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Category: History/Archeology

Autocrats don’t act like Hitler or Stalin anymore − instead of governing with violence, they use manipulation

Autocrats don’t act like Hitler or Stalin anymore − instead of governing with violence, they use manipulation

Autocrats today tend to govern by manipulation of the public, among other tactics, rather than solely using violence. Nanzeeba Ibnat/iStock/Getty Images Plus By Daniel Treisman, University of California, Los Angeles President Donald Trump’s critics often accuse him of harboring authoritarian ambitions. Journalists and scholars have drawn parallels between his leadership style and that of strongmen abroad. Some Democrats warn that the U.S. is sliding toward autocracy – a system in which one leader holds unchecked power. Others counter that labeling…

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J. D. Vance warns the federal courts to get in line

J. D. Vance warns the federal courts to get in line

Ruth Marcus writes: Vice-President J. D. Vance offered some unsolicited advice to Chief Justice John Roberts the other day: the federal courts need to be more deferential to Presidential authority, and the Supreme Court must do a better job of keeping lower-court judges in line. Vance was speaking to the New York Times’ Ross Douthat about the Trump Administration’s nearly unbroken string of court losses in immigration-related cases. These setbacks, in Vance’s telling, represent an undemocratic project by some federal…

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Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny

Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny

In a commencement address given to graduates from U. Cal. Berkeley’s School of Education earlier this week, Robert Reich said: Throughout history, tyrants have understood that their major enemy is an educated citizenry. Slaveholders prohibited the enslaved from learning to read. Nazis burned books. Putin and Xi censor the media. Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny. America’s founders knew this. They saw how easily emperors and kings could mislead uneducated publics. The survival of the new nation required a public…

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How Kahanism found its way into the Israeli political mainstream

How Kahanism found its way into the Israeli political mainstream

Natasha Roth-Rowland writes: At the end of January, Israel’s ambassador to the United States arrived in Washington to take up his new role. In some ways, Yechiel Leiter’s resume is typical for someone appointed to perhaps the most prestigious diplomatic posting on offer: A U.S.-born immigrant to Israel, Leiter served in numerous senior government roles, including as chief of staff to then-Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, before working as a senior fellow at the right-wing Kohelet Policy Forum, and then moving…

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Kremlin cites past wars as it threatens long conflict in Ukraine

Kremlin cites past wars as it threatens long conflict in Ukraine

Pjotr Sauer writes: Peter the Great’s long war against Sweden – a grinding conflict that claimed countless Russian lives – is rarely held up as a model for modern diplomacy. Yet behind closed doors on Friday, during the first direct peace talks with Ukraine in three years, Russia’s lead negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, cited it as an explicit warning: Moscow was prepared to fight for as long as it took. Just like when Russian troops rolled into Ukraine in 2022, the…

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Judge Michael Luttig on the end of rule of law in America

Judge Michael Luttig on the end of rule of law in America

J. Michael Luttig writes: The president of the United States appears to have long ago forgotten that Americans fought the Revolutionary War not merely to secure their independence from the British monarchy but to establish a government of laws, not of men, so that they and future generations of Americans would never again be subject to the whims of a tyrannical king. As Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense in 1776, “For as in absolute governments the king is law,…

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Trump seems to be ceding the future to China while emulating its past

Trump seems to be ceding the future to China while emulating its past

Derek Thompson writes: China may well come to dominate the next century—because President Donald Trump is taking a page from the most famous Chinese leader of the previous one. The United States remains the world’s preeminent soft power. It’s a financial and cultural juggernaut, whose entertainment and celebrities bestride the planet. But as an industrial power, the U.S. is not so much at risk of falling behind as it is objectively behind already. A recent essay in the journal Foreign…

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Are we heading for World War III – or has it already started?

Are we heading for World War III – or has it already started?

