Op-Ed by Clifford Jackson
“The American military protects our freedoms. They sacrifice every day for us”. These are two myths that we have been saturated with daily in this country.
The United States military has been called the most powerful military in the world. What is not said in this country, but many countries around the world understand this; they have been the most deadly and violent organization on this planet.
During the so-called American Revolution, the deadly consequences of the U.S. military, along with state militias, were on full display. The Gnadenhutten massacre of 1782 was just one of many examples of their terror, where, after making the Delaware and Mohican indigenous confederations surrender, the U.S. military still imprisoned and bludgeoned to death 96 men, women, and children.
This savagery was repeated by the United States military as well as state militias with the massacre at “Wounded Knee”, the “Bear River massacre”, “Sand Creek massacre, where hundreds of men and children were murdered, and the women were raped and murdered by the barbarism of the U.S. military.
General George Washington, an Indian killer on steroids, ordered Major General John Sullivan to “lay waste to all the Haudenosaunee tribe settlements. Our future security will be in their inability to injure us. Do not listen to any overture for peace. “
Thomas Jefferson said, “The doctrine of discovery did not just apply to European nations; it is a part of our new republic”. This gave justification to use the military and all tactics of violence, including starvation and the killing of deer and game, which indigenous tribes depended upon for food, by the U.S. military to augment this starvation campaign of evil. This was used during the so-called Louisiana Purchase from the French, where the military under Jefferson and rapacious settlers killed and displaced thousands of Comanche, Sioux, and Cheyenne confederations.
In each case, the hunger for profit from the slave trade and the rapacious need for land from so-called settler speculators, such as in California during the gold rush, led to thousands of California Indians being killed, displaced, and removed by the U.S. military. They obviously were not protecting the freedom of native Americans; they were taking it away. The evil and depravity of Andrew Jackson as military governor of Florida as well as a colonel in the Tennessee state militia would begin a process of unspeakable crimes that Jackson and his military commandees would commit, and brand him as the ” Adolf Hitler” of indigenous people over the past 60 years where his crimes have come to fruition and no longer are being ” white washed”, a typical American characteristic .”
The Trail of Tears,” which was Jackson’s magnum opus of death and destruction where thousands of Creek, Choctaw, Seminole and Chickasaw native Americans died by the thousands and were starved to death because of forced removal at the behest of the US military.” Scorched earth policies” by the US military led to Indian villages being burned to the ground and destroyed, as well as their clothing and horses leaving tens of thousands of indigenous people to starve.
There has not been a more invasive operation in the world than the United States military’s. They have maintained dictatorships and overthrown or helped overthrow governments since the end of the nineteenth century, including in Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, Chile, Guatemala, Liberia, Panama, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Anyone reading this, including the editor, should understand this is not the racist label of woke indoctrination or propaganda. My delineation here is statements of fact that contravene the non sequitur of America’s greatness.
In the case of El Salvador and Nicaragua, tens of thousands of men, women, and children were murdered by the dictatorships that go back ninety years, which the U.S. military fully supported. Part of the pathology of this “sick society” that Dr. King said is the constant refrain, when American soldiers are killed, usually in an unprovoked operation like what Bush did in Iraq, we will hear the lamenting that ” 20 American soldiers have been killed”.
At the same time, it was either not mentioned or mentioned quickly, ” 2000 Iraqis were killed,” or three million Vietnamese civilians were killed, as we saw in Vietnam. This pathology of America, in particular, white America, is the ignoring of the killing of millions of civilians. Yet we call this a Christian nation. Much of the world understands the terror of the American military, and as tragic as 9/11 and October 7th were, they were caused by the sanguinary, jingoistic, and criminal behavior of the American military.
Clifford Jackson, Larchmont