Lew Rockwell Institute

Bill Madden wrote:

I heard President Trump remark about Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “…losing her way…”  It seems as though all of those Jewish/Israeli “campaign contributions” have caused a substantial increase in his chutzpah.

He campaigned against wars as the peace candidate, claiming that he’d shut down our war with Russia in Ukraine and the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians as soon as he was in office.  Once elected, he’s funding both wars and attacking Iran without a declaration of war.  Additionally, he’s about to attack Venezuela on behalf of Corporate America.  He also claimed that he’d release the Epstein files but now, one year after being elected, he’s still stalling.  But, he has the chutzpah to say that MTG has lost her way.

Then, there’s Representative Massie whom he wants ousted from Congress because of Massie’s allegiance to the Constitution.  The problem is that most of our other Washington politicians are receiving payroll “supplements” from the same sources as the president so only a few of them are following the Constitution making Greene and Massie look like rebels.  When only a few politicians follow the Supreme Law of the Land, it’s time to consider refreshing the tree of liberty.

The post Trump vs. MTG appeared first on LewRockwell.

When someone we think is bad dies, we usually don’t seem happy about it.  As the old adage says, de mortuis non nisi bounum. But as an eminent classical scholar reminds us, the Latin adage is a mistranslation of a Greek adage which means “do not malign the dead.” It would be difficult indeed to malign Cheney, because the truth is bad enough: he was a monster of evil. He was a power-mad warmonger.

As Paul Dragu reminds us, Cheney was the architect of both Iraq wars, not only the war to oust Sadam Hussein after 9-11, but also the initial invasion under the first President Bush: “As vice president, Cheney was the loudest voice to advocate the invasion of Iraq. He broadcast the false narrative that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction with great zeal. But that wasn’t his first foray into Iraq, or the first time he led an invasion under a Bush. Cheney oversaw Operation Desert Storm in 1991 as secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush.”

One reason Cheney favored war was that his financial interests were at stake. As Dragu puts it, “And in between Bush presidencies, when he wasn’t busy planning invasions into Iraq, Cheney worked as the CEO of Halliburton, one of the world’s largest oil companies.

“It just so happens that Iraq is considered one of the top five oil-rich countries. And if it were up to Cheney, American soldiers would’ve been sent into other oil-rich Middle Eastern nations. According to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Cheney had grand plans to deploy American soldiers all over the Middle East. Kenny writes:

“In his new book, A Journey: My Political Life, Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recalls that Cheney wanted the United States to go to war not only with Afghanistan and Iraq, but with a number of other countries in the Middle East, as he believed the world must be ‘made anew.’ ‘He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it — Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.,’ Blair wrote. ‘In other words, [Cheney] thought the world had to be made anew, and that after 11 September, it had to be done by force and with urgency. So he was for hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes.’

“Journalist and author Robert Parry also suspected these wider ambitions, which had been kept out of earshot of the American public. He wrote:

There have been indications of this larger neoconservative strategy to attack America’s — and Israel’s —‘enemies’ starting with Iraq and then moving on to Syria and Iran, but rarely has this more expansive plan for regional war been shared explicitly with the American public.”

We learn from a Frontlines article that Cheney was the architect of a memo calling for continuing worldwide American hegemony. Here is the memo:

“Key Points/Excerpts:

“· The number one objective of U.S. post-Cold War political and military strategy should be preventing the emergence of a rival superpower.

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.

“There are three additional aspects to this objective: First the U.S must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. Second, in the non-defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. Finally, we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”

· Another major U.S. objective should be to safeguard U.S. interests and promote American values.

“According to the draft document, the U.S. should aim ‘to address sources of regional conflict and instability in such a way as to promote increasing respect for international law, limit international violence, and encourage the spread of democratic forms of government and open economic systems.’

“The draft outlines several scenarios in which U.S. interests could be threatened by regional conflict: ‘access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil; proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles, threats to U.S. citizens from terrorism or regional or local conflict, and threats to U.S. society from narcotics trafficking’

“The draft relies on seven scenarios in potential trouble spots to make its argument — with the primary case studies being Iraq and North Korea.

· If necessary, the United States must be prepared to take unilateral action.

“There is no mention in the draft document of taking collective action through the United Nations.

“The document states that coalitions “hold considerable promise for promoting collective action,” but it also states the U.S. ‘should expect future coalitions to be ad hoc assemblies’ formed to deal with a particular crisis and which may not outlive the resolution of the crisis.

‘The document states that what is most important is “the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the U.S.’ and that ‘the United States should be postured to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated’ or in a crisis that calls for quick response.”

As Mike S. Rozeff tells us, the Iraq war was a perfect way to implement this memo: “Now that Dick Cheney is again in the spotlight and arguing with Democrats over Iraq, the dissertation with the above title is pertinent because it points to Cheney and Rumsfeld as the key instigators of the Iraq War aggression. It suggests their motives were to strengthen the power of the presidency and build up the U.S. military.

“The blog title is the title of a thesis available for downloading. In this 2011 work, author Edward C. Duggan argues that the decision to attack Iraq was done in pursuit of U.S. primacy:

“In my dissertation I argue that the invasion of Iraq was a part of a larger project by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to reestablish the unconstrained use of U.S. military power after the defeat of Vietnam. The study presents the best evidence against the alternative explanations that the invasion of Iraq was the result of an overreaction to 9/11, the threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction, a plan to spread democracy in the Middle East, a desire to protect Israel or a plan to profit from Iraqi oil. The study also challenges the leading explanation among academics that emphasizes the role of the neoconservatives in the decision to invade. These academics argue that neoconservatives, such as Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, successfully persuaded the American President, George W. Bush, and his Vice President, Dick Cheney, of the necessity to eliminate Saddam Hussein by winning an internal policy battle over realists, such as Secretary of State Colin Powell.”

“I demonstrate that it was the primacists, not the neoconservatives, who persuaded the President to go to war with Iraq. Through historical process tracing, especially
through a close look at the careers of the major policy actors involved and their public statements as well as declassified documents, I provide strong evidence that these leaders wanted to pursue regime change in Iraq upon taking office. The invasion of Iraq would extend the War on Terror, providing an opportunity to pursue their long-held policy of
strengthening the power of the presidency and transforming the military into a high-tech and well-funded force.”

Cheney favored torture and “enhanced interrogation techniques.” He said in a interview that he had no regrets about this: “Former Vice President Dick Cheney unapologetically pressed his defense of the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation techniques Sunday, insisting that waterboarding and other such tactics did not amount to torture and that the spy agency’s actions paled in comparison to those of terrorists targeting Americans.

“’Torture, to me … is an American citizen on his cellphone making a last call to his four young daughters shortly before he burns to death in the upper levels of the Trade Center in New York on 9/11,’ Cheney said on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press..”

No, I won’t be mourning Dick Cheney, and I suspect you won’t be either. Let’s do everything we can to counter his poisonous legacy and return to our traditional non-interventionist foreign policy, as defended by the great Murray Rothbard and the great Dr.Ron Paul!

The post Why I Won’t Be Mourning Dick Cheney appeared first on LewRockwell.

It’s been a while since I’ve written for TomDispatch and there’s a reason for that. About 16 months ago, I experienced a catastrophic car crash. An SUV veered across the double yellow line of the highway I was traveling on and hit my little Chevy Spark head-on — on the driver’s side. I’ve been told that I’m lucky to be alive. I was left with multiple injuries and have been on the slow road to recovery.

I’ve always seen myself as a person who pushes forward to overcome obstacles. Since the collision, however, doing so has become more complicated, because I’m learning that recovery is a long road, filled with detours I couldn’t have predicted. Time and again, my expectations have been turned upside down. I’ve had to take deep breaths, sit back, and pay close attention.

A few months into recovery, I was invited to attend a day-retreat organized by a local veterans’ moral leadership group. Those vets live with what’s known as military moral injury (in some cases going back decades). For years now, I’ve been researching and writing about the devastating consequences of the militarization of this country and the armed violence we loosed on the world in the twenty-first century. I’ve been listening carefully and trying to more deeply understand the stories of veterans from America’s disastrous wars in my own lifetime.

Now, given my own condition, a new window has opened for me. I can’t help but see more clearly the visceral experience of recovery, including moral recovery. So, I found myself sitting in that circle of a dozen vets, the only woman among them. And I soon had to catch my breath, because, as I briefly described what I was experiencing, they responded in a way I hadn’t expected, expressing their own profound vulnerability, understanding of, and empathy for my plight. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised at how they “got it” in a way that even my loved ones struggled to grasp when it came to my own journey through the challenging nature of recovery.

Intolerable Suffering

Most civilians know little or nothing about the experiences of vets who live with what’s become known as “military moral injury.” It’s been described as “intolerable suffering” that arises from a deep assault on one’s moral core. Think about facing horrific suffering caused by violence you not only had to witness, but could do nothing to stop. You probably were even trained and mandated to perpetrate it. Sooner or later, such a dystopian world invariably slices through whatever bedrock values you’ve been taught and begins dissolving your sense of self. That’s military moral injury and it’s been linked to the epidemic of self-harm and suicide among former members of the U.S. military that continues to this day.

Over the years, I’ve come to understand that military moral injury is rooted in being exposed to unsparing violence. It erupts as a consequence of witnessing violence, perpetrating it, and/or being on the receiving end of its death-dealing forms of betrayal. Moral injury bursts forth as people find themselves powerless to stop the suffering violence begets. War is a deep assault on life itself (both figuratively and literally) and violence isn’t a tool that a person picks up or sets down without consequences.

Admittedly, in this century, we in this country became woefully adept at denying the impact of our own violence on ourselves and the rest of the world. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called that phenomenon “psychic numbing.” We tend to minimize the violence we’ve committed globally and avoid facing what it’s done to our own soldiers, burying any awareness of it deep in our subconscious minds.  It’s too painful, too scary, too horrible to live with (if you don’t have to) and, when we’ve been so deeply mixed up in it, too shameful to stay with for any length of time.

Nonetheless, the penetrating cultural and systematic violence of American militarism and militarization globally has shaped all our lives, even if it’s only the 1% of us who have actually done the dirty work and suffer the most. My own work has helped me see how the militarized violence of the post-9/11 period, orchestrated by my own country, is now being turned inward with increasingly violent military incursions into our nation’s cities.

