Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…
Fifty years ago, an epic adventure film starring Sean Connery proved to be strikingly prescient about Donald Trump — and, indeed, descriptive of "the American character" (two clips below).
Contrary to being the king of the African jungle, as in The Lion King parody, the president of the United States was described by the Senate's most witty member as the incarnation of a regal beast in North America's own wilderness.
Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., offered an optimistic perspective on the Supreme Court’s tariff ruling, arguing the "grizzly" in the Oval Office should view it as a win.
… "He believes in being a bear. And he thinks if you’re [going to] be a bear, be a grizzly," Kennedy said of Trump’s aggressive trade strategy.
"Be a grizzly" is far from fantasy. It has a long history. Although reviled as an unfair caricature, the common Indian sound, Ugh, ugh, turns out to be true enough and indeed is actually the Native Americans imitating the grunt of the animal they respected, they venerated, and they… feared the most — the king, so to speak, of the North American wilderness.
It is given a new spirit in the film The Wind and the Lion, just over 50 years old, by none other than Theodore Roosevelt (played by Brian Keith and co-starring Sean Connery, their two characters — the Scottish 007 playing another historical figure, Raisuli the Sultan to the Berbers — incarnating the metaphors in the movie's title).
Watch the clip above or check out IMDB's quotation page to see if, half a century ago, John Milius didn't accurately describe the American character through the words of Theodore Roosevelt (Brian Keith), and that of nobody better than Donald John Trump.
Theodore Roosevelt: The American grizzly is a symbol of the American character: strength, intelligence, ferocity. Maybe a little blind and reckless at times... but courageous beyond all doubt. And one other trait that goes with all previous.
Theodore Roosevelt: Loneliness. The American grizzly lives out his life alone. Indomitable, unconquered — but always alone. He has no real allies, only enemies, but none of them as great as he.
2nd Reporter: And you feel this might be an American trait?
Theodore Roosevelt: Certainly. The world will never love us. They respect us - they might even grow to fear us. But they will never love us, for we have too much audacity! And, we're a bit blind and reckless at times too.
2nd Reporter: Are you perhaps referring to the situation in Morocco and the Panama Canal[?]
Theodore Roosevelt: If you say so... The American grizzly embodies the spirit of America. He should be our symbol! Not that ridiculous eagle — he's nothing more than a dandified vulture.
When the bear is being prepared for exhibition in the Smithosnian, the man who inspired the teddy bear affirms that "The American grizzly must always be portrayed in a fighting stance!."
I remember going to watch this movie with my mother as a kid — and coming out awe-struck. I had finally seen a movie displaying true virility and realistic battle scenes (see clip below). Along with The Man Who Would Be King (also co-starring Sean Connery and also with John Huston, not as a secondary character but as director) the same year, I had finally seen two true motion pictures.
While we're at it, below is another quote from the film — isn't it pure Trump?! — along with a a scene from "1904" that reflect TR's words above — perfectly — and that indeed foreshadows somehow the January 3 capture of Nicolas Maduro (the last couple of lines are pure gold):
Theodore Roosevelt: What do I want? I want respect! Respect for human life and respect for American property! And I'm going to send the Atlantic Squadron to Morocco to get that respect.
But what courage would it take today for a politician, a journalist, even a historian, simply to ask the question: is this report on the child's death possibly a "fake"? Who in the media world would have the audacity to alienate their self-righteous circles just to ask the question? And since we would then be dealing with "the most anti-Semitic fake of our generation," to use the words of the Causeur report, doesn't that cast a harsh light on the bias of public broadcasting?
Mais quel courage faudrait-il aujourd’hui à un politique, à un journaliste, à un historien même de simplement poser la question : ce reportage sur la mort de l’enfant est-il possiblement un « fake » ? Qui dans la galaxie médiatique aurait le front de s’aliéner son environnement bien-pensant pour a minima poser la question ? Et puisqu’alors, nous aurions affaire au « fake le plus antisémite de notre génération » pour reprendre les termes du dossier de Causeur, cela ne jette-t-il pas un regard cru sur la partialité du service public ?
Au programme de notre matinale du lundi 9 février 2026 :
À 8h : Philippe Karsenty, porte-parole du comité Trump France, nous rejoindra pour revenir sur l’affaire Al-Durah, à l’occasion de son grand entretien publié dans Causeur.
À 8h30 : François Bousquet, rédacteur en chef de la Revue Éléments et directeur de la Nouvelle Librairie, sera en plateau pour présenter son enquête choc parue dans le JDD : « Fatwa bancaire : pourquoi la droite est systématiquement visée ».
