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Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Monday, July 2, 2012
A Lesson From Crazy Horse by Chris Hedges
The original article is at this LINK
A Lesson From Crazy Horse by Chris Hedges
Native Americans' resistance to the westward expansion of Europeans took two forms. One was violence. The other was accommodation. Neither worked. Their land was stolen, their communities were decimated, their women and children were gunned down and the environment was ravaged. There was no legal recourse. There was no justice. There never is for the oppressed. And as we face similar forces of predatory, unchecked corporate power intent on ruthless exploitation and stripping us of legal and physical protection, we must confront how we will respond.
The ideologues of rapacious capitalism, like members of a primitive cult, chant the false mantra that natural resources and expansion are infinite. They dismiss calls for equitable distribution as unnecessary. They say that all will soon share in the "expanding" wealth, which in fact is swiftly diminishing. And as the whole demented project unravels, the elites flee like roaches to their sanctuaries. At the very end, it all will come down like a house of cards.
Civilizations in the final stages of decay are dominated by elites out of touch with reality. Societies strain harder and harder to sustain the decadent opulence of the ruling class, even as it destroys the foundations of productivity and wealth. Karl Marx was correct when he called unregulated capitalism "a machine for demolishing limits." This failure to impose limits cannibalizes natural resources and human communities. This time, the difference is that when we go the whole planet will go with us. Catastrophic climate change is inevitable. Arctic ice is in terminal decline. There will soon be so much heat trapped in the atmosphere that any attempt to scale back carbon emissions will make no difference. Droughts. Floods. Heat waves. Killer hurricanes and tornados. Power outages. Freak weather. Rising sea levels. Crop destruction. Food shortages. Plagues.
ExxonMobil, BP and the coal and natural gas companies—like the colonial buffalo hunters who left thousands of carcasses rotting in the sun after stripping away the hides, and in some cases carrying away only the tongues—will never impose rational limits on themselves. They will exploit, like the hustlers before them who eliminated the animals that sustained the native peoples of the Great Plains, until there is nothing left to exploit. Collective suicide is never factored into quarterly profit reports. Forget all those virtuous words they taught you in school about our system of government. The real words to describe American power are "plunder," "fraud," "criminality," "deceit," "murder" and "repression."
Those native communities that were most accommodating to the European colonists, such as the peaceful California tribes—the Chilulas, Chimarikos, Urebures, Nipewais and Alonas, along with a hundred other bands—were the first to be destroyed. And while I do not advocate violence, indeed will seek every way to avoid it, I have no intention of accommodating corporate power whether it hides behind the mask of Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that resistance may ultimately be in vain. Yet to resist is to say something about us as human beings. It keeps alive the possibility of hope, even as all empirical evidence points to inevitable destruction. It makes victory, however remote, possible. And it makes life a little more difficult for the ruling class, which satisfies the very human emotion of vengeance.
"Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power," wrote the philosopher John Locke, "they put themselves into a state of war with the people who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience."
The European colonists signed, and ignored, some 400 treaties with native tribes. They enticed the native leaders into accords, always to seize land, and then repeated the betrayal again and again and again until there was nothing left to steal. Chiefs such as Black Kettle who believed the white men did not fare much better than those who did not. Black Kettle, who outside his lodge often flew a huge American flag given to him in Washington as a sign of friendship, was shot dead by soldiers of George Armstrong Custer in November 1868 along with his wife and more than 100 other Cheyenne in his encampment on the Washita River.
The white men "made us many promises, more than I can remember," Chief Red Cloud said in old age, "but they kept but one. They promised to take our land, and they took it."
Native societies, in which people redistributed wealth to gain respect, and in which those who hoarded were detested, upheld a communal ethic that had to be obliterated and replaced with the greed, ceaseless exploitation and cult of the self that fuel capitalist expansion. Lewis Henry Morgan in his book "League of the Iroquois," written in 1851 after he lived among them, noted that the Iroquois' "whole civil policy was averse to the concentration of power in the hands of any single individual, but inclined to the opposite principle of division among a number of equals. ..." This was a way of relating to each other, as well as to the natural world, that was an anathema to the European colonizers.
Those who exploit do so through layers of deceit. They hire charming and eloquent interlocutors. How many more times do you want to be lied to by Barack Obama? What is this penchant for self-delusion that makes us unable to see that we are being sold into bondage? Why do we trust those who do not deserve our trust? Why are we repeatedly seduced? The promised closure of Guantanamo. The public option in health care. Reforming the Patriot Act. Environmental protection. Restoring habeas corpus. Regulating Wall Street. Ending the wars. Jobs. Defending labor rights. I could go on.
