Lew Rockwell Institute

People say government is corrupt.  If it were corrupt it would be acting in ways contrary and detrimental to its purpose, and it would be possible to right the course.  In truth, it acts in ways that befit its nature.

Today’s governments are states, ruling by legal coercion.  There is another, unacknowledged “government” that works to govern our behavior peacefully, and it’s usually called the free market.  But to states, the market whether free or otherwise is the farm from which they extract wealth and distribute it according to their perceived needs.   States are plundering gangs that wouldn’t exist without something to plunder — a market.  But can markets exist without states?

We might never know.  States will not step aside — the set-up is far too lucrative for those in charge.  So we watch as it runs off the rails in its myopic pursuit of power.

Given this arrangement, how is it possible states can maintain their grip on the minds of its captives?  From the perspective of those under its thumb it is an elaborate interwoven mix of claims accepted as truths.

Let’s touch on a few.

Captives view everything government does as the fruits of democracy, as if the world around them came into being by free choice at the polls.  Democracy is how people maintain their freedom, they believe — it’s their check on state power.  Every Fourth of July they wave their sparklers in government’s honor, as if today’s rulers were intellectual descendants of the revolutionaries of 1776, rather than the counter-revolutionaries of 1787.  Government schools have done their job.

The state watches as some of its captives shoot and rob each other, and propose that it’s only right to make it difficult for everyone to acquire guns.  The thugs cheer and the crime rate goes up.  And states feel uncomfortable with their captives owning guns.

Some captives try to stick the Bill of Rights in government’s face. The Bill of Rights is a tourist attraction. Who sweats a document sequestered in the National Archives? Even so, who interprets and enforces the Bill of Rights?  Elected stiffs from Woodrow Wilson onward, as well as a few appointed ones, have been telling them the Constitution is alive. In other words, their rights are also living and no longer absolute.

Some captives still refer to government officials as their servants.  How many politicians have the demeanor of servants?  Politicians respect money and votes.  Since most voters aren’t organized, it’s the politicians’ rich supporters who help pull the levers of power.

Captives believe it’s only logical that the state should have complete control of the military, police, and courts. What saints do they know personally who could be trusted with such power? And how will the state fund these various functions? Through voluntary trade on the market? Why should it mess with production and exchange when all it has to do is nudge them with a gun?  The state is a monopoly of crime, a fact too shameful for them to admit.

Almost all captives complain about high taxes.  But the state posts signs to assuage their grief: “Your tax dollars at work.”  And it points to the military and its global presence, stirring patriotic fever.  Thus, some captives console themselves with what taxes provide, failing as always to look at the alternatives.

If they had better schooling they might know something about Randolph Bourne, who in 1918 wrote the following:

The modern State is not the rational and intelligent product of modern men desiring to live harmoniously together with security of life, property, and opinion. It is not an organization which has been devised as pragmatic means to a desired social end. All the idealism with which we have been instructed to endow the State is the fruit of our retrospective imaginations. What it does for us in the way of security and benefit of life, it does incidentally as a by-product and development of its original functions.

But the captives, some of them, still have hope for freedom under state rule.  They revive the memory of the Gipper, their sole purported savior in recent history, who promised to get government off their backs.  He pledged to abolish the departments of Energy and Education.  Somehow it didn’t happen.  And rather than ditch the bankrupt Ponzi scheme called Social Security, he followed Alan Greenspan’s advice and increased taxes to postpone the bankruptcy. During the Gipper’s eight-year reign, the federal debt almost doubled and civil liberties diminished.  Oh, those aching backs.

But wait — many captives point to Abe Lincoln as a freedom fighter.

Let’s see.  No Union lives were lost during the Confederacy’s 36-hour shelling of Fort Sumter, an incident provoked by Lincoln ‘s ordering the fort reprovisioned instead of abandoned. A month earlier, he had ignored a Confederate peace commission that had traveled to Washington , D.C. to negotiate a peaceful secession. But Lincoln had his ‘incident,’ got his war, and some 800,000 people died, including civilians and slaves.

The end of slavery was never Lincoln ‘s objective, as he repeatedly stated, but rather one of the byproducts Bourne refers to. By 1840, the British Empire had ended slavery peacefully through compensated emancipation. During the 19th Century, dozens of other countries ended slavery without war. If manumission was Lincoln ‘s goal, why did the master statesman need a long, bloody war to achieve it? Lincoln invaded the South to regain lost tariff revenue when the southern states seceded. Lincoln, in other words, murdered and imprisoned people to carry on his policy of predation, aka Union mercantilism.

Moving ahead a half-century, President Wilson imposed a maximum 20-year prison sentence for anyone criticizing the government during World War I. “Civil liberties” were synonymous with treason.  “Make the world safe for democracy”?  Why not “Make the world safe for freedom”?  Why did Wilson ship a million conscripts packed like sardines overseas to join a war that had already killed five million men?

World War II was different – the so-called Good War, even if it was the costliest conflict in human history. Civilian deaths outnumbered military deaths by over 16 million and total deaths on both sides exceeded 72 million. The Good War saw the guys in white hats set the precedent for dropping nuclear weapons on mostly civilian populations. Who was being defended when we incinerated two hundred thousand people whose leaders had earlier asked to negotiate a conditional surrender, a condition we ultimately agreed to?

Was the State defending its citizens during the build-up to war when FDR neglected to tell Pearl Harbor commanders Short and Kimmel an attack was imminent? Twenty-four hundred troops lost their lives in that attack to join a war the president promised we would never join. The man who made the promise had an eight-point provocation plan to get Japan to attack us.

Did the war in Vietnam stop communism in its tracks and keep other dominoes from falling? The only thing it stopped were the lives of 58,209 American soldiers and several million Vietnamese civilians. And these figures don’t include countless others who suffered and perished from Agent Orange exposure.

Were their trillions of dollars in taxes at work on 9-11 defending Americans from terrorist hijackers? And did they get their money’s worth later, when the president invaded a country posing no threat to their security and having no connection to the attacks?

They grumble about inflation and never mention its role in the State’s growth and wars. They come out of college believing the Federal Reserve is our number one inflation fighter. Ironically, it’s true but only because the Fed is the sole source of inflation. It’s a little like saying Al Capone was Chicago ‘s number one crime fighter.

So there you have it — the State in a nutshell.  It is systemically anti-freedom but poses as its defender.  And the captives buy it.  The only way they can eliminate their overlords is with ideology, but the state has the majority of ideologists, both left and right, on its side.  They’ll have to educate themselves and enough others to pose a threat. And they’ve been trying since 1576 if not earlier.

You would think freedom would be an easy sell but it isn’t.  We keep trying because we can’t live without it.

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As a retired U.S. Air Force officer, I firmly believe in civilian control of our military. This country should be a nation of laws — not of special interests, oligarchs, or kings. Before committing our forces to battle, Congress should always declare war in the name of the people. Our military should indeed be a citizen-soldier force, not an isolated caste driven by a warrior ethos. And above all, the United States should be a republic ruled by law and shaped by sound moral values, not a greed-driven empire fueled by militarism.

Yet when I express such views, I feel like I’m clinging to a belief in the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus. It feels idealistic, naïve, even painful to think that way. Yes, I served this country in uniform for 20 years, and now, in the age of Donald Trump, it has, as far as I can tell, thoroughly lost its way. The unraveling began so long ago — most obviously with the disastrous Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s, though in truth this country’s imperial desires predated even the Spanish-American War of 1898, stretching back to the wanton suppression of indigenous peoples as part of its founding and expansion.

A glance at U.S. history reveals major atrocities: the displacement and murder of Native Americans, slavery, and all too many imperial misadventures abroad. I knew of such realities when I joined the military in 1985, near the end of the Cold War. Despite its flaws, I believed then that this country was more committed to freedom than the Soviet Union. We could still claim some moral authority as the leader of what we then referred to as “the free world,” however compromised or imperfect our actions were.

That moral authority, however, is now gone. U.S. leaders fully support and unapologetically serve an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. They sell weapons to nearly every regime imaginable, irrespective of human rights violations. They wage war without Congressional approval — the recent 12-day assault on Iran being just the latest example. (The second Trump administration has, in fact, launched almost as many air strikes, especially in Yemen and Somalia, in its first five months as the Biden administration did in four years.) Those same leaders have been doing a bang-up job dismantling the America I thought I was serving when I took that oath and put on second lieutenant’s bars four decades ago. That America — assuming it ever existed — may now be gone forever.

FUBAR: A Republic in Ruins

My fellow citizens, America is FUBAR (a term that dates from World War II). We are not faintly who we claim to be. Rather than a functioning republic, we are an ailing, flailing, perhaps even failing empire. We embrace war, glorify warriors, and profit mightily from the global arms trade, no matter the civilian toll, including tens of thousands of dead and wounded children in Gaza, among the latest victims of U.S.-made bombs, bullets, and missiles.

Signs of moral rot are everywhere. Our president, who would like to be known for his budget cuts, nonetheless giddily celebrates a record trillion-dollar war budget. Our secretary of defense gleefully promotes a warrior ethos. Congress almost unanimously supports or acquiesces in the destruction of Gaza. Images from the region resemble bombed-out Stalingrad in 1942 or Berlin in 1945. Meanwhile, for more than two decades now, America’s leaders have claimed to be waging a successful global “war on terror” even as they fuel terror across the globe. What do they think all those U.S. weapons are for — spreading peace?

My wife and I cope through dark humor. We see news on cuts to Medicaid, the mentally ill in the streets, and crumbling infrastructure, and quip: “But Bibi [Netanyahu] needs bombs. Or Ukraine does. Or the Pentagon needs more nukes.” That’s why Americans can’t have nice things like health care. That’s why all too many of us are unhoused, in debt, out of work, and desperate. In 1967 — yes, that’s almost 60 years ago! — Martin Luther King warned of exactly this: America’s approaching spiritual death through militarism (aggravated by extreme materialism and racism). That death is visibly here, now.