À 9h : Jean Messiha, tête de liste Reconquête pour les municipales à Évreux, viendra échanger sur sa campagne et les enjeux locaux.
À 9h30, nos journalistes Lino Bauer et Jordan Florentin seront sur le plateau avec nous pour revenir sur les prises à partie dont ils ont été victimes alors qu’ils ne faisaient qu’exercer leur métier.
👉 Notre nouveau magazine "Censure : la tentation totalitaire", disponible sur : https://www.frontieresmedia.fr/produi...
On February 12, a handful of young women belonging to a right-leaning group called Némésis came out in Lyon to protest against a university meeting of the LFI (La France Insoumise party) deputy Rima Hassan, and among the dozen security personnel they had retained was a young Catholic math student named Quentin Deranque.
That day, the seven women in le Collectif Némésis, an anti-immigration collective fighting violence against Western women are confronted by a dozen members of La Jeune Garde (The Young Guard), an Antifa-type organization created by LFI's Raphaël Arnault (and officially dissolved last June), some of whom land blows on and try to strangle some of the girls. The rightists fight back and it soon became "like a rugby match" (BFMTV video, Le Parisien video, Le Progrès video, and — best, IMO — Le Monde video). According to The Guardian,
Images broadcast by TF1 of the alleged attack showed several people hitting three others who were lying on the ground, two of whom managed to escape. One witness told AFP: “People were hitting each other with iron bars.”
Quentin's death reminds us that far-left activists act with complete impunity, watchdogs of the very power they claim to fight, punks with their decadent ideas and yet lapdogs whenever courage is required. Anyone who has spent five minutes, fifty times, every day, facing them knows this. The antifascists, who have adopted this label to cloak their nauseating methods in a veneer of respectability, intimidate, flour-bomb, beat, and kill, but, since their victims are right-wing, morality no longer holds any weight in their eyes: all means are justified, even the most "impactful," to use the words of the French left's Lider Maximo.
La mort de Quentin nous rappelle que les militants d’extrême gauche agissent en toute impunité, chiens de garde du pouvoir qu’ils pensent combattre, punks à chiens d’idées décadentes et toutous dès qu’il s’agit d’être courageux. Quiconque s’est trouvé cinq minutes, cinquante fois, tous les jours face à eux le savent. Les antifascistes, qui se sont attribués cette étiquette pour couvrir leurs méthodes nauséabondes d’un vernis de respectabilité, intimident, enfarinent, frappent et tuent, mais, comme leurs victimes sont de droite, il n’existe plus, à leurs yeux, de morale qui vaille : tous les moyens sont permis, même les plus « impactants » pour reprendre les termes du lider maximo de la gauche française.
La France Insoumise hurls broadside after broadside against the right, which allegedly wishes to "transform political debate into a form of civil war" while the LFI's leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, goes so far as to ask for the dissolution of Némésis because the collective made entirely of females roughly between 18 and 30 "is dangerous. It attacks our leaders, it threatens our lives." (Mise à jour: Merci à Sarah pour l'Instalien and to Tappa Keggabru for providing an English-language France 24 video.)
As the pauvre extrême gauche's Mathilde Panot tried to diminish the death of Quentin in the Assemblée Nationale, comparing one assassination to others in the past (notice that French Wikipedia's descriptions of Quentin Deranque and especially Némésis are so extremely partisan throughout that they are almost unreadable), the prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, has responded to the president of the La France Insoumise group in the National Assembly, "What you have just done is absolutely despicable and abject!" As a leftist assitant to a politician was denied entry to the National Assembly, President Macron has condemned "an unprecedented surge of violence".
Meanwhile, one of the main presenters of CNews, sort of France's Fox News, has declared that the leftist television channels "are putting a target on our backs."
As you know, conservatives both inside and outside the United States are (rightly) questioning the mainstream media for branding them far right (in contrast to their opponents being described only as "the left"), but the murder of Quentin Deranque has finally led to the French interior ministry branding several as "extrême gauche" (the far left). This led in turn the LFI's Jean-Luc Mélenchon — who is caricatured on the front page of Charlie Hebdo with blood on his hands — to react with fury, denouncing France as a "the banana republic" "à la Trump".
