BACKGROUNDER: POWER AND FREEDOM
SEPTEMBER 22, 2004. The founders of America stood back a little and said, "We want to guarantee personal liberty. In order to do that, we have to create a structure that will make sure liberty exists."
Already, there was the hint of contradiction---but no nation had ever invented itself without a government. Who could accept a country with zero government? That would be a vacuum, and into it all sorts of corrupt people would flow.
So the founders invented a government that would do two things: guarantee the continuance of personal liberty and "oppose itself" on enough fronts (checks and balances) so that it would never overwhelm liberty.
We see what has happened to that plan.
Because there is a deeper principle at work.
Every organization that reaches a certain size goes on to protect ITSELF against real and imagined opponents. And in the process, it adopts the tacit understanding that its own survival is the number one objective.
Survival is interpreted to mean, among other things, growth.
The fungus is born.
"If we get bigger, we can endure attacks and still exist."
"If we get big enough, we can forestall or defend against all attacks."
"If we become the one and only force, nothing can kill us."
All of the above is the best argument for decentralization of power.
In order for that to occur, a certain trust factor among the people must be restored.
If power is shattered and re-established in a million ways, all sorts of people will become leaders.
A VARIETY of technologies and arts will emerge. Some of these will appear strange and even threatening to those who are forwarding their own arts and technologies.
Nevertheless, the perverse desire for ONENESS must be scrapped.
The new slogan would be: from one, the many.
All tyrannies rely on the popular hunger for the One.
All tyrannies rely on the popular perception that, if enough amenities of living and enough sharing seem to be flowing from the one Power, it would be a dangerous mistake to dismantle that Power.
What escapes notice is the progress of the fungus itself, the progress of the one fungus which, more and more, is ceding to itself the right to control everyone.
Eventually, under a tyranny, the people can no longer even imagine a different fundamental state of affairs. Therefore, they say, "If you take the One away, what will we have? What will we do? How will we function? How will we preserve order? How will we stop our worst nightmares from coming true?"
The translation of that confusion and fear is: "I can't think. I can't imagine. I can't initiate. I can't invent. I can only accept what is coming down the pipeline."
The One Power begins to understand that this passivity and confusion on the part of the people is its own best guarantee for future control. And so it pushes forward programs to mantain that overall state of mind in the people.
Which state of mind, of course, is the opposite of liberty.
JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com

A HEADS-UP FOR PREGNANT WOMEN
SEPTEMBER 22, 2004. Here is a press release from the Kaiser group. It reports on a new study that summarizes the effects of medical drugs given to pregnant women.
About 5% of these women are prescribed drugs known to be harmful to fetuses. That’s 1 out of 20 pregnant women.
38% of pregnant women are given drugs whose safety (vis-à-vis the fetus) is UNKNOWN.
And another 5% of pregnant women are taking drugs that “can pose a risk to the fetus” but may have benefits that outweigh the risks. Yeah, well, we’d have to see about that.
So, all in all---from what is undoubtedly a conservative estimate---48% of pregnant women are being given potentially dangerous drugs.
I don’t know what you call it, but I call it a CRIME.
You’ll notice, in the release below, that this whole insanity is laid at the door of a lack of a computerized system that could warn prescribing doctors.
Come ON.
Let’s say you’re a doctor and you have patients who are pregnant women. You’re going to blithely sail through and not bother to research the drugs you’re dealing? You’re going to leave it to chance? You’re going to wait for a piece of software that’ll make you feel safe?
In particular, ob/gyn docs give out the same basic drugs over and over to pregnant women. It has to occur to them that they should carefully check out the effects of these drugs before they write scripts.
But let’s blame it all on a lack of software.
Or let’s blame it on a storm on Saturn or Abe Lincoln or Plato or a worm in India in 253 BC.
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
Pregnancy & Childbirth Almost 5% of Pregnant Women Prescribed Drugs Known To Be Harmful to Fetuses, Study Says
Nearly 5% of pregnant women are prescribed drugs that are known to pose a risk to fetuses, and more than one-third of pregnant women are prescribed drugs that are not proven to be safe for use during pregnancy, according to a study published in the August issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Reuters Health reports (Reuters Health, 9/17). Dr. Susan Andrade of the University of Massachusetts Medical School and colleagues studied data from automated databases from eight HMOs involved in the Health Maintenance Research Network of the Centers for Education and Research on Therapeutics. They also analyzed data from 152,531 deliveries that occurred between 1996 and 2000 (Andrade et al., American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, August 2004).
Results The researchers found that 64% of the pregnant women studied were prescribed drugs other than vitamins during the 270 days preceding delivery; 37.8% of the pregnant women were prescribed drugs that are not known to be safe during pregnancy; 4.8% of women were prescribed drugs that can pose a risk to a fetus but may be acceptable due to the benefits of the drug; and 4.6% of women were prescribed drugs that are "absolutely contraindicated" during pregnancy, according to Reuters Health. The researchers concluded that until computerized order systems that can prevent or warn against the prescription of drugs that pose risks to fetuses are more widely available, routine medication audits and educational programs for physicians might identify and prevent the "risky" prescription of drugs for pregnant women, Reuters Health reports (Reuters Health, 9/17). They also concluded that the study "highlights the importance of the need to understand the effects of these medications" on pregnant women and fetuses (American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, August 2004).
End of Kaiser release
JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com

