Lüge, Lüge, Lüge – und eine bekloppter als die nächste. 24 Stunden im deutschen Nachrichtendschungel. Die Urwaldreportage.
von Max Erdinger
+++ 17 Uhr am 20.02.2024: Die ARD-Tagesschau. In Kiew laufen Gedenkveranstaltungen. Es geht um den “Euro-Maidan” vor zehn Jahren, den Hauptauslöser für den überflüssigerweise noch immer andauernden Ukrainekrieg. Zu diesem Ereignis gibt es die sehr sehenswerte Doku “Ukraine On Fire” von Oliver Stone aus dem Jahr 2016. Der dreifache Oscarpreisträger zeichnet in seiner Doku fast minutiös die Ereignisse von damals nach, komplettiert durch viele Zeugenaussagen. Die Redaktion der 17 Uhr-Tagesschau von heute muß davon ausgegangen sein, daß niemand wissen kann, wie das damals tatsächlich gelaufen ist, und daß sie deshalb völlig frei irgendwelche Märchen von der Sehnsucht der lieben Ukrainer nach der tollen EU, der Freiheit, der Demokratie und den westlichen Werten erfinden dürfe. Oder, wie man das heute nennt: Daß sie ein total realitätsfremdes “Narrativ” in die Hirne der Schafsherde einpflanzen darf. Kein Wort über Victoria Nuland, kein Wort über die spendable Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, kein Wort von den “Demonstrationsgeldern”, die damals ausgezahlt wurden – und die 100 Toten, die im Auftrag der Rädelsführer des Putsches gegen Janukowitsch vor die Läufe von Scharfschützen gelockt wurden, die damals, etwas entfernt vom Hauptgeschehen, auf den Dächern einiger Häuser postiert worden waren, sind, wenn es nach der ARD-Tagesschau geht, im Auftrag der Regierung erschossen worden. Es waren genau die 100, die als Zahl von der US-Botschaft in Kiew als Vorbedingung dafür genannt worden waren, daß Söldner von “Academi” (vormals “Blackwater”) auf Seiten der Putschisten ins Geschehen eingreifen. In Kiew werden sie heute als das “Himmlische Hundert” verehrt, ganz so, als habe es sich um arglose Bürger gehandelt, die nichts weiter getan hatten, als ihre demokratischen Rechte auf Protest wahrzunehmen. Tatsächlich waren sie von denen, die dort am heutigen Tag Krokodilstränen vergießen, gezielt geopfert worden, um bewaffnete Unterstützung durch “Academi” zu erhalten. Kein Wort in der ARD-Tagesschau, daß sich die ethnischen Russen in der Ukraine keinen EU- & Nato-hörigen Präsidenten aufs Auge drücken lassen wollten, nachdem der auf Interessensausgleich bedachte Präsident, den sie mitgewählt hatten, für die geostrategischen Interessen der Nato, der USA und der EU mit einem Putsch nach Art der berüchtigten Farbrevolutionen aus dem Amt verjagt worden war. ARD-Tagesschau am 20.02.2024: Die bislang dreisteste aller Geschichtsklitterungen. Volksverblödung im Quadrat. Oliver Stone hat übrigens drei Jahre später mit “Reveiling Ukraine” noch einmal nachgelegt. +++
“Ukriane On Fire”: Stone-Doku aus dem Jahr 2016 – Screenshot Gigazine
+++ Unsicherheitskonferenz in München. Die hochkompetente US-Vizepräsidentin Kamala Harris ist anwesend und sorgt für Unterrichtung. Demzufolge sieht es bei den Russen so aus: Horrende Verluste, 350.000 Gefallene, kaum noch Soldaten, Knackis werden zwangsrekrutiert, Munition ist fast alle, die Wirtschaft kollabiert wegen der total effektiven Sanktionen, es gibt kaum noch etwas zu essen – und Putin kann froh sein, daß der heilige Wolodymyr nicht zu Fuß in den Kreml marschiert, um den bösen Diktator mit einem Kinnhaken außer Gefecht zu setzen. Da staunt der Westmedien-Konsument deutscher Provenienz. Hieß es denn nicht in der Woche zuvor noch, daß der total fiese Putin sich zuerst die komplette Ukraine greifen will, um als nächstes Polen anzugreifen, weil er die offene Konfrontation mit der Nato sucht, weswegen auch die liebe Ukraine weiterhin totalunterstützt werden müsse, um die Gefahr durch westwärts marschierende, schwerbewaffnete Horden barbarischer Unzivilisierter für Europa abzuwenden? Wie soll er das denn machen, der total fiese Putin, wenn sich ein ganzes russisches Knacki-Bataillon bereits ein Knoppers zum Frühstück teilen muß, ehe sie auswürfelt, wer das Gewehr mit der einen, übriggebliebenen Kugel im Lauf nach Westen tragen darf, um die Nato das Fürchten zu lehren? Es geht nur eines von beidem: Entweder man muß die Russen fürchten – oder sie sind völlig am Ende. Beides zugleich geht nicht. +++
Kamala Harris (Bild: shutterstock.com)
+++ Die Israelis verteidigen nur das Existenzrecht ihres schönen Landes Israel. So muß man das sagen, wenn man ein braver und artiger “Gerade-wir-als-Deutscher” ist. Und wehe, man sagt es anders. Dann wäre man womöglich auf die hundsgemeine Pali-Propaganda hereingefallen. Nein, das darf man nicht. Man muß schön glauben, was die netten Herrn aus der israelischen Regierung an Hochinformativem zum Besten geben. Israelis lügen nicht. Weil sie nämlich Israelis sind. Doch, doch, doch, so ist das. Ruhe im Puff!Werbung
Aber es gibt Amerikaner, die keine “Gerade-wir-als-Deutschen” sind, weswegen sie auch ein wenig näher an der Realität berichten dürfen. Ich weiß nicht mehr, ob es der Ex-UN-Waffeninspekteur Scott Ritter oder der britische Ex-Diplomat Alastair Crooke gewesen ist, der gestern von einer Umfrage in Israel erzählte, derzufolge über 70 Prozent der Israelis dafür sind, daß die IDF in den Südlibanon einmarschiert, um dort der Hezbollah den Garaus zu machen. Die Hezbollah deckt von dort aus nämlich den israelischen Norden mit Raketen ein, so daß etwa 200.000 Israelis gar nicht mehr dort leben, sondern weiter im Süden zum Teil in Hotels untergebracht sind. Nordisrael sei ab etwa 50 Kilometer vor der Grenze zum Libanon so gut wie menschenleer, heißt es. Aus israelischen Regierungskreisen wiederum heißt es, die Hezbollah solle sich gefälligst bis zum Fluß Litani nach Norden zurückziehen, da man sie ansonsten Mores lehren wolle.
