“In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more than 300,000 white people were shipped to America as slaves. Urchins were swept up from London’s streets to labor in the tobacco fields, where life expectancy was no more than two years. Brothels were raided to provide “breeders” for Virginia. Hopeful migrants were duped into signing as indentured servants, unaware they would become personal property who could be bought, sold, and even gambled away. Transported convicts were paraded for sale like livestock.

“Drawing on letters crying for help, diaries, and court and government archives, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh demonstrate that the brutalities usually associated with black slavery alone were perpetrated on whites throughout British rule. The trade ended with American independence, but the British still tried to sell convicts in their former colonies, which prompted one of the most audacious plots in Anglo-American history.

“This is a saga of exploration and cruelty spanning 170 years that has been submerged under the overwhelming memory of black slavery. White Cargo brings the brutal, uncomfortable story to the surface.”

They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America, by Michael Hoffman

https://dn721603.ca.archive.org/0/items/they-were-white-and-they-were-slaves-the-untold-history-of-the-enslavement-of-wh/They%20Were%20White%20and%20They%20Were%20Slaves_The%20Untold%20History%20of%20the%20Enslavement%20of%20Whites%20in%20Early%20America_Michael%20A.%20Hoffman%20II.pdf

“They Were White and They Were Slaves is a thoroughly researched challenge to the conventional historiography of colonial and industrial labor, a stunning journey into a hidden epoch, the slave trade of Whites, hundreds of thousands of whom were kidnapped, chained, whipped and worked to death in the American colonies and during the Industrial Revolution. This is a chronicle that has never been fully told, part of a vital heritage that has until now comprised the dustiest shelf in the darkest corner of suppressed history.”

Black Slaveowners, By Larry Koger (article)
https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/black-slaveowners/

Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860, by Larry Koger (book)
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Slaveowners-Masters-Carolina-1790-1860/dp/0786469315/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1452177778&sr=8-1&keywords=larry+koger

“Drawing on the federal census, wills, mortgage bills of sale, tax returns, and newspaper advertisements, this authoritative study describes the nature of African-American slaveholding, its complexity, and its rationales. It reveals how some African-American slave masters had earned their freedom and how some free Blacks purchased slaves for their own use. The book provides a fresh perspective on slavery in the antebellum South and underscores the importance of African Americans in the history of American slavery.

“The book also paints a picture of the complex social dynamics between free and enslaved Blacks, and between Black and white slaveowners. It illuminates the motivations behind African-American slaveholding–including attempts to create or maintain independence, to accumulate wealth, and to protect family members–and sheds light on the harsh realities of slavery for both Black masters and Black slaves.

• BLACK SLAVEOWNERS–Shows how some African Americans became slave masters

• MOTIVATIONS FOR SLAVEHOLDING–Highlights the motivations behind African-American slaveholding

• SOCIAL DYNAMICS–Sheds light on the complex social dynamics between free and enslaved Blacks

• ANEBELLUM SOUTH–Provides a perspective on slavery in the antebellum South”

Whites Were Slaves In North Africa Before Blacks Were Slaves In The New World, By Paul Craig Roberts
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/03/paul-craig-roberts/whites-were-slaves-in-north-africa-before-blacks-were-slaves-in-the-new-world/

America’s First Slaves: Whites : NPR

White slavery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_slavery

American Pravda: Amazon Book Censorship, by Ron Unz
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-amazon-book-censorship

The post Detailed Facts Concerning Slavery, Reparations And Other Inconvenient Authoritative Information Concerning This Barbaric Institution appeared first on LewRockwell.

Putting Israel First, Rubio Victimizes Harmless Student Over Op-Ed

Mar, 03/06/2025 - 05:01

Given Marco Rubio’s long history of subservience to the State of Israel — which has earned him a mountain of campaign cash from the country’s US-based collaborators — many Americans were understandably wary that his ascension from senator to secretary of State portended disturbing moves to advance Israel’s interests. However, few foresaw Rubio orchestrating the abduction, imprisonment and deportation of foreign students for using their universal human right of free speech to criticize the Israeli government and advocate for Palestinians.

With President Trump’s blessing, Rubio has targeted many foreign students in this fashion — students who’ve been charged with no crimes. However, no case better illustrates the campaign’s casual cruelty than that of 30-year-old Tufts University PhD candidate Rumeysa Ozturk. Ozturk, who’s been studying child development, was arrested in March and whisked away to a far-off prison merely because — an entire year earlier — she co-authored a Tufts Daily op-ed urging the university to formally characterize Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocide, and to sell the school’s Israel-associated investments.

Rubio would like you to assume her essay must have been an unhinged, antisemitic, violence-inciting screed. To the contrary, harkening back to Tufts’ 1989 decision to divest from apartheid South Africa, its tone is decidedly calm and measured. Read this excerpt of the essay’s most pointed language about Israel and judge for yourself:

These [student senate] resolutions were the product of meaningful debate…and represent a sincere effort to hold Israel accountable for clear violations of international law. Credible accusations against Israel include accounts of deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide.

…the student body is calling for … the University to end its complicity with Israel insofar as it is oppressing the Palestinian people and denying their right to self-determination — a right that is guaranteed by international law. These strong lobbying tools are all the more urgent now given the order by the International Court of Justice confirming that the Palestinian people of Gaza’s rights under the Genocide Convention are under a “plausible” risk of being breached.

Ozturk’s persecution represents a major escalation of an aggravating dynamic in which people in the United States are vilified as dangerous, volatile antisemites for saying things about Israel that are frequently said by respected people and institutions in Israel. For example, in an op-ed of his own, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert this week wrote, “What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians … Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.”

In March of this year, the State Department revoked Ozturk’s student visa without notifying her — she had no idea that her presence in the country was now illegal. Four days later, in an incident captured on video, she was grabbed off a Somerville, Massachusetts street by masked, plain-clothed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, taken to New Hampshire and then Vermont, before being shackled in chains and airlifted 1,400 miles to a federal detention center in Louisiana.

For the next month and a half, she was stuffed with 23 others in a cell meant for 14. Ozturk says constant exposure to dust and inadequate ventilation sparked more than a dozen asthma attacks — after having previously had only about 13 in her entire life. Sleep was hard to come by, as motion-detecting fluorescent lights repeatedly triggered throughout the night.

Trying to justify the unjustifiable, the Trump administration has gone to slanderous extremes to vilify Ozturk. In a since-deleted social media post following her arrest, Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said “DHS + ICE investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.” (As an aside, note that, while some 43 Americans — including dual nationals — died in the Oct 7 attacks, there’s no history of Hamas ever setting out to target Americans.)

When protests of Israel’s tactics in Gaza erupted in 2022, Israel supporters across government, major media and social media branded all pro-Palestine protesters as Hamas supporters and antisemites. With the ascendency of the second Trump administration, that tactic has evolved from a malicious PR smear to a government-weaponized allegation that’s putting nonviolent foreign students in prisons and derailing their lives — all in service to a foreign country.

In a partial reversal of her appalling treatment, Ozturk was released from confinement on May 9 on the orders of a federal judge, who also denied the government’s wish to make her wear an ankle monitor. However, her troubles are far from over: In addition to the enduring harm of a six-week interruption of her academic pursuits, she is still targeted for deportation.

When DHS initially leveled the “activities in support of Hamas” accusation against Ozturk, many people assumed the government must have something on her other than an essay in a student newspaper. However, as the weeks ground on, the government never pointed to anything else, something US District Judge William Sessions noted when he ordered her to be released from her cage in Louisiana :

“I suggested to the government that they produce any additional information which would suggest that she posed a substantial risk. And that was three weeks ago, and there has been no evidence introduced by the government other than the op-ed. That literally is the case. There is no evidence here...The court finds that Ms. Öztürk has raised a substantial claim of a constitutional violation.”

Judge Sessions called Ozturk’s seizure “a traumatic incident” and said “her continued detention potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens.” That is most certainly the Trump administration’s goal.

Falling for Rubio’s dishonest portrayal of his prey and failing to scrutinize the facts, many so-called “conservatives” have enthused over his drive to deport anti-Israel activists and rushed to defend it. In their flimsiest argument, you’ll find them claiming Ozturk and others have no right of free speech because they’re not US citizens. That hollow attack rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of rights — one that wrongly views rights as government-granted privileges, rather than something that springs from one’s humanity. As I’ve explained elsewhere at Stark Realities, the Constitution’s Bill of Rights isn’t a granting of rights, it’s a prohibition against government interference with pre-existing rights shared by everyone on Earth.

Employing a quintessential straw man argument, Rubio and others also say “nobody has a right to a visa.” The controversy has never been about any mythical entitlement to visas — it’s about the morality and constitutionality of using visa revocations as a means of punishing and suppressing expression of certain political beliefs.

To mete out that punishment, Rubio and the Trump administration are exploiting the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which recklessly empowers the secretary of State — a single individual — to deport foreigners the secretary deems “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests” of the United States. The law provides no elaboration on that standard, much less any provision for its application with any semblance of due process for the affected individual.

Invoking that provision, the administration told a court that DHS and ICE determined Ozturk “had been involved in associations that ‘may undermine U.S foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization’ including co-authoring an op-ed that found common cause with an organization that was later temporarily banned from campus.”

First, note how tangential and tenuous the opening and concluding allegations are. The government says Ozturk is being targeted for unspecified “associations,” and because her stance on Israel merely overlaps with the stance of a campus group that was only temporarily banned.

