The Death of a Slave-Catcher

 

Ogden Police Officer Jared Francom was fatally shot during a raid on the home of Matthew David Stewart last January 4. Francom was part of a twelve-man SWAT team attached to the Weber-Morgan Narcotics Strike Force, a federally subsidized counter-narcotics squad. 

A few weeks earlier, a woman named Stacy Wilson who had broken up with Stewart called the Strike Force snitch line to report that Stewart was cultivating marijuana on his property. After three attempts to conduct a “knock and talk” search of the home, the Strike Force obtained a warrant for a nighttime paramilitary raid – despite the fact that they didn’t even bother to do a background check on the accuser.

In familiar fashion, the SWAT team knocked on the front door, shouted “Search warrant!” and immediately broke into the home with a battering ram. Stewart barricaded himself in a room and began shooting. Francom was shot six times, although it’s possible he was hit by “friendly fire.” Five other officers were wounded, as was Stewart, who was arrested in a shed outside his home. He has been charged with one count of aggravated murder and seven counts of attempted aggravated murder. The state intends to seek the death penalty.

A search of the home turned up a handful of marijuana plants. Stewart, a veteran, insists that he used marijuana to treat a variety of physical and psychological conditions that are the residue of his time in the military. He also maintains that he didn’t know that the armed invaders – some of whom had long hair intended to make them look like gang-bangers -- were police officers. 

Would you let them into your home? Strike Force members receive an award.

This is a potentially significant detail.

In early September, Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill determined that a man named Priest Jemelle Mitchell was justified in killing an intruder named Brandon Saunders – despite the fact that Saunders was unarmed.  Infuriated to learn that Mitchell was involved with his ex-wife, Saunders broke down the door of her apartment.  Mitchell responded by fatally shooting Saunders.

After reviewing the evidence, Gill concluded that the act of kicking in the door constituted trespassing with intent to commit an act of violence, and Mitchell was justified in believing that he faced “imminent peril and threat of injury.”

If this is true of a situation in which an unarmed, jealous ex-husband threatens a man who was in his ex-wife’s apartment, how would the same standard not apply to a man confronting six heavily armed strangers who had broken down his door in a nighttime raid? 

The men who barged into Stewart’s home insist that they identified themselves as police. But the same was true of the people who raided the Sandy, Utah residence of Clayton Green  in early October.  In that case, however, the assailants were private sector criminals posing as their state-licensed counterparts.

Mr. Green was greeted at his door by a man wearing police garb, displaying a badge, and demanding access to their home. A few seconds later, Green and his wife were thrown to the floor and handcuffed with zip ties. They were held gunpoint while burglars ransacked the home. Although the Sandy Police Department admits that this incident was not an isolated case, they refuse to say how frequently this kind of thing happens in Utah. 

A few days after the incident at the Green family’s home, another armed raid was carried out against an elderly couple in Salt Lake City. Michael and Teresa Ryan were terrorized by an armed gang that busted down their front door and held them at gunpoint. This time, it was the police – specifically, a federally supervised joint narcotics task force – who committed this act of terrorism.

According to Salt Lake City Police Chief Chris Burbank, the only problem with the second raid was that it took place at the wrong address. Drug Enforcement Administration Agent Frank Smith, whose agency participated in the assault, blithely explained that “law enforcement, unfortunately, is not a perfect science.”

 Todd Blair of Roy, Utah was another victim of the imperfect “science” of paramilitary drug enforcement. 

At about 10 PM on September 16, 2010, Blair was in the basement of his home when he heard footsteps and the voices of strangers at the back door. Apparently thinking that he was being robbed, Blair grabbed a golf club and went upstairs to confront the trespassers – who were agents of the same Weber-Morgan Narcotics Strike Force that would invade Matthew Stewart’s home roughly a year and a half later. 

The no-knock raid at Blair’s home was carried out on the basis of a single, anonymous tip that he was selling meth and heroin. After gunning down Blair, the officers were able to scour up less than half an ounce of marijuana. 

Following the standard perfunctory and predictable official review, the fatal shooting of Blair by Sgt. Troy Burnett was ruled a “justifiable” use of force by Weber County Attorney Dee Smith – the same official who is now determined to execute Matthew Stewart. 

The institutional response to the needless violent death of Todd Blair was the equivalent of a “sucks to be you” shrug. This was decidedly not the case after the death of Officer Francom.

