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Writes Tim McGraw:

Start the video at the 38:00 mark. The USA is bankrupt. The bond market is demanding higher interest on government bonds. Foreigners and Americans aren’t buying enough of the bonds, so the Fed will just create currency to buy the bonds. This leads to inflation of the money supply and a recession since the government is eating up all the capital (credit) available in the country.

We went through this in the 1970s. They ended with the depression of 1981-82 and interest rates of 21%. Happy Days are Here Again (if you have any savings.) For everyone else, tough times.

The post Representative Thomas Massie Interview on Redacted appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Kramer. 

Interesting Times with Ross Douthat

 

The post Robot Plumbers, Robot Armies, and Our Imminent A.I. Future appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

The American Conservative

 

The post Andalusian Leader Praises Farmers—While Bulldozing Their Fields appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Caitlin Johnstone

 

The post The Western Media Brought Gaza To This Point appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Antiwar.com Original

 

The post Israeli Hatred for Children in Gaza Is Shocking appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, David Martin.

The Unz Review

 

The post May 22, Forrestal Assassination Day appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, David Martin.

The post Scott Ritter Takes Trump’s Measure on Gaza, Ukraine appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Stars and Stripes

 

The post Truman engaged in ‘largest airstrike in the history of the world’ from an aircraft carrier, top admiral says appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith.  

Haaretz.com

 

The post Destroying Gaza ‘With Love’: Israel’s New YogiNazis appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, David Krall. 

The post Kash Patel & Dan Bongino Repeat Epstein Suicide LIE! appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Saleh Abdullah. 

LifeZette

 

The post Feds Caught in Wild $40B Credit Card Spending Spree on Crazy Stuff You Won’t Believe appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post Prosperity Or Poverty? House Hands Trump His ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ricordo a tutti i lettori che su Amazon potete acquistare il mio nuovo libro, “Il Grande Default”: https://www.amazon.it/dp/B0DJK1J4K9 

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 è 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 è la storia di un coyote, che quando non riesce a sfamarsi all'esterno ricorre all'autofagocitazione. Lo stesso è accaduto ai membri del G7, dove i sei membri restanti hanno iniziato a fagocitare il settimo: gli Stati Uniti.

____________________________________________________________________________________

da Bitcoin Magazine

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/il-catalizzatore-che-potrebbe-standardizzare)

Oggi volevo scrivere di una rivelazione sull'adozione, la standardizzazione e la normalizzazione di Bitcoin che ho avuto la scorsa settimana. Mentre riflettevo su cosa sarebbe necessario affinché ricevesse una spinta considerevole all'adozione negli Stati Uniti, mi è venuto in mente uno scenario del genere, che potrebbe non essere molto lontano.

E contrariamente a quanto si pensi, non ha nulla a che fare con la regolamentazione, la tassazione, gli standard contabili, o con qualsiasi altro aspetto di cui si parla erroneamente riguardo tale tema. Come ho imparato in prima persona, mentre facevo qualche ricerca su Bitcoin il mese scorso, nessuna di queste cose conta davvero. La natura decentralizzata della rete implica che non abbia bisogno di nessuno di questi elementi per prosperare. L'ho sottolineato nel mio articolo della scorsa settimana intitolato Io, Bitcoin.

Ma quello che ho anche sottolineato è che esso sopravviverà se le persone lo vorranno. Chi conosce la rete capisce che circa 20.000 nodi globali significano che la rete rimarrà in piedi indipendentemente da quale politico, giurisdizione o ente regolatore in tutto il mondo cerchi di ostacolarla. Fa parte dell'eleganza della rete stessa.

E tuttavia, dopo aver compreso tutto questo, mi chiedo: “Cosa accelererà così tanto questa adozione da farci passare da un punto di quasi non ritorno per Bitcoin a un punto significativo di seria velocità di fuga?” La risposta era proprio sotto il mio naso.

Quando ho scelto il titolo di quell'articolo è stato uno di quelli che ti vengono in mente d'istinto. A volte passo ore a cercare di capire quale titolo sia il più accattivante, mentre altre volte ce l'ho già pronto perché è chiarissimo cosa voglio dire.

Ma durante il fine settimana ero in giro e mi chiedevo dove avessi già sentito quella frase.

All'improvviso, mi è venuto in mente: in uno dei miei sketch comici preferiti, un gruppo di comici improvvisati di Filadelfia si è recato alle proteste di Occupy, scoppiate in seguito alla crisi economica del 2008. In più di un punto c'erano cartelli con su scritto “Why I Occupy”; in realtà era il nome di una parte del movimento Occupy. Ricordo che WhyIOccupy.org era la fonte di informazioni per una buona parte della popolazione arrabbiata dell'epoca; pensavano che qualsiasi ideologia fosse presente su quel sito web, fosse la loro particolare versione di soluzione alla crisi finanziaria.

Solo dopo averlo ricordato, ho pensato che nella prossima crisi finanziaria le persone avrebbero davvero avuto una legittima via d'uscita dal sistema. Bitcoin è quella via d'uscita. È ciò che le persone coinvolte nella frenesia per GameStop cercavano così disperatamente, che lo sapessero o no, ma non sono riuscite a trovare.

Mentre si consumava il fiasco di GameStop, ricordo di aver pensato tra me e me che c'erano troppe persone arrabbiate, ma che non avevano la minima idea del motivo. Nelle chat room e sui social media, a tutto si dava la colpa tranne che alle banche centrali. Queste persone erano furiose perché si sentivano raggirate: stavano reagendo, che ne fossero consapevoli o meno, all'aumento del divario di disuguaglianza, mentre loro faticavano ad arrivare a fine mese.

Ma quello che non sapevano era che la colpa non era di Ken Griffin, di Citadel o degli speculatori, bensì delle banche centrali.

Oggigiorno è diventato chiaro che le banche centrali hanno ulteriormente ampliato questo divario di disuguaglianza. È più chiaro perché l'inflazione è un fenomeno di dominio pubblico e comprensibile per tutti. Anche se non sanno perché si verifichi, la maggior parte delle persone ha una parvenza di comprensione del fatto che sia dovuto alle banche centrali che hanno fatto esplodere la massa monetaria negli ultimi quattro anni e poi, per aggiungere la beffa al danno, hanno mentito sulla transitorietà dell'inflazione.

E coloro che speravano di ripetere il successo di GameStop con nomi come AMC, ora sanno che una gestione tossica e un asset in perdita possono facilmente indebolire qualsiasi slancio in qualsiasi tipo di short squeeze, o FOMO, su qualsiasi azione. E sanno anche che broker e autorità di regolamentazione possono impedirgli di effettuare transazioni in qualsiasi momento lo ritengano opportuno.