Litani (Fluß), rot markiert – Screenshot Facebook
Südlich des Litani würden sie ihre Lektion auf libanesischem Gebiewt erteilt bekommen. Dem widersprach allerdings Hezbollah-Chef Nasrallah schon vor längerer Zeit. Er sagte, daß der nächste Kampf zwischen der Hezbollah und der IDF keinesfalls im südlichen Libanon stattfinden würde, sondern auf israelischem Territorium. Im Jahr 2006 war die IDF von der Hezbollah schon einmal des Landes verwiesen worden, woraufhin die Israelis so sauer gewesen sind, daß sie Kampfjets nach Beirut schickten, um die Zivilisten im Stadtteil Dahija aus der Luft zu ermorden. Seither gilt in Israel die Dahija-Doktrin, die besagt, daß, wenn der Konflikt mit dem gegnerischen Militär nicht zu gewinnen ist, die Zivilbevölkerung des Feindes dran zu glauben hat. Das ist übrigens mit der Hamas im Augenblick genauso. Die ist weit davon entfernt, besiegt worden zu sein. Aber über 30.000 Zivilisten haben schon dran glauben müssen. Vielleicht gibt es ja bald eine Gaza-Doktrin als Ergänzung zur Dahija-Doktrin. Die israelische Hannibal-Direktive ist ja auch nicht von schlechen Eltern: Bevor der Feind deinen Landsmann als Geisel nimmt, tapferer IDF-Soldat, jagst du ihm am besten selber eine Kugel in den Kopf. Doch, doch, die Israelis sind, was das Kriegerische angeht, die zivilisiertesten von allen. Absolut. Wahre Gentlemen. Die kennen sich aus wie kein Zweiter, wenn es um staatliches Existenzrecht geht. Die wissen genau, welcher Staat eines hat und welcher auf gar keinen Fall. Da kann gar nichts schiefgehen.
So ein Existenzrecht ist schon was Feines – Foto: Inna Reznik/Shutterstock
Das hat man gefälligst zu wissen als “Gerade-wir-als-Deutscher”. Dichter, Denker, Kulturvolk und so weiter. Wenn nicht: Antidingsbumsit, dumme Sau und gesellschaftliche Ächtung. Aber zurück in den Südlibanon und zur Hezbollah: Der Ex-Un-Waffeninspekteur und Ex-Marine-Intelligence-Officer Scott Ritter hat schon vor längerer Zeit Zahlen zur Bewaffnung der beiden Konfliktparteien genannt und sich auch zur jeweiligen Truppenstärke geäußert. Allein diese Daten geben die Vermutung nicht her, daß Israel in einer hitzigen Auseinandersetzung mit der Hezbollah einen Blumentopf zu gewinnen hätte. Das sähe nur dann anders aus, wenn sich die USA tatkräftig einer Unterstützung der israelischen Seite befleißigen würden, was sie prinzipiell immer gern tun würden, da sie bekanntlich allezeit auf der Seite des Guten stehen wollen. Nun hat Ritter aber auch den Verdacht, daß man in den USA damit angefangen haben könnte, nach Aufwand und Verlust zu kalkulieren – und daß deshalb nicht unbedingt viel dafür spricht, die IDF in ihrem beabsichtigten Krieg gegen die Hezbollah im Südlibanon besonders tatkräftig zu unterstützen, sondern eher nur halbherzig, wenn überhaupt. Die Iraner hingegen hätten es mit der Halbherzigkeit nicht so und würden der Hezbollah auf jeden Fall vollsolidarische Unterstützung leisten, wenn die USA halbherzig mit einsteigen. Das würde bedeuten, daß die hochgerüstete Hezbollah mit ihrer 350.000-Mann-Armee iranische Präzionsraketen erhalten würde, mit denen sie von zwischen dem Litani und der Grenze zu Israel bis nach Eilat am Golf von Akaba jedes Ziel treffen würden, das sie vernichten wollen. Das wiederum seien gar keine schönen Aussichten für die hochzivilisierten Gentlemen von den IDF, deren ritterliche Scharfschützen nie im Leben palästinensische Kinder im Alter zwischen fünf und acht Jahren mit bestens gezielten Kopfschüssen ermorden würden. Wenn doch, dann wäre es Pali-Propaganda aus Paliwood.
Was einen möglichen Kriegseintritt der arabischen Liga angeht, meinte Ritter, daß der wohl endlich erfolgen würde, sollte sich die Hezbollah im Südlibanon respektive in Nordisrael nicht eindeutig als siegreich erweisen. Das würde mit ziemlicher Sicherheit bedeuten, daß die israelischen Siedlungen im Westjordanland ausradiert werden und fortan Geschichte sind. Alles in allem sieht es zur Zeit wohl danach aus, als sei das Klügste, was Netanyahu tun kann, seine Doktrin von der Dominanz durch militärische Gewalt zu revidieren, zunächst einem umfangreichen Waffenstillstand zuzustimmen – und als nächstes Verhandlungen anzustreben. Für Israel und dessen Existenzrecht ist es wahrscheinlich das klügste, muß man hier einschränkend anmerken. Für Netanyahu persönlich nicht. Sowie nämlich die Waffen schweigen, hätte er wieder seinen Korruptionsprozess an der Backe. Was israelische Gefallene angeht, halten sich die IDF bedeckt, um keine israelischen Staatsbürger zu schockieren, meint Ex-CIA Ray McGovern. Es gebe allerdings Zahlen von Ende Dezember 2023. Damals sei von 380 gefallenen IDF-Soldaten die Rede gewesen, was allerdings stark untertrieben gewesen sein dürfte.
Na, jedenfalls verteidigen die tapferen und edlen Israelis nur das Existenzrecht ihres schönen Landes Israel. Doch, doch, doch. Daß mir da niemand etwas anderes behauptet. Von einem Großisrael haben noch nicht einmal Itamar Ben-Gvir oder Bezalel Smotrich je etwas gehört oder gelesen, geschweige denn, daß sie so etwas Ungeheuerliches je gefordert hätten. Vor Abscheu geschüttelt hätten sie sich. Schließlich kennt man sich in Israel mit dem Existenzrecht von Staaten besser aus als sonst irgendwo auf der Welt. Aber das habe ich ja schon gesagt. Und die “Gerade-wir-als-Deutschen” hätten es ja ohnehin schon gewußt, gell? +++
Alle Parteien der Bundesregierung – und weite Teile der Opposition – stützen die aktuelle Kriegspolitik. Bei den auch dadurch ausgelösten sozialen Kürzungen ist die FDP sogar noch hemmungsloser als die Grünen. Aber bei der grünen Partei kommen noch die Aspekte des groben Etikettenschwindels und einer angestrengt „gut gelaunten“ Arroganz hinzu. Einige Fotos und Äußerungen aus den letzten Tagen verdeutlichen diesen schrillen Befund. Ein Kommentar von Tobias Riegel.
Dieser Beitrag ist auch als Audio-Podcast verfügbar.
Das Titelbild zeigt die Grüne Katharina Schulze zusammen mit der US-Politikerin Hillary Clinton vor einigen Tagen in Deutschland. Ich finde dieses Bild geradezu symbolisch für den Zustand der grünen Partei: Das distanz- und kritiklose Ranschmeißen an eine mächtige, mutmaßliche US-Kriegsverbrecherin (unter anderem Libyen und Syrien), die kindliche Begeisterung und die dabei präsentierte, dem Anlass völlig unangemessene super Laune.