“We have lost and brother and will grieve this loss knowing that officer Francom laid down his life for his friends and community,” lamented Weber County Sheriff Terry Thompson during a press conference following the shooting. He also praised “all of our heroes in the public safety family who have stepped up this day to the task of caring for our wounded warriors.”

That expression shouldn’t be dismissed as a specimen of melodramatic rhetoric: Like nearly everybody in their profession, Sheriff Thompson and the members of the Strike Force see themselves as waging war on the population they supposedly serve – and they demand the unqualified support and admiration of that same population. 

Carrying out its duty as a state-aligned media organ, the Deseret News used the death of Jared Francom as an excuse to lecture Mundanes about what we are to consider the peril-forged bond of shared by our uniformed overlords:

“When the shots were fired in a Wednesday night drug raid, killing one officer and wounding five others, the shots may as well have been fired at all of Weber County law enforcement. Those shots also may as well have been fired at all of Utah law enforcement and police officers in this country — such is the solidarity, such is the bond. The men who work the streets, those who moved on to desk jobs, the women on patrol or the detectives who work sex crimes come from one family. And you don't understand unless you've been there.”

Salt Lake City NBC affiliate KSL described Francom’s death as “a startling example of the dangers drug enforcement officers face.” Naturally, it didn’t describe that fatal paramilitary raid – or the one that resulted in the murder of Todd Blair – as a “startling example” of the dangers drug enforcement officers pose to the public. 

The Sunday following the shooting, the entire Ogden Police Department was allowed to take the day off – with pay – in order to deal with its collective bereavement. Utah Governor Gary Herbert ordered flags to be flown at half-staff. The following month, the Utah Legislature held a brief ceremony to honor Francom. During the ceremony, Representative Brad Dee, who represents Ogden, praised Francom for answering the call “to step between good and evil.” 

Francom’s funeral at Ogden’s Dee Events Center was attended by 4,000 people, including hundreds of police officers, Governor Herbert, and Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee. 

In his remarks at the event, Troy Combs, who was Bishop of Francom’s Mormon congregation, recalled that the officer had grown his hair long as part of his undercover work. In addition to being a police officer, Francom was a Sunday School teacher, Bishop Combs related, and for the kids the experience was like “being taught by Jesus.” This assumes, of course, that the Savior’s day job involved kicking down doors and terrorizing people for consuming substances of which the government disapproves.

“Jared’s was a tragic death,” continued Bishop Combs. “He was murdered in the line of duty. But he did it serving and protecting.”

The first of those statements is an indisputable fact: Jared Francom was an irreplaceable individual – a husband and father – who died in a needless and preventable episode of violence. The second statement is morally unsupportable: Matthew Stewart was defending his home against armed strangers he may not have recognized as police officers, and who in any case were not acting as peace officers. The third statement is unambiguously false: The actions of Francom and his comrades at Matthew Stewart’s home had nothing to do with protecting the rights of anybody. 

Through his work with a paramilitary unit enforcing drug prohibition, Jared Francom “protected and served” the public in exactly the same sense that 19^th Century Deputy U.S. Marshal James Batchelder did in his work enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act.

In early 1854, a young man named Anthony Burns escaped the custody of a Virginia man named Charles Settle, who claimed to “own” him. After Burns had settled down and found gainful work, an informant recognized him as an escaped slave and contacted the authorities. Batchelder was sent to Boston for the purpose of returning Burns to his previous condition of servitude.(Interestingly, this process was called “rendition.”) The marshal quickly located Burns and – after using the pretext of a bogus robbery investigation to place him under arrest -- locked him in the federal courthouse.

News of this abduction provoked an immediate response from local abolitionists, who organized an armed posse to liberate Burns from his captors. In the ensuing skirmish, Batchelder was fatally shot, but the police retained custody of Burns. 

Wanting to avoid further bloodshed, Burns – a devout Christian – asked his supporters not to attempt another rescue. A few days later, Burns was escorted to a ship bound for Virginia. The rendition took place under the watchful eyes of 1,600-man military contingent sent by President Franklin Pierce to deter any further efforts to liberate Burns. 

Like Jared Francom, James Batchelder died in the line of duty.  Both of their names are inscribed in the “Officer Down Memorial Page.” 

“To have faced a mob as a law officer, especially in the days of only the gun and the badge -- and little else -- is the very core of bravery no matter the circumstances,” declares a tribute posted in honor of the slave-catcher. “To have taken a bullet in the name of the law deems one a hero among heroes. Long live such bravery and honor.”