SECRET OPERATIONS, PART 4
SEPTEMBER 22, 2004. Re-running series on secret ops....
JULY 2. What secrets lie behind the war against Iraq? Why was it fought? Who really ordered it? Was it the neo-con group attached to Bush? Was it Bush, seeking revenge on behalf of his father?
These are all important questions.
Both Iraq and Afghanistan are looking more and more like quagmires these days. No way to control the populations, the rebels, the internal warring factions; no way to set up stable governments that will last.
Quite some time ago I suggested that Bush had been suckered into those wars, egged on by 9/11 and his own predispositions. And that nations like France and Germany could see the coming messes in Iraq and wanted no part of that. As part of the EU, they were rooting for Bush’s Waterloo. Economic wars and all that.
If Bush’s reactions to 9/11 were so predictable, was there a force that wanted to sucker him into war with Iraq, that wanted to bog down the US in a lasting and hopeless cul de sac?
Who is who on the game board?
Let’s review 9/11 briefly. After all, it was the trigger event that started the whole “war on terrorism” and all the ensuing consequences.
Did David Rockefeller, the man who surely was deeply involved in ousting Nixon, whose brother Nelson became vice-president under Ford, who told a European audience that “free trade,” his precious baby, was back on track after Nixon had torpedoed it----did David have some part in 9/11, the attacks that “sacrificed” another of his babies, the Twin Towers in NYC? Or was he caught off-guard and enraged?
9/11 was a huge economic hit against the US. It also marked a new level of “global concern” about terrorism. In that sense, 9/11 seemed to promote Rockefellerian globalism. Batten down the hatches, build up global military power to go to war against Al Qaeda. Reduce basic individual freedoms. Become Orwellian. Create enemies everywhere. Circle the planetary wagons. Step up surveillance of citizens from Hong Kong to Miami, from South Africa to Alaska. Put everyone in a database. All dreams of the globalists.
Was Rockefeller himself part of the 9//11 op?
And if so, at what level? Did he order it? Was he fronting for something even higher on the power ladder?
Was 9/11, an op coming out of the planetary controlling elite, a majority decision, or was it forced by some renegade faction?
These are not easy questions, but simply asking them begins to clarify the situation.
I’m going to go out on a few limbs here, and if it turns out that I saw myself off, so be it.
9/11 was launched by a faction of the global elite, a militant faction headed up by the ideological descendants of the Nazis. Their aim everywhere and always is chaos. Extreme chaos. (“Cause chaos, and then build on the ashes.”) They are not interested in boiling the frog slowly. Slow boil is the basic strategy of the majority of this elite. But in this case, the smaller faction pre-empted long range strategies for global control.
And yet? Is that the whole story? No.
Certain transnational corporate interests have been looking at the probable distribution of oil resources on the planet, and have determined that SOMETHING has to quicken the resolve to take over oil wherever it can be found. And of course, in a propaganda sense, from 9/11 flowed the war against Iraq, and Iraq has lots of oil.
Is there more?
Who, like the Nazis, longs for less order and more chaos? Who has made its greatest gains in times of chaos and trouble and plagues and wars? Who has actually worked with the Nazis in the past? Who wants to return the industrialized world to a more primitive state? Who depends on that primitive state to bring more adherents into the orbit of its crazed ideology? Whose mission is the control of minds everywhere through fear?
Remember, 9/11 was a watershed moment that shattered the sense of complacent security for millions and millions of people. It was the kickoff for a whole string of events, ranging from the anthrax scare to the DC sniper episode to SARS to two wars.
Every major intelligence operation employs layers and layers of cutouts who do their jobs, for their own reasons, who tell various lies.
If we are talking about Bush or Perle or a quite militant faction within the government of Israel or any number of other people, they would, in the final analysis, be cutouts. That is my conclusion at this time----after talking to a number of my long-time sources on intelligence matters.
At the top of the heap would be the core militant controlling faction of the Vatican. The core militant faction of the Order of Jesuits.
The Vatican and the Jesuits have many faces. Good faces, nice faces, kind faces, boring faces, brilliant faces, criminal faces, saintly faces, controlling faces.
The fact that an Italian has become the first temporary president of Europe in the wake of the final draft of the European constitution is no accident. It is a nod to the Vatican.
And it is no accident, as Tupper Saussy has pointed out in his tremendous book, Rulers of Evil, that the banking house of the Rothschilds was, long ago, appointed to handle and manage Vatican money.