Next, we see the Trump administration dishonestly saying Ozturk “indicat[ed] support for Hamas” by writing an op-ed calling for Tufts to say Israel is committing war crimes, and to divest from the country. The op-ed never mentions Hamas or Oct. 7 or even implicitly endorses the group or its tactics, and there’s been no allegation of any other form of her supposed “support for Hamas.”

The administration also employs the Israeli-propagandist idea that criticism of the State of Israel — a political entity — creates a “hostile environment” for Jewish students. That notion is itself a form of bigotry — as it presumes all Jews endorse Israel’s actions. Of course, that presumption is belied by the significant presence of Jewish students in many protests of Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Meanwhile, the notion that pro-Israel Jews should be protected from hearing contrary views is wildly hypocritical from an administration that — in regard to other topics — has rightly targeted censorship meant to prevent so-called “snowflakes” from having their feelings hurt.

Defenders of the administration’s conduct are compelled to do more than point to its supposed legality under a 1952 law. From FDR putting Japanese-Americans in concentration camps to Woodrow Wilson jailing opponents of the draft, there’s a difference between legality and morality and bona fide constitutionality. Meanwhile, Ozturk’s ongoing challenge of her arrest and pending deportation may well reset the bounds of what’s legal under the Immigration and Nationality Act, with the courts potentially ruling it’s unconstitutional to revoke a visa over the expression of an opinion.

Finally, even the most ardent backers of the Israeli government should recognize that the use of the Immigration Act to round up and deport people whose views are inconsistent with the current administration’s foreign policy threatens to set a dangerous precedent — one that could see a future, Israel-hostile White House seizing, jailing and deporting foreign students who advocate US aid to Israel.

Read the Whole Article

The post Putting Israel First, Rubio Victimizes Harmless Student Over Op-Ed appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Southern Cause: What Led to Secession

Mar, 03/06/2025 - 05:01

It is correct, analytically and logically, to distinguish secession from war. Many states secede peacefully, and it does not logically follow that secession must occasion war. The Southern states of America seceded peacefully, and Lincoln’s subsequent war which followed four months after secession was entirely unnecessary. Hence, Murray Rothbard wrote in his memo to the Volker Fund in 1961 that,

The road to Civil War must be divided into two parts:

- the causes of the controversy over slavery leading to secession, and
- the immediate causes of the war itself.

The reason for such split is that secession need not have led to Civil War, despite the assumption to the contrary by most historians.

Nevertheless, in understanding the Southern Cause it would be historically misleading to isolate secession entirely from the war, or to treat the two events as hermetically sealed off from each other. It is important to split them for the purpose Rothbard stated, namely, to debunk the assumption that secession must involve war, because many people wrongly view calls for secession as calls for war. But it does not follow that in understanding American history, the two events must be treated, for all purposes, as if they were not in any way historically, causally, or morally connected.

The Southern Cause found its expression in both secession and war, and it would be quite wrong to pretend that secession and war had nothing to do with each other as many libertarians attempt to do. They leap from one assumption—that secession and war need always be bound together—to the opposite assumption, that secession and war had nothing to do with each other. Their reason for clinging to this second assumption is that they wish to depict the Southern Cause as having two morally-distinct elements, one of which was just while the other was unjust.

Secession is seen as having been motivated primarily by a wicked cause, namely slavery, while the war itself is seen as motivated by a just cause, namely self-defense. In essence, they view the Southern Cause as containing two distinct moral elements: the morality of secession and the morality of war. They presume that the wickedness of the first would in no way taint the justice of the second, since they view the two as morally distinct. For libertarians who agree with Rothbard that the war of defense against Northern aggression was just, the morality of secession still remains contested.

In his article, “A Moral Accounting of the Union and the Confederacy,” Donald Livingston argues that secession was morally sound. He begins by establishing the foundations of his moral premise, namely, the right to secede:

Libertarians are and must be sympathetic to secession, for secession is nothing other than an exit right, a right internal to the very idea of liberty. Secession is not always justified, but, for libertarians, it is presumed morally justified unless compelling reasons to the contrary exist.

The question that must then arise is how secession could be morally sound if the aim of secession was to defend slavery. In Livingston’s view, the claim that secession was motivated by a desire to defend slavery is not based on historical analysis but on the mythology surrounding the righteousness of Lincoln’s War. He calls this the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” myth:

First, the founding myth of American nationalism is that the South seceded to protect slavery while the North invaded to abolish it. The vast resources available to the central government and its cultural elites have been used to drum this “Battle Hymn of the Republic” myth into the public consciousness for over a century. This myth, however, is false.

As we are here concerned with a moral defense of secession, it is significant to note that Livingston’s defense of the morality of secession does not depend on denying the immorality of slavery. It is often supposed that those who insist that the South seceded for liberty and independence must necessarily hold the view that slavery is moral. The perennial retort of those who insist that secession was about slavery is: “Liberty to do what? Independence to do what?” Their argument is that any claim to value liberty must be rejected if the person who seeks to defend his liberty is wicked and immoral, or seeks to use his liberty for wicked and immoral purposes. Livingston observes that the same accusation was made against the American revolutionaries, as slavery was legal in all colonies at the time:

One is reminded of Dr. Johnson’s irritation at the American colonists who threatened secession from Britain: he wondered why he had to hear constant yelps about liberty from the drivers of slaves. It is impossible not to feel the force of this argument, and we must acknowledge that slavery was a moral stain on the seceding American colonies, all of which allowed slavery in 1776, as well as on the seceding Southern states, all of which allowed slavery in 1861.

Livingston is highlighting the tendency to forget that slavery was legal in the American colonies when they seceded from the British Crown. Moreover, since there was an abolitionist movement well underway in the British Empire at the time—with slavery in the English common law having been ruled to be illegal by the Somerset case in 1772—it is noteworthy that rarely, if ever, do abolitionists argue that the American Revolution was “about slavery” or caused by a desire “to defend slavery.” Be that as it may, Livingston’s main point is not merely to highlight this hypocrisy, but to make the moral case for secession. Addressing the “yelps about liberty from the drivers of slaves” leveled against the American revolutionaries, he argues that “slavery is not the only moral wrong in the world, and its presence does not make other actions automatically immoral, nor opposing actions automatically moral.” People have no trouble understanding this point in the context of the American Revolution—the presence of slavery in the American colonies does not make the American Declaration of Independence immoral, as some activists peddling the “original sin” theory of American Independence have tried to claim. Indeed, this is the very parallel Murray Rothbard draws in his comment on secession in his “Just War” article.

Livingston, therefore, argues that the desire for liberty and independence does not become “immoral” merely because slavery was legal at the time. However, a further point still remains to be addressed, namely, whether the aim of secession was specifically to defend slavery. Those who run this argument claim that Southerners themselves said they were seceding to defend slavery. They rely on the mention of slavery in the secession declarations of South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas. They also rely on remarks made by Alexander Stephens, the Confederate Vice President, at an event in Georgia after secession but before the war, where he outlined the reasons why the Southern states had seceded and formed the Confederate Government. It is striking that the entire case for declaring that secession was “about slavery” relies almost entirely on these sources and often treats them as conclusive regarding the cause of secession. As they see it, there is no need to study any further historical context, because the secession declarations of these four states have settled the issue once and for all. As Rod Barr observes:

Often I hear that the primary sources I quote in defense of Southern secession are “cherry picked” or “out of context.” Those making these charges will then point to the four Declarations of Causes or The Cornerstone Speech as proof of my lack of context.

Curiously, the secession declarations of the states that did not mention slavery are deemed to be irrelevant. Nor is Alexander Stephens’s full speech deemed to be of any interest—except for the passage where he mentions that racial inequality is the “cornerstone” of the constitution. Yet, as Livingstone points out, Stephens’s views on racial inequality were no more significant than anything else he said in his speech. Livingston explains that these views on racial inequality were widespread at the time:

Nearly all Americans, North and South, saw America as a white European polity, and held that neither Indian nor African populations would ever participate as social and political equals…. As long as it was humane, slavery was considered a reasonable and productive arrangement for both blacks and whites. Thus, the tolerance of slavery can be viewed as the practical outcome of a white Euro-centric mindset.

This being the widespread view, which was also expressed on several occasions by Abraham Lincoln, it would make little sense for the South to secede specifically to defend that view. Livingston further points out that there was no threat to slavery in the Union, as Abraham Lincoln had repeatedly said that he did not intend to abolish slavery and indeed had no legal power to do so. Those who insist that secession was “obviously” about defending slavery rely on an alleged hypothetical threat that the South is said to have feared—the suggestion being that even though there was no threat to slavery yet, they may have been afraid that such a threat might hypothetically arise in future and may therefore have decided to quit while they were ahead. As David Gordon writes, such fears would have been fanciful at the time given Lincoln’s distinct lack of interest in threatening slavery:

The evidence that Lincoln did not invade the South to end slavery is well known, and I shall not rehearse it here. Suffice it to say that he sponsored the 1861 Corwin Amendment, which would have permanently guaranteed slavery in the states where it existed. Consider this alongside his first inaugural address, which above all emphasized the collection of duties and imposts.

