George W. BUSH: One of the major theaters against al Qaeda turns out to have been Iraq. This is where al Qaeda said they were going to take their stand. This is where al Qaeda was hoping to take–Martha RADDATZ: But not until after the U.S. invaded.BUSH: Yeah, that’s right. So what?
President Bush's interview on ABC News in Baghdad, December 15.
Sgt. Evan Vela Carnahan, 25, has served roughly one year of a ten-year sentence at the Ft. Leavenworth Military Prison. In November 2007, he was convicted of murdering an Iraqi civilian named Genei Nasir Khudair al-Janabi, whom he killed with a single shot to the head from a 9mm sidearm.
The killing took place just a few hundred feet from Janabi's home, which is located in a Sunni-dominated neighborhood in Baghdad near Iskandariyah in a region sometimes called the "Triangle of Death." Evan admits that he killed Janabi in compliance with a direct order issued by his squad leader. The squad leader -- who was acquitted of a murder charge -- admits that he gave the order, and stated under oath that he would have killed Janabi himself except for the fact that Evan was the one with the pistol in his hand.
During the past six years, the Bush Regime has followed an inverted Nuremberg formula -- call it the "Abu Ghraib Doctrine" -- under which the legal accountability for war crimes resides only with those at the bottom of the chain of command. To palliate public opinion in Iraq, a handful of low-ranking soldiers were sent to prison after the Abu Ghraib atrocities were made public.
Curtis Carnahan, Evan's father (and a close personal friend of mine from High School), told Pro Libertate that "the Iraqi Human Rights Minister was present at every session of Evan's military trial, which the Army insisted on holding in Baghdad.... The trial didn't begin until November [of 2007], after Evan's unit had returned to Alaska. They could have brought Evan back to the United States, and we repeatedly filed motions to have the trial moved stateside. Instead, the Army, at great unnecessary expense, held the trial in Iraq, under the constant scrutiny of Iraqi officials. It's clear to me that Evan was being used as a scapegoat, as a political sacrifice, in order to appease Iraqi government officials."
Evan was part of a five-man sniper team that had implanted itself in a "hide" behind an earthen berm. Over the previous four days the team had been able to sleep no more than 3-4 hours during each 24-hour cycle, and what sleep they had was divided into fifteen-minute segments. This was typical of the 56 missions Evan's team had carried out under Staff Sergeant Michael A. Hensley, an Expert Marksman tasked to increase the "kill rate" of suspected "insurgents" in the area.
Hensley -- described in an Esquire story as a twitchy, tatooed collection of eccentric mannerisms and nihilistic opinions -- was one of the most proficient snipers in the U.S. Army, a "natural-born killer."
Evan was adopted by Curtis (who runs a printing business in eastern Idaho) as a child. The Army insists on calling him Sgt. Vela because of a clerical matter involving his Social Security Card. He was, by all accounts, an exemplary soldier who did not check his conscience at the door when he left for combat.
Before shipping out for Iraq, Evan expressed his ambivalence about killing Iraqis to his LDS (Mormon) Bishop. The spiritual counsel he received, as encapsulated in a videotape prepared by church authorities, was that he would not be held accountable by God for shedding the blood of Iraqis as long as he went to war "in a spirit of love."
This is anodyne advice of no practical or moral value in a war of aggression in which every U.S. soldier who kills in self-defense is actually committing murder. Since the U.S. government had no moral right or legal authority to invade Iraq, U.S. military personnel in that country are the equivalent of robbers suddenly confronted by an armed homeowner: A robber in that situation has no right to defend himself by force.
This isn't to say that every American serviceman in Iraq intended to behave like an armed robber, or that they deserve to be killed. It is to say that they shouldn't have been sent there in the first place, and that justice requires not only that we totally withdraw from Iraq but also prosecute and punish of those responsible for planning and ordering the invasion.
Evan's case offers a particularly poignant example of the multi-layered injustices that have blossomed from the Bushling's unnecessary war.
Early on the morning of May 11, Evan -- who had been assigned guard duty, but (given his human limitations) inevitably found himself dozing off -- awoke to find himself staring into the startled face of Genei al-Janabi, who had stumbled onto the sniper squad's "hide" on his way to fetch water. The squad soon awoke, and Janabi was taken prisoner. Shortly thereafter, Janabi's teenage son materialized and was likewise taken into custody.
Hensley now confronted a predicament. His squad had been sent to ferret out suspected insurgents in what was, at the time, a very active battle zone. Their position had been compromised, and the elder Janabi, understandably terrified, began to thrash and cry out for help. Helmsley decided to release the son. As soon as the teenager had departed, Hensley turned to Evan and ordered him to kill Janabi. Evan did as he was ordered.
Immediately thereafter, Hensley ordered the squad to plant an AK-47 on Janabi's dead body. He also began to concoct cover story; this involved multiple spurious radio calls to Lt. Matthew Didier at the squad's patrol base describing concerns about a suspected insurgent and requesting permission to kill him.