Washington is not even faintly committed to “peace through strength,” a vapid slogan touted by the Trump administration, and an unintentional echo of George Orwell’s dystopian “war is peace.” It is committed instead to what passes for dominance through colossal military spending and persistent war. And let’s face it, that warpath may well end in the death of the American experiment.

The Mediocrity of Our Generals

In this era of creeping authoritarianism and mass surveillance, perhaps the U.S. is lucky that its generals are, by and large, so utterly uninspired. Today’s American military isn’t open to the mercurial and meteoric talents of a Napoleon or a Caesar. Not in its upper ranks, at least.

One struggles to name a truly great American general or admiral since World War II. That war produced household names like George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton, and Chester W. Nimitz. In contrast, America’s recent generals — Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell of Desert Storm fame, Tommy Franks in Iraq in 2003, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal of the “fragile” and “reversible” Iraq and Afghan “surges” — have left anything but a legacy of excellence or moral leadership, not to speak of decisive victory. At best, they were narrowly competent; at worst, morally compromised and dangerously deluded.

Mind you, this isn’t a criticism of this country’s rank-and-file troops. The young Americans I served with showed no lack of courage. It wasn’t their fault that the wars they found themselves in were misbegotten and mismanaged. Twenty years have passed since I served alongside those young troops, glowing with pride and purpose in their dedication, their idealism, their commitment to their oath of service. Many paid a high price in limbs, minds, or lives. Too often, they were lions led by donkeys, to borrow a phrase once used to describe the inept and callous British leadership during World War I at bloody battles like the Somme (1916) and Passchendaele (1917).

Today, I fear that America’s lions may, sooner or later, be led into even deeper catastrophe — this time possibly a war with China. Any conflict with China would likely rival, if not surpass, the disasters produced by World War I. The world’s best military, which U.S. presidents have been telling us we have since the 9/11 attacks of September 2001, stands all too close to being committed to just such a war in Asia by donkeys like Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

And for what? The island of Taiwan is often mentioned, but the actual reason would undoubtedly be to preserve imperial hegemony in the service of corporate interests. War, as General Smedley Butler wrote in 1935 after he retired from the military, is indeed a racket, one from which the rich exempt themselves (except when it comes to taking profits from the same).

A disastrous conflict with China, likely ending in a U.S. defeat (or a planetary one), could very well lead to a repeat of some even more extreme version of Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign, amplified and intensified by humiliation and resentment. From the ashes of that possible defeat, an American Napoleon or Caesar (or at least a wannabe imitator) could very well emerge to administer the coup de grace to what’s left of our democracy and freedom.

Avoiding a Colossal Act of Folly

War with China isn’t, of course, inevitable, but America’s current posture makes it more likely. Trump’s tariffs, his bombastic rhetoric, and this country’s extensive military exercises in the Pacific contribute to rising tensions, not de-escalation and rapprochement.

While this country invests in war and more war, China invests in infrastructure and trade, in the process becoming what the U.S. used to be: the world’s indispensable workhorse. As the 10 BRICS countries, including China, expand and global power becomes more multipolar, this country’s addiction to military dominance may drive it to lash out. With ever more invested in a massive military war hammer, impetuous leaders like Trump and Hegseth may see China as just another nail to be driven down. It would, of course, be a colossal act of folly, though anything but a first in history.

And speaking of folly, the U.S. military as it’s configured today is remarkably similar to the force I joined in 1985. The focus remains on ultra-expensive weapons systems, including the dodgy F-35 jet fighter, the unnecessary B-21 Raider bomber, the escalatory Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, and Trump’s truly fantastical “Golden Dome” missile defense system (a ghostly rehash of President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” proposal, vintage 1983). Other militaries, meanwhile, are improvising, notably in low-cost drone technology (also known as UAS, or uncrewed autonomous systems) as seen in the Russia-Ukraine War, a crucial new arena of war-making where the U.S. has fallen significantly behind China.

The Pentagon’s “solution” here is to continue the massive funding of Cold War-era weapons systems while posing as open to innovation, as an embarrassing video of Hegseth walking with drones suggests. America’s military is, in short, well-prepared to fight a major conventional war against an obliging enemy like Iraq in 1991, but such a scenario is unlikely to lie in our future.

With respect to drones or UAS, I can hear the wheels of the military-industrial complex grinding away. A decentralized, low-cost, flexible cottage industry will likely be transformed into a centralized, high-cost, inflexible cash cow for the merchants of death. When the Pentagon faces a perceived crisis or shortfall, the answer is always to throw more money at it. Ka-ching!

Indeed, the recent profit margins of major military contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and RTX (formerly Raytheon) have been astounding. Since 9/11, Boeing’s stock has risen more than 400%. RTX shares are up more than 600%. Lockheed Martin, maker of the faltering F-35, has seen its shares soar by nearly 1,000%. And Northrop Grumman, maker of the B-21 Raider bomber and Sentinel ICBM, two legs of America’s “modernized” nuclear triad, has seen its shares increase by more than 1,400%. Who says that war (even the threat of a global nuclear war) doesn’t pay?

Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s war budget, soaring to unprecedented levels, has been virtually immune to DOGE cuts. While Elon Musk and his whiz kids searched for a few billion in savings by gutting education or squelching funding for public media like PBS and NPR, the Pentagon emerged with about $160 billion in new spending authority. As President Biden once reminded us: Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value. Far too often, America’s leaders, whatever they’ve said in their election campaigns, have valued weapons and wars over almost anything else.

What Is To Be Done

I’ve written against warriors, warfighters, and U.S. militarism since 2007. And yes, it often feels futile, but silence means surrender to warmongering fools like Hegseth, Senator Tom Cotton, and the farrago of grifters, clowns, toadies, con men, and zealots who inhabit the Trump administration and much of Congress as well. The fight against them must go on.

All leaders, military and civilian, must remember their oath: loyalty to the Constitution, not to any man. Illegal orders must be resisted. Congress must impeach and remove a president who acts unlawfully. It must also reassert its distinctly lost authority to declare war. And it must stop taking “legal” bribes from the lobbyists/foot soldiers who flood the halls of Congress, peddling influence with campaign “contributions.”

For tyranny to be stopped, for a catastrophic war with China (and who knows what else) to be avoided, America must have profiles in courage, not cowardice. Yet even despair is being weaponized. As a retired colonel and friend of mine wrote to me recently: “I don’t even know where to start anymore, Bill. I have no hope for anything ever improving.”

And don’t think of that despair as incidental or accidental. It’s a distinct feature of the present system of government.

Trump and Hegseth are not faintly what the founders of this country envisioned when they placed the military under civilian control. Yet power ultimately resides in the people (if we remember our duties as citizens). Isn’t it high time that we Americans recover our ideals, as well as our guts?

After all, the few can do little without the consent of the many. It’s up to the many (that’s us!) to reclaim and restore America.

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.com.

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My father grew up in Florida, and most of his friends were Cuban. He often heard from them how wonderful Cuba had been before Fidel Castro’s revolution. My father once asked one of his friends how Castro managed to take over the county. He told him it was simple: first they would take over a factory. Then, they would remove the manager of the factory and replace him with the janitor. The reason for this was that the janitor could never become the manager in normal times but only because of the revolution. Thus, the janitor would defend the revolution to the death, so as to keep his new position of power at all costs.

This is how the Castro regime has survived in Cuba. There is only one problem, however. Revolutionaries are a rare breed. Disciplined, high-functioning, cunning, and, above all, fanatically devoted to the cause for its own sake, they are simply too few in number. True revolutionaries are always few in number. A handful can make a revolution, but they cannot see it to fruition.

Instead, they have to pass on the job to the former janitors, who will never abandon the cause but are incapable of ruling competently. The revolution inevitably collapses. Or, if they somehow manage to keep power, as in Cuba, they condemn those under their control to a sort of living death of malicious incompetence.

Readers of Crisis Magazine have likely heard that the new archbishop of Detroit has terminated professors Eduardo Echeverria, Ralph Martin, and Edward Peters from Sacred Heart Major Seminary in that diocese. You may recall that earlier this year he also decimated the diocesan Latin Masses in Detroit, which were the most numerous in the country. This comes on the heels of revelations that at least one of the official reasons for banning the Latin Mass was based on a patently false claim. These professors were no traditionalists, but they were well-known “conservative” theologians clearly opposed to the theological tendencies of the last pontiff.

The “Detroit Massacre” is a sign that the Catholic Church has entered the janitorial phase of its own revolution. This began in the 1960s, and the original Progressive faction in the Church that began it has largely passed from the scene. Perhaps the only remaining member of the original cohort is Cardinal Kasper. But the days when a true revolutionary, such as Hans Küng, at least had a brain and some level of competence are long gone.

Instead, we have nonentities such as “Tucho” Fernández and whoever ghostwrote Traditionis Custodes raised to positions for which they are wholly unqualified. But they are willing to do whatever it takes to advance the revolution, which is why they were raised up in the first place. That is why men such as James Martin are promoted and protected while three distinguished professors are fired from their positions with no explanation and no warning. No doubt, more “janitors” will soon replace them.

Such is almost certainly the case with the archbishop of Detroit. It is clear he was chosen with a mandate to put an end to the “rigid” tendencies, theological and otherwise, in that diocese. The new bishop of Detroit once suggested, when he was bishop of Tucson, Arizona, that canonical penalties be used against Catholic federal agents who enforced the current administration’s immigration policies. I do not mean he actually cares about the issue of immigration. Rather, he knew who was in power and what kind of signal he needed to send to be promoted.

And he is delivering. What strikes one about this is how brazen an exercise of power it is. A couple of sites have confirmed the bishop fired these three men without notifying either the rector of the seminary or the board of directors about his decision. My guess is that they would have tried to prevent the dismissal of the professors, so he bypassed them. This tracks with the method of Traditionis Custodes, which resorted to an outright lie to get the desired result. The ends justify the means because the revolution takes precedence over everything—that and remaining in power.

