Alien Agenda?

Alien Agenda?

Disclosure politics lands on the White House lawn

Jim Kavanagh

      

Yeah, I’m going there.

Here’s a little something from out of left field that I now think is worth putting on everyone’s radar: There is a lot percolating in UFO world, and, for the first time, there’s a real possibility it is going to spill into the political world in a way that cannot be ignored.

I’ve been a UFO buff since I was a kid. I’m talking Donald Keyhoe, Betty and Barney Hill, et. al. I’ve followed the subject closely and consistently. I am convinced that: 1) There are real UFOs/UAPs/USOs of non-human intelligence (NHI), and 2) The US government has NHI craft and bodies, and has had ongoing programs retrieving and attempting to back-engineer craft, at least since the 40s, including programs of disinformation and fakery. Ditto Russia, China, and maybe other governments.

The OG of UFO

Now, you may think I’m nuts. Which is OK.  I'm not interested in convincing anyone. It’s a subject that is filled with disinformation and fakery and deserves the utmost skepticism.  One needs to spend a lot of time to sort it out. I also think, when one does sort it out, there is so much evidence that it is only denied because of severe threats against disclosure, combined with rigorous siloing, epistemological anathema, and consistent ridicule, which works very well.

It’s also easily hidden and considered something not worth thinking about, because it doesn’t seem to make a difference. Indeed, even though the USG reversed decades of absolute denial and acknowledged the existence of UAP/USO of unknown, and possibly extraterrestrial, origin eight years ago, that news—which many thought would freak everyone out, or at least provoke some sharp public interest—has been absorbed and forgotten as if it were a weather report. So, though the phenomenon obviously has spectacular implications, it has had no discernible significant effect on society or people's lives, politically or economically. I’m a Marxist, and this phenomenon has had no effect on the class struggles on earth we must focus on. (Though,Yes, Virginia, there is a corpus of Marxist Ufology.)  

Even the technological advances some claim were gleaned from studying NHI craft since the 1940s—fiber optics, night vision, semiconductors, etc.—were not all that impossible within normal human science, and have not had earth-shattering effect. We’re still waiting for a good flying car. You’d think, if exponentially advanced energy and propulsion systems have been zipping around for 80 years, that would have radically upended life as we know it—or at least appeared as a super weapon to win a war. And it hasn’t. So, whether the phenomenon is real or not, it’s been irrelevant.

That may be about to change.

First of all, the phenomenon is getting more brazen. The mass wave of “drone” sightings last year over towns, beaches, and military facilities in the Northeast (and not just the NE, and not just New Jersey) was impossible to hide, or to explain. It’s clear “drones” are the new “swamp gas.” But that flap still had no dangerous effects that couldn’t be ignored. This year, the phenomenon impinged on political/military events in a way that was dangerous. The wave of "drone" sightings over European airports and military installations was likely related to the phenomenon, and it was blamed, and used to suggest an attack, on Russia. That's a kind of provocative appearance in a crisis situation that does threaten to destabilize the world.

Second, in unprecedented ways, the political and media establishments are taking the phenomenon seriously. A ripple started with the NY Times story in 2017, when the paper of record recognized the seriousness of the phenomenon and the credibility of the pilots witnessing it. It was a story that cancelled the automatic ridicule toward discussing the phenomenon. The ripple has become a flood since David Grusch came out in 2023 and testified before Congress, convincing a bipartisan group of legislators—from Rubio to Schumer to Gillibrand—of the reality of NHI craft and “biologics,” and prompting them to attempt to pass strong whistleblower and disclosure legislation on the subject. They could not, because the resistance of whatever deep-deep state element controls this was still too strong.  Two years later, there have been more congressional hearings with more credible witnesses.  There are now hundreds of people in the know—military, intelligence, scientific, and political—opening up about this in greater detail, in podcasts and in closed-door congressional meetings. If you’re on any media, you can’t escape it.

