Lew Rockwell Institute

For all his towering theological acumen, Joseph Ratzinger was a very practical man. When asked by a Bavarian journalist in 1991 whether it was the Holy Spirit who chooses the pope, the then-Cardinal Ratzinger gave a down-to-earth answer:

I would say that the Spirit does not exactly take control of the affair, but rather like a good educator, as it were, leaves us much space, much freedom, without entirely abandoning us. Thus, the Spirit’s role should be understood in a much more elastic sense, not that he dictates the candidate for whom one must vote. Probably the only assurance he offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined.

If electors heed the Spirit’s voice in such a way during any particular conclave, they will weigh several factors to narrow down the pool of candidates to a handful, any of whom they would consider competent to lead the Church for the foreseeable future. Though few would admit it, geopolitics is one such factor.

Prior to the modern conclave, political motivations were commonplace, if not necessary, for the election of the Bishop of Rome. After all, for well over a thousand years, the popes wielded temporal, not just spiritual, power. Even in the fourth century, it was normal for imperial authorities to determine who would succeed Peter.

The emperor Constantine effectively appointed Julius I to the pontificate single-handedly in 337. Innocent I, who began his reign in 401, may have risen to the papacy for no other reason than that his predecessor, Anastasius, was his father (though some dispute what St. Jerome meant when referring to the former as the latter’s “son”). Although never formally recognized by the Church, a jus exclusivae had been exercised by several Catholic monarchs to prevent candidates from being elected. The institution of the conclave in 1276 and its various instantiations since then have streamlined the process and mitigated the abuse of political power in the election process.

Nevertheless, it would be naïve to think geopolitics had nothing to do with the election of Karol Wojtyła in October of 1978. Appearing on the balcony for the first time, the Polish pope acknowledged that the cardinals called him “from a far-away country” though he was “always near in the communion of faith and the Christian tradition.” Those who knew the Archbishop of Kraków knew that he was a man of extraordinary talent, and they were able to convince others of the same.

He would have been a strong candidate no matter where he came from. Yet no one knew the authoritative, systematic repression of Christianity in Poland better than Wojtyła’s main advocate, the Archbishop of Warsaw, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński. It is not as if Wojtyła’s nationality was either the main reason or even an overt reason for him to have collected nearly 100 of the 111 votes that year. But each of those votes tacitly represented the acknowledgment of an opportunity, albeit risky, to encourage Christians suffering in the Eastern Bloc and perhaps send a message to an already tiring Soviet regime.

Although Joseph Ratzinger had spent almost a quarter century working in the Roman Curia, nobody had forgotten that he was a German. He is now listed among half a dozen German popes spanning back to Gregory V in the 10th century. Unlike his German predecessors, however, Ratzinger’s CV included a line indicating his former affiliation with the Hitler Youth, an organization he was required to join at the age of fourteen and something the press was obsessed with reminding us of after his election in 2005.

More often than not, the media continued to consider his nationality a major liability, such as when Benedict visited Yad Vashem in 2009 and stopped short of stepping out of his white robe and acknowledging personal responsibility for the Shoah. Yet, every soul in the Sistine Chapel casting a vote for him in 2005 knew deep down that no one understood the crisis of European culture better than the former Archbishop of Munich and Freising. In fact, the speeches Benedict gave in Regensburg, Paris, and London proved that he understood the crisis even better than anyone thought.

It was only a matter of time before the cardinals would elect a pope from the Americas. If they had been specifically searching for one, they had a handful at their disposal. Cardinals Ouellet, Maradiaga, Scherer, and even U.S. prelates Dolan and O’Malley fit the bill (the last two, though conceivable under an Obama administration, are unimaginable under Trump). But again, it was unlikely that geopolitics would be elevated as the prime factor of consideration.

Yet, every vote cast for Jorge Mario Bergoglio in March of 2013 signaled at least an openness to a different mindset reflected in the Argentinian cardinal’s “peripheries” speech amid the general congregations held before the formal election process commenced. Think what you will of our ailing pontiff, but never forget that he hails from a part of the globe that approximately 40 percent of Catholics throughout the world call home.

Read the Whole Article

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Writing for The Hill, Andrew Latham’s article asks the question: “Is America preparing to abandon NATO and Europe?”

Let’s hope so.

Latham is a professor of international relations at Macalester College in Minnesota, a senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, and a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities in Washington, D.C.

He believes that “the uncertainty surrounding America’s future commitment to NATO has never been higher.” He maintains that “if European allies continue to underinvest in their militaries and rely disproportionately on American security guarantees, they may soon find themselves without them.”

Let’s hope so.

Latham concludes that “if NATO’s future depends on America indefinitely underwriting European defense, then NATO, in its current form, has no future at all.”

Let’s hope so.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was established in 1949 by the North Atlantic Treaty (known as the Washington Treaty) with 12 member countries. Since its founding, NATO has been enlarged 10 times and now has 32 member countries.

The principle of “collective defense” is “enshrined in Article 5 of the Washington Treaty:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

This means that the United States is obligated to come to the defense of countries like Albania, Estonia, Latvia, Luxembourg, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Slovenia — all of which have armed forces that number less than 10,000 — and Iceland, which doesn’t even have a military. Aside from Iceland, how many Americans even know where these countries are? And how many Americans even care?

If the wisdom of the Founding Fathers had been followed, the United States would never have joined NATO—just like it never joined the League of Nations.

In his Farewell Address, George Washington famously warned against “permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” He also said, “The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible.” America’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, specifically warned against getting involved in Europe:

I am for free commerce with all nations, political connection with none, and little or no diplomatic establishment. And I am not for linking ourselves by new treaties with the quarrels of Europe, entering that field of slaughter to preserve their balance, or joining in the confederacy of Kings to war against the principles of liberty.

I have used my best endeavors to keep our country uncommitted in the troubles which afflict Europe, and which assail us on every side.

Since this happy separation, our nation has wisely avoided entangling itself in the system of European interests, has taken no side between its rival powers, attached itself to none of its ever-changing confederacies.

If the countries of Europe are that concerned about a non-existent Russian threat to their security, then let them band together to fund and maintain NATO. They just shouldn’t expect the United States to join with them.

The post Let’s Hope So appeared first on LewRockwell.

A mountain was in labour, uttering immense groans,
and on earth there was very great expectation.
But it gave birth to a mouse. This has been written for you,
who, though you threaten great things, accomplish nothing.”

Sundays meeting of selected European leaders in London reminded me of the above Aesop fable.

Prime Minister Starmer’s summit, called for in haste, has achieved nothing:

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer rallied his European counterparts Sunday to shore up their borders and throw their full weight behind Ukraine as he announced outlines of a plan to end Russia’s war.
…
Starmer said he had worked with France and Ukraine on a plan to end the war and that the group of leaders — mostly from Europe — had agreed on four things.

The steps toward peace would:

• • keep aid flowing to Kyiv and maintain economic pressure on Russia to strengthen Ukraine’s hand;
  • make sure Ukraine is at the bargaining table and any peace deal must ensure its sovereignty and security; and
  • continue to arm Ukraine to deter future invasion.
  • Finally, Starmer said they would develop a “coalition of the willing” to defend Ukraine and guarantee the peace.

“Not every nation will feel able to contribute but that can’t mean that we sit back,” he said. “Instead, those willing will intensify planning now with real urgency. The U.K. is prepared to back this with boots on the ground and planes in the air, together with others.”

It is far from certain whether Russian President Vladimir Putin will accept any such plan, which Starmer said would require strong U.S. backing. He did not specify what that meant, though he told the BBC before the summit that there were “intense discussions” to get a security guarantee from the U.S.

“If there is to be a deal, if there is to be a stopping of the fighting, then that agreement has to be defended, because the worst of all outcomes is that there is a temporary pause and then Putin comes again,” Starmer said.

Starmer said he will later bring a more formal plan to the U.S. and work with Trump.

That mouse the mountain gave birth to is stillborn:

– Trump has made clear that the U.S. will not agree to back any European forces in Ukraine.

– Zelenski, unless under more pressure, will not agree to a ceasefire without U.S. backing.

– Russia does not agree to any temporary ceasefire. It wants a new permanent security architecture for Europe and beyond.

– Russia does not agree to forces from NATO countries in Ukraine. It started the war to prevent that to happen.

– Russia will not agree to a rearming of Ukraine. Its declared aim is to ‘de-militarize’ the country.

– Russia is winning the war. Neither Starmer nor Europe have the means to prevent it from doing that.

What Starmer and Macron are trying to do now is the very same they had failed to do last week when the both made the pilgrimage to Washington DC:

Macron, Meloni and Starmer were among European leaders who spoke with both Trump and Zelenskiy over the weekend, as they tried to get the two men back to the table. They believe there’s still a narrow path to reviving the minerals deal that the presidents had planned to sign, giving the US leader a vested interest in deterring further Russian aggression against Ukraine.