One hopes that this would be a wake-up call to those Catholics who, for whatever reason, still deny that such a revolution is taking place. To those who find this idea too shocking to contemplate, I would urge you not to be taken in by the usual suspects, the midwit Internet Torquemadas who attack anyone who dares question this ongoing demolition of the Catholic Faith. A person on  wrote that the firing of these professors was fine because some seminaries purged professors under John Paul II. My response is that those seminaries did not purge enough of them. Seminary professors should be fired if they teach anything approaching heresy.

Do not get sidetracked concerning arguments about authority. This conflict isn’t about authority. It is about what authority is for: the service to divine, unchanging truth revealed once for all in Jesus Christ and handed on to be guarded by the Church, or protean diktats subject to the whim of whoever holds power. The battle is between those who think that truth is something authority can only safeguard, not create, and those who believe authority can transmute heresy into orthodoxy by fiat (or those who want everyone else to believe this, as to forward their designs).

The bishop fired Echeverria, Peters, and Martin because they objected, however politely, to the toying with heresy that characterized the reign of Pope Francis. Francis was quite explicit that he wanted to alter the Church’s fundamental beliefs. This is the obvious implication of the constant refrain that Vatican II’s reforms are “irreversible,” as everyone knows the Progressive interpretation of that council is a revolutionary one. Lest we forget, the last pontiff issued or approved documents which suggested that

1) sex outside marriage is sometimes not sinful for subjective reasons,

2) homosexual couples can be “blessed,”

3) all religions are willed by God, and

4) the old Mass is somehow intrinsically harmful.

I find it hard to believe a person sincerely convinced of these sentiments is a Catholic Christian in any meaningful sense of the term.

Read the Whole Article

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Yesterday, August 4, Nima and I discussed on Dialogue Works the three iron constraints on the US government that seem to guarantee the world is heading into catastrophic  war.

One constraint is the US foreign policy doctrine of US hegemony over the world, known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine:  The principle goal of US foreign policy is to prevent the rise of any country that can serve as a constraint on US unilateralism. This doctrine targets Russia and China.

As President Trump recently declared to the Atlantic magazine, ” I run the country and the world.” This is a statement of hegemony.

Another constraint is the US military/security complex, a heavy political campaign contributor, which needs enemies, such as Russia, China, Iran, to justify its massive budget and power.

A third constraint is the blackmail power over the US and entire Western world of Epstein’s honey-trap Mossad operation that has films of  members of the ruling  class having sex with underaged persons. 

Wrapped up in these chains, no Western leader can undertake action to avoid war.

Russian President Putin has contributed to the coming catastrophic war by his ignoring of provocations in the hope that in the end he would secure a mutual security agreement with Washington that would end the tensions that threaten both countries.  Putin’s hopes were fruitless, because they ignored the Wolfowitz doctrine, the power of the US military-security complex, and Israel’s blackmail power over the government in America. 

In A.P.J. Taylor’s history, The Origins of the Second World War, Taylor points out that the war, which no one intended, including Hitler, resulted from diplomatic blunders, the consequences of which no one understood.

Today the same kind of blunders are being repeated, building tensions instead of reducing them.  To these tensions Trump adds egomania, which is blinding.  The failure of leadership will end in disastrous war.

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What follows is a revised and updated version of an essay from my 2020 book, Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies.  

“The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint…But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.”
– C. S. Lewis, author’s preface, 1962, The Screwtape Letters

American history can only accurately be described as the story of demonic possession, however you choose to understand that phrase. Maybe radical “evil” will suffice. But right from the start the American colonizers were involved in massive killing because they considered themselves divinely blessed and guided, a chosen people whose mission would come to be called “manifest destiny.” Nothing stood in the way of this divine calling, which involved the need to enslave and kill millions of innocent people that continues down to today. “Others” have always been expendable since they have stood in the way of the imperial march ordained by the American god. This includes all the wars waged based on lies and false flag operations. It is not a secret, although many Americans, if they are even aware of it, prefer to see it as a series of aberrations carried out by “bad apples.” Or something from the past. Most know nothing about it, for they have never opened a history book.

Our best writers and prophets have told us the truth: Thoreau, Twain, William James, MLK, Fr. Daniel Berrigan, et al.: we are a nation of killers of the innocent.  We are conscienceless. We are brutal. We are in the grip of evil forces.

The English writer D. H. Lawrence said it perfectly in 1923, “The American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted.” It still hasn’t.

When on August 6 and 9, 1945 the United States killed 200-300 thousand innocent Japanese civilians with atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they did so intentionally. It was an act of sinister state terrorism, unprecedented by the nature of the weapons but not by the slaughter. The American terror bombings of Japanese cities that preceded the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – led by the infamous Major General Curtis LeMay – were also intentionally aimed at Japanese civilians and killed hundreds of thousands of them.

Is there an American artist’s painting of Tokyo destroyed by the firebombing to go next to Picasso’s Guernica, where estimates of the dead range between 800 and 1,600?

In Tokyo alone more than 100,000 Japanese civilians were burnt to death by cluster bombs of napalm. All this killing was intentional. I repeat: Intentional. Is that not radical evil?  Demonic? Only five Japanese cities were spared such bombing. Sixty-seven cities were fire-bombed.

As a conclusion to such bombings, in August 1945 the atomic bombings were an intentional holocaust, not to end the war, as the historical record amply demonstrates, but to send a message to the Soviet Union that we could do to them what we did to the residents of Japan. President Truman made certain that the Japanese willingness to surrender in May 1945 was made unacceptable because he and his Secretary-of-State James Byrnes  wanted to use the atomic bombs – “as quickly as possible to ‘show results’” in Byrnes’ words – to send a message to the Soviet Union.

So “the Good War” was ended in the Pacific with the “good guys” killing hundreds of thousand Japanese civilians to make a point to the “bad guys,” who have been demonized ever since. Shortly after, in September 1945 the U.S War Department made plans to wipe out the U.S.’s ally, the Soviet Union, with a massive nuclear strike aimed at 66 major cities. Professor Michel Chossudovsky documents it here.

Satan always wears the other’s face.

Many Baby Boomers like to say they grew up with the bomb. They are lucky. They grew up. They got be scared. They got to hide under their desks and wax nostalgic about it. Do you remember dog tags?  Those 1950s and 1960s?  The scary movies?

The children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who died under our bombs on August 6 and 9, 1945 didn’t get to grow up. They couldn’t hide. They just went under. To be accurate: we put them under. Or they were left to smolder for decades in pain and then die. But that it was necessary to save American lives is the lie. It’s always about American lives, as if the owners of the country actually cared about them.  But to tender hearts and innocent minds, it’s a magic incantation. Poor us!

Fat Man, Little Boy – how the names of those atomic bombs echo down the years to the now fat Americans who grew up in the 1950s and who think like little boys and girls about their country’s demonic nature. Innocence – it is wonderful! We are different now. “We are great because we are good”; that’s what Hillary Clinton told us. The Libyans can attest to that. We are exceptional, special. The 2020 election was said to prove that if we can defeat Mr. Pumpkin Head and restore America to its “core values,” all will be well.

Now that they were restored with Biden’s support for the U.S. proxy war against Russia via Ukraine and the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, delusionary Trump 2024 voters might be learning that those core values are bipartisan. “We are great because we are good,” goes the mantra. We kill, therefore we are. There is a straight line from the nuclear bombing of Japan to the arrant U.S. support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.

Perhaps you think I am cynical. But understanding true evil is not child’s play. It seems beyond the grasp of most Americans who need their illusions. Evil is real.  There is simply no way to understand the savage nature of American history without seeing its demonic nature. How else can we redeem ourselves at this late date, possessed as we are by delusions of our own God-blessed goodness?

But so many Americans play at innocence. They excite themselves at the thought that with the next election the nation will be “restored” to the right course. Of course there never was a right course, unless might makes right, which has always been the way of America’s rulers. Today, as in 2016, Trump is viewed by so many as an aberration. He is far from it. He’s straight out of a Twain short story. He’s Vaudeville. He’s Melville’s confidence man. He’s us. Did it ever occur to those who are fixated on him that if those who own and run the country wanted him gone, he’d be gone in an instant? He can tweet and tweet idiotically, endlessly send out messages that he will contradict the next day or minute, but as long as he protects the super-rich, accepts Israel’s control of him, and allows the CIA-military-industrial complex to do its world-wide killing and looting of the treasury, he will be allowed to entertain and excite the public – to get them worked up in a lather in pseudo-debates. And to make this more entertaining, he will be opposed by the “sane” Democratic opposition, whose intentions are as benign as an assassin’s smile.

Look back as far as you can to past U.S. presidents, the figureheads who “act under orders” (whose orders?), as did Ahab in his lust to kill the “evil” great white whale, and what do you see? You see servile killers in the grip of a sinister power. You see hyenas with polished faces. You see pasteboard masks. On the one occasion when one of these presidents dared to follow his conscience and rejected the devil’s pact that is the presidency’s killer-in-chief role, he – JFK – had his brains blown out in public view. An evil empire thrives on shedding blood, and it enforces its will through demonic messages.

Resist and there will be blood on the streets, blood on the tracks, blood in your face.

Despite this, President Kennedy’s witness, his turn from cold warrior to an apostle of peace in the final year of his presidency, remains to inspire a ray of hope in these dark days. As recounted by James Douglass in his masterful JFK and the Unspeakable, Kennedy agreed to a meeting in May 1962 with a group of Quakers who had been demonstrating outside the While House for total disarmament. They urged him to move in that direction. Kennedy was sympathetic to their position. He said he wished it were easy to do so from the top down, but that he was being pressured by the Pentagon and others to never do that, although he had given a speech urging “a peace race” together with the Soviet Union. He told the Quakers it would have to come from below. According to the Quakers, JFK listened intently to their points, and before they left said with a smile, “You believe in redemption don’t you?” Soon Kennedy was shaken to his core by the Cuban missile crisis when the world teetered on the brink of extinction and his insane military and “intelligence” advisers urged him to wage a nuclear war. Not long after, he took a sharp top-down turn toward peace despite their fierce opposition, a turn so dramatic over the next year that it led to his martyrdom. And he knew it would. He knew it would when he gave his extraordinary American University Commencement Address on June 10, 1963.