The new documentary film, Age of Disclosure, is now the leading edge of this tide of revelations. It features 34 former and current scientists and senior government, military, and intelligence officials who claim to have direct knowledge of NHI and of an 80-year craft recovery and reverse engineering program—people like Jay Stratton, former director of the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force, who says: “I have seen with my own eyes nonhuman craft and nonhuman beings.” It also claims that President George H. W. Bush knew of NHI who landed at Holloman Air Force Base in 1964, and that Presidents George W. and Donald Trump (in his first term), considered, but decided against, revealing the truth about the phenomenon.

Now, again, you may think this is all a load of bullshit, but this film, and the narrative it represents, is being taken seriously by mainstream politicians and media. At this point, there is just too much of the story out there, in too much detail, and I think there is a non-zero chance that something more is going to give, in a dramatic way. A “disclosure” is happening and being believed, and what the politicians and military/intelligence figures involved in this fear most now is what they call “Catastrophic Disclosure”—a reveal that is not managed properly enough to avoid upsetting the fundamental structures of political and economic power.

Of course, it would also provide the ultimate distraction from the crises of late capitalism and fading hegemony. The preferred spin would be to use the UAP phenomenon to gin up a New Cold War arms race—We have to figure out how to fully weaponize NHI tech before the Chinese or Russians do. ‘Cause they’re working on it, too, and may already be ahead.

Or maybe Werner Von Braun’s alleged prediction that the USG will use a false-flag alien invasion to demand the weaponization of space—a prediction recently reprised by Jeremy Corbell. Whatever gets the defense contractors fed. 

Fictional or real, there’s a UAP disclosure story waiting to be used to exacerbate “New Cold War” international tension and militarism—which is especially sad if it’s real.

So, there is now a push—based on the intense interest of administration insiders like Rubio and the fear of Catastrophic Disclosure—for Trump to announce that, Yes, we are not alone in the universe. The US has NHI craft and bodies and programs for investigating them. The pitch to him is that it would be the most important presidential speech ever, and would cement his legacy as the most important president ever. And if he doesn’t do it, Putin or Xi might. Why leave them the opportunity? ‘Cause the story is coming out, one way or another. Historical, cosmological narcissism. A pretty irresistible pitch for Donald Trump.

To be sure, this is an ultimate Black Swan warning—there is only the slightest chance of it happening and enormous, unknown consequences if it does. I say only a “non-zero” chance because, even after the NYT and David Grusch, until right now, I would have put the chance at 0—either because, if you wish, there’s nothing to disclose, or because the resistance will continue to be, as it has been, absolute for reasons we’ll never know.

One of four things will be the case:

1.      The phenomenon is not real, and there will be no “disclosure” about it.

2.       The phenomenon is not real, and there will be a fictional “disclosure” about it, as a device for manipulating the population.

3.      The phenomenon is real, and it will continue to be denied, to serve the purposes it always has.

4.      The phenomenon is real, and there will be “disclosure” about it, which you can be sure will be manipulatively limited and fictional in its own way, for its own purposes. 

I still think 3 is the most likely scenario, and five years from now, we’ll be having the same discussion. This is the most closely guarded secret. But, for the first time, 4 is possible. I put the chances at about 10%. Let’s keep the possibility in mind, and not be blindsided by it should it occur.

 If the phenomenon is real, disclosing even a bit of it will be fantastic enough to capture people’s attention, but there’s a danger that people will then demand disclosure beyond the obvious, and I’ll just say, after thinking I knew about this for decades, I’ve recently come to think it’s much weirder than we’re prepared for—an alterity,  an “other,” that we cannot have imagined. There are more things in heaven and earth… 

We live in interesting times. Live long and prosper.

____________________________

Trump-Mamdani Bromance

Trump-Mamdani Bromance

Opposites Attract

Jim Kavanagh

The Trump-Mamdani meeting in the Oval Office blew everyone’s mind. Without renouncing the “communist” and “fascist” epithets they’ve thrown at each other—indeed, with Trump good-naturedly accepting his—they had a very friendly exchange.