They still want to win Trump’s agreement to prolong the war. I doubt that this second attempt will be more successful than their first try.

One wonders how Starmer and Macron became delusional enough would even try that plot. One reason may be that get advised my ‘military experts’ like these:

Despite President Volodymyr Zelensky’s efforts, the United States has made it clear that it does not intend to offer Ukraine security guarantees or directly contribute to any forces supporting Ukraine after the imposition of a ceasefire. It therefore falls upon Europe to plan for such a force. This is a serious undertaking. Can European powers field such a force without hollowing out Europe’s ability to defend NATO’s borders, all while the United States potentially withdraws forces from the continent?

While the length of front and the size of Russian ground forces may give the impression that the task is infeasible, in our view it is practicable if European nations are willing to pay the cost. With the right force balance, investment, and political framework Europe could generate a credible commitment.

There is nothing fantastical about a European mission in Ukraine.

Watling and Kofman, the authors of the above, call for the deployment of three(!) European brigades to Ukraine:

Given the significant degradation in Russian force quality over the course of the last three years of fighting, the initial force deployed could be as few as three combat brigades, or their equivalents.

Since the start of the war the Russian forces in Ukraine have more than doubled in size. Russia is now producing more missiles and drones than ever before. Its soldiers have gained valuable experience. How can this be seen as a ‘degradation in Russian force quality’?

Ukraine itself has deployed some 100 brigades in the war and Russia about twice that many.

How three inexperienced multinational brigades from western Europe could in any way effect that balance is way beyond me.

Is there any way to direct these people to a more realistic and sane view of the world?

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Starmer’s Summit Gives Birth to a Mouse – It’s Stillborn. appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ostensibly, it is not in Europe’s interest to mount a concerted resistance against the U.S. President over a failed war.

They (the Euro-élites) don’t have a chance: “If Trump imposes this tariff [25%], the U.S. will be in a serious trade conflict with the EU”, the Norwegian Prime Minister threatens. And what if Brussels does retaliate?

“They can try, but they can’t”, Trump responded. Von der Leyen has, however, already promised that she will retaliate. Nonetheless, the combined suite of the Anglo administrative forces is still unlikely to compel Trump to put U.S. military troops on the ground in Ukraine to protect European interests (and investments!).

The reality is that every European NATO member – to varying degrees of self-embarrassment – admits publicly now that none of them want to participate in securing Ukraine without having U.S. military troops provide ‘backstop’ to those European forces. This is a palpably obvious scheme to inveigle Trump into continuing the Ukraine war – as is Macron and Starmer’s dangling of the mineral deal to try to trick Trump to recommit to the Ukraine war. Trump plainly sees through these ploys.

The fly in the ointment, however, is that Zelensky seemingly fears a ceasefire, more than he fears losing further ground on the battlefield. He too, seems to need the war to continue (to preserve continuing in power, possibly).

Trump calling time on the Ukraine war that has been lost has seemingly caused European elites to enter some form of cognitive dissonance. Of course, it has been clear for some time that Ukraine would not retake its 1991 borders, nor force Russia into a negotiating position weak enough for the West to be able to dictate its own cessation terms.

As Adam Collingwood writes:

“Trump has torn a huge rip in the interface layer of the fantasy bubble … the governing élite [in the wake of Trump’s pivot] can see not just an electoral setback, but rather a literal catastrophe. A defeat in war, with [Europe] left largely defenceless; a de-industrialising economy; crumbling public services and infrastructure; large fiscal deficits; stagnating living standards; social and ethnic disharmony – and a powerful populist insurgency led by enemies just as grave as Trump and Putin in the Manichean struggle against vestiges of liberal times – and strategically sandwiched between two leaders that both despise and disdain them …”.

“In other words, through the tear in the fantasy bubble, Europe’s elites see their own demise …”.

“Anybody who could see reality knew that things would only get worse on the war front from autumn 2023, but from their fantasy bubble, our élites couldn’t see it. Vladimir Putin, like the ‘Deplorables’ and ‘Gammons’ at home, was an atavistic daemon who would inevitably be slain on the inexorable march to liberal progressive utopia”.

Many in the Euro ruling-strata clearly are furious. Yet what can Britain or Germany actually do? It has quickly become clear that European states do not have the military capacity to intervene in Ukraine in any concerted manner. But more than anything, as Conor Gallagher points out, it is the European economy, circling the drain – largely as a result of the war against Russia – that is dragging reality to the forefront.

The new German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has shown himself to be the most implacable European leader advocating both military expansion and youth conscription – in what amounts to an European resistance model mounted to confront Trump’s pivot to Russia.

Yet Merz’s winning CDU/CSU achieved only 28% of votes cast, whilst losing significant voter share. Hardly an outstanding mandate for confronting both Russia – and America – together!

“I am communicating closely with a lot of prime ministers, and heads of EU states and for me it is an absolute priority to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible, so that we achieve independence from the U.S., step by step”, Friedrich Merz said.

Second place in the German election was taken by the Alternative for Germany (AfD) with 20% of the national vote. The party was the top vote getter in the 25-45 year-old demographic. It supports good relations with Russia, an end to the Ukraine war, and it wants to work with Team Trump, too.

Yet AfD absurdly is outcast under the ‘firewall rules’. As a ‘populist’ party with a strong youth vote, it becomes automatically relegated to the ‘wrong side’ of the EU firewall. Merz has already refused to share power with them, leaving the CDU as pig-in-the-middle, squeezed between the failing SPD, which lost the most voter share, and the AfD and Der Linke, another firewall outcast, which, like AfD, gained voter share, especially among the under-45s.

The rub here – and it is a big one – is that the AfD and the Left Party, Der Linke (8.8%), which was the top vote getter in the 18-24 demographic, are both anti-war. Together these two have more than one third of the votes in parliament – a blocking minority for many important votes, especially for constitutional changes.

This will be a big headache for Merz, as Wolfgang Münchau explains:

“For one thing, the new Chancellor had wanted to travel to the NATO summit this June, with a strong commitment to higher defence spending. And even though the Left Party and the AfD hate each other in every other respect, they agree that they won’t give Merz the money to strengthen the Bundeswehr. More important, though, is the fact that they won’t support a reform to the constitutional fiscal rules (the debt brake) that Merz and the SPD are desperate for”.

The Rules are complicated, but in gist dictate that if Germany wants to spend more money on defence and aid to Ukraine, it had to be saved from elsewhere in the budget (most likely from social spending). But politically, saving on social spending to pay for Ukraine hasn’t played well with the German electorate. The last coalition failed on precisely this issue.

Even with the Greens, Merz still will be short of the two-thirds majority necessary to make constitutional changes, and the ‘Centre’ just doesn’t have the fiscal space for challenging Russia without U.S. funding. Von der Leyen will try to ‘magic’ money for defence from somewhere, “but German youth are voting against the Establishment parties who are hated. They can build a few Leopards if they want. They won’t get recruits”.

Whilst the EU and Britain are proposing to raise billions to arm themselves against some imaginary Russian invasion, it will be done against the backdrop of Trump saying explicitly – on the threat of a Russian invasion of NATO – “I don’t believe that; I don’t believe it, not one little bit”.

Another Euro-shibboleth ripped by Trump.

Thus, how will the European public, which has largely soured on the Ukraine war, react to higher energy costs and more tax and social service cuts, in order to pursue an unwinnable war in Ukraine? Starmer already has been warned that the (government debt) ‘bond vigilantes’ will react badly to yet more UK government debt as the fiscal situation wobbles precariously.

There are no obvious solutions to Europe’s current predicament: It is, on one hand, an existential conundrum for Merz. And on the other, it is the same one that dogs the EU as a whole: To get anything done, a parliamentary majority is a basic necessity.

The ‘firewall’, though primordially intended to protect the ‘Centrists’ in Brussels from Rightist ‘populists’, was subsequently turbo-charged in Brussels by Biden’s issuing of a foreign policy determination to all U.S. foreign policy ‘actors’ to the effect that populism was a ‘threat to democracy’ and must be contested.

The practical outcome however, has been that across the EU, blocking coalitions were formed of odd (minority party) bed-fellows agreeing to keep the Centrists in power, but which rather has led to endless stasis and an ever increasing detachment from ‘we, the people’.

Angela Merkel governed in this way, kicking the can of reform down the road for years – until the situation ultimately became (and still is) insoluble.

“Can another coalition of short-sighted centrists arrest the decline of the economy, fix the failure of leadership, and free the nation from its pernicious political trap? I think we know the answer”, writes Wolfgang Münchau.