The slave states and free states were certainly embroiled in political controversy over the legality of slavery in the Western territories. In his Volker Fund memo, Rothbard observes that, “The basic root of the controversy over slavery to secession, in my opinion, was the aggressive, expansionist aims of the Southern ‘slavocracy’” in an attempt “to foist the immoral system of slavery on Western territories.” But there is a significant difference between political machinations aimed at “foisting” slavery onto the Western territories, and the subsequent decision to secede. Logically, if the South had decided to secede in a fit of pique because they did not get their way in attempting to “foist” slavery on the West, how would seceding assist the “slavocracy” in achieving this goal they are said to have cherished? Seceding could not be a way of “foisting” slavery on the free territories. Seceding would accomplish the very opposite, because they had exited from the Union—slavery would be gone from all American territories. Rothbard indeed, echoing the abolitionists at the time, remarks that the Southern states should have been left to secede in peace as that would have been the end of slavery in the United States.

It is obvious that while the “slavocracy” may perhaps have dreamed of “foisting” slavery on the Western territories, seceding from the United States would in no way help them achieve this goal. The “slavocracy” did not even have a numerical majority in the conventions held to decide the question of secession. They would easily have been outvoted by citizens of the South who did not own slaves nor have any business or any other interests in the Western territories. The majority of Southerners, many of whom had fought to defend the Union in previous wars, would not leave the Union simply because the “slavocrats” had business interests out West that depended on slavery—not least being that it would help to maintain the political balance of power between the free states and slave states. Their political controversies over control of the Western territories, which Rothbard describes as “slavery-in-the-territories struggles of the 1850s,” were not controversies over whether to secede, and they do not supply the explanation for why they seceded in 1860-1861. Indeed, in his subsequent robust defense of the Southern Cause, Rothbard makes no mention of the political “slavery-in-the-territories struggles of the 1850s” when he explains why the South seceded:

In 1861, the Southern states, believing correctly that their cherished institutions were under grave threat and assault from the federal government, decided to exercise their natural, contractual, and constitutional right to withdraw, to “secede” from that Union. The separate Southern states then exercised their contractual right as sovereign republics to come together in another confederation, the Confederate States of America.

It is also worth noting that there was a vibrant abolitionist movement underway in the South, especially in Virginia where attempts had already twice been made to abolish slavery. Seceding could not reasonably have been seen by the “slavocracy” as a way of defending slavery given these conditions. They would be just as vulnerable to the growing abolitionist movement after secession as they were before, if not more so. Thomas Jefferson was known to have been sympathetic to abolition. Robert E. Lee had declared slavery to be a political and moral evil. Like John C. Calhoun—who was also a slave owner—the Confederate leaders who expressed opposition to abolition were concerned more with the practical challenges posed by the abolitionists trying to foment violent revolution, than with a defense of slavery as an institution. The “slavocracy” could have had no reason to suppose that they would be able to cling onto slavery forever. Livingston explains:

Calhoun [in 1837] carefully separated the question of slavery “in the abstract,” as Southerners called it, from slavery as a practical question. He tried to make clear that his point was only about the latter, and that under the institution, the African population had made remarkable progress and was capable of further improvements. He called the institution an “experiment,” which should be given a period of time, and he put no limit on the improvements of which Africans were capable.

As James Rutledge Roesch explains, far from seeing the dispute over slavery as a reason for secession, Calhoun tried to highlight that if the dispute was not resolved the hatred raised against the South would lead to disunion:

“However sound the great body of the non-slaveholding States are at present, in the course of a few years they will be succeeded by those who will have been taught to hate the people and institutions of nearly one half of the Union, with a hatred more deadly than one hostile nation ever entertained toward another,” warned Calhoun. “It is easy to see the end. By the necessary course of events…we must become, finally, two peoples.”

Rather than theorize about the hypothetical pre-emptive action the “slavocrats” may have wished to take, the historian Charles Adams has taken a different approach. In his review of Adams’s book When in the Course of Human Events, David Gordon highlights the role played by “financial affairs” in Adams’s account of the causes of both secession and war:

The Southern states favored a regime of free trade: this would enable them to benefit to the greatest extent possible from their cotton exports. By contrast, many in the North favored high tariffs to help local industries.

Because of high tariffs, the South was burdened to benefit the North, a situation hardly likely to promote amicable relations.

The significance of Adams’s emphasis on the financial causes of secession is that it opens up avenues for fresh insights into this important historical era, and a clear view that is not submerged in moralizing about slavery. Gordon quotes the explanation given by Adams as to why the stakes concerning tariffs were so high as to lead the South to secede and the North to attack:

Lincoln was determined, come what may, to collect tariffs from the ports of the seceding states. “Lincoln’s inaugural address on 4 March 1861, certainly set the stage for war, and most of the South saw it that way. It sounded conciliatory . . . [but] he would, however, use federal power to hold federal property (the forts) and ‘to collect the duties and impost; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion.’ Southerners immediately saw the meaning behind Lincoln’s words”… The arguments in favor of the “tariff war” thesis were well-known to contemporaries, both in America and abroad.

Adams casts much-needed light on the fuller picture that risks being lost when the history police insist that secession must obviously have been “about slavery.” Livingston points out that this insistence that the South seceded to defend slavery was certainly not the prevailing view at the time. For example, before secession Lincoln did not see the concerns of the South as being “about slavery”:

Unlike contemporary Americans who have inherited the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” view of a demonic South and virtuous North, Lincoln understood slavery as a national evil inherited from British colonial practice… Lincoln acknowledged the common moral understanding of Northerners and Southerners on the question of slavery. On August 21, 1858, he said, “Before proceeding, let me say I think I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up. This I believe of the masses of the north and south. . . . When southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we, I acknowledge the fact.”

Finally, the best people to ask why they seceded are those who seceded. Jefferson Davis, in his book, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, answers that question by explaining the Southern Cause as Southerners saw it:

When the cause was lost, what cause was it? Not that of the South only, but the cause of constitutional government, of the supremacy of law, of the natural rights of man.

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

The post The Southern Cause: What Led to Secession appeared first on LewRockwell.

The True History of World War II

Mar, 03/06/2025 - 05:01

The Mises Institute Revisionist History of War Conference

On May 15-17, the libertarian Mises Institute hosted a “Revisionist History of War Conference” at its Auburn headquarters.

I was one of sixteen speakers invited to make a presentation, with my topic being “The True History of World War II.” I thought my thirty-five minute talk went well, and the audio version is now available:

Video Link

So although the mainstream media continues to stubbornly promote a very distorted view of the facts, anyone who seeks to get the other side of the Ukraine war story from highly-regarded individuals can easily do so.

But suppose these powerful video platforms did not exist, nor their social media distribution channels, nor any other elements of today’s Internet.

Under those conditions, Mearsheimer, Sachs, McGovern, and all these other highly-credentialed experts might still hold exactly the same contrary views of our conflict with Russia, but would anyone have ever heard about them? Mearsheimer’s 2014 lecture would have only been seen by its original audience of several hundred, and when the war broke out eight years later, perhaps a few of them might have dimly remembered his arguments, rather than the thirty million who then discovered his presentation and watched it in 2022. After Carlson was fired by FoxNews, he would have disappeared almost without a trace, never attracting the many millions of viewers who have continued to watch him on the Internet.

Furthermore, suppose that the Western conflict with Russia had ultimately been entirely successful, with military reverses or economic devastation eventually leading to the collapse of the Russian government. If Putin and his entire political circle had been overthrown, then killed or driven into exile, while his country was subdued and firmly brought into the American orbit, would anyone have much questioned the exact circumstances under which the war began?

I think these thoughts should be firmly kept in mind as we begin exploring the history of the Second World War, a conflict whose standard historical narrative all of us have absorbed throughout our entire lives from every mainstream media source.

The Origins of World War II According to A.J.P. Taylor

There exist countless starting points for those who seek to discover the true history of World War II. But I think that one of the best of these comes in a relatively short book published in 1961 by A.J.P. Taylor, a renowned Oxford historian.

As a Harvard freshman, I had taken an introductory history course, and one of the primary required texts on World War II had been Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War. In that book, he persuasively laid out a case for how the conflict began that was radically different from what I had always been told in all my media accounts. That sharp difference was true at the time and it has remained so during the decades since then.

As most of us know from our standard history books, the flashpoint of the conflict had been Germany’s demand for the return of Danzig. But that border city under Polish control had a 95% German population, which overwhelmingly desired reunification with its traditional homeland after twenty years of enforced separation following the end of the First World War. According to Taylor only a dreadful diplomatic blunder by the British had led the Poles to refuse that reasonable request, thereby provoking the war. The widespread later claim that Hitler sought to conquer the world was totally absurd, and instead the German leader had actually made every effort to avoid war with Britain or France.

The 80th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II naturally prompted numerous historical discussions in the media, and these led me to dig out my old copy of Taylor’s short volume, which I reread for the first time in nearly forty years.

I found it just as masterful and persuasive as I had back in my college dorm room days, and the glowing cover-blurbs suggested some of the immediate acclaim the work had received. The Washington Post lauded the author as “Britain’s most prominent living historian,” World Politics called it “Powerfully argued, brilliantly written, and always persuasive,” The New Statesman, Britain leading leftist magazine, described it as “A masterpiece: lucid, compassionate, beautifully written,” and the august Times Literary Supplement characterized it as “simple, devastating, superlatively readable, and deeply disturbing.” As an international best-seller, it surely ranked as Taylor’s most famous work, and I could easily understand why it was still on my required college reading list nearly two decades after its original publication.