Islamophobic, anti-communist rightists like Laura Loomer found it “Wild to allow a jihadist communist to stand behind the President’s desk in the Oval Office."  Indeed, it drove Laura to drink—ginger ale, that is: “I had to drink a bottle of ginger ale today after seeing Mamdani in the Oval Office because it physically nauseates me seeing Islamic jihadists infiltrate our government.”

And it didn’t quite go as the rightists expected:

The Israelis also found it confusing:

Of the jihadist communist, Trump said “I feel very confident that he can do a very good job…And we're gonna be helping him, to make everybody's dream come true, having a strong and very safe New York."

Despite Zohran’s sticking to his “fascist” and “genocide” guns, leftists  found his cozying up to the fascist genocidaire billionaire hard to swallow (even with ginger ale), and found most apt Trump’s remark that "I will say there's no difference in party. There's no difference in anything.” Political theater of the capitalist and imperialist duopoly.

Centrists found it a “vision” of new political possibility::

Though somebody has to explain to me how this works. Are the young well-to-do guy and the old billionaire both on the “bottom”? Where’s the “top”? Is Trump engaging in a class-warfare solidarity fest or another kind of buddy hug? We’ll come to that.

Mamdani Musings

Mamdani Musings

Jim Kavanagh

So, New York City, the most Zionist city in the world outside of Israel and the capital of capital, has elected a new Muslim immigrant mayor who is a professed anti-Zionist and socialist. How cool is that?! Let's consider.

First of all, yes, the role that Mamdani has played as part of the surprising, unprecedented, and quick, sea change in Americans’ attitudes towards Israel and Zionism—the normalization of not just “criticism of Israel” but explicit anti-Zionism within American political discourse—is important. As I’ve argued previously, there is nothing more important.  And, yes, Mamdani’s campaign has been a key reflection and driver of that change. It's indisputable that his “I'm not going to visit Israel” moment was a turning point in his campaign, and therefore an inflection point in the national political discourse.

At that moment, it became clear in New York that Mamdani was winning because he refused the Zionist loyalty test, and it became clear to the entire country that Zionist loyalty was becoming a political detriment that would be increasingly difficult to hide or overcome.  Anti-Zionists now say, “If we can make it there, we can make it anywhere,” while, astonished and infuriated, and after spending at least $22 million, the Zionists have to lament, “If we can’t make it there, we’re in trouble everywhere.”

Whatever ultimately comes of it, this victory of anti-Zionism is, in itself, an unprecedented and good advance in the ideological and political framework of the country, a positive         moment, a good political thing. And, have no doubt: It is the thing that Mamdani’s opponents are most upset about.

Let’s also recognize that, for the purpose of defeating Zionism in the world, Mamdani’s victory will have little to no practical effect. For one thing, it’s a local election. Because it’s New York, it’s of national ideological and political significance, but he’s still only the mayor of one city. Beyond the beneficial ideological effect of his victory, Zohran Mamdani can’t do much to change U.S. policy towards Israel and Zionism. He can institute BDS-type policies—divesting from Israel bonds, revoking contracts and partnerships with the Israeli government, municipalities, and companies, etc.—and most boldly, as he suggested, arresting Netanyahu if he sets foot in the city.

For another thing, Mamdani’s “anti-Zionism” is a little evanescent. There’s no reason to deny his career-long statements about Palestine: “It is Palestine that brought me into organizing, and it is Palestine that I will always organize for,” or his undeniably courageous refusal to endorse Israel as a “Jewish state,” which logically makes him (though I’m not sure he’s ever explicitly called himself) ”anti-Zionist.”

At the same time, there is no reason, either, to refrain from asking how his anti-Zionism relates to the entirely unforced Zionist-friendly decisions he is making.

It seems starkly contradictory, for example, to keep as police commissioner the uber-Zionist, uber-wealthy, oligarch heiress, Jessica Tisch.

This is the top cop who denounced as “antisemites,” and led the NYPD attack against, pro-Palestine, anti-genocide Columbia student protestors, and who “promised” the ADL that “the NYPD will …remain on the front lines of this fight” to treat anti-Zionism as antisemitism.