Apart from those who belong to the Sanctified Brotherhood of Official Coercion, is there anybody today who would regard James Batchelder as a “hero,” and consider his death a noble “sacrifice”?

Anyone burdened with a conscience should recognize that dying in an effort to enslave another human being is ignominious, rather than honorable. Although few police officers are aware of Batchelder’s “sacrifice,” they routinely celebrate the purported valor of officers who meet their mortal end while employing violence to enforce government policies rooted in a denial of self-ownership.

Drug prohibition is a subset of slavery – in both its philosophical premise (the denial of individual self-ownership) and its role in creating a huge and growing population of people in chains. A hundred years from now, assuming that Jesus tarries and Americans rediscover rational thinking, drug enforcement officers will be seen for what they genuinely are:  The heirs and successors to 19th Century slave-catchers.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Russell Means: Renegade, Patriot, Freedom Fighter

Confined to a barren prison camp in Washington, the displaced Paiute Indians were dying. The Interior Department had promised to send rations, but they never arrived. After being exposed to the elements during the winter of 1880, fifty-eight of them had died – including thirty children --  and many more were seriously ill. 

James Wilbur, the pious fraud who served as Indian Agent at Fort Simcoe, wouldn’t exert himself to see that his prisoners were cared for, and wouldn’t permit them to migrate to more hospitable surroundings.

Sarah Winnemucca, daughter of the renowned Paiute chief of the same name, had gone to Washington to lobby Interior Secretary Carl Schurz for relief. In May she returned with a written promise that the department would arrange for the Paiutes to relocate to Lovelock, Nevada, where they could at least obtain food. When she arrived in Yakima, however, Sarah was informed that Wilbur had received no instructions from Washington.

Sarah called a public meeting in which she recited, in detail, the broken promises that had been made to her. In short order Sarah was summoned to a second meeting with Wilbur, who intended to slap her down for impudently assuming that a promise to an Indian meant something.

“Your people were content here until you came back and stirred them up,” Wilbur insisted, condescendingly rebuking Sarah of “putting the devil into their heads.”

That accusation came from a well-fed hypocrite who – in the classic “Indian Ring” tradition – was growing wealthy by embezzling money and supplies promised to the pitiful, dying people over whom he presided. 

“Mr. Wilbur, you forget that you are a Christian when you can talk so to me,” Sarah chastised him, her composure barely concealing her contempt. “You are starving my people here, and you are selling the clothes which were sent to them. That is why you want to keep us here…. I say, Mr. Wilbur, everybody in Yakima City knows what you are doing, and hell is full of just such Christians as you are!”

“Stop talking or I will have you locked up!” bellowed Wilbur.

“I don’t care,” Sarah defiantly replied. “My people are saying I have sold them to you and get money from you to keep them here. I am abused by you and by my own people, too.” By this time, Sarah had become a nationally renowned lecturer and advocate of Indian rights, and she promised that she would use her formidable influence to expose Wilbur’s murderous corruption.

“From this day on,” records Dorothy Nafus Morrison in her biography, Chief Sarah, “Father Wilbur was Sarah’s unrelenting enemy.” Wilbur had previously extolled Sarah’s “noble work” and her impeccable character. Now his official reports bristled with insistent and conveniently vague references to Sarah’s “disreputable intrigues” and intimations of personal depravity. Sarah “is utterly unreliable and no dependence whatever can be placed on her character or her word,” insisted Wilbur in a communique to the Interior Department.

If Sarah had been alive and active during the 1970s, she would most likely have been described as a “militant,” an “agitator,” and quite possibly as a Communist. 

The FBI would have collected a detailed dossier on her mistakes and shortcomings – whether real, exaggerated, or invented – which would have been artfully leaked to the press. She would have been surrounded by paid informants and provocateurs who would keep her under surveillance, sabotage her campaigns, and create whatever trouble they could. 

After being arrested on spurious charges, Sarah might have found herself in federal court listening to one of the FBI’s paid perjurers describe her role in a grandiose Communist plot against the very existence of the United States.

In brief, she would have received the same treatment given to the American Indian Movement (AIM) and its most prominent spokesman, Russell Means, who died of cancer on October 22. He is most widely remembered for his prominent role in the 71-day standoff at Wounded Knee, in which a handful of poorly armed AIM activists withstood a siege carried out by a huge federal military force that intended to slaughter them. 

