CLASSICAL GREEK HISTORY
431-404 BC, Peloponnesian War. Pericles’ funeral oration was the Gettysburg Address of its day. See Dr. North’s comments:
Thucydides’ book is most famous for his account of Pericles’ funeral oration
of 430 B.C. This oration spelled out the basics of how Athenians liked to think of themselves. Pericles delivered this oration at a mass funeral of Athenian warriors who had died in the war with Sparta. The war was about a year old. Pericles was more responsible for that war than any other Athenian politician.
Pericles was using a highly emotional event, which had the character of a religious rite, to defend Athenian ideals. This was necessary in order to justify a war that was already going badly and would soon go much worse. His speech is regarded as one of the classic documents in the history of Western civilization. The textbooks laud both Pericles and his speech. Rarely are students told what followed. (Or should I say “were”? These days, they do not hear of Pericles or his speech.)
A year later, a great plague struck maritime Athens, though hardly at all in Sparta and the inland cities of the Peloponnesian alliance. According to the historian of Greece, J. B. Bury, this plague led to the destruction of Athenian civil religion and personal morality.
(Bury, History of Greece, p. 390.) Pericles’ two sons died in the plague.
6th Century, BC. Democracy originated in 6th-century BC Greece. It was a unique and workable method of governance for city-states of a few thousand people. And in the case of Athens, as many as 40,000 people.
BIBLICAL HISTORY
44 BC, Julius Caesar. Joseph Sobran on Julius Caesar.
54-68 BC, Nero. Nero converted to Judaism.
29 AD, “Render Unto Caesar” from RJ Rushdoony’s Institute of Biblical Law, Chapter 6 “The Tribute Money,” 1973.
70 AD, The Seige of Jerusalem. From Wikipedia . . .
The Siege of Jerusalem in the year 70 was the decisive event of the First Jewish–Roman War. The Roman army, led by the future Emperor Titus, with Tiberius Julius Alexander as his second-in-command, besieged and conquered the city of Jerusalem, which had been occupied by its Jewish defenders in 66.
The siege ended with the sacking of the city and the destruction of its Second Temple. The destruction of both the first and second temples is still mourned annually as the Jewish fast Tisha B’Av. The Arch of Titus, celebrating the Roman sack of Jerusalem and the Temple, still stands inRome.
451, Chalcedon Creed. This creed was adopted at the Fourth Ecumenical Council, held at Chalcedon, located in what is now Turkey, in 451, as a response to certain heretical views concerning the nature of Christ. It established the orthodox view that Christ has two natures (human and divine) that are unified in one person.
WESTERN EUROPEAN HISTORY
1095-1456, Crusades
1184-1230, Medieval Inquisition.
1208-1244, Catholic Church burned the Cathar sect.
1209, Massacre at Beziers, France was the first major military action of the Albigensian Crusade. Lots of movements that opposed Catholicism.
1215, Magna Carta, “The Great Charter.” King John, 1166-1216, signed the Magna Carter into law. Who was he? Here’s a timeline of the events leading up to the signing of the Magna Carter.
14th Century, Catholic Indulgences. Dr. North says that “Indulgences had been authorized in the late 14th century. Julius II used them to finance St. Peter’s, beginning in 1510.”
1415, Jan Huss, (1369 – 6 July 1415), often referred to in English as John Hus or John Huss, was a Czech priest, philosopher, early Christian reformer and Master at Charles University in Prague. After John Wycliffe, the theorist of ecclesiastical Reformation, Hus is considered the first Church reformer, as he lived before Luther, Calvin and Zwingli.
Hus was a key predecessor to the Protestant movement of the sixteenth century, and his teachings had a strong influence on the states of Europe, most immediately in the approval of a reformist Bohemian religious denomination, and, more than a century later, on Martin Luther himself.[2] He was burned at the stake for heresy against thedoctrines of the Catholic Church, including those on ecclesiology, the Eucharist, and other theological topics.
1419-1434, Hussite Wars.
1478, Spanish Inquisition
The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition
from Charles Burris, “One of the most striking and visceral accounts of human barbarism and intolerance passed down through the centuries has been the Spanish Inquisition. But as we often discover through the patient and prudential analysis of careful revisionist history, what we think we “know” may not always be so. Compare and contrast these two “documentaries” on the Inquisition. The first was produced by the BBC, the second one by The History Channel. Note the difference not only in tone and presentation of visual imagery, but the alleged scholarship behind the narrative. LRC readers interested in delving into the true story of this institution whose very name denotes torture, religious repression, and death may begin to find the answers here.”
1492, Spanish Colonization of America
1492, Christopher Columbus. That link there contains a good article to explain all of the Christopher Columbus bashings. Oh, there is no dispute of his brutality, thievery, and murderous ways; it’s just that the Left loves to traipse out all of the anti-Christopher Columbus arguments to demonize all European white males. Laughable.
Painting, “Columbus Before the Queen.” (1843) by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, 1816-1868.
1509-1564, On the Economics of Calvin & Calvinism. Calvin broke with Aristotle on economics and capital controls. Calvin argued in favor of capitalism, breaking price controls that stagnated an economy. “The United States could never have risen to become the world’s financial center without moving past Aristotle, past just price laws, past capital controls” argues Jerry Bowyer.
1513, from Gary North. In 1513, Leo X replaced Julius II as Pope. Julius II had begun a huge, expensive reconstruction of St. Peter’s Church in Rome. He hired Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel. Leo X wanted to complete the project, but he soon ran out of money.
1514-1572, John Knox, “leader of the Protestant Reformation and is considered the founder of the Presbyterian denomination in Scotland.” “. . . While in exile, Knox was licensed to work in the Church of England, where he rose in the ranks to serve King Edward VI of England as a royal chaplain. He exerted a reforming influence on the text of the Book of Common Prayer. “. . . In Geneva he met John Calvin, from whom he gained experience and knowledge of Reformed theology and Presbyterian polity.” Rothbard on Presbyterianism and Knox.
A cathedral is a seat that contains the seat of a bishop; thus serving as the central church of a diocese, conference, or episcopate.[2] Cathedral in German is Dom from the Latin domus ecclesiae or domus episcopalis. In Italian it’s duomo. In Dutch it’s domkerk. Churches with the function of “cathedral” are specific to those Christian denominations with an episcopal hierarchy, such as the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, and some Lutheran and Methodist churches. Church buildings embodying the functions of a cathedral first appear in Italy, Gaul, Spain and North Africa in the 4th century, but cathedrals did not become universal within the Western Catholic Church until the 12th century, by which time they had developed architectural forms, institutional structures and legal identities distinct from parish churches, monastic churches and episcopal residences.
Episcopal polity is “the church united under the oversight of bishops.”
1517, October 31. Protestant Reformation.
1520, Anabaptists, or Messianic Communists of their day.
1530, William Tyndale was an English scholar and leader of Protestant reform. Tyndale’s translation was the first English Bible to draw directly from Hebrew and Greek texts, the first English one to take advantage of the printing press, and first of the new English Bibles of the Reformation. It was taken to be a direct challenge to the hegemony of both the Roman Catholic Church and the laws of England to maintain the church’s position. In 1530, Tyndale also wrote The Practyse of Prelates, opposing Henry VIII‘s divorce from Catherine of Aragon on the grounds that it contravened Scripture. The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World, Henning Graf Reventlow, 1985.
1653, Lord Oliver Cromwell was invited by his fellow leaders to rule as Lord Protector of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland from 16 December 1653. According to Dr. Gary North, Cromwell was a “Great cavalry officer. He brought religious toleration to England. No corruption.” North points to Antonia Fraser’s book, Cromwell, 2001.
Murray Rothbard explains that “For two decades, Roger Williams had worked closely with the most libertarian and individualistic groups in the revolutionary movement in England; but now, just as the laissez-faire, individualist “left” seemed to have triumphed, England suddenly moved precipitously rightward and stateward under the new dictatorship of the Independent Oliver Cromwell. The shift away from liberty in England was embodied in Cromwell’s brutal suppression of the Levellers, the leaders of libertarianism in the Revolution. With the mother country sliding away from liberty and into dictatorship, the aging Williams undoubtedly lost much of his previously firm grip on libertarian principle.”
1655, On the Late Massacre in Piedmont
AMERICAN HISTORY
Pre-US Constitutional Charters
BOOKS ON AMERICAN NATIONAL ORIGIN
Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith, James Billington
Tragedy and Hope, Carroll Quigley
1620, Mayflower Compact. Ryan McMaken argues that, like many of so many anti-state documents, the Mayflower Compact had little impact.
1636, Harvard began. Here is Gary North’s history on Harvard.
1640, Roger Williams promised autonomy from God for humanist political man. He opposed Governor John Winthrop, who in 1630 had hoped that Massachusetts would serve the whole world as a city on a hill, a bright beacon of biblical Christianity that would persuade men to construct a biblical civil order in their lands. But is was not Winthrop’s beacon that illuminated the future. It was Roger Williams’.
Pluralism is polytheism. And the Darwinian Humanists hold sway today claiming neutrality in religion, yet it is “a philosophy which says that God’s people must remain politically silent, that neutrality is a valid religion, and that the King of history must confine Himself to the home, the church, and the funeral parlor” says Dr. North.
No political order can be religiously neutral, and the modern political order in the United States and other Western nations, called “pluralism,” is in reality polytheism
1641, The Massachusetts Body of Liberties.
1642-1659, Puritan Revolution. Gary North writes that “the Puritans suspected that the curriculum of Oxford and Cambridge was against them, yet they did not seek to change it. They hoped that inward salvation would somehow make Renaissance rationalism Christian. Cromwell changed nothing at Oxford, even though as Lord Protector, he was chancellor of Oxford. John Morgan writes in his survey of Puritan education, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning and Education, 1560–1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1986): Puritans did not venture far from the traditional academic routine. The structures of educational institutions, and the content as affected by Renaissance urgings, seemed to satisfy their need for an academic base. There can certainly be no doubt of the very limAristotle ited effects of puritans to the legacy of the Renaissance, or in developing the human intellect in the Baconian sense of the `advancement of learning’…. A novel theory of learning or education lay outside the necessities of a puritan blueprint for the future (pp. 305–6). To indulge in classical education is to indulge in Renaissance education. To force a child to learn Latin is to encourage him to accept the premises either of medieval Catholicism or the Renaissance. Yet today’s would-be Puritans have accepted the error of those Puritans who built Harvard. Harvard went Unitarian in 1804. Christians know something is wrong with rationalism, yet they seem incapable of breaking with the past.”
A lot of kids worrying about money insisted that getting a good government job with paid vacations, 100% medical and dental benefits, and a good pension is the way to go. Yes, they can make a good living, but at what cost? And be assured that there is a cost. Public institutions get their money from tax dollars. Tax dollars are theft: that money is stolen by the threat of force and violence of government. Already a government employee is dealing with Satan’s money. Then there is the issue of how government employees get paid. They get paid with a salary. A salary turns the individual into a slave. Yes, you get one paycheck for the month, and you will do what you are told, regardless of what you’re told, or that public institution will find someone else to fill your shoes.
1642-1651, English Civil War. Gary North writes that “Rhode Island was the first civil order in the West to be established self-consciously on a secular foundation. That took place in 1644, when Parliament during the English Civil War issued a charter to Rhode Island. The colony’s founder, Roger Williams, was the first self-consciously secular political theorist in the West to receive a covenantal charter for a supposedly religiously neutral civil order. The story of the Constitution is the story of Rhode Island’s conquest of America.”
1644, Battle of Marston Moor.
1644, Rhode Island receives its covenantal charter during the English Civil War.
1746, The Theological Origins of the U.S. Constitution, pg 53.
The First Great Awakening
The shift from rationalism to emotionalism in the life of colonial America can best be seen in the writings of Jonathan Edwards. He began with his youthful speculations on science: “. . . it is self-evident I believe to every man, that Space is necessary, eternal, infinite and omnipresent. But I had as good speak plain: I have already said as much as, that Space is God. And it is indeed clear to me, that all the Space there is, not proper to the body, all the Space there is without the bounds of Creation, all the Space there was before the Creation, is God himself; . . .”159. Yet he was to write that lengthy defense of “sweet” emotionalism, the Treatise Concerning the Religious Affections (1746).
René Descartes was the intellectual godfather of the youthful Edwards—God as Space was clearly not Newtonian—but Newton was surely the intellectual godfather of the Edwards of the Great Awakening.
1754, The Battle of Jumonville Glen (or present-day Uniontown, Pennsylvania) and how it was the decisive battle for George Washington. Gary North says that “George Washington was the most important American in the history of America. In my opinion, he was the most important American in the history of the modern world. His 15-minute disaster, disguised as a victory, the battle of Jumonville Glen, destroyed the old world order. It was the most important single event that did so. He pulled the trigger. The gun was loaded; the hammer was cocked; and it was aimed at the French Empire. Then came the Seven Years’ War, the Stamp Act crisis, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, Napoleon, Waterloo, and the rise of the modern world.
George Washington doesn’t get enough credit for the battle of Jumonville Glen, but he surely gets credit for the American Revolution and the Constitution, where he really was crucial. This is not mythology. This is real. Without him, the outcome might have been different.”
Wikipedia explains that that war “was a contributing factor in the start of the Seven Years’ War in 1756.”
1765-1783, American Revolution
1765, [Dr. North teaches] the English 3 course for the Ron Paul Curriculum. This week, I am producing ten lessons on verbal persuasion. I begin with debates. They will read these debates for two weeks. I begin with the British Parliament’s debates over the taxation of the American colonies: 1765 (Stamp Act) and 1775 (closing Boston harbor). Also included: the Quebec Act of 1774. William Pitt argued against the Stamp Act and the Quebec Act. Edmund Burke argued against the closing of Boston Harbor and all taxation of the colonies’ internally. They said such taxation was a mark of tyranny and in violation of traditional English liberties. They pulled no verbal punches. In two debates, Pitt won the first and lost the second. Burke overwhelmingly lost. But everything he had predicted then came true. The British spent a fortune, but the Americans won the war. If the British had listened to Pitt in 1774, we probably still would be part of the Commonwealth. It was too late by the time Burke gave his speech. Three weeks later, Paul Revere rode.
1769, Four American Pioneers: Daniel Boone (1769), George Rogers Clark, David Crockett, and Kit Carson.
Thomas Fleming books.
A precursor to American Revolution. . .
1775, “The colonists had a sweet deal in 1775. Great Britain was the second freest nation on earth. Switzerland was probably the most free nation, but I would be hard-pressed to identify any other nation in 1775 that was ahead of Great Britain. And in Great Britain’s Empire, the colonists were by far the freest.”
1775-1783, American Revolutionary War.
1776, Declaration of Independence. Western civilization was founded on a conspiracy theory.
1776, Virginia Constitution.
Virginia Constitution of 1776.
First written constitution adopted by the people’s representatives in the history of the world.
Implemented on June 29, 1776, with Patrick Henry’s inauguration.
Fulfillment of Virginia’s republican independence (May 15, 1776)
Virginia Constitution of 1776 was chiefly awarded to George Mason from the Potomac area.
—Preceded by a Declaration of Rights (after the model of 1688) (George Mason)
—Laid out basic constitutional principals
—popular sovereignty
—Government’s responsibility to protect citizens’ rights, but not slaves’
—Representatives’ accountability
—separation of powers.
1777, Beginning of Abolitionist Movement in the United States in America? Following the Revolutionary War, Northern states abolished slavery, beginning with the 1777 state constitution of Vermont, followed by Pennsylvania’s gradual emancipation act in 1780.
1780-1860, INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
The Industrial Revolution. Scottish equality opposed French equality. What were the differences? Out of the industrial revolution came innovation. Out of that innovation came enrichment. Londoners in the late 1700s were living on 2 sterling pounds a day; today, it is approximately 80 sterling pounds a day. That’s an increase of 3900%. Nothing like it in the history of the world: not in China, nowhere. This period was ushered in by the Scotts asserted two important attitudes to usher in unmatched innovation: 1) Human dignity and 2) human legal equality. Let people innovate, do what they can without harming others and you get remarkable achievement. (Video below is thanks to Gary North.) “Everyone” in the immortal English expression, “can have a go.” “And when everyone has the confidence to have a go, amazing thins can happen” explains Deidre McCloskey. Social theories of the 19th century proved to be mistaken–socialism, nationalism, national-socialism, eugencis, etc. 19th century shows that the 18th century, Scottish equality, “a man’s a man for all that.” That struts and stares and all that.” He’s but a coufe for all that.” that point in Burns’ great egalitarian poem is the core spirit of the modern world. Out of that came innovation, and out of that came enrichment. What didn’t cause the modern to conclude is that government and trade union compulsion. She’s not against unions; she’s a member of one. It’s not union struggles that made us rich; what made us rich is 1) the embodiment of the economy in bright ideas like cheap steel, and 2) universities. The wretched of the earth (i.e., the poor) will be made prosperous, if we let this amazing spontaneous order of market-tested betterment grind on. “The letting people have a go experiment has worked poorly in the 20th century.” The poor are not poor because the rich are rich. Redistribution does not benefit the poor. L’Oreal’s charitable foundation is one half of one percent; not exactly Andrew Carnegie. Carlos Slim (which means “clever” in Afrikan) introduced cell phones to Mexico. He engaged in voluntary trade: cash for cell phones. The improvements of the working class from economic growth are 20 to 30x more than redistribution. Economic improvements in China and India have done more for the poor than redistribution.The 1% per year per capia. This year India is growing at 7% per year per capita, which solves a lot of social problems. General-limited liability didn’t happen til the middle of the 19th century in France. Ideas cause institutions. Institutions can’t work without ethics. Can’t have laws without instituted courts. So institutions are intermediary causes; they’re not the spark. The spark is an ethical change in the valuation of other humans–value driven. Up to 1900, science is not terribly important. You don’t get artificial fertiliser without German organic chemistry. Nor do you get German warfare. The true spirit of capitalism is not so much about capital accumulation, but about innovation. And the Anglo-sphere does not have any particular advantage under capitalism than do other civilizations. In order for a society to have adopt English Common Law, there must be an ethical conviction between the prosecutors, judges, and lawyers. Taken Pakistan, for example. It has English Common Law; the judges wear white wigs. The counter force that stopped the modern world to begin with was the absolute conviction that order could only be achieved by the “great chain of being.” Letting people have a go was a terrible thought. Innovation until the 19th century was a bad word. It is a theological word. Innovation means you’re going to change the order of the mass, or that you’re going to introduce some theological idea that I don’t like. “Curiositas” is a sin in medieval Latin. Forces of order and fear by the elite of losing power and the fear of environmentalism impede the old English adage of “let ’em have a go.” Adam Smith lived in a Scotland where everyone was expected to read from a schoolmaster. Only 1 private university in the United Kingdom? Did not know that. It’s the bouegeoui deal. You let me have a go, start a factory or university or a convenience store, let me keep the profits. In the second act, alas, there will be others who will compete with me. But I am allowed to do it. In the third act, I will make you, the working class, rich. That’s how it works. It’s not let me form a trade union and that’s what made me rich. Big potatoes are the result of the bourgeois deal. Small potatoes still have to struggle. 1848 is crucial here. Why? The clerisy or intellectuals, painters, novelists, playwrights, and moviemakers turned against their fathers. So a fathers versus sons thing. The strongest opponents of market-tested betterment are the manufacturers, lawyers, etc. Why do people still believe in socialism? Where are the authors of prosperity? A family is a socialist economy. Income mysteriously appears and is distributed, fairly or unfairly. When a child of a middle-class family encounter very poor people is to get daddy’s wallet and help the poor. She is pro-poor person through business. Swedish politics has been dominated by a metaphor of a national home. Trade testing or market test. Your idea turns out to be a bad one. We use the same model in sports, art, and music. [The Difficulty of Being Good] Equality is not the point; raising up the working class is. Let people have a go is the best way to do that. Safety net, yes, but we don’t need the government to do that.
1787, Shay’s Rebellion. Gary North reviews Leonard Richard’s Shay’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle, 2002.
Richards is a UMass/Amherst history professor. The University of Pennsylvania Press published this book in 2003.
Based on original and “arduous” research, it overturns the textbook view that the rebellion was an uprising of indebted farmers against the state government of Massachusetts. It became clear to Richards early in his research that “the standard story of Shays’s Rebellion did not wash” because a good number of prominent creditors were part of the rebellion. It wasn’t debt that triggered Shays’s Rebellion, he argues, but the new state government and ‘its attempt to enrich the few at the expense of the many.’
Yet Shays is the perennial poster child for the consequences of weak government and is usually cited as the catalyst for the Constitutional Convention. Again, Richards is not a libertarian providing a new twist on the standard data, but a researcher drawing conclusions from primary sources no one else had bothered to explore. To dispute his conclusions one would have to reject his data. At the very least the book should be controversial, yet it has only 8 reviews on Amazon and its current sales rank is 441,663. If it’s creating any kind of a disturbance in the public discussion of ideas, I haven’t noticed. For the most part it seems to be ignored.
In his review of Richards’ book, DGN writes:
Shays’ Rebellion provided an opportunity for a majority of a group of 55 men, more than half of whom were lawyers, to break the law of the land and get away with it. This is not how historians of the Constitution have treated the Convention in Philadelphia.This fact provides additional support for the ancient rule of historiography, indeed, its only known rule: the victors write the textbooks.
<“John Hancock’s Big Toe and the Constitution”, http://archive.lewrockwell.com/north/north247.html>
For the victors to remain unchallenged after publication of Richards’ book is astounding to me. Is there nothing that can break the grip they hold?
Shays’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle [Kindle Edition] by Leonard L. Richards, http://tinyurl.com/q3y6rov
1787, Madison tried to get the revision at 1786: the Annapolis Convention. It failed. So, using the free trade argument, he called the 1787 convention. It was a ruse to fool state legislatures. He promised a revision of the Articles, not a replacement. He lied. It was a set-up from day one, literally. On day one, there were multiple submissions for the replacement.
The 1787 convention would not have taken place had it not been for John Hancock’s big toe. That sucked Washington into it. He had resisted until then.
Gary North writes on Shay’s Rebellion and John Hancock, “But would these taxes actually be collected? After the Revolution, the most popular politician in Massachusetts was John Hancock, the ex-smuggler/merchant whose signature is so large on the Declaration of Independence. He was among the richest men in the state. He was lenient to all poor debtors who owed him money personally. He let them pay him in depreciated paper money. The rich had to pay in silver. He was elected governor in 1780 and served for five years. He also was elected in 1787 and served until his death in 1793. He did not serve in 1785 – 87, the crucial period. He declined to run in 1785 because of gout. Gout normally affects the big toe. It can accurately be said that the great turning point in post-Revolutionary America was John Hancock’s big toe.”
One commenter noted that “If a person is in anyway aware of the events of 18th century America, they know for a fact that things were horrible and unworkable under the Articles of Confederation. Shay’s Rebellion was an outburst of anarchy that would have eventually destroyed us all, and that the Constitutional Convention saved us all. Yet all these facts are as fictitious as Romulus and Remus. National foundation mythologies are dug in too deeply to be uprooted easily.”
1787, Gary North on the conspiratorial motives of the U.S. Constitution:
1787, Ryan McMaken on the strength of a national document to restrain the state. Even Patrick Henry knew that assumption was childish.
The old opponents of the 1787 Constitution, the Anti-Federalists, understood this well, and they feared the new powers implied in the new constitution that could allow the federal government to nationalize the local militias.
Those who feared these new power were derided as paranoid, of course. “The president would never wage war without the approval of all the people under law.” they were told. “If the Federal government gets out of hand, we shall “assemble the people” and put an end to tyranny.” Patrick Henry was ready with a retort, however:
Oh, Sir, we should have fine times indeed, if to punish tyrants, it were only necessary to assemble the people! Your arms wherewith you could defend yourselves are gone…Did you ever read of any revolution in any nation, brought about by the punishment of those in power, inflicted by those who had no power at all? A standing army we shall have also, to execute the execrable commands of tyranny: And how are you to punish them? Will you order them to be punished? Who shall obey these orders?
Liberals from Patrick Henry to Jefferson to Richard Cobden all understood standing armies as engines of government force.
1788, U.S. Constitution ratified. And that wiped out the Christian foundation of the United States of America. It was systematic and it was deliberate. Conspiracy in Philadelphia. Took place one week after the Presbyterian Church sold us out. Took out the Confessions of Faith in the application to politics and they ratified it at the same the Constitution was ratified. It was executed by John Witherspoon, who taught James Madison the rule.
1789, Rousseau and conformity to the will of the state, Gary North.
1789, U.S. Supreme Court established.
1789, French Revolution. The French Revolution: A Study in Democracy, 1919.
1789, July 14, Bastille Day “Is Nothing to Celebrate.” See the video in that link. There was a French teacher at Garfield when I taught there who celebrated Bastille Day every July 14 (the school had three school years at the time, and July 14 was a school day for B track students) getting the kids riled up to bolt out of the school for the day in celebration of the slavers who bolted from the Bastille prison.
1799, Charles Burris On Republicanism, the U.S. Constitution, and Thomas Jefferson.
1799, Gradual Abolition Law in New York.
1800-1820, Second Great Awakening. Charles Grandison Finney, 1792-1875, was the leader of the Second Great Awakening. Finney and Lyman Beecher were fanatics who with the Second Great Awakening launched anti-Catholic campaigns.
1801-1835, John Marshall, former Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court.
1807, British Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act. It effectively ended slave trade in England.
1808, U.S. Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves was passed to end not slavery but the importation of slaves hence forth.
AMERICAN INDIAN
(Check with Will Grigg on American Indian battles, like Wounded Knee and others.)
Rushdoony on the American Indian
Rushdoony’s son on how the federal government has infected the American Indians and all other Americans with reservation fever. The term “Indian” is a European term thanks to Columbus who believed that he had landed in India. The Indians themselves never saw themselves as Indians but in fact small tribes of families.
1812, War of 1812
Second War of Independence?
Issues: Abolitionism v. Anti-Slavery. Important differences. Abolitionism, of whom mass murderer, John Brown, was one of its leading members, was used by the Yankee New Englanders as fuel to mass murder Americans in the southern states during the Civil War.
“It was in this milieu that abolitionism, as opposed to the antislavery sentiment shared by many Americans, including Southerners, had its origins. Abolitionism, despite what has been said later, was not based on sympathy for the black people nor on an ideal of natural rights. It was based on the hysterical conviction that Southern slaveholders were evil sinners who stood in the way of fulfillment of America’s divine mission to establish Heaven on Earth. It was not the Union that our Southern forefathers seceded from, but the deadly combination of Yankee greed and righteousness.”
Most abolitionists had little knowledge of or interest in black people or knowledge of life in the South. Slavery promoted sin and thus must end. No thought was given to what would happen to the African-Americans. In fact, many abolitionists expected that evil Southern whites and blacks would disappear and the land be repopulated by virtuous Yankees.
The darker side of the Yankee mind has had its expression in American history as well as the side of high ideals. Timothy McVeigh from New York and the Unabomber from Harvard are, like John Brown, examples of this side of the Yankee problem. (Even though distinguished Yankee intellectuals have declared that their violence was a product of the evil “Southern gun culture.”)
