Comments by "SkyRiver" (@SkyRiver1) on "“Exterminate All the Brutes”: Filmmaker Raoul Peck Explores Colonialism & Origins of White Supremacy" video.

@Dance4JC No matter, this is not some true history that is just now being revealed, this is just a narrow subjective interpretation of isolated events without regard for the tenor of the times, what other cultures were doing, or the facts about the conquered cultures and their own violent history.
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There is no real history that your children will ever see. All history outside of primay sources of trade and accounting is a story and a narrative that is presented as fact. Including this documentary.
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You think that people who disagree with this propaganda are sick, but they may just be more knowledgeable than you. This narrative can be refuted almost line for line, if not for the actual incidents it presents, for the isolated manner in which it seperates them from everthing else that was happening in the world at the same time, and the narrow view is takes in its judgements of them.The people who really need to learn some unbiased history as can be found in primary sources and integrated into a holistic view will not bother to do it, they would rather believe this incredibly biased and narrow narrative, as you apparently have, because it fits in with the tropes they already have conformation bias toward.
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@tiaturnbullchampionscoachi9587 The ancestors of the people who, as you claim, own everything, did not give themselves permission to act more brutally than anyone else, they merely had the means for their brutallity to triumph over less advanced forms of brutality. This documentary gives the false impression that all the various American Indian tribes were united in peaceful communion and trade. What an absolute crock. One of the very first thing the Natives tried to do to the colonist was to recruit them into their ongoing wars against other tribes. All human cultures contain brutes and saints and that is the whole truth despite the nonsense presented here.
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@125ZJK My history doesn't make me uncomfortable at all. My family never owned slaves, in fact we harbored runaways on a PA farm as part of the underground railroad. I realize the human condition is universal, at least on earth, and all cultures have both saints and brutes. Not this nonsense that is now being spewed about European evil. All governments are evil and the most dangerous thing, outside of driving an auto and eating SAD that an American is exposed to, no matter their color.
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@Charles Bronson Sure practically all cultures in history had slaves in one form or another. Whether they were called serfs, or slaves, or tennent farmers, or as was the case with many of the Europeans that immigrated in the 1700's indentured workers. Actually the word slave does come from the word Slav, because many of the eastern Europeans were captured and enslaved during the middle ages, but the word Slavic did not originally mean slave it meant "the people" as many tribes describe themselves as the real people or the chosen people etc. Of course slavery itself outdated this by many thousands of years. Almost everyone, despite believing that they descended from royalty, have slaves in their family tree. I personally am still waiting for compensation from the French for the bastard Pippin the Fat having invited all the Alamani nobles to a feast and slaughtering them then parceling out their kingdoms to his bros and his son Charlemagne. I heard the check is in the mail. And if I don't hear from them soon I will have to try to get my reperation check from the Catholic church as the true heirs of the Roman Empire which also enslaved some of my ancestors. If we trace it back far enough, no doubt Adam will owe us all trillions, or Lucy as the case may be. :)
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@Dance4JC Quite understanable, my own predilection would be to find the companies, corporations, and families whose present wealth was founded in the slave trade or use of slave labor and basically take everything they have, both as compensation and a symbol that such behavoir will not be tolerated retroactively. Apparently there are quite a few present ongoing concerns that fit this profile. Maybe set up a trust or just disperse it, but it would probably be more useful in the long run to set up something that would go on benefiting proven descendants of American slaves. I know nobody I know or am related to benefited one bit from slavery, in fact it probably hurt them because it devalued their own labor. I have these old photographs of the boys and men who worked the family farm. Every once in a while there would be a black person or two dressed in overalls like everyone else, standing with the rest of them in front of the barn. This baffled me for a while because to this day there are no persons of African descent anywhere near that valley, just a bunch Mennonites. Then I found out they were active in the underground railroad, and it all made sense.