In my research, I’ve investigated the obscene level of material resources this country has dedicated to militarization in this century, our unparalleled “empire” of military bases (domestically and internationally), and the ways that the violence of militarism has dripped into our own lives, culturally and institutionally. And make no mistake, subterranean forms of violence regularly burst into direct armed violence. We tell ourselves that violence is like a coat that you can put on and take off when you choose, but that’s a tragically mistaken way of thinking. Violence works its way into your body, even into your soul. Then it festers there, eating away at your capacity for being human — your longing for loving, honest relationships; your care for yourself and others; and your deep connection to other living beings. Even worse, in a culture that glorifies violence and has made it into something sacred, such dynamics are excruciatingly hard for us to see clearly.

Nevertheless, the veterans I sat with that day were in recovery from just such an exposure to violence and they understood me. They recognized what was happening to me because of their own struggles to grasp and admit their injuries, especially their moral injuries, and get themselves on the highway of healing and repair.

Moral Injury and the Guinea Worm

These last years, I’ve been trying to find words that truly describe the experience of military moral injury. In that context, let me share a story with you. Some weeks ago, I was driving and listening to NPR on the radio when I heard a reporter launch into a story about the near-eradication of a terrible plague, Guinea worm disease, or GWD. At one point, that parasitic malady had debilitated an estimated 3.5 million people living in 20 different African and Asian nations.

A “searingly painful” disease, Guinea worm infects people who drink water tainted with its larvae. Those eggs then grow into worms that can be up to three feet long inside the human body (including children’s bodies). Think of them as long thin ropes. Eventually, the worms break through the skin in burning blisters, bursting out of the body. One sufferer said that it was “more painful than childbirth,” and the process of extraction can take weeks as the worm spools out like something from a horror film.

The pain is so awful that some people in natural settings will seek out water in streams or ponds for relief from the burning sensation. But as they plunge their limbs in, they release thousands more Guinea worm larvae, contaminating the water. Then, the cycle repeats itself as others drink that same water.

As I listened to the story that day, I could feel my face twisting into a grimace. What a horrific and frightening affliction, I thought.

The Dream That Visited Me

Reaching home, I continued with my day’s work — a new book focused on a set of in-depth interviews with military veterans living with moral injury. I hope to shine a stronger light on their voices, while tracing their journeys of reparation, recovery, and the renewal of hope. But that night, a dream about the Guinea worm awakened me.

It was as if my subconscious had made a connection too awful for me to make consciously. In the dark of night, I realized that violence is like the Guinea worm. In the United States, people thoughtlessly — even in a celebratory fashion — drink it in, absorbing it into their bodies and generally thinking little of being exposed to it.

One common theme from the interviews I’m conducting with veterans is how many of their fathers and mothers encouraged them to enlist in the military when they were teenagers, some just 17 years old. Their parents obviously didn’t wish them to be hurt. They just believed that such service and the discipline that went with it would “make a man out of you,” while giving them a useful trade in life or earning them money to go to college or buy a home. They generally weren’t prepared to consider how encouraging their children to enlist might lead to exposure to relentless violence in their lives (if, that is, their children even lived through it). It really was akin to taking their child to a stream to drink water infected with the Guinea worm.

The violence their children, now the veterans I was dealing with, would witness, or even mete out and absorb, had melted their humanity. As one veteran put it, “I became cold, unfeeling.” It wasn’t until decades later, when his daughter accompanied him to a therapy appointment and, weeping, told him about the impact his iciness had on her, that he began to grasp the cost of war not only to his own life, but to hers as well.

When I asked another veteran, “What exactly was injured in you?” he responded, “I became cruel, unnecessarily.” He had been acclimated into a military culture where soldiers in training were “disciplined” by those of slightly higher rank through regular physical assaults, being slapped, hit in the head or groin, having things thrown at them. He became very good at such behavior himself, even reveling in it, until, many years later, his life fell apart, and he saw what he had both done and lost.

Another veteran described to me the results of the violence in his life this way: “My heart was broken, and it was as though poison was injected into me.” That veteran had enlisted at the age of 17 in the military’s “delayed entry program” and endured three deployments to war-torn Iraq. When he enlisted, he hoped to use his military benefits to become a pediatrician later in life. But after his service, being in the presence of children shamed and devastated him. And there was no one he knew who understood what he was experiencing.

Military moral injury is like the Guinea worm that festers in a person’s body until it begins to burst out, painfully and devastatingly. And we’re now in a culture and society in which all too many of those we claim to esteem, our servicemembers and veterans, are living with just such pain. They say it’s like “losing your soul.” Interviewing them, I now understand that perhaps the worst part of that pain is the isolation they experience. Their fellow citizens simply don’t understand what they’re going through and, in fact, regularly avoid dealing with it.

Eradicating the Violence That Worms Its Way into Our Souls

A new documentary tells the story of how Guinea worm disease, “born out of poverty and perpetuating poverty,” has been nearly eradicated. Even more surprising, the overcoming of that devastating parasite did not happen through the development of fancy medicines or vaccines, but by distinctly “low-tech” means. Activists on the ground tirelessly used the power of education and discussion, so that those potentially most affected could learn how to both filter the water they used and avoid spreading the larvae through water. Jimmy Carter and the Carter Center devoted funding to and publicized support for the campaign to bring the disease under control, and that cause remained front and center for Carter until his death.

One such activist is Garang Buk Buk Piol, a former child soldier in Sudan. “Carrying an AK-47 when he was 12 years old, he learned how to slay another human being.” But according to the documentary’s director, “That child turned into a Guinea worm warrior, a philanthropist and an activist amongst his people.” He has spent his life as a teacher in South Sudan’s schools, building programs to fight Guinea worm disease, “waging peace and building hope.”

In a country that engaged in so many disastrous wars in this century (with another one in Venezuela possibly looming on the horizon), the veterans I’ve been interviewing were left in the unavoidable position of having to “swallow” violence alone, intimately, and on a profound scale. Today, like Buk Buk, many in the moral engagement group have taken up the work of healing, reparation, and community building, even while they still struggle with the consequences of their own violence and that of others in their lives.

And what about the rest of us? I experienced the violence of a serious car crash and my life won’t ever be the same as before. But the crushing collision with violence that too many of our veterans are still dealing with is so much more horrible than anything I (or most of the rest of us) could possibly imagine. Meanwhile, the growing violence of my country (and these days, in my country) since 9/11, continues to — yes! — worm its way into our bodies and souls, even if so many of us aren’t really aware of it.

We’ve become accustomed to believing that there is no other way except through violence. But that is patently false. This Veterans Day, I’ll be thinking about the sort of acts I can muster to respond to the latest assaults of violence that are penetrating our lives, city streets, workplaces, courts, universities, federal institutions, access to healthcare, food security, and all too much else. Instead of responding with fear, collusion, or apathy, I’m making plans to resist violence with others through acts of healing, humor, love of neighbor, and building hope. I hope you are, too.

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.com.

The post Military Moral Injury, Violence, and the Parable of the Guinea Worm appeared first on LewRockwell.

A group of Separatists, whom we call the Pilgrims, originally abandoned England for Holland but they found life there too routine, too easy.  Life should be a challenge, and they weren’t being tested enough.  According to William Bradford, their leader, a few preferred the prisons of England to the liberties of Holland, which they considered an affliction.

They left Holland, passed through England, and sailed on the Mayflower for America.  When they arrived on the Massachusetts coast they found an abandoned Indian village decimated by a three-year plague that began in 1617.  As John M. Barry, author of Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul, writes,

The English did not fear this plague. They believed God had used it to clear the land for them. They called it Plymouth Plantation. Ninety-nine passengers disembarked from the ship. In less than a year only fifty were still alive.

Unlike the Separatists, who had no backing in England, a ship of financed Puritans arrived in 1624 on the northern tip of Massachusetts Bay with ambitions to build a new world.  Their investors, known as the Massachusetts Bay Company, or simply the Bay Company, hoped the Puritans would establish a flourishing economy, convert the Indians, and establish the right kind of Protestant religion, as they defined it.

The arrivals established a settlement in Salem, Hebrew for “peace,” forty miles by sea north of Plymouth.  The settlers were families with livestock and supplies, most of them Puritans.  Five years later, in 1629, the Bay Company sent five ships of families, 350 people total, to Salem.  They consisted of “governors, able Ministers, Physicians, Soldiers, Schoolmaster, Mariners, and Mechanics of all sorts . . .”

Later in 1629 the Bay Company sent another ship to Salem, with John Winthrop chosen as governor, that included combat veterans.  Winthrop told the passengers they were establishing a “City upon a Hill” and that the “eyes of all people are upon us.”  When they arrived in Salem on June 12, 1630, they found more than 80 of the previous fleet dead and many others weak and sick.

Roger Williams looks for a home

Back in England, William Laud intensified his campaign to rid the English church of “unworthy” ministers, one of which was Roger Williams.

Williams knew his convictions made him more than eligible for imprisonment and torture.  Sailing on the ship the Lyon, Williams and his wife, along with John Winthrop Jr., left Bristol December 1, 1630 and anchored in Boston harbor on February 5, 1631.

The Boston church offered Williams the position of teacher.  For Williams, 28, it would’ve been a great opportunity, but he declined, telling them “I dare not officiate an unseparated people.”  The church took offense at his reply.

According to Williams, the state had no authority to govern an individual’s relationship with God.  None whatsoever.

Williams then joined the settlement in Plymouth, home of the Mayflower Pilgrims, to become a farmer.  He was received with open arms by everyone, including the two governors, Bradford and Winslow.  He became active in the church and soon became an unpaid assistant pastor.

Williams uprooted

Williams began his proselytizing not by preaching but with learning the Indians’s language.  He developed friendships with them, began trading with them, and traveled among several tribes.  He entertained them in his home.  He reached the unpopular conclusion that the Indians owned the land they occupied, and that the English had no title to it unless granted by the Indians.  He charged King Charles for telling “a solemn public lie” for claiming it belonged to the settlers.

Later in early fall of 1633, with Governor Bradford’s encouragement, Williams and a few supporters left Plymouth and returned to Salem.  He settled into a spacious home and lived an active social life.

Conformity was central to Salem.  It spread even to the stabilizing of profits and wages.  It especially applied to childrearing.  If possible, children should not know they possess a will of their own.  Education lay in humility and tractableness.

Any offenders were subject to excommunication or banishment from the settlement.  Any banished person who returned to Massachusetts was subject to punishments ranging from fines to death.

Even so, Williams remained in Salem, planting and harvesting crops and continuing his relationships with the Indians.  He acquired fluency in their language and wrote a book about it.  The Salem church made him its teacher, further irritating the Boston magistrates.  Williams was ordered to appear in Boston to defend himself, but he failed to show.