Thomas Fleming states in an interview that “The best people of the North showered praise on a fanatic who believed that “without the emission of blood, there is no forgiveness for sin.” In Kansas a few years earlier, Brown had murdered six unarmed southerners before the horrified eyes of their wives and children, and ordered his sons to hack up their bodies with swords.
After Brown’s execution, America’s best-known writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, declared him the equal of Jesus Christ. Another Massachusetts man told Emerson that compared to John Brown, Christ was a “dead failure.” He had ignored three decades of northern prayers begging him to end slavery. John Albion Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts, declared the South had to be conquered, “though it cost a million lives.”
John Brown, 1800-1859, an abolitionist and monster, murdered a half dozen southern soldiers in front of their children and wives. He had the financial backing of northern abolitionists. He lived by the ideology that “without the emission of blood, there is no forgiveness for sin.”
FLEMING: Here we get into the peculiarities of the New England mind. They had a natural tendency to look down on the rest of the country. They saw themselves as the real founders and were infuriated that the leadership had passed to Jefferson and other southern presidents. Jefferson’s 1807 embargo, which was an economic disaster for New England, was the trigger that made them see the South as enemies. Then they focused on the South’s moral flaw — the continuance — and the growth — of slavery, and the two arguments fused into Abolitionism, a creed proclaimed in their souls by God.
In Britain, one of the ways the situation was diffused was to compensate the slaveholders. Reasonable voices—Abraham Lincoln for example—proposed that here, but the Abolitionists in Congress never backed his bill. The abolitionists’ goal was not the persuasion of southerners. It was to shame them into submission, confess their guilt and free the slaves. It was essentially a fanatical religious crusade.
1816-1819, First Seminole War.
1819, McCulloch v. Maryland.
1821, New York’s reformed Constitution of 1821 retained the property requirement for voting, thereby preventing most blacks from voting in New York. Abolitionist Movement gains steam in the U.S. with the state of New York being the first to officially abolish slavery completely. Here is a timeline.
1824, Old Glory is a nickname for the American flag or American National flag. I really don’t see the big deal with this flag. Sounds like something some relatives made for a sailor who used it on his boat. Big whoop.
1825, John McDonogh.
This leads me to the story of John McDonogh. He was one of the great forgotten men in American history. He was not well known outside of Louisiana, and he was generally hated there. He died in 1850, the richest man in the state. Today in Louisiana, there are many public schools named after him. There is a reason for this.
John McDonogh was a penny-pinching Scot. Like most Calvinist Scots, he was a strict Sabbatarian. Nobody worked on his plantation on Sundays, but they worked like madmen on the other six days.
Why? From everything we know about the slave economy, slaves were slackers. They stole, they cheated, they faked illnesses. They were goldbricks. They were officially regarded as natural slaves.
What John McDonogh proved, as perhaps no one in American history has proved more clearly, is that men respond to incentives. In 1825, he conceived of a plan that would enable his slaves to buy their way to freedom. He hoped that they would go to Liberia, but only one did.
As a strict Sabbatarian, he would give them Saturday afternoons off for their own work if they promised not to work on Sundays. Other planters also gave their slaves Saturday afternoon off. But McDonogh made this offer: if they would work for him on Saturday afternoon, and two extra hours each day, he would pay them extra. He paid them 50 cents a day in winter and 62.5 cents in summer.
He established a set release price for males of $600 and $450 for females. This was somewhat less than the average market price for healthy field hands. Once they had paid off one-sixth of this agreed-upon price, they would get one free day of their own. They could then use their earnings on this free day to speed up repayment. When they “owned” Saturday, the time they spend working for him on Saturday enabled them to buy Friday. When they had bought Friday, they started buying Thursday. When they bought Monday, they were granted their freedom. It took fifteen years for a slave to buy his way out of slavery.
1828, New York state abolishes slavery. Why did it take 7 years and why did NY abolish slavery in 1828, which corresponded with the Tariff of Abominations?
1828, The Tariff of Abominations.
1830, Colonizing blacks. Lincoln supported deportation back to Africa. Tom Di Lorenzo observes Abraham Lincoln’s question of “What Shall We Do With the Negroes After They Are Free?”
So asked Abraham Lincoln of General Benjamin Butler in early 1865 (page 19 of the linked article). Lincoln answered his own question: Deport them all out of America, he said. After complimenting Butler on his ability to move large numbers of people by water during the war, Lincoln asked him if he could work up a plan to deport every last black person in America by sea. This was all well known to prior generations of historians before the Great PC Whitewashing of Civil War History commenced, as discussed in this 1919 article in theJournal of Negro History. (Thanks to Tom Mullen).
Could this mean that Lincoln was not quite the racial saint that the Republican Party (among others) has portrayed him as being for the past 150 years?
Remember Marcus Garvey, head of the black organization here in the 1920s? Well, he also advocated deportation back to Africa.
1830s, Pietism
Pietism, as it swept American Protestantism in the 1830s, took two very different forms in North and South, with very different political implications. The Southerners, at least until the 1890s, became “salvationist pietists,” that is, they believed that the emotional experience of individual regeneration, of being born again, was enough to ensure salvation. Religion was a separate compartment of life, a vertical individual-God relation carrying no imperative to transform man-made culture and interhuman relations.
In contrast, the Northerners, particularly in the areas inhabited by “Yankees,” adopted a far different form of pietism, “evangelical pietism.” The evangelical pietists believed that man could achieve salvation by an act of free will. More particularly, they also believed that it was necessary to a person’s own salvation – and not just a good idea – to try his best to ensure the salvation of everyone else in society:
“To spread holiness,” to create that Christian commonwealth by bringing all men to Christ, was the divinely ordered duty of the “saved.” Their mandate was “to transform the world into the image of Christ.”
1830, In tandem with Pietism, came the Welfare State and in 1860, Progressivism.
1830s, Temperance Movement. Lyman Beecher, 1775-1863, was one of the movement’s co-founders as well as a supporter of the Second Great Awakening.
Postmillennialism was a dominant theological belief among American Protestants who promoted reform movements in the 19th and 20th century such as abolitionism and the Social Gospel.[2] Postmillennialism has become one of the key tenets of a movement known as Christian Reconstructionism. It has been criticized by 20th-century religious conservatives as an attempt to Immanentize the eschaton.
Lysander Spooner provides excellent insight on the unconstitutionality of slavery.
1832, South Carolina made noises about secession in 1832, but President Jackson put an end to all that speculation. Jackson was ready to invade South Carolina. Dr. Gary North points out that:
Madison sucked them in. He and the others did not discuss getting back out.
It was clear that Jackson was ready to invade South Carolina in 1832.
They backed off.
The War of 1861 was a revolution. It was justified as such: an appeal back to the Declaration of Independence.
The South in 1861 wanted to gain control over the import taxes that were being collected by the Union. Lincoln referred to this in his first inaugural. He said he would collect them.
“The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.”
The South wanted the money. Lincoln said no.
And the war came.
1833, UK Paid to Abolish Slavery via Slavery Abolition Act.
1835, Dade Massacre.
1835, Tocqueville‘s Democracy in America. Great 1962 article by Robert Schuettinger. From the article:
“Tocqueville saw that the real threat to a democratic society in our age would not be what the Tories dreaded, anarchy, nor would it be the absolute dictatorship feared by the Old Liberals; rather, it would be the mild tyranny of mediocrity, a standardization of mind and spirit, a gray uniformity enforced by a central government in the name of “humanity” and “social justice.”
1835-1842, Second Seminole War.
1835, U.S. immigration into Mexico.
Immigrants from the United States poured into the area, and by 1835, over three-fourths of Mexican citizens in what is now east Texas were of American origin and largely Protestant as well. The Mexican government had attempted to stop the flood of immigrants in 1830 by halting immigration and setting up administrative districts to impose new customs duties. The halt in immigration was largely ineffective, however, since Mexicans of American extraction were numerous enough to control many of the local institutions and did little to prevent further immigration. The end result was a small minority of Catholic and Spanish-speaking citizens in the region by the time Texas declared its independence in 1835.
The example of Texas is so useful because it clearly shows us that when dealing with issues of immigration, the point in time in which it becomes clear that immigration is a problem, it may already be too late. As the “American-Mexicans” of the 1830s showed us, it can prove exceedingly difficult to enforce any meaningful immigration policy when the machinery of government is controlled by those who stand to gain from even more unlimited immigration.
The Mexican government should have really known better than to swing the doors open to Protestant and English-speaking Americans when they couldn’t even begin to populate the area with anyone hailing from any parts of New Spain. It didn’t take long before Mexico’s open borders policy had produced a situation where almost 23,000 of the 30,000 people in Texas were more interested in being a part of the Protestant-Anglo society of the United States than in being a part of Mexico’s Catholic and Hispanic culture. It took little more than the demographic shift to make Texas an independent country, and then a part of the United States.
1840s, Great Irish Famines that incited mass migration at first to Britain because the cost of moving to England was cheaper than to travel across the Atlantic to the United States or most families. In his excellent book, The Economics and Politics of Race: An International Perspective, Thomas Sowell explains that the Irish entered British economy when Britain was the leading economy of the world, “producing one-third of the world’s manufactured goods, mining half its coal and making half its textiles.” After 1870, the great bulk of Irish immigration went to America.
1846, US Invasion of Mexico. “. . . from the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. . . .” Ryan McMaken points out that . . .
“Much of the [Marine] behavior was motivated by the crazed anti-Catholicism endemic among most American troops, and of course, by long-standing bigotry toward Mexicans in general. The disdain for civilian Mexicans was so great, in fact, that such behavior was a major motivating factor for the members of the famous San Patricio Battalion of Irish and German Catholics which went over the Mexican side at least partially in response to the American treatment of Mexican civilians. From a history of the San Patricios . . . .”
1846-1848, Mexican-American War. San Patricios, 1846-1848, Irish immigrant recruits who deserted the US Army in order to defend Mexican fellow Catholics from Yankee aggression.
1848, Shelby Foote said that the bayonet had been defunct tactically since 1848.
1848, Revolutions in Europe. Failed revolutionaries flee to the United States.
Between 1845 and 1854 over one million German citizens left their homes and emigrated, many of them as a result of the failed revolution of 1848 and its aftermath. The ‘Forty-Eighters‘ who came to the United States both for political and economic reasons went through different stages of adaptation to the new country. The immigrants contributed to the political, social and cultural life of their new homeland by transforming staid communities on the East coast, by founding new settlements in the Midwest and West, and by swelling the number of politically conscious artisans and workers in the big cities. Their voting power and personal sacrifices were of great importance in the abolition of slavery in the U.S. They participated in the debate about the women’s vote and in stressing the concepts of free and general education.
Excerpt from a podcast between John Denson, an Alabama lawyer, and Lew Rockwell, head of the Mises Institute. Terrific review of the role played in the US by the Forty-Eighters and their impact on Lincoln and the Civil War.
Let me move on to a second book that I think is important. And this is something brand new to me. This is a book called Red Republicans and Lincoln Marxists. And the subtitle is Marxism in the Civil War. It’s by Walter D. Kennedy and Al Benson Jr. It’s been out several years but it is about the effect of the 1848 revolutions in Europe and what they did to America.
You know, when I look at the European history, and you see the Congress of Vienna Mitterrand put together, 1814, 1815, to bring the Napoleonic Wars to an end, historians and I have praised that settlement because it, in effect, brought general peace to Europe for 100 years until World War I. Now there were some revolts in there. The Classical Liberals didn’t particularly like it. They wanted less government. But the Socialists and Communists arising out of the French Revolution did not like it at all. And so in 1830, there was a tremendous revolt in France that overthrew Charles X, but that was about it.
1848 in Europe, everybody but England and Russia suffered the revolt. 17 countries put on efforts to overthrow the Congress of Vienna settlement and they were all suppressed. None of them were successful. And so I’ve sort of dismissed that in my mind as a significant event in history.
And then you get to the Franco-Prussian War, 1870, 1871, and then you get the Nationalist – Germany being made more into a national government rather than a confederacy. But I never really read anything or thought about the fact that a huge number of the rebels in 1848, primarily in Germany, were run out of the country. Some of them sought asylum in England, some in Switzerland. But a huge number came to America because they saw that, in the War Between the States, this was exactly what they were trying to do in Germany, and that is to create a national government. They wanted a strong central government. They wanted a graduated income tax. They wanted government control over the money. And they saw an opportunity in American. So there’s a listing of so many of them, but several of them became generals in the Union Army; colonels in positions of military leadership.
And a guy named Charles Dana, D-A-N-A was a good friend of Karl Marx, and so he convinced Horace Greeley to let Marx write a regular column in the New York Tribune. And Carl Schurz, I’ve read about from time to time. In fact, he was the only one I thought had anything to do with the 1848 revolution and came here. He had a very high military position and was eventually elected Senator of Missouri and became secretary of Interior under Hayes. And he was about as red as you could get. (laughing) And so these ideas that were not successful in Europe in 1848 became successful under Lincoln in the War Between the States. And they were all attracted here and thought Lincoln was doing exactly the right thing, to eliminate a confederacy and have a strong central government; do away with the ability of the states to do anything.
ROCKWELL: Didn’t Marx write Lincoln – wasn’t Marx an admirer of Lincoln personally, too?
DENSON: Yes, absolutely. He was very much in praise of what Lincoln was doing. And these ideas, it was like a contagious virus that came over here from Europe. And these ideas continued to bubble into the populous movement and into the progressive movement. And it all begins with this virus hitting us over the 1848 revolutions in Europe that were unsuccessful, but very successful here.
And this is a book that needs to be studied because not many people know how strongly the Union Army was led by the rebels from Germany – (laughing) – and it was not just Germany but primarily Germany – and how many of those ideas were put into place by people like Schurz, becoming a Senator and Secretary of Interior, and Marx being able to write in a New York paper the benefits of Communism and centralized government. It’s a very revealing book to me, that I had never thought about (laughing) why the European history of 1848 was important to American history.
1848, Social Justice. While the concept of social justice can be traced through Ancient and Renaissance philosophy, such as Socrates, Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, and Thomas Paine,[4] the term “social justice” only became used explicitly from the 1840s. A Jesuit priest named Luigi Taparelli is typically credited with coining the term,[5] and it spread during the revolutions of 1848 with the work of Antonio Rosmini-Serbati. In the late industrial revolution, progressive American legal scholars began to use the term more, particularly Louis Brandeis and Roscoe Pound. From the early 20th century it was also embedded in international law and institutions, starting with the Treaty of Versailles 1919. The preamble to establish the International Labour Organization recalled that “universal and lasting peace can be established only if it is based upon social justice.”[6] In the later 20th century, social justice was made central to the philosophy of the social contract, primarily by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971). In 1993, the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action treat social justice as a purpose of human rights education.[7] Here is a decent article on social justice.
1850, Fugitive Slave Act.
. . . the Fugitive Slave Act incensed many Northerners. It was one thing for Southern states to perpetrate slavery in their territory; it was another to have the federal government send marshals into non-slave states, arrest runaways, and return them to bondage.
1850, Frederic Bastiat’s The Law. Here is Wikipedia’s history.
1851, from the Pietist article by Rothbard above:
“Swett was keen enough to recognize that the pietist educational formula meant that the state takes over jurisdiction of the child from his parents, since “children arrived at the age of maturity belong, not to the parents, but to the State, to society, to the country.”
1854, Henry David Thoreau and Walden
This is a great essay by the economist, Dr. Gary North, on how Thoreau was anti-capitalist and not self-reliant as he was trying to live up to his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. (April 18, 2014)
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1855, “…when the poor people who are the victims of this crime [slavery], disliking the stripping and peeling process, run away into states where this practice is not permitted – a law has been passed requiring us who sit here to seize these poor people, tell them they have not been plundered enough and must go back to be stripped and peeled again, and as long as they live.”
1857, Dread Scott Decision. DiLorenzo explains that:
The 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision solidified the state’s protection of slavery. In his first inaugural address, delivered on March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln clearly stated that in his opinion slavery was already constitutional, but that he would support a constitutional amendment (the Corwin Amendment) that would make the protection of slavery “express and irrevocable” (his exact words). If any flag ever “represented” an American slave empire, it is the U.S. flag.
At the same time, the newly-formed Confederate government adopted a new flag based on the Saint Andrew’s Cross. Saint Andrew is said to have been crucified on the cross, shaped like an “X.” Saint Andrew is the patron saint of Scotland, which is why the Scottish flag has been a rendition of the Saint Andrew’s cross since the ninth century, as are numerous other national flags, as well as the state flags of Florida and Alabama, and even of cities in other countries.
The Confederates chose the Saint Andrew’s Cross, apparently, because of the overwhelming numbers of Scots-Irish immigrants in the Southern states. As James Webb wrote in his book, Born Fighting: A History of the Scots-Irish in America, “his people,” the Scots-Irish, dominated the ranks of the Confederate Army, where the average soldier was a yeoman farmer who did not own slaves and fought “because he was provoked, intimidated, and ultimately invaded.” The tendency to resist outside aggression was bred deeply into every heart” of the Scots-Irish, writes Webb, which is why they fought. In every major battle of the war, Webb points out, Confederate non-slave owners fought against Union Army slave owners from border states where slavery was still protected during the Lincoln regime as long as those states remained in the union and continued paying federal taxes.
1859, It was Thomas Huxley, beginning in late 1859, who became known as Darwin’s bulldog. He did the heavy lifting intellectually, and then the ideas spread very fast. Darwin, I’m sure you’ll agree, was an evolutionist. He was not a believer in radical discontinuities as shapers of nature. His whole system was opposed to radical discontinuity as an explanatory device. –from Gary North
AMERICAN CIVIL WAR, 1861-1865
How to Teach/Study the Civil War:
Turns out that the cause for secession at the start of the Civil War actually was slavery.
“The forgotten fact that you should begin with concerning the Civil War is this: the future of North from 1860 to 1865 was dependent on the Illinois Central Railroad. Lincoln was a lawyer with that railroad. Stephen A. Douglas was a lawyer with that railroad. In senior management was George McClellan, who oversaw both of them. So, in the election of 1860, the President was going to be won by an Illinois Central lawyer. In the election of 1864, the election was going to be won by an employee of the Illinois Central Railroad. Anybody who thinks this was random is the kind of person who believes that it was random in 2004, when a member of Yale’s Skull and Bones was going to be elected President. This is an organization that selects 15 people a year. Out of all the people in the United States, the only candidates who made it to the top were Skull and Bones members in 2004, neither of whom was allowed, or is allowed, by the secret oath of the organization to discuss the organization. Similarly, historians of the Civil War rarely bother to talk about the centrality of the Illinois Central Railroad.
Lincoln went to war to save the union, and to make certain that the union would stay in control of tariff revenues, especially tariffs collected at the port of Charleston. That is why the war began there. That is why General Beauregard began firing on Fort Sumter, which was under the control of his former West Point instructor, Maj. Anderson. The South wanted the revenues that were coming in through the port of Charleston and the Port of New Orleans. They wanted the money, and Lincoln was not going to let them have it.
The South’s spokesman who told the truth on this matter after the war was the man who had been Stonewall Jackson’s chaplain and his aid to camp: Calvinist theologian and Presbyterian pastor, Robert L. Dabney. Dabney wrote a defense of slavery during the war, and he allowed it to be published as a book in 1867: A Defense of Virginia (And Through Her, the South. He placed slavery and its defense front and center. After the war, all other defenses of the South shifted the issue to the constitutional right of secession, ignoring slavery as the primary reason.
Read more at http://teapartyeconomist.com/2015/03/05/how-to-teach-the-civil-war/#mGIRIaCO6KyZissl.99
CIVIL WAR LITERARY FIGURES:
Gary North explains that:
The three literary figures who fought in the Civil War were Ambrose Bierce (North), Lew Wallace (North), and Sydney Lanier (South).
Bierce is remembered for The Devil’s Dictionary and the most famous short story of the war, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Bierce did write a personal memoir of the war. It is not famous.
Lew Wallace, author of Ben Hur.
Lanier was a poet. He is remembered mainly because there is a large man-made lake in Georgia named after him. It supplies Atlanta with its water.
. . .
On the origins of the American Civil War or the War for Independence of the Southern States.
This is why the US Civil War is important and relevant today. “Almost everything, in short, that is currently evil on the American political scene, had its roots and its beginnings in the Civil War.” –Murray Rothbard. Here is more from Charles Burris.
On the origins of the Civil War, Thomas DiLorenzo explains “A war was not necessary to end slavery – the rest of the world did it peacefully; only 6 percent of adult Southern men owned slaves, which means that the average Confederate soldier was not fighting to preserve a system that actually harmed him and his family economically; and that the real cause of the war was what Fleming calls a “malevolent envy” of the South by New England “Yankees” who waged a war of economic conquest. In his own words, from the inside front cover of A Disease in the Public Mind:
[Northern] hatred for Southerners long predated their objections to slavery. Abolitionists were convinced that New England, whose spokesmen had begun the American Revolution, should have been the leaders of the new nation. Instead, they had been displaced by Southern “slavocrats” like Thomas Jefferson.”
. . .
Fleming discusses in great detail how John Brown came to replace Jesus Christ in the minds of Northern abolitionists, who adopted his mantra that blood must shed in order to eradicate sin. That is, if they were to be saved and sent to Heaven, there must be bloodshed, and the more the better. That is why peaceful emancipation was not achieved in America, writes Fleming: It was not stubborn and evil Southern plantation owners who were the problem, it was the bloodthirsty abolitionists.
John Brown “descended from Puritans” and was “the personification of a Puritan,” says Fleming. And he truly became a “god” to the New England “Yankees.” “Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed awe and near-worship of John Brown,” writes Fleming. He lavished praise on John Brown’s “religion of violence.” Emerson called Brown “that new saint” who “would make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” Henry David Thoreau said that “Brown was Jesus.” He was “the bravest and humanest man in the country,” said Thoreau with horribly clunky English. He described Brown in that way after learning of Brown’s execution of non-slave owning, innocents in front of their wives and children. These men were clearly crazy, and their writings must have contributed a great deal to the “disease in the public mind.”
In his final chapter Thomas Fleming writes about Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was an officer in Lincoln’s army who was wounded in battle. After the war, “For seventy years, he repeatedly condemned the abolitionists and others who claimed they had a message from some higher power that everyone had to obey. Above all, he voiced his contempt for people whose claim to certitude often persuaded other men to kill each other.” If this sounds familiar, it is because it has been the guiding principle of American foreign policy ever since 1865. “The Yankee Problem in American History” by Clyde Wilson.
Manumission was the act of a slave owner releasing his slave.
Political support for the North in the Civil War came from Germans exiting the 1848 revolution in Germany.
The Outlaw Josey Wales, released in 1976, is based on Forrest Carter’s Rebel Outlaw: The Josey Wales, 1973.
Shenandoah is not on Netflix as of June 12, 2013, but it is available to rent at YouTube for $2.99.
1861-1865, Civil War revisionism. “Napoleonic charges . . . characterized the war.” “Krugman goes on to assert that the North’s victory in the war was a victory in “manners” by a region that “excelled at the arts of peace.” Well, not really. What the North “excelled” in was the waging of total war on the civilian population of the South. The Lincoln administration instituted the first federal military conscription law, and then ordered thousands of Northern men to their death in the savage and bloody Napoleonic charges that characterized the war. When tens of thousands of Northern men deserted, the Lincoln administration commenced the public execution of deserters on a daily basis. When New Yorkers rioted in protest of military conscription, Lincoln ordered 15,000 soldiers to the city where they murdered hundreds, and perhaps thousands of draft protesters (See Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots). It also recruited thousands of European mercenaries, many of whom did not even speak English, to arm themselves and march South to supposedly teach the descendants of James Madison, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson what it really meant to be an American. Lee Kennett, the biographer of General William Tecumseh Sherman, wrote of how many of Lincoln’s recruits were especially suited for pillaging, plundering and raping: “the New York regiments were . . . filled with big city criminals and foreigners fresh from the jails of the Old World” (Lee Kennett, Marching Through Georgia, p. 279).”
1861, CSA, Confederate States of America, was formed in 1861, the year in which the War of Secession began.
1861, General Robert E. Lee’s battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, also known as the Rebel flag.
1861, The Confederate Flag, also known as the “Stars and Bars.”
St. Andrew’s flag is the national flag of Scotland, 1542. Notice the resemblance of the St. Andrew’s flag and the St. Patrick’s flag to the second national and battle flag of the Confederate, called “Stainless Banner,” 1863. This is referred to as the white diagonal cross of St. Andrew of Scotland. Andrew is Greek for manly explains David Dieteman, whose article provides some very important background and context for these state flags.
St. Patrick’s red diagonal cross of Ireland, 1625.
1863, Stainless Banner was the 2nd flag of the Confederate States of America.
The Southern Cross is not an emblem on any American flag, but it is a constellation of the Milky Way whose configuration is in the shape of a kite or a cross. The emblem does appear on national flags of countries in the southern hemisphere, like Australia [and here] and New Zealand.
Crux /ˈkrʌks/ is a constellation located in the southern sky in a bright portion of the Milky Way. It is among the most easily distinguished constellations, as all of its four main stars have an apparent visual magnitudeabove +2.8, even though it is the smallest of all 88 modern constellations. Its name is Latin for cross, and it is dominated by a cross-shaped or kite-like asterism that is sometimes known as the Southern Cross.
“Lincoln’s win in the War To Prevent Southern Independence put that argument to bed, established the Republican party, and led us to the corporate Washington we have today, an unconstitutional club of business and government bureaucrats and lobbyists responsible to no one but themselves, with force, threats, and intimidation being the order of the day.”
Gary North: “Slaves would have been freed by federal vote in the 1880s or 1890s. The South would have seceded. Then the war would have crushed the South in a matter of a year. The South had no industry. It could not defend itself.
The South could have done it in 1828. Then it would have contracted economically in the final decades of the century. Agriculture was finished as a major source of income. The South took a century to recover after 1865. It was a basket case economically.
Slavery was doomed in the 19th century. Its time had come. But the South’s leaders thought they could get away with secession. They could have in 1861, but only by adopting guerrilla warfare. Had Nathan Bedford Forrest been put in charge of the army, the South would have won.”
Here is a little more on Bedford.
1861, The Sacking of Osceola, Missouri, September 23. The movie, starring Tobey Maguire, Ride with the Devil, 1999, depicts the guerrilla warfare on the border states at the outset of the Civil War. It’s directed by Ang Lee. I liked the movie for it showed how expansive the war was across counties and states. You get a good sense of size and scope of the war from the movie.
1861, Lincoln suspends Habeas Corpus.
Salmon P. Chase was Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary.
Jay Cooke financed the North’s war.
1862, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882, eulogizes Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862. “The Eastern elitists, from Emerson, the Alcotts, Hawthorne, Melville, Horace Greeley, etc. were orthodox Christians they were all a part of the progressive agenda that led to the Lincoln idolatry,” observes Newleaf.
1862, Revenue Act. “In July 1862, during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln and Congress created the office of Commissioner of Internal Revenue and enacted a temporary income tax to pay war expenses (see Revenue Act of 1862).”
1862, Battle of Shiloh. Here’s one history and another. This music by Bobby Horton should not be missed.