This is the police commissioner who sent her senior NYPD staff to a training session which “cast the Palestine solidarity movement as a significant threat to Jewish safety…, focused heavily on student protesters, repeatedly conflated antisemitism with anti-Zionism…categorized campus demonstrators as extremists tied to Hamas, and branded as antisemitic Palestinian symbols like the watermelon and the keffiyeh, as well as phrases such as ‘settler colonialism’ and ‘all eyes on Rafah.’”

This is a police commissioner who has the NYPD engaged in continuous joint training and intelligence-sharing with Israeli law enforcement and military forces, including the International Liaison Program, which maintains a NYPD detective post in Israel.

Israel: the 51^st state and 79^th precinct.

Sure, Zoran might say that, as mayor of New York City, he couldn't be expected to exclude everyone with Zionist thoughts from his administration. But the police commissioner is not a trivial administrative post; it’s one that deeply affects how pro-Palestinian politics can be expressed in the city. And Jessica Tisch is no casual, unthinking Zionist–by-default, but a committed, militant Zionist.

There are a thousand nasty battles over his professed anti-Zionism that are to come, with the NYPD and the federal government. To take the very difficult one, on which he has ostensibly staked out a determined anti-Zionist position: Will Zohran Mamdani be counting on Jessica Tisch to—almost certainly in defiance of federal authority—arrest Benjamin Netanyahu? Or has his “anti-Zionism” surrendered that battle in advance? One may like to keep an open mind about how that challenge will be resolved by Mamdani, but it seems to me it already has been.

Perhaps even more telling, because it cannot be excused by the exigencies of, nor will its effects be limited to, New York City—is Zohran’s decision to oppose a primary challenge to Hakeem Jeffries. It’s not even that Jeffries’s likely opponent, Chi Ossé, has such a strong anti-Zionist position; it’s that Jeffries has been so sycophantic to Israel that he’s been nicknamed “AIPAC Shakur,” and everyone understands he represents the worst of sold-out Democratic Zionism. Whether Mamdani wants to support Ossé or not, trying to prevent him from challenging Jeffries reads as a gratuitous defense of the rightly despised decrepit Democratic Party apparatus, including its intransigent Zionism, which Mamdani’s campaign was all about disrupting.

We cannot help but notice, as Steve Salaita puts it, that such decisions have “a detrimental effect on anti-Zionist consciousness.  Instead of inspiring (or reinforcing) a stronger stance against Israel, the campaign… [is] once again defending the appeasement of Zionists as a necessary condition of political success.”

The second radical leg of Mamdani’s signature political project is his professed “socialism.”

Again, it’s a good thing that Mamdani helped to normalize the idea of socialism, which has been growing among people whose lives are being increasingly constricted by capitalism. His campaign has demonstrated that some version of "socialist" discourse and policy, presented forthrightly, wins.

Of course, you don’t have to be a Marxist theoretician to understand that Mamdani’s (the DSA’s, AOC’s and Bernie’s) concept of “democratic socialism” is the mildest version of social-democratic reform, and that his proposed “municipal socialist” policies—rent freezes, free buses, childcare, public groceries— represent no radical threat, and nothing particularly new, to New York or American capitalism. (I urge everyone to see one of Mamdani’s best campaign videos, an homage to Vito Marcantonio, an Italian-American who represented NYC’s East Harlem in Congress for seven terms as a lifelong socialist, in a historical context where there was a real socialist movement.)

In today’s capitalist America, any attempt by a politician like Mamdani to re-introduce a concept of basic “sociality,” of concern for the general welfare of the people and society—let alone the vigorous socialist politics that once had purchase in American local and national politics—is furiously portrayed and attacked as an attempt to turn the country into “North Korea, with a dash of Sharia.” (I kid you not. I can’t make this shit up.)

As the capitalists and Mamdani know, there’s no such thing as socialism in one city. The mild, socially aware reforms Mamdani may be able to achieve would be of concrete help to a lot of people, and are worthy of support, but they will be contained within the limits of New York City and national capitalism. Only if the Mamdani victory became a building block of a national movement not just to reform, but to consciously confront and overturn the dictatorship of capital, would it be a threat.

