All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and Hillary Clinton's on CNN international threatening Syria.
Let's listen to that.
Nah, I'm just kidding.
Let's talk with Will Grigg.
He keeps the blog pro libertate at freedom in our time.blogspot.com.
He's the author of the book Liberty in Eclipse.
And his articles quite often run at Lou Rockwell dot com, including this one.
What to remember on Memorial Day.
Welcome back to the show.
Will, how are you doing, Scott, my friend?
I'm doing very well.
Thank you once again for the opportunity.
Well, you're welcome.
I'm always very happy to have you here.
And everybody always gets really excited when they find out you're going to be on the show.
And, you know, it's funny, I find myself talking about you quite often on the show.
A thing I learned here, a thing I learned there.
For example, you know, and one of the things that I was saying about you the other day was that you really are the master of world history and that any of your writings that I've read for, I don't know, 15 years or something now, it's always peppered with references to things that happen that nobody else really knows about.
And not only do you know all about it, but you also you know, and it could be whatever something happened in the year 13 something or other.
And but you make it very easy to understand and very relevant to the point you're making about what's going on right now.
And it's always just floored me.
And it's in the way you speak on the show every time I interview you, of course, as well.
And then so one of the things that you're really good on is the Indian Wars.
And I have a feeling that maybe this is a project of yours that you're trying to get better and better and better on the Indian Wars of the 19th century.
And so I'm just so happy that I have the opportunity to learn from you and to give you a chance to tell the story, what to remember on Memorial Day to my audience today.
Well, Scott, you're very kind.
I really appreciate that.
I'm a synthesist.
I'm not a specialist in this.
And the Indian Wars of the 19th century in particular is a subject in which I have a particular interest.
I'm obviously somebody who's got Indian heritage.
That is to say, my ancestors were from what's called Mesoamerica.
My most salient ancestral trait has to do with my Aztec background.
The Aztecs were imperialist.
So I really can't lay claim to any ancestral pride here in terms of being resistance fighters against an empire when my dominant ancestors actually had a very large and very unpleasant empire that was overthrown by one that was meaner and more capable.
That tends to be the way that history works out.
But in what happened in the 19th century to the American Indians, whether you characterize them as Native Americans or not, I don't happen to like that description.
Most American Indians, I don't like it either.
The fact is that what we're dealing with now in terms of the global manifestation of the empire was all prefigured during that period called Manifest History, which was when the corporatist entity that gestated in Washington and New York was given free reign to inflict itself on the rest of the contiguous landmass of North America.
And at that time, it was something that unabashedly called itself an empire.
It took great pride in the description of manifest destiny as the propagation of this globe or this continent straddling empire.
And of course, this was not an unpeopled landmass, as Ronald Reagan said in one of his less lucid pronouncements.
There were people living in that area.
There were, of course, all kinds of varieties of Indian tribes who didn't consider themselves to be part of one nation.
They considered each individual group to be an independent entity.
They were people.
They were fully panoplied with all the the blessings and burdens that come from the human condition.
Many of them were noble.
Many of them were less than noble.
Some of them were craven.
Many of them were aggressive.
Some of them were peacemakers.
But they were human beings and they lived in these particular places and they had property.
They had loved ones, but they were considered an impediment to the westward progress of what was called civilization.
And one of the most potent displays of the ideology that defined Manifest Destiny was found in an 1872 painting by an artist named John Gast that was called American Progress.
There was a evangelist of Manifest Destiny by the name of George Crowfoot who wrote a caption to this.
And the painting depicted this blonde woman, rather bosom lean than well-endowed, clad in a very thin, precarious robe.
And on her forehead, there was a star that was described as the star of empire.
And she was looking westward with this beatific gaze as terrified Indians were scurrying in front of her.
And in her right arm was held a book inscribed Common Schools.
And George Crawford described that as the emblem of our education, the testimonial of our national enlightenment.
With the left hand, she had a skein of threads that were the slender wires of the telegraph that are to flash intelligence throughout the land.
And everything before her was dark and dreary and visibly uncivilized.
