So Long, Partner

WHEN I WAS STILL an eight-year-old runt, my mother would often park me for the weekend at my grandparents’ house in a village under the shadow of the Dolomites in Northern Italy. Recoaro is set like a green emerald at the heart of a luxuriant valley rising up to breath-taking views of meadows and peaks. At the time, I rarely hiked up to those cloud-topped pinnacles populated by grazing mountain goats and monosyllabic cheese-makers. Instead, while grandfather and grandmother napped, I spent my after­noons in a reading lounge with a panoramic window facing a steep forest which shielded us from the sun. That room contained a treasure.

These mountainous landscapes are famous not only for curative waters, pioneering rock climbers, and Olympic skiers but also because German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche found among Recoaro’s inhabitants and highlands the inspiration to write Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I had absolutely no idea who Nietzsche was. Nor Zarathustra. What interested me was indoors. In that reading room, furnished with 1960s’ snazzy couches and armchairs, there was a precious cabinet with creaky wooden doors. In it I discovered three long shelves stacked with a collection of comic books featuring my favourite cowboy charac­ter: Tex Willer. It was my uncle Eddo’s rare compendium, telling the stories of the Wild West through colourful drawings enriched by plots written by the Italian author Sergio Bonelli.

The main character looks like a cowboy but, as the name reveals, he is actually a Texas Ranger. Tex is a silent, direct type, getting in all sorts of trouble with his devoted partners, the white goateed Kit Carson and a Navajo guide called Tiger Jack, often depicted kneel­ing in front of Tex, for some subliminal reason.

There are bands of Comanchero gangsters raiding from northern Mexico, stray fighters from the Confederate South, the mysterious magician Mefisto, the Malaysian thug Sumankan and many Native Americans. Tex was created in 1948 by Sergio’s father, Gianluigi. According to his son, Gianluigi was fascinated by violence and brutality both in life and in art. Bonelli Sr was always in favour of the gringos’ bloodlust for the “savage Indians”. When Sergio took over the family publishing business, imbued with the healthy doubts of a younger generation, Tex began to side with the losers of the invasion of the West and no longer with the winners, the Anglo-Saxon Americans. In the politically charged 1970s, Bonelli Jr made Tex marry Lilith, a charming Navajo young lady, just as the early invader John Smith had married the native Pocahontas of the Powhatan people. Intermarriage as a solution to conflict between peoples: a clas­sic. Due likely to an unconscious bias, it was often a white man marrying a brown woman, rarely the other way round.

Buffalo Bill and the flamboyant Tom Mix, just like Saul Goodman (or Buster Scruggs), represent the cowboy, the showman, in juxtaposition to a stronger archetype which survived longer: the romantic, strong, shy man of action. Gary Cooper. John Wayne. The silent, Marlboro man, and self-righteous killers

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In my impressionable mind, these stories contributed to building my values and life objectives. They worked in feeding that hazy realm called inspiration. They engraved in my imagination the myth of the West, of self-reliance, of trusted friendship, of conflict and its possible resolution via your wits, plus how a well-administered and just form of violence, followed by a diplomatic path to peace à la “speak softly and carry a big stick”, was what we call normality. All those cowboy stories glorifying Americanness contributed to me craving to move to the States by myself just a few years later, at the age of 16, as I went seeking my own “land of freedom”, my own West.

In Recoaro, I would sometimes take breaks from reading, as the room facing the forest was connected to the historical Royal Pharmacy owned by my grandfather. I moved with stealth around the wooden cabinets stacked with porcelain jars. Imagining myself as a tiny Tex Willer, I avoided creaky floors in order to not get caught. My mission was to climb up to the tall glass vases lined on the top shelf of the counter. These gleaming objects of desire contained thousands of multi-coloured sugar drops shaped like minute glucose coins. They made my eyes widen and my mouth melt. I dipped my hand in that crum­bling sea of artificially coloured sugars, a bonanza of reds, yellows, turquoise, and white candies. Back in the reading room, I’d crunch away, while leafing feverishly through Tex Willer’s adventures on a sugar high boosting my excite­ment. This resulted in me having most of my molars drilled without anaesthesia by the time I turned 13. It was like being tortured by Mefisto. I bit the bullet, as Tex would have.

