Lew Rockwell Institute

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” —Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind

I’m at the wheel of my mother’s car with my elderly mother in the passenger seat. We are running errands and poking along on a six-laner through the vast sprawl of Jacksonville, Florida. The road is swarming with speeding traffic and afflicted on both sides with shopping malls, office parks, condominium developments, and warehouses.

Not long ago this land, like much of the Southeast, had been fields and farms and swamps. But the fields and farms and swamps had been filled in and paved over and built upon to capitalize on the swelling ranks of people of all ages moving here from all over the country as though at the end of a huge funnel. Around that time, the early 2000s, the Sunshine State’s population was growing at a rate about double the national average. My parents were just two among that multitude of transplants—in their case, retirees—many of whom surround us now.

“Where are we?” my mom asks apropos of nothing, while looking around at the maelstrom whizzing by in the glaring heat outside our air-conditioned car’s windows. I glance at her. Never a large woman, she appears smaller now on account of her years. And I swear she appears to be sinking into the oceanic, anonymous chaos all around us.

“What do you mean?” I ask. We’ve been on this road many times before. I say, “You know where we are.” I think, with a fright, that maybe she is losing her mind. Dementia, that’s what I’m thinking. Is this how it starts? Small slips of disorientation.

“Not like that,” she says. “I mean, what is this place?”

I feel her perplexity as my own. I feel “lost” here, too. Ungrounded. Uneasy. What is this place? We could be just about anywhere in the country; there are no defining features to indicate that we are anywhere unique. Where I live, in the Hudson Valley of New York, there’s the same scourge of urban and suburban sprawl. But the scale is smaller, more contained, and even easily avoidable if that’s something you want to do. There’s still plenty of nature around in which to seek solace. But not here. There’s no escape; you could drive for hours and still never find your way out of this same mind-numbing morass, drained of the natural world but for the ragged palmettos that occasionally dot the median strip that separates the opposing lanes of traffic.

Born in the Northeast, I spent most of my youth in an early American exurban pocket of Connecticut. Now, in the nearly 40 years that I’ve lived in the Hudson Valley, I’ve sown my own roots here among similar remnants of old architectures, storied histories, and bumpy, winding roads among which I was raised. I like it. I could even say I need it. And I’ve cherished living among the spirits of my ancestors on my mother’s side of the family who, as members of the Continental Army, fought the British in the Revolutionary War in these parts. My small house—a former gatehouse to a still-extant 19th-century Hudson Riverfront estate—is just a mile from a historic site and house that belonged to one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. He is entombed in the graveyard of the old stone church next door to me.

For most of their lives, my mother and father, too, lived in the Northeast. My guess is that in this moment my mother is not feeling rooted someplace or connected to anything meaningful in her life. I can almost feel as if we’re tumble weeds surrounded by more tumble weeds, all of us just blowing in the prevailing wind. With nothing around us now to remind her of where she’s from, of where her lineage fits into the nation’s history, perhaps it’s my mother’s ancestral memory that’s drawing a blank. Yet, she knows exactly where we are: Somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

I despair for her. She has reached an age when you want to feel secure in, and at ease with, your place in the universe—a feeling of being held, if you will, by family and friends—yet now she appears to feel more emotionally orphaned than I’ve ever noticed before. It is strange to think of your mother or father being orphaned. But how else to put it? There is no one they can count on for regular, familial support; nothing beyond the physical comfort they’d sought all of their adult lives and have now achieved. But gained at the expense, it turns out, of no longer feeling at home anywhere. Which is to say there are other ways to feel orphaned besides having no parents. And there are other ways to suffer the blight of homelessness besides not having a roof over your head.

It has been a long road getting here. My father spent his working life seeking promotions in order to earn more money so that he could buy ever-larger houses to accommodate our growing family. Sometimes we picked up stakes and moved not just across town but to other towns and, once, to another state. And these moves, I think, disrupted the bonds of neighbors and friends we’d all had forged individually and as a family—my parents, my three brothers, and I—wherever we had settled. We didn’t move a lot but we moved just enough—and perhaps at critical times in my and my siblings’ psychological development—to fracture our developing internal cohesion and sense of having any sort of solid ground beneath our feet or allegiance to place.

The moving had taken a toll on our familial bonds as well. Since 1973, when my father relocated us from our beloved home in Connecticut to accept an executive job running a struggling brass factory in Michigan, I can recall only two times when my parents and their four sons gathered under one roof for a family celebration or holiday. Which is to say that we’ve never been a close-knit family, in part because of how we grew up and in part because of where we all ended up, which may be a consequence of how we grew up.

While I’m in New York, I have a brother in Colorado and another brother in Michigan. We also had a brother in Maine, but in December of 2022, he died at age 65. (I wrote about that here.) He never married and moved several times in search of satisfying work in graphic design and advertising, and for a place where he might feel rooted, which turned out to be the Maine coast. It was there that he spent his final years living in a roughly finished, walk-out basement of a house owned by a cousin of ours in Cape Elizabeth, yet still the most lost and alienated among four brothers.

***

Simone Weil was a French philosopher who, during WWII, had been commissioned by General de Gaulle, head of France’s government in exile in London—Free France—to write a report on the duties and privileges of the French after their liberation. This report was intended to outline options for reviving France after an allied victory, which was imminent but still a year away. This report was published in book form in 1949 in French under the title of L’Eracinement, six years of Weil’s death in 1943. It was published in English in 1952 as The Need for Roots: A Prelude to a Declaration of the Duties of Mankind. In it, she writes:

“A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future. This participation is a natural one, in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession and social surroundings. Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw wellnigh the whole of his moral, intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.”

What Weil is saying here is that it’s not enough to feel rooted to a particular place or to the community in which we’ve found ourselves. We also need to feel rooted to a shared history, to a common language, to a moral standard, to our work, to obligations, to some sort of spiritual life. She believed France was suffering from this lack of roots both before and during the war and wrote in The Need for Roots what she believed would help get France back on its feet.

I’m writing about this now because it appears to me that there are certain aspects regarding what happened in France before and during the Nazi occupation that are similar to what we have faced in this country before and during another kind of occupation—an insidious amalgamation of communism and chaos and corruption—which boiled over the bounds of common decency during the unfathomably fraudulent Biden regime, an occupation that sought—and to a great degree temporarily succeeded—in the decimation of so much our country that Weil also lamented had happened in France. Both countries suffered from a malady of uprootedness that weakened both individual and collective resilience and left them open for an invasion.

But, just as there are similarities, there are also differences between the Nazi occupation of France and the despotic occupation in America over the past several years. One is that it was usually obvious during the occupation of France who the adversaries were. For one thing, they’d come from another country and spoke another language. And they wore uniforms. During the occupation of this country, the conspirators were—and remain—not so obvious. The Luciferian operatives of the current occupation gathered their conscripts from tens of millions of ordinary Americans who had—and continue to have—no idea of the breadth and depth of the occupation of which they are a part. Nor do they have any inkling about its intention or how long it has been slowly infiltrating every nook and cranny of American life. As a result, this occupation has had on all of us a far more destructive ideological force than America has ever faced from a foreign invader.

What began, for example, in the 1990s in the stealth fog of “political correctness” in America, has mutated into our current monstrous “cancel culture” and gaslighting. “The tag itself, I have come to realize, creates a linguistic cul-de-sac where we just park our brains,” writes Diana West in her brilliant 2013 opus, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character. “‘PC’ is, gosh, ‘PC.’ We look no further. Sure, the acronym, ‘PC’—’political correctness’—conveys the idea that something is phony, forced, and ideologically, not logically, inspired, but it doesn’t advertise its bona fide totalitarian provenance in the language of ideology, which, once accepted, once internalized, draws an individual into that ideological pact with the devil in which reasoning powers are lost. [Italics mine.] In other words, ‘PC’ is just another label for Big Lies—little lies, too. It describes the systematic suppression of fact that advances and sustains the ideology of the State and its barricades in academia, media, and other cultural outposts.”

Weil might have naively flirted with the Big Lies and little lies of the State totalitarian ideologies of her time, which then—as now—was embodied in communism. After all, it was de rigueur among the so-called intellectuals in France—the likes of leftists Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir—lingering over glasses of Burgundy in smokey Parisienne cafes in the 1930s and 1940s. But Weil eventually learned how foolish Karl Marx’s idea was about the “dictatorship of the proletariat” leading to a more egalitarian if not utopian civilization.