RIP Jesse Jackson, whose life and career you will be reading about in all the usual media outlets (such as Instapundit [combining reports from The Times of London, PJMedia, and NRO] and The Daily Mail). FYI, I met him at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2001. (There were no camera cel phones or selfies at the time, so I handed my camera to one of the young students accompanying JJ on the Mediterranean beach asking her to use it to take a picture of us; Jackson duly obliged, and I don't know what happened, maybe she just pretended to snap the button — a girl I had met in Brazil did the same, and after I noticed that the number of photos remaining in the camera had not changed, this Karen-like ungrateful @#$$^&@ was unceremoniously dumped — but in any case when the negatives were developed in Paris, that photo did not show up.)
Nine years after Cannes, in July 2010, as the Obama birth controversy was raging, the reverend was part of one of the longest posts on this blog in 22 years, The JournoList Issue No One Is Bringing Up. (A shorter summary, from the 2016 election campaign, is The 4 Key Facts About Obama's Birth Certificate Issue that Nobody Tells You.) The following is an extract from the one of those key facts, the point being that when have a father from a foreign country (Kenya) and when you have spent a major part of your youth abroad (in Indonesia), it is far from racist, twisted, and/or simply abnormal — whatever the color of your skin and whatever the name of your party — to be asked to provide reassurance of your birth place and whom you swear allegiance to. (Thanks for the Instalink, Sarah.)
Indeed, since then, it has transpired that two presidential candidates, both of them white, have been born abroad.
Imagine, if in 2008, someone raised questions about John McCain, pointing out that he spent a lot of his youth outside the United States. Indeed, it turns out that the senator from Arizona was born in Panama. What if, in 2016, someone raised questions about Ted Cruz, pointing out that he seems to have spent a lot of his youth north of the border? And, indeed, it turns out that the senator from Texas was born in Canada. (Still, it turns out that both men qualified, or qualify, as natural-born citizens and thus as U.S. presidents — as, presumably would… Barack Obama (!), even if he indeed had been born abroad!)
3. A Dispassionate Examination of the Facts, of the Nutjobs, and of Obama's Youth
May we be allowed to examine this issue — what MSM outlets like The Economist want us to dismiss instantly and categorically as "the absurd “birther” controversy" — fairly, coolly, and dispassionately?
[Update: Not until April 2011 did the White House finally release Barack Obama's original birth certificate.]
Why are there some Americans who doubt the narrative that Barack Hussein Obama was not born in Hawaii, or elsewhere in the United States? After all, no one ever doubted that George W Bush was born in the United States or that John Kerry or Al Gore or Bill Clinton or Bob Dole or Ross Perot were born in the United States.
So, isn't this proof that only Obama's color is the only reason for these nutjobs, these racists, these birthers, to claim, preposterously, that Obama was born abroad — or that he is a Muslim, or a socialist, or indeed a communist?
But then, again, neither George W Bush nor John Kerry nor Al Gore nor Bill Clinton nor Bob Dole nor Ross Perot had a foreigner for a father (or for a mother) nor did they spend numerous years of their childhoods abroad — many years, if not most, of which were in a Muslim country.
Should Allen West, or JC Watts, or Thomas Sowell [or Herman Cain, or Ben Carson] run for president, no one would ask where they were born or demand to see their their (original) birth certificate as proof. But perhaps that is because those black men are Republicans (proving thereby that conservatives are biased)?
Hardly. That is because those African-Americans (emphasis on the "Americans" part) are known to have grown up in the United States and are known to have had parents who were not foreigners — certainly not at the time of their birth (i.e., if either of the parents was born abroad, he or she had become an American citizen by the time of his or her famous offspring's birth). And indeed, it is the same for left-leaning blacks (as it is for whites, left-leaning of otherwise).
Recall that Jesse Jackson tried running for president twice (in 1984 and 1988), and although he did not manage to become the Democratic Party's candidate, no one suggested that he was born abroad, and that for the simple reason that the Greenville, SC, native did not have a foreigner for a father (or for a mother) nor did he spend numerous years abroad. [Nor did Herman Cain or Ben Carson have to deal with such charges in their respective elections about a quarter century later, be it by Democrats or by the supporters of their GOP competitors.]
Similarly, it is unlikely that Al Sharpton (who grew up in Brooklyn) would ever be asked for his birth certificate. Neither Baptist minister would be likely accused of being a Muslim, although both might very well be described as socialists, or as communists — and that, for reasons that, in the final analysis, are pretty valid…
After all, Barack Obama is not being asked to provide his tax statements or medical records (both of which actually turn out to be the norm for politicians to provide to the public and each of which is a far more intrusive document than a simple statement about an infant's birth location), nor is he being asked to provide some sort of far-fetched Jim-Crowe-era certificate, such as, say, the birth certificate of a grand-parent.
