Lew Rockwell Institute

The older I get, the more suspiciously I look at the causes of war.  This is natural.  Young people — especially young men — are incapable of properly evaluating risk.  Though they are rebellious, they also follow orders from authority figures.  There is a reason why eighteen-year-olds are sent over embankments to cross open fields on the frontlines: They can be convinced to pursue success and ignore mortality.  Courageous young men look right past danger.  Only years later do they ask themselves, “Why the hell did I do that?”

There is no question that we are being psychologically prepped for a great and terrible war.  Whether you are a civilian, veteran, or active service member, you surely have heard over the last ten years at least one commanding officer describe publicly the likelihood of a U.S.-China war or wider WWIII in the near future.

European politicians have been instructing their citizens to prepare for a full-on military conflict with Russian forces since the current war in Ukraine began.  Such civilian war preparations have not been limited to the Baltic states, Finland, or Poland.  France and the United Kingdom have spent the last several years conditioning citizens to expect bloodshed with the Russian Federation.

During the half-century Cold War, violence operated mainly in the shadows and through “proxies” so that the United States and the Soviet Union could at least pretend they were not directly fighting one another.  Such was the shared fear of nuclear weapons — and of mutually assured destruction — that even bitter enemies did what they could to limit runaway escalation.  The Moscow-Washington hotline — or what Hollywood mythologized as the doom-averting “red phone” — was established because both sides understood the stakes of WWIII.

Cold War warriors generally took to heart a quote attributed to Albert Einstein: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”  With this warning lingering in the minds of men who could unleash global annihilation with the pressing of a few buttons, humanity has somehow avoided destroying itself in the eighty years since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In my estimation, the mood has radically changed over the last fifteen years.  A more cavalier attitude toward the use of nuclear weapons has replaced decades-long angst and circumspection.  Senators, generals, and even diplomats publicly make the case for the use of terrible weapons that could easily lead to mass slaughter on a scale never before witnessed.  Gone are the days of worrying about the end of life as we know it.  In their place, a new generation of military and political leaders seem to be not so quietly echoing a spine-chilling refrain: How will nuclear weapons deter our enemies if we are habitually afraid to use them?

Five years after mass hysteria concerning COVID convinced much of the world to shut down for no good reason, more people are familiar with the concept of “mass formation psychosis.”  Simply stated, this phenomenon exists when large numbers of people believe in something detached from reality.  I put COVID in the same category as man-made “climate change.”  I believe that a large percentage of the global population has been manipulated to believe that both are much more dangerous than they really are.

For hundreds of years, academic studies have shown how political leaders exploit the “madness of crowds” to their advantage.  In the early twentieth century, “propaganda” even had a positive connotation, as the “elites” of the day argued that “educated” people have a moral duty to corral the masses.  In Public Opinion, writer Walter Lippmann argues explicitly that “experts” should use a combination of propaganda and censorship to “manufacture” the consent of the “bewildered herd.”  If the “educated” class finds it useful to scare the dickens out of humanity with regard to coronaviruses and carbon dioxide, it will do so.

With this in mind, it is entirely possible that I am serving as a useful idiot when it comes to worries over WWIII.  Perhaps I am doing exactly what Lippmann’s disciples wish me to do by professing my genuine concerns regarding the devastating global conflict heading our way.  It still feels like yesterday, however, when I was reading of the likelihood of Islamic terror attacks on U.S. soil years before the murder of 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001.  Now I read and hear similar predictions for a great war ahead, and I cannot help but be filled with terrible dread.

As with all matters involving mass communication and public opinion, the whole thing devolves into a “chicken or the egg” quandary rather fast.  Am I writing about WWIII because so many signs indicate that it will arrive within the decade?  Or am I inadvertently pushing what I wish to avoid by helping to convince society that it is imminent?  Putting the dilemma of causality aside, I will say that I learned long ago that the war machine first prepares the public for conflict in the information space before officially firing weapons on the battlefield.

As distasteful as it sounds, the military considers civilian minds part of the overall battlespace during war.  Before every conflict begins, the social consciousness is shaped to accept, expect, and engage in battle.  It feels as if we are being directed toward global war today.

Such an assertion might appear strange coming in the same week that President Trump is brokering peace in the Middle East.  Even casual students of war would expect that region of the world to be fully enflamed during any true global conflict.  Yet there are over fifty other conflicts raging around the world today, and over ninety countries are involved in battles beyond their territorial borders.  Although some Western societies can be hypnotized into believing that the world is enjoying relative peace, war is spreading faster today than it has since WWII.  Even with so much bloodshed, though, we have seen nothing that approaches the level of violence that will unfold should the Russia-Ukraine war transform into a U.S.-Russia war or simmering tensions between China and Taiwan transform into a direct showdown between the U.S. and China.

For the last decade, military academics have been predicting a global war by 2030.  Suspiciously, that is the date that the World Economic Forum, United Nations, and other globalist institutions have been highlighting as a universal “pivot” for humanity.  Artificial intelligence is evolving quickly.  Plans for mandatory digital identifications are taking hold across Europe.  Central banks are designing government-controlled digital currencies.  The European Union wants access to all private communications.  As president, Joe Biden constructed a “disinformation board” to filter public information and censor dissent.  The walls of a grand surveillance prison are being built all around us, while the same powers that be are preparing the public for economic hardship and prolonged war.

We may not like it.  We may not want it.  But it appears our “betters” expect us to take it in stride.

There is another option.  It is at least possible that billions of humans on this planet learn to push back.  Rather than permitting a handful of “elites” to dictate “public opinion,” the public might discover that it has some control over its opinions, too.  If enough people refuse to engage in senseless slaughter, perhaps the globalists who wish to lead us to war will discover that no-one is much interested in following.  Nothing so perfectly epitomizes the “madness of crowds,” after all, than millions of young people rushing carelessly into the madness of war.

For the sake of those who will otherwise lose their lives in the coming fights, I pray that wiser stewards of peace chart the course ahead.