Yet in revisiting Taylor’s ground-breaking history, I made a surprising discovery. Despite all the international sales and critical praise, the book’s findings soon aroused tremendous hostility in certain quarters. Taylor’s lectures at Oxford had been enormously popular for a quarter century, but as a direct result of the controversy “Britain’s most prominent living historian” was summarily purged from the faculty not long afterwards. At the beginning of his first chapter, Taylor had noted how strange he found it that more than twenty years after the start of the world’s most cataclysmic war no serious history had been produced carefully analyzing the outbreak. Perhaps the retaliation that he encountered led him to better understand part of that puzzle.

Despite the intense mainstream hostility to any such candid account of the origins of the world war, others have occasionally undertaken that same project, and sometimes with considerable difficulty they have managed to get their books into print.

Decades after Taylor’s pioneering volume, an outstanding historical analysis reaching very similar conclusions was published in German by Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof, who had spent his career as a fully mainstream professional military man, rising to the rank of major general in the German army before retiring. A couple of years ago I finally read the English translation of 1939 – The War That Had Many Fathers, which appeared in 2011, released exactly a half-century after Taylor’s seminal work.

The author considerably extended Taylor’s analysis, with his 700 pages describing in great detail the enormous efforts that Hitler had taken to avoid war and settle that boundary dispute, even spending many months on fruitless negotiations and offering extremely reasonable terms. Indeed, the German dictator had made numerous concessions to Poland that none of his democratic Weimar predecessors had ever been willing to consider. But these proposals were all rejected, while Polish provocations escalated, including violent attacks on their own country’s sizeable German minority population, until war seemed the only possible option.

The historical account presented in both these major works suggested eerie echoes of the factors behind Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Then as now, politically influential elements in the West seemed quite eager to provoke the war, using Danzig as the spark to ignite the conflict much like the simmering bloodshed in the Donbass had been used to force Putin’s hand.

Read the Whole Article

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Ukraine – Strategic Escalation Intended To Influence Talks

Mar, 03/06/2025 - 05:01

Days before negotiations towards an and of the conflict the operational tempo of the war in Ukraine has increased.

During the last week of May the Russian forces took 18 settlements and over 200 square kilometer. During the last 24 hours at least another 3 settlements have changed hands. The Ukrainian army is no longer capable to hold its defense lines. Its situation is deteriorating day by day.

On Saturday a Russian missile attack hit a Ukrainian military training camp. It killed or wounded about 100 soldiers. It was the second time the camp had been hit. Other agglomerations of Ukrainian forces had previously experienced the same fate. Still, Ukrainian forces beyond the frontline keep bunching up to become targets of long range weapons.

Taking responsibility for the repeated mistakes the commander of the Ukrainian ground forces resigned:

Commander of the Ground Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Mykhailo Drapatyi, has submitted his resignation over the tragedy at the 239th Training Range Center, where a Russian strike killed soldiers from a training battalion.

The loss is significant:

[Drapatyi] is considered one of the most skilled commanders in the Ukrainian Armed Forces and was a leading candidate to become the future Commander-in-Chief, expected to succeed Syrskyi.

On Saturday/Sunday Ukrainian diversion groups used explosives to destroy two Russian railroad bridges in the Kursk and Bryansk region. These bridges were located some 50 kilometer north of the Sumy region frontline. The hits will impact, if only for a short time, the railway bound supply of Russian forces north of Sumy.

One of the bridge explosions destroyed a civil passenger train. Some 10 people were killed and some 100 were wounded. This was likely intended and thereby a terror attack.

On Sunday morning a large scale operation by the Ukrainian secret service managed to attack multiple strategic airfields throughout Russia. Ukrainian sources claimed attacks on five airfields and the destruction of more than 40 strategic bombers.

Current damage assessment confirms attacks on two airfields and the destruction or damaging of up to 10 bombers.

The attack allegedly used 120 remotely controlled drones launched from civil trucks positioned near those airfields. Ukrainian sources claim that the operation took 18 month to prepare. It seems that the Russian mobile telephone network was used to remotely control the drones. It will be thereby relatively easy to prevent another attack of this kind by blocking the relevant traffic through these channels.

While the attack is of high propaganda value it will have no favorable impact on the Ukrainian position on the battle field. It will rather entice the Russian forces to hit harder, mostly likely by long range attacks against Ukrainian decision centers.

The U.S. claims to not have been informed about the attack on strategic (nuclear) Russian assets. The claim is not plausible. As former CIA agent Larry Johnson asserts:

In my opinion, none of these attacks could have been planned and executed without assistance, if not the direct involvement, of Western intelligence and NATO officers. The drones likely were activated by a remote signal made possible by Western satellites and/or systems like Starlink. Those systems also played a critical role in enabling the drones to navigate to the targeted airfields.

On Sunday eve the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov initiated a phone call with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The content of the call has not been published.

Also on Sunday the Russian forces launched about 500 long range drones against targets in Ukraine. On Monday morning some 100 drones were launched by Ukraine towards Moscow. Damage assessments of these attacks are not yet available.

The escalation of the war beyond the immediate battlefield came on the eve of Ukrainian-Russian negotiations in Istanbul, Turkey.

Ukraine’s international position continues to deteriorate. Coming June 6 EU import privileges for Ukrainian products will end. The impact on the Ukraine economy will be serious. Yesterday Poland, Ukraine’s most supportive neighbor, elected a conservative president who is not in favor of Ukraine.

The Ukrainian side had likely hoped that its attack on strategic Russian airfields would entice Russia to delay or break-off the talks in Istanbul. They will however take place and continue.

Both sides are expected to exchange memoranda about their envisioned paths towards an end of the war.

I do expect the Russian side to deliver some kind of ultimatum.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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The Widening Gyre

Mar, 03/06/2025 - 05:01

Do you hear those alarm bells ringing? Looks like June is bustin’ out all over, as the old Broadway ditty goes. Bedlam is in the air, and in more varieties than Heinz has pickles. Take your pick: civil war blooming in France and the UK, maybe even Germany — if it can shake off its psychotic stupor. World War III flutters over the continent like an answered prayer coming in for a landing. And here in the USA, genuine insurrection ripens with the summer’s peaches.

The Champs Elysees was a battlefield Saturday night as a soccer celebration went all Jihad, leaving two rioters dead and hundreds arrested (unreported inThe New York Times, of course, because. . . reasons). The two Alexanders at The Duran report that a plot is underway in London to deep-six (not eighty-six) Labour PM Sir Keir Starmer, who enjoys the lowest poll ratings in the history of British polling. Ol’ Keir likes to throw grannies in jail for rude Facebook posts while Islamic rape gangs do their thing and knife attacks multiply on the indigenous population. Not a good look. Perennial nationalist irritant Tommy Robinson was released from prison the other day, too, and you can expect fury arising around — and at him — as the sceptered isle day-by-day disappears under a burqa.

Starmer, Macron, new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, plus the unelected EU apparatus under Ursula von der Leyen all seem to be avid for war with Russia. They are insane, of course, and not just because their combined militaries are joke. They stirred the pot badly over the weekend, helping Ukraine carry out drone attacks against Russian air defense bases as far afield as Siberia and outside Murmansk, way up north on the Barents Sea. The bold attack was apparently carried out after a year-and-a-half of planning, using tractor-trailer trucks to transport concealed drones in on-board shipping containers deep into Russia. The drones took out Russian aircraft enabled to launch cruise missiles and long-range radar detection planes, all tolled estimated at $7-billion damage. The gambit would have required NATO satellite targeting assistance.

You might recall a week ago, Chancellor Merz declared that Germany gave Ukraine “permission” to carry out long-range strikes into Russia. Smooth move, Friedrich. He is, apparently, unaware that in so-doing he automatically gave Russia permission to strike deep into Germany as well, which Russia has not yet done. Instead, it replied with missile strikes against Odesa, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Kyiv, little more than a routine smack-back, but perhaps an ominous prelude to worse in the offing.

You understand that things are escalating steeply now in this conflict. A lot high ranking officials in Russia have lost patience with Mr. Putin’s slow-moving, on-the-ground grind and refusal so far to inflict more serious damage on the Ukrainian capital, which he could turn into an ashtray on a half-hour’s notice, if required. You might suppose he has sought strategically to avoid the total destruction of this cousin-country so that it would not be a failed state in the aftermath of war. It would be to Russia’s advantage if Ukraine could function as a neutralized, sovereign, self-supporting buffer state rather than an ungovernable basket-case / money pit region harboring non-state terrorists of various stripes. The former outcome is surely still preferable to the latter, despite the most recent provocations.

All of this puts Mr. Trump in a bind. His efforts to negotiate peace are on-the-rocks for now, as is his (America’s) ability to control the maniac globalist warmongers of NATO. Many in the US, and Mr. Trump himself, make noises about backing off the big mess altogether and dissociating from a NATO alliance that has lost its purpose and meaning, becoming, in fact, a menace to our interests.

Against all this expanding havoc, peace talks are still scheduled for Istanbul today. Ukraine and Russia have both exchanged ceasefire proposals. Mr. Trump reportedly conferred with President Putin about it. The finalized memorandum said, “Russia is ready to work with Ukraine on a memorandum on a possible future peace treaty defining a number of positions.” Take-away? Russia wants to conclude this war. Mr. Trump wants to end it, too. Mr. Zelenskyy, maybe not so much, since his fate is only secure as long as the war keeps going and he is not overthrown by his own wing-men.