In The Need for Roots, she called Marxism “a completely outlandish doctrine.” Robert Coles in his 1987 portrait of Weil, Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage, writes, “She knew how unlikely, how absurd such a notion was. She knew, morally, what ought to be, but she knew as a slave, as a brilliant slave, how oppressive force is on anyone’s life, and on society.” All anyone had to do to learn about the abject failures of Marxism was to dig a little and find out what was happening under Josef Stalin’s murderous hand in the U.S.S.R. not all that far as the crow flies from those glasses of Burgundy in those smokey cafes. But then, like now, there’s mysteriously little motivation among certain people—most people, I’m beginning to learn—to acknowledge the truth if it compromises or challenges their ideology.

Not so Simone Weil. Coles writes: “The Need for Roots, with its sketches of a postwar world, a France of her dreams, she not only used the metaphor of rootedness; she tried to spell out ‘the needs of the soul’ if an undermining, disheartening uprootedness were not to develop. Her recitation of those needs amounts to a remarkable conservative manifesto, a powerful statement on her part with respect to politics and social institutions.” He goes on to say that Weil “detested the proudly amoral or value-free partisans of the liberal and radical intelligentsia.”

In his preface to the first English translation of the book, published in 1952, T.S. Eliot writes that “she appears as a stern critic of both Right and Left; at the same time more truly a lover of order and hierarchy than most of those who call themselves Conservative, and more truly a lover of the people than most of those who call themselves Socialist.” He goes on to say that Weil was “by nature a solitary and an individualist, with a profound horror of what she called the collectivity—the monster created by modern totalitarianism. What she cared about was human souls.”

Here, so successful was the complicit mainstream media in getting vast swaths of the American population to go along with the big and little lies of the totalitarian ideology of the State in our times, which came to head with the COVID-19 psyop, that the complete conquest of America was at hand. And it was not happening through any sort of armed conflict, but rather via government orchestrated, insidious pathways into the mind through widespread censorship and narrative control, and all of it dominated by fear. Tens of millions of American minds had been captured and convinced that anyone—people like me and perhaps like you, too—who have done what we could to stand in the way of this tyrannical takeover, perhaps only by asserting our right to refuse the toxic COVID-19 jabs—had become, at the flick of a switch, the enemy.

And all it took was a complicit media to spin the lies big and little, a phenomenon of which Weil, too, was well aware. She writes in The Need for Roots:

“We all know that when journalism becomes indistinguishable from organized lying, it constitutes a crime. But we think it is a crime impossible to punish. What is there to stop the punishment of activities once they are recognized to be criminal ones? Where does this strange notion of nonpunishable crimes come from? It constitutes one of the most monstrous deformations of the judicial spirit.”

***

The Nazi occupation of France had begun in May 1940 when France was invaded by German forces. The occupation ended in Paris in August 1944. By the latter part of that year, all of France was free. So, Weil was writing during the occupation while she was living in London, itching to get back to France to fight with the French Resistance, but unable to do so because of her failing health—she struggled with poor health throughout her life and was tormented by migraines—which might have been exacerbated during her brief involvement in 1936 on the harsh battlefields of Spain while fighting with the Republican forces against Franco’s Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War.

One time on the front along Spain’s Ebro River, Weil, nearsighted and clumsy by nature, accidentally stepped into a large vat of hot cooking oil. In her biography of Weil, Simone Pétrement writes in Simone Weil: A Life of her and her fellow soldiers:

“They were still bivouacked in the bushes, on the right bank of the Ebro. They had started a fire in order to cook their meal in a hole dug in the ground, so as to screen any flames that might have given their position away. A huge pot or frying pan had been place at ground level over this fire of covered coals. Simone did not see it and put her foot right into the boiling oil. Her foot was protected by her boot but the lower part of her left leg and the instep were seriously burned.”

There is no telling what Weil might have accomplished had she joined the Resistance in France instead of writing in London. She was given an office on her own but never intended to give up her intention to get back to France to take on more dangerous missions. What we do know is that whatever dedication and energy she might have poured into the Resistance movement in France, she gave to her writing in London. “She was boiling with ideas,” writes Pétrement. “The sheer amount of what she wrote in London in a few months is almost beyond belief. She must have written day and night, scarcely taking the time to sleep. More than once she spent the entire night in her office, where she voluntarily locked herself in.”

Read the Whole Article

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Gaza is suffering the most intense bombing, per capita, of anywhere on earth, ever.

Over 100,000 tons of bombs have been dropped on Gaza, an area slightly smaller than the City of Detroit, Michigan, resulting in the recorded deaths of at least 60,000 Gazans and injuries to hundreds of thousands.¹

It is impossible to overstate the effects of the abominable bombing war on Gazans, their lives, their families, their health, and their communities.

What has escaped attention up until now is the undeniable environmental and health effects of the bombing of Gazans on Israelis, as well as on citizens of neighboring states, and the potential harm to U.S. military personnel in the region.

A study of explosion physics based on declassified Department of Defense data, as well as blast temperature data and consequent emissions; a review of wind patterns, together with publicly available data of health effects from 9/11, as well as data gathered from U.S. veterans of the Persian Gulf War, yield a shocking conclusion.

Israel, in executing the unprecedented bombing attack on Gaza, is, in effect, bombing itself, with grave consequences for the public health of its people.² What is being visited upon Gaza does not stay in Gaza.

The sustained bombing of Gaza pulverizes stone, heavy metals, and the human body. The vaporizing of human beings under extreme heat and pressure combines with dust, water vapor, and metallic particles the size of microns, all blasted upwards, aerosolized, wind-driven across borders, into Israel and surrounding countries.³

The unlimited bombing of Gaza has created an unparalleled ecological and biomedical feedback loop. Israel exhales death in Gaza and inhales the Gaza it has vaporized.

Israel, in bombing neighboring Gaza, is breathing in its own fallout, along with the vaporized remains of its declared enemies. The external consequences of violence becomes internalized. The substance of the oppressed communes with the oppressor.

On a clinical level, breathing in bioaerosols can compromise human immune systems.⁴ Breathing in ultrafine particles from non-biological war dust can cross the blood-brain barrier and contribute to neurodegenerative disease.⁵

Israel and the Palestinians share a common atmosphere. They inhale the same war dust, from bomb materials, carbon soot, and the fine particle remains of vaporized Gazans.

Human cremation occurs at temperatures between 1,400°F and 1,800°F.⁶ The blast temperatures of the bombs identified as being dropped on Gaza—MK-84 bombs: 4,496°F; GBU-39s: 4,892°F; BLU-109s: 3,632°F—far exceed this range.⁷ In comparison, blast furnaces used to melt steel operate at 2,500°F to 2,800°F.⁸

People at the epicenter of such bombings in Gaza are instantly turned into dust. This is a factor confounding the determination of exactly how many people have perished in Gaza since October 2023. How can an accurate body count be achieved if bodies have been turned to smoke and ash?

Let’s look at 9/11. The total confirmed dead: 2,753. Almost 40% of the victims were never identified, as their bodies were fragmented or vaporized, reduced to dust.⁹

When a bomb hits its target—for example, a tent city—the high-temperature explosion can vaporize a person so thoroughly that microscopic particles of DNA and loose molecules are suspended in air, mingling with dust and smoke as bioaerosols.¹⁰

These biologicals—DNA and fat in human tissue—turn to carbon, black dust, and smoke. The minerals of bones and teeth, skeletal dust, go airborne. Fragments of cells can float in the air, bubbles holding fat, bone, and broken DNA strands travel with the wind and are breathed in dozens of miles from the blast site.¹¹

It is not only the superheat that destroys the human body. The explosive force of a bomb, in terms of pounds per square inch (psi), can produce vaporization at the blast site, an impact equivalent to a plane plunging into the earth at high speed.¹²

As 100,000 tons of bombs have been dropped in Gaza, the matter destroyed takes a different form, as toxic pollutants carried aloft in gas, dust, vapor, and particulates.

Specifically, toxic quantities of cadmium, nickel, lead, mercury, and arsenic are released into the air, together with dioxins, furans, PCBs, (polychlorinated biphenyls); PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) and VOCs (volatile organic compounds).¹³

One calculation indicates that 100,000 tons of bombs, exploded in a densely populated area of Gaza, can generate between 800,000 to 1.2 million tons of pollution.¹⁴

Add to this the dust of Gazans’ human remains and you have extreme airborne consequences carried by the wind, directly into Israel, particularly the central and northern regions, and far beyond.