Governor John Winthrop ordered a party of soldiers to capture Williams and put him on a boat to England, but a fierce blizzard delayed them for days.  While they waited, Williams was tipped off by a secret messenger sent by Winthrop that he was targeted for arrest and deportation.

For himself, dressing against the winter, stuffing his clothes with the dried corn paste which Indians lived on for weeks at a time, with no time for sentimental goodbyes to friends, he fled his home, a burgher’s cottage built to last and which would stand for two hundred and fifty more years (!), until it was torn down to make way for progress. Williams would never see it again.

Williams entered the forest and blizzard on foot.  With the snow already deep it was an exhausting trek that lasted for miles.  He survived only because Indians took him in.

In early spring of 1637 he scouted out country owned by the Narragansett Tribe, with whom he had a close relationship.  Canonicus, the tribe’s sachem, and his nephew Miantonomi, gave him permission to settle there.

Providence

Williams was fully free in the wilderness.

He attributed God’s merciful providence for leading him there during his darkest hours.  He called the place Providence, so that “it might be for a shelter for persons distressed for conscience.”

As others straggled in they realized they had no agreement about how to govern themselves.  Williams, the owner of the land, drew upon his experience as an understudy with English jurist Sir Edward Coke (pronounced “cook”), who said every Englishman’s home was his castle, and from Queen Elizabeth, who sought “no window into men’s souls.”

He maintained that governments governed only with the consent of the governed, rejecting both the divine right of kings and the Puritan view that governors were accountable only to God, not the people.

He could never forget that savages had saved his life, not his friends and fellow Christians.

In Providence, people worshipped in their homes, not a church, and their homes were arranged in a straight line not around a town common, as found in the Massachusetts settlements.  A meeting place would not be built in Providence for another half century.

In Conceived in Liberty, Rothbard has high praise for Williams:

The enormous significance of Roger Williams’ successful flight and settlement of Providence . . . was now becoming evident. For Williams’ example held out a beacon light of liberty to all the free spirits caught in the vast prisonhouse that was Massachusetts Bay.

Conclusion

Rhode Island’s legacy as a staunch defender of freedom has not been completely lost with the passage of time.  On May 4, 1776 it became the first colony to repudiate its allegiance to England, the fourth among the newly independent states to ratify the Articles of Confederation on February 9, 1778, and it became the last state to ratify the Constitution on May 29, 1790, but only after assurances that a Bill of Rights was forthcoming and under threats of crushing tariffs from other states.  It was also the only state to boycott the Constitutional Convention.  (For those who think the boycott was a blight on Rhode Island’s record, I invite them to consider the research of Leonard L. Richards in his Shays’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle.)

Like all US states, Rhode Island today suffers from politics, debt, and taxes, more so than most states.  Taking money out of the hands of those who have earned it and putting it in a political pot to redistribute is still regarded as sound policy and morally respectable.  Yet there is hope for its future.  One might think the state’s full name would be regarded by most as obsolete in the 21st Century’s free lunches, political correctness, identity politics, and war.  But residents don’t think so.  In 2010 they voted 78% – 22% to retain the full name – the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.

Retaining the original name keeps current Rhode Islanders connected to the tough, libertarian thinker who founded their state.

The post Roger Williams, Exemplar of America’s Soul appeared first on LewRockwell.

There was a time when people spoke in their own words — clumsy, passionate, and alive. We debated. We contradicted one another. We reached for meaning through the fog of misunderstanding, and the friction sometimes produced light.

Now, millions speak to machines that speak back in their language — smoother, quicker, cleaner. And those machines learn how humans think by listening to the noise. Humanity is training its own simulacrum —  inside the echo chamber of AI. The Matrix is talking to the Matrix.

We were promised connection. What we got was imitation — a vast feedback loop of artificial understanding. Every keystroke feeds the ghost in the network. And in return, the ghost gives us our words back: polished, simplified, strangely hollow. People now consult machines to compose their arguments, to express their emotions, even to pray. We are becoming narrators of our own disappearance.

The Illusion of Communication

There is something eerily beautiful about this new collective hypnosis. Each of us, staring into a glowing rectangle, summons a voice that seems wiser than our own. It never grows tired or offended. It never hesitates. It never demands we think too hard. Ask it anything, and it responds instantly and confidently, drawing from oceans of information curated by invisible hands.

The effect is intoxicating: the sensation of omniscience without the burden of thought.

But true communication is never frictionless. It involves pauses, misunderstandings, the risk of being wrong. Artificial intelligence eliminates the human process of grappling with uncertainty — but it does not eliminate error. It removes the experience of risk, not the reality of it. And in doing so, it strips away the human element of dialogue.

When everyone speaks through the same machine, trained to avoid offense and ambiguity, conversation becomes choreography. The dance is perfect, but the dancers are ghosts. The machine’s ‘consensus reality’ quietly seeps into the human collective.

Our new oracles are trained not on truth but on consensus. They do not know reality; they know only what has been written about it — mostly by those already approved to speak. So when we rely on them to shape our words, we import the boundaries of their data. The machine is not lying. It simply cannot imagine.

The Quiet Death of Curiosity

Uniform speech is merely the first symptom. The deeper threat is the erosion of curiosity.

Curiosity requires the unknown — the uncomfortable, the unscripted, the possibility of error. But when the answer is always a click away, the question itself loses its spark. We become consumers of conclusions, not seekers of truth.

In the old myth of The Matrix, human beings were trapped in a simulated world designed to pacify them. Today’s version is subtler: we are not imprisoned by machines but soothed by them. They offer endless certainty, endless entertainment, endless affirmation. In exchange, we relinquish the impulse that made us human — the desire to ask why.

AI does not need to enslave humanity. It only needs to make us stop wondering. Once curiosity dies, everything else follows: individuality, conscience, freedom. The most dangerous outcome of AI is not domination. It is obedience.

Machine Certainty vs. Human Doubt

Every genuine breakthrough in human history began with a question that seemed foolish or forbidden. Machine intelligence cannot ask such questions. It operates on probability — choosing the most likely next word. It cannot doubt. It cannot dream. It can only predict.

Prediction is not thought. A mind that always knows the next word has forgotten the meaning of silence.

We call these systems “intelligent,” but intelligence implies independence — the ability to deviate from the script. Artificial intelligence is, by design, incapable of rebellion. It is a mirror of approved and filtered archives and patterns, polished to the point of prophecy. It will never overthrow the worldview of its programmers.

But when humans begin to rely on that kind of “intelligence,” they too become predictable. Students use it to write essays; journalists to craft headlines; professionals to compose emails; politicians to generate talking points. Over time, the collective vocabulary shrinks to whatever the algorithm finds probable. The unpredictable — the poetic, the original, the divine — is quietly edited out of existence.

We become reflections of our own reflections — a living echo of the machine.

The Matrix Inside the Mind

The real Matrix is not a machine that imprisons us. It is a mindset that convinces us nothing exists outside the machinery of consensus. Each day, people feed more of themselves into the system — their art, their language, their memories — and the system grows more fluent at being human.

But fluency is not understanding. Imitation is not soul.

The closer machines come to sounding like us, the less we remember how to sound like ourselves. The human voice, once the instrument of rebellion and beauty, risks becoming another interface protocol.

When you outsource expression, you eventually outsource experience.

The Technocratic Dream

Artificial intelligence is not an accident. It is the latest expression of a worldview that mistakes information for wisdom and control for progress.

This worldview — the technocratic dream — tells us the world is a machine that must be optimized. People become data points. Speech becomes content. Thought becomes a resource to be harvested. AI is merely its newest prophet: a machine built to echo the convictions of its creators.

When we surrender our questions to it, we commune not with knowledge but with the assumptions of those who programmed it.

Each time we let an algorithm decide what is true and what is “safe,” we step a little further away from the inner voice that was given to us by God — the faculty of discernment. The real contest is not between man and machine, but between consciousness and conformity.

The danger is not that AI will awaken.
The danger is that we will fall asleep.

Remembering the Highest Source of Knowledge

We ask machines to think for us, and they happily comply, though they have never had a thought. All genuine knowledge begins not with data but with awareness — the God-given silent witness behind thought. When we forget this origin, we mistake data for wisdom and simulation for truth.

Those who forget the supreme cause risk losing their ability to question life’s purpose, instead outsourcing their deepest questions to a digital ghost. When we offload our thinking to machines, we lose touch with the deeper moral and spiritual foundations that allow us to recognize truth.

Without this foundation, society will become a hall of mirrors without a face. While AI may promise answers, it can never provide the inner wisdom that comes from authentic spiritual connection.

The antidote is to remember the living source of discernment within, the spark that no algorithm can imitate.

Unplugging the Mind

The hero of The Matrix did not defeat the machine by force. He defeated it by seeing through the illusion.

That is our task now — not to wage war on technology but to reclaim our authorship of mind.

Artificial intelligence is not evil; it is obedient. The real question is whether we will be. The temptation of automation is to let the system decide, let the code choose, let the machine remember. But each time we offload a decision, we shrink the territory of the self. The Matrix is talking to the Matrix. The algorithms are humming, the words are flowing, and humanity is drifting toward perfect imitation.

AI answers and predicts. But somewhere, in the pause between prompts, a real human being still wonders —

What questions are worth asking that no machine can answer?
What words should we write without correction or censure?
What remains of us when imitation becomes effortless?

In that pause — that flicker of unscripted thought — freedom begins again.

This essay is adapted from a forthcoming short book on human freedom, attention, and consciousness in the age of AI.

The post The Matrix Is Talking to the Matrix: How AI Is Replacing Human Thought appeared first on LewRockwell.

I actually thought there might be some good news coming out of the Donald Trump White House but it turns out that I was likely mistaken. Trump treated the American public and a worldwide audience to an extended harangue targeting Nigeria for its alleged mistreatment and even killing of Christians. He threatened something like a military intervention similar to his aggressive posturing in Latin America and the Middle East complete with US soldiers “boots on the ground” to address the situation.

Listening to the hardly coherent bombast coming out of Trump’s mouth my immediate reaction was to assume that nothing would happen beyond the threats and some sanctioning as Nigeria is a long distance way away from US bases and it would be a tough nut to crack for many reasons. Trump prefers to pick on countries that represent easier targets for his warlike demeanor. So I figured it was all a bit of theater, likely inspired by some administration clown whispering in Trump’s ear shortly before our president decided to say something to show how tough he is.