The AIM was, to borrow Will Durant’s phrase, a medley of discordant fragments. The same could be said of Means, who made no effort to disguise his personal shortcomings or to sanitize the troublesome aspects of his career as an activist. 

If the Soviet Union had somehow managed to invade and occupy the United States, the regime it would have imposed on the country would have differed little, if at all, from the Indian reservation system – which, let us not forget, was constructed by Carl Schurz, a German-born socialist who had been one of Lincoln’s “Red Generals” during the war against the South.

 It’s not necessary to endorse everything AIM did -- or all of the alliances it made -- in order to understand that the organization’s grievances were entirely legitimate. Given that AIM’s objective was to liberate people living in America’s equivalent of the gulag archipelago, it’s reasonable to characterize it as a militant anti-Communist group. The role played by the FBI, on the other hand, was quite similar to that played by the Soviet Cheka in dealing with independence movements within the nations subsumed into the USSR. 

“They are a conquered nation, and when you are conquered, the people you are conquered by dictate your future,” declared Norman Zigrossi, a high-ranking FBI special agent in Rapid City, South Dakota, in 1977. “This is a basic philosophy of mine. If I’m part of a conquered nation, I’ve got to yield to authority.” The proper role of the FBI in “Indian Country,” according to Zigrossi, was that of a “colonial police force.”

Protecting the lives and property of Indians was not a priority for the American Cheka. In 1972, when an Oglala man named Raymond Yellow Thunder was tortured and murdered by two white men in Gordon, Nebraska, the local police refused to pursue the case, and the FBI couldn’t be bothered to intervene. So Means and his AIM colleague Dennis Banks organized a protest of more than 1,000 Indians from nearby reservations, who converged on Gordon and “occupied” it until local authorities arrested and prosecuted Yellow Thunder’s killers. 

It was this act of “Communist agitation” – that is, a demand that the laws be faithfully and equitably enforced – that prompted the FBI to make AIM a target of its COINTELPRO initiative. Secret police informants and provocateurs began to infiltrate the movement. One of them, a sociopathic former cop (and likely wife-murderer) named Douglas Durham – would organize some of the most notorious “militant” activities carried out in the name of AIM.

“Durham’s history as a blackmailer, thief, and cheat was readily available to the FBI from the Des Moines police, which in the 1960s had dismissed him from the force; a police psychiatrist had diagnosed him as a `paranoid schizoid’ personality with `violent tendencies’ and termed him `unfit for employment involving the public trust’ after the unexplained death of his first wife in 1964,” recalls Peter Matthessien in his book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse.

Durham, the psychiatrist concluded, was “unable to tell right from wrong.” While I withhold judgment regarding the merits of psychiatry as a discipline, it’s reasonable to conclude that this particular diagnosis was quickly and amply validated.

 In 1972, Durham was identified by a Des Moines grand jury as the “major culprit” in a police corruption scandal involving a sportswear theft ring: Durham, working undercover at a factory, would steal clothes that were fenced by his comrades on the police force. In the same year he was convicted of extortion on behalf of the Mob, but the conviction was thrown out by an appeals court, which ruled that the case had been tried in the wrong venue. In any case, by this time Durham was safely in the employ of the FBI. 

During his September 1976 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Internal Security, Durham described the AIM as a domestic salient of a Communist-backed insurgency devoted to subverting American independence (and, for all we know, sapping and impurifying all of our precious bodily fluids). Durham wasn’t the only FBI sock puppet who was used to depict AIM as a cadre of “Red Indians.”

During the 1974 trial of Means and Banks on charges arising from the 71-day standoff at Wounded Knee, the prosecution called a “surprise witness” named Louis Moves Camp, a 22-year-old who had been expelled from AIM because of problems involving alcohol and drug abuse. 

Speaking from the witness stand in a federal courthouse in St. Paul, Minnesota, Moves Camp “offered testimony in support of the FBI’s cherished belief that the international Communist conspiracy was somehow behind AIM; he declared that agents from Russia, China, and Czechoslovakia had attended the first meeting of the AIM-sponsored International Indian Treaty Council” a few months earlier, recounts Matthiessen. 

The first problem with Moves Camp’s testimony – which was almost certainly scripted by FBI agent David Price – is that the defense was able to document that he was in California at the time of the alleged events he described. He was also awaiting trial for robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, and assault causing bodily injury. 