1862, Pharaoh’s Army, starring Chris Cooper, Kris Kristofferson, and Patricia Clarkson. “In the spring of 1862, in the Cumberland Mountains ‘down near the Tennessee line,’ war sympathies were strongly divided against neighbors.” Wikipedia.
1862, The Homestead Acts. Lincoln hoped to bleed the South of fighting men by offering 160 acres per man for free; sans the filing fee.
1862, The Morrill Act. “Officially titled “An Act Donating Public Lands to the Several States and Territories which may provide Colleges for the Benefit of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts,” the Morrill Act provided each state with 30,000 acres of Federal land for each member in their Congressional delegation.” This is how public high schools and universities got their start. They needed land for the buildings. Then they continued to build. I recall my days at UC Irvine how it was a fairly remote place in South Orange County. Then one by one building, large structures began being built before every inch of space was taken despite the complaints from the environmentalists about brown-spotted moths or anteaters.
1862, Ulysses. S. Grant expels Jews from his military district.
1863, Emancipation Proclamation, January 1.
1863, Lawrence, Kansas, August 21.
1863, November 19, Gettysburg Address and what Lincoln’s speech achieved. And here is Gary North’s interpretation of Lincoln’s address. How Lincoln forged a civil religion of American nationalism.
In 1967, sociologist Robert Bellah launched the modern career of “civil religion” as a concept, a way to examine how, on the one hand, the state adopts religious language, ritual, holidays, and symbolism to bind a nation together and how, on the other hand, it elevates its own values and ideas to the status of holy doctrine. Regarding the first type, University of Toronto political theorist Ronald Beiner recently defined civil religion as “the appropriation of religion by politics for its purposes.” Lincoln had been doing this to the Bible since at least 1838. He ended his Lyceum Address by applying Matthew 16:18 to American liberty: “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” More famously, in 1858 he quoted Matthew 12:25 to characterize the precarious state of the Union: “A house divided against itself shall not stand.”
Such an appropriation of Christianity for politics dominates the Gettysburg Address, from its opening “four score” to its closing “shall not perish.” In the 1970s, literary scholar M.E. Bradford, in his essay, “The Rhetoric for Continuing Revolution,” identified the Gettysburg Address’s “biblical language” as the speech’s “most important formal property.” That is undoubtedly so. Lincoln drew from the King James Version’s archaic words and cadences, as he opened with the biblical-sounding “four score,” an echo of the Psalmist’s “three score and ten” years allotted to a man on this earth. He continued with “brought forth,” the words in the Gospel of Luke that describe Mary’s delivery of Jesus—the first instance of what turns out to be a repeated image of conception, birth, life, death, and new birth, culminating in the promise of eternal life in the words “shall not perish”—a startling echo of Jesus’ words to Nicodemus in John 3:16 (“whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life”).
1864, August, Burning of the Shenandoah Valley by Ulysses S. Grant & U.S. General, Philip Sheridan. Shenandoah Valley.
In September, Sheridan defeated Jubal Early’s smaller force at Third Winchester, and again at Fisher’s Hill. Then he began “The Burning” – destroying barns, mills, railroads, factories – destroying resources for which the Confederacy had a dire need. He made over 400 square miles of the Valley uninhabitable. “The Burning” foreshadowed William Tecumseh Sherman’s “March to the Sea”: another campaign to deny resources to the Confederacy as well as bring the war home to its civilians.
from Bovard’s “Burning of the Shenandoah Valley” . . .
The carnage inflicted by Sheridan, Sherman, and other northern commanders made the South’s post-war recovery far slower and multiplied the misery of both white and black survivors. Connecticut College professor Jim Downs’ recent book, Sick From Freedom, exposes how the chaotic situation during and after the war contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of freed slaves.
Bovard adds insight on the results of brutal war policies on future wars the U.S. launched and are a must-read for any student of American history, of war, or the U.S. Civil War in particular.
After the Civil War, politicians and many historians consecrated the conflict as a crusade for freedom and the grisly tactics were consigned to oblivion. The habit of sweeping abusive policies under the rug also permeated post-Civil War policy towards the Indians (Sheridan famously declared “the only good Indian is a dead Indian”) and the suppression of Filipino insurgents after the Spanish-American War. Later historians sometimes ignored U.S. military tactics in World War Two and Vietnam that resulted in heavy civilian casualties.
Bovard concludes
The failure to recognize how wars routinely spawn pervasive brutality and collateral deaths lowers Americans’ resistance to new conflicts that promise to make the world safe for democracy, or rid the world of evil, or achieve other lofty sounding goals. For instance, the Obama administration sold its bombing of Libya as a self-evident triumph of good over a vile despot; instead, chaos reigns in Tripoli. As the administration ramps up bombing in Syria and Iraq, both its rhetoric and its tactics echo prior U.S. debacles.
Since 1864, no prudent American should have expected this nation’s wars to have happy or uplifting endings. Unfortunately, as long as the spotlight is kept off atrocities, most citizens will continue to underestimate the odds that wars will spawn debacles and injustices that return to haunt us.
1864, December 21, General Tecumseh Sherman’s “March to the Sea.”
The campaign began with Sherman’s troops leaving the captured city of Atlanta on November 15 and ended with the capture of the port of Savannah on December 21. His forces followed a “scorched earth” policy, destroying military targets as well as industry, infrastructure, and civilian property and disrupting the Confederacy’s economy and its transportation networks. The operation broke the back of the Confederacy and helped lead to its eventual surrender. Sherman’s bold move of operating deep within enemy territory and without supply lines is considered to be one of the major achievements of the war.
Thomas DiLorenzo reviews a book on Sherman’s March to the Sea by historian Karen Stokes, South Carolina Civilians in Sherman’s Path: Stories of Courage Amid Civil War Destruction, that deals with Sherman’s motivation in waging total war on the civilian population of South Carolina.
These passages are telling
In a January 31, 1864 letter to Major R.M. Sawyer, Sherman explained the reason why he hated the South in general, and South Carolina in particular, so much. The war, he said “was the result of a false political doctrine that any and every people have a right to self-government.” In the same letter, Sherman referred to states’ rights, freedom of conscience, and freedom of the press as “trash” that had “deluded the Southern people into war.”
Sherman’s subordinates expressed similar opinions. In 1865 Major George W. Nichols published a book about his exploits during Sherman’s “march” in which he described South Carolinians as “the scum, the lower dregs of civilization” who are “not Americans; they are merely South Carolinians.” General Carl Schurz is quoted by Stokes as remarking that “South Carolina – the state which was looked upon by the Northern soldier as the principal instigator” of the war was “deserving of special punishment.”
All of this is so telling because it reveals that neither Sherman, nor his subordinate officers, nor the average “soldier” in his army, were motivated by anything having to do with slavery. South Carolina suffered more than any other state at the hands of Sherman’s raping, looting, plundering, murdering, and house-burning army because that is where the secession movement started. It was NOT because there were more slaves there than in other states, or because of anything else related to slavery. It was because South Carolinians, even more than other Southerners, did not believe in uncompromising obedience to the central state.
This is why Sherman and his army reveled so much in their brutalization of defenseless South Carolinian women and children and the looting and destruction of their property. And they bragged about it for the rest of their lives. Much of the boasting is cataloged in South Carolina Civilians in Sherman’s Path. Stokes quotes General Charles Van Wyck as writing that “nearly every house on our line of march has been destroyed.” An “embedded” New York reporter named David P. Conyngham is quoted as described one South Carolina town after observing “the smoking ruins of the town, to tall, black chimneys looking down upon it like funeral mutes” with “old women and children, hopeless, helpless, almost frenzied, wandering amidst the desolation.” The book contains dozens of other eye-witness accounts by Union Army soldiers and Southern civilians of the burning down of entire cities and towns, rape, robbery, and wanton destruction of all varieties of private property, all of it occurring after the Confederate Army had vacated. All to prove once and for all, to South Carolinians and all other Americans, North, and South, that federalism and self-government was a “delusion,” to quote General Sherman himself.
Few songs capture the soul of the South that The Band and Lynnard Skynner do. Too many others inject honkie tonk rhythms into their songs. Not these. These are ballads and tributes to the folks and heroes of the South. The sad thing is that the country music industry captured all the venues and all we hear now are these bubble gum, lip-smacking tales of “I was in New York week . . . .” There is no soul to what used to be one of the greatest genres in the world.
The song, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” (1969), was written by Robbie Robertson, Canadian singer, and songwriter, and famous lead guitar of the band, The Band. The video is above is from their 1978 concert, The Last Waltz. The opening stanza to the song goes
Virgil Caine is the name, and I served on the Danville train
‘Till Stoneman‘s cavalry came and tore up the tracks again
In the winter of ’65, we were hungry, just barely alive
By May the tenth, Richmond had fell, it’s a time I remember, oh so well
The destruction of the Danville train is a reference to the R&D Railroad, the Richmond & Danville Railroad. Richmond, Virginia was the Confederate capital.
Robertson stated that he had the music to the song in his head but at first had no idea what it was to be about. Then the concept came to him and he did research on the subject, relying heavily on the Dunning School theories of the period. Levon Helm, a native of Arkansas, stated that he assisted in the research for the lyrics.[2] In his 1993 autobiography, This Wheel’s on Fire, Helm wrote, “Robbie and I worked on ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’ up in Woodstock. I remember taking him to the library so he could research the history and geography of the era and make General Robert E. Lee come out with all due respect.”
Dixie is the historical nickname for the states making up the Confederate States of America. The first lines of the lyrics refer to one of George Stoneman‘s raids behind Confederate lines attacking the railroads of Danville, Virginia at the end of the Civil War in 1865.
Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama. And, of course, “Simple Man.” The Outlaws‘ “There Goes Another Love Song,” 1975 is excellent guitar riffs of the ’70s. Paul McCartney released his “Silly Love Song” in 1976. The Beatles are blatant copycats. The other band that might compare with The Band could be Creedence Clearwater Revival, a bay area band. I like a lot of their songs, but there is a kind of fusion between psychedelic lyrics and themes with country and southern rhythms if that makes any sense.
1864/1865, 13th Amendment. Gary North tells it like it is:
“Wait a minute! Are you saying that the various levels of civil government should shut down prisons and re-institute slavery?” Yes, I am. That’s what the U.S. Constitution authorizes.
I am saying that slavery in the private sector is better for the victims and the criminals than slavery in the public sector, which is what prisons are. Slavery in the public sector is inherently unproductive.
The actual text of the 13th amendment is rarely discussed in public, and never in public school textbooks. Why not? Because the text of the 13th Amendment flies in the face of the idea of the messianic State, the State that promises to make bad men good and good men better. The therapeutic state is the modern concept of the State. C. S. Lewis called this the humanitarian theory of punishment. He regarded it as a moral monstrosity, which is exactly what it is. The idea that someone should be sold into slavery, where he can earn his way out — the biblical system — is an affront to the defenders of the messianic State. “Criminals must pay their debts to society — at taxpayers’ expense!”
So, we have a gigantic prison industry, where taxpayers are charged on average about $29,000 a year to house criminals. (In New York City, where everything costs more, it’s about $168,000 a year.) Here, young people learn new trades from skilled professionals. When released, they go back into the job market as trained criminals.
1865, April 9. Surrender at Appomattox. General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant. Robert E. Lee’s birthday is January 19, 1807. He died October 12, 1870. Clyde Wilson observes that “January 19, is a memorable date, the birthday of one of the greatest of all Americans. Robert E. Lee was born in Tidewater Virginia in 1807. Two uncles signed the Declaration of Independence and his father was a notable cavalry officer in the War for Independence. He was later to wed the granddaughter of Martha Washington.” Wilson mentions at the end that it was Ulysses S. Grant who presided over the greatest political corruption this country had seen up to that point. “His actions after the war illustrate his nobility. He refused invitations to lend his name to business ventures that would have made him a rich man. Instead, he became head of a struggling college and devoted himself to setting an example for his people of quiet rebuilding. His opponent in the last period of the war was President of the United States for eight years and presided over the greatest political corruption in American history.”
1865, Abraham Lincoln is assassinated. His dates are February 12, 1809-April 15, 1865.
1865-1876, RECONSTRUCTION
“No period of Southern history has been covered by more distortions in recent times than has 1865-1876. Not too long ago, nearly everybody, including Northerners, regarded this period as a shameful un-American exercise in military rule and limitless corruption. Now, it is established academic “truth” that the only thing wrong with Reconstruction was that it was not ruthless enough. The South should have been subjected to a complete Marxist, egalitarian revolution.” Clyde Wilson. Matthew, 19:30 is used to justify revolution.
1866, A critique of Lincoln and his neocons:
. . . Robert E. Lee told the great libertarian Lord Acton in 1866 that “the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it.”
Here is the Acton Institute’s website.
Tom Woods on Libertarian history to 11th graders.
POST CIVIL WAR: THE PLAINS INDIAN WARS
from Thomas DiLorenzo . . . .
General Sherman wrote in his memoirs (p. 775) that as soon as the war ended, “My thoughts and feelings at once reverted to the construction of the great Pacific Railway . . . . I put myself in communication with the parties engaged in the work, visiting them in person, and I assured them that I would afford them all possible assistance and encouragement.” “We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians check and stop the progress [of the railroads],” Sherman wrote to Ulysses S. Grant in 1867 (See Michael Fellman, Citizen Sherman, p. 264).
Lincoln’s old personal friend Grenville Dodge, who he had appointed as a military general, initially recommended that slaves be made of the Indians so that they could be forced to dig the railroad beds from Iowa to California (See Dee Brown, Hear that Lonesome Whistle Blow, p. 64). The government decided instead to try to murder as many Indians as possible, women and children included, and then to imprison the survivors in concentration camps euphemistically called “reservations.”
When he became president, Grant made his old pal Sherman the commanding general of the U.S. Army and another “Civil War” luminary, General Phillip Sheridan, assumed command on the ground in the West. “Thus the great triumvirate of the Union Civil War effort,” writes Fellman (P. 260), “formulated and enacted military Indian policy until reaching, by the 1880s, what Sherman sometimes referred to as ‘the final solution of the Indian problem’” (emphasis added). Other former Union Army officers joined in the slaughter. This included John Pope, O.O. Howard, Nelson Miles, Alfred Terry, E.O.C. Ord, C.C. Augur, Edward Canby, George Armstrong Custer, Benjamin Garrison, and Winfield Scott Hancock.
“Sherman viewed Indians as he viewed recalcitrant Southerners during the war and newly freed people after: resisters to the legitimate forces of an ordered society,” writes John Marzalek, author of Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order (p. 380). “During the Civil War,” Marzalek continues, “Sherman and Sheridan had practiced a total war of destruction of property . . . . Now the army, in its Indian warfare, often wiped out entire villages . . . . Sherman insisted that the only answer to the Indian problem was all-out war – of the kind he had utilized against the Confederacy.”
1867, US War on Plains Indians.
Drawing on Michael Fellman’s book, Citizen Sherman, the general is quoted as saying the following about the Plains Indians shortly after the war: “It is one of those irreconcilable conflicts that will end only in one way, one or the other must be exterminated . . . . We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to the extermination, men, women and children” (p. 26). According to Fellman, Sherman “had given [General Phillip] Sheridan prior authorization to slaughter as many women and children as well as men Sheridan or his subordinates felt was necessary . . . . Sherman would cover the political and media front” and “maintained personal deniability.” “The more Indians we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed next year,” wrote Sherman. “They all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers.”
Valerie quotes Professor Harry Stout of Yale Divinity School as recently writing that Sherman’s “religion” was “America, and America’s God was a jealous God of law and order.” All those who “resisted” were “reprobates who deserved death.”
But Sherman’s “religion” was not “America,” which at the time was comprised of some 30 million people. His God was the federal government or, more specifically, the Lincoln administration and Lincoln himself. This is what motivated Sherman, not the ending of slavery or anything else. After all, the citizens of the Southern states were Americans and included the descendants of Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, and Patrick Henry, among other notable historical figures (Robert E. Lee’s wife, Mary Custis Lee, was descended from Martha Washington’s family).
In 1867, William Sherman wrote a letter to General Grant insisting that “we are not going to let thieving, ragged Indians check and stop the progress” of the railroad. About a year earlier, Sherman had urged Grant to “act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.” Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo points out that Sherman set out to make the Sioux “feel the superior power of the Government,” even if “the final solution to the Indian problem” required that they be physically annihilated.
The Plains Indians were canny, elusive, and motivated. However, their dependence on the buffalo provided the aggressors with an exploitable vulnerability. Hunting the Indians was difficult and risky; slaughtering buffalo was neither.
The railroads, acting as a military force multiplier, began ferrying tourists to the West for the specific purpose of “sport-hunting” buffalo.
Unlike the Indians, who never threatened to hunt the buffalo to extinction, or Bill Cody, who was restrained in his efforts to harvest them to feed construction crews for the Kansas Pacific Railroad, the Eastern tourists had no property interest in the continued existence of the species, and didn’t have to pay any price for the profligate destruction they wrought.
“Massive hunting parties began to arrive in the West by train, with thousands of men packing .50 caliber rifles, and leaving a trail of buffalo carnage in their wake,” recalls King. “Hunters began killing buffalo by the hundreds of thousands,” leaving their ravaged bodies to bloat and fester.
Cattle became the successor to buffalo in the late 1860s and early 1870s.
1868, Memorial Day, every year since 1868. Formerly called “Decoration Day.”
1868, France’s role in the slave trade.
1870s, Horatio Alger, Jr., Rags to Riches stories.
1876, Custer’s Last Stand or Battle of Little Big Horn. Gary North explains Wyatt Earp’s role: “Custer’s last stand. Why was it relevant? Because, for the first and last time, the Plains Indians got together in one location for one battle. It wasn’t just Custer’s last stand; it was the Plains’ Indians last stand. It took place in 1876. Wyatt Earp was part of what made it the Plains’ Indians last stand. In the early 1870s, he was a buffalo hunter. Between 1872 and 1874, the buffalo herds were exterminated.”
1881, Shootout at the OK Corral. Historian Dr. Gary North writes “There are few events in American history less relevant and more widely known than the gunfight at the OK Corral. The reason why it had any relevance at all is this: it was virtually the only gunfight in the old West that anybody has heard of, and it was pretty much the last one in the era. It marks a representative high point in the story of the wild West.”
1887, Interstate Commerce Commission. Passed in order to protect the railroads from competition. See Milton Friedman on this and his book, Free to Choose, 1979.
1890, Wounded Knee Massacre as one battle in the War on the Plains Indians.
1890, Wounded Knee Massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Wikipedia does a pretty good job here. This is more detailed. Here is more of Will Grigg’s take on Wounded Knee at freedomeinourtime.blogspot. Prepare to be enlightened.
From Will Grigg’s page linked above:
“Dead and wounded women and children and little babies were scattered all along … where they had been trying to run away,” recalled Ogalala medicine man Black Elk, who arrived shortly after the slaughter. “The soldiers had followed along the gulch, as they ran, and murdered them in there. Sometimes they were in heaps because they had huddled together, and some were scattered all along. Sometimes bunches of them had been killed and torn to pieces where the [Hotchkiss] wagon guns hit them.”
Those who resisted survived. Black Elk recounted how two small boys had taken up sniping positions and killed as many soldiers as they could: “These were very brave little boys.” Other Sioux had “fought soldiers with only their hands until they got their guns.” An Army Captain named Wallace was surrounded by a scrum of Sioux mothers and beaten to death with clubs.
. . . Here, Griggs answers the belabored question of whether it was a battle in the war or a massacre of slaughter.
But this was not a “battle,” as it was referred to for a century after the event. It was a massacre of helpless, innocent people by Leviathan’s killing apparatus. When Black Elk arrived on the scene, what he saw was not a battlefield, but rather “one long grave of butchered women and children and babies, who had never done any harm and were only trying to run away.”
When survivors sought medical help, they discovered that the first priority was to tend to the wounds of the handful of Army personnel who had been injured in the course of carrying out the slaughter. Many of them perished from exposure and untended wounds. For several days the ground at Wounded Knee was littered with the bodies of the dead. On January 3, 1891, the mortal remains of the victims were gathered and interred in a mass grave.
The military expedition that carried out the massacre cost an estimated $2 million in 1890 dollars. This did provide a welcome “economic stimulus package” for local communities. But it’s worth remembering that it would have cost just a fraction of that amount to provide the starving Sioux with the rations they had been promised under the original 1868 treaty.
But Washington apparently believed the additional expense was worthwhile in order to extract the last full measure of submission from the once-fearsome Sioux. Providing the Seventh Cavalry with an opportunity to avenge its defeat, and thereby vindicate the power of the “Star of empire,” was a lagniappe.
1891, March 14, Largest mass lynching in America took place in New Orleans of 11 Italians suspected of assassinating the police chief of that city. Here’s the history of Mexican-Americans being hung by Anglos at the border of Texas and Mexico.
1892, “The Pledge of Allegiance” was written by Francis Bellamy, a defrocked Baptist minister. See Tom DiLorenzo’s review. The salute that the Nazis used under Hitler was actually an import from the United States, called the Bellamy salute.
1895, State of New York passes Bakeshop Law where any baker is not allowed his workers to work more than 10 hours a day. The results of this law worked to shut down mom-and-pop bakeries that would allow their bakers to sleep in the bakery and work more hours. The Left likes to herald this law as progress because it gave workers greater freedom and more free time. Well, what if the workers didn’t want free time? What if they wanted and liked working? Hello . . . ! This was a protectionist measure designed to protect the big bakeries from the little bakeries who were operating in their homes. The Supreme Court declares that law in violation of the 14th Amendment, saying that it’s not the job of government to play this paternalistic role. This battle continued through the ’20s, the ’30s and through the New Deal. The Classic Liberals lose. In 1937, in the case of West Coast Hotels v. Parrish, the Supreme Court said enough is enough even after FDR’s infamous court-packing scheme and then we see this flood of Progressivism. Progressives made people believe that nothing had changed, that progress meant saving or reforming the free enterprise system. Not an abandonment or rejection of the system but a refining and improving of it. So today progressives believe that the system of mercantilism is a genuine free enterprise system. So Progressives will look at capitalism, say it doesn’t work and say “Look, we need Progressive ideas or reforming.”
19th Century still believed in Federalism with it division of powers and a limitation on those powers. Progressivism believed in revolutionizing a country’s institutions and change the traditional order under which a society operates and exists. Which gives rise to the interpretation that the Constitution is a living document, that there are no invariant and unchanging rules, principles, or moral ideals that should be the foundation of human association. Because there is an unchanging and invariant human nature that can be understood from experience and reason to guide us to understand what should be viewed as each individual’s rights. And learn what individual order would be most likely to secure and protect them from predators. Progressives had this idea that in a changing historical environment the rules and laws of the society have to change. This includes the Constitution. That’s why Woodrow Wilson was the worshipping darling of the Progressives. He was known as a scholar, challenging the traditional order of the United States. Federalism had to be weakened. Power needed to be concentrated. The elite had to have the authority outside of Constitutional constraint to do what was necessary for the good of society as they were defining and dictating it. That is the intellectual legacy that is captured in the thinking of Barack Obama and other presidents, including George W. Bush. But right now with Barack Obama with his idea of Executive Orders and the ability to do whatever he wants regardless of Congress and the Constitutional authorities of the 3 branches of government “because he knows it’s right and good and on the right side of history.” That’s the danger of this guy and his ideas–they undermine the rules of society and the philosophic principles that are meant to secure and explain liberty.
Wilson intervened in WWI. Prior to that, there was a bias for staying out of wars. Wilson’s mindset is the same hat guides the domestic policies. It goes something like this, “If we can use policies here at home to meddle and intervene on the lives of Americans and their enterprise, then we can do the same thing with the European folk . . . or the Middle Eastern folk.” To use the power of the Federal government to go abroad and wreak havoc. “Let slip the dogs of war.” “Make the world safe for democracy” and “This will be the war that ends all wars.” And in the middle of that war abroad, Wilson committed some of the serious violations of civil liberties in all of history. If people aren’t going along with his vision, he started putting people in jail. Teddy Roosevelt also went into Cuba to fix the “problems of Cuba.” Same with the Philippines. Even if he has to kill multitudes of people as they did in the Philippines to impose their vision. Behind their ideas and their vision is the coercive apparatus of the government. God-given vision they think they have enforced by the power of the state.
Classical Liberals did oppose McKinley’s annexation of Puerto Rico and the Philippines.
Woodrow Wilson, and his WW1 and Progressive policies, gave rise to communism in Russia, Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy and the chaos that ensued in WWII and the 20th century across the globe. All because he wanted to make the world safe for democracy. This is the legacy of Woodrow Wilson and his social engineering paternalism.
1894-1896, Hamidian Massacre of the Armenians by the Turks. Bionic Mosquito says that “Targeting Armenians was not new in the Ottoman Empire. There were the Hamidian Massacres of 1894 – 1896, with an estimated 200,000 – 300,000 Armenians killed; there was the Adana massacre of 1909, with 20,000 – 30,000 Armenians killed. The first was committed under the Sultan; the second during the transition to a constitutional monarchy and the Young Turks. The Young Turks were to be different, more liberal – even having support of the Armenians and other minorities.”
1896, Transformation of the American Party System, Murray Rothbard.
1896, William Jennings Bryan, a non-Calvinist, in 1896 converted the Democratic Party from a free market, gold standard party to a liberal, Populist, and then Progressive party with one speech that lasted 30 minutes. That speech changed American political history more than any other speech in history. He did not take prisoners. He went for the jugular, and he severed it. I never liked his Arminian theology, and I despised his politics. But he never gave an inch. He was courageous. He did not compromise. He was the greatest speaker of his generation. Most important of all: he was not inclined to “dialogue.”
1898, The turning point in American history was not the Civil War. The turning point was 1898. The Spanish-American War was the major turning point in the history of this country. The American Establishment, as we know it today, began in 1898. . . . modern foreign policy began in 1898. Gary North writes
I believe that the textbook blackout on the Spanish-American War and its aftermath constitute the most important single success of Establishment historiography since the ratification of the United States Constitution. It was during that war that what we call today the American Establishment established itself. There were bits and pieces of it before 1898, but it was only in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War that the institutional foundations of the modern American Establishment were first constructed. Yet Establishment historians have been remarkably successful in covering up the radical nature of the transformation of American foreign policy, which took place in 1898. They tell the story of American history as if this transformation did not transfer political power, and then economic power, to the Progressive movement. It was the Progressive movement, more than anything else, that brought with it the modern welfare-warfare state.
1899, Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” endorses American imperialism.
1899-1902, The Second Boer War or the Anglo-Boer War. This was the beginning of Imperial Britain, launched by Sir Cecil Rhodes, Milner, and Tread. The British built refugee camps using white tents, but the camps quickly became concentration camps where 26,000 men, women, and children died. Here are some pictures of those camps. Wikipedia does a good job providing background on the Boer War.
The conflict is commonly referred to as the Boer War, since the First Boer War (December 1880 to March 1881) was a much smaller conflict. “Boer” is the common term for Afrikaans-speaking white South Africans descended from the Dutch East India Company‘s original settlers at the Cape of Good Hope. It is also known as the (Second) Anglo-Boer War among some South Africans. In Afrikaans, it may be called the Anglo-Boereoorlog (“Anglo-Boer War”), Tweede Boereoorlog (“Second Boer War”), Tweede Vryheidsoorlog (“Second Freedom War”) or Engelse oorlog (“English War”).[13] In South Africa, it is officially called the South African War.