So hope is not all lost. There are great souls like JFK to inspire us. Their examples flash here and there. But to even begin to hope to change the future, a confrontation with our demonic past (and present) is first necessary, a descent into the dark truth that is terrifying in its implications. False innocence must be abandoned. Carl Jung, in “On the Psychology of the Unconscious,” addressed this with the words:

It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses – and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster’s body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost. Having a dark suspicion of these grim possibilities, man turns a blind eye to the shadow-side of human nature. Blindly he strives against the salutary dogma of original sin, which is yet so prodigiously true. Yes, he even hesitates to admit the conflict of which he is so painfully aware.

How can one describe men who would intentionally slaughter so many innocent people?  American history is rife with such examples up to the present day. The native peoples, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, etc. – the list is very long. Savage wars carried out by men and women who own and run the country, and who try to buy the souls of regular people to join them in their pact with the devil, to acquiesce to their ongoing wicked deeds. Such monstrous evil was never more evident than on August 6 and 9, 1945.

Unless we enter into deep contemplation of the evil that was released into the world with those bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we are lost in a living hell without escape. And we will pay. Nemesis always demands retribution, as the ancient Greeks said. We have gradually been accepting rule by those for whom the killing of innocents is child’s play, and we have been masquerading as innocent and good children for whom the truth is too much to bear. “Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one,” Screwtape, the devil, tells his nephew, Wormwood, a devil in training, “the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”  That’s the road we’ve been traveling, as Trump’s second term is showing us, as he facilely and recklessly talks of nuclear war and makes moves that make it more likely.

The projection of evil onto others works only so long.  We must reclaim our shadows and withdraw our projections.  Only the fate of the world depends on it.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post The Satanic Nature of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki appeared first on LewRockwell.

There’s a story – it may be true – that Nixon (back when he was president) thought it would be a fine idea to make the North Vietnamese and the nuclear-armed Soviets who backed them believe he was irrational and volatile enough to push the button, so as to bluff them into kowtowing.

History repeats because human nature never changes.

Our Nixon seems to also believe it’s a fine idea to convey to the Russians that he just might push the button. Only this time, the Russians might just do it first. Trump’s announced sending of nuclear-missile-armed submarines close to Russia means the Russians would have less warning and less time to react to a first-strike. This no doubt makes the Russians uneasy. It probably makes them more likely to consider a first strike as a preemptive measure – and why not? The United States is run by a cabal that regularly engages in such, though not yet with nuclear weapons and (naturally) not yet against a nuclear-armed nation. The cabal that runs the United States prefers to rain conventional death on nations that can’t do much about it, such as Iran (on behalf of Israel).

But you see the point. Or rather, the hypocrisy. No doubt the Russians see it and tire of it. We – Americans are supposed to not see it and hate the Russians because they see it (and tire of it).

What, exactly, is Trump hoping to accomplish by bellowing demands and authorizing overtly threatening things such as edging our underwater nuclear “deterrent” closer to Russia, the better-to-nuke-them-with? This is something his senile grifter predecessor never did and that’s a measure of just how strange things have become. One of the main reasons people voted for Trump was to end the god-damned wars rather than incite worse ones. Why is he pushing the Russians to push the button? It cannot be Because Democracy, since the Ukrainians are ruled by a dictator who cancelled elections. It isn’t because America is threatened in any way by the Russians hashing things out with a former Russian province. It certainly isn’t because the American people are demanding it. Politically, it is idiotic because it (like the Epstein Business) is alienating people who supported Trump. There is no “upside” that makes any good sense.

So, why?

Well, because war is the health of the state. It not only shuts up those who raise questions about what the state is up to, it places them in the position of being enemies of the state. Herman Goring, the head of the German Luftwaffe and probably one of the smartest of the leadership cabal of the Third Reich, explained it thusly:

Naturally the common people don’t want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

Indeed, it does. Indeed it will.

Trump is in trouble. He needs a diversion, one big enough to shut people up about the Epstein Business as well as other emulsifying shit-storms, including the “fake news” about the jobs that haven’t been created and general enshitification of life in this country for average Americans, who are paying $100 for two plastic bags of groceries and double or triple what they used to pay for insurance and forget buying a new house if you are a first-time buyer.

A war would serve. It worked for The Chimp. It always works. Which is why it’s what they always do whenever it looks like the public is getting tired of the schtick.

This article was originally published on Eric Peters Autos.

The post The Nixon Strategy appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

Activist Post

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Rick Rozoff wrote:

Spokesperson for the Cincinnati police chief said that the middle-age woman savagely beaten is a “Russian, who fled back to her country,” though she was born and raised in Ohio. Echoing the claim of the chief perpetrator’s mother days earlier.

Fox is the only non-local news source reporting on the week-long story at all.

The post Cincinnati beating victim dismissed as “Russian asset” appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

Reclaim the Net

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Click Here:

Eugyppius

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Tim McGraw wrote:

Bataan Death March, 

My Mom, who is 93, told me this story years ago. Mom had driven her black Jaguar sports car from Kansas City up to southern Minnesota to visit her relatives. Mom told me the oil light came on somewhere in Iowa, so she pulled into a gas station. The mechanic looked under the hood and told my Mom that he didn’t have a clue how to fix the British car.

My Mom drove on to southern Minnesota with no problems.

Mom stayed in Minneapolis and drove out to the small towns of her relatives. There, she found out that her Uncle Scrubby had died. Mom told me that Uncle Scrubby was a good guy. He was always kind. They called him Scrubby because he was short.

Uncle Scrubby had joined the Army before WWII. He was in the regular Army and stationed in the Philippines when the Japanese invaded. His company surrendered to the Japs and then had to endure the Bataan Death March. 

Uncle Scrubby spent WWII in a Japanese POW camp outside of Manila. I think the fact that he was short and needed fewer calories of food to live kept him alive. 

After the war, Scrubby was shipped home. His widow told my Mom that Uncle Scrubby was a skeleton. He slowly put on weight and went to work in the small town.

Scrubby’s widow told my Mom that every night for over 60 years after the war, Scrubby would scream in his sleep.

The post Grand Uncle Scrubby appeared first on LewRockwell.

Whenever I talk about things like tariffs, Trump supporters appear in my comments to tell me that Europe has gotten a free ride for long enough and that it is time we learned to pay our way. I find it a little frustrating to read this, because in Europe it does not feel like we are getting a free ride at all. In fact it seems like the opposite: The most common complaint on the populist German right is that our political class refuses to represent our interests and will not stop carrying water for the Americans.

I recognise that I’ll never be able to put this right, but it’s worth trying, because it is important to understand the world as it is. The truth is that the United States is an imperial power. Generally speaking, it does not give foreign nations free rides and it does not hand out unearned favours. There is however a lot of confusion here, because hardly anybody bothers to describe honestly the geopolitical strategy pursued by the United States or the nature of the American empire. Western liberalism cannot conceptualise imperial politics, and while empire generally benefits political elites on both sides of the Atlantic, it is not necessarily or always in the interests of ordinary Americans or ordinary Europeans, which is yet another reason not to talk about it.

The Americans and the British before them expended enormous effort to preempt the emergence of a dominant power on the European Continent that might challenge their successive naval empires. They fought two world wars to stop Germany from becoming just such a power. This great struggle ended in 1945 with Western Europe as a fully subjugated imperial province. Since then, the Americans have coordinated the NATO alliance and guaranteed the security of European countries not out of charity, but because Europe is their provincial possession. As a rule, they have not wanted Europe to assume full responsibility for its own defence, because a world in which America no longer guarantees the security of Europe is a world in which Europe is no longer an American province. It’s that simple.

To fend off the Soviets, the Americans nevertheless rebuilt and rearmed the nations of Western Europe. Everyone involved in this project had to come up with a way to allow the Germans to become a dominant economic power again, without displacing the United States or provoking the hostilities of wary postwar neighbours like France. One solution here was the European Union, which promoted economic interdependency as a counterweight to nationalist concerns. Another solution came at the cultural level, where Germany sought to allay European anxieties over possible Teutonic aggression by developing a national cult of historical guilt for World War II, which steadily blossomed into a full-blown civic religion. This exercise in self-effacement has grown more and not less extreme over time, in part as a response to nervousness about the consequences of German reunification. Many voices on the right like to portray Germans as victims of an externally imposed guilt regime, but the truth is that we did most of this to ourselves. The German left in particular has profited from and encouraged this mindset from the beginning.

German political self-effacement had one unexpected feature, in that it proved to be contagious. Within a generation of 1945, many of the victorious allied powers were striving to develop their own historical guilt cults after the German example, in each case centred around a national original sin like slavery or colonialism. Just as the German political class found it expedient to foreground collective European concerns at the expense of a more narrowly construed German nationalism, so did the broader West develop an overarching obsession with global issues and the plight of the developing world. This has caused the proliferation of a lot of silly people in our political culture, a lot of profoundly stupid organisations, and at least two cancerous ideological systems in the form of climatism and migrationism. We have had a nearly incalculable gift in the form of 80 years of peace, which may yet be offset by the equally incalculable costs of the lunacies this peace has encouraged.

Trump’s greatest geopolitical ambition is to reorient American foreign policy away from Europe and the minor rivalry with Russia, towards East Asia and the far greater rivalry with China. This pivot entails a demotion of provincial Europe in the pecking order of empire. The Americans will want Europeans to pay more for their place in the broader imperial system, and they will be inclined to extend the Europeans fewer benefits. That is what a lot of the low-resolution MAGA rhetoric about free-riding Europeans adds up to, it is the meaning of Trump’s demands that European nations massively increase NATO spending, and it has been an important subtext in the tariff negotiations too. So far, NATO member states and the EU have folded to Trump’s demands with very little resistance, despite their extravagance.