The killing of Janabi, Hensley later explained, "is legitimate to me; it's not legitimate to the law. So I [had] two choices. I can do something illegal, like put a gun on him, or I can go to jail for murder. I don't know where you stand ethically on all of that, but that is what it is. And if doing something that is a little dishonest keeps me and my men from going to jail one day, I am going to be a little dishonest. If the law causes my men to get killed, the law will be broken. If lying prevents me from going to jail, I'm going to lie."
Al-Janabi, Hensley insisted, had to die because he was "making too much f*****g noise" and thus imperiled the lives of his men. As a field commander, Hensley decided that the Iraqi, who was in his own neighborhood, looking for water on his own property, "had no right to be there, he was a bad guy, he deserved to die."
So he ordered Evan Carnahan to shoot the man in the head. And Carnahan, trained by the military to obey reflexively, and taught by his church leaders that obedience to authority expunges the taint of criminal actions, pulled the trigger, believing that his action was legally sound and morally right.
After the Sunni Buy-Out -- aka "Surge" -- began, the shooting of Janabi became a local political controversy, and the Army sicced the Criminal Investigative Division on Hensley and his squad. Hensley, whose conscience is as flexible as a Cirque du Soleil performer, brazened out the interrogation.
Evan broke down under questioning. He was offered immunity to testify against Specialist Jorge Sandoval and S. Sgt. Hensley. Both Sandoval and Hensley were acquitted of murder and convicted of lesser offenses. Both of them were given sentences equivalent to time already served in pre-trial detention.
Despite his immunity agreement, Evan was brought to trial. Hensley -- who, having been acquitted of murder, had nothing to lose -- testified on Evan's behalf. He eagerly, perhaps even giddily, admitted to being the instigator of Janabi's death, describing Evan's role as merely that of carrying out what the soldier believed to be a lawful order.
Curtis Carnahan, who made three long, expensive trips to Baghdad for Evan's pre-trial hearings and criminal trial, told me that the eight-member trial panel who heard the case "was hand-picked by General Rick Lynch," the appropriately surnamed commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, whom Carnahan describes as "a smug, narcissistic son-of-a-bitch." Lynch's priority at the time was to placate Iraqi officials. This was necessary, in turn, to ensure the "success" of the "Surge," which itself was intended to neutralize growing American antipathy toward the war.
Given all of these considerations, someone had to be fed to the wolves, and Evan happened to be the only suitable candidate.
A Father seeks justice: Curtis Carnahan (right) during one of his trips to Baghdad on behalf of his son, Evan.
According to Curtis, the Army had a file on Janabi suggesting that "he was a bad guy. And several people with detailed knowledge of the region have developed intelligence confirming that the al-Janabi tribe was either active in al-Qaeda, or collaborating with them."
Of course, just days after Janabi was killed, collaborating with suspected al-Qaeda operatives became official U.S. military policy in Iskandiriyah. It's also worth recalling the exchange quoted in the epigram above, in which George W. Bush, when confronted with the charge that it was his invasion and occupation of Iraq that resulted in Iraq becoming infested with al-Qaeda, replied: "So what?"
Bush infused those two syllables with his proprietary blend of bellicose ignorance and arrogant dismissiveness. Yes, he was admitting, the invasion created a morass of guerilla violence and a breeding ground for terrorism where none previously existed -- but that's not important. The implicit question is: If this isn't important -- if there were no WMDs, and the invasion actually enhanced the terrorist threat -- why did the U.S. invade Iraq?
An observation offered Curtis Carnahan is suggestive of an answer.
"Everything I saw while I was over there suggests that they're not going to pull out," Curtis told me. "There was construction going on everywhere -- more buildings, more concrete, more everything at Camps Victory and Liberty. They're definitely settling in for a long haul."
This underscores the fact that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was pure military colonialism. It wasn't intended to "liberate" a country long ruled by a U.S.-installed surrogate thug, much less to protect the United States and its inhabitants from any "threat" posed by that tiny, insignificant country. The objective was always to seize control over Iraq and use it as a staging base to assert military and political control over the region's energy resources -- an objective that will be followed irrespective of the new agreement with "independent" Iraq.
Curtis, as I mentioned earlier, is an old friend of mine (he was, in fact, my vice president when I was president of the Madison High School Class of 1981). He sees the war in starkly different terms than I do, insisting that the correct approach is to "cut off their heads and crush them -- we should be acting like a conquering army, forcing them to submit to our will." Like many other people I know, including many I love and respect, he doesn't appear troubled by the prospect of living under a government capable of exercising powers of the sort he describes. But due to what his son has experienced, Curtis does have a better understanding of the incurable corruption that infects every element of the Regime that rules us.
She's not saying "Bush is Number One!" Evan Carnahan's sister, during a visit to Mordor, expresses her opinion of George W. Bush and the Regime he briefly ruled. (Photo courtesy of Curtis Carnahan.)
To justify an act of murder, Hensley fixed the "facts" around his decision to justify the killing. This was perfectly in harmony with the conduct of his Commander-in-Chief. When that decision created a local public relations problem, the soldier who pulled the trigger was offered as a sacrifice to political expediency; this, too, is perfectly in accord with Mr. Bush's priorities.
Among the clear lessons taught by this abhorrent case is this: Those who understand and cherish individual liberty should never allow themselves to become the agents of another person's will.
