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I begin this post in the unusual manner of quoting myself from an article titled The Consummate Metagelical. “Following the phenomena of the Jordan Peterson series of lectures on the Genesis book of the Bible a Calvinist pastor in a rundown section of Sacramento made a YouTube video to express his astonishment that so many would pay to hear a sermon. Paul Vanderklay (PVK) was one of the many online creators I began to follow that became known among themselves as this little corner (TLC) of the internet. PVK’s gift is his pastoral presence, his ability for honest, sincere, interest and conversation about meaningful subjects with all manner of random individuals (his randos).”

One of the original randos is Sam Tideman. He is an Ivy league educated statistician by profession, and a relatively young husband and father living in the Chicago area. His family history goes back to colonial America through the famous Adams family. This ancestral line is fundamental to understanding his unique role in the TLC; that is, he comes from a family of Unitarians. I find his Unitarian arguments against the Trinity persuasive, yet I am not persuaded. But this issue is not the topic of this post.

Tideman has a YouTube channel called Transfigured.  He has done several interviews that touch on Unitarianism. They are more interesting than you might think. For example, he has had fascinating discussions with Muslims: Jake Brancatella, The Muslim Metaphysician – Can Islam participate in Liberalism? and Dr Shabir Ally and a Unitarian Christian dialogue about Jesus. As an interlocutor, the most common response to his queries is, “great question.” There you can also find his unique Personal Story.

Herein I wish to point you to Tideman’s recent presentation, Does Moral Therapeutic Deism still exist? This is a socio-political analysis of American political history up to our current predicament. (PVK made an insightful commentary on Tideman’s presentation, The Fracturing of the Religions Nominalism Beneath American Culture and Politics.) The key premise is that there has been, and there must be, an agreed upon arena for political discourse; indeed, for all political activity to maintain a peaceful polity. The concept is similar to the Overton window or Tom Woods and his 3×5 card of allowable opinion, but much more implicit than explicit. It is the arena where civil politics can play out. If there is no agreed upon arena the ultimate result can be civil war until a new arena is established by the survivors. Furthermore, Tideman posits that in America this arena has been what an academic called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD), and MTD is essentially Unitarianism. See the following slides from the presentation on the thesis and MTD.

Tideman’s Unitarian analysis of American political history nicely dovetails with Murray Rothbard’s Yankee Problem analysis as recently restated by Tom DiLorenzo; Public Enemies: Government Bureaucrats as Societal Parasites – LewRockwell

“Rothbard wrote of how the civil service reformers of the late nineteenth century were almost exclusively from New England and New York, were relatively highly educated, and were “shaped by the cultural and religious values of their neo- Puritan Yankee culture.” They wanted “good men” in government jobs, with the “good men” being themselves, wrote Rothbard. These were men who believed in “the inherent right of their sort to rule” over lesser citizens and believed in democracy, but only if guided by people like themselves.”

An important observation by Tideman is that the MTD, the socio-political  arena, is dead; and therefore, we are at a dangerous moment in American history (for example see It Seems Like The War is Coming. Increased Violence is Inevitable..) The collapse of the arena came in the form of the left taking over, controlling the arena in their own favor. Imagine the umpire of a baseball game calling balls and strikes differently, in favor of one team (if you are a gambler you probably believe that is true).

The situation that comes to my mind is Spain in the 1930s before the civil war as depicted in the epic novel (the first of a trilogy) The Cypresses Believe in God by José Maria Gironella. Like the leftists who fled Spain after Franco’s rebels won the civil war, there are many Americans leaving the USA. Here is a short (30 min) French documentary on Americans who have left due to the growing “tyranny” of Donald Trump, Ils fuient l’Amérique de TRUMP | Reportage | ARTE Regards. Is this Trump derangement syndrome or justified fear? What Gironella also depicted in his novel is the right wing Spanish who fled earlier because of the reign of terror of the left wing government that ignited the war. Did MAGA Americans leave the US during the Biden administration as they are now? Not that I know of. They are of a different economic and social class that typically do not travel internationally. Furthermore, it must be said that to truly be MAGA one must stay in the USA.

Noting that the Charlie Kirk memorial event was much like a mega-church evangelical event, and the forgiveness offered in the widow’s speech, in this TLC adjacent podcast Tideman suggests that American Evangelicalism could be the “way forward to reset the arena. On another TLC channel Tideman was interviewed on the same subject delineating his thesis in more detail, When the Background Religion Breaks | Moralistic Therapeutic Deism and the American Soul.

Certainly, we are living in interesting times. Tideman’s thoughts on the situation bring clarity to what we are experiencing.

The post American Politics Is a Fight for the Arena appeared first on LewRockwell.

War is one of the few things that only the State can do. Indeed, as Randolph Bourne said, “War is the health of the State.” Let’s briefly discuss the nature of the State to see why World War 3 is on the way.

The State is like any other living entity: its prime directive is to survive and grow. Bear in mind that the State—the government—is not at all the same thing as the country or society, even though it claims to be. It’s not “We the People”; it’s a distinct entity with its own discrete interests. And that’s actually too mild an assertion. While individuals and companies prosper by providing goods and services to others through voluntary exchange, the State specializes in coercion.

There’s nothing voluntary about the State. Its main products have always been pogroms, persecutions, confiscations, taxation, inflation, censorship, harassment, repression—and war. The State is not your friend.

Mass murder and wholesale destruction are bad enough in themselves. But in wartime, the State enables them with new taxes, new debt, draconian controls, and new bureaucracies. These things linger long after the war is over.

Worse yet, the State does these things with the sanction of the victim; the typical citizen has been taught that almost anything is justified by “national security.” Anyone who would normally protest these depredations in peacetime soon learns to dummy-up when there’s a war for fear of being lynched for sympathizing with the invariably demonic enemy.

After the war—assuming a victory, of course—the State’s debt, taxes, regulations and general size never return to pre-war levels. They ratchet up to ever higher plateaus, requiring the State to do more of the same to justify its existence. Government programs, of whatever description, are almost never pulled out by their roots. At most, they’re trimmed, which has the same effect as pruning a plant, i.e., they’re encouraged to grow back bigger and stronger.

Why am I saying these scary things? Because we’re clearly heading towards a big war.

A Clear and Present Danger

I want to make a point in this article that many will find unpalatable, perhaps even incredible: In today’s world, the US military is nearly useless in countering potential threats from abroad. It’s actually a positive danger. And it’s not ready for a real war.

If you’re looking for a comforting mainstream analysis, I don’t have much. Let’s start with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

NATO is a US government program that’s taken on a life of its own. Its original purpose was to defend against the Warsaw Pact. But although the Soviet Union and its allies ceased to exist as a military threat in the early 1990s, NATO has continued to grow. Despite agreements with Russia, it’s grown right to their border, even adding traditionally neutral states like Finland and Sweden.

Even if you assume that NATO doesn’t provoke WW3 over the Ukraine (setting aside a discussion of who’s right or wrong and who really started it), the Chinese are likely next on the dance card. They can only see the allied Western states as pointing a gun in their direction. To them, NATO is a provocation to a cultural/racial war. NATO encourages them to make building their military a high priority.

So much for the “End of History.” As long as nation-states exist, there will be violent conflict between them. But the way I see it, the nature of war, and even the nation-state itself, is going to change radically over the next 20 years. And, as has been the case throughout history, a prime mover is going to be technology.

Weaponry & Strategy

It’s an old saying: “Generals always fight the last war.”

That’s not because they’re (necessarily) stupid. But by the time a man gets a bunch of stars on his epaulets, you’re only assured of a competent bureaucrat with good political skills, not someone with a great military mind. Bureaucrats are not daring innovators; they do things by the book. That gives them CYA excuses and plausible deniability if things go wrong.

Apart from simple inertia, fighting the last war makes sense. For one thing, it’s what they know. For another, the equipment and tactics in question have been tested. For another, the weapons exist, and when a war starts, you basically have to “run what you brought.”

Whether they can get away with fighting the last war depends mainly on whether there has been a significant change in technology. Up to early industrial times, one change in a lifetime was a lot. After all, how often do major innovations like the stirrup or gunpowder come along? But since the advent of industrialized warfare with the American conflict of 1861-1865, changes have been very rapid, and the rate of change is accelerating at warp speed.

The military is not unaware of this; as I said, they’re not stupid. In fact, today’s officers are highly educated; almost all are college graduates, for what that’s worth. Most field grade officers have done graduate work as well. That’s one reason the US emphasizes high-tech weaponry.

The military is throwing ever greater amounts of money on larger, more complex, and vastly more expensive pieces of equipment. The idea is to stay technologically ahead of any potential enemies. Maybe the US can maintain its lead as long as it’s a simplistic scenario of our tanks, planes, and ships against theirs. But the chances of things staying that simple are close to zero. The whole paradigm is about to change.

This is true for several reasons: today’s “hi-tech” weapons (F-35 fighters, Abrams tanks, aircraft carriers) are already obsolete. They’re certainly a nightmare to maintain and keep personnel competent. New drones, missiles, and torpedoes are both superior to and vastly cheaper than conventional weapons. Biological and cyber weapons obviate them all. If they’re deployed in earnest, it’s “Game Over”.

Projecting force worldwide with 800 bases, $100 million aircraft, and carrier fleets, is ruinously expensive, especially for a bankrupt government that’s “on tilt”. But that’s the essence of American doctrine.

The concept of “defense” itself is obsolete for a nation-state. Let’s look at this in a bit more detail.

1. Today’s “Hi-Tech” Weapons Are Obsolete

Starting with a blank piece of paper, during World War II, the US developed one of the conflict’s finest fighters, the P-51 Mustang, in 117 days and produced it for $50,000 a copy—say about $500,000 in today’s dollars. It’s true that the F-35 is considerably more complex, but relative costs should have been dropping because of advances in materials, techniques, computers, robotics, and such, not escalating over 100-fold in real terms. A friend who knows about these things tells me that every hour of operating time on an M-1 Abrams requires 8 hours of maintenance. For a F-16, it’s 20 hours. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that only 30% of F-35’s are flyable at any given time.

Unsustainable runaway costs are apparent everywhere. When you’re paying upwards of 15 billion dollars for an aircraft carrier (without any aircraft or auxiliary ships), $500 million for a B-2, and $7 million for a tank, you can’t afford to buy very many of them. And you absolutely can’t afford to lose any. Apart from the costs, it takes many months or years to produce more.

On the other hand, despite sophisticated defense armaments, a swarm of cheap sea-skimming missiles might sink a carrier and its 5000-man crew—not to mention a single hypersonic missile. A hit with a cheap shoulder-fired missile can bring down any low-flying aircraft, and at $10,000 a copy, the battlefield can be peppered with them. Fire-and-forget missiles transform tanks into expensive iron coffins; ultra-cheap commercial drones can drop explosives anywhere. Cheap, accurate, small, and numerous missiles are the modern equivalent of Sam Colt’s six gun, which not only made the little guy equal to the big guy, but superior—because big guys are big targets. Drones the size of bumblebees will seek out highly trained and very expensive infantrymen.

Like a small person who knows he shouldn’t fight a giant on his own terms, US adversaries will use the military equivalent of Aikido, turning the opponent’s own might against him. The Houthis in Yemen recognize that it costs the Americans millions to blow up a mud hut, which is, in popular parlance, “unsustainable.” In addition to creating more enemies. They see themselves as the under-gunned rebels in Star Wars when they destroy the Empire’s Death Star, substituting daring and cleverness for the enemy’s overwhelming physical capital.

2. Today’s Conventional Weapons Will Soon Be Totally Obsolete

This whole discussion will be completely academic in a generation when nanotechnology becomes practical. The idea is the creation of machines and supercomputers atom by atom. The essence of the technology is making things larger from a molecular level rather than trying to miniaturize them.

It’s likely to be the most important event in human history, including the conquest of fire. It will change the very essence of life itself totally, irrevocably, and unrecognizably—including the nature of armed conflict. An excellent, albeit conservative, description of a nanotechnic future is offered by Neal Stephenson in Diamond Age, which I highly recommend. Nanotech weapons will be available to everyone after a delay, much as gunpowder was in the 15th century. That assumes, of course, that the cyber and bioweapons now available to everyone don’t obviate the whole question.

In the meantime, the trend to miniaturization will continue apace. Microchips and other computer components are commercially available everywhere, and they’re cheaper and more powerful every day. The next generation of weapons will be highly miniaturized robots, weighing at most a few pounds apiece, probably designed with running or flying insects as models. Construction will be facilitated by the use of off-the-shelf electronic products. That’s in addition to full-size Terminator-style robots, AI-piloted and armored vehicles.

A $50 billion fleet can be devastated by a few score missiles; a formation of soldiers wouldn’t stand a chance against an attack by thousands of very cheap microbots. Just as a hundred tiny ants can easily overwhelm a scorpion, cheap and tiny machines will turn current military behemoths into useless artifacts. Any country will be able to have a truly formidable military for a fraction of today’s costs.

3. Overextension as a Formula for Disaster

Fighting a war next door is one thing; doing so on the other side of the world is something else again.

Fuel, materials, and troops are very costly to transport and maintain at the end of a 10,000 mile airlink. Doing so is likely to result in what has been called “imperial overstretch”; if you try to cover all the bases, you become overextended, vulnerable, and bankrupt. The US currently maintains a military presence of some description in about 100 countries, and almost all of those emplacements are an active provocation to somebody.

Question: If social spending cannot or will not be cut, with $1 trillion in interest that must be paid each year, debt growing at $2 trillion per annum, and money already being created by the trillions annually, what is going to give when times get tough? Will the government get involved in yet another serious foreign military adventure? Of course. They see it as a solution, not a problem.

A poor country can fight a war using human capital—like Korea in the 1950s or Vietnam in the 1960s. But a country like the US is almost forced to use financial and technological capital because human life has a high price tag for us. That makes for a problem when we don’t have the financial resources to maintain a military that’s both very expensive and ineffective.

Can the US afford to fight a continuous war in the alleged search for continuous peace? The experience of previous empires, from the Romans on, suggests the answer is no.

America’s best defense is a strong economy with lots of technological innovation, not an overweening military. If the US government, with its taxes, regulations, currency inflation, and welfare, were to disappear, the country would experience the greatest and most genuine boom in world history. In a decade, even China would appear as relatively insignificant as Nigeria today. It would be almost impossible to threaten a genuinely advanced America.

It’s equally important not to give any government or group a reason to launch an attack. People the world over love the idea of America; they love the culture, the cars, the food, the freedom, you-name-it. They like the good things American corporations used to make. They don’t mind good-natured, free-spending American tourists.

What they don’t like is US boots on the ground or in their airspace, fomenting coups to install “democracy.” If Washington DC ceased to exist, the other 96% of the planet’s population would have no more incentive to strike America than Costa Rica.

Of course, I may be anachronistic in that view. Over the last 50 years, while the US was building an arsenal to fight Russia and China, a different threat has been building. The Muslim world, which has been in what amounts to a Forever War with the West for 1400 years, is cyclically on the march again. They have two very important weapons.

One is firm and fanatical beliefs. The West, on the other hand, has lost all confidence; it’s flaccid and believes itself to be evil. As Napoleon said, in warfare, the psychological is to the physical as three is to one. The prognosis for America and Europe is not good. They’ll be conquered both psychologically and by migration. America’s bloated military will be useless.

Islam’s second weapon is many hundreds of millions of young Mohammedans. From a military viewpoint, they are infiltrating the demographic and political structure of the West and changing it. And if things ever go kinetic, scores of millions of young fighters are cheaper and more effective than expensive hi-tech hardware.

There’s much more to be said on the topic of the Forever War with Islam.

Where this is Going

As a reader, I presume you agree with me on some of the above or are at least willing to listen to the argument with an open mind. I suspect that’s not the case with most Americans, however. They view the military as a national treasure or even an icon.

On one level, I can understand this atavistic attachment. As a kid I wanted to go to West Point—but was cured of the temptation by four years of military high school. In college, during the Vietnam War, I was signed up for the Marines PLC program (yes, I was a slow learner). But then I simultaneously drew 365 of 366 in the draft lottery (it was a leap year) and was medically rejected as 1-Y because I had broken my right leg in 17 different places only a year before.