There are relevant comparisons for the health effects of a tremendous explosion in an urban area. A month after 9/11, people in Manhattan began to develop chronic coughs.

A longitudinal study of members of the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) revealed that after six months, firemen began to suffer from chronic bronchitis; others saw the onset of pulmonary fibrosis.¹⁵

Two years after 9/11, a higher incidence of thyroid, prostate, breast, and other cancers arose among those exposed to 9/11 contaminants. Early-onset neurodegenerative, Alzheimer’s-type symptoms presented after five years or longer.¹⁶

Based on epidemiological data from studies of those near the people and buildings destroyed on 9/11, certain health effects can be anticipated in Israel.

The people of Sderot, Netivot, Be’er Sheva—all within a short distance of Gaza—are at high risk of long-term health effects of the bombing. Ashkelon and Tel Aviv have been exposed to environmental consequences, as has northern Israel and even Jordan.

While Israel’s Ministry of Environmental Protection operates air-monitoring stations at sites proximate to Gaza, it would be instructive, given the intensity of the bombing, to see if the effects of war-related pollution are being fully disclosed to the Israeli public.¹⁷

Given the unprecedented levels of bombing in Gaza, the types of bombs used, their explosive power, the extent of physical destruction, the extraordinary number of casualties, the creation of large plumes of black smoke containing the genetic material of burned and vaporized Gazans, the people of Israel—on the other side of the Gaza boundary—will likely experience increased levels of respiratory illness, asthma-like and other pulmonary diseases, and a sharp increase in cancer as a direct result of being exposed to toxic airborne substances present at a microscopic level.¹⁸

Added to this direct hazard is the ongoing recirculation of wind across the vast hellscape to which Gaza has been reduced. That, too, will sweep up and redistribute the contaminants from the over 50 million tons of debris from the land of Gaza to the land of Israel.

At this point, the calamity which has befallen Gaza as a result of incessant bombing will visit, in various forms and degrees of harm, southern and central Israel, western Jordan, the northeast Sinai Peninsula, northern Egypt (Delta and Cairo), Lebanon, Cyprus, southwestern Syria, northwestern Saudi Arabia, southeastern Turkey, Crete, Greece, Sicily, and Malta. Additionally, sea spray can carry aerosolized particles clear across the Mediterranean Sea.¹⁹

The United States has a substantial number of Naval forces in the eastern Mediterranean, including two aircraft carriers, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and the USS Gerald R. Ford, as well as numerous other assault ships.²⁰

U.S. military installations are present at Incirlik, Turkey, Naples, Italy, Cyprus, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. All face “war dust” pollution hazards as a result of the bombing of Gaza.²¹

I know well the adverse health consequences suffered by US servicemen and women who served in the Persian Gulf War, 1990–1991.

Veterans of that war came to my congressional office complaining of constant pain, neurological, musculoskeletal, gastrointestinal and respiratory symptoms, all of which were ignored or covered up by the Department of Defense.

As a Member of Congress, over the objections of the Department of Defense, I took up the cause of veterans who suffered what came to be known as Gulf War Illness, a multi-symptom condition still affecting, to this very day, nearly 245,000 veterans of the Persian Gulf War.²²

Bernie Sanders and I worked together in Congress to obtain funding for research into GWI, which is now a medically recognized, war-related condition.²³

When you see the measurable, catastrophic effect which war environments can have on those who serve, and the measurable catastrophic effect of those proximate to the 9/11 attacks, and the indefensible obliteration bombing of Gaza and its people, you may come to an understanding of the wholly fallacious notion of the containment of war and why I assert Israel is bombing itself.

The bombing of Gaza has created a human health crisis which cannot be ignored any longer.

There must be an immediate cease-fire on humanitarian and ecological bases.

• The UN must urgently address the collapse of the Palestinian public health system, including the implications of the war for respiratory diseases and cancers among survivors.
• The UN must lead a Transboundary Environmental and Human Health Assessment of the Immediate and Long-Term Implications of War Dust, which will include transboundary assessments of the toxic environmental effects of the war.
• Monitoring stations must be set up. The people of the world have a right to know what is in the air they breathe.

International humanitarian and environmental law must, at last, be enforced.

UN representatives must determine a path forward.

Israel and the United States must consider the far-reaching consequences of the decision to attack and bomb the people of another country.

The tortured mindset which licenses the extinction of Gazans is now a spectre haunting the entire world, with its ghoulish designs on Iran. I will explore that approaching cataclysm in a future column.

Human rights and compassion are not considerations in bombing Gazans. Perhaps enlightened self-preservation can be introduced as a means to stop the bombing, once and for all.

The war against Gazans must end, and perhaps through the suffering of Gazans, and understanding the regional and global health impact of bombing, we may understand why it is time to call an end to all wars.

Footnotes:

1. UNOSAT Gaza Strip 7th Comprehensive Damage Assessment, May 31, 2024.

2. DDESB Blast Effects Computer, DoD, June 11, 2018.

3. Milgram, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1963.

4. Oberdörster et al., Particle and Fibre Toxicology, 2005.

5. Calderón-Garcidueñas et al., Brain and Cognition, 2008.

6. CANA Position Statement, 2022.

7. Department of the Army, Military Explosives, TM 9-1300-214, 1990.

8. World Steel Association, LCA Eco-profile, 2023.

9. NYC Office of Chief Medical Examiner, 2023.

10. Møller et al., Journal of Heredity, 2013.

11. Block & Calderón-Garcidueñas, Trends in Neurosciences, 2009.

12. DoDM 4145.26, DoD, March 13, 2008.

13. UNEP, From Conflict to Peacebuilding, 2009.

14. NATO RTO-TR-071, Urban Operations 2020, 2024.

15. FDNY WTC Health Program, 15-Year Report, 2007.

16. Mount Sinai WTC Health Registry, 2021.

17. Israeli Ministry of Environmental Protection, Air Quality Reports, 2024.

18. WHO, Health Effects of PM, 2013.

19. EUMETSAT, Dust Transport Models, 2023.

20. USNI News, Carrier Deployments, June 2024.

21. Wikipedia, U.S. Overseas Military Bases, 2024.

22. VA Gulf War Research Reports, 2008–2024.

23. CDMRP Gulf War Illness Research Program, ongoing since 2006.

This originally appeared on The Kucinich Report.

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News this week that Elon Musk will soon be departing his “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) is a grim reminder of what happens when you challenge big spending DC. Unfortunately, the lesson once again is that when you challenge the empire, the empire eventually strikes back.

President Trump rode into office with the help of Elon Musk’s ambitious plan to cut two trillion dollars in spending and slash useless and bloated government bureaucracies. Opinion polls demonstrated the huge popularity of the “Department.” Americans were excited when DOGE came to DC.

The exposure of the real harm being done to the country by agencies like USAID and others reinforced the idea that much of the “Federal bureaucracy” was simply not needed. Although Musk became a figure of hate for the entrenched special interests, to the large chunk of America forced to pay for Washington’s excesses he became a hero.

Many in Congress, seeing its popularity, actively embraced DOGE. Suddenly those who helped us rack up 37 trillion in debt were talking about making huge cuts and posing for photos with Musk.

Unfortunately, after the photos were taken and the hoopla had died down, Congress returned to doing what it usually does: nothing. There is no way for a DOGE to succeed without the Legislative Branch enshrining those cuts in legislation. But when the massive “Big Beautiful” spending bill was introduced, the spending cuts were nowhere to be found.

In the end it was the Beltway addiction to the global US military empire that may have hammered the final nail in DOGE’s coffin. The “Big Beautiful” spending bill actually increased military spending even after President Trump hinted that a 50 percent cut was possible. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth bragged about presiding over the “first” trillion-dollar defense budget. Starting a war on Yemen – at over a billion dollars a month – and saber rattling over Iran are the most obvious evidence that the empire has struck back. And of course the DC hawks want to “confront” China.

This isn’t the first time a populist, popular movement to tame the Beltway beast was embraced then defeated by that same beast. The “Tea Party” movement was launched in December, 2007, with volunteers supporting my 2008 Presidential campaign holding a record-breaking 24 hour “money bomb” on the anniversary of the 1773 Boston Tea Party.