Diese Mischung wirkt umso aufreizender, wenn man sich die realen Folgen einer auch von den Grünen befeuerten Politik betrachtet, die mit diesen Posen weg-gelächelt werden sollen: Kriegsgefahr durch ideologische Russland-Resssentiments, das Verbrennen von Unsummen für einen daraus folgenden Wirtschaftskrieg und Aufrüstung sowie aus dieser Geldvernichtung wiederum erwachsende Verteilungskämpfe und die Gefahr der sozialen Kürzungen.
Noch ein Wort zum Titelbild: Die Aufnahme macht auch die riesige Fallhöhe von US-Politikern zu deutschen Grünen deutlich. Dazu passt auch, dass Clinton sich den Titel „Queen Of Chaos“ erarbeitet hat, während es bei der Grünen Annalena Baerbock nur zur „Queen Of Kitsch“.
Die Grünen sind meiner Meinung nach nicht gefährlicher als die FDP, aber bei ihnen kommt noch der Etikettenschwindel dazu, während die FDP in Sachen Sozialkürzungen und Aufrüstung ein relativ offenes Buch sind und waren. Die Grünen dagegen sind irgendwann mal angetreten mit einer angeblich sozialen „Friedens-Ökologie“, stattdessen praktizieren sie aber umweltschädigende (und klimaschädigende) Kriegspolitik.
Bei sozialen Kürzungen sind die Grünen dagegen nicht die härtesten Akteure – aber: Dadurch, dass sie mit der Politik der teuren Energie, mit ihrer Kriegsrhetorik und den darauf folgenden Unsummen, die für Rüstung geopfert werden sollen, den gesamtgesellschaftlichen Kuchen verkleinern, wirkt es heuchlerisch, wenn sie bei der Verteilung des Restkuchens eine soziale Verantwortung simulieren: Sie haben mit ihrer Politik (Wirtschaftskrieg, Aufrüstung und „Klimapolitik“) erst die Verteilungskämpfe mit ausgelöst, die sie nun „sozial“ moderieren wollen.
„Olivgrünes Wirtschaftswunder“
Hier folgen nun einige vom X-Nutzer „TheRealTom“ präsentierte Eindrücke, die den Zustand der Grünen meiner Meinung nach gut illustrieren. Hier zunächst der grüne Boom für Waffenproduzenten:
Deutschland mal zuhören, bitte:Nach dem gescheiterten Versuch,zum Weltmarktführer bei Wind und Sonne zu werden, soll es nun die Rüstungsindustrie richten. Und wieder kostet es Unsummen an Schulden und Steuern.Besonders pikant: Alle ‘anderen gesellschaftlichen Bereiche’ sollen… pic.twitter.com/RodW0ab7OH
Zum Thema „Rüstungswunder“ wurde in diesem Text schon erwähnt, dass die Grünen bei Eskalation und Aufrüstung in der Bundesregierung nicht allein sind – aktuelle Koalitionspläne belegen die Mitverantwortung von FDP und SPD einmal mehr.
Neben dem Thema Rüstung spielt bei den Grünen unter anderem auch das Thema Meinungskontrolle eine wichtige Rolle. Die bereits im Titelbild gezeigte Grüne Katharina Schulze liefert im folgenden (zusammengeschnittenen) Video diesbezüglich bedenkliche Einblicke in die grüne Seele:
Das ist Stasi, das ist Blockwart, das ist alles, was ich in der Schule lernte, daß es sich niemals wiederholen darf.Das neue Braun ist Grün.
Das folgende Foto von der Münchner „Sicherheitskonferenz“ spricht für sich. Ich finde die Worte, die den Fotografierten auf „X“ satirisch in den Mund gelegt werden, trotzdem treffend:
«Korruption» — Symbolfoto: Bits And Splits / Shutterstock
Verteidigungsminister Boris Pistorius gefällt sich zwar in der Rolle des Retters der Ukraine und schwelgt in ahistorischem Geschwafel über Deutschland als deren „Garantiestaat“, ist aber nicht fähig, dem Land, dessen Patenschaft er quasi übernommen hat, auch nur funktionsfähige Transportfahrzeuge zur Verfügung zu stellen. Laut „Bild“ deutet vieles darauf hin, dass das Verteidigungsministerium die Fahrzeuge nicht nur völlig überteuert eingekauft hat, sondern dass diese sogar zur Gefahr für ihre Besatzung werden können. Im letzten Jahr schloss das Verteidigungsministerium mit dem Rüstungskonzern FFG einen Vertrag über die Lieferung von 66 „geschützten Infanteriegefechtsfahrzeuge“ in die Ukraine. Seit Oktober wurden 48 davon in die Ukraine verschickt. Jedoch ist die Panzerung viel zu schwach, dass die Panzerfahrzeuge gar nicht gefechtstauglich sind.
Konkret fehlt es am Minen- und Fragmentschutz gegen Artillerie-, Raketen- und Mörserbeschuss. Stattdessen ist, wie das Ministerium einräumen musste, nur ein „Schutz gegen Handwaffen“ vorhanden, rechtfertigt dies aber damit, dass „ein erhöhter Schutz gegen Minen zum damaligen Zeitpunkt nicht durch die Ukraine gefordert“ worden sei. Aus ukrainischen Regierungskreisen heißt es dagegen, man hätte sehr wohl gerne Fahrzeuge erhalten, die gegen Minen schützen. Diese hätten jedoch „seitens der Deutschen aber nicht zur Auswahl“ gestanden. Darum habe man sich „mit der leicht gepanzerten Variante zufriedengegeben“.Werbung
600.000 Euro statt maximal 215.000 Euro pro Stück bezahlt
Offenbar hat FFG den Auftrag an die deutsche Sparte des US-Rüstungskonzerns „The Armoured Group“ mit Namen „TAG Germany“ weitergegeben. In den USA wurde er dann weitervermittelt und landete schließlich in den Vereinigten Arabischen Emiraten bei der Waffenfirma „TAG Middle East“. Von dort aus wurden sie dann an die Ukraine geliefert, möglicherweise über Flensburg. In Deutschland wurde anscheinend kein einziges hergestellt. Offiziell will man davon im Verteidigungsministerium nichts wissen. „Das Vorgehen als Lizenzbau wurde im Rahmen der Projektierung durch die Firma FFG dargelegt. Herstellung/Lieferung des Chassis durch Ford, USA. Herstellung der Aufbaukomponenten durch „The Armored Group‘, USA, Anlieferung der Komponenten nach Deutschland und Endmontage in Deutschland, um die Wertschöpfungskette in Deutschland zu ermöglichen“, teilte es auf „Bild“-Nachfrage mit.