A few days before his testimony, Moves Camp went “bar-hopping” across the border in River Falls, Wisconsin with Price and another FBI agent named Ronald Williams. After the sozzled Feds retired for the evening, Moves Camp took a high school-age girl to a remote location and raped her. The agents arrived at the River Falls jail, flashed their credentials, and freed their informant. Although Moves Camp wasn’t prosecuted for that assault, within a year he was tried and convicted on a second rape charge.

Such was the character of a young man expelled by AIM – and eagerly embraced as a star witness by the FBI.

Most of the WoundedKnee-related counts against Means and Banks were thrown out, and the juryacquitted them of a single charge of “conspiracy.” Before dismissing the case, Judge Alfred Nichol lambasted the FBI and the prosecution for well over an hour.

“The fact that incidents of misconduct formed a pattern throughout the course of this trial leads me to the belief that this case was not prosecuted in good faith or in the spirit of justice,” Nichol observed. Tellingly, he also condemned the “unlawful military involvement at Wounded Knee” during the 71-day standoff. “We don’t want the military running the civil affairs of this country, or having anything to do with the execution of the laws,” the judge pointed out. 

Preparing for a massacre: U.S. Army APCs at Wounded Knee.

 The Wounded Knee occupation was a protest against the lawlessness that prevailed on the Pine Ridge Reservation under the rule of Dickie Wilson, the extravagantly corrupt, federally installed tribal dictator. Wilson’s “Tribal Council” – a festering puddle of nepotistic corruption -- was sustained by an officially sanctioned death squad called the Guardians Of the Oglala Nation (or GOONs), which routinely harassed and beat the ruler’s critics while doing nothing about the scores of unsolved violent crimes committed on the reservation each year.

Wilson was of use to the Feds because of his willingness to defy treaty law to turn over tribal lands to government-favored mining and industrial interests. When AIM protesters rallied at Wounded Knee to protest Wilson’s administration and demand the recognition of rights guaranteed by treaty, the dictator sent the GOONs to surround them. Playing to the most credulous element of the public, Wilson insisted that “There is no doubt that Wounded Knee is a major Communist thrust” and he promised to annihilate the dissenters. Given the pandemic violence that had characterized Wilson’s reign, that threat was entirely credible.

Means, the supposed ringleader of the purported Communist cabal, depicted the standoff in terms that resonated with the ideals of 1776, rather than the ideology of 1917:

“This is our last gasp as a sovereign people. And if we don’t get these treaty rights recognized, as equal to the Constitution of the United States – as by law they are – then you might as well kill me, because I have no reason for living. And that’s why I’m here in Wounded Knee, because nobody is recognizing the Indian people as human beings…. We haven’t demanded any radical changes here, only that the United States Government live up to its own laws. It is precedent-setting that a group of `radicals,’ who in the minds of some are acting outside the law, are just in turn asking the law to live up to its own. We’re not asking for any radical changes. We’re just asking for the law to be equitably applied – that’s all.”

“I’m not going to die when I walk into Pine Ridge and Dickie’s Goons feel I should be offed,” Means concluded. “I’m going to die fighting for my treaty rights.”

The FBI was eager to grant Means the honorable death he envisioned. After the GOONs had surrounded Wounded Knee, the U.S. government mobilized the largest domestic military deployment since – well, since the last time the Feds set out to slaughter Indians at the same location. 

Armed FBI agents, U.S. Marshals, SWAT teams, and federally supervised GOONs formed an iron ring around the village. Colonel Vic Jackson, head of the Pentagon’s Civil Disorder Management School, was tapped by the FBI to implement “Operation Garden Plot,” a martial law blueprint (one that still exists, in some form, today). The FBI envisioned a scenario in which the Army would invade and “pacify” the village before the FBI went in to “arrest” whoever might survive the onslaught. Armored Personnel Carriers were on hand to deal with what were described as “bunkers” (and were, in fact, root cellars). Phantom F-4 jets flew low-altitude reconnaissance runs over the town.

“For seventy-one days, a few hundred men, women, and children, supplied by volunteer airlifts -- and by sympathizers who slipped in and out during the night – had challenged a large paramilitary force abetted by hundreds of short-haired vigilantes, red and white, who were eager to wipe out the `longhair troublemakers,’” Matthiessen recounts. “For Dick Wilson’s men, the threat posed by the occupation of Wounded Knee was economic: under an Independent Oglala Nation, the Tribal Council and its dole would end.” 