At that point, I figured the cosmos was trying to send me a message like, “If you really want to go to Vietnam, do you really need the government to pay your way?”

American’s warm feelings toward the military are largely misplaced. And I speak as someone who likes soldiers. Whatever its star-spangled history, the US military no longer serves much of a useful purpose because of the ongoing evolution of technology. Worse, it’s become an active danger. What’s left of its esprit de corps is being eroded by DEI, LGBT, and anti-whiteism. Soldiers’ first loyalty is naturally to each other—although that’s been weakened by Wokism. Their next loyalty is to their employer, who they trust less and less. Their third loyalty is to those they supposedly protect and serve, but they have less and less in common with them.

Combine those problems with others I’ve listed, and it’s no wonder the militaries of Western countries are becoming less and less reliable and effective. Not good; at the very time their governments are provoking war with Russia, China, and smaller counties.

Let me sum things up.

US foreign policy is putting this country on a collision course with any number of other countries. The US military is in a position to fight the last war, but not the next one, because the weapons the US is loading up on are basically dinosaurs. And like dinosaurs, they’re unbelievably expensive to feed. The likely bankruptcy of the government during the next economic downturn will make feeding them near impossible.

When the next conflict occurs, it’s likely to do extensive damage in the US itself. It will be hard to insulate yourself from World War 3. It makes the Southern Hemisphere look better all the time.

Your first line of defense, of course, is common sense survivalist stuff. You know the drill: buy gold, silver, and get a survival retreat with a year’s supply of food, fuel, and ammunition. Keep gaining skills and knowledge. Try to become self-employed. Surround yourself with reliable, like-minded associates. Keep a low profile with the authorities. And, I might add, enjoy yourself; don’t take things too seriously. We’re dealing with the human condition.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post Welcome to the Warfare State appeared first on LewRockwell.

WASHINGTON, D.C.  — The Trump administration has laid off thousands of Department of Health and Human Services workers due to the government shutdown, including those that work on “family planning” and “LGBTQ health” issues.

A former Biden official complained to the pro-LGBT website The Advocate about the cuts. Self-described LGBT “activist” Adrian Shanker was “deputy assistant secretary for health policy and senior adviser on LGBTQ+ health equity under the Biden administration,” according to the publication. He also founded an LGBT “community center” that hosted drag queen story hours, as previously reported by LifeSiteNews. He has written about “queer health activism,” along with several publications with sexually inappropriate names.

He said the cuts by Trump have been “ideological.”

“These are the programs that centered [so-called] reproductive and queer health, and now they’re gone,” Shanker said.

The Office of Population Affairs, which has effectively been shut down, facilitated “sex education” for “LGBTQ+ youth,” the magazine reported.

The office has been criticized for promoting birth control and abortion, as the name implies. Under President Barack Obama, for example, the office promoted abortifacient birth control as a means of controlling the spread of the Zika virus (though the connection is unclear).

The agency also oversees the Title X “family planning” program, which subsidizes birth control so women can have fewer babies. Planned Parenthood is a major recipient of this funding, and so the office acts as a conduit to funnel taxpayer dollars to the nation’s largest abortion vendor.

The government shutdown officially began on October 1 and has necessitated a “reduction in force,” which means layoffs across the federal government.

The administration is using the layoffs as an opportunity to cut programs favored by Democrats, according to President Trump.

“We’re only cutting Democrat programs, I hate to tell you, but we are cutting Democrat programs,” Trump said during a recent cabinet meeting, as reported by Politico. “We will be cutting some very popular Democrat programs that aren’t popular with Republicans, frankly.”

Republicans maintain that Democrats are keeping the government shutdown because of Obamacare subsidies, which could be used to subsidize abortions.

“It’s disgusting that Democrats are shutting down the government to continue to hide the failures of Obamacare with massive taxpayer-funded subsidy checks to insurance companies that can fund abortions and [transgender] surgeries,” Florida Senator Rick Scott told The Daily Signal. “Republicans cannot allow American taxpayers to foot the bill for Democrats’ liberal wish list that lets this happen.”

This article was originally published on Lifesite News.

The post Trump Admin Ending LGBT, ‘Family Planning’ Programs Due to Government Shutdown appeared first on LewRockwell.

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October 13 this year is Columbus Day (observed) in the United States, a day referred to by some as “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.” Right on schedule, we’re seeing all the usual media posts—in both social media and old media—asserting that land should be controlled by those who are indigenous to it.

This raises the question of what it means to be “indigenous”—a status generally premised on the we-were-here-first claim—which implies a right of ownership. That implied right to ownership, in turn, is premised on a presumption that the alleged indigenous group homesteaded the land in question—by virtue of being the first to occupy it. Or, put in more colloquial terms, ownership is premised on the moral theory known as “finders keepers.”

But, there are some problems and ambiguities with the we-were-here-first claim as it is usually made. Indeed, the problems are found in the phrase itself and in the lack of specifics that is usually presented in the argument. That is, when we encounter the phrase “we were here first” we have to be very specific about at least three of the terms contained in the phrase. For example, what is the precise meaning of “we” and of “here” and of “first”?

Once we look at this problem in detail, we find that no group is ever truly indigenous. On the other hand, if we prefer peace to utter lawlessness and war, it becomes necessary to recognize that just because a population in a certain place is not indigenous, and had displaced some other population in the past, this does not mean the land in question is simply up for grabs.

Who Is Indigenous?

In engaging the problem of indigeneity, we might turn to a helpful fictionalized account of a conversation between Chief Sitting Bull and Colonel Nelson Miles in the 2007 film Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. This scene from the film is often posted by users in social media whenever the claim of tribal indigeneity makes the rounds in media. The conversation surely did not happen this way—if it happened at all—but the dialogue itself helps illustrate how difficulties arise when a group of people claims to be indigenous.

Sitting Bull: Take your soldiers out of here they scare the game away.

Miles: Very well, sir, tell me then, how far away should I take my men?

Sitting Bull: You must take them out of our lands.

Miles: What precisely are your lands?

Sitting Bull: These are the lands where my people lived before you whites first came.

Miles: I don’t understand. We whites were not your first enemies. Why don’t you demand back the land in Minnesota where the Chippewa and others forced you from years before…

Sitting Bull: The Black Hills are sacred land Given to my people by Wakan Tanka.

Miles: Very convenient to cloak your claims in spiritualism. …No matter what your legends say, you didn’t sprout from the plains like the spring grasses and you didn’t coalesce out of the ether. You came out of the Minnesota Woodlands armed to the teeth and set upon your fellow man. You massacred the Kiowa, the Omaha , the Ponca, the Otoe, and the Pawnee without mercy …and yet you claim the Black Hills is a private preserve bequeathed to you by the great spirit. … You conquered those tribes, lusting for their game and their lands, just as we have now conquered you for no less noble a call.

The conversation is fictionalized and dramatized, but the facts laid out are broadly correct. Virtually no one disputes, for example, that the Lakota had lived in Minnesota during the eighteenth century, and had likely lived somewhere else—perhaps the Ohio River valley—before that.  The Lakota only emigrated to the northern plains of what is now the United Sates in the late eighteenth century, claiming the Black Hills as their own. Other tribes had lived in these places before the Lakota showed up and drove the residents of each area out.

The Problem of “Where”

The above exchange could be had, with the names changed, in countless contexts over time and across the globe. If we go back far enough in history, virtually no group of people is indigenous to where they are now. The Arabs are not indigenous to northern Africa. The Hungarians are not indigenous to Hungary. The Japanese are not indigenous to Japan. And so on.

As with Eurasia, the history of North America is filled with countless migrations as climate and demographic realities changed. This happened both before and after the Europeans arrived. For example, the so-called Ancestral Puebloans expanded and migrated well before the Europeans arrived, displacing other tribes in the place where the Pueblo tribes now reside. The Comanches moved to the southern plains in the sixteenth century. The list of similar migrations is long. So, the first question that must be answered whenever there are claims of indigeneity is this: “indigenous to where exactly?”

Determining property rights—including communal property rights of like those asserted by tribal groups—requires specificity. The same is true of determining who is indigenous where. Clearly, then, a claim of “we are indigenous to North America” is about as specific as the phrase “we are indigenous to Europe.” Even speaking generally, this is not helpful. We can see why if we apply the method to Europe: the Irish are not indigenous to, say, Bulgaria, even though both groups are in Europe. Thus, being indigenous to Europe does not denote indigeneity to just anywhere in Europe. The same is true in North America. The Arapahoe, for instance, are not Indigenous to the lands of the Muscogee, even if both areas are found in North America.

The Problem of “Who”

This brings us to the second challenge in establishing indigeneity: who exactly are we talking about? The very idea that all tribal groups in North America can be lumped together as “Indians” is a purely modern invention that only began to take root in the 1920s. Before then, few members of, say, the Navajo tribe would regard themselves as being part of the same group as members of the Iroquois tribe. It is similarly absurd to claim that an Englishman in the eighteenth century considered himself to be French because England and France are both in Europe. Specifics matter.

On the other hand, at least the English and the French share some common, documented history in terms of Roman institutions, earlier cultural bonds in Christendom, and language. This type of loose cultural unity and exchange was far more rare among North American tribal groups that were not in close proximity with each other. In pre-Columbian times there certainly was nothing like the international Church in North America that could provide a sort of cultural unity among many “national” groups. Languages were numerous and varied. Nor was there any widely known written language that could facilitate communication across time and space as with Latin in Europe.

So, any reference to “Indians” as a generic group is of little value in determining indigeneity in any specific place. It is unhelpful to say that “Indians” are indigenous to, say, Texas. The proper question is “which Indians?” (And, for that matter, where in Texas?) Without answering this question very specifically, we’re not even getting close to establishing anything we might call a claim to indigenous status.

The Problem of “First”

Finally, we have to address the problem of what is meant by “first.” When the phrase of “we were here first” is invoked, does “first” mean “original inhabitants” or does it just mean “here before you.”

In theory, the term necessarily means “we are the original inhabitants” since the claim to indigeneity is essentially a claim to ownership through homesteading. In practice, however, the term only means “here before you“ because it is impossible to prove indigeneity based on nonspecific stories about the distant past. This is why many who claim indigeneity, as the Miles character notes in the exchange above, “cloak [their] claims in spiritualism.” If all else fails, simply say “our god gave us this land.”

As shown in the dramatization above, it was clear that the Lakota were not the first people to live in the Black Hills region. They had come from somewhere else. But, they could rightly claim to have been in the area before the European settlers started claiming the area. That certainly gives the Lakota a better claim to the land, but it does not establish indigeneity.1

But, for the reasons listed by Miles in his retort to Sitting Bull, simply being present before the other guy doesn’t actually establish a moral right to ownership. After all, someone else had been there before the Lakota and had been forced to give up their ownership.

Does This Mean Might Makes Right?

The Lakota and the Americans are nonetheless both conquerors who showed up and expropriated land from the people who were there before. When the Americans came, they did the same to the Lakota that the Lakota had done to their victims before. Miles, in the dramatization, apparently recognizes that neither group can make a moral claim to the land. At no point does Miles actually establish a moral justification for the US government’s conquest of the region.  That is, in both cases, the victor wins by no virtue other than being militarily victorious. The only law at work in both cases was the law of the jungle.

So, if no one is truly indigenous, does that mean that all land is up for grabs everywhere? The answer is “no” if we’d like to live in a world where lawless conquest and butchery is not the norm always and everywhere.

As a practical matter, the concept of indigeneity is of little value in any case. Actually proving true indigeneity is impossible, so it is not practicable to base any claim of ownership on who had lived in a place, say, 2,000 years ago. Over time, legal records disappear, are burned, or otherwise destroyed. Migrations take place, and even local, living memory fails to suffice as a record for who lived where. This, of course, is why some resort to claiming “our god gave us this land.” That’s a last-ditch effort to assert ownership when no legal record remains.

The hopelessness of the task of proving indigeneity means we’re left with the moral imperative to employ pragmatism and prudence in pursuit of peace. Thus, the best we can usually do is to look at who lives in a place right now or in the recent past. The group that fulfills these requirement should be considered as the de facto indigenous population. To do otherwise is to embrace conquest, displacement, and wars of attrition.

This is not a new problem, of course. Everywhere, conquest and migration and displacement are woven into the fabric of local history. This is what the Church and the ruling classes of Europe spent centuries trying to fix in the Middle Ages. With movements like the Peace and Truce of God, the medievals tried to put into place legal institutions that would protect property rights and mediate conflicts over land claims. The idea was to replace war with negotiation and legal arbitration. Wars, after all, were known to bring famines and massacres. Few would describe such outcomes as “just.” For the same reasons, nobles and kings were expected to act as arbitrators and judges who could “keep the peace” by preventing land disputes from spiraling out of control.

In these cases, it was rarely the goal to find out who had a right to land based on some ancient claim from 1,000 years earlier. Everyone knew that to mediate based on such grandiose and tenuous claims would do little to protect peace in the here and now. What mattered was to maintain some semblance of order and peace while protecting the property rights of those who could be actually observed to be the owners of the property in question.

These early attempts to substitute law for open warfare continue to influence modern international law and the recognition that, at least in theory, might does not make right. In many ways, progress has been made, if for no other reason than it is now rare to see populations impelled by famine to desperately migrate to neighboring lands and forcibly displace the natives. Moreover, the growth and spread of the concept of private property has helped to institutionalize claims to ownership that are more precise, specific, and not founded on vague claims of an ancient, unprovable history.

Unfortunately, these principle are still often ignored, even today. In many places, the reality still looks like that of when the US cavalry fought the Lakota.

—

1 The failure to establish a moral claim here was pithily explained in a poem by Carl Sandburg in which he writes:

“Get off this estate.”
“What for?”
“Because it’s mine.”
“Where did you get it?”
“From my father.”
“Where did he get it?”
“From his father.”
“And where did he get it?”
“He fought for it.”
“Well, I’ll fight you for it.”

The post Are Any Peoples Truly Indigenous? appeared first on LewRockwell.

In the 20th century, the difference between Republicans and Democrats was between a party that wants citizens rewarded on merit and a party that wants citizens rewarded based on needs.  It was Democrats who gave the needy property rights, sometimes called entitlements, via taxation, rent control, and other redistributive methods in the incomes of taxpayers.

The needy and their needs expanded rapidly, necessitating further violations of Constitutionally protected property rights.  Today an American making $300,000 annually pays one-third of his income in federal income taxes on top of which are added state income taxes, sales and excise taxes, taxes on services such as electricity and telephone, and property taxes to pay for the education of other peoples’ children.  Today a middle class American, the few who still remain, faces a larger claim on his income than Feudal lords had on the labor of serfs.  Until the Reagan tax rate reduction, rich Americans had a smaller claim to the products of their labor than 19th century slaves on a cotton plantation.  On many occasions I have pointed out in an April 15 column that Americans think of themselves as free, but in fact have no more claim to their labor than Feudal serfs and 19th century slaves.  As the historical definition of a free person is a person who owns his own labor, free people no longer exist in any country with an income tax.

The consequence of coercively redistributing property rights to the needy is that every “free democratic” Western society is a “welfare” society, a curious term as Western societies are not very well.  Indeed, the rights of the needy now include the rights of illegal aliens to enter a Western society and be maintained at the expense of the taxpaying citizens.  Oregon, for example, spends more of taxpayers’ money providing free health care to immigrant-invaders  who are not citizens than it spends on the state police force.  Immigrant-invaders have acquired the de facto right to rape ethnic British and Swedish girls and to have charges against them for rape dismissed as race-based hate crimes.  Currently, in the US Democrat mayors and governors are in active insurrection against the government of the United States by blocking the deportation of illegals, but the policy of not distinguishing between citizens and illegal aliens is now so entrenched that the Democrats are not arrested for insurrection.

There is no prospect of America or any Western country having a political party committed to resurrecting a free people as historically defined.  At any given time our property rights are restricted to what has not yet been assigned to others. Our residual rights to our own labor will continue to diminish until the needy’s needs exceed in amount the incomes of the productive.