For centuries, the core of the Jesuit Order (and I’m not talking about a few Jesuits in Cleveland or Memphis or Sri Lanka trying to get food for the poor) has been refining and enacting a plan to put the planet under the theocratic rule of God’s agent on Earth, the Pope.
Except the Pope is the figurehead for the Jesuit Order and its own Pope.
This plan is of a magnitude that makes “the American agenda” or “the Communist agenda” or the “Israeli agenda” or “the CIA agenda” pale by comparison.
In its details, the plan puts nothing out of bounds. Every crime is permissible. Every crime.
Any ideology or cause can be used, temporarily, to forward the overall agenda.
And there is a place where, by the way, control of the foreign policy of the United States melds into a blur that includes such masters as the World Trade Organization (the old Trilateral Commission), the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberger Group, key London banks-----and the Jesuit Order, working in part through its outpost at Georgetown University.
At this level, there is both competition and cooperation.
In the Jesuit scheme, the elevation and then the trashing of Bush would be one detail. Because DEMORALIZATION of populations is always front and center. It brings on passivity and then a desire for older forms of authority. Simpler forms. Deeper surrender to mind control.
Re-creating a more primitive and impoverished state of planetary society is a goal that is shared by the Vatican and the militant faction of Islam. In this matter, they are on the same page.
In the pages of the PREMIUM CONTENT section of my site, there is much more material on these basic subjects-----on the control of planet Earth.
Both the human mind and its controllers combine to create periods of creation and destruction---renaissances and dark ages. Over and over. It’s one way to run a successful prison.
JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com
SECRET OPERATIONS, PART 3
SEPTEMBER 21, 2004. Re-running series on secret ops...
JULY 1. You can think of this article as opinion, as guess, as fact, as metaphor, as lunacy, as lie, as speculation, as whatever suits you. Be my guest. I’m not going to bother labeling it, and I’m not going to offer evidence.
Earth, one of the millions or billions of locales that sustain conscious life, is, as a number of science fiction writers have suggested, a prison planet.
It may not have been built or seeded to be that, but it became that.
It became a place for anomalous individuals who just didn’t fit into their home-planet cultures, who fought against tyranny, who took hold of a crazy idea called freedom.
Of course, among the prisoners shipped to Earth over millennia, there were people who had used freedom as an excuse to commit many crimes.
So Earth has always been a mixed bag.
On a considerable number of other planets, art as we know it did not exist. Art was thought of as a crime, an outburst of emotion and intellect proceeding from a warped consciousness, having the effect of stirring up the masses.
On these planets, order was considered the mark of an advanced civilization. Order meant top-down control. Machine order. Cog in wheel order. Every citizen had his place. Appointed. You do this. You do that. Your function is ABV2-4 and nothing else.
War, disease, grinding poverty were enemies of order. So over time they were eliminated. They were used as reasons to impose machine order.
A person who rejected the order was killed, re-conditioned, put in prison, or shipped off to a place like Earth.
Earth was looked on as a kind of island where the worst characters were sent.
It was observed, as an experiment in motion, to see what would emerge from the collection of crazy criminals.
Eventually, it was decided that Earth too needed order, and the first target of that order was human consciousness. The mind. The mind needed to believe that slavery for most was part of the big cosmic plan. A caste system. A gift from God or the gods. A punishment for past sins. Sins committed in one life or over many lives.
The Roman Church and the ruling spiritual force called Hinduism and the religious dynasties of Egypt were three of the most important centers for this mind control. Through an interaction between those Earthly religious leaders and their off-planet patrons, cosmologies were built, rules were instituted, repression was enacted on a large scale, and wealth was accumulated.
Myths were woven. Messiah myths, sacrifice myths, guilt myths, obedience myths, salvation myths.
Myths about good and evil.
All of these myths played on the desire for liberation. That desire was channeled through the structures of these religious organizations. The desire was given what appeared to be a path into fulfillment.
Of course, that was a lie. The paths were just dead ends. They were symbols and images which captured the consciousness of individuals.
Eventually, the whole idea of reincarnation was debunked in the West. It was thought that, if people believed they only lived once, they would feel more bound to the fake liberation myths. They would understand less about their power.