There lies a bigger problem however: As Vance very explicitly warned at the recent Munich Security Forum, Europe’s enemy lies not with Russia; It lies within. It derives, Vance implied, from the fact of having a permanent bureaucracy, assuming to itself the exclusive prerogative of autonomous governing power, yet incrementally becoming ever-more remote from its own base.

Tear down the firewalls, Vance advocated, in order to return to the (abandoned) principles of that earlier democracy originally shared between the U.S. and Europe. Implicitly, Vance is targeting the Brussels Administrative (Deep) State.

The Eurocrats see in this new front an alternate American-supported attack on their Administrative State – and perceive therein their own demise.

In the U.S., there is acknowledgement that there is an “institutional resistance to Trump” in the DOD, DOJ and the FBI. It proves, Margot Cleveland argues, that those touting the need for “institutional resistance” and the supposed independence from the executive branch, are the opponents to democracy – and to Trump.

Given the close nexus between the U.S., the British and European Deep States, the question arises as to why there is such strong parallel resistance to Trump amongst European leaders also.

Ostensibly, it is not in Europe’s interest to mount a concerted resistance against the U.S. President over a failed war. Is the European frenzy then fuelled by a wider (U.S.) Deep State desire to neuter the ‘Trump Revolution’ by demonstrating, in addition to the U.S. domestic opposition at home, that Trump is causing havoc amongst the U.S.’ European allies? Is Europe being pushed further down this path than they would otherwise have chosen to venture?

For Germany to change course – albeit unthinkable for Merz – it would require only a minimal amount of imagination to envision Germany again linked to Eurasia. The AfD gained 20% of the vote on just such a platform. Really, there probably is little other option.

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

The post Reality Confronts the Euro Ruling-Strata – ‘Through the Tear in the Fantasy Bubble, They See Their Own Demise’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

See if you can get this straight: So, Keir Starmer says: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland wants to “put boots on the ground and planes in the air” in Ukraine so as to lead a “coalition of the willing” (NATO) against Russia. Sounds a little like the British PM is holding seances at No. Ten Downing Street to channel the spirits of bygone European leaders who launched doomed bear hunts into the vast and mysterious Eurasian east. (Who comes to mind?)

Why is Europe so avid for war? After eighty-odd years of serving as the world’s tourism theme park, languishing in their cafes, maybe they forgot what war is like. The New York Times reports: Ursula von der Leyen said the European Union would fortify Ukraine with economic and military aid, aiming to turn it into “a steel porcupine that is indigestible for potential invaders.” This requires you to fall for the fake idea that Russia seeks to invade western Europe. Notice how much the EU acts like America’s Democratic Party — projecting its own hostile fantasies on its adversaries.

Also, like our Democratic Party, Europe is sinking into oblivion. The animating ethos of the ruling parties in Germany and France is to punish their own citizens with censorship, tyranny, and sponsoring an alien invasion that aims to demolish European culture. Their economic wizards are taking the continent medieval, to a global backwater of defeated peasants eating bugs. I will boldly predict that the likes of Starmer, von der Leyen, and Friedrich Merz will be swept out of power by angry mobs before next Christmas.

In the meantime, Europe has made itself preposterous. Europe does not have the mojo to do a darned thing about Ukraine or Russia. The British army has 74,296 active-duty troops, comparable to Algeria. The UK’s North Sea oil production has declined by approximately 73-percent since 2000. Germany produces around 23,000 barrels-a-day, enough to meet two percent of its domestic oil demand. Anyway, exactly a year ago, Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared, “There will be no ground troops, no soldiers on Ukrainian soil sent there by European countries or NATO states.” So, who’s kidding whom?

Circumstances are driving the USA and Russia into an alliance of necessity. The immediate goal is to stop the insane war provoked by previous non-Trump administrations (and the EU) going back to George W. Bush, that repeatedly promoted “color revolutions” (regime change) in Ukraine so as to drag it into NATO — putting a hostile forward base on Russia’s “front porch.” The idea all along among the most fervidly delusional neocons has been to bust-up Russia in order to seize its oil and mineral assets.

That project never panned out because after a decade of post-Soviet chaos, Mr. Putin put his country back in order, turned it into what used to be the definition of a normal European nation and — too ironically even for Russian literature — made it a bastion for defending Western Civ while the other nations of Europe launched their campaign of collective suicide. History is ever a trickster and the zeitgeist is its consigliere.

Mr. Trump and his wingmen apparently recognize the obvious: that Ukraine is exactly what its name signifies in its Slavic root, Украина” (Ukraina): frontier, borderland, periphery, outskirts. Ukraine is on the edge of Russia. Most of all, it is geopolitically within Russia’s sphere-of-influence in the same way that Mexico is in ours, with similar implications for national defense as laid out explicitly in our Monroe Doctrine. Because Ukraine is mostly a flat plain, it has served historically as the doormat for invasions into Russia, so you may see why Russia was not comfortable with the prospect of NATO perched there, especially in a new age of drones and missiles.

As Europe now flounders impotently and wrecks itself, America and Russia are motivated to avoid being snookered into an unnecessary world war over Ukraine. Mr. Zelenskyy is but an anachronistic artifact of the color revolutions that finally sputtered out with “Joe Biden,” who was himself in the vanguard of a colossal money-grubbing operation in that sad-sack country. While much is already known about how that worked, a whole lot more is waiting to be revealed, including the degree of actual treason it entailed. People around “Joe Biden” will be going to jail over this, or worse.

I’d also venture to predict that W. Zelenskyy will before much longer get removed from his position by his own generals. Ukraine will return to its long-standing status as a borderland that poses no danger to the rest of the world. America and Russia will be poised to defend what remains of Western Civ from ambitious China. And Gawd help Europe if its insane national leaders revert to fighting among each other as they did for two thousand years before 1945, making a slaughterhouse of the region again.

Mr. Trump is correct to avoid getting dragged into that. We have enough on our own agenda for repairing the damage done to ourselves the past thirty years. The good news is that we’re beginning to get that done.

Reprinted with permission from JamesHowardKunstler.com.

The post Attitude Adjustment appeared first on LewRockwell.

As the Trump administration pauses military aid to Ukraine and western liberals continue their shrieking meltdown over Trump hurting Saint Zelensky’s feelings, it’s probably worth reminding everyone that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was indisputably provoked by western aggressions. That’s why so many western experts and analysts spent years warning ahead of time that western aggressions were going to provoke an invasion of Ukraine.

Now, some may hear this and say “Okay but Russia still shouldn’t have invaded even though our western leaders were aggressively provoking them to.” But before you do that it might be a good idea to look inside yourself and ask where that impulse is arising from. Why are you so eager to skip past the part where you criticize your own rulers for their role in starting this war and focus solely on criticizing the leader of an eastern government who has no power over you? What is it inside of you that’s flailing all over the place trying to avoid any forceful scrutiny of the reckless warmongering of your own government and its allies?

The last time a foreign rival placed a credible military threat near the border of the United States, the US responded so aggressively that the world almost ended (if you want to know just how close we came to nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis, look up the name Vasili Arkhipov). Western liberals have been conditioned to insist that Russia should have responded differently to the US empire amassing proxy forces on its border than the US would respond to the same kind of threat on its own borders. The frenetic mental contortions needed to justify this ridiculous double standard are only possible because the west is saturated in domestic propaganda manipulating the way they think about the world.

It makes sense for there to be criticism of Russia for its role in this war, and for people to be horrified by the nightmare that’s been happening in Ukraine these last few years. What makes absolutely no sense whatsoever is for western liberals (or “progressives” or whatever they want to call themselves) to assign ZERO PERCENT RESPONSIBILITY to their own government and its allies for their extensively documented role in sparking this conflict and ONE HUNDRED PERCENT RESPONSIBILITY to a foreign government with no power over them. That’s pathetic, bootlicking behavior, and it’s utterly inexcusable.

Stop performing mental gymnastics to defend the abuses of your rulers. Have a little dignity for god’s sake.

I get asked this all the time, so I am reposting my famous thread of all the top strategic thinkers – from Kissinger to Chomsky – who warned for years that war was coming if we pursued NATO expansion, yet had their advice ignored (which begs the question: why?).

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) September 10, 2023

It is good that Trump appears to be moving toward ending an unwinnable proxy war that Ukrainians no longer want to fight. Anyone who disagrees with this is a dogshit human being.

I am not grateful to Trump for ending this nightmare, I’m just disgusted with anyone who’s against doing so. The proxy war in Ukraine was going to end sometime relatively soon anyway; the only way for NATO to reverse Russia’s steady gains at this point would be to intervene more directly in ways that would risk nuclear consequences that western leaders aren’t willing to receive. This was always a chess game for them; they’re not going to put their own necks on the line. So the war had to end to make way for other imperial projects — the Trumpists are just the faction that the empire has tasked with advancing this agenda.

