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.

_________________

Charlie’s Devils

 Charlie’s Devils

Jim Kavanagh

Charlie, Angel

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

— Abier (@abierkhatib) September 15, 2025

https://twitter.com/i/status/1967602291697209472

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 Grayzone articles, 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.

https://x.com/LauraLoomer/status/1944540088400281688

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.

When will enough people wake the fuck up?

___________________________________

U.S./Israel-Iran War: The Issue Is Palestine. The Issue Is Zionism.

 U.S./Israel-Iran War

The Issue Is Palestine. The Issue Is Zionism.

Jim Kavanagh

https://x.com/KashifMD/status/1934065000815231259

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 7^th, 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.

https://x.com/AliAbunimah/status/1935330933063733290?t=QDnR2wcD12Rvp6iGUJ4N7g&s=19

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.