The following video was produced by James Corbett of the Corbett Report, which I found through the great post by Charles Burris at LewRockwell. Burris posted this fantastic book list on WWI.
PROGRESSIVE ERA, 1900 to 1920
Federal Reserve banking cartel, the Harrison Narcotics Act, the Pure Food and Drug Act, the ascendancy of the Eugenics movement and “scientific racism,” the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment and the progressive income tax, the Seventeenth Amendment and the popular election of U. S. senators, the Eighteenth Amendment and Prohibition, and the abandonment of America’s traditional non-interventionist foreign policy, first following the Spanish-American War (Cuba and the Philippine Insurrection), in Latin America and Mexico, and more decisively in the First World War in Europe.
1899, America Empire and American Establishment begin.
1900, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Frank L. Baum is published.
1901, Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington’s autobiography is published.
1903, Militia Act of 1903. Commenting on the Clive Bundy incident in Nevada against the BLM, Gary North writes:
If one of these blowhards ever suggests to you that you take up arms against the federal government, cut off all contact with him. You are dealing with a fool who has not read the Constitution carefully.
The Congress shall have Power . . . To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;
Congress placed the militia under federal control in the Militia Act of 1903. It thereby turned the militia over to the United States Army. The President is in charge.
1903-1914, Panama Canal was built.
1906, Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle, is published. Lawrence W. Reed writes, “One hundred years ago, a great and enduring myth was born. Muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair wrote a novel entitled The Jungle—a tale of greed and abuse that still reverberates as a case against a free economy. Sinclair’s “jungle” was unregulated enterprise; his example was the meat-packing industry; his purpose was government regulation. The culmination of his work was the passage in 1906 of the Meat Inspection Act, enshrined in history, or at least in history books, as a sacred cow (excuse the pun) of the interventionist state.
A century later, American schoolchildren are still being taught a simplistic and romanticized version of this history. For many young people, The Jungle is required reading in high-school classes, where they are led to believe that unscrupulous capitalists were routinely tainting our meat, and that moral crusader Upton Sinclair rallied the public and forced government to shift from pusillanimous bystander to heroic do-gooder, valiantly disciplining the marketplace to protect its millions of victims.
1906, Federal Meat Inspect Act.
1906, After the Civil War, Reconstruction, railroads, and transforming the North and South war machines towards peacetime required public funding. However, in 1872, seven years after the war, lawmakers allowed the temporary Civil War income tax to expire.
Income taxes evolved, but in 1894 the Supreme Court declared the Income Tax of 1894 unconstitutional in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co. The federal government scrambled to raise money.[4]
In 1906, with the election of President Theodore Roosevelt, and later his successor William Howard Taft, the United States saw a populist movement for tax reform. This movement culminated during then-candidate Woodrow Wilson‘s election of 1912 and in February 1913, the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution:
| The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration. |
1906, Pure Food and Drug Act.
1906, Eugenics Movement in the United States. Considered a hallmark of the Progressive Era.
1909, Bloomsbury Group, England. Bloomsbury Group. One way of thinking about the Bloomsbury Group is that they formed a bridge between the Victorians and the Moderns.
1909, The Nazis borrowed their racial hygiene legislation from Indiana, which passed sterilization laws in 1909, a fact gleaned from Gary North’s review of this article.
1910, Bombing of the Los Angeles Times killed 21 and injured 100 people.
1910, Social Gospel. The movement applied Christian ethics to social problems, especially issues of social justice such as economic inequality, poverty, alcoholism, crime, racial tensions, slums, unclean environment, child labor, inadequate labor unions, poor schools, and the danger of war. Theologically, the Social Gospellers sought to operationalize the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:10): “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”[1] They typically were post-millennialist; that is, they believed the Second Coming could not happen until humankind rid itself of social evils by human effort.[2]
LIBERATION THEOLOGY [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Gospel]
ADHERENTS
Dorothy Day, Leo Tolstoy, Francis of Assisi, Antoninus of Florence, Wilhelm E.F. von Ketteler, Pope Leo XIII, Adolph Kolping, Edward Bellamy, Washington Gladden, Margaret Wedgwood Benn, Phillip Berryman, James Hal Cone, Toni Negri, Oscar Romero, Gustavo Gutierrez, Abraham Kuyper, Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, Martin Luther King, Jr. Walter Rauschenbusch, Desmond Tutu, and Tommy Douglas.
1911, the federal courts ordered the breakup of the Standard Oil Company into a number of smaller firms, citing the Sherman Antitrust Act and a vague notion of the “public good.”
Keep in mind that the courts paid no mind to the realities of the marketplace or the role Standard Oil had played in making fuel available to poor and lower-income persons, who simply did without in the pre—Standard Oil era. Furthermore, the courts took no notice of John D. Rockefeller’s decision not to tap into the oil that flowed from Texas wells. (That oil ultimately helped other companies to become able to whittle down Standard’s once-huge market share.)
Furthermore, the courts did not seem to care that consumers preferred to freely purchase Standard Oil products. Instead, the courts depended on the nebulous “public interest” argument that basically promoted the “everyone knows big, successful businesses are bad” point of view.
1912, U.S. military occupies Nicaragua to make sure there would be no Nicaraguan canal.
1912, Austrian Business Cycle Theory, ABCT, developed by Ludwig von Mises.
1912, 17th Amendment: direct election of senators. The amendment supersedes Article I, § 3, Clauses 1 and 2 of the Constitution, under which senators were elected by state legislatures.
1913, Federal Reserve Act.
1913, Income Tax Act. 16th Amendment–Income Tax. Implementation of progressive tax rates.
Laurence Vance on Tax-Withholding:
America’s current income-tax system was inaugurated in 1913 with the adoption of the Sixteenth Amendment. It began quite modestly with a 1 percent tax on income above $3,000 ($4,000 for married couples). A series of surcharges up to 6 percent were applied to higher incomes with the maximum rate being 7 percent on taxable income over $500,000. Very few Americans actually paid a tax on their income–until the United States entered World War I.
The minimum rate soon doubled, and the maximum rate rose to 77 percent. Neither fell significantly until 1925 only to rise again during the Great Depression and then again during World War II, which also marks the institution of the withholding tax. Although income-tax rates have both fallen and risen since the 1960s, the size and complexity of the tax code have increased astronomically.
1914, Ludlow Massacre, April 20, 1914, Ludlow, Colorado between Trinidad and Walsenburg, Colorado. Here are some pretty good pictures.
1914, Harrison Act
United States federal law that regulated and taxed the production, importation, and distribution of opiates and Coca products. The act was proposed by Representative Francis Burton Harrison of New York and was approved on December 17, 1914.[1][2]
“An Act To provide for the registration of, with collectors of internal revenue, and to impose a special tax on all persons who produce, import, manufacture, compound, deal in, dispense, sell, distribute, or give away opium or coca leaves, their salts, derivatives, or preparations, and for other purposes.” The courts interpreted this to mean that physicians could prescribe narcotics to patients in the course of normal treatment, but not for the treatment of addiction.
WORLD WAR I, 1914-1918
[for additional reading on WWI, see the list of books at the bottom of this page.]
The Long Run-Up to World War II started in WWI and the Versailles Treaty.
WWI Propaganda Posters. These are always fun.
1914, WWI.
1914, War Collectivism, Murray Rothbard.
1914, Christmas Day Truce. Here is one of the many letters that were written and sent back home.
1914-1923, “Hyperinflation in Germany, 1914-1923“
from Gary North on Lawrence of Arabia. At the time of the events of World War I in Arabia, the British Empire was the most powerful empire in the world. It was about to take over large chunks of the Middle East because the Ottoman Empire collapsed. That was when Great Britain went into the oil business on a full-time basis.
But World War I was, in the magnificent book title, the war to end all peace. It destroyed the old European order.
Three decades later, the British Empire was functionally bankrupt. Great Britain surrendered control over India in 1947. Most of Asia became independent of Western colonialism at that time, and about the time that the movie was released, sub-Saharan Africa gained its independence.
There was no collapse of the British economy after World War II. It stagnated, but it limped along. It produced a series of wonderful movies starring Alec Guinness. British cultural influence was maintained after the Empire was formally disbanded.
The reason why the Empire was formally disbanded is simple: Great Britain ran out of money. World War I had stretched the nation’s finances tightly and the United States began to replace the British Empire. Over the next quarter century, the United States did replace it.
It took from about 1875 until the end of World War I for the Ottoman Empire to disintegrate. It took from about 1914 until 1947 for the British Empire to disintegrate. The process of Empire disintegration had sped up.
The Russian Empire lasted longer, but only because of the new burst of optimism and power that the Communist ideology supplied after 1917. The high point of the Russian Empire was 1914. In December 1991, the Soviet Empire formally declared itself out of business. The Communist Party had done the same thing the previous August. But when you think of how powerful the Soviet Empire was in 1946, it took less than half a century for it to go the way of all flesh.
In each case, money and debt were at the heart of the disintegration of empire. That was true of the Ottoman Empire. It was true of the British Empire. Finally, in 1988, it was manifestly the case with the Soviet Empire. Gorbachev went to the West, begging for an extension of loans. He did not get those loans. Within three years, he was out of office. The USSR was no more.
Today, the United States dollar is the dominant currency. It is rising in value against other currencies. It remains the world’s reserve currency. But that means that the United States government has been the beneficiary of massive transfers of wealth from central banks around the world. They have created money out of nothing, and they have used this money to buy American government debt.
We forget that money today is based on debt, not assets in a warehouse. Under the gold coin standard of 1815-1914, bank receipts to gold circulated as if they were gold. Behind each IOU for gold was an asset. Banking was fractionally reserved, but not as it is today. This has not been true since the fall of 1914. With the abolition of the gold coin standard in Western Europe, and with the abolition of the gold coin standard in the United States in 1933, money is now based on debt. Therefore, the pre-eminence of the dollar is visible manifestation of the magnitude of American debt to foreign central banks.
I don’t think there’s going to be a run on the U.S. Treasury, because foreign central banks don’t want their currencies to rise, thereby reducing exports. Nobody can foreclose on the United States government. There is no collateral behind the debt. But foreign central banks do not have to continue to buy this debt. They do not have to continue to subsidize the federal government, keeping interest rates down for our government, thereby enabling the U.S. government to avoid balancing its budget. This has gone on since the outbreak of World War I, and it has accelerated since 1947. But it does not have to continue.
This is why the American Empire is as doomed as the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, and the Soviet Empire. All empires are based on the same things: military power and debt. Eventually, one or the other runs short. In the case of the Ottoman Empire, military power ran short. I know of no better movie about this than Lawrence of Arabia. The consummate scene was towards the end of the movie, when Lawrence and the Arabs attack a retreating group of Turkish soldiers, crying: “No mercy!” There was no mercy shown to the Ottoman Empire, nor should there have been. The genocide of Armenians looked cheap in 1915, but it all came to nothing in 1918.
In early 1991, the military forces of the Soviet Empire’s client state Iraq were completely obliterated by Gen. Schwarzkopf and his forces. The weaponry supplied by the Soviets was ineffectual. That was in February. On the last day of December, the Soviet Empire was no more.
1915, May 7, Sinking of the Lusitania.
1915, Plan of San Diego. Now the New York Times chimes in. Ryan McMaken. Much of this conflict dates back to the border dispute between the Mexican government and the Republic of Texas. Texas maintained that the border was at the Rio Grande, but the Mexicans maintained the border was at the Nueces River. Much of the reason that the Mexican government stipulated the Nueces River as the border was because there was a sizable population of Mexicans south and southwest of the river. The areas north of the river, the Mexican government knew, had already been largely overwhelmed by the influx of Anglos. Moreover, secessionist sentiment among Texans in 1836 was largely confined to areas north of the Nueces River as well.
As the newcomers stripped Mexican Texans of their votes and began to strip them of their lands, the Mexican Texans resisted. The result was virtual civil war in Texas between 1915 and 1917.
1915, Armenian genocide by the Turks. By 1915, this changed substantially. Losses in the Balkan Wars resulted in massive population transfers of Muslims from what was Ottoman Europe to what remained – Turkey. To create space (and reduce the potential for divided loyalties), the Ottomans sent Ottoman-Greek Christians to Greece. The “abandoned” houses, farms, and workshops were then allocated to the newly arrived Muslims.
These “population exchanges” were regulated by formal agreements concluded between the Porte and the Balkan states–ethnic cleansing with an international seal of approval.
Ultimately, several hundred thousand Greeks were forcibly expelled before and during the war (this does not include events at Smyrna in 1922, effectively ending the Greco-Turkish War three years after the Greeks invaded).
Unfortunately for the Armenians, there was no such independent state to which the Ottomans could deport them.
Armenians were concentrated in three parts of Turkey: Istanbul, Cilicia and in the east bordering the Caucasus. It is this group in the east that was most concerning to the Turks.
In the Caucasus, a minority of Armenian activists compromised the standing of the community as a whole when they allied themselves with Russia against the Ottoman Empire.
Unlike – and greater than – the Turks’ fear of the Greeks, their fear of the Armenians included the possibility of an independent homeland in the east – reducing even further the remaining stump of a once significant empire.
This brings us to the spring of 1915. Though there is no written record of a formal decision, “Ottoman documents and contemporary memoirs suggest” that the “Young Turk officials made key decisions initiating the annihilation of the Armenian community of Turkey between February and March 1915.”
1915, And there is this on the Armenian Genocide.
1915-1919, Allied Blockade & Attempted Starvation of Germany, Ralph Raico, 2010.
1916, Planned Parenthood founded in Brooklyn by Margaret Sanger. Sold it to the public as birth control. Birth control is code for abortion. Check out the overview in this video:
Funding for her eugenics program came from the usual suspects–Carnegie Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and Harriman money:
Rockefeller money was behind much of this research. So was Carnegie money. So was Harriman money. The great foundations, funded by the great fortunes, funded it.
She could not sell her eugenics program to the black community, so what she sought was the hiring of affable black ministers with a background in social work or community service and use religion to bring the blacks to the promised land of eugenics. Monstrous.
Here’s the opening paragraph at Wikipedia
The origins of Planned Parenthood date to October 16, 1916, when Margaret Sanger, her sister Ethel Byrne, and Fania Mindell opened the first birth control clinic in the U.S. in the Brownsville section of the New York borough of Brooklyn.[16] They distributed birth control, birth control advice, and birth control information. All three women were arrested[17][18][19] and jailed for violating provisions of the Comstock Act, accused of distributing obscene materials at the clinic. The so-called Brownsville trials brought national attention and support to their cause. Sanger and her co-defendants were convicted on misdemeanor charges, which they appealed through two subsequent appeals courts. While the convictions were not overturned,[20] the judge who issued the final ruling also modified the law to permit physician-prescribed birth control. The women’s campaign led to major changes in the laws governing birth control and sex education in the United States.[21]
1917, “I Have a Rendezvous With Death,” poem by Alan Seeger, 1888-1916. His collection of Poems was reviewed by his Harvard classmate, T.S. Eliot.
1917, October Revolution.
1917, Selective Service Act. The Act was canceled with the end of the war on November 11, 1918 [but] upheld as constitutional by the United States Supreme Court in 1918. Men got suffrage because men could be drafted.
1917, This article, more than most I’ve read, makes clear how it were the Zionist Jews who orchestrated the Bolshevik Revolution. All of the revolutionary committees were staffed by Jews or Jews held a majority position in them. So when you hear people say that communism is Jewry, ah, they’re exactly right. But there are many Jewish sects. Which Jewish sect had a controlling influence on the Bolshevik Revolution? The article makes it clear–the Zionist Jews. According to the article, though the state of Israel was created in 1948, its idea was conceived by the Balfour Declaration.
Nevertheless, at the time of the October revolution only a minority of the Bolsheviks were Jews (in the early 1900s they constituted 19% of the party). “At the elections to the Constituent Assembly ‘more than 80% of the Jewish population of Russia voted’ for Zionist parties. Lenin wrote that 550,000 were for Jewish nationalists. ‘The majority of the Jewish parties formed a single national list, in accordance with which seven deputies were elected – six Zionists’ and Gruzenberg. ‘The success of the Zionists’ was also aided by the Declaration of the English Foreign Minister Balfour [on the creation of a ‘national centre’ of the Jews in Palestine], ‘which was met by the majority of the Russian Jewish population with enthusiasm [in Moscow, Petrograd, Odessa, Kiev and many other cities there were festive manifestations, meetings and religious services]’.”
The simultaneous triumph of the Jews in Russia and Palestine was indeed an extraordinary “coincidence”: Divine Providence drew the attention of all those with eyes to see this sign of the times when, in one column of newsprint in the London Times for November 9, 1917, there appeared two articles, the one announcing the outbreak of revolution in Petrograd, and the other – the promise of a homeland for the Jews in Palestine (the Balfour declaration).
This coincidence was reinforced by the fact that the theist Jews who triumphed in Israel in 1917, and especially in 1948 after the foundation of the State of Israel, came from the same region and social background – the Pale of Settlement in Western Russia – as the atheist Jews who triumphed in Moscow in 1917. Sometimes they even came from the same families. Thus Chaim Weitzmann, the first president of Israel, points out in his Autobiography that his brothers and sisters were all either Zionists or Bolsheviks. M. Heifetz also points to the coincidence in time between the October revolution and the Balfour declaration. “A part of the Jewish generation goes along the path of Herzl and Zhabotinsky. The other part, unable to withstand the temptation, fills up the band of Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin.” “The path of Herzl and Bagritsky allowed the Jews to stand tall and immediately become not simply an equal nation with Russia, but a privileged one.”
WWI Historical Association contains resources and photographs of the war.
According to John Denson above, the Versailles Treaty created Hitler. WWI and WWII were the same war with a 20-year recess. As important as the Peloponnesian War for Greek civilization.
1917, I.V. Lenin, 1870-1924. Gary North explains that “In any case, if Lenin had not become a communist and a revolutionary, and if he had not been an organizational genius, very few people would still know anything about Karl Marx. It was Lenin, not Marx, who made communism a worldwide movement,” October 24, 2014.
Who was protesting against WWI?
William Jennings Bryant for one. Gary North points out that “William Jennings Bryan quit as Secretary of State in 1915 because he saw that Wilson, in the name of neutrality, was pushing the United States into the war in Europe. He refused to become responsible for pursuing such a policy, as his letter of resignation said.”
The Soviet Union was not formally created until 1923 after years of bloody civil war between the Bolshevik “Reds” and the anti-communist, pro-Czarist “Whites.” There were also the “Greens” but virtually no mainstream court historian mentions them because they do not fit in their tight little narrative.
There was no discussion of the role of Trotsky in the Revolution. It was Trotsky who was responsible for the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ending Russian participation in WWI. And it was Trotsky who successfully led the Red Army in the civil war against the Whites.
Mussolini, before the war, was more than an “antiwar activist, a pacifist.” He was a prominent radical Marxist socialist revolutionary, editor of the leading Socialist newspaper, Avanti!
Avanti!, under Mussolini, had an anti-war stance on the war, urging neutrality for Italy when the war began in August 1914. Mussolini formed the pro-war, interventionist newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia and the Fasci Rivoluzionari d’Azione Internazionalista (“Revolutionary Fasci for International Action”) in October 1914.
This paper was 180 degrees different than his editorial stance at Avanti! Why the sudden change? He was bribed by the French who provided funds to start his publication. Mussolini was always the ultimate opportunist. He soon left to join the Italian Army
Who else?
Tom Woods answers this in his Who Dared to Say No to War: American Anti-War Writing from 1812 to Now.
Otto Dix’s art indicts those who led the US into WWI with his paintings.
1918-1920, Spanish Flu Epidemic or Flu Epidemic of 1918 was caused by a strain of the H1N1 Virus and killed 500 million worldwide. History.com explains
More than 25 percent of the U.S. population became sick, and some 675,000 Americans died during the pandemic. The 1918 flu was first observed in Europe, the U.S. and parts of Asia before swiftly spreading around the world. Surprisingly, many flu victims were young, otherwise healthy adults. At the time, there were no effective drugs or vaccines to treat this killer flu strain or prevent its spread. In the U.S., citizens were ordered to wear masks, and schools, theaters and other public places were shuttered. Researchers later discovered what made the 1918 pandemic so deadly: In many victims, the influenza virus had invaded their lungs and caused pneumonia.
It’s called the Spanish Flu because Spain was one of the earliest countries to be hit particularly hard by it.
the 1918 flu was first observed in Europe, America and areas of Asia before spreading to almost every other part of the planet within a matter of months. Despite the fact that the 1918 flu wasn’t isolated to one place, it became known around the world as the Spanish flu, as Spain was one of the earliest countries to be hit hard by the disease. Even Spain’s king, Alfonso XIII (1886-1931), contracted the flu.
So why did so many people die from it? Why did it become a worldwide epidemic? Aspirin. That story is here. Even the NYT admits as much after Dr. Karen M. Starko, Md wrote about it in 2009.
1918, November 11, Armistice Day. “Is Veterans Day the worst of the military holidays?” asks Laurence Vance.
Anthony Gregory reminds us . . .
“Well after World War II and at the end of the Korean War, President Eisenhower signed a bill in 1954 that changed the name of the national holiday to Veterans’ Day. There were good intentions: America’s veterans of wars other than World War I deserved some recognition. Interestingly enough, however, the United States had not retracted its military reach after World War II as it now was in a perpetual state of war against Communism. Whereas after World War I, the United States brought its armed forces home, the Cold War guaranteed that the United States would henceforth have little interest in armistice, in truce, in peace.”
1918, Bombing of the Federal Building in Chicago following the trial of 95 Wobblies.
1919, Versailles Treaty.
BOOKS ON THE 1920S
Modern Times, Paul Johnson
1920, Harlem Renaissance. Nora Zeale Hurston was “one of the few who did not demonstrate any Marxist inclinations–Hurston went on to educate herself before going to college where she took up writing seriously. The author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937, began focusing her attention on politics after World War II.”
In “Crazy for Democracy,” the outspoken antiwar Zora accused the United States of using taxpayer’s money and American blood to “carry the English, French, and Dutch and lead them back on millions of unwilling Asiatics.” She also denounced the federal government’s interventionism in state affairs and defended that the best way to deal with the racial issues was to allow communities to work their problems on their own instead of allowing the federal government to enact more unconstitutional laws to “solve” everybody’s problems.
Hurston was a passionate critic of those who supported any form of interventionism in the name of freedom, a characteristic that placed her right with the Old Right.
“People who claim that it is a noble thing to die for freedom and democracy wax frothy if anyone points out the inconsistency of their morals.”
By referring to Harry S. Truman as the “butcher of Asia,” Zora Neale Hurston went down in history as one of the only authors brave enough to defend unpopular positions in a time when being cool meant being a liberal intellectual.
1920, January 3, the Palmer Raids.
1920, Twelve Agrarians (Southern writers).
1920, Matewan, West Virginia. And here’s the movie by John Sayles, starring Chris Cooper, Mary McDonnell, James Earl Jones, and David Strathairn.
1920s Cleveland, Ohio was the Silicon Valley of its day.
1920-1933, Prohibition. The 18th Amendment to the US Constitution mandated prohibition. Awful. “After hours,” Edward Behr wryly observed in his book Prohibition: Thirteen Years that Changed America, “many of those attending the meeting were haunting the speakeasies they denounced.”
Our safety and happiness lie in obedience to law by every man, woman, and child,” pontificated Attorney General Harry Micajah Daugherty in his keynote address to the 1921 annual conference of the American Bar Association in Cincinnati. His homily on the supposed virtue of submission to the state was offered in the service of the crusade to “suppress the age-long evil of the liquor traffic,” a holy errand to which the assembled legal luminaries were firmly committed, at least while they were on the clock.
1920s, Origins of the Welfare State, Murray Rothbard.
1920s, Stefan Molyneux, at the 16-minute mark, says that race-baiting was foundational to the communist’s agenda that was put forward by the Comintern by as early as the 1920s, and it’s a way to set people against each other who otherwise might be friends and allies. It’s one of the easier ways to rule people.
1920s Fundamentalism:
Fundamentalism simply sealed itself off from the general culture after 1920, and it was never reintegrated into the general culture. The grandsons and granddaughters of fundamentalists now recognize that they had lousy educations, probably in the public schools.
1920, Harry Emerson Fosdick.
1920, On September 16, 1920, Bombing of Wall Street killed 30 people instantly, 8 more people died from their injuries with a total of 143 injured. Apparently, the target was JP Morgan Bank.
1920, On August 16, 1920, Marshal Józef Piłsudski personally led the Polish Army counter-attack against the Red Army, which practically smashed it, and saved Poland and Europe from a Soviet invasion.
1921, NEP or the New Economic Plan, coined by Lenin in the new Soviet Union. Dr. Gary North writes “Lenin adopted the NEP because the country was facing starvation under his policies. Academics do not want to admit this because it would mean the communism was never viable economically.”
1. The New Economic Policy, or NEP, was a revised economic strategy, developed and introduced by Lenin in early 1921 – a time when the Bolsheviks faced rising opposition and rebellion.
2. The NEP replaced war communism as the Soviet regime’s official economic policy. It ended grain requisitioning, replacing it with a fixed tax to be paid in kind, and allowed private ownership of small businesses, the return of markets, and the sale of surplus goods.
3. The NEP allowed the return of capitalist behaviors, such as buying and selling for profit, and produced the emergence of new kulak and Nepmen classes.
4. In comparative terms it was a success, allowing Russia’s agricultural production to quickly recover and, by 1925, reach similar levels to before World War I.
5. Some in the Communist Party considered the NEP a betrayal or abandonment of socialist economic principles. Lenin justified it as a temporary “breathing space” for the Russian economy, which had been exhausted by years of World War I, the Civil War, and war communism.
1921, UNESCO. UNESCO originated with the League of Nations as the intellectual arm of the United Nations, which has always tried to insinuate itself into the sovereign affairs of every country it purports to represent. Officially, UNESCO wasn’t created until 1945. The following was posted at Gary North’s Specific Answers: “Julian Huxley was a co-founder of UNESCO. Read his charter document. It will tell you everything you need to know about NWO. His brother Aldous was a key figure in MKULTRA mind control, Manchurian candidate experiments, and the 1960s “counterculture,” spreading sex, drugs, and rock and roll to distract the masses for reality. Grandfather Thomas was “Darwin’s Bulldog” spreading his theories of natural selection.
Aldous wasn’t warning, he was forecasting, rubbing it in our face that this is the way it’s going to be, predictive programming.”
If you want to understand the role that the UN and UNESCO play in national politics and particularly in national politics in the United States, then start with Charlotte Iserbyte’s works. She illuminates how the UN and UNESCO infiltrate national, state, county, and local governments to adjust American, Christian, and capitalist values and implant in the minds of kids and their parents’ international values set by a supra body that engineers control over values and politics from somewhere in New York and elsewhere. Control over education, if control is to be transferred at all from the parents’ hands to anyone else, should never be transferred to the national level. Education should be a local affair.
1921, Tusla, Oklahoma Riots.
