Raoul Peck and the Courage to Draw Conclusions

Why 'Exterminate All the Brutes' is the film we need to make sense of who we are, where we are and what is to be done

1.
Sorry Adam Curtis, it’s Raoul Peck that I Can’t Get Out of My Head

I’ve counted Adam Curtis as a guilty pleasure since I first saw his work at the NYC Armory a few years back in a 2013 live event with Massive Attack.  A 360-degree wrap-around screen showed clips from Hypernormalization, and I found plenty to ponder in its mesmerizing tale of the banal evil that was the managerial neoliberal social order of which then-President Obama was the latest incarnation — you could almost feel Trump’s inevitability in Curtis’s bleak picture of a social order with no coherent narrative, and which benefited a shrinking elite at the expense of the rest. Plus, the dark humor, as in this moment when reggae legend Horace Andy and Massive Attack performed the Archies’ classic “Sugar Sugar”.

Even though he sometimes gets things wrong — in Hypernormalization, for example, he took the Assad regime’s “anti-imperialist resistance” narrative at face value — I’d still count myself a fan: I’m old enough to realize that even one’s favorites are right no more (and often quite a bit less) than 80% of the time. So, his 8-hour (serialized) opus  Can’t Get You Out of My Head, available free on YouTube, was pandemic catnip for me.  (Having been a news consumer through much of the history he’s parsing in the series, I found the sampling of everyone from Jiang Qing and Horst Mahler to Afeni and Tupac Shakur a seductive mélange.)

Then there was the fact that Curtis seemed focused on a question that’s been bothering me for some time: Over the past two decades, we’ve seen unprecedented mass mobilization by citizens outraged at the actions of self-serving elites. Hundreds of millions of ordinary people have taken to the streets of cities on every continent protesting everything from the Bush Administration’s illegal invasion of Iraq; the collapse of a neoliberal financial order in 2008 and the self-serving response of the Davos elites who imposed a crippling austerity on those least able to bear the burden of the mistakes of their betters; the decrepit Arab autocracies challenged across the MENA region from 2011; the protests against election fraud in Iran and authoritarian crackdowns in Hong Kong; the Black Lives Matter rebellions of 2014 and 2020, and more. And yet, despite that unprecedented global mobilization, what has actually changed? Sure, conversations have been shaped and elites sometimes even prompted into symbolic-gestural virtue signaling. But who is in power? The very same elites that have so spectacularly failed and who offer no plausible solutions because they can’t see beyond their own greed.

As remarkable as the flowering of these mass protest movements has been is their equally remarkable dissipation and wilting. Despite the whimsical, provocative, fever-dream quality of his work, Curtis — as he makes clear in interviews — seeks to understand why all of our protests and our votes have produced so little social change.

Provocations aside, Curtis invites us to consider how the collectivist politics of the past has given way to an individualism that by definition precludes challenging the neoliberal order. That individualism has focused us on feelings and experiences — even to the point of treating the ennui, anxiety and despair produced by the atomized experience of a profoundly dysfunctional neoliberal order, as pathology requiring “treatment” through psychology and psychiatry — a parallel with the Soviet habit of pathologizing dissidence, deploying drugs and “therapies” to adapt the individual to the needs of an inhuman social system.

Still, despite sharing some of his core concerns, I couldn’t help feeling, throughout my eight hours immersed in Curtis’s head, that something was missing — notwithstanding his forays into Chinese politics and the Black Panther Party, he was looking at the world from within the frameworks, analytical constructs and narratives of mostly white, mostly Western power centers. And his sense, in Can’t Get You Out of My Head, of the relevant history of our time really dates back no further than the post-World War II era.

The traumatic history that we’re still living in the US today, however,  starts hundreds of years prior to 1945. And visualizing that history from the perspective of its victims produces a more complete, more challenging picture.

Curtis is asking, how did we get here? But he’s not able to answer that question with nearly the same depth and power as does Raoul Peck’s Exterminate All the Brutes.

2.

Why Black Lives Don’t Matter to Those Who So Easily Extinguish Them

The casual insouciance of Derek Chauvin’s body language as his knee choked the life out of George Floyd’s prostrate body revealed, in a thumbnail portrait, the story not only of the United States of America, but of the “Enlightened” European colonial order that birthed it.