Durante la prossima crisi finanziaria, che, a mio parere, non è poi così lontana, lo stesso gruppo di “poveri” arrabbiati, si spera, attribuirà la colpa a chi ce l'ha davvero: alla politica monetaria. Dopotutto, l'inflazione è una tassa brutale per chi non se la può permettere ed è praticamente ininfluente per i super-ricchi. E questi ultimi diventano ancora più ricchi grazie al quantitative easing e alla stampa di moneta, che indirizzano una quantità sproporzionata di aiuti al mercato azionario, obbligazionario e immobiliare: asset che i ricchi possiedono e che le persone a basso reddito no.

Durante la stampa di denaro nel periodo della “pandemia”, mi chiedevo spesso: se le banche centrali avessero voluto stampare $5.000 miliardi, perché non dividerli equamente tra tutti gli abitanti e staccare un assegno per tutti? Dopotutto $5.000 miliardi divisi per 300 milioni di americani equivalgono a circa $16.500 a persona. Tralasciando il ragionamento sistemico, questa è una domanda piuttosto semplice e diretta. Se si vuole stimolare l'economia distribuendo denaro ovunque, perché non farlo equamente tra tutti i cittadini, invece di fare favoritismi?

Ma non è questo che è successo nel 2008 e non sarà questo che accadrà durante la prossima crisi finanziaria.

Quello che penso accadrà è che un nuovo gruppo di “poveri” sarà più informato sul funzionamento della politica monetaria, non solo a seguito del fiasco di GameStop, ma anche man mano che una nuova generazione più giovane avrà familiarizzato con le argomentazioni ideologiche a favore di Bitcoin. Prima ancora di iniziare a usarlo, una delle cose che mi piaceva era l'idea che stesse costringendo una generazione più giovane a comprendere l'economia Austriaca in un mondo in cui abbiamo praticamente abusato e sfruttato a morte i privilegi della MMT. Armata di questa nuova conoscenza, un'intera generazione di persone arrabbiate dovrà ancora una volta pagare il prezzo delle perdite socializzate di aziende nefaste e tossiche che hanno privatizzato i loro profitti. E questo avverrà in un contesto di crisi inflazionistica ancora vivida nelle loro menti. Questa volta non ci saranno dubbi su chi stia erodendo, attraverso tassazione e inflazione, il potere d'acquisto e la ricchezza per cui hanno lavorato.

Il che mi porta al punto: Bitcoin potrebbe benissimo rappresentare la rampa d'uscita verso cui milioni di persone arrabbiate guarderanno a una situazione del genere.

A differenza di GameStop, Bitcoin ha la possibilità di incidere su un cambiamento radicale, perché il successo della rete è legato alla sua crescita. Questo significa che ogni singola persona che decide di possedere Bitcoin, o di informarsi su di esso, diventa parte di una profezia che si autoavvera sul successo della rete. E, naturalmente, l'ideologia alla base del successo della rete è saldamente radicata nel dare potere a persone proprio come loro: persone stanche di vedere quel poco che guadagnano portato via silenziosamente dall'oscura macchina finanziaria inflazionistica.

Molte persone che hanno partecipato alla frenesia di GameStop, comprese le “scimmie” di Wall Street Bets su Reddit e milioni di altri trader al dettaglio, saranno costrette a rendersi conto che Bitcoin ha tutti gli aspetti positivi di ciò che hanno cercato di ottenere in passato, ma senza gli aspetti negativi. Non c'è un management che possa rovinarlo, non c'è una controparte che possa diluirli, non c'è nessuno che possa disattivare il pulsante di acquisto e non c'è sostanzialmente alcun organo di governo o di regolamentazione che impedisca alla rete di avere successo se le persone lo desiderano. Diventa la libertà digitale che tutte queste persone hanno cercato durante l'ultima crisi finanziaria, ma che non hanno trovato un modo efficace per manifestare.

Il 2008 è stato l'esempio di quella che è ormai la norma a Wall Street: ogni volta che la situazione precipita, la popolazione ne paga le conseguenze, si infuria e brandisce le torce. Ma poi, alla fine, la situazione si placa e la gente torna a badare ai fatti propri.

“Sto iniziando a sentirmi un po' meglio riguardo a tutta questa faccenda”, dice John Tuld alla fine del film Margin Call, a significare che più le cose cambiano, più restano le stesse.

Banchieri e politici hanno fatto affidamento su questo schema e l'hanno perpetuato per decenni. È, in sostanza, ciò che permette l'errore di giudizio da parte di cittadini americani comuni che pagano il prezzo dei fallimenti degli ultra-ricchi.

E così, la prossima volta che ciò accadrà, gli investitori potrebbero legittimamente avere la possibilità di interrompere questo ciclo per la prima volta in mezzo secolo adottando Bitcoin. Avrebbero la possibilità di escluderli dal sistema contro cui si sono scagliati. I flussi di capitale verso Bitcoin e in uscita dagli asset finanziari tradizionali invieranno un messaggio ai principali istituti finanziari che reagiscono solo all'opportunità di applicare commissioni (si veda la loro nuova ossessione per Bitcoin ora che ci sono gli ETF). Allo stesso tempo questi flussi potrebbero contribuire alla profezia autoavverante del successo della rete, grazie alla sua ridondanza che funge essenzialmente da barometro per la salute della rete stessa.

Non è affatto garantito, ma se il sistema dovesse fallire di nuovo e la persona media cercasse una vera arma per combatterlo (e una che sia letteralmente programmata per essere il Braille tecnologico delle frasi “l'unione fa la forza” e “il potere al popolo”), Bitcoin potrebbe emergere e inaugurare un'epoca che in futuro potrebbe essere considerata il Rinascimento della sua adozione.

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

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

Thanks, David Martin.

The Left’s Racism on Full Display

 

The post The Left’s Racism on Full Display appeared first on LewRockwell.

Even some of our brightest scientific minds are projecting that there is absolutely no positive future for our civilization if we stay on our current course.  Perhaps one of the reasons why our society has become so obsessed with short-term results is because most of us can’t bear to think about the long-term consequences of our actions.  I have a website that focuses on “economic collapse”, but it isn’t just the economy that is headed for catastrophe.  Virtually every aspect of our society is coming apart at the seams all around us, and the era that we are moving into will be more nightmarish than most people would dare to imagine.  But our political leaders continue to insist that everything is going to work out just fine somehow, and most people choose to believe them.

This week, an old MIT study from 1972 that projected that our civilization will collapse at some point during the 21st century made headlines on several major news sites…

In 1972, a team of MIT scientists got together to study the risks of civilizational collapse. Their system dynamics model published by the Club of Rome identified impending ‘limits to growth’ (LtG) that meant industrial civilization was on track to collapse sometime within the 21st century, due to overexploitation of planetary resources.

In particular, the study identified a period of time “around 2040” when societal collapse would be very likely…

The study was published in the Yale Journal of Industrial Ecology in November 2020 and is available on the KPMG website. It concludes that the current business-as-usual trajectory of global civilization is heading toward the terminal decline of economic growth within the coming decade—and at worst, could trigger societal collapse by around 2040.

Of course events are not going to transpire exactly as they foresaw, but as far as the big picture is concerned they were right on the money.

