through europe

Memories.

 

On May 4, 2009, a few months before Barack Obama won his Nobel Peace Prize, a B-1 supersonic bomber dropped a 2,000 pound missile on the tiny peasant village of Granai, in Southern Afghanistan. About 140 people, mostly women and children, were torn to shreds and scattered in a range of hundreds of feet.

 

The Pentagon first tried to cover up what happened. But echoes of the massacre began to circulate among the foreign press, and the Army accused the Taliban of having used civilians as shields. The Afghan people reacted: a caravansary with the bodies of the victims stacked up on carts made its way to Kabul, with thousands of demonstrators shouting against the US occupants. The Pentagon then admitted that a few dozens of combatants and a few innocent people were killed. Finally, after a few weeks, almost no one outside of Afghanistan was still talking about Granai.

 

America, 1858. Two individuals, an ex-doctor and a freed slave, turned into bounty-killers. They have zero concern for the welfare of their society and seem to be irreconcilable to each other but actually, as the tradition of spaghetti-westerns wants, they are associated by practical, monetary and private reasons. A true 'union of egoists' in the Old West, as Max Stirner would put it.

 

This was the intriguing subject of films as the Dollar Trilogy or Butch Cassidy, to which Tarantino owes more than a reference. “Egoistic unions” Leone-style have emerged, in fact, as an opposition to the lovely “liberal unions” of Traditional WASP Western movies – where the autonomy of action of the Lone Gunman, even when motivated by personal issues, was only a replacement of an evanescent State. On the contrary, in their temporary alliance, the bounty killers keep a healthy distance from an oppressive Society: they don’t respect it – they only utilize it. They transform the Law into their own property and their own creature.