Americans sick of deficit spending, over-reaching government, and the costly and counterproductive US military empire overseas, joined together to demand change. The “money bomb” success got Washington’s attention – money is the lifeblood of the political class – and before too long politicians of all stripes declared themselves to be part of the “Tea Party.”

They loved the popularity of associating themselves with the “Tea Party.” But actually cutting government? Not so much.

The first thing these newly-minted “Tea Party” members rejected was our demand for an end to the unsustainable, bloated military budget and our aggressive foreign policy. Eventually they backed away from other spending restrictions and within a few years the “brand” was diluted and tossed away.

What is the lesson here? Is it all futile? Hardly. The popularity of DOGE shows that Americans still want a much smaller government. That is great news, and the country owes a debt of gratitude to Elon for reminding us of this. But until Americans elect Representatives who have the courage to follow through beyond photo-ops, we will sadly continue down the path toward bankruptcy and collapse.

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I have been following Catherine Austin Fitts off and on for many years once I became fully convinced, she was “the real deal.” Her extensive “insider” background status at the top echelon of one of Wall Street’s most prominent and politically connected investment banks, and her sub cabinet stint at HUD during the George H W Bush regime, demonstrated she was being groomed for a seat within elite power brokers. (She served as managing director and member of the board of directors of the Wall Street investment bank Dillon, Read & Co. Inc., as Assistant Secretary of Housing and Federal Housing Commissioner at the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development in the first Bush Administration.)

Too many readers may not be aware of the seminal importance of Dillon, Read & Co. Inc. to the power elite.

C. Wright Mills observed in his pioneering work, The Power Elite, that “During the Democratic era, one link between private corporate organizations and governmental institutions was the investment house of Dillon, Read.”

Here are four crucial examples.

Paul Nitze, served as United States Deputy Secretary of Defense, U.S. Secretary of the Navy, and Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department. He is best known for being the principal author of NSC 68 and the co-founder of Team B. He helped shape Cold War defense policy over the course of numerous presidential administrations.

James Forrestal, was president of Dillon, Read & Co. Inc. who later became the first Secretary of Defense under Harry Truman. He was assassinated by his enemies.

C. Douglas Dillion became vice-president and director of the firm that bore his father’s name (Clarence Dillon). Dillon became an American diplomat and politician, who served as U.S. Ambassador to France (1953–1957) and as the 57th Secretary of the Treasury (1961–1965) in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He was also a member of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm) during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He later served as chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation, was president of the Harvard board of overseers, chairman of the Brookings Institution and vice-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Nicolas F. Brady, was a former chairman of the Board of Dillon Read & Co. Inc. (1970–1988). He became United States Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. He was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. and a member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group.

But Catherine Austin Fitts soon found out “where the bodies were buried,” particularly the nexus of the global narcotics traffic, money laundering, and the deep state. Further deep probing led to investigations of the missing trillions of federal funds put an even bigger target upon her back.

DEEP State and Continuity of Government (COG)

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“I run the country and the world,” brags Trump.

The post The Wannabe Global Dictator appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Middle East Eye

The post Israeli official accuses UK minister of ‘blood libel’ over Gaza aid worker killings appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Saleh Abdullah.

LeoHohmann.com

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Gail Appel wrote:

If Trump was pushing for Ukraine to continue the war and reject a peace agreement, the globalist left would blast Trump and rush to make a deal with Putin.

Because Trump wants to negotiate a deal with Iran, suddenly , the Dems are on the side of striking Iran.

Trump should use a new strategy. Put forth every antithetical, disastrous idea and strategy the Dems push. They’ll rail and pound their pigeon chests, demand he does the polar opposite and he can say, “ Put the bill on my desk. I’m ready to sign it”. And laugh his ass off.

See here.

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Click here:

NaturalNews.com

The post Former Biden-era disinfo czar urges Brussels to “stand firm” against criticism of censorship laws appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Gail Appel:

Kirsti Noem’s purse was stolen at a DC burger joint by an illegal alien this week. The purse contained her security badge, passport, keys, blank checks and $3000 cash.

The robber was masked and she had a full security detail. 

What’s wrong with this picture, aside from everything?

See here.

The post Oh, Look Who Just Got Busted for Stealing DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s Purse appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Gail Appel:

Hi Lew,

Next time somebody tells me I’m crazy for naming Soros, his NGOs, CIA cutout Atlantic Counsel, John McStain,Lindsey Graham, Amy Klobuchar, Kerry were major players in the 2014 Ukraine Coup That Obama, Biden, Nuland, Brennan, Killery, and the aforementioned advocated, funded, armed and provoked the Maidan ( aka Nazi) uprising, naming them the “ good guys”. That there are no Nazis in Ukraine- it’s Russian propaganda.. .

Nazis ‘r’ Us’

See here.

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Gail Appel wrote:

Not only are the Dimms psychotic, but colorblind. Literally.

See here.

The post The Media’s Latest Attack on Trump at the Pope’s Funeral Blows Up in Their Face appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Gail Appel.

Jerome’s Substack

The post Tulsi’s doing the job of Bondi and Patel appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

The Hill

The post A damning indictment of Netanyahu’s leadership from his own security chief appeared first on LewRockwell.

The death of Pope Francis highlights a concern of many Catholics, including myself. Can we believe in the free market consistently with our faith? If we accept the Peronist views of the late pontiff, we obviously cannot do so. But fortunately, there is a better option available to us.

Clearly, God wants us to have peace and prosperity, to live in a “free and prosperous commonwealth,” as Ludwig von Mises put it. But the science of praxeology teaches us, by irrefutable logic, that only the free market enables us to avoid economic chaos. It therefore follows that the free market is ordained by God. This line of reasoning is more than theoretical. The great nineteenth-century free market economist Frédéric Bastiat, who was a Catholic, argued in just this way. As Claudio Resani notes: “’[L]iberty…is an act of faith in God and in His works.’ This is how Frédéric Bastiat thought concludes The Law, his most famous work. Reading his various writings and pamphlets, we can very often notice a recurring mention of God, or at least of a Creator, and of the morality that today we call ‘Judeo-Christian’ As already introduced, The Law is a very important work by Bastiat, and here we find the profound definition of freedom mentioned above but, we also find other statements with a religious background. Turning to the collectivist theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his disciples, horrified, Bastiat comments with a touch of irony: ‘But, oh! sublime writers, deign to remember sometimes that this clay, this sand, this manure, of which you are disposing in so arbitrary a manner, are men, your equals, intelligent and free beings like yourselves, who have received from God, as you have, the faculty of seeing, of foreseeing, of thinking, and of judging for themselves!’ Bastiat was a natural law scholar. For him, every individual is endowed by his Creator with rights and faculties that no one can justly take away from him. This is the same case with another famous statement he wrote in The Law: ‘Nature, or rather God, has bestowed upon every one of us the right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property, since these are the three constituent or preserving elements of life;…’ This is what is expressed in The Law by Bastiat as far as philosophy is concerned. It is a philosophical thought enlightened by a deep Christian faith that sees each individual as the image and likeness of the Lord. As far as economic thought is concerned, Bastiat expresses substantially the same natural law, to explain it we use his own words taken from Economic Harmonies and from the first edition of Economic Sophisms: ‘…the thought that put harmony into the movement of the heavenly bodies was also able to insert it into the internal mechanisms of society….freedom and public interest can be reconciled with justice and peace; that all these great principles follow infinite parallel paths without conflicting with each other for all eternity;… [This] we know of the goodness and wisdom of God as shown in the sublime harmony of physical creation…’ He is convinced that the harmony that exists in the natural sciences is also present in society and in interpersonal relationships, as a marvelous work of God. Again, in the introduction to Economic Harmonies, he writes about the harmony of individual interests: ‘It [the harmony of interests] is religious, for it assures us that it is not only the celestial but the social mechanism that reveals the wisdom of God and declares His glory.’ Economic Harmonies, although less famous than The Law, is by far his most important work. Here economics, philosophy, and theology merge and give life to the best and complete expression of Bastiat’s thought. In one of the last pages he writes: ‘To impair man’s liberty is not only to hurt and degrade him; it is to change his nature; it is (in the measure and proportion in which such oppression is exercised) to render him incapable of improvement; it is to despoil him of his resemblance to the Creator; it is to dim and deaden in his noble nature that vital spark that glowed there from the beginning.’ The fulcrum of Bastiat’s philosophical and economic thought is precisely the idea of spontaneous order, of natural harmony placed by God in human relationships because of the intelligence and free will with which the Creator has provided individuals.”

