Politics & Power Quote by Geronimo

Geronimo’s line isn’t a complaint so much as an indictment of how “order” gets manufactured on a frontier. The sentence turns on a quiet asymmetry: soldiers are framed as the government’s eyes and ears, but those eyes only look one way. When an Indian is wronged, there is no report, no paperwork, no narrative that reaches power. When an Indian is accused of wrongdoing, the machinery suddenly works perfectly. The intent is to expose that mismatch as policy, not accident.

The subtext is about information control. Empires don’t just win with guns; they win by deciding what counts as a fact. By selectively documenting “misdeeds,” the military produces a steady moral rationale for land seizure, punishment, relocation. Silence becomes a weapon: absence of evidence is treated as evidence of absence, and Indigenous suffering is rendered administratively invisible. Geronimo is naming a system where the official record is built to pre-justify violence.

Context matters. Speaking as an Apache leader who lived through war, broken treaties, and forced confinement, Geronimo is addressing a U.S. government that preferred its conflicts narrated as “pacification” rather than invasion. His phrasing is plain because the charge is blunt: the state’s legitimacy rests on a curated story, delivered by those with uniforms and authority to define “truth.” Read today, it lands as an early diagnosis of institutional bias: not simply prejudice in individual hearts, but a pipeline that filters grievances upward and ensures only certain victims ever become legible to power.