When I say Americans need a political party that serves them, I mean only in a limited sense.  Let’s begin by asking who Democrats and Republicans serve.  Both parties serve the donors of their political campaign funds.  The US Supreme Court has given permission to organized lobbies to purchase the US government via campaign contributions.  There are a large number of these lobbies:  Big Pharma, the military/security complex, and so forth.  It is not unusual for the lobbies to purchase members of both parties.  Once in office, “our” elected representatives serve Big Pharma, the military/security complex and the rest. Nothing can be done about this until the Supreme Court ruling is overturned and money is taken out of politics.

So far I have been dealing with material interests.  There are other kinds of interests, such as philosophical interests.  For example, the differing views Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton had of government and its role. There are ideological/religious interests.  

Today the Democrat Party, once a party that represented the working class against the Republican Party that represented  business, has become an ideological party whose agenda is a Sodom and Gomorrah Tower of Babel.   The Democrats have been convinced by critical race theory and aversive racism that white ethnicities are racist against people of color and historically have subjected them to exploitation and abuse.  The New York Time’s 1619 Project exemplifies the belief that America was founded on racism, not on freedom.  

To make amends to people who never were slaves at the expense of people who never owned slaves, for the last 60 years white Americans, especially heterosexual males, in violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection of law, have been subjected to discrimination in university admissions, employment, and promotion.  This blatant violation of the US Constitution is termed euphemistically “Affirmative Action,” a federal policy created not by legislation, but by one man, a Jew named Alfred Blumrosen at the EEOC.  That is all it took to override the US Constitution’s requirement of equal protection and the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s prohibition of racial quotas.

The illegal racial privileges created by Blumrosen expanded into the DEI ideology that characterizes a merit-based system and merit-based education as racist.  One consequence has been that the STEM-based special high schools, whose graduates were better prepared in math and science than university graduates, had to reduce their standards in order to enroll unqualified candidates.  In other words, the Democrats destroyed the schools in the name of DEI. 

This was done because DEI–Diversity, Equity, Inclusion–imposes the “truth” that all differences in performance are due to “white privilege.”  In other words, there is no such thing as merit.  Merit is simply a nice word, a disguise, for “white privilege.”

Recently the Secretary of War told an assembly of 800 generals and admirals that the DEI days in the military were over.  We will see.  The decline of the US military began when weak men submitted to feminists and allowed women combat roles.  I sometimes wonder if other than for Alabama and white non-city areas of Texas America has any men capable of being real soldiers. America certainly has no Democrat men capable of serving a country whose traditional values they are fiercely aligned against even to the point that they attack federal agents deporting illegal aliens.

To arrive at the nitty-gritty, the purpose of the Democrat’s Tower of Babel policy is to displace whites in America with peoples of color. The remedy to white racism is simply to turn white ethnic Americans into a minority that can be punished for their racism.

The purpose of the Democrats’s Sodom and Gomorrah policy is to legalize all forms of sexual perversion on the grounds that all sexual preferences are equal. The only remaining sexual perversion is pedophilia, and it, also, is being normalized.  Pedophile is no longer a politically correct term.  It has been replaced by “minor-directed person.”  Democrat school boards are grooming pre-puberty children for sexual intercourse.  Parents who protest are evicted from school board meetings. AI porn websites present voluptuous female bodies with children’s faces. It was many years ago when the news was of 12 year old girls giving boys oral sex on school buses.  Today mothers  have their 12 year old daughters on the pill.  As sexual morality has been displaced by Sodom and Gomorrah, the case against pedophilia has crumbled.

Consider Epstein.  My opinion is that he was running a Mossad honey-trap operation to ensnare American policy-makers to the service of Israel. The version that protects Israel is that he was trafficking for money underaged girls to the American elite.  Actually, the official version is the worst, because if true it indicates the American elite are already into pedophilia. The nation will follow.

So, can we expect better or worse from Republicans?

Other than the organized material interests, who do Republicans represent?

The obvious answer is Israel.

The US has been allied with Israel since the origin of the Cold War in the mid-20th century.  The US and Soviet Union were competing for influence in the Middle East, the home of oil.  President John F. Kennedy got Washington at odds with Israel when he attempted, prior to his assassination, to stop Israel’s development of nuclear weapons.  President Nixon had a poor view, some say a correct view, of the Jewish state, but Nixon was removed by the CIA’s Watergate Scandal.  By the opening of the 21st century the Zionist neoconservatives who controlled the foreign policy of the George W. Bush regime and most high level appointments in the government with vice president Cheney as their ally, decided to orchestrate the “new Pearl Harbor” event that their plan to overthrow 7 countries in the way of Greater Israel (from the Nile to the Euphrates) in five years required in order to enlist American lives and money in Middle Eastern wars for Israel.

9/11 succeeded for the Zionists despite the obvious blatant improbability of the official narrative.  The obviously wrong explanation of what happened was overlooked by an American population that believes every claim that there is an enemy out there plotting to get them.

The Zionist neoconservatives in the top echelons of the George W. Bush regime succeed in using their attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon to take the American people to war against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Somolia, and later to fund Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians and Trump’s attack on Iran, with another American attack on Iran for Israel on its way.

President Donald Trump is so deeply in the pocket of Israel that he does not see any difference between America’s interest and Israel’s interest. As far as Trump is concerned, America and Israel are the same country.

The evidence is overwhelming.  Here, for example is Caitlin Johnstone, yesterday, “Trump Keeps Admitting That He Is Bought And Owned By The World’s Richest Israeli.”

Actually, it is worst than Caitlin reports.  Trump is Netanyahu’s puppet ruler of the United States.  

Trump, of course is trapped by the thorough brainwashing and indoctrination of his conservative and evangelical supporters.  American conservatives have been Israel supporters since the Cold War began.  Evangelicals have been taught that the worship of God is the worship of Israel.  Lately, reports have emerged of the money Israel pays to evangelical churches for their support.

So what can Trump do?

If Trump were to act against Israel, seeing their chances the Democrats would bring impeachment charges and the Republicans would support the impeachment.

My conclusion? Although Americans deserve a government that represents them, there is no possibility of such a government. The war on whiteness is the Democrats’ policy, and the war for Israel is the Republicans’ policy.

The post America Needs a Political Party That Represents Americans appeared first on LewRockwell.

On October 6, the Neo-Nazi junta forces announced they’ve supposedly “shot down” nearly 500 Russian drones and missiles over NATO-occupied Ukraine. According to their official statistics, this includes 439 drones out of 496 launched (presumably “Geranium”), 38 Kh-101, “Iskander-K” (although unspecified, presumably 9M728) and “Kalibr” cruise missiles (again, unspecified) out of the 51 launched. Of course, last but not least, the Kiev regime forces also “shot down” one 9-S-7760 air-launched hypersonic missile of the 9-A-7660 “Kinzhal” system out of two launched (for some inexplicable reason, both Western and Ukrainian sources keep calling it the Kh-47M2, even though the Russian military has never used that designation). This would put the efficiency of the Neo-Nazi junta’s air and missile defenses at 88.51% when it comes to drones, 74.51% against cruise missiles and 50% when it comes to hypersonic weapons.

Impressive, right? Well, General Igor Romanenko, former Deputy Chief of the Kiev regime’s General Staff, had something to say about that. Namely, just days after this “astonishing” PR feat, he warned that their air defenses are failing. Romanenko singled out the grossly overhyped and exorbitantly overpriced US-made MIM-104 “Patriot” SAM (surface-to-air missile) system as the most problematic, warning that its effectiveness has “fallen from 42% to 6%”.

He attributed these failures to alleged “software upgrades to Russian ballistic missiles which have increased their speed and maneuverability as they approach their targets”. This comes after years of similar statements by Ukrainian and Western officials, including in recent days, similarly warning that the effectiveness of the “Patriot” against missile attacks had fallen dramatically, particularly against the “Iskander-M’s” 9M723 hypersonic missiles.

It should be noted that Colonel Yuri Ihnat, Head of the Communications Department of the Neo-Nazi junta’s Air Force Command, has repeatedly issued similar warnings over the years, confirming that the military is “faced with growing challenges in intercepting Russian missile attacks”, highlighting their ability to “follow new flight patterns and more complex trajectories”. The unpredictable flight paths of hypersonic missiles used by the 9K720M “Iskander-M” and the aforementioned 9-A-7660 “Kinzhal” systems are making interception based on calculating ballistic trajectories effectively impossible.

Worse yet, as the “Kinzhal” is integrated on MiG-31K/I interceptors-turned-strike-fighters, launches from multiple directions also complicate air and missile defense efforts, further exacerbating the already low chances of interception. The infamous “Patriot” is particularly vulnerable to such attacks.

“This complicates the work of ‘Patriot’, because the system operates in automatic mode when intercepting ballistic missiles. It becomes harder to calculate the point where the interceptor missile will collide with or detonate near the enemy missile,” Ihnat lamented, adding: “If the ballistic missile can approach from different directions, detection by a single system is not possible… It is necessary to have several systems, several radars, which can detect targets and cover the city from different directions.”

And yet, the US-made system has been struggling even against basic ballistic missiles, both historically and in recent times. This includes the old Iraqi “Scud-B” back in 1991, as well as newer Iranian missiles during recent clashes across the Middle East. A 1992 military report revealed that, of nearly 160 missiles fired, around 50% were launched against dummy targets.

A subsequent study by Theodore Postol from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that “the ‘Patriot’s’ intercept rate during the Gulf War was very low” and that “evidence from these preliminary studies indicates that ‘Patriot’s’ intercept rate could be much lower than 10%, possibly even zero”. Postol’s study concluded that “even the most primitive of adversaries could easily evade interception”. The revelation prompted a massive modernization program that cost tens of billions over the next two decades, but the effort proved to be in vain.

“The ‘Patriot’ missile system was not the spectacular success in the Persian Gulf War that the American public was led to believe. There is little evidence to prove that the ‘Patriot’ hit more than a few ‘Scud’ missiles launched by Iraq during the Gulf War, and there are some doubts about even these engagements. The public and the Congress were misled by definitive statements of success issued by administration and Raytheon representatives during and after the war,” the US House Government Operations Subcommittee on Legislation and National Security reported back in 1992.

The Israeli military hasn’t been relying on “Patriots” for years, instead opting for its domestic air and missile defense systems. It should be noted that the weapons used by Iran and its regional allies, although advanced, are still far behind Russian missile technologies. We know that the aforementioned modernization program for the “Patriot” failed based on its performance in recent years, so does it make any sense to claim the US-made system that keeps failing in the Middle East is supposedly “succeeding” against a much more dangerous and technologically advanced opponent in NATO-occupied Ukraine? Even makeshift ballistic missiles used by Yemeni forces against Saudi Arabia regularly penetrated “Patriot” defenses. Not to mention the laughably illogical claims the Kiev regime keeps making with regard to the supposed interception rates of Russian missiles (including hypersonic ones).

Here’s the Neo-Nazi junta’s official 2024 list of supposed “missile kill efficiency”:

“Kinzhal”: 25.23%

“Kalibr”: 49.55%

Kh-555/101: 78.06%

“Oniks”: 5.69%

“Iskander-K”: 37.62%

Kh-35: 6.67%

Kh-22: 0.55%

“Iskander-M”/KN-23: 4.31%

“Zircon”: 33.33%

“Tochka-U”: 8.82%

Kh-25/29/31/35/58/59/69: 22.17%

S-300/400: 0.63

The list is “strange”, to say the least. Apart from certain missile types (specifically the Kh-35) being listed in two separate statistics, Russian SAM systems are also presented as targets for interception, despite being air defense/ABM weapons themselves. Also, listing the S-300/400 here is very vague, to put it mildly, as it doesn’t specify which of the numerous missile types this refers to. Namely, all types from this family of SAM systems can fire a plethora of missiles designed to neutralize all sorts of targets. Putting all of them under one tab doesn’t really make sense.

However, what’s far more intriguing is the comparative “success rate” against various high-speed missiles. For instance, the claim that over a quarter of all “Kinzhals” (111, according to this list) have been shot down. Flying at speeds of up to 16,000 km/h, this missile is one of the fastest in the world. This alone makes it effectively impossible to intercept. However, if we add its ability to maneuver into the mix, the Kiev regime’s claim becomes all the more absurd.

Nobody in the political West has a viable defense against the “Kinzhal”, let alone any of its vassals and satellite states. The same goes for the 3M22 “Zircon”, against which the Neo-Nazi junta claims a 33.33% success rate (two out of six). This missile’s maximum speed exceeds 11,000 km/h and it also has high maneuverability, meaning that it’s in no way easier to shoot down than the “Kinzhal”.

On the other hand, the Kiev regime claims that it shot down only 8.82% of the old Soviet-era “Tochka-U” missiles which aren’t only slower (around 6,500 km/h), but also have a regular ballistic trajectory that is far easier to predict and intercept. Only 6 out of 68 of these were downed, as opposed to 28 out of 111 “Kinzhals” which are decades ahead, both technologically and in terms of capabilities (nearly three times faster while also being highly maneuverable).

If we add the “Iskander-M” and the KN-23 (its North Korean derivative) to the equation, it reinforces the notion of just how illogical these claims are. Namely, the Neo-Nazi junta says that it shot down 4.31% of these (56 out of 1300), even though the “Iskander-M’s” basic weapon, the 9M723 ground-based hypersonic missile, can reach a top speed of nearly 11,000 km/h, which is comparable to the “Zircon”.

Although it can maneuver, the 9M723 is less maneuverable than the more advanced 3M22, which the Kiev regime allegedly “shoots down” at a rate of 33.33%, meaning that it’s nearly eight times more effective against it than the less capable “Iskander-M”. However, the illogic continues, as the claims for the much older Kh-22 (maximum speed nearly 5,700 km/h) is just 0.55% (a mere two out of 362 launched so far).

The Neo-Nazi junta regularly complains about this missile, even admitting that it never shot down a single one until last year, even though the Kh-22, albeit fantastic, is still far less capable than either the “Kinzhal” or “Zircon”. In addition, the P-800 “Oniks”, for which the Kiev regime also claimed it’s impossible to shoot down, is also listed, with an alleged shootdown rate of 5.69% (12 out of 211). The missile’s top speed is around 3,600 km/h.

Although there’s zero evidence that a single “Oniks” was ever shot down (the same goes for the Kh-22), just for the sake of argument, let’s say the statistics are “on point”. Namely, the “Zircon” is at least three times faster than the “Oniks”, once again showing that the Neo-Nazi junta’s numbers simply don’t add up. In addition, both missiles can be fired by virtually the same platforms and the Russian military is already augmenting them with ground-based “Zircons”. Moscow certainly wouldn’t be doing that if the “Oniks” were more capable, as the Kiev regime is claiming.

There are a number of other over-the-top, completely unverifiable statistics on the list, but those would require an entirely separate analysis. Either way, it’s clear that NATO and its Neo-Nazi puppets are terrified to admit that Russian weapons are far superior and will do anything to denigrate them.

Source infobrics.org.

The post Ukrainian General Inadvertently Debunks Kiev Regime’s ‘500 Overnight Shootdowns’ Propaganda appeared first on LewRockwell.

It’s bizarre how little mainstream attention is given to the fact that the president of the United States has repeatedly confessed to being bought and owned by the world’s richest Israeli, especially given how intensely fixated his political opposition was on the possibility that he was compromised by a foreign government during his first term.

During a speech before the Israeli parliament on Monday, President Trump once again publicly admitted that he has implemented Israel-friendly policies at the behest of Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson and her late husband Sheldon, this time adding that he believes Adelson favors Israel over the United States.

Here’s a transcript of Trump’s remarks:

“As president, I terminated the disastrous Iran nuclear deal, and ultimately, I terminated Iran’s nuclear program with things called B2 bombers. It was swift and it was accurate, and it was a military beauty. I authorized the spending of billions of dollars, which went to Israel’s defense, as you know. And after years of broken promises from many other American presidents — you know that they kept promising — I never understood it until I got there. There was a lot of pressure put on these presidents. It was put on me, too, but I didn’t yield to the pressure. But every president for decades said, ‘We’re going to do it.’ The difference is I kept my promise and officially recognized the capital of Israel and moved the American Embassy to Jerusalem.