In the East, reincarnation was embroiled in insane notions about a steady progress toward higher and higher castes---depending on one’s behavior. One could slip back and become a cricket or a worm, too.
Karma. That was one of the great myths. It was created, in part, so that the underclass could look up at their masters and say, “They’ll get their punishment for what they’re doing. No one escapes retribution. It’s all about action and reaction.”
All of the myths were built to invent order.
Order could be organized around anything. A few huge pointed stones in the desert. A snake with a bite. A priest with a key to heaven in his pocket. A goat with one eye and a limp. A shroud a thousand years old. A candy bar wrapper in a glass case.
The kind of order I’m talking about has one great function, at the level of the individual. It makes him think he is looking toward something he wants from the inside of something he doesn’t want.
Instead of looking at what he doesn’t want from the outside.
Order puts people in a place they don’t like, and makes them yearn for escape to a place they’re sure they’ll like.
A perfect OP.
Planet Earth is an op.
In a sense, the whole UFO phenomenon is working that angle, too. As in, “We’re all trapped on this planet and now we see we have visitors from somewhere else. Maybe they’ll help us get from here to a better place.”
Re-enforcing the notion that human consciousness belongs on Earth and seeks a better destination.
On the inside looking out. That’s the op.
Such a good op very few people can imagine any other state of affairs.
Then, other ops are set up to puncture the order, which makes people yearn for the order with more intensity. Blow up a building. I wish we could all return to the better time. We need more order.
People become convinced that without the order we have, chaos and crime would reign. It’s one or the other. Freedom doesn’t really exist. It’s a lie used to promote lawlessness, because look at what people do when they go outside the order. We need a tighter order. No one can handle being outside the order. Impossible. Everyone becomes a McVeigh or an Oswald or a school shooter or a terrorist.
Something, though, about the word SECRET triggers echoes in the mind. People begin to gnaw on this word and dimly suspect we are living inside an op, inside a matrix. People begin to look for clues that will tell them something about how the order is constructed to give the false appearance of a complete and seamless and self-contained landscape.
People begin to pull on tag-ends of clues.
People begin to report experiences of a certain weirdness, experiences that suggest the order is a fake painting that has bamboozled us.
People begin to talk about other dimensions of experience.
And as crazy as that talk may sound, more echoes trigger the mind to think, to explore.
I can tell you this. Some readers of this site, from the beginning, latched on to my investigations----and then cut and ran away as soon as they suspected I was really going somewhere they felt was dangerous. They usually used words like responsibility and order and values and morals and tradition as they sped away from nomorefakenews.
It was interesting.
They often sent me final messages about how the Democrats or the Republicans needed our support to weather the coming storms.
In other words, they fed me an op and hoped I would bite. I didn’t.
Being part of an op gives one a sense of security. I’m playing the right game. I’m fitting in. Things are going well. There is light at the end of the tunnel. I’m going Home. The tides are in my favor. All will be revealed. The revelation is at hand. The correct currents of energy are carrying me along to where I need to be. I’m just a particle in a perfect wave.
When Earth was designated a prison, consciousness itself was designated a relatively small space.
Funny thing, but every time I go to a museum, I look at paintings that tell me just the opposite. Consciousness is as wide as it wants to be. It can use harmony and dissonance and who knows what else to build other universes and spaces and times---and even in the bowels of dung-ridden caves, in the dark, there is always someone who picks up a sharp stone and scratches a few shapes on the wall. Saying, “I’m not what you think I am.”
And when I go into great cathedrals and see the religious tales portrayed on walls and ceilings and in windows, I see something else there too. I see the total contradiction of what the cathedral stands for. I see the order, the matrix, left behind. I see another universe. Other universes. All over the place, wherever I look. Right there.
Gorgeous.
And these paintings say, “This is what freedom can give birth to. You don’t have to think about escaping the order through this myth you see portrayed on the wall. What you’re seeing is not the myth. Not at all. It’s the spontaneous creation of a dimension. The morons who paid to have this fake myth fleshed out received just the opposite.”
And so it is.
JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com