The truth is that we could fund our own defence for less than 5% of our collective GDP, but this is as yet unthinkable, because European independence would spell the end of our present system. Basically, there can be no united Europe without the Americans. If and when the Americans leave, some European nations will pursue closer trade relations with Russia; others will oppose them in this. It has been four generations since any major European nation plotted an independent geopolitical agenda; the very idea is a nightmare for our rulers, and many of the resulting alliances would remind people of unfortunate early 20th-century geopolitical configurations. This is primarily why European leaders have developed such a fanatical obsession with the war in Ukraine. For the moment, the conflict defines Russia as an external threat and suppresses all discussions about the different national interests of EU member states. It is yet another way for Germany’s political class to practice their conventional self-effacement in favour of notional pan-European interests.

As in many other cases, Trump’s policies with respect to Europe represent the culmination of forces and trends that are much bigger than his presidency. The era of unchallenged American global hegemony is over with, and in this environment being a province of the American empire will just become a steadily worse deal for Europe as a whole.

This article was originally published on Eugyppius- A Plague Chronicle.

The post Trump’s Tariffs and Those Damned Freeloading Europeans appeared first on LewRockwell.

Predicting the collapse of a country is like reading between the lines of history, economics, and politics. Some nations, however, are walking on thin ice, where even a small additional burden could lead to their downfall. In this article, we’ll explore 10 countries facing severe risks that could put them on the brink of collapse by 2027. Some of these might surprise you.

1. Lebanon: A country where nothing works anymore
Once hailed as the “Switzerland of the Middle East,” Lebanon is now in absolute economic chaos. Hyperinflation, currency collapse, and political corruption have brought the state to its knees. Ordinary citizens struggle to secure basic needs like food and fuel. Can Lebanon still be saved, or will it follow the fate of nations that fragmented into smaller entities?

2. Afghanistan: Taliban isolation and hunger
Since the Taliban regained power, Afghanistan has plunged into international isolation. Its economy is collapsing, people are starving, and humanitarian organizations cannot meet the overwhelming needs. If the situation doesn’t improve, the state risks fragmentation into territories controlled by armed factions.

3. Haiti: From freedom to a nation ruled by gangs
Haiti has been grappling with a crisis for years. With no functioning government, armed gangs dominate cities. Add to that natural disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes, and you have a recipe for complete collapse. Can Haiti ever rise again?

4. Sudan: A nation in perpetual conflict
Sudan’s civil war between the army and militias is spiraling into catastrophe. Thousands are dead, millions are displaced, and famine looms large. If the conflict continues, Sudan could disintegrate into smaller regions controlled by local warlords.

5. Venezuela: From riches to rags
Home to some of the world’s largest oil reserves, Venezuela has been in freefall for years. Hyperinflation, food shortages, and mass emigration have devastated the nation. Could Nicolás Maduro’s regime fall, or will Venezuela remain stuck in this “frozen collapse” for decades?

6. Myanmar: A coup that crushed hope
The 2021 military coup plunged Myanmar into chaos. Protests, uprisings, and ethnic conflicts have become the norm. If the military junta doesn’t relinquish power, the country risks breaking into warring regions.

7. Yemen: A nation where survival is a battle
Yemen is the epitome of disaster. Its civil war between Houthi rebels and the internationally recognized government has raged for years. Millions suffer from hunger and disease. If the conflict isn’t resolved, Yemen could vanish as a functioning state altogether.

8. North Korea: Behind the curtain of isolation
Kim Jong Un’s regime appears solid, but what if it isn’t? Economic sanctions, famine, and a possible power struggle after his death could lead to an unexpected collapse. If that happens, the chaos could be unimaginable.

9. Pakistan: Battling economic and political storms
Pakistan is grappling with an economic crisis deepened by debts and political instability. Extremism, corruption, and worsening relations with neighbors could weaken the country to the point of losing control over its regions.

10. Somalia: A collapse that never ended
Somalia has been a failed state for decades. The terrorist group Al-Shabaab still controls large swathes of territory, while the central government remains weak. Without minimal international support, total disintegration seems inevitable.

Why Do Countries Most Of Time Collapse?
Normally, the collapse of a state is always the result of a combination of factors:

• Economic instability: Hyperinflation, overwhelming debts, or resource shortages.
• Political corruption: Weak governments unable to address crises.
• Civil conflicts: Wars, ethnic tensions, or regional uprisings.
• Climate change: Worsening conditions, natural disasters, and resource depletion.
• International isolation: Sanctions or loss of foreign support.

Can Any of These Countries Be Saved?
History shows us that even nations on the brink of collapse can change course with the right leadership, international assistance, or societal unity. While rescue is possible, these cases will require far more than just hope.

Which other countries do you think are at risk? Let’s discuss.

Beyond the most vulnerable states, there are also numerous other countries that could face significant challenges if their situations do not improve.

Read the Whole Article

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story has been updated with new FBI documents recently discovered, and subsequently is being republished on August 1, 2025. Primary source documents used in the story have been notated and added to the ‘End Notes’

One of the enduring mysteries of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing case is the little-known but well-documented and indisputable fact that Timothy McVeigh and the “others unknown” involved in the attack used two different Ryder trucks in the later stages of the bombing plot.

What happened to this second truck, where it was obtained (FBI documents indicate that the FBI may have believed it was purchased at auction—more on those documents in a moment), and its final purpose remains unknown today.

Dozens of witnesses in Kansas observed two distinctly different Ryder trucks between April 11th and 18th — both parked at both Geary Lake and the Dreamland Motel.

One of the trucks was smaller, described frequently as faded yellow in color, with either no visible Ryder logo or one that was barely visible, and with a cab-overhang on the front part of the truck.

The other of the two trucks was described as much larger—the 20-foot model—and appeared cleaner and newer. This was the truck rented from Elliott’s body shop on the 17th that was ultimately used to deliver the bomb.

The Smaller “Second Truck”

The second truck, with a few exceptions, is generally omitted from most contemporary accounts of the bombing, yet its existence is confirmed within numerous FBI documents.

A half dozen people at the Dreamland Motel—where McVeigh stayed the week before the bombing—place McVeigh parking the smaller Ryder truck at the motel on Easter Sunday and Fri/Sat—days before the larger bomb truck was rented at Elliott’s on Monday the 17th.

The Dreamland Witnesses

Consider the following account from Apache helicopter mechanic Shane Boyd. Boyd stayed in room #28 at the Dreamland Motel for several weeks in April 1995 while he was working at nearby Ft. Riley. Boyd told FBI SA Mark Bouton that around 6:00 AM on Friday, April 14th, he saw a Ryder truck with a steel-framed trailer pulling out of the Dreamland Motel’s parking lot.1 Boyd also told the FBI that he is sure he saw the Ryder truck parked at the Dreamland Motel again on Saturday the 15th and Easter Sunday. 2

Consider also the accounts of Dreamland residents David King and his mother, Herta King. The Kings both saw the smaller Ryder truck the weekend before the bomb truck’s rental. FBI special agents Robert Knox and Leslie Gardner interviewed David King on April 27 regarding activities in and around the motel. King told the FBI that on Easter Sunday, his mother, Herta, visited him at the Dreamland around half past noon. King stated that both he and his mother saw a yellow Ryder truck parked directly in front of his room that Sunday afternoon.3

Herta King later testified at the McVeigh trial that she saw the Ryder truck parked at the Dreamland on Easter. She stated that she was friends with the motel owner, Lea McGown, and that they had even discussed the truck being there on Easter. King testified that Lea McGown told her “it doesn’t make sense that a truck was there on Sunday, if McVeigh rented it on Monday.”4

Indeed, it doesn’t make sense. Consider, then, what does make sense: the truck seen before the 17th was a different truck. This is what the evidence suggests. Supporting this theory is David King’s statement that he saw two different Ryder trucks at the Dreamland. King’s observations are crucial for understanding the multiple Ryder truck sightings that occurred before Monday, April 17th.

On April 16th, Easter, King saw the older “faded yellow” Ryder truck parked at the Dreamland. King then noted a change in the truck from Sunday to Monday: on Monday, McVeigh arrived driving a “brand new” and “more aerodynamic” model Ryder truck.5 This was the bomb truck that was rented from Elliott’s, and its appearance was distinctly different, much larger than the truck King and his mother had seen that weekend.

King also saw McVeigh and two other men attaching a trailer to the new Ryder truck and engaging in some activity with the truck and trailer. King recalls this because the Ryder truck blocked access to his parking spot. He noted that something was inside the trailer wrapped in a dirty white canvas tarp: “It was a squarish shape, and it came to a point on top, about three or four feet high,”6 King told the New York Times.

Witness Connie Hood described a similar scene involving the older Ryder truck that weekend: it had a trailer attached and a group of guys working there. Hood told McCurtain Gazette reporter J.D. Cash, “I saw John Doe No. 2 with McVeigh in the parking lot, and a couple of other guys were helping them. They were working on that old truck they had. There was a trailer hooked to the truck that afternoon, and it had a lot of stuff in it. I couldn’t tell what because a tarp covered the trailer.”7

Witness Shane Boyd also observed a trailer attached to the older model truck that weekend. Whatever its purpose, it seems the trailer was moved from the older truck and then attached to the new one when McVeigh showed up with it on Monday.

In addition to Shane Boyd, Herta King, David King, and Connie Hood, the owners of the Dreamland Motel also noticed the other older model truck. Motel owner Lea McGown and her son, Eric, described the truck to the FBI and reporters, and their accounts were published in the newspaper.

