

What had happened in the meantime,

was the expansion

of African-American sl*very.

That was the most potent impetus

for the transformation of European

ethnocentrism into scientific racism.

"Blacks were inferior

and therefore enslaved",

"Black sl*ves behaved badly

and were therefore inferior."

The practice of sl*very in the Americas

secured the Black's position

at the bottom of the human world.

By the time

of the American Revolution,

European ethnocentrism

had merged into scientific racism

and framed the ideological landscape

on both sides of the Atlantic.

The final years of the 18th century

were called "The Age of Revolutions."

But one usually thinks

of the American revolution,

starting in 1763

and the French Revolution of 1789.

Not the Haitian Revolution of 1790.

Indeed, in those changing years,

a particular group of Black sl*ves,

men women, and children, would rise.

In just 10 short years, they would

fight and create the Nation of Haiti,

the truly first free republic

in America.

The only revolution that materialized

the ideal of enlightenment:

freedom, fraternity,

and equality for all.

In 1790, French colonist La Barre

wrote to his wife in France

to reassure her of the peaceful state

of life in the Tropics:

"There is no movement among our

Negroes. They don't even think of it.

A revolt among them is impossible.

Freedom for Negroes is a chimera."

Just a few months later,

the events would ridicule

these r*cist assumptions.

A nation is not an act of creation,

but a process of growth.

You will take the city of Cap Haitian,

but only when it is reduced

to ashes.

And even on those ashes,

I will fight you.

What happened in Haiti

contradicts most of what the West

has claimed about itself.

The silencing of the Haitian Revolution

is part of a narrative

of global domination.

Nevertheless, the revolution played

a central role

in the collapse of the entire system

of sl*very

and in the liberation of

Latin America.

Haiti created the possible.

The Haitian Revolution was unthinkable

even as it happened.

But "unthinkable" only in the framework

of a self-centered Western thought.

Unthinkable in the West,

not only because it challenged

sl*very and racism,

but because of the way it did so.

It was the ultimate test

of the universalist pretensions

of both the French

and the American revolutions.

And they both failed that test.

Confronted with this "unthinkable",

Napoleon sent 65,000 troops

to reestablish sl*very in Haiti.

His whole army was defeated

within two years.

Forcing him to renounce

his American dreams

and sell all

of his American properties.

The so-called "Louisiana Purchase"

doubled the size of the United States

and, through this added power,

would accelerate the conquest

of the rest of Indian territories.

The debt owed to Haiti still

remains to be paid.

I fell in love in Rome.

I made my first film in Berlin.

My parents spent 25 years in Africa.

My daughter was born in Uganda

and went to school in New Jersey.

the other won an Emmy

My older brother spent two years

in Vietnam and even more with PTSD.

Who are we?

I have taught filmmaking from Norway

Who am I?

Who am I in this official pre-approved

Eurocentric classification?

Bonding

Helping each other, walking

together, loving each other!

That's why I love the young!

I once followed a charismatic man

whom I revered and who

one day betrayed his people.

I made a film about him too.

Who am I?

De Cuba traigo un Cantar.

Raoul Peck. 1982

I have traveled to many places.

And have never called them my own.

And no violence

was ever involved.

Places where I lived.

Places where I worked.

Places where I loved

and sometimes was loved.

I played w*r in the streets

I rode a bicycle in Katanga.

I built houses in Cuba.

Who am I?

During the sixteenth century,

England began its brutal

conquest of Ireland

and declared half a million acres of

land in the north open to settlement.

Under British colonial rule,

the Irish were regarded as a lower

species and naturally inferior.

They were descendants of apes,

while of course,

the English were descendants

of "man,"

who had been created by God

"in his own image."

The English were "angels."

But Britain's Irish policies

brought economic ruin to Ireland's

wool and linen industries.

The invaders became losers.

This pushed nearly a quarter

of a million

Calvinist Scots-lrish colonizers

to leave Ireland

for British North America.

One of history's greatest migrations.

But as foot soldiers of British

empire-building

and even before ever encountering

Indigenous Americans,

the Scots-lrish had already practiced

scalping for bounty, on the Irish.

Theodore Roosevelt said of his

Scots-lrish ancestors:

"They were a grim, stern people.

Strong and simple, powerful in good

and evil,

relentless, revengeful, suspicious.

Knowing neither ruth, nor pity.

They were of all men the best

fitted to conquer the wilderness

and to hold it against all comers.

They made up the officer corps

and were soldiers of the regular army

as well as the frontier-ranging

militias that cleared areas

for settlement by exterminating

Indigenous farmers

and destroying their towns.

They served in sl*ve patrols as well

as in the Confederate Army.

They regarded themselves as chosen

people of the covenant,

commanded by God to go into the

wilderness to build the new Israel.

I, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

do solemnly swear

that I will faithfully execute

the office of president

of the United States.

All modern nation-states claim

a kind of rationalized origin story

upon which they fashion patriotism

or loyalty to the state.

So help me God!

So help me God!

According to God's

unfathomable will,

one is born as part

of the elect or not.

And being elected gives you the right

to implement God's will

and eliminate the native people.

Because individuals could

not know for certain

if they were among

the elected or not,

material wealth became

the manifestation of election.

Conversely, bad fortune and poverty,

not to speak of dark skin,

became evidence of damnation.

The attractiveness of such a doctrine

is quite obvious,

commented historian Donald Akenson.