You might object that even if this argument is right, it goes against the official teachings of the Church, as expressed in papal documents. Certainly it goes against what the Peronista Pope taught, but his encyclicals are not infallible doctrine. As Father James Sadowsky, S.J., who was a friend of Murray Rothbard, pointed out, Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891)  is the most authoritative papal encyclical written in the modern era on social justice, and it is favorable to the free market: “What I call the classical social doctrine is that which prevailed among Roman Catholic thinkers from the time of Rerum Novarum (1891) until the middle of the twentieth century.  Rerum Novarum is the title of what is called an ‘encyclical,’ a papal letter addressed to the bishops, which articulates a pope’s position on some matter of importance to the Catholic Church.  Though what is set forth in encyclicals possesses great authority, encyclicals do not, in and of themselves, possess the force of doctrine.  In other words, positions can and do change with the passage of time.  Yet more than any other single document, Rerum Novarum guided the thinking of Roman Catholics on socio-economic questions during the first half of our century. The encyclical was written in 1891. Leo XIII was striving to improve the living conditions of the worker, and quite properly so.  Here is Pope Leo’s summary of the problem that he thought needed his attention: ‘After the trade guilds had been destroyed in the last century, and no protection was substituted in their place, and when public institutions and legislation had cast off traditional religious teaching, it gradually came about that the present age handed over the workers, each alone and defenseless, to the inhumanity of employers and the unbridled greed of competitors . . . and in addition the whole process of production as well as trade in every kind of goods has been brought almost entirely under the power of a few, so that a very few exceedingly rich men have laid a yoke almost of slavery on the unnumbered masses on non-owning workers.’ No socialist, no liberation theologian could have brought forth a stronger indictment.  But if one is expecting the pope to propose the socialist remedy as his own, one is heading for a severe disappointment: ‘To cure this evil, the Socialists, exciting the envy of the poor toward the rich, contend that it is necessary to do away with private possession of goods and in its place to make the goods of individuals common to all, and that the men who preside over a municipality or who direct the entire State should act as administrators of these goods.  They hold that, by such a transfer of private goods from private individuals to the community, they can cure the present evil through dividing wealth and benefits equally among the citizens. But their program is so unsuited for terminating the conflict that it actually injures the workers themselves.  Moreover, it is highly unjust, because it violates the rights of lawful owners, perverts the functions of the State, and throws governments into utter confusion. If the worker cannot use his wages to buy property, which under socialism he could not do, his right to dispose of his wage as he sees fit is taken from him.’ In other words, socialism dooms the worker to remaining forever under the very wage system it deplores, ‘. . . inasmuch as the Socialists seek to transfer the goods of private persons to the community at large, they make the lot of all wage earners worse, because in abolishing the freedom to dispose of wages they take away from them by this very act the hope and the opportunity of increasing their property and of securing advantages for themselves.’ Even more important, a regime of private property is demanded by human nature itself.  Unlike the animals, man must plan for the future.  He can do so only if he is able to possess the fruit of his labors in a permanent and stable fashion.  It is in the power of man, wrote Leo, ‘to choose the things which he considers best adapted to benefit him not only in the present but also in the future.  Whence it follows that dominion not only over the fruits of the earth but also over the earth itself ought to rest in man, since he sees that things necessary for the future are furnished him out of the produce of the earth.  The needs of every man are subject, as it were, to constant recurrences, so that, satisfied today, they make new demands tomorrow.  Therefore nature necessarily gave man something stable and perpetually lasting on which he can count for continuous support. But nothing can give continuous support of this kind save the earth with its great abundance.’ The ownership of the earth by man in general means only that God did not assign any particular part of the earth to any one person, but left the limits of private possessions to be fixed by the industry of man and the institutions of peoples.  To use the technical phrase, ownership in the original state was negatively rather than positively common: owned by no one but capable of being converted into property by anyone. How does one convert the unowned into property?  By laboring on what till that moment has been unowned.  By so doing ‘he appropriates that part of physical nature to himself which he has cultivated.’  He stamps his own image on the work of his hands in such wise that “no one in any way should be permitted to violate this right.”  Moreover, those who would deny to the individual the ownership of the soil he cultivates, while conceding to him the produce that results from that activity, forget that the modifications man introduces into the soil are inseparable from it.  A man cannot own one without owning the other.’ In sum, here is Leo’s indictment of socialism: ‘From all these conversations, it is perceived that the fundamental principle of Socialism which would make all possessions  public property is to be utterly rejected because it injures the very ones it seeks to help, contravenes the natural rights of individuals persons, and throw the functions of the State and public peace into confusion.  Let it be regarded, therefore, as established that in seeking help for the masses this principle before all is to be considered as basic, namely, that private ownership must be preserved inviolate.’ Running through the encyclical is the theme that man’s natural right of possessing and transmitting property by inheritance must remain intact and cannot be taken away by the State, ‘for man precedes the State,’ and, ‘the domestic household is antecedent as well in idea as in fact, to the gathering of men into a community.’ At most, the State could modify the use of private property, but it could never rightly take away the basic right to its ownership and ordinary exercise.”

Let’s do everything we can to promote the free market. That is the best way Catholics can adhere to the teachings of our Church.

The post The Free Market and Catholic Social Teaching appeared first on LewRockwell.

It is ideas that group men into fighting factions, that press the weapons into their hands, and that determine against whom and for whom the weapons shall be used. It is they alone, and not arms, that, in the last analysis, turn the scales.

Regardless of all the suffering men like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao caused, it is vitally important to understand that they were fellow humans, like any others, who absorbed a complex set of ideas that led them to act the way they did. Although we no longer see people as being possessed by evil spirits, or heretics to be tortured or burned at the stake, many people still see these men as non-humans, maniacal creations that just commit “irrational evil,” thus overlooking what really matters—the ideas they held. Therefore, we understandably keep repeating the same fallacies and their consequences. Let us briefly try to understand some of the actual fallacies which led to Hitler’s disastrous views and actions.

Let’s begin by briefly summarizing how the modern socioeconomic order has arisen during the last 300 years, and the vital role that increasing freedom and “economic competition” played. For this, I quote a previous article, “How Austrian Economists Repeatedly Saved Civilization”:

Until the late 1700s, most people lived in small, nearly self-sufficient farming towns. As technology improved (engines and factories) the rate at which mankind could transform raw materials into wealth was rapidly increasing in cities. A growing class of businessmen-entrepreneurs-capitalists were constantly innovating and due to people’s “freedom to trade” their private property only for things they deemed superior alternatives, entrepreneurs also had to copy the innovations of competitors thus inadvertently creating and spreading superior information, turning cities and eventually the entire planet into supercomputers that were constantly reordering mankind in increasingly productive and technologically advanced states.

Competition between increasingly wealthy and productive factories and entrepreneurs motivated them to pay increasing amounts of wealth for labor relative to what people could earn in farms causing people to move to cities, quickly leading to massively complex metropolises and steadily increasing living standards for everyone.

These changes—what we could refer to as the emergence or evolution of modern capitalism—were not the deliberate design of people, they were, as Carl Menger writes: “the unintended result of individual human efforts (pursuing individual interests) without a common will directed toward their establishment,” or, in the words of Adam Ferguson: “indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.”

Since these changes were unintended, their benefits were not widely understood. Ignorance of how competing private sector companies were the creators and spreaders of superior information and subsequent social order led to some common errors. Erroneously and resentfully seeing the growing fortunes of some entrepreneurs and investors as exploitation of laborers—among numerous other fallacies led to the rapid spread of a new erroneous ideology-mythology—socialism.

Misguided ideologues and resentful masses increasingly thought that private companies led to unfair differences in wealth and exploitation, and that abolishing them or having them managed by a competition-immune coercive bureaucracy of experts, in other words, the state or government or the “public sector” would be better for society. Naive intellectuals would describe these increasingly popular fallacies-myths in a manner that was bound to go viral and that is what sort of happened with Karl Marx and his bite-sized “Communist Manifesto” where he famously writes: “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”

Hitler was one of those “misguided ideologues” who did not understand the vital role freedom and emerging private sector businesses and their competition played in both, generating and spreading superior information, as well as using profit-loss calculation to ensure they were ordering society in a manner where more wealth (sales revenue) was produced, than consumed (costs), thus being a profitable wealth-increasing order. This, of course, made Hitler a socialist, a National Socialist (Nazi). These economic fallacies he shared with other leading socialist-minded figures of his time like Mussolini, Stalin, and FDR.