It is with this premise of pleasure and pain that I approach the topic of how the West, Westerns, cowboys, inter-ethnic relations, colonialism, and land-grabbing by invading mi­grants from Anglo-Saxon countries affected my upbringing, as it did for so many of my generation born between the 1960s and 1980s. Since the end of WWII, or the beginning of the American Era, along with Tex Willer most cinemas and plenty of TV networks all over the world have been replete with a beloved genre: the Western movie. Italians pioneered a critical version called Spaghetti Westerns, making Clint Eastwood famous. Later, Quentin Tarantino, added his twist, combining Asian martial arts and exposing the cruelty of that world. More recently, Martin Scorsese explored a less white-centric view (yet still from the point of view of an Italian-American director) of the Native Americans’ plight in Killers of the Flower Moon.

How have all these hours, days and months of storytelling affected how the prototype of the cowboy as a hero influenced Western mentality into believing in a certain superiority of the “white saviour among the savages”? And how have the Western movie and the myth of the West impacted people for decades into a twisted, discriminating view of global reality?

RED RIVER VALLEY

I’VE GOT SO many things wrong about the Wild West while growing up. So many myths craftily manufactured in Holly­wood and in the European cultural machine. The soundtrack is country and blue-grass music, of course. The sets are time-stop­ping sunsets disappearing behind orange limestone towers which soar silently above the desert, as a harmonica plays ‘Red River Valley…’

I actually taught myself how to play that tune on the harmonica, maybe because I also grew up in a verdant valley crossed by a river, but mostly because of all those Westerns I’d watched. First, they were in black-and-white. Then, when colour TV arrived, the emotional impact of the beauty of that often-cruel imaginary world was forever woven into my soul. Of course, with zero consideration of the historical genocidal concept it was built upon, a culture of war which has penetrat­ed American and Western mentality, cloaked in the illusions of the heroic mythology it created around its storytelling. It made us all dream of riding in those wide prairies, of the openness of those skies, of the tingling excitement of adventures which that long-gone world promised to everyone’s imagination.

It wasn’t just Americans and it’s not been just movies. The myth of the West and of the cowboy, aside from the Italian Tex Willer and the Spaghetti Westerns often filmed in Spain, was helped by Belgian cartoonist Morris and French author René Goscinny’s Lucky Luke, a street-smart sharp-shooter who could roll his cigarettes with one hand. This apathetic gunslinger contributed to making us urbanised European children learn to idolise the lonesome American cowboy trope. Italy, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain… this post-WWII Americanisation of Europe stretched into the 1970s and 1980s with the powerful US marketing machine which started in the 1920s and was perfected through the 1950s. For decades, this apparatus even used charismatic, cool Western cowboys to sell cancer-inducing cigarettes to the entire world by posing as advertising models. Those real cowboys were at times first or second-generation Brits, Irish, Scandinavian, Dutch or Ger­mans and Austrians: no need to colonise the youthful heads in those white European countries, as they already identified with cowboys who looked like them.

General George Armstrong Custer instructed a band to play the Irish jig ‘Garry Owens’ during attacks on native American villages. ‘It was Custer’s way of gentling the war. It made killing more rhythmic,’ Thomas Dilorenzo writes, adding: ‘the culture of violence in the West of the late 19th century was created almost entirely by the US government’

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I’m such a cowboy stories’ junkie that I’ve completed with maximum glee the video-game Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2. It makes the gamer become the cowboy in the movie, with brilliant screen-writing and true-to-life graphics. As country star Tim McGraw sings, “I guess it’s just the cowboy in me” that made me binge watch the spate of TV series produced by wily storytellers who have comprehended that the Trumpian appeal to nationalism would require digging again into the founding myth of the alleged individualist anarchists who, in theory, conquered the West. It wasn’t so, of course. It was the myth itself that transformed America, not real historical facts, which are quite different from the manipulation of reality.