As the man himself said:

Mamdani’s increasingly uncritical implication in the Democratic Party is reflected in his legacy-Democrat transition team, whose most radical member, Lina Khan, has progressives all aflutter. That, combined with his defense of Democratic leadership in the person of Jeffries, smells more of ambitious Democrat team spirit than revolutionary socialist fervor.

As the capitalist dictators understand quite well:

https://x.com/FiorellaIsabelM/status/1986089972940652702?s=20

Let’s, please, not forget that we’ve seen the emergence of “socialism” before—not long ago by any but American memory standards, and in a context where it was taken much more seriously by even mainstream pundits.

When I started posting political commentary online, I chose the above February 2009 cover of Newsweek, when the financial crisis made everyone, on a national level, recognize the failures of capitalism and the need for state intervention and for managing social wealth in a different way—you know, more for the benefit of the whole of society than the 1%.

Propelled by immense popular and political support (more than Trump just came in with), Barack Obama walked through the door that had opened to socialism and promptly shut it in the face of the working class, promising the banksters that he would stand as "the only thing between you and the pitchforks." And he, indeed, helped transfer mass amounts of wealth to them, while evicting homeowners and demolishing small (especially black) businesses.

I continue to use that icon because I don't want people to forget what happened, when something else was possible.

Because of the legacy of Obama's failure to change things fundamentally, as he could have, a failure that the Democratic Party refuses to recognize, and continued to embrace through Biden, more millions of people ever year—especially working-class and non-white people (read those links and weep)—were driven to the false hope of “anti-establishment” Trump and the “anti-government” Republicans.

Mamdani needs to remember the first video that marked him as a possible winner—the one where he listened respectfully to non-white, working-class New Yorkers who voted for Trump. It was Obama and the Democratic Party that made that happen. Any professed “socialist” or “progressive” politician or movement that does not recognize, and say, and persuade people that they understand that—and I suspect Mamdani, now settling into the AOC-Bernie-progressive Dem nest, will not—is going to end up doing it again.

Zohran Mandani, even if he professes (as Obama did not) to want to open a door to socialism, will find it virtually impossible to find that door today in the fortified capital of Capital, especially if he’s dragged down by the dead weight of the “We’re capitalists. And that’s just the way it is” party he’s clinging to.

Mandani is not the radical jihadist or the revolutionary socialist of the fevered tabloid dreams. He’s another Obamacan reformist. Whether he’s more sincere and less of a con man, we shall see.  His professed commitments to the most unradical, basic social ethic at home and anti-colonial ethic internationally turned the reactionary capitalist-Zionist American ruling class of New York City and America apoplectic. They know very well, however, that his ability to realize any but the most minimal of his stated goals will be constrained by their class power and by Zohran’s self-confinement within the Democratic Party wing of the political apparatus that their class provides.

Sure, wait and see. I’m an old-school native New Yorker, and I “know the score by now.” Without promoting him or expecting anything more from him than AOC 1.5, I voted for Mamdani—for the pleasure of watching Shmuley's and Rappaport's heads explode, if nothing else. I hope he gets, and think he might, a couple of the moderate reforms he’s proposing, and maybe, relative to his poor predecessor and with the help of such as Soros, he’ll succeed as mayor and be wound up for higher office.  I will not be surprised, however, if, as Obama's pitchfork management paved the way for Trump, Mamdani’s paves the way for the next Giuliani or Bloomberg.

Whatever Zohran Mamdani does in New York, and wherever he goes from here, the system needs a revolutionary change nationally that's not going to come from him.

 ________________________

The Eternal Shutdown of the Capitalist Mind

 The Eternal Shutdown of the Capitalist Mind

Jim Kavanagh

Am I missing something or is there much less concern than one might expect in the country over the fact that the government is shut down?