Hinzu kommt noch der Verdacht, dass völlig überhöhte Preise bezahlt wurden. Während der gewöhnliche Preis pro Fahrzeug, inklusive des Transports in die Ukraine, maximal 215.000 Euro pro Stück beträgt, hat das Ministerium einen Stückpreis von 600 000 Euro pro Fahrzeug, insgesamt rund 40 Millionen Euro, gezahlt. Auch das wollte Pistorius` Ministerium nicht bestätigen. Ein Sprecher teilte lediglich mit, „das Preis-Leistungs-Verhältnis für das einsatzbereit gerüstete Gesamtsystem wurde im Rahmen einer Plausibilitätsprüfung als gerechtfertigt bewertet“. Es scheint also, als habe man fast den dreifachen Preis für Fahrzeuge entrichtet, die kaum ihren Zweck erfüllen können. Hier zeichnet sich ein weiterer Skandal im völlig überbürokratisierten Verteidigungsministerium ab, wo wieder einmal die rechte Hand nicht weiß, was die linke tut. Anstatt sich zur Schutz- und Garantiemacht für andere Länder aufzuwerfen, täte Pistorius als besser daran, erst einmal diesen Augiasstall auszumisten und die Verteidigungsfähigkeit des eigenen Landes zu gewährleisten. (TPL)
The liberal story of the United States is that we’re a nation of immigrants. The indigenous story is that the country was founded as a nation of settler colonialists. For most of US history, maintaining overwhelming white settlement to ensure indigenous dispossession was official policy.
In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler even praised American immigration law for its racial exclusions, favorably comparing the United States to what he framed as a racially defiled Latin America.In an interview with Daniel Denvir on the Jacobin Radio podcast the Dig, Nick Estes discusses his book, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. He talks through nineteenth-century smallpox epidemics, massacres at the hands of the US military, the genocide of the buffalo, and the caging of indigenous people on the reservation system.
The conversation also delves into the twentieth century, highlighting how the US government dammed the Missouri River to control flooding and create white farmland. In doing so, the government flooded massive expanses of indigenous land. This action was part of a broader pattern of settler colonialism characterized by horrific violence, including the near elimination of the buffalo, confinement on reservations, and the domination and exploitation of natural resources. These measures aimed to address not just the presence of indigenous people but also the existence of a larger complex relationship between indigenous people and the land and water and animals. The history of resisting this capitalist and colonialist dispossession, however, endures.
Imperialist Expansion and Annexation
Daniel Denvir
You write that the mobilization against the Dakota Access Pipeline marked a “historic resistance and resurgent indigenous histories not seen for generations, if ever.” Explain what the movement at Standing Rock was about, and why you assign it such an important role in the long sweep of indigenous history.
Nick Estes
Standing Rock was two things. First, it was a movement within a moment of history, but it was also a moment within a longer movement of history. It emerged at the tail end of [Barack] Obama’s presidency, coinciding with the peak of the North American oil boom. Standing Rock was both a unique event and part of ongoing, historic resistance.
Standing Rock is seen as kind of this moment of exceptional indigenous resistance, but if we look at it within a longer context — even just within a decade — it was part of a series of historic fights. This includes opposition in the Alberta tar sands region against the extraction of oil sands and the creation of new pipeline infrastructure, such as the Keystone XL pipeline, leading into the Bakken oil boom, which really took off in 2007 and 2008.
There was an infrastructure in place of indigenous peoples making alliances along these pipeline routes. In that sense, it’s a moment within a larger movement of history. The longer sweep of this history is comprised of two centuries of indigenous resistance going back to the first time we encountered Lewis and Clark on the Missouri River in 1804, all the way through the Plains Indian Wars of the nineteenth century; the damming of the river in the twentieth century; the rise of Red Power; and then the North American oil boom.
There are four invasions, so to speak, that I trace, and the first is the fur trade beginning at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, leading into the second, the expansion of the transcontinental railroad. The third is the slaughter of the buffalo in the mid–nineteenth century, and the damming of the river in the mid–twentieth century. The fourth invasion is the North American oil boom.
And so Standing Rock is, in my opinion, one of those high points of resistance and the coalescence of not just disparate forces that are in the climate justice movement, but the coalescence of history itself on that land and on that river. The reason why Standing Rock is important is that we think of imperialism often in the context of overseas empire.
I was in conversation with a lot of anti-imperialist scholars such as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Manu Karuka, author of Empire’s Tracks. And Manu Karuka is clear about this — he calls it territorial imperialism. And I think if we think about it in that context, we can understand settler colonialism as imperialist expansion and annexation. And thus we can think about indigenous resistance as the first kind of anti-imperialist resistance in North America.
Daniel Denvir
Settler colonialism, you write, is a project that’s fundamentally about replacement and genocide. A perverse irony of this is that these are the very features of settler colonialism that naturalize and legitimate settler colonialism by making the settlement of the United States, or elsewhere, seem normal and inevitable.
Why is it crucial to analyze and confront both capitalism and colonialism, considering the intertwined social, economic, and ecological threats that we face today, beyond just understanding their violent historical foundations?
Nick Estes
Oftentimes, settler colonialism is historicized as something that happened in the past, where I think a lot of scholars and activists and organizers are really making interventions into that conversation is to think about settler colonialism as an ongoing project that is also incomplete — because if it was a complete project, and if it was fulfilled, then why would you still need to expropriate indigenous land bases?
And why would we still be fighting forces of capitalism embodied within the infrastructures of oil pipelines or sites of extraction, such as the Alberta tar sands? In many ways, the coalescence of forces at Standing Rock was really just kind of an echo of past indigenous resistance.
The concept of climate change and even the term “Anthropocene,” though I’m very critical of it, suggests we’re all undergoing a radical global transformation. Indigenous people and indigenous histories play an important role in this context because they embody the perspective of postapocalyptic nations.
We’ve undergone several rounds of genocide — and that genocide isn’t just for indigenous people; it’s not just anthropocentric. In the context of settler colonialism, oftentimes we think of genocide as targeting humans alone, but as we can see, and as I try to detail in my book, it’s not an anthropocentric project, it also targets nonhumans, and we can see that specifically in the clear example of the buffalo nations.
It’s not just some kind of ahistorical or mystical reading of history to say that indigenous peoples have relations with the nonhuman world. Often, when this point is made — there’s this kind of flute music that begins playing — we call it the “Indian flute music syndrome.”
You can be talking about the most urgent political tasks that we’re facing as indigenous people, — overcoming climate change — and people are floored by it. And then you start playing indigenous flute music. And it’s as if they just didn’t hear anything else that happened before that. So there’s a tendency to look at these relations with the nonhuman world in a mystical or ahistorical or metaphysical way, which in many ways is a part of the erasure and the racialization of indigenous people.
It creates this kind of ethno-othering, where we just become ethnographic subjects. We try to refuse ethnographic framing to say that we don’t need to make these spiritual connections to water to say that we as human beings have a right to clean drinking water. That should just be the framework that we’re using.
Because we’re not legible in that framework — we’re not legible in the human rights framework in the United States — we tend to get collapsed into this kind of spiritual connection to the land and to the water. And that’s why the urgent task of our present is to look at history within a materialist framework — the historical materialism of [Karl] Marx and [Friedrich] Engels — to understand that our sources of water, food, our relationship with the land, fundamentally determines our quality of life as indigenous peoples. Why should recognizing this fundamental truth be considered radical?