This article was originally published on American Thinker.

The post Wars and Rumors of Wars appeared first on LewRockwell.

It’s actually never legitimate to withhold aid from starving civilians. It was never legitimate at any time.

That’s one of the annoying things about having to discuss Israel’s ridiculous claim that Hamas is hoarding hostage corpses in order to achieve some kind of goal, and therefore justifies reducing aid into Gaza as punishment: the conversation skates right over the fact that it has never been legitimate for Israel to withhold humanitarian aid into Gaza. Debating whether Israel is right or wrong to withhold aid under these specific circumstances tacitly assumes that it could ever be right to withhold aid under any circumstances.

Listening to Israel’s justifications for why it needs to inflict monstrous abuses upon the Palestinians has the effect of assuming that there are circumstances under which those monstrous abuses could be acceptable. And there just aren’t.

It has never been legitimate to intentionally deprive civilians of humanitarian aid that they need to survive. You have to give them aid.

It has never been legitimate to shoot noncombatants because you decided they crossed some sort of line into a forbidden zone. It has never been legitimate to shoot noncombatants at all.

It has never been legitimate to commit genocide. Israel just needs to stop the genocide.

The onus for stopping a genocide is on the party committing the genocide. The onus is not on the victims of the genocide to end it by meeting certain conditions. This should not even need to be said.

It’s so obnoxious how everyone’s getting sucked into these debates about whether or not Israel might need to resume the genocide because Hamas refused to disarm or they didn’t get their hostage corpses back or this or that ceasefire demand wasn’t met or blah blah whatever. Israel has never needed to commit genocide. It needs to stop committing genocide.

The world shouldn’t be bending over backwards to ensure that the state which is committing genocide is happy with the terms by which the genocide is ended. The world should be aggressively punishing the state that is committing genocide until it stops. That would be true peace. What we are seeing now is just a bad joke.

And of course this true peace is not emerging because the powerful western states who’ve been backing the genocide this whole time are perfectly fine with it. Their weapons industries get to profit from the genocide. Their empire managers get to enjoy the domination of a critical geostrategic region. They sleep like babies at night, because they do not view the victims of the genocide as human beings.

So we find ourselves doing this ridiculous dance where we go “Okay well maybe the genocide could stop if the victims of the genocide agree to terms X, Y and Z and don’t make too much of a fuss about being killed in smaller numbers every day.”

This is madness. It’s the craziest thing you could possibly imagine. We live in a dystopian madhouse.

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The post The Onus Is on Israel and Its Allies To End the Genocide, Not Their Victims appeared first on LewRockwell.

Because the U.S. government is apparently addicted to war, I often ponder a profound and eloquent reflection written by James Madison, author of the U.S. Constitution.

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

—James Madison, Political Observations, Apr. 20, 1795 in: Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, vol. 4, p. 491 (1865)

Partisanship in the United States is at least as old as the rivalry between Hamilton and Burr that resulted in Hamilton’s death in 1804. Partisan rivalry reached a fevered and ugly pitch in 1856, when Preston Brooks, Representative of South Carolina, beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner almost to death with a cane on the floor of the Senate.

However, since 2001, a war mentality has placed us in a state of hyper-vigilance and readiness to be angry and aggressive. This has engendered a steady “degeneracy of manners and morals” in the United States.

We see it whenever we watch news shows in which people who are supposed to be educated and civilized adults scream at the top of their lungs at other and use the most intemperate and ugly language in the entire English lexicon.

We see it in the frequent acts of violence perpetrated on streets, in subways, and even in schools.

We see it in the general lack of modesty and restraint in the way people carry themselves and speak in public.

We see it in U.S. Congressmen signing bombs to be shipped to Ukraine and used on young Russian soldiers who will be missed by their parents, wives, and friends when they are blown to smithereens by American munitions.

We see it in U.S. Representative Dan Crenshaw telling a British reporter, “If I ever meet him [Tucker Carlson] I’ll fuckin’ kill him,” adding “No seriously, I would kill him.”

Such “degeneracy of manners and of morals” is often blamed on the waning influence of Christianity in American public life, but I suspect that this is only one contributing factor.

The war mentality that germinated in 2001 fell on very fertile ground in the United States due to cultural and societal influences that had already been in play since the 1960s.

Nowadays when we hear the expression “good breeding,” we think of it as quaint, outmoded, effete, and even pretentious. Through a steady diet of popular culture and especially Hollywood films, we have been conditioned to believe that “authentic self-expression” is the admirable trait.

A man of “authentic emotions” is one who expresses his indignation, his anger, and even his rage. The classical Greek and Christian virtues of prudence and temperance have been supplanted by the vulgar notion that it is virtuous to give free rein to one’s emotions, no matter how intemperate they are.

In my lifetime, the cultural milestone that expressed the triumph of authentic degeneracy was the 1994 cinema release of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Because the film was so stylish, with such sparkling dialogue, it enabled us to take gleeful delight in murder, torture, debasement, drug overdose, and sodomy-rape. We laughed out loud when one of the characters (played by John Travolta) accidentally blows the head off of a young black boy in a car, splattering his brains all over the interior.

I wrote a negative review of the film in the British Salisbury Review, and all of my friends thought I was a hopeless square for doing so. Maybe I was. However, as callow and awkward as I was, I believe that my perception was correct. In the undeniably brilliant work of cinema, I perceived the beginning of the end of American manners and morals. Thirty-one years later, I see little evidence that my perception was wrong.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

The post ‘The Degeneracy of Manners and Morals’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Putin initiated the Russian policy of not acknowledging acts of war when he defined the attack on Russia’s strategic bomber force as an “act of terrorism” in order to evade his responsibility to respond.

Anticipating Washington’s delivery of nuclear-capable Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, the Kremlin has defined their use against Russia as “terrorist attacks aimed at escalating the conflict.”  In other words, Putin has cancelled his warning that the use of Tomahawks against Russia means the supplier of the missiles and targeting information are cobelligerents subject to Russian military response. 