Our society is now in the process of collapsing all around us, and you can see evidence of this everywhere that you look.

This week, civil unrest is causing widespread chaos in the streets in Cuba, South Africa, Beirut and Paris.  We have entered a period of time when it seems like people are perpetually angry, and the wild scenes that are playing out around the globe are absolutely shocking.

Here in the United States, we are in the midst of a crazy crime wave.  Murder rates in our major cities rose by an average of 30 percent in 2020, and they are up another 24 percent so far in 2024.  Extreme violence has become a way of life in many of our largest metropolitan areas, and this is particularly true in the city of Chicago…

A Chicago rapper died after suffering as many as 64 bullet wounds to his head and other parts of his body in what police are calling an ambush shooting just as he was released from jail.

Londre Sylvester, 31, who is known by his stage name KTS Dre, was one of three people who were shot just outside Cook County Jail in the Little Village section of Chicago on Saturday.

Chicago police seem powerless to stop the endless violence, but of course the same could be said about many other police departments around the country.

The streets of our biggest cities are becoming war zones, and what we have experienced so far is just the beginning.

Meanwhile, we are dealing with the worst epidemic of illegal drugs in our history.  If you can believe it, drug overdose deaths were up nearly 30 percent last year…

Drug-overdose deaths in the U.S. surged nearly 30% in 2020, the tragic result of a deadlier supply and the destabilizing effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to preliminary federal data and public health officials.

The estimated 93,331 deaths from drug overdoses last year, a record high, represent the sharpest annual increase in at least three decades, and compare with an estimated toll of 72,151 deaths in 2019, according to provisional overdose-drug data released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Drug overdose deaths were already at an all-time high coming into 2020.

So for the number of deaths to rise 30 percent above that level in just one year is really, really tragic.

At the same time, our system of public education continues to rapidly deteriorate.

Earlier today, I was shocked to learn that 41 percent of all high school students in Baltimore have a grade point average that is below 1.0…

Project Baltimore obtained a chart assembled by Baltimore City Schools. The chart shows the average GPA for every high school grade in the city – freshman through senior. In the first three quarters of this past school year, according to the chart, 41% of all Baltimore City high school students, earned below a 1.0 grade point average. In other words, nearly half of the 20,500 public high school students in Baltimore earned less than a D average.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Patterson. “If almost half of our kids are failing, what options do they have after high school? This is really disheartening. It’s sad to see this.”

I don’t just want to single out Baltimore, because that isn’t fair.

All across this once great country of ours, public schools are completely and utterly failing our kids.  The vast majority of our high school graduates cannot read, write or speak coherently, and that simply should not be happening in the wealthiest nation on the entire planet.

Read the Whole Article

The post All Warnings Have Come True! appeared first on LewRockwell.

This article might offend everybody, but the links here are to the sources, and all of its sources are not only authentic when they are primary, but are true when they are secondary. (I have checked-out all sources within each secondary source that I link to.) Individuals who disagree with something here but don’t click onto the link to the documentation when they disagree, are not open-minded; and, for me, the first obligation is to be constantly open-minded, because only in that way can truths be discovered, and falsehoods become identified and replaced with truths. So: I open here by admitting that I am not bothered, at all, if I lose a closed-minded reader. I don’t want them, though I find that a majority of people are closed-minded. I instead look for readers who are (like I am): always seeking evidence to change one’s view of things whenever that view is false.

That is the Introduction.

——

The most pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian countries — America and its European colonies — are so blind to the evilness of Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide against the residents of Gaza, and of its ongoing and accelerating land-thefts from the Palestinians in the West Bank, as to present the serious question of why these massive ongoing evils, which are of historic magnitude, are absent from their Governments’ official condemnations and (until recently) almost completely absent from these countries’ news-reports, even as-if these horrors weren’t being perpetrated by Israel with America’s weapons and satellite guidance and targeting, or weren’t even happening at all. There is a real blindness about the blindness, as if this tolerance of Israel’s (and America’s) genocide and land-theft against Palestinians simply were not so. But it is. What explains the blindness and the blindness about the blindness — the utter refusal — to acknowledge the evilness of Israel (and of the U.S. Government ever since Harry Truman created the state of Israel in 1948, even when the genocidal intent of Israel’s founders was already known both privately and publicly)?

Stupidity — believing the Israeli Government’s lies — is part of the answer. Especially the lie that to be anti-Israel is to be anti-Jew is obvious to everyone but idiots, because many Jews are anti-Israel — even some rabbis, both in America and in Israel, are against Israel — and this means that the equation between “Jew” and “Zionist” (supporter of Israel) is false. Only stupid people would believe it. Nonetheless, the Trump Administration and many throughout the world spout Israel’s lie that to be anti-Israel is to be anti-Jew (an “anti-Semite”); and, for example, prestigious American universities have expelled students for speaking publicly against Israel’s slaughter of Gazans — and the U.S. Government, despite the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment (which prohibits the Government’s suppressing public expressions of political opinions), has halted federal funds to universities that DON’T expel such students.

However, even the opponents of that lie falsify, by alleging that the Jewish religion does not support this ethnic cleansing and genocide. Here are a few examples from the Jewish religion’s alleged ‘holy texts’ or Scriptures, specifically referring to what their ‘God’ wants:

Genesis 15:18-21

“On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham and said, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt [the Nile] to the great river, the Euphrates, including the lands of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amoriotes, the Caananites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.’”

Deuteronomy 7:1-2

“You must not let any living thing survive among the cities of these people the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance: the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Caananites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. You must put them all to death.”

Deuteronomy 7:16

“Destroy every nation that the Lord your God places in your power, and do not show them any mercy.”

Deuteronomy 20:16-18

“When you capture cities in the land he Lord your God is giving you, kill everyone. Completely destroy all the people: the Hittites, the Amorites, the Caananites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, as the Lord has ordered you to do. Kill them so that they will not make you sin against the Lord by teaching you to do all the disgusting things they do in the worship of their gods.”

Israel’s Government takes such passages as ‘justifying’ what they do to Palestinians. And the vast majority of Israelis agree with that viewpoint. America’s Government says it doesn’t like what Israel is doing, but nonetheless continues to provide almost all of the weaponry and satellite intelligence in order to do it, and is therefore co-equal with Israel in doing this genocide, but (since America pretends to be not a theocratic nation [and our Constitution is entirely secular, so anything at all theocratic in the U.S. Government would actually be traitorous], and not even an aristocratic nation, but instead a democratic nation — though it now IS actually an aristocratic nation, a nation ruled by billionaires instead of by mere voters) alleges that it isn’t participating in the genocide. That allegation by the U.S. Government is clearly a lie.

