'Exterminate All the Brutes', a title lifted from Joseph Conrad's much quoted 'Heart of Darkness', seemed so promising. Sorry to say, it disappoints. It is as ddry as a university lecturers endlessly droning on during a class that encourages yawns and looking at the clock until the hour ends.
As a series of four, it is hardly exciting.
Raoul Peck is our don; he is in and out of the camera's eye; his voice is everywhere.
He as he says is interested in 'understanding', not condemning. And you can be sure, this grand piety is everything that is condemnatory. Slavery, exploitation, extermination are everything to condemn, for sure.
White supremacy rules 'uber alles'; its essence springs from capitalism that has the ability to redefine and find an afterlife.
From Marx and Engels (Peck shot an excellent 'Young Marx') through Lenin, Trotsky, Galiano, Che, Samir Amin so name a few the red thread weaves a pattern not unfamiliar, yet for Americans and many others, the critique is dulled to the point it hardly ruffles the Puritan way of life of capitalism, a challenge to the order of how things are and ought to be, examples to the contrary.
Public intellectuals anchors to reality have abdicated responsibilty; they have become talking heads on television full of vacuous opinions, vomiting the tritest of the obvious. Individualism pushed to extremes.
On the other anti-European has its mirror image in Said's 'orientalism' or Ian Buruma's 'occidentalism' or Pankash Mishra's writings on Tagore and East Asian writers.
Anyway Peck slices the onion his four part documentary enlightens. (HBO Max offer them only at set dates and times, in English or Spanish. Why?) Despite Peck's flaws, it is worth viewing.
As a series of four, it is hardly exciting.
Raoul Peck is our don; he is in and out of the camera's eye; his voice is everywhere.
He as he says is interested in 'understanding', not condemning. And you can be sure, this grand piety is everything that is condemnatory. Slavery, exploitation, extermination are everything to condemn, for sure.
White supremacy rules 'uber alles'; its essence springs from capitalism that has the ability to redefine and find an afterlife.
From Marx and Engels (Peck shot an excellent 'Young Marx') through Lenin, Trotsky, Galiano, Che, Samir Amin so name a few the red thread weaves a pattern not unfamiliar, yet for Americans and many others, the critique is dulled to the point it hardly ruffles the Puritan way of life of capitalism, a challenge to the order of how things are and ought to be, examples to the contrary.
Public intellectuals anchors to reality have abdicated responsibilty; they have become talking heads on television full of vacuous opinions, vomiting the tritest of the obvious. Individualism pushed to extremes.
On the other anti-European has its mirror image in Said's 'orientalism' or Ian Buruma's 'occidentalism' or Pankash Mishra's writings on Tagore and East Asian writers.
Anyway Peck slices the onion his four part documentary enlightens. (HBO Max offer them only at set dates and times, in English or Spanish. Why?) Despite Peck's flaws, it is worth viewing.
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