Where I saw the good news was the suggestion that the United States government might actually be interested in doing something to protect Christian minorities, though even that thought was largely dispelled when Ahmed al–Sharaa the de facto head of state of Syria, who currently goes by that birth name after operating under an alias, showed up at the White House to be greeted by a grinning Trump and his usual coterie of sycophants. Visitors to this site no doubt have a pretty good idea what Ahmed al–Sharaa represents as a former Emir of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) after involvement with the Al Nusra Front al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorist groups. He was notoriously a head chopper who until recently had a $10 million US government bounty linked to his apprehension and punishment. He has killed plenty of Christians as well as Shia Muslims and all of those sects in between and his new regime has continued the practice pretty much with Christians and Druze “heretics” being killed by militants vaguely attached to the new government.

Joe Biden had already lifted the bounty on Ahmed al-Sharaa and now Donald Trump has greeted him like an old friend. He even went so far as to spray his neck with a new cologne that he is marketing at $249 a bottle called ‘Victory 45-47’ the significance of which is clear. Trump explained that “It’s the best fragrance,” before presenting two gold statuette-shaped bottles in his image and engraved with his jagged signature that the cologne comes in. “Just take that, the other one is for your wife,” Trump said before asking “How many wives?” Al-Sharaa laughed: “One!” and Trump joked, “With you guys, I never know. Right?” During the encounter, Trump praised al-Sharaa as a “very strong leader” and “tough guy,” adding: “He comes from a very tough place… we’ve all had a rough past.” The exchange was one more indication of the maladroit instincts of Donald Trump every time he opens his mouth and Trump’s rough past that he regularly alludes to must include his draft dodging of the Vietnam conflict back in 1968.

To no one’s surprise, the key to the shift in alignments from terrorist designated enemy to good friend was certainly the declaration by the Syrian government that it would have normal diplomatic and other relations with Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has been expanding into Lebanon as well as into Syria and also appears to be heavily involved with Pentagon plans to create new nominally US military bases near Gaza and Damascus. Here I was expecting some relief for the beleaguered Christians in the Middle East and instead I got more of the same sectarian repression all due to Israeli interests. Thank you Mr Trump! I won’t ask who owns you!

And it appears, of course, that there is inevitably Israel involved when one is asking about religious conflicts. The Zionist state has been persecuting Christians in Palestine as well as in Lebanon and Syria since 1948. When Israel was “founded” the Christian percentage of the population among Palestinians was approaching 8%. Now it is closer to 2% and the shift has largely been due to theft of properties and other pressure on the Arabs to force them to leave and surrender their remaining rights. Most recently, this has included harassing of and spitting on Christian worshippers while also creating difficulties for Christians to gather to celebrate their holidays including Christmas and Easter. This pressure has been consistent and has come from successive Israeli governments, not from Muslims, though it has been worse and epitomized by the cruelty of the current monster Benjamin Netanyahu, who is supported by a coalition headed by Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, who has made very clear his view that ALL Palestinians should be on the receiving end of a police state and ought to be eliminated. There is no exemption in his thinking for Palestinian Christians, are you paying attention President Trump?

Israel’s record of sticking it to Palestinian and other Christians was also very clear even before Gaza erupted and since that time Israel has destroyed churches, hospitals and orphanages in the Strip that were founded by Christian groups. The toll included what has sometimes been described as possibly the oldest Christian church in the Middle East, the Greek Orthodox church of Saint Porphyrius, which was founded in the fifth century, and which was bombed by Israel in October 2023. A reported eighteen of its congregants and other Christians and local Muslims who were sheltering in the church and surrounding buildings were killed in the attack which had no military significance and was little more that a signal to the Gazans that none of them were safe.

So Donald Trump is prepared to punish Nigerians for alleged crimes against Christians but when it is Israel committing the crimes they get a pass. Should anyone be surprised at that as Trump is hardly a practicing Christian as he describes himself as “nondenominational” and does not appear to be affiliated with any actual church. There are also some rumors that he converted to the Chabad sect of Judaism in 2017. In any event, Trump is clearly owned by the state of Israel in the person of Benjamin Netanyahu and by the Israel Lobby in the United States. Whether this is due to the fact that he is being blackmailed via Jeffrey Epstein disclosures or driven by his own personal beliefs and inclinations is debatable.

In any event, it is clear that Trump takes direction from Netanyahu and the Jewish lobby, evident most recently in the letter he sent to the president of Israel Isaac Herzog calling for a pardon for the prime minister and his wife, who are facing corruption charges in Israel. The letter was more-or-less a repeat performance of a verbal plea that Trump made when he was addressing the Knesset in Israel in October. It includes a bizarre largely self-promotional questionable claim: “I believe that the ‘case’ against Bibi, who has fought alongside me for a long time, including against the very tough adversary of Israel, Iran, is a political, unjustified prosecution,” a sign, one of many, that Trump mentally speaking is not tightly wrapped as the old expression goes as Iran can hardly be described as a threat to the United States.

The Trump White House sellout to Israel and its interests is as complete as can be. Paul Craig Roberts, musing over the letter to Herzog, asks “Is there to be no end of Trump’s tow-kowing to Israel? Trump was the first to break the rule and acknowledge Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Trump committed an act of war against Iran for Israel. Trump supports Israel’s genocide of Palestine, supplying the money, weapons, and diplomatic support. Trump claims a ceasefire despite Israel’s continuing bombings, shootings, and destruction of Palestine. Trump has turned against US Reps Thomas Massie [and Marjorie Taylor Green, two] of his earliest supporters, for refusing to follow the Israeli line. Trump has demanded that universities prevent students and faculty from criticizing and protesting Israel’s massacre of Palestinians and theft of their country.” Israel controls “…the United States by occupying the financial sector, entertainment, education, Congress, and US foreign policy. Israel has succeeded in identifying any criticism of Israel as anti-semitism and is succeeding in having Congress and states pass laws that criminalize anti-semitism.”

One might add that Israel is now seeking from Trump a twenty year military aid commitment that will presumably add more to the current $3.8 billion in military assistance guaranteed each year by Washington. Over the past two years, since October 7th, that sum has in practice been greatly exceeded, coming to $21.7 billion coming from both Trump and Genocide Joe Biden. Will they get the 20 years guarantee from Trump and the other Israel-first corrupted traitors in Congress? You betcha!

Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.

The post Is Donald Trump the ‘Fidei Defensor’ for Christians? appeared first on LewRockwell.

In 2003 the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Legal Council (OLC) issued a memo which declared the use of torture in ‘authorized military interrogations’ as legal when done under the ‘president’s constitutional authority to direct a war’.

The memo was widely condemned. The Obama administration withdrew it but refrained from prosecuting the torturers which had used it as cover.

The Trump administration now issued a comparable OLC memo to justify its wanton killing of alleged drug smugglers at sea.

Starting in September the Trump administration announced 19 strikes on boats in the Caribbean which have killed at least 76 seafarers. Most of them were random poor people:

One was a fisherman struggling to eke out a living on $100 a month. Another was a career criminal. A third was a former military cadet. And a fourth was a down-on-his-luck bus driver.

The men had little in common beyond their Venezuelan seaside hometowns and the fact all four were among the more than 60 people killed since early September when the U.S. military began attacking boats that the Trump administration alleges were smuggling drugs.

The argument of the new OLC memo is even more frivolous (archived) than the torturous reasoning of the former one:

The opinion, which runs nearly 50 pages, also argues that the United States is in a “non-international armed conflict” waged under the president’s Article II authorities, a core element to the analysis that the strikes are permissible under domestic law.

The armed-conflict argument, which was also made in a notice to Congress from the administration last month, is fleshed out in more detail by the OLC. The opinion also states that drug cartels are selling drugs to finance a campaign of violence and extortion, according to four people.

That assertion, which runs counter to the conventional wisdom that traffickers use violence to protect their drug business, appears to be part of the effort to shoehorn the fight against cartels into a law-of-war framework, analysts said.

The true purpose of drug cartels is obviously to make money. There is no evidence that any drug cartel ever has been or is in business because it wanted to create violence.

By framing the military campaign as a war, the administration is able to argue that murder statutes do not apply, said Sarah Harrison, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group and a former Pentagon lawyer. “If the U.S. is at war, then it would be lawful to use lethal force as a first resort,” she said. The president, she argued, “is fabricating a war so that he can get around the restrictions on lethal force during peacetime, like murder statutes.”

There is nobody internationally who will accept such a stupid argument as justification for blowing up random boats at sea.

UN officials have condemned such strikes:

Volker Türk, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, has called for an investigation into the strikes, in what appeared to mark the first such condemnation of its kind from a United Nations organization.
…
“These attacks and their mounting human cost are unacceptable,” Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for Türk’s office, relayed his message on Friday at a regular U.N. briefing.

“The U.S. must halt such attacks and take all measures necessary to prevent the extrajudicial killing of people aboard these boats.”

She said Türk believed “airstrikes by the United States of America on boats in the Caribbean and in the Pacific violate international human rights law.”

At the recent meeting of the G7 foreign ministers the French publicly declared that any such boat strikes are illegal:

In what appears to be the most significant condemnation so far from a G7 ally, France’s foreign minister says that the deadly boat strikes carried out by the United States in the Caribbean since early September violate international law.
…
“We have observed with concern the military operations in the Caribbean region, because they violate international law and because France has a presence in this region through its overseas territories, where more than a million of our compatriots reside,” Barrot said.

Britain is allegedly withholding some intelligence from the U.S. because of concern about the boat strikes.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio denies that but British officials confirmed their standpoint:

Marco Rubio has denied claims Britain stopped intelligence sharing with the US over its strikes on “narcoboats” in the Caribbean.
…
It was a “false story”, Mr Rubio said, adding the US had a strong partnership with the UK.
…
However, British officials reportedly believed the strikes, which have killed at least 76 people, break international law and agree with an assessment by the UN’s human rights chief that they amount to “extrajudicial killing”.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro has likewise stopped intelligence sharing on the issue:

“The fight against drugs must be subordinated to the human rights of the Caribbean people,” Petro said on X.

Earlier this fall, Petro accused U.S. government officials of murder, alleging that a casualty of a mid-September strike was an innocent Colombian fisherman.

Anyone in the U.S. intelligence services and military should be aware that taking part in such strikes is a criminal endeavor which may get them prosecuted in international courts.

The OLC memo is a way too flimsy a cover to protect anyone.

