01x04 - The Bright Colors of Fascism

[bunniefuu]

A guy walks into a bar

"My name is Christopher Columbus,"

he yells, "And I now own this bar."

From now on, I call it:

"Hispaniola Lounge".

Among the black patrons,

nobody says a word.

Only the black barman, shakes his head:

"White people"

EXTERMINATE ALL THE BRUTES

PART 4

THE BRIGHT COLORS OF FASCISM

LAND WITH PEOPLE

THE MYTH OF PRISTINE WILDERNESS

Land with no peoples does not exist.

The idea that America was virgin land

or wilderness inhabited by non-people

called savages is a myth.

Only through k*lling and displacement

does it become uninhabited.

Before the arrival of the British,

North America was a continent

of villages, of nations,

of federations of nations.

Between 1814 and 1824,

a big chunk of land between today's

Florida and Kentucky

became the private property

of white settlers.

The first permanent US colonial

institution was established.

First named

the Office of Indian Affairs

and placed within

the Department of w*r.

We are less than two centuries old.

But no nation has ever been

more strongly stirred

by the knowledge of its own story.

We are the product of many strains,

and many visions.

And yet we see that story as

essentially one heroic adventure.

Photocall

at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation

South Dakota, 1891

The bid for independence by what

became the United States of America

was nourished by the ideas of freedom,

democracy, and equality for all.

But these ideas

were difficult to reconcile

with the reality of dominance

of one race over another,

much less with genocide,

settler colonialism, and empire.

To reconcile rhetoric with reality,

a new model had to emerge.

The birth of something new:

the birth of the US American race.

A new people born of the merger of

the best of both worlds:

the Native and the European.

Not a biological merger.

God forbid!

But something more ephemeral,

implying the dissolving of the Indian.

A process that would exclude

Native Americans and Afro-Americans

from participating,

unless as foils.

"You have there the myth of

the essential white America,"

wrote D. H. Lawrence

about James Fenimore Cooper's

frontiersman character Deerslayer.

"All the other stuff, the love, the

democracy, the floundering into lust,

is a sort of by-play", he writes.

The essential American soul is hard,

isolate, stoic, and a k*ller.

It has never yet melted."

The Navy SEAL team members

who carried out the assassination

of Osama bin Laden on May 2nd, 2011

were reporting in real time

to President Obama,

Secretary of State Hilary Clinton,

and other officials

in their sealed "Situation" Room.

NO PHOTO FINISH

Following the operation,

the "New York Daily News" commented:

"Along with the unseen pictures of

Osama Bin Laden's corpse,

intelligence officials' reasons for

dubbing the Al Qaeda boss 'Geronimo'

remain one of the biggest mysteries of

the Black Ops mission."

But it was not a mystery to the

US Navy Seals, or to Obama or Clinton,

and especially to any Native American

who heard it.

Geronimo, or by his real name,

Goyathlay,

was one of the greatest adversaries

the colonizing Army had confronted

in their "k*ll anything that moves"

march across the continent.

Geronimo is revered as a great

freedom fighter by the Apache people

and by all Native Americans.

The choice of the code word "Geronimo"

for a US enemy

was not a mystery to the military,

who also use the term "Indian country"

to designate enemy territory.

"Indian country" and "in-country"

are military terms,

like other euphemisms

such as "collateral damage"

for k*lling civilians

or "ordnance" for bombs,

that appear in military training

manuals and are used regularly.

CLEAR-IN-ZONE

UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE

ALTERNATIVE PROCEDURES

VIOLENT EXTREMISM

"Indian country" and "in-country"

mean "behind enemy lines."

UNLAWFUL COMBATTANTS

ADMINISTERED TERRITORIES

BULK PERSONAL DATASE

HARSH TACTICS

BRUTAL TREATMEN

UH-60 BLACK HAWK

All US wars re-enact fundamentally

the "Indian Wars.

H-34 CHOCKTAW

BELL-UH1 IROQUOIS

OV-1 MOHAWK

AH-64 APACHE

LOOKHEED AH-56A CHEYENNE

CH-47 CHINOOK

Counterinsurgent warfare

was the way of w*r.