I will not waste any gratitude on Trump rolling back a failed imperial bid to weaken Russia, but I will absolutely scream my fucking lungs out at anyone who insists Ukrainians should keep throwing their bodies into a war that Ukrainians themselves no longer support. If you want the Ukraine war to continue, then go enlist and put your body on the line so that Ukrainians don’t have to. The Ukrainian Foreign Legion is still accepting volunteers. If you want this horrific war to continue, either go and fight or shut the fuck up. Stop tweeting from the sofa in your safe, comfortable home and get your ass to the frontline. Bring along as many western liberals as you can convince to join your cause.

The western empire provoked this war. The western empire sabotaged peace talks in the early weeks after the invasion. They refused off-ramp after off-ramp in pushing Ukraine into this situation, and as a result Ukraine is going to be much worse off than before this all started. Wanting Ukraine to keep throwing human lives into the meat grinder in the hopes that they can recover all their lost territory is just sunk cost fallacy at this point.

Ukrainians now recognize that it’s time to cut their losses and negotiate a peace. Western armchair warriors need to recognize this too.

_______________

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The post Some Thoughts On Ukraine appeared first on LewRockwell.

It goes without saying that the Donald can never get enough of the limelight. But last Friday in a live Oval Office broadcast seen around the world that thirst for public attention may have actually changed the course of history. And very much for the good—even if the trigger was pulled by a third rate actor who couldn’t even figure out how to properly brown-nose one of the most capacious egos on the planet.

For all practical purposes, therefore, Washington’s sick adventure in the destruction of a fake nation—along with the hideously unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of real people who inhabit the Ukrainian territory—is now over.

Zelensky will soon be gone to a hideaway in such as Costa Rica or an unmarked grave, as the case may be. Thereafter a caretaker regent for the rump of what is now the Potemkin State that Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev built with Bolshevik blood and guns will sign-up to a Trump/Putin ceasefire and partition deal—the latter having been in the making ever since the yoke of communism was lifted in 1991.

Indeed, Friday’s final splintering of “Ukraine” in the Oval Office itself will surely soon unmask the rationality-defying farce that has been the Washington/NATO proxy war against Russia in its own “borderlands”. The latter term, of course, being the meaning of the word “ukraine” in Russian.

And we do mean monumental farce. As the most recent desultory chapter has unfolded since February 2022, in fact, the US and EU combined have spent the staggering sum of nearly $400 billion to conduct a Demolition Derby on Russia’s doorstep in order for what?

Apparently, to pleasure the arms merchants of the US and Europe with a grand occasion for the sale of beaucoup new weapons to replenish depleted NATO arsenals. And all in the name of more of the same old baloney about collective security and a “rules based international order”.

But that’s all just beltway bullshit. There has not been an iota of America’s homeland security implicated in the fate of the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic after it split off from the expired corpse of the Soviet Union in 1991. And since “Ukraine” was a communist-built simulacrum of a nation, it was not destined to last, anyway—nor would its demise have been even a little bit noted or briefly remembered by the world at large.

That is to say, the wholly artificial state of “Ukraine” embodies the very historical metaphor associated with the borderland territories that Russia had acquired, conquered, populated and developed in the late 18th century under the stewardship of Grigory Potemkin. The latter was the nation’s chief minister, who literally had an intimate relationship with the Russian Empress, Catherine the Great.

After the Catherine’s 1783 acquisition of Crimea from the Ottoman Empire and the liquidation of a small Cossack principality on the lower Dnieper River called the Zaporozhian Sich, which had governed the adjacent territories for upwards of 200 years, Potemkin became governor of the region. He promptly named these new territories Novorossiya or “New Russia” in honor of his paramour/ruler. At length, Russian people, capital and commerce poured into the theretofore largely empty steppes.

Potemkin’s major tasks were to pacify and rebuild what had been a war-torn region by bringing in Russian settlers and laying the ground work for a new flourishing of farms, industry, towns and trade. In 1787, as renewed war was about to break out between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, Catherine II, with her court and several ambassadors, made an unprecedented six month tour of New Russia, navigating down the Dnieper River (blue thread on the map) to inspect her new colonies.

One purpose of this trip was to impress Russia’s allies prior to the war. To help accomplish this, Potemkin was said to have set up “mobile villages” on the banks of the Dnieper River. As soon as the barge carrying the Empress and ambassadors arrived, Potemkin’s men, dressed as peasants, would populate the village. Once the barge left, the village was disassembled, then rebuilt downstream overnight.

Whatever the degree to which the story is apocryphal, the underlying metaphor could not be more apt. To wit, the entire territory from Lugansk and Donetsk (i.e. the Donbass) down through Mariupol on the Sea of Azov and on both banks of he Dnieper, to Odessa on the Black Sea coast, was henceforth known as New Russia and was labeled as such per the 1897 map depicted below.

Moreover, search other maps of the pre-1917 era as you may, but you will find no country called Ukraine because the latter was place name, not a state. And the place name came to life as a organized modern society only as the expanding border region of the Czarist Empire.

Novorossiya As Of The End of The Nineteenth Century

Ukraine became a state, therefore, only upon the WWI induced collapse of the Russian Empire and the seizure of power by Lenin and his brutal heirs. As shown in the map below, the communist administrative unit that became known as the Ukrainian SSR was cobbled together from New Russia (blue area) and other parts and pieces of the Czarist Empire wrested from various neighbors (yellow area)—along with historic Galicia (green area) centered in Lviv, which was seized by Stalin when Poland was dismembered in WWII.

At length, Crimea (purple area), which was thoroughly Russian from the time of its purchase by Catherine the Great in 1783, was seconded to Khrushchev’s Ukrainian compatriots in 1954 as a door prize in return for their support in the struggle for succession after Stalin.

The last thing that can be said about the Ukrainian “borders” which outline the five color-coded components shown above, therefore, is that they were sacrosanct in any meaningful sense of the term. They did not represent the organic evolution of peoples, national identities and states, but the iron-fist of the Soviet politburo and the blood-thirsty tyrants who ruled it.

In turn, this meant that when the Soviet Union collapsed into the dustbin of history in 1991, Ukraine’s days as a unitary state were numbered.

Needless to say, there was no common linguistic and religious identity at all. Even 40 years after the Soviet rulers had finished assembling “Ukraine” this 1991 map of language usage tells you all you need to know. That is to say, there were overwhelming Russian-speaking majorities in the Donbass and Black Sea rim (red areas), which in some oblasts including Crimea were more that 75% Russian-speaking. By contrast, the center and west was populated by Ukrainians, Poles, Bulgarians, Hungarians and others, where Russian speakers accounted for as little as 5% of the population.

1990s Linguistic Map Of Ukraine By Percentage of Russian Speakers

And, no, once the communist-ruled entity known as the Ukrainian SSR split away from the corpse of the defunct Soviet Union the happenstance borders it inherited were not “guaranteed” by the US in the so-called Budapest Memorandum of 1994 in return for giving up it nuclear weapons.

In fact, Ukraine never had any nukes! These weapons had been stock-piled on its territory by the Soviets and were still under Moscow’s control when the latter signed the Memorandum along with the US and the United Kingdom. But no borders were “guaranteed” because that would have been a treaty requiring Senate confirmation and support of the American people—something Bill Clinton and his operatives were unwilling to test.

Instead, the new Ukrainian government was given “assurances”. But whatever rubbery definition that term implied was soon made clear enough by Deep State operatives at State, NED and the CIA, who busied themselves fomenting color revolutions in Ukraine not long after Putin ascended to power on January 1, 2000.

In any event, once the machinery of elections and democracy was established after 1991, the resulting electoral maps make one thing abundantly clear: People voted as they spoke.

This is clearly evident in the three maps below. Ukrainian democracy began, matured and ended on the same note. Namely, with an electorate far more sharply divided than even the Red State v. Blue State politics of the US in recent decades.

In 1994 Leonid Kuchma, a former industrial manager from the heavily industrialized, Russian-speaking east (Dnipropetrovsk), campaigned on a platform emphasizing economic ties with Russia and appealed strongly to the Russian-speaking populations in eastern Ukraine and Crimea.

In the second round of that election, Kuchma won about two-thirds of the vote in eastern Ukraine, where ethnic Russians and Russian speakers predominated, and nearly 90% in Crimea, a region with a 70% ethnic Russian population.

On the other side, Leonid Kravchuk, the first president and the incumbent in 1994, was a key figure in Ukraine’s independence movement. He had positioned himself as a guarantor of Ukrainian sovereignty and national identity. He drew his strongest support from western Ukraine, where Ukrainian speakers and nationalist sentiments were dominant, earning 70% to 80% of the vote in those regions.

This cavernous split in the electorate never changed. Except unlike the US where a GOP gubernatorial candidate actually made a 47% showing in the deep blue state of New York in 2022, the vote split in the most hard core of the respective regions (dark red and dark blue) was upwards of 90/10 in many localities.