And behind it was, of course, arrayed steamships and factories, schools and churches.
And Crawford exalted that from the cities proceed the three great continental lines of the federally subsidized railway.
And there were pony express riders, pioneer wagons and so forth.
And Crawford summed this up in the final paragraph of the caption, saying, fleeing from progress and towards the blue waters, the Pacific or the Indians with their squaws, papooses and pony lodges.
The Indians flee from the presence of the wondrous vision.
The star is too much for them.
That is the star of empire.
And of course, the lead roles in the promotion of the empire were a couple of familiar figures from the American Civil War, War Between the States, which were William Sherman and Sheridan, Philip Sheridan, who had been involved in some really nasty assaults on civilians in the Confederacy during the War Between the States.
Sheridan, of course, famously laid waste to the Shenandoah Valley.
And Sherman was infamous for his march to the sea.
He reminds me a little bit of the Prussian General Westerman, who was a genocidal leader of a group of mercenaries during the French war against the Vendee region during the French Revolution.
He killed hundreds of thousands of people to General Westerman.
There were some limits on what they were permitted to do to people who were being reconquered in the independent South on behalf of the Union.
But once they were put in the employ of the federally subsidized railroad combine, bear in mind there were private railroads that actually did deals with the Indians, treated them as people who had property and rights that had to be respected.
They didn't have problems with the Indians when they made equitable deals and carried them out fastidiously.
The private railroad enterprises did very well.
It was the federally subsidized railroads that simply enlisted the army to throw everybody out of their way.
And that was not merely the Indians.
There are plenty of European settlers who found that when they got crosswise with the railroad combine, they came out a poor second.
But Sherman's approach to the Indians was to say that they should be exterminated.
He used that word on several occasions.
He never qualified it.
It was not metaphorical.
If they were to resist, they were to be physically liquidated.
And that was, of course, the westward progress of the empire that was celebrated by George Crawford in this horrible painting by John Nass, which in recent years, I'm happy to say, has been revived in a number of critical studies.
It's been the cover illustration, for instance, of a number of critical works of revisionist history about what happened in the 19th century.
But this all happened, of course, after the reconsolidation of the Union in the war between the states.
And when Lord Acton wrote to Robert E.
Lee that he lamented what was lost at Appomattox more than he celebrated what was gained at Waterloo, Lee wrote back that this consolidation of the federal government was sure to be a bane, I'm paraphrasing, to people who lived in the American continent, but of great menace and a very problematic proposition for the world.
And after the frontier was closed in 1890, Frederick Jackson Turner, I think, declared that the frontier was closed just a few months before the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek.
He had 300 Indians who were killed in this disarmament exercise.
They were disarmed after being herded into what was literally a death camp.
They were being starved to death, the Lakota Sioux and the other Sioux tribes at the time.
But this happened in 1890.
All of a sudden, Washington had to look abroad in pursuit of new empires to build and and new frontiers to push back.
And, of course, the first beneficiaries of its dubious humanitarianism were the Cuban subjects of the Spaniards and the Filipinos who were subjects of the Spaniards when the United States government decided to take over from the dying and ramshackle Spanish empire in 1898.
And so you had reservations being built across the United States to contain the Indians who had been dispossessed by the empire.
And then you had reconcentration camps being built in Cuba and the Philippines for the same purpose.
It comes out of the same ideology.
Right.
So there was no old republic.
It was always just an empire.
It looks that way.
All right.
Hold it right there.
It's Will Grigg.
Freedom in our time dot blogspot dot com for his great blog Pro Libertate doing Indian Wars today.
Anti-war radio.
All right, everybody, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Starting with Will Grigg from freedom in our time dot blogspot dot com, mostly chronicling local police state abuse in America with great diversions from time to time as well.
And this one is what to think about, what to remember on Memorial Day.
And it's about the Indian Wars of the 19th century.
I want to give you a chance to talk all about this particular massacre at Sand Creek, the Cheyenne Indians that you wrote about here.
But first, I wanted to ask you whether where do you think the state of Indian Wars revisionism is now?