Gendered Violence
Daniel Denvir
This discussion highlights how indigenous spirituality is often misconstrued through a racialized lens, particularly regarding indigenous relationships with nonhuman nature. This overlooks the tangible, material relationships indigenous peoples have with the environment. You write that nineteenth-century river trade forts — “man forts” — were, in a sense, the first part of an extractive model that is today replicated in the fracking boom. This model combines violence against the earth with violence against women, creating these sharp dichotomies between human and nonhuman nature, on the one hand, and between genders, as well.
Explain the argument that you’re making about colonialist and capitalist approaches to land, to nonhuman nature, and to gender, and how this has repeatedly played out for and been resisted by the Oceti Sakowin.
Nick Estes
I am a big fan of Silvia Federici and her book Caliban and the Witch. Most people talk about the first part of that book, but they don’t talk about the other part. The part of the book that she’s really known for discusses enclosures in Europe and the targeting of peasant women’s political authority within communal European society and the proletarianization of the European peasantry into the capitalist system. The part doesn’t get talked about, however, is the Caliban part — the other part of that title, which is about the same processes happening in the Americas with the discovery of the “New World” by European explorers and the penetration of capitalism into what is ostensibly a non-capitalist indigenous society. I think there’s a romanticization of indigenous people — and even contemporary communal society — as being “socialist” or “communist.”
But I would say that they are socialist or communist, not as a direct rebuttal to capitalism, but rather due to the absence of capitalism. The profit motive didn’t exist naturally. Looking at the Northern Plains in this way, we can see that capitalism penetrates new territory — especially indigenous territory — with violence, and that violence is very gendered.
The arrival of the river trade marks the arrival of the first Europeans who come entirely as groups of men. We understand what the word “man camps” means that it’s often associated with extractive industries and the oil and gas industry. They’re transient temporary settlements — often near indigenous reservations or indigenous communities — and they prey on indigenous women. They exploit the jurisdictional patchwork of indigenous reservation land — which is federal, state, and tribal — because we often don’t have the ability to prosecute nonnatives.
You can see evidence in popular culture, such as the movie The Revenant. Hugh Glass, who was a real historical figure, is played by Leonardo DiCaprio. In the movie, he kind of goes native, so to speak, though that whole part is completely fictionalized. He never had indigenous children as far as we know. But what the director does depict with great historical accuracy is the immense amount of violence and militarization of the river trade and the fur trade.
For example, in the final scene, Hugh Glass is coming to settle accounts with the people who left him to die after he got mauled by the bear. He approaches this river trade fort run by French traders and English traders and some American traders. And outside of that trade fort, he sees Indigenous men and Indigenous children and women kind of begging. He also sees indigenous women being bought and sold like chattel inside the forts themselves.
What this tells us is that gender violence was one of the key tools of colonialism at that time. The fur trade was as much a trade in furs as it was a trade in flesh. But that’s often not how the era is historically depicted. To my mind, it’s such a travesty, and I’m not an eighteenth-century or nineteenth-century historian. It’s not what I trained in. It’s not what I specialize in. So when I went back and read the historiography of that time period, I was appalled because they were making excuses. They were saying in these instances of clearly documented rape — within trader’s journals and within the primary documents — historians were saying, well, you know, it was a different time, so we can’t really call it rape. To me, that was such an oversight on part of how we understand that time period. History may not repeat itself, but there certainly are echoes of that history in the present time. We can see that in the new rounds of accumulation.
The first round of accumulation was the river trade. The second round of accumulation was the advance of what we now know as kind of classic settler colonialism and the privatization of land, often using rail lines or transportation routes to penetrate indigenous territories that were marked by trade forts and military forts and outposts. We can look at the landscape where I’m from and see that Indian reservation headquarters are typically named after the fort that was there.
Standing Rock is Fort Yates. That’s the headquarters. Crow Creek, where I have family, which is right across the river from Lower Brule, is called Fort Thompson. The pier, across from our state capital in South Dakota, is Fort Pier — you know, the Anglicized version of “Pierre.” We can look at the landscape as very much militarized in that context.
The third round of accumulation would be the creation of the dams, which was implemented by a branch of the US military, which is the Army Corps of Engineers. The penetration of capital goes in hand in hand with the state; the state is the handmaiden of capital in that sense. To go back to the fur trade forts — and the way that traders used indigenous women’s bodies to gain access to new markets — this period has been described in Indigenous history as creating “middle grounds” in which native people and settlers or traders negotiated invasion or negotiated settlement. They weren’t partners necessarily, but they were kind of equals, and one didn’t overpower the other.
I think that’s a false rendering of history because we didn’t send traders into European societies and marry only European women. It’s such a bizarre framework. It erases the entire context of encroaching settler colonialism and the subordination of indigenous nations into settler-colonialist capitalist market relations.
The Destruction of Dams
Daniel Denvir
In the 1860s, the United States destroyed ten to fifteen million buffalo in less than two decades, almost eliminating a population that once stood at twenty-five to thirty million. This era marked the allotment, privatization, decollectivization, and denationalization of native land. And then in the twentieth century, the flooding of the Missouri River over huge swaths of reservation land. You cite the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) 1946 Missouri River Basin Investigation, which made this all abundantly clear.
The report found that native people depended upon “free goods of nature,” and that dispossessing them of land via flooding would force them “into seeking cash incomes to make up for the substantial portion of income now represented by their use of natural resources of their present environment.”
The head of the BIA at the time, Dillon Myer, a man who had been in charge of Japanese internment during World War II, said that it was “the starting point to more assimilation and integration, away from a narrow and inbred way of life that was customary of reservation living.”
What role did the destruction of the possibility of subsistence, time and again, play in this multifront genocide? And how did native people resist over time?
Nick Estes
The question of food has played an important role for specifically the Lakota and Dakota people. The 1862 US-Dakota War, in what was then Minnesota Territory, coinciding with the Civil War, began when several Dakota men were starving because they had their rations cut. They went into a white settler’s farm and stole chicken eggs. They ended up killing most of the settler family and it sparked this larger confrontation. So that war began around food and starvation.
This early contestation wasn’t just about a clash of civilizations or a clash of cultures as we’re often told — it was about how we subsist. How do we physically reproduce ourselves on the land? And so, when we signed our treaties with the United States government, that was one of the first things that we talked about.
Yes, there were some elements of the reservation communities that wanted to begin adopting more agriculture into their lifestyles, but by and large they wanted to retain hunting rights. But those indigenous communities that were along the Missouri River had a mixed economy of subsistence. They had large cattle herds from which they could make money while at the same time subsisting off the land itself. With the creation of the Pick-Sloan dams — from that report that you were reading — 75 percent of the wildlife and 90 percent of commercial timber was destroyed when they flooded the land.
That is something we have not actually physically recovered from, as nations on the river itself. There are many wild plants and animals that have never fully returned or have never been fully restored. That’s something that we’re talking about in the context of food sovereignty. We do manage buffalo herds, even though they were nearly extinct because of the mass slaughter and buffalo genocide.