I’ve gulped down six seasons of Longmire featuring Lou Diamond Phillips. I’ve admired Josh Brolin brood in the mysterious Outer Range; I’ve followed Kevin Costner’s tortu­ous destiny in Yellowstone. I’m a sucker for all that. Why? Also because of certain lessons in what at the time I didn’t know was toxic masculinity and in deep self-reliance, a centeredness and self-assuredness that many men and boys of my genera­tion always found magnetic and exemplary, as ridiculous as we deservedly appear to a balanced contemporary view. It’s another version of the Roman Empire obsession for adolescent and middle-aged males.

All this Westernisation of our minds is based on a demon­strated false myth built artfully by small groups of powerful people on various occasions in order to perpetrate genocide at the service of commercial interests and to assert racial superior­ity while wiping away the locals. Famous generals and American presidents, unsurprisingly, are the culprits.

THE FRONTIER CLUB

THE IDEA OF the West did not come about by chance. It was formulated purposely, with intent and effort. It began with a pivotal essay written in 1893 by Frederick Jackson Turner, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’. The author argued that what he defined as “the meeting point of savagery and civilization” is the foundation of American identity and politics. The history of America’s role in the world in the last 130 years could be interpreted through this theory, which later was widely contested. Turner saw farmers and settlers as the heroes arriving in the West at the end of the era of hunters, trappers, and pathfinders. It is the first step towards what to him was “civilization”. The settlers were pushing the boundary westward, bringing modernity, nationalism, and democracy to the “savage” lands. It is the continuation of the now-disputed idea that history begins with farmers substituting hunter-gatherers and creating civilisation. The idea that NATO comes from Plato. That Western ideas began in Greece, with Socrates as the imaginary first cow­boy, the fastest shooter of Greek philosophy, then mixed with the Jewish sect of Christianity. This hybrid then evolved through the Middle Ages, into justifying the genocidal Conquest of America, which financed the Renaissance (and the Inquisition), leading to the American and French Revolutions, all meshed, today, into the Great Values of the Superior West. Not quite so.

In the first phase of the colonisation of the West, before the Civil War of 1861-65, a period we will call “trade instead of raid”, most colonisers understood that selling and buying, commerce and dialogue were more advantageous to all. The militias were made up of carpenters, farmers, merchants—people who put their non-soldierly interests first. Killing everyone on their path didn’t make sense. The foreigner invaders, the white Europeans, were integrating, to a degree. This is what really happened. Not what was concocted at the end of the 19th cen­tury. But in Turner’s revisionist view, the West was just settled country on the edge of unlimited free land and of opportunities available to all. The idea of America as the land of opportunity for the strong to conquer was born. It later blended with the concept of capitalist exploitation of the land, as the country evolved into an industrialist nation, and needed to adapt its ideology to lead the American century.

Tex Willer was created in 1948 by Gianluigi Bonelli, in favour of the gringos’ bloodlust for the ‘savage Indians’. When his son Sergio took over the family publishing business, Tex began to side with the losers of the invasion of the West and no longer with the winners, the Anglo-Saxon Americans

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The idea that there were first trappers fighting the Indians (false) and then settlers conquering free land (false) is at the foundation of the ‘Two Wests’ concept: one historical, one mythical. In the West of literary novels, dime novels, pulp fic­tion, mainstream newspapers, theatre plays, movies and series, there is a barren landscape full of ‘savages’ who jump out of the wilderness like zombies who do not have families or real lives. They are just non-humans to be killed one by one in the name of Christian values, just like the faceless ‘Japs’ in Pacific WWII movies are mindlessly chopped to the clack-clack of ruthless Browning machine guns. The frontier hero is part of a romanti­cised idea of the life of the rugged man.

In the West of historical data, there were farmers, ranchers, miners, prostitutes, criminals pursuing their quest for happi­ness, at times with violence, but often organising themselves to maintain some sort of order and justice before a government could be established. Which is when the real mayhem started.

