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Category: History/Archeology

Wajahat Ali and Norman Ornstein: The contempt of a fascist regime

Wajahat Ali and Norman Ornstein: The contempt of a fascist regime

  Norman Ornstein: “Every student of history — of the history of the growth of tyranny — said over and over again: you need immediate resistance. And the strongest resistance from every entity in the society — from the business community, from the education community, the intellectual community, the scientific community, the press community, the elected officials — have to resist. And if you don’t do it right from the start, they will gobble up more territory until it’s too…

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Why dictatorships fail

Why dictatorships fail

Anne Applebaum writes: He blinked. But we don’t really know why. Whether it was the stock market cascading downward, investors fleeing from U.S. Treasury bonds, Republican donors jamming the White House phones, or even fears for his own portfolio, President Donald Trump decided yesterday afternoon to lift, temporarily, most of his arbitrary tariffs. This was his personal decision. His “instinct,” as he put it. His whim. And his decision, instinct, or whim could bring the tariffs back again. The Republicans…

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Globalization is collapsing. Brace yourselves

Globalization is collapsing. Brace yourselves

Tara Zahra writes: Before World War I, globalization was at a high point. Advances in technology, including the steamship and the telegraph, allowed people, goods and news to cross borders with extraordinary speed. Migration boomed. The economist John Maynard Keynes, conjuring an Edwardian version of Amazon, recalled how “the inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect…

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Smithsonian braces for Trump rewrite of American history: ‘It reminds you of a fascist state’

Smithsonian braces for Trump rewrite of American history: ‘It reminds you of a fascist state’

The Guardian reports: In a brightly lit gallery, they see the 66m-year-old skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex. In a darkened room, they study the flag that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the national anthem. In a vast aviation hanger, they behold a space shuttle. And in a discreet corner, they file solemnly past the casket of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman in the US south. Visitors have come in their…

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Trade war explodes across world as it did in the 1930s

Trade war explodes across world as it did in the 1930s

The Wall Street Journal reports: Barriers to open trade are rising across the world at a pace unseen in decades, a cascade of protectionism that harks back to the isolationist fervor that swept the globe in the 1930s and worsened the Great Depression. It isn’t just President Trump’s extensive new tariffs, which have set off a barrage of retaliatory measures across Europe, China and Canada targeting hundreds of U.S. goods. Even before Trump retook the White House, many countries were…

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The masquerade of ‘America First’

The masquerade of ‘America First’

Danny Postel writes: The term “America First” is just as confusing and misleading as [Walter] Lippmann [in 1952] argued “isolationism” had become. Its advocates would have us believe that they are merely pursuing a realist foreign policy, one of neutrality and restraint, while in actuality they have dogs in various fights, both between warring countries and inside them. In one breath, they profess indifference about “what’s going on” in faraway lands, and in the next breath, they let slip their…

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Trump is the kinglike president many feared when arguing over the U.S. Constitution in 1789 – and his address to Congress showed it

Trump is the kinglike president many feared when arguing over the U.S. Constitution in 1789 – and his address to Congress showed it

President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol on March 4, 2025. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images By Maurizio Valsania, Università di Torino If there are any limits to a president’s power, it wasn’t evident from Donald Trump’s speech before a joint session of Congress on March 4, 2025. In that speech, the first before lawmakers of Trump’s second term, the president declared vast accomplishments during the brief six weeks of his presidency. He claimed to have…

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Trump just handed Putin the knife for carving up the world

Trump just handed Putin the knife for carving up the world

Masha Gessen writes: Washington and Moscow have been repairing relations at breakneck speed, comparable only to the speed at which the Trump administration is breaking things at home. After meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Saudi Arabia on Feb. 18, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said the two sides had resolved to “eliminate impediments” to improving bilateral relations, a phrasing that sent chills down the spines of Russian exiles — myself included — who have sought what…

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Former U.S. ambassador to the EU: This administration ‘wants to destroy the European Union’

Former U.S. ambassador to the EU: This administration ‘wants to destroy the European Union’