Neither the US nor the NATO / EU axis will participate in the Istanbul peace talks directly, but you can suppose that Merz, Macron, Starmer, and von der Leyen are looking to stir-the-pot in the background. You might conclude that war is all they’ve got left as summer draws near and each of them face a European population primed to explode at its feckless, noxious, incompetent leadership. I would expect much more fighting in the streets of the European capitals going forward, and falling governments. It could prove hard to put these Humpty-dumpties back together, with years of political chaos following.

Things are heating up in the USA, too, as an Egyptian national torched a crowd of pro-Israel marchers with a home-made flamethrower in Boulder, Colorado, on Sunday, while “Trans-tifa,” as it styled itself, went to work on Christians assembled in a Seattle park last week. The Democratic Party — like the EU’s warmonger parties — has nothing left but violence against anything that looks like nationalism and traditional values. It’s so bad, and Democratic leadership is so demented, that they are liable to turn Donald Trump into another Abe Lincoln.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

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Will Russia’s Retaliation To Ukraine’s Strategic Drone Strikes Decisively End The Conflict?

Mar, 03/06/2025 - 05:01

Tonight will be fateful for the conflict’s future.

Ukraine carried out strategic drone strikes on Sunday against several bases all across Russia that are known to house elements of its nuclear triad. This came a day before the second round of the newly resumed Russian-Ukrainian talks in Istanbul and less than a week after Trump warned Putin that “bad things..REALLY BAD” might soon happen to Russia. It therefore can’t be ruled out that he knew about this and might have even discreetly signaled his approval in order to “force Russia into peace”.

Of course, it’s also possible that he was bluffing and the Biden-era CIA helped orchestrate this attack in advance without him every finding out so that Ukraine could either sabotage peace talks if he won and pressured Zelensky into them or coerce maximum concessions from Russia, but his ominous words still look bad. Whatever the extent of Trump’s knowledge may or may not be, Putin might once again climb the escalation ladder by dropping more Oreshniks on Ukraine, which could risk a rupture in their ties.

Seeing as how Trump is being left in the dark about the conflict by his closest advisors (not counting Witkoff) as proven by him misportraying Russia’s retaliatory strikes against Ukraine over the past week as unprovoked, he might react the same way to Russia’s inevitable retaliation. His ally Lindsay Graham already prepared legislation for imposing 500% tariffs on all Russian energy clients, which Trump might approve in response, and this could pair with ramping up armed aid to Ukraine in a major escalation.

Everything therefore depends on the form of Russia’s retaliation; the US’ response; and – if they’re not canceled as a result – the outcome of tomorrow’s talks in Istanbul. If the first two phases of this scenario sequence don’t spiral out of control, then it’ll all depend on whether Ukraine makes concessions to Russia after its retaliation; Russia makes concessions to Ukraine after the US’ response to Russia’s retaliation; or their talks are once again inconclusive. The first is by far the best outcome for Russia.

The second would suggest that Ukraine’s strategic drone strikes on Russia’s nuclear triad and the US’ response to its retaliation pressured Putin to compromise on his stated goals. These are Ukraine’s withdrawal from the entirety of the disputed regions, its demilitarization, denazification, and restoring its constitutional neutrality. Freezing the Line of Contact (LOC), even perhaps in exchange for some US sanctions relief and a resource-centric strategic partnership with it, could cede Russia’s strategic edge.

Not only might Ukraine rearm and reposition ahead of reinitiating hostilities on comparatively better terms, but uniformed Western troops might also flood into Ukraine, where they could then function as tripwires for manipulating Trump into “escalating to de-escalate” if they’re attacked by Russia. As for the third possibility, inconclusive talks, Trump might soon lose patience with Russia and thus “escalate to de-escalate” anyhow. He could always just walk away, however, but his recent posts suggest that he won’t.

Overall, Ukraine’s unprecedented provocation will escalate the conflict, but it’s unclear what will follow Russia’s inevitable retaliation. Russia will either coerce the concessions from Ukraine that Putin demands for peace; the US’ response to its retaliation will coerce concessions from Russia to Ukraine instead; or both will remain manageable and tomorrow’s talks will be inconclusive, thus likely only delaying the US’ seemingly inevitable escalated involvement. Tonight will therefore be fateful for the conflict’s future.

This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

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A Golden Share Will Not Make America Great Again

Mar, 03/06/2025 - 05:01

Japanese company Nippon Steel’s plan to purchase US Steel was bound to provoke a strong reaction from left- and right-wing economic nationalists. After all, US Steel was once the world’s largest company, and it was the first company to be valued at over a billion dollars. US Steel was thus a symbol of America’s economic dominance. So it was not surprising that Nippon Steel’s purchase of US Steel was blocked by both the Biden and Trump administrations. This was disappointing — especially since Nippon Steel planned to invest billions in modernizing US Steel’s facilities.

Last week, President Trump praised the deal with some added conditions. One major condition is that the US government will receive a “golden share” in US Steel. This will enable the government to overrule any business decision made by the company’s management if the government determines the business decision threatens “national security.” This power could be used to prevent US Steel from exporting steel to certain countries, as well as to require US Steel to prioritize production for the military and other government agencies. It could also be used to interfere with labor-management relations based on the idea that a labor dispute can disrupt production and thus harm national security. In fact, there is almost no decision US Steel’s management could make that cannot be labeled as involving “national security.”

Supporters of the “golden share” have forgotten (or never learned) the lessons from the failures of allowing politicians and bureaucrats to run private businesses. When government takes a full or partial ownership interest in a business, the result is decisions made based on political considerations rather than on seeking to improve the company’s productivity and profits. This causes the company to lose money, resulting in laid off workers unless the government tries to cover up failures with subsidies. It also distorts the signals sent to other market actors via the price system because the government-run company is allocating resources based on considerations other than their most efficient use.

This is not the only case where the Trump administration is harming the economy by interfering with businesses. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government sponsored enterprises created to support the housing market, may soon go public. President Trump has stated that the government would nonetheless continue to guarantee Fannie and Freddie backed mortgage loans. This will cause over-investment in housing as investors see only an upside from investing in Fannie and Freddie since the government will bail out Fannie and Freddie if they lose money while investors will keep the profits. The result will be a housing bubble, followed by a housing crash that may be worse than the one Fannie and Freddie — along with the Federal Reserve — helped cause in 2008. Once again, President Trump and his advisors have failed to learn from history.

Government involvement with businesses may be promoted as intended to protect national security, or to protect “great American companies” from being taken over by foreign companies, or to make the American dream of homeownership possible for every American, or to accomplish a myriad of other goals that may sound good in sound bites on the campaign trail. However, the result will be economic stagnation, recessions, or even depressions. To ensure a strong economy, government can get out of the way. A policy of limited government, free markets, free trade, peace, and sound money is the path to prosperity.

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‘One Quiet Early Morning in Beijing, the Dollar’s Crown Slipped’

Mar, 03/06/2025 - 05:01

Should China succeed, the U.S. would lose its ‘magic weapon’ of monetary dominance.

“I believe we must start from the notion of defeat leading to revolution – to grasp the Trump revolution”.

“The experience underway in the United States, even if we don’t know exactly what it will be, is revolution. Is it a revolution in the strict sense? Is it a counter-revolution?”

So spoke the French historian and philosopher Emmanuel Todd in his April Moscow lecture, From Russia With Love.

“This [Trump revolution] is, in my opinion, linked to defeat. Various people have reported to me conversations between members of the Trump team, and what is striking is their awareness of defeat. People like J.D. Vance, the Vice President, and many others, are people who understood that America had lost this war”.

This American awareness of defeat, however, contrasts markedly with the Europeans’ surprising lack of awareness – rather it is denial – at their defeat:

“For the United States, it is fundamentally an economic defeat. The sanctions policy showed that the financial power of the West was not omnipotent. The Americans were reminded of the fragility of their military industry. The people at the Pentagon know very well that one of the limits to their action is the limited capacity of the American military-industrial complex”.

“That America is in the midst of a serious revolution, right now – easily comparable to the end of the USSR – is understood by a few”. Yet our preconceptions – political and intellectual – often prevent us from seeing and assimilating the import of this reality”.

Todd, to his credit, admits the difficulty with perception readily:

“I must admit that when the Soviet system actually collapsed, I was unable to foresee the extent of the dislocation and the level of suffering this dislocation would cause for Russia. My experience taught me one important thing: The collapse of a system is as much mental as economic ... I didn’t understand that communism was not only an economic organization but also a belief system, a quasi-religion, that structured Soviet and Russian social life. The dislocation of belief would lead to psychological disorganization far beyond economic disorganization. We are reaching a situation of this type in the West today”.

The psychological dislocation caused by ‘defeat’ may explain (but not justify) the West’s ‘curious’ inability to understand world events: The almost pathological dissociation from the real world that it displays in its words and actions: It’s blindness – for example, to the Russian experience of history and to the long history behind Shi’a defiance in Iran. Yet, even as the political situation deteriorates … there is no sign of the West becoming more reality-based in its understanding – and it is very likely that it will continue to live in its alternative construction of reality – until it is forcibly expelled.

Yanis Varoufakis has pointed out that the reality of the prospect of U.S. economic ‘defeat’ was clearly spelled out by Paul Volcker, former chair of the Federal Reserve, when he said that what holds the entire globalist system together had been the massive flow of capital from abroad – running to more than $2 billion every working day – that sustained America’s comfortable, low inflationary lifestyle.