This is not what the member of the Frontier Club wanted people to see. This argument has been made by Christine Bold in her study The Frontier Club: Popular Westerns and Cultural Power, 1800-1924 (2013). She has contended that a group of people, such as politician and later US President Theodore Roosevelt (the founder), writer Owen Wister and painter Frederic Remington, and other members of the Boone and Crockett Club, an elite gathering of Ivy League white men who loved hunting, wilfully distorted the reality of the West, morphing it into a romanticised concept.

Their goal was to sway public opinion, lobbying for legislation to protect hunting grounds for themselves. They concocted and exaggerated Western tales in order to guaran­tee they could continue hunting big game. How did they do this? By investing money and influence to silence the “other story”—the voices of the Blacks (one in every four cowboys was a former slave), the exploitation and genocide of Native Ameri­cans, the enslavement and mistreatment of immigrants from non-Anglo-Saxon Europe, and of non-elite white men.

Their effort was successful. All the stories that followed after this plan were enacted, featured a white cowboy or a white hero figure riding in to save the white men and especially protect white women from brown-skinned Native Americans or Mexi­cans. The real story is more often the other way round. And yet, the myths around Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Jesse James, or Buffalo Bill are the results of this initial plan that produced innumerable movies, comic books and literature neglecting the realities of the “conquest” of the West, overlooking the mas­sacres, the racism, the exploitation of people and resources.

This was done with the concept of hero-building that began with the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper like The Last of the Mohicans, the early frontiersman adventures of Daniel Boone and on to Davy Crockett and Kit Carson. And with the help of William F Cody, aka Buffalo Bill, who, conspir­ing with the Winchester Rifle Company, feeding on a culture of nostalgia for an already disappearing Wild West, took his armed circus on a world tour, promoting gun violence, helping to build up for America and Europe an idea of the Old West that resembled what the Knights of the Round Table had signified to the English.

WHITENING THE MYTH

THE FOUR ARCHETYPES created by this frontier myth culture are: One, the trapper fighting the “savage Injuns”; two, the outlaw battling the system; three, the gunslinger bounty hunter or shooting celebrity being hunted; and four, the general (the true villain of the West, by contemporary anti-genocide standards). Within these categories, there are two main types of cowboy hero which have survived till today in popular culture. The Better Call Saul TV series, a spin-off from the successful Breaking Bad, is a representation of the modern comical cowboy. Not only because the series is set in Arizona, but because the sly lawyer, Saul Goodman, is an epitome of the Tom Mix and Buffalo Bill buffoonish cowboy prototype.

British historian Eric Hobsbawm investigated this concept in his fascinating engagement with the culture of modernity, Frac­tured Times (2012). While gauchos of the Southern Cone of Latin America, llaneros in Colombia and Venezuela, vaqueiros in Brazil, and especially vaqueros in Mexico, originally from Andalusia, had long existed before Western cowboys, it was Americans who became globally revered as macho, semi-barbarian heroic myths, more so than the mounted herdsmen csikós from the Hungarian plain, the Tuscanian butteri, the Ukrainian Cossacks, or the Aussie stockmen from the Outback.

Theodore Roosevelt, writer Owen Wister, and other members of the Boone and Crockett Club, an elite gathering of Ivy League White men who loved hunting, wilfully distorted the reality of the West, morphing it into a romanticised concept

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Initially, the invented cowboy myth represented either an explorer in the wilderness or, alternatively, men living in symbiosis with nature. It was a late romantic creation embody­ing the search for individualistic freedom, often escaping the civilisation of the East Coast and Europe. But, as Hobsbawm ex­plains, the invented tradition of the West is entirely symbolic, as it generalises the experience of a handful of marginal people. It was “the defence of the native Waspish American ways against the millions of encroaching immigrants from lower races.” In this myth, the lanky tall Aryan prevails, excluding from power the Mexicans, Native and Black elements, who had been originally included in Buffalo Bill’s international shows.

But Buffalo Bill and the flamboyant Tom Mix, just like Saul Goodman (or, today, Buster Scruggs), represent the cow­boy entertainer, the showman, in juxtaposition to a stronger archetype which survived longer: the romantic, strong, shy man of action. Gary Cooper. John Wayne. The silent, Marlboro Man, and self-righteous killers.