The Soviet competition-immune bureaucracy owned and generated all the information that attempted to order production. The Nazis allowed private ownership in name, but, as Mises explains in his treatise Human Action,

…in all their activities they are bound to obey unconditionally the orders issued by the government’s supreme office of production management…. This is socialism under the outward guise of the terminology of capitalism. Some labels of the capitalistic market economy are retained, but they signify something entirely different from what they mean in the market economy.

Thus, as with the Soviets, all information needed to coordinate and order production emerged and was coerced from a competition-immune bureaucracy, leading to—per Mises—Planned Chaos.

Hitler, being a man of his time—like other major racists like Churchill and Roosevelt—also fooled himself into believing that race or tiny biological differences within humans were a vital factor for socioeconomic prosperity. It was culture-software, the above-summarized emergence of capitalism and related social institutions like private property, money, finance-banking, the rule of law, etc., not “hardware” (blue eyes, white skin, etc.), which was the main factor in the rapid relative socioeconomic advancement Europeans had enjoyed paving the way for their misguided imperialism of the time. The cultural—not biological—evolutionary process which has created capitalism is much, much faster than the slow genetic biological evolution, thus rendering slight genetic differences between races and populations largely irrelevant. As Hayek writes:

…biological evolution would have been far too slow to alter or replace man’s innate responses in the course of the ten or twenty thousand years during which civilisation has developed… Thus it hardly seems possible that civilisation and culture are genetically determined and transmitted. They have to be learnt by all alike through tradition.

As numerous great free-market thinkers like Mises, Robert Higgs, and Ralph Raico have shown, during the last couple thousand years different groups of people, in widely dispersed locations like the Middle East, Asia, and Europe, traded the sort of title for most socioeconomically-advanced places. Mises makes this point and criticizes people who erroneously focus on race:

But it is by all means an unsatisfactory answer to say that a genius owes his greatness to his ancestry or to his race. The question is precisely why such a man differs from his brothers and from the other members of his race.

It is a little bit less faulty to attribute the great achievements of the white race to racial superiority. Yet this is no more than a vague hypothesis which is at variance with the fact that the early foundations of civilization were laid by peoples of other races. We cannot know whether or not at a later date other races will supplant Western civilization.

Hiter’s anti-Jewish fallacies significantly grew from misinterpreting inadvertent Jewish overrepresentation in the horrific Bolshevik revolution and resulting Soviet Communist calamity, with some deliberate malicious plot masterminded by Jews and/or tied to their “race.” Jewish author, Yuri Slezkine, writes in his excellent book The Jewish Century: “At the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets in June 1917, at least 31 percent of Bolshevik delegates (and 37 percent of Unified Social Democrats) were Jews.” Jews—at least in Lenin’s Russia—were, on average, better educated, thus inadvertently rising to the top of the disastrous ideological bureaucracy, which required the better-educated to coerce the rest. Lenin mentions how:

Jewish intelligentsia members in the Russian cities was of great importance to the revolution…. It was only thanks to this pool of a rational and literate labor force that we succeeded in taking over the state apparatus.

Unfortunately, ethnic Jews were also over-represented in the tyrannical Soviet secret police. Slezkine again:

In 1923, at the time of the creation of the OGPU(the Cheka’s successor), Jews made up 15.5 percent of all “leading” officials and 50 percent of the top brass (4 out of 8 members of the Collegium’s Secretariat). “Socially alien” Jews were well represented among Cheka-OGPU prisoners, too, but Leonard Schapiro is probably justified in generalizing (especially about the territory of the former Pale) that “anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with and possibly shot by a Jewish investigator.

In just 13 years—from 1927-1940—the Soviet secret police destroyed 29,084 Christian Orthodox Churches, leaving less than 500, while killing an estimated 80,000-100,000 priests. This erroneously made it seem to naïve thinkers like Hitler—and sadly many to this day—that “the Jews” were purposely annihilating Christianity due to sheer malice instead of just being over-represented in a disastrous ideology.

Bottom line, per Mises, “We must substitute better ideas for wrong ideas.”

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

The post The Economic Fallacies Underpinning Hitler’s Disastrous Views appeared first on LewRockwell.

It was August 18, 2021. I was at a coffee shop in Paso Robles, California. I had kids in college who feared that their institutions might kick them out if they didn’t get one of the experimental mRNA-based Covid “vaccines.” They didn’t need the shots for many reasons, from their healthy age and lack of any co-morbidities to the most important fact of all: our entire family had gotten and fought through Covid and we all had antibodies, easily demonstrated by blood tests we offered to provide from their doctors to the schools. Worse, there were legitimate fears of myocarditis and pericarditis among young people from the Covid shots. I knew of a 19-year-old girl locally whose heart was so immediately damaged that she required a heart transplant. (Yes, seriously. I wrote about it at the time. I worked for four years in organ transplantation.)

In addition to seeking medical exemptions, my kids appealed to an even more important right as Catholic Christians, a sacred right: conscientious exemption. This form of moral-religious exemption is considered more powerful and constitutionally protected in America than medical appeals. In fact, one of my kids in the summer of 2021 was told just that by the school’s powers-that-be. Students would be better served by filing religious exemptions.

But then the news hit that August 18. I read on my phone that morning that the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, head of the world’s largest body of Christians, stated that Catholics not only should get the shot but had a moral duty to do so. He said that “getting vaccinated is an act of love” and “our choice to get vaccinated affects others.”

As happened with seemingly every Francis statement, a debate then erupted over whether Francis in these remarks—and others prior and yet to come—had said that Catholics were “morally obligated” to get vaccinated or had a “moral responsibility.” And was he speaking of a “moral obligation” to “healthcare” generally or the vax specifically?

Yes, you know the drill. How exhausting it always was. Maddening Francis statements like this would be made to the media and created some of the most outrageous moments of his papacy. Every time that Francis grabbed a mic on an airplane we braced ourselves for the tumult to come, not knowing which centuries-old Catholic teaching might suddenly come into question.

Indeed, in a January 10, 2021 interview on Italy’s TG5 news program, Francis had said: “I believe that morally everyone must take the vaccine. It is the moral choice because it is about your life but also the lives of others.” Between that remark in January and what he had just said in August, who could blame the liberals at NPR and elsewhere for headlines reporting that the pope said that Catholics had a “moral obligation” to get vaxxed?

As for Catholics who disagreed and pleaded for exemptions, Francis said: “I do not understand why some say that this could be a dangerous vaccine. If the doctors are presenting this to you as a thing that will go well and doesn’t have any special dangers, why not take it?” The pope insisted: “There is a suicidal denialism that I would not know how to explain, but today people must take the vaccine.”

They “must.”

Of course, many doctors disagreed with that. They wrote medical exemption claims for their patients. My good friend Tom (I wrote about his case just after the Francis statement) had such a physician’s statement because his Covid antibodies were sky high after nearly dying from the virus. His physician said the shot was not only unnecessary for him but could be dangerous. But most HR departments refused such claims, demanding a one-size-fits-all approach. And if Tom sought the added backing of a religious/conscience appeal as a Catholic, he would have no recourse there, especially given that the pope stressed the moral imperative that he get the shot.

For Francis, his words served as a universal checkmate against Catholics seeking exemptions, not to mention for the pope-splainers, who yet again tried to parse his words. There was no denying what Francis was saying at this point. We could re-translate his statements all we wanted. He had obliterated our religious appeals, plain and simple. Every pro-vax liberal Catholic in America, and every pro-vax priest, bishop, cardinal, hospital, university, health organization, charity, or whatever, had enough from Francis to inform any Catholic making a religious appeal that the pope himself was saying no way.

Get the shot! Do you not love your neighbor?