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@cavalier5727 You don't like what we actually know about the Euopean invasion of the Americas, so there can be no truth in it -- so childish. The Truth is easy to see. No stone age group has survived intact when it came in contact with a technologically superior culture, with the exception of Sentinal island off the coast of India that has been declared off-limits by the gov of India. You would not want to live there. Nobody has resisted the truth being brought into light as you say, more than the people who believe a revisionist romantic fantasy of Native American culture and know nothing of the near constant war between various groups, the lack of any meaningful progress in most any area, the brutal torture (usually to death, which is why Native Americans did not surrender in battle) as the rule not the exception for captives and enemies, the delight by women and children in taking part in the torture of captives, the helplessness in the face of pathogens, the self hobbling superstitions taken as fact, which lead to things like the ritual sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of people on an industrial scale, cannabalism, and murderous raiding of civilians as a business model. Or even the fact that most of the Africans taken into captivity were taken by other subsaharan Africans or Muslim slavers. Their real history like that of all peoples includes the brutal and the humane. Instead of the truth the woke puddin'-heads believe in a golden age of noble savage environmentalists that never existed except in their heads and Hollywood. The real history of the European conquest of the Americas is the history of several vastly imperfect and violent cultures in conflict. Just like it happened everywhere else in the world when a technologically or organizationally superior culture came in contact with a primitive one.
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@Redactedlllllllllllll If you know how to read then you would know that I didn't make excuses for anybody. I merely pointed out that the narrative of this documentary does exactly what it claimed it would not do, it presented partial facts and only those facts that he found fit his viewpoint.
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@littlegravitas9898 Really: instead of meaningless and vague ad hominem statements which only reflect on youself, why not point out the mistakes I have made in my criticism of this blatantly biased documentary.
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@125ZJK I see, the American Indians that raided homesteads and butchered women and children (unless they took them as slaves to sell to the commancheros) then returned to the safety of the reservations for a good nights sleep and some R&R were honorable, but the commanders who got fed-up with this obvious deception and attacked the villages themselves were monsters. It all makes sense, if you are a puddin-headed woke history-free know-nothing. Yeah it all makes sense: nowhere on earth did stone-age people survive intact when in contact with more technologically advanced cultures, not in Europe, not in Asia, not anywhere, but in the Americas we are supposed to beat our breast over people in the 19th century not having post sixties sensebilities. . . . wow.
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@tigran56 Peck is certainly lying throughout the whole of his documentaries. These are lies of omission. The Europeans triumphed over these cultures largely by strength of arms and other technological means, and of course the microbes to which they had no immunity and which are estimated to have killed between 50 and 90 percent of the native population of the Americas, but the barbarism was common to both victor and the defeated, Though he pointedly never points this out. Many of the native tribes that reemerged after the fall of the huge mound building civilizations (which fell before the tidal European engagement in the Americas) learned horsemanship and became warrior cultures. Their prime means of survival was raiding each other and the Spanish colonies. They were certainly more warlike than the respective European countries of the time, but lacked only the means of totally destroying one another, because, but for the adoption of European advancements they only had stone age techniques of murdering, enslaving, and making war. The entire documentary series is rife with a twisted narrative that ignores the evils of man, such as the Moslem slavers that took more slaves than England, Spain, and Portugal combined, and were far more murderous toward them. I just don't have the time to go through this point by point, but anyone that is really interested can read about what we actually know, without the bias present in Peck, and find out that almost every sentence he utters is misleading because of PREJUDICE against European civilization and the failure to describe all the other things taking place in the world at the same time by other cultures. Lets take one example from history then I am done. During the American Revolutionary War, more continental soldiers died in prison ships in New York harbor than died on the battle field. About fifty percent of the prisoners died. However in the perpetual wars and raiding of one Indian tribe by another, virtually 100 percent of the prisoners died, and in fact were commonly tortured to death as community entertainment. So as brutal as the English may have been, they lagged behind the Native American warrior cultures. And by the way, it is naive to think that the British were the only culture that considered themselves to be the apex of civilization while employing devilish actions. All cultures did this. It is the common human condition of the power elites. It is this blairingly obvious fact that is completlely ignored in these documentries which are just a bunch of crap compared to a real understanding of what we actually know of history. But no doubt that will not matter at all to most of a particular inane ANTI bent. Why bother to study when you can just believe what you want to. Isn't this just exactly what he appears to be striving against? Consider his own personal history growing up in one failed black governed state after another. Peck is a little man of little mind and even less truth.
