History Rhymes Again: The Comanche Empire of the Summer Moon, My Ancestors, and Palestine

Plus a really good book recommendation

My ancestors are the people liberals tell us we should despise. They were French settlers coming down the Mississippi from Canada after the British conquest, mainly Scots-Irish who went with Daniel Boone through the Cumberland Gap, they were Indian fighters, slaveowners, soldiers, farmers, and one probable escaped or freed slave, but never mind him for now except to say that makes my family’s story even more American. Let’s concentrate on the settlers, particularly on the more recent ones who went to Texas.

There were some who at least attempted to settle on the Texas frontier as early as the 1840s or 50s, and there was one who served in the Confederate Army from 1861-65, and then lost his North Carolina farm to Carpetbagger Yankee bankers no later than 1866. His name was William J. Curtis, but I’ll just call him Bill. He and his wife Miranda went to Waco, Texas, and found themselves in another war, a war which had recently seen the greatest triumph of First Nation arms over the encroaching Americans that ever happened.

This story, of which most Americans are woefully ignorant, is told very well by S.C. Gwynne in Empire of the Summer Moon, which I heartily recommend.

Once upon a time, there was a small, impoverished weak First Nation eking out an existence on the southeastern Colorado plains. Then horses came. These people quickly transformed their whole way of life, became the best horse warriors since at least the Mongols, and were probably better than them one-on-one. They were the Comanche.

Adopting a totally nomadic lifestyle and shunning agriculture, they pushed the Apache out of western Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and eastern New Mexico and established something of a nomadic empire. They utterly destroyed a few Spanish settlements west and northwest of San Antonio. Spanish and later Mexican attempts to subjugate them all failed.

Then the Texans came. Better organized, more numerous, better armed, and ruthless as any conquistador, they waged a campaign of expansion, terror, and settlement against the Comanche and any other First Nations in the way(most especially the Cherokee in East Texas, whom the Texas Rangers pretty much genocided during the years of the Republic of Texas), and built towns deep in Comanche country—Dallas, Fort Worth, Abilene, Lubbock.

The Comanche furiously fought back with raids, often at night, on isolated settlements. They fought for their land and their way of life. They were slowly losing, but then they got lucky. The American Civil War broke out, most of the armed forces of the State of Texas were sent east to fight the Union, and the Comanche took full advantage of the situation.

They increased their raids. Lubbock, Abilene, and Fort Worth were first abandoned by the settlers and then burned to the ground by the Comanche. Dallas, Waco, Austin, and San Antonio were raided. Over four years, the Comanche rolled back the area of white settlement by three hundred miles over at least a four hundred mile front.

Jealous yet, Zelensky? That’s a serious can of whoop-ass right there. And Bill and Miranda Curtis decided to move right into it, along with thousands of other refugees of one sort or the other from the aftermath of civil war. Why? Well, they had next to nothing. The material conditions in the United States at the time gave them an out—seize your own land and make a go of it, anybody else already living there be damned. So that’s precisely what they did.

They moved with Bill’s brother and a few other settlers right into the Texas Panhandle. The Comanche were not happy about this, and they fought. The brother, my great-uncle, was caught by the Comanche and tortured to death in a gruesome way to send a message: Leave our land or this may happen to you. It was no worse than what the Texas Rangers did to the Indians they caught, and was in fact a reflection of the exact same message.

Bill and Miranda stayed, and prospered, thanks to several US Cavalry campaigns against the Comanche, the most decisive of which was led by the 10th Cavalry, better known as the Buffalo Soldiers. They didn’t so much defeat the Comanche in battle as as to starve them into submission by the simple expedient of slaughtering buffalo, the species upon which the entire Comanche culture was based.

The Comanche went to the reservation, and my family owned that farm for another three generations, before abandoning the fight of the small family farm against corporations like Monsanto in the 1980s. Blood on the scarecrow, blood on the plow, but I digress.

It’s easy to draw some historical parallels to Palestine here. An indigenous population was forced off its land to reservations where they were at the mercy of the invading power. The rhetoric of the invaders was similar to that of the Israeli government, to the average Israeli-on-the-street in social media, and to their rabid Zionist supporters in the United States today.