Besides, there are many basic things that a president, that any president (whatever the pigment of his — or her — skin), owes his populace, i.e., the people who are his "masters"…
… to believe that an American citizen (whatever the color of his skin) born to a foreign father who lived much of his childhood abroad may indeed have been born in a foreign country turns out not to be that far-fetched at all.
Indeed, the difference between the Truthers and the Birthers is that in the first case, we are being asked to believe that 1) hundreds, if not thousands, of government officials were approached with a view to conspire to kill thousands of their fellow citizens, all (or most) of them innocent civilians, that 2) hundreds, if not thousands, of government officials agreed (apparently without a moment of hesitation) to conspire to murder thousands of innocent civilians, and that 3) none of these hundreds (thousands) of government officials has ever had a single, even fleeting feeling of remorse, or let the cat out of the bag, say while having too much to drink (no remorse?) during a Saturday outing to a local bar.
In the second case, we do not even have a conspiracy, but basically one single man hypothetically telling a falsehood — although it might even be termed a lie of omission — a lie about what offhand is a personal matter, but has turned into the only thing (allegedly) keeping him from power (Update: The New York Times' Double Standard on Conspiracy Theories).
Most damning of all, when you pause to think of it, the castigators' proof — if it can be called that — all lies in one fact (beyond the recently released certificate of live birth): and that fact is that Obama is a man, a person, a saint whose word should never be doubted, who is capable of no lying, no evil, no chicanery. If he tells you that, say, he is a Christian, then how dare you deny he is a religious man?! How dare you imply that he is a Muslim?! How dare you state he is a socialist?!
The person who ridicules the "Birther" theory as inane has no more proof than the born-in-Hawaii skeptic of where Obama was actually born [or didn't have any more proof until over two years into Obama's presidency]: his only argument — beyond the contention that the certificate of live birth and the newspaper clipping are incontrovertible proof that are not, can not be, fakes, bureaucratic mistakes, or misinterpretations — is the indisputable "truth" that Obama is someone whose honesty should not — should never — be questioned. (Whether in regards to his private life or to his political plans for America's future.) [Update: As it happens, we would learn in 2012 (over four years after Obama was first a candidate and over three years after he entered the White House) that a "New Book Raises Questions About Obama's Memoir" (The New York Times' Michael Shear) and that, indeed, it turns out that Obama's memories were a "fantasy (like most of the President's own memoir)" (The Daily Mail). Adds Toby Harnden: "'Barack Obama: The Story' by David Maraniss catalogues dozens of instances in which Obama deviated significantly from the truth in his book 'Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance'. The 641-page book punctures the carefully-crafted narrative of Obama’s life."]
[Moreover, as Lloyd Billingsley writes, there does seem to be quite a number of snags, significant or not (the reader will have to decide that for himself), in the former Barry Soetoro's past:
Clinton factotum George Stephanopoulos, one year ahead [at Columbia University in the early 1980s], and Matthew Cooper of Newsweek, a year behind, had no memory of the future president there. On that score, the pair had plenty of company.
Wayne Allyn Root, the Libertarian Party candidate for vice-president in 2008, was in Obama’s 1983 Columbia political science and pre-law class, the identical course of study, and graduated on the same day. As Root told Matt Welch of Reason, he “never met him in my life, don’t know anyone who ever met him.”
In similar style, class of ’83 Columbia grads included a group of 25 lawyers, a doctor, several engineers and other professionals living in Israel. “Not one of us remembers Barack Obama . . . from our undergrad years, nor do we know anyone else who does,” explained Judy Maltz.]
When you think about it, it might be less worrying that some do not believe Obama was born in the United States (because of the circumstances linked to his entire childhood, much of it abroad) than that some are utterly convinced he must be born in the United States (because the Chicago pol is allegedly a sainted figure who can do, who can say no evil, who is incapable of or of lyingor of falsifying documents). Again, remember the desires of some of his followers who want(ed) the constitution to be changed, only so Obama could win one election after another and end up, in one way or another and in the best of all possible outcomes, as (de facto if not de jure) president-for-life? Let me ask everybody a simple question: Who is the truly terrifying fanatic, here?