I understand that each of the protagonists—the Trump administration and the Democrats—knows its own fundamental weakness in this situation and hopes it can turn the other’s weakness to its advantage, if played carefully enough. But I repeat: the government is shut down, for over a month now, with no end in sight. Thousands of people are getting laid off, thousands of businesses and millions of people aren't being paid or receiving services, scores of programs and agencies are being suspended or eliminated. Forty-two million people are about to lose their SNAP benefits, and millions will see their health insurance premiums soar. Flights are being cancelled as air traffic controllers are laid off. The country should be up in arms. Why isn’t it? Why the big—actually, moderate—yawn?

Well, maybe because paralysis is the normal state of affairs for the U.S. government. The budgetary process is now comprised of an infinite chain of Continuing Resolutions, Supplementary Appropriations, and Debt Ceiling fights. There is no agreed-upon concept of what the federal government is or what it should be doing.  Though our entire social economy depends on and is structured by it, there is no understanding of why this is so or how it works. People perceive “the government” as some kind of strange animal they have to live with that sometimes brings food and favors, sometimes goes wild and attacks the neighbors or the siblings, and spends a lot of time busying itself with tasks that no one understands. And, of course, an animal that lives off the food (taxes) it eats from our hands. Or something like that. It’s more than that people don’t have a dog in the fight; it’s that they don’t know what the dog in it is.

This is a nice example, a political instance, of what Marxism calls alienation —the phenomenon where social subjects become estranged from the process and products of their own labor, which they confront as strange, alien entities and forces with which they have little, and largely antagonistic, relation. This occurs because the process and product of their labor is not under their control. In this case, the political process of producing a government and the government produced by it, though nominally an expression of the people’s will expressed through elections, are not actually under the people’s control.

It's under the control of the same ruling class, which appropriates the political power that flows from people’s hands and uses it for the ruling class’s own antagonistic interests, in the same way that the ruling class takes the economic wealth the people’s labor created and turns it against them.

The ruling class wants the people alienated from the “government” and confused about what it is. The ruling class does not want the polity to have clear lines of political authority that derive from the people, that the people can understand and, heaven forfend, exercise.

Bury My Heart: Genocide in the Family

Bury My Heart
Genocide in the Family
Jim Kavanagh

Burial of Native American dead at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, 1891.

Here’s Pete Hegseth’s impassioned rant, announcing his decision, “without hesitation,” that the soldiers from the “Battle” of Wounded Knee “deserve those medals” they received “for their actions,” that their “place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate” and that we “honor their service” and “will never forget what they did.”

I am, as anyone with an ethical cell in their brain should be, disgusted by the triumphal praise for an event that, per Britanica, “investigations and eyewitness accounts clearly established …as a massacre.” That is not, and since the day it happened has not been, “up for debate.”

The Wounded Knee incident occurred as the final act in America’s betrayal of treaties and destruction of Native American life and culture was playing out in a region where the Lakota tribes were already the victims of “forced assimilation” and “pushed to the brink of starvation.” A Miniconjou Lakota camp had agreed to “surrender without resistance” to the U.S. Army.  On December 28, 1890, the camp was surrounded by a 7^th Cavalry detachment commanded by Colonel James W. Forsyth and its people were relinquishing their weapons, when a deaf Lakota’s gun accidentally went off. The soldiers opened fire with Hotchkiss guns that fired 50 two-pound shells per minute, and mowed down between 250 and 300 Lakota, almost half of whom were women and children. Those who were able to evade that fire were cut down by mounted soldiers. As Britannica says, “The 7^th Cavalry did not discriminate.” 25 U.S. soldiers also died, many to friendly fire.

The commander of U.S. Army forces on Lakota territory, Major General Nelson A. Miles, was, unlike Pete Hegseth, “appalled” and tried to strip Forsyth of his command.

It’s a case of If this isn’t a massacre, nothing is, and in no circumstance is it any kind of action to “honor.” Hegseth is right that nobody has, or will, forget what they did.

Family Affair

But, beyond Wounded Creek, Hegseth’s rant struck a particular nerve with me.