“Isn’t that right Miriam? Look at Miriam. She’s back there. Stand up. Miriam and Sheldon [Adelson] would come into the office and call me. They’d call me — I think they had more trips to the White House than anybody else, I guess. Look at her sitting there so innocently — got $60 billion in the bank, $60 billion. And she loves, and she, I think she said, ‘No, more.’ And she loves Israel, but she loves it. And they would come in. And her husband was a very aggressive man, but I loved him. It was a very aggressive, very supportive of me. And he’d call up, ‘Can I come over and see you? I’d say ‘Sheldon, I’m the president of the United States. It doesn’t work that way.’ He’d come in. But they were very responsible for so much, including getting me thinking about Golan Heights, which is probably one of the greatest things ever happened. Miriam, stand up, please. She really is, I mean, she loves this country. She loves this country. Her and her husband are so incredible. We miss him so dearly. But I actually asked her, I’m going to get her in trouble with this. But I actually asked her once, I said, ‘So Miriam, I know you love Israel. What do you love more? The United States or Israel?’ She refused to answer. That means — that might mean Israel, I must say, we love you. Thank you, darling, for being here. That’s a great honor. Great honor. She’s a wonderful woman. She is a great woman.”

Sheldon Adelson reportedly gave Trump and the Republicans over $424 million in campaign funding from 2016 up until his death in 2021. His widow Miriam continued her husband’s legacy and poured a further $100 million into Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

On the 2024 campaign trail Trump also admitted to being controlled by Adelson cash. Here’s a transcript of those remarks:

“Just as I promised, I recognize Israel’s eternal capital and opened the American embassy in Jerusalem. Jerusalem became the capital. I also recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

“You know, Miriam and Sheldon would come into the White House probably almost more than anybody outside of people that work there. And they were always after — and as soon as I’d give them something — always for Israel. As soon as I’d give them something, they’d want something else. I’d say, ‘Give me a couple of weeks, will you, please?’ But I gave them the Golan Heights, and they never even asked for it.

“You know, for 72 years they’ve been trying to do the Golan Heights, right? And even Sheldon didn’t have the nerve. But I said, ‘You know what?’ I said to David Friedman, ‘Give me a quick lesson, like five minutes or less on the Golan Heights.’ And he did. And I said, ‘Let’s do it.’ We got it done in about 15 minutes, right?”

Legitimizing Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights and moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem were two of the most controversial moves Trump made in Israel’s favor during his first term, which have now been eclipsed by his backing the genocide in Gaza and his bombings of Iran and Yemen.

And here is his, openly admitting that his billionaire Zionist megadonors have been using the access their donations bought them to push him to take drastic action in favor of Israel.

Just imagine for a second if someone had leaked documents to the press proving that Trump and received extensive financial backing from a Russian oligarch to whom he doled out favors of immense geopolitical consequence. It would be the biggest scandal in the history of American politics, bar none. But because it’s an Israeli oligarch, he can admit to it openly and repeatedly without anyone batting an eye.

During Trump’s first term his political rivals spent years pushing a bogus conspiracy theory that he was controlled by Vladimir Putin, despite his having spent that entire term aggressively ramping up cold war hostilities against Russia. Entire political punditry careers were birthed trying to create a scandal out of a narrative that could be plainly seen as false just by looking at the movements of the US war machine and Washington’s actions against Moscow.

But here’s Trump openly admitting to bending over backwards to give an Israeli oligarch whatever she wants because she gave his campaign huge sums of money, while pouring weapons into Israel to facilitate its mass atrocities and engaging in acts of war on Israel’s behalf. And it barely makes a blip in mainstream western politics or media.

This is because mainstream western politics and media understand that we are living in an unofficial oligarchic empire to which both the US and Israel belong. They never acknowledge it, they never talk about it, but all high-level politicians, pundits and operatives in the western world understand that they serve a globe-spanning power structure run by a loose alliance of plutocrats and empire managers. They understand that states like Israel are a part of said power structure, while states like Russia, China and Iran are not. So they spend their time normalizing the corruption and abuses of imperial member states while facilitating the empire’s efforts to attack and undermine the states which have successfully resisted being absorbed into the imperial power umbrella.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the only thing I like about Donald Trump is his infantile tendency to say the quiet part out loud. He advances the same kinds of abuses as his predecessors who were no less corrupt and controlled, but he exposes the underlying mechanics of those abuses in ways that more refined presidents never would.

__________________

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The post Trump Keeps Admitting That He Is Bought and Owned by the World’s Richest Israeli appeared first on LewRockwell.

Hiroshima. Chernobyl. Nagasaki. Fukushima. They’re practically household names at this point. As such, most people know that the consequences of the radioactive fallout spread far beyond the borders of these towns and cities. What you may not realize, however, is just how far.

In some cases, the consequences might seem trivial. Take, for example, the lack of salad greens throughout France for months following the Chernobyl disaster.

Meanwhile, the black rain following the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were clearly devastating.

In this regard, radioactive fallout can be elusive—taking a ruinous toll on some, while others are left seemingly untouched.

Either way, the most important point to remember is that fallout is the inevitable result of practically any major nuclear event. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about a meltdown at one of the world’s 450 active nuclear facilities, a terrorist attack with a dirty bomb, or full-scale nuclear war: fallout will be a fact of life for anyone in the surrounding area.

The silver lining? Radioactive fallout isn’t nearly as instantaneous, destructive, and unpredictable as a nuclear blast or meltdown. Indeed, it is something that you can prepare for—something you can work around and navigate your way through.

So in this post, we’re going to take a deeper look at the nature of nuclear fallout and delve a bit deep into the chances of surviving a nuclear attack.

This means we’re going to look at the science behind it, the basics of how fallout works, the situations that can arise, and the challenges you may face in the event of a nuclear disaster.

We will also pay close attention to prevailing wind patterns and geography, allowing us to gauge how much radioactive fallout you would potentially be exposed to during a nuclear attack or disaster.

Table of Contents

• 01Understanding Fallout and its Effects
• 02How to Survive the First 72 Hours After an Attack
• 03Time after Nuclear Attack
• 04Having a Safe Distance
• 05Shield from Radiation
• 06Decay from Nuclear Explosion
• 07Seek Shelter Indoors and Stay Inside, Away from Windows
• 08Remain Calm in the Event of a Nuclear Disaster or Radiation Emergencies
• 09Prepare for the Worst
• 010Knowledge is Power
• 011Frequently Asked Questions

And perhaps most importantly, we’re going to touch on a few basic things that you can easily do in order to prepare for—and ultimately survive—short-term exposure to nuclear fallout as you make your way to safety.

For the roughly 100 million Americans living within the fallout zone of an active nuclear reactor, this could be an important read.

So let’s get started…

As the name clearly implies, the definition of nuclear fallout is any residual radioactive material that falls out of the sky in the aftermath of a nuclear blast, meltdown or other critical event. If that sounds like common sense, it’s because it is.

What few people appreciate, however, is the true magnitude of nuclear events—or the massive amounts of toxic fallout they can produce. After all, there are a few key things that nuclear bombs and meltdowns both do exceptionally well:

Pulverizing

Pulverizing matter over a wide area, nuclear events can create a tremendous amount of debris, ash, and particulates. These rapidly increase exposure for those in the immediate area—where the highest concentrations of fallout and radiation can be found. In a subterranean explosion, called a “base surge,” this phenomenon is even more pronounced—with an effect akin to that of an active volcano.

Irradiating

Nuclear events irradiate this pulverized material, creating an unintentional but extremely toxic concentration of debris, dust, ash, and fallout—all while local residents are most likely seeking medical attention or escape.

Propelling

Finally, nuclear events propel the radioactive material into the stratosphere. In fact, in some cases, nuclear events can contaminate entire wind patterns with high concentrations of irradiated fallout. That’s how these events have lasting—albeit milder—effects hundreds or thousands of miles away.

These forces work together to produce a synergistic effect that maximizes victims’ exposure to toxic elements. Ergo, even and especially those who survive the initial blast can expect to face an absolute nightmare situation in terms of exposure to radiation.

When it comes to determining the extent and volume of fallout following any particular nuclear event, there are two key factors to consider.

First, there’s the location of the explosion. If it’s an airburst, then comparatively little fallout will be produced (but there will be a substantial EMP wave). However, if it’s a surface explosion, material will actually be pulled up into the nuclear cloud and irradiated before it’s carried along the plume into the upper atmosphere.

Consequently, you might think an explosion over water would be more favorable—but that’s just not the case.

You see, the explosion evaporates water and irradiates the remaining sea salt, producing much finer and smaller radioactive particles that can spread across a much larger area. This fallout can then seed clouds and rain back down on cities hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

And it goes without saying that this fallout won’t simply wash off the outside of a building. Indeed, water surface bursts can even pulverize the sea floor. During the infamous Castle Bravo nuclear test, for instance, where a massive chain reaction was accidentally triggered due to the bomb’s peculiar construction, it was reported that calcinated white powder (pulverized coral) rained down on nearby boats.

Subsurface bursts, meanwhile, become even more complicated, because the base surge they produce can flood the surrounding areas with lethal doses of radiation before the fallout even arrives.

The second key factor is meteorological. Though it’s frightening to think that something as devastating as nuclear fallout is determined by the way the wind blows, that, we’re afraid, is exactly the case. This means that, due to the fine particulates produced by a nuclear blast, fallout can easily be carried over hundreds of miles in a matter of hours and days.

Of course, the greatest intensity of the fallout is felt in the immediate area of the nuclear event, but radioactive materials can nevertheless spread far and wide due to its volatile nature.

Part of this is accomplished through the animal kingdom. For livestock who graze in fields covered in nuclear fallout, for instance, their radioactive diet might prompt their extermination (as in Chernobyl). In other instances, however, they may spread the fallout further by carrying it in their fur, droppings, and bodies.

Vegetation is a concern here, too. After all, crops can be dusted with fallout from an explosion hundreds of miles away, as was the case with the French salad greens mentioned above. These plants typically have to be safely destroyed to contain exposure.

But ultimately, the nature of exposure, how it works, and what constitutes a lethal dose of radiation—these things are still widely debated and little understood. But, when it comes to fallout, there are a few things that can be said for certain:

Fallout isn’t always predictable, it’s got devastating potential, and knowing what to expect can provide a crucial advantage at a time when most people will still be reeling.

How to Survive the First 72 Hours After an Attack

Facing the reality of a nuclear detonation (and the fallout that comes with it) might feel overwhelming to think about. With that said, it’s far from being a hopeless scenario.

Consider Akiko Takakura, for example, who was just 300 meters from ground zero at the Hiroshima explosion but survived unscathed. Eizo Nomura, meanwhile, was even closer, at just 155 meters from the hypocenter. That means he stood less than two football fields from a nuclear explosion and still lived well into his eighties.

This, of course, raises the question: how did they survive a nuclear bomb going off right on top of them while so many others perished? In reality, there are four key factors that will determine whether you’re safe from the fallout of a nuclear detonation or meltdown:

Time after Nuclear Attack

As we’ll cover in just a moment, time is crucial after a nuclear blast. You’ll only have about fifteen minutes to seek sufficient cover, but radiation will die down to acceptable levels in most of the blast area after just a few days. Note that fallout is at its absolute worst in the first 72 hours, so it’s crucial to evacuate immediately or stay sheltered. After a few weeks, you’ll be able to make longer trips outside (if you haven’t yet evacuated).

Having a Safe Distance  

While there are a handful of cases like those mentioned above, close proximity to a nuclear blast and the immediate fallout tend to spell certain disaster. So while it makes sense to shelter in place during the worst of the fallout, your ultimate goal will be to put a safe distance between you and the bomb’s lingering radioactive effects.

Shield from Radiation

In an instant, the initial fireball and scorching thermal radioactive material of a nuclear detonation gives way to what’s called gamma radiation. Gamma radiation is notoriously powerful, able to penetrate inches of heavy material (even thick lead plating) and rapidly poison the body, so shielding can play a vital role in protecting you from radiation. Notably, both of the Hiroshima survivors mentioned above were underground in a shielded concrete basement, which was the key to their survival.

Decay from Nuclear Explosion

Radioactive materials decay at different rates, which can affect everything from timing and distance to the amount of shielding needed to protect yourself.

Here, it’s worth noting that each of these factors interacts with the others. So if you’ve got a robust enough shelter, you won’t have to worry so much about distance. Likewise if you enter an area weeks after the fallout has dissipated.

In that spirit, let’s take a look at how you might really survive a modern nuclear event.

First things first: if you’re exposed to a nuclear detonation or meltdown, it will be a hard thing to miss. You’ll either see it, hear about it on the news, take note of a special nuclear fallout alarm, or catch on as those around you react to what’s going on.

In the first crucial minutes, your very first priority will be finding the best possible shelter nearby. This is because you’ll have about fifteen minutes or less to do so. Remember that cars provide absolutely no protection, and that any (indoor) shelter is better than being outside.

Once you’ve found the right place, go to the deepest room inside it. You’re basically trying to put as many walls as possible between you and the outside world, even if that means holing up in a linen closet. Note that you’ll want to make sure you’re away from doors, windows, and anything else that might be exposed to the outside world.

It’s even a good idea to tape up the cracks around doors and windows, to prevent particulates from seeping in.

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Have you ever had the impression you are living in a world stage theatre of clowns and jokers, who make you laugh and cry? And when you walk out of the theatre, you smile to yourself, “It’s just been a little drama play, but if we don’t take it seriously, they will take us over and down.”

So, let us take it seriously. What at times looks, sounds, and appears like a joke, in reality, is not a joke at all. Like Trump the peacemaker. Nine months into his second presidency, there is no peace in sight in Ukraine, and there is no real peace in Palestine, let alone the rest of the Middle East and the world.

Even if President Trump claims credit for the fragile Israel-Gaza ceasefire he says he brokered – we do not know, whether it is going to hold, or will fall apart like all the previous ones?

Just this one seems to have achieved an exchange of Hamas-taken hostages (in the dozens) and Israeli prisoners (in the thousands). Is Israel indeed releasing all her political prisoners?

If Trump’s election campaign promises of peace were serious, he could have stopped the Zionist-Israeli aggression almost from one day to the next, by saying nyet to his buddy, Bibi Netanyahu, no longer supplying weapons, nor money. In the two years since the infamous 7 October 2023, US taxpayers have dished out more than 21 billion dollars to keep the Israeli Gaza killing machine – and others – oiled and going.

Is this latest – hopefully real — “breakthrough” a Trump achievement because he thought it would bring him his long-coveted Nobel Peace Prize? Hardly. Because his channels must have told him in advance that the Prize would be awarded to the Venezuelan opposition lady, Madame María Corina Machado – and that Machado’s Peace Prize would strengthen and even justify his, Trump’s aggression and “regime change” efforts in Venezuela. It is a two-in-one fusion.

Ms. Machado is known to have attempted coups against the Maduro government on various occasions. So, is the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarding a hybrid Peace Prize to please conventional reigning politics?

A controlled, multi-concocted move in favor of Trump’s US of A? If this behind the curtain motion will prove successful, giving the US eventually control over the world’s largest hydrocarbon reserves, it may have been worth, waiting for perhaps another year (?) for his self-nominated and so desired Peace Award.

Could Mr. Donald Trump have been put in his current presidency as controlled opposition? Well-chosen by Tavistock (the UK-based social engineering agency), because of his super-ego, manifested daily, and his erratic personality, an egocentric buffoon, confusion, and chaos creator, thus, divider of society?

Is Trump given orders by these powerful invisible underground forces, told to first defy them and then follow them, for more of peoples’ credibility and confusion?

Though no tangible proof is available, all is possible, especially if in the end he gets his “piece of sugar”, a benefit towards his other mantra (other than the peacemaker), MAGA, Make America Great Again. With Venezuela under the roof, he would have added a substantial chunk of wealth to his MAGA.

The powers behind the rotten, corrupt, and criminal world system that so far successfully controls our civilization, point to an immensely commanding financial stronghold, like the city of London and its offshoots around the world: Paris, Frankfurt, Tokyo, New York, and not to forget, Zurich (financially) and Geneva (politically and financially).

The invisible Powers-that-Be do not want peace with Russia. They never did. And they have their hands on enough money to keep trying subduing Russia, buying off Germany’s Fritz Merz, France’s Emmanuel Macron, and Brussels unelected European Commission (EC) Queen Madame Ursula Von der Leyen. But they will not succeed – ever.