Evan Carnahan is merely one of countless thousands of fundamentally decent Americans whose earnest patriotism led them to participate in a world-historic crime. Unlike most of them, however, Evan is now in prison while those who used him to carry out that crime are free -- and his only hope for freedom, at present, is an act of clemency from the War Criminal in the White House.
As is the case whenever Israel conducts a major military campaign, the ongoing IDF assault on Gaza – which has annihilated hundreds of non-combatants, including children -- has flushed the bigots out of the brush.
One particularly notorious specimen encapsulated the message sent by Israel’s strike against Hamas in terms that should resonate among die-hard anti-Semites: “Do not f**k with the Jews.”
The neo-con warrior elite: Martin Peretz of The New Republic (left), Bill Kristol of Fox "News" and the New York Times (below, left); cultural critic Michael Medved (below, right).
That sentiment was not put into play by a neo-Nazi or someone else plagued by similar ethnic obsessions. It was Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic, self-appointed authority on matters of ethnic etiquette, and Al Gore’s Harvard-era academic Pygmalion, who blessed the blogosphere with that elegantly phrased insight.
What Peretz wrote could quite easily have fallen from the lips or flowed from the fingers of David Duke or someone else of his persuasion. If it had, Peretz – from whose exacting scrutiny no public figure is exempt, not even his precious Prince Albert – would probably have accused the author of trafficking in invidious stereotypes regarding “Jewish power.” But Peretz himself is obsessed with that subject, at least as it pertains to the power wielded by the Israeli government – which he apparently considers the embodiment of the Jewish collective identity.
Peretz is fixated on the preservation of the power of the Israeli State. And as left-leaning journalist Eric Alterman observed in a critical profile, the policy options preferred by Peretz “almost always [mean] more war” – not only between Israel and the Palestinians, or Israel and an insufficiently docile neighbor, but also between Washington and any of Israel’s enemies that is seen as a bit too big for the Israeli government to handle on its own. And like nearly all people of his persuasion, Peretz has been careful to limit his involvement in wars of any kind to the role of spectator.
Rush Limbaugh famously declared that feminism was invented “to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society.” In similar fashion it sometimes seems as if Zionism has degenerated into little more than a vicarious celebration of Israeli militarism, thereby offering flabby, pasty-faced nebbishes like Martin Peretz, Bill Kristol, and Michael Medved a way to indulge their fantasies of being shtarkers.
People of this ilk don’t live in Israel or serve in the military of any country, so they don’t have to deal directly with the bloody business of the wars they incite and applaud. From the comfortable distance of several thousand miles and two continents they grind out pseudo-tough guy rhetoric from computer keyboards, or plant their well-fed tuchises on comfortable chairs in radio or television studios and belch self-satisfied homilies about the virtue of sending other people’s children out to kill and die on behalf of a distant and thoroughly disreputable State.
Religious Judaism, as I see it, is centered in the worship of God. Its defining text was delivered at Sinai.
Cultural Judaism, by way of contrast, is based on the worship of a people. It has much less to do with Sinai than with Seinfeld.
Zionism, which draws from both of the above, is the worship of a political State.
Zionism, which began as a 19th Century secular collectivist movement, has come to define not only the Jewish view of politics and religion, but is the dominant perspective within much of Evangelical Christianity. It planted the axioms that govern any discussion of Middle Eastern affairs, either in religious or secular political circles.
Yet there is little, if any, appreciation for the lethal paradox Zionism represents to those concerned about the survival of the Jewish people:The movement summoned into existence a Jewish State supposedly to provide a refuge for the Jewish people, yet Israelis enjoy a precarious existence as citizens of what is routinely described as a tiny, perpetually imperiled Middle Eastern country.
“For 2,000 years,” observes Charles Krauthammer, “Jews found protection in dispersion – protection not for individual communities, which were routinely persecuted and massacred, but protection for the Jewish people as a whole. Decimated here, they could survive there.... Hitler put an end to that illusion. He demonstrated that modern anti-Semitism married to modern technology – railroads, disciplined bureaucracies, gas chambers that kill with industrial efficiency – could take a scattered people and `concentrate' them for annihilation.”
The “cruel historical irony” of modern Israel, Krauthammer continues, is that creation of the Jewish State “required concentration – putting all the eggs back in one basket, a tiny territory hard by the Mediterranean, eight miles wide at its waist. A tempting target for those who would finish Hitler's work.”
Israel’s demographic and geographic vulnerability are constantly invoked by those who believe that the US Government – and, therefore, the people from whom that entity plunders the necessary resources – must, as a matter of moral duty, ensure the survival of the Jewish State.
The unexamined corollary to that demand – indeed, it is all but a criminal offense to discuss such corollaries in public, at least here in the putative Land of the Free – is that Jews are uniquely imperiled by living in Israel. What this means is that Israel may actually be a net liability to the Jewish people, as well as an avoidable burden for the American public at large.