If non-enforcement of all of Russia’s “red lines” has not already convinced Washington that there would be no Russian response to the deployment of Tomahawks, the statement yesterday by the Russian Foreign Ministry will remove any hesitation in Washington by the the Foreign Ministry’s cancellation of the cobelligerent threat.  

As was completely obvious from the beginning, by attempting to limit the conflict and to make it seem non-threatening to the West, Putin’s never-ending war has greatly widened it, turning it into the war with the West that Putin did not want.  

Having permitted Washington to overthrow the Russian-friendly Ukrainian government in 2014, having clung to his delusion of the Minsk Agreement for 8 years while the West built and equipped a large Ukrainian army prepared to attack the Donbas breakaway republics, having been cold-shouldered in response to his plea for a mutual security agreement, Putin in February 2022 had waited far too long and had no alternative to intervening in Ukraine.  Unfortunately, Putin lacked the strategic judgment to quickly defeat Ukraine before the West could become a cobelligrent.  Now the war is on the verge of spiraling out of control with Trump talking about Ukraine going on the offensive.

There seems in Russia to be no understanding of the situation and of their enemy.  Consequently, war is inevitable.

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Political violence and political revenge have been around as long as…politics have. I grew up with it in Greece. As a 5-year-old, looking down across the street of a chic Athenian neighborhood, I remember seeing a chauffeur-driven car’s open door and a bald man bending down in order to enter it, then hearing one, two, three, and four shots, with dark red round holes forming on his scalp. The screams that followed were from his daughter watching his departure from a balcony above. The name of the victim was Kalyvas, and he was undersecretary of some Greek ministry during the German occupation. In other words, Kalyvas was deemed a collaborator, according to the Stalin-led Communists in Greece. Others felt differently, that unless responsible and patriotic Greeks accepted government posts, the Germans would be ruling outright with far worse results.

I was to see far worse during the civil war that followed liberation. The royal gardens next to where we lived and where I daily played were suddenly covered with stinking, rotting corpses. Both sides were taking revenge, and it wasn’t pretty. The good guys won, with a little help from the Americans, thank God. It took more than eighty years for old wounds to heal, and they only healed because people died and old hatreds died with them and new generations were not brought up to hate like those during the war years.

“Once in power, be magnanimous.”

Here in America, old hatreds between North and South have also died away. Some were still around when I attended The University, as the University of Virginia, founded by the great Thomas Jefferson, was and is referred to by some diehards like myself. Back then, boys from the South made fun of Yankees, but there was no hatred involved, none whatsoever. I was, of course, on the side of the Confederacy. Imagine what those nice folks of the left would invent about me if they knew it, especially if my name were Trump.

In the wake of James Comey’s indictment, Democrats and the so-called neutral media are issuing dark warnings about the end of democracy and so on. These lefties and their sidekicks were around on Joe Biden’s watch but failed to notice that Trump, an ex-president, faced four separate indictments with 88 criminal charges. Trump adviser Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro were jailed for contempt, and my buddy Roger Stone—a sharp London tailored womanizer—was arrested at dawn in an over-the-top SWAT raid. Worst of all was the case of Gen. Michael Flynn. A decent and patriotic Afghan veteran, General Flynn was charged with making false statements to the FBI. Comey had two FBI agents visit Flynn days after Trump took office the first time. Flynn was up for national security adviser, and he would have been a good one, but Comey nailed him on calls Flynn had made to Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Flynn had done nothing wrong but prepare to serve his country. Comey made the calls out to be illegal, which they were not. Flynn lost his house, his savings, and his reputation fighting the charges until Trump pardoned him. Comey should have been sent to jail for what he did to Flynn. Instead he bragged about it.

My friend Roger Stone had a similar experience over fake Russian collusion allegations. In a predawn darkness setting, heavily armed FBI SWAT teams descended on Roger’s house and arrested him. He and his wife were marched outside in their pajamas, something Comey should have been subjected to but was not, unfortunately.

And let’s not forget the brave charge of the light brigade of FBI agents on Mar-a-Lago, when they rifled through Melania’s underwear. This was worthy of Thermopylae, or something similar. Now it’s Biden’s turn, but he is not around for us to enjoy it. His awful son is making the usual noises, but my unsolicited advice for him is to go back to taking drugs; he’ll make less of a fool of himself than by playing the victim.

Needless to say, anti-Trump pundits—aren’t they all?—are screaming bloody murder. One named David French in the Times calls it a vindictive campaign by Trump to get revenge on his political enemies, “no matter the facts or the law.” For some strange reason I don’t remember him saying anything when a good soldier was indicted on made-up charges by the Comey gang. The Russian hoax ruined the first Trump presidency. It was a first for American politics.

I remember how Richard Nixon refused to question the Kennedy victory in 1960 despite real allegations of cheating in Illinois and West Virginia that gave JFK the victory. It simply was not done, and Nixon was first and foremost a patriot. Al Gore did not question the George W. victory after a dead heat. It would have hurt the country’s standing in the world. Not even Hillary dared to challenge and dispute the results, despite winning the popular vote in 2016. Only Biden’s brood and fellow leftists decided to punish Trump for winning in 2016. Now they’re squealing like pregnant penguins, but I for one hope Trump sticks it to them. If I sound vengeful, I am not. But I truly believe it might teach the left a lesson. Once in power, be magnanimous. Do not do a Biden, because things can change and come back to bite you. Revenge is a two-headed monster, and we never know which way it might go.

This article was originally published on Taki’s Magazine.

The post The Two-Headed Monster appeared first on LewRockwell.

Western authorities continue to spread anti-Russian rumors to justify their illegitimate war plans. Now, German intelligence claims that a Russian attack on Europe could happen at any moment, thus spreading panic among the local population to support the narrative that it is “necessary” to prepare the country and the EU for a direct armed conflict with Moscow. As a result, tensions on the European continent are likely to escalate even further, with no prospect of diplomatic dialogue between Russia and the EU.

