Just Be Grateful The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Isn't Defending Its Property The Way A White Republican Man Would

[motonoggin]

Just Be Grateful The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Isn't Defending Its Property The Way A White Republican Man Would

 

The Standing Rock Sioux would likely be well within their rights to use lethal force against their attackers, since the DAPL is illegal and it's their own land they're protecting.

According to a fascinating RT interview last week with attourney and environmental activist Robert Kennedy, Jr., the Dakota Access Pipeline is, as it stands right now, illegal. Kennedy asserts that Energy Transfer Partners, the corporate owners of Dakota Access, have been trying to exploit a loophole that doesn't even exist to enable them to construct their pipeline without having to provide a full environmental impact statement. 

“This project is huge – 1,200 miles – only 7 miles less than the XL Pipeline, and the XL Pipeline got a full environmental impact statement,” Kennedy said. “It’s going to create more carbon pollution than 29 coal burning power plants. It crosses and disrupts 209 streams, and there are all kinds of other problems, such as cultural areas, Indian graveyards, and these kinds of things – any of those individually you would need to get a full environmental impact statement.”

Why do they want to avoid providing an environmental impact statement? According to Kennedy, it's because this would mean providing the American people with a full cost-benefit analysis of the pipeline, which will immediately lose all public support when people see how much they're losing and how little they're gaining.

"They would have to show how many jobs we are producing, where is the oil going," Kennedy said, which would show Americans that only a few dozen jobs will be created and all the oil exported overseas. "What this project is going to do is enrich a few billionaires… but it’s going to impoverish the rest of the country. And it’s going to injure humanity profoundly."

If Kennedy is correct, the pipeline's construction itself is currently illegal. The owners of Standing Rock are therefore not only well within their rights to protect their land, they are also well within their rights to defend it against an illegal attacker. If they were to fight back with arms against the violent assaults of police officers and mercenary security forces, they would have a pretty strong case for having done so in self defense.

Just a reminder -- this is not about peaceful assembly. Of course they have the right to peaceful assembly in public areas too, but seeing as they are protecting their own property then the injustice that is occurring right now at Standing Rock goes much much further than that. 

Do you remember back in July when an off-duty police officer shot and killed a 20 year-old Missouri man when he threw a concrete planter through the officer's window after an argument online? The officer was never charged; I don't recall anybody even bringing up the possibility. Well, now you've got police officers ripping off a girl's arm with a concussion grenade and using life-threatening weapons to assault people who are only protecting their land from an illegal and incredibly damaging invader. 

If an officer of the Morton County Sheriff’s Department was to be shot at or even killed by one of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe members or any of their guests, then a court of law could very well find in favor of the defendant as it is a case of defending one's property.  

Now, I'm not suggesting they do that. Imagine the freak out from the echo chamber if people actually started standing up for themselves defensively rather than the passive aggressive Gandhi route we liberals love to take. It would be a PR disaster for a start and only add to the chaos and probably turn into wholesale slaughter. I think it would be a terrible mistake because it would lead to many deaths.

But let's be clear here -- the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe not only has  the right to peaceful assembly, they have far more rights than that because it is their land. Let's not get confused here. This is not a case of people assembling peacefully in the streets to protest something. This is their land and they have every right to decide what happens to it. Even the UN agrees.

GENEVA (22 September 2016) – The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, today called on the United States to halt the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline as it poses a significant risk to the drinking water of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and threatens to destroy their burial grounds and sacred sites. - United Nations Human Rights, Office of the High Commissioner

Even in the case of peaceful assembly, the police would be found to be at fault. You cannot take such drastic and potentially fatal measures against a group of people who are only assembling to protest, and not destroying property or blocking roadways. That is wrong and they are in the wrong in that case. But that's not the case; it's far worse than that. 

These people are not protesters. They are protectors. They are protecting their own property. These people are defending their own property against intruders. The police are very much on the wrong side of the law here because not only are they defending trespassers, but they are attacking for the trespassers with outrageous physical force. 

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is showing great restraint by just peacefully being on their own land and not moving from their own land. Great restraint and forebearance. Just keep that in mind when you are talking to people who are confused by what they're seeing, because usually you think of the police being on the side of the good guys. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe are up against illegal aggressors trespassing on their land, land which they not only have a right to protect, but have the right to defend with arms according to U.S. law.

I know this is not a comfortable position for a progressive to take. This means accepting that taking up arms to defend yourself is a right, something that I myself have argued strongly against in the past. And I actually don't think that even in this case they should, it will just escalate the situation and lives will be lost. 

But when the government, corporation and militarized police team up against a people peaceably defending their own land against hostile aggressors, we have to be clear about how far out of bounds the government, corporations and militarized police have stepped. If they were a simple burglar, a court of law would uphold the owner's right to use whatever force necessary to defend their family and property. 

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe don't just have a right to be there, they have the right to throw out anyone they don't want there. The police should be helping them. The police (and the government as complicit, silent accomplices) have found themselves on the wrong side of the law here and we have to let them know that that is the case right now, not in some dry courtroom years from now when all the unnecessary blood has been shed. This needs to stop right now. No one has any right to force themselves on land that is not theirs, and they certainly do not have the right to mow down the rightful owners of that land with brute, militarized force. 

What is occurring right now at Standing Rock today is the most shameful display of abuse of power we have seen since the white man first stepped off his boat onto American soil and shouted "Mine! Mine! It's all mine!" at its bewildered inhabitants and proceeded to destroy everything in sight. When all you armchair liberals are done kvetching about fascism coming to America under Trump, pull your heads out of the echo chamber for a second and see how fascism is happening right now, under Obama.

