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

What’s largely absent in Western common sense, though, is how the national communities of Europe and the USA (not only those on the Axis side of World War II) 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 Aimé Césaire, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Hannah Arendt to more contemporary writers such as W.G. Sebald, Sven Lindqvist, Pankaj Mishra, and Anthony Bogues that there’s an intimate connection between the atrocities 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 Césaire 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 has been, in fact, the lived reality of black and brown people at the hands of the West for centuries. It is the reality of genocidal racism that has underlain the lofty pretensions of Europe’s liberal traditions, telling itself comforting stories as it claimed lives and land as “property” and violently subordinated whole continents to its greed.

In his new film, Exterminate All the Brutes, Raoul Peck, together with his close friend and late comrade 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 do to confront, dismantle, and replace that reality 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 (after 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.”