German intelligence chief Martin Jager recently stated that the EU is in serious danger of war with Russia. He described the current situation of relations between Moscow and the EU as an “icy peace” that could become a “heated confrontation” in the near future. He warned European authorities to prepare as soon as possible for a direct war scenario, making it clear that he believes a Russian attack on one or more European countries is possible in the coming years.

According to Jager, Moscow seeks to destabilize “European democracies,” thus attempting to cause political and economic damage to the EU and NATO. He criticizes the fact that many European parliamentarians fail to recognize the supposed seriousness of the current crisis with Russia, urging the bloc’s politicians to act quickly to prepare for war. With this, he suggests that recent militarization efforts in several European countries, including Germany, such as conscription policies and increased defense spending, are insufficient in the face of the supposed “Russian threat.”

Germany’s top spy also stated that a Russian invasion of Europe could occur by 2029. He does not consider this period sufficient for Europe to prepare for a direct conflict scenario if defense investment levels remain at the status quo. Therefore, Jager desperately calls for awareness among all European authorities regarding the danger allegedly posed by Moscow.

“We must not sit back and assume that a possible Russian attack will not come until 2029 at the earliest (…) At best, there is an icy peace in Europe, which could turn into heated confrontation at any moment (…) To achieve this goal, Russia will not shy away from direct military confrontation with NATO, if necessary,” he said.

Jager’s words came at a particularly tense time in Europe. Although he suggests that European politicians are not doing enough to prepare for war, the EU has initiated several militarization efforts—always justifying them with the narrative of an “imminent Russian threat.”

It’s important to remember that in July, NATO member state leaders met in The Hague and decided to increase defense spending to 5% of GDP by 2035. In parallel, Europe has launched several defense programs, including ReArm Europe, which has already allocated approximately 800 billion euros (equivalent to 930 billion dollars) to a joint investment fund for militarization policies.

Apparently, even these numbers don’t seem sufficient for Jager and some other European “hawks”. There’s an atmosphere of paranoia among key EU figures, with an unjustifiable fear that war will break out on the continent soon. Indeed, the possibility of a conflict is real—but this is due not to a Russian threat or a Kremlin expansion plan, but to the political irresponsibility of European leaders themselves.

It is the EU that is creating the risk of armed conflict on the European continent. By initiating a wave of massive militarization, based on the unjustified lie that Russia wants to invade other countries, the European bloc is simply escalating tensions, undermining the possibilities for dialogue, and generating threats for Moscow—which is naturally obliged to respond by expanding its defense policies as well. The responsibility for the worsening European situation and for creating future war risks lies with the EU, which is acting increasingly irrationally and anti-strategically, motivated solely by Russophobic paranoia.

As Russian officials have repeatedly stated, there is no plan for Russian expansion in Europe. The special military operation in Ukraine itself was not initially intended to incorporate territories into the Russian Federation, with the reintegration of the New Regions being a consequence of both Ukrainian and Western intransigence and popular determination in the liberated areas. There are no parallels between the situation in Ukraine and that in EU countries, which is why the narrative of an “imminent war” is merely politically motivated hysteria.

Unfortunately, however, this hysteria could lead to real conflict if the Europeans continue to escalate their militarization measures and threaten Russia in the future. The best course of action is to halt their irresponsible pro-war policies and quickly resume diplomatic dialogue.

This article was originally published on Infobrics.org.

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If you believe what is written on those hats worn in the Israeli Knesset – “Trump the Peace President” – you are deluded beyond hope. Halloween may be coming, but you don’t need a frightening mask to realize the horrors that confront us. Trump is the culmination of a long developing horror story. Unlike his predecessors who prepared the way for him and who generally wore traditionally allaying masks to hide their evil actions, he is the greatest blatant fraud to ever occupy the White House. He is a war monger, a genocidal killer, and an enemy of people home and abroad so obvious, so capricious, so erratic – a man of endless threats – that no one should be surprised to wake up one morning to news that might seem “shocking.” Everyone should expect surprises, not treats but tricks.

Trump is like an advertisement that tells you its characters are not ordinary people but actors and their spiel isn’t true – only to tell you to buy the product they are pitching. Every pitch Trump throws is a curve ball.

The only way his schtick can be explained is that he is the culmination of a decades’ long development in American culture where acting is presented as so fake that the audience thinks it’s real because of its fakery. He is a dangerous joke, and all the more dangerous because he fits so comfortably into the larger cultural development that Neil Postman in 1985 aptly termed Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business and Neal Gabler later called Life:The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality.

He is the culmination of the latent stream of despotism that has flowed through American history, especially during the last twenty-five years, but which many see as only a battle between political parties, the so-called good and bad. They fail to see that fascism is like a castle that takes years to build from the foundation up, and it necessitates the slow acceptance by all shades of political opinion of the gradual loss of fundamental freedoms, the acceptance of a corporate warfare state, and a secret government lodged in “intelligence” agencies such as the CIA, the NSA, and the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), working hand-in-glove with the major media and Silicon Valley corporations in their partnerships to propagandize and spy on the public.

Someone like Trump is not hatched overnight. His progenitors are all those bipartisan sycophants who have accepted the official explanation of 9/11 and the immediate institution of the Patriot Act (prepared during the Clinton administration), the national state of emergency declared by George W. Bush on September 14, 2001 and renewed annually since, the wars against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Russia, Iran, the Palestinians, etc. (wars launched and supported by Republicans and Democrats), the bailout of the Big Banks and financial institutions in 2009, the 2014 U.S. coup against the Ukrainian government, the so-called war against terror, the Russiagate fraud, the extrajudicial murders by U.S. presidents, the endless propaganda, the growth of Public/private “partnerships” that have privatized government services, the COVID lies, the new Cold War, and the enormous influence of Israel within the U.S. government, etc. The list is extensive. Trump the chickenshit despot did not hatch overnight; he is the chicken come home to roost.

