Friday, March 23rd, 2012
CrazyHorse Memorial, South Dakota
(Image source.)
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“There was a woman with an infant in her arms who was killed as she almost touched the flag of truce. A mother was shot down with her infant; the child not knowing that its mother was dead was still nursing…The women as they were fleeing with their babies were killed together, shot right through…and after most all of them had been killed a cry was made that all those who were not killed or wounded should come forth and they would be safe. Little boys…came out of their places of refuge, and as soon as they came in sight a number of soldiers surrounded them and butchered them there.”
The Native Americans were successfully indoctrinated to hate themselves, demoralized by a vicious propaganda campaign, chillingly summarized by its slogan: ‘Kill The Indian, Save The Man’. Having lost their country and slowly divided by collaborators and self-defeating tribalism, material dispossession led to despair which led to alcoholism which led to the gutters of gambling and a downward spiral that was sure to end in absolute ruin for this once brave and magnificent race.
Now those with a penchant for comparative martyrology have tried to draw parallels between the persecutions of Jewry in Europe to that of the Natives in America. The irony being that few, if any, of those who peddle this preposterous canard know, or will ever admit to the fact, that it was ‘The Benefactor of Jews’ Edmond James de Rothschild who bankrolled the slaughter of Native Americans (via Jacob Schiff’s ‘Kuhn, Loeb and Co’, August Belmont, Nicholas Lowe, J.P. Morgan, Albert Pike, Sigmund Shlesinger and other agents of influence).
President Jackson,"driving out the devils and money changers" with his order to withdraw public money from the central bank - Edward Clay lithograph, published 1833 |
Such was the universal disdain for Rothschild meddling in the 19th century, that less than a year after Wounded Knee, and in spite of the fact that Britain is also a vassal state of Rothschild, the following editorial appeared in the ‘The British Labour Leader’ newspaper:
“This blood-sucking crew (Rothschild) has been the cause of untold mischief and misery during the present century, and has piled up its prodigious wealth chiefly through fomenting wars between States which ought never to have quarrelled. Whenever there is trouble in Europe, wherever rumours of war circulate and men’s minds are distraught with fear of change and calamity you may be sure that Rothschild is near the region of the disturbance.”
U.S. journalist L. Frank Baum vocalized the sentiments of the ignorant masses, and less than a week after the massacre, as frozen corpses were still being excavated and Native youth ruthlessly exterminated by U.S. troops, Baum wrote:
“Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untameable creatures from the face of the earth. The whites are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit is broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are.”
The red desert landscape is dotted with poorly built wooden shacks, fitted with corrugated iron fronts; the majority of these houses have no hot water and others have only just been connected to the power grid. Torn pieces of canvas and cloth attached to cover the broken windshield of a pickup truck, flutter in the mid autumn breeze like rags on an injured leper. Three Native American girls in their early twenties huddle outside a shack; one cradles a puppy against her chest as the other rubs both hands against her arms in an effort to stay warm. Further down the road; a drunkard lies unconscious, empty bottle in hand, on the porch of a beaten up old saloon as a skinny black Labrador staggers through the empty streets, his tongue hanging out as if to imitate the wasted winos around him.
Its’ not hard to be affected by the monumental tragedy that occurred just a few miles from here in 1890: For if Wounded Knee was the death of the dream, than Pine Ridge is the dreamer’s tortured spirit, a meandering wraith trapped between life and death: patronized, forgotten and left to rot. The majority of American Indians live below the poverty line, education opportunities are limited, employment is virtually non-existent, 23.1% of the prison population are Natives, the average life expectancy for an American Indian is just 50 and teenage suicides are the highest in the country.
The ancient Greek historian Myron of Priene wrote of the persecuted Helot civilisation in 280 B.C., and described how the savage Spartan minority imposed upon the Helots “…every shameful task leading to disgrace”. And went onto reveal that if any Helot “…exceeded the vigour proper to a slave’s condition, they (Sparta) made death the penalty”.
Well I’ve seen the Helots of today, a people who had everything and lost it all, who tried their best to resist but where decimated and trampled by an enemy more brutal than such a people could ever imagine much less overcome. An enemy that now threatens the world and looks upon the Earth with the same covetous eyes with which it once looked upon the Americas, a mad beast plagued with violence, racism, paranoia and greed. And yet despite their hardships and the impossible task of having to reside inside the belly of the mad beast, Wounded Knee is not just the site of a loss, its’ also the site of a small, but significant, victory: 22 years ago, this historic site was home to a renewed freedom struggle, a 71 day siege where the AIM (American Indian Movement) declared independence from the U.S. regime and liberated part of their country. They were, alas, thwarted by the same problems that’d led to their ancestor’s downfall. But it was a cri de Coeur heard around the world, one which reminded the U.S. that American Indians will not be swept under the colonial carpet, but rise up as a defiant, albeit dying, reminder, of the sins of those who fraudulently call themselves Americans.
River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian
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