The natives are immutably

profane and damned,

while oneself is predestined to virtue.

The Puritans

who founded the Massachusetts colony

endorsed this virtue.

Forty-one of the "pilgrims," all men,

wrote and signed the compact.

Invoking God's name, while

planting the First Colony.

The United States is supposedly

a "nation of immigrants."

But this assumption masks a reality

of over three centuries of violence.

According to the myth,

the faithful citizens come together

of their own free will

and pledge to each other

and to their god

to form and support a godly society,

and their god in turn vouchsafes them

prosperity in a promised land.

But for non-European immigrants,

no matter how much might they strive

to prove themselves

to be as hardworking and patriotic as

descendants of the original settlers,

they are suspect.

To be accepted,

they must prove their fidelity

to the covenant

and what it stands for.

They must endeavor

to embrace whiteness

and look down on descendants

of enslaved Africans,

the Indigenous, and Mexicans,

none of whom, of course,

are immigrants.

It was a messy night, not Thursday

anymore, but not yet Friday.

This is Howard Zinn. Probably the most

decisive historian of this country.

This is Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz.

A respected historian as well.

Her father was Scots-lrish

and she once married a famous poet.

Howard and Roxanne are friends.

When Howard published "A People's

History of the United States,"

it immediately became a milestone

in the deconstruction

of the official American narrative.

A distinguished white scholar was

for once questioning the dream

and telling the story differently.

One day, Roxanne asked Howard

why he left out parts

of the Native people's story.

Howard listened quietly,

then confessed:

"I don't know how to write it."

"Why don't you write it?"

So, Roxanne did. Putting Native

Americans at the center.

And knowing that it was

going to be painful.

I met Howard long

before I met Roxanne.

And when I met Roxanne, Howard had

died a few years earlier.

And Howard never read Roxanne's

finished book.

I learned from Howard,

Roxanne and Michel-Rolph.

As we learn from our elders.

From them, I learned to favor

the collective over the individual,

to look for the "we"

before indulging in the "I"

and to always place oneself

"within the world," not above.

Learning years.

Contrary to what has been asserted

about the birth of the United States

and its domination of the continent,

it was neither superior weapons

nor technology,

nor a superior number of settlers,

nor disease,

that is to say, not "g*ns,

steel, and germs"

that can account for it.

The determining factor of this

domination was the willingness

to eliminate whole civilizations of

people in order to possess their land.

The case of Andrew Jackson,

The 7th president of

the United States is a telling story.

Andrew Jackson is enshrined in most

US history texts

in a chapter titled

'The Age of Jackson,'

'The Age of Democracy,'

'The Birth of Democracy,'

or some variation thereon.

Jackson's family personified

the Protestant Scots-lrish migration.

He was an influential Tennessee

land speculator, politician

and wealthy owner of a sl*ve

plantation, near Nashville,

worked by a 150 sl*ves:

The Hermitage.

Jackson bought his first sl*ve,

a young woman, in 1788.

He was 21 years old.

When Tennessee became a state,

he was elected at the age of 29,

as its first US senator.

An office he quit after a year

to become a judge

in the Tennessee Supreme Court.

As a judge, he was in a better

position to seize Native lands.

It was in 1801 that Jackson first took

command of the Tennessee militia

as a colonel and began his

Indian-k*lling military career.

In 1821, by then a national hero,

Jackson became military governor

of the Florida territory.

In 1829,

Jackson became president.

By that time, it was already clear

that this new nation

called the United States of America

needed a clear and decisive policy

toward the first Americans.

It was their land after all.

1830, Congress passed

the "Indian Removal Act."

Andrew Jackson immediately

pushed through to forcibly deport

all Indigenous peoples

from East of the Mississippi

to what they would

then call "Indian Territory."

the Nations which firmly resisted.

Jackson sent in the Army.

And as usual, when a power decides

to "solve" a problem,

especially if it includes the removal

of whole peoples, it turns ugly.

Quartermaster General Thomas Sidney

Jesup was made commander of that force.

He would become the embodiment

of every other henchman in history.

Treaty of the Hickory Ground, 1814

A treaty is an agreement signed

by two nations,

in order to establish borders and

conditions for their mutual survival.

Council at Medicine Lodge Creek

Kansas, 1867

But nevertheless, from 1832 to 1871,

American Indians were arbitrarily

considered to be

domestic dependent tribes.

And as such any treaty had

to be approved by the US Congress.

Andrew Jackson said

to Secretary of w*r John Caldwell

Calhoun of Scotch-lrish descent,

who considered

sl*very as a necessary evil:

"I think making treaties with Indians

is not only useless but absurd."

Indeed, to accept the term treaty

was to tacitly

accept the notion of Nation.

During the Jacksonian period,

also called "the birth

of the white republic,"

the United States made

eighty-six treaties

with twenty-six Indigenous nations

between New York and the Mississippi,

all of them forcing land handovers,

and including removals.

And then,

they signed treaty after treaty,

which were violated

one after the other.

Famous French aristocrat

and writer, Alexis de Tocqueville,

witnessed part of what would become

known as the "Trail of Tears."

He was present at the deportation

of the Choctaw people.

I saw with my own eyes several

of the cases of misery

which I have been describing.

I was the witness of sufferings

which I have not

the power to portray.

No cry, no sob.

All were silent.

Life? Race?

Patriotism?

What is a flag?

A piece of cloth to die for?

Or to k*ll for?

Explain in two words.

To be continued