Francis’ Covid remarks were some of the worst and most shockingly ill-informed statements of a 12-year papacy of chaos and confusion that left many of us pope-splainers and defenders frustrated, angry, exhausted. I went through that painful process with my many writings on Covid, here at Crisis (here and here) and especially at The American Spectator, of which I’m the editor. (I wrote so often on the subject because of my medical background. I did work in immunology for the organ-transplant team at the University of Pittsburgh under Dr. Thomas Starzl, the man who pioneered the procedure. And I most certainly don’t oppose vaccination.) Here at Crisis, our editor Eric Sammons (among other writers) wrote about it frequently (here and here), including a piece that I urge readers to consult again, “Have You No Decency, Holy Father?” in which Eric reviewed the distasteful Francis comments on Cardinal Raymond Burke’s near-death from Covid.

Returning to the point: The pope said that we had a moral duty to get vaccinated. And with that, Mr. and Mrs. Catholic, your religious appeals were dead. Alas, take the shot and accept the moral and physical consequences, or lose your job, get kicked out of the military, get booted from your college. Francis labeled you a moral failure and threat to your fellow man. You were not loving your neighbor.

Of course, it is crucial to remember that Francis’ position flatly contradicted his own Vatican and groups like the National Catholic Bioethics Center. Unlike Francis, those groups had long carefully studied these moral concepts in great depth. They were staffed by individuals with advanced degrees in bioethics, philosophy, medicine, developed over the course of decades in conferences and peer-reviewed papers. In fact, I had crafted religious appeals for my children based on some of these. Here’s the July 2021 statement that I wrote for one of my kids, which was added to the medical appeal we submitted:

My religious appeal is a simple and straightforward conscientious objection. My choice to not be vaccinated against my will is a matter of conscience and free will. I am Roman Catholic, and my Church backs this. In December 2020, the Vatican released an official statement that affirms: “vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation.” That document says that vaccination “must be voluntary.” The Vatican says that forced vaccination is a violation of freedom of religion and conscience. This is officially affirmed by the American bishops. My Church firmly stands behind this. This is my sincerely held religious belief. It is an ethical-moral-religious objection.

That was what we sent into the college. But alas, boom, then came Francis’ statements. I told my kids: “The pope himself just pulled the plug on your religious exemption.”

Of course, he pulled the plug not only for my kids. Millions of Catholics worldwide were sunk with no recourse, no protection. Over subsequent months, I got numerous emails from Catholics who felt they had no hope. I heard horror stories from those who lost jobs. When they filed appeals based on their conscience and faith, they were dismissed by an HR bully who informed them that their own pope said they had a moral duty to get the shot. Their pope undermined them.

It must be underscored here that the pope’s top American enforcer in this campaign was Cardinal Blase Cupich. Immediately upon Francis’ August 17 statement, Cupich and his Chicago diocese—as well as the diocese of Philadelphia—sprang into action. This was captured in a sad headline by the National Catholic Register: “Chicago, Philly Archdioceses Tell Priests Not to Provide Religious Exemption from COVID Vaccines.” The article stated:

The archdioceses of both Philadelphia and Chicago have instructed their clerics not to assist parishioners seeking religious exemptions from receiving COVID-19 vaccines.

An Aug. 18 letter from Fr. Michael Hennelly, Vicar for Clergy for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, said that neither the archdiocese “nor its parishes are able to provide support, written or otherwise, for individuals seeking an exemption from the vaccine on religious grounds.”

“Parishioners surely can determine their own actions, but it would be important to clarify that they cannot use the teaching of the church to justify such decisions, which in their essence, are a rejection of the church’s authentic moral teaching regarding  Covid vaccines,” the cardinal wrote.

“There is no basis in Catholic moral teaching for rejecting vaccine mandates on religious grounds,” he said. 

Cardinal Cupich wrote that “In fact, the Holy See has clearly stated that receiving the Covid vaccine is unquestionably in keeping with Catholic faith, and even has urged people to be vaccinated as an act of charity and out of respect for the common good in fighting the pandemic. Our moral teaching, while ever respectful of the rights of individuals, always keeps in focus the common good. Not doing so distorts Catholic doctrine.” 

Cupich went further. He pressured the bishops and National Catholic Bioethics Center to go against their informed understanding of the Church teaching on conscience. He went to battle against a July 2 NCBC statement that no Catholic should have opposed. That NCBC statement noted that it “does not endorse mandated COVID-19 immunization,” citing the December 2020 statement from the pope’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith stating that “practical reason makes evident that vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation and that, therefore, it must be voluntary.”

Read the Whole Article

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I am looking at a couple of random lines lifted from a bleak little poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., written at a sad time near the end of a short and, by his own reckoning, unfulfilled life. He was quite mistaken about that, by the way. His last words, whispered aloud about how happy he was to be going home to God, certainly put that misconception to rest.

Nevertheless, the lines he wrote were, without a doubt, an expression of bitter lamentation, advising us that because “The times are nightfall,” we must remain ever vigilant, on high alert in order to watch and see how “their light grows less.” Indeed, says Hopkins, on all sides we are beset by forces that threaten to put the lights out altogether, leaving the world impacted by the sheer dark. “The times are winter,” he tells us; thus, he summons us to see what he sees, which is “a world undone: They waste, they wither worse…”

Perhaps this is what Sir Edward Grey, England’s foreign secretary, had in mind when, on the eve of the Great War, he dolefully announced, “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” Less than a year later, all the lamps having gone out, Winston Churchill would declare in a letter to his wife that, “a wave of madness has swept the mind of Christendom.”

A mere half-century later, Walker Percy would make the same point in a piece of brilliant dystopian fiction called Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World. Percy’s protagonist will spend sleepless nights rereading “Stedmann’s History of World War I,” a meticulous account confirming those same devastations referenced by Churchill:

For weeks now I’ve been on the Battle of Verdun, which killed half a million men, lasted a year, and left the battle lines unchanged. Here began the hemorrhage and death by suicide of the old Western world: white Christian Caucasian Europeans, sentimental music-loving Germans and rational clear-minded Frenchmen, slaughtering each other without passion. “The men in the trenches did not hate each other,” wrote Stedmann. “As for the generals, they respected or contemned each other precisely as colleagues in the same profession.”

Shakespeare, of course, had foreseen much the same state of derangement some two or more centuries before when, in the voice of Hamlet on seeing the ghost of his murdered father, the king—a murder so “foul and most unnatural” that it must be avenged—cries out in the midst of a time as depraved and disjointed as any heretofore recorded: “O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right.”

But, alas, Hamlet proves singularly inept in doing so, leaving a stage littered with dead bodies, his own included. Still, the point is made, which is that we live in a deeply disordered age, one that seems on every side to conspire in keeping goodness at bay. Not just goodness but simple sanity, which is nothing more than seeing the truth of things, so that we don’t all go mad.

Would it be possible, I wonder, living in a world such as the one we’ve got, to sort of nudge things modestly along in a direction that will make it easier for people to be good? To remain sane? In other words, to be able actually to see reality straight on, and to act accordingly? Or must the lights always be going out, if for no other reason than the fact that humankind having had its Fall, no rebirth or reform will ever be permanent? Must the worm be forever inside the apple, insinuating its poison deep down, infecting the fruit from within?

What are we to say about all this? More to the point, what can we do? I mean, as Christians, that is, specifically Roman Catholic Christians? Are there measures we can take that might make a life of virtue possible, not just for the heroic few but for the mediocre many? Those who, as some wag once put it, are always at their best? Could not society bestir itself a bit on behalf of making the mediocre just a wee bit better? Not mere “fragments,” mind you, “shored against my ruins,” as Eliot famously put it at the end of The Waste Land, his chronicle of personal disillusion, which may or may not have expressed the disillusion of an entire generation. But something sane and solid for all of us; a scaffolding, as it were, on which the generality of human beings can lean in order to live a more decent, even saintly, life?

This is not about individual excellence, the triumph of the solitary soul, but about an effort to elevate everyone, or at least to make it easier for the generality of humankind genuinely to see goodness as a distinct possibility, even if they refuse to seize upon it in the daily round of their lives. Because, while no man may actualize himself without himself, without others he cannot actualize himself at all.

My body will, to a certain extent, always be a boundary separating me from others, but it can also become a bridge joining me to those others, a medium of communion no less. If to be is necessarily to be in relation, then all life is relational, lived out in a spirit, an ethos, of reciprocity with others. Even Robinson Crusoe, in order to find and fulfill himself, required the friendship of Friday.

Might it be possible, therefore, to build a culture where it is easier for men to be virtuous? “A cell of good living,” is how the craftsman and critic Eric Gill put it, “in the chaos of our world.” Not the beehive, but the Mystical Body.