There are few resistance figures in American history as noble as Crazy Horse. He led, long after he knew that ultimate defeat was inevitable, the most effective revolt on the plains, wiping out Custer and his men on the Little Big Horn. "Even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was," Ian Frazier writes in his book "Great Plains," "because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because he knew exactly where he wanted to live, and never left; because he may have surrendered, but he was never defeated in battle; because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured; because he was so free that he didn't know what a jail looked like." His "dislike of the oncoming civilization was prophetic," Frazier writes. "He never met the President" and "never rode on a train, slept in a boarding house, ate at a table." And "unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the encounter."
Crazy Horse was bayoneted to death on Sept. 5, 1877, after being tricked into walking toward the jail at Fort Robinson in Nebraska. The moment he understood the trap he pulled out a knife and fought back. Gen. Phil Sheridan had intended to ship Crazy Horse to the Dry Tortugas, a group of small islands in the Gulf of Mexico, where a U.S. Army garrison ran a prison with cells dug out of the coral. Crazy Horse, even when dying, refused to lie on the white man's cot. He insisted on being placed on the floor. Armed soldiers stood by until he died. And when he breathed his last, Touch the Clouds, Crazy Horse's seven-foot-tall Miniconjou friend, pointed to the blanket that covered the chief's body and said, "This is the lodge of Crazy Horse." His grieving parents buried Crazy Horse in an undisclosed location. Legend says that his bones turned to rocks and his joints to flint. His ferocity of spirit remains a guiding light for all who seek lives of defiance.
Sunday, July 1, 2012
No Bibles at Walter Reed Hospital?
This Administration is unbelievable! I can't
understand why the Navy went along with this.
Bibles at Walter Reed
Obama must really want to be a one term president. The soldiers who wake up in Walter Reed Medical Center are in Maryland --not communist China . But under the Navy's new rules, they may not know the difference!
After months of peeling away
the military's core values, Obama's army is on the move. And this time, it has
a high-value target: the Bible.
In a memo obtained by FRC,
Navy officials have announced that "no religious items (including Bibles,
reading material, and/or artifacts) are allowed to be given away or used
during a visit." The new orders are buried in a four-page document about
patient care, which an Army officer forwarded to us in disbelief.
Effective immediately,
families, friends, and even pastors will have to check their beliefs at the
door to visit one of the largest military hospitals in the United States .
Last night, after we circulated the memo to leaders on the Hill, an outraged
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) took to the House floor and blasted the policy.
"Mr. Speaker, these military
men and women who are recovering at Walter Reed and Bethesda have given their
all for America ... They've defended and taken an oath to the Constitution,
and here they are. The people that come to visit them can't bring a religious
artifact? They can't bring a Bible? ...A priest can't walk in with the
Eucharist and offer communion to a patient who might be on their deathbed
because it's prohibited in this memo from the Department of the Navy?"
This is Obama's military,
where homosexuality is celebrated and Christianity is censored; where witches
are financed and crosses are scorned; where bestiality is embraced and Bibles
are banned; where same-sex "weddings" are encouraged but international charity
is not. After three years of ideological warfare, the administration's intent
is clear: to disarm the military of its biggest weapon. Faith.
Regardless of President
Obama's agenda, there is absolutely nothing in the Constitution that empowers
the government to stop family members from giving Bibles or crosses to their
loved ones. And from a PR standpoint, I'm not sure the best way to boost
approval ratings is by denying comfort to wounded warriors. Unfortunately for
our troops, who have endured so much turmoil under the Obama administration,
this is another blow.
Hopefully, with the help of
Congressman King and others, it's only a temporary one.
Even liberal Snopes says it's
true.:
Friday, June 22, 2012
Joint Resolution of the Congress of the United States, December 29th, 1846
Joint Resolution of the Congress of the United States, December 29, 1846
29th Congress first Session
Begun and held in the city of Washington, in the District of Columbia, on Monday, the first day of December eighteenhundred and forty- five.
Joint Resolution the admission of the state of Texas into the Union.
Whereas, the Congress of the United States, by a Joint Resolution approved March the first, eighteen hundred and forty- five,
did consent that the territory properly included within, and rightfully belonging to the Republic of Texas, might be erected into a new State, to be called the State of Texas, with a republican for of government, to be adopted by the people of said republic, by deputies by Convention assembled, with the consent of the existing government, that the same might be added as one of the states of the Union: which consent of the Congress was given upon certain conditions specified in the first and second sections of said Joint Resolution: And whereas, the people of said Republic of Texas, and by their authority, did ordain and did declare, that they assented to and accepted the proposals, conditions, and guarantees contained in first and second sections of said resolution: And whereas the sais Constitution, with proper evidence of its adoption by the people of the republic of Texas, has been transmitted to the President of the United States, and laid before Congress, in conformity of the provisions of said Joint Resolution:
Therefore
Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the state of Texas shall be one, and is hereby declared to be one, of the United States of America, and admitted to the Union on equal footing with the original states, in all respects whatever.