Israel, therefore, does represent Judaism’s mythological god by doing to the Gazans what it is doing to them, and also doing to Palestinians in the West Bank what it is doing to them. Self-alleged Jews — including some rabbis — who say otherwise (that Judaism isn’t intrinsically racist and even genocidally so), are clearly lying about the Jewish religion, by saying that being a follower of the Jewish religion does NOT necessarily entail being a Zionist. Though Zionism, as a political movement, started only with Theodor Herzl’s pamphlet The Jewish Nation in 1896, Zionism had been an intrinsic part of the Jewish faith ever since that faith’s Scripture, the Torah, which includes those passages, which Israel is now trying to finalize in both Gaza and the West Bank (and a bit beyond), which Scripture became Judaism’s Torah, or ultimate holy Scripture, at some time during the 6th-5th Century BC. Since that time, every Jewish assembly place or synagogue has had a Torah. It is the basis of the Jewish religion, and before that, Jews were simply tribes.

Judaism’s hatred of, and desire to destroy, the Palestinians is as old as the faith itself. For this reason, as I headlined on 14 August 2017, “Netanyahu’s Pro-Nazi Lie: ‘Hitler Wanted To Expel The Jews’”: Netanyahu blamed Palestinians — NOT Christians — for the Holocaust. Despite Hitler himself having been a Catholic, and that Church having held a solemn private (but attended by Bormann and Goebbels) Memorial Mass for him, on 6 May 1945, a week after his suicide. Hitler was born, lived, and died, as a Catholic.

However, there is nothing unique about Judaism’s racism. Consider, for example, the Christians, not just Hitler but all of the Nazi leaders, and the 94% of Germans in that time who called themselves “Christian”:

The Catholic-raised Hitler took very seriously such anti-Semitic New-Testament statements as, from ‘Jesus,’ John 8:44, Matthew 23:31-38, and Luke 19:27; and from Paul, 1 Thes. 2:14-16. (Hitler even said to his followers on 18 December 1926, “The teachings of Christ have laid the foundations for the battle against the Jews as the enemy of Mankind; the work that Christ began, I shall finish.” Then, on 26 April 1933, he told the Pope’s representative, “I am doing what the Church has done for 1,500 years. I am simply finishing the job.”) All of that was Christian racism against Jews. Furthermore, virtually all of Germany’s Nazis were Christians — committed to the New Testament — and, in fact, that (an applicant’s purebred Christianity) was a requirement in order to join the Party, and ESPECIALLY in order to join the SS, as is documented in a 13,000-word masterpiece of an article by Coel Hellier, on “Nazi racial ideology was religious, creationist and opposed to Darwinism”, which can leave no intelligent reader to doubt that the Nazi Party was itself a Christian movement, which historical fact is covered-up by ‘journalists’ and ‘historians’ (but exposed and documented by the primary sources cited in that article — they’re all authentic).

In addition to this: On 21 October 1941, Hitler, in the privacy of his bunker, concluded a long tirade against Jews (as transcribed in his Table-Talk) by saying: “By exterminating this pest, we shall do humanity a service of which our soldiers can have no idea.” Hitler’s buddy, Himmler, stated, in a speech to top SS leaders, two years later, when the Holocaust was in full swing, on 4 October 1943, that this extermination was necessary for them to carry out, in order to have “exterminated a bacterium because we do not want in the end to be infected by the bacterium and die of it.” Hitler had stated, on various occasions, that the “Jewish infection” or “Jewish bacterium” or “blood-poisoning by Jews,” was transmitted to non-Jews in their “blood,” and so Jews must be entirely eradicated like plague-carrying rats — not only in Germany, but beyond. Hitler said, on 24 February 1943: “This fight will not end with the planned annihilation of the Aryan [which to him meant the descendants of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 — and the snake was, according to the NT, the father of the Jews] but with the extermination of the Jew [which to him meant the descendants of the snake in Genesis 3] in Europe. Beyond this, thanks to this fight, our movement’s world of thought will become the common heritage of all people.” (Yet,still, there are Holocaust-deniers who say that it is just ‘a Jewish hoax’, or that if it happened, Hitler didn’t know about it.) Or, as Hitler stated it in his last official words, his “Political Testament” right before his suicide: “Above all I charge the leaders of the nation and those under them to scrupulous observance of the laws of race and to merciless opposition to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.” (His phrase “international Jewry” referred to Jews in all nations. He didn’t make any explicit reference here to exterminating them, because this statement from him was intended to be public — not merely private.)

Furthermore, that 24 February 1943 quotation ISN’T from the flawed Trevor-Roper publication of the Table-Talk but instead from an authentic speech that Hitler gave on that date, and the varying translations of which were discussed in an 8 March 1943 OSS Memorandum http://www7.bbk.ac.uk/thepursuitofthenazimind/FDR/DSCN2002.jpg by Walter Langer to William Donovan. The 1941 quotation from Hitler isn’t only in the original German version of the Table-Talk but was quoted in a book by Winston Churchill in 1948, four years before any translated version of the Table-Talks (Tischgesprache) (and this includes the one issued by Trevor-Roper) was published. The Himmler quotation is likewise accepted as authentic by historians.

Moreover, Horst von Maltitz perceptively observed in this regard in his excellent 1973 The Evolution of Hitler’s Germany (p. 171), that “railroad transport trains carrying Jews from the West to extermination camps in Poland were given priority over trains for urgently needed troops and war supplies. Moreover, skilled Jewish laborers, desperately needed in the munitions plants in occupied Poland, were carted off to extermination centers, in spite of strong objections by plant managers.” And, according to the Polish Ambassador, Jan Ciechanowski, in his 1947 Defeat in Victory (p. 179), he had personally handed U.S. President Roosevelt in the White House on 28 July 1943 a memo that, “The unprecedented destruction of the entire Jewish population is not motivated by Germany’s military requirements. Hitler and his subordinates aim at the total destruction of the Jews before the war ends and regardless of its outcome.”

And, as I pointed out in my 2000 WHY the Holocaust Happened: Its Religious Cause & Scholarly Cover-Up (see summary of it here), Hitler said that “Aryans” have remained unchanged since the time God first created Man (Adam and Eve). Thus, Mein Kampf asserted that the objective was “to give the Almighty Creator beings as He Himself created them.” Though during his later years Hitler was trying to adopt a scientific view, he failed, and Hitler even in his war bunker on the night of 25 January 1942, confided that Darwinian evolution does not apply to Man, who “has always been as he is now.” This was NOT an atheistic type of racism; it was SPECIFICALLY Biblical, a religious type of racism, despite all of the propaganda to the contrary (which has fooled almost all of the Hitler ‘experts’ ever since — though the evidence proves the contrry to be true).

Consequently, it will be good here to quote the most important New Testament origins of Hitler’s — and other Christians’ — Holocaust:

John 8:44

“You are the children of your father, the Devil, and you want to follow your father’s desires. From the very beginning, he was a murderer, and has never been on the side of truth, becuse there is no truth in him. When he tells a lie, he is only doing what is natural to him, because he is a liar and the father of all lies.”