These symbolic messages percolated into politics, as Teddy Roosevelt himself adopted the cowboy look to attract votes. The cowboy stance lingered in American politics with presidents John F Kennedy, Lyndon B Johnson, Richard Nixon and, of course, the biggest cowboy of them all, Ronald Reagan, who had actually played one in Hollywood as an actor. Aren’t both Donald Trump and Joe Biden often talking, standing, act­ing just like cowboys? I guess it’s just the cowboys in them…

PLAYING COWBOYS AND INDIANS

WHEN I WAS growing up, I had plenty of heroic role models to look up to in my own culture and even in my own family. My paternal grandfather, Carlo, was a captain of the special Alpini mountain corps, warriors used to long uphill marches, battles in high altitudes and in snowstorms. He fought in two World Wars and in the notorious invasion of Ethiopia. My mother’s uncle, Gino Soldà, was an alpine hero, part of the expedition that first summited the world’s toughest mountain, K2, after fighting as a leader of the Partisans who battled the Nazis. He helped Jewish refuges escape from Fascist Italy into Switzerland by leading them through treacherous Alpine passes at night. And yet, I wanted to be a cowboy. Why?

When my mother was a child, growing up in the 1950s in the house with the Tex Willer collection, she pretended with her childhood friend Natalina that they were both Calamity Jane. “We were in the full phase of Americanisation— she now recalls—we skipped and hopped around the village square making clippety-clop sounds with our mouths, pretend­ing to be in the West. We must’ve looked ridiculous!” Her brother Eddo set up an entire imaginary Western town on the ground level of the three-floor house. It had a jail, a saloon, a living room where he and his friends also investigated the cowboys in them.

During the years of elementary school, I’d visit my friend Ser­gio and his brother Marco in their country estate on the hillside of my hometown of Valdagno. Their father, Ugo, had built them a faithful replica of a US cavalry fort, smaller in size but with corner watchtowers, a wide gate, and wooden steps climbing up to the palisades from which we cowboys would fight back the attacks of the Indians, played by our parents. My oldest sister got so involved in the violent play-acting, once, that she sent an eager adult to the hospital, hitting him with a large pole on the head when he had almost breached the fort.

We were just little Americanised cowboys. This phenomenon invested Europe with full strength but trickled down to the rest of the world as well. How come we all got to identify with these lanky Aryan types, most of whom would not have considered an Italian a white person until 1920? We had read too many Tex Willers and watched too many movies. The first Western was released in 1909. Why did it represent a white man as the hero, considering how diverse the West actually was? It can be attributed to the long reverberation of the work of the Frontier Club. And also because the last phase of the European invasion of America took place in the northern states of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, where a later influx of Eng­lish, German, and Scandinavian white migrants flooded the prairie, and con­tributed to fixing the standard around a sturdy, tough white man feeling that his culture was superior to the inexplicable savagery surrounding him.

The stories featured a White hero figure riding in to save the White men from native Americans. The real story is more often the other way round. Yet, the myths around calamity Jane, Jesse James, or Buffalo Bill are the results of this, producing movies and literature neglecting the realities

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HOW THE WEST WAS ACTUALLY WON

NO, IT WAS not the lonesome, lasso-twirling cowboys, the artsy gunslingers, the stubborn miners of the Gold Rush, the romantic trappers, nor the resilient farmers with their wagons who conquered the West. It wasn’t the militias either. It was business, which financed a thoroughly planned massacre in the interest of industrial development for white people.

The Old West was actually not as violent as it’s been por­trayed. It was more peaceful and less deadly than today’s US. The Western frontier was a far more civilised, more peaceful, and safer place than American society today. Property rights were guaranteed, civil order prevailed. It was not a place of great chaos, as the myth of literature and cinema would have us believe. Pri­vate protective agencies like land clubs, cattlemen’s associations, mining camps, and wagon trains kept the order. Bank heists were less than 10 in total and violent deaths among both foreign invaders and local populations were in the few hundreds, in the years leading up to the Civil War. Then things changed. It was the end of trade and the beginning of raids.

