Joe Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has convened a special panel empowered to revoke Medals of Honor awarded to 20 US cavalrymen. The panel is looking at the Medals of Honor awarded for the Battle of Wounded Knee, where some 350 hostile Dakota men, women, and children were killed in a confused and one-sided fight. Ausitn’s charge is to review records of the event, investigate “each awardee’s individual actions,” and “consider the context of the overall engagement.”
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“It’s never too late to do what’s right,” an unnamed senior defense official said in a statement Wednesday. “And that’s what is intended by the review that the secretary directed, which is to ensure that we go back and review each of these medals in a rigorous and individualized manner.”
The engagement occurred during the last gasps of the Indian Wars that began shortly after English settlers arrived in Jamestown and dragged on until the early 20th Century. The wars were bloody and filled with atrocities committed by both sides, but ultimately, the superior culture carried the day. The operation took place in the context of the Ghost Dance movement among the Plains Indians. The 7th Cavalry intercepted a band of Indians traveling between two reservations in South Dakota. The mission was to disarm them as they were suppressing the Ghost Dance. A lot of modern apologists claim the movement, which had as its goal the mystical elimination of White people, was totally benign. I think that is a damned comfortable opinion to have 130 years after the fact. The battle took place a mere 14 years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The last battle between the US Army and Indians was still 30 years in the future. The homesteading families upset by the Ghost Dance had every reason to be afraid and expect the worst. They and their neighbors had been brutalized during the extended war with the Dakota and had no reason to think the Ghost Dance was some quaint ethnic custom. Quite honestly, had the Ghost Dance not been suppressed there is no guarantee that another war would not have erupted.
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Twenty Medals of Honor were awarded for bravery at Wounded Knee.
The Medal of Honor, at that time, was the only decoration for valor, and the criteria were very different from those today.
Revoking an award of the Medal of Honor is not unprecedented. In fact, there have been 911 instances. Of that number, 864 belonged to members of the 27th Maine Volunteer Infantry who were awarded the Medal of Honor for extending their expired enlistments to fight at Gettysburg. President Abraham Lincoln authorized those medals. People often refer to the award as the Congressional Medal of Honor, but Congress has no role in awarding the medal; it gets that name because it is awarded “in the name of the United States Congress.”
Congress started down this road by apologizing in 1990. The 2023 National Defense Authorization Act required the Department of Defense to examine the medals.
Rep. Kaialiʻi Kahele, D-Hawaii, was the legislation’s primary sponsor, though other members of Congress, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Reuben Gallego, D-Ariz., have pushed for similar legislation in the past. Kahele is a Native Hawaiian.
Dubbed the “Remove the Stain Act,” the legislation’s advocates, which include more than a dozen Native American tribes and groups, say it’s a long-overdue step to right a historical wrong.
“As Congress continues to consider the FY23 NDAA, the most important defense legislative vehicle that is debated each year, we must remind ourselves of the uncomfortable truth that this land – the United States – was taken from indigenous peoples,” said Kahele in a press release. “Although we can never undo the irreparable damage inflicted on indigenous peoples, we can do our best to respect their lands, empower our communities and acknowledge the truth behind our shared history.”
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No matter what this Potemkin board organized by Austin finds, the facts remain that the 7th Cavalry was operating under legal orders, and the men awarded the Medal of Honor met the criteria of the time. There is no wrong to be righted here. This is simply a political act by the losers to count coup on the winners. Austin’s order to “consider the context of the overall engagement” is just a way to open the door to relitigating the Indian Wars by the “stolen land” nutters.
Don’t think this is the end of it.
As we have experienced over the last decade, there is an active attempt by the anti-American left, abetted by a bunch of weakling suck-ups in Congress and State Houses, to erase our history and replace it with a narrative that divides Americans and is designed to create different classes of thought. It started with banishing all vestiges of the military history of the Civil War from our military. National Guard units in the South were stripped of battle streamers, reflecting their participation in the politically incorrect side of the Civil War. Statues were torn down. Military installations were renamed. This exercise in stupidity marks the beginning of an effort to do the same to participation by the US Army in the Indian Wars.
When these 20 medals are revoked, and they will be revoked, there will be other boards covered to examine other Medals of Honor. Battle streamers will be stripped from regimental flags. Forts named for military figures of that era, like Fort Carson, will be renamed.
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In his first speech after accepting the GOP nomination for president, former President Donald Trump made this pledge:
He needs to take it one step further. He needs to reverse any decision, stripping 20 deceased cavalrymen of a medal for bravery, and he needs to send anyone involved in this process into retirement.