The calm indifference on the face of a man choking another to death might be deemed the mark of a psychopath in a context stripped of everything we know about power and race in America. In a more humane and evolved context, the bystanders would not hesitate to physically intervene to stop Floyd’s murder. But Chauvin was warded by a uniform that entitled him to kill on behalf of the state, making any effort to stop him a potentially suicidal challenge to the exercise of state power. And, we know (even if many won’t admit) that George Floyd’s skin painted him as less than human in the eyes of the killer, his colleagues, and the culture, history, and received moral commonsense that has shaped Chauvin’s sense of who he is — and who George Floyd was.

The brutal reality of the white supremacy on which the USA was built, and from which we cannot turn away if we want to understand and move beyond the present, is that Chauvin is hardly exceptional.

Guyanese scholar Anthony Bogues, in this profound extract, explains why white supremacy and the dehumanization of the Black body — an historical legacy regularly reenacted by hundreds of cops like Chauvin — was central to the culture and political economy of the nation state that emerged as the United States in 1776:

The enslaved body, as the Caribbean historian Elsa Goveia has said, was “property in person”. It was a body that produced commodities while it was itself commodified. The black female body reproduced this commodification process three times over; as a living commodity, while producing commodity, and through a regime of sexual violence, as a reproductive body of enslaved labor. The plantation was thus a generative site for the violence of commodification, as capitalism was inaugurated through the violence of black enslavement, and exploitation established upon a foundation of unfree labor. 

… In such a history the body is not secondary, but the central subject of processes and practices through which the person was turned into an enslaved, dehumanized thing. 

To create such a subject/object, power (and in this case colonial/planter power) needed to create forms of life, ways of thinking and modes of being human that could, for a time at least, guarantee the full reproduction of a society. Or to put this another way: exploitation requires its forms of domination, which in turn require a set of ideas accepted by the majority of a society, manufacturing what Antonio Gramsci calls “common sense”, and by which he means a kind of naturalized societal underpinning, an ideational glue that holds it all together.

In slave and colonial societies, in which might was right, violence was regularized as the technique of rule. There was also the need for a set of ideas and practices, however, in which both the native and the enslaved were characterized as non-human… 

The slavery and dispossession that were the economic foundation of Western prosperity over centuries required not only violence, but the ideological dehumanization that enabled and entitled the agents of that system to in good conscience engage in epic racist violence over generations — to feel human even as their actions in pursuit of “white” greed were objectively monstrous.  Bogues continues:

Historically and in the present, anti-black racism and the creation of whiteness, of white supremacy, was both a way of life and a signifier of being human. It is not just an ideological belief but rather a naturalized common sense... 

Common sense is also in part constructed by the historical understandings a society maintains about itself. We are, as humans, historical beings who make sense of ourselves through memories of the past — taking from the past to make the self. But in societies where the past has been a historical catastrophe, where regularized violence has operated as “power in the flesh”, making the human superfluous, the past becomes a critical way to establish the grounds for inhumane ways of life. 

The US’s unwillingness to confront the fact that it was a slave society since its founding as a British colony, and that practices of settler colonialism wreaked havoc on indigenous populations, in conjunction with Europe’s unwillingness to confront its own history of colonial violence, now provides a dominant common sense which structures the present. 

And that’s why Black Lives Matter, as a rallying cry, represents a profound, revolutionary challenge to the US system, because in fact the “commonsense” on which America was founded held, in fact, that BIPOC life did NOT matter, which is how God-fearing Christians could justify their monstrous assault on those lives. Bogues again:

[Black Lives Matter] says, “we are human”. And as humans, it demands that society be transformed to create new ways of living. It therefore not only exposes police brutality, but also calls to order the entire historical foundation on which Western civilization rests. While being part of a historic black liberation tradition, its political organizational methods have also enacted critiques of black masculinity. Given all of this, Black Lives Matter as a political banner is world historic. 

It’s also why the “polarization” of the US body politic over which establishment liberals and their media continue to fret is actually a very healthy sign — the system is no longer able to forge a consensus that sweeps its ugly origin story, and the enduring consequences of that story, under the mat.

