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.
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 7th 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 7th
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.
I did not and do not give one whit about, or want to waste
one ounce of intellectual energy on, Charlie Kirk.
I confess that—like, I bet, most of the people (certainly
the politicians) now gnashing their teeth and attending prayer vigils—I was
blissfully unaware of exactly who Charlie Kirk was, until last week when I
suddenly saw him receiving the most ridiculously inflated veneration since
Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize. I now know that he was a mediocre right-wing
podcaster and wannabe intellectual.
This is the guy for whom there’s a massive, coordinated,
multi-media campaign to turn him into a martyred national hero on a par with
Lincoln and JFK? Lying in state? Really? I don't believe that even most people
who liked Kirk thought he was that important a week ago.
Now, the politically dominant right-wing really—they
say it openly—wants to cancel everyone who does not participate in the
canonization of Charlie Kirk. You must join in the gala of national
mourning and sanctification, or be removed from social media, publicly shamed,
and fired from your job, if not rounded up.
Whatever the facts of his assassination turn out to be (Don’t
even start!), the speed, thoroughness, and level of state-mandated adamance with
which this Charlie canonization campaign took hold smacks of something prepared and organized in advance.
Because it was, and it’s not about Charlie Kirk. Charlie
Kirk’s assassination was the occasion for activating an aggressive campaign of
Zionist and right-wing repression that was waiting for an excuse. He—actually,
his ghost—is now nothing but an instrument of that campaign, wielded by people
who care as much about the real Charlie Kirk as I do.
Here is Charlie Kirk today:
What in the unholy algorithm did I just watch 😱
AI slop of Charlie Kirk in heaven defending Israel from Greta & Hamas 🤣 is making the rounds, and Evangelical influencer is weeping on camera over it pic.twitter.com/DtBG5i8guO
This is what it's about: the sanctification of
Charlie as a conjoined angelic twin of Israel and the demonization of
any dissenters. The purpose of sanctifying Kirk is not to preach his
gospel, but to recruit the Republican/MAGA base to a program of repression,
destroying the First Amendment rights of expression, dissent, and protest in
order to: 1)immediately, prop up falling support for Israel among “America
First” young Americans who were attracted go Kirk and whose dissatisfaction
with Israel he was listening to; 2) proactively,
instigate an even nastier conflict between culture-war “left-right” factions
that will divert the populace from the real left vs. right, 99%-vs.-the
oligarchy, socio-economic civil war the US capitalist oligarchs rightly fear is
coming; and 3) justify the intensified
police-state policies needed to crush it if/when it does come—whether or not
any of this has anything to do with Charlie Kirk’s actual message when he was
living.
I want to stress that the defense of Israel and Zionism is
the immediate, urgent task of those promoting the canonization of Kirk. They certainly
are right-wing defenders of capitalist oligarchy, and definitely want to
pre-emptively repress any real left that would influence or lead any hint of
anti-capitalist uprising. But that threat is not imminent, and they presume
their ability to avoid and/or control it. They are also committed Zionists, who
at this moment know that Israel and the Zionist project, which has lost all
legitimacy in the world, cannot survive without the support of the U.S.
government, and they are terrified of the imminent threat that the American
populace—including the Republican/MAGA base—will turn decisively against that
support.
Which is happening. Influential right-wing figures such as
Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, and Thomas Massie are
going hard on an America-First rupture with Israel’s aggressions, with effect. We’ve reached a point where only 22% of
younger (18-34) Republicans think Israeli actions in Gaza are justified.
That’s an amazing, and fast, reversal of Zionist fortune in
the American public—crucially, in the younger demographic that Kirk affected
most. And the Zionist establishment cannot allow it to continue.
