Cowboy mythology

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Cowboys and "Indians"

https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.jstor.org/stable/1409497

Iraq Genocide

American Sniper

As presented by Dr. Yousef K. Baker[1][2]:

Racist ideas of soldiers’ understanding of Iraq became glorified as authoritative experiences with the Muslim other in the frontier. In 2012, Chris Kyle, “the most lethal sniper in US history,” published his autobiography, American Sniper. It quickly became a New York Times bestseller.[3] Two years later Clint Eastwood directed a film based on the book. The film grossed over half a billion dollars worldwide and was nominated for six Academy Awards.[4] The film and book portray a complex character in Kyle, whose civilized childhood filled with dreams and aspirations is set against Iraqis lacking these characteristics. They are “savage” with evil lurking in their depths,[5] which can strike at any time: “Savage, despicable evil. That’s what we’re fighting in Iraq. That’s why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy ‘savages.’ There really was no other way to describe what we encountered there.” Referring to the number of Iraqis he killed, Kyle writes,

"The number is not important to me. I only wish I had killed more. Not for bragging rights, but because I believe the world is a better place without savages out there taking American lives. Everyone I shot in Iraq was trying to hurt Americans or Iraqis loyal to the new government."[6]

Chris Kyle refers to insurgent-controlled territory as “Injun territory” or “Injun country.”[7] The figure of the Indigenous peoples of America, of Indigenous warriors, looms in the background every time the notion of “Injun territory” is invoked. It permeates Kyle’s aspirations to be a cowboy, his love for Westerns where there is a clear antagonism between good and evil, cowboy and Indian, the civilized and the savage.[8] The brutalization, murder and dislocation of Indigenous people of the Americas is rehearsed once again in a revisionist narrative presenting their death portrayed as a civilizing mission reanimated through the death, destruction and disorder brought onto Iraq and Iraqis by the US military.

Eastwood’s film only amplifies the sensibility expressed in Kyle’s book. It is a piece of historical revisionism, where the attacks of 9/11/2001 become the reason for Kyle to go to war. The news of the 9/11 attacks are followed by gunfire from Kyle’s platoon in Iraq. The film creates this juxtaposition without any interest in the fact that there was never a connection between the 9/11 attacks and Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq.[9] As Chris Hedges, writes, “‘American Sniper,’ like the big-budget feature films pumped out in Germany during the Nazi era to exalt deformed values of militarism, racial self-glorification and state violence, is a piece of propaganda, a tawdry commercial for the crimes of empire.”[10]

Sources

  1. ↑ https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.13169/arabstudquar.42.1-2.0046; p. 56-57, "KILLING “HAJIS” IN “INDIAN COUNTRY”: NEOLIBERAL CRISIS, THE IRAQ WAR AND THE AFFECTIVE WAGES OF ANTI-MUSLIM RACISM," by Dr. Yousef K. Baker
  2. ↑ These ideas are also discussed in The Red Nation's podcast episode "Cowboys and Hajis: Iraq 2003 w/ Yousef Baker" co-hosted by Nick Estes and Sina Rahmani: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqY2ZiVNOkI
  3. ↑ C. Kyle, S. McEwen, and J. DeFelice, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in US Military History (New York: W. Morrow, 2012).
  4. ↑ C. Eastwood, American Sniper (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Entertainment, 2015); C. Mauricette, “American Sniper (2014),” in S. Murguia, ed., The Encyclopedia of Racism in American Films (London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018), 18–24; L. Soberon, “‘The Old Wild West in the New Middle East’: American Sniper (2014) and the Global Frontiers of the Western Genre,” European Journal of American Studies 12:2 (2017), 1–18.
  5. ↑ Mauricette, “American Sniper (2014),” 20.
  6. ↑ Ibid., 4–5. Kyle et al. repeatedly refer to Iraqis as “savages.” See the following pages just for a sampling of the usage: Kyle et al., American Sniper, 167, 97, 250, 60, 324.
  7. ↑ Ibid., 304, 32.
  8. ↑ Soberon, “The Old Wild West in the New Middle East,” 3–4.
  9. ↑ Ibid., 10.
  10. ↑ C. Hedges, “Killing Ragheads for Jesus,” Truthdig (2015).
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