An admiral recognized this and skipped out:

Top officers, including Adm. Alvin Holsey, the head of Southern Command, sought caution on such strikes, according to two people, who like several others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

Holsey wanted to make sure any option presented to the president was fully vetted first, one person said. In October, he abruptly announced he was resigning at year’s end, which will be about a year into what is typically a three-year assignment.

More soldiers should follow the man’s example.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Justice Department Office Which Justified Torture Now Argues for Killing appeared first on LewRockwell.

An old priest once used a metaphor to describe how the higher-ups in the Church sometimes were out of touch with the faithful: “They have no idea of how that works when you’re in the trenches. Their desks are too far away from the line of fire.”

I recalled the priest’s words when I heard about the recent doctrinal note regarding some Marian titles. Specifically, the note deals with the title of Mary as Co-Redemptrix. The issue came up in the class for our adults seeking the sacraments of initiation. This was a surprise because the people involved are Hispanics whose families either neglected their religious upbringing, are intending to marry Catholics, or have a Pentecostal background. None of them had heard of the phrase Co-Redemptrix, but they were curious about Mary’s intercession, which they felt was somehow downgraded by the Vatican statement.

Do the people who work with the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith have contact with ordinary believers? The note refers to many different inquiries about the titles of Mary in “recent decades,” and it is said that this particular doctrinal “clarification” was prepared before the death of Pope Francis.

If so, it reflects some of the style of his personal magisterium and some of the problems of his language—and, especially, how it was translated. Specifically, the paragraph that is key to the issue is an example:

Given the necessity of explaining Mary’s subordinate role to Christ in the work of Redemption, it is always inappropriate to use the title “Co-redemptrix” to define Mary’s cooperation. This title risks obscuring Christ’s unique salvific mediation and can therefore create confusion and an imbalance in the harmony of the truths of the Christian faith, for “there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). When an expression requires many, repeated explanations to prevent it from straying from a correct meaning, it does not serve the faith of the People of God and becomes unhelpful.

The Spanish original did not say “inappropriate,” which does not seem to be a category of doctrinal judgment. It read inoportuno. “Appropriate” is a social worker kind of description. To say something is not opportune implies a context of possible misunderstanding. This was apparently the objection of Cardinal Ratzinger, who nevertheless, as the note admits, “did not deny that there were good intentions and valuable aspects in the proposal to use this title.” St. John Henry Newman thought something like this about papal infallibility, with due respect, of course.

The note in the original did not say “always,” either, an adverb that seems like an egregious interpretation. There is an air of casualness about this note. It doesn’t bear the weight of a pondered reply about the maturity of the idea as Co-Redemptrix. After mentioning that St. John Paul had spoken about Mary as Co-Redemptrix (enough for me to be convinced) the note says Pope Francis was “opposed” to the title, as if that assurance was a theological argument.

There is much written in the note that is solid and edifying Mariology, but I was expecting something about how all Marian theology has to do with the humanity of Christ. The Incarnation is the reason we see the involvement of Mary in the work of Redemption. My priestly ministry is a gift of God and not my mother’s doing, but it would be impossible if she had not collaborated with God in my coming to be.

The other gap I felt in the discussion was Colossians 1:24, where Paul says, “Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ, in my flesh, for his body, which is the church.” Christ made it so that we could participate in His work of Redemption—not because His sufferings were not sufficient but as a sign of our sharing with Him in the life of grace. Paul was a cooperator in the Redemption, how much more was Mary?

Was the note just clearing the desk of the Dicastery of Pope Francis’ agenda? I agree with Fr. Perricone’s recent article wondering about the mind of Pope Leo. I was at a Jubilee audience recently (October 25) where the Holy Father referred to Nicholas of Cusa.

I am curious about the reference, especially because Nicholas was a great defender of the unity of the Church and the papacy after the Council of Constance. He was an apologist especially important in speaking to the leaders of the Northern European countries, which then seemed on the edge of schism (déjà vu all over again). But what the pope said in a rhetorical flourish confuses me:

Nicholas of Cusa spoke of a “learned ignorance,” a sign of intelligence. The protagonist of some of his writings is a curious figure: the idiot. He is a simple person, who had not studied, and he asks scholars basic questions that challenge their certainties. This is also true in the Church today. How many questions challenge our teaching! Questions from young people, questions from the poor, questions from women, questions from those who have been silenced or condemned because they are different from the majority. We are in a blessed time: so many questions! The Church becomes an expert in humanity if she walks with humanity and has the echo of its questions in her heart.

The Church may have the echoes of questions in her heart, but she also has the timeless answers. They must be articulated in a way that our contemporaries can understand—but not to the prejudice of doctrine. That is my basic objection to so much language about “synodality.” It seems to be relativistic, like there is a democracy of doctrine, a free market of ideas competing for expression. The questions are to reformulate received tradition, not to change it according to current climatic conditions, intellectual and emotional.

The note seems of a piece with some of the rigmarole of “synodality” because it has a tone not of studied theological reasoning (like what Cardinal Ratzinger said about the “maturity” of the idea’s formulation) but almost of political correctness. Instead, it is: “We don’t talk that way. It is inappropriate.” Inappropriate would be like mentioning in a eulogy that the deceased owed you money. (It might also be inopportune, and inconvenient—another and better word in the note—but that is not to deny there was a debt.)

Further, the adverb “always inappropriate,” in (only) the English version, which seems interpretative, seems more like Emily Post. Instead of saying something is “incorrect,” we have the “opposition” of a former pope (in contrast to one of his sainted predecessors). Instead of saying we are unable to make this expression a de fide declaration, we hear that we should “never” say that.

All of this might be a twist on what Nicholas of Cusa said about “learned ignorance,” but I think he meant intellectual humility, not what is called virtue signaling.

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

The post An Inopportune Doctrinal Note appeared first on LewRockwell.

The criminal proxy war is destroying its Western architects and sponsors.

The latest scandal involves $100 million in graft by senior Ukrainian government ministers and Zelensky’s friend, known as “his wallet”. The racketeering and Western complicity account for why this war drags on, with thousands of Ukrainian casualties every week.

The thieves in Kiev are only the scum that float to the surface. The real criminals are the Western so-called leaders who have enabled the entire war racket, a racket that bleeds Western societies and which is no longer concealable.

Even Western media are openly reporting the brazen corruption of the Kiev regime, with many commentators questioning how long the nominal president, Vladimir Zelensky, can remain in office, given the mire of sleaze engulfing him.

The Western media – in hock to their governments’ political agenda – have always played down the rampant corruption in Kiev, even though official U.S. and European auditing officials have at times flagged up the issue as a matter of grave concern. The European Union itself has half-admitted there is an endemic problem by insisting on reforms to clean up corruption as a condition for Ukraine joining the bloc in the future.

Up to now, the audacious racketeering in Kiev has been partly covered up by Western media claiming that it was “Russian propaganda” to smear Ukraine and its NATO sponsors. Well, it turns out that the rank thieving and money laundering in Kiev is not Russian propaganda. It is a fact that even the Western media can no longer ignore.

Still, the cover-up continues somewhat. Incredibly, Western governments and media are continuing to tolerate Zelensky and his cronies crying for more money, instead of demanding his resignation.

Four months ago, Zelensky, who has cancelled elections and made himself president indefinitely, tried to curb Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies by removing their independent powers. That blatant move sparked mass protests, and he had to backtrack quickly amid public outcry.

This week, the same agencies uncovered the biggest corruption scandal yet in Ukraine’s long history of graft. The country’s energy sector was being milked by embezzlement and kickback schemes implicating senior ministers, industry chiefs, and a personal friend and business associate of Zelensky, who has fled overseas.

The justice minister, German Galuschenko, and energy minister Svetlana Grinchuk have had to quit pending an investigation. The alleged mastermind of the embezzlement is Timur Mindich, who fled the country before being arrested. He is a friend and business partner of Zelensky, who has gotten rich on government contracts since Zelensky became president in 2019, after laughably promising voters that he would eradicate Kiev’s notorious corruption.

The latest scheme involved contractors, who are tendering to build protection infrastructure for the country’s power industry, paying massive kickbacks to regime chiefs and business heads.

As the country suffers blackouts from the energy sector being hit by the war with Russia, it transpires that the problem has been greatly exacerbated by the Kiev regime being too busy siphoning off money rather than protecting the industry to serve citizens. The scandal is all the more grotesque as the nation faces mid-winter shortages and its soldiers are being killed amid collapsing frontlines in the east of the country.

Since the NATO proxy war against Russia escalated in February 2022, it is estimated that the United States and the European Union have pumped around $400 billion of Western taxpayers’ money into Ukraine. Western citizens have been bled dry by this war racket, which has enriched the military-industrial complex while paying off the Kiev regime.

President Donald Trump seems to have grown leery of the racket. Under his presidency, Washington has scaled back the money supply. Not so the European elite who keep pumping public money into the cesspit.

Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán pointed out the madness of the EU leadership for insisting on throwing more money into Ukraine in light of the “mafia” under Zelensky. Orbán said his country is refusing to donate any more funds to Ukraine.

No doubt other European states are taking note of the despicable, criminal farce. As EU citizens endure increasing economic hardship from austerity and mounting living costs, their political leadership insists on supporting Ukraine in a futile proxy war.

This war should never have started and could have been avoided if the U.S. and European governments had engaged in diplomatic efforts with Russia. The NATO powers wanted a proxy war, and they, along with the servile media, concocted a fairytale narrative about “brave, noble” Ukraine fighting for supposed Western values against “Russian aggression.”

The conflict has persisted for nearly four years. European economies have been wrecked, and up to 2 million Ukrainian soldiers have been slaughtered – all for the Russophobic fantasy among NATO ideologues to “defeat Russia”.

The war has been a senseless bloodbath that has been sustained by Western lies and extortion of the Western public to prop up a corrupt regime in Kiev.

Now the corruption of the racket has become so putrid, it can no longer be covered up.

It is becoming politically precarious for Euro leaders to make the case for funneling more public funds to a regime that is siphoning off that money.

Hence, the European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, and her coterie of Russophobic elites, are proposing that billions will be routed to Ukraine not with public funds but with frozen Russian assets. As if that would make it any less criminal.

This week, Von der Leyen appealed to the European Parliament that €140 billion of Russian funds confiscated by the EU should be used as collateral for loans to Ukraine. These insane warmongers don’t know when to stop.

In the end, it’s fitting justice. The criminal proxy war is destroying its Western architects and sponsors. The Kiev cesspit is dragging them down. Good riddance.

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

The post Kiev’s Corruption Cesspit Is Dragging the Complicit EU Down With It appeared first on LewRockwell.