It was shortly after an Easter lunch when the McGowns saw McVeigh trying to park the Ryder truck.8 Lea McGown’s recollection to reporters was vivid, saying, “He backed in jerky, jerky, jerky. Like somebody who doesn’t know how to drive a truck. I thought he was going to smash my roof!”9

Upon watching this, Lea McGown sent her son, Eric, to tell McVeigh to move the truck to the open area in front of the office. Eric McGown got a good look at the truck as he did and described it in detail:

“It was medium-sized. It wasn’t one of the newest models. It was not so rounded. It had a different compartment for the one cab, and it had the trailer portion.”10

Consistent with other sightings of this second truck, it had a trailer attached, looked older, with faded and worn yellow paint, and had no writing on the back.

The Geary Lake Witnesses

Alongside the Dreamland witnesses, a handful of people observed a Ryder truck parked at Geary Lake days before the bomb truck was rented.

According to the official story, McVeigh built the bomb with Terry Nichols at Geary Lake on April 18th. However, witnesses interviewed by the FBI reported seeing a distinct yellow Ryder truck at Geary Lake fishing park for four straight days the week before: on the 11th, 12th, 13th, and 14th.

The FBI roadblock at Geary Lake gathered testimony from multiple credible witnesses who recalled seeing the truck parked there every morning on their way to work, with some also spotting the truck in the evening during their commute home.

Two of these witnesses were Kansas real estate agent Georgia Rucker11 and retiree James Sargeant12, with the latter spending the week from the 11th to the 14th fishing at the lake each morning. Sergeant testified at trial that “it’s pretty hard to forget something you see four days in a row” – much less something so out of place as a yellow moving truck parked at the shoreline. Rucker said much the same, spotting the truck parked at the lake each morning on her commute that week.

Perhaps the most interesting account from the Geary Lake witnesses is that of Robert Nelson. Nelson testified that he drove into Geary Lake on April 17th or 18th—he wasn’t sure which day. It was there that he saw the Ryder truck, surrounded by several vehicles, and a group of four to five men.13

Read the Whole Article

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On Saturday, I received three pennies in change at a store. Looking at the pennies in my hand, one jumped out for its unique color. I was happy to see it — the happy penny.

Sometimes I have to look at the date on a penny to see if it is one of those increasingly rare to receive in change pre-1982 pennies with a different metal composition than the newer pennies. But, sometimes a special hue shines through the surface giving away the relatively rare coin’s presence.

In 1965, silver was replaced with cheaper metal in new dime and quarter coins. A few years later, in 1971, President Richard Nixon closed the gold window, preventing foreign governments from exchanging their United States dollars for gold. Several decades earlier, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had demanded Americans turn in to the government their gold coins. Roosevelt then devalued the dollar in terms of gold. US gold coins production for public use also ended.

These actions, spanning roughly fifty years from the 1930s to the 1980s, were all taken to facilitate progressively inflating away the value of the dollar. Over this time, metals deemed too valuable were successively removed from US coins. First removed was gold. Then silver. Both are precious metals long valued for their monetary use. Then even the base metal copper was replaced so that new pennies are made nearly entirely of cheaper zinc.

One reason you don’t often see these older pennies, and silver coins especially, in change is that people hold on to them because of their high metal value relative to face value (the value stamped on the coins). This is an example of the behavior described in Gresham’s Law. Gresham’s law is often summed up briefly as “bad money drives out good.” In other words, people will tend to spend the lower metal value coins while saving — or exchanging at a premium over face value as is now commonly done with the old gold and silver coins — the higher metal value coins.

A little over forty years after the penny’s metal content was downgraded, the US government is taking a new sort of action with pennies because of the continuing decrease in the dollar’s value. In May, the United States Mint declared it had made its final order of blanks upon which pennies are pressed. The plan is for these blanks to be turned into the last pennies put into circulation. Fatima Hussein and Alan Suderman, reporting for the Associated Press on the discontinuation of the production of new pennies, noted that making each penny now costs almost four cents — nearly four times the coin’s face value.

Hussein and Suderman also related that a nickel costs almost 14 cents to make — nearly three times its face value. Despite the coin’s name, nickel makes up only about one fourth of the metal content of a new nickel coin. The rest is copper.

The writing seems to be on the wall for nickels. As their metallic value and production costs further and further exceed their face value, there will be more pressure to make changes in nickels’ composition to significantly reduce their cost of production. Alternatively, the government may, as is being done with the penny, just stop making new nickels.

How bad has the inflation been that the coins debasement and discontinuation of production has accompanied? Consider that the one-ounce gold coins Roosevelt demanded people turn in had a face value of twenty dollars but now have a metal content value of roughly 3,400 dollars. And the metal value of those silver dimes and quarters that the US Mint stopped producing 60 years back is now over 25 times the face value.

Why do I think of that penny with the unique color as the happy penny? The reason is because it reminds me of a time when coins, along with the dollar, retained their value instead of having their value continuously eroded by government’s inflation.

This article was originally published on The Ron Paul Institute.

The post The Happy Penny appeared first on LewRockwell.

Escalation with Russia is clearly on the cards (in one form or another), but Trump has also threatened to attack Iran’s nuclear sites – again.

A U.S. President, beset by the Epstein story that refuses to lie down and die, and under pressure from domestic hawks because of a visibly collapsing Ukraine, has been letting off a blunderbuss of geo-political threats across the board: Firstly, and principally, at Russia; but secondly at Iran: 

“Iran is so nasty, they’re so nasty in their statements. They got hit. We cannot allow them to have nuclear weapons. They are still talking about uranium enrichment. Who talks like that? It’s so stupid. We will not allow it.”

Escalation with Russia is clearly on the cards (in one form or another), but Trump has also threatened to attack Iran’s nuclear sites – again. Were he to do so, it would be ‘gesture politics’ entirely removed from the reality of Iran’s present circumstance.

A further strike would be presented as setting back – or finally halting – Iran’s capacity to assemble a nuclear weapon.

And that would be a lie.

Theodore Postol, Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and International Security at MIT, regarded as the U.S.’ leading expert on nuclear weapons and their delivery systems, however makes some counter-intuitive technical points which, when translated politically (the aim of this piece), plainly indicate that a further attack on the three nuclear sites struck by the U.S. on 22 June would be pointless.

It would be pointless in terms of Trump’s ostensible objective – yet a strike may happen anyway albeit as a piece of theatre designed to facilitate other different objectives such an attempt at “regime change” and furthering Israel’s hegemonic ambitions in the region.

Simply put, Professor Postol’s compelling argument is that Iran does not need to rebuild its previous nuclear program in order to build a bomb. That era is over. Both the U.S. and Israel believe, with good reason, Postol says, that most of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium (HEU) survived the attack and is accessible:

“The tunnels at Esfahan are deep – so deep that the United States did not even try to collapse them with the bunker busters. Assuming the material wasn’t moved, it is now sitting unsquashed in intact tunnels. Iran unblocked the entrance to one tunnel at Esfahan within a week of the strike”.

In short, the U.S. strike did not set back the Iranian programme by years. It is highly likely that most of Iran’s HEU survived the strikes, Postol estimates.

The IAEA says that Iran had, at the time of the strike, 408kg of 60% HEU. It likely was removed by Iran before the Trump strike, which Postol has said could be readily transferred on the back of a pick-up (“or even a donkey cart!”). But the point is that no one knows where that HEU is. And it almost certainly is accessible.

Professor Postol’s key argument (– he eschews drawing political implications –) is the paradox that the more highly enriched the uranium is, the easier further enrichment becomes. As a result, Iran could make do with a centrifuge facility much smaller – yes, much, much smaller than the industrial-scale plants at Fordow or Natanz (which were designed to accommodate thousands and tens of thousands of centrifuges, respectively).

Postol has drawn up the technical outline for a 174 centrifuge cascade that would require a mere 4 to 5 weeks for Iran to obtain enough weapons-grade uranium (as enriched hexafluoride gas) for one bomb. In 2023, the IAEA found uranium particles enriched to 83.7% (weapons grade). This likely was an experimental exercise to prove to themselves that they could do it when, and as, they wanted, Professor Postol suggests.

Postol’s cascade demonstration was intended to underline the point – ‘the secret story of enrichment’ – that with 60% HEU, it takes almost no enrichment effort to reach 83.7%.

What may be even more shocking to the non-technical observer, is that Postol has further demonstrated that a 174 centrifuge cascade could be fitted within a space of a mere 60 square metres – the floor space of any modest city apartment, and would require, as power input, just a few tens of kilowatts.

In short, a few such small enrichment facilities could be hidden anywhere in a vast country – needles in a big haystack. Even the conversion of the uranium to uranium metal 235 would be a ‘small size operation’ that could be done in a facility of 120 to 150 sq. m.

In another culling of the shibboleths surrounding the Iranian reality, building a spherical atomic bomb requires no more than 14 kg uranium metal 235, surrounded by a reflector. ‘It is not high tech; it’s garden shed stuff’. Just assemble the pieces; no test needed. Postol says: ‘Little Boy’ was dropped on Hiroshima. Without a lot of testing; wrong to think it needs testing.

There goes another Shibboleth! ‘We would know if Iran moved to weapons capability, because we could detect seismically any test of a weapon’.

A small Atomic bomb of this nature would weigh just 150 kg. (The warheads on some Iranian missiles launched on Israel in the course of the 12 day war, by comparison, weighed between 460 and 500 kg).

Ted Postol is careful not to spell out the political implications. Yet they are absolutely clear: There is no point to another round of bombing Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. The bird has gone. The coops are empty.

Professor Postol, as the foremost technical expert in nuclear matters, briefs the Pentagon and Congress. He knows Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and reportedly briefed her before the Trump strike on Fordow on 22 June to argue that the U.S. likely would not be able to destroy the deeply buried centrifuge hall at Fordow. (Other Pentagon reportedly officials disagreed).

We know that the U.S. did not even try to collapse the tunnels under Isfahan with the bunker busters, but contented themselves with trying to block the several tunnel entrances to Isfahan by using conventional weapons (such the aging Tomahawk missiles, launched from submarines).