INTERNATIONAL CONTROL OF NUTRITION---WHO CARES ABOUT YOU?
SEPTEMBER 21, 2004. Here are some sources on what is happening: go there and read: do it.
www.iahf.com
www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/
...and google "Scott Tips"
These and other sources will fill you in on what is happening at Codex, the global body organized to decide FOR YOU what nutritional supplements (and in what potency) are legal and sellable.
Say what?!?!
Codex is about to have a meeting in Bonn (Nov.1). It is a key, key event in making this decision.
Don't know what Codex is? Never heard of it? Go to the sources I listed and read. Don't wait.
The plan is fairly simple. The global pharmaceutical industry has watched in horror, over the last 20 years, as more and more people have decided to take their health into their own hands.
Millions and millions of people have left drugs on the shelf and have gone to nutrients.
Nutrients come in bottles, too.
They are in pill form and capsule form.
They sort of look like drugs.
Drug giants have made a number of moves to buy out and take over nutritional companies.
The drug companies want EVERYTHING.
Through political connections, these drug companies have backed Codex, the body that has been meeting and shaping a NUTRITIONAL POLICY for (ultimately) the whole planet.
This policy asserts that supplements are basically drugs because they affect health. By perverse definition, that which affects health must be a drug.
It's kind of like saying that which can bring about peace must be a weapon, because weapons are used to fight war, and war always results in peace...and therefore peace conferences should be owned by munitions companies.
Codex is evil, and it was created to extend evil.
I can't say it more plainly than that.
At the root of this whole war against the populace is the question: ARE YOU FREE TO CREATE HEALTH FOR YOURSELF OR NOT?
If you don't care, you're in great shape, because Codex will handle it for you.
If you care, imagine this nightmare: all nutritional supplements can only be sold at drastically reduced potencies. Many nutrients can only be dispensed after a medical doctor writes a script (price goes way up). That doctor won't write the script unless he decides the nutrient is proper for you. And many, many nutritional supplements will simply be outlawed.
If some small nutritional company wants to market a nutrient, it has to spend millions of dollars testing it (impossible) and proving to various government bodies that it is safe and effective.
This, despite the fact that nutrients have a remarkable, remarkable track record of safety. This, despite the fact that, in the US alone, 100,000 people are KILLED every year by medical drugs correctly prescribed by doctors and approved by the FDA as safe and effective.
Codex is an integral element of the medical cartel, which is seeking to install a medical model for every citizen of the planet. That model includes medical and psychiatric screening, from birth, diagnoses of various disorders, and toxic drugging.
The history of Codex meetings, to this point, reveals a complete disregard for champions of nutritional supplements and champions of freedom of choice.
The South African delegation, for example, which has stepped up to the plate and demanded this freedom, has been ignored and squashed. In fact, that delegation won't even be present at the vital upcoming November 1 Bonn meeting of Codex.
You'll get a flavor of the meetings when you find articles by attorney Scott Tips, who has attended one of these kangaroo courts.
The European Union ( you know, the kinder, gentler United States of Europe) has constantly been deferred to by the presiding Codex chairman. And the EU wants pharmaceutical oligarchy in all matters.
This is the face of globalism: create a structure that is so far removed from the individual that the individual feels powerless to act.
Of course, the individual and the group dedicated to freedom can act.
Codex and its ongoing machinations have been ignored, for the most part, by the mainstream press, which is linked like a brother to the pharmaceutical industry.
Political parties basically don't know about Codex or don't care. In the US, they're far too busy launching attacks on the military records of Kerry and Bush.
Kerry and Bush care about Codex the way an ant on my bathroom sink cares about ice on one of Jupiter's moons.
Pick your favorite political pundit. Write him or her and ask about Codex. See if you get anything back. See if he or she knows what you're talking about.
The doom machine is moving. The machine views you as a unit that can be mined for illnesses and drugged for profit.
Lie down or stand up.
JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com