Matthew 23:31-38

“So, you actually admit that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets! Go on, then, and finish up what your ancestors started. You snakes and sons of snakes! How do you expect to escape being condemned to hell? And so I will tell you that I will send you prophets and wise men and teachers; you will kill some of them, crucify others, and whip others in the synagogues and chase them from town too town. As a result, the punishement for the murder of all innocent men will fall on you. … The punishment for all of these murders will fall on the people of this day!”

Luke: 19:27

“Now, as for all those enemies of mine who did not want me to be their king, bring them here, and kill them in my presence!” (This is told as the closing line of a parable.)

Paul 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16

“You suffered the same persecutions from your own countrymen that they suffered from the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and persecuted us. How displeasing they are to God! How hostile they are to everyone! They even tried to stop us from preaching to the Gentiles the message that would bring them salvation. In this way, they have completed the full total of the sins they have always committed. And now God’s anger has at last come down on them!”

To put those passages into their true historical context: Paul never met nor heard the living Jesus but wrote the earliest of all documents that came to be canonized in the year 393 by the Roman Catholic Church and later by all other Christian churches; and his followers wrote the four canonical Gospel-accounts of ‘the words of Jesus’ but even in their time Jesus’s having been a rabbi who preached Judaism (NOT Christianity) was so well known so that 3 out of the 4 canonized Gospel accounts of ‘Jesus’ mentioned specifically that his disciples sometimes addressed him simply as “rebbi” rabbi: Matthew 23:7, 23:8, 26:25, 26:49; Mark 9:5, 11:21, 14:45; and John 1:38, 1:49, 3:2, 3:26, 4:31, 6:25, 9:2, and 11:8. They could not deny it, because to have tried would have been too obviously false and thus Paul’s new religion would have been recognized for what it actually was, not as they wanted it to become — they were evangelists for Paul’s religion, which they believed to be true because Paul told them that it was.

As I documented in my 2012 CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS, Paul created Christianity in the year 49 0r 50 in order to get back at Jesus’s brother James who then headed the former Jesus-created sect of Jews and finally decided that the by-then thousands of uncircumcised men in Paul’s congregations would either be circumcised in accord with Genesis 17:14 or else be expelled from the sect. That is the reason why Christianity is anti-Jewish (anti-Semitic): James finally decided to enforce Genesis 17:14 (in that age when no such things as anesthetics nor antibiotics existed — and circumcision was therefore almost always perpetrated upon only infants, who didn’t volunteer for it and whose screams adults didn’t take seriously).

As regards the Christian clergy, they very predominantly supported Hitler’s anti-Semitism, and they even provided to his Government the documentation as to whom was and therefore also whom was NOT a Christian — the basic data from which the Holocaust’s “Jews” would be selected for extermination:

Eberhard Bethge, who had been a liberal Protestant cleric during the Third Reich, was interviewed in the last chapter of Augustin Hedberg’s 1992 FAITH UNDER FIRE and was asked what those years had been like. Bethge commented, “‘Bad blood’ was the great term. You had to have Aryan blood.” Hitler, in only his private statements, had defined “Aryan,” as pureblooded Christian. Bethge’s interviewer inquired, “So we know this Jewish poison [Jewish blood] had to be cleansed. How did they propose to do that?” Bethge replied, tellingly: “For instance, everybody in an office, in a village, in a city, in a province, in Berlin, had to prove that he had [only] Aryan ancestors. How could he do that? He could do it only if he wrote to church officers in the villages or in the cities and asked them to look in the old books of the church in which baptisms were recorded. So many pastors and church secretaries had to work for hours and hours, weeks and months to answer all these requests. ‘Please give me an excerpt out of the church files that proves my ancestors had been Christians.’ The church officers and the ministers, they didn’t care. They did that. They said, ‘How important we are now.’ I was an assistant curator in the winter of ’33. I had to sit all morning and look through the books and answer these letters.” It was therefore the Christian clergy themselves — people indoctrinated with John 8:44, and Matthew 27:25, and Matthew 23:31-36, and Luke 19:27, etc. — who were the proud implementers of the indispensable first step in the Nazis’ 12-year-long “racist” war against the Jews, by supplying the crucial raw data for segregating-out Jews. Bethge was even honest enough to admit, “We were anti-Semitic, and we thought this was Christian.” (Of course, they did, because it was, and they had absorbed this from Christianity’s Scripture.) The essential first step in the “final solution” was this identification of who was NOT an “Aryan,” who WAS “a Jew.” Hitler commanded this first step in the year he came into power, 1933, and the Christian clergy executed it with pride. And yet even today, so-called “historians” say that Hitler didn’t have execution of the Jews in mind from the very start, and that Hitler was no Christian, and so forth.

“Historians” have not been doing their job, for the truth. That’s why the general public cannot separate propaganda from history — the latter is just an extension of the former. Compare this account of the origin off how the Nazis managed to identify who was “a Jew” and who was not, that was given in a traditional history book on that topic, Edwin Black’s 2001 IBM AND THE HOLOCAUST. Christianity’s role is ignored.

So: Zionists such as Netanyahu can’t blame Christianity for the Holocaust; they need Christian believers to blame Palestinians instead — people who had nothing to do with it — this was instead a Christian operation.. The historical truth and context behind 7 October 2023 needs to be, and has effectively been, hidden from the publics in America, and in its European colonies.

So: Zionists such as Netanyahu can’t blame Christianity for the Holocaust; they need Christian believers to blame Palestinians instead — people who had nothing to do with it — this was instead a Christian operation.. The historical truth and context behind 7 October 2023 needs to be, and has effectively been, hidden from the publics in America, and in its European colonies.

There is a Big Lie, and, this time, it comes not from Germany’s racist-fascist-imperialist-supremacist (or ideologically nazi) Nazi Party and all the rest of Christendom, but instead from Judaism’s own racist-fascist-imperialist-supremacist Zionists and all the rest of Judaism.

And what about Islam’s equivalent? That is the jihadists, the fundamentalist Arab Sunni (U.S. propaganda lies that it’s instead fundamentalist Iranian Shiite) movement that includes both al-Qaeda and ISIS and whose former leader in Iraq and Syria, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, Donald Trump made a deal with on May 14th for Syria to become a U.S. colony, now that this former al-Qaeda and then ISIS leader, whom both Obama and Biden, and also Trump, had protected ever since 2012, finally succeeded (with U.S.-supplied weapons and training) at overthrowing Syria’s secular President Bashar al-Assad, and started the ethnic cleansing in Syria against Shiite Muslims and Christians there (that isn’t being reported in the U.S. empire).

This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.

The post The Truth About The Jews, The Christians, and The Palestinians appeared first on LewRockwell.

Total government spending in the American Colonies took away just 1% to 2% of GDP. In the USA through 1913, apart from during major wars, spending took away just 3% to 8% of GNP. Now, spending takes away 43% of GDP.

National-government regulations alone now take away another 8% of GDP.