In this precarious context for Zionist support in the U.S, we
also have Max Blumenthal and Anya Parampil’s Grayzonearticles,
based on “Kirk’s friend, who also enjoyed access to President Donald Trump and
his inner circle.” According to that source, Kirk had refused Netanyahu’s offer
of “a massive new infusion of Zionist money into his Turning Point USA,” had
come to “loathe the Israeli leader, regarding him as a ‘bully,’” and “was
disgusted by what he witnessed inside the Trump administration, where Netanyahu
sought to personally dictate the president’s personnel decisions, and
weaponized Israeli assets like billionaire donor Miriam Adelson to keep the
White House firmly under its thumb.” The Grayzone source also says Kirk was “frightened”
by the pressure he was receiving from Zionist donors, while Trump supporter,
Harrison Smith, said he was told by “someone close to Charlie Kirk that Kirk
thinks Israel will kill him if he turns against Israel.”
I make no claim that Charlie Kirk was on the verge of renouncing
Zionism, or that he was assassinated by Israel. I do know that, because he
had platformed Israeli critics like Tucker Carlson and Dave Smith, he had
been declared anathema by the same people who are now sanctifying, and
insisting that you must worship, him.
My point is not to adjudicate Charlie Kirk’s “real” position
on Israel. My point is this: The people behind this canonization campaign do
not really care about Charlie Kirk or think he's all that. They are using
his ghost to prop up the sanctity of Zionism, to gin up a
"right-left" fight to forestall the "right-left" unity that
has been coalescing in opposition to Israel and Zionism. It’s a reasonable
discussion and potential alliance between leftists and right-populists over
Israel—like this Tim Dillon-Max Blunenthal interview—that Israeli and American
Zionists are terrified of.
We’re in an unprecedented—and for the Zionists,
unacceptable—situation where people on the MAGA “right”—perhaps even more than
those on the liberal “left”—are concluding that Israel might have assassinated
Charlie Kirk and was likely involved in the JFK assassination, that Jeffrey
Epstein was running a Mossad op that may have entrapped Trump, and that the
country wasted its blood and treasure in a succession of regime-change wars in
the Middle East for the benefit of Israel.
That's why they're going much harder with this
ridiculous mythification of Kirk as Israel’s angel than they did even with
Trump after his assassination attempts. Not because the person is more
important to them, but because the historical moment is—a moment in
which Israel is going full indefensible “final solution” in Gaza and dragging
the U.S. into another wasteful war with Iran, and most people in the world and
in the United States are sick of it. In this moment, the narrative managers
don't give a damn about Charlie Kirk; they're concerned about defending and
preserving indispensable American support for Israel and Zionism.
So, to argue about Charlie Kirk is to miss the point. It’s
like arguing about the hostages in Gaza. The people pushing this campaign care no
more about him than Netanyahu does about them. One might say that he, or his
ghost, is effectively now their hostage.
J.D. Vance and the Republican leadership no more think
Charlie Kirk is really some historic American saint and moral and intellectual
giant than John Brennan and the Democratic leadership really thought Donald
Trump was a spy for Vladimir Putin. The factions that spin these tales do so to
corral their constituents into an ideological and political pen they can
control, rather than have them wandering into forbidden places. If you thought
Russiagate was about exposing Trump as a Russian agent, you were being played. If
you think this narrative is about establishing the sainthood of Charlie Kirk,
you are being played. If the words “left” and “right” keep you from seeing
that, you are being played. The factions that spin these tales are contemptuous
of you for believing them.
What I find upsetting and depressing is how quickly and
thoroughly these tales saturate the political and media environment, making it
virtually impossible for most people not to ingest and regurgitate them.
Do the people who liked Charlie Kirk because he presented as
a free-speech warrior not see what's going on here? What they are being
recruited into? It’s really not hard.
And, yes, it's a mirror version of what the liberal Democrats
did during Biden—embracing expansive and malleable concepts of “terrorism” and “domestic
terrorism,” “misinformation,” protest as “sedition,” “political violence,” speech
as violence, etc.—to justify censorship, cancellation, and RICO
prosecution. Some of us warned constantly about the precedents being set
and the tools put in place that would inevitably be used against those so
smugly wielding them. It was not hard to see how pernicious and stupid the Dems
use of those tools were, and it was not hard to see—I did—how
pernicious and stupid the Trump administration was going to be. Because neither
faction really believes in the principles, or saints, they claim to revere.