I am an agnostic regarding the claim that the State of Israel, as it presently exists, is the fulfillment of the pious desires of ancient prophets and martyrs. But I am convinced to the point of moral certainty that Israel has no legitimate claim on our tax dollars or military aid, and that Washington’s subsidy of Israel has been an unalloyed disaster for both Israel and the region.
The ongoing stream of financial and material aid to Israel has created a uniquely damaging form of moral hazard. The amount of aid grows in proportion to the perceived threat to Israel. At the same time, Washington doles out aid to the Palestinian “leadership,” generally favoring the worst and most corrupt elements within that population. Tax dollars are also used to slop the foreign aid troughs of such governments as Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, and of course, “liberated” Iraq.
Buy-offs of this kind are justified as part of the “peace process,” but it actually creates a perverse incentive to sustain the violence, or at least the threat thereof: If peace were actually to break out, the rationale for that aid would disappear.
There is a sense in which Washington’s aid to Israel is akin to such museum-quality examples of government stupidity as FEMA’s flood insurance program, which encourages people to build homes in food plains, or the role played by government-sponsored entities such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in underwriting and securitizing bad mortgage loans. All of those programs subsidize risky behavior, and socialize the costs when that behavior leads to disaster.
Israel’s punitive military excursion into Gaza is a splendid example of the same kind of subsidized foolishness, this time in international rather than domestic affairs.
Intermittent rocket attacks into Israel by Hamas cadres provided the pretext for the current Israeli war on Gaza. These attacks are not “resistance” to the Israeli government’s suffocating blockade of Gaza; they are cynical, damnable terrorist assaults on Israeli citizens – carried out, ironically, by elements of a movement created and sustained by the Israeli government itself.
The Israeli government and its defenders describe the Hamas missile attacks as a violation of a cease-fire agreement and, therefore, proof that the population of Gaza is incorrigibly committed to violence. But the current Israeli campaign was planned more than six months ago – before the cease-fire even went into effect. Had Hamas not been stupid enough to fire a handful of largely useless rockets into Israel, some other provocation would have been arranged to justify the invasion of Gaza.
Just War principles do not require a strictly proportionate response to an attack. However, there is a point where punitive action taken in self-defense becomes aggression, and aggression becomes a slaughter.
Waging war in this fashion is politically profitable for elements of both the Israeli government and the Palestinian leadership. This reflects a durable, and carefully concealed, symbiosis described by Ben Cramer in his immensely important book How Israel Lost.
One illustration of that symbiosis mentioned by Cramer is the creation by the Mossad of Hamas, which nurtured the cult of suicide bombing and has killed hundreds of Israelis since 1988. While this was supposedly done to provide a “counter-weight” to Arafat, the Israeli establishment maintained intimate ties with him, as well – even as Israelis and Palestinians were dying by the hundreds in a supposedly irrepressible conflict.
Victims of a cynical, murderous charade: The bodies of a mother and her children, killed by U.S. weapons in Israeli hands.
"The PA's slimy business intersects with Israeli business at the highest levels of Israeli political life," wrote Cramer with palpable disgust. "Things are not as they seem."
Cramer illustrated this cynical “understanding” by highlighting the relationship between Israeli-owned Dor Energy and the PLO-operated Palestinian fuel monopoly. Dor's petroleum depot was a large, conspicuous target on the border with Gaza, re-supplied at regular, predictable intervals by large, slow-moving fuel tankers. In any of the numerous Israeli military strikes on Gaza, both the depot and the trucks would make irresistible targets. Yet, owing to the deal arranged between power-brokers on both sides of the conflict, neither the depot nor any of the tankers has ever been hit.
By far the most lucrative “arrangement,” Cramer explains, is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself, in which outbreaks of violence are timed to serve the political interests of leaders on both sides.
Prior to his death in November 2004, Arafat’s popularity "in opinion polls [would often] teeter near nowhere--invisibility--until his rescue by Israeli action against him," Cramer points out. The same was true of Ariel Sharon: "If his polls dropped, something terrible happened--dead Jews all over the TV," and his political fortunes would rise.
Exactly the same cynical game is afoot now in the latest bloodletting in Gaza. The present conflict, remember, was being planned six months ago, and is being played for political advantage by the incumbent Israeli government.
Once it’s understood that the Israeli-Palestinian blood feud is, in some ways, a scripted exercise akin to a professional wrestling “match” -- albeit one on a much bigger scale, with real injury and death – then it’s easy to understand why peace is so elusive. Those in charge of the Israeli State, and those who aspire to run the embryonic Palestinian State, simply find the conflict too politically and materially profitable to abandon, despite the horrors it inflicts on the victims of their misrule.
“Why is there no peace?” asks Cramer. “Who wants one?”
It is impossible to see how this murderous charade could continue without the financial and material intervention of Washington. Were the U.S. to do what our Constitution and founding principles require – withdraw all subsidies and support from both sides of the conflict – the perverse incentives that propel much of this conflict would be removed.
U.S. withdrawal wouldn’t palliate ancient ethno-religious grievances, or those of a more recent vintage rooted in the dispossession of the Palestinians. But it would force the antagonists to make a more realistic accounting of the actual costs of the conflict, which might prod them to make the kind of grudging, halting, agonizingly reluctant material overtures that eventually lead to peace.