1922, Creation of the USSR
1923, Charles Burris on the creation of the Soviet Union
The Soviet Union was not formally created until 1923 after years of bloody civil war between the Bolshevik “Reds” and the anti-communist, pro-Czarist “Whites.” There were also the “Greens” but virtually no mainstream court historian mentions them because they do not fit in their tight little narrative.
There was no discussion of the role of Trotsky in the Revolution. It was Trotsky who was responsible for the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ending Russian participation in WWI. And it was Trotsky who successfully led the Red Army in the civil war against the Whites.
Mussolini, before the war, was more than an “antiwar activist, a pacifist.” He was a prominent radical Marxist socialist revolutionary, editor of the leading Socialist newspaper, Avanti!
Avanti!, under Mussolini, had an anti-war stance on the war, urging neutrality for Italy when the war began in August 1914. Mussolini formed the pro-war, interventionist newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia and the Fasci Rivoluzionari d’Azione Internazionalista (“Revolutionary Fasci for International Action”) in October 1914.
This paper was 180 degrees different than his editorial stance at Avanti! Why the sudden change? He was bribed by the French who provided funds to start his publication. Mussolini was always the ultimate opportunist. He soon left to join the Italian Army.
1923, Lenin dies. Yay!!
1924-1929, Federal Reserve monetary inflation.
1925, Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee.
High school teacher John T. Scopes on trial in Dayton, Tennessee for teaching evolution, which was prohibited under state law. 1925 pic.twitter.com/q1v7WWI7QG
— History Defined (@historydefined) August 27, 2023
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
1925, Congress authorizes Mt. Rushmore.
1925, Henry Louis Mencken on problems of Southern culture.
1927, Sacco and Vanzetti executed.
1927, The Supreme Court ratified state sterilization laws in Buck v. Bell, in 1927, six years before Hitler came to power.
Consider this review of Thomas Leonard’s book, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era.
The progressive reformers did not come from a diverse array of social classes and ethnicities, but, as Leonard shows, from a rather homogenous background. Born of New England descent, or Yankee stock, they were post-millenarians who wanted to correct social ills in order to establish a Kingdom of God on earth. Many of them went to Germany to get Ph.D.’s, where they became heavily influenced by the German Historical School who were hostile to the British classicals by being both anti-theory and pro-interventionist. They also became enthusiastic proponents of the German welfare state (and many other aspects of German thinking to which the modern reader seem eerily similar to Nazi thought), and became committed to enacting social change in America. Spearheaded by the thinkers at the University of Wisconsin, which, not coincidently, was a region of heavy German ethnicity, they were determined to overhaul the American government and economy–and put themselves in charge.Leonard shows that there was a strong element of self-interest which motivated the progressive reformers, particularly the economists, who previously belonged to a generally laissez-faire discipline which unlike many other professions at the time, had not yet used the state to block out competitors and legitimize it. The new economists recognized that a strong activist state required an army of professionalized planners, and also recognized that they were prime candidates for the job. Previously, the laissez-faire conclusions which formed the backbone of economics prevented the emergence of an elitist group of experts with comfortable job security provided by the state. Leonard describes the alliance between economists and the state, who saw their ideal “fourth branch” of government–the new administrative regulatory bodies, as requiring endless planning and monitoring by the nation’s economists. It also required the end of laissez-faire thought.
Eugenics and Progressivism were a package deal. Civilization is not about race, it’s about ethics. A young man should know one’s audience or one’s enemy. You should know about Progressives, their history, their temperament, and what motivates them. You should also know which professions in the government marketplace employs the greatest number of them. To that end, please read the articles, books, and watch the video interviews of lawyer, James Ostrowski. Seriously, do not take Progressives themselves or their ideas lightly. There is a strong murderous streak in them that they like to justify any which way.
1929, Vatican City comes into existence. The year is important since it coincides with the rise of fascism in Europe and Italy. Murray Rothbard points out that “This encyclical is a horse of a very different color: anti-capitalist, and pro-fascist (it was, of course, written during a Papal-fascist honeymoon, in relations that were always quite friendly, after the Lateran treaty of 1929 setting up Vatican City).”
The Pope is the Bishop of Rome.
The independent city-state, on the other hand, came into existence in 1929 by the Lateran Treaty between the Holy See and Italy, which spoke of it as a new creation,[8] not as a vestige of the much largerPapal States (756–1870), which had previously encompassed much of central Italy. According to the terms of the treaty, the Holy See has “full ownership, exclusive dominion, and sovereign authority and jurisdiction” over the city-state.[9]
Within Vatican City are religious and cultural sites such as St. Peter’s Basilica, the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican Museums. They feature some of the world’s most famous paintings and sculptures.
1929-1933, Herbert Hoover
“Herbert Hoover’s Depression” by Murray Rothbard.
And others . . . .
Tom Woods
For lessons on WWII and the Great Depression, see the list that Thomas Woods has compiled here.
1930s
1930, The Great Depression
1930, from Murray Rothbard’s The Betrayal of the America Right, 1971
The Old Right arose during the 1930s as a reaction against the Great Leap Forward (or Backward) into collectivism that characterized the New Deal. That Old Right continued and flourished through the 1940s and down to about the mid-1950s. The Old Right was staunchly opposed to Big Government and the New Deal at home and abroad: that is, to both facets of the welfare-warfare state. It combated U.S. intervention in foreign affairs and foreign wars as fervently as it opposed intervention at home.
1930, The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of June 1930, raised American tariffs to unprecedented levels, which practically closed our borders to foreign goods. According to most economic historians, this was the crowning folly of the whole period from 1920 to 1933 and the beginning of the real depression. “Once we raised our tariffs,” wrote Benjamin Anderson, an irresistible movement all over the world to raise tariffs and to erect other trade barriers, including quotas, began. Protectionism ran wild over the world. Markets were cut off. Trade lines were narrowed. Unemployment in the export industries all over the world grew with great rapidity. Farm prices in the United States dropped sharply through the whole of 1930, but the most rapid rate of decline came following the passage of the tariff bill.”
1930, Gary North explains that “The last time the Western world faced a monumental crisis was World War II. Before that, it was the Great Depression. From about 1930 until 1945, the West, including Japan, went through the greatest crisis since the bubonic plague of the mid-14th century. The plague lasted for about three years: 1348-50. In the aftermath of the plague came the Renaissance, which replaced the medieval world. That was the greatest crisis in Western history.
“Did Capitalism Cause the Great Depression?” by Murray Rothbard
1928-34, Stalin’s Ukraine Holodomor. Here is one video or re-enactment with decent commentary and several linked resources. The Kulaks were wealthy independent farmers who were benefiting from hard work under the previous, pre-Stalin, agriculture system in the Ukraine. But then the Bolsheviks began to tax, harass and beat the Kulaks into submission of Stalin’s Five-Year Plan, 1928-1932. Stalin and the Bolsheviks collectivized all farmers throughout the Soviet Union with the exception of a few. Those who would not participate were exiled. In fact, the American Communist Party used to conduct its very own assaults against Ukrainians who protested the Ukraine Holocaust at the hands of the Bolsheviks.
Eric Margolis points out:
Among these monstrous crimes, Ukraine stands out as the worst in terms of numbers. Stalin declared war on his own people. In 1932 he sent Commissars V. Molotov and Lazar Kaganovitch, and NKVD secret police chief G. Yagoda to crush the resistance of Ukrainian farmers to forced collectivization
Ukraine was sealed off. All food supplies and livestock were confiscated. NKVD death squads executed “anti-party elements.” Furious that insufficient Ukrainians were being shot, Kaganovitch “the Soviet Adolf Eichmann” set a quota of 10,000 executions a week. Eighty percent of Ukrainian intellectuals were shot.
During the bitter winter of 1932—33, 25,000 Ukrainians per day were being shot or dying of starvation and cold. Cannibalism became common. Ukraine, writes historian Robert Conquest, looked like a giant version of the future Bergan-Belsen death camp.
1931, Bacon Davis Act. For a review of its effects, see here and here.
During the Great Depression, Congress delivered an amazing sequence of six major pieces of labor legislation favored by unionists, virtually revolutionizing labor markets: Davis-Bacon (1931), Norris-LaGuardia (1932), National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), Wagner National Labor Relations Act (1935), Walsh-Healey (1936), and the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938), popularly known as the minimum wage law. This avalanche of legislation to entrench unions was hastened by the prevailing doctrine of 1920s business leaders, that “high and rising wages were necessary to a full flow of purchasing power and, therefore, to good business,” which was followed by its corollary, that “‘reducing the income of labor is not a remedy for business depression, it is a direct and contributory cause.'”9 This ignorant blather reverses the true line of causation: high wages are an effect of high productivity and prosperity, not a cause of them. If it were otherwise, rather than producing themselves rich, nations could simply declare all good things cheap and all wages high, and thus abolish poverty with pious hopes.
1931, Canada secedes from Great Britain.
1932, FDR’s Pittsburgh Speech: A Masterful Deception.
1933, Prohibition ends. Charles Burris nails it . . .
When he entered office in 1933 in the midst of the Great Depression, FDR made himself a national hero by ending the farce of Prohibition. Trump could have done the same, a first step on the road to Making America Great Again (Great and More Free)
1933, Soviet Purges
Partial view of a plaque with photos of victims of the Great Purge who were shot in the Butovo firing range near Moscow. The photos were taken after the arrest of each victim.
1933, Catholic philosopher who took on Hitler, Dietrich von Hildebrand, 1889-1977. Read his memoirs [found also in the WWII section at the bottom of this page] to see his influence to move world sentiment against Hitler. Here is an article that reviews his life and work.
Here is an audio interview that Tom Woods did with David Beito where they discuss the welfare state. That interview is titled “Before the Welfare State,” and in it they discuss Beito’s book From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967, published in 2000. Welfare before Welfare, David Beito.
Here, I have linked to a few resources on the rise of totalitarianism that accompanied WWI and WWII by Charles Burris: Totalitarian Art.
1933, Tennessee Valley Authority. Amity Shaels explains that
Electricity use went up during the depression because it was so exciting. It was the fracking of its era or the internet of its era. Gov’t took it over through the Tennessee valley authority, 1933. Rural electricity was political “We want to help the distance town and they will vote for me.”
1933-1936, FDR’s New Deal.
In fact, Rexford Tugwell, an important figure in FDR’s Brain Trust, frankly admitted that the entire New Deal was simply extrapolated from what Hoover had done.
1933, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, . . . mandated [that] crops be destroyed that might otherwise have fed starving people. Wikipedia states that “The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) was a United States federal law of the New Deal era which reduced agricultural production by paying farmers subsidies not to plant on part of their land and to kill off excess livestock. Its purpose was to reduce crop surplus and therefore effectively raise the value of crops.” Reading from that graph below, it says “Government provided subsidies for limits on production of corn, wheat, cotton, pork, & tobacco.” Next, “If farmers reduced their supply, then prices would increase,” which effectively forced them to control their prices. Third, “Slaughtered 6 million hogs.” Nice. “In return for withdrawing land, farmers received rental payments from the AAA” or Agricultural Adjustment Act. Fifth, the AAA “Paid $200 million to plow under 10 million acres of cotton.” And still the government was perceived as savior. It still is. And folks who perceive the government as the equitable distributor of other people’s money have it so backwards that it borders on the criminally insane. When will folks disabuse themselves of this horrible, ornery lie? 
1934, AFL-CIO Strikes.
1. History of Labor Unions from Colonial Times to 2009, Morgan Reynolds, 2009.
2. The Great Depression, Hans Sennholz, 2009.
3. The Lure of Utopia, John Taylor Gatto, 2010.
4. Garet Garrett Revived, The New Deal and Other Atrocities, 2002.
5. Courts and the New Deal, William Anderson, 2005.
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Remarkable history on FDR’s courtship with Stalin.
“The Courts and the New Deal,” William Anderson, 2005.
1934, Upton Sinclair campaigns for governor of California.
1934, FDIC Insurance, brought to you by the Federal Deposit Insurance Company, part of FDR’s New Deal, created by the 1933 Banking Act “to restore trust in the American banking system” according to Wikipedia in response to bank failures and bank runs in the Depression era: “more than one-third of banks failed in the years before the FDIC’s creation, and bank runs were common.” It was with “the passage of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in 2011, the FDIC insures deposits in member banks up to US$250,000 per ownership category.” Who funds FDIC? “The FDIC and its reserves are not funded by public funds; member banks’ insurance dues are the FDIC’s primary source of funding.[4] The FDIC also has a US$100 billion line of credit with the United States Department of the Treasury.[5] Only banks are insured by the FDIC; credit unions are insured up to the same insurance limit by the National Credit Union Administration, which is also a government agency.” Here is a useful timeline on FDIC. This history by Gary North on the New Deal is good.
1935, The program was created under the name Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) by the Social Security Act of 1935 as part of the New Deal. ADC dispensed scant relief to poor single mothers. The federal government authorized case workers, supervisors, and administrators with discretion to determine who received aid and how much. ADC was primarily created for white single mothers who were expected not to work. Black mothers who had always been in the labor force were not considered eligible to receive benefits.[3] The words “families with” were added to the name in 1962, partly due to concern that the program’s rules discouraged marriage.”
1934-1939, Popular Front.
1935, Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935. Shaels explains that the government
Outlawed private companies or severely constrained them through public utilities holding company act, called the death sentence act.
1935, September 8, Huey Long is assassinated.
1935, Winston Churchill, 1874-1965. Do not miss this talk by Ralph Raico on Churchill, whose favorite past time was war. Key members of the Fabian Society (or Britain’s Socialism society) Beatrice & Sidney Webb, supported Churchill.
1935-1943, WPA Program. Most of the funds spent on the WPA program went to workers and not to materials used in construction. Here is a list of some of the projects built by the WPA in Los Angeles. Here is a fuller list of WPA projects throughout California.
History of Southern Illinois
By Paul Kelpe, Illinois Federal Art Project, WPA, ca. 1935-39 Gouache
1935, Nuremberg Laws were the antisemitic laws passed in Nazi-controlled Germany by the Nazi Party.
Photos from The Atlantic on the fields of WWII.
Dr. Gary North explains that “World War II seemed to defeat the fascist nations by the combined forces of Soviet Communism and Western democracy. But the War was, in fact, the establishment of a permanent warfare-welfare state, and Truman escalated this to become a national surveillance state.”
1936, Minimum-wage laws and Eugenics.
1936, Berlin Olympics. Jesse Owens wins 4 gold medals as Hitler hosted the Olympics. Short of an outright ban, through the Nazi Party newspaper, Hitler strongly discouraged blacks and Jews from participating in the Olympics. Only when other countries threatened to ban the Olympics did he relent. “Hitler saw the Games as an opportunity to promote his government and ideals of racial supremacy, and the official Nazi party paper, the Völkischer Beobachter, wrote in the strongest terms that Jews and Black people should not be allowed to participate in the Games.[2][3] However, when threatened with a boycott of the Games by other nations, he relented and allowed Black people and Jews to participate, and added one token participant to the German team—a German woman, Helene Mayer, who had a Jewish father.”
WWII Isolationism. “Isolationism” was coined as a smear term to apply to opponents of American entry into World War II. Since the word was often applied through guilt-by-association to mean pro-Nazi, “isolationist” took on a “right wing” as well as a generally negative flavor. If not actively pro-Nazi, “isolationists” were at the very least narrow-minded ignoramuses ignorant of the world around them, in contrast to the sophisticated, worldly, caring “internationalists” who favored American crusading around the globe. In the last decade, of course, antiwar forces have been considered “leftists,” and interventionists from Lyndon Johnson to Jimmy Carter and their followers have constantly tried to pin the “isolationist” or at least “neo-isolationist” label on today’s left wing.
“If the watchword of the market economy is profit, the watchword of bureaucracy is growth.”
“We are the government, so why are you so negative about government action?”
1936-1939, Spanish Civil War.
Popular accounts of the Spanish Civil War often portray it as a struggle between democracy and fascism, but for Starkie this ideological view radically distorted the facts. The Nationalist leaders, he maintained, were not pawns of Hitler and Mussolini but defenders of Spanish Spain who wished to avert a Communist takeover of their country. The Communist leader Dolores Ibárruri said in response to a fiery talk in the Spanish Parliament by the conservative Calvo Sotelo, “You have given your last speech.” A group of Republican Assault Guards assassinated Sotelo a few days later, and Starkie believed that had the conservatives not risen against the weak Republican regime, they would have been destroyed in a Communist revolution.
the legions of Americans who fought alongside the Stalinist Thugs during the Spanish Civil War in the aptly named Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
Add to that this,
The U.S. did not get involved in the Spanish Civil War and placed an arms embargo against the Republicans. (According to Murray Rothbard this was the only thing FDR didn’t do wrong.) In addition to agitating for intervention, many on the Left decided to put their money where their mouth was and went off to Spain. To coordinate the effort, the Soviet-controlled Communist International organized the International Brigade, which consisted of volunteers from 7 countries to fight with the Republicans. The American division of the group was the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Over 60% of the members belonged to either the Communist Party USA or the Young Communist League. While much has been made about the very nominal amount of aid that Franco received from Hitler, Mussolini, and a few US companies until recently little has been said of the huge amount of support the Republicans received from Stalin and the atrocities they committed.
In his book, Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century, Robert Royal states that The Republicans killed at least 6,832 priests and nuns including 13 Bishops. The priests were often burned alive and mutilated while the nuns were raped. Bishops were tortured and executed in front of entire towns. They destroyed every single church they could. In Modern Times, Paul Johnson estimates that the Republicans slaughtered 50,000 civilians. In spite of these facts, the Catholic Church is still criticized for supporting the Nationalists.
1937, Nanking Massacre. An excellent movie on this event is Flowers of War, starring Christian Bale.
1937, Panay Incident.
1938, Khrushchev, Soviet Premiere, served as the government’s executioner in Ukraine in 1938.
1938, Nazi Gun Control Act. Germany had no 2nd Amendment. Anti-gun culture. Could be shot for gun possession during the anti-communist period. Origin of requiring licenses for firearms and ammunition. 1931 registration was authorized.
Muslims, not Nazis, invented yellow cloth with which to tag Jews.
1938, HUAC, House on Un-American Activities Committee is formed.
1938, Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds,” radio play is broadcast.
WORLD WAR II, 1939-1945
1939, February 20, [George Washington’s birthday] Nazi Party rally at Madison Square Garden in New York promoted American fascism by The Bund Führer, Fritz Kuhn. Any honorable adherent to the 1st Amendment should not have any problem with this.
Collected in the booklet “Free America” are the speeches given at the controversial Madison Square Garden rally on February 20, 1939. (pages 8-9 missing.) George Washington’s birthday was deliberately picked for the event; the Bund sought to tie its beliefs to American patriotism and its founding fathers, even referring to Washington as “America’s first fascist.” Speeches were given by Bund members J. Wheeler-Hill (National Secretary), Rudolf Markman (Eastern Department leader), George Froboses (Midwestern Department Leader), Hermann Schwinn (West Coast Department Leader), G. William Kunze (National Public Relations Director), and The Bund Führer, Fritz Kuhn.
Per my introductory line,
Fiorello LaGuardia, the mayor of New York, was criticized for allowing the rally to take place. But LaGuardia, along with the American Jewish Committee, supported the Bund’s right to rally on free-speech grounds. “If we are for free speech, we have to be for free speech for everybody, and that includes Nazis,” he said.
1939, September 1, Germany invades Poland on the pretext that Poland attacked Germany. James Corbett explains that false-flag, “In 1939 Heinrich Himmler masterminded a plan to convince the public that Germany was the victim of Polish aggression in order to justify the invasion of Poland. It culminated in an attack on Sender Gleiwitz, a German radio station near the Polish border, by Polish prisoners who were dressed up in Polish military uniforms, shot dead, and left at the station. The Germans then broadcast an anti-German message in Polish from the station, pretended that it had come from a Polish military unit that had attacked Sender Gleiwitz, and presented the dead bodies as evidence of the attack. Hitler invaded Poland immediately thereafter, starting World War II.”
1939, The movie “The Wizard of Oz” was released.
1940, Katyn Massacre. Another movie to show should be Katyn about the massacre of the Polish elite and soldiers in the Katyn Forest. The massacre occurred in April and May 1940.
1941, Mount Rushmore is completed.
1941, June. Operation Barbarossa was the first of several battles the Germans and Russians fought on the Eastern Front. The Soviets called the war, The Great Patriotic War, while in Germany it was called the Eastern Front of the Eastern Campaign. What’s interesting about these battles that depleted Germany’s war resources was that they began a full three years ahead of D-Day, the American invasion of Normandy, June 1944. In his review of Jochen Hellbeck’s Stalingrad: The City That Defeated the Third Reich, Bionic Mosquito points out how the U.S. invaded a depleted Nazi defense:
Stalingrad. Almost six months of fighting; between the two sides, over two million combatants; of these, almost two million killed, wounded or captured. A key result of the German defeat: Germany moved significant military resources from west (i.e. where Brokaw’s generation would eventually fight a drastically weakened Germany) to east to deal with the losses and the newfound Soviet momentum.
1941, September 8 to January 27, 1944, Battle of Leningrad.
1941, Pearl Harbor, December 7.
Start on page 7 of this brilliant essay by G. Edward Griffin. And if you really want to study this topic, check out this list of articles on the topic.
The photos above and below are from two Hawaiian newspaper headlines. Here’s the background. It was clear then, and with more and more documented evidence since, that the United States baited Japan into the war. FDR and the US wanted war all along despite their rhetoric to the contrary. Evidence that Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor was facilitated by American military was known back in 1945, publicized in Life Magazine. Yet, today, Americans have bought the myth–that Japan is a terrorizing nation that we have to keep an eye out on, a country whose military that we have to, through the UN and Council on Foreign Relations, disband.
posted here on 12/26/2014, 1945 Life Magazine: Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) Knew Japan Would Attack Pearl Harbor. Reposted here on Monday, 12/5/2016.
“On the birthday of the Prince of Peace, we’ll have the despicable American Sniper, Clint Eastwood’s paean to murder, and–in case you were worried–the despicable Interview, a comedy about the assassination of a foreign head of state by the CIA. Well, at least there is some truth to that one!”
Writes BionicMosquito:
About Clint Eastwood and his new movie: I wonder if this was the penance demanded for his blasphemous work, “Letters from Iwo Jima.” Showing the Japanese during the “good war” as human beings is about as close to unpardonable as one might ever wish to get.
1940s, U.S. Census helped the Army round up Japanese Americans. Awful. This reminds me of what the Nazis did with new prisoners to concentration camps in Germany and Poland. Camp commanders told new prisoners that the prison was a labor camp and that they would work there until the war was over. Lied to them about typhus as a rationale for shaving heads and going to the “showers,” a.k.a., gas chambers. But the commanders instructed the new arrivals to write back home telling their families where they were and that they were alright. Many did. And the Nazis used the information to gather up more Jews. I remember one of my earliest purchases on Amazon how I was concerned about giving my personal information online specifically for this reason–that it could be used for something else, something more sinister. So far, so good. Only marketers with their viruses and spam can get a hold of me . . . for now.
1942, Joseph Schumpeter in 1942 wrote these words in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. They are more relevant today than they were then, for the Left has controlled academia for two additional generations.
Perhaps the most striking feature of the picture is the extent to which the bourgeoisie, besides educating its own enemies, allows itself in turn to be educated by them. It absorbs the slogans of current radicalism and seems quite willing to undergo a process of conversion to a creed hostile to its very existence. Haltingly and grudgingly it concedes in part the implications of that creed. This would be most astonishing and indeed very hard to explain were it not for the fact that the typical bourgeois is rapidly losing faith in his own creed.This is verified by the very characteristic manner in which particular capitalist interests and bourgeoisie as a whole behave when facing direct attack. They talk and plead–or hire people to do it for them; they snatch at every chance of compromise; they are ever ready to give in; they never put up a fight under the flag of their own ideals and interests–in this country there was no real resistance anywhere against the imposition of crushing financial burdens during the last decade or against labor legislation incompatible with the effective management of industry.
1942, Lights of the Old Right.
1942, Battle of Midway, June 4 to June 7.
Rethinking the Good War (i.e., WWII) by Laurence Vance.
1942, August 2nd, Sleepy Lagoon murder, Los Angeles. Here is an excellent review of the monopoly of violence that County of LA exerted at the time of the murder to portray Mexicans “criminals.” Excellent read. A must-read for a distinction between state discrimination versus private discrimination. State discrimination is an invitation to murder.
White Californians responded with alien land laws in 1913 and 1920 which banned the sale of land to foreign-born Japanese and also prohibited leasing land to the same for more than three years. The Japanese merely responded by putting the land deals in the names of their native-born children, and the cycle continued, until Roosevelt solved many of the whites’ problems by simply locking the Japanese in concentration camps.
1942, Battle of Stalingrad, August 23 to February 2, 1943.
1942, Internment of US citizens of Japanese ancestry throughout the United States.
The caption to this picture reads “A crowd of Japanese Americans stand behind a barbed wire fence waving to departing friends on a train leaving Santa Anita, California.” This is Santa Anita Race Track, folks. Gary North states that John J. McCloy was the brains behind the Japanese internment camps.
Here is a cartoon illustration of Hitler’s economic policies. And this commentary by Lew Rockwell on Hitler’s economic policies is where I lifted it.
1942, On Japanese internment camps throughout the U.S. under FDR, Gary North explains the non-air brushed horrors:
On April 1, 1942, California announced the order for the arrest and deportation of Japanese citizens in California. They were sent into internment camps — read: concentration camps in Idaho. Here are photos and an accompanying account. Here are other photos.
We all know this story. President Roosevelt signed an executive order on February 19, 1942, authorizing the program. Congress never voted on this. The program was implemented by Secretary of War Henry Stimpson. The only major figure in Washington to oppose this was J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI.
The prisoners were released in early 1945. They were given $10 and a train ticket back home. But they had no homes to go to. Most of their homes had been sold, along with their possessions and businesses, at bargain basement auctions in 1942.
This executive order stayed on the books until February 19, 1976, when Gerald Ford rescinded it. In 1982, the American government issued a formal apology. It made token reparations to survivors of $20,000 each.
This is the airbrushed version. This part of the story could not be hidden from the public. It got into American history textbooks.
More on American Concentration Camps.
1942-1943, Aug. 7 (’42) to Feb. 9 (’43). Guadalcanal Campaign on the Solomon Islands.
1942-1946, Manhattan Project gave birth to more than just the Atomic Bomb…
1943, Sophie Scholl–The Final Days should be shown in every classroom unit on the Jewish Holocaust or Shoah, burnt offering.
From Charles Burris:
Butler Shaffer asks perhaps the most penetrating question of the day: are Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, and Julian Assange quickly becoming our Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl, and Christoph Probst? They have been declared dangerous enemies of the state, contemptible traitors who threatened the security of the nation because they dared speak the truth at great personal cost to their very lives and liberties. Will they suffer the same ultimate consequences for their heroic actions as did the Scholls and Probst? Please watch this award-winning film, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, and afterward read and reflect upon Jacob G. Hornberger’s powerful essay, “Why Germans Supported Hitler.” While the specific malevolent persons he is describing may be dead, their loathsome ideological descendants are still with us. We see them in our churches and our workplaces, our malls and our playgrounds with their children. But especially we see them every night on television, slithering out of their congressional sewers and poisonous think tank lairs, rearing their vicious heads, calling for the blood of Snowden, Manning, and Assange, or whoever is next on their kill list.