To repeat the 22 June exercise would be pure Kabuki theatre devoid of any solid objective based in reality. So why might Trump still contemplate it? He told reporters during his recent Scottish visit that Iran has been sending out “nasty signals” and any effort to restart its nuclear program would be immediately quashed:

“We wiped out their nuclear possibilities. They can start again. If they do, we’ll wipe it out faster than you can wave your finger at it”.

There are several possibilities: Trump may hope that a further attack might finally – in his and others’ estimation – prompt the Iranian government to fall. He may too instinctively shy away from kinetic escalation against Russia, fearing the conflict might spin out of control. And subsequently might conclude that he could, the more easily, spin an attack on Iran as showcasing U.S. ‘strength’ – i.e. spin it, irrespective of truth, as another “obliterated” claim.

Finally, he might think to do it, believing Israel desperately wants and needs it.

The last seems the more likely motivation. However, the biggest game-changer of the present geo-strategic era has been the revolution in terms of accuracy of Russian and Iranian ballistics and hypersonics, that precisely destroy a target with negligible collateral damage – and which the West basically can’t stop.

This changes the entire geo-strategic calculus – especially for Israel. A further attack on Iran, far from benefitting Israel, might unleash a devastating Iranian missile riposte on Israel.

The rest – Trump’s narratives – are Kabuki theatre: A Potemkin simulacrum of supporting Israel, whilst the true underlying objective is to collapse and Balkanise Iran – and weaken Russia.

An Israeli Colonel told Netanyahu (Postol relates) that by attacking Iran ‘we’ll likely have a weapons state on our hands’. Tulsi Gabbard likely told Trump the same.

Professor Postol concurs. Iran must be viewed as an undeclared nuclear weapons State, albeit one with its exact status carefully obfuscated.

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

The post A Further U.S. Attack on Iran Would Be Pointless Kabuki appeared first on LewRockwell.

A few weeks ago I published an article noting that the State of Israel and the Zionist movement that gave rise to it have probably employed assassination as a tool of statecraft more heavily than any other political entity in recorded history. Indeed, their deadly activities had easily eclipsed those of the notorious Muslim sect that had terrorized the Middle East a thousand years ago and gave rise to that term.

The piece had been prompted by Israel’s sudden strike against Iran, capping its reputation as the greatest band of assassins known to history. Even as the Iranian government was intensely focused on the negotiations with America over its nuclear program, a sudden Israeli surprise attack successfully assassinated most of Iran’s highest military commanders, some of its political leaders, and nearly all of its most prominent nuclear scientists. I cannot recall any previous case in which a major country had ever had so large a fraction of its top military, political, and scientific leadership eliminated in that sort of illegal sneak attack.

Less than one year earlier, a series of missile exchanges between Israel and Iran had soon been followed by the death of hardline Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and his foreign minister in a highly-suspicious and never explained helicopter crash. Given subsequent events, I think we can safely assume that he, too, had died at the hands of the Israelis.

• Zionist Israel as the Assassination Nation
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 23, 2025 • 11,800 Words

Earlier this year, the declassification of a large batch of JFK Assassination files had prompted me to recapitulate and summarize many of my articles of the last half-dozen years on that landmark twentieth century event. I gathered together some of the very considerable evidence that the Israeli Mossad played the central role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 as well as the death of his younger brother Robert a few years later, probably the highest-profile political assassinations of the last one hundred years or more.

• How Israel Killed the Kennedys
  Ron Unz and Mike Whitney • The Unz Review • March 24, 2025 • 11,500 Words

The most weighty and authoritative work on the long history of Israeli assassinations is surely Ronen Bergman’s 2018 volume Rise and Kill First, running 750 pages and including a thousand-odd source references, with many of the latter citing official documents never previously made available to journalists. By some estimates, this book documented nearly 3,000 such foreign political killings, a remarkable total for a small country then less than three generations old.

Although the Bergman book was certainly very comprehensive, it was produced under strict Israeli censorship, so the text quite understandably omitted almost any coverage of some of the highest-profile Zionist attacks on Western targets. For example, there was no mention of the unsuccessful but well-documented attempts to kill President Harry Truman, nor the assassination efforts aimed at British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the top members of his Cabinet.

Some of this latter coverage may be found in Thomas Suarez’s 2016 book State of Terror which I would recommend as a very useful supplementary work, though its focus is almost entirely limited to the activities of Zionist groups just prior to the establishment of Israel.

For a broader discussion of the history of Israeli assassinations and closely-related terrorist attacks, especially those targeting Westerners, one of the most useful compilations might be my own very long January 2020 article, providing extensive references to the underlying primary and secondary sources.

• American Pravda: Mossad Assassinations
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 27, 2020 • 27,300 Words

That 2020 article had actually been prompted by America’s own sudden assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, a shocking development that drew a great deal of media coverage at the time.

I had opened my long discussion by noting that over the last several centuries Western governments had almost totally abandoned the use of political assassinations against the leadership of major rival nations, regarding such actions as immoral and illegal.

For example, historian David Irving revealed that when one of Adolf Hitler’s aides suggested to him that an attempt be made to assassinate the Soviet military leadership during the bitter combat on the Eastern Front of World War II, the German Fuhrer immediately forbade any such practices as obvious violations of the laws of civilized warfare.

For most of American history, a similar attitude had prevailed, but I explained that this began to change over the last couple of decades, mostly in the wake of the 9/11 Attacks.

The 1914 terrorist assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was certainly organized by fanatical elements of Serbian Intelligence, but the Serbian government fiercely denied its own complicity, and no major European power was ever directly implicated in the plot. The aftermath of the killing soon led to the outbreak of World War I, and although many millions died in the trenches over the next few years, it would have been completely unthinkable for one of the major belligerents to consider assassinating the leadership of another.

A century earlier, the Napoleonic Wars had raged across the entire continent of Europe for most of a generation, but I don’t recall reading of any governmental assassination plots during that era, let alone in the quite gentlemanly wars of the preceding 18th century when Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa disputed ownership of the wealthy province of Silesia by military means. I am hardly a specialist in modern European history, but after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War and regularized the rules of warfare, no assassination as high-profile as that of Gen. Soleimani comes to mind…

During our Revolutionary War, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and our other Founding Fathers fully recognized that if their effort failed, they would all be hanged as rebels by the British. However, I have never heard that they feared falling to an assassin’s blade, nor that King George III ever considered using such an underhanded means of attack. During the first century and more of our nation’s history, nearly all our presidents and other top political leaders traced their ancestry back to the British Isles, and political assassinations were exceptionally rare, with Abraham Lincoln’s death being one of the very few that comes to mind.

At the height of the Cold War, our CIA did involve itself in various secret assassination plots against Cuba’s Communist dictator Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders considered hostile to US interests. But when these facts later came out in the 1970s, they evoked such enormous outrage from the public and the media, that three consecutive American presidents—Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan—all issued successive Executive Orders absolutely prohibiting assassinations by the CIA or any other agent of the US government.

Although some cynics might claim that these public declarations represented mere window-dressing, a March 2018 book review in the New York Times strongly suggests otherwise. Kenneth M. Pollack spent years as a CIA analyst and National Security Council staffer, then went on to publish a number of influential books on foreign policy and military strategy over the last two decades. He had originally joined the CIA in 1988, and opens his review by declaring:

One of the very first things I was taught when I joined the CIA was that we do not conduct assassinations. It was drilled into new recruits over and over again.

Yet Pollack notes with dismay that over the last quarter-century, these once solid prohibitions have been steadily eaten away, with the process rapidly accelerating after the 9/11 attacks of 2001. The laws on our books may not have changed, but

Today, it seems that all that is left of this policy is a euphemism.

We don’t call them assassinations anymore. Now, they are “targeted killings,” most often performed by drone strike, and they have become America’s go-to weapon in the war on terror.

The Bush Administration had conducted 47 of these assassinations-by-another-name, while his successor Barack Obama, a constitutional scholar and Nobel Peace Prize winner, had raised his own total to 542. Not without justification, Pollack wonders whether assassination has become “a very effective drug, but [one that] treats only the symptom and so offers no cure.”

Thus over the last couple of decades the American government has followed a disturbing trajectory in its use of assassination as a tool of foreign policy, first restricting its application only to the most extreme circumstances, next targeting small numbers of high-profile “terrorists” hiding in rough terrain, then escalating those same killings to the many hundreds. And now under President Trump, the fateful step has been taken of America claiming the right to assassinate any world leader not to our liking whom we unilaterally declare worthy of death.

Pollack had made his career as a Clinton Democrat, and is best known for his 2002 book The Threatening Storm that strongly endorsed President Bush’s proposed invasion of Iraq and was enormously influential in producing bipartisan support for that ill-fated policy. I have no doubt that he is a committed supporter of Israel, and he probably falls into a category that I would loosely describe as “Left Neocon.”

But while reviewing a history of Israel’s own long use of assassination as a mainstay of its national security policy, he seems deeply disturbed that America might now be following along that same terrible path.

Pollock’s discussion of these facts came in his lengthy 2018 New York Times review of the Bergman book entitled “Learning From Israel’s Political Assassination Program,” and he greatly decried what many have called the “Israelization” of the American government and its military doctrine. President Donald Trump’s sudden public assassination of so high-profile a foreign leader as Gen. Soleimani came less than two years later and demonstrated that Pollock’s concerns were fully warranted and indeed even understated.

As my January 2020 article explained, nothing like this had ever previously happened in peacetime American history, and only very rarely even during wars.

The January 2nd American assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani of Iran was an event of enormous moment.

Gen. Soleimani had been the highest-ranking military figure in his nation of 80 million, and with a storied career of 30 years, one of the most universally popular and highly regarded. Most analysts ranked him second in influence only to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s elderly Supreme Leader, and there were widespread reports that he was being urged to run for the presidency in the 2021 elections.