Of course, American withdrawal is going to happen anyway when the destruction of the dollar is consummated, a fact that should not be lost on those interested in Israel's survival. That nation's ability to dominate its rivals militarily is a particularly pernicious variant of an investment bubble, one that has distorted Israel's priorities and discouraged it from creating a security framework on assumptions that don't involve leveraging U.S. power on its behalf.
The bubble of U.S.-Israeli dominance in the Middle East will burst as soon as the fiat dollar's global hegemony ends.
An authentic American hero: Crazy Horse, as depicted in the monument in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
“What’s happening in my country is also happening in your country…. You don’t even know it, but you’re the Indians of the 21st Century, and that’s very sad.” –
Russell Means, Indian Activist and Facilitator of the newly created Independent Republic of Lakota.
Manifest Destiny had run out of room, and the American Empire – a term used unblushingly in triumphalist literature of the period – now girded the entire North American continent, and its rulers were free to confer the blessings of civilization on untutored masses beyond our shores.
First in line for this unsolicited privilege were the Cubans and Filipinos. Chinese and Mexicans would taste – in the sense of being force-fed – the unpalatable fruits of American imperial benevolence, before Washington, under the reign of the unspeakably vile Woodrow Wilson, dispatched hundreds of thousands of armed missionaries for democracy to the battlefields of Europe.
American intervention broke a stalemate in WWI that could have resulted in a negotiated peace, thereby preserving Christendom. The allied “victory” helped cultivate several nasty strains of totalitarianism and bellicose nationalism, thus effectively inoculating mankind against an outbreak of peace and normalcy. This meant an unending list of imperial errands abroad, with America’s Ruling Elite using means both relatively subtle (bribery through foreign aid) and vulgar (bombing and other forms of lethal “humanitarianism”) to propagate its vision of social justice around the globe.
And as Washington eagerly audited the shortcomings of other regimes, the original beneficiaries of its civilizing mission – the residue of the various American Indian communities – were consigned to a wretched existence marked by intractable poverty, abysmal mortality rates, and pervasive despair. The status of the American Indians offered a reality-based counterpoint to America’s self-enraptured rhetoric, and the reservation system served as a kind of portrait of Dorian Grey for the regime’s image as guardian of liberty and justice. And the mass murder of Sioux at Wounded Knee served as a kind of graduation ceremony for the Regime as it prepared to export imperial violence abroad.
Roughly three years after the December 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, historian Frederick Jackson Turner treated an audience at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago to his soon-to-be-famous “frontier thesis” – namely, that the closing of the western frontier, which he called “the meeting point between savagery and civilization,” brought an end to the first phase of America’s national life. The conquest of the frontier, Turner claimed, had refined a distinctly American character, one that was restless and inventive, fiercely individualistic and disdainful of centralized power and hierarchical authority.
Turner’s oration was, in some ways, a scholarly version of the familiar lounge singer ploy of inviting his audience to “give yourselves a round of applause.” Then, as now, Americans were eager to view themselves as hardly, independent folk, even when they were taking part in a militarized, federally subsidized land grab of unprecedented scope and shamelessness.
True, settlers and pioneers were often bold and courageous people, and more than a few of them acquitted themselves honorably both in tragic combat with Indians, and in honest commerce with them when peace was achieved. But taken as a whole, Manifest Destiny represented the triumph of corrupt corporatism.
The dominant human type found on the frontier, he writes, “was a lean and cold-eyed man who feared God and nothing else…. He had courage, hardihood, and a stubborn will that balked at no problem as too great…. He was the man who refused to remain close to forts and so was often killed by Indians, his wife nursed her children with a rifle across her knees, and he tilled his fields with a gun strapped to his plough handles. He dared off Indians, the big cattlemen, the outlaws. He was the nester, the squatter, the man who moved west.”
Whether they knew it or not, L’Amour points out, individualist pioneers acted as icebreakers on behalf of the forces of collectivism.
“Railroads came west on government subsidy and gifts of government land,” he recalled. “They never advanced a foot without government land to sell, government money to spend, and the protection of the Army. The [pioneers] asked no protection from anybody, or if so, not for long, but moved on out ahead of the Army wherever their path was not blocked by too tight a line, and where they stopped they put down roots.”
And wherever these individualists put down roots, the Leviathan State would soon materialize to install the necessary apparatus of coercive conformity. This process was captured by publisher George A Crofutt – an energetic evangelist of Manifest Destiny – in his caption to John Gast’s 1872 painting “American Progress.”
The American Empire as a winsome maiden: John Gast's seminal 1872 propaganda lithograph "American Progress."
The much-produced lithograph portrayed the American State as a fair-haired, zaftig female precariously clad in a diaphanous robe, her alabaster brow garlanded with the “star of empire,” gazing westward with an expression of benevolent resolution as terrified Indians are driven in terror before her. In her right arm is clutched a volume inscribed “Common Schools,” which Crofutt exultantly described as “the emblem of our education and the testimonial of our National Enlightenment.” With her left hand she threads the countryside with “the slender wires of the telegraph, that are to flash intelligence throughout the land.”
