Laurence, Wounded Knee was horrific, but almost trivial compared to the totality of the U.S. government’s twenty-five year campaign of genocide against the Plains Indians in which tens of thousands of Indian women and children were slaughtered “to make way for the railroads,” as General Sherman, who was in charge of it all, declared.  The survivors were sent to concentration camps known as “reservations.”  The Indian Genocide Wars were orchestrated by such “Civil War luminaries” as Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and Custer.  In fact, they commenced it during the war with such atrocities as the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado. Sherman himself declared that racial purification was a big part of his purpose as he considered Indians, like Mexicans, to be “mongrels” (his exact language as quoted in my article in the link). He cynically recruited ex slaves (the “Buffalo Soldiers”) to assist in the mass murder of another non-white race.  In a letter to his son a year before his death, he said that his greatest regret was that his armies did not kill every last Indian. He even described his policy toward the Indians as “the final solution to the Indian problem.”  These are just a few reasons why there are myriad bronze statues of William Tecumseh Sherman littering the American landscape.

The Best of Thomas DiLorenzo