Military historian John Grenier states:

"Successive generations of Americans,

both soldiers and civilians,

made the k*lling of Indian men, women,

and children

a defining element

of their first military tradition

and thereby

part of a shared American identity."

The chief characteristic of irregular

warfare is that of the extreme violence

against civilians,

in this case the tendency to

seek the utter annihilation

of the Indigenous population.

k*ll anything that moves,

take no prisoners.

In California, hunting Indians

was both legal and profitable.

$5 a head, 50 cents a scalp.

In 1854 alone,

the federal government paid more than

a million dollars to Indian hunters.

The State reward for dead Indians

has been increased to 200 dollars.

Many of the descendants

of those settlers

are at the forefront

of the Second Amendment activists.

They say they represent "the people"

and have the right to bear arms

in order to overthrow any government

that does not in their view adhere to

the God-given covenant.

But it is a fact that the original

mandate of the Second Amendment was

to empower and authorize settlers

to arm themselves to k*ll Indians

and to control enslaved Africans.

Roughly three-fourth of g*n owners

are men, and 82% are white.

Taken together, that's 61% of adults

who own g*ns are white men.

We cannot make sense of g*n hoarding

and the cult of the g*n

if we don't deal with

white nationalism.

And we can't deal

with white nationalism

without dealing with

United States history.

My friend Roxanne told me:

As Men of their times,

the founders created

the most perfect document ever written

for the most perfect country on Earth.

But today we can see the warts.

And they ruin the picture.

"Make America great again,"

he said.

When exactly was it great?

I mean, really great?

And for whom?

Roxanne tells me:

Thanks to sl*very cotton became

the fuel of the 19th century.

Around 1831, US cotton made up almost

half of the world's production.

The elite in the South

became extremely wealthy.

The elite in the North became

extremely wealthy as well.

Sparking the Industrial Revolution.

At the beginning, the sl*ves had to

clean the cotton with their bare hands.

The invention of the cotton gin by

Eli Whitney would change everything.

But cotton also destroyed the soil.

So, Southerners and Northerners

plundered more Indian land.

While using sl*ves' bodies

as a commodity

became the most lucrative enterprise

around.

More profitable than all land, banks,

railroads, factories,

and gold products put together.

sl*ves were used as collateral

for mortgage.

A newly developed tool of commerce.

Thomas Jefferson mortgaged a 150 of his

enslaved workers to build Monticello.

With a Dutch company

putting up the money.

Mortgaging people to buy more people.

A large part of Europe had abolished

sl*very by 1848,

but Europeans were still silently

bankrolling the sl*ve industry

in the United States.

"sl*very may be called

cultural genocide par excellence.

It is the most effective and thorough

method of destroying a culture,

and of de-socializing human beings."

RESISTANCE

By 1890, disarmed,

held in concentration camps, their

children taken away, half-starved,

the Lakota and Dakota survivors,

found a new form of resistance:

Ghost dancing.

It was a simple dance

performed by everyone in the open,

requiring only a specific kind of

handmade ribbon shirt

that might protect the dancers

from g*nf*re.

It spread like wildfire

in all directions.

Among the presumed sources

of this dance,

is a Nevada Paiute holy man

named Wovoka.

Native Pilgrims journeyed long

distances to hear Wovoka's message

and to receive directions on

how to perform the Ghost Dance,

which promised to restore

the Indigenous world

as it was before colonialism,

make the invaders disappear and

the dead warriors and buffalo return.

They danced without rest.

Occasionally,

they collapsed unconscious.

Quickly those on each side

of the fallen closed the gap

and continued dancing.

When the dancing began among

the Sioux in 1890,

reservation officials falsely reported

that Sioux leader Tatanka Yotanka,

Sitting Bull,

had ordered the people

at Pine Ridge Reservation

to perform the Ghost Dance

day and night.

Although Sitting Bull had learned

the Ghost Dance,

he lived in the Standing Rock Sioux

reservation,

miles away from the dancing,

and was not giving orders.

The dancing was spontaneous.