  Anthony Gardner, former U.S. ambassador to the EU, tells Channel 4 News: “It’s time for European leaders including [British prime minister] Starmer to realize that this administration actually wants to destroy the European Union. And that sounds pretty — some people will think that’s pretty exaggerated, but it’s not. I think that’s actually what’s going on and I think the UK has a fundamental interest in ensuring that the EU remains strong.” Consider the multiple lines of attack and…

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‘After this, you’d really have to be a fool to trust the word of the United States’

‘After this, you’d really have to be a fool to trust the word of the United States’

  Eric Edelman and Eliot Cohen bemoan the shameful meltdown in the Oval Office between VP Vance, President Trump and President Zelensky. They discuss Vance’s ambush and whether he executed it alone or in concert with Trump and note that those who are blaming Zelensky for rising to the bait are objectively pro-Putin. They discuss Vance’s dark political views and they consider what Europeans can and should do. They also discuss Trump’s delegation of responsibility to others and his “Trump…

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Trump’s Washington is starting to feel like Putin’s Moscow

Trump’s Washington is starting to feel like Putin’s Moscow

Peter Baker writes: She asked too many questions that the president didn’t like. She reported too much about criticism of his administration. And so, before long, Yelena Tregubova was pushed out of the Kremlin press pool that covered President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. In the scheme of things, it was a small moment, all but forgotten nearly 25 years later. But it was also a telling one. Mr. Putin did not care for challenges. The rest of the press pool got…

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Trump administration sets out to create an America its people have never experienced − one without a meaningful government

Trump administration sets out to create an America its people have never experienced − one without a meaningful government

A worker removes letters from the U.S. Agency for International Development building. Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images By Sidney Shapiro, Wake Forest University and Joseph P. Tomain, University of Cincinnati The U.S. government is attempting to dismantle itself. President Donald Trump has directed the executive branch to “significantly reduce the size of government.” That includes deep cuts in federal funding of scientific and medical research and freezing federal grants and loans for businesses. He has ordered the reversal or removal of regulations…

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Rise of AfD highlights the divide between eastern and western Germany

Rise of AfD highlights the divide between eastern and western Germany

The New York Times reports: Three and a half decades after reunification, a line runs through Germany where the Iron Curtain once stood. Instead of barbed wires and dogs, that line now divides Germans by measures like income and unemployment — and increasingly by the willingness to vote for extremist parties. If East Germany were still its own country, the hard-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which has been linked to neo-Nazis and is being monitored by domestic intelligence, would…

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Frozen in the face of fascism

Frozen in the face of fascism

The Guardian reports: The French far-right leader Jordan Bardella on Friday morning cancelled a scheduled speech at the US Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, after Donald Trump’s former aide Steve Bannon flashed an apparent fascist-style salute there hours before. Bannon, who helped Trump win office in 2016 and is now a popular rightwing podcast show host, finished his CPAC speech on Thursday with an outstretched arm, fingers pointed and palm down – a sign that echoed both…

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How aspiring strongmen consolidate power: Fire civil servants; dismantle government departments

How aspiring strongmen consolidate power: Fire civil servants; dismantle government departments

A leader bent on expanding his own power would see the government’s bureaucracy as a key target. Andry Djumantara – iStock/Getty Images Plus By Erica Frantz, Michigan State University; Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Yale University, and Joe Wright, Penn State With the recent confirmations of Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – two of the most controversial of President Donald Trump’s high-level administration nominees – the president’s attempt to remake government as a home for political loyalists continues. Soon after coming…

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Make no mistake: this is a coup

Make no mistake: this is a coup

Timothy Snyder writes: Imagine if it had gone like this. Ten Tesla cybertrucks, painted in camouflage colors with a giant X on each roof, drive noisily through Washington DC. Tires screech. Out jump a couple of dozen young men, dressed in red and black Devil’s Champion armored costumes. After giving Nazi salutes, they grab guns and run to one government departmental after another, calling out slogans like “all power to Supreme Leader Skibidi Hitler.” Historically, that is what coups looked…

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