On the question of whether the U.S. entered WWII to rescue the Jews, please see history teacher Charles Burris’ remarks here:
Michael is exactly correct in his presentation of facts concerning the US Government under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As a history teacher, I have discovered that one of the most enduring myths of younger Americans not versed in the history of their country preceding their birth is that the United States entered the Second World War in order to save the Jews of Europe. In fact, the very opposite was the case. The government deliberately chose not to save the Jews until it was much too late. After FDR’s callous immigration authorities illegally obstructed and surreptitiously slammed the door to freedom for vast numbers of potential refugees, his administration continued its policy of deliberate betrayal of the millions of European Jews in Hitler’s death camps until the “Final Solution” was almost finalized. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. even had his staff prepare “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews,” concerning heinous activities of the State Department in this regard, which was presented to Roosevelt. David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, is a masterpiece in meticulous scholarship. This brilliant book formed the basis for the powerful PBS documentary, America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference. After the war the government under FDR’s successor, Harry S Truman, was complicit in both Operation Keelhaul (which concerned the forced repatriation of Soviet POWs to the USSR – and to certain death or the GULAG) and Operation Paperclip (the program which brought thousands of former war criminals and perpetrators to the United States under the guise of the Cold War.
Michael Rozeff uses house-to-house invasions to illustrate comparisons between American fascism and German fascism.
1943, I highly recommend the movie, Katyn, released in 2009 that shows (I was going to use the word “dramatizes” but how can one dramatize mass murder?) Stalin’s mass murdering machine murder 22,000 of Poland’s best–soldiers, doctors, teachers, and intellectuals.
The Katyn massacre was beneficial to Nazi Germany, which used it to discredit the Soviet Union. On 14 April 1943, Goebbels wrote in his diary: “We are now using the discovery of 12,000 Polish officers, murdered by the GPU, for anti-Bolshevik propaganda on a grand style.
1943, Escape from Sobibor, 1987, is based on the Ashes from Sobibor by Thomas Toivi Blatt, a survivor of Sobibor. The event took place in 1943.
1943, Current Tax Payment Act
1943, The Origin of Tax Withholding
So where did the withholding tax come from? It was not part of the original income tax that resulted from the sixteenth amendment in 1913. Very few people paid any taxes back then anyway. The income tax did not directly affect the average American until World War II.
On the eve of the war, few Americans paid income taxes. Those that owed taxes paid them in one lump sum on March 15 (later changed to April 15). To pay for the war, the Revenue Act of 1942 lowered exemptions and raised income tax rates. But it also did something even more insidious—it instituted a 5 percent “Victory Tax” on all wages above an exemption of $624. The tax was to be collected by the employer and deducted from the employee’s paycheck—just like the Social Security tax that began in 1935.
The Current Tax Payment Act of 1943 then revolutionized the income tax by making withholding taxes universal. The withholding tax was part of the new tax plan offered by Beardsley Ruml (1894–1960), the chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and treasurer of R.H. Macy and Co. By 1945, about three-fourths of Americans were paying federal income taxes. And although the withholding tax was sold as a wartime emergency, like most expansions of government instituted during wartime, it has been a way of life for most Americans ever since.
Curse of the Withholding Tax
The income tax allows the government to confiscate the wealth of its citizens. The curse of the withholding tax is that it allows the government to commit this crime systematically, effortlessly, painlessly, and benevolently.
Surprisingly, it was a free market economist who helped the federal government implement the withholding tax in the first place. As was pointed out by the Austrian economist, Murray Rothbard (1926–1995), in his 1971 article “Milton Friedman unraveled“:
One of Friedman’s most disastrous deeds was the important role he proudly played, during World War II in the Treasury Department, in foisting upon the suffering American public the system of the withholding tax. Before World War II, when income tax rates were far lower than now, there was no withholding system; everyone paid his annual bill in one lump sum, on March 15. It is obvious that under this system, the Internal Revenue Service could never hope to extract the entire annual sum, at current confiscatory rates, from the mass of the working population. The whole ghastly system would have happily broken down long before this. Only the Friedmanite withholding tax has permitted the government to use every employer as an unpaid tax collector, extracting the tax quietly and silently from each paycheck. In many ways, we have Milton Friedman to thank for the present monster Leviathan State in America.
Here it is in Friedman’s own words.
Dr. Gary North on WITHHOLDING TAXES
The withholding tax program makes it easier for governments to collect taxes. The system was invented by Rockefeller agent Beardsley Ruml. When, in 1942, he came up with a plan to sell Congress on the idea of income tax withholding, he understood exactly what this would do for revenues actually collected: multiply them.
Here was the government’s problem in 1942: only about five million out of the 34 million Americans subject to the income tax were saving to pay it on March 15, 1943. This presented a big problem for tax collectors, now that wartime taxes had been hiked dramatically. Ruml, formerly the director of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Foundation, in 1942 was chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. He was also the treasurer of R. H. Macy & Co., the department store. As Macy’s treasurer, he well understood that most people resist saving for known expenditures. He asked: Why not get employers to deduct their employees’ income tax liabilities? He recommended this to Congress in 1942, and Congress in 1943 passed a tax collection bill that included Ruml’s withholding provision: the Current Tax Payment Act.
The Treasury Department went to work defending this program. It used staff economist Milton Friedman to do much of the research.
Did the scheme work? Beyond the politicians’ wildest expectations. In 1942, the U.S. government collected $3.2 billion from income taxes. It 1943, before the law was fully operational, it collected $6.5 billion from income taxes. In 1944, it collected $20 billion. (“Historical Statistics of the United States,” Pt. 2 [1975], p. 1105.)
The withholding tax was passed as a wartime measure. Naturally, it was not repealed in 1945.
The withholding tax system is popular with the Federal government for four reasons. First, the government deliberately over-withholds. This forces taxpayers to file their forms to get their refunds. They must identify where they live. Second, it creates a “free money from the government” emotional response when the refund check arrives. Third, the government gets to use this money, interest-free, during the taxable year. Fourth, it makes income taxes and Social Security taxes less painful and therefore more acceptable.
If withholding were abolished, the decline in revenues would be both immediate, permanent, and spectacular. Then, on the second Monday of November, there would be desperation across the land. Hardly anyone would have saved all of the money owed during the year. Where would they get the money to pay? They wouldn’t. So, many would not file. There would be no way that the Internal Revenue Service could follow up on all the non-filing residents.
As soon as the taxpayers realized that there are too many people to convict, they would understand the enormous power they possess. Congress could do nothing. It would have to cut taxes to such a degree that people will set aside money to pay. It would have to issue high-interest tax prepayment bonds.
The government would have to default on its other debts.
I mention this just as a reminder: the entire system of Federal power rests on three laws, two of which are essentially technical, namely, the date for tax filing and tax withholding. These two technical laws are the foundation of the modern welfare-warfare-nanny state. Remove these two pillars, and the whole Federal system will come down.
1944
Here is the caption to the above photo I got from Wikipedia:
“Selektion” on the Judenrampe, Auschwitz, May/June 1944. To be sent to the right meant slave labor; to the left, the gas chamber. This image shows the arrival of Hungarian Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia, many of them from the Berehov ghetto. The photographer was Ernst Hofmann or Bernhard Walter of the SS. Image courtesy of Yad Vashem[1]
1944, Bureaucracy, Ludwig von Mises.
Mises’s 1944 book applies his insight concerning economic calculation to delineate the difference between bureaucratic management and profit-and-loss management in the free market. The implications of his argument are far-reaching, for it shows that all types of public administration lack the ability to conduct their affairs in an economically rational manner.
1944, D-Day, June 6, 1944.
1944, The Pastoralization of Germany. from Charles Burris @ LewRockwell, March 22, 2018. The meaning of pastoralization
the act or process of making pastoral; specifically, the conversion of an industrial country into a pastoral one. “Carrying industrial disarmament to the point of pastoralization”—A. O. Wolfers
Extremely powerful and courageous cinematic effort to correct the flawed and duplicitous Post-WWII historical record concerning Allied (particularly American) governments of the deliberate and calculated horrific treatment of captured German soldiers and non-combatant civilians. Described as “the last dirty secret of World War Two,” this tragic story remains highly inflammatory and subject to criticism by court historians and regime academics. Together with his central role in the Operation Keelhaul forced repatriation of captured Soviet POWs back to the USSR, the place of Dwight David Eisenhower in history will remain disputed and controversial for decades to come.
1944, Giorgio Perlasca, 1910-1992, was an Italian who helped save thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust by issuing them fake passports to travel to neutral countries. Despite fighting alongside Franco in the Spanish Civil War, Perlasca became disillusioned with Fascism and escaped from Italy to the Spanish embassy in Budapest in 1944, where he became a Spanish citizen on account of his war experience. While there he worked with Spanish diplomat Angel Sanz Briz in creating fake passports to smuggle Jews out of the country. When Sanz Briz was removed from his post, Perlasca pretended to be his substitute so that he could continue printing false passports. He also personally sheltered thousands of Hungarian Jews while they were waiting for their passports. It is estimated he saved over 5,000 Jews from the Holocaust. After the war, he returned to Italy where he lived in obscurity until he was contacted in 1987 by a group of Hungarian Jews he had rescued, and his remarkable story became public. He died in 1992.
1944-1945, Battle of the Bulge, Dec. 16, 1944, to Jan. 25, 1945.
1944, Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. “A landmark system for monetary and exchange rate management established in 1944. The Bretton Woods Agreement was developed at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference held in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, from July 1 to July 22, 1944.
Major outcomes of the Bretton Woods conference included the formation of the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and, most importantly, the proposed introduction of an adjustable pegged foreign exchange rate system. Currencies were pegged to gold and the IMF was given the authority to intervene when an imbalance of payments arose.” Gary North says that “The Bretton Woods system finally was destroyed unilaterally by Nixon, on August 15, 1971.”
1944, GI Bill is passed.
1945, September 21. I post a reference to the animated film, made in 1988, Grave of the Fireflies, as a beautiful and stunning rebuke of war. See this page for the video itself.
1945-1948, Great Depression ends NOT BECAUSE OF WWII but because of a “stimulus” provided by about a two-thirds reduction of federal spending, from $98.7 billion in 1945 to $33.8 billion in 1948. See the Statistical Abstract of the United States, and click on #14, “Federal Government Finances” on the left.
As Bob Higgs has said, every Keynesian economist in the world, led by Paul Samuelson, predicted an economic calamity at the time, and every Keynesian in the world was dead wrong. Taking all of that money from the parasitic clutches of the state and returning it to its rightful owners (taxpayers) caused the post-war recovery. Today’s Keynesians, led by Paul Krugman, insist that they have no idea whatsoever why the Great Depression did not resume after WW II ended. Thus, they haven’t learned a single thing in over 60 years. (Either that or they are and always have been nothing by shills for the state masquerading as “economists”).
1945, Feb. 4-11, Yalta Conference. This conference was attended by all of the Allied powers to talk about how they would divvy up Europe vis-a-vis Germany. It would be yet another knee-capping of Germany by its economic enviers. Yalta is located in Crimea or on the Crimean Penninsula, a country just south of Ukraine on the northern rim of the Black Sea.
from Eric Margolis:
At the 1945 Yalta Conference, Stalin boasted to Winston Churchill that Commissar Lazar Kaganovitch, who had supervised the murder of at least seven million Ukrainians and sent 2 million to concentration camps, “is my Adolf Eichmann,” referring to the Nazi official responsible for killing millions of Jews. [Did you hear that? Mass murder, Stalin, bragging to another world leader that he, too, has someone in charge of murdering millions. These thugs brag about their own violent accomplishments. Publicly, they will hide it or lie about or at best hold some kind of insincere memorial and bloviating mea culpa that can only make one sick.]
In 1945, the Soviet Union — the close wartime ally of Britain, Canada, and the United States — had 5.5 million prisoners in its prison system, the gulag, of whom 25% died annually from cold, hunger, exhaustion, and disease.
Though Stalin’s worst crimes were committed before World War II, the full horror of his system of industrialized murder and slave labor was barely known outside Russia until the 1980s. To this day, the world is constantly reminded of Germany’s crimes during the National Socialist era. But Stalin’s victims, who surpassed those of Hitler by a factor of three times, are almost forgotten. Why?
History is the propaganda of the victors. Few photographs of the gulag have survived, evidence was destroyed, and witnesses have died. Churchill and Roosevelt could not admit they were allied to the greatest mass killer since Genghis Khan, and complicit in his crimes. Or reveal that Communist agents of influence had shaped White House policy. The feeble-minded Roosevelt even hailed Stalin as “Uncle Joe.”
Algiers Hiss is the man standing at the far right in the picture below. Read this on the communist subversion of the Roosevelt government.
Gar Alperovitz explains that “at Yalta [the February 1945 summit between Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill] we desperately begged the Russians to come in.” Why?
1945, Feb. 16-March 26. Iwo Jima.
1945, April 12. FDR dies two months after the Yalta Conference.
1945, April 30th, Hitler dies. Did Hitler Escape to South America?
1945, May 8. Germany surrenders in Berlin.
1945-1959, Project Paperclip. was created in early April 1945. The CIA was created just 2 years into this recruitment by Harry S. Truman. Odd. The below Wikipedia entry no longer states the following, “The Soviet Union was more aggressive in forcibly recruiting (at gunpoint) more than 2,200 German specialists . . . .”
The primary purpose for Operation Paperclip was U.S. military advantage in the Russo–American Cold War, and the Space Race. The Soviet Union was more aggressive in forcibly recruiting (at gunpoint) more than 2,200 German specialists – a total of more than 6,000 people including family members – with Operation Osoaviakhim during one night on October 22, 1946.[3]
1945, July 17 to August 2, Potsdam Conference, held in Potsdam, Germany.
1945, July 26: Potsdam Declaration which attempted to lay out the terms of surrender in Japan. With FDR dead, Truman attended this conference. The Declaration laid out the terms of Japan’s surrender with a direct and open threat of annihilation if Japan refused to surrender.
The Potsdam Declaration or the Proclamation Defining Terms for Japanese Surrender was a statement that called for the surrender of all Japanese armed forces during World War II. On July 26, 1945, United States President Harry S. Truman, United Kingdom Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Chairman of the Nationalist Government of China Chiang Kai-shek issued the document, which outlined the terms of surrender for the Empire of Japan as agreed upon at the Potsdam Conference. This ultimatum stated that, if Japan did not surrender, it would face “prompt and utter destruction”.[1][2]
And this
The allied leaders meeting at Potsdam in late July issued the Potsdam Declaration laying the surrender terms for the Japanese. In your book, you discuss an attempt to include the necessary assurances about preserving the emperor in the declaration. What happened?
As originally written, paragraph twelve of the Potsdam Declaration essentially assured the Japanese that the emperor would not be taken off of his throne, and [would] be kept on in some titular role like the king or queen of England but with no power. It was a recommendation of everyone in the top government, with the exception of Jimmy Byrnes. Byrnes was the chief advisor to the president on this matter, and he was secretary of state. There’s no doubt that he controlled the basic decision-making on it. He was also the president’s personal representative on the interim committee, which considered how, not whether, to use the bomb. He was the man who was directly, in this case, in charge. They all thought the war would end once that was stated, and they knew the war would continue if you took out paragraph twelve, and Jimmy Byrnes took it out, with the president’s approval.
1945, August 9, Nagasaki. On Nagasaki, Rockwell makes an interesting point, “The war criminal Truman was a bitter anti-Catholic. It’s why he decided to atom-bomb Nagasaki as well, the Catholic capital of Japan.” Catholic capital in Japan, Nagasaki, is fleshed out in a little more detail here. As evidence of Truman’s anti-catholic views, he boycotted the DNC that nominated Kennedy in 1960. “The Kennedy bandwagon could not be stopped despite the pressure of the combined Congressional leadership, including Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas, and of former President Harry S. Truman. Mr. Truman had boycotted this meeting on a charge that the convention had been rigged for Senator Kennedy’s nomination.”
1945, August 6, Hiroshima
1945, Ryan McMaken on the sociopathic narrative assigned to WWII veterans. “The American media and the US Government have cultivated an image of the WWII veteran as a tough guy with no regrets. We have a name for those people. They’re called sociopaths, and much of the WWII narrative is built around them. If one takes the time to talk to the veterans who aren’t filled with bluster, the picture becomes far more complex. This video explores one such situation.”
To Live, 1994
Sunshine with Ralph Fiennes is not available at Netflix but is available at YouTube for $2.99. This movie is far better than any trailer can hint at. The performances are exquisite. Some features will offend and appall. It is not suited for under-aged students; home-viewing, well, you’re on your own. It is 3 hours long. But I feel worth the time. Here is Wikipedia’s summary.
Another movie to consider is Burnt By the Sun, 1994
1945, August 14, eight days after the bombings on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the United States launched a 1000-plane air-raid against Japan.
Arnold wanted as big a finale as possible, hoping that USASTAF could hit the Tokyo area in a 1,000-plane mission: the Twentieth Air Force had put up 853 B-29’s and 79 fighters on 1 August, and Arnold thought the number could be rounded out by calling on Doolittle’s Eighth Air Force. Spaatz still wanted to drop the third atom bomb on Tokyo but thought that battered city a poor target for conventional bombing; instead, he proposed to divide his forces between seven targets. Arnold was apologetic about the unfortunate mixup on the 11th and, accepting Spaatz’ amendment, assured him that his orders had been “coordinated with my superiors all the way to the top.” The teleconference ended with a fervid “Thank God” from Spaatz. Kennedy had the Okinawa strips tied up with other operations so that Doolittle was unable to send out his VHB’s. From the Marianas, 449 B-29’s went out for a daylight strike on the 14th, and that night, with top officers standing by at Washington and Guam for a last-minute cancellation, 372 more were airborne. Seven planes dispatched on special bombing missions by the 509th Group brought the number of B-20’s to 828, and with 186 fighter escorts dispatched, USASTAF passed Arnold’s goal with a total of 1,014 aircraft. There were no losses, and before the last B-29 returned President Truman announced the unconditional surrender of Japan.
This was the largest bombing raid in history. Yet, many timelines of World War II do not even list this event as having occurred.
1945, September, 2: Japan surrenders.
1945, October 24: United Nations is created.
Map of the Pacific Naval Battles during WWII.
1945-1949, Nuremberg Trials
Here is some revealing details about who was involved in the Jewish Holocaust. Every high school in the nation will point to the Nazis as being the sole perpetrators of Jewish extermination. According to Hannah Arendt, a German Jew, that just isn’t true. That, in fact, many Jewish leaders were involved in the extermination of Jews as well. Horrifying fact. Yet rarely told. Arendt told it and got flak for it. By flak I mean hate mail. Books that Hannah Arendt has written related to this subject are:
The Origins of Totalitarianism
1945, Kobe Bombings, five months prior to the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Great movie, Grave of the Fireflies, 1988 animated film. It is set during the American fire-bombing of Kobe.
POST WORLD WAR II
1946, The Best Years of Our Lives. I don’t recall watching this movie as a kid and had only seen sections of it since. But watching it now, Saturday, July 14, 2018, reminds me of the tender intentions that Hollywood portrayed of American men and women of those war years.
1946, It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra.
1946, in American film.
1947, Indian Independence. The Indian Independence Act 1947 was Parliament of the United Kingdom that partitioned British India into the two new independent dominions of India and Pakistan. The Act received the royal assent on 18 July 1947, and Pakistan came into being on 15 August at the same time as Indian independence. However, due to Mountbatten’s need to be in New Delhi for the transfer of power, Pakistan celebrated its formation a day ahead on 14 August 1947 to enable the viceroy Lord Mountbatten to attend both events.
1947, February 10, The Paris Peace Treaty was a treaty between Italy and the minor Axis powers with the U.S., Britain, Soviet Union, and France. There were 42 treaties in all signed throughout WWII, a fact that I’d just now come to learn about.
The Paris Peace Treaties (French: Traité de Paris) was signed on 10 February 1947, as the outcome of the Paris Peace Conference, held from 29 July to 15 October 1946. The victorious wartime Allied powers (principally the United Kingdom, Soviet Union, United States, and France) negotiated the details of peace treaties with Italy, the minor Axis powers (Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria), and Finland, following the end of World War II in 1945.
The treaties allowed Italy, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Finland to resume their responsibilities as sovereign states in international affairs and to qualify for membership in the United Nations.
The settlement elaborated in the peace treaties included payment of war reparations, commitment to minority rights and territorial adjustments including the end of the Italian Colonial Empire in Africa, Greece, and Albania, as well as changes to the Italian–Yugoslav, Hungarian–Czechoslovak, Soviet–Romanian, Bulgarian–Romanian, Hungarian-Romanian, French–Italian and Soviet–Finnish borders.
1947, Gary North writes that “The Pony Express was still a legend in 1947. Nostalgia dies hard.”
The old is replaced by the new. The pace of this replacement has increased over the last century because of the impact of falling costs of information. I think this began in 1844 with the invention of the telegraph. The Pony Express was old technology. It lasted for 19 months: 1860 to 1861. It offered a major speed improvement over ships around the Horn or wagon trains. But, technologically, it was no improvement over the communication system of the Egypt of the pharaohs. It was mainly the link in between telegraph lines that could not be defended across Indian territory.
When I was five years old, I had a 78 RPM record. It was a story of the Pony Express told and sung by Tex Ritter. That was the first time I had ever heard of Tex Ritter. Maybe you have not heard of him. He has gone the way of the Pony Express. He is famous mainly for singing the theme song of High Noon (1952), which you may not have seen, let alone heard. Things change. By the digital magic of YouTube and Google, I found this in 15 seconds. It had 85 views. I made it 86.
1947, Truman creates the CIA.
1947, The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was a multilateral agreement regulating international trade. According to its preamble, its purpose was the “substantial reduction of tariffs and other trade barriers and the elimination of preferences, on a reciprocal and mutually advantageous basis.” It was negotiated during the United Nations Conference on Trade and Employment and was the outcome of the failure of negotiating governments to create the International Trade Organization (ITO). GATT was signed in 1947, took effect in 1948, and lasted until 1994; it was replaced by the World Trade Organization in 1995.
“The press release says that Paul has also hired Leon Hadar, the scholar who pointed out 15 years ago that when the Cold War fizzled out [1947-1991] and it was no longer our base in Arabia against the Soviet Union, Israel had to come up with a new modus-dependi for the United States. Radical Islam! The idea of the usefulness of Radical Islam has been echoed in the last year by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt and Trita Parsi.
1948, Creation of the state of Israel.
1948, Operation Mockingbird. Look for Alex Constantine’s essay on the subject, Mockingbird: The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA. For more on McCarthyism during the 1950s, see Charles Burris’s article on fake news here.
1948-1952, The Marshall Plan or The European Recovery Act. Interesting distribution of American or Allied funds. Wikipedia explains that not all countries received an equal amount of aid
The Marshall Plan aid was divided amongst the participant states roughly on a per capita basis. A larger amount was given to the major industrial powers, as the prevailing opinion was that their resuscitation was essential for general European revival. Somewhat more aid per capita was also directed towards the Allied nations, with less for those that had been part of the Axis or remained neutral. The largest recipient of Marshall Plan money was the United Kingdom (receiving about 26% of the total), followed by France (18%) and West Germany (11%). Some 18 European countries received Plan benefits.[4] Although offered participation, the Soviet Union refused Plan benefits, and also blocked benefits to Eastern Bloc countries, such as East Germany and Poland. The United States provided
similar aid programs in Asia, but they were not part of the Marshall Plan.
From corbetreport a piece of his documentary on the rock…. And our modern medicine……1/3 pic.twitter.com/nVuqovd9ok
— Mr ROBOT (@EllioT_MR___) June 7, 2022
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WWII Revisionism
1948, Always begin with John T. Flynn’s book, The Roosevelt Myth (1948). In 1958, when I first began studying the New Deal, this was the only book that was hostile to both New Deal domestic policy and foreign policy. In 2007, it is still the only book. It lacks footnotes at crucial points. His other books are important: As We Go Marching and Country Squire in the White House. Edgar Eugene Robinson’s book, The Roosevelt leadership, 1933-1945 (Lippencott, 1955), was as close to a critical account as academia allows; it came half a century ago.
On Federal Reserve policy, Murray Rothbard’s book, America’s Great Depression. It covers Hoover’s failure. Rothbard’s book supplied Paul Johnson with his interpretive framework for discussing the origins of the depression in Modern Times (1983).
On the history of Hoover and Roosevelt, see Antony Sutton’s book, Wall Street and FDR (1975).
On the revolutionary aspect of the New Deal, read Garet Garrett’s The Revolution Was and The People’s Pottage.
On FDR and Pearl Harbor, there are many books. I provide an introduction here.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north330.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north26.html
This list is also detailed: http://www.garynorth.com/public/11904.cfm
Once hard to locate, Porter Sargent’s book, Getting US into War (1941), is on-line with Questia. A better way is to send $50 to http://AmericanDeception.com and order its CD, which has dozens of great books on it, including this one.
A well-respected academic historian, Thomas Fleming (not the editor of Chronicles), wrote The New Dealers’ War: FDR and the War Within World War II (2001). This book is a major break from Roosevelt worship, and the Establishment reviewers attacked him for this. See the snide reviews posted on Amazon.
Herbert Feis. Here are a few of his books.
Everett Gleason co-wrote with Langer International Commitments. These were the court historians that the Rockefellers commissioned to write books, letters, and articles discouraging criticism or revisionism of the the official version of the causes, the nature, and the consequences of the state going to war. Here are a few of their co-authored books.
Charles Callan Tansill, greatest of the war revisionist historians of the two major wars.
1949, NATO, North Atlantic Treaty Organization. “As the strategist, Zbigniew Brzezinski told me long ago. NATO serves as “stepping stones” for the ongoing US geopolitical control of Europe. No wonder it was not disbanded like the Warsaw Pact after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The post-war European states gravely weakened by World War II mostly accepted NATO as their overlord. General Charles DeGaulle ousted NATO from France and refused American tutelage.
But his successors restored US suzerainty over France. Germany’s tough defense minister, Franz Josef Strauss, said “we won’t play foot soldiers to America’s atomic knights” but his attempted to build a more independent policy failed.”
1949, Fair Deal. Ugh. Truman’s State of the Union Address to Congress in January 1949 was his attempt to extend FDR’s New Deal, 1933-1938, while adding his social liberal programs to the Progressive trough. But there was a problem: the country was coming out of the Depression as an economic boom was starting in 1946.
A liberal Democrat of the Midwestern populist tradition, Truman was determined to both continue the legacy of theNew Deal and to make Franklin Roosevelt‘s proposed Economic Bill of Rights a reality, while making his own mark in social policy.[2]
Alonzo Hamby argued that the Fair Deal reflected the “vital center” approach to liberalism which rejected totalitarianism, was suspicious of excessive concentrations of government power, and honored the New Deal as an effort to achieve a democratic socialist society. Solidly based upon the New Deal tradition in its advocacy of wide-ranging social legislation, the Fair Deal differed enough to claim a separate identity.