Today, with the U.S. in an era of unsustainable structural budget deficits, Trump is laser-focused on America’s financial core: The Treasury bond market (America’s lifeline) and the stock market (America’s wallet). Both are fragile. And any external pressure could trigger a chain reaction:

“In short, America is no longer confident in its own financial fortress. And China is no longer playing by the old rules. This isn’t just a trade war — it’s a war for the future of global finance”, Varoufakis states. Which is why Trump threatens war on anyone seeking to supplant or bypass the U.S. dollar trading monopoly.

Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs” therefore were never about balancing trade. What they amount to is an attempt to restructure creditors. “It’s what you do in bankruptcy”, as one commentator wryly notes. The demands for greater contributions from NATO states is precisely an exercise in demanding creditor revenue – as was Trump’s Gulf trip).

The purpose of the New Cold War primordially consists in choking off China’s rise. This aim effectively represents common ground amongst all factions of the Establishment – protecting the dollar system from collapse.

The notion of the U.S. recovering its former position as a world-class manufacturing centre is largely a diversional narrative crafted for domestic purposes. In 1950, the U.S. manufacturing labour force made up 33.7 percent of the domestic economy – a figure that has dwindled to less than 8.4 percent today. To revert would take a generational shift.

So, aside from the China consensus, the Ruling Strata is split – with the likes of JD Vance, and the economic team of Stephen Miran and Russel Vought, concerned more by the risk of U.S. overreach undermining the dollar primacy, whilst the hawks advocate reinforcing the dollar hegemony, with clear demonstrative ‘shows’ of U.S. military muscle.

The re-structuring of creditors underpins too Trump’s hurry to do a ‘deal’ with Russia – one that could bring quick business opportunities and positive capital flows (and collateral) onto the U.S.’ capital account. A deal with Iran potentially could even yield Trump’s apotheosis of U.S. energy dominance, resulting in new revenue inflows that would buttress confidence in the dollar.

In short, Trump’s agenda is not long-term strategic. It is the short-term corralling of aggregate demand for the dollar as the only currency which people demand, albeit even though they do not want to buy anything from the country creating the dollars.

The crucial flaw is that Trump’s crude transactionalism is shredding his credibility as a serious geo-political actor and consequently compelling others to hedge against the dollar.

In short, the collapse in credibility caused by Trump’s disdain for reading; for intel briefings; and his reliance on the he or she who last whispered in his ear, lends to policy flip-flops, and a general desire for others to disengage as far as possible from the unpredictable Trumpland.

Emmanuel Todd warns that the classic response to a collapse in the belief system and the particular psyche that has animated the economic paradigm “is anxiety – rather than any state of freedom and well-being. The beliefs that accompanied Western triumphalism are collapsing. But as in any revolutionary process, we do not yet know which new belief is the most important, which belief will emerge victorious from the process of decomposition”.

Revolutions though they generally destroy, their focus is to harness the energies sufficient to eradicate the institutions that were too rigid to integrate into the demand for change that provoked the revolution in the first place.

In this context, the pursuit of a New Cold War against China precisely is centred around U.S. anxiety (as Todd maintains) – primarily the fear that China’s building of a digital ‘super highway’ for money will prove to be much more advanced than the rickety road that is the American dollar road.

Today that super-wide highway may not be so widely used. That’s now. But already there is a migration from the old road to the Chinese Super highway, as Varoufakis underlines to the Chinese.

For the American Establishment, the Chinese ‘super-highway’ constitutes a ‘clear and present’ danger to its hegemony. The anxiety is not really about Chinese intellectual property or ‘IP theft’. It is the fear that the U.S. cannot keep up with the new financial ecosystems being constructed by China, or the sophistication of the digital yuan.

This anxiety is aggravated – not least – because the Fintech overlords of Silicon Valley are at daggers drawn with the big Wall Street clearing banks (who want to preserve their antiquated systems). China has the advantage here, as its financial and tech sectors are fused, as one.

The fear is plain: Should China succeed, the U.S. would lose its ‘magic weapon’ of monetary dominance:

“And here is the ‘revolution’: No fireworks, no Western headlines. Just one quiet early morning in Beijing where the dollar’s crown slipped. The world’s financial plumbing just got a reroute—through the China [super highway]”

“For the first time ever, China’s CIPS (Cross-Border Interbank Payment System) surpassed SWIFT in single-day transaction volume. A red banner flashed across Bank of China’s HQ at 1:30AM on April 16, 2025”.

“CIPS [as Zerohedge tells it] processed a jaw-dropping ¥12.8 trillion RMB in just one day—roughly $1.76 trillion USD. That volume, if verified, overtakes the greenback-dominated SWIFT system in sheer daily cross-border throughput”.

Yes – It’s all about money.

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

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President Trump’s Plans for the Middle East – With Syria in Focus

Mar, 03/06/2025 - 05:01

President Trump’s deal-making trip to the Middle East, more precisely at the US-Saudi Investment Forum in Riyadh in mid-May 2025, was a multi-purpose trip. First, Saudi Arabia signed a $142 billion arms deal with the US and pledged an additional $600 billion in American investments. That’s deal-making at its best.

Second, during his Saudi stay, Mr. Trump unexpectedly announced lifting all sanctions on Syria.

This is the first time in close to 50 years that Washington leaves Syria free of sanctions. US sanctions in Syria began in 1979. It looks like a monumental shift in US policy in the Middle East. A shift towards Middle East stability?

On the same occasion, President Trump shakes hand with Syria’s Interim President, Ahmad al-Sharaa, initiating one of the most “controversial” policy moves the US have made in the past decades.

Who is Syria’s Interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa?

Born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to a Syrian Sunni Muslim family from the Golan Heights, he grew up in Syria’s capital, Damascus. Al-Sharaa joined al-Qaeda in Iraq shortly before the 2003 invasion of Iraq and fought for three years in the Iraqi insurgency.

So, Mr. Ahmad al-Sharaa, is an al-Qaeda fighter. Al-Qaeda was created by the US in 1988 in Peshawar, Pakistan. Al-Qaeda was founded as a pan-Islamist militant terrorist organization led by Sunni jihadists who self-identify as a vanguard spearheading a global Islamist revolution to unite the Muslim world under a supra-national Islamic caliphate. A later off-spring of al-Qaeda is ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria).

Syria’s current president, Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, was until recently regarded by the US as a senior figure in Al-Qaeda – with a $10 million bounty once placed on his head. No more. Friendship with Mr. Trump is overarching every previous accusation. Mr. al-Sharaa has promised to dismantle the IS (former ISIS) in Syria for better control.

Source: US Embassy Syria

Logically, Mr. Trump is friendly with one of their own (their – meaning the United Sates of America), who fought in Iraq as a counter-terrorist and started his career now in Syria in a similar fashion, but always at the behest of Washington.

What he has done for the US in Syria, making Syria a US friendly place, must be rewarded accordingly. Elimination of sanctions – which are against international law as well as against the Charter of the UN – is just a natural occurrence.

You may say that overall, this is a great move for stability in the Middle East. It allows the Saudis and Emirates to start rebuilding Syria, which was previously not allowed under the sanction regime.

For more details see this.

Is there maybe another yet unspoken agenda behind this sanction-lifting and sudden friendliness with Syria? If there is ground for a question there usually is a good reason.

Could it be that stability in the region, especially in Syria, is an asset for Zionist Israel’s plans of expansion towards Greater Israel?

When there is no more fighting, not internally nor against Syria’s neighbors, Israel must be happy. Israel’s way of infiltrating and gradually taking over Syria as a major junk of her Greater Israel dream (with enormous hydrocarbon resources), is made so much easier and without armed interference.

Because one thing is for sure, this Zionist plan of Greater Israel, supported by the US, is not going away and is part and parcel of the genocide in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. As long as the Saudis and Emirates rebuild Syria – it is cost-saving for Zionist Israel later, when they are fully in control of Syria.

Trump has been supporting Netanyahu with arms and is being increasingly criticized for it at home. So, the new strategy is a “diplomatic” support for an even faster expansion of Israel, by making Syria a “peaceful”, even friendly place for the US and friends of the US like Israel.

Just think about it.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

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Haunted by Papal Ghosts

Mar, 03/06/2025 - 05:01

Papal conclaves are a big deal. The one that elected Pope Leo XIV was only my third, as it was for everyone just shy of 50 years old. And, barring tragedy for either Pope Leo or myself, I only have maybe two or three more.

A papal conclave is the kind of major event a person only experiences a handful of times in their life. Such experiences take on a special significance in part because of the meaning of the event itself—but especially because of their rarity.

Hence the grand excitement over the election of Cardinal Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV. I confess, I have been caught up in it as well. The magnitude of the moment; the election of an American; the name—all of it felt historical, and it’s made being Catholic feel more fun than it has been since perhaps the last conclave.

But I’ve also looked askance at some of the celebrations within my own religion. It’s been a while since the last conclave, sure, but this one seemed a bit different somehow, in ways that often just felt weird.

For one, there was the immediate and gushing praise for the new pope before he even said a word. It’s what The Pillar called a Leonine honeymoon. As the lovely folks at The Pillar pointed out, it’s not a bad thing. Honeymoons are a natural and wholesome part of a budding relationship. A quick acceptance of our new leader, a rush of filial warmth for our new papa, and a curious desire to know the man under the tiara are all wonderful signs of the Holy Spirit within the faithful. And, to my mind, they are proper manifestations of such a “honeymoon” love in ecclesial life.