Some years ago, I reconnected with a cousin—a second cousin, once removed—in Chevy Chase, whose family home I used to visit as a kid.  On a shelf in his apartment, I saw, in its wood-framed display case, a Congressional Medal of Honor. Impressed, I asked him who had won that, and he told me that it had been awarded to his "uncle-in-law” or “great-uncle-in-law,” Frederick Platten—a name I had never heard and bore no resemblance to any names I knew in our extended family. He then said, to my astonishment, that it was an object that Platten was ashamed of, and told me the story that Frederick Platten handed down, which I will relate after showing the official citation from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society website:

 

So, according to the official citation, Sgt. Platten “broke the resistance” of “an entrenched Cheyenne position” by sneaking up behind it with five other men.

This is not an account that screams “Congressional Medal of Honor” to me. But Federick Platten’s own account of what actually happened is even more disturbing. I will relate it to the best of my knowledge, based on notes I took after visiting my cousin.

Platten said that he had been sent to retrieve the body of a dead soldier. When he arrived at the scene of the soldier’s death, he either came upon, or was come upon by, two Cheyenne—one with a rifle, the other with a bow-and-arrow. He shot the one with the rifle first, then the other one. When he got back to base and told his Lieutenant, the Lieutenant praised him and said he would recommend him for a Medal of Honor. (It was the Lieutenant who wrote the fictional narrative for the citation.) The Lieutenant then ordered his squad to attack and massacre a Cheyenne village ("like My Lai," as my cousin put it), specifically ordering the killing of every inhabitant. Either before setting off, or at the scene of the attack on the village, Platten refused a direct order to kill women and children, saying "I don't do that." For this refusal, that Lieutenant or another officer brought him to a court-martial, which dismissed the case. Patten always told his family that he was prouder of the court-martial than of the Medal of Honor.

Thus, I discovered a distant, not direct bloodline but extended family involvement in the gruesome history of Native American genocide, which the Army now calls the “Indian Campaign.” (When I first looked this up, it was called the “Indian Wars”—-a not-as-coy, but equally false designation I think Hegseth would prefer.) The details of this passed-down story are not precise, though I don’t doubt the most important points, which are so terribly emblematic of American warfare history: A 26-year-old Irish immigrant soldier, enlisted in an American army protecting settler expansion, kills one armed and one semi-armed indigenous man and is then ordered, but refuses, to participate in the slaughter of the whole population of an indigenous village. As good a version as you’ll get of the intrinsically compromised American “warrior.”

And a sharp reminder to me that it’s all in the family.

The strangest element in the story is Sgt. Platten being both recommended for a Medal of Honor and put up for court-martial. But that confusion is precisely a telling mark of the ethical fault and contradiction underlying the entire “Indian Campaign,” which extends throughout scores of such incidents. In the Wounded Knee case, the general in charge was so “appalled” at the massacre that he tried to relieve the on-scene colonel of his command, while, at the same time, nineteen soldiers were—-based on officers’ recommendations—-awarded Medals of Honor for their “actions.” This kind of “appalling honor” schizophrenia has been a constituent, continuous element of America’s mass historical denegation regarding its foundational crimes. What better way to deny what you know is so bad than to insist on how good it is. It's a testimony to the criminal nature of that military history that the first Medal of Honor was awarded during the “Apache Wars” of 1861, and that “Indian Campaigns” account for the highest number of Medals of Honor (426) apart from the Civil War (1522) and World War II (464).

Who’s a more beloved president than Abraham Lincoln, who personally authorized the largest mass execution in American history—-of 38 Dakota men who fought in the US-Dakota “War” that was triggered by the “starvation and displacement” of the Dakota people? Glory, glory, Hallelujah.

So, now we have a resolution from both houses of the U.S. Congress (passed in1991) formally expressing "deep regret" for the Wounded Knee Massacre and a bill introduced twice (in 2019 and 2025) to “Remove the Stain” by rescinding the medals given to the soldiers for their “action,” and we have the Secretary of Defense War “hono[ring]  their service” in that he calls the Battle of Wounded Knee.

One way or another, we will, and should, never—-and my second cousin once removed’s uncle-in-law’s Congressional Medal of Honor won’t let me—-forget.