Because I think when I was like a high school age and say the early to mid 1990s, it seemed like Indian Wars revisionism was sort of all the rage and people thought, ah, geez, really shouldn't have done that.
Right.
Sort of kind of became the common narrative.
But then I wonder whether that sort of, you know, swings back and forth and whether Custer's a hero again or not or what's the temperature as you take it on that, you think?
Just gauging it from my own personal experience, I came of, I guess you'd call it sentient age in the late 60s, early 1970s.
This is coming off of a period of revisionism that actually began with a James Stewart movie called Broken Arrow back in the 19, I believe, early 1950s, where he was the first really sympathetic treatment of the history from the perspective of peacemakers on the European-American side and complimentary peacemakers on the part of the Plains Indians and sort of reached its height, I suppose, with Satchin Littlefeather accepting the Academy Award or being tapped by Brando to accept an Academy Award and making a pitch for a more sympathetic treatment of the plight of the American Indians of the reservation system.
I think that the Wounded Knee incident in 1973, which was ill-conceived and sort of the capper of a period of not terribly productive tantrums described as Indian activism, sort of soured the public on this more sympathetic depiction of what had been done to the Indians, a more sympathetic depiction of the Indians themselves, that is, not meant to try to say that the grievances that propelled the American Indian movement were anything other than substantial.
They certainly were, but I think it was a more sympathetic depiction of what had been done, so they certainly were.
I just don't happen to think that so-called AIM shopping, which was when they'd go into a grocery store and loot the place, was a really good way of trying to express your dissatisfaction over the fact that your ancestors had been looted and your life had been blighted by the crimes of the federal government, including the FBI.
It was just horrible, the treatment of the American Indians in the Dakotas and elsewhere.
And I think what happened is that there was a counter-reaction, if you will, sort of a countervailing tendency in the late 1980s because of the excesses of multiculturalism and so-called political correctness, and the effort to try to shove all Indians into one politically correct mold as infinitely wise stewards of the earth and trying to invest Indians generically with a sense of authenticity.
And they were being used, if you will, as sort of a sports mascot on behalf of a certain form of left collectivism that really left a bad taste in people's mouths.
And I think that just examined on the merits right now, American history of the 19th century is full of perfectly mortifying people, mortifying things to people who are decent irrespective of their political backgrounds.
And so I think that where the pendulum sits right now is that people are willing, for the most part, if they're able to sit down and listen to a fairly even-handed depiction of what happened in the 19th century, are horrified by what was done by the government in the name of the American people to the people who were living here at the time of the European settlement.
What complicates this, Scott, as you well know, is the fact that for the purposes of propaganda right now, we're being fed exactly the same line about the Afghans, about the Iraqis, about the Yemenis or Somalis, whoever else is being targeted by the empire this week, that was being retailed back in the 19th century for public consumption to justify the expropriation of people like Chief Black Kettle and the Cheyennes and Arapahos in southern Colorado back in 1864.
Every time you see a massacre of innocent people in a country such as Pakistan or Afghanistan by the forces the empire has described as a battle, when they fight back against the imperial legions, it's called a massacre or an act of terrorism.
So that complicates things because – and that's one of the reasons why I write so much about this subject is because I think the parallels are so plentiful and so pregnant for our times.
So I think that there is a willingness to listen as long as people are somehow able – those who have fallen prey to the ubiquitous propaganda of the empire are willing to evaluate what happened in the 19th century on its own merits.
They're willing to accept that horrible things were done back then.
What I'm hoping is they'll make the conceptual leap to understand that what's being done today is just as bad if not worse.
Right.
Yeah, you know, a young person asked me one time, but I don't get it.
How could Harry Truman use nuclear bombs on them?
You know, there had to be another way.
And I said, well, have you ever kicked over an ant pile and it didn't really trouble your morals or conscience?
Exactly.
And he said, yeah.
And I said, well, it was basically the same thing, right?
Because first step one is you lie to yourself and pretend the people you're killing aren't people.
And then two, you just kill them.
And really all you've got to do is call them names.
