European expansionism has been a sordid, 500-year long odyssey that continues to this day, bringing murder and mutilation, shock and awe, theft and betrayal in its wake.

The story cannot be told often enough. Great books have been written, and yet, the average 21st Century American, wearing his flag lapel-pin, is largely ignorant of the rapes and massacres, the ethnic cleansings and genocides which have taken place under the little banner he so proudly displays.

Thanks to Petersen for adeptly pulling the curtain back again, exposing the fraudulent wiz behind the smoke-screen of the American myth. Only when we begin to see clearly through the smoke-screen can we hope to gather the lost fragments, the wandering souls of our story.

Peltier’s struggle for justice is the struggle of a true hero, one who has endured the “outrageous fortune” in order to tell truth and to bear witness. The media will adduce John McCain as a “war hero,” because he claims he was tortured after dropping bombs from a jet on innocent civilians in Vietnam. But of men who defend their homes and their people against maniac war-mongers like McCain or Cheney–our mass media have no corporate use for them; such men cannot stir the emotions for war and more war. They state their case quietly year after year, decade after decade, “tortured” by lost years and neglect, but ennobling us all by never faltering in their quest for justice and truth.

Peltier’s words evoke the depths to which our American Empire has sunk: “Think of all the cops and judges and guards and lawyers who’d be out of work if they didn’t have Indians to oppress! We keep the system going. We help give the American system of injustice the criminals it needs.”

Of course, a system oppressing one group of people will soon oppress all of its people. Now we all, like worker-drones, “keep the system going.” We answer now, in 2008, for the original sins of enslavement of blacks and genocide against “Indians.” One lie leads to another, to another, to another until we entangle ourselves in webs of lies, losing the beauty, purpose and meaning of life itself.

And I would suggest, in honor of this day, that American workers should celebrate a “Patriots Day” for each country in which American soldiers in uniform are found. Beginning next Monday with “Iraq Day.”