Before this comely yet omnipotent maiden the land is alluring, yet desolate; in her wake can be found cities, “steamships, manufactories, schools and churches, over which beams of light are streaming and filling the air – indicative of our civilization,” continues Crofutt. From the cities “proceed the three great continental lines” of federally subsidized railway, as well as a stream of pony express riders, pioneer wagons, stagecoaches, gold seekers, and others drawn irresistibly westward.
But the true focus of this artistic celebration of “our country’s grandeur and enterprise,” as Croffut understands, is the handful of Indians who flee before the “beautiful and charming Female” who embodies the American State.
“Fleeing from `Progress,’ and towards the blue waters of the Pacific … are the Indians … with their squaws, papooses, and `pony lodges,’” he wrote in words oozing contempt. The Indians “flee from the presence of the wondrous vision. The `Star’ is too much for them.”
“American Progress,” as captioned by Croffut, coupled civic sanctimony with an undisguised appeal to three of the basest instincts: Simple prurience; the tribalist impulse toward the worship of collective power; and the dehumanization of those not part of the chosen collective.
The goodness of America, on Croffut’s reading, is ratified by the retreat of the Indian savages. Speaking through Matt Bardoul, one of his fictional heroes, Louis L’Amour gave voice to a less self-congratulatory view, concluding that the Indians withdrew in the face of “what some might consider a superior barbarism.”
In 1874, two years after Gale unveiled his propaganda portrait, George Armstrong Custer, an agent of American “progress,” led an invasion force into the Black Hills of South Dakota, a territory considered sacred to the Sioux and solemnly promised to them in perpetuity by treaty less than a decade earlier.
Like everyone of consequence in the employ of the American Leviathan, Custer looked upon treaties much the same way Lenin later would – as pie crusts, made to be broken as circumstances required. The Black Hills, Custer announced, were full of gold “from the grass roots down.” This turned a trickle of illegal immigration into the Black Hills into a deluge, and Washington – true to form – decided the time had come to re-write its treaty with the Sioux.
In September 1875, Washington convened a conference with Sioux representatives in the hope that the Indians would (in Dee Brown’s phrase) “sell their land in order to save the United States Government the embarrassment of having to break a treaty to get it.”
The attitude of most Sioux was captured in a defiant gesture by Sitting Bull. Informed of Washington’s desire to purchase the Black Hills, Sitting Bull replied by picking up a pinch of soil and releasing it to the wind. “I want you to go and tell the Great Father that I do not want to sell any land to the government – not even as much as this.”
Faced with an owner not interested in selling land, the government did what it always does: It prepared to steal the land and murder those determined to defend it. Preparations began to “whip the Indians into subjection,” as Indian Bureau Inspector E.T. Watkins put it.
After the Seventh Cavalry was routed and its vain and bloody-handed commander was sent to hell, the Leviathan embarked on a course of collective punishment. Not able to track down Sitting Bull, Gall, Crazy Horse, and other Indian commanders who had beaten their Army and defied the “Star of empire,” Washington authorized the impenitent war criminal Gen. William T. Sherman – the General Westerman of the Union’s war against the South – to treat all Sioux on the reservation as prisoners of war. This meant that those who had not fought would be punished as retaliation for the Indians’ victory.
Although they were not definitively beaten on the battlefield, the Sioux were eventually broken through terror, political pressure, and the relentless logic of demographics.The Americans were too numerous to repel, their government too powerful to resist, their rulers entirely without pity or scruple.
Crazy Horse was determined to withstand the federal Army, but eventually be he made the bitter choice to bring his people onto the reservation in order to avoid starvation. When he learned that the same government that had stolen his lands and killed his people was enlisting Sioux to kill Chief Joseph’s Nez Perce – a northwestern tribe experiencing the same treatment at the hands of the empire – Crazy Horse threatened to rebel and leave the reservation.
After an informant learned of Crazy Horse’s plans, the chief was “arrested” by Indian Agency police – whose number included several Sioux Quislings, including Little Big Man -- and then assassinated by a US Army Private at Ft. Robinson.
After the death of Crazy Horse in the fall of 1877, his parents – part of a Sioux band hoping to withdraw to Canada and find sanctuary there with the exiled Sitting Bull – buried their son’s body near a creek called Wounded Knee, on a parcel of land that would soon become the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
Sitting Bull fled to Canada after the battle of Greasy Grass in the hope that his people would be protected as subjects of the British Crown. However, Washington’s intervention prevented the Great Chief and his followers from obtaining a parcel of suitable land. In July 1881, Sitting Bull joined Crazy Horse, Red Cloud, Red Dog, Spotted Tail and other Sioux chiefs in choosing surrender over starvation.
Imprisoned at Ft. Randall in violation of promises of decent treatment, Sitting Bull’s resilient dignity proved to be an obstacle to federal Indian commissioners, who wanted to make sure that the resistance of the Sioux had been permanently broken. In his first meeting with the commissioners, Sitting Bull treated the bureaucrats with regal contempt, taunting them for “acting like men who have been drinking whiskey” in demanding that the Sioux formally turn over the coveted Black Hills.