General Sherman, General Sherman.

New York City

January 7,1891

A few days after the "battle"

of Wounded Knee

General Sherman,

how do you see the end of this revolt?

- Are there civilian casualties?

- How many savages have you k*lled?

Lots of familiar faces.

General. How do you keep such vigor

after such an exhausting battle?

Well, riding horses and k*lling Indians

do keep one crisp and fresh.

What lesson do you draw

from this campaign?

Is there an end

to these permanent revolts?

Indians must either work or starve.

They never have worked; they won't work

now, and they never will work.

But should not the government

supply them with enough

to keep them from starvation?

You're gonna pay for it?

Who shot Sitting Bull?

How is that important?

He resisted arrest, and he was shot.

- What about Big foot?

- What about him?

It is said that

they had him surrounded.

That's what the fake press

wanted us to believe.

What about Custer's regiment?

It is said that they wanted revenge.

And what about the twenty-five soldiers

k*lled in "friendly fire"?

sh*t happens.

And why is it that you journalists

are always trying to make things

more complicated than there are?

It was a search action. We told them to

surrender and hand over their weapons.

Which they did

Well that's your version

Wounded Knee m*ssacre

Est. Indians k*lled: 300

Survivors: 51 (4 men, 47 women)

Army casualties: 25 dead

Yellow Bird, Medicine Man

Big Foot, chief of the Miniconjou

Lakota Sioux

The Wizard of Oz

Victor Fleming, 1939

Five days after the sickening events

at Wounded Knee,

Lyman Frank Baum,

a Dakota Territory settler,

who would become famous years later for

writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,

wrote in the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer

newspaper:

'The Pioneer has before declared

that our only safety depends upon

the total extermination of the Indians.

Having wronged them for centuries,

we had better,

in order to protect our civilization,

follow it up by one more wrong

and wipe

these untamed and untamable creatures

from the face of the earth."

The fact is,

the Native Americans are still here,

and this is still their home.

And despite some real individual

accomplishments,

the real fight remains the fight for

self-determination and restitution.

Anything less, will not be acceptable,

Representative Heather Keeler

Minnesota

"American Indian individuals

shall have the right to choose

his or her citizenship. And American

Indian nations have the right to choose

their level of citizenship and autonomy

up to absolute independence."

THE PAST IN THE PRESEN

The same observation could be made

about sl*very.

For sl*very here is a ghost,

both the past and a living presence.

And after 400 years the problem of

historical representation

is how to represent that ghost.

Something that is

and yet is not.

The fact that US sl*very has both

officially ended

and yet continues in many complex forms

of institutionalized racism

makes its representation

particularly burdensome.

As long as genocide, sl*very

and the exploitation of human bodies

do not convert into reparation,

whatever the form,

there will never be any peace.

As writer James Baldwin says:

"there is scarcely any hope

for the American dream,

because people who are denied

participation in it,

by their very presence will wreck it."

Galveston, Texas

August 2019

The facts are staring us in the face.

Time is not a chronological continuity,

wrote Trouillot in his book

"Silencing The Past".

It is the range of disjointed moments,

practices and symbols,

that thread the historical relations

between events and narratives.

No amount of historical debate about

any of these events,

and no amount of guilt

can serve as a substitute

for marching in the streets today.

Synagogue sh**ting

What must be denounced here

is not so much the reality of

the Native American genocide,

or the reality of sl*very,

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.

I witnessed death in Haiti.

Of unknown people and of friends like

or Guy Malary

both slain by CIA linked military.

But not all deaths are violent.

I accompanied my mother's passing, in a

hospital room in Voorhees, New Jersey.

She, who was the first to tell me about

Congo's assassinated Prime Minister,

Patrice Lumumba.

I made a film about him too.

And my mother is in it.

I spent 15 years of my life

in a city called Berlin in Germany.

I went to film school there.

My entry project was about the prison

of Plotzensee. A n*zi t*rture compound.

Not one single day when I lived there,

did I forget that this country,

which produced some of humanity's best

philosophers, scientists, and artists,

also operated one of the most

devastating scientifically-run

and engineered k*lling machines.