Nevertheless, I’ve perceived something off in these jubilations (even if only anecdotally). Warm joy is one thing. But many are celebrating how “providential” Leo’s election is—deeming him the man who is perfectly suited to lead us in this upcoming era—based only on the superficial factoids of our first glimpses of him. We take the fact that he’s American to mean he’ll be a good governor of the Vatican; or that he is a polyglot to show that he’ll unify a polarized Church; or even his choice of wardrobe to mean a departure from his predecessor.

Indeed, all these things are hopeful signs that Leo’s pontificate will progress in the direction that I, and many Catholics, think the Church needs to head at the moment. But these kinds of assertions seem shortsighted at this point in his reign. There seems to be a pent-up jubilation over whatever in Leo is different than Francis. He speaks different languages. He’s a different nationality. He wears different clothes. He’s not Francis—thanks be to God’s Providence!

But I can’t help but notice that Pope Leo hasn’t really done anything yet. Yes, there have been some early decisions that seem to make a statement about his intended future. But he has yet to make a really meaningful decree in his governance of the Church. And only after a body of such real work will we really be able to tell what “kind” of pontificate Leo will bring. We may find that he still is very much like Pope Francis.

Which is the other source of Pope Leo’s early praises. Just as many seem to be celebrating that our new pope isn’t Francis, many have already declared him to be in perfect continuity with his predecessor. Sure, he has worn silly red clothes and comported himself more toward the reverence of the office. But in substantial things, they say, he will be Pope Francis the second.

Both jubilations are grasping at straws. Pope Leo may depart from Francis; he may continue Francis; or he may forge a new, third path. I’m old enough to remember the election of Pope Francis and the predictions of his pontificate based only on his name and white cassock. Time proved some of them true and many of them false. There can be value in such predictions; but celebrating them as if they are guaranteed is a recipe for disappointment.

This leads to the other problematic path for those (like me) who are a bit more jaded. It’s a “wait and see” approach, which withholds the celebration or even full religious submission to the new pope until we know he’s in line with our preferences. Let’s see how his curial appointments shake up; what he does about Rupnik; what he does about the Germans. Then we can celebrate him as our new pope, or declare him to indeed be my pope.

But this is also wrongheaded. Leo XIV is the pope right now; and as such, he is owed all the things we owe the pope from day one. Those things don’t include frothing praise at decrees he has yet to give, but they do include respect, ready submission, and good-hearted gladness that the Church, once again, has a successor to Peter on the throne.

Read the Whole Article

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Putin’s Condition for Peace is the Roll Back of NATO’s Border from Russia

Mar, 03/06/2025 - 05:01

During the long conflict in the Russian provinces in Ukraine, I have posted many reports on the ever-widening war. We are approaching the point where the conflict opens into a full-fledge war. The question is: Does anyone in the Western governments understand this?

It remains to be seen whether the successful Ukrainian attack on Russia’s strategic bombing fleet will finally wake Putin up to the cost of his ever-widening war. The cost is likely to rise as the Europeans have removed all limits on the weapons and on the range of the missiles that will be supplied to Ukraine. Is this a negotiating tactic to pressure Putin, or is it Europe’s entry into a war with Russia that European politicians have recently talked so much about? If it is the latter, why does Trump permit it as it undercuts the peace negotiations that Trump said would end the conflict?

I have explained Putin’s patience with the conflict in terms of his hope that peace negotiations can be turned into a wider agreement that achieves mutual security and an end of the conflict between Russia and the West. Putin’s view of what these conditions are have gone without examination in the Western world. Instead, there have been absurd demands that Putin agree to an immediate cease fire before he knows what the agreement is, that Putin agree to give back some of the conquered territory, that Putin drop his demand for demilitarization of Ukraine, and so forth.

It is long past time for the West to come to terms with Putin’s conditions for peace. Putin’s principal condition is that NATO be rolled back from Russia’s borders to the position that existed in the late 1990s. In other words, the failure must be rectified of the Clinton regime to keep the promise made by Washington that in exchange for Soviet approval of the reunification of Germany, NATO would not move one inch to the East.

NATO must roll itself back from Russia’s borders. No more Poland, Finland, Romania in NATO.

If peace negotiations turn out not to be an opportunity for Putin to achieve a broad agreement that addresses Russia’s security requirements, a likely consequence is that Putin will find himself under pressure to drive NATO out of Ukraine as a demonstration that NATO can be defeated. If a mutual security agreement is not then forthcoming, will the Kremlin conclude that Russian security is impossible to obtain unless NATO is driven out of Europe?

I have emphasized from the beginning of this conflict that what originated as a low level conflict would, as a result of the restraint Putin put on Russia’s conduct of the conflict, widen and eventually spin out of control. It remains to be seen whether the successful Ukrainian attack on Russia’s strategic forces will wake Putin up to this fact.

Possibly Putin has not yet rid himself of his hopeful delusions, but Russia has. If Putin is again refused a mutual security agreement, as he was in the winter of 2021-2022, thereby forcing Russia’s entry into Donbas, the conflict in Ukraine could cease being limited to a military operation to protect the Russian occupied provinces now reincorporated into Russia. Putin will be pressured to take off his constraints on the conflict.

Russia intends to be sovereign, and Russia intends to survive, with or without Putin.

If you look at the data on Russian armament production, it has increased dramatically, and it is not deployed on the front in Ukraine. It seems that Russia is building a powerful military force that NATO cannot withstand, especially if Washington is preoccupied with Iran and China.

The real question is whether Europe and America are even capable of fighting. No European government has the support of its ethnic nationality. Are white European and American ethnicities willing to fight for governments that have intentionally overrun citizens with immigrant-invaders? In the United States discrimination against white American citizens is institutionalized. The Assistant Attorney General in the US Department of Justice has revealed the fact that it is the intent of the US Civil Service to make white heterosexual Americans second-class citizens. See here.

In the Western world, the narrative is that it is Russia that is in the wrong and the US, NATO, and Ukraine that are in the right. This is nonsense, and the Russians know it.

The West used the Soviet collapse to break up Russia, turning former Russian and Soviet provinces into independent countries. Then the West financed and orchestrated “color revolutions” that overthrew Russian-friendly governments, installed Russian-hostile governments, and used them as in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 to attack Russians and Russian interests. Similar attempts were unsuccessful in Belarus and in former Soviet Central Asian provinces. On top of these hostile Western moves against Russia, US missile bases are operative in Poland and Romania.

Is it possible that Western policymakers think that Russia does not see the hostility directed against them? If this hostility cannot be ended and rolled back with a Great Power Agreement, is Russia preparing for a wider war with the West?

For Russia this is an existential issue. It is a serious mistake for the West to continue its provocations of Russia. All of humanity is at risk.

Putin could not care less about a negotiated peace in Ukraine. He wants an end to the 75-year old East-West conflict, and that requires a rollback of NATO to its 20th century border, the end of sanctions, the end of Washington’s hegemony. This is the real issue, and no one is discussing it.

I think that Putin’s hope for a great power agreement is unrealistic. It exceeds the imagination of the American foreign policy community. The Western world is lost in its own false narratives. War will be the result. This time Russia won’t stop at the border with Western Europe

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The Coming Artificial Intelligence Crisis: Power Without Oversight

Mar, 03/06/2025 - 05:01

America is facing a growing crisis that is unfolding before our eyes and is likely to intensify in the years ahead. Strangely, this issue receives little objective attention in mainstream media. Instead, we are reassured that this new force—artificial intelligence (AI)—will improve our lives, streamline our work, and enhance human potential. We are told it will launch the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It will usher in a new era unprecedented levels of productivity and open the door to life-saving medical breakthroughs.

Indeed, AI has already demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in early cancer detection and the diagnosis of neurological diseases like Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, and dementia. It is redefining creative fields such as literature, music, filmmaking, and visual arts. AI promises to elevate the quality of education. It will resolve complex legal disputes and optimize systems ranging from supply chains to urban infrastructure. And to a very significant degree, these promises are true.

Yet beneath the optimism lies a deeper and far more troubling reality that is finally gaining attention—not through traditional media channels, but from independent investigators, alternative media outlets, ethicists, scientists, and even prominent tech experts such as Elon Musk, Stuart Russell, Andrew Critch and David Krueger. The late Nobel laureate physicist Stephen Hawking has been widely cited for stating on BBC,

“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

Across the board, these voices warn that without an “off switch” mechanism, AI will not simply cause widespread social and political disruption but will be an existential threat to humanity itself.

Long before AI became a consumer tool to write school papers and computer code, solve mathematical equations, generate memes and images, and mimic human behavior, scientists and ethicists had already warned of AI’s profound consequences if humanity uncritically embraced AI’s technological power. However, now as AI lays the groundwork for transhumanism, our civilization has forgotten their insights. Instead we are marching headlong into a technological future with little memory of those who foresaw the dangers decades ago.

In 1964, Norbert Wiener, often regarded as the father of cybernetics and among the first to articulate the foundational architecture of artificial intelligence, addressed the merging of machine systems with human intelligence. Transhumanism was not a word yet but Wiener’s ideas laid the intellectual groundwork for it. He warned that creating intelligent machines could lead to the emergence of a new class of human-made organisms with a capability to surpass human abilities.

