7 October 2018. O God, Thou Are My God

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Crazy Horse’s Last Stand

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In the early 1940s, Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear, wrote to Polish-American architect Korczak Ziolkowski and asked if he’d be willing to build a monument to commemorate Native American history. The letter ended:

My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know the red man has great heroes, too.

However, who was it they proposed to embody the epic history of their people? It wasn’t Sacagawea. Although she was a formidable woman, she personified cooperation with white America at a moment when Native leaders wanted to express resistance. The recent completion of Mt Rushmore enraged Native America. It was a monument to white presidents in the Black Hills of South Dakota… land sacred to the Natives of the region. Henry Standing Bear and his fellow chiefs wanted their counter-sculpture to represent someone who fought against the American empire. The choice was easy… Crazy Horse (killed by American soldiers on this day in 1877).

An Oglala Lakota (one of the many sub-branches of the Sioux people), Crazy Horse was born in 1840 at a time when the United States’ thirst for land was driving a bloody expansion into what remained of Native land in North America. Crazy Horse grew up with his younger brother, Little Hawk, in a Lakota camp in modern-day Wyoming. He had his first experience of US brutality there in 1854 that when Federal forces stormed the camp in search of a supposed cattle thief, murdering the camp’s chief, Conquering Bear, in the process. After this, Crazy Horse committed himself to a life of resistance against the USA and its growing empire.

He was well-suited to the task as a fearless warrior and shrewd tactician. By the mid-1860s, his band named him Ogle Tanka Un (“Shirt Wearer”… the war chief) for his successes in battle against US forces. Soon after, in December 1866, Crazy Horse led a decoy manoeuvre which enabled a combined force of Lakota and Cheyenne to defeat a US force ranging out of Fort Phil Kearny in northeast Wyoming. A lull followed, until the Natives of the north had their final showdown with the US empire… the Great Sioux War of 1876-77.

It began with an astonishing Native victory in the river lands of Montana. On 17 June 1876, at the Battle of the Rosebud, Crazy Horse led 1,500 soldiers in an attack against 1,000 US troops under George Crook. The action delayed Crook, who was trying to link up with the 7 Cavalry Regiment of Colonel George A Custer. The rest is well-known. On 25 June, beside the Little Bighorn River, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse led a large Native force to a dramatic victory against Custer. Crazy Horse’s earlier action at Rosebud Creek made this possible, and his bravery on the field was a defining feature of both battles. One eyewitness recalled of Crazy Horse at the Little Bighorn:

He was the bravest man I ever saw. He rode closest to the soldiers, yelling to his warriors. All the soldiers were shooting at him, but he was never hit.

The Battle of the Little Bighorn was the last great war-cry of Native America against its conquest. Alarmed by Custer’s defeat, the federal government poured more and more troops into the region. After a harsh winter in 1876-77, Crazy Horse surrendered to save his people from starvation and death. Later, on 5 September 1877, an American soldier bayoneted Crazy Horse whilst he was in US Army custody.

It goes without saying that no commemoration, whatever its scale, can redress the historical injustice done to the Native American people… an injustice upon which the modern USA was built. Three centuries of colonisation, genocide, and ethnic cleansing can’t be undone with a statue of Crazy Horse. However, such tributes can, at the very least, prevent the dispossession of Native Americans from being written out of the American story just because it’s an uncomfortable truth for those who rule. What’s more, the story of Crazy Horse and his resistance gives hope, not just to Native Americans, but to all who confront the forces of colonialism. To borrow the words of American journalist Chris Hedges:

There are few resistance figures in American history as noble as Crazy Horse. His ferocity of spirit remains a guiding light for all who seek lives of defiance.

By the way… the Crazy Horse Memorial is still under construction in the Black Hills of South Dakota!

5 September 2018

Pete Morgan

Radical Tea Towel

https://www.radicalteatowel.com/blog/crazy-horses-last-stand/

If You Support Kavanaugh, You Support Torture as an Ordinary Means of Policy

Yes… greed walks openly in our streets and “Christians” like Franklin Graham bow down before it. None dare call it evil…

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Brett Kavanaugh is an American Wilhelm Frick.

Frick was a bureaucrat, a lawyer. He never hurt anyone personally. He never got his hands dirty, he never kicked anyone in the face, and he never even raised his voice. He was a consummate apparatchik… he filed papers, he wrote out draft legislation, and he saw to it that everything was according to the laws extant at that time. He was a respectable man. He was a pillar of society.

Frick died on the gallows in 1946 as a war criminal.

Brett Kavanaugh’s decisions in favour of torture are exactly the same as Frick’s legal apologia for the Holocaust. Exactly identical. That is, “conservatives” praise Kavanaugh for the very behaviour that led decent people to reject Wilhelm Frick as a monster outside normal society. This says much about so-called “movement conservatives”, about the Republican Party, about neoliberalism in general (which includes rightwing Dems such as the Clintons and those who voted for Kavanaugh), and what America has become.

I’d suggest that we’ve devolved… that we’ve turned into amoral grasping hedonists who worship money and power, who hate any mention of objective right and morals. Ponder this… most of those who worship Mammon loudly profess “Christianity”. Do recall what Our Lord said on this. I’d say that we have a great deal of repentance and recompense to do. We could start with not commodifying everything and stopping rewarding filth like Wall Street scum, real estate “developers”, and healthcare industry thieves… Kavanaugh approves of their actions and of the ideology that underpins their rapine… another point to ponder.

Shall we get up? That remains to be seen…

BMD

EP Exarch Served Fully-Vested With Uniates

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Let’s keep this simple and short. One of Bart’s exarchs in the Ukraine served fully-vested with Uniates. This disgusting action means that Bart is winking at concelebration with papist schismatics. This is against all canons, usages, customs, and traditions of the Church. This by itself is grounds for breaking communion with the EP. However, Moscow is waiting for Bart to announce his false autocephaly. It’s giving him every chance to reconsider, repent, and desist from this action. However, the signs aren’t good. This may portend a schism as profound as the Schism of 1054. The USA is pushing this. How will this play out in the end? No one knows, least of all, me. I’ll say this though… it’ll be a replay of the obnovlentsy (Renovationists). Bart can proclaim a fictive autocephaly, and his minions can even seize the church buildings. That happened in the time of the obnovlentsy, too. The people and clergy simply worshipped outside the church buildings and had nothing to do with Renovationist nonsense. I confide that much the same will happen here. May God protect the real Orthodox Christians of the Ukraine and protect their real shepherd, Metropolitan Onufry Berezovsky of Kiev. The lights are going out, and the Anglo toddlers are mucking with things that they don’t understand in the least. I fear that no good will come of this at all.

BMD