While the war against the Comanche raged, American newspapers were full of quotes like:

The only good Indian is a dead Indian. The Indians are vicious, uncivilized savages who don’t know how to make land profitable, and therefore must make way for those who do. It is Our Manifest Destiny to rule this continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. We give the Indians chance after chance for peace, but their savage nature prevents them from honoring their treaties. God is clearly on our side. Kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out. Nits make lice. $10 Bounty per Indian Buck Scalps, $5 for Squaws. Buffalo Hides $1 each.

No wonder what Israelis have been saying about Palestinians rhymes so strongly with me(all quotes from googling “quotes on Palestinians”):

We must defend ourselves against the wild beasts. —Benjamin Netanyahu

Beat them(the Palestinians) up, not once but repeatedly, until it’s unbearable. —Benjamin Netanyahu

They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.—Ayalet Shahed, Israeli Minister of Justice

There is no such thing as a Palestinian people. It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist. —Golda Meir

Stop right there! Now the historical rhyme jarringly ends and the discordance begins.

My settler ancestors never thought that the First Nations people never existed, after all. WTF? We’ll get to that, but first, let’s ask what happened to the Comanche and other indigenous Americans after they surrendered(well, except for the Seminoles, who never technically did, which is awesome).

The last great Comanche chief, Quanah Parker, was celebrated by the American press. He was also exploited by his capitalist backers and hawkers of the time, as was Geronimo years later. Welcome to the American working class and all its woes, but also welcome to being American citizens, worthy and honorable enemies of yesteryear.

The United States, for all its faults, never officially described itself as a nation-state of one and only one specific ethnicity or religion. It was never, in spite of the best efforts of many, a white nation, an English nation, or a Christian nation. The whole idea, as was taught to generations of Americans, was to establish a rule of law with the consent of the governed, with the promise of liberty and justice for all.

You just can’t make a promise like that if you describe your nation as a “Jewish state,” which is what Israel explicitly does. The very term describes a place where Jews either have all the power or only Jews live there.

The Palestinians haven’t even been allowed to surrender. Instead, their population has had one of two things happen to it. Either it has been concentrated into Gaza or steadily decreasing pockets on the West Bank, or it has fled altogether, kind of like the Armenians have.

Indeed, it is impossible for Israel to allow the Palestinians to surrender, become Israeli citizens with the right to vote and everything, and still remain a Jewish state. Golda Meir’s rationalization that since they were Arabs, they could just find another Arab nation to live, crookedly flows from that inescapable fact.

The Israeli government wouldn’t dare consider a siege and ground invasion of Gaza that could kill a million children(chillingly enough, and as Zionists never tire of reminding us, there were a million Jewish children exterminated during the Holocaust), were it not for the support of a greater imperial power, the United States.

The Comanche could not appeal to another power to intervene and help them. The Americans were not financed and armed by a nation on the other side of the Atlantic. Israel is a completely different story. Not only is it a nation founded on the principle of claiming a parcel of land for a specific religion and ethnicity, it has always been little more than an imperial tool.

The British wanted Israel established as a check against the socialistic pan-Arab nationalism of the 1940s, mainly to help the British Empire control the Suez Canal and Arab oil. The US Empire used Israel as a foil in the Cold War against Soviet influence, and also as an ally in its quest to control and exploit the vast oil reserves in the region.

Israel cannot survive without American aid. The Israelis know it, the Palestinians know it, everybody knows it. The Palestinians are forcing we Americans to make a choice—to watch, and to fund, the Armenianization of those Palestinians who survive what looks very much like an merciless ethnic cleansing campaign, or to oppose it.

The most effective way to oppose it is to stop funding it. I think both my ancestors and the Comanche who fought them would say the same thing—If the Israelis are going to make the entire former Mandate of Palestine a Jewish state by ethnically cleansing the indigenous people there, at least make them pay the costs of their own atrocity.

Don’t ask me, or my fellow Americans who are still Comanche and other First Nations people, to fund what amounts to a genocide more complete than anything even Phil Sheridan ever did. It is not in our interests, and is a stain on our name and our common heritage.

Thank you for reading, good day and good luck.