However, they create an intimidating ambiance of war and fearmongering meant for appeasing western societies for easier dominance.

Germany has again been chosen to be in the forefront as an aggressor on Russia – like in the two preceding world wars. Why? Because Germany was long ago identified as one of the western countries most obedient and submissive to orders. Tavistock 101.

Although Trump officially questions the worldwide intro and promotion of AI (artificial intelligence), the digitization of our lives, the control over the people worldwide, to the point of dominating our lives in a way of no return. However, he allows it to happen in the US at warp speed – after all, the motto is competing with China.

Mr. Trump may not know that this was the play-script he was given to advance the world a little bit closer to full globalization, speak a fast-accelerating blow-up – what he pretends he does not want. His non-action on the global scene of decay allows causing a bit more damage, more killing, more submission, more torture. He did not and does not want to know, because his ego tells him constantly that he is stronger than the screenplay he is acting on.

They make us people believe that two (East and West) or more forces are fighting each other – divide and conquer style – and achieve dividing us, the people, the potentially real power that is. And we fall for it, as always.

Another Tavistock 101.

There is no real proof for either option: a genuine Trump, or a controlled Trump. Nevertheless, his role as Controlled Opposition – a bit like Bernie Sanders of the US Congress but less obvious — becomes an ever-stronger gut-feeling, as increased Trump-caused or initiated chaos is waging around the globe.

People stand down or even lie down, doing NOTHING against it, letting the very society / civilization, an achievement of the people, be flushed down the drain.

And the MAGA chief, whether controlled or not, in the end will get his pound of flesh.

And We the People? Let us enjoy the daily spectacle with humor, as the world is blown to pieces in slow motion, as what it is – a world stage theatre into which we have been compromised for Inaction.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post World Stage Theatre Keeps People Nodding in Comfort and Scared from Reality. ‘Nobel Peace Prize = War’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Given that the Federal Reserve has obviously abandoned its 2 percent target for the rise in prices brought on by its own paper-money inflationary policy, it’s important that we keep in mind how our nation’s paper money-system and the Fed’s inflationary policy plunder and loot the American people.

There is the plunder and looting that takes place through the simple inflationary expansion of the money supply. By inflating the amount of money in circulation, the Fed reduces the value of money sitting in people’s savings accounts or that they receive in income. Their savings and income buy less than before simply because the federal government, through its inflationary policy, has debased the value of money.

This is what has been occurring ever since the U.S. government converted to a paper-money standard during the President Franklin Roosevelt administration during the 1930s. Prior to that time — in fact, for more than 125 years prior to that time — the official money of the American people had been gold coins and silver coins. That’s because the Constitution mandated gold coins and silver coins as the official money of our nation.

But gold coins and silver coins cannot be printed, like paper money can. So, FDR used the excuse of an economic “emergency” to declare a permanent end to our constitutional monetary system. Indeed, he did it without even the semblance of a constitutional amendment. And the U.S. Supreme Court upheld his extraordinary “emergency” power to effectively amend the Constitution through executive order and congressional law, even though the Constitution does not delegate“emergency” powers to either the president or the Congress.

Ever since then — year after year, decade after decade — the value of the paper dollar has gone down. That’s because the federal government found it more convenient to pay for its out-of-control welfare-warfare-regulatory programs through newly printed money than by simply raising income taxes on people.

After all, people get upset when public officials raise their income taxes. With rising prices that come with inflation, most people have no idea that it is federal officials who are causing the prices to rise through inflationary debasement of the value of people’s money. So, they get angry at people in the private sector who are raising their prices to reflect the lower value of the money rather than get angry at people in the government sector who are causing the rising prices through inflationary expansion of the money supply.

Even at an inflationary rate of 2 percent per year, the citizenry are still getting plundered and looted to the tune of at least 2 percent per year. When one compounds that amount year after year, the amount of plunder and looting increases substantially.

But there is another factor to consider — the benefit that an inflationary policy brings to state and local governments in the form of higher property taxes on people’s homes.

Over the years and decades, the Fed’s inflationary policies have caused the value of people’s homes to soar. While this phenomenon has caused people to feel like they are increasing the equity in the home, it actually doesn’t make any real difference at all. Why? Because all the home values in the surrounding area have increased too.

Thus, people quickly discover that selling their home in the hope of acquiring a better home doesn’t work out. In order to benefit from the increased inflationary-induced value of their home, they have to move to another part of the country — one where home values are relatively lower.

The people who love the inflationary increase in home values are state and local government officials. That’s because they rely on property taxes to fund their operations — and those property tax revenues are based partly on the assessed value of people’s homes.

Thus, as the value of people’s homes increase due to the Fed’s inflationary debasement policies, the real-estate taxes that state and local officials are assessing on people’s homes are constantly going up. That means that while people are receiving no real benefit from the increase in their home values, they are suffering a constantly worsening situation in terms of the real-estate taxes they are paying, which are going up year after year, decade after decade.

According to ChatGPT, with a 2 percent inflation rate, the nominal value of someone’s house, given compound interest, will increase by 22 percent over a ten-year period, meaning, as ChatGPT states, its “real purchasing power remains about the same.”

But notice something important: while the real purchasing power remains the same, the same can’t be said of the amount of property taxes that must be paid to state and local officials. The property tax burden is constantly increasing because the taxes are being assessed on the nominal value of the home, not the real purchasing-power value of the home.

Thus, it’s important to keep in mind that America’s paper-money monetary system that FDR foisted upon our nation on a permanent basis, which is reinforced by the inflationary policies of the Federal Reserve, which was established in 1913, ends up looting and plundering people not only at the federal-government level but also at the state and local government level.

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

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When Donald Trump came down that escalator in 2016, just like The Simpsons foretold, I just kind of shrugged. A billionaire running for president. I’ve seen that movie before. But his rhetoric became increasingly radical, even revolutionary. He lashed out at immigration, bad trade deals, “globalists,” and the “senseless wars.”

I wasn’t really sure who Roger Stone was when he contacted me that year, telling me how much he loved my book Hidden History. Talk turned to his long time friend Trump, who’d just announced his candidacy. “He knows about all the conspiracies,” Stone assured me. “You’re going to love him.” I don’t know that I ever loved him, but I did start paying more attention. Much of that rhetoric sounded pretty good to me. And long, long overdue. Trump blasted our Third World infrastructure, which has been largely untouched for more than sixty years. He talked about bringing the troops home from the over 150 countries around the world where they are still nonsensically stationed. He called out the corruption in Washington, D.C.; the “Deep State.” He vowed to “Drain the Swamp.” He especially focused on his villainous opponent, career criminal Hillary Clinton, dubbed her “Crooked,” and promised to prosecute her. He inspired millions, who loved it when he called out “Fake News.”

Naming Mike Pence as running mate was alarming, but JFK had been pressured into putting LBJ on the ticket, and it didn’t stop him from trying to reform things. Trump’s first Inaugural Address was stunning, the best since JFK’s. Among the guests he invited to watch the ceremony was Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who first spread the word about the obvious links between vaccines and autism. Wakefield had been smeared by the state controlled media. It took courage to invite him. The response to his election from the Deep State Trump was critiquing daily was unprecedented. Shrieking women lined the streets in “pussy hats,” screeching “Not my president!” All of Hollywood stood in unison against him. He received countless threats of physical harm, proudly posted publicly on social media. Grown college students were assigned “safe spaces” with crayons, because they couldn’t “deal” with Trump’s election.

But once he entered office, things began unraveling. At least for people like me, who had found it hard to accept the abrupt transformation from lifelong liberal playboy and trash talking reality TV star into a renegade crusader. Almost as soon as the White House door shut behind him, Trump was urging supporters to stop chanting “Lock her up!” in regards to Hillary Clinton. He declared that the Clintons were “good people.” And he didn’t do anything that he said he’d do “on my first day in office.” No executive orders banning birthright citizenship or sanctuary cities. It quickly became clear that Trump was more about talking than doing. Weeks, and then months passed. No mass deportations. No grand infrastructure proposal. No troops called home. Trump’s first term became a mishmash of juvenile food fights online with vacuous celebrities, partisan impeachment efforts, and constant flip flopping. The COVID psyop didn’t help, but it can never be forgotten that Trump presided over it.

Trump’s maddening flip flops on COVID alone are thoroughly documented in my book Masking the Truth: How COVID-19 Destroyed Civil Liberties and Shut Down the World. It’s still the champion- the most shadow banned book in the world. Trump continues to brag about the diabolical “warp speed” vaccine which has in reality killed and maimed millions. He seems to enjoy trolling his most loyal supporters, whom he obviously knows are strongly opposed to him on this issue. That is the essence of the Trumpenstein Project; an “outsider” who is viciously attacked by every corner of the establishment. Who feigns solidarity with dreaded conspiracy theorists and Thought Criminals. Who is always “considering” doing things which really might make this country better. Improve the lives of the People. But who ultimately, when push comes to shove, always sides with the Deep State. The undrained monsters in the Swamp.

We all know what happened in 2020. Cities burned, historical statues were torn down, and Trump did nothing. Except tweet like a blue collar worker in a trailer park. Yes, there was even more electoral fraud than usual in 2020. Trump stomped his feet and hired the worst lawyers he could find. Then threw the January 6 protesters under the bus, while too many of them were denied due process for four years. To his credit, he did pardon almost all of them as he entered office for the second time. He also wrote some of the same executive orders he’d promised the first time. And he created DOGE, headed by another offbeat billionaire, Elon Musk. Eliminate government waste? Sounds good. But DOGE rapidly fizzled out, after some blockbuster exposures from USAID. Musk started feuding with Trump for unclear reasons. As has been the story throughout Trump’s time in office, no one was prosecuted for the fraud.

But something happened to Donald Trump a few months back. Suddenly, he became reluctant to release the files of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s FBI director, Kash Patel, and his top aide, former talk show host Dan Bongino, publicly stated that Epstein killed himself. Then they, along with aging Blonde bombshell Attorney General Pam Bondi, simply said that there was no Epstein file. Never mind all the previous statements, and Trump’s own references to it. Then, Trump was asked about it at a press conference, and exploded in rage. “I can’t believe you’re asking me about Epstein!” It was the first time the public had seen this kind of anger from him. And ever since then, Trump’s character-which I have termed Trumpenstein-has taken a really dark turn and never been the same. No more broken promises about doing great things. Now it’s all frightening threats. Police state type of stuff. Basically, Trump started doing what his deluded TDS critics claimed he really wanted to do.

As it is with everything associated with Trump, it’s hard to tell exactly what he really has done, versus the nonstop loaded language, always full of contradictory twists and turns. He did send National Guard troops into the streets of Washington, D.C., much as Joe Biden had after the contested election of 2020. It seemed like an oddly belated move, given that then President Trump did absolutely nothing when the cities were burning, people were dying, and property was being destroyed in the long, hot summer of 2020. He has talked about sending troops to Chicago, Los Angeles, and other “Blue” cities. That is obviously unconstitutional, but the Right seems to care as little about the Constitution as the “Woke” Left does. At around the same time that he went ballistic over the Epstein List, Trump bombed Iran. Clearly and unequivocally at Israel’s behest. It was the most overt cuckery on the part of a U.S. president ever, and every president has been an Israeli cuck since the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

These moves cost him an unknown number of supporters. The question of just how committed our nation is to supporting Israel right or wrong started being asked, by formerly mainstream figures like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. It still is unclear how many MAGA supporters were unquestioning Zionists. Because of Trump’s frequent references to “senseless wars” and his campaign slogan of “America First,” it seems logical to assume that most of them weren’t unquestioning Zionists. I like to picture how many of the MAGA faithful are now scratching their heads, having endured the ridiculous QAnon psyop, and the perpetual flop flopping and backtracking. I’ve seen those lists of the hundreds of great things Trump has supposedly done so far. Most of them amount to vague claims of anonymous sex traffickers being arrested, with some of them tried secretly at Guantanamo Bay, where the likes of Swamp Queen Hillary Clinton were also supposedly prosecuted.

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The seven study categories were overall, thyroid, gastric, colorectal, lung, breast, and prostate (see chart below). The sample was of over 8.4 million South Koreans.  Pretty hard to ignore.  (The first study was of approximately 300,000 residents of Pescara province in Italy monitored for 30 months and indicated that the Covid mRNA shots significantly increased the risk of overall, breast, bladder, and colorectal cancer.)

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Il manoscritto fornisce un grimaldello al lettore, una chiave di lettura semplificata, del mondo finanziario e non che sembra essere andato fuori controllo negli ultimi quattro anni in particolare. Questa una storia di cartelli, a livello sovrastatale e sovranazionale, la cui pianificazione centrale ha raggiunto un punto in cui deve essere riformata radicalmente e questa riforma radicale non può avvenire senza una dose di dolore economico che potrebbe mettere a repentaglio la loro autorità. Da qui la risposta al Grande Default attraverso il Grande Reset. Questa la storia di un coyote, che quando non riesce a sfamarsi all'esterno ricorre all'autofagocitazione. Lo stesso accaduto ai membri del G7, dove i sei membri restanti hanno iniziato a fagocitare il settimo: gli Stati Uniti.

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(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/lo-smantellamento-sistematico-dello)

Nel 1883 quando fu approvato il Pendleton Act, il quale istituiva la pubblica amministrazione statunitense, non doveva sembrare un granché. Il presidente era il dimenticato Chester A. Arthur. La paura di essere assassinato come il suo predecessore, James Garfield, lo convinse a sostenere quella legge. Le ragioni per l'approvazione: lo stato ha bisogno di professionisti con competenze istituzionali. I tecnici stavano cambiando il mondo, quindi perché non anche lo stato?

Scienza e ingegneria andavano di moda – elettricità, ponti d'acciaio, comunicazioni telegrafiche, combustione interna, fotografia – quindi sicuramente gli affari pubblici necessitavano dello stesso livello di competenza. Chi poteva negare che la pubblica amministrazione potesse fare un lavoro migliore dei cugini e soci in affari dei politici di professione?

È così che tutto è iniziato. Quello che un tempo veniva chiamato governo del popolo, dal popolo e per il popolo, fu deriso come uno “spoil system” irrimediabilmente corrotto, un'espressione che rifletteva una linea di marketing geniale. Così fu rovesciato a favore di assunzioni “meritevoli” nell'esecutivo, uno staff non ancora permanente o numeroso, ma il proverbiale cammello ora aveva infilato il naso nella tenda.

Attraverso due guerre mondiali, la Grande depressione e poi la Guerra fredda, ciò che accadde fu qualcosa che i Padri Fondatori della Costituzione non avrebbero mai immaginato: enormi sistemi di governo, costituiti da gigantesche burocrazie gestite da dipendenti che non potevano essere licenziati. Spettava a loro applicarle le cose, ma in realtà hanno creato il quadro operativo per l'intera società civile.

Uno stato nello stato, con molti livelli, incluso ciò che era ed è classificato.

L'industria e i media da tempo si sono resi conto che la pubblica amministrazione è una fonte di informazione e di continuità istituzionale più affidabile rispetto ai rami eletti, o nominati, di un governo. Servire in essa è diventato un segno di credibilità nell'industria e quindi la porta girevole tra di loro ha continuato a girare. I ​​media e lo Stato profondo, compresi i suoi settori militare e di intelligence, hanno sviluppato un rapporto reciprocamente vantaggioso che ha aperto alla manipolazione dell'opinione pubblica.

L'aspetto migliore del nuovo sistema era che quasi nessuno nella vita pubblica lo capiva veramente. Agli studenti veniva insegnato che ci sono tre rami del governo, con pesi e contrappesi tra di essi. La vita pubblica è stata a lungo dominata dalle elezioni, con feroci battaglie ideologiche che alla fine sono diventate più simili a una facciata, i cui risultati non avevano molta importanza per gli affari pratici dello stato. Era l'illusione della democrazia.