Thus, in the 2004 election the pro-Russian candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, narrowly lost the overall count, even as he dominated overwhelmingly in the east and south with 70% to 90% margins.

2004 Election Results in Ukraine

By contrast, in 2010 Yanukovych retraced the same massive domination of his own Russian-speaking regions in the east and south while striking out in the west. But this time he had sophisticated campaign help from Washington-based election consultants (i.e. the infamous Paul Manafort, who temporarily managed Donald Trump’s red versus blue state campaign in 2016 until he got nailed by the Russophobes in the Deep State). Consequently, the pro-Russian Yanukovych managed to accumulate enough incremental votes to come out on top of the perennial Ukrainian nationalist, Yulia Tymoshenko, in the nation-wide tally.

2010 Election Results in Ukraine

Needless to say, by Washington’s lights the Ukraine election of 2010 had nothing sacrosanct about it because, well, the voters elected the wrong candidate!

In short order, therefore, the neocons led by the detestable Victoria Nuland, who surrounded then Vice-President Joe Biden, fomented the coup against Yanukovych in February 2014. Yet even as they drove him from power and forced him to flee to Moscow, they had no clue as to the tenuous political balance they were upending.

But it didn’t take long to strike the match. In short order the followers of the WWII Hitler ally, Stephan Bandera, who dominated the unelected, Washington-installed government in Kiev, made two destructive moves that amounted to a signal to “let the partition begin”.

The first of these was to abolish Russian as an official language in the Donbass and elsewhere. And the second was the massacre by fire of upwards of 50 pro-Russian trade unionists in a building in Odessa by supporters of the Kiev government.

It was only a matter of time, therefore, before most of the red-colored territories on the maps above declared their independence. It was also in short order that the people of what had been the Russian province of Crimea voted overwhelmingly (80%+) to re-join the Russian Federation. That ended their brief sojourn in the Ukrainian state, which had been Khrushchev’s 1954 gift to the communist thugs in Kiev who had helped him seize power after Stalin’s death.

Also, in short order the new proto-Fascist government in Kiev moved to deeply antagonize its historic neighbor and former fealty overlord in Moscow by seeking to join NATO and launching a brutal, unrelenting war on the breakaway Republics of the Donbas. This onslaught ended up killing upwards of 15,000 civilians during the eight year run-up to Russia’s invasion in February 2022.

Needless to say, Putin was no more interested in having nuclear missiles planted even closer to his own border than was President John Kennedy in October 1962. Nor was he about to countenance the continued slaughter of Russian speakers in the Donbass after Kiev launched a drastically stepped up shelling and bombing campaign on these beleaguered areas one week before the February 24th (2022) invasion.

That is to say, the history was far from black and white. While the Donald frequently does not do his homework—in this case he did know that the “unprovoked” invasion canard is a Deep State prevarication. So last Friday he was not about to be schooled on the matter by the incompetent song and dance man who was sent into the Oval Office by the crowd of UniParty warmongers and GOP RINO’s depicted below for the purpose of shaking-down the current incumbent for another round of weapons and financial wherewithal.

So in response to Zelensky’s Putin-howling, the Donald did not mind blurting out the truth.

The Ukraine war had actually been provoked by the Washington war machine and its

Senate board of directors pictured below.

Of course, now that the truth was let out of the bag on daytime TV there will surely soon be an end to the pointless killing and utterly elicit NATO proxy war on Russia. And with it will come an even more important repudiation of the entire post-1991 neocon perpetuation of an American Empire that should have never been stood up in the first place.

That is to say, the false Uniparty demonization of Putin and Russia will be repudiated even more decisively. That’s because apart from the impending Trump/Putin partition agreement on Ukraine, the map of eastern Europe will not change any time soon.

The whole idea that Putin means to resurrect the old Soviet Empire and that Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Moldova and destinations west are next in line for invasion was made of whole cloth. Its malign purpose was to give NATO a reason for expanding even further east to Russia’s very doorstep and to justify Washington’s call to war in a territory that makes not one damn bit of difference to America’s homeland security.

For crying out loud. The archives of American post-Soviet diplomacy are also crystal clear on this matter. Bush the Elder and his Secretary of State James Baker explicitly promised Gorbachev that in return for the dismantling of the Warsaw Pact and the unification of Germany that NATO would not move “one inch” to the east.

And that pledge was made for screamingly obvious reasons: The Soviet Empire was gone, and the threat of the massive Red Army had vanished. Its troops weren’t even being paid and its tanks and artillery were being melted down and sold for scrap. So ex-paratrooper George HW Bush should have parachuted into Ramstein Air Base in Germany during 1992, declared victory and consigned NATO to a newly created museum of world peace.

Indeed, at the time the very astute “father” of the containment doctrine and the 1949 NATO alliance, Professor George F. Kennan, warned that the perpetuation and expansion of NATO under these circumstances would be folly. When in 1998 the Senate nevertheless voted to extend NATO to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, he clairvoyantly observed,

“I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever.” …

“It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course, there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong.“

In a word, risking everything to get Ukraine into an obsolete NATO alliance that was and remains long past its “sell-by” date is surely one of the stupidest acts of foreign policy in all of American history.

And now, on the back of the momentous events of this past weekend, the opportunity has finally come. That is, to name, blame, shame and drive from the seats of power the UniParty wreckers of American democracy, prosperity and liberty who brought the nation to its present parlous estate.

So President Trump’s history-changing mission at the present hour is crystal clear. He needs to make War & Peace the preponderant issue on the banks of the Potomac and send the UniParty remnants into spasmodic apoplexy by winning the Nobel Peace Prize for ending this needless war with the same dispatch that Eisenhower did with Korea in 1953.

So doing, he can accomplish the great mission for which is was apparently chosen against all odds by the gods’ of history. That is, to decisively splinter the Uniparty, thereby gathering refugees from both sides of the aisle into a revitalized political force that can enable the the people of Flyover America to reclaim their democracy from the corrupt, self-perpetuating ruling class that arose on the Potomac.

Needless to say, the Donald seems to be on to his mission. When Zelensky issued the following rejoinder to his being cast out of the White House, the Donald was not far behind with a perfectly apt answer.

Ukraine “will never” recognize any Russian annexation of territory it occupies, even if it is to try to secure a peace deal, Zelensky added, and he repeated that he would only accept a ceasefire if it was followed by robust security guarantees that had the confidence of his country’s people.

Though Russia has said it will insist on incorporating territories that it occupies, for Ukraine it would always be “a temporary occupation”, Zelenskyy insisted, even if his country lacks the military muscle to expel Russia from all of the country at the moment.

Zelenskyy said what he wanted “from partners” – a clear reference to the US White House – was for them to remember that Russia launched the full-scale invasion of his country three years ago. He did not want politicians rewriting history, he said, to suggest “that there are two parties in this war and it is vague who the aggressor is”.

Why, yes, there were two parties to this war and the true aggressor was domiciled on the banks of the Potomac, not the Moskva/Oka/Volga.

Trump warned in response with words that have not been heard from the Oval Office since June 1963, when JFK issued his short-lived call to end the Cold War at American University.

“This is the worst statement that could have been made by Zelensky, and America will not put with it for much longer.” He added in reference to Zelensky that “this guy doesn’t want there to be Peace as long as he has America’s backing…”.

“He’s got to say I want to make peace,” Trump said before he departed the White House on Friday. “He doesn’t have to stand there and say about ‘Putin this, Putin that,’ all negative things. He’s got to say I want to make peace. I don’t want to fight a war any longer.”

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post The Snit Fit Heard Round The World appeared first on LewRockwell.

[Reprinted with permission from the author and Liberty Nation News, where this article was originally published.]

Americans have become more distrustful of federal agencies in recent years, including “vaccine hesitancy” because of alleged misinformation about the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has criticized HHS and other federal agencies for “regulatory capture” by corporate interests that profit when the government approves their products. The recent departure of FDA employee Patrizia Cavazzoni, who worked for pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, Inc. before her FDA stint, has drawn criticism as Cavazzoni returned to her former employer.

Cavazzoni was hired at Pfizer by former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who left the agency in April 2019 to “spend more time with his family” …and then joined Pfizer’s board of directors in June of that year. The family relations appear to some to be nepotism: Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine sales amounted to more than $80 billion as of March 2024.

Leaving her post as director of FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) just days before Donald Trump took office, Cavazzonni stated “Leaving CDER was an extremely difficult decision, but the time has come for me to be more present for my family….” Pfizer appears to be a big happy family for many former and future FDA employees, adding fuel to Kennedy’s campaign messaging that he planned to clean up the FDA’s act.

