Sitting Bull, the great Sioux chief, had finally found a degree of peace for his people in Canada in 1877 when the U.S. War Department sent a delegation to try to convince him to return to the United States. Surrender your firearms and your horses, and we will grant you a full pardon, they told him.
The truth was Sitting Bull’s very existence was an insult to the U.S. military. He was a legend who had successfully resisted their efforts to silence him forever. He was “a dangerous symbol of subversion,” as writer Dee Brown tells the story in his 1971 classic Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
“There is no use in talking to these Americans,” he told Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commissioner James MacLeod. “They are all liars, you cannot believe anything they say.”
Sitting Bull knew of what he spoke. The long, sordid trail of broken promises, greed, and rampant racism that the American settlement of the West had left behind was well known to Sitting Bull, Geronimo, Cochise, and other great Indian leaders. Many had felt it better to die on the battlefield than simply fall prey defenseless to a purposeful genocide.
Brown’s book, subtitled “An Indian History of the American West”, makes for painful reading, but it is also instructive of this nation’s long history after the settlement of the West. From the Gilded Age of Rockefellers, Morgans, and Carnegies and their brutal rise to economic power to the strike-breaking militias that kept tenant farmers and cotton mill workers in a kind of human bondage to the anti-communist witch hunts of the early and mid-20th century, the stage was set for the broken promises of the post-Cold War era when the United States ruled as the sole super power.
It’s a history that prompts another quote from Sitting Bull. “The white man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it.”
After decades of CIA-prompted coups in places as disparate as Iran, Honduras, and Libya, all in the name of promoting “democracy” even if the result was anything but, a reckoning seems to be coming in Ukraine.
As the Soviet Union tottered in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it agreed to allow the reunification of Germany so long as NATO did not expand eastward. No worry, American officials told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. NATO will not expand one inch to the East. What happened? NATO expanded right up to Russia’s borders and included Poland, the Baltic states, and potentially Ukraine. Allegedly a “defense” organization, it even waged war with longtime Russian ally Serbia in the 1990s.
Ukraine, however, was the red line to the Russians. American leaders rarely study history and likely had no real idea that Ukraine has an almost mystical place in Russian history, in many ways the core of ancient Russia. Plus, just like the U.S. didn’t want Soviet missiles in Cuba in the early 1960s, Russia didn’t want a hostile, missile-ladened NATO member on a large swath of its border, particularly after the CIA-backed coup of 2014 in Ukraine that overthrew a Russian-friendly leader with pro-West puppets. Those puppets would go on to wage war with Ukraine’s Russian-speaking citizens in the nation’s east.
Today, President Trump has initiated a new round of peace talks to end the war in Ukraine. Russia is willing to listen. However, Ukraine’s leaders and their Russophobe European buddies don’t seem willing to give an inch even though Ukraine is clearly losing the war.
After failed earlier peace agreements at Minsk and Istanbul, Russia will approach any new peace deal with an understandable amount of skepticism. Trump, although volatile to a fault, seems to really want peace, unlike his predecessor Joe Biden, a neocon warmonger who would’ve truly continued the war until the last Ukrainian soldier fell to a bitter and useless death.
Chances seem slim for a real peace deal that doesn’t follow complete defeat on the battlefield. Too many political careers and stuffed bank accounts stand in the way. Kudos to Trump for trying, however, if that’s really what he’s doing. After all, he bombed Iran at the same time he was negotiating with them.
If the West’s negotiators are anything less than serious about wanting peace in Ukraine, they may hear Russian leader Vladimir Putin say something similar to what Sitting Bull said when pushed for a peace deal in 1877. “I would like to know why you came here,” he said. “You come here to tell us lies, but we don’t want to hear them. … Go back home where you come from.”