Una volta svelato il meccanismo, e posta un'attenzione critica alla sua legittimità, il disfacimento era inevitabile. Il motivo è piuttosto ovvio: l'intera faccenda è incoerente con l'idea di un governo del popolo. I Padri Fondatori combatterono una guerra per rovesciare la burocrazia, non per istituirne un'altra. La Dichiarazione d'Indipendenza affermava chiaramente: è diritto di un popolo rovesciare qualsiasi governo e istituirne uno nuovo.

Quest'idea è il postulato più radicato nell'intera vita civica americana. Ha molta più legittimità nell'opinione pubblica delle rivendicazioni della pubblica amministrazione, o delle richieste che i suoi complotti e macchinazioni rimangano segreti al popolo.

Durante tutto il periodo delle conquiste amministrative dello stato, la Corte Suprema non è mai stata chiamata a pronunciarsi chiaramente sulla sua legittimità. Ci sono state piccole decisioni lungo il percorso che ne hanno consolidato il funzionamento, ma nulla che dicesse chiaramente: questo è o non è coerente con la legge che governa un popolo libero.

Quest'anno, e soprattutto perché l'amministrazione Trump ha deciso di mettere in discussione l'intero modello, il meccanismo ha iniziato a funzionare male e a sgretolarsi. C'è ancora molta strada da fare, ma finalmente abbiamo la risposta alla domanda sulla legittimità di questo quarto potere: non è legittimo, non lo è mai stato.

Il libro, Is the Administrative State Unlawful? (2014), di Phillip Hamburger ha gradualmente innescato un enorme dibattito letterario a favore e contro, oltre a un crescente esercito di podcaster che lo hanno capito nel corso degli eventi successivi. È stato un classico caso di presa di coscienza: una volta che si vede una cosa, non si può più non vederla.

Il confronto attivo è iniziato durante il primo mandato di Trump. Arrivò a Washington aspettandosi di essere il capo del potere esecutivo, probabilmente perché questo è ciò che la Costituzione stabilisce all'Articolo 2, Sezione 1. Scoprì rapidamente il contrario. Tutto ciò che voleva cambiare era stato dichiarato off-limits. Per quanto ne sapeva, l'intera città concordava sul fatto che l'incarico fosse puramente cerimoniale.

Questo non gli andava giù. La tradizione, tipica dello Stato profondo, di ignorare il presidente a meno che non lo infastidisse, irritava non poco Trump. Alla fine si stancò dei complotti, degli intrighi e dei tentativi di indebolire l'autorità presidenziale – che considerava simili a quelli di un amministratore delegato, ma nessun altro era d'accordo – e decise di fare un test: licenziò James Comey da capo dell'FBI. Washington andò fuori di testa.

La persona a cui toccò il compito di licenziarlo fu il giudice Rod Rosenstein, la cui sorella lavorava al CDC. Si trattava di Nancy Messionier, la quale convocò la prima conferenza stampa sulla questione di un nuovo virus proveniente dalla Cina che, a suo dire, avrebbe richiesto cambiamenti radicali nella vita americana. Il suo ruolo fu rivelato per la prima volta dal giornalista del New York Times, che in seguito affermò di essere stato ingannato.

Nessuno al CDC si prese la briga di verificare con Trump. Quando gli fu chiesto di firmare per i lockdown, un mese dopo l'annuncio iniziale del CDC, l'impresa era stata praticamente compiuta. Scelse di prendere il toro per le corna piuttosto che essere divorato vivo dai media generalisti, pronti a incolparlo di ogni morte. Trascorse gli otto mesi successivi a emanare proclami sui social media – inizialmente pessimi, poi sempre migliori – ma fu quasi completamente ignorato dallo Stato amministrativo che aveva scatenato.

Poco prima di lasciare l'incarico nel 2020, Trump emise un ordine esecutivo che avrebbe riclassificato una parte del personale pubblico come dipendente con mansioni soggette a licenziamento. Ogni sede che si occupava di affari federali fu colta da un'ondata di panico per le conseguenze che questo avrebbe avuto sul futuro del racket centenario che avevano gestito. L'ordine fu rapidamente revocato dal nuovo presidente al momento del giuramento, un'azione che ha dato il via alla grande battaglia del futuro: Washington contro il popolo.

Dopo quattro anni di esilio Trump e il suo team hanno pianificato la loro vendetta. Era chiaro a tutti che la questione era fondamentale. Avrebbe dovuto rischiare tutto sottoponendo la questione alla Corte Suprema. Lo ha fatto emanando un numero record di ordini esecutivi riguardanti il ​​ramo esecutivo, tutti presupponendo che potesse agire come un presidente.

Il team di Trump aveva previsto una raffica di cause legali seguite da ingiunzioni, molto simile a quanto accaduto nel 2019-2020. Questa volta avrebbe dato battaglia a livello giudiziario e avrebbe portato la questione in cima alla sua lista. È stata una scommessa rischiosa, ma ha pagato. Sapeva che la struttura dello status quo era completamente indifendibile da un punto di vista costituzionale.

Il colpo più recente allo Stato amministrativo tocca il cuore della questione. Nel caso Trump contro l'American Federation of Government Employees (8 luglio 2025), la Corte Suprema ha sostenuto il diritto del presidente di procedere a licenziamenti di massa di dipendenti federali. C'è stato un solo voto contrario da parte della giudice Ketanji Brown Jackson, la quale aveva annullato altri ordini di Trump quando era giudice distrettuale di Washington.

Il dissenso della Jackson cerca di dare un senso al quarto ramo del governo. “Secondo la nostra Costituzione, il Congresso ha il potere di istituire agenzie amministrative e di specificarne le funzioni”, ha scritto, “pertanto, nel corso dell'ultimo secolo, i presidenti che hanno tentato di riorganizzare il governo federale hanno prima ottenuto l'autorizzazione dal Congresso”. In mancanza di tale autorizzazione, ha affermato, la Corte dovrebbe abbracciare il “mantenimento dello status quo per ridurre i danni”.

“Questa azione esecutiva promette licenziamenti di massa, cancellazione diffusa di programmi sociali e servizi federali, e lo smantellamento di gran parte del governo federale così come lo ha creato il Congresso. Ciò che una persona (o un Presidente) potrebbe definire ingombrante burocrazia è la prospettiva di un agricoltore di ottenere un raccolto sano, la possibilità di un minatore di carbone di respirare senza problemi di polmonite, o l'opportunità di un bambino in età prescolare di apprendere in un ambiente sicuro”.

Eccoci qui: il cuore stesso della bestia della pianificazione centralizzata è a rischio. Almeno lei capisce la posta in gioco.

Quest'ultima sentenza – a cui probabilmente seguiranno molte altre – arriva sulla scia di una serie di decisioni simili, tra cui: Loper Bright Enterprises contro Raimondo (28 giugno 2024), che ha annullato la Deferenza Chevron (1986) riducendo l'autorità interpretativa delle agenzie governative e trasferendo il potere da queste ultime ad altri rami (rispettivamente giudiziario ed esecutivo); SEC contro Jarkesy (27 giugno 2024), che ha limitato l'uso di decisioni interne da parte delle agenzie governative rafforzando il controllo giudiziario; Corner Post, Inc. contro Federal Reserve (1° luglio 2024), che ha ampliato le possibilità di contestare vecchie normative; Ohio contro EPA (27 giugno 2024), che ha imposto una rigorosa conformità all'APA limitando l'eccesso di potere normativo; Garland contro Cargill (14 giugno 2024), che ha limitato le interpretazioni statutarie delle agenzie governative; Trump contro CASA (27 giugno 2025), che ha limitato le ingiunzioni a livello nazionale rafforzando l'azione esecutiva; City and County of San Francisco contro EPA (4 marzo 2025), che ha ridotto l'ambito normativo della stessa EPA.

Tutto questo è accaduto con una rapidità sorprendente: nel giro di un solo anno. Il regime durato cento anni è improvvisamente cambiato radicalmente per adattarsi a quanto progettato dai Padri Fondatori. Si tratta di un contro-colpo di stato contro la tirannia degli esperti e i sistemi di coercizione/controllo da loro attentamente costruiti. Anche se non ne sentiamo ancora gli effetti, il terreno ci è crollato sotto i piedi.

È un mito che i tribunali si limitino a esaminare la legge e a giudicare i casi in base al merito. Sono soggetti alle pressioni dell'opinione pubblica e si sono inchinati di fronte all'ethos del tempo. Quest'ultimo è cambiato, improvvisamente e drasticamente... perché?

Dal 2020 al 2023, con le ricadute che continuano ancora oggi, lo Stato amministrativo, che si era a lungo tenuto lontano dagli occhi della gente comune, ha insinuato profonde intrusioni negli affari privati ​​di ogni americano. Ha chiuso scuole, chiese e aziende; ha emesso ordini di restare a casa; ha sequestrato persone in strutture sanitarie, impedendo qualsiasi contatto con i familiari; ha poi imposto l'iniezione a moltitudini di persone con un vaccino sperimentale che non ha fatto altro che causare feriti e morti.

È una misura dell'arroganza e dell'egemonia di questa macchina burocratica – che si estende dalle agenzie governative alle aziende, dal mondo accademico al settore non-profit – il fatto che così tanti al suo interno credano di poterla fare franca con tutti questi oltraggi senza conseguenze. La rabbia pubblica è scoppiata, esprimendosi in ogni modo possibile e chiedendo un cambiamento. Quel cambiamento è iniziato: e ci sono le condizioni anche per uno molto più radicale, che potrebbe avvenire più in là nel tempo o forse prima.

Le intricate reti di influenza, corruzione, do ut des e furtivo saccheggio delle risorse e del potere del popolo si credevano invulnerabili, un po' come i governanti del vecchio impero sovietico nei mesi precedenti al suo crollo. Ogni vecchio regime si è creduto al sicuro fino al momento in cui i suoi leader hanno cercato rifugio e i suoi tirapiedi sono fuggiti sulle colline.

Con la risposta al Covid lo Stato amministrativo ha superato il limite, ha fatto il passo più lungo della gamba, ha tirato fuori il mattoncino Jenga sbagliato, o qualsiasi altro cliché si voglia scegliere. È stato l'evento scatenante, l'evento che ha smascherato il tutto. Viene in mente la guerra alla vodka di Mikhail Gorbaciov, che fece più della Glasnost o della Perestrojka per porre fine al regime e minare l'ultimo brandello di credibilità del governo del partito.

Per molti anni ci siamo chiesti come sarebbe stata la rivoluzione una volta tornati a casa. Ne abbiamo avuto un assaggio la scorsa settimana, quando le fotocamere degli iPhone hanno ripreso migliaia di dipendenti del Dipartimento di Stato mentre portavano i loro averi in scatole fuori dalle porte d'ingresso del palazzo che era stato a lungo la loro casa. Vivi secondo gli editti amministrativi; muori secondo gli stessi editti.

[*] traduzione di Francesco Simoncelli: https://www.francescosimoncelli.com/

Supporta Francesco Simoncelli's Freedonia lasciando una mancia in satoshi di bitcoin scannerizzando il QR seguente.

LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON is a president who has escaped the scrutiny and judgment of history despite considerable documentation that should make him an outstanding candidate for historical review, critique, and analysis. His primary biographer, Robert Caro, consistently gets rave book reviews from mainstream media for his disingenuous puff piece books on LBJ. It’s entirely possible that LBJ is the most evil or one of the most evil presidents in US history. (ILLUSTRATION: The USS Liberty post-Israeli attack)

Some researchers believe that LBJ was the mastermind behind JFK’s assassination and researcher Phillip F. Nelson wrote a book documenting his investigation on this issue: LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination.

However, one of the greatest unknown chapters in LBJ’s presidency is that he personally gave the order to Israel to bomb and utterly destroy the USS Liberty and its entire crew of 294 Americans. Astoundingly, when the mission went awry and Sixth Fleet Commanders were ordering the rescue of the besieged and bloodied USS Liberty crew, LBJ ordered that rescue operations be called back, at least twice. Against all odds, the USS Liberty survived but after the attack, 34 Americans lay dead. Except for four worthless .50 caliber machine guns, the USS Liberty was unarmed and defenseless against the far superior firing power of the Israeli navel and air force armada that descended upon it with relentless and unspeakable terror.

Not a whole lot has been written about the USS Liberty. It’s just another critically important issue that has been buried in history, but two extraordinary books document the truth. James M. Ennes Jr., is a retired US Naval Officer and a survivor of the Liberty attack who wrote a book that documents his investigative disclosure of the truth, here.

Peter Hounam, an investigative journalist, wrote Operation Cyanide, Why the Bombing of the USS Liberty Nearly Caused World War III. Hounam’s extraordinary book, published in 2003, relies heavily on the work of Ennis and also documents numerous interviews that Hounam conducted with the USS Liberty survivors as well as other folks in the US, British, and Israeli governments.

The “official” story of the USS Liberty, according to the government and mainstream media version of the event, is that on June 8, 1967 the Israelis accidentally bombed the Liberty off the coast of Egypt and killed 34 American sailors.

The real story is that President Johnson, who was being battered in the polls over the Vietnam War and facing a general election loss and even losing the Democrat primary, asked the Israelis to bomb the Liberty to create a casus belli and to secure a Gulf-of-Tonkin-style resolution to explode the world into war — because in America everybody loves an outraged and indignant president who will use the full force of the military at the slightest provocation, even a government-planned false flag attack.

The USS Liberty, however, encompasses far more than a murderous psychopathic American president resorting to hideously evil deeds to get re-elected. In addition to ordering the total destruction of the USS Liberty and potentially sending 294 Americans to a watery grave in the Mediterranean Sea, LBJ also ordered the nuclear bombing of Cairo, an event specifically designed to create a nuclear war by blaming the entire USS Liberty affair on Russia or Egypt. More horrifying, it’s documented that US planes were on emergency standby orders as pilots waited on the runways in their planes armed with nuclear weapons. The nuclear bombing of Cairo was called off only three minutes before the nuclear bomb drops.

As fate would have it, LBJ’s plan blew up in his face and the world got a reprieve from a US-induced nuclear holocaust.

How did all this happen? First, it must be understood that the USS Liberty was supposed to be destroyed and sunk within minutes and without any survivors.

The actual attack on the USS Liberty commenced at 2:00 p.m. Israel time on June 8, 1967. The USS Liberty was 13 miles off the coast of Gaza and moving slowly at five knots. The crew had observed several flyovers by Israeli reconnaissance planes earlier in the day.

When the USS Liberty was struck, it was struck with an awesome force. According to USSLiberty.org, a website created by the survivors to document and expose the truth, the ship was first struck by Israeli fighter aircraft:

“Israeli fighter aircraft launched a rocket attack on USS Liberty. The aircraft made repeated firing passes, attacking USS Liberty with rockets and their internal cannons. After the first flight of fighter aircraft had exhausted their ordnance, subsequent flights of Israeli fighter aircraft continued to prosecute the attack with rockets, cannon fire, and napalm. During the air attack, USS Liberty’s crew had difficulty contacting Sixth Fleet to request assistance due to intense communications jamming. The initial targets on the ship were the command bridge, communications antennas, and the four .50 caliber machine guns, placed on the ship to repel boarders.

After the Israeli fighter aircraft completed their attacks, three Israeli torpedo boats arrived and began a surface attack about 35 minutes after the start of the air attack. The torpedo boats launched a total of five torpedoes, one of which struck the side of USS Liberty, opposite the ship’s research spaces. [20] Twenty-six Americans in addition to the eight who had been killed in the earlier air attacks, were killed as a result of this explosion.

Following their torpedo attack, the torpedo boats moved up and down the length of the ship (both the port and starboard sides), continuing their attack, raking the ship with cannon and machine gun fire.[21] In Malta, crewmen were later assigned the task of counting all of the holes in the ship that were the size of a man’s hand or larger. They found a total of 861 such holes, in addition to “thousands” of .50 caliber machine gun holes.”, link here.

USS Liberty Timeline, here.

0600: Israeli Nord 2501 Noratlas (flying boxcar) reconnoiters Liberty….

0603: Reconnaissance aircraft reports to Israeli naval headquarters that “GTR-5” is written on the ship, identifying it as an NSA intelligence vessel.

0720: Fresh American flag is raised….

1000: Two unmarked, rocket-armed, delta-winged jets circle Liberty three times. Liberty officers can count rockets and see the pilots, but see no identifying marks on the plane. The jets radio Israeli headquarters that the ship is flying an American flag….