“But what happens,” writes Gary Wills in Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home, “if when we look into our historical rear view mirror, all we can see is a movie?”

Fascism is often accompanied by a dreamy complacency and Hollywood effects, such as with Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 Nazi propaganda film, commissioned by Adolf Hitler. Today screen culture dominates people’s thinking night and day, and images and digital videos accompany their day and night dreams. As a reality-TV actor, Trump is the perfect embodiment of this screen culture. Everyone is now waiting for something to culminate in their celluloid illusions, some denouement in a horror picture show, as in Poe’s The House of Usher.

The German playwright Bertolt Brecht said: “To understand fascism you have to understand capitalism from whence it springs.” Capitalism’s spring is its need to create inequality between the haves and the have nots. Once that becomes threatened, capitalism metamorphosizes into outright totalitarianism.

It was in 1985, the year of “amusing ourselves to death,” that Donald Trump, a fake-estate developer, acquired the Atlantic City Hilton Hotel and renamed it Trump’s Castle, a sign of his obsessive megalomania. Trump’s homage to himself went into bankruptcy seven years later, forecasting the future fate of the USA. It was the first year of the second term of Ronald Reagan, a former actor who was called the acting President by his critics. But Reagan himself was proud of his acting; he thought it served him well in the White House, as Gary Wills writes in Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home.

Trump makes Reagan look genuine as hell. Everything about Trump is kitsch, fake in every way, a copy of a copy of a copy in a culture of the copy. But that is his appeal to those who can’t distinguish between illusion and reality. Is it the ridiculous reality-TV guy firing people left and right or really the President of the United States?  It is most apt they he has returned to the presidency as Artificial Intelligence has come to prominence.

At 5:16 P.M. on November 9, 1965 in New York City, I stepped out of an IRT # 4 Subway car on the elevated outdoor station at 161St overlooking Yankee Stadium and all the lights went out throughout the northeastern United States. Such things happen when we least expect it. One rat can spend years building a house of cards to his own glorification, but another rat can turn the lights out and bring it down in one night, as Kris Kristofferson sings in Darby’s Castle.

One can be certain that behind the walls of America’s Potemkin Village, the ruling rats are fighting among themselves for dominance, and the public – whether they dwell in the doll’s house of illusion, still thinking things are good under Trump, or fear much worse to come – will one day awaken to a great surprise. “But it only took one night to bring it down /  When Darby’s castle tumbled to the ground.”

Whether that surprise will just be Darby’s personal Castle falling, or the U.S. and world economy, or our semblance of democracy, or the entire world under falling nuclear missiles, no one can say. But like a jack-in-the box that has never been opened, when that handle is turned by sinister forces in the darkness of night, we will wake up to a great shock. For the masks have come off.

Oh, it took three hundred days
For the timbers to be raised
And the silhouette was seen for miles around
And the gables reached as high
As the eagles in the sky
But it only took one night to bring it down
When Darby’s castle tumbled to the ground

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

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Let’s take a look at Miles Taylor’s recent screed  – masquerading as principled commentary –accusing President Donald Trump of a “blatantly unconstitutional” act by pressuring the Department of Justice to prosecute James Comey (“With the Comey indictment, Trump commits an impeachable offense; The criminal conduct is worse than his previous impeachments”). It is nothing short of intellectual malpractice.

Taylor, a self-styled whistleblower and CNN darling, peddles the tired trope that such executive direction of the attorney general violates some sacred “independence” of the Justice Department, warranting impeachment. This is hogwash, a fever dream of progressive jurisprudence (aka, judicial gibberish). It ignores the Constitution’s plain text and structure. As an unreconstructed originalist – a refugee from battling too many postmodern, language-mangled judicial interpretations – I see Taylor’s claim not just as misguided, but also as symptomatic of a deeper rot: the pernicious myth of judicial supremacy, birthed illegitimately by John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison (1803).

Taylor’s error provides the perfect excuse to expound my theory that the Constitution was deliberately crafted without a “stopping rule” – no final arbiter, no supreme interpreter – to ensure perpetual contestation among branches, fostering equilibrium through raw power politics, not robed fiat. Let’s dismantle Taylor’s folly step by step.

He asserts Trump’s pressure on the DOJ to indict Comey – an action rooted in the President’s Article II authority as chief executive to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” – is an “extraordinary abuse of power.” Nonsense. The Constitution vests “the executive Power” solely in the President (Art. II, §1), empowering him to direct subordinates, including the attorney general, in enforcing laws. There’s no textual whisper of DOJ “independence;” that’s a post-Watergate fairy tale, not Framers’ intent.

If Trump believes Comey’s actions violated false-statement laws codified at 18 U.S.C. §1001(a)(2) and 18 U.S.C. § 1505, ordering prosecution is his duty, not a crime. Taylor’s impeachment-call reeks of partisan hysteria, conflating his dislike for Trump with violation of constitutional principles. But his real sin is assuming some external authority – implicitly the courts – gets to declare this presidential act “unconstitutional,” as if the judiciary holds the trump card. This betrays a profound misunderstanding: The Constitution has no stopping rule, no primus inter pares among branches.

Disputes among the branches weren’t to be resolved by judicial decree; they were to be battled out among the three branches until balance emerges. The Framers, scarred by monarchic tyranny and colonial overreach, designed a system of separated powers with intentional ambiguity on interpretation. Each branch – executive, legislative, judicial – interprets the Constitution independently in exercising its powers and duties. The President enforces laws as he reads them; Congress legislates within its viewed limits; courts resolve disputes under existing statutes and derivative regulations.

Disagreements? Conflict? Built right into the design of the Constitution, not an internal deficiency of the Constitution to be rectified by the courts. No “final-say” clause exists.

Instead, branches were meant to check each other: Congress impeaches or withholds funds; the President vetoes or refuses enforcement; courts… well, courts opine and rule in specific cases, perhaps enforcing its own interpretation of the laws and regulations at issue; but their words aren’t gospel for everyone else beyond the parties to the case. This back-and-forth is the genius: a dynamic equilibrium, akin to a market equilibrium, where preferences clash until supply meets demand. No branch gets its “most-preferred” outcome absolutely; each settles for the best feasible given others’ pushes and shoves. If deadlock persists, voters intervene via elections, the ultimate check in a republic.