1950s, in film. This may be a better list, if for no other reason than it has recorded dates to each film.
1950s, Cold War within the Intelligence community: CIA v. Wisconsin Senator, Joseph McCarthy.
1950, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is published.
1950-1953, Korean War.
1951, American Betrayal at the 1951 San Francisco Peace Conference and the Roots of Korean-Japanese Conflict. h/t Robert Wenzel @ TargetLibery.
1951, MK-Ultra, McGill University.
1951, Truman relieves General MacArthur of his duties . . . in a ceremony on Wake Island.
In perhaps the most famous civilian-military confrontation in the history of the United States, President Harry S. Truman relieves General Douglas MacArthurof command of the U.S. forces in Korea. The firing of MacArthur set off a brief uproar among the American public, but Truman remained committed to keeping the conflict in Korea a “limited war.”
Problems with the flamboyant and egotistical General MacArthur had been brewing for months. In the early days of the war in Korea (which began in June 1950), the general had devised some brilliant strategies and military maneuvers that helped save South Korea from falling to the invading forces of communist North Korea. As U.S. and United Nations forces turned the tide of battle in Korea, MacArthur argued for a policy of pushing into North Korea to completely defeat the communist forces. Truman went along with this plan, but worried that the communist government of the People’s Republic of China might take the invasion as a hostile act and intervene in the conflict. In October 1950, MacArthur met with Truman and assured him that the chances of a Chinese intervention were slim. Then, in November and December 1950, hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops crossed into North Korea and flung themselves against the American lines, driving the U.S. troops back into South Korea. MacArthur then asked for permission to bomb communist China and use Nationalist Chinese forces from Taiwan against the People’s Republic of China. Truman flatly refused these requests and a very public argument began to develop between the two men.
1952, J. Edgar Hoover.
1952, Robert Taft defeated. Taft lost the Republican nomination to General Eisenhower. The Democratic nominee was Adlaia Stevenson.
1952, US Drops Fleas with Bubonic Plague on North Korea.
1953, Stalin dies. “Thousands of people lined up in the snow to see it. The crowds were so dense and chaotic outside that some people were trampled underfoot, others rammed against traffic lights, and some others choked to death. It is estimated that 500 people lost their lives while trying to get a glimpse of Stalin’s corpse.”
1953, IRS (Internal Revenue Service) was created in the United States.
1953-1961, Eisenhower Administration. Robert Welch (and his The Politician), head of the John Birch Society and campaigner for Robert Taft in 1952, outed Eisenhower as the most communist man in America second only to Allen Dulles.
Here Charles Burris explains how un-Repulican his administration was. Here are two more terrific articles by Charles Burris, here and here.
1954, Soviet Union requested to join NATO. Read just below:
“In 1955 a meeting of the heads of government of the USSR, USA, Britain and France took place in Geneva. Sharp exchanges occurred revealing serious differences between the former allies. Eisenhower, Eden and Edgar Faure fiercely argued that NATO was a force for peace, especially in Europe, whereas in fact their plan was aimed at swallowing up East Germany into West Germany, and whitewashing the remilitarisation of West Germany in peace-loving propaganda.
In an effort to deprive the three Western powers of their notion that the Soviet Union was not doing its part in consolidating peace, the Soviet delegation, consisting of Khrushchev, Bulganin, Molotov, Marshal Zhukov and myself, announced that the Soviet Union was willing to join NATO. We argued that, since NATO was dedicated to the cause of peace, it could not but agree to include the USSR. It is hard to describe the effect this announcement had on the Western delegations when it was made by Bulganin, as President of the Council of Ministers. They were so stunned that for several minutes none of them said a word. Eisenhower’s usual vote-winning smile vanished from his face. He leaned over for a private consultation with Dulles, but we were not given a reply to our proposal.
1954, Warsaw Pact.
1954, Brown v. Board of Education. Landmark case that declared state laws for separate schools for whites and blacks as unconstitutional. The Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of all public schools. Pat Buchanan notes that “Yet the Supreme Court not deterred in its resolve to remake America. In 1973, the Court discovered the right to an abortion in the 9th Amendment. Then it found, also hidden in the Constitution, the right to engage in homosexual sodomy.” Here is a little background on desegregation. After the war, it was all but understood that democracy would thrive without further intervention of the federal government on states’ rights.
14th Amendment. The Equal Protection Clause is part of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The clause, which took effect in 1868, provides that no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction “the equal protection of the laws.” The point of this is that why would the federal government need the 1954 landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education if the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment already provided for the law to not discriminate? The answer is that is that liberal Supreme Court justices wanted to go further. Instead of laws enforcing anti-discrimination, the liberal SC judges were pursuing integration.
Kevin Gutzman points out that “Liberal justices, led in this case by Clinton appointee, Stephen Breyer, generally hold that Brown and its progeny committed the Court and the country to racial integration. Ever since 1971’s Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education decision, the Court’s liberal wing has supported race discrimination aimed at fostering integration. (Beans must be counted before they can be sorted, that is.) The liberal wing considers discrimination of this kind, whether in the form of busing, of racial exclusion, or of any of numerous other race-conscious policies, “benign.”
Gutzman continues, “. . . Brown v. Board of Education was an instance of judicial legislation, plain and simple, and none of the three positions staked out by the current justices has any relationship to the Equal Protection Clause’s actual meaning. Brown really was “new law for a new day,” and this revision of the Constitution was entirely the act of federal judges.”
Paul Craig Roberts [with Lawrence M. Stratton] raises some great questions on the con that is Brown v. Board of Education. He asks “Why does Brown generate unthinking, uninformed support? Could it be that Brown is supported because it is understood as a continuation of Reconstruction against the south? Has Brown become central to the intellectual and moral ascendancy gained for minorities by exploiting WASP guilt? Is this intellectual and moral ascendancy based on white guilt the reason that anyone who points out the cons of the Brown decision risks being demonized?”
Paul Craig Roberts adds that “The Brown decision was not a 14th Amendment case, because the same Congress that had passed the 14th Amendment had also segregated the schools in the District of Columbia. That fact made the argument unconvincing that Congress intended the 14th Amendment to abolish segregation. The Plessy decision six decades prior to Brown had ruled that segregation was a social convention that did not imply inequality before the law. Precedent against a 14th Amendment case was overwhelming.”
Black Education: Legacy left over from slavery or from welfare society of the 1960s? by Walter Williams.
On Justice Black, I found this write-up funny:
Among the strongest supporters of the Supreme Court’s decision to outlaw racial segregation in public education in Brownwas Justice Hugo Black, an Alabama native who had joined the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s in an attempt to increase his electoral prospects for a U.S. Senate race, which he later won at the age of 40. Black had dropped out of the Klan prior to his arrival in the Senate, several years before being appointed in 1937 as the first of what eventually became eight Supreme Court justices picked by President Franklin Roosevelt. During his 34 years on the court Black became one of the most forceful advocates of decisions that struck down various forms of racial discrimination. Late in his life, Black’s daughter said of him, “My father used to wear white robes and scare black people. Now he wears black robes and scares white people.”
1953-1961, You cannot look at the Eisenhower Administration without some kind of study of the Dulles brothers. The best interview I’ve listened to on this topic was on the Robert Wenzel Show of a guy by the name of Stephen Kinzer. His book, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War.
1954, McCarthy Hearings and HUAC. Charles Burris explains how the secret government worked to discredit Joe and his efforts.
1954, May 6, Roger Bannister breaks 4-minute mile.
AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS 1955-1965
1955, Starts with the shooting of Emmett Till.
1955, founding of National Review and its rapid rise to dominance of the conservative movement. It was National Review that, consciously and cleverly, transformed the content of the Old Right into something very like its opposite, while preserving the old forms and rituals, such as lip service to the free market and to the Constitution of the United States. It was, as the great Garet Garrett said about the New Deal in the American polity, a “revolution within the form.”
1955, December 1, Rosa Parks is arrested for NOT sitting in the back of the Montgomery bus. Here is her arrest warrant. Here is Dr. Gary North on Tactics of Christian Resistance where he mentions Rosa Parks.
1956, Dr. North said that he was influenced by a 1956 anti-communist speech given by Dr. North said that he was influenced by a 1956 anti-communist speech given by Dr. Fred Schwarz.
I came into the conservative movement in 1956 in response to a lecture by the anti-Communist Australian physician, Fred Schwarz. I was taught civics in 1958-59 in high school by the man who was probably the most conservative high school teacher in the state of California, and probably on the entire West Coast: Wayne Roy. He was legendary in the district.
I was the part of the Goldwater for Vice President movement in 1960. There were not many of us, especially in California.
I started reading The Freeman [now the Foundation for Economic Freedom] in 1957, a little over a year after it began publication. I started reading National Review in 1959, when I went off to college.
Well, that was interesting. And here is Wikipedia’s introduction on Fred Schwarz.
Frederick Charles Schwarz,MD (15 January 1913 – 24 January 2009) was an Australian physician and political activist who founded the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade (CACC). He made a number of speaking tours in the USA in the 1950s, and in 1960 moved his base of operations to California.[1] He was the author of the international bestseller, You Can Trust The Communists (to be Communists), Prentice Hall, 1960. Dr Schwarz worked with his wife, Lillian Schwarz, from abroad and, in his later years, at their home in Camden, near Sydney, in the Australian state of New South Wales.
1958, John Kenneth Galbraith, Canadian economist, taught at Harvard and Princeton. He was essentially the court economist, the man who was justifying the economic policies on which the state was operating on to re-distribute wealth from productive people to government-connected people. Murray Rothbard called it correctly, calling Galbraith a guy who made a career and a fortune denouncing affluence but owning several mansions and skiing in exclusive Gstaad, Switzerland.
1958, John Birch Society, JBS, founded by Robert W. Welch, Jr. and Fred C. Koch, father of Charles and David, in Wisconsin. Charles Burris has the skinny.
From its beginning in 1958 the John Birch Society was a tightly organized, dogmatically rigid, hierarchical entity with autocratic founder Robert Welch in absolute control of the Belmont, MA command structure. It was deliberately authoritarian in nature, modeled on the cadre structure of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) which was perceived as its principal ideological adversary. It was not conceived as an organization for free and open discussion or debate but as an educational/political action organization with a specific agenda and rigid dogma dictated from Belmont.
What I found interesting was this comment:
Welch described Eisenhower in early drafts of The Politician as “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.
Burris adds that he has never believed this or supported these unproven assertions. Did not realize that Larry McDonald, second president of the John Birch Society and also a cousin of General George S. Patton, was JBS’s 2nd president. Wow!! Wikipedia explains:
In a 1983 edition of Crossfire, Congressman Larry McDonald (D–Georgia), then its newly appointed president, characterized the society as belonging to the Old Right rather than the New Right.[14]
1958, October 1, NASA is established. As to the 1969, Apollo 11 moon landing, be sure to check this out. The U.S. began its interest in rocketry back in the 1930s, culminating in the creation and building of JPL. But Jack Parsons should be credited with the interest in rocketry in the United States. He had been in communication with Werner von Braun back in the ’30s. Parsons was killed in 1952.
1959, Ben Hur
1960, Anti-Catholic Truman boycotts Kennedy nomination at the DNC at the LA Sports Arena, which is now torn down. The irony, of course, is that Truman was a staunch Democrat until it came to Catholics.
1960, To Kill a Mockingbird is published.
1960, Inherit the Wind on the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee.
1960, Elmer Gantry
As for the movies, two stand out as turning points: Inherit the Wind (1960) and Elmer Gantry (1960). These came in the wake of the spectacularly successful Ben Hur (1959). They represent the first full-scale Hollywood assault on Protestant fundamentalism. I will also highlight films that were part of the culture war that followed. Bonnie and Clyde will be on the list. So will the beach blanket movies. Annette Funicello was surely a reigning symbol of the early 1960s: the 1950s, all grown up.
TV and sports came together in the 1960s to create a cultural empire. In sports, the supreme figure was Clay/Ali: as a media figure, a religious figure, and a political figure. He could talk. Has any sports figure been a more engaging talker? And he could really fight. A few years ago, he observed that if people around the world loved each other the way that they love him, there would be more peace in this world. He was correct.
1961, January 17. There was, of course, Eisenhower’s famous Farewell Address:
1961, Bay of Pigs.
1962, Cuban Missile Crisis.
1963, The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
Gary North comments following Friedan’s death in 2006:
“What I did not know at the time — few people did — is that Betty Friedan had been a dedicated Stalinist in college. She had also been the mistress/lover/sweetie-pie of Manhattan Project director J. Robert Oppenheimer, which does not prove that Oppie was a Communist—only that he had excruciatingly bad taste in women. This information became public knowledge with the publication of Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique (1999), by Professor Daniel Horowitz. David Horowitz — no relation — then told the world about this in a 1999 book review published in Salon. On his website, David Horowitz adds this:
The actual facts of Friedan’s life — that she was a professional Marxist ideologue, that her husband supported her full-time writing and research, that she had a maid and lived in a Hudson River mansion, attending very little to household duties — were inconvenient to the persona and the theory she was determined to promote.
She was the primary founder of the National Organization of Women. I referred to her as “The Nose” in my summary of my proposed homeschool course on the ‘sixties, published on LewRockwell.com on February 2.”
1963, June 10, JFK’s Commencement Address at American University.
1963, June 12, Civil Rights organizer and NAACP member, Medgar Evers is assassinated.
1963, August 28. “I Have a Dream” Speech presented in D.C. King plagiarized a lot. I did not know of his real name, Michael King. FAther and son changed their names to give them both more dignity. The name change was never official. He lived and died as Michael King, but the media presented him to the world as Martin Luther King, Jr. He never officially changed it, however. I’d heard that he had extra-marital affairs; just didn’t know that he had those affairs with other men’s wives. And this from a Baptist minister. Here is a little background on the speech.
Mahalia Jackson was the most famous gospel singer in the world in 1963. She had been working with King since 1957. Repeatedly, she sang where he spoke. They were good friends. He trusted her.
1963, JFK Assassination. Terrific resources on the assassination from Charles Burris.
1963, November 22, JFK is assassinated. Gary North takes stock of American culture following that national tragedy. “On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in the city of Dallas. This event ended the self-confidence of post-war humanistic liberalism. Beginning ten weeks later, American culture entered a period of unprecedented social change. Campus riots, race riots, the anti-war movement, a huge increase in crime, hard rock music, drugs, pornography, and radical art forms combined into what became known as the counter-culture. American society was turned upside-down until 1970. Then the “Me decade” began.”
Roger Stone provides the best analysis on LBJ’s role in the assassination of JFK. He’s out with a couple of books. One is LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination, 2013. Another is The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ, 2014. And a third book, Richard Nixon: The Rise, Fall, and Unknown Truth About the President, Watergate, and the Pardon, 2014.
1964, Civil Rights Act.
Gary North nails it again. “The protests of the early 1960’s got it right. When white Northerners, mostly young, streamed into the South to help get blacks registered to vote, they did not wear clown suits. The young men wore white shirts and ties; the young women wore conservative dresses. They conducted themselves as adults. They got themselves beaten up on national TV. Three were murdered. Within a decade, those protests and newly registered voters had transformed Southern culture and Southern politics. The Jim Crow laws of the 1880’s finally ceased to be enforced in the early 1970’s. Those protest movements had a specific agenda, and they were successful. They had a focused agenda, based on the concept of civil rights, and that agenda became federal law in 1964, and it became culturally dominant by 1974. The bloody reactions to those protests embarrassed moderate white segregationists — the political majority — and this embarrassment led to their complete capitulation within a decade. They seemed unbeatable in 1955. They were relics by 1975. That was not done by the New Left. The Civil Rights Act of July 1964 preceded the New Left’s protests at Berkeley by about two months.”
1964, Berkeley Free Speech Movement.
1964, Phyllis Schlafly’s landmark book, “A Choice Not an Echo,” became the motto of Barry Goldwater’s grass-roots movement. Gary North made this comment about Schlafly, “She is 90 years old. She never tires out. She never changes her hair. (Hillary Clinton should take notice.) She remains the only conservative Republican who ever made a real difference in American political life. She stopped the ERA. Without her efforts and the efforts of Eagle Forum, that amendment would have passed.”
Read more at http://teapartyeconomist.com/2015/02/23/schlafly-still-no-choice-still-an-echo/#m2CVZXhbFrqS6j2H.99
1964, LBJ’s War on Poverty. And here from the Washington Post.
1965, Wenzel on the War on Poverty here.
Gary North on the bastard nation, feds losing the war on poverty here,
War on poverty was a war on the family by Mcalvany Intelligence Advisor. From the MIA report above, Bob Adelmann explains:
But what about the intended beneficiaries? How are they doing?
Not so well. The latest from the Census Bureau shows that the percentage of American children living in poverty is more than one in five: 21.3 percent, to be exact. Back in 1964, it was 22.7 percent. But the real casualty has been the American family, especially the black American family.
Walter Williams has been reporting on that war for years now, and he noted that before war was declared, poverty among black families had dropped from 87 percent in 1940 to 45 percent by 1960. But ever since war was declared, black families and their children have seen those numbers stall. Said the bureau:
In 2012, a child living in a single female-headed family was well over four times more likely to be poor than a child living in a married-couple family.
In 2012, among all children living in single female-headed families, 47.2 percent were poor.
Most of those single female-headed households are black, at least for the moment. The Associated Press noted in 2010:
Children of unmarried mothers of any race are more likely to perform poorly in school, go to prison, use drugs, be poor as adults, and have their own children out of wedlock.
The black community’s 72 percent [illegitimacy] rate eclipses that of most other groups: 17 percent of Asians, 29 percent of whites, 53 percent of Hispanics, and 66 percent of Native Americans were born to unwed mothers in 2008….
At the time, the AP writer tried to explain away the huge discrepancy by blaming it on the latent remaining legacy of segregation and the drug epidemic that has put huge numbers of black males behind bars. In his commentary, however, he revealed the real reason: “Welfare [state] laws created a financial incentive for poor mothers to stay single.”
The breakdown and virtual disappearance of the black family unit was predicted back in 1965 by former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his book The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. He said:
The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States….
At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of the Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family.
His book was met with withering criticism at the time because he blamed the disintegration (black illegitimacy at the time was just 26 percent) on the destruction of the nuclear family – i.e., mom, dad and kids – rather than on the politically correct mindset at the time: economic conditions were primarily responsible for social success. Moynihan later noted: “It turned out that what everyone knew [to be true] was evidently not so.”
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In 1935, Congress created three safety-net programs aimed at alleviating poverty: Social Security, which is for the old and disabled, Unemployment Insurance, which is for those temporarily out of a job, and Aid to Dependent Children, whose name was later changed to Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The latter is what we typically think of as “welfare”—cash transfers intended to help widows with children.
In 1996, former President Bill Clinton pledged to “end welfare as we know it,” and AFDC morphed into TANF—Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. A five-year time limit was introduced, and mothers were required to work 30 hours per week or risk losing their benefits. States’ funds were capped, pressuring them to slice welfare rolls.
1965, LBJ modifies FDR’s Social Security and introduces Medicare. “Lack of adequate protection for the aged against the cost of health care was the major gap in the protection of the social insurance system in 1963. Meeting this need of the aged was given top priority by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Administration, and a year and a half after he took office this objective was achieved when a new program, “Medicare,” was established by the 1965 amendments to the social security program.”
1965, Immigration & Nationality Act, opened the doors to Latin American immigrants and closed the doors to European immigrants. Television series, like “I Love Lucy” and TV personalities like Carmen Miranda, Charo and her first husband, Xavier Cugat, all served to make Latin culture in America legitimate. Fine, but then the government got involved and began to invent a poster-child for welfare: the helpless Latin immigrant. Stories of the poverty in Mexico began flooding in. When the Japanese banks flooded the United States in the 70’s and 80’s, we heard not about their poverty but about how smart the Japanese were.
On the 1965 Immigration Act, Wikipedia states
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (H.R. 2580; Pub.L. 89–236, 79 Stat. 911, enacted June 30, 1968), also known as the Hart–Celler Act,[1] changed the way quotas were allocated by ending the National Origins Formula that had been in place in the United States since the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. Representative Emanuel Celler of New York proposed the bill, Senator Philip Hart of Michigan co-sponsored it, and Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts helped to promote it.
The Hart–Celler Act abolished the quota system based on national origins that had been American immigration policy since the 1920s. The new law maintained the per-country limits, but it also created preference visa categories that focused on immigrants’ skills and family relationships with citizens or U.S. residents. The bill set numerical restrictions on visas at 170,000 per year, with a per-country-of-origin quota. However, immediate relatives of U.S. citizens and “special immigrants” had no restrictions.
1965, The Voting Rights Act. Two years ago in Florida, Laurence Vance observed that his “. . . state of Florida recently held a primary election. The vote in five counties had to be supervised by the feds. I also heard that the feds have blocked early voting in Ohio. Repeal the Voting Rights Act.”
1965, Malcom X is (1925 to Feb. 21, 1965) is assassinated. “Malcolm X who became a Muslim Sunni left the Nation of Islam because he found them to be not truly Muslim but a black supremacy group. He was assassinated by three members of the “Nation of Islam.” Actually Farrakhan is not considered by the Muslims a true adherent to Islam. Malcolm X found this out when he was not allowed to go to the holy place in Mecca. With this new revelation he came back and after he started saying they had it wrong he was assassinated.”
VIETNAM WAR, 1960-1975
(Said to be the war to end the Cold War.)
JFK
I’ve read several books on JFK’s assassination. Douglas’s book explains which groups were responsible for the planning, the execution, and the cover-up of JFK’s assassination. He points to JFK’s last year where he was working in conjunction with Soviet Premier Khrushchev to disarm both countries of nuclear arsenal and make the world a safer place for people to flourish. Here is one online JFK Library resource. Schools often teach JFK’s “Ask not what your country do for you, as what you can do for your country” speech. But more importantly, I believe, is JFK’s Commencement Address at American University on June 10, 1963.
The Killing Fields is available at YouTube for a $1.99. It does not stream at Netflix.
Platoon is streaming at Netflix.
We Were Soldiers is an excellent movie, much better than Platoon, for showing the human side of the enemy, a feature that most movies fail to do. I watched Mel Gibson’s movie We Were Soldiers today. Though it is not a direct anti-war movie or open protest against war in general, the effect leaves you regretting the wasteful losses that result from war. And the boys that fight don’t fight or die for the country; they fight and die for each other. One song featured in the movie is “Sgt. MacKenzie,” a lament written by Joseph Kilna MacKenzie in memory of his grandfather. The story is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sgt._MacKenzie.
Here is the haunting but reverent lament. Oh, and I encourage you, if you haven’t already, to see the movie. The movie raises an important issue of war theory, the idea of body count as a criteria for victory or defeat. To the U.S., the more enemy soldiers killed means victory. See this article for a review that theory.
1965, Video review of the battle at Ia Drang Valley.
1965, This is a must-view. Hal Moore and the Battle of Ia Drang Valley.
1967, U.S.S. Liberty, a U.S. spy ship, was sunk by Israel. President Johnson ordered the bombing of the Liberty by Israeli soldiers. James Corbett explains that “In June 1967 the Israelis attacked the USS Liberty, a US Navy technical research ship, off the coast of Egypt. The ship was strafed relentlessly for hours in an apparent attempt to blame the attack on Egypt and draw the Americans into the Six Day War, but amazingly the crew managed to keep it afloat. In 2007 newly released NSA intercepts confirmed that the Israelis knew they were attacking an American ship, not an Egyptian ship as their cover story has maintained.”
John McCain’s father was involved in ordering the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty as well as involved in the cover-up.
1967, June 8. More on this Israeli attack to draw the U.S. into the 6-Day War. And if you want to read more about witnesses and survivors of the U.S.S. Liberty, check out this article.
1967, The Black Panthers launched a bit of lawfare that brought about a ban on the open carry of loaded guns in California. It is hard to believe that the change in law was not what the Panthers intended, though they claimed to support the right to bear arms. Remember, the Panthers openly supported armed revolution in the United States. The day the gun control bill was before the legislature, the Panthers showed up at the capitol, carrying their guns in a threatening manner, unlike the open carry protests of today. The summer of 1967 was the year of race riots in much of the nation.
The panthers’ demonstrations resulted in the ban on the open carry of loaded guns that was signed by Ronald Reagan. This has been twisted by the left to claim that the Panthers initiated the gun rights movement in the United States. Nothing could be further from the truth. California had always been less than supportive of the second amendment. California does not have a right to keep and bear arms clause in its constitution, because the state government wanted to be able to disarm Mexicans and Chinese. California concealed carry law was originally passed in 1923, with the intention of making sure that minorities were disarmed.
1967, Black Panthers had a hand in shaping California gun control laws under Reagan. Article worth reading.
1967, Bonnie & Clyde
I saw this movie at the Foothill Drive-In Theater on Foothill in Azusa with Chuck Pullman.
1968, March 16, My Lai Massacre. William Calley convicted on 6 charges of murder. This is stunning
An Army board of inquiry, headed by Lt. Gen. William Peers, investigated the massacre and produced a list of 30 persons who knew of the atrocity, but only 14, including Calley and his company commander, Captain Ernest Medina, were charged with crimes. All eventually had their charges dismissed or were acquitted by courts-martial except Calley, whose platoon allegedly killed 200 innocents. He was found guilty of personally murdering 22 civilians and sentenced to life imprisonment, but his sentence was reduced to 20 years by the Court of Military Appeals and further reduced later to 10 years by the Secretary of the Army. Proclaimed by much of the public as a “scapegoat,” Calley was paroled by President Richard Nixon in 1974 after having served about a third of his 10-year sentence.
For an excellent discussion on the event, on Calley, and on the fallout, give a listen to John Sacks’ October 25, 1971 talk given at UCLA.
Wow. Sacks explains that the moment that U.S. soldiers land in Vietnam they are in violation of the Geneva Convention. For a list of books on the Vietnam War, see this.
1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. (Jan. 15, 1929 to April 4, 1968) is assassinated. The FBI was trying to get King to commit suicide. They drafted this letter to get that task done. Here is a good analysis by historian, Dr. Gary North, on the event that we know today as the “I Have a Dream” march and speech. Dr. King not quite following the script that day, said “Thank God, Almighty, We’re At Last!” He didn’t say “Thank Stalin, Almighty.” He thanked God. So whatever your opinion about MLK’s legacy is, he did work to shift his peace and non-violent movement away from socialist thought.
1968, Robert F. Kennedy (1925-June 9, 1968) is assassinated in the Ambassador Hotel in Hollywood two months later. Shane O’Sullivan’s is the best documentary that I’ve seen on the RFK Assassination. Sirhan Sirhan was charged with his murder and still sits in a California jail. “He is currently serving a life sentence at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego County, California.”
Oliver Stone’s JFK, 1994, for me was the definitive movie that alerted me to government corruption and assassinations and helped launch for me my own inquiry into JFK’s assassination. The movie is riveting. It is not available on Netflix, but YouTube does have the director’s cut, which is excellent, for $1.99.
1968, Gun Control Act.
1969, NEA said “the Path to Change to transforming American lives” requires that schools become psycho-social clinics with teachers becoming psycho-social therapists to make this happen. This is incredible. Back in May of 2016, the Portland, Oregon school district banned any opposing view on climate change. The schools really are psychosocial clinics.