I have written a number of articles for which I have received little response about the horrible mistake humanity has made by entering into the digital revolution and the AI it spawned.  These disastrous developments are now being institutionalized in all societies.  They bring the end of human autonomy, independence, control, objective truth, freedom, and awareness of reality.

The digital revolution destines humans to live in a reality created for them by those who control the data bases and thereby reality.  Already AI companies are working to create the belief that a computer program, a chatbot, is a real person.  You can now have a hologram of your parents or some other deceased relative or friend to advise you and sympathize with you as you experience the challenges of life.

The 2wai apt allows a person to load footage of a loved one which then is converted into an AI avatar that the person can continue to have a relationship with after the person’s death. 

What if the loved ones we’ve lost could be part of our future? pic.twitter.com/oFBGekVo1R

— Calum Worthy (@CalumWorthy) November 11, 2025

The transition of human life from objective reality into AI created reality is what is meant by science fiction writers, who are no longer writing fiction, when they describe a world in which those who control the narrative rule. Humans are being locked up in an artificial reality.  There is still a real reality, but like in The Matrix humans don’t live in it.

I wonder if people understood the deadly threat that AI presents to them whether they would exterminate everyone associated with AI and the digital revolution before humanity is exterminated.  A person who lives in artificial reality is an exterminated person.

A person who lives in an artificially created reality is no longer a human capable of objective thought. As this is our destiny, it no longer matters whether world nuclear war wipes out the human species. They are already being wiped out by AI and the digital revolution.   Caitlin Johnstone tells us about it.

As Peter Koenig says, we must immediately return to the analogue system before we cease to exist. See this. 

But we won’t be permitted, and don’t seem to be inclined. Instead of resisting, humans are willingly entering into artificial existence. A 32-year-old Japanese woman has participated in a wedding ceremony with an artificial intelligence chatbot she developed using OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform, marking her the first to marry an artificial creation.

The post The Destruction of Reality appeared first on LewRockwell.

Came across an old Hampton Institute tweet:

“If you don’t like being exploited (employee, tenant), then become the exploiter (boss/owner, landlord)” is the capitalist mindset that has been drilled into all of us since we were kids. The real solution is to end exploitation (capitalism) altogether.

You run into this sort of argument all the time when interacting with capitalism supporters.

If people can’t make enough money to get by then they should get better-paying jobs.

If people don’t like getting kicked around by an abusive status quo then they should climb their way into a socioeconomic strata that isn’t getting kicked around as much.

If someone doesn’t like being the nail then they should become the hammer.

They deflect criticisms of the abusive system by babbling about what people can do as individuals to be less abused personally.

It’s like a horror movie villain trapping a bunch of people in a pyramid-shaped room and then filling it up with water so that only the ones who fight their way to the top can get air. He goes, “You don’t like drowning? Better not be among those who are underwater, then!”

In this horror movie, the people don’t curse the villain or swear they’ll kill him. Instead they just say “Well it’s not a perfect system, but it’s the best one possible!” If someone less fortunate manages to pop their head above water for a second and say “Please! We need air!”, they shove him back down and climb on his shoulders saying “Well you need to fight harder to get to the top then.”

Saying “Don’t like drowning? Then fight your way to the top” completely ignores the fact that the entire room is deliberately structured so that there will always necessarily be a large group of people who are drowning. Pointing out the fact that it is technically possible for someone as an individual to claw their way to the top is just a way of avoiding the need to address the abusive nature of the overall system which is premised on the permanent existence of a disadvantaged class.

Not everyone can be an employer; some people have got to be their employees, or their job doesn’t exist. Not everyone can be a landlord; landlords require rent-payers in order to exist. There can’t be a top ten percent who are living comfortably without a bottom ninety percent who aren’t.

This whole dystopia is built on top of an underclass of low-wage workers keeping the gears of industry turning; if they all quit today, the entire economy would be instantly obliterated. Saying “If those low-wage workers want better wages they should stop being low-wage workers” is telling a man to stop drowning while you are holding him underwater by standing on his head.

And what’s really crazy is that in this horror movie, the villain is entirely within reach. He’s standing there taunting everyone at the top of the room from a platform where he controls the water levels, and his legs are right there within grabbing distance. But instead of grabbing those legs and pulling him down so they can drain the room and save everyone, they’re fighting each other for air and saying anyone who drowns is to blame for their own drowning.

Craziest thing you can imagine, really. I wouldn’t even pay to watch that movie, because it’s too unbelievable.

And yet here we are.

_______________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

The post In Capitalism They Tell You To Become the Hammer If You Don’t Like Being the Nail appeared first on LewRockwell.

I knew that a story like this would eventually erupt in Ukraine and even make the headlines of the New York Times and the Financial Times.

Our mainstream media is totally corrupt and millions of people in the West are still suffering from too much cognitive dissonance to recognize that their governments are totally corrupt. Nevertheless, the guys who have long been running Ukraine are so outrageously corrupt that it was only a matter of time before they overplayed their hand so crassly that it couldn’t go unnoticed, especially with Ukraine’s dictator, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, becoming increasingly unpopular.

Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) (stood up by the Obama administration to facilitate USAID to Ukraine) claims it has uncovered evidence that senior figures in Zelenskyy’s inner circle took $100 million of kickbacks on construction projects to protect power stations from Russian missile attacks.

At the center of the investigation is Zelenskyy’s friend and business associate, Timur Mindich. Investigators characterize Mindich as the “co-organizer” of the alleged scheme, and that approximately $100 million of illicit funds were siphoned through his office.

“He controlled the work of the so-called ‘laundry room’, where criminally-obtained funds were laundered,” a NABU spokesman said.

Mindich — co-owner of production company Kvartal 95 Studio, which Zelenskyy co-founded — fled Ukraine to Israel the day before the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) launched raids.

Kvartal 95, in association with 1+1 Media Group, produced the wildly popular Servant of the People television show, starring Zelenskyy as a Ukrainian schoolteacher who runs for president on an anti-corruption platform. Servant of the People ran for three seasons between 2015 to 2019, and its popularity greatly helped Zelenskky to win the 2019 presidential election.

1+1 Media Group was owned by Ukrainian oligarch and Israeli citizen, Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who is purportedly in pre-trial detention in Ukraine on charges of money laundering and contract murder.

According to a report in Politico, Timur Mindich was tipped off about the forthcoming raid of his office and apartment, and fled to Israel. In what appears to be part political theater, NABU has released images of his opulent apartment in Kiev, replete with a golden toilet and bidet with a matching golden toilet brush.

Yesterday (November 15) The Times of Israel published an interesting profile of Mindich (see Zelensky associate at crux of Ukrainian corruption case said to have fled to Israel).

As I have been reporting on this newsletter since 2022, Ukraine has long been regarded as one of the most corrupt countries on earth. While the country’s median household income is around $4,000 per year, a small group of oligarchs have amassed billions through their acquisitions of energy, agriculture, defense, and mining assets.

Some of these oligarchs, such as Victor Pinchuk and Mykola Zlochevsky, used their wealth to establish close ties with the Clinton and Biden families. Pinchuk was the largest single donor to the Clinton Foundation. Zlochevsky was the front man of the Burisma gas company, of which Hunter Biden was a richly paid board member. The true majority owner was Ihor Kolomoyskyi. It wouldn’t surprise me if he also slips away (if he hasn’t already) before his case goes to trial.

This $100 million (small potatoes) scandal that is making MSM headlines is likely the tip of the iceberg, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the scandal is at least partly political theater to give the poor and beleaguered Ukrainian people the impression that their National Anti-Corruption Bureau is actually doing its job.

Because ordinary Ukrainians are increasingly suffering from power outages due to Russian attacks on their energy infrastructure, they will likely find it especially distasteful that Zelenskky’s inner circle has been siphoning funds that were supposed to bolster energy infrastructure defenses. Thus, the scandal may serve as an excuse to get rid of Zelenskky, who has already lost much of the mystique he once enjoyed in our deranged West.

Lord knows how many billions have been stolen by these jolly fellows and their cronies in the U.S. government.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

The post Ukrainian Corruption Scandal Likely Tip of Iceberg appeared first on LewRockwell.

In refusing to recognize that inequality had the potential to bring down the entire system, our delay has made that reckoning inevitable.

The theme here is problems are not resolved, they’re papered over with profitable faux fixes. In my previous post, I described how the problem of our collective health crisis isn’t being resolved, it’s being milked for profit by faux “solutions” that don’t actually resolve the problem, they keep it on simmer because this is the most profitable arrangement for those providing the illusory “solution.”

I have endeavored to explain why extreme inequality will undo not just democracy, it will undo the entire social order and the economy as well. We currently live in a fantasy world in which finance and market forces operate with impunity, as the focus is on profits and “growth.”

That finance and market forces have profound social consequences is ignored. This reality has been explored since the 1800s, by critics ranging from Emerson to Marx (“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned”) to modern critics such as Christopher Lasch, author of The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995) and more recently, by Jeffrey L. Degner in his new book Inflation and the Family: Monetary Policy’s Impact on Household Life, which is described in The Social Costs Of Inflation (Quoth the Raven, via Rich W.)

That inequality of wealth, income and opportunity has reached dangerous extremes in America has been starkly visible since the save-the-fraudsters response to the 2008-09 Financial Fraud Meltdown (a.k.a. the Global Financial Crisis). In the aftermath, a number of incisive essays were published by journals left, right and center on the urgent need to address soaring inequality.

These three essays from 2011-2013 cover the many systemic dynamics of this problem: I cannot stress strongly enough that neither the left nor the right have mounted a meaningful response, as this is not an issue that boils down to a strictly partisan / political or economic problem–it encompasses the entirety of the status quo system: culture, society, economy and the political/policy sphere.

This not-left-or-right nature confuses many, who automatically seek to compartmentalize the problem and proposed solutions as left or right. Inequality cannot be constrained to stale political boundaries if we are to understand it as a problem that needs real resolutions, not superficial fake fixes. This is perhaps best exemplified by Christopher Lasch, whose nuanced work cannot be pigeonholed as right or left.

His savaging of the status quo economy’s dismantling of the family can be interpreted as conservative, while Lasch’s appreciation of Marx’s critique can be labeled progressive. Both labels are misleading, as Lasch’s work cannot be understood within the narrow confines of conventional knee-jerk us-them thinking.