Regulatory capture at HHS agencies allegedly involves user fee arrangements whereby corporations contribute to the salaries of government personnel working on approvals for their products, and “revolving door” intermingling of employees who work both for large corporations and the government entities charged with policing them. Cavazzonni ticks both boxes, as a fan of user fee arrangements and a loyal Pfizer employee who took a two-year hiatus – to work at the FDA.

The Trump administration seeks to curtail user fee programs established in 1992 under the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA), which permits pharmaceutical companies to fund the hiring of FDA staff to oversee the assessment of submitted products under “commitment letters” approved by Congress, allegedly to enhance efficiency of drug review and accelerate the approval process.

MAHA Takes Aim

Kennedy and Trump likely cannot dismantle FDA programs established under current commitment letters, but most user fee programs are due for reauthorization in September 2027. FDA staff cuts may result in eliminating programs relying on user-fee-funded staff. Remarkably, Scott Gottlieb on February 7, 2025, “publicly suggested that FDA and industry encourage Congress to extend the term of the current user fee amendments rather than renegotiate with the current administration,” according to the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Floom LLP and Associates.

For her part, Cavazzoni was also an ardent supporter of user fee programs during her tenure as head of CDER, stating in an interview that working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic improved efficiency in administering the programs. As reported by Regulatory Focus:

“She also noted that user fee reauthorization processes moved along as parties held virtual negotiation sessions through the past several months. Public meetings will be coming later in 2021, and FDA’s user fee reauthorization packages should be ready for Congress on schedule, said Cavazzoni.”

Ironically, she also mentioned that the pharmaceutical industry and FDA share a talent pool, and that the government can’t compete with the corporate offers: “However, FDA is alert to the reality that industry is now wooing staff who have become accustomed to this flexibility by promising them the opportunity for fully remote work.” The center is now, she says, giving some hard thought to allowing more flexibility in on-site attendance requirements.

Gottleib’s and Cavazzoni’s door-revolving at the FDA is par for the administrative course. Former FDA Commissioner Mark McClellan sits on the board of Johnson & Johnson, while former FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn perches on the board of Flagship Pioneering, creator of Moderna. Kennedy calls such shifting an ethical conflict, but industry players are all on board with jumping ship (back and forth), even if a stint at FDA or other federal agencies is merely a three-hour tour.

Slamming the Revolving FDA Door

Critics claim the system fosters unacceptable conflicts of interest. Attorney Mary Holland, who replaced Kennedy as President of Children’s Health Defense, told Liberty Nation News:

“The revolving door swings again! It is a national disgrace that people walk out of our federal regulatory health agencies and into the financially rewarding embrace of the pharmaceutical industry. I sincerely hope that HHS‘s new commitment to radical transparency includes ending this corruption between mega-corporations and the state.”

As DOGE matures into a cohesive effort to root out government graft, expect Bobby Kennedy to take a dim view of user-fee arrangements that allow Big Pharma to fund their own products at FDA with salaries for their own employees. Americans are now closely watching who makes their vaccines, and who regulates them. Calls to impose time limits between hirings and eliminate conflicts of interest inherent in close-knit user-fee structures are increasing in an environment that many see as justifiable citizen distrust of many federal agencies.

Many Americans believe they are being double-jabbed by an oligopoly of pharmaceutical manufacturers who don’t bother revolving the door but just leave it brazenly wide open. Cavazzoni’s shameless jump into Gottlieb’s Pfizer arms begs closer scrutiny of corporate-regulatory family ties. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s scrupulous eyes are wide open.

The post Kennedy Sizes Up FDA Conflicts of Interest appeared first on LewRockwell.

Last week the Pew Research Center released a new survey on religion in America; their first major study of this type since 2014. Upon the survey’s publication, I could almost hear a collective groan from Catholics, since we’ve come to approach such polls with a sense of dread. The question isn’t, “Will it be bad?” The question is, “How bad will it be?”

I won’t bury the lede: it’s bad. Really bad.

Only 19% of Americans self-identify as Catholic, down from 24% in 2007. This is a 20% decrease. By comparison, Protestants decreased by 21%, while religious “nones” increased by 81% and Muslims increased by an astounding 200% (although they still make up a small percentage of the overall population—only 1.2%). Even though the Pew Survey headline suggests that the decline in Christianity in this country may have “leveled off,” it’s clear the overall direction is downward.

The numbers get worse for Catholics. Perhaps the most stunning finding in the survey is that for every 100 people who join the Catholic Church, 840 leave. So when you rejoice seeing folks become Catholic at Easter (which you should), remember that more than 8 people have left by the back door for each one who’s come in the front.

No other religion has nearly as bad of a join/leave ratio. For every 100 people that become Protestant, 180 leave. That’s bad, but it’s not Catholic bad. Conversely, for every 100 people who leave the religious “nones” (i.e., they join a religion), a full 590 become part of that irreligious cohort.

Where are the former Catholics going? Of all the former Catholics, 56% become religious “nones” and 32% become Protestant. I think we all know from personal experience that these numbers ring true. What Catholic doesn’t have family members who have become Protestant or have stopped practicing any religion? It’s just part of being an American Catholic these days.

Like I said, it’s bad. But it’s actually much worse than you might first think from those numbers.

You might have noticed something peculiar about what I’ve shown so far. If so many people are leaving the Church, how is it that the total number has only dropped by 20%? Shouldn’t it be more?

Yes, but there’s something that keeps the numbers slightly afloat: immigration. As the Pew Survey itself states, “immigration has helped to bolster the number of Catholics in the United States.” So while millions are fleeing the Catholic Church, new migrants keep the overall numbers from looking horrific. I’m not saying our bishops are working so hard to keep mass immigration alive in this country to keep the true horrible state of the Church hidden, but the inflow sure does end up having that effect.

However, that’s not all the bad news (I’m starting to feel like a TV salesman constantly saying, “But wait! There’s more!”). All of the numbers above reflect self-identifying Catholics; it makes no distinction between practicing and non-practicing Catholics. If you say you’re Catholic, then you’re counted as Catholic. We know, of course, that what really matters, when it comes to the salvation of souls, is actually practicing the Catholic Faith.

Fortunately, the survey also asks about attendance at religious services, but these numbers are also discouraging. Only 29% of self-identifying Catholics attend Mass weekly. So only 29% of the 19% of Americans who identify as Catholic actually fulfill the Sunday obligation.

At the risk of earning broken record status, I think it’s even worse. The Pew survey doesn’t ask about going to Confession, but based on other surveys I’ve seen over the years, the total number of self-identifying Catholics who go to Confession at least once a year is around 10%. Let’s be optimistic and say it’s actually around 20% and that all those Catholics also go to Mass weekly.

Based on the very-minimally-defined idea of a “practicing Catholic” as someone who attends Mass weekly and Confession yearly, probably at most 20% of the 19% of self-identified Catholics are practicing Catholics.

Let’s run these numbers:

• 340 million Americans
• 19% self-identify as Catholic: 64.6 million Catholics
• 20% of those Catholics: 12.92 million practicing Catholics, or 3.8% of all Americans

Compare this number of practicing Catholics to the 98.6 million religious “nones”—there are almost eight times more religious nones in America than practicing Catholics. And then remember more than 50 million of the people who identify as Catholics don’t even do the minimum to be considered practicing their faith in any real sense.

Like I said, the news is bad. Very bad.

The two questions that naturally arise when looking at these dire numbers are:

1) How did this happen?

2) What can we do to correct it?

Obviously, we must answer the first question before we can answer the second, but unfortunately most Catholic leaders are wholly uninterested in that first question. They might want to talk about how we can attract new Catholics, but they will not seriously look at why so many are leaving. Yet, for every 100 new Catholics there are 840 former Catholics. We absolutely must look at what caused this problem in the first place.

Catholics ignoring the problem is the biggest challenge, but there is another challenge: giving simplistic answers. There is no “silver bullet” that will reverse the decline. Just spreading the TLM (the trad silver bullet) or improving catechesis (the conservative silver bullet) or accepting modern sexual mores (the liberal silver bullet) won’t solve the problem. There is no one answer for how to move forward.

Read the Whole Article

The post Catholics Are Rapidly Losing Ground appeared first on LewRockwell.

I’ve always been a staunch Pat Buchananite (and later Ron Paulian) non-interventionist when it comes to foreign conflict. During the 90s, I abhorred Bill Clinton’s adventurism in places like Bosnia and Somalia. Black Hawk Down is a great movie, but those American military personnel should never have been placed in harm’s way in the first place. It might seem hard for younger viewers to imagine this, but George W. Bush campaigned on what he called a “humble foreign policy” and “no nation building” ahead of the 2000 election. That was sweet music to my ears as a first-time presidential voter that year, and I enthusiastically voted for Bush.