The quantity of money was inflated by congressmen and presidents using their new Fed throughout the 1920s, causing the 1929–1945 Great Depression. Double that money inflation caused the 1970s Great Inflation, and a roughly-comparable amount caused the 2007 Financial Crisis. Doubling those latter amounts, the money inflation from August 2008 to April 2022 was 303%. The covid portion alone, 120%, was of the same order of magnitude as the money inflation that had caused each of those previous crises. And like their predecessors’ hyperactivity kept all those previous crises going, current congressmen and presidents are keeping their money inflation going now.

The national-government debt is now 123% of GDP, and politicians keep adding more. But what can’t continue forever, won’t. Already, attracting treasury-bond buyers to even the existing debt is requiring increasingly-higher interest rates.

The root cause of all of this despotism has been simple enough: both major parties have been majority big-government Progressive since 1894. Both parties’ despotic legislators have grabbed executive powers, and both parties’ despotic executives have let them.

Legislators Grab Executive Powers

Despotic legislators have grabbed the executive power to allocate line-item budgets.

They have delegated their legislative power to regulate. They have then grabbed even the resulting illegitimate executive power, by controlling the regulators, through line-item appropriations, and through oversight other than summary impeachment.

In their various oversight actions, despotic legislators have relentlessly grabbed the executive power to control how to enforce the laws: the executive powers to organize departments, to control who gets hired and who can be fired or let go, and to control even what processes the executives must follow—even dictating minute details that executives must report to the legislators.

When legislators grab executive power, they unconstitutionally combine powers. Once combined, these powers can’t offset and limit each other. Without such limiting to serve as sanctions, there is no force compelling government people to follow the Constitution’s good rules.

As plural executives, legislators are unaccountable. They leave burdensome unconstitutional statutes in place and keep adding to the burden. Meanwhile most of all, session after session, they logroll: they divvy out favors, to get cronies’ donations, to broadcast false or deceptive sales pitches, to get reelected.

Some Representatives Start Supporting the Constitution

In state legislatures and to a lesser extent in the national legislature, freedom-caucus members are beginning to bring government-limiting bills up for recorded votes. Sometimes this leads their crony-backed opponents in their own party to vote for freedom. More often so far, this creates clear voting records, and freedom-caucus members then inform voters about opponents’ bad votes to primary and defeat heavily crony-funded opponents.

Legislative blocs grow more slowly than executives can get elected, so executives are already showing how to limit governments. Recent and present state attorney generals, for example Louisiana’s Jeff Landry and Missouri’s Eric Schmitt and Andrew Bailey, and one governor so far, Florida’s Ron DeSantis, have been unprecedentedly using their powers against other government jurisdictions. Under a different constitution, Argentina president Javier Milei has rapidly chainsawed his government by 30%.

Caucuses can make greater strides in limiting governments by tightening caucus membership rules. Voters can take matters into their own hands by never voting for any national or state legislator whose latest-term Freedom Index is—or, going forward, likely could be—below 80%.

Activists, media, voters, and politicians can make the greatest strides if they understand which specific actions support the Constitution best.

Rules-and-Sanctions Boundary Must Get Respected and Enforced

When legislators first start limiting governments in earnest, they must do this by shifting to just two main actions.

First, they must quickly pass a single overall-total appropriation. It must no longer be a minutely-detailed shopping list, every item of which they claim that executives must fully spend, in the exact amount they dictate in their list. Instead, their single total appropriation must be a required constitutional check on executives’ power.

Second, legislators must pass bills that if enacted will be constitutional. Their highest priority must be to pass repeals of the many existing statutes that are unconstitutional because these statutes fail at least one of the following simple pass/fail tests:

• No misleading parts.
• Only uses powers enumerated for the national government.
• No delegation of legislative power.
• No grabs of executive power.
• No grabs of judicial power.
• Not noncritical, complex, or long, and not helping make the total corpus of law incomprehensibly complex or long.

By quickly passing a single total appropriation and then repealing unconstitutional statutes, legislators must start limiting themselves. Executives must also start limiting legislators.

Executives must use their executive powers to organize departments, allocate budgets within the legislator-passed overall-total appropriation, hire, lay off or fire, control work processes, and manage all officers who aren’t empowered and managed through processes explicitly specified in the Constitution.

If legislators then impeach and remove an executive for doing this, succeeding executives must simply do the same. Voters will keep electing such Constitution-protecting executives, and voters will replace such despotic legislators.

Statutes that are constitutional as shown by the simple tests above will consist solely of rules and sanctions that apply to all persons. They won’t specify any enforcement actions that executives must take.

Legislators and executives must hold legislators to passing bills that if enacted into statutes will be constitutional. Executives must step up and choose for themselves every action they take to enforce the resulting constitutional statutes, similar treaties, and judicial opinions.

Within each government jurisdiction, limiting legislators to passing rules and sanctions is the fundamental process boundary.

Violating this boundary is despotism. Securing this boundary will greatly advance freedom.

The post Rules and Sanctions: Boundary between Freedom and Despotism appeared first on LewRockwell.

From the Tom Woods Letter:

I know there are more important things in the world, but sometimes you get a bee in your bonnet and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Mine is an email I received from Harvard this weekend.

In particular, it was an invitation for me to visit Adams House, my upperclass house, after years of renovations.

A little background: before Harvard made the dumb decision to assign students randomly to the various upperclass houses, you used to be able to submit your preferences. The result was that students sorted themselves according to their interests and personalities: Kirkland House was for the jocks, Eliot House for the snobs, and Adams House for, wait for it…

…the artsy people.

You know, just like ol’ Woods here!

Never in a million years would I have chosen Adams House, but that’s where I was assigned, oddly enough in one of the last years students were allowed to submit their preferences.

“Poetic justice!” proclaimed my leftist friend in my freshman dorm.

I came to make my peace with Adams House, though, and I even became friendly with Professor Robert Kiely, who was the “house master” (a faculty member who lived in and lightly oversaw the administration of an upperclass house).

Well, in this weekend’s email, beneath the signatures of the new house masters was the ugly title “faculty dean,” followed by “formerly house master.”

And I thought: don’t tell me. They decided “house master” sounded too much like it involved slavery.

Bingo.

I remember having thought the title “house master” was pretty neat, actually.

Apparently the change was made back in 2016 because, according to the Harvard Crimson, some house leaders “noted that the term ‘master’ could be associated with slavery.”

Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Michael D. Smith admitted at the time that there was no connection between the term and slavery (though of course anyone with an IQ above 70 already knew that): “I have not been shown any direct connection between the term House Master and the institution of slavery.”

He likewise acknowledged that alumni were likely to continue to use the older term and insisted that “they should have no qualms in doing so. The term House Master is and will remain a part of the College’s long and proud history.”

These are the pretzels you have to twist yourself into while simultaneously trying on the one hand to appease crazy people and emotional hypochondriacs, while on the other hand maintaining at least a tenuous connection to reality.

I for one think the changes did not go far enough.

Perhaps the college should no longer use the term “fork” to refer to a utensil. Such terminology could remind people of “forks in the road,” which could in turn trigger them with reminders of difficult decisions.

I propose “scoop buddy” as a suitably anodyne replacement.