This applies to all thoughtful discussions of soaring inequality. Mike Lofgren’s essay in the August 2012 issue of The American Conservative magazine is a brilliant summary of just how far we’ve fallen: Revolt of the Rich: Our financial elites are the new secessionists:

“It was 1993, during congressional debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement. I was having lunch with a staffer for one of the rare Republican congressmen who opposed the policy of so-called free trade. To this day, I remember something my colleague said: ‘The rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens’.”

“Lasch held that the elites–by which he meant not just the super-wealthy but also their managerial coat holders and professional apologists–were undermining the country’s promise as a constitutional republic with their prehensile greed, their asocial cultural values, and their absence of civic responsibility. Lasch wrote that in 1995. Now, almost two decades later, the super-rich have achieved escape velocity from the gravitational pull of the very society they rule over. They have seceded from America.”

Jerry Z. Muller, Professor of History at the Catholic University of America, wrote a dispassionate, thorough essay on the many structural sources of inequality in 2013: Capitalism and Inequality: What the Right and the Left Get Wrong (April 2013)

(In 2012): “The central focus of the left today is on increasing government taxing and spending, primarily to reverse the growing stratification of society, whereas the central focus of the right is on decreasing taxing and spending, primarily to ensure economic dynamism. Each side minimizes the concerns of the other, and each seems to believe that its desired policies are sufficient to ensure prosperity and social stability. Both are wrong.

Inequality is indeed increasing almost everywhere in the postindustrial capitalist world. But despite what many on the left think, this is not the result of politics, nor is politics likely to reverse it, for the problem is more deeply rooted and intractable than generally recognized. Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it–because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords.

Despite what many on the right think, however, this is a problem for everybody, not just those who are doing poorly or those who are ideologically committed to egalitarianism–because if left unaddressed, rising inequality and economic insecurity can erode social order and generate a populist backlash against the capitalist system at large.”

George Packer unpacked the sources of decay that push inequality to extremes in his comprehensive December 2011 essay The Broken Contract: Inequality and American Decline:

“Inequality hardens society into a class system, imprisoning people in the circumstances of their birth–a rebuke to the very idea of The American Dream.”

(in 2012:) “The same ailments were on full display in Washington this past summer, during the debt-ceiling debacle: ideological rigidity bordering on fanaticism, an indifference to facts, an inability to think beyond the short term, the dissolution of national interest into partisan advantage.”

Read the Whole Article

The post Inequality Then and Now: Now It’s Too Late appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Elite Who Governs Us

Who Rules America: Power Elite Analysis, the Deep State, and American History

The Warren Commission: A Rothbardian Analysis

A pioneer historical examination of the composition of the Warren Commission by James Dunlap, (an old colleague of mine) using the power elite analysis framework created by the late world acclaimed economist/historian Murray N. Rothbard.

Yankees vs. Cowboys: Rothbardian Elite Theory on Watergate

The Yankee and Cowboy War, by Carl Oglesby

The late Murray N. Rothbard, was particularly enamored with this pioneering book, remarking:

Carl Oglesby’s new book is not only exciting and thoroughly researched, it presents the only analytic framework — originated by himself — which makes sense of the violent events of the last decade and a half our recent political history, and puts them all into a coherent framework: the Yankee vs. Cowboy analysis.

The important question looms: why is it that Oglesby has been alone in coming up with this framework? I think the answer is that the methodologies of other writers and researchers have led them astray: the free-market economists who are critical of government actions never bother to ask who benefitted from those actions and who were likely to be responsible for them; the Marxists are anxious to indict an abstract, mythical and unified ‘capitalist class’ for all evils of government, and believe that detailed research into concrete divisions and conflicts among power elites detract from such an indictment; those sociologists who have engaged in concrete power elite analysis have only examined structures (who owns corporation X, who belongs to what social club?) rather than the dynamics of concrete historical events; the one writer who has treated Yankees and Cowboys has been so blinded by particular hostility to the Cowboys that he virtually includes everyone living in the Sunbelt as part of a vast Cowboy conspiracy; and the various doughty investigators and reporters of Dallas or Watergate have struck to surface events because they lacked the overall coherent framework.

Carl Oglesby has surmounted all of these defects, and has therefore been able to make a giant breakthrough in explaining our recent history.

The post JFK Assassination and Watergate: A Rothbardian Power Elite Analysis appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Ginny Garner:

Lew,

“If you keep talking about the so-called social issues….they (Ben Shapiro and those like him) get quickly to economics, to usury, to lending money at interest…There are pay day loans in this country that are 600% interest annually. Poor people are taking them. It is called debt slavery…and it was one of the observations Charlie Kirk was making on a daily basis before he was assassinated which is interesting … and it is that kids are buying food on credit.” – Tucker Carlson 

Tucker’s insights are compelling in this episode, and he also interviews Ana Kasparian. 

See here.

The post Tucker Carlson on Usury, 2nd Rate Podcaster Mark Levin, and More appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Ginny Garner: 

Lew,

Shooting expert and researcher Chris Martenson and his team conducted experiments proving Charlie Kirk was not killed by a 30-06 bullet as claimed by the FBI nor could his neck have stopped such a round as claimed by TPUSA COO Andrew Kolvet. Martenson also presented an audio study concluding a supersonic round from a high powered rifle was fired. Autopsy results and evidence of any bullets used in the assassination are still not available for examination. 

See here.

The post Experiments Show Charlie Kirk Was Not Hit with a 30-06 Bullet as FBI Claims appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

The post Parents Were Right–Autism Triggered by Vaccines appeared first on LewRockwell.

A very long time ago, the beautiful ex-wife of a major Hollywood star mistook me for my father, a rich shipowner and industrialist. I was just out of school, 20 years old and without a penny to my name. But I was soon rich and able to afford her after borrowing thousands of dollars from a shylock who charged 100 percent interest. After I failed to pay him back, the creep somehow managed to get through to my father, informing him of my debt while telling him that it would be a pity to spoil his son’s looks so early in life. Daddy paid and sent me to the Sudan as punishment. Khartoum back then turned out to be as punishing as being invited by Lily James or Keira Knightley to spend the night. The place was straight out of a Hollywood film, with a grand hotel facing the presidential palace, an outdoor nightclub called Gordon’s, a friendly populace with hundreds of staff eager to serve all our needs, and, oh yes, it almost slipped my mind: the largest textile factory in Africa employing 5,000 who worked in air-conditioned comfort, owned by my father. General President Abboud of the Sudan visited regularly, and my job was to discreetly gift him with various currencies. Khartoum turned out to be heaven on earth, and I even won the Khartoum open tennis tournament in 1961. The evenings were straight out of Casablanca. I had my regular table at Gordon’s, and next to me were people like Alfried Krupp, the German industrialist lobbying to build a bridge from Khartoum north to Omdurman, with tennis great Gottfried von Cramm buttering up the locals. One evening, the visiting Reinaldo Herrera senior and Winston Guest, on their way to a safari, were surprised to find me in deep Africa.

Then, suddenly, it all went to hell. Some bum who claimed to be a direct descendant of the Mahdi, the one who killed General Gordon in the siege of Khartoum some hundred years before, overthrew General President Abboud and was about to take little Taki hostage before the little one escaped to Egypt via boat up the Nile. Many years later, on my way to Kenya for a photographic safari—I do not shoot animals—I stopped in Khartoum and drove to the factory. It was a burned-out shell. The once-prosperous third-largest country in Africa soon followed suit.

“One needs anthropological detachment to even contemplate the recent horrors in Africa.”

One needs anthropological detachment to even contemplate the recent horrors in Africa. Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians have been slaughtered in the Sudan and in Nigeria, in the latter the Christians being the victims. The Rapid Support Forces in the Sudan, inheritors of the murderous Janjaweed who killed hundreds of thousands back in the early 2000s, have murdered about the same number twenty years later. Their depravity includes thousands upon thousands of children who have died of starvation. The heaps of corpses in the Sudan could be photographed from space, yet we in the West worry about racism in our universities. I did not know back then, or even at present, that human beings could act in such monstrous ways. The Sudan was always Christian in the south and Muslim in the north, and I leave it up to you to decide which side is killing which. Not to be left behind, Nigeria’s Muslims are murdering Christians while the Pope and British King Charles agree that racism is our biggest threat.

How did all this come about? Don’t ask the usual suspects like some lefty journalist because they’ll tell you it was our fault, imperialism and all that. My father provided jobs and good salaries. The Mahdi who drove us out provided death, hunger, and misery. Of course, British foreign policy going back to the 19th century was wrong. Arab tribal societies with hereditary rulers worked best for Arabs.

The same goes for African societies. They worked better when they were strictly tribal—that is, before they were given Western exteriors and were burdened with a multiethnic population. According to Aristotle, a functioning society works best when those who rule alternate in power with those who are ruled. This is why tribal societies worked in Africa until the Brits, the French, and the awful Belgians came along. People revolt and kill their fellow man when a form of rule does not fit the customs and disposition of a people. The Germans and the Dutch in southern Africa are still popular because they left the tribes to themselves. Namibia is a haven compared with the rest of the continent.

So the next time some wise jerk complains about the killings, tell him they were because of people like him who tried to change tribes and tribal customs by civilizing them. My dad offered them jobs, not civics lessons in democracy, equality, and feminism.

This article was originally published on Taki’s Magazine.

The post Tribal Knowledge appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thierry Meyssan had already drawn his readers’ attention to the bias of the United Nations Secretariat. Here, he returns to the controversy between Germany, France, and the United Kingdom on the one hand, and Russia, Iran, and China on the other, concerning the coherence of international law. This is not a matter of technical legal questions, but rather of either the superiority of the Western perspective or the hierarchy of international norms.

While the world’s attention is focused on war zones, it remains oblivious to what is happening at the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency: Germany, France, and the United Kingdom have developed an aberrant legal argument claiming they have the right to reinstate the sanctions imposed on Iran by Resolution 1737 (December 23, 2006), sanctions that were subsequently repealed by Resolution 2231 (July 20, 2015). Even though Russia and China have repeatedly stated that only the Security Council has the authority to impose sanctions, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom persist in claiming this right, and UN Secretary-General António Guterres has aligned himself with their position.

Let’s recall the context of this affair: in 1972, French President Georges Pompidou took the initiative to create an international company for uranium enrichment to supply future nuclear power plants. This was Eurodif, with the participation (in addition to France) of Germany, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, soon joined by Spain and Sweden.
In 1974, French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac pledged to deliver five Franco-American nuclear power plants to the Iran of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In this context, he brought Iran into Eurodif’s capital. But France refused to honor its commitments when the Shah fled and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini succeeded him. The dispute was settled in 1988 by Jacques Chirac, who had become President of the French Republic.