… There have been rumors that Obama may have attended college as a "foreign student" and that his book editor listed him as born in Kenya. Even if they are piddling issues, occasionally proven false, the point has nothing to with Obama per se. (As Breitbart states, "It is evidence — not of the President’s foreign origin, but that Barack Obama’s public persona has perhaps been presented differently at different times.") The point is that the mainstream media never bothered to devote even a minute to investigate the issue (or the strategy behind the different public personas); only new online media (Breitbart and Snopes) did so.
Indeed, the last point — and the kicker — of all three posts (2016, 2016, and 2018) is as follows:
Here comes the kicker: the so-called "Birther" charge (whether brought by a Democrat or a Republican) was never a charge leveled primarily at a man called Barack Obama or, for that matter, against a member of a minority or a person of a particular race.
It was a charge against the media.
Indeed … the "birther" charge was, and is, an entirely justifiable charge against the mainstream media. It was never about birth certificates per se. It was about the double standards that the MSM demonstrate again and again, first, between a Republican and a Democrat, and, second, between the other members of the Donkey Party and the media's preferred (i.e., its "dream") candidate.
… It was not by accident that the title of my "lengthy, in-depth, and dispassionate examination of the facts, of the nutjobs, and of Obama's youth" was The JournoList Issue No One Is Bringing Up.
There are two things that a person discovers the very first time he takes a real authentic firearm in his hands:
First of all, how much heavier the firearm is than thought after viewing innumerable motion pictures, both from Hollywood and abroad; and
Second of all, what a heavy responsibility you feel with what all of a sudden lies in your hands.
In the wake of Alex Petti's death, there has been a great deal of controversy over whether a person should carry a handgun to a protest — why shouldn't he, given that conservatives are always touting the Second Amenment as one of the rights of all Americans (indeed, of all people everywhere)? Aren't Republicans being hypocritical?
Here is the kicker — the final word on the matter, if you will, in a handful of sentences: when wearing a firearm in public and during protests, you should feel that extreme responsibility. Meaning that you stand back; you stand aside; you refrain, insofar as possible, from touching said gun; you remain calm and composed. You do not get involved in fistfights with other armed men (law enforcement officers or other). Indeed, you don't even get involved in shouting matches. You do not go berserk (think also Renée Good, armed not with a SIG Sauer P320 but with a Honda Pilot SUV). You do not yell. Again: you stand back. You remain calm and composed.
Which brings up the matter of the film industry. Remember that Europeans, echoing the drama queens of the Democrat Party, are always calling the United States as a place of violence, indeed a place where the neanderthals are addicted to violence or to guns, if not both.
Take two westerns that were released within two years of each other, one in America and one in Europe (although both were eventually released in each other's countries and in the rest of the world).
In 1964 came out the first of Sergio Leone's Man With Ho Name trilogy (called the Dollars trilogy in Italian), A Fistful of Dollars, which started the spaghetti westerns phenomenon. Now, I don't want to sound like a spoilsport — I know it is all in fun, and, as it happens, no matter what I write below I still enjoy the Leone movies — but a number of things need to be pointed out.
In Per un Pugno di Dollari, Clint Eastwood guns down one villain after another, often 4 or 5 at a time. In the trailer alone, "the magnificent stranger" (the original shooting title of the film) kills about 14 people (they're not easy to count), often punctured with jokes ("Get three coffins ready" "My mistake, four coffins" "See, my mule don't like people laughin'"). At the end of the sequel, For a Few Dollars More (nine killed in the trailer), a joke in the final scene (at 3:12) has Clint Eastwood piling one gang member after another in a mule cart while he counts the reward money the dead will bring him. He tells Lee Van Cleef that he "thought I was having trouble with my adding".
Of the two heroes in Leone's Once Upon the Time… the Revolution (Duck, you Sucker!), Rod Steiger's total kill count comes allegedly to 37 while James Coburn's rises to 123. Having said that, there's no denying that that movie doubles as a war film; as does the third Man With Ho Name entry, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. A joke in what I believe is the latter is that Blondie (Clint) is faced with three bad guys in the desert (of Spain), the camera never pulls away from a focus on the gun in his holster as three shots ring out in quick succession, and the three men are lying dead on the ground; it turns out he has shot the trio so fast (à la Lucky Luke, "the man who shoots more quickly than his shadow") that the camera never manages to pick up the action.
Again, I don't want to spoil the fun, but the revolvers in these films are the epitome of the light handguns we think of as weighing no more than children's plastic toys — and used just as irresponsibly — although they certainly feature in most of American films (westerns or other) as well. (In one of the most pro-American movies ever to grace the screen, Rough Riders [do click that hyperlink if you want to see one of the most patriotic scenes ever filmed], John Milius insisted that the actors be furnished with real rifles.)