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@tigran56 You project too much into what you read. All people develop the military technology they are capable of. This has been the case since the Assyrians formed the first professional armies and attacked and dominated their neighbors. I never said that the Europeans were the greatest versions of humanity. I never assumed any of the attitudes you project onto me. I am simply stating the obvious. What is verifiable fact, as opposed to the false dichotomies that Peck evokes? It is quite notable that you could not find fault with the actual facts I conveyed but instead had to assume a bunch of nonsense about attitudes I neither hold nor have in any manner conveyed. This is typical of people who are immune to facts because of the beliefs they hold. Like Trump supporters who refuse to admit that Biden won the election, so are the woke puddin' heads who refuse to acknowledge the relative barbarism of all cultures and insist on judging peoples who struggled in past centuries because they did not hold post sixties progressive attitudes. Your talk of supremism is absolute nonsense when seen in the light that almost every primitive tribe refers to themselves as "The Real People, The Chosen People, The Human Beings", and various terms that discriminate against others and hold themselves out as special. This is common to all cultures, even to high schools and any group that needs to feel cohesive in the face of any type of opposition. And I repeat, it is quite telling that you cannot find a valid argument against the historic influences that I have only hinted at. Like Peck naming the crusades as the first white supremacist act, when they invaded Moslem lands. Of course he fails to point out they these were not always Moslem lands and had been taken by force of arms from the previous inhabitants who were mostly Sasanids, and Christians. The remnants of the Parthian and Eastern Roman Empire, and of course the Christian remnants of the Germanic tribes that had destroyed the western Roman Empire and settled in northern Africa, and even Greek remnants of Alexanders conquests -- as was the case for centuries in Egypt. It is also telling that you find the recounting of relevant facts tedious, long winded, and European. How typical of attitudes based on fantasy that must uphold themselves somehow, and can't really deal with the reality of the situation under scrutiny.
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The fabric of humanity in general, which this doc and your statement pointedly ignores.
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A real "broader" historical perspective is that all humans have the capacity to enact authoritarian and draconian behaviors. The Standford experiment proved this beyond a doubt. All so-called races have been brutal to others and one another. The so-called native peoples almost all have done the same thing. Some of them in a manner more horrible than most would believe. A documentary could only really be objective and impartial if it also includes the unbelieveably evil that the American Indian tribes did to each other. The only thing they lacked is the capacity that the Europeans had.
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@Rhythmicons You only think it is self-refuting because you fail to distinguish between the history that is actually known, such as certain events that are accurately detailed in primary sources such as accounting records, etc, and the rationalized narratives used to evoke romatic and heroic images, such as are used by all cultures for egocentric reflection and the establishment of cultural identities.
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@Dance4JC Totally agree.
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@yvettegreen3242 I trust that by now you have found out that your statement is not even an approximation of the facts.
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Christian Cole Apparently you know nothing at all about world history.
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Watched the first episode: it pretends to objectivety, but is as partial a narrative as it promises not to be. Example: it denounces the crusades as the beginings of white supremisist racist politics, fails to mention that Muslim lands invaded by the crusaders were the result of an extremely ethnocentric invasion that took more African and European peoples into captivity and slavery than all the European countries combined. Presents the various American Indian tribes as living in peaceful harmony with one another -- total bull. All in all more revisonist romanitic tropes for woke, history free puddin-heads to beat their breasts over and accuse people who struggled centuries ago of not having post sixties values. But most of all, fails to point out that all so-called races and cultures have enacted brutal acts and claims that the American Indians were not really violent except in self-defense. I guess the fact that Mexico basically abandoned huge areas of the southwest because of Commanche savagery and tactical prowess didn't really happen. An area that the Commanches invaded from their northern homeland -- by the way.
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History is mostly bullshit by one side or another, including the histrory that you like.
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Please advise of one place on earth were this is not the case. I would like to move there.
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