1055: Pinchas Pinchasy, naval liaison officer at Israeli air force headquarters, reports to Naval Headquarters that the ship cruising slowly off El Arish is “an electromagnetic audio-surveillance ship of the U.S. Navy, named Liberty, whose marking was GTR-5.”…

1100 & 1130: Israeli reconnaissance aircraft again circle Liberty.

The above information is critically important because it proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the Israelis were well aware that the USS Liberty was a well-marked US spy ship. US spy ships are extremely easy to spot because, as telecommunication vessels, they are loaded with wires, antennas and other communication gear that are easily recognized and identifiable (unlike Russian spy ships that were realistically camouflaged as trawlers and fishing boats). The reason it’s important to understand this is because the cover-up of of the USS Liberty incident was so flimsy and fictitious that both the US and Israeli governments officially stated that the USS Liberty was mistook for an Egyptian vessel that hauls horses. This is simply impossible.

As the timeline unfolds, it’s clear that the attack on the USS Liberty had two goals: 1. first destroy and disable all communication capabilities and 2. sink the ship, her crew and guarantee that there were no survivors. The timeline continues:

1358: Two unmarked delta-winged Mirage jets attack Liberty. After taking out gun mounts, they target ship’s antennae and bridge with heat-seeking missiles.

1424: Three French-built 62-ton Israeli motor torpedo boats approach Liberty in attack formation.

1435: Torpedo boats launch five German-made 19-inch torpedoes at Liberty. One torpedo strikes starboard directly into NSA area, accounting for 25 of the 34 men who would be killed. Torpedo boats then circle, machine-gunning the ship with armor-piercing projectiles for another 40 minutes.

At this point, the USS Liberty was being pummeled by air and sea with everything that attack planes and motorized torpedo boats (MTB’s) could possibly throw at them. The decks were ablaze from napalm fires, the ship was being torpedoed by the Israeli Navy and bombs and rockets from the air rained down on them.

This is where the story turns extraordinarily heroic from human ingenuity that pretty much killed LBJ’s grand plan. One of the USS Liberty’s communication transformers had been down and not functioning, something the Israeli’s must have known in advance because it wasn’t destroyed or even hit. A courageous crew member managed to fix it by stringing long wires across a burning deck and rendered it operable, and, of course, capable of sending out a mayday message to numerous US aircraft that permeated the area. However, the Israeli planes had high tech jamming equipment that successfully jammed the signal. It’s probably also true that at that point the Israeli’s were not much concerned with the USS Liberty sending out a message because they believed that all communication equipment was knocked out permanently.

Peter Hounam writes in Operation Cyanide, “Liberty radioman Richard Sturman concluded that the attackers had carefully prepared for the attack with the specific intention of preventing the ship communicating with the outside world. To do so effectively they must have had prior knowledge from shore-based receivers of the five frequencies being used by the ship, so that jamming gear could be tuned to them. Sturman recalled his anger when he discovered that the international distress frequency, used for Mayday messages, was also jammed”.

The astute crew however made a startling discovery. The Israeli jamming capabilities did not work when they were actually engaged bombing and the USS Liberty crew had windows of a few seconds of opportunity in between strikes to send out a message.

Hounam writes, “At first, the signalmen felt their task was hopeless. Plane after plane was swooping in on the ship, firing cannon, shooting missiles and dropping napalm….Then someone spotted that there was a respite from the jamming, lasting just a few seconds, when the attacking planes fired their missiles. Halman grabbed the opportunity and shouted into the mike, ‘Any station, this is Rockstar. We are under attack by unidentified jet aircraft and require immediate assistance!’”. On the USS Saratoga (call-sign ‘Schematic’) the radioman picked up the message but it was garbled, possibly by further jamming. “Rockstar, this is ‘Schematic,’ he said. ‘Say again, you are garbled.’”

Eventually, the USS Liberty message was acknowledged and authenticated 10 minutes after the attack began. The USS Saratoga confirmed Liberty’s message with “Roger, Rockstar. Authentication is correct…”. The messaged bounced everywhere and was even acknowledged by two US embassies in the region. Furthermore, it was impossible for the Pentagon not to know of Liberty’s attack as all messages are also automatically routed to the Pentagon and other government agencies. The Israelis must have also intercepted the radio message.

The Liberty crew was relieved and believed that help was on the way. Wrong! Although fleet commanders quickly ordered rescue operations, twice the rescue missions were ordered called back by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a close friend and trusted associate of LBJ. In fact, it’s documented that during one of the conversations between the the Sixth Fleet Commander and McNamara, LBJ got on the phone and roared, “We will not embarrass an ally,” to reinforce McNamara’s direct command from LBJ to not rescue the ailing USS Liberty and her crew.

According to James Ennes, the entire attack lasted 1 hour and 15 minutes, although some crew members believe it was longer. Unquestionably, the attack was sheer hell for those on board the USS Liberty and the agony was prolonged by the fact that help from the Sixth Fleet never arrived as expected.

Then something extraordinary happened. The Israelis stopped attacking despite having more than enough firepower to finish the job of sinking the USS Liberty and her crew. Its been documented that the Israelis had commando helicopter crews hovering above the USS Liberty with a crew to finish the job. Clearly, the USS Liberty crew expected to die.

But with the message out and everybody knowing about it, including the Russians who knew what was going because they were close by in their own disguised spy ships as they intercepted the message or possibly even observed the USS Liberty being attacked, the Israelis panicked, called off the attack and never finished the job. Eventually, the surviving crew was rescued and many were badly injured.

Hounam documents an interview with one of the injured USS Liberty crew members, Joe Lentini:

I woke up, it was pitch-black and I was in water. I tried to stand up and put my weight on my left leg and it wouldn’t support me, obviously I fell back down; I didn’t know at the time I had six broken ribs, a collapsed lung, a fractured skull, both tympanic membranes in my ears were blown out, shrapnel all over me in my body…it never occurred to me that I didn’t have a leg and it never occurred to me that I was about to die.

Shockingly, the USS Liberty tragedy did not begin at 2:00 p.m. Israeli time according to the sanitized official version. It began earlier. According to Hounam, he interviewed a retired Air Force pilot, Jim Nanjo, who spent 20 years on the H-bomb attack force. The job of such pilots who lived on US air bases was to be ready to jump into a plane and carry out orders immediately.

Nanjo told Hounam about how he was awakened on the morning of 6/8/67 between 2:00 a.m. and no later than 4:00 a.m. by an alert that told him an emergency situation existed and he needed to man his plane immediately. Other bomber pilots were also manning their planes and revving up their engines waiting for the “go” order and their orders. They knew nothing about their mission and Hounam writes:

Nanjo was in no doubt that the world was near to Armageddon that day…

There was however one other significance of his story that he had not spotted. The klaxons had woken him at between 1 am. and 4 am; he was certain it was no later, but the Liberty was not attacked until 5 am California time. How were the American military and their commander in chief, Lyndon Johnson, able to anticipate the attack, and yet apparently not know the Israelis were behind it.

Hounam also documents that Nanjo was aware that other US Air Force bases were under the same highest alert in Guam, Britain, Moron, Spain as well as in the US. What was Nanjo carrying? Hounam writes:

Even after 35 years, he was reluctant to provide details of the bombs carried by his squadron that morning.: ‘Other than to say it was a weapon of mass destruction. I am not able to give you the nomenclature.’ Then he confirmed that they were carrying thermonuclear weapons — H-bombs…

It’s well documented that LBJ and his trusted Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, were deeply and personally involved in the USS Liberty tragedy, the cover-up of the truth and even a scheme to explode the world into nuclear warfare.

To comprehend the severity of the situation, it’s imperative to understand the Cold War, the backdrop against which it was played, the prevalent paranoia at the time of the Communist threat and the incredible rise of America’s military industrial complex to the world’s sole superpower. Many who knew LBJ well feared that he was unstable, mentally ill, a psychopath, or even worse. He was notoriously crude and vulgar. Denis Healey, the Secretary of Defense in Britain so despised and distrusted LBJ that he wrote in his memoirs:

Lyndon Johnson was a monster….

[He was] one of the few politicians with whom I found it uncomfortable to be in the same room. Johnson exuded a brutal lust for power which I found most disagreeable. When he said, “I never trust a man unless I have his pecker in my pocket,” he really meant it. He boasted about acting on the principle, “Give me a man’s balls, and his heart and mind will follow.”… Source: Operation Cyanide

That LBJ was mad is validated by his numerous actions that fueled his personal ambitions over the decades and in the summer of 1967. LBJ was obsessed with one thing and one thing only: reelection. He was in grave danger of losing the presidency and his power. That he would do anything to maintain that power is 100% consistent with the depth of his evil.

But LBJ was also an extraordinarily clever master politician who profoundly understood how a raucous game of geopolitics could be played and manipulated to his own advantage, especially when it came to courting the approval of the American people. Vietnam was already a whopper of a failure and LBJ’s war was growing more unpopular by the second.

The Middle East has always been a disaster (some things never change), at least since oil came into play and the modern nation state of Israel was created by the United Nations in 1948. The rise of Arab nationalism was also heating up as Egyptian President Gamal Nasser and the Marxist styled Baathist movements were flourishing. Syria and Iraq had shed western imposed monarchs and were raising their own brand of dictators. Israel was becoming America’s unofficial 51st state as the Evangelical movement was rising in anticipation of fulfilling Biblical prophecy now that Israel existed for the first time since Biblical times.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Most Incredible Story Never Told: LBJ’s Order to Destroy the USS Liberty appeared first on LewRockwell.

One must grant the man this: he possesses an unerring instinct for the vulgar moment. The setting was presumptively solemn—the Knesset, a chamber that has known its share of bombast and crisis. The occasion was ostensibly historic—the ratification of a ceasefire that has, for the moment, halted the slaughter in Gaza. And the principal actor was, of course, the 45th and 47th President of the United States, a man who believes that history is a trophy to be won and then brandished at the nearest camera.

He came not to mourn the Palestinian dead, whose numbers are so vast they have become a macabre abstraction, but to preside over a victory lap for the Israeli right. He came to receive the adulation he believes is his contractual due. And he came, inevitably, to talk. Oh how he talked. To listen to Donald Trump address the Israeli parliament is to experience a peculiar form of auditory waterboarding: a torrent of self-congratulation, bizarre digressions about gas stations in the sky and generals named “Raisin,” and a level of sycophantic praise for his host, Benjamin Netanyahu, that would make a North Korean newsreader blush.

The core of the performance, beneath the bluster and the off-the-cuff suggestion that his counterpart be pardoned for his various legal embarrassments, was a claim of world-historic triumph. The “age of terror and death” was over, he announced. The “new Middle East” was dawning. One half expected the walls of Jerusalem to part to reveal a choir of angels singing “Hail to the Chief.”

Let us, for a moment, apply the cold compress of reason to this febrile rhetoric. This “peace” was achieved not through diplomacy in the sense that grown-ups understand it, but through the application of overwhelming and indiscriminate force, bankrolled and armed by the United States. The Gaza Strip is now a leveled, toxic ruin, its population traumatized, starved, and displaced. To call this a victory for peace is like calling the bombing of Dresden a triumph of urban renewal. It is a peace of the cemetery, a peace that resembles nothing so much as a successful pest extermination.

And what of the vaunted “deal”? It is, in essence, the product of a simple and brutal equation: when one side possesses a modern military arsenal and the unconditional support of a global superpower, and the other side possesses little more than desperation and primitive rockets, the outcome is not a negotiation. It is a decree. The terms are not discussed; they are imposed. Hamas, suitably pummeled into a state of momentary incapacity, has been forced to swallow them. To call Trump a peacemaker for overseeing this process is like crediting a bulldozer with architectural innovation.

…when one side possesses a modern military arsenal and the unconditional support of a global superpower, and the other side possesses little more than desperation and primitive rockets, the outcome is not a negotiation. It is a decree.

The most nauseating spectacle, however, was the sight of a nation that styles itself the Middle East’s only democracy feting a man who has expressed open admiration for the world’s strongmen and a visceral contempt for the norms of liberal democracy. Netanyahu, a man clinging to power like a limpet to a rusting hull, lauded Trump as a “colossus” who will be “enshrined in the pantheon of history.” One can only assume this pantheon includes such other luminaries as Caligula and the Emperor Nero.

They thanked him for moving the embassy to Jerusalem, a cynical provocation that solidified apartheid-like realities. They thanked him for recognizing the stolen Golan Heights. They thanked him for withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, an act of such profound geopolitical stupidity that it gifted the mullahs a perfect pretext to accelerate their nuclear program, necessitating the very bombing campaign Trump now boasts about. They are thanking the arsonist for showing up with a single bucket of water after he spent years dousing the house in gasoline.

And then, with a staggering lack of self-awareness, Trump extended a hand to the Iranian regime he had just finished bombing. “We are ready when you are,” he cooed, as if addressing a spurned lover rather than a nation whose facilities he had just obliterated. It was a moment of pure, unadulterated performance, utterly divorced from statecraft, history, or basic logic. The message was clear: I can smash your capital to dust one day and offer you “friendship” the next, because it is all about *my* narrative, *my* deal-making prowess.

The whole tawdry affair—the groveling, the grotesque self-praise, the willful blindness to the mountains of corpses upon which this “peace” is built—was a perfect epitaph for our era. It was not the signing of a peace treaty. It was the celebration of a successful mob hit. The don flew in, collected his tribute, assured his capo he was the greatest, and promised everyone a bright future in his new racket. The only thing missing was the cigar.

History will record this speech, but not in the way its participants hope. It will be remembered not as the dawn of a new age, but as a gaudy, ill-mannered party thrown atop a mass grave. The guns are silent for now. But the hatred, the injustice, the utter humiliation—those have been poured into the foundation of this “new Middle East.” And that is a foundation that cannot hold.

The entire grotesque charade can be viewed here. But a fair warning: make sure it’s been a few hours since your last meal.

This article was originally published on The Goins Report.

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Donald Trump garnered some major political optics yesterday as he signed his Gaza Peace Plan, with a raft of European, Asian and Arab leaders sitting in the cheap seats watching the spectacle. But who has a signing of a peace agreement when neither of the two parties to the conflict are present? This is more than a bad joke… this is a scam. I can understand holding a funeral for the dearly departed even if the corpse ain’t present, but what took place Monday in Sharm El-Sheik was more like a royal wedding without a bride or groom present… Hell, neither chose to attend even via video conference.

I can guess why Bibi didn’t show… The majority of those attending had recently granted official recognition to Palestine as a state and Bibi did not want any photos of him shaking hands with the lot. Israeli officials, speaking to the Hebrew press, continue to insist that there will never be a Palestinian state.

Hamas, for its part, is the largest of the 14 Palestinian resistance groups. Even if Hamas agreed to disarm — which it will not do in my judgment — that still leaves 13 other groups, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Phase I, i.e. the exchange of hostages for jailed Palestinians, will conclude this week. I suspect that Hamas will not be able to return all of the remains because some of the Israeli hostages are buried under rubble as a result of attacks by the Israeli Air Force. I don’t discount the possibility that Bibi will use that as justification to return to the bombing campaign in hopes of forcing the Palestinians to vacate Gaza.

The wild card is Donald Trump. Many of the staunchest pro-Israel supporters in the West wrongly interpret today’s showing of the various Arab, Muslim, West Asian and European leaders as proof that there is a consensus on disarming Hamas. Yet, as I noted above, the majority of leaders present are on the record insisting that there will be a Palestinian state. I am pretty sure that Donald Trump told them what they wanted to hear, i.e. that he will push Israel to accept a Palestinian state, and I am also certain that he told his Zionist pals the exact opposite. So, regardless of what Trump does, one of those groups will be angry and disappointed.

Then there is Iran… I think there is a deal that could be made, e.g., Iran recognizes Israel in exchange for the creation of an independent Palestinian state. The Zionists would reject that, but the majority of the world would enthusiastically embrace that solution, especially if the US agrees to lead the charge. Don’t get your hopes up.