Yeah so, happy Thanksgiving y'all. This year's turkey is stuffed with more than a hint of irony. 

http://www.newslogue.com/debate/133

[Kivalo]

I thought the other thread said this was private property not owned by the injuns?

[Turf]

That article is absolutely bullshit. The tribe never even went to the meetings when the pipeline was in planning and design phase. Although they were invited. The Army corps has signed of on this project sometime ago. The pussy president we have right now is to much of a wimp to support the project as it was signed off by the corps. 

[Turf]

Also it is all on private property and government land.

[Jimmy Snacks]

Moto the do nothing revolutionary has gone off the fucking rails.

[Snake]

18 minutes ago, Biggie Smails said:

Moto the do nothing revolutionary has gone off the fucking rails.

Hardly. He posts here all day.

[Rod]

It's not on injun land. 

[Rod]

Lol bernie is running around telling everyone that they shouldn't be building the pipeline on indian land  

[Ez ryder]

The Standing Rock Sioux would likely be well within their rights to use lethal force against their attackers, since the DAPL is illegal and it's their own land they're protecting.

 

U are a gullible fool it is not part of the rez . just because they think everything is there's because there ancestors were here first dose not make it so.

[CarlSpackler]

Fucking retards...

[CarlSpackler]

All of the reservations exist at " the pleasure of the President". What will happen if the loose cannon decides to tell the leeches to fuck off?

[Rod]

Just now, CarlSpackler said:

All of the reservations exist at " the pleasure of the President". What will happen if the loose cannon decides to tell the leeches to fuck off?

I hope he does 

[CarlSpackler]

It would the be the the best thing to ever happen to the sad reservation bastards, they are sad children...dependends. 170 years of welfare, on a society that was 2000 years behind when "whitey" got here. No horses, no wheel, no anything...fawk.

[Anler]

Hey remember these guys? they were heroes. wasn't even their land...

 

[snopro31]

just bulldoze the protestors out of the way

[motonoggin]

The United States has a very bad reputation for treating Native Americans, the original inhabitants of this land, as less than human. In many instances in the past, the land where Native Americans lived was deemed to be of higher value than the Natives’ lives.

Such has been the case in North Dakota — not only now, but in the past as well. According to The Atlantic:

 

 

“The land beneath the pipeline was accorded to Sioux peoples by the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868. Eleven years later, the U.S. government incited and won the Great Sioux War, and ‘renegotiated’ a new treaty with the Sioux under threat of starvation. In that document, the tribe ceded much of the Laramie land, including the Black Hills of South Dakota, where many whites believed there to be gold.”

After the federal government relegated the Sioux people to the “Great Sioux Reservation” in 1851, the treaty was re-written and “renegotiated” by force whenever resources were discovered or when the U.S. government wanted land. Essentially, the Sioux people were victims of U.S.-sanctioned murder, and their land was stolen because gold was discovered on it.

Fast forward to 2016 and the Sioux people are once again making a stand on land that was once — and still is, according to the tribe — theirs. How is the government reacting to this stand? By brutally arresting the Native American water protectors for trespassing. If that is not a miscarriage of justice, I don’t know what is.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-28/5-things-you-need-know-about-dakota-access-pipeline-protests

Edited November 25, 2016 by motonoggin

[motonoggin]

As you can see, you guys are wrong.

[motonoggin]

I expect some retractions. 

 

[Rod]

So not their land. Interesting.

[motonoggin]

1 minute ago, Sludgey said:

So not their land. Interesting.

Uh, no. It is their land. 

[Rod]

Just now, motonoggin said:

Uh, no. It is their land. 

Besides the pesky fact that it's not.

[Angry ginger]

6 minutes ago, motonoggin said:

The United States has a very bad reputation for treating Native Americans, the original inhabitants of this land, as less than human. In many instances in the past, the land where Native Americans lived was deemed to be of higher value than the Natives’ lives.

Such has been the case in North Dakota — not only now, but in the past as well. According to The Atlantic:

 

 

“The land beneath the pipeline was accorded to Sioux peoples by the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868. Eleven years later, the U.S. government incited and won the Great Sioux War, and ‘renegotiated’ a new treaty with the Sioux under threat of starvation. In that document, the tribe ceded much of the Laramie land, including the Black Hills of South Dakota, where many whites believed there to be gold.”

After the federal government relegated the Sioux people to the “Great Sioux Reservation” in 1851, the treaty was re-written and “renegotiated” by force whenever resources were discovered or when the U.S. government wanted land. Essentially, the Sioux people were victims of U.S.-sanctioned murder, and their land was stolen because gold was discovered on it.

Fast forward to 2016 and the Sioux people are once again making a stand on land that was once — and still is, according to the tribe — theirs. How is the government reacting to this stand? By brutally arresting the Native American water protectors for trespassing. If that is not a miscarriage of justice, I don’t know what is.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-28/5-things-you-need-know-about-dakota-access-pipeline-protests

to the winners go the spoils the government can and did take whatever they want.  Maybe some indian should come and claim your land as theirs cause 300 years ago it was,  i'm sure you'd be right there supporting them.  

[Angry ginger]

3 minutes ago, Sludgey said:

So not their land. Interesting.

zactly

[Rod]

Why stop at the Sioux? Someone would have occupied those lands before them.  Are the Sioux going to give it back to whoever that was? 

[Angry ginger]

51 minutes ago, bussman said:

I like that on Thanksgiving the NFL had a battle between the Cowboys and Indians and the winner was historically accurate.