Section 2. And be it further resolved, That untill the representatives in Congress shall be apportioned according to an acctual enumeration of inhabitance of the United States, the state of Texas shall be intitled to choose two representatives.
John W Davis
Speaker of the House of Representatives
G.M. Dallas
President of the Senate
Approved December 29, 1845
James K.Polk.
Source:
Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States of America.
Edited by Hunter Miller.
Volume 4
Documents 80-121: 1836-1846
Washington: Government Printing Office. 1934.
http//www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/texan04.htm
Sunday, June 17, 2012
Joint Resolution of the Congress of Texas, June 23rd, 1845
Joint Resolution of the Congress of Texas, June 23, 1845
Joint Resolution of the Congress of Texas, June 23, 1845
Joint Resolution giving the consent of the existing Government to the Annexation of Texas to the United States.
Joint Resolution giving the consent of the existing Government to the Annexation of Texas to the United States.
Whereas the Government of the United States hath proposed the following terms, guarantees and conditions on which the people and Territory of the Republic of Texas may be erected into a new State to be called the State of Texas and admitted as one of the States of the American Union, to wit: Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled. That Congress doth consent that the territory properly included within and rightfully belonging of the Republic of Texas may be erected into a new State, to be called the State of Texas, with a Republican form of Government, to be adopted by the people of said Republic, by deputies in Convention assembled, with the consent of the existing Government, in order that the same may be admitted as one of the States of this Union. 2 And be it further resolved, That the forgoing consent of Congress is given upon the following conditions, and with the following guarantees, to wit: First said State to be formed subject to the adjustment by this Government of questions of boundary that may arise with other Governments, and the Constitution thereof, with the proper evidence of its adoption, by the people of said Republic of Texas, shall be transmitted to the President of the United States, to be laid before the Congress for its final action on or before its first day of January one thousand eight hundred and forty six. Second, said State when admitted into the Union, after ceding to the United States all public edifices, fortifications, barracks,ports, and harbors, navy and navy yards, docks, magazines, arms, armaments and all other property and means pertaining to public defence, belonging belonging to the said Republic of Texas, shall retain all the public funds, debts, taxes and dues of every kind which may belong to or be due and oweing said Republic, and shall retain all the vacant and unappropriated lands lying within its limits, to be applied to the payment of the debts and liabilities, of said Republic of Texas, and residue of said lands, after discharging of said debts and liabilities, to be disposed of as said State may direct: but in no event are said debts and liabilites to become a charge upon the Government of the United States. Third, new States of convienient size, not excluding four in number, in addition to said State of Texas, and having sufficiant poulation, may hereafter, by the consent of said State, be formed out of the territory thereof, which shall be entitled to admission under the provision of the Federal ( constitution. And such States may be formed out of that portion of said territory lying south of thirty-six degrees thirty minutes north latitude, commonly known as the Missouri compromise line, shall be admitted to the Union, with or without Slavery, as the people of each State asking admission may desire. and such State or States as shall be formed out of said territory north of said Missouri compromise line, slavery or involuntary servitude (except for a crime) shall be prohibited. And whereas, by by said terms, the consent of the existing Government of Texas is required-Therefore,
Be it resolved by the Senate and the House of Representatives of the Republic of Texas in Congress assembled, That the Government of Texas doth consent that the People and Territory of the Republic of Texas may be erected into a new State to be called the State of Texas, with a Republican form of Government to be adopted by the People of said Republic by Deputies in Convention assembled, in order that the same may be admitted as one of the States in the American Union, and said consent is given on the terms, guarantees, and conditions set forth in the Preamble to this Joint Resolution.
Section 2. Be it further resolved, that the proclamation of the President of the Republic of Texas, bearing date May fifth eighteen hundred forty five, and the election of deputies to said Convention, at Austin, on the fourth day of July next for the adoption of a Constitution for the State of Texas, had in accordance therewith, hereby recieve the consent of the existing Government of Texas.
Sec 3. Be it further resolved, That the President of Texas is hereby requested, immediatly, to furnish the Government of the United States, through their accredited Minister near this Government, with a copy of this Joint Resolution, also to furnish the Convention to assemble at Austin, on the fourth day of July next a copy of the same. And the same shall take effect from and after its passage.
John M. Lewis
Speaker of the House of Representatives
K.L. Anderson
President of the Senate
Approved June 23, 1845
Anson Jones
Source:
Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States of America.
Edited by Hunter Miller
Volume 4
Documents 80-121: 1836-1846
Washington: Government Printing Office. 1934.
http//www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/texian02.htm
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