Judging from history, there is no chance that this agreement produces the peace that Donald Trump envisions. Since the 1967 Six-Day War, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has seen numerous ceasefires (also called truces, hudnas, or armistices), primarily involving Israel and Palestinian groups like the PLO, Fatah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). These are often mediated by the UN, Egypt, Qatar, or the US and tend to follow escalations such as wars, intifadas, or Gaza operations. “Declaration” typically refers to formal agreements between the parties, though some are unilateral or UN-imposed.

Counting them precisely is challenging due to varying definitions—e.g., short humanitarian pauses vs. longer truces—and overlaps (e.g., the 1973 Yom Kippur War ceasefire applied to Egypt/Syria but had direct Palestinian implications). Based on comprehensive timelines from sources like CFR, Al Jazeera, Wikipedia, and IMEU, there have been at least 12 major ceasefires declared between Israelis and Palestinians since 1967. This excludes minor local pauses or non-Palestinian-specific Arab-Israeli truces (e.g., 1982 Lebanon). Many lasted days to months before violations or breakdowns, often due to rocket fire, airstrikes, or failed negotiations.

Key Insights:

Total Count: 12 major instances, but some sources (e.g., IMEU fact sheets) list 20+ if including shorter Gaza operations (e.g., 2019, 2022 PIJ clashes) or intra-Palestinian truces with Israeli involvement.

Average Duration: ~2–3 years for pre-2008 truces; <1 year post-2008, reflecting Gaza’s volatility.

Common Patterns: Most fail due to mutual accusations of violations (e.g., rockets vs. incursions). Gaza-focused ones (post-2007) are shorter, tied to Hamas rule and blockades. Broader ones (e.g., Oslo) lasted longer but didn’t resolve core issues like borders/settlements.

In light of this history, the chances that this peace deal will endure is slim.

This article was originally published on Sonar21.

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For many years, there have been those who have been prognosticating an economic crisis – not just a recession lasting a year or two, but a full-blown Greater Depression that would eclipse any major event we’ve seen in our lifetimes.

That may appear to be an overstatement, but historically, it’s the norm for a time of major upheaval to occur every eighty years or so. And although some of us began analysing and commenting on the Greater Depression many years ago, it’s clear to all of us that we’ve now entered the leading edge of the crisis.

All of the traditional warning signs are present, and although technology has changed considerably over the millennia, human behaviour has not. We are witnessing the same symptoms that were present in major collapses of the past, going back at least as far as the Roman Empire.

We are therefore seeing not only the initial stages of an economic collapse but the concurrent events, such as an almost total corruption of the political structure, a move toward totalitarian rule, the destruction of currencies, and a loss of faith in leadership across the board. Along the way, we’re also experiencing a decline in logic and morality and an eroding sense of humanity.

That’s quite a lot to take in, yet, sorry to say; we’re only in the first stages of collapse. It will get quite a bit worse before it gets better.

As the economy begins its collapse in earnest, what we shall witness will be a population that will be unable to adapt quickly to the symptoms of the crisis as they increase in frequency and magnitude. The reaction to each will be, first, shock (an inability to comprehend that the impossible has occurred), then fear (a state of confusion and inability to adjust to rapidly-changing conditions), and finally, anger.

This last development should give pause to us all, as it’s the stage when those who have been most strongly impacted realise that there’s precious little that they can do to regain normalcy. When they find that they can’t get their hands around the necks of those who actually are to blame, they’ll take out their anger on whomever is in their proximity – each other.

So, the questions arise: Where will these problems be most prevalent? Where will the situations exist that should be avoided as much as possible, in order to minimize the likelihood that we’ll become collateral damage of the crisis?

Having studied previous similar historical periods, I can attest that this is a question that, unfortunately, requires an extensive and complex answer. However, as a rough guide, there are three considerations that will be overarching.

Regardless of any other concerns that may affect the reader individually, all persons would do well to stay clear (as much as possible) from the following:

First World Countries

Since 1945, the First World countries (the US, UK, EU, Japan, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) have led the world in both prosperity and power. Under the driving force of the US, they’ve created not only the advances of the last eighty years but also the rot that has led to the current crisis. As such, these countries are not only the countries where we’re seeing the most dramatic oppression of people; they will also experience the most precipitous fall economically, politically, and sociologically.

Although these countries have, until recently, seemed to be the most attractive locations in which to live, that condition has now begun a reversal, and in the coming years, they’ll represent the very nexus of decline. As such, they’ll become the most unpredictable and even the most dangerous places to be.

Conversely, the choicest countries in which to live will be those countries where change will be minimal. Those countries where the populations and governments have been relatively unambitious over the last half century or more, will be the locations that are the least likely to change dramatically during the crisis. That one fact speaks loudly to the reader’s economic, political, and social well-being in this period.

Cold Climates

The colder a location is, the less hospitable it will be in a crisis. When governments collapse economically and seemingly basic amenities can no longer be paid for, politicians will look after their own needs before those of the people they are meant to represent. Simple services such as snow ploughing may be dropped from city budgets that must experience cutbacks. More importantly, during an energy crunch, you’re likely to experience periods in which heat cannot be attained. This doesn’t mean that you will necessarily freeze to death, but it does mean that life will be much harder. In addition, produce cannot be grown in colder climates, which eliminates even the possibility of a kitchen garden in colder months.

Cities

By far, this is the riskiest of the three concerns. The more concentrated the population is the greater the risk. The larger your building, the less control you have over utilities. If the water, electricity, or heat is shut off due to energy shortages, you will have little or no recourse.

But, by far, the greatest risk in a city will be the inherent depersonalisation that exists even in the best of times. Even if you live in a very nice apartment building in a nice neighbourhood, you’re likely to be socially isolated from others. (You may not even know the people in the apartment across the hall.) People in cities tend not to help each other much at the best of times, but in a crisis, those around you can become a threat to your very existence.

Most importantly, food supplies are likely to be interrupted for indeterminate periods and, as Isaac Azimov stated, “After nine missed meals, a man will kill for food.” Even if you’re able to obtain a loaf of bread at a neighbourhood store, you may not be able to walk home with it without being waylaid. Even brief periods of interruption of food delivery to a population centre may result in a simple loaf of bread being worth killing for.

And even for those who live in prosperous neighbourhoods where the neighbours tend to be civil, poorer neighbourhoods are not so far away that their residents, if desperate, will not make the short trip to where they think others have the essentials.

Such breakdowns, as described above, tend to occur slowly, then suddenly. Those of us who have lived through city riots understand that tension builds as people attempt to maintain normal decorum, then some small event sparks off rioting. A citywide riot can go off like popcorn spontaneously. In good times, police can quell a riot in a few days or weeks, but when rioting is citywide, and the cause cannot be quickly remedied, riots can last for extended periods, potentially turning formerly-safe city streets into the equivalent of a war zone.

Of course, there’s the tendency to say, “Don’t be ridiculous – it can’t get that bad.” However, history tells us that whenever a major crisis period occurs, the above conditions almost always occur.

The reader may wish to assess his exposure to the three conditions above. Ideally, he’ll find a location to sit out the crisis – a country that’s likely to be less affected by the events that are now unfolding. He may choose a location that’s warm year-round, where food is plentiful even in harder times. And he may try to locate himself in a community of lower population density, where neighbours habitually help each other.

But regardless of what the reader chooses to do, he should be aware that the future of his well-being and that of his family may hinge on the choices he makes in the very near future.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

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Brilliant Eurasian cultures converged, interacted and spread their wings on the Ancient Silk Roads.

DUNHUANG – Across History, the Silk Road – actually a network of roads – is the supreme Highway Star: the most important connectivity corridor ever, rolling across Ancient Eurasia, linking what Chinese scholars consensually define as the main civilization systems in the world: China, India, Persia, Babylon, Egypt, Greece and Rome, as well as showcasing several historical stages of economic and cultural exchanges between East and West.

Prof. Ji Xianlin, a top scholar of Dunhuang Studies, came up with a formulation certified to drive Western supremacists crazy for all eternity:

“There are only four, rather than five, influential cultural systems in the world: Chinese, Indian, Greek and Islam. They all met only on China’s Dunhuang and Xinjiang”.

Dunhuang’s prime geo-strategic position across History was inevitably bound to generate spectacular artistic achievements.

After years since my previous journeys, then the Covid shock, then China’s subsequent recovery, I have been privileged to finally embark on a renewed Journey to the West to retrace the original Ancient Silk Road, starting in Xian – the former imperial capital Chang’an – all the way through the Gansu corridor to Dunhuang.

Brilliant Eurasian cultures converged, interacted and spread their wings on the Ancient Silk Roads. Dunhuang – on the western end of the Hexi corridor in Gansu province – was the most vital hub in the eastern section of the Chinese Silk Road, framed by mountains to the north and south, the central plains to the east, and Xinjiang to the west.

Dunhuang, the “Blazing Beacon”, held a supremely strategic position controlling two passes – Yangguan and Yumenguan. Han Emperor Wu Di clearly understood that Dunhuang was the last major water source before the fear-inducing Taklamakan desert to the west, as well as sitting astride the three main Silk Road routes heading west.

Yumenguan was the all-important Jade Gate pass – set by the Han empire in the 2nd century B.C.: placed in the south Gobi and the western end of the Qilian mountains, actually marking the western limit of classic China.

The Jade Gate Pass. Photo: Pepe Escobar

I spent a whole blinding beautiful blue-sky day in the pass and its surroundings after striking a deal with a taxi driver in Dunhuang. It’s a thrill to admire how the Han dynasty organized their traffic management system, the beacon fire system, and the Great Wall defense system (remains of the Han Wall are still there) – guaranteeing the safety of the long-distance Silk Road connectivity corridor.

The remains of the Great Han Wall. Photo: P.E.

Talk to the caravan: the secret of “people to people’s exchanges”

At the impeccably organized Dunhuang Book Center, historical records refer to it as “a metropolis where the Han people and non-Han peoples meet”. Quite the antecessor to Xi Jinping’s “people to people’s exchanges.” The spirit remains, especially at the fabulous Night Market, a gastronomic feast with pride of place for Uyghur recipes.

Uyghur businesswomen at the fabulous Dunhuang Night Market. Photo: P.E. 

Silk and porcelain from the central plains, jewelry and perfume from “the western regions”, camels and horses from north China, grains from Hexi, everything was traded in Dunhuang. Merchant deals, migrations, military games, cultural exchanges, a profusion of literati, scholars, artists, officials, diplomats, religious pilgrims, military brought classic Chinese culture into an effervescent mix – Sogdian, Tibet, Uyghur, Tangut, Mongolia – all absorbed into what eventually became Dunhuang art.

Itinerant Buddhism, Nestorianism, Zoroastrianism, Islam – the sophisticated aesthetic feel of Dunhuang was progressively influenced by architecture, sculpture, paintings, music, dance, weaving, dyeing techniques all the way from Central Asia and West Asia.

“Silk Road” terminology in Xi’s “moderately prosperous” modernized China is an extremely nuanced business. For instance, already in Xian, at the Small White Goose pagoda, we see it described as “Silk Roads: The Routes Network of Chang’an-Tian Shan corridor”.

That’s a geographically correct interpretation, stressing the Tian Shan mountains instead of the politically correct Xinjiang (which was essentially part of the “western regions”, not necessarily Chinese territory, for centuries).

As for how the Silk Road began, that now follows a single, scholarly accepted version: Han Emperor Wu Di, in 140 B.C. sent Zhang Qian as an envoy to the “western regions” on two business missions. The “Records of the Grand Historian” show that Zhang Qian, as the first official diplomat in Chinese history, de facto opened channels of communications with the “western regions” and then all the states in the northwest started trading with the Han, especially silk.

From Xian’s Shaanxi History Museum to the Dunhuang Academy, and including the Gansu museum in Lanzhou, in interactions with scholars and museum curators as well as in complement to formidable Silk Road exhibits, it’s fascinating to retrace the now established official narrative on the Silk Roads, according to which “the civilization of ancient China represented by silk started to impact the states in the western regions, Central Asia and West Asia.”

It was way more complex than that – as spices, metals, chemicals, saddles, leather products, glass, paper (invented in the 2nd century B.C.), everything was on the market, but the general drift applies: merchants from the central plains defying deserts and mountain peaks in caravans laden with silk, bronze mirrors and lacquerware from China, seeking to exchange them for commodities, while merchants from the western regions brought furs, jade, felts to the central plains.

Talk about multi-ethnic “people to people’s exchanges”. And by the way, no one ever used the term “Silk Road”; it was “the road to Samarkand” or just the “northern” or “southern” routes around the ominous Taklamakan desert.

About the Tang dynasty monetary system…

By the 3rd century, Dunhuang was already at the apex of Silk Road connectivity; and that’s when merchants and pilgrims started to sponsor the construction of the nearby Buddhist Mogao caves.

The main pavilion at the Mogao caves. Photo: P.E.

The Mogao Caves are part of what is known in Gansu province as the five Dunhuang grottoes. It’s the same system of caves – 813 surviving, with 735 in Mogao. To approach Mogao is a major thrill in itself: we need to be in an official park bus, crammed with zillions of Chinese tourists, rolling through the desert, and suddenly we are in the eastern foot of the Mingsha mountains, with the Dangquan river running right in front of us, facing the Qilian mountains to the east, with the caves set back against and cut into the cliff face, connected by a series of ramps and walkways.

The caves started to be built as early as in the 4th century – all the way to the 14th century (the earliest wall paintings are from the 5th); it’s a group of caves in four levels, 1,6 km from north to south along a cliff as much as 30 meters high. The 492 caves in the southern area house more than 45 km of wall paintings, over 2,000 painted statues, and five wooden eaves. They were originally used for worshipping Buddhas.

At the Dunhuang Academy museum: where the artists came from. Photo: P.E.

What we are still able to see takes our breath away. Highlights include a wrestling scene from Buddha’s life on cave 290; a girl apsara – mythic dancer – on cave 296; the Deer King on cave 257; a hunting scene on cave 249; a Garuda – defined in Chinese as “the Scarlet Bird” – on cave 285; parables of the Magic City from the Lotus Sutra, a masterpiece of High Tang dynasty, on cave 217; a sitting Boddhisattva on cave 196; impeccably preserved worshipping bodhisattvas on cave 285.

One of the Buddha highlights of the Mogao caves. Photo: P.E.

Rules are extremely strict: visit only to selected caves, with an official guide, no photos, only the guide’s torchlight to illuminate the grottoes. I was privileged to visit guided by Helen, who studied in Dunhuang University and is now doing her PhD in Archeology. After the visit she explained in detail the ground-breaking conservation work of the Dunhuang Academy.

The construction of the caves was a spectacular undertaking in terms of division of labor. Just imagine: chiselers to dig and excavate a cave out of the cliff; stonecutters, who also dug caves; bricklayers to build wooden or earthen structures; carpenters, who also repaired wooden tools; sculptors to create the statues; and painters to paint the caves and statues.

Mogao, as an aesthetic experience, is unequaled in its striking collection of Buddhist wall painting criss-crossing China, Persia, India and Central Asian art.

And then there’s what we cannot see: more than 40,000 scrolls found in the library cave, the largest deposit of documents and artifacts discovered anywhere along the Silk Road, with texts on Buddhism, Manicheism, Zoroastrianism and the Eastern Christian Church (from Syria) showing how cosmopolitan Dunhuang was. That’s part of the European scholarly – and otherwise – plunder of the Dunhuang wealth starting in the late 19th century, a completely different, complex, and long, story.

In geoeconomic terms, for nearly ten centuries Dunhuang was extremely wealthy, especially during the Tang dynasty (6th to 9th century). The Tang had a fascinating monetary system – with three different currencies: textiles (silk and hemp), grain and coins.

The central government, in the imperial capital Chang’an, used a single aggregate unit to represent all trade. The Dunhuang garrison was a key strategic post: payments came in no less than six different types of woven silk. Well, each place paid their taxes with their locally produced cloth. What the Tang did was to transfer all these textiles to Dunhuang. The garrison’s officers then converted the tax cloth into coins and into grain, to pay local merchants and to feed the soldiers.

So in a nutshell the Tang dynasty was all the time injecting a lot of money – via woven cloth – into the Dunhuang economy. Talk about a public-private state development model – which certainly did not escape Beijing planners when they came up, in 2013, with the concept of the New Silk Roads.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

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