HISTORY

BIBLICAL HISTORY

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.

WESTERN EUROPEAN HISTORY

1095-1456, Crusades
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.

1184-1230, Medieval Inquisition 

1478, Spanish Inquisition

1492, Spanish Colonization of America
1492, Christopher Columbus.  That link there contains a good article to explain all of the Christopher Columbus bashing.  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, "Colmbus 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.

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

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.

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. 

1746,  The Theological Origins of the U.S. Constitution, pg 53.

I. 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.

1765-1783, American Revolution

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.

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. 

1787, Shay's Rebellion.

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."

1789, Rousseau and conformity to the will of the state, Gary North.

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 president. 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 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 flag

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.

St. Patrick's flag, 1625.

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.

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 supporter of the Second Great Awakening.

Postmillenialism 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.

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 artricle:
"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. 

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.

Carl Schluz supported Lincoln

1848, Shelby Foote said that the bayonet had been defunct tactically since 1848.
.
1848, Revolutions in Europe.  Failed revolutionaries flee to the United States.

The Forty-Eighters

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 is it 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 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.

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 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.

AMERICAN CIVIL WAR, 1861-1865

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-slaveowning, 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.  

Christians and the Civil War

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.

1861, CSA, Confederate States of America, was formed in 1861, the year in which the War of Secession began. 

"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"

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 showing how expansive the war was across counties and states.  

1861, Lincoln suspends Habeaus 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, 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. 

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.

1864, Burning of the Shenandoah Valley by Ulysses S. Grant & Philip Sheridan.  Shenandoah Valley.

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, 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.
from Tom Di Lorenzo . . . .
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). 

1868, Memorial Day, every year since 1868.  Formerly called "Decoration Day." 

1870s, Horatio Alger, Jr., Rags to Riches stories.

1890, Wounded Knee Massacre as one battle in the War on the Plain Indians.

From Will Grigg:

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.

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.

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.

1896, Transformation of the American Party System, Murray Rothbard.

1899, Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" endorses American imperialism.

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 begins.
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, Pure Food and Drug Act

1906, Eugenics Movement in the United States.  Considered a hallmark of the Progressive Era.
1910, Bombing of the Los Angeles Times killed 21 and injured 100 people.
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 has 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

Mises
The Long Run-Up to World War II started in WWI and the Versailles Treaty.

1914, WWI.
1914, Christmas Day Truce.

1914-1923, "Hyperinflation in Germany, 1914-1923"

1915, Sinking of the Lusitania

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, 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." Oct, 24, 2014.

WWI Historical Association contains resources and photographs of the war. 

The Western Front Association

 

According to John Denson above, 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.

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, 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."

1919, Versailles Treaty.

1920s

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 Naele 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, 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. 

1920s, Origins of the Welfare State, Murray Rothbard.   

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, 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.

1921, UNESCO.  UNESCO originated with the League of Nations as its 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 1960's "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 its 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, Declaration of the 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

1925, Henry Louis Mencken on problems of Southern culture.

1927, Sacco and Vanzetti executed.

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.

BOOKS ON THE 1920S

Modern Times, Paul Johnson

1930s

1930, The Great Depression

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."

"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.
1931, Canada secedes from Great Britain.

1932, FDR's Pittsburgh Speech: A Masterful Deception
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.

1933-1936, FDR's New Deal

1.  Remarkable history on FDR's courtship with Stalin. 

2. "The Courts and the New Deal," William Anderson, 2005.  

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.^[4]

1934-1939, Popular Front. 
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, Nuremburg Laws were the antisemtic 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 “neoisolationist” label on today’s left wing.
 
WWII Bureaucracy.

"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?"

1937, Nanking Massacre
Flowers of War with Christian Bale.

1938, Khrushchev, Soviet Premiere, served as the government's executioner in Ukraine in 1938.
 

WORLD WAR II, 1939-1945

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."

1940, Katyn Massacre.  Another movie to show should be Katyn about the massacre of Polish elite and soldiers in the Katyn Forest.  The massacre occurred in April and May, 1940.

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 at the right are from two Hawaiian newspaper headlines.  Here's the background.  It was clear then, and with more and more documented evidence, it is becoming certain 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

"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.

1942, Lights of the Old Right.

 
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 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. 

1942-1946, 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 afterwards 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 whomever 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, 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.

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, Bureacracy, 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 economic rational manner.
 
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. 

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 Keyensian economist in the world, led by Paul Samuelson, predicted an economic calamity at the time, and every Keyensian 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, Hitler dies.  Did Hitler Escape to South America?

1945, Project Paperclip.

1945, August 9, Nagasaki

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 “co-ordinated 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, United Nations is created in October.

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

Eichmann in Jerusalem

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

1946, It's a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra. 

1946, in American film.

 

COLD WAR, 1947-1991

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.
 
1948, Creation of the state of Israel.

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 nook, 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. 

Walter Charles Langer

S. 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.

1950s, in film.  This may be a better list, if for no other reason than it has recorded dates to each film. 
1950-1953, Korean War

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."

1953-1961, Eisenhower Administration 
Here Charles Burris explains how un-Repulican his administration was.  

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 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."

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.

There was, of course, Eisenhower's famous Farewell Address:

   

AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS 1955-1965

1955, Starts with the shooting of Emmett Till.

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.
1959, Ben Hur

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, Bay of Pigs.

1962, Cuban Missile Crisis.

1963, The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan

Gary North comments following her 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 home school course on the 'sixties, published on LewRockwell.com on February 2."

1963, June 10, JFK's Commencement Address at American University.

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, LBJ's War on Poverty
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.”

*************************************************************************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, Immigration & Nationality Act, opened the doors to Latin American immigrants and closed the doors to European immigrants.  Shows like I Love Lucy took on greater appeal.  

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.

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. 

H
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.  

1

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, Bonnie & Clyde
I saw this movie at the Foothill Drive-In Theater on Foothill in Azusa with Chuck Pullman.

1967, Black Panthers had a hand in shaping California gun control laws under Reagan.  Article worth reading.

1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. (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.  The FBI is a horrible organization.

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.

1970, May 4, Kent State Shooting.  The anti-war demonstrations ended after this shooting. 

1972, Watergate.

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.
 

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.

Walter Williams (2005) says those lefties, like the SPLC, Social Justice groups, and left liberals of all stripes are poverty pimps.  Pretty convincing article. 

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. 

BOOKS ON THE VIETNAM WAR:

1.  Background to Betrayal: The Tragedy of Vietnam, Hilaire du Berrier, 1965.
2. Kill Anything that Moves, Nick Turse, 2013. 
3.

ARTICLES ON THE VIETNAM WAR

Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy's "A True Hero of the Vietnam War . . . ."

PICTURES OF THE VIETNAM WAR.

Philip Jones Griffiths' pictures of the Vietnam War are here and here.  As you can expect from war pictures, there are some terrible pictures of injured human beings.

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.

A terrific list of movies. 

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.  

1991, Fall of the Soviet Union.
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?

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)

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 . . . 
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.

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.

2007, Global Warming.  The Great Global Warming Swindle is the best antidote to the communist propaganda of global warming. Enjoy it here.

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.

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 fascicm (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!!