But we are managing our own buffalo herds and we are managing our own indigenous lands. And we’re trying to recuperate what would be called a subsistence economy because we are entirely dependent, not just on rations and commodities, as we call them, but we’re entirely dependent on the cash economy. In many ways, the creation of the Pick-Sloan dams coalesced with termination and federal relocation policies at the time.
If you read those reports, these Bureau of Indian Affairs anthropologists and policymakers and people like Dillon S. Myer, whom you just quoted, you see these dams as a physical means to implement termination. The dams flooded a lot of reservation headquarters, they flooded the Lower Brule headquarters, they flooded the headquarters for the Crow Creek reservation, they flooded Yankton’s headquarters, they flooded Cheyenne River’s headquarters. Luckily, most of Standing Rock’s headquarters were saved, but the headquarters up in Fort Berthold were destroyed as well.
The plan was, well, since we’ve taken the central location of these indigenous nations away from them, now they’re going to have to relocate those services off the reservation. That will be part of this relocation plan to move indigenous people off the land and move them into surrounding border towns.
Chamberlain is where I was born and raised. Chamberlain is representative of the paradox of relocation. It’s like the paradox of Israeli settler colonialism — they want indigenous land, they want Palestinian land, but they don’t want indigenous people, and they don’t want Palestinians.
The failure of the termination project and the failure of the relocation project was the pure bigotry of South Dakota saying, “We don’t really want to fully integrate these people into our public school system, into our welfare system. We don’t want to take on that burden. We want the land, but we don’t want indigenous people.”
Addressing the concept of subsistence within the Oceti Sakowin territory, specifically the great Sioux reservation, which is the western half of South Dakota, raises essential questions. What are we going to do? What does a decolonial future look like?
Oftentimes there’s this question around land: Who owns it? What are they doing with it? Who profits from it? Somebody like Ted Turner owns 200,000 acres of our treaty land. That acreage is actually larger than our nation as the Lower Brunswick tribe. It’s larger than a lot of our smaller indigenous nations.
And so when we talk about decolonization — when we talk about land restoration — yes, we are talking about what the Army Corps of Engineers has taken of our shoreline, but we’re also talking about these settler families that have historically lived within our territories. We’re not talking about kicking people out of their homes, you know, but we are talking about changing that relationship to land.
Slavery and the Question of Land
Daniel Denvir
A revealing irony is that the supposed inviolability of private property rights — private land rights didn’t and don’t protect ordinary settlers from corporate power. Energy companies and the like have always exercised a higher form of property rights. Ordinary white settlers were promised this dream of white egalitarianism but what was actually taking place, beneath the mystifications of racial capitalism, was the concentration of land and wealth in the hands of the few.
Nick Estes
Absolutely. Land is wealth in this country. Native people, and even black people, are racialized according to land.
Daniel Denvir
How did these different relationships to the land inform Indigenous and settler identities. On the one hand, the system has fundamentally been about relationships with the land in terms of facilitating the settler-colonial order of domination, its racialized hierarchies, and the raw materiality of acquiring its land base. But at the same time, this sort of ideology of civilizational differences often was exposed as a thin pretext for the material interests at play.
If you look at the so-called five civilized tribes in the Southeast, like the Cherokee, who became sedentary farmers and ran cotton plantations that used enslaved labor, they were still moved, and violently. What does that reveal about the relationship between the land ideology of settler colonialism and its material reality?
Nick Estes
The context of the removal of the five “civilized” tribes from the southeastern United States to the West is really important. That also was about westward expansion. It was about securing access to gold mines in places like Georgia, but it was also about the seizure of property. When [Andrew] Jackson, and then [Martin] Van Buren, removed the five “civilized” tribes from the southeastern part of the United States, settlers literally just moved into these communities and took over these plantations.
The Cherokee nation is really fascinating too, because at that time they had their own written newspaper. They had their own tricameral legislature. They had their own separation of powers. They had their own judges. They were sending a lot of the children of these slave owning elites to places like Harvard. They were getting education. They had their own lawyers. For all intents and purposes, they were a “civilized” nation. But nonetheless, they weren’t citizens of a settler nation.
So as much as they enacted forms of “civilization,” they could never fully achieve a settler identity or equality under US federal law. While the foundation of federal Indian law is codified within the Marshall trilogy, nonetheless, those Supreme court decisions by John Marshall relegate indigenous peoples almost as outside of settler citizenship.
Johnson v. McIntosh is an important Supreme Court decision. I detail it in the book because it designates indigenous nations as domestic dependent nations. What people don’t understand — and why you can’t just read settler colonialism within the legal framework — is that the United States at that time was just a small cluster of colonies hugging the Atlantic seaboard. And yet that law was applied to all indigenous nations after the fact, even though we had nothing to do with that Supreme Court decision.
The question of slavery attends the question of land — we can’t talk about settler colonialism without talking about the institution of slavery because black slavery specifically was the engine of westward expansion, both in an economic sense, but also in a political sense.
When we look at westward expansion and the addition of states and territories, there was the question of free state versus slave state. Texas couldn’t become a state until Oregon Territory had organized into a state. And to organize Oregon Territory into a state you had to annihilate all the indigenous people there, or at least subdue them.
However, Texas also saw indigenous wars against the Comanche Nation — against a lot of the plains tribes down there, the Kiowa as well. And even the expulsion and removal of the Kickapoo who were in the Ohio River Valley, but because they were fleeing westward expansion are now in Mexico.
We can think of westward expansion in the context of slavery. That’s one aspect. But then after the Emancipation Proclamation and the conclusion of the bloody Civil War, we also have the occupation of the South to enforce Reconstruction. Once the Northern capitalists lost interest in overseeing Reconstruction in the South, that army was withdrawn. But that army didn’t just disappear. It went westward.
Richard Henry Pratt, who was the architect of the Carlisle Industrial Indian Boarding School, developed his concept of Indigenous assimilation while commanding units of mixed freed black slaves and Indian scouts during punitive campaigns against the Kiowa and Comanche in Southern Texas. Carlisle Barracks, one of the oldest military outposts in the United States, was transformed into an Indian boarding school — the first to go there were the Lakota people.
In 1879, we were considered the most militant and hostile indigenous nation to the United States. And so, they took our children — specifically in Rosebud and Pine Ridge — to essentially hold them hostage. That’s not hyperbole; that’s actually the language that they used.
And we see that going back to the British colonists in New England — capturing Pequot children and holding them hostage for the good behavior of their people. It served as both an assimilative gift of civilization and as a coercive measure against their leadership. Richard Henry Pratt, in all his benevolence, rejected biological racism. He didn’t believe that black people are biologically inferior to white people or that indigenous people were inferior to white people. But he did subscribe to a form of social and civilizational chauvinism, meaning that what made black people more susceptible to settler citizenship or incorporation into the United States was the fact that they had experienced natal alienation.
