Day: March 14, 2023

Wounded Knee–50 Years On

Yep a little slice of American history that most young people have NO idea ever occurred.

50 years ago last month the Native Americans started their protest at Wounded Knee, the site of a US cavalry massacre of American natives….

The 1973 Siege at Wounded Knee is the longest “civil unrest” in the history of the US Marshal Service. For 71 days, the American Indian Movement (AIM) and members of the Oglala Lakota (Sioux) nation were under siege in a violent standoff with the FBI and US Marshals equipped with high powered rifles and armored personnel carriers.  Two people were killed, over two dozen wounded.  At stake, sovereignty and self-determination guaranteed through treaty rights.

Fifty years have passed but for American Indians the struggle for recognition of the nation-to-nation treaties continues to be seen as survival.  At the end of February, young Indian leaders joined older activists to gather at Wounded Knee to commemorate the violent events that began on February 27, 1973, and renew their call for self-determination and recognition of their treaties.

For older Wounded Knee veterans, this Fiftieth Anniversary year is a time for a ritual passing on of the struggle.  “You are the seventh generation. It’s your time to stand up and protect your water, defend your land,” proclaimed Vic Camp, son of Wounded Knee AIM leader Carter Camp, “Remember your treaty rights, protect those treaties . . .  we have to remind the United States government that this is our land.”

Bill Means, a veteran of the 1973 siege urged people to be clear on the purpose, “Remember, we came here for the 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaty. We didn’t come here just to raise hell. We had to make a statement, to tell the world that Indians are still alive, that this is still our land, and the Black Hills are not for sale!”

For the Lakota this fight for self-determination, the preservation of their nation and its land, were the central demands of the siege at Wounded Knee.  It was a fight for survival. During the negotiations in 1973 the local Oglala leaders were frustrated with the Justice Department’s refusal to grasp the central issue of the Treaty.  Gladys Bissonette, a revered Oglala elder admonished the Government negotiators, “In the past there were a lot of violations of the sacred treaties . . . This is real. We’re not playing here. So all you people that go back to Washington, think real good, because our lives are at stake. It concerns our children’s children, the unborn.”

Much has been written about the aftermath of the 1973 siege, including the murders of 60 AIM sympathizers and activists in the following year, known as the Reign of Terror, carried out by a local vigilante group self-titled “Goons” (Guardians of the Oglala Nation). U.S. District Court Judge Fred Nichols viewed this as the FBI colluding with vigilantes to target AIM sympathizers. The continued imprisonment of Leonard Peltier despite universal calls for clemency – even by the prosecutor – demonstrates the truth of the FBI’s intent to eliminate Indian activists even at the cost of truth.

Siege at Wounded Knee 50 Years Later: the Fight for Self-Determination Continues

I remember those days and thinking ahead…..the Native Americans are still trying to gain some sort of respect from this government and the nation at large….slow go and little has changed…..they still do not get the respect they deserve from either the government or the nation at large.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

 

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The Day After

I would like to state for all to read….I by no means think that Putin is anything other than a power mad prick and that Ukraine has every right to defend itself from invasion….I make this statement because according to several commenters seem to think that I may have sympathies for Putin and Russia….plus maybe now the questions asked will be answered and the inevitable support for Ukraine can be taken off the table….but we will see.

This post poses the question…..what will happen if and when a peace agreement is settled between Ukraine and Russia? (I know I know Putin is a prick….long live Zelensky….blah…blah….blah)

What does the situation hold when it is declared over?

Allies do not agree on what comes next….

In nearly a year of war in Ukraine, NATO allies have tried to present a united front.

“It is in our security interest to support Ukraine,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told NPR last month at the organization’s headquarters in Brussels. “If you look across the alliance, there’s a strong, continued support on both sides of the Atlantic.”

That’s true. There are also some big divisions. The most obvious is disagreement over what kind of weapons to send Ukraine. But there are also differences over how the conflict should end and what role — if any — Russia should play in a post-war Europe.

In December, French President Emmanuel Macron made waves when he said NATO would eventually have to address Russia’s security concerns.