The circumstances of his peacetime death were also quite remarkable. His vehicle was incinerated by the missile of an American Reaper drone near Iraq’s Baghdad international airport just after he had arrived there on a regular commercial flight for peace negotiations originally suggested by the American government.

Our major media hardly ignored the gravity of this sudden, unexpected killing of so high-ranking a political and military figure, and gave it enormous attention. A day or so later, the front page of my morning New York Times was almost entirely filled with coverage of the event and its implications, along with several inside pages devoted to the same topic. Later that same week, America’s national newspaper of record allocated more than one-third of all the pages of its front section to the same shocking story.

But even such copious coverage by teams of veteran journalists failed to provide the incident with its proper context and implications. Last year, the Trump Administration had declared the Iranian Revolutionary Guard “a terrorist organization,” drawing widespread criticism and even ridicule from national security experts appalled at the notion of classifying a major branch of Iran’s armed forces as “terrorists.” Gen. Soleimani was a top commander in that body, and this apparently provided the legal fig-leaf for his assassination in broad daylight while on a diplomatic peace mission.

• American Pravda: Mossad Assassinations
  From the Peace of Westphalia to the Law of the Jungle
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 27, 2020 • 27,300 Words

Although Pollock provided some explanations for this shocking transformation in American doctrine, he failed to note what was arguably the most obvious factor. Over the last generation or two, the American government and American political life have been almost entirely captured by what scholars John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt called “The Israel Lobby” in their best-selling 2008 book of that title, and this political and ideological transformation has only further accelerated in the last couple of years, most recently reaching ridiculous, almost cartoonishly extreme levels.

Read the Whole Article

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I need to be more empathetic with Putin’s hopes.  Sometimes I, too, let hopes run away with me.  

Yes, I was wrong to hope President Trump would normalize relations with Russia.  Perhaps Trump intended to do so, until the men in black knocked on his door and told him that he was not allowed to takeaway the enemy that justified the power and profit of the military/security complex.

In the era of nuclear weapons it makes perfect sense to be on good terms with other nuclear powers.  Mutual suspicions and high tensions can result in catastrophic consequences.  Russia has not threatened us and clearly has no territorial ambitions.  Putin’s ambition is a mutual security agreement with the West.

For some reason Trump won’t consider it.  Perhaps the situation is one of armament profits taking precedence over life. 

Trump doesn’t negotiate.  He delivers ultimatums with punishments attached for non-compliance.  Never during the Cold War did an American president issue an ultimatum to the Soviet leader.  

What is Putin supposed to comply with?  Trump hasn’t told us or Putin.  It seems that Trump intends for Putin to make a deal with Zelensky to end the conflict.  But how can Putin do this when Zelensky has said that his terms are for Russia to give back Donbas, Crimea, and pay war reparations, when Zelensky is no longer officially the president and has no authority to negotiate for Ukraine, and when Zelensky is merely the proxy that Washington is using in its war with Russia?

Trump says it is not his war. Perhaps, but it is Washington’s war, and Trump is the president in Washington.  So it is Trump’s war.

Trump can stop the war by ending weapons delivery, financing, and diplomatic cover, but Trump has not done so.

Trump can stop the conflict by sitting down with Putin, understanding what Putin means by “the root causes of the war,” and addressing these issues, but Trump has not done so.

Instead, Trump issues meaningless ultimatums that show that Trump is not sincere about ending tensions with Russia.  Clearly, ultimatums are not the way to normalize relations. 

As far as I can tell, the media have not asked Trump what the agreement is or what parts of the agreement are unacceptable to the Russians.

It is reckless to issue threats to Russia in an atmosphere so tense.  Putin’s efforts to avoid real war have been misinterpreted as irresolution, thus resulting in more provocations.  Putin’s avoidance of war is leading to a larger war.  At some point the provocation will go too far.  Maybe it will be the missiles that Trump and the Germans are talking about firing at Moscow.

This is the dangerous situation that urgently needs to be resolved, not the conflict in Ukraine.  If the root causes are addressed, the war goes away.

The post Is Trump Taking Us to War? appeared first on LewRockwell.

For much of his life, John Henry Newman was a towering figure in the Church of England. A brilliant theologian, preacher, and professor at Oxford, he was widely respected for his intellect and piety. As a longtime Anglican priest, Newman devoted himself to defending the Church of England against both secularism and the perceived errors of Catholicism. Yet, in a dramatic twist of providence, the very work he undertook to defend Anglicanism ultimately led him to embrace the Catholic Church he had long opposed.

Newman was a central figure in the Oxford Movement (1833–1845), a group of Anglican scholars and clergy who sought to revive the Church of England’s connection to its ancient Catholic roots. They emphasized the importance of the early Church Fathers, apostolic succession, liturgical beauty, and the sacraments—all while remaining firmly within the Anglican tradition. Newman and his colleagues believed the Church of England represented a via media, or middle way, between the extremes of Protestant reform and Roman Catholic authority.

As opposition to the Oxford Movement grew and theological disputes intensified, Newman felt compelled to defend the integrity of Anglicanism on firmer intellectual ground. In doing so, he set out to write a theological work that would distinguish Anglican teaching from Roman Catholicism while still affirming its legitimacy as the true inheritor of apostolic Christianity. The result was his 1845 masterpiece, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.

The irony is inescapable: Newman’s attempt to defend Anglicanism became the very instrument of his conversion.

As Newman studied Church history with increasing depth, he became convinced that many of the teachings he had rejected as Catholic “additions”—like the papacy, Marian devotion, and purgatory—were not corruptions but organic developments growing from the seed of apostolic teaching. In contrast, he found the Anglican claim to possess full continuity with the early Church historically fragile and theologically inconsistent.

It was in this context that Newman wrote his now-famous line: “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.”

By the time he finished writing the Essay, Newman had already made up his mind. His intellectual honesty, coupled with years of spiritual struggle, brought him to the conviction that the Catholic Church was the true continuation of the Church founded by Christ. In October 1845, he was received into the Church by the Italian Passionist missionary Blessed Dominic Barberi.

The conversion stunned English society and scandalized many of his former Anglican colleagues. For them, Newman had not just left a church; he had joined an enemy.

But Newman’s journey was not one of betrayal—it was one of integrity. He had followed the truth wherever it led, even at great personal and professional cost.

In the years that followed, Newman became one of the most celebrated Catholic thinkers in the English-speaking world. He was eventually named a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879. His influence extended far beyond theology into education, philosophy, and literature. In 2019, Pope Francis canonized him as St. John Henry Newman, recognizing his holiness, brilliance, and enduring impact.

Now, Pope Leo XIV is preparing to name St. John Henry Newman a Doctor of the Church, a title reserved for saints whose theological writings have contributed significantly to the universal understanding of the Faith. Such an honor would affirm what many Catholics have long recognized: Newman’s insights into doctrine, conscience, and the development of faith remain essential for our time.

Newman’s story is especially powerful today, as many sincere Protestants wrestle with questions of authority, doctrine, and historical continuity. His own journey is a reminder that the search for truth must be grounded in both faith and reason. Perhaps our prayer might be that St. John Henry Newman will continue to lead others toward the fullness of truth and the beauty of the Catholic Faith.

His life stands as a witness to the idea that God sometimes works through irony—and that those who seek to defend error in good faith may ultimately become its most effective critics simply by following the truth to its source.

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

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Last week the nuclear rhetoric between the US and Russia made some of us feel like we were transported back to 1962. Back then, Soviet moves to place nuclear-capable missiles 90 miles off our coast in Cuba led to the greatest crisis of the Cold War. The United States and its president, John F. Kennedy, could not tolerate such weapons placed by a hostile power on its doorstep and the world only knew years later how close we were to nuclear war.

Thankfully both Khrushchev and Kennedy backed down – with the Soviet leader removing the missiles from Cuba and the US president agreeing to remove some missiles from Turkey. Both men realized the folly of playing with “mutually assured destruction,” and this compromise likely paved the way to further US/Soviet dialogue from Nixon to President Reagan and finally to the end of the Cold War.

Fast forward more than 60 years later and we have a US president, Donald Trump, who last week stated that he had “ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions,” meaning nearer to Russia.

Had Russia attacked the US or an ally? Threatened to do so? No. The supposed re-positioning of US strategic military assets was in response to a sharp series of posts made by former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev on social media that irritated President Trump.

The war of words started earlier, when neocon US Senator Lindsey Graham’s endless threats against Russia received a response – and a warning – from Medvedev. Graham, who seems to love war more than anything else, posted “To those in Russia who believe that President Trump is not serious about ending the bloodbath between Russia and Ukraine… You will also soon see that Joe Biden is no longer president. Get to the peace table.”

Medvedev responded, “It’s not for you or Trump to dictate when to ‘get at the peace table’. Negotiations will end when all the objectives of our military operation have been achieved. Work on America first, gramps!”

That was enough for Trump to join in to defend his ill-chosen ally Graham and ended with Medvedev alluding to Soviet nuclear doctrine which provided for an automatic nuclear response to any first strike on the USSR by US or NATO weapons.

The message from the Russian politician was clear: back off. It was hardly Khruschev banging his shoe at the UN screaming “we will bury you,” but it was enough for Trump to make a rare public pronouncement about the movement of US nuclear submarines.

Trump is understandably frustrated that his promise to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours has not been fulfilled after six months in office. President Trump doesn’t seem to understand that you cannot arm one side in a war and then demand that the other side – the side that’s winning – stop fighting. That has never happened in history.

What is most tragic is that the war in Ukraine could have likely been ended if not in 24 hours, then surely in six months if Trump simply ended Joe Biden’s policy on Ukraine. It is continued US support for the war that keeps the war going. Even the US mainstream media admits that Ukraine will lose. But Trump seems under the spell of the neocons who can never reverse a failed policy.

Hopefully the return of nuclear rhetoric will awaken some in DC to the danger that the neocons pose to our country. We are no longer in 1962.

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