They lost their culture, their land base; their families were completely utterly destroyed. Pratt looked at that as a positive model for Indigenous people: to say, we need to take them from their families, isolate them from their nations, and that’s the only way they can successfully become productive citizens of the United States. It really boils down to the land; they were taking these children, not because they wanted to give us civilization — most of the children that went to boarding schools never graduated. So, what was the purpose? The purpose was to force our leadership to sign over land. This strategy culminated in the 1887 resistance to allotment and the eventual signing of the Great Sioux Agreement in 1889, which opened up nine million acres of our land. This created what we now know as the modern reservations in West River, South Dakota.
The Myth of the Uninhabited West
Daniel Denvir
You make an interesting distinction between two different settler orientations to indigenous land. On the one hand, the land has been targeted because it’s valuable for farming or for gold in the Black Hills. But then, with the flooding of the Missouri, you write, “Our lands and lives were targeted not because they held precious resources or labor to be extracted. In fact, the opposite was true. Our lands and lives were targeted and held value because they could be wasted, submerged, destroyed.”
Explain your argument, and what this reveals about settler colonialism and capitalism in light of this dynamic of seizing land either for profit or for waste in the pursuit of profit elsewhere.
Nick Estes
Richard Nixon created the term “national sacrifice zone” when he was talking about uranium mining in the West to fuel US economic and military interests. The idea was that we had to sacrifice these areas in the West — what a lot of people call flyover country. We can think about that concept in the context of a lot of different US presidents. Teddy Roosevelt created the modern national park system. To do so he had to ideologically put native people out of existence — the fact that there were Shoshone people still living there on the land in Yellowstone National Park.
If we look at a lot of the photography of the Western landscape — like the work of Ansel Adams — or Western landscape art, it often depicts an empty, barren land. The story was of an endless supply of land. If we look at the artwork on US passports as US citizens, it’s typically about our national monuments, and many of them are natural — they’re landscapes. This plays a very important ideological function, and it does a lot of political work. It describes the West as this kind of open landscape, free of indigenous people, free of any kind of people. If there’s nobody living on the land or if it’s not being used, then it could be settled. It could be reserved for white tourists to go visit or it could be wasted.
All of these factors play an important role in how we understand the West. The Pick-Sloan dams weren’t built downriver of major white settlements. They had strategically located each of these dams on Indian reservations. The Missouri River Basin States Authority created maps. And on those maps, they showed the boundaries of the states themselves. But what they didn’t show was the Indian reservations where they were going to build these dams.
It was determined before the Flood Control Act of 1944 was passed by Congress — these dams would be built on Indian reservations. Dams are very destructive. Dams throughout the world — dams that are being built in places like China and India — are not being built next to major metropolitan areas.
They’re building dams in rural spaces where they often think life is cheaper. Life can be easily relocated, and the land isn’t much use. This has been an important part of the racialization of native people — that we’re “nomadic.” Thus our removal is made much easier.
I want to push back on some notions here about Lakota people specifically. Yes, we did follow the buffalo herds. Yes, we were people who traveled quite frequently. Yet if we look at the names that we called ourselves, like Miniconjou, which means plants by the water, it suggests that we have a different relationship to the land.
And we weren’t just aimlessly roaming across the plains. Plants by the water, Miniconjou, those people typically lived by the river, and set up seasonal camps where they grew corn. And if you know anything about corn, corn requires a lot of intensive care — it requires human intervention. It can’t grow wild.
There are a lot of plants and vegetables that we did harvest from the wild, but there were a lot of domesticated plants that we use, such as corn, beans, and squash. I don’t want to glorify that transition to the reservation period and a more sedentary life.
The reservation period was horrific. A lot of people starved. A lot of people died. But nonetheless, the transition to a sedentary life was much easier because we had the agricultural knowledge. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, 80 percent of indigenous nations in the Western Hemisphere had some form of agriculture.
The “Dangers” of Wilderness
Daniel Denvir
And yet this myth of total nomadism was key to justifying indigenous dispossession. The McIntosh decision — the 1823 Supreme Court decision authored by the famous chief justice John Marshall — uses this kind of logic to basically declare the legitimacy of US dispossession by virtue of conqueror’s rights.
Nick Estes
Even today, modern Indian water law is based on those precepts of “civilization,” of agriculture. When a state decides that it wants to assert water rights over a river, oftentimes they’ll take this to court, and it’s adjudicated, and it’s called quantification.
And what quantification means for indigenous people is how we use our water. What counts under federal Indian water law is water used for the purposes of civilization, because according to the federal government, that’s why we signed treaties and that’s why we were put on reservations — to become civilized Indians. And that form of civilization was agriculture.
It’s really important to remember that this is not just some kind of benign racist thing — it’s actually codified in the law, and it actually determines how much sovereignty we have over our own natural resources such as water.
Daniel Denvir
And this is all an echo of Chief Justice Marshall writing that natives were “fierce savages whose occupation was war and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest. To leave them in possession of their country was to leave the country a wilderness.”
Nick Estes
Marshall was drawing from papal bulls and what is now understood as the doctrine of discovery. When Columbus, who, to his dying day, believed that he landed in India and not the Americas, he was authorized by the Spanish crown to conquer or to claim this land and its people in the name of that crown, and he was authorized to do so by the Vatican. And they created these edicts such as the papal bulls. You can read them — they’re online. These became the basis for not just federal Indian law, but also international law.
The debates of [Francisco de] Vitoria that were happening in the mid-1500s were around whether or not indigenous people were humans. Ultimately, they decided that we were partially human. So, the Spanish had to convert us or at least offer conversion before they killed us. Nonetheless, this has been codified within federal Indian law in the United States. And so in the chapter that you’re quoting — that quote from John Marshall — who’s being quoted by Judge [Warren K.] Urbom in a federal court decision about whether or not the United States has jurisdiction in Sioux Territory.
The law that is being cited is based on these papal bulls that were passed at the end of the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth century. These are very old, very problematic, and flawed conceptions of indigenous people — very dehumanizing in many ways. But this is the basis of federal Indian law. It’s very conservative, and it’s not conservative in the political sense. It’s conservative in the sense that it draws upon these backward notions of indigenous people.
When a lot of our political issues get tied up in the courts, this is the basis that federal judges are required to draw from — this precedent of Indian law. And it often works against us. Sometimes it works in our favor, but oftentimes it works against us. And until it’s repealed at a federal level, we’re still going to be encountering the papal bulls of the fifteenth century. And as far as I know, the Vatican, for all of its problems, doesn’t accept these as valid today.
Daniel Denvir
I want to pause here to discuss the centrality of treaties in native politics, particularly the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty in the case of the Oceti Sakowin. What did and do treaties mean to the settler government? And what did they do and mean to native nations?
Nick Estes
I’ll answer the second part of that question first. The United States has had a monopoly on interpretation of the treaties it signed with us, but a treaty has to be equally interpreted by all parties. Our treaties have been imbricated into federal court systems — imbricated into congressional law.
But our interpretation of those treaties is that they form our original agreement with the United States government. The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty is very foundational in who we are as Indigenous people, as Lakota people specifically, and Dakota and Nakota people.
Daniel Denvir
And it was signed after a rather successful round of armed resistance on the part of native peoples: when a group under Crazy Horse’s leadership destroyed an entire unit, the United States was forced to come to the table.