Taylor’s worldview, steeped in modern judicial worship, flips this on its head. He implies courts (or perhaps “norms”) may halt the process, pronouncing Trump’s actions null and void and if he refuses to capitulate, impeachable. But whence this power? Enter Marshall’s cheeky overreach in Marbury, itself a masterpiece of ambiguity and vagueness, on which Taylor hangs his hat. Marshall declared it’s “emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” Historically, this phrase has been cherry-picked from Marshall’s dicta and twisted into a license for judicial review – striking down laws as “unconstitutional.”

Read strictly, courts must in fact “say what the law is” but only within the specific “Cases” and “Controversies” before them (Art. III, §2), applying existing statutes and derivative regulations to resolve disputes. If statutes conflict, regulations clash, courts synthesize for coherence in that case alone, which may require the court to pronounce one or more of the laws/regulations involved in the case “unconstitutional” and refuse to apply them to the case at hand, not only to adjudicate the case but also to send a loud signal that it will continue to do so every time such law(s)/regulation(s) are brought before it in a case or controversy – however courts were never meant to nullify laws wholesale. (This means the Supreme Court, especially in today’s world, must focus on ensuring the vast assembly of lower federal courts are consistent in their interpretations of the law and Constitution – the primary use of precedent to guide the judicial system internally.)

Marshall’s audacious invention was blatantly unconstitutional, a power grab with no predicate in text. The way for the other two branches to correct Marshall’s “error” (long since a “mistake” through his successors’ intransigent refusal to acknowledge the error and give up their usurpation of power) is for them to ignore it; go about their duties as they understand them without being bound by such sweepingly unconstitutional court edicts.

The Constitution establishes courts to adjudicate, not legislate or executively veto. Article III grants “judicial Power” over specified matters, but nowhere the authority to bind other branches on constitutional meaning, especially where powers of the other two branches are concerned. The Supremacy Clause (Art. VI) makes the Constitution supreme, but doesn’t assign enforcement to judges. Delegates at the Constitutional Convention debated and rejected proposals for a council of revision (judges vetoing laws pre-enactment). Hamilton in Federalist No. 78 called judiciary the “least dangerous” branch, lacking sword or purse – yet Marshall armed it with a scepter, smuggling in post-facto judicial revision through the back door – a council of revision the Framers dismissed out of hand. This set the stage for today’s activist judges, from Roe to Obergefell (which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide), imposing mere policy preferences under constitutional guise. Taylor buys this hook, line and sinker, assuming judicial review stops the music when executives like Trump dance too vigorously.

The Limits of Judicial Opinion in a Halting-Rule-Free System

In cases where statutes may seem to clash with the Constitution, courts may, of course refuse to enforce laws/regulations they find repugnant to the Constitution, and indeed, may wax eloquent in opinions, deploying jurisprudential flourishes to urge reform. But these are dicta – non-binding musings, not edicts. As Alexander Hamilton noted in Federalist No. 78, judicial judgments bind parties to the case, not the nation. Other branches can ignore or counter: Andrew Jackson famously defied Worcester v. Georgia (1832), declaring, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”

Congress could strip jurisdiction (Art. III, §2 exceptions clause); presidents pardon or refuse implementation. This isn’t anarchy or overreach; it’s the Framers’ auto-adjusting mechanism.

Like a complex adaptive system in economics, branches iterate, push, resist, recalibrate to produce collective decisions. Equilibrium emerges when all are tolerably content – not from judicial ukase, but mutual accommodation. If no unanimous agreement among the branches materializes, elections reset the board, exercising the sovereignty vested in “We the People.”

My own musings on this, reiterated in some of my old Forbes “Back on the Margin” columns, underscore the point. In pieces like “Gun Control Tramples On The Certain Virtues Of A Heavily Armed Citizenry” (Dec. 28, 2012), I argued hard cases belong to the Constitution, not hastily enacted laws, implying branches must wrestle interpretations without a referee. Though I didn’t explicitly coin “stopping rule” there, the idea is the same: no final whistle; play continues until balance.

As a political economist, not a lawyer (thank heavens), I see this as Pareto-optimal governance – maximizing liberty through contestation, not central control by black-robed oracles. Taylor’s error exposes the rot. By invoking “unconstitutional” as pronounced by courts (seemingly any federal court today), he perpetuates Marshall’s myth – that judicial precedent can alter the constitution if it is allowed to stand long enough, thereby eroding the Framers’ vision. To paraphrase President Ronald Reagan, “Federal jurisprudence is just a fancy legal term for the malodorous rot eating away our constitutional republic.”

As for Trump’s DOJ directive? Raw executive power, to be checked, if necessary, by Congress (impeach if they dare) or voters (who elected him twice knowing his style). No judicial stopping rule needed; the system self-corrects. If Taylor dislikes it, vote accordingly – not cry “impeachment” as an incantation against phantom violations. This isn’t abuse; it’s the Constitution raw, unfiltered by judicial gloss. It’s past time to reclaim the Constitution from the robes, correct Marshall’s mistake and restore the Framer’s original intent of branch parity. Let the system work as intended and equilibrium will reign. Anything less is surrender to tyranny in robes.

The post The Framers’ Intentional Design of a Constitution Without a Stopping Rule appeared first on LewRockwell.

The future of the former “Western Regions”: an energy-rich, multi-cultural, multi-religious, geostrategic New Silk Road hub of “moderately prosperous” China.

YUTIAN, ON THE SOUTHERN SILK ROAD – We are on the road in southern Xinjiang, after a harrowing back-and-forth in the Taklamakan, across the sand dunes, to visit the “lost tribe” cum village of Daliyabuyi, right in the middle of the desert, then back to our drop-dead modern hotel in the oasis of Yutian. It’s midnight, we just finished the proverbial Uyghur gastronomic feast, and there’s only one thing to do: to get a shave.