I mean, there's nothing complicated about it.
Everybody knows 75 different versions of the same thing.
And it means you're not really a person.
So now it's all right if I kill you with my bayonet.
Yeah, we've got Theodor Geisel, Dr. Seuss to blame for at least part of that, too.
He was a war propagandist in World War II who did these perfectly hideous caricatures of Japanese, trying to depict them all as people wearing Coke bottom glasses and being deployed in serried rows of automatons, trying to undermine our culture and pledging their fidelity unquestioningly to the emperor, including, of course, the Nissi, the American Japanese who were treated for a limited period of time, much the same way that the American Indians have been treated back in the 19th century.
Yeah, that'll blow people's minds if you go back and look.
Just search Dr. Seuss in World War II and you'll see he's got Tojo with a bomb stand and every Japanese-descended Californian lined up to get his sabotage bomb in order to wage war against us from within.
Well, one of the things about that episode that resonates so much with what happened to the American Indians was the way that these people were expropriated, then forced at bayonet point into transportation, of course, we're talking about trucks for the most part in the 1940s, but trains as well, and taken to desolate places, then confined in what were called re-concentration camps in the 1900s, or reservations in the 1800s, and then forced as a condition of receiving any kind of benefits from their captors to make some kind of pledge of unconditional loyalty to the government that had just treated them this way.
That didn't happen to the Japanese.
In some limited sense, it happened to some American Muslims here in the 21st century as well, but that's something that always lurks beneath the surface of any imperial system, including our own.
Yeah.
Well, and now back to the Indian Wars for a minute there, and well, if you want you can talk a little bit more about Chief Black Cove.
I was wondering maybe, can you give us some numbers of how many tens of millions, because I know that there's the stories of the smallpox blankets and that kind of thing, that happened a couple of times, right?
Yeah.
It was mostly just disease spread, and that's what killed most of the Indians, but then again, there were still, how many millions were just butchered in these wars?
Is there any real accounting out of detail?
I've not been able to find a hard number.
What I have been able to do is focus on limited, geographically specific episodes like the Sand Creek Massacre, and like other massacres that were called battles at the time, to show how when these people were perfectly at the mercy of the oppressors, you know, the people who were agents of whatever empire was oppressing them.
I believe it was the British, actually, who pioneered germ warfare through the propagation of smallpox blankets in the 18th century, and maybe even late 17th century in some instances.
But how they were treated and how they were annihilated, to the point of liquidating an entire limited population, hundreds of throes.
I mean, the problem is that, as you know, living where we do, post-20th century, post-Gulag, post-death camp, in order for a figure to shock us, it has to have at least six zeros behind us.
So when we see that 100 or 200 were massacred here or there, that really doesn't impress us as much as hearing about the industrialized murder of millions by the Soviets, by the Nazis, and so forth, or the 800,000, 1.2 million who were butchered in Rwanda in 1994.
It takes that kind of a body count in order to impress upon our minds the seriousness of what is done.
I think that dealing in the American Indian context, when you're talking about tribes that numbered maybe 200 or 300, little bands of several hundred at a time, when you have dozens or scores or hundreds being wiped out in proportionate terms, you're talking about something that has to be called at least genocidal in principle, if not in terms of the aggregate numbers.
Yeah.
Well, and the thing is, too, it's until you realize that this is where your town is, your neighborhood is built on spilt blood.
And I remember going to what they call Mount Bunnell, which is just the biggest hill near the actual city of Austin, where it has a nice view up there or whatever.
And if you go up there, there's actually a little plaque that says, on this place, a heroic white man named Johnson or something, threw the last red Indian in these parts off of this cliff to his death.
And that was the end of that.
And hooray for him.
Wow.
So there you go.
This is where the Indian Wars just west of Austin, Texas, ended, was on top of that hill.
Yeah, that's true of so many places in this country, unfortunately.
That's amazing.
All right.
Thank you so much.
It's always great to talk to you, Will.
Everybody, please go read everything that this guy writes.
It's at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Thanks.
Thanks, Scott.