INTERMISSION: To briefly change the subject — Notice that the trailer for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly gets it wrong — the Bad is usually said to refer to Lee Van Cleef's Angel Eyes (Sentenza) while the Ugly is usually said to designate Eli Wallach's Tuco. Having said that, Sergio Leone has declared that the title is intentionally misleading — at various points during the film, the viewer is not supposed to know for sure which of the three characters — including Eastwood's Blondie — is which person in the title.
Speaking of getting it wrong, the original tile was Il Buono, Il Brutto, il Cattivo, so the American title gets the two last people mixed up (but that was obviously a deliberate decision, because it sounds better in English) — while the French title is mistranslated as Le Bon, La Brute et le Truand (although The Good, the Brute, and the Crook may also have been a deliberate decision, for the same reason in French). In any case, a young Jean-Paul Belmondo was happily surprised when learning that he was nicknamed "il brutto" among Italian filmgoers in the 1950s and 1960s until he discovered it was a "false friend" mistranslation. "Brutto" does not mean "Brute" (a bad boy term prized by bad boys) but "Ugly."
Update: Grazie, Signora Hoyt, per il Instalink and to Inge Scott for reminding us that "Fistful of Dollars copies Yojimbo. It's an Italian homage to a Japanese Samurai movie influenced by American westerns" — although Steven Fletcher is less diplomatic and calls it a remake or even a plagiary of the the Akira Kurosawa film.
Incidentally, before I saw a single spaghetti western — or an American western or war movie for that matter — I knew their music through the purchase of LP records, notably the Ennio Morricone soundtracks. (While other kids preferred pop music rock'n'roll, as a teen-ager my favorite records (beyond Civil War songs) were motion picture soundtracks.)
END OF INTERMISSION
Compare the first of the Man With Ho Name trilogy with a John Ford western that was released two years prior. In The Man Who Shot LIberty Valence, the legalistics of killing are discussed (among others, by none other than Lee Marvin) — "That ain't murder, Mister Marshall, that's a clean-cut case of self-defense!" — and I don't remember exactly how many people are killed throughout the entirety of the 1962 oater — but it's safe to say, hardly more than the fingers of one hand — however, as far as the bad guys are concerned, only one (Liberty Valence himself) is gunned down. His two henchmen — one of whom is Lee Van Cleef — are immediately told to refrain from reacting and to stand down, which they do immediately, threatened as they are by John Wayne's rifle.
Moreover, the story doesn't end there, but the killing has consequences. A political rival — sounds like a locofoco Democrat, to be honest — tries to destroy Tom Doniphon for shooting Lee Marvin, "an upstanding citizen,"
while the key plot point revolves around the very fact that that Jimmy Stewart character wants to end his career in his guilt over shooting a man.
In Warlock (with Henry Fonda and Anthony Quinn, 1959), a full gang of outlaws who are every bit as vicious as those of Indio (Gian Maria Volonté) ride into town and confront the wounded sheriff, Richard Widmark — with only two of them ending up killed while the rest are held at gunpoint and arrested.
The spaghetti westerns (the spaghetti oaters?) are how the drama queens — Europeans and leftist Americans alike — view America and the absolute horror of its terrifying gun culture.
Remember also, how we are always warned by the locofocos about the dangers of autocracy and genocide to the United States. Often, indeed, we hear about fascism descending upon America (but somehow always landing in Europe). Mass killings, in the form of genocide, have not usually occurred in North America — certainly not to the same extent as in the of the rest of the world — notably Europe itself. (Grazie, Second Amendment.)
While, again, I do think it is fine to enjoy Sergio Leone's westerns (along with Ennio Morricone's music) not least the black humor within, the Hollywood western — no matter how left-leaning its "artists" — was more likely to tote responsibility (not to mention real life) while the European westerns revel in mass murder — which it considers a joke — and fantasy.
Needless to say, in the aftermath, Hollywood and the rest of the world's film industries followed the lead of the spaghetti western, both in oaters (e.g., The Wild Bunch) and in other films (e.g., Kingsman: The Secret Service, which, among other things, glorifies the alleged (in-bred?) violence of America's church-goers, as well as their mass murder).
Related: 18 years ago, a French TV station compared the 2008 campaign to a Sergio Leone film — Obama the Good, Bush the Bad, and McCain the Ugly (or, rather, using the film's French mistranslation, Obama the Good, Bush the Crook, and McCain the Brute).
