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Category: History/Archeology

Trump’s secret police

Trump’s secret police

Christian Gläßel and Adam Scharpf write: Since the Pendleton Act of 1883, the U.S. federal government has rested on a simple promise: professionalism, merit-based recruitment, independent oversight. Over time, U.S. federal law enforcement became a global reference point—effective, technically sophisticated, built to serve the law rather than a leader. And it traveled. For decades, officers from across the world sought training through U.S. programs such as the FBI’s National Academy and the Justice Department’s ICITAP. Now that model is collapsing…

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Will China save Western civilization?

Will China save Western civilization?

Chang Che writes: In November, 2024, on the day of the U.S. Presidential election, Tim Whitmarsh landed in Beijing, jet-lagged and disoriented. It was the middle of the academic term at the University of Cambridge, where Whitmarsh holds the Regius Professorship in Greek. He had been flown business class halfway around the world and put up at a five-star hotel for what he had been told would be the first World Conference of Classics. What followed, he later wrote, was…

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Putin resurrected and exported a fascist ideology to the West

Putin resurrected and exported a fascist ideology to the West

Zaza Bibilashvili and Tom G. Palmer in conversation at The Unpopulist: Zaza Bibilashvili: Over the last decades we’ve witnessed the rise of authoritarianism and a worldwide crisis of liberal democracy. What caused such developments and what should be done to reverse the trend? Tom G. Palmer: Most prognoses focus on demographics, technological changes, economic structures, and so on, which gives an air of inevitability to trends. I think that there are such contributing factors, notably the rise of media fragmentation…

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Why, for the West, it will always be ‘five minutes to midnight’ for the two-state solution

Why, for the West, it will always be ‘five minutes to midnight’ for the two-state solution

Michael Lynk writes: In 1982, Meron Benvenisti, former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, spoke to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, D.C., about research that he and other social scientists in Israel were conducting into the political implications of the rapidly expanding Israeli settler population in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). That year, there were 22,000 settlers living in the occupied West Bank, with another 76,000 settlers in East Jerusalem and 6,500 in the Gaza Strip. According to an Anthony…

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Iran’s Islamic Republic is designed for survival

Iran’s Islamic Republic is designed for survival

Ali Hashem writes: The latest Israeli and U.S. war on Iran began with airstrikes on the home and offices of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The premise seemed to be that Khamenei’s sudden elimination would pose a dire threat to the current ruling system. The goal would be to achieve what happened in Libya after Muammar al-Qaddafi or in Syria after Bashar al-Assad, where regimes collapsed as soon as their leaders were no longer in power. In those systems, the state’s…

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Leaked Interior Department database reveals revisionist plans to rewrite American history

Leaked Interior Department database reveals revisionist plans to rewrite American history

Reuters reports: The U.S. Interior Department said a database revealing how President Donald Trump’s administration planned to revise information on key phases of ​American history at national park sites was deliberative and the employees ‌who released it “will be held accountable.” An internal government database first reported by the Washington Post and posted on two public websites on Monday revealed the scope of the Trump administration’s ​effort to revise or remove information on African-American history, LGBT rights, ​climate change and…

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The unresolved contradictions that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei leaves behind

The unresolved contradictions that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei leaves behind

Mehrzad Boroujerdi writes: The 13th-century Persian poet Saadi once offered a prescient warning: “He who would not practice statecraft with his foe will not be able to maintain his rule.” It is a maxim Ayatollah Ali Khamenei chose not to heed. “The enemy” was among the most frequently invoked terms in the lexicon of Iran’s late supreme leader — most often directed at the United States and, at times, Israel. In the end, those very adversaries brought his 37-year rule…

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Ayatollah Ali Khamenei brought his country and regime to ruin

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei brought his country and regime to ruin

Barbara Slavin writes: Many if not most successful revolutions boast inspirational leaders followed by less charismatic figures who serve to entrench the new ideology and system of government. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the second-ever supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, exemplified that latter role. Khamenei never had the fervent following of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, and he became increasingly unpopular as his rule dragged on. But after succeeding Khomeini in 1989, Khamenei managed to…

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The ideological connections between Stephen Miller, Calvin Coolidge, and Hitler

