If you have not read the book ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ or watched the recently released movie by this same title, please read this article only after you watch the movie by the same name.
As you would expect from a story based on a book, with Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, and the winner of the next Oscar Best International Actress award Lily Gladstone as lead actors, and no other than Martin Scorsese as director the movie is an exciting masterpiece, and a cultural anthropology marvel.
However, what I did not expect was how similar the lessons learned a century ago were to lessons learned today. The story shows us the level of evil horrors that human beings commit when we do not reign in our worst sins - arrogance, greed, and lust.
The story of the Killers of the Flower Moon
The movie is set in the United States western State of Oklahoma Osage County post-WWI, a small part of what represents, by far, the land of opportunities for tens of millions of people from around the world. It was a rediscovery in 1492, by the navigator Christopher Columbus, on a voyage commissioned by the then-new Queen and King of Spain Isabella and Fernando.
With every discovery, and rediscovery comes infinite opportunities for people with entrepreneurial spirit.
Therefore, the movie shows how among the many people who flocked to the Wild West to earn a more decent living; many chose a quasi-genocide organised crime lifestyle.
The target of their violence was the native Americans in Osage country who retained their land where oil was discovered and lured many other Americans.
These non-native Americans resorted to treachery, violence, poisoning, physical and mental torture, and killing of Native Americans to gain control over the oil-rich lands of the Native Americans whom they had legally labeled, and stigmatized, as ‘incompetent’. In a breathtakingly beautiful cinematography, the movie shows the parallels between the blooming of what native Americans called flower moon fields and the killings of beautiful, innocent native souls.
Entrepreneurs of the Flower Moon
You would think that we as human beings will never normalize horrible crime again and call colonial settlers and killers entrepreneurs. Yet more than 100 years after the greedy settlers killed hundreds of thousands of natives we are witnessing today in life, television surrendering to arrogance, greed, and lust.
In the Wild West of America crimes against, the wrongly labeled as uncivilised, natives were called discovery, settlement, and entrepreneurship, while the same colonial settlers' crimes committed today are under the pretense of self-defence and democracy.
I firmly believe that entrepreneurial spirit should not be used as justification for injustice. Anywhere and everywhere, we are witnessing those who lost their way to benevolent entrepreneurship and resorted to lying to justify injustice against others.
We have to speak up before it is too late. In the US it took too long for people to recognise the quasi-genocide against native Americans and humanity lost so much of that spiritual and vibrant culture.
I pray that we are not today’s Killers of the Flower Moon.
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