Kazembe Balagun joins Malek and Matt to discuss Raoul Peck’s new 4-part film on HBO, Exterminate All the Brutes. We discuss recent Hollywood dramatization and the visualization of abstract political concepts, as well as decolonial thought, media, and art in the 21st century. How do we confront the ghosts of the past, and where do we find hope and meaning when politics has failed us? How can we face the unimaginable and unspeakable horrors of European violence of the last 500 years without mystifying this reality? How do we divorce the archaeology of humanism from techniques of dehumanization, and how are we to understand the global adoption of these techniques in the 21st century? Where do we locate our own hearts of darkness, and what excavations are we called to do while living within the everydayness of American capitalism? How do you contribute a revolutionary analysis when there’s not a revolutionary organizational form to make sense of it? How can we decenter whiteness as we reconstitute what it means to be a human being, looking to friendship and solidarity for the development of a new common language?

--"Set It Off: The Current Uprising is a Chance to Reset American History" - Kazembe Balagun, 2020: https://rosalux.nyc/the-current-uprising/

--"What We Learned in the Trump Era" - Kazembe Balagun, 2020: https://indypendent.org/2020/12/what-we-learned-in-the-trump-era/

--“Towards a Syrian ‘Politics of Life’” - Malek Rasamny, 2020:

https://www.aljumhuriya.net/en/content/towards-syrian-“politics-life”

--"The Revolution Post-Explosion" - Malek Rasamny, 2020: https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/the-revolution-post-explosion/

--Essential Reading & Viewing - Raoul Peck, 2021: https://www.hbo.com/exterminate-all-the-brutes/raoul-peck-essential-reading-films

--“Exterminate All the Brutes” Syllabus: https://www.hbo.com/content/dam/hbodata/documentaries/exterminate-all-brutes/resources/eatb-syllabus-210412.pdf

Kazembe Balagun is a writer/cultural historian/activist, and former program director of the Brecht Forum and member of the Red Channels Collective.