The ideological connections between Stephen Miller, Calvin Coolidge, and Hitler

To the following question, What are the ideological connections shared by Calvin Coolidge, Hitler, and Stephen Miller? Google AI responded: The ideological connections between Calvin Coolidge, Adolf Hitler, and Stephen Miller are primarily centered on strict immigration restriction based on eugenics, nativism, and the pursuit of national “homogeneity” or “racial purity”. While separated by different political contexts—1920s American conservatism, 1930s Nazism, and 21st-century American populism—they are linked through a chain of influence and shared admiration for the Immigration Act of…

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Trump employs authoritarian icons as his image glowers down from federal buildings

Trump employs authoritarian icons as his image glowers down from federal buildings

Philip Kennicott writes: Most of the buildings in the Depression-era Federal Triangle development have an irregular geometry. The Federal Trade Commission office, known as the Apex Building, is a right-angled triangle with its sharpest point rounded off. The Ronald Reagan Building, added in 1998, looks a bit like a stumpy meat cleaver. And the Justice Department building, named for the slain senator, former attorney general and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, is a four-sided polygon with corners beveled flat. It…

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Jesse Jackson: ‘My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised’

Jesse Jackson: ‘My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised’

Bishop William Barber II is the co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and was a friend and mentee of Jesse Jackson:   Peter Applebome writes: The Rev. Jesse Jackson, whose impassioned oratory and populist vision of a “rainbow coalition” of the poor and forgotten made him the nation’s most influential Black figure in the years between the civil rights crusades of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the election of Barack Obama, died on Tuesday at his home…

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Federal judge says Trump can’t ‘erase’ history, orders slavery exhibit restored

Federal judge says Trump can’t ‘erase’ history, orders slavery exhibit restored

The Washington Post reports: A federal judge in Pennsylvania on Monday ordered the Trump administration to restore displays discussing slavery at a site in Philadelphia where George Washington lived as president. In a 40-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania compared the displays’ removal last month to the government mind-control employed in George Orwell’s famous novel “1984.” “The government claims it alone has the power to erase, alter, remove and hide historical accounts…

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Trump’s imperial fantasy begins with Gaza

Trump’s imperial fantasy begins with Gaza

Peter Beinart writes: In 1945, the United States stood at the apex of its global dominance. It comprised half the world’s GDP, owned 80% of its hard currency, and possessed the only nuclear weapons on earth. So, it’s hardly surprising that, in the spring of that year, Americans designed the logo for the new organization tasked with keeping world peace: the United Nations. With diplomats from across the globe set to arrive in San Francisco for the UN’s inaugural meeting,…

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Hitler didn’t have AI, but he employed the same playbook that Trump uses every single day

Hitler didn’t have AI, but he employed the same playbook that Trump uses every single day

Another day, another outrage. How Hitler used outrageous behavior to distract the German establishment. Google’s AI offers this overview: Hitler utilized a strategy of manufactured crises, constant scandalous behavior, and extreme rhetoric to disorient, distract, and eventually dominate the traditional German establishment—including conservative politicians, military leaders, and the press—between 1930 and 1934. By creating an atmosphere of perpetual chaos, Hitler compelled the elite to react to immediate “emergencies,” preventing them from organizing effective opposition to his true goal of dismantling…

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What ICE should have learned from the Fugitive Slave Act

What ICE should have learned from the Fugitive Slave Act

Jelani Cobb writes: One measure of the numbing effect that the constant heedless and cruel assault on democracy and on simple reason that Trumpism has imposed upon American life is the fact that we no longer flinch at the word “unprecedented.” Now, a full decade since Donald Trump’s arrival on the national scene, we have reached a point where the violation of norms has become a norm in itself. At the same time, however, there has been a tendency to…

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Our Gettysburg moment in Minneapolis

Our Gettysburg moment in Minneapolis

Jonathan V. Last, after summarizing the events immediately leading up to the Civil War’s pivotal Battle of Gettysburg, writes: It’s not clear why the Trump regime chose to invade Minneapolis. Maybe it was animus toward the city’s Somali population. Maybe it was because Gov. Tim Walz had run against Trump and Vance. Maybe it was because they believed the state’s welfare fraud investigations made Minneapolis favorable terrain on which to fight. But when the regime’s forces occupied the city they were surprised…

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