1970s, WWII rent control laws in New York incentivizes arson in the Bronx and the South Bronx.
1970, May 4, Kent State Shooting. The anti-war demonstrations ended after this shooting.
1971, Nixon coins the phrase “War on Drugs,” but this is far from being the first concept of a war on drugs. The FBI and CIA have pursued their own war on substance users in your local neighborhood throughout the 20th century.
The term was popularized by the media shortly after a press conference given on June 18, 1971, by President Richard Nixon—the day after publication of a special message from President Nixon to the Congress on Drug Abuse Prevention and Control—during which he declared drug abuse “public enemy number one”. That message to the Congress included text about devoting more federal resources to the “prevention of new addicts, and the rehabilitation of those who are addicted”, but that part did not receive the same public attention as the term “war on drugs”.[10][11][12] However, two years prior to this, Nixon had formally declared a “war on drugs” that would be directed toward eradication, interdiction, and incarceration.[13] Today, the Drug Policy Alliance, which advocates for an end to the War on Drugs, estimates that the United States spends $51 billion annually on these initiatives
1972, Watergate.
1972, June 17. Charles Burris writes on Saturday, June 17, 2017
Today is the 45th anniversary of the June 17, 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Complex in Washington, D.C. Here is Barbara Newman’s searing 1992 A&E Investigative Reports documentary, The Key To Watergate, which explores what was really behind the Watergate burglary which led to President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation. Phil Stanford’s White House Call Girl: The Real Watergate Story, is the best book on the topic. All of these damning revelations are, of course, strenuously denied by establishment media gatekeepers Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who shaped the Watergate mythos.
1972, George Wallace was shot five times by Arthur Bremer. “Bremer was found guilty and sentenced to 63 years (53 years after an appeal) in a Maryland prison for the shooting of Wallace and three bystanders.” Wallace lived but spent the rest of his life in a wheel chair. Bremer served 35 years and was released from prison in 2007.
1973, Roe v. Wade. And its implications.
“The 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade has come and gone,” writes Laurence Vance. The result has been 55 million legal abortions. The Religious Right denounced abortion and the decision as would be expected. I have no problem with that, although I do have problems with the pro-life movement. As anyone know who has read my articles on abortion knows, I oppose both abortion and Roe v. Wade. But what I want to point out is one reason why the pro-life movement doesn’t doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere. According to the Guttmacher Institute, in 2008, 37.3 percent of women getting abortions were Protestant and 28.1 percent were Catholic. It sounds like the Religious Right should be preaching to its own. Now, pro-lifers can dispute these percentages all they want, but I find it hard to believe that everyone who gets an abortion is an atheist. And to the shame of Christians, I don’t think it is Muslim women that are getting abortions. And, of course, there is also the continued Republican support in Congress for Planned Parenthood.”
According to Will Anderson, “Roe v. Wade did not “legalize” abortion as such, but rather was a punitive ruling that forbade states from restricting abortion during the first 12 weeks and basically abolishing most restrictions all the way until actual birth. To put it another way, it forced states to make abortion on demand a legal entity.” He adds that “The law permitting abortion in California was signed by then Governor Ronald Reagan,” which I think is interesting since Reagan is held up as the conservatives’ saint.
1974, A must-see documentary on the Vietnam War is Hearts and Minds (1974), produced by Bert Schneider and Peter Davis.
Gary North points the searchlight on three political outsiders, guys who worked in the halls of government but worked it to the end of a Christian, limited-government vision. I post this excerpt from North because these 4 gentlemen served during the 70s..
Ron Paul was the only man we ever had in Washington who was the incarnation of Albert J. Nock’s principle of the remnant. The remnant found him. He did not seek it. Nock was opposed to political mobilization, and his classic essay, “Isaiah’s Job,” explained why in 1936.
A similar figure was Howard Buffett (1903-1964), Warren’s father, who served in the Truman era.
A third man who had a career anything like this was Larry McDonald (1935-1983). He was the representative of the John Birch Society. He and Ron Paul cooperated. In fact, I got my job with Ron Paul in 1976 because McDonald told him that I was available. McDonald had no illusions of being able to persuade anybody in the Democratic Party of the legitimacy of his views. His views ceased to be published when Korean Airlines flight 007 disappeared. (Note: I did not write “shot down.” There is a reason for this.)
H. R. Gross [(1899-1987), an Iowa Congressman], for a quarter of a century challenged the spending of the federal government. It did no good. But at least he became the only Congressman for whom the House of Representatives reserved the same bill number in every Congress for Gross’s futile law to balance the budget: H.R. 144. (144 is a gross.)
North also mentions Paul Weyrich, who founded the Committee for the Revival of a Free Congress and the Heritage Foundation in 1075. I do not konw how I missed these folks but I did. North offers a letter written by Weyrich in 1999, where he explains how Cultural Marxism is destroying our Jedeo-Christian culture. Here’s an excerpt from that letter:
Those who came up with Political Correctness, which we more accurately call “Cultural Marxism,” did so in a deliberate fashion. I’m not going to go into the whole history of the Frankfurt School and Herbert Marcuse and the other people responsible for this. Suffice it to say that the United States is very close to becoming a state totally dominated by an alien ideology, an ideology bitterly hostile to Western culture. Even now, for the first time in their lives, people have to be afraid of what they say. This has never been true in the history of our country. Yet today, if you say the “wrong thing,” you suddenly have legal problems, political problems, you might even lose your job or be expelled from college. Certain topics are forbidden. You can’t approach the truth about a lot of different subjects. If you do, you are immediately branded as “racist”, “sexist”, “homophobic”, “insensitive”, or “judgmental.”
BTW, this anxiety with Cultural Marxism is not some flight of paranoia that you hear or read about in right-of-center publications or alt-right publications, this stuff is real and really destructive to Judeo-Christian values. Here is Zero Hedge’s overview of Cultural Marxism. The following video is an excellent presentation of the history of politically correct thought from communism to Cultural Marxism to Poilitical Correct thinking today. Do not miss it. Originally appeared at Robert Wenzel’s Target Liberty.
1975, President Gerard R. Ford, an unelected president, presides over the closing of the Vietnam War.
1975, Church Committee was the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. “In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting Communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran.” (1)
1976, Mao dies.
WRITTEN HISTORY ON THE VIETNAM WAR
Start here:
“Vietnam Falls: It Is Time to Establish Responsibility.”
Here is a compelling excerpt from the above article:
To young people, perhaps coming in very late to the Vietnam story, it will seem amazing that the United States Government was responsible for dusting off Ho chi Minh, after twenty years of failure, and unleashing him upon Vietnam! But that is exactly what happened.
Ho’s anti-Japanese activities were minimal, but the Japanese turned over their weapons to his Viet Minh in August of 1945, which soon gave the French something with which to contend. In March, 1946, a Leftist French Government was ready to let Ho have the North, but he wanted everything, and made his bid with a surprise attack on Hanoi on the night of December 19, 1946. Thus began the eight-year war with France.
The recently retired General Edward Lansdale, one of our C.I.A. generals and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, won his spurs by helping Ho chi Minh. The Emperor of Indochina, Bao Dai, had been captured by the Communists in 1946, and once recalled that this was when he first met Lansdale. “The difference between his presence and mine is that he was there by choice,” the Emperor remarked. For the next thirty years, we were to hear of Lansdale as the hero of The Ugly American (a “sponsored” book by a fellow spook), and as the great expert on guerrilla warfare. The great expert was also a chronic loser to his old friend Ho chi Minh.
. . . another great excerpt:
“In the North, Ho chi Minh settled undisturbed into his “period of consolidation.” Dienbienphu was, for him, a classic Pyrrhic victory—his Army was in shreds, and had to be rebuilt. Then, too, there was the matter of Communist “land reform.” This is always a bloody process; it is nothing less than the complete subjugation of the rural population, so that they are nothing but serfs thereafter. What Leftist scholar A. Doak Barnett refers to as a “peasant revolt” in the North in 1956 was an expression of the total desperation of the people under Communism – clubs against machine guns. Though inured to the routine sufferings of being Asian peasants, the people were in the clutches of a government which forced them to allow the children of executed “class enemies” to starve to death in the open fields. The horrors of a Communist “period of consolidation” have been amply recorded in Congressional Hearings, but they are not a favorite topic of our Leftist mass media.”
and further . . .
That accomplished, President Johnson, along with his crew of “hawks” like Dean Rusk, Walt Rostow, and Robert McNamara (C.F.R. all), and politician-general Maxwell Taylor (C.F.R.), proceeded to pour in the American troops. But the war was not to be run by the military. It was to be run by civilian “whiz kids” of the sort who helped McNamara to begin the gigantic program of disarming America from 1961 onward. Among those civilians was Daniel Ellsberg (C.F.R.).
American troops disembarked, American bombers flew – but never was there a better example of the old French saying, “The more it changes, the more it is the same thing.” General Ira Eaker commented that, in our wars prior to Korea, we had professional (military) leaders and amateur soldiers, but that we now had professional soldiers and amateur leaders. That was not the real problem, however. Amateurs would at least be capable of learning, eager to do so, and ready to seek professional advice. But the Council on Foreign Relations clique knew what it wanted—a “better” no-win war than Korea—and that is what they got.
There is really no point in attempting to sketch the American military campaigns in Vietnam, because they were militarily irrational. President Johnson, reports General Curtis LeMay, repeatedly told the military men that they were in Vietnam “to prevent aggression from succeeding [sic!] without attempting either to conquer or invade or destroy North Vietnam.”
As ever, “measured response” meant guaranteed insufficient response. It was a war in which the paper jungle of the “Rules of Engagement” was worse than the real jungle; it was an undeclared war in which the only home-front mobilization was on behalf of the enemy! The United States Government wouldn’t even move against the authors of poison-pen letters and phone-calls tormenting the families of killed and missing men. We would not even accept the offer of the great anti-Communist leader Le van Vien to lead a private force to liberate our men being tortured in enemy concentration camps.
1978, Jonestown Massacre, named for Jonestown, Guyana. Jonestown was a CIA settlement. It was a social experiment that ultimately was responsible for the murder of hundreds of innocent, God-loving families. Wikipedia lies in its reporting of the incident, describing their deaths as “people died in the settlement.” No, they were murdered. It was an event of mass murder. It was cult suicide, mass murder. It was run in such a way to trap people psychologically, then run a game of mass mind-control, not unlike you saw in 2016 following Trump’s election where liberals were whipped up into a violent frenzy. Jim Jones was a sociopath.
The Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, better known by its informal name “Jonestown“, was a remote settlement established by the Peoples Temple, an American cult under the leadership of reverend Jim Jones, in northwestern Guyana. It became internationally notorious when, on November 18, 1978, a total of 918 [1][2] people died in the settlement, at the nearby airstrip in Port Kaituma, and at a Temple-run building in Georgetown, Guyana’s capital city. The name of the settlement became synonymous with the incidents at those locations.
It’s hard to imagine something as monstrous as this today, but I am sure that I just haven’t read the morning paper yet. Mike Adams puts it into words
As Jim Jones proved, people can be easily swept up into an irrational belief in a guru or prophet who quite literally plans to murder them.
1979, U.S. Dept. of Education is created under Carter, October 17. Standardized testing began with the Dept. of Education. Dept. of Ed. didn’t want to improve education, but they wanted to measure certain aspects of education so they could manipulate it for their own control. George Bush, II’s, No Child Left Behind, turned over the writing of NCLB to Ted Kennedy and John Boehner, the most liberally progressive, morally degenerate member of the Kenndey family, wrote the language for Common Core. Ballotopedia writes
President George W. Bush initially proposed the No Child Left Behind Act on January 23, 2001. It was co-authored by Representatives George Miller and John Boehner and Senators Ted Kennedy and Judd Gregg. The United States House of Representatives passed the bill, voting 384-45 on May 23, 2001.
So Horace Mann is the father of tax-funded, government education. And Thomas Dewey, a card-carrying communist, was the founding father of progressive American education. Architects have told us what they’ve wanted all along:
Public education was not meant to teach kids skills or or make them smarter, but to shape their will, to condition the students to become useful tools of the state. Public education wants to separate kids from parents, to subordinate them to state, to remove critical thinking, and make them good conditioned, little warriors.
Prussian system produced Nazism in some ways, and the communist system looked to the Nazi system to get their educational standards. There is an outright hostility to critical, independent thinking. The state has always been at war with critical thinking. Shouldn’t refer to public schools as public schools but as government schools, for that is who they serve. Federally subsidized schools are really social experiments and not schools. “Schools are there for psycho-social therapy. What do they even mean by that?
1980-1988, Iran-Iraq War.
1980, October Surprise, Bush-Reagan negotiated with radical Iranians to delay the release of American hostages until Reagan was elected. This list might be more exhaustive on all the different angles, cover-ups, lies, and distortions surrounding American hostages in the American Embassy in Tehran. Remember, too, that Tehran was the seat where the allied powers divvied up Western Europe following the war.
Though last-minute campaign surprises are probably as old as democracy itself, the phrase in its modern usage dates back just over a quarter century to 1980 when President Jimmy Carter was seeking the freedom of 52 American hostages in Iran. Then-vice presidential candidate George H.W. Bush fretted publicly that a hostage release might be an “October Surprise” that would catapult Carter to reelection.
Ironically, however, the 1980 “October Surprise” controversy came to refer to an alleged dirty trick by Bush and other Republicans that thwarted Carter from gaining the hostages’ freedom. Carter’s failure propelled Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. to a landslide victory.
Arguably, the “October Surprise” of 1980 ushered in the modern era of GOP dominance, with the 12 years of the Reagan-Bush administrations. Arguably, too, the Democrats’ failure in December 1992 to get the truth out about the Republican chicanery set the stage for the Right’s congressional resurgence in 1994 and for today’s George W. Bush Era.
1981, the AIDS crisis begins.
Though a lot of people have died, awareness has been raised throughout the world, and communities have been defined by their high rate of exposure and death for which we are all collectively supposed to mourn, some science writers and scientists as well as documentary makers have asserted that AIDS and HIV were a hoax deliberately created and perpetrated by junk science to generate exclusive contracts with the pharmaceutical industries who through their products execute depopulation programs in Africa. What I am saying is that AIDS is a corporate-government scheme to scare the larger population, to kill a society’s undesirables, and to make billions doing so. I do not mean to say that just because AIDS may be a hoax that there are not some very serious diseases one can contract from out-of-wedlock sex. So please do not mistake my intention for raising questions about AIDS. Read Jon Rappoport on AIDS. And watch this 2007 documentary on AIDS.
1983, April 18, bombing of U.S. Embassy in Beruit, Lebanon.
1983, October 23, bombing of U.S. Marine barracks in Beruit, Lebanon.
1983, October 25, two days after the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beruit, the U.S. invades Grenada. Huh.
1984, Olympics in Los Angeles.
1985, May 13. Philadelphia bombing at the hands of the local police. The local police were responding the actions of a group called MOVE, a Philadelphia-based black liberation group founded by John Africa in 1972.
1986, Iran-Contra Affair. From Richard Wall.
In the International Court of Justice, however, Nicaragua had in 1986 successfully sued the government of the United States, being awarded $17 billion on six counts of damages arising out of the Reagan administration’s support for the Contras and direct US military intervention, including the mining of Nicaraguan ports. The US government reacted to this, after the verdict, by withdrawing its earlier declaration accepting the Court’s compulsory jurisdiction. The US ambassador to the United Nations, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, dismissed the Court as a “semi-legal, semi-juridical, semi-political body which nations sometimes accept and sometimes don’t.” So there!
1989, Tiananmen Square Protests.
1989, Fall of the Berlin Wall
from Eric Margolis on November 8, 2014 . . .
In the USSR, resistance among hardline Communists, the military brass and the KGB was intense. Gorbachev would have been unable to sound the retreat without the support of Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze.
He was a remarkable man: the tough former KGB boss of Georgia and Communist Party chief, Shevardnadze seemed an improbable reformer. But he co-authored the liberating policy of glasnost and perestroika and forced its adoption by the unwilling Soviet hierarchy.
I asked [Eduard Shevardnadze] if he might consider becoming president of an independent Georgia – which he later did until overthrown by the US-backed 2003 “rose revolution.”
In secret, Gorbachev and Shevardnadze agreed to a deal with US President George H.W. Bush and his senior strategy officials: the Soviet Union would pull out of Eastern Europe and the Baltic. In exchange, the US vowed not to advance NATO into Eastern Europe or anywhere near Russia’s borders.
Equally important, Gorbachev refused to use force to keep the USSR together.
The Soviet leaders believed they had an ironclad deal. They did not.
The next three US administrations – Clinton, Bush II, and Obama – violated the original sphere of influence accord and began advancing US power east towards Russia’s borders. The most recent NATO foray was the overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian government, a ham-handed act that nearly sparked World War III.
1989, US Invades Panama, December 20, and begins the start of DC’s post-Cold War Imperialism. Read on. And for more about the invasion itself, be sure to watch The Panama Deception. It is by far the best video documentary on the invasion. Remember also that this was 1989, a full 14 years after the Vietnam War ended. That was the longest period of peace time in the US. Between WWII and the Korean War is only 5 years. Between the Korean War and the Vietnam War it is only about 10 years with several clandestine invasions into South and Latin America.
1990, German Reunification.
1991, Collapse of the Soviet Union.
1992, Kyoto Protocol. Gary North points out that “In 1992, the United Nations Organization first introduced the anti-global warming project known as the Kyoto protocols. This was the response of the world socialist movement to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. I have never heard anybody else talk about this timing, but it seems obvious to me. Call me a conspiracy historian.
Two decades earlier, today’s promoters of global warming had predicted a new ice age. That hype didn’t work, so they switched to global warming. “Any port in a storm, and any storm in a port.” He says it is bad science for bad economics. And that it is socialism’s last stand. I agree. Be sure to watch The Great Global Warming Swindle, released in 2007. If it’s not the definitive documentary produced to destroy the anthropomorphic genesis of climate change theory, then it is at least a great documentary all by itself to understand the science behind climate change. It is the best antidote to the communist propaganda of global warming. Enjoy it here.
1992, Sam I. Hayakawa, 1906-1992, dies.
1993, is the renewal year of multiculturalism, though the whole
“Do Illegal Immigrants Steal American Jobs?” by Gary North, 12/2014.
1993 to the present: Slavery Reparations?
1993, April 19. Waco, Texas. The Waco Seige. The Rules of Engagement. Ron Paul on Waco Massacre. You’ll want to read this by Anthony Gregory, who chronicles the BATF’s publicity stunt as a preface to the Massacre of children at Waco. Watch the cruelty of the Feds in Waco: The Rules of Engagement. That’s the official name, and it’s now for rent on YouTube. TopDocumentaryFilms also hosts the documentary, but they simply host the YouTube version for rent at $2.99. I remember I was in UC Irvine’s Periodical section in the Basement working and talking about this horrible event with my coworker, Debra.
1995, Oklahoma City Bombing. Read David Hoffman’s Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror. Then there is the Jesse Trentadue story.
1996, The [CIA] is openly cooperative with Hollywood: in 1996, the role of Entertainment Liaison Officer was created to provide filmmakers with factual advice and authentic props. Chase Brandon, a CIA operative who was a special operative in Panama for 25 years (and Tommy Lee Jones’s cousin), was appointed.
1998, Pentagon Wars. Carl Ewls plays Lt. Colonel James Burton, who is responsible for oversight. The movie, which is excellent, is based on the book by Lt. Colonel James Burton, titled The Pentagon Wars: Reformers Challenge the Old Guard, 1993. A NYT’s article was written in his quasi defense against the military by Tim Weiner.
SURVEILLANCE
1998, Enemy of the State. Tony Scott, brother of British film maker, Ridley Scott, directed Enemy of the State, 1998. I did not know that he committed suicide in San Pedro in 2012.
For articles on the NSA, read those written by James Bamford. James Bamford’s book, The Puzzle Palace (1983). Another book by Bamford is his Pretext to War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies, 2005.
A short fiction classic is Ray Bradbury’s, 1951, “The Pedestrian.”
This should be read in any unit on the creeping surveillance state.
Colored Revolutions . . .
1999, Able Danger. a classified military planning effort led by the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). It was created as a result of a directive from the Joint Chiefs of Staff in early October 1999 by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Hugh Shelton, to develop an information operationscampaign plan against transnational terrorism.
2000, Yugoslavia Bulldozer Revolution.
2001, September 11. Bombings of the World Trade Center in New York. The video here by James Corbett is the best 5-minute overview of the event that I’ve seen.
2001-2010, Catholic Church Sexual Abuse Scandal.
2003, U.S. Invades Iraq.
2003, Georgia’s Rose Revolution.
2004, In Defense of Corporations, Dr. Gary North.
2004, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. November to December, 2004.
2005, Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution.
2005, Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution, February 2005.
2005, Kuwait’s Blue Revolution.
2006, Imperialism the Logic of War Making, Joseph Salerno.
2008, The Soviet Story. Don’t miss this documentary. If any student of literature or history, science or anthropology is ever inclined to embrace socialist ideals, please be aware of the communist preference for killing and mass murder. It was part of the tenet of Marxists, Leninists, communists and socialists the world over. So as you’re sitting in your class and the professor advocates violence as a method for achieving social goals you should immediately submit a letter of complaint to the Ombudsman of your school and cc a copy of it to as many school officials as you can drum up. Any public figure advocating for such violence needs to be censured. He probably won’t lose his job, but he needs to be censured. It should be noted that the communists have done an excellent PR and propaganda job of positioning themselves as the guys who put a stop to the Nazis and to Hitler. They were after all the guys who drove Hitler’s Nazi army all the way back to Berlin. Students should also take note that Hilter was a Marxist. Remember this fact.
Be sure to check out Charles Burris’ comments on this documentary as well as his well-advised reading recommendations on the topic here:
Daniel Hannan’s excellent overview article describing the common collectivist roots of internationalist Marxist Socialism and German National Socialism is a topic that bears constant repetition to the attentive public. The subject has received previous detailed exposure in vital works such as Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Leftism: from de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse, and Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change. I contributed a brief piece myself on the subject at LRC a number of years ago. In the above superb documentary, The Soviet Story, this symbiotic relationship is forcefully driven home. In particular, check out George Watson, author of The Lost Literature of Socialism (beginning at 14:15) who Hannan used as one of his primary reference sources. The brief segment comparing and contrasting contemporary German National Socialist propaganda posters with those of Soviet Union (with the Internationale playing in the back ground) is one of the most amazing examples of film editing I have witnessed. I will be soon showing this superb documentary once again to my World History students next semester in January. I strongly urge you purchase it and the above mentioned books.
2011, U.S. Invasion of Libya and the assassination of Muammar Gaddafi. Here again, we have Wikipedia shilling for the warfare/welfare establishment, calling Ghaddafi’s murder a “death” in its title, “Death of Muammar Gaddafi.” And just as Madeleine Albright rationalized the mass murder of 500,000 Iraqi children, Hillary Clinton offered up her best Caesarian assessment, “We Came, We Saw, He Died.”
2011, Penn State Sexual Abuse Scandal involving Jerry Sandusky (whose son also pleaded guilty to molestation, Oh, my God) and Joe Paterno.
2012, December 14, Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting turns out to be a hoax. If not a shooting, then what was it? It was a drill. Here is a good place to start. And then, of course, there is the courageous Florida college professor, James F. Tracey.
2014, September. Ray Rice hits girlfriend/wife. Condolezza Rice takes over for the NFL to conduct damage control.
2014, Great article on Clive Bundy’s weekend warriors in Nevada. Gary North refutes this stand-off to any comparison of the Civil Rights movement. Cites huge differences. Says it’s more like the Whiskey Rebellion than the non-violent civil rights movement.
2014, Summer. Mininmum-wage laws create poverty.
2014, November. Speech by Vladimir Putin at the Meeting of the Valdai International Club.
2014, November, Bill Sardi on the international shifting of finance.
2014, “I have been getting a great response to my recent LRC article on Murray Rothbard’s bete noir, the old CIA hawk William F. Buckley Jr. This little piece on WFB came from my over forty year fascination regarding the aviary sociology of the media elite and court intellectual academia in America. There have been some excellent historical books and articles over the years exploring the various ornithological enclaves, niches, cloisters, water holes, and retreats of these often elusive owls, hawks, mockingbirds, crows, buzzards, vultures, and other savage birds of prey. These predatory birds have had their defenders and detractors, their chroniclers and critics, their sycophants, supplicants, and scribes. But Murray’s impassioned account remains the seminal story of how these ideological migratory raptors came to roost and nest in the name of national security and as servitors of state power projection and empire.”
2014, December 9. CIA Torture Report is de-classified.
2014, Dec. 12. Today, the ACLU is running a series of videos from CIA agents who spoke out against torture.
“While I don’t agree with the jobs that these people hold,” says Chris Rossini, “and believe they should resign and work in the private (non-torturing) sector, I think it’s very good when conscience hits government employees, and they realize that the monster they’re working for is wrong.”
Then, of course, there was this gem. Cheney admits that President George Bush knew of the torture.
Gary North reports on what the terms of torture mean. I don’t know what the report on torture means. But the CIA’s budget is never cut. Ever.
2014, 12/29
An excellent interview of Walter Block. In under 15 minutes you will learn a lot, for example, the zero differences between communism (Russia, East Germany, et al.) and fascism (Germany, Italy, et al.). You will also learn key differences between laissez-faire capitalism and corporate capitalism. The distinctions are important to know so as not to have your Lefty friends charge that capitalism is the same as communism. Oy, vey!!
2014, Charles Burris has written about the covert war in the 1950s between the Central Intelligence Agency and Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, particularly how the CIA mobilized its Operation Mockingbird media assets to engage in a counter-attack upon old “Tail Gunner Joe” when he was building up momentum in going after the Agency’s “family jewels” of the time after his highly-publicized campaigns against communist spies in the state department and the army. Two interesting books of Establishment Studies (or power elite analysis) have outlined how CIA director Allen Dulles directed his counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton to find a means of destroying McCarthy. Angleton chose a veteran of the OSS, James McCargar, to undertake this covert espionage/disinformation action against McCarthy. These facts are discussed in Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA; and Gregg Herken, The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington.
Somehow George Clooney (CFR) missed all this in his sanitized and vetted Hollywood agitprop epic, Good Night and Good Luck, which was nominated for six Academy Awards.
2015, Foreign Aid, Laurence Vance.
2015, Ron Paul on Charlie Hebdo as False Flag.
2015, Jan. 25, Unions and the Right to Work.
2015, February 25: Calvin’s Sermons on Deuteronomy, all 200 of them.
2015, June. Following a shooting of black member of a Virginia church, the press demonized the Confederate flag. Again. WhatReallyHappened has an answer to that demonization.
HISTORY
1. Tom Woods.
2. Lew Rockwell. This site has lots of excellent writers and historians. I like the archival search that you can find at the top right of their page.
3. When General Grant Expelled the Jews, Gary North.
4. Di Lorenzo on Emancipation Proclamation.
5. Charles Burris on Antony Sutton and Wall St.’s creation of socialist states.
6. William & Mary Quarterly
7. Institute for Historical Review.
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San Gabriel Tutor 