ohh new template nice.

Prelude to the Incident

During the total eclipse of the sun on January 1, 1889, God revealed to Jack Wilson that Wilson was the Messiah. The new religion formed by this revelation was the Ghost Dance Religion, a syncratic mix of Paiute spiritualism and Shaker Christianity. God informed Wilson that earthquakes would be sent to kill all whites. However, Wilson taught that until that judgement Indians must live in peace and not refuse work from whites.

Two early converts to the Ghost Dance Religion were the Lakota warriors of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation Kicking Bear and Short Bull. Both stated that Wilson levitated before them, though they interpreted his statements differently. They rejected Wilson's claims to be the Messiah, and believed that the Messiah would not arrive until 1891. They also rejected Wilson's pacifism, and believed that special garments, called Ghost Spirits, would act as bullet proof armor.

Though perhaps a majority of Pine Ridge Lakota converted to the Ghost Dance Religion, Chief Sitting Bull was not among them. However, he granted practioners religious freedom. Federal officials misconstrued Sitting Bull's tolerance as full support, and attempted to arrest him on December 15, 1890. For unclear reasons a gun battle ensued, and Sitting Bull was killed.

Sitting Bull's half-brother Big Foot took over the tribe. On the way to help his fellow chief Red Cloud make peace with the whites, Big Foot was intercepted by Major Samuel Whitside of the 7th Cavalry. Whitside transferred Big Foot to an army ambulence due to his severe pneumonia and escorted the Indians to their camp for the night at Wounded Knee Creek. The army supplied the Indians with some tents and rations, and then conducted a census, determining that there were 120 males and 230 women and children.

The next morning the Sioux found that additional 7th Cavalry troopers with more Hotchkiss guns had arrived during the night. The canons were set up on a low hill overlooking the Indian encampment. Colonel John Forsyth had assumed command of the soldiers. Forsyth informed his command that the Sioux were to be taken to a military camp in Omaha, Nebraska.

i grabbed this off bombshell, something to do with the wizard of oz, to read later..

The Massacre, or, The Battle

That morning the Indians were summoned to a meeting in their own camp, issued army hardtack for rations, and informed that they must hand over all firearms. Soldiers attempted to disarm the Sioux, but fears of hidden weapons persisted. Not satisfied with the weapons voluntarily stacked by the Indians, the soldiers began to search the tents, and removed anything that could be used as a weapon. Seized material ranged from firearms to extra tent stakes and hatchets for cutting firewood. Next the soldiers began to search the warriors. As the efforts to locate weapons continued, the Indians became more irritated and unruly.

The last warrior the soldiers attempted to disarm was Black Coyote. Some accounts claim that Black Coyote was deaf or otherwise impaired. Regardless, the seizure was unsuccessful and a weapon discharged. Fearing an attack, other soldiers on the rise began firing the Hotchkiss guns. Chaos ensued, as soldiers working with the Indians were caught in the crossfire, and warriors ran to re-arm themselves from the stacked weapons.

When the shooting stopped, 153 Indians lay dead, along with 25 cavalrymen. Big Foot lay among the dead. Perhaps a majority of the soldiers killed died by friendly fire. Wounded soldiers and Indians were placed in wagons and taken to Pine Ridge. Approximately 50 Indians arrived at Pine Ridge, but were kept outside in the cold until quarters were found. Approximately 150 Indians remained unaccounted for. Most sources believe that these fled the federal army, and an unknown number subsequently died of wounds and exposure.

The Aftermath

The military hired civilians to bury the dead Indians after an intervening snowstorm had abated. Arriving at the battleground, the burial party found the deceased frozen in contorted positions by the freezing weather. They were gathered up and placed in a common grave. Forsyth was exonerated of any wrong-doing.

Reaction to the battle among the American public was generally favorable. 150 Medals of Honor were awarded to federal soldiers. Many Americans living near the Indian reservations interpreted the battle as a defeat of a murderous cult, though some confused Ghost Dancers with Indians in general. In an editorial in response to the event, a young newspaper editor, L. Frank Baum, later famous as the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, wrote in the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer on December 20, 1891:

The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, inorder to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past.

In the 20th century, reaction has become more critical. Many consider the incident changed to be one of the most grievous atrocities in American history. It has been commemorated in the popular protest song written by Buffy St. Marie, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, as well as the book by native American historian Dee Brown by the same name.

Historically, Wounded Knee is generally considered to be the end of the Indian Wars, the series of conflicts between U.S. forces and Native tribes that had been taking place since the 1700s, as well as the end of the frontier, and the end of the Ghost Dance Religion.