Apparently, concern for the fate of his long-suffering band of followers caused Sitting Bull to temper his tongue in a follow-up meeting. Predictably, the Indian Commissioners weren’t inclined to reciprocate; instead, they seized an opportunity to upbraid Sitting Bull for his defiance and harangue him about the manifold glories of the Imperial State.
“You are not a great chief of this country,” lectured Republican Senator John Logan of Illinois. “You have no following, no power, no control, and no right to any control. You are on an Indian reservation merely at the sufferance of the government. You are fed by the government, clothed by the government, your children are educated by the government, and all that you have and are today is because of the government…. The government feeds and clothes and educates your children now, and desires to teach you to become farmers, and to civilize you, and make you as white men.”
Logan unbosomed himself of this totalitarian homily decades before Mussolini encapsulated the same worldview in his fascist credo:“Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”
Eventually, through the application of its favorite tactic – negotiation through extortion, in the form of threatening to starve the Indians if they didn’t surrender their lands – Washington was able to secure ownership of the Black Hills. By an 1889 act of Congress, the pitiful remainder of the original 1868 treaty land was divided into six small reservations in South Dakota. The Sioux themselves were disarmed, deprived of their horses, and confined to reservation plots.
Prior to the 1889 treaty, the Sioux had been promised that the subsistence rations promised in the 1868 pact would continue. But once the Black Hills had been signed away, Washington saw no need to fulfill its end of the agreement it had wrung from the Sioux, and Congress promptly cut the rations by half. By 1890, the promised rations were being withheld outright. Several years of poor harvests left the Euro-American residents of South Dakota struggling; the captive Sioux were starving.
Master of the Ghost Dance Wovoka (seated on the right).
Confronting utter annihilation, the Sioux suddenly experienced a religious revival. A Paiute holy man named Wovoka was preaching an eschatological doctrine that combined mysticism with elements of the New Testament.
By 1891, he prophesied, the buffalo would return, dead warriors by the thousands would arise from their graves, and a great wind would sweep the White Man’s government from the land.
Until then, Wovoka taught, the Sioux was to keep the peace.
“When your friends die, you must not cry,” he insisted. “You must not hurt anybody or do harm to anyone. You must not fight. Do right always. It will give you satisfaction in this life. Do not tell the white people about this. Jesus is now upon the earth.”
Rather than resisting the Whites by force of arms, Wovoka explained, the Indians were to clothe themselves in a special “medicine garment” that would protect them from bullets, and perform a “ghost dance” in order to worship the messiah and express the hope that his kingdom would soon prevail.
This new religion – a kind of Indian Sufism, without the militancy that informs the original Muslim version – gave the desperate, starving Sioux a sense of hope and the beginnings of a new shared identity. So of course, it had to be suppressed with alacrity and severity.
In October 1890, Daniel F. Royer, a disgraced pharmacist and former M.D. (his license had been revoked in California owing to a drug addiction) was appointed Indian Agent at the Pine Ridge Reservation. He had no experience in Indian affairs; his appointment was done for purely political reasons. About two weeks later, Royer dispatched a panicky telegraph to Washington demanding military intervention and the arrest of the Sioux leaders.
Sensationalistic accounts of purported Indian plots clotted the air and darkened the pages of newspapers across the country. Royer and other Indian Agents issued arrest warrants for Indian “troublemakers” on any available pretext. In early December, the South Dakota Home Guard, a militia which had been created byGovernor Arthur C. Mellete less than a month earlier, ambushed and massacred and scalped 75 Sioux Ghost Dancers.
Early on December 15, an aged Sitting Bull was surrounded by a task force of 43 police under the command of Lt. Bull Head, an Indian Quisling. The Great Chief was prepared to surrender peacefully, but after a large group of Ghost Dancers materialized to protest the unprovoked arrest he had second thoughts. After one of the Ghost Dancers produced a rifle, one of the policemen drew a gun and shot Sitting Bull in the head at point-blank range.
The murder of Sitting Bull prompted his half-brother, Bigfoot, to flee with his people to the reservation at Pine Ridge in search of sanctuary.
Bigfoot suffered from such severe pneumonia that he was coughing up blood; his weary, emaciated followers – roughly 120 men and about twice that number of women and children – weren’t in much better shape. Yet Major Samuel Whitside, who intercepted Big Foot’s band on December 28, insisted on treating them as a captured military force. Under the guns of the Seventh Cavalry – which retained the bitter institutional memory of its defeat at Greasy Grass/Little Bighorn – the band was taken to a camp on the banks of Wounded Knee Creek, where the Indians were to be disarmed.
Bigfoot and his followers were ringed with two troops of Cavalry; four wagon-borne Hotchkiss rotating rifles, which were able to hurl explosive charges up to two miles, were carefully positioned on a rise outside the camp.
Shortly after dawn on December 29, the Army began to collect rifles from Big Foot’s followers. With weary resignation, the Indians surrendered the only independent means of obtaining food, leaving themselves entirely at the mercy of a capricious enemy that had frequently used starvation as a weapon.
Impatient with the pace of the gun turn-in, several contingents of soldiers fanned out through the camp, going from tent to tent to confiscate any hidden firearms. This prompted an understandable outcry from the women whose dwellings were violated.