Berlin.

I know these streets by heart.

Every day,

I walked under these arches

to my classes

at the Technical University.

The superimposition of time and images.

Auschwitz.

I went there too.

I wanted to see for myself.

More than anything else,

it was these details which gave me

the clearest sense of the horror.

I have seen these Images before.

In Ntarama, Rwanda, in 2003.

I took these exact same photos.

A few hundred people had been

slaughtered by Hutu militias

and government soldiers in a church.

A young man told me

about what happened.

He had been there

and had escaped through a hole.

He showed me the hole.

Still there after ten years.

Sometimes in April

Raoul Peck, 2005

I knew I had seen this picture before,

"We're staying together".

Why didn't the world react?

The argument that people didn't know.

That's not true. They knew.

We know now from intelligence records;

just how much they knew.

That within hours,

they were aware that the k*lling was

being done on an ethnic basis,

systematically,

that there were lists,

that the K*llers were going through

the capital city

choosing out people from certain

households and executing them.

They knew this.

This is Alison Des Forges.

She spent her life documenting

the horror.

She met world leaders, confronted

assassins, engaged doubters,

and denounced world institutions

hiding behind their silence.

She guided me and taught me

how to decipher the language of death

and see through the monster

hiding behind a human mask.

Alison died in an airplane accident

on February 12th 2009,

on her way to visit her family

in Buffalo.

I miss her.

I am not putting anybody on a moral

plane - what I'm saying is this:

You had a group on one side

and you had a group on the other,

and they came at each other with clubs,

and it was vicious, and horrible.

It was a horrible thing to watch.

I think there is blame on both sides.

You look at both sides,

I think there is blame on both sides.

George Washington was a sl*ve owner.

are we gone take down the statues?

How about Thomas Jefferson?

What do you think of Thomas Jefferson?

Do you like him?

These images project a profound idea

of self.

Or of the desperation.

Lost souls on a pile of

human confusion.

The absence of any trace of empathy

and genuine humanity is unbearable.

The nightmare is buried deep

in our consciousness.

So deep

that we do not recognize it at first.

It says who you are,

It says what you have become.

The stubborn privilege of

superiority And comedy.

In times of despair, fear

and insecurity,

people are looking for saviors.

Any kind will do.

But possibly, one with easy sounding

solutions, that others will pay for.

RAPEFUGEES STAY AWAY!

NOT WELCOME

But a complex world

calls for complex responses.

With at least some minimal agreement

over the diagnosis.

We never listened to the poor.

Those who are less poor,

fear the loss of what they have.

And they are rebelling.

I am extremely happy to be here

among you, in Marseille.

We have been there before.

Without learning much.

For some reason

we thought that in modern days,

fascism would be disguised

in bright friendly colors,

so that

it would be difficult to recognize.

But it is recognizable.

The same roar when the leader speaks.

The same hatred of aliens.

The same violence.

The same projection

of wounded manhood.

The frailty of power.

The Western world is panicking.

A delirious, spiraling panic.

Complaining about a clash of

civilization,

thus displaying the limits of

superiority.

"Privilege" makes you vulnerable.

And panic, when blended with ignorance

and bigotry, creates anger.

Limitless and blinding anger.

Everyone else becomes the enemy.

The fortress becomes a prison.

Everyone else looking in at you.

People die, because they are hungry

and can't protect their own existence.

Others, because they are persecuted

or because they can't feed, protect or

care for their own children.

Meanwhile, the pornographic rich

are the new moralists.

Most disturbing are not the images.

Or even the terrifying words.

Most disturbing here

is the absence of ridicule.

And the silence of complacency.

Any hint of decency has definitely been

lost in the picture.

m*rder in Pacot

Raoul Peck, 2014

We search for truth

when we should search for meaning.

The very existence of this film

is a miracle.

One day, an 18-year-old Palestinian

girl strapped with expl*sives

detonates herself

in a crowded discotheque in Tel Aviv.

When others think about revenge,

I think of my daughter.

What would have pushed her

to commit such a horrific act?

