'I thought there was one white man among you'
Dana Andrews says it when the letter he wrote is shown to Tetley. I don't get that line.
This is a phrase that was very popular amongst Victorian era Brits - any 'decent' behaviour 'made a feller out to be a white man', in contrast to the 'dam wog' to whom only the basest behaviour was attributed. That these white anglo-saxon Protestants used imperial jargon is understandable; having fought to free themselves from Brit imperialism they immediately set up their own empire inside the US. They had all of the same hallmarks of greed, slaughter of innocents for their land, corrupt legal systems and broken treaties as their mentor. And they crocadile-teared all of the same sorry pseudo-religious exculpatory claptrap which both brit and yank mouth - hypocritical lip-service in their little white chapels outside which their black neighbours oh-so-recently used to swing in the breeze from hemp to the light of their burning anti-christian crosses. And now their empire is just about global, imposed thanks to a nearly one trillion dollar per year military budget. Of course, but for the seven or more aircraft carrier groups prowling the seas, and unknown numbers of nukes, no nation would take their now worthless paper money; so their military 'pays for itself'. Any backing it once had was stolen by Cheyney's gang to finance the Bush & co loonie fringe of a reverse exodus 'back to Israel' for the white protestant anglo saxon 'elite'. Luther abandoned the Christian part of Christianity when he decided that charity - which simply means the respect every person owes to every other person and living thing - making protestants simply another sect of Judaism mislabeled. What this movie is about is exactly this - everybody outside the moronic mass of local white protestants is a thing, to be abused when it suits. Curiously the ratio of seven charitable men to the thirty others in the posse co-relates to the then numerical ratio of catholics to protestants in the USA. Funny, eh?
shareFortunately, (perhaps unfortunately from your jaded point of view) you are likely to be picking through the leavings of "Victorian era Brits" for the foreseeable future.
It is indeed unfortunate that we have foisted upon the world:
Democracy with universal suffrage,
Global democratic free speech (the Internet),
Standards against which the behavior of nation states may be measured (The Rights of Man, The Declaration of Independence),
Penicillin,
and the list goes on. If it were not for us you would not have the words to complain about us. You would be using your fingers to pick your toes or your nose, unless someone or something else was picking you out of their teeth.