Three Decades Ago Clint Eastwood Presented Us With a Picture of Justice Prevailing over Authority
Three Decades Ago Clint Eastwood Presented Us With a Picture of Justice Prevailing over Authority
Paul Craig Roberts
In Washington, D.C., in 1992 a friend called and said there was a new Clint Eastwood western movie out, “The Unforgiven,” that the Washington Post reviewer said was anti-gun. In lieu of Eastwood’s former movies, we found this hard to believe. My friend insisted we see the movie.
We arrived only to find that the next showing was sold out. My friend insisted that we could buy tickets for a later showing and spend the time in a nearby restaurant with good food and drinks. I was more or less captured and reluctantly agreed.
When the time came, we reappeared at the theater to find a long line. Taking our place, I was struck by the expressions of the liberal men and women exiting the movie to which they had gone to see Clint Eastwood renounce “gun violence.” They were shaken people. I asked one woman, “Was it as bad as that,” and she burst into tears.
My hopes for the movie went up.
It was difficult for the Washington Post morons to hold on to their delusion that Eastwood had joined their anti-gun ranks. One of the morons wrote that Eastwood’s film de-glamorized the Western genre in which right prevails over wrong. (A prostitute’s face is slashed by cowboys, thus ruining her livelihood as a “sex worker” to use the WP’s euphemism. The sheriff, Little Bill, refuses to do anything. The women in the brothel put up a reward for the cowboys execution, and William Munny, played by Eastwood, sees in the reward rescue from failing efforts to provide for two children.
What the movie is really about is the view of the great British jurist, Blackstone, who created liberty for the English and the Americans, with his emphasis that the whole of society should protect all of its parts. Otherwise, it was impossible that protection could be extended to any.
Little Bill shows that a person deprived of his guns, his self protection, is beaten and humiliated and has zero protection from law. Munny comes into town sick and suffers the same brutal beating.
His parter, a black man, who is no longer willing to kill, turns away from the task and leaves. Guiltless, he is captured and tortured to death by the law administered by Little Bill.
Munny rides into town, a killer of men, women, children and “everything that walks or crawls at one time or another.” Little Bill is organizing a posse to go after Munny, but Munny walks into the Salon and kills Little Bill and his deputies. A reporter on the scene is delighted with the story of multiple deaths that he has lucked upon, and begins questioning Munny about who he killed first, reciting a formula given him by Little Bill. Munny tells him he can only tell him who will be last, and the reporter flees the scene.
The truth in the movie is above the heads of the people at the Washington Post, NY Times, NPR, CNN, who tell us Americans how to think and how to perceive the world.
The rule of law failed. The sheriff does nothing about the assault on the prostitute. The women in the brothel find this unacceptable. They collect up their earnings and offer a bounty for justice. Munny accepts it and delivers justice.
Eastwood’s movie is a rare statement of accountability in our time. Today when the massive sufferings of the American people are ignored while the secret agendas of the elite are supported, one man removed tyranny from a western town.
This is not what the American elite, hell-bent on imposing tyranny on Americans and the world, want to hear. And so the excrement that rules us has created its own explanation.
Eastwood’s movie is guilty of having justice prevail over authority. In the Western world today this is unacceptable.
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