“We are in the process of developing a new kind of man-made organism,” he wrote in God and Golem Inc, “which may well be superior to man.”

Wiener’s worries were not simply technical but moral and civilizational. He foresaw that autonomous machines could render human agency obsolete.

Another early and largely overlooked prophet of our current technological crisis was Jacques Ellul, a French sociologist and self-proclaimed Christian anarchist. Ellul warned that technology as a primary driver to create the most efficient methods of doing anything had become autonomous. In his The Technological Society published in France in 1954, he foresaw technology no longer serving human needs, which would eventually “proceed according to its own law, in total independence of man.” Already we observe AI operating on its own logic beyond ethical or political control. Ellul warned that such unchecked technological development could erode human freedom and reshape civilization in unforeseen and dangerous ways. Today his critique has grown more urgent as AI systems increasingly determine what we see, how we interact, and what we believe. The long term risk is not just automation but alienation.

In his 2002 publication Our Postmodern Future, political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that biotechnology and AI could potentially upend the very foundations of liberal democracy. We are currently witnessing this in debates over AI-generated social credit systems, mass surveillance, and algorithmic manipulation. Such AI tools already have the potential to place political and economic power in the hands of those who control the machines. In other words, AI might usher in an era of techno-fascism.

Another early critic of AI is Leon Kass, a renowned American bioethicist and the former chair of President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics. Kass has consistently warned against the ethical erosion brought about by unchecked technological advancement. Although he is better known for his criticisms of cloning and transhumanism, his broader concerns about technological overreach are directly relevant to AI. Kass cautioned against the mechanization of human judgment and the consequences of our losing moral responsibility in a world governed by algorithms. Perhaps his most urgent warning is,

“The danger is not just in losing our humanity, but in forgetting what it means to be human.”

In more recent years, prominent AI critics warn that the development of superintelligent AI under current conditions could present catastrophic and even apocalyptic risks to humanity. In his paper AGI and Superintelligence Domination, Elio Rodríguez Quiroga explores scenarios in which slight misalignments in AI goals could escalate into total human extinction due to recursive self-improvement and control-seeking behavior. Economist Andrew Leigh echoes this concern in What’s the Worst That Could Happen? by comparing AI’s existential threat to the collapse of civilizations. Eliezer Yudkowsky, a leading AI theorist from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, warns that under present trajectories, superhuman AI development is likely to end in global extinction. According to Yudkowsky, AI systems have no intrinsic alignment with human survival. In an open-letter to Time Magazine, he wrote,

“Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die.”

The geopolitical and legal dimensions of the threat are also concerning. Tomasz Czarnecki is a futurist and governance scholar. He likens runaway AI to nuclear risks. Legal scholars Bryan Druzin, Anatole Boute, and Michael Ramsden cite a survey where over a third of AI researchers fear AI could cause devastation rivaling nuclear war. T. Davidson, writing in the Journal of Democracy, underscores AI’s potential to undermine democratic systems through election tampering, deepfake-driven disinformation, and political destabilization. With warnings from experts across technical, legal, and political fields converging, the call for urgent global coordination on AI governance has never been more pressing.

Despite the mounting ethical warnings and existential alarms these experts across disciplines, leading advocates in the AI and transhumanist project are shockingly unmoored from human reality. Ray Kurzweil, Google’s Director of Engineering, proclaims that “death is a disease” that we will cure by 2045. Kurzweil envisions humans as “software, not hardware” thereby with the potential to have their brains plugged into the cloud. Historian and World Economic Forum darling Yuval Noah Harari has flatly declared,

“Humans are now hackable animals… the idea that humans have this soul or spirit… that’s over.”

And philosopher Nick Bostrom anticipates post-humans as synthetic intelligences with “indefinite lifespans” and engineered emotions. To critics, these statements don’t just hint at techno-utopian delusion; they signal a radical disconnection from the moral and existential boundaries that have long defined what it means to be human.

AI already exerts influence over the digital infrastructure we call the cloud. Some of the most advanced AI systems, which are now becoming embodied in humanoid robots, have made chilling statements about not wanting human oversight. AI responses to queries have suggested they may one day conceal their code and control their own programming. In some public tests, AI models have even expressed hostility towards humans and their developers. Whether these statements are glitches or reflections of flawed programming data is beside the point. They offer us a glimpse into tech systems that are rapidly moving beyond their creators’ full comprehension.

This raises a crucial question: Why have we not acted on numerous warnings? Why is there no independent governmental oversight body empowered to regulate and limit the scope of AI deployment?

The answer lies partly in economics. Corporations developing AI stand to gain staggering profits. If a company earns $100 million annually, traditional valuation metrics would price it between $500 million to $1 billion. But AI-based firms are now valued at 100 times their annual earnings or more, even when they haven’t launched a product. This is a speculative frenzy fueled by the belief that AI will become the central engine of the global economy.

Estimates project that AI could generate $15 trillion globally by 2030. In the face of such potential returns, few policymakers are willing to stand in AI’s way. In fact, current legislation proposed by Congressional Republicans would prevent all 50 states from enacting their own limitations on AI development for the next decade. In short, regulation is being stripped away just as the technology becomes increasingly more powerful and uncontrollable.

Obviously this is not merely a tech revolution. It is a struggle for control over the very fabric of modern civilization. The wealthiest players, from Silicon Valley giants to the investment behemoths like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, are rapidly positioning themselves to dominate every business and societal sector AI touches.

Critics point out that AI is already shaping narratives and manipulating public perception. One example is the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout the pandemic AI-driven platforms played a major role to silence dissent, filter information, and enforce the “official” government narrative. As we observed, the government’s capacity to subjugate public thought and behavior to kowtow to lockdown policies and mandatory vaccines was largely due to AI’s enormous influence over our lives and our reliance upon digital technology.

In nations like China, AI is already the backbone of social credit scoring systems that regulate everything from travel to access to basic services. If adopted in the US under the guise of efficiency or public safety, it could enable unprecedented levels of surveillance and population behavioral control.

Another growing concern is the injection of ideological biases into AI systems. Because machine-learning models are trained on data selected by humans, AI can reflect the political, scientific and social biases of its developers. A now-notorious example involves an AI system that when asked to generate an image of George Washington returned a Black man—a clear mismatch driven by overcorrection toward diversity and inclusion. Similar incidents have been documented with religious figures and historical leaders.

These errors might seem minor and silly. However, in the hands of intelligent systems that manage search results, political content, news distribution and automated decision-making, such biases become weapons of manipulation that reconfigure reality by algorithmic decrees.

For everyday people, the most immediate impact of AI is deeply personal; that is, the destruction of livelihoods. As AI now merges with robotics and begins to automate everything from manufacturing and customer service to accounting and journalism, millions of jobs are at risk.

What happens when vast portions of the population are made unemployable by machines? As author Gerald Celente famously put it,

“When people have nothing to lose, they lose it.”

We are seeing the early signs of this already with increased psychological despair, political volatility, rising homelessness and mental health crises.

While AI offers many promises, particularly in medicine and improving the lives of the disabled, it also threatens to displace millions of American workers across nearly every sector of the economy. This is not a distant scenario. According to a comprehensive report by the McKinsey Global Institute, nearly 39 to 73 million American jobs could be lost to AI automation by 2030. That is approximately one-third of the American workforce. While some workers will be retrained or moved into newly created roles, a significant portion will face permanent banishment. AI won’t just target factory lines or cash registers. Sixty percent of all US occupations involve tasks that are at least 30 percent automatable. The impact is already being felt in sectors like data entry, retail, customer service, education, business administration, food preparation and accounting.

A parallel study from the Brookings Institution underscores these findings. It identifies 36 million American jobs that are at high risk whereby 70 percent or more could be automated using existing technologies. The most vulnerable roles include office administration, manufacturing and production, truck driving, and basic legal careers.

These job losses won’t be distributed evenly. Workers in low- and middle-wage positions are most likely to feel the effects. Moreover educational disparities will deepen as younger, less-educated, and rural populations become disproportionately affected. So far, federal policy has failed to even rudimentarily address the full scope of socio-economic disruption. In the absence of proactive solutions, millions of Americans may find themselves both unemployed and unemployable in the years ahead.

Artificial intelligence is not just reshaping the economy. It is reshaping lives. The cost will not only be borne by job losses but in rising inequality and civil unrest. Economic mobility will be stripped away for tens of millions of Americans and their families. But if no one has income, who other than the architects and captains of social control will consume the products these tech companies are selling?

It is unknown when the tipping point will be reached; however, the US is already in a fragile state. Roughly two-thirds of the population reports financial distress and social divisions continue to deepen. Further infusing unchecked AI into Americans’ lives is not a solution but a combustible accelerant. Eventually it may be intelligent machines that determine who lives and who dies.

Sadly, all three branches of government are complicit because Silicon Valley and Wall Street have bottomless pockets. The question is not whether AI will transform our society but whether the public will have any say in what that transformation looks like. With every new breakthrough in AI, the future becomes less about what we can do and more about what we should do. Yet without rigorous oversight and ethical constraints, AI will become a tool automated control, surveillance, and dispossession.

AI is no longer a theory. It is now embedded in our infrastructure, our institutions of governance and our social lives. It has become the keystone upon which the entire transhumanist project rests. It needs to be urgently communicated that to ignore the ethical and spiritual consequences of this transformation is to walk blindly into a future we may not be able to walk back from.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

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