The Chris Hedges Report Podcast with author Nathaniel Philbrick on How George Armstrong Custer Became a Martyr Used to Justify Genocide and US Imperialism
The Chris Hedges Report Podcast with author Nathaniel Philbrick on How George Armstrong Custer Became a Martyr Used to Justify Genocide and US Imperialism
Custer became in death a martyr to the American empire. He was in popular mythology the last to die in the battle, a symbol of martial valor, although there is scant evidence for this assertion.
Appears in this episode
Image: Pictograph by Red Horse, 1881
The playwright Eugene O’Neill said that one of the few events worth celebrating in American history took place on June 25, 1876, when Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho, led by Crazy Horse and Chief Gall, annihilated a unit of the 7th Cavalry under the command of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer. There are few battles in American history that have generated as much controversy or been as meticulously dissected and examined. And with good reason. The death of Custer and his command stunned the nation. It turned Custer, although he was criticized after the battle by his superiors for impulsiveness and lack of judgment, especially for splitting his force of some 600 soldiers into three battalions, into a martyr for the cause of western expansion and imperialism. His death, portrayed as the ultimate sacrifice for the nation that was at the time celebrating its centennial, was used to justify a massive military campaign against Native Americans that would culminate in the massacre of some 300 Native Americans in 1890 at Wounded Knee, many mowed down with Hotchkiss guns fired by the 7th Cavalry. The remnants of Native tribes were after the battle forcibly relocated to prison of war camps known later as reservations. There is a vast disparity between the mythic presentation of Custer and the reality of the so-called Indian wars. Native Americans, including women, the elderly and children, were slaughtered. The U.S. government repeatedly violated formal treaties to seize land promised in perpetuity to Native Americans. The buffalo herds, which sustained nomadic tribes, were decimated by white hunters. Joining me to discuss this seminal moment in American history is Nathaniel Philbrick author of The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Big Horn.
The Chris Hedges Report Podcast with author Nathaniel Philbrick on How George Armstrong Custer Became a Martyr Used to Justify Genocide and US Imperialism
Yes, good point, Chris he was one of the celebrities of white settler, colonialism -- the quintessential Aryan.
The velvet uniforms, the long shining yellow hair. One can see him as a bad comic book figure, if he was not so genocidal.
A symbol of American Exceptionalism, up against the collective indigenous, who were little more than vermin to the savage White colonial settlers, Custer remains a hero among the beguiled and bewildered.
Very much like Columbus.
Another in a series of psyops made so popular by American capitalism and propaganda.
Now it is the God ordained March to the East.
Custer's failure and death can be set side by side with the US's failure to win a war since WWII.
Same hubris,same ideology and same sanctioned terrorism against indigenous people.
Now that the reservations have been transformed into Gambling casinos, it is the mining companies that now are looking to extinguish all indigenous that inhabit the planet.
Custer and those like him in American history cannot be understood outside of the White settler colonial system and the individualism of capitalist culture.
There is always alone assassin and a lone hero. Binary thinking and management perception at its best.
Ironically, Custer died in the year that Jack London was born.
Gerald Horne has done a great job on setting the historic record straight on Colonial Settlement in America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODp_yEEK3WA
Who will be the next Custer that Americans will latch on to?
There was in my youth during the Vietnam War in which I served as a medical corpsman, a novelty rock n roll song, "Please, Mister Custer, I Don't Want To Go." If you can excuse the racist characterization of "Injuns" in the song, a young soldier knows in his heart of hearts this military campaign is a chronicle of a death foretold. It's typical of grunt dark humor I hear on the ward. But along with the tradition of "chickenshit" as in all our wars, Professor Paul Fussell points out in his history books on war, even in our supposedly last "good war," the Second World War, the brass are a bunch of preening prima donnas who seek glory with immoral abandon. But they do so at the expense of the cannon fodder under their command. That's why Howard Zinn is hated so much on the right. He has the utter gall to write a history from the perspective of all the "little people" the victims conveniently left unmentioned. They fight and die in these wars. Zinn said, "War poisons everybody." I think he means even the soldiers who survive and return to civilian life have so soured on life they have lost to feel any vestige of humanity in their souls. Chris Hedges has repeatedly cited the now nearly forgotten but a once important public intellectual Dwight Macdonald. Macdonald observed that since the end of the Second World War the U.S. has been on a permanent war footing. MacDonald said it induced in the public a pervasive "war psychosis" that poisoned everybody in the body politic and rendered its citizens' unable to think rationally, clearly about war. This permanent fever, war psychosis, has spread like a contagion to the Russo-Ukrainian War. Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister Olga Stefanishyna told France 24 that the Kharkov offensive was a "turning point" and we (she meant NATO and the U.S.'s proxy war against Russia) must push onward harder. Russia and its allies will eventually fall like "dominoes." "Scheisse!", I thought. Have these American advisers resurrected the Domino Theory from the Vietnam War? No communist countries fell. The only domino that fell, my dear Olga, was Saigon along with the Republic of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975. I knew that the Iraq War would be a debacle when a general in an interview with a NYT reporter that the 'autobahn phase" of the race to Baghdad was going quite well. Again, I said Scheisse! to myself. Any American general who must invoke the lexicon of the Third Reich Wehrmacht means we are in serious trouble down the road. Genocide is a physical manifestation of a country that has lost its moral compass and hence its collective soul. But Custer looms large in our collective consciousness as a military martyr. Of course, he was probably clinically insane, a career psychopath. There's plenty more where he came from. Stanley Kubrick satirized this national archetype with Sterling Hayden's supporting role as Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper in his classic Dr. Strangelove. The fictional name is a historical reference to the serial killer that terrorized prostitutes during the Victorian era in London. We breed such archetypes. It's a reflection of our moral decadence.