Yes, many (maybe most) of them are. But not all of them. The best ones are quite the opposite, and they are the reason why I like the Spaghetti Western subgenre. I recommend two excellent books: Austin Fisher’s Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western and Lee Broughton’s Euro-Western. And, for a deeper understanding of American and Western mythology, Richard Slotkin’s indispensable trilogy Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. The last volume is, of course, the most relevant concerning ideas, opinions, thoughts, perceptions and sensitivities on this forum.
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