You can say, “well, 9/11 changed things,” but 9/11 had nothing to do with the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Iraq’s government, despite the Bush administration attempting to link the two in order to sell the American people on the war. The reasons for launching a war against Iraq were proven to be, at best, a horrible intelligence failure, and at worst outright lies. Now just about everybody, including most of those responsible for the war, acknowledge it was a mistake, and one that left hundreds of thousands dead, the area destabilized, and under greater Iranian influence. You can say, “okay, but we had to invade Afghanistan.” How did that work out? We ultimately captured and killed bin Laden in Pakistan, eventually left Afghanistan in disgrace after 20 years of pouring blood and treasure into what has been called “the graveyard of empires,” and the very party that was in control in Afghanistan before we invaded is now again in power. We spent two decades sending young Americans to die for absolutely nothing, not to mention the vast civilian deaths.

U.S. foreign policy elites can’t stop interfering all over the world. In 2014, we didn’t like the pro-Russian government of Ukraine, so our government lent support to the pro-Western Maidan revolution. The result of meddling by both the U.S. and Russia was the start of eight years of civil war in Eastern Ukraine. Russia, and Russia alone, bears the blame and the responsibility for starting the current war in 2022 by invading Ukraine, but a lot of parties, including the U.S., the U.K., the E.U., Ukraine, and (oh, yes) Russia, have a share of the blame for creating the conditions that led to the current war.

Since 2022, Russia has grabbed a large swath of Eastern Ukraine and has painfully eked out additional territorial gains, while Ukraine has successfully prevented Russia from taking additional oblasts and has even successfully invaded and taken some territory in Russia. And what has all of this cost? Billions of dollars and at least hundreds of thousands of deaths from both sides. Not to mention the loss of limbs, homes, and entire cities.

Now, in the abstract, of course, I agree that it’s wrong when one country invades another. (Even when the U.S. invaded Iraq.) But as an American, I can’t think of a good reason why I should particularly care whether Kyiv or Moscow controls Eastern Ukraine. These two people groups and nations have a complicated history going back centuries in which this territory has changed hands many times. The current borders are ten years younger than I am. Western Ukraine is heavily Ukrainian nationalist and culturally, linguistically, and ethnically Ukrainian. Eastern Ukraine has large minority populations that are ethnically, culturally, and linguistically Russian.

I don’t condone or support Russia’s actions, but it’s simply not my fight, and not in the interest of the American people for billions more dollars to be poured into that country. And in fact, it’s quite counter to the interests of the American people. Pro-interventionists point to all of the money flowing into American arms manufacturers because of this war, but I have a low view of that industry because it consistently lobbies for more war. And why shouldn’t it? It doesn’t make money from peace. Meanwhile, we’ve depleted our own supplies of artillery shells because we’ve sent our stockpiles to Ukraine, meaning our own readiness to protect the American people has been degraded.

More importantly, the U.S.-backed war on Russia’s border has brought the world closer to nuclear annihilation than at any point in my lifetime, and I lived through the last decade of the Cold War. Most people don’t think about what that would actually be like, but it would be the end of civilization as we know it. It would mean the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in a single day, and many more over the months to come due to starvation and radiation poisoning. It might set humanity back 1,000 years.

Think about it. In the 1960s, President Kennedy was willing to go to nuclear war over the USSR threatening to put nukes in Cuba. My dad and my grandfather built a bomb shelter in their backyard, as did millions of fathers and sons. It was that serious. Washington DC is over 1,000 miles from Cuba. Moscow is less than 300 miles from the Ukrainian border over which Ukraine-launched American high-tech weapons are being sent to Russian targets. Those facts don’t excuse Russia’s invasion or continued war in the slightest, but you cannot seriously assess a global conflict if you’re not willing to try to understand the other side’s perspective.

I hear pro-interventionists say things like, “We can’t live in fear of nuclear war.” Well, it’s easy to say that, but the entire world lived in fear of nuclear war during the entire Cold War. There were times when nuclear war nearly broke out accidentally between the U.S. and Russia due to human errors. I believe it’s only by the hand of Almighty God that we were spared that. Moreover, the fear of nuclear war was one of the main deterrents that kept the Cold War from becoming a hot war. You don’t have to like the leverage that a vast nuclear arsenal gives to Russia, but that kind of leverage is why nations want to get nuclear weapons in the first place.

Remember in Terminator 2 when the Terminator is explaining to young John Connor how the war between Skynet and humanity started? Skynet kicked off a preemptive nuclear strike from the United States against Russia. It didn’t do it because Russia was the enemy. It did it because it knew that Russia would immediately retaliate. The mutually assured destruction would aid Skynet in its goal of winning a war against all humanity. Even the dopey Hollywood writers were aware of the reality of American and Russian nuclear doctrine, but lots of people on social media think the threat of nuclear war is “no big deal.”

“Why attack Russia? Aren’t they our friends now?” This is what John Connor said in shock after the Terminator described Skynet attacking the Russians. You have to remember that Terminator 2 was released a few months before the fall of the Soviet Union. But even by the summer of 1991, tensions had weakened enough that a line like that could appear in a movie and not cause controversy.

That’s certainly what those of us on the Buchananite right expected would happen after the USSR broke up. It was a new chance for peaceful relations. Friendship. NATO’s original purpose, to deter Soviet expansion, was at an end. But NATO didn’t end. In fact, it kept expanding eastward. We stayed meddling in European affairs, and we continued a militarily provocative posture toward Russia.

Had the U.S. not backed Kyiv through words, money, and arms, it’s entirely possible that peace talks, which were underway shortly after the war began in 2022, might have resulted in far less loss of life for both sides, and far less territorial loss for Ukraine. Instead, it’s droned on for three years. Zelensky today said the end of the war is far away. The American and Russian-backed civil war lasted for eight years before Russia invaded Ukraine. Five, eight, or ten more years of war in Eastern Ukraine would continue to decimate the Ukrainian population. I have no interest in subsidizing more death and life-changing injuries. I have no interest in subsidizing more Ukrainian civilians getting kidnapped by military press gangs and sent to the front with little training. It’s time to do what JFK did: ratchet down tensions by negotiating. Let both sides get something that they want and forge a path to peace.

Let me address one final common objection: “We have to stop Putin now or Poland and Germany are next.” Every geopolitical foe throughout my entire life has been compared to Hitler by those who advocate U.S. involvement in opposing those geopolitical foes. So in the current context, Putin is Hitler, Russia is Nazi Germany, and anyone advocating for peace is a modern-day Neville Chamberlain. This analogy is employed because it packs a rhetorical punch, but it’s lazy and unintelligent. Hitler had taken Poland, Austria, and France within eighteen months. In roughly three years, Putin has only managed to take maybe 20% of Ukraine. Additionally, continent-spanning wars are incredibly expensive. Even if Putin wanted to reconstitute the Soviet Union, and there’s absolutely no evidence that he wants to, he couldn’t afford the attempt. Russia’s GDP is roughly equivalent to Texas’s GDP.

If Ukraine wants to go on fighting, they don’t need my permission. If Western Europe wants to go to war against Russia on Ukraine’s behalf, they don’t need my permission. But the United States should cut off the welfare. This is not our war. And the sooner we pull the plug, the higher the likelihood that both sides will hammer out a cease-fire deal.

This originally appeared on Being Right.

The post It’s Past Time To End U.S. Participation in the War in Ukraine. appeared first on LewRockwell.

Europe’s heads of state were outraged by Zelensky’s reception at the Oval Office. As compiled by ZeroHedge:

• Spanish PM Sanchez says “Ukraine, Spain stands with you.”
• French Foreign Minister Barrot says Putin’s Russia is the aggressor, there is one necessity: Europe, now the time for words is over, time for action.
• German Chancellor Scholz says Ukraine can rely on Germany and Europe.
• EU’s von der Leyen says “be strong, be brave, be fearless, you are never alone, Dear President Zelensky”
• Lithuanian President says Ukraine will never be alone.
• Portuguese PM says Ukraine can count on us to support it
• Czech Republic President says “We stand with Ukraine more than ever. Time for Europe to step up its efforts.”
• EU foreign policy chief Kallas says “Today, it became clear that the free world needs a new leader. It’s up to US, Europeans, to take this challenge.”
• Polish PM Tusk posts on X, “Dear Zelensky, dear Ukrainian friends, you are not alone”.
• French President Macron says Russia is the aggressor, and Ukraine is the aggressed people. We were all right to help Ukraine and sanction Russia 3 years ago, and to continue to do so.

Reading these statements reminded me of how Europe lost its head for Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1803, Beethoven dedicated his Third “Eroica” Symphony to Napoleon (though the composer changed his mind the following year when Napoleon had himself crowned Emperor).

After seeing Napoleon enter the German city of Jena at the head of French troops, Hegel wrote to a friend:

I saw the Emperor—this soul of the world—go out from the city to survey his reign; it is a truly wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrating on one point while seated on a horse, stretches over the world and dominates it.