Would I call my child a monster?

Yes, it is complicated.

Today, I learned of Sven's death.

It wasn't sudden.

I knew it would happen soon.

I had learned to cope.

It's not pain that I feel.

But rage and sorrow.

Sven gave me the original impulse

for this story.

And he washed away my doubts that

such a film was even conceivable.

Up until his last day,

he wanted it to happen.

Finishing this story is now vital.

Nobody starts with a clean slate.

But the human condition also requires

that practices of power and domination

be renewed.

It is that renewal that

should concern us most.

Calling to account the so-called

legacies of past horrors,

sl*very, colonialism, or the Holocaust

is only possible

because of that renewal.

And that renewal occurs

only in the present.

Only in that present can we be true

or false

to the past we choose to acknowledge,

said Trouillot.

You know

I'm not an expert in religion.

The racial industry

This is a hardline issue for people

who live in border states.

The president tries to protect

borders from an invasion."

- So you know the law?

- Shut up moron! Shut up!

45000 people a year die from

automobile accidents

American scholars have largely

abandoned

the role of public intellectuals

to pundits and entertainers.

No proof, no arguments are necessary.

It is opinions against opinions.

Shamelessly passing off impudence

as reason.

We now know that narratives

are made of silences.

While some of us debate

what history is or was,

others take it into their own hands.

In 1920,

biologist Charles Davenport,

leader of the American eugenics'

movement,

asked his friend Madison Grant, author

of The Passing of the Great Race:

"Can we build a wall high enough

around this country

so as to keep out those

cheaper races?"

Japs keep moving

This is a white man's neighbourhood

On May 26, 1924,

President Calvin Coolidge signed

the Restriction Act into law

and shut down immigration by 97%.

The door was shut for 40 years.

People tend to forget.

A political victory for eugenics.

As one congressman said,

the nation would remain

the home of a great people.

Christian,

English-speaking white people.

The open arms of Ellis Island

are now closed again.

That law closed the door on Jews

who were fleeing the Nazis.

For lack of a visa, Anne Frank died

in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

AFTERMATH

CULTURAL LOSSES

DISLOCATION

MORAL DETERIORATION

POLITICAL CHANGES

When Adolf Hitler entered politics,

the opportunities for Germany to expand

had been closed.

He had to find an alternative

closer to home.

Hitler's campaign to the East

became his very own colonial w*r.

In the long-term, he intended to

incorporate these agricultural areas

into the expanding German Lebensraum.

The Lebensraum, meaning living space.

According to Hitler's imperial vision,

the elimination of America's redskins,

as he called them,

was the perfect example

of a successful colonization.

Like the Americans had done, he would

proceed to send German settlers,

to replace all Jewish and Slavic

populations in the East.

The law of blood justified

the needs and the deeds.

Hitler was driven throughout

his political career

by a fanatical anti-Semitism that was

rooted in 1000-year-old tradition.

But the step from mass m*rder

to genocide was not taken

until the anti-Semitic tradition

met the tradition of genocide

that arose during Europe's expansion in

America, Australia, Africa, and Asia.

According to the Lebensraum theory,

the Jews belonged to an even lower race

than the Russians and Poles,

a race which could not lay claim

to the right to live.

Liquidation of the Mizocz Ghetto

(now Ukraine), 1942

It was only natural that such lower

races should be exterminated

if they were in the way.

The other Western master races

had done just that.

Same procedures apply.

Different player.

Warsaw Ghetto,

Poland, 1942

They died on their own

when the food supply was cut off.

The sad rule that

so-called inferior people died out

upon contact with highly cultivated

people was at work again.

If they did not die fast enough,

then it was merciful to shorten

their suffering.

A n*zi officer took these pictures.

Like the previous ones, they were found

in what has been called

"The Auschwitz Album".

The accounting of death.

Beneath the numbers, there are faces,

there are souls,

caught for one small moment,

by the lens of their tormentors.

And they know

They must have known.

"Unfit to work."

This is how they call

those who are put aside. To die.

This group is saved.

Momentarily.

The photographer and his prey.