Bogues (yes, I’m finding his work very nutritious!) in a piece on the significance of the January 6 events at the Capitol, notes:

Part of the crisis of America is rooted in its myth of exceptionalism, as always a force for good; as a nation in which God’s handwork is made manifest. These enduring myths produced part of an ideological configuration which does not account for racial slavery and indigenous dispossession, war and conquest as part of American history. 

It means that in part the great divide which is now opening up in the country has been produced by the historical myths which have been a deep part of the dominant country’s narrative about itself.

These historical myths have now become fantasies that are at the foundation of many Americans’ beliefs about themselves and the country. They are the ballast of the ideology on which white supremacy is constructed. When the mob trashed the Capitol Building and its offices they were making it clear that for them American liberal democracy did not have the capacity to renew the country, that what was required was the ditching of liberalism and a return to an imagined community based upon the historic ideas of white settler colonialism and patriarchy. Many of the mob called for a revolution, but this was a call for a revolution of the past. Nostalgia displaced the present and the future became an imagined past. In such a context reactionary violence becomes the order of the day.

3.

If you want to get the West’s attention, talk about the Holocaust

Far-right revisionism and denial notwithstanding, it remains an intractable part of Western commonsense that the Nazi murder of millions of European Jews was such a profound and massive evil that the national communities whence the perpetrators and their enablers came needed to collectively confront and atone for their role in it — and to educate successive generations on that complicity in order to strengthen societies’ safeguards against any sort of repeat.

What’s largely absent in the Western commonsense, though, is how the national communities of Europe and the USA (not only those on the Axis side of WWII) have engaged in hundreds of years of genocide against Africans and the indigenous peoples of the Americas — a brutal history that continues to inscribe itself on their present, precisely because it’s been barely acknowledged as such, much less atoned for.

It has long been noted by engaged intellectuals from Aime Cesaire, WEB DuBois, Frantz Fanon and Hanna Arendt to more contemporary writers such as  WG Sebald, Sven Lindqvist, Pankaj Mishra and Anthony Bogues, that there’s an intimate connection between the horrors perpetrated by the “Enlightened” West on those they colonized and enslaved, and the horror later unleashed on Europe’s Jews by the continent’s most technologically advanced nation.

As Cesaire wrote, Europeans had “tolerated Nazism before it was inflicted on them – because until then, it had only been applied to non-European peoples.” What is deemed fascism in Western parlance is, in fact, the lived reality of Black and Brown people at the hands of the West for centuries — the genocidal racism that underlay the lofty pretensions of Europe’s liberal traditions that told itself comforting stories as it violently subordinated whole continents to its greed, claiming humans and the land as “property” to serve the greed of the colonizer.  

Peck, together with his close friend and late comrade, the Swedish historian Sven Lindqvist, channels those insights into a film that challenges its audience to confront the ugly reality of how we got here — and what it is that we have to confront, dismantle, and replace with something better. We should have nothing to fear from taking such a journey: We cannot change the past, but we can change the future.

“You already know enough,” says Peck, quoting from Lindqvist’s 1992 book that shares his series’ title (via Joseph Conrad). “So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions.”

4.

Toxic Whiteness

Whiteness is an ideology of power and privilege, at the often mortal expense of all those deemed “other”. It’s an imagined system of difference that was constructed to sanctify the monstrous violence required to subordinate the world and its people to European greed — by rendering them less than human.

Back in my activist days, when we were being prepared for the possibility of facing torture in the detention cells of Hitler’s South African heirs, we were warned to expect that our captors might seek, under threat of violence, to force us to engage grotesque behavior — say eating or drinking one’s own bodily waste, or other forms of sub-human actions. The reason, we were told, is that the interrogator needs to convince himself that when he is meting out torture on a defenseless person, he is not being inhuman: to maintain his own sense of humanity, to go home and hug his kids after a long day of torturing a victim, it helps if he is able to convince himself that his victim is somehow less than human, and not worthy of being treated as human. The advice we were given was to resist this dehumanization as far we could, doing whatever was possible to remind our interrogator of our humanity and corrode the psychological defenses he had created for his monstrous behavior. I feel extremely lucky that I never found myself in the situation of those who had learned these lessons through personal experience. But the underlying principle is clear: Monstrous behavior in service of an ugly system requires that its victims be dehumanized.