And what exactly is culture but an embodied religion, a faith that is given flesh and blood and bone in a visible and public way, so that everyone may avail themselves of its customs and convictions. Have we got anything at all like that? I mean at the moment, right this minute? No, we do not. And were such a thing to suddenly materialize, a genuine social life rooted in religion, anchored to God, it would very shortly be suppressed; it would quite hastily be dismantled on the grounds that, having breached the sacred wall of separation between Church and State, it was nothing less than an affront to the U.S. Constitution.

Is there an answer to this? Can an argument be made to disabuse people of the high anxiety they experience whenever religion and politics, faith and culture, are thrown into the same mix, a conjunction perceived by many to be so toxic that we are forbidden to stir it into life? I think that there is. And to that end I’ve put together a number of essays which actually aim to persuade the reader that to join the two makes perfect sense—and that by not doing so we really are in the soup.

This originally appeared on Crisis Magazine.

The post Is Christian Culture Possible? appeared first on LewRockwell.

This is the first of a three-part series on the history of NATO and US European Command military exercises with Ukraine. This shows how the West, acting like a camel, slipped its big nose under the Ukrainian tent as part of a long-term strategy to defeat Russia. While many of these exercises were touted as peacekeeping in nature, the real purpose was to train and equip Ukraine with the ultimate goal of fighting and defeating Russia. In July 1998, for example, NATO’s Sea Breeze maritime exercise included anti-submarine warfare. WTF??? That ain’t peacekeeping. That is preparation to fight Russia in the Black Sea.

The process of making Ukraine a de facto member of NATO started in 1992, one year after the collapse of the Soviet Union. 1994 marked the first year that Ukrainian forces participated in NATO exercises, although these were held in Poland and the Netherlands. The following year, 1995, witnessed the creation of Ukraine’s Yavoriv military base as the NATO training center, although this was not formalized until 1999.

1999 was no coincidence… it was the year that NATO expanded to the East by accepting the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland as new members on March 12, 1999. This provoked alarm in Russia because it obliterated the promise of former US Secretary of State James Baker, that NATO would not move one inch to the East. President Bill Clinton broke that promise.

Part 2 will cover the period, 2000 – 2010. Part 3 will cover 2011 – 2021. The plan to use Ukraine as a proxy to weaken Russia was born in the 1990s and matured into war in 2022. I hope you find this informative.

I did a podcast today with Garland Nixon. That is posted at the end of this article.

1992

NATO-Ukraine Relations in 1992 — In 1992, Ukraine formally established relations with NATO by joining the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC) in March 1992. The North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC) was established by NATO in December 1991 as a forum for dialogue and cooperation between NATO member states and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, including the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact states, in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War.

The NACC ostensibly was created to foster political consultation and build confidence between former adversaries, reflecting NATO’s “hand of friendship” to the newly independent and transitioning states of Central and Eastern Europe, which also included Russia. The NACC’s activities paved the way for deeper cooperation, notably leading to the launch of the Partnership for Peace (PfP) program in 1994, which allowed for more practical and individualized cooperation between NATO and partner countries.

In 1997, the NACC was succeeded by the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC), which expanded the partnership framework to include more countries and provided a more sophisticated forum for dialogue and cooperation, reflecting the evolving security environment and the deepening relationships between NATO and its partners. Russia also joined EAPC, but was suspended from the organization in 2014 after the people of Crimea voted to reunite with Russia.

• Ukraine’s cooperation with NATO began in March 1992 when it joined the newly established NACC, marking the start of formal relations and opening the door for future military cooperation .
• The first concrete participation of Ukraine in a NATO-linked military exercise did not occur until September 1994, when Ukraine joined the Partnership for Peace (PfP) program and participated in joint training exercises such as “Cooperation Bridge” in Poland .

1993

In 1993, Ukraine began its military cooperation with the United States and NATO, although it had not yet joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace (which happened in 1994). The most significant development in 1993 was the initiation of the U.S.-Ukraine State Partnership Program (SPP), established between the California National Guard and Ukraine. This program laid the groundwork for ongoing joint training, military exchanges, and exercises.

The U.S. European Command (USEUCOM) advocated for establishing a Military Liaison Team (MLT) in Kyiv as early as 1993, but the deployment was delayed due to diplomatic considerations. Nonetheless, military cooperation and engagement activities were ongoing under the Defense Attaché Office. The cooperation in 1993 set the stage for more formal and larger-scale military exercises such as “Peace Shield” and “Sea Breeze,” which began after Ukraine joined the Partnership for Peace in 1994.

1994

Cooperative Bridge 94

• In September 1994, Ukraine participated in its first NATO Partnership for Peace (PfP) joint training exercise,
  “Cooperative Bridge 94,” held at the Biedrusko military training area near Poznan, Poland, from 12 to 16 September 1994 .
• This exercise involved approximately 600 soldiers from 13 NATO and Partner nations, including Ukraine, and focused on basic unit and individual peacekeeping tasks and skills.
• The aim was to share peacekeeping experience, develop a common understanding of operational procedures, and improve interoperability among NATO and Partner military forces .
• The exercise was conducted under the supervision of NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) and was jointly planned with Polish military authorities.

Spirit of Partnership

Later in 1994, a Ukrainian air-mobile unit participated in another PfP training exercise called “Spirit of Partnership,” held in the Netherlands.

1995

Peace Shield 1995:

The primary NATO/USEUCOM military exercise conducted with Ukraine in 1995 was “Peace Shield,” a joint US-Ukrainian exercise held at the Yavoriv training area near Lviv from May 23 to May 27, 1995. This exercise was part of the Partnership for Peace (PfP) program, which aimed to increase interoperability and cooperation between NATO and partner countries, including Ukraine.

Autumn Allies 95:
Another notable exercise was “Autumn Allies 95,” which involved approximately 400 U.S. Marines and 200 Ukrainian soldiers. The exercise focused on promoting interoperability in peacekeeping operations and was conducted later in 1995.

The Partnership for Peace program was central to these activities, providing a framework for joint exercises, training, and defense planning between Ukraine, NATO, and USEUCOM.

1996

Cossack Step-96:

In 1996, Ukraine hosted a military exercise called “Cossack Step-96” in cooperation with Great Britain. This exercise was conducted “in the spirit of Partnership for Peace (PfP),” NATO’s program for building trust and
interoperability with non-member countries, including Ukraine at the time. The exercise involved approximately 140 participants from Ukraine and Great Britain.

During this period, Ukraine was actively increasing its military cooperation with NATO through the PfP framework, which included joint training and exercises aimed at enhancing Ukraine’s ability to participate in multinational operations with NATO forces. The U.S. European Command (USEUCOM) was involved in
developing security cooperation with Ukraine, focusing on familiarization activities, military professionalism, and closer ties to NATO.

1997

Cooperative Neighbor-97:

In July 1997, Ukraine hosted the Cooperative Neighbor-97 joint exercise at the Yavoriv training grounds in western Ukraine. The exercise involved approximately 1,200 soldiers from the United States, Greece, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, and Macedonia. Cooperative Neighbor-97 was conducted under NATO’s Partnership for Peace (PfP) program, which aimed to build
trust and interoperability between NATO members and partner countries. The exercise focused on joint training and cooperation, and was observed by U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen and Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksandr Kuzmuk.

Sea Breeze 1997:

Sea Breeze 1997 was a multinational maritime exercise cohosted by the United States and Ukraine in the Black Sea region. The exercise included U.S. Marines and Ukrainian forces and was initially planned to simulate an intervention in a fictional ethnic conflict, but the scenario was changed due to Russian
sensitivities. The revised scenario focused on providing humanitarian aid after an earthquake. The land-based segments were moved from Crimea to the Ukrainian mainland to avoid local protests and Russian
opposition. While conducted “in the spirit of NATO’s Partnership for Peace,” NATO itself maintained a hands-off approach, with only Turkey among NATO members sending ships to participate directly.

Significance:

Both exercises were part of the broader NATO-Ukraine cooperation established by the Charter on a Distinctive Partnership, signed in July 1997, which set the framework for ongoing military and political collaboration. These exercises marked early steps in Ukraine’s integration into Euro-Atlantic security structures and were designed to enhance interoperability, readiness, and mutual understanding between Ukraine, NATO, and U.S. European Command forces.

Read the Whole Article

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