The perks of being on the road in Xinjiang to shoot a documentary supported by a crack Uyghur production team – drivers included – is that they know everything. “No problem”, says one of the drivers, “there’s a barber shop on the other side of the street.” Actually, a boulevard gleaming at midnight. Shops still open. Life goes on as usual in Uyghurstan.

With my friend Carl Zha, we cross the street and hit the barber shop just to plunge into a fabulous slice of (Uyghur) life, courtesy of two young barbers and their sidekick, a snazzy kid playing a videogame compulsively on his smartphone who seems to know everything about the hood (he may be even running it, wise guy-style).

They tell us everything about their daily routine, flow of business, cost of living, sports, life in the oasis, chasing girls, their expectations for the future. No, they are not refugees of concentration camps. Nor slaves under forced labor.  An hour and a half with them, and you have a PhD in Uyghur social studies, live. With the added bonus of getting a haircut (Carl) and a shave (myself) for under 10 bucks at one in the morning.

We were ready for the next day on the road – when we formally completed the Silk Road triad: Silk, Jade and Carpets. Silk and carpets in the fabled oasis of Khotan – watching how they have been produced for centuries.

Carpet weaving in Khotan. Photo: Pepe Escobar

And jade in Yutian itself, which is not as famous, historically, as Khotan, but now boasts a state-of-the-art jade company involved in everything from mining to the refined final product, including the finest grade: black and white jade.

Polishing the finest jade in Yutian. Photo: P.E.

In fact, it’s a Silk Road quartet, because we should add knives, in the small oasis of Yengisar, world capital of jeweled knife production. Every Uyghur man carries a knife: as a sign of manhood and to cut those juicy Xinjiang melons at any opportunity.

Yengisar: the knife capital of the world. Photo: P.E.

Throughout the Northern Silk Road, we were of course on the lookout non-stop for labor slaves and concentration camps to be duly reported to Western intel agencies. Then, on the way from Kucha to Aksu, we spotted a lady among the rolling cotton fields.

The lady in the cotton fields. Photo: P.E.

We started to chat, and soon found out that she was not picking cotton: she was actually clearing the path in the cotton plantation for a machine to make a turn and then start picking cotton mechanized agriculture-style. She told us everything about her daily life; she was a local Uyghur, had been working on this same – private – cotton fields for nearly two decades, living with her family, decent salary. Never seen a forced labor/concentration camp in her life.

Enjoying real Uyghur life in oasis towns

Across both the Northern and Southern Sik Roads, in historically key oasis towns from Turfan and Kucha to Khotan and Kashgar, we followed daily Uyghur life unfiltered, introduced by Uyghurs and among Uyghurs. Politics never entered the conversation.

We were invited into their sprawling homes – large courtyards, grapes growing on the roof; we went to two weddings, one relatively low-key in a four-star hotel, another a Bollywood production in the top restaurant in Kashgar.

Over the top Uyghur wedding in Kashgar. The bride and groom are sitting right behind “Love”. Photo: P.E.

We talked to barbers, bakers, bazaaris, business men and women. We sampled their spectacular cuisine with relish; yes, the meaning of life is contained in the perfect bowl of laghman, with the perfect naan bread on the side.

The Holy grail of Uyghur gastronomy: laghman, plov and Kashgar barbecue. Photo: P.E.

More than that – an obsession I carried since my first Silk Road travels in 1997, right after the Hong Kong handover: I wanted to retrace and dig deeper into the mesmerizing Ancient Silk Road history of those oasis towns, following once again on the footsteps of my man: the itinerant monk Xuanzang in the early Tang dynasty.

So this updated Journey to the West was, in so many ways, a Journey to the Buddhist “Western Regions” before they became part of China.

Both Turfan and Kucha were key stops in Xuanzang’s Journey to the West in the early 7th century. Then, equipped with camels, horses and guards, he crossed the Tian Shan mountains, met the kaghan of the Western Turks (who wore a fine green silk robe and a 3-meter long silk band around his head) on the edge of deep blue Lake Issyk-kul (in today’s Kyrgyzstan) and kept walking all the way to Samarkand (in today’s Uzbekistan).

All that is like a miniature jade representing the Silk Road allure – intertwining the connection between Chinese culture, Buddhism, Sogdians (the Persian people who were the key connectors in Silk Road trade and the most influent immigrant community in China during the Tang dynasty) and Persia itself.

In Samarkand, Xuanzang was exposed for the first time to extremely rich Persian culture – so different from equally sophisticated China’s. And it was Samarkand – not Rome – which was the most important trade partner of the independent Gaochang kingdom in the 5th century, and then the Tang dynasty.

The remains of the Gaochang kingdom – outside of Turfan.

And that bring us to some fascinating geo-strategic and geoeconomic aspects of the Ancient Silk Road(s).

Very few people apart from top scholars – and economic planners around Xi Jinping – know that the key player in the Silk Road economy especially during the Tang dynasty, from the 7th to the 10th centuries was… the Tang dynasty itself. It was a matter, above all, of financing the then “Western Regions” in a serious military confrontation against the Western Turks.

So we had Tang armies positioned all along the oases of the Northern Silk Rod, with an interesting twist: most of them were not Chinese, but local, from across the Gansu corridor and the “Western Regions”.

There was a non-stop back-and-forth of conquests and losses. For instance, the Tang dynasty lost the all-important oasis of Kucha to the Tibetans from 670 to 692. The result: increased military expenditure. In the years 740, the Tang dynasty sent no less than 900k bolts of silk each year to four military HQs in the Western Regions: Hami, Turfan, Beiting and Kucha (all top Silk Road oases). Talk about supporting the local economy.