In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the character Pierre Bezukhov believes that Napoleon is “a giant” who will liberate and improve all of Europe, including Russia.

What could account for Europe’s love affair with the Corsican of Italian ancestry who began his career as a junior artillery officer in the French Royal Army?

Undoubtedly Napoleon was a skilled military commander who was very good at killing tens of thousands of young men, but why did intellectuals and artists all over the Continent lose their heads for him?

The same question might be asked of Zelensky. I suspect that many of his fans have no idea how he rose to prominence in European affairs. Few probably know that Zelensky was the protege of the Ukrainian billionaire oligarch, Ihor Kolomoyskyi.

As Wikipedia describes his rise to power:

In 2019 Kolomoyskyi owned 70% of the 1+1 Media Group whose TV channel 1+1 aired Servant of the People, a comedy series in which Volodymyr Zelenskyy plays a school teacher who, defying all expectations (including his own), becomes president of Ukraine on an anti-corruption platform. In March 2018, members of Zelenskyy’s production company Kvartal 95 registered a new political party called “Servant of the People.” Twelve months later, they succeeded in getting their candidate past Yulia Tymoshenko in the first round of the presidential election, and on 21 April 2019 to defeat President Poroshenko in the second round with 73 per cent of the vote.

In an unexpected twist to this story, both the United States and Ukrainian governments turned on Kolomoyskyi in 2020, indicting him for multiple crimes in both countries. As with all things and people in Ukrainian politics—which has long been dominated by rival oligarchs worth billions in a country whose annual household median income is about $1000 U.S.—the reality of Kolomoyskyi’s affairs would probably be extremely difficult to elucidate. That fact that the Biden and Zelensky regimes turned on him doesn’t necessary mean he is guilty as charged. More likely, he’s no better and no worse than the rest of Ukraine’s shady oligarchs, including Victor Pinchuk, who was the single largest donor to the Clinton Foundation.

I mention Zelensky’s career because it reminds me of the movie the The Wizard of Oz and The Matrix about the difficulty of distinguishing reality from an elaborate and convincing simulacrum.

For now, it seems that Zelensky continues to hold great sway of the minds of Europe’s heads of state, just as Napoleon did in 1803, when Beethoven dedicated his beautiful Third Symphony to the Corsican artillery commander.

POSTSCRIPT: Several of my dear readers have suggested in the comments that I compared Zelensky to Napoleon. I did not. I compared Europe’s adulation for Zelensky today to its adulation for Napoleon during the first decade of the 19th century.

Here’s is Herbert von Karajan conducting a performance of it by the Berlin Philharmonic.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

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‘Germans are either at your throat or at your feet,’ quipped old war lover Winston Churchill.

Today, Germans are at our feet – an astounding 80 years after the end of World War II.  Though mostly reunited, Germany remains an occupied nation reduced to second class status and afflicted with war guilt.  Japan – also occupied – remains in a similar status.

The recent German federal elections brought the moderate, polite Christian Democratic Union to power, ousting the feeble, namby pamby Socialists whose primary goal was not to offend anyone.  Many younger Germans, fed up with Germany’s subservient behavior, voted for the new AfD, a moderately conservative party.  But AfD was blocked from the coalition leadership after a chorus of howls from the press and rivals that it was a neo-Nazi party.  AfD’s leader is a big-boned woman whom German media claims is a lesbian who lives with a south Asian younger lady.  Hardly a reincarnation of the Third Reich.

The liberal German and US media kept running reports on Auschwitz and other wartime atrocities.  No one took time to mention the Soviet concentration camps or the 27 million killed by Stalin in the USSR.  No one mentions that ‘Nazi’ stands for ‘National Socialist.’  The feeble US-dominated German press never mentions that World War II was begun by France and Germany, or how many times Chancellor Hitler tried to make peace with London and Paris.  Or how much German territory was detached in 1945-1948. 

The most significant point is that Germany remains under US military occupation.  This happened as result of what we believe was the Soviet threat in 1945 and after.  General George S. Patton understood this well and said that the US should have attacked the Soviet Union, instead of Germany.  He was killed soon after in a mysterious vehicle crash.  Pavel Sudoplatov, a former KGB general, claimed in his very interesting book, ‘Special Tasks,’ that the Roosevelt administration had many high-level Soviet agents.

Today, of the 84,000 US troops in Europe, 39,000 are permanently based in Germany, 10,000 in Britain, 14,000 in Poland and 13,000 in sunny Italy, more in Turkey and the Baltic states.  Many are air force personnel maintaining America’s control of the skies over Europe.

Of course, one must ask why 80 years after the end of WWII the US still maintains such large forces in Europe – not to mention Japan.  The US says it is defending against a possible Russian invasion.  But three years of war have shown that Russia is no longer the military juggernaut it was in the post-war years when its military forces numbered in the millions.

Russia’s Vlad Putin is a convenient bogeyman.  Claims he intends to invade Western Europe are nonsense. He might try to reclaim the Baltic states.  US claim’s that Putin wants to annex parts of the world are pretty rich considering the US invasions of Panama, Grenada, the Dominican Republic, Iraq, Somalia and, most lately, Trump’s territorial claims on Canada and Greenland.

The point is – how can a nation that has been occupied by a foreign army since 1945 be truly independent?  When it was revealed the US National Security Agency was tapping the cellphone of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, all the red-faced Germans dared do was huff and puff a little.

Germans should resume acting like a strong and proud people instead of beaten dogs.  Germany is the locomotive of Europe.  For Europe to reassume its key world role, Germany must lead the way instead of awaiting email instructions from Washington.

And it’s high time to forget about WWII.

The post Liberate Germany! appeared first on LewRockwell.

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Writes Ginny Garner:

Lew,

Did Covid-19 ever exist? There is no evidence the SARS-COV-2 virus particle was ever isolated and purified according to responses from 225 governments, health agencies and the CDC. This information came as a result of FOIA requests. 

See here.

The post Did Covid-19 Ever Exist? 225 Health Agencies, Governments and the CDC Say No appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Ginny Garner:

Lew,

If anyone had any doubt, Steve Bannon remains a Christian Zionist. It will be interesting to see if he supports US fighting a war with Israel against Iran.

The post Steve Bannon Speech: Still a Christian Zionist appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post There They Go Again…House Republicans Break The Bank With Budget Bill appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Watson Institute

The post United States Spending on Israel’s Military Operations and Related U.S. Operations in the Region, October 7, 2023-September 30, 2024 appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

OpenSecrets

The post Pro-Israel Summary appeared first on LewRockwell.

Today marks the 32nd year anniversary of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which was carried out by followers of The Blind Skeikh.  The convicted bomb-maker, Ramzi Yousef, entered the United States in 1992 with alleged Mossad mole Ahmed Ajaj, who was arrested at JFK Airport.   Ajaj was carrying multiple passports, videos of suicide bombings, documents on fabricating fake IDs, and plans for constructing bombs.  From prison, Ajaj played a major role in facilitating the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing.

Robert I Friedman reported in The Village Voice that Ajaj was a possible Mossad mole according to Israeli intelligence sources.  Ajaj was identified by the FBI as a senior intifada activist and according to federal sources and the Israeli police, Israel expelled Ajaj in 1991 to Jordan for conspiring to smuggle weapons to Palestinian militant groups.  However, according to an Israeli newspaper, Ajaj was never involved in intifada activities or with militant groups.  Instead, Ajaj was a small-time criminal who was arrested in 1988 for counterfeiting U.S. dollars and was convicted and sentenced to prison.   During his prison stay, the Mossad apparently recruited him per Israeli intelligence sources.  Friedman wrote, “By the time he was released after having served just one year, he had seemingly undergone a radical transformation. The common crook had become a devout Muslim and hard-line nationalist. Soon after, he was arrested for smuggling weapons into the West Bank, allegedly for El Fatah.”

According to Friedman, Israeli intelligence sources asserted that the arrest for weapons smuggling, and Ajaj’s torture and deportation, “were staged by Mossad to establish his credentials as an intifada activist.” Also, the Mossad allegedly “tasked” Ajaj to infiltrate militant Palestinian groups operating outside Israel and to report back to Israel and that it is common for the Mossad to recruit common criminals.

Friedman wrote, “If Ajaj was recruited by Mossad, it is not known whether he continued to work for the Israeli spy agency after he was deported. One possibility, of course, is that upon leaving Israel and meeting radical Muslims close to the blind Egyptian sheikh, his loyalties shifted.  Another scenario is that he had advance knowledge of the World Trade Center bombing, which he shared with Mossad, and that Mossad, for whatever reason, kept the secret to itself.  If true, U.S. intelligence sources speculate that Mossad might have decided to keep the information closely guarded so as not to compromise its undercover agent.”

The post Alleged Mossad Mole and the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

Weston A. Price Foundation

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