It's extraordinarily depressing to see how easy it is to
manipulate different groups of people with their shiny trinket. We did succeed in preventing the
Disinformation Governance Board. It’s a different administration, but the
same Deep State, which now wants (because his work overall lends to this)
to fold mandatory Charlie-worship in with mandatory Zionism-worship.
We—everyone who wants to challenge that Deep State—better not let them get the “We'll
take your social media if you criticize Charlie Kirk”Law, or any
of its "We'll take your passport if you criticize Israel" affiliates.
As the man sings,
“Everybody plays the fool sometime. There's no exception to the rule.” But time
has run out on the American merry-go-round of tomfoolery.
On the one hand, I feel the need to say something about the US/Israel-Iran
war; On the other hand, I saw it coming and said it right after October 7th,
2023, in “Israel’s
Solution to Gaza: War on Iran.” And I'm really tired and depressed to see
it happening as was inevitable.
The most important thing here is for everyone to understand
what this conflict is, and is not, about.
In a short clip I urge
everyone to watch, Seyed Mohammad Marandi says it quite
well: “The real issue is not Iran's nuclear program. The real issue for the
United States is Iran's support for the Palestinian people. That is it…The
issue for the United States is Palestine.”
The issue is not nuclear weapons, and we have to stop giving
credence to any attempt to fix the public focus on that. The issue is Palestine—or,
in other words, Zionism.
It is about Zionism. It is about forcing Iran—the remaining
powerful nation-state in the region that has not—to once and for all accept the
Zionist colonizing project of expelling and exterminating the Palestinian
people, which is underway in Gaza and the West Bank.
Per Marandi:
[The United States] wants Iran to
end its support for Palestine. It wants Iran to be something like Turkey …or
the Emirates, or Egypt, or Jordan, or Morocco, or it doesn't matter, [to], say,
criticize the Israeli regime, but at the end of the day do nothing in reality
to oppose its hegemony and domination.
It is indeed a regime-change operation against Iran, and its
entire point—the only thing about the regime that has to change—Is for
Iran to accept the Zionist project, which means, abandoning support for
Palestinian liberation, accepting Israel
as the unchallenged regional hegemon, and ridding itself of any military
capacity that would allow effective resistance to any aggression, including
against the Palestinians, that Israel might wish to undertake.
Understand: the only thing. If Ayatollah Khamenei
announces tomorrow that Iran is capitulating to acceptance of the Zionist
project and changes nothing else, sanctions will be lifted and relations with
Iran will be normalized. The United States will not care if Iran is Islamist or
secular, theocratic or democratic, if women have to wear hijabs or burqas or
miniskirts. All the blather about democracy, women’s rights, and secular
liberalism will disappear. Even civilian nuclear power would be permitted.
Understand also: If Iran were to capitulate on the nuclear
issue and announce that it will forgo all nuclear enrichment, it will still be
attacked. If and only if Iran capitulates on accepting the Zionist
project and abandoning the Palestinians to whatever fate Israel wants to
inflict on them (extermination and expulsion, as we all see), will the attack
on Iran stop.
It’s convenient for the U. S. and Israel to present the
nuclear issue to the public as the main problem, but it is only relevant
to them as a lesser included aspect of the principal issue of capitulation to
the Zionist project—“lesser” because, as they know, as the DNI has declared (“I
don’t care what she says”), Iran has no
nuclear weapons, but has other weapons and assets that presently do threaten
the Zionist project.
If you like my work, you can support me by subscribing to my Substack or by making a one-time donation via Buy Me A Coffee, PayPal,Venmo,Cash App, orZelle(preferred, no fee).Thanks for your support!