A few dates tell us how the geostrategic scenario changed non-stop. Let’s start with the early 800s, when Uyghurs actually began to rule Turfan. By then the Uyghur kaghan met a teacher from Sogdiana – the lands around Samarkand – who introduced him to Manicheism, the fascinating religion founded in Persia by Mani in the 3rd century, according to which the forces of light and darkness are forever fighting to control the universe.

The Uyghur kaghan then made a fateful decision: he adopted Manicheism – recording it in a trilingual stone tablet (in Sogdian, Uyghur and Chinese).

The long march from Buddhism to Autonomous Region

The Tibetan Empire was also very strong in the late 700s. In 780s they moved into Gansu and in 792 they conquered Turfan. In 803 though the Uyghurs got Turfan back. But then the Uyghurs still living in Mongolia were defeated by the Kyrgyz in 840; some of them actually ended up in Turfan, and established a new state: the Uyghur Kaghanate, whose capital was Gaochang City, which I had the pleasure to finally visit.

The ruins of Gaochang city. Photo: P.E.

So only then Turfan became Uyghur, using the Uyghur language, and not Chinese, for trade. That went on for centuries. The economy was largely focused on barter, with cotton replacing silk as a currency. Religiously, under the Tang dynasty, the people of Turfan was a mix of Buddhists, Daoists, Zoroastrians and even Christians and Manichean.  A small church, evidence of Eastern Christianity, based in Mesopotamia, with Syriac as the liturgical language, was found in the early 20th century by German archeologists outside the eastern walls of Gaochang.

So Manicheism for a while actually became the official state religion of the Uyghur Kaghanate. Their art was absolutely exceptional. Yet only one Manichean cave painting still survives – at the stunning Bezeklik caves. I paid 500 yuan for the privilege of seeing it, guided by a very knowledgeable young – Uyghur – researcher.

The reason for the vanishing Manichean art murals is that around the year 1000 the Uyghur Khaganate decided to go full Buddhism, abandoning Manicheism. Even the now notorious cave 38 in Bezeklik (the one I visited, no photos allowed) shows the evidence: the caves had two layers, with a Manichean layer beneath a Buddhist layer.

Politically, the back-and-forth continued unabated: that’s prime Silk Road history. In 1209 the Mongols defeated the Uyghur Khaganate in Turfan – but left the Uyghurs alone. In 1275 the Uyghurs allied themselves with legendary Kublai Khan. But then peasant rebels ended up toppling Pax Mongolica and establishing the Ming dynasty in the 14th century: but Turfan, significantly, still remained outside the borders of China proper.

A crucial date is 1383: Xidir Khoja, a Muslim, conquered Turfan and forced everyone to convert to Islam: that lasts until today. At least on the surface: when you ask people in oasis towns in Xinjiang if they are Muslim, many politely decline to answer. The Buddhist past remains – in the collective unconscious – and visibly, in the spectacular ruins of Gaochang.

Xinjiang, crucially, remained independent of China until 1756, when the Qing dynasty armies took over. During our on the road last month, we were smack in the middle of the 70th year of the foundation of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The whole of Xinjiang was enveloped in red flags and banners with the number “70”.

Urumqi: celebrating 70 years of Xinjiang. Photo: P.E.

That’s the future of the former “Western Regions”: as an energy-rich, multi-cultural, multi-religious, geostrategic New Silk Road hub of “moderately prosperous” China.

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

The post Two Foreign Guys Walk Into a Barber Shop in Xinjiang… appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Trump said today that if Hamas doesn’t stop killing people in the Gaza Strip, then the United States would have no other choice but to “go in and kill them.” Trump is always talking about killing people, and apparently likes ordering Americans to kill for him. Is any boat in the Atlantic safe?

The post Why Does Trump Always Talk about Killing People? appeared first on LewRockwell.

JFK Russia Files From Russia Released
https://x.com/MJTruthUltra/status/1978859062637764717

One wonders how the information in this new Russian document provided to Congresswoman Luna (when translated) compares to that reported in the classic account below:

Regicide: The Official Assassination of John F. Kennedy, by Gregory Douglas
https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Gregory-Douglas-ebook/dp/B00K9QVQGW

https://ia903108.us.archive.org/11/items/jfkmovies/The%20Kennedy%20Asassination%20-%2011%20books/Regicide-The%20Official%20Assassination%20of%20John%20F.%20Kennedy-Gregory%20Douglas.pdf

“Thirty Nine years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the truth finally comes to light: In 1996, Robert Trumbull Crowley, former head of Clandestine Operations of the CIA, gave documents of his own top secret operations to his friend, historian Gregory Douglas.

“After Robert Crowley died in late 2000, Gregory Douglas now begins publishing important sections of the Crowley Papers. This is the first of a series of shocking revelations of the secret plots of top officials of the US government.

“Operation ZIPPER” was the code name for the forced removal of John F. Kennedy, President of the United States of America. This operation was implemented with the help, approval, and/or knowledge of the FBI, the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. Army, and the Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, under the aegis of the CIA.

“Backed up with documents reproduced in the book, Douglas proves, which individuals plotted to kill John F. Kennedy, why they thought that this assassination was justified, how it was done, who else was involved, and how the cover up of this major clandestine operation was mounted.

“However one may respond to the horrific contents of this book, one has to be impressed by its internal coherence; and it also brings some welcome clarity to the prolix and entangled drama of the JFK assassination. It should trigger a fresh Congressional inquiry into this national tragedy.”
Fredrick J. Norris,

Robert Trumbull Crowley
https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKcrowleyR.htm

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Daniel McAdams 

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Zero Hedge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Clear and Present Danger

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

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

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

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

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

Weaponry & Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Overextension as a Formula for Disaster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where this is Going

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

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

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

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

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

Let me sum things up.

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

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

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

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article was originally published on Lifesite News.

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

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

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

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

Who Is Indigenous?

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

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

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

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

Miles: What precisely are your lands?

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

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

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

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

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

The Problem of “Where”

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

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

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

The Problem of “Who”

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

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

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

The Problem of “First”

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

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

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

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

Does This Mean Might Makes Right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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