“How do we protect our allies and member states?” Macron said in an interview on French TV. “By giving guarantees for its own security to Russia the day it returns to the table.“

For NATO allies in Eastern Europe, the notion of making security pledges to a nation that has relentlessly shelled Ukrainian cities is stomach-churning. It’s also personal. They spent decades under Soviet domination.

“This kind of rhetoric coming from the Western leaders plays into the Kremlin’s narrative,” says Linas Kojala, who runs the Eastern Europe Studies Centre, a Lithuanian think tank.

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/23/1158152004/ukraine-russia-war-nato-europe

This situation brings me back to my question from day one….What does the US hope to get for its massive and blind support for Ukraine?  I believe Ukraine had that since 2014.

There is so much more to this conflict that anyone is willing to ask about for their views are given them by the MSM that they refuse to look any further.

As I have stated cracks in the situation are starting to form….

Over one year since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, there are growing differences between Washington and Kyiv on how to move forward in the conflict,POLITICO reported Sunday.

One issue is over Bakhmut, the eastern Ukrainian city where Russian and Ukrainian forces have been locked in battle for over eight months. Biden administration officials think Ukraine has expended too many resources defending Bakhmut and worry it will impact their ability to launch a counteroffensive this spring, but officials in Kyiv have decided to keep fighting for the city.

Another point of contention is over Crimea as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky insists they will retake the peninsula, which has been under Russian control since 2014 and is populated by people who are happy to be part of the Russian Federation.

US-Ukraine Unity Is Cracking Apart

Let us say the war ends….will Ukraine return to its former glory?  Before you answer think about other US involved wars…Haiti, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq….have any of them been improved by our involvement?

America’s twenty-year involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated that nation building is often more expensive, prone to failure, and politically unpopular than expected at the outset. The State Department’s Afghan Stabilization Assistance Review acknowledged the difficulties nation building poses and found that there was no appetite in the American public for such ventures in the future. Yet today, less than two years after the Afghan withdrawal, the United States and its European allies are faced with a nation building exercise more expensive and at least as extensive as those of the past two decades.

NATO’s pursuit of the long war risks pushing Ukraine past a tipping point beyond which it’s economy may never recover. Revitalization of the Ukrainian economy would even have been difficult had the war ended in 2022. Continuation of the fighting and the introduction of more destructive and lethal Western arms risks making Ukraine a permanent economic vassal state of the United States and the EU.

Even the hawkish Rand Corporation in their review of the costs and benefits of the long war acknowledged the tradeoff between continued fighting and the additional cost and difficulty to revitalize the Ukrainian economy post-war.

Existing estimates of reconstruction costs are enormous. The National Recovery Plan that Ukraine’s National Recovery Council put forth in July 2022 carried a $750 billion price tag. In January 2023, Ukraine President Zelensky put the cost to rebuild Ukraine at $1 trillion. These estimates are several times that of the $150 billion in all forms of aid that the West has extended to date. They also exceed by a factor of five or more the size of the post-World War II Marshall Plan, $150-160 billion in today’s dollars, and the $145 billion that the U.S. government spent on rebuilding efforts in Afghanistan.

What if the West Can’t Put Ukraine Back Together?

Maybe Einstein was on to something.

And do you presume we will field most of the cost?

Did the US and its handlers really just make an addict to US funds?

From the time Ukraine declared independence on August 24, 1991, until the Maidan coup of February 2014, Ukraine was essentially a binational kleptocracy that used its position as a buffer state, particularly in its role as a transit hub for Russian natural gas to Europe, to the advantage of its kleptocratic elite—a coterie of deeply compromised politicians and former Soviet-era functionaries-turned-oligarchs

The tension between the Russian East and Galician West came to a head during the Maidan protests when then-president Viktor Yanukovych, a politician from eastern Ukraine, sought to leverage Ukraine’s unique geographic position during the country’s E.U. accession bid—a bid against which Russia, with long and deep economic ties to Ukraine, furiously objected.

Ukraine’s Endgame

Maybe that answers my original question of oh so many months….what will the return on investment for the US?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”