A last glimpse of humanity,

in this woman's gaze.

And there is no illusion.

The children are thirsty.

"Where can we have water?" they ask.

"Walk all the way to the back.

There is water, I promise,"

says the SS officer.

And so they walk.

The children, their mother, their aunt,

their cousins,

walking towards death.

In less than 20 minutes,

they will be dead.

All of them.

20 minutes, that's the time it takes to

get from the dock, across the tracks,

along the stony path

all the way to the back of the camp,

where crematoriums 4 and 5 are located.

The SS blew them all up

the day they fled.

But enough remains to bear witness.

It's time to own up to a basic truth:

the great planners and executors

of the Final Solution

were extremely well-educated.

They had college degrees,

and quite a few even PhDs.

All German production capabilities

were mobilized to create

this racial paradise.

From architect, manufacturers,

plumbers,

bankers, to landscapers,

agronomists and SS henchmen.

Their organizational creativeness

was unparalleled.

Cross-section of crematorium III

by David Olere,

SS guards

Chimney

Living area

for the sl*ves of the crematorium

Hair combers

Casters: gold, jewelry and teeth

Accelerator

Smoke vacuum

Outside view

IT'S NOT KNOWLEDGE WE LACK

It's not knowledge we lack.

Just as educated Frenchmen

in the 1950s and 1960s

knew what their troops

were up to in Vietnam and Algeria.

Just as educated Russians in the 1980s

knew what their troops did

in Afghanistan.

Just as educated South Africans

and Americans, during the same period,

knew what their "auxiliaries"

were doing in Mozambique

and Central America, respectively.

So educated Europeans today

know how children die

when the whip of debt and bombs

whistle over poor countries.

It is not knowledge that is lacking.

Auschwitz is just the modern industrial

application

of established extermination methods.

The educated general public has always

largely known

what outrages have been committed

and are being committed

in the name of Progress,

Civilization, Socialism, Democracy,

and the Market.

And this for the last 500 years

since the original Christian crusades.

No, it's not knowledge that is lacking.

This knowledge could be expressed

in general and in scholarly language:

"Imperialism is a biologically

necessary process

that, according to the laws of nature,

leads to the inevitable destruction of

the lower races."

Things of that kind could be said.

At all times,

it has also been profitable to deny

or suppress such knowledge.

Conrad would have been able to set

his story

using any of the peoples

of European culture.

In practice, the whole of Europe acted

according to the maxim

"exterminate all the brutes."

Officially, it was, of course, denied.

But man to man, everyone knew.

This knowledge

is a fundamental prerequisite.

That is why "the narrator"

can tell his story

as he does in Conrad's novel

"Heart of Darkness".

He has no need to count

the crimes Kurtz committed.

He has no need to describe them.

He has no need to produce evidence.

For no one doubted it.

But the way it actually happened,

what it really did to the exterminators

and the exterminated,

that was, at most, only implied.

Drop the b*mb.

Exterminate them all!

And when what had been done

in the heart of darkness

was repeated in the heart of Europe,

no one recognized it.

No one wished to admit

what everyone knew.

APOCALYPSE NOW

Francis Ford Coppola, 1979

Everywhere in the world

where knowledge is being suppressed,

knowledge that,

if it were made known,

would shatter our image of the world

and force us to question ourselves.

Everywhere there,

"Heart of Darkness" is being enacted.

Black Elk,

holy man of the Oglala Lakota people,

said after the Wounded Knee m*ssacre:

I did not know then

how much was ended.

When I look back now

from this high hill of my old age,

I can still see the butchered women

and children lying heaped and scattered

all along the crooked gulch

as plain as

when I saw them with eyes still young.

And I can see that something else

died there in the bloody mud

and was buried in the blizzard.

A people's dream died there.

It was a beautiful dream

The nation's circle is broken

and scattered.

There is no center any longer,

and the sacred tree is dead.

A people's dream died there.

Auschwitz II, Birkenau

Do not let our planet die!

Do not let our planet die!

We still haven't seen everything yet.

This is only the beginning

of the beginning.

We are all together!

No, it's not knowledge we lack.