 

Blood Brothers

It’s impossible to write this today without thinking and saying something about the parallels with the genocide that the United States and its ward state, Israel, are perpetrating now on the Palestinian people—-displacement, starvation, and all. It’s impossible not to think of all the liberals and progressives who buried their sympathetic hearts with the Native Americans as soon as they learned about Wounded Knee, but hardened them to the Palestinians even when they knew for decades about the Nabka, and Deir Yassin, and Tantura, and Lydda, and Gaza, and Gaza, and Gaza again and again.

This is especially so, since an argument that Zionists love to snap out in favor of their Manifest Destiny—-as if it’s a killing rhetorical blow, packed with irrefutable historical realism—-is some version of: “So what, you’re a genocidal settler-colonizer, too. American Indians!” Gotcha!.

Here's how I’ve already addressed how phony that is, in a previous article:

It baffles me that anyone thinks that’s an effective argument.  My reply, after confirming that the speaker is unambiguously admitting that the relationship between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs today is ethico-politically analogous to that between European settlers and Native Americans from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, would go something like the following.

Yes, the U.S. and virtually every nation-state that came into being before the mid-twentieth century rests on a legacy of war, conquest, and injustice. 

And, yes, it’s hard to think of a worse colonial genocide than that visited on Native Americans from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Those facts are hardly enough to support the analogy as intended, however. First of all, being historically realist and all, we have to recognize that, tragically, over those four centuries, the Native American population was so completely ravaged that it now constitutes less than 1% of the population. If Native Americans were now the majority of the population in North America under white settler control; if they were engaged in a fierce resistance struggle in order to prevent being expelled or exterminated; if they had the support of hundreds of millions of their neighbors, as well as of populations and powerful governments throughout the world, as well as of an established international ideological and legal framework that forbade and denounced the colonial project the white settlers were still trying to complete (while demanding that everyone recognize America as the White Man's State)—then you would have a relevant analogy.

Furthermore, it’s not the fifteenth-to-nineteenth, but the twentieth-into-twenty-first century that we’re talking about. My country was also, as I recall, founded on centuries of slavery, a practice that was acceptable to many Western minds for centuries.  Does any liberal-minded Westerner today think it would be OK to establish or perpetuate a polity based on slavery?  To let just one more slip by, because, well, so many people have done it before and this is the last one, promise?

Sorry, but It doesn’t matter because someone else did it at some other time is a shallow, specious historicism. Isn’t what we learn from history, precisely, what should never happen again? I can’t stop the slave ships, or give the island I am living on back to the Manhattoes, but I can learn from history that it’s necessary to support today’s struggles against the New Jim Crow in my country, and the fight against the ongoing, unfinished colonial subjugation of Palestine that my country is enabling. That, I think, is how to historicize.

So, yes, there are historical lines that are often drawn under past injustices that cannot be reversed. The point—what Gaza shows—is that the fate of the Palestinians is not one of them; it is an ongoing struggle-in-progress that is nowhere near finished, and that calls on us to take responsibility, not excuses, from history.

I have a familial connection with that, too—-closer, more contradictory, and more poignant, which I’ll relate as I remember it (some siblings’ memories may differ). When my father, who had a rare blood type, was sick in St Vincent’s hospital in 1969, he received a blood donation. He did not survive. A few days after he died, my mother received a gift from the man who had donated his blood. The man had contacted the hospital, found out the sad result for the man whose life he had wanted to save, and graciously extended his condolences with a gift to the widow. That gift, from that nice Jewish man, my father’s blood brother, was a framed certificate certifying that a tree had been planted in my father’s name in a park in Israel.

It was many years later that I understood that tree was almost certainly planted over the ruins of one of the hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns that were levelled to the ground in the Zionist ethnic cleansing of 1948—-part of a Jewish National Fund “greenwashing” project to erase any traces of Palestinian presence and make European settlers feel comfortable and at home.

That man, like Sgt. Frederick Platten, did a good thing in the middle of a very bad thing. And I, like my second cousin once removed, carry around the token of that good and bad thing, on a shelf in my mind and heart.

And yes, Pete, we will never, and can never, forget what they did—-everything that they did. It is all in the family.

_________________