The FBI clearly intended to annihilate AIM at Wounded Knee. At one point, the Bureau ordered the media to leave the area and then warned the occupiers to send out their women and children. The anticipated massacre might well have been thwarted by the presence of local white residents whom the FBI called “hostages” – many of whom voluntarily stayed behind to protect their supposed captors from the Feds.

“The fact is, we as a group of hostages decided to stay to save AIM and our own property,” explained Wilbur Reigert, an elderly resident of the village. “Had we not, those troops would have come down here and killed all of these people. The real hostages were the AIM people.”

A little more than two months after the siege began, mainstream public opinion was turning in favor of AIM. During the standoff, the Feds threw several hundred thousand rounds of ammunition into the village. Two of those rounds killed AIM supporters, and another left a third paralyzed. A cease fire agreement was reached. The White House agreed to review violations of Indian treaties, and investigate civil rights abuses on the reservation. In addition, the Justice Department would audit Wilson’s official accounts. The Feds made those promises with glib insincerity that characterized all of their dealings with the Indians, and displayed the familiar insouciant disdain in violating them.

Hundreds of AIM supporters were prosecuted after Wounded Knee; nearly all of them were either acquitted or saw the charges dropped. The FBI escalated its covert war against the group, fomenting internecine squabbles, abetting the worst instincts of some of its members, and in several cases facilitating outright murder. 

In 1975, another paramilitary invasion of the Pine Ridge Reservation – complete with helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, a chemical warfare team, snipers, and SWAT operators -- occurred after two FBI agents were killed in a shoot-out. After fleeing to Canada, Leonard Peltier – the chief suspect in the killings -- was extradited on the basis of what a federal court later admitted was perjured testimony. Peltier was convicted of murder and imprisoned for life. The evidence presented against Peltier was identical to the case made against two of his associates who had been acquitted of all charges. 

Jack Coler and Ronald Williams, the FBI agents who died in the shoot-out have been beatified as heroes and martyrs – but nobody has ever explained why they were on the reservation in the first place. The agents were supposedly on the reservation to arrest a young man named Jimmy Eagle for stealing cowboy boots after a drunken fight. 

Why would the Feds be involved in investigating such a petty crime after years of ignoring murders, rapes, and rampant police brutality? One possible answer to that question is found in the fact that the day before the shootout, Dickie Wilson had turned over a large, mineral-rich tract of the reservation to federal control, in violation of the 1868 treaty. This suggests the possibility that the Feds were looking to create a pretext for a paramilitary raid intended to clean out any remaining opposition to Wilson’s junta. 

Means dissociated himself from AIM in the late 1970s. Over the next two decades he became a successful film actor and, much more importantly, a passionate and eloquent exponent of the non-aggression ethic.

In a singularly graceless obituary of Means, a reliably foolish and incurably ill-informed commentator accused the Indian activist of fomenting Communist revolution and seeking to establish “a foreign entity within our nation’s borders.” 

That statement is a glistening nugget of unalloyed stupidity. Means, who was not a “foreigner” in any sense of the word, wasn’t seeking to destroy the United States; he insisted on claiming the rights promised to his ancestors in treaties that were made pursuant to the authority (such as it is) of the U.S. Constitution. Failing that, he emulated the patriots of America’s founding era by asserting independence from a distant and irremediably corrupt central government. 

I will grant that the largely notional “Independent Republic of Lakotah” created by Means is a “foreign” entity, in this sense: It aspires to be a polity based on sound money, honest commerce, and peaceful cooperation. It’s difficult to see how this is the fruit of “Marxist militarism.”

“What’s happening in my country is also happening in your country,” Means warned Americans of all backgrounds shortly before his death. “You don’t even know it, but you’re the Indians of the 21^st Century, and that’s very sad.” 

Russell Means never believed that he had a “patriotic” duty to consider himself part of a conquered people and therefore subject to the whims of his conquerors. What American worthy of the name would? 

Video extra

Although this presentation is a bit heavy with collectivist tropes, it does offer a very good overview of the Federal Government's war against the Plains Indians: 

A quick personal note: 

In the interests of full disclosure I should acknowledge that my perspective on Means and the AIM has changed dramatically over the past decade -- as a quick examination of chapter six of this book will demonstrate. 

 Dum spiro, pugno!