Patrick Wintour writes: In a week in which former allies in a redividing globe separately commemorated the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war, the sense of a runaway descent towards a third world war draws ever closer. The implosion of Pax Americana, the interconnectedness of conflicts, the new willingness to resort to unbridled state-sponsored violence and the irrelevance of the institutions of the rules-based order have all been on brutal display this week. From Kashmir to…

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Habeas corpus: A thousand-year-old legal principle for defending rights that’s under the Trump administration

Habeas corpus: A thousand-year-old legal principle for defending rights that’s under the Trump administration

Two Latin words – ‘habeas corpus’ – protect any person, whether citizen or not, from being illegally confined. deepblue4you, iStock / Getty Images Plus By Andrea Seielstad, University of Dayton In some parts of the world, a person may be secreted away or imprisoned by the government without any advanced notification of wrongdoing or chance to make a defense. This has not been lawful in the United States from its very inception, or in many other countries where the rule…

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Naomi Klein on Trump, Musk, the far right and ‘End Times fascism’

Naomi Klein on Trump, Musk, the far right and ‘End Times fascism’

  ‘The rise of end times fascism‘ by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor was published in The Guardian on April 13. The movement for corporate city states cannot believe its good luck. For years, it has been pushing the extreme notion that wealthy, tax-averse people should up and start their own high-tech fiefdoms, whether new countries on artificial islands in international waters (“seasteading”) or pro-business “freedom cities” such as Próspera, a glorified gated community combined with a wild west med…

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Presidential reform necessitates diminishing presidential power

Presidential reform necessitates diminishing presidential power

Jack Goldsmith writes: Donald Trump’s wrecking-ball second term has revealed the full latent power of the presidency. His administration has done this most clearly in its comprehensive elimination of legal and norm-based checks inside the executive branch, its systematic disrespect of judicial process, its extortionate abuse of government power to crush foes and its destructive rhetoric and nastiness. Yet it is important to recognize that many of Mr. Trump’s efforts to expand the powers of the office build substantially on…

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Every American child is born pre-polluted with synthetic chemicals

Every American child is born pre-polluted with synthetic chemicals

Mariah Blake writes: During the crucial early weeks of pregnancy, when fetal cells knit themselves into a brain and organs and fingers and lips, a steady flow of man-made chemicals pulses through the umbilical cord. Scientists once believed that the placenta filtered out most of these pollutants, but now they know that is not the case. Along with nutrients and oxygen, numerous synthetic substances travel to the womb, permeating the fetus’s blood and tissues. This is why, from their very…

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Tree-ring records suggest that drought played a role in Roman Britain’s decline

Tree-ring records suggest that drought played a role in Roman Britain’s decline

Molly Glick writes: Roman Britain collapsed into chaos in the spring of 367 A.D.—the rival Picts attacked by land and sea, while the Scotti barged in from the west and Saxons from the south. Anarchy ensued in an event that’s now known as the Barbarian Conspiracy: The invaders captured and murdered senior commanders, and some Roman soldiers may have even joined in. It’s considered a pivotal event in the abandonment of Roman Britain. Historians have surmised some of the potential…

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Dow headed for worst April since 1932 as investors send ‘no confidence’ signal

Dow headed for worst April since 1932 as investors send ‘no confidence’ signal

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Trump rout is taking on historic dimensions. The Dow Jones Industrial Average shed almost 1,000 points on Monday and is headed for its worst April performance since 1932, according to Dow Jones Market Data. The S&P 500’s performance since Inauguration Day is now the worst for any president up to this point in data going back to 1928, according to Bespoke Investment Group. Worries about trade restrictions and the prospect of President Trump firing…

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Before Trump’s tariffs there were Hitler’s tariffs

Before Trump’s tariffs there were Hitler’s tariffs

Timothy W. Ryback writes: The Hitler tariffs, announced on Friday, February 10, 1933, stunned observers. “The dimension of the tariff increases have in fact exceeded all expectations,” the Vossische Zeitung wrote disapprovingly, proclaiming the moment a “fork in the road” for the German economy. It appeared that Europe’s largest and most industrialized nation would suddenly be returning “to the furrow and the plow.” The New York Times saw this for what it was: “a trade war” against its European neighbors….

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