One young man, a deaf-mute named Black Coyote, balked when his turn came to hand over his rifle. Holding his Winchester above his head, this young man – who had committed no crime and threatened nobody – somehow conveyed to several onlookers the sentiment that he had paid good money for his rifle and didn’t intended to give it up. He was swarmed by several soldiers.*
Shortly thereafter, a shot pierced the pregnant silence, inducing delivery of the massacre that became inevitable when the disarmed Sioux fell into the hands of a vengeful Seventh Cavalry.
“We tried to run,” testified survivor Louise Weasel Bear, “but they shot us like we were buffalo.” The ailing and helpless Bigfoot was gunned down, his disease-racked body left grotesquely twisted in the snow. He was joined by as many as 300 of his followers.
“Dead and wounded women and children and little babies were scattered all along … where they had been trying to run away,” recalled Ogalala medicine man Black Elk, who arrived shortly after the slaughter. “The soldiers had followed along the gulch, as they ran, and murdered them in there. Sometimes they were in heaps because they had huddled together, and some were scattered all along. Sometimes bunches of them had been killed and torn to pieces where the [Hotchkiss] wagon guns hit them.”
Those who resisted survived. Black Elk recounted how two small boys had taken up sniping positions and killed as many soldiers as they could: “These were very brave little boys.” Other Sioux had “fought soldiers with only their hands until they got their guns.” An Army Captain named Wallace was surrounded by a scrum of Sioux mothers and beaten to death with clubs.
But this was not a “battle,” as it was referred to for a century after the event. It was a massacre of helpless, innocent people by Leviathan’s killing apparatus. When Black Elk arrived on the scene, what he saw was not a battlefield, but rather “one long grave of butchered women and children and babies, who had never done any harm and were only trying to run away.”
When survivors sought medical help, they discovered that the first priority was to tend to the wounds of the handful of Army personnel who had been injured in the course of carrying out the slaughter. Many of them perished from exposure and untended wounds. For several days the ground at Wounded Knee was littered with the bodies of the dead. On January 3, 1891, the mortal remains of the victims were gathered and interred in a mass grave.
The military expedition that carried out the massacre cost an estimated $2 million in 1890 dollars. This did provide a welcome “economic stimulus package” for local communities. But it’s worth remembering that it would have cost just a fraction of that amount to provide the starving Sioux with the rations they had been promised under the original 1868 treaty.
But Washington apparently believed the additional expense was worthwhile in order to extract the last full measure of submission from the once-fearsome Sioux. Providing the Seventh Cavalry with an opportunity to avenge its defeat, and thereby vindicate the power of the “Star of empire,” was a lagniappe.
Although it closed the curtain on America’s Frontier Era, Wounded Knee was merely the overture to Leviathan’s career in imperial butchery. The outward course of the “Star of empire” has been marked with atrocities displaying a family resemblance to that massacre and the tactics that led to it.
Just a few years later, the Empire mounted a counter-insurgency campaign that would lead to the imprisonment, torture, and slaughter of tens of thousands of “liberated” Fillipinos. At the close of WWI, Washington and its allies used the same tactic that had been so successful against the Sioux – deploying the weapon of starvation to secure submission to a treaty – against defeated imperial Germany.
A century after Wounded Knee, the same American Leviathan that had starved the Sioux into submission imposed a murderous embargo of Iraq that would last for more than a decade and kill hundreds of thousands of children. After using starvation and the denial of medical necessities to soften up the Iraqis, the Empire – already bogged down in Afghanistan -- launched an invasion Iraq.
And as Scott Horton of AntiWarRadio points out, wherever the Empire deploys its legions abroad, the territory not under imperial control is referred to as “Indian country.” With entirely unwarranted optimism, most Americans assume that this only applies abroad. But every once in a while – as at Ruby Ridge or Waco – the Empire offers a bloody reminder that Wounded Knee remains the official template for dealing with any resistance, foreign or domestic.
As the financial system implodes, inhabitants of our de-industrialized country are having what remains of our wealth confiscated in order to serve the interests of the most corrupt elements of the ruling elite. The sky is thick with portents of impending military rule in order to suppress any organized resistance to this unprecedented plunder.
We will know that the Wounded Knee option is on the table when our rulers demand of us what they required of the conquered Sioux: The surrender of our personal firearms.
It is a glorious fact that America's private gun owners possess more firearms than the combined armies and police forces of the entire world. It is that fact, and perhaps it alone, that explains why the Regime hasn't succeeded -- yet -- in transforming our country into one giant Rez. We should never assume that this cannot change, in a hurry.
--
*In the original version of this essay, I wrote that Black Coyote, reportedly a deaf-mute, "exclaimed" that he resented turning in his rifle, which he could not literally do if he, in fact, suffered such disabilities. My thanks to commenter "Mike" for catching this inadvertent contradiction.
Video extra
As is usually the case, the incomparable Maxwell Smart blunders into the truth (watch to the end of this episode).
A Father seeks justice: Curtis Carnahan (right) during one of his trips to Baghdad on behalf of his son, Evan. 