Up until 1861, negotiation was the predominant means of acquiring land. War was bad for business. But the Civil War created a standing army, nurturing a professional soldier mentali­ty whose personal welfare increased with warfare. Thomas DiLorenzo explains it in ‘The Culture of Violence in the American West: Myth versus Reality’ (2010): “The real culture of violence in the American West of the latter half of the 19th century sprang from the U.S. government policies towards the Plain Indians.” The very same government, while still in the process of defeating the Confederate Army in the South, decided to subsidise the construc­tion of a transcontinental road project, backed by industrialists faithful to Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party. It was, in other words, a concerted effort in­volving the military and the industry. The most important leader behind this was General William Tecumseh Sherman. He and General Grenville Dodge had to “clear the Indians from the designated path of the country’s first heavily subsi­dized federal railroad, Union Pacific.”

So much for libertarianism, self-reliance, and rugged individualism. It was Union soldiers’ lives and taxpayers’ money that made it possible to build infrastructure thanks to state-funded weapons—public policy and tax money enriching the companies which sold shovels to dig, iron for tracks, wire for the telegraphs, etc.

General Sherman wrote it plainly, in letters to his wife, that genocide would be “the final solution of the Indian problem.” Indians, he believed, were “a less-than-human and savage race.” And “since the inferior Indians refused to step aside so superior American culture could create success and progress, they had to be driven out the way as the Confeder­ates had been driven back into the Union.” That means by massacring women and children as the Union Army had done in the infamous Shenandoah Valley mayhem, a plan of action than applied to many Native American tribes. Sherman’s genocidal objective, black on white, was “the extermination not of soldiers alone… but of the people.” Sherman’s troops killed and burned every man, woman and child they found. Even dogs and all animals were to be slaugh­tered, especially buffalos which provided Native Americans with warm clothes and food to survive the winter.

In Frederick Jackson Turner’s revisionist view, the West was unlimited free land. The idea of America as the land of opportunity for the strong was born. It blended with the concept of capitalist exploitation of the land, as the country evolved into an industrialist nation

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General George Armstrong Custer even instructed a band to play the Irish jig ‘Garry Owens’ during attacks on Native American villages. “It was Custer’s way of gentling the war. It made killing more rhythmic,” DiLorenzo writes, adding: “The culture of violence in the American West of the late 19th century was created almost entirely by the US govern­ment’s military interventions, which were primarily a veiled subsidy to the government-subsidised transcontinental road corporation.” The Indians fought back, returning the cruelty in kind. But they didn’t start the ruthless 25-year-long invasion ending with the holocaust of millions of natives.

Did it need to be this way? Was dehumanisation and a complete mas­sacre of the local population built on racism and theories of ethnic superior­ity necessary to establish a commercial infrastructure that would bring goods from the West to the coasts for export? We just need to look at Canada. Yes, the extermination of the indigenous population there was quieter, hidden. Yet Canadians built a similar transcon­tinental railroad, a few miles north of the US border, without the devastat­ing campaign of Native American genocide, proving that the construc­tion absolutely did not need to be as murderous as in the US.

Tragically, what recent historical analysis tells us is that the very same values of freedom and equality that the West, reaching back to its mythology of the brutal conquest of the American West, is now purportedly defending around the world, was imported into Western philosophy via the intellectual contribution of some of those “savage Indians” massacred in the Americas.

INDIGENOUS FREEDOM AND EQUALITY

IN 1703 A BOOK called Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Travelled, authored by Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, or Baron de Lahontan, became somewhat of a bestselling sensation in Europe. It was based on the baron’s encounter with a brilliant and eloquent statesman of the Wendat people called Kandiaronk. It was widely read by a high percentage of intellec­tuals of the era fascinated by the indigenous critique on the lack of freedom and equality in the monarchies ruling Europe in the 17th century. The brilliant study The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by anthropologist David Graeber and archae­ologist David Wengrow digs into how the very ideas of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” of the French Revolution, of “Freedom and Equality” of the American Revolution, the concepts of indi­vidual freedoms and equality that blossomed with the Enlight­enment, the entire genesis of the Western Left via Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s essays, along with Friedrich Engels’ lucubrations over the primitive communism of the people of the New World, all originated thanks to the critique that Native Americans made of European society once they discovered it. Translated: How indigenous culture of North America reacted to European society in the 1600s transformed Western political philosophy and made Western societies what they are today. As the Ancient Romans would have said, considering what Greek thought did to their society: victi victores sunt (the conquered are the winners). And I guess the image of prime minister of Indian-origin Rishi Sunak at 10 Downing Street brings this concept home, via an Eastern door.