Whiteness was constructed as a supremacist moral-psychological device to sanctify genocidal violence by the servants of the colonial order, because the logic of that system required dehumanizing the tens of millions of victims across whose broken bodies European, and later American “progress” would roll. Genocidal violence is anything but personal; it’s the systemic pursuit of what the perpetrators understand as a historic necessity for the greater good.

And America’s failure or refusal to confront the legacy of whiteness has left an indelible, and extremely toxic imprint on the minds, the sense of self/other and identity that’s clearly at play in the systematic police violence against Black and Brown people in the US today.

One of Peck’s most striking scripted interludes has a Black priest encounter a Black slaver brutally driving a column of white children in chains through an African jungle. The power of these images juxtaposing historical roles is that they attack the viewer’s unconscious whiteness, i.e. the learned dehumanization of the other that has sustained white supremacy for centuries — and which is clearly at work in the pattern of police brutalization of people of color. Yes, 13-year-old Adam Toledo shot dead in Chicago last week with his hands raised, was a child. Yes, 12-year-old Tamir Rice killed by a cop in Cleveland in 2014 was a child. But did their killers actually see them as children like the children in their own homes or extended families?

Perhaps we’re seeing the consequences of the society’s failure to confront the depth of barbarism that the United States visited upon generation after generation of enslaved Africans, and on the indigenous population they forced from the land. Sure, many white Americans have been made aware of that legacy, but the state itself remains stubbornly resistant to unpacking the appalling truth that so thoroughly negates the presumption of virtue in the origin story this society has told itself for decades.

The U.S. won’t overcome its systemic racism without overcoming whiteness, i.e. the systematic dehumanization of the “other”. That’s why Peck provides such a profound public service in “Exterminate All the Brutes”, by offering us such a powerful tool for understanding how we got here.

5.

What is to be done?

“It is not knowledge we lack,” say Peck and Lindqvist. “What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions.” But once we’ve drawn the obvious conclusions about how we got here, and what exactly “here” is, the question remains, how do we change it?

In this engaging interview on the film with Peck, Africa scholar Mahmoud Mamdani, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz whose work on the Native American perspective on US history forms a key thread in “Exterminate All the Brutes”, Mamdani makes the important point that the very fact that Peck’s film is being shown on HBO is a reminder of just how powerful the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement has been. No question, a project this radical would have been unlikely to get the greenlight from a mainstream entertainment corporation a decade ago. That’s the good news. But there’s a flip side: HBO is a subscription service unavailable to many millions of Americans and others whose story the film is telling. So, he’s making history but not under conditions of his own choosing, as it were — there’s something of an irony in the fact that a film that fundamentally challenges the property relations on which today’s neoliberal social order is founded, is nonetheless still commoditized in that social order.

Peck’s film makes clear that the victims of white supremacy in the American context are not only Black, but also indigenous — and those indigenous people who suffered genocidal violence and dispossession are not only those lands fell within the borders of what became the USA, but also throughout the countries to the south (and north): Most of those fleeing Central America seeking refuge across the Rio Grande are descendants of the indigenous people brutalized by Spain. So, Black, Brown and Indigenous people all have a common enemy, and the basis of a common struggle for justice and restitution. But how is that struggle to be won? (The historical record — or, at least, my cursory reading in the history of radical politics in the US — seems to show that each community has waged intense and heroic struggles, but rarely in direct coordination.)

Also, I can’t help but remember Adam Curtis’s observation that the system appears unmoved even by a high degree of mass protest, as last summer’s Black Lives rebellion showed. So, there are questions to be asked in the realm of politics and struggle, of how to win democratic equality in the US and eradicate the white-supremacist DNA that has reproduced itself in evolving forms for generations — questions over what a comprehensive American liberation struggle looks like, and how it tackles the question of power. These are questions I wouldn’t dare presume to imagine I can answer, but I’m avidly reading those who may have more insight and perspective with all the enthusiasm, in my middle-aged dotage, that I felt as a young revolutionary student in South Africa in the '80s — I have lately found the writing of Robin D.G. Kelley such a nourishing, inspiring and thought-provoking guide.

More thoughts to come on this, and I’d love to hear yours.