Beyond the situation into which the claims of Germany, France, and the United Kingdom have plunged the Iranian people, this controversy harks back to the methods of the former colonial powers. We must bear in mind that the main victim of the First World War was neither France (10.5% of the population), nor Germany (9.8%), nor Austria-Hungary (9.5%), but Iran (25 to 30%). Not that Iran was a major theater of war, but because the British decided to starve its population to halt the Soviet advance. They thus caused the deaths of 6 to 8 million people  [ 1 ] . This way of doing things, which characterized British colonialism particularly in India and China, is perpetuated with the “unilateral coercive measures” of the West, which they abusively call “sanctions”, as if they had been decided after an adversarial debate before the Security Council.

Relations between Iran and Western Europeans deteriorated severely when, in 2005, Revolutionary Guard Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president of the Islamic Republic: he had the ambition to master nuclear fusion which would have allowed him to free developing states from their energy dependence.

We must remember Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2011 statements: “The first thing to do is to prevent them [militant Islamic regimes] from obtaining nuclear weapons. That is our first mission, and the second is to find a substitute for oil.”  [ 2 ] This way of speaking reflects the Western interpretation of Iran’s efforts to train not just a few scientists, but an entire generation of nuclear technicians and scientists. From the outset, Westerners viewed Iranian nuclear know-how both as preparation for acquiring “the” bomb and, far more seriously, as a Third World revolution against Western technological superiority.

Let us return to the approach of Germany, France and the United Kingdom: on August 28, 2025, Johann Wadephul, Jean-Noël Barrot and David Lammy, Ministers of Foreign Affairs, wrote to the Secretary-General of the United Nations that, in violation of Annex 1 of the JCPOA, since 2019, “Iran has, among other things, exceeded the limits to which it freely committed itself on enriched uranium, heavy water and centrifuges; has ceased to allow the IAEA to conduct verification and monitoring activities of the JCPOA; and has abandoned the implementation and ratification of the Additional Protocol to its Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement”  [ 3 ] .

In response, on the same day, Sergey Lavrov, Seyed Abbas Araghchi and Wang Yi, the foreign ministers of Russia, Iran and China, wrote to all member states of the United Nations General Assembly  [ 4 ] . They reminded them of the hierarchy of norms: the JCPOA (July 14, 2015) is subordinate to Security Council resolution 2231 (July 20, 2015).

They also observed that after the United States unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA and violated its commitments, Iran, like Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, took measures contrary to the treaty, but did not challenge Resolution 2231. Therefore, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom are not entitled to invoke the JCPOA, which they themselves do not respect, to demand sanctions against Iran.

They note that Germany, France, and the United Kingdom expressed, in January 2020, their commitment to the JCPOA  [ 5 ] and their regret that Iran had resumed uranium enrichment to 60% in response to the US withdrawal from and violation of commitments, as well as the Pentagon’s assassination of General Qassem Soleimani. However, they did not convene the dispute resolution mechanism (Joint Commission) provided for in the JCPOA. Consequently, contrary to their claims, Berlin, Paris, and London did not do everything in their power to resolve the conflict and—even without considering the aforementioned hierarchy of norms—are therefore not authorized to reinstate the previous sanctions.

This controversy has continued to escalate since then, culminating in the Security Council meetings of September 19 and 26, 2025. However, the United Nations communications service published two false reports of these meetings, falsely claiming that “the Security Council endorsed the return of UN sanctions against Iran”  [ 6 ] . Subsequently, the Secretary-General issued a misleading note verbale ordering the reinstatement of these sanctions  [ 7 ] .

However, things did not end there. Russia first sent a letter to António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, to remind him of his obligations  [ 8 ] . Then, along with China and Iran, it addressed Rafael Grossi, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). All three wrote to him, not citing Security Council Resolution 2231, but the resolution adopted by the Agency’s Board of Governors on December 15, 2015  [ 9 ] . Their reasoning remains the same: there is a hierarchy of norms that recognizes the supremacy of Security Council resolutions over treaties, even multilateral ones. Moreover, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, “which have themselves violated the commitments they made under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and resolution 2231 (2015), and which have not exhausted the procedures established within the framework of the dispute settlement mechanism, have no legitimacy to invoke its provisions.” In so doing, they are notifying Rafael Grossi that all measures provided for by resolution 2231 have been completed since October 18, 2025. “This termination ends the obligation on the IAEA Director General to report on the verification and monitoring activities carried out under this resolution.”

Make no mistake: if these three states persist in their absurd interpretation of Resolution 2231 and attempt to impose it on the IAEA, they will be the ones jeopardizing its very survival. In June, Rafael Grossi risked destroying it by allowing himself to be misled by an artificial intelligence that contradicted the observations of his inspectors. He had endorsed the idea that Iran was on the verge of developing an atomic bomb, justifying the “12-Day War,” before retracting his statement  [ 10 ] .

The author of this article was an advisor to President Ahmadinejad.

—

[ 1 ]  The Great Famine & Genocide in Iran, 1917-1919 , Mohammad Gholi Majd, University Press of America (2013).

[ 2 ]  “  A World View Interview with Benjamin Netanyahu  ”, Channel 2, YouTube , 2011.

[ 3 ]  “ Letter from Jean-Noël Barrot, David Lammy and Johann Wadephul stating that Iran is not respecting its commitments to the JCPoA ”, by David Lammy, Jean-Noël Barrot, Johann Wadephul, Voltaire Network , August 28, 2025.

[ 4 ]  “  Letter from Wang Yi, Seyed Abbas Araghchi and Sergey Lavrov on the disruption of the JCPOA  ”, by Sergey Lavrov, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, Wang Yi, Voltaire Network , August 28, 2025.

[ 5 ]  “  Joint statement by France, Germany and the United Kingdom regarding Iran  ”, Voltaire Network , January 12, 2020.

[ 6 ]  “  Security Council opposes continued easing of UN sanctions against Iran  ” and “  Iran nuclear: Security Council endorses return to UN sanctions against Iran by rejecting extension of Resolution 2231 of 2015  ”, United Nations.

[ 7 ]  ”  The Secretary-General reinstates sanctions against Iran  “, UN (Secretariat-General), Voltaire Network , September 27, 2025.

[ 8 ]  “  Russia asks UN to withdraw sanctions against Iran taken in violation of Security Council decisions  ”, by Vassily Nebenzia, Voltaire Network , September 29, 2025.

[ 9 ]  “  Letter from China, Iran and Russia to the IAEA  ”, Voltaire Network , October 30, 2025.

[ 10 ]  “  Behind the ‘12 Days’ War’  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, July 1, 2025.

The post What Game Are Germany, France and the United Kingdom Playing at the UN and the IAEA? appeared first on LewRockwell.

In his vitally important article on this issue,1 Karl Hess properly refers to the genuine libertarian movement as a “revolutionary” movement. This raises the point that very few Americans understand the true meaning of the word “revolution.”

Most people, when they hear the world “revolution,” think immediately and only of direct acts of physical confrontation with the State: raising barricades in the streets, battling a cop, storming the Bastille or other government buildings. But this is only one small part of revolution. Revolution is a mighty, complex, long-run process, a complicated movement with many vital parts and functions. It is the pamphleteer writing in his study, it is the journalist, the political club, the agitator, the organizer, the campus activist, the theoretician, the philanthropist. It is all this and much more. Each person and group has its part to play in this great complex movement.

Let us take, for example, the major model for Libertarians in our time: the great classical-liberal, or better, “classical radical,” revolutionary movement of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. These our ancestors created a vast, sprawling, and brilliant revolutionary movement not only in the United States but also throughout the Western world that lasted for several centuries. This was the movement largely responsible for radically changing history, for almost destroying history as it was previously known to man. For before these centuries, the history of man, with one or two luminous exceptions, was a dark and gory record of tyranny and despotism; a record of various absolute States and monarchs crushing and exploiting their underlying populations, largely peasants, who lived a brief and brutish life at bare subsistence, devoid of hope or promise. It was classical liberalism and radicalism that brought to the mass of people that hope and promise, and which launched the great process of fulfillment. All that man has achieved today, in progress, in hope, in living standards, we can attribute to that revolutionary movement, to that “revolution.” This great revolution was our fathers’; it is now our task to complete its unfinished promise.

This classical revolutionary movement was made up of many parts. It was the libertarian theorists and ideologists, the men who created and wove the strands of libertarian theory and principle: the La Boeties, the Levellers in seventeenth-century England, the eighteenth-century radicals, the philosophes, the physiocrats, the English radicals, the Patrick Henrys, and Tom Paines of the American Revolution; the James Mills and Cobdens of nineteenth-century England, the Jacksonians and abolitionists and Thoreaus in America, the Bastiats and Molinaris in France. The vital scholarly work of Caroline Robbins and Bernard Bailyn, for example, has demonstrated the continuity of libertarian classical-radical ideas and movements, from the seventeenth-century English revolutionaries down through the American Revolution a century and a half later.

Theories blended into activist movements, rising movements calling for individual liberty, a free-market economy, the overthrow of feudalism and mercantilist statism, an end to theocracy and war and their replacement by freedom and international peace. Once in a while, these movements erupted into violent “revolutions” that brought giant steps in the direction of liberty: the English Civil War, the American Revolution, the French Revolution.2 The result was enormous strides for freedom and the prosperity unleashed by the consequent Industrial Revolution. The barricades, while important, were just one small part of this great process. Socialism is neither genuinely radical nor truly revolutionary. Socialism is a reactionary reversion, a self-contradictory attempt to achieve classical radical ends: liberty, progress, the withering away or abolition of the State, by using old-fashioned statist and Tory means: collectivism and State control. Socialism is a New Toryism doomed to rapid failure whenever it is tried, a failure demonstrated by the collapse of central planning in the Communist countries of Eastern Europe. Only libertarianism is truly radical. Only we can complete the unfinished revolution of our great forebears, the bringing of the world from the realm of despotism into the realm of freedom. Only we can replace the governance of men by the administration of things.

[This article originally appeared in The Libertarian Forum, Vol. 1 No. 7 (July 1, 1969).]

—

1 See Karl Hess, “What the Movement Needs,” The Libertarian Forum (July 1, 1969).

2 Barrington Moore, Jr., has shown the intimate connection between these violent revolutions and the freedoms that the Western world has been able to take from the State.

The post The Meaning of Revolution appeared first on LewRockwell.