“It’s almost impossible to find a single author in the Western tradition, from Plato to Marcus Aurelius to Erasmus, who did not make it clear that they would have been opposed” to the concept of contemporary democracy and of equality as we understand it today. Almost impossible, Graeber and Wengrow write, to find a single European who suggested that democracy would be anything other than a terrible form of government. The “sav­ages” were to teach a lesson to the “superior white saviours” that would transform them forever. It was the concept of freedom, based on equality, adopted by Native American society which inspired, indirect­ly, contemporary Western democracies.

“Many influential Enlightenment thinkers did in fact claim that some of their ideas on the subject were directly taken from Native American sources.” But historians have been in denial of this fact which seemed impossible to them. The Native Americans, the real Americans, in other words, are still seen as either angels or demons, either guardians of mystic wisdom or cannibalistic savages with no humanity in them. Just shooting targets for heroic cowboys. Or, today, either mostly drunkards to keep inside reservations, financed by casinos, or symbolic and exotic victims to be waved like a flag of political correctness without acknowl­edging the deeper philosophical and political contribution of their intellectual tradition.

THE COWBOY NO LONGER IN ME

SO, BEHIND THOSE twangy country music songs one is bound to listen to while chopping branches in the garden, behind those faded jeans, clip-on shirt pockets and leather boots one has at times worn with attitude, behind a certain strut and self-confidence which comes from having seen too many cowboy movies, there is nothing but myth covering up mass murder, the fable of an individualist anarchism that unfortunately is back in fashion today, both in president Javier Milei’s Argentina and in Donald Trump’s America. The lore of a bragging cowboyish self-reliance that, however, sees businesses crawling back to the state for help whenever a crisis hits, when markets collapse, a pandemic halts everything, when the system fails.

The truth of the West is quite different. Behind the tall hunt­ing and trapping tales concocted by the Frontier Club to create a sense of adventure and of “undiscovered land” free to explore for all men of good will (whereas it was inhabited by structured political organisations of different Native American realities) lies mostly a bloodbath and a fantastic propaganda machine which for decades would enlist the best writing, directing and acting talents to create an archetype of the Western men, which crept into the minds of many. It’s a cultural reverberation, a lie within a lie that I chewed on daily, along with my red, yellow, and blue sugar candies while reading Tex Willer, a comic book hero who, as I later discovered, was originally meant to be called, more frankly: “Tex Killer”. It was only thanks to the intervention of Bonelli Sr’s mother that the name was sweet­ened into Willer—just like the historical reality of the genocide of the Plain Indians of America has been cloaked in the heroic myth of the West some still believe in.

Now, whenever I watch an old Western, I can’t un-know what I know. I can’t help but see the unmasked buffoonery, the ‘act’ as Henry Kissinger himself explained his own cowboy diplomacy: riding into world capitals by himself like a lonesome rancher. The screen has fallen. Unfiltered truths emerged. They tell of a world where ideas have travelled across more freely than we thought, were great concepts and experiments on how people have or­ganised themselves have originated in various parts of the world, inside the minds of people whose level of melatonin in their skin varied widely. It’s a non-Western tale I find much more believable. It speaks of a rich humanity, free of convenient Manichean inter­pretations based mostly on military might and often on racism.

It has evicted for good the cowboy in me. Adiós, amigo!

About The Author

Carlo Pizzati

Carlo Pizzati is an award-winning multilingual author of ten books of fiction and non-fiction. He has worked as a foreign correspondent in several continents since 1987. He lives with his spouse and four dogs near a fishing village in Tamil Nadu

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