Nick Estes
That was what they called Red Cloud’s War. Red Cloud was one of the main treaty signers. He was one of the main treaty negotiators. There was an internal debate among our nations as to what to do about the United States government. We understood that the United States was militarily, economically, and politically weakened by the Civil War. And our debate was about whether or not we should actually wipe out most of the white settlements in our homelands and wipe out all of the forts. We did wipe out a lot of the forts in the western frontier of our territory because they were interfering with our access to the buffalo herds.
But we chose the path of diplomacy. And I think that speaks volumes. We had an upper hand in that region — not across North America in general — but in that region we couldn’t be defeated. And so we drew the United States to the negotiating table.
There’s a lot of debate about whether or not we fully understood what was being presented to us because we couldn’t read what was on the paper, but we have our own oral traditions. And oftentimes you’ll go to cultural events around our nation, on the reservation powwows. At gatherings — political gatherings, et cetera — they will talk about the treaties, and there’s such an in-depth knowledge of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. It is cited verbatim — from memory — about what is in that treaty and what was promised to us.
Red Cloud understood, for example, that the hunting territory of our nation, which was about thirty to thirty-five million acres, was something that was reserved specifically for the buffalo nation. In that way, we were signing that treaty on behalf of a nonhuman nation — to protect them.
Daniel Denvir
And these are expansive hunting grounds in the Powder River Basin.
Nick Estes
The Powder River Basin going up to the Heart River in the area between what is now Standing Rock and Mandan, North Dakota. This hunting territory plays an important role because the treaty says “so long as the buffalo shall roam to justify the chase” or something along those lines. That’s an important clause of the treaty because, if there are no buffalo, then there’s no hunting territory.
Initially, some of the treaty negotiators were hesitant to include such a clause, as it granted such expansive territory. How are we going to reign in the militant bands that decide not to live on reservations? And the answer to that was, well, we kill the buffalo.
Buffalo Annihilation
Daniel Denvir
It seems like one question might be not whether native people understood the treaty they were signing because they couldn’t read the text, but whether they could imagine that the US government would interpret that clause in such a twisted way as to justify the unthinkable: the apocalyptic destruction of the Buffalo.
Nick Estes
It’s something that I’ve pondered over. I could write a whole book on just that and our oral interpretations of that treaty and of that clause. If you look at Red Cloud’s testimony — when he resigned as the leader of the Pine Ridge agency — he cites that clause specifically. And he says something along the lines of “The Lakotas need the buffalo and the buffalo need the Lakotas and without our hunting territory, we are no longer Lakota people.” I’m not trying to paint Red Cloud as a tragic figure, but there was a huge amount of loss, not just on the human side, but on the nonhuman side as well in that particular moment in time.
The reason why something like the Ghost Dance caught on was because it wasn’t just about the return of indigenous life — it was about the return of nonhuman life. There were Ghost Dance songs that were songs for the buffalo and the return of the buffalo.
There were also songs for the return of the bear — the plains bear that had been almost utterly annihilated. Many of our last names — the names of the people who still have those really old, traditional last names — are names like Bull Bear. There are names like Spotted Tail, Black Elk, names that suggest that we had a relationship — a profound relationship — to these nonhuman relatives.
When we’re advocating for the restoration of our treaty lands, we also are advocating for the restoration of our treaty relatives, so to speak — those nonhuman nations who signed that treaty. Buffalo herds require an expansive territory. Our reservations are so fractionated and so fenced off and so small that we can’t really facilitate the mass reintroduction of buffalo herds unless we take out fences and we open up a common pasture.
We’ve signed about thirty-five treaties with the United States. The first was in 1805, and the last was in 1868. Three years later, of course, treaty making was abolished. The first thing that most of these treaties establish is that the United States is the sole sovereign in the region, and that we will only negotiate with the United States.
The first treaties essentially boxed out other European powers — the French and the British and even the Spanish. Later on, the 1851 treaty at Fort Laramie brought together tens of thousands of indigenous people on the plains. The treaty was described by the US government as a brokered peace among warring factions. If an issue arose over hunting grounds, the United States would be the one who negotiated or mediated that conflict. It established the US government as the protectorate of these indigenous nations.
And the 1868 treaty is particularly fascinating for its broad recognition of indigenous rights, specifically for the Lakota people, defining the territory, resources, and protections provided by the government. For example, it designates the western half of what is now South Dakota as the permanent home of the Sioux Nation of Indians.
Daniel Denvir
How did the era of mass armed resistance in the nineteenth century come to an end and how did it lead to a shift in the dominant mode of settler-colonialist domination from military repression to a system of carceral control that created the modern reservations? It became a system defined by reservation police, boarding schools, missionaries, all together aimed at breaking cultural, political, and kinship institutions.
Nick Estes
The transition from armed resistance to one of reservation life was a very traumatic one for us. It’s marked by the 1876 Battle of Greasy Grass when we wiped out the Seventh Cavalry — [George Armstrong] Custer’s so-called last stand. It was the centennial celebration of the United States birthday and the Declaration of Independence.
And I feel like Custer aimed for a big win before the centennial celebration on July 4th, which was almost a week after he was killed at the Battle of Little Bighorn, as the US government calls it. At this time, it wasn’t just militant bands of the Lakotas who were still waging armed resistance. A lot of reservation-based people would slip away from the reservation system and join up to live like free Lakota people, and to hunt and follow the buffalo, and to live under the leadership of people who had never signed treaties with the United States government.
After the Battle of Little Bighorn at Greasy Grass, there was an understanding that we had done something that was going to reap a lot of consequences for our people. And so the bands scattered. Some of them went north to Canada to seek protection under the British crown — Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were there for a while. Others went back to the reservation life.
It’s not as if we were defeated and then decided militant armed resistance was no longer viable. It was because we realized that we couldn’t fight anymore. The US military couldn’t defeat us, yes, but they could take away our food sources and they could take away our children and they could take away all the things that we held sacred to our communities and our families. The surrendering was a military surrender in many ways, but it’s important to note that it didn’t happen after a major defeat.
While I don’t really get into this in my book, I highly recommend that people read The Politics of Hallowed Ground by Mario Gonzalez and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn. The work discusses the killing of our pony herds. They wiped them out because they understood the pony was a tool for mobilization. We could leave the reservation — we could escape, we could continue to hunt.
They wiped out the pony herds. They implemented a reservation pass system, which essentially barred us from leaving the agency to visit another agency without the permission of the Indian agent at the time.
A lot of these Indian agents weren’t just technocrats or bureaucrats. A lot of them had investments in the fur trade. A lot of them had investments in the killing of buffalo. Some of them even had stakes in mines in the Black Hills. Even the Catholic priests that were out there had stakes in mines in the Black Hills. They were benefiting financially. At the same time, you had the implementation of the civilization regulations. Which essentially disallowed dancing, ceremonial feasts, large public gatherings, giveaways, and also the Sun Dance.
The Sun Dance was one of our most sacred and most powerful ceremonies. It brought together the entire nation. But these kinds of cultural events were banned because they were where we organized politically.
So the transition from armed resistