The True History of Violence.

In North Dakota, Local Dakota Natives and supporters are protesting a pipeline  being built through both North and South Dakota. Ignoring the hideous irony of both states being named by colonial settlers after people they forcibly removed from the east following a mass hanging, I will allow myself to continue using the names.  As the protest has grown with calls for support from the outside, the protest has not disappeared, as is likely government officials hoped for.

This Minnesota Public Radio headline reflects the Orwellian language of our colonial culture and modern capitalism: “Dakota Access Pipeline Protests in North Dakota turn violent.” Local officials complained that protesters violated public land; private “security companies” used attack dogs and pepper spray on the supposed invaders. The empty stupidity and arrogance of any Government official standing west of the Missouri River south of Bismarck and complaining of Natives “violating private land” should be met with derision and a public dunking. Any soul familiar with the history of the Fort Laramie Treaty would know this, but colonial cultures, especially one as arrogant as the immigrants to the United States, must erase history in order to justify their very presence. Genocide and land theft don’t match with flag waving and the “shining city on the hill.” The Dakotas are its very essence.

A true complaint and history of violence might include how colonial settlement was built on the violence of extraction for profit, beginning with the fur trade, the buffalo slaughter, the Forts, the Indian Agents, the forced settlement of the Dakota from Minnesota to what are now the Dakotas, the Black Hills gold rush, the mines, the Dawes Act, the importation of colonists via public subsidy of the railroads, the Homestead Act, the damming of the Missouri, the coal mines and now of course, the oil extraction.  None of these are mentioned, and of course if they are, the immediate response is to “Why do you bring up the past...all you do is complain!” That is the heart and soul of any colonial culture built on exploitation for profit…deliberate erasure of history.

The true history of violence links settlers very presence with exploitation. The workers, now best represented by oil boomers, pipeline workers and imported mercenaries renamed “security firms”, are merely well trained and indoctrinated servants of their corporate masters and their state enforcers. Most of them are merely desperate to make a living in Post-Reagan America, which is really America at its core, built on fraud, boom, bust and resource extraction.  The Bakken is just a pile of Buffalo bones heaped across the horizon disguised in moving metal. Afterall, America is real estate speculation started by European royalty until the locals wanted their cut.  As modern workers on the industrial frontier, the corporations are able to buy their allegiance as their profits are beyond avarice. Meth and Heroin have replaced alcohol for use in quieting the soul. And like much of the U.S. population, indoctrinated on flags, empty myths and psychological desperation to justify their own actions, the response to anyone interfering with their right to rev a truck is rage.

The mercenaries, who at this point should probably include most government officials who complain of the protestors, are servants of power and privilege. Most are amoral, self-serving psychopaths, the ordinary bureaucrats as in Hannah Arendt’s description of Adolf Eichmann. It is fitting the local sheriff has a German name, for his actions do imitate the Afrikaners, another colonial culture built on its own myths and a cultural history of nothing. Underneath their definitions and actions are the ignorance and myths of our history,  a history of land exploitation, of soil, of the fish and animals, of the Natives and of the immigrant colonists. The error lies in the colonist descendants, orphans of history and capitalism, their history erased much like the forced Native boarding school victims, not knowing just how they got here in both time and place. Someone has been telling them to wave the flag and forget who they are, and off they have gone for three generations. Their anger is desperation to keep up with the great debt cycle their masters impose on them, but without history they have no words. You cannot speak up if you don’t know the language. And that is what makes us human.

What frightens the government and the corporations is the Natives are restless, and now some of the Sepoys agree with them. They are terrified of Lucknow happening here, not in violence, but in political resistance. The security “companies” are the paid mercenaries of the exploitive state. They are the cavalry with different emblems. It may no longer be legal to kill us en masse, but they can enslave us or pay us, and still make a tidy profit.