Tables, too, might trigger our delicate flowers, perhaps reminding them of “turning the tables,” a phrase tied to conflict or betrayal, or medieval torture devices like the rack, which were vaguely table-like.

Instead, I propose “flat gathering surface.”

Can we devise enough neologisms to satisfy the perpetually aggrieved?

Never pay for a book again: TomsFreeBooks.com

The post They Just Stole Another Word From Us appeared first on LewRockwell.

On the Romantic poet John Keats’ tombstone in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome are these words, which he chose: “HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER.”

His name is not there, by choice. Keats was twenty-five when he died. In Ode to Psyche he wrote:

Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:
…………………………………………………………………………………………..
And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign,
Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same.

On the American writer James Agee’s burial stone in an isolated wooded spot off a dirt road in upstate New York, there are no words, although I like to think Keats’ poetic words seem appropriate to the sylvan nature of the spot and the bird song that filled the air in praise when I and my wife “trespassed” onto land that once meant so much to Agee, and where the house he once sought refuge in lies dilapidated and mute.

I read somewhere that he wished that a bird would be carved into the stone under which he was placed, but it is absent. Perhaps a phoenix, that symbol of the triumph of life over death and immortality, so dear to D.H. Lawrence. Maybe it, like him, flew away, and maybe a young man like Keats, who died so long before him, could conjure winged words of praise – doves of the spirit – for a man who would come long after him, nearly a century and a half after, because he sensed a connection that he could send flying into the future. Like Emily Dickinson, he knew hope was a thing with feathers, and the bird of time has no limits when it is released from the sentence. Time? Not a magazine where Agee once worked – but the real mystery and obsession of true artists. Time, death, and the fact that love brought us into existence. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all /Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” wrote Keats.

Keats and Agee were pilgrims, and Agee no doubt would agree with Keats’ words that “this life is a vale of soul-making.”

Many people visit Keats’ and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s graves in the Roman cemetery; few ever have or will pay homage to Agee over the boulder that marks the spot where his body was placed after he died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-five in a NYC taxi on May 16, 1955, seventy years ago. He has largely been forgotten. If you are reading this, you may have no idea who he was and why I am writing this. I will tell you.

I am writing this because I have felt a connection to him since I was a young man, not just to his talent, but his passionate soul, beautiful writing, the religious quality of his strivings, his faith and doubt, and his sense of wonder and reverence before the mystery of existence. His deep moral outrage at the suffering forced on the poor by the rich is close to my heart, and the desperate way he threw himself into life, always aware since the age of six when his father died in an automobile accident that death shadows our every move on our short visits through life. All his work is filled with the sense of the mysterious nature of existence as described by Einstein:

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

Agee’s eyes were always wide-open; he saw through them the hope and hopelessness that battle in every heart.

I am a minor writer whose work is essentially ignored, which I understand but wish wasn’t so. But I know also that recognition is not why I write; I do it because it is my effort at soul-making, which is as much a restorative endeavor as a prospective one.  Agee wrote for his soul. Years ago he grasped my ironically young-old mind when he wrote:

Now as awareness of how much life is lost, and how little is left, becomes ever more piercing, I feel also, ever more urgently, the desire to restore, and to make a little less permanent, such of my lost life as I can, beginning with the beginning and coming far forward as need be. This is the simplest, most primitive of the desires which can move a writer. I hope I shall come to other things in time; in time to write them. Before I do, if I am ever to do so, I must sufficiently satisfy this first, most childlike need.

We are all little lost children at heart, disguised to ourselves as adults, doing what we do to find the natural piety that Wordsworth said was “the Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star.” When the living ignore my work, I often shamefully respond like a hurt child, but it is just a small step to the realization that Agee and Keats shared, that we will all be forgotten in due time, that we are bubbles on the great stream, and recognition is a fool’s dream. Fugitives from our true vocations, we often engage in endless imitation, something Agee never did. To say he was true to his life’s star is to say he was never a copy but always an original.

He was the author of the posthumously acclaimed (but failure in his lifetime) classic account of dirt-poor Alabama tenant farmer families during the Depression, with searing photographs by Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (the Foreword begins on page 75), the posthumously published Pulitzer Prize winning beautiful autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family, film scripts for The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955), and unique film reviews for Time and The Nation magazines, among other works. Agee, a poet at heart, was acutely aware that he, and all of us over time, will be forgotten, but while the thought is upon me – before I too am extinguished like a brief spark on a chimney wall – of how powerful a writer he was and how full of moral passion his yearnings and how beautiful his prose, let me offer this long quote from an undated fragment he wrote for use in his rapturously sad A Death in the Family, a novel based on the six year-old Agee’s reaction to his father’s death in an automobile accident near their home in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1915:

Those who have gone before, backward beyond remembrance and beyond the beginning of imagination, backward among the emergent beasts, and the blind, prescient ravenings of the youngest sea, those children of the sun, I mean, who brought forth those, who wove, spread the human net, and who brought forth me; they are fallen backward into their graves like blown wheat and are folded under the earth like babies in blankets, and they are all melted upon the mute enduring world like leaves, like wet snow; they are faint in the urgencies of my small being as stars at noon; they people the silence of my soul like bats in a cave; they lived, in their time, as I live now, each a universe within which, for a while, to die was inconceivable, and their living was as bright and brief as sparks on a chimney wall, and now they lie dead, as I soon shall lie; my ancestors, my veterans. I call upon you, I invoke your help, you cannot answer, you cannot help; I desire to do you honor, you are beyond the last humiliation. You are my fathers and my mothers but there is no way in which you can help me, nor may I serve you. You are the old people and now you rest. Rest well; I will be with you soon; meanwhile may I bear you ever in the piety of my heart.

Piety has become a lost virtue (from Latin pietatem (nominative pietas) dutiful conduct, sense of duty; religiousness, piety; loyalty, patriotism; faithfulness to natural ties), as have so many others such as honor, courage, truthfulness, etc. Agee was no exemplar of every virtue, but in that he was like all of us, frail and flawed, but his audacious courage in his writing was his way to redeem his child’s soul by never holding back like so many writers do. He always drew on what was deep and true in his experience, especially the lacerating wound he suffered when his father died. That preoccupation, that youthful revelation, that presence of an absence, that hole in his heart, that death at an early age, joined to his youthful Christian devoutness and doubt, can be seen in everything he wrote.

That he came to think his ancestors could not help him was mistaken, I would say; for the bridge over the river between life and death, across the rivers Acheron and Styx, which separate the worlds of the living and the dead in Greek Mythology, runs two ways when one trusts the heart not the head. Agee, like Aeneas whom Virgil so often describes as pius in the Aeneid, was essentially a man of the heart, a rough Tennessean schooled at Harvard and in the sophisticated secular precincts of New York City where he may have turned a bit away from his youthful faithful heart under the strain of the heart attacks that killed him and the ideology of that “sophisticated” culture.

Like Agee’s father, my wife’s father died in a single car crash on a bridge at night when she was two months old. I have seen how that presence of his absence – the father that she never knew and her family’s reaction to his death: silence – affected her. Her courage in facing it inspires me. Agee, at least, had the father he loved dearly for six years, so the absence of his presence was different but similar. Who can say which was worse, the loss of presence or a lifelong absence?

When I was five years old, my mother, nine months pregnant, went to the hospital to give birth to another sibling (there were five of us already), and we were all very excited. Something happened; the baby was stillborn. When my father took me to the hospital to see my mother, I was not allowed in, but the figure of her sad face waving to me from the window on the second floor has stayed with me across the years. When I was ten years-old, my six year-old cousin accidentally shot and killed his eight year-old brother with a rifle that was hidden under a bed in a neighbor’s home. There is more, and no doubt many people have such stories to tell, but I offer these examples to reveal some of the impulses for my writing this essay about James Agee, just as one can explore the reasons behind Agee’s writing and behavior, or that of all the actions of those who never wrote a word but were marked by death in their tender years. For some, tragedy elicits words; for others, the mystery renders them mute.

Being a master of the English language and a writer from an early age with music in his words, Agee tells us at the end of his book, The Morning Watch, that when he (Richard in the book) was twelve years-old at a religious boarding school on Good Friday, feeling a new, heavy, “cold, crushing sorrow” at the thought of Jesus’s suffering, he saw hogs devour a wounded snake and felt such horror and pity, that he said to himself that:

. . . he was so far gone by now that there must be a way beyond really feeling anything, ever any more (the phrase jumped at him): (Who had said that? His mother. ‘Daddy was terribly hurt so God has taken him up to heaven to be with Him and he won’t come back to us every any more.’) ‘Ever any more,’ he heard his quiet voice repeat within him; and within the next moment he ceased to think of the snake with much pain.

Agee was such a deep feeling writer that it was impossible for him to get beyond really feeling anything, ever any more. Some critics have accused him of being too emotional and also of never having fulfilled his promise. In a luminous memoir, his good friend, Robert Fitzgerald, the poet and translator of the Odyssey and the Aeneid, puts that canard to rest:

Quite contrary to what has been said about him, he amply fulfilled his promise. In one of his first sonnets he said, of his kin, his people

‘Tis mine to touch with deathless their clay,
And I shall fail, and join those I betray.

In respect to that commission, who thinks there was any failure or betrayal?

As for those poor tenant farmer families that he praised in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – the book that started with a commission from Fortune magazine where he was working in the 1930s to write an article that Fortune never published – Agee began it thus:

I spoke of this piece of work we were doing as ‘curious.’ It seems to me curious, not to say obscene and thoroughly terrifying that it could occur to an association of human beings drawn together through need and chance and for profit into a company, an organ of journalism, to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings, an ignorant and helpless rural family, for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science, of ‘honest journalism’ (whatever that paradox may mean), of humanity, of social fearlessness, for money, and for a reputation for crusading and for unbias which, when skillfully enough qualified, is exchangeable at any bank for money (and in politics for votes, job patronage, abelincolnism, etc.’); and that these people could be capable of meditating this prospect without the slightest doubt of their qualifications to do an ‘honest’ piece of work and with a conscience better than clear, and in the virtual certitude of almost unanimous public approval. . . . And it seems curious still further that, with all their suspicion , save only for the tenants and themselves, and their own intentions, and with all their realization of the seriousness and mystery of the subject, and of the human responsibility they undertook, they so little questioned or doubted their own qualifications for this work.

All of this, I repeat, seems to me curious, obscene, terrifying, and unfathomably mysterious.

Those are the words of a man who didn’t mince words.

So let us now join with him in praising these famous men and all like them who struggle to eke out a living against the predations of the wealthy hyenas with smiling faces whose fortunes are built on the backs of working people.

And let me now praise James Rufus Agee who died on this day, May16, 1955. He spoke for the human family, that one death was everyone’s, and as Wordsworth put it, we should give thanks for his life and give

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

May James Agee speak to us still, if only we would listen.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post Let Me Now Praise James Agee appeared first on LewRockwell.

PARIS – The UN’s Under-Secretary-General just warned that 14,000 Palestinians children risk starving to death in the coming hours due to the total Israeli blockade of food, medicines and water.  Thousands of other adults will also die due to famine or Israeli bombing in coming days.

No amount of running old documentaries on Auschwitz or threatening pro-Palestinian protestors will cover up what the UN calls a `war crime.’  Nor will threatening financial hardship on those who protest Israel’s savage repression of Gaza.

So far, Israel’s extreme right-wing government led by Benyamin Netanyahu has rejected all calls to aid the 2.2 million starving or injured Palestinians in the hellhole of Gaza.  His government will eventually bend a little in the face of outrage from France, Canada, the UK, Australia and other western powers.

Meanwhile, Israel has run amok, becoming what Jewish author Arthur Koestler called ‘a nasty little Sparta.’  The slaughter in Gaza would not be happening without the prior connivance of the Biden administration, which fell under the control of the rabid pro-Israel neocons in Washington, and now Israel’s cheerleader, Donald Trump.

But Palestinians will continue to starve or die from US-supplied bombs dropped on refugee camps because Washington keeps blocking real action to halt the mass killing.  Jewish hostages in Gaza have been forgotten.

Interestingly – or shockingly – the rest of the Arab League has only issued little peeps of criticism over the slaughter in Gaza, with the exception of remote, impoverished Yemen, which was heavily bombed by the US and Israel.  President Trump’s visit this week to the obedient Gulf states showed once again how the west has re-colonialized most of the Arab world and brought it to heel.

Meanwhile, Israel and the US keep talking about ‘transfer’ of 2.2 million Palestinians from Gaza to someplace else.  For a while in the 1930’s Ethiopia and Kenya featured as key deportation centers for Germany’s Jews.  When National Socialists (aka Nazis, a British propaganda creation) spoke of moving Germany’s Jews to other remote countries, they were scourged as horrid racists by the Brits and Americans.  But today the US and UK are doing something similar with their efforts to expel third worlders and Latinos or move them to Albania, Zimbabwe or Libya.

Israel’s far rightists – ‘Jewish Nazis’ in the words of the late, great Israeli columnist Uri Avnery – aim to kill as many Palestinians as possible to limit their future reproduction.  They are determined to thwart creation of a long-overdue Palestinian state, and seized lands occupied by West Bank Palestinians. These could include much of Lebanon and Syria, and possibly Iraq’s oil producing regions, and even some of Saudi Arabia’s northern territories. 

Many of the one million former Soviet citizens who moved to Israel thanks to US financial help will recall Stalin’s infamous saying, ‘no man, no problem.’  But following in the footsteps of Heinrich Himmler and the Stalinist mass murderers in Ukraine, is ‘worse than a crime’, to paraphrase Talleyrand, a ‘mistake.’ 

Many Israelis want to be rid of the Netanyahu government and end the mass killing of Palestinians.  Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert speaks for them. The western powers should ensure he returns to office.

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