How Good the Whites Are

Maybe it is because of the unfortunate admixture of Sub-Saharan African blood among certain southern Goombahs or that they are unlike Nords and are less timid about saying what they think and expressing how they feel, but out of all the great European peoples, the Italians have had the most testicular fortitude when it comes to cinematically depicting the than less than good, almost always bad, and the uniquely ugly in regard to the Dark Continent. Indeed, from Mondo maestros Jacopetti and Prosperi’s singularly scathing post-colonialism-themed schockumentary Africa addio (1966) to the nasty apocalyptic artsploitation nihilism of Alberto Cavallone’s Afrika (1973), Guido filmmakers have always been at the forefront of depicting post-colonial Africa as a virtual hell-on-earth that is plagued poverty, war, starvation, rape, disease and—arguably the most ugly thing of all—European altruism. Of course, it should be no surprise that Milanese auteur Marco Ferreri (Dillinger Is Dead, La Grande Bouffe) would make a movie mocking those hopelessly neurotic and decidedly deracinated white degenerates who make it their big business to save wild starving negroes in negroland. Indeed, the Spanish-Italian-French co-production Ya bon les blancs (1988) aka How Good the Whites Are aka Come sono buoni i bianchi depicts a fiercely farcical fable-like vision from Ferreri’s typically ruthless perspective where naïve white liberals attempt to give starving African spaghetti and tomato sauce as aid, ugly Italians attempt boning bloated black native broads, a Catholic priest is gang-raped while he eats Russian chicken and stares at the starved corpse of a preteen negro boy, a deranged jigaboo wearing a white mask claims to whites that he is a real white man and that they are imposters that must leave, and a group of cannibalistic negroid nomads who eat two crackers that dare to sully their magical waterhole. Shot in Morocco, the film is clearly one of the most aesthetically flaccid and least thought out works in Ferreri's rather striking oeuvre, yet it is still a consistently hilarious little romp that completely reams the figurative rectums of ethno-masochistic whites who feel spiritually lost on their own continents and thus feel the need to put their noses in poor Africans' business. Indeed, from French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud to great miscegenation-obsessed English explorer Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, restless Europeans have always journeyed to distant lands like Africa in a desperate attempt to find solace from their forsaken souls, yet the whites of How Good the Whites Are are soft bourgeois wankers, misguided lily liberals, and miscegenation-celebrating cranks who think living in a third world country is as simple as riding in an airplane and who ultimately finds themselves to be victims of their own naivety in regard to the truly archaic way of predatorial pickaninnies who do not buy into decadent white man scams like liberalism and multiculturalism. Undoubtedly, if you're the kind of person that derives Schadenfreude from seeing white wimps getting their just deserts from patronizingly groveling to sand savages, Ferreri’s grotesque little piece of celluloid cultural sensitivity training is just for you.

The crackers of How Good the Whites Are are not really good at anything, not even when it comes to simply transferring food to starving sand spades via large trucks, or so one quickly learns while watching Ferreri’s fiercely facetious film. Although initially rather idealistic about the prospect of deriving self-satisfaction from feeding dying illiterate jigaboos in North Africa's Sahel region, the ethnically eclectic group of white do-gooders of 'Operation Blue Angel' (they described themselves as, “the women and children of Bergamo, Italy, Ropesa, Spain, Villeneuve, France”) will be asking themselves: “Why didn’t we stay in Europe?,” by the end of the film.  Led be a particularly pompous pansy Spaniard named Diego Ramirez (Juan Diego) who acts like an anally retentive French fairy and does not like getting his hands dirty yet thinks it will be a good idea to travel through unpredictable African war-zones to deliver spaghetti, tomato sauce, and powdered milk to negroes in need, Operation Blue Angel is unquestionably made up of the European bourgeois’ most weak and neurotic rabble, with every member suffering some sort of repellant quirk that is even instantly spotted by the sand negroes. Almost immediately upon arriving in Africa, the group is swindled out of most of their foreign aid by a goofy black brother named Vincent Dupont de Protocol (Ben Taleb Moha) who, among other things, likes showing off his European language skills and hustling naive crackers. Indeed, Vincent takes the group to a fancy motel where his entire family has been staying and gives the white suckers the bill (which Diego hilariously describes as being “barbaric”) as he knows the white altruists are big enough bitches that they will pay it, but they don’t have any money so they have to give up a large fraction of their spaghetti to pay off the dubious debt. Of course, this incident of Afro-hustling is nothing compared to the true savagery the group will ultimately face at the hands black tribesmen who do not take too kindly to white devils in their sacred savage lands. As one of the characters remarks regarding the murder trends in Africa, “Last year almost 10,000 [died]. Africa is dangerous.” 

 While featuring a dozen or so characters, the film many revolves around a decidedly dumb Dutch single mother named Nadia (Maruschka Detmers) and a sleazy middle-aged Guido named Michel (Michele Placido) who immediately attempts to get in young girl's pants by discussing how he would like to get involved in a “good intellectual rapport” with her.  Pseudo-macho horn-dog Michel also has a thing for dark meat and does not minding getting inside the toga of an overweight negress tribeswoman every once in a while. Although the Blue Angels decide to hire an adventurer that sort of looks like a chubby version of Adolf Eichmann named Peter (Jean-François Stévenin) to help guide them to Sahel, he ultimately takes them through war-zones occupied by less than gregarious guerillas who he is friends with. At one of these particular guerilla camps, the group meets a French priest who has lost the faith and meekly states, “I am Father Jean-Marie. I don’t want to save anyone. I’m going back to Europe. Please give me permission to spend the night here.” As Father Jean-Marie has concluded regarding black Africans, “They prefer the Koran to the Gospel. And they are not completely wrong.” During one of the most hilarious scenes of the film the Priest is gang-raped by some militia men while eating Russian chicken and starring at the corpse of a negro boy. Despite being in the middle of nowhere and only running into archaic hunter-gatherer tribes, Nadia runs into a black chick named ‘Katiuscia’ she once met in Paris who is now the Princess of a tribe and who Michel assumedly bones.  Of course, the interactions between the deracinated whites and the deeply rooted blacks only get more hostile and absurd as the film progress.

 In one of the more jovial scenes of the film, the group bumps into a tribe of severely spastic spades who wear poorly made ‘whiteface’ masks and vintage colonial adventurer hats and hostilely declare to the Europeans, “no whites” because “the whites are us!” Indeed, somehow these poor Africans believe that the Europeans are imposters and that they are the true Europids. Of course, on the way, the Europeans have various things stolen from them from the more violent tribes, including barrels of oil. By the end of the film, all of the whites are ready to give up, but a watering hole that initially seems like a mirage gives them enough hope to tread on. When Nadia and Michel decide to stay at the scenic water holing, they find themselves to be the prey of a group of pissed tribesmen with voracious appetites. Indeed, when the tribe arrives there, a seemingly nice French-speaking tribesman—a smiley sort of guy who lived in France for a while but eventually got fired from his job and had to go back to his humble tribe—approaches the two bourgeois crackers and asks them, “The chief wants to know why you have polluted the water?” Needless to say, Nadia and Michel never make it back to Europa. Indeed, when Operation Blue Angel leader Diego and adventurer Peter fly back to the watering hole to pick up Nadia and Michel, they only thing they find is a camcorder and some burnt bones. As the two learn while playing back footage from the camcorder, Nadia and Michel where eaten by the tribesman during a fireside cannibal ritual. Of course, if these obnoxiously altruistic crackers had minded their own business and never left Europe, they would have never been the dinner and, in turn, excrement of some starving Africans.  Ironically, as victims of cannibalism, Nadia and Michel did manage to accomplish their original mission of providing starving negroes with some pure white meat from Europe.

Undoubtedly, the final scene of How Good the Whites Are featuring camcorder footage of two of the characters being eaten certainly resembles Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980), as if Ferreri was attempting to lampoon the unkosher cannibal classic. While far from Ferreri’s greatest work, the film certainly has a great message: Europeans need to stay the hell out of Africa! Indeed, despite their ostensibly good intentions, the characters in Ferreri's film only bring cultural contamination, unconscious arrogance, resentment, and superlatively shitty food to the Dark Continent. Aside from making a major mockery of would-be-well-meaning white altruists, the film also depicts the glaring absurdity of multiculturalism and globalization in a variety of ways, with a cannibal who once worked in France being one of the more obvious examples. As the timeless European colonialist saying goes: “You can take the Negro out of the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of the Negro.”  Indeed, How Good the Whites Are is a work that wallows in sardonic culture shock and demonstrates that virtually all European xenophiles are degenerates, neurotics, and/or perverts who fail to fit in their own society, hence their dubious fetishism for dark meat. Ironically, it is only when the characters in Ferreri’s film are fully exposed to the ‘other’ that they began to appreciate their own indigenous culture and develop a sense of national identity. Indeed, while loony leftist believes that the best way to solve the race problem is by absurdly mixing people into a so-called ‘melting pot,’ race hate is really a direct result of multiculturalism and that the melting pot will never melt (not that it would be a good thing if it did, as demonstrated by the mystery meat that make up the populous of Brazil!). In the documentary Marco Ferreri: The Director Who Came from the Future (2007), Ferreri prophesied that there would be a great showdown between the Occident and the the third world, remarking: “We think we know everything thanks to the airplane. Instead we don’t know…We don’t know anything. We think we know it all. We arrive by plane somewhere with lovely hotels…and we think we’ve know that place. Now we’re entering a period of religious wars. The Muslim Brotherhood and Islam…are coming to the fore. It’s a more political voice than Catholicism.” Most importantly, Ferreri revealed that Europa is on its way to a cultural apocalypse of sorts, stating regarding the continent's precarious future: “Geographically, Europe is very small. It’s a fortress that thinks it’s…It thinks it’s invincible, but it isn’t. It’s surrounded and under siege by peoples who are less technologically advanced but more motivated than we are.” I don’t know ‘How Good the Whites Are’ nowadays, but if they think it is a good idea to leave their abstract bourgeois world of Starbucks and Barnes & Nobles to feed hostile savages then they deserve to be eaten.   Of course, since the barbarians are already inside the gates thanks to American hegemony and globalization, whites no longer need to leave their countries to become victims of ‘cultural enrichment.’

-Ty E