What villain actually had a good point?

Every Hollywood movie has the proverbial good guy (or good guys) and villains. The baddies are usually motivated by nefarious or sinister motives. They are out to acquire financial gain, or destroy civilisation as we know it as revenge for some injustice they have experienced.

Life is not a straightforward Hollywood movie. Sometimes the villains do have a legitimate point.

Unforgiven (1992) is an award winning movie directed by Clint Eastwood. The main villain of the piece is the ruthless sheriff, played by the late Gene Hackman. Without going into an extensive examination of the plot and characters, let’s just say here that the movie is told from the point of view of Eastwood’s character, William Munny.

For a moment, let’s take a look at the narrative from the sheriff’s perspective. The sheriff, Little Bill Daggett, is facing multiple bounty hunters – contract killers – from arriving in his town, Big Whiskey. The reason? The local madam of the brothel has offered 1000 dollars to whomever will kill the man who attacked one of her prostitutes.

The attacker, caught by Sheriff Daggett, was forced to pay compensation in the form of horses and ponies to the sex workers. This was considered unacceptable and pitiful by the women, so they offer money for vigilante justice. Are they correct to circumvent the law? Does not the sheriff provide appropriate justice according to the laws of the state? He does not want to encourage vigilantism.

Ok, that is one perspective, and I am certain numerous film critics will jump down my throat about that particular interpretation. My point here is that life is more complicated than a straightforward ‘good guys versus bad guys’ scenario. Eastwood, to his credit, explores these themes in his movie. His character, William Munny, is an ex-alcoholic murderer (gunslinger) who is spending his days atoning for his violent past.

It is up to others to take up these topics in other blog articles, but now I would like to pivot slightly. From my own experience, I have found that in the Anglophone nations, the people we are taught to regard as villains turn out to have legitimate grievances. Indeed, we turn out to be the real villains of the story.

May 8 1945 was a time of joyous celebration in France. The people were celebrating the defeat of Nazi Germany, and the end of the war (at least for the people of Europe). France regained its national independence from German fascism. During the war, the French government in exile, led by Charles De Gaulle, signed multiple agreements advocating the national independence of those countries occupied by Nazi Germany.

On that day, the Parisian authorities made clear that the principle of national independence would not extend to the nations occupied by French colonialism.

Across the Mediterranean, the Algerians were rallying to proclaim their independence. Surely the French authorities, having waged a struggle for national liberation and committing themselves to that principle, would now recognise their former colony as an independent nation?

Sadly, that was not to be. On Victory in Europe (VE) Day, French soldiers and police massacred thousands of Algerians over the subsequent days. Some estimates put the number of Algerian dead as high as 45 000. Launching punitive and sadistic expeditions, French forces were joined by settlers, the pied-noir, French colonists who willingly participated in atrocities against Algerian civilians.

The irony is that the Free French, those who fought against the Nazi occupation, included thousands of Algerian soldiers. The French recruited from the Muslim-majority population, deploying these soldiers across European and North African theatres of war. 7500 Algerians died fighting Nazi Germany.

Once the immediate protests on May 8 were quelled, the French military backed up by gendarmes, launched waves of mass reprisals against the indigenous Algerian population. The parallels in conduct between the Nazi Wehrmacht, and the French imperial forces, was not difficult to see.

So when we understand episodes like this, we are compelled to ask ourselves whom the real villains are in this story. What we are being taught is a series of comforting truths, designed to make us in the Anglophone and richer countries feel good about ourselves. Surely we are the good guys, confronting the Nazi war machine?

Aimé Césaire (1913 – 2008), Afro-Martinican poet and philosopher, once wrote that the reason Hitler and the Nazis have become the epitome of evil and villainy is not because of their methods or motives, but rather because they applied those methods to other white European populations. Our outrage at villainy is orders of magnitude stronger and larger when the victims of oppression and occupation are white.

Indeed, the imperial states have perfected a cynical propaganda technique – disguise your villainy in the cloak of righteous victimhood. The political leaders of Tel Aviv have practiced and refined this technique over the decades. We all agree that the Holocaust was an unspeakable crime, and its victims should be remembered.

It is also true that the Israeli state, wrapping itself in the mantle of the Holocaust, continues to commit genocidal atrocities against the Palestinians. No-one is questioning the enormity of the Holocaust, and its perpetrators are definite villains. Please stop using the fact of the Holocaust to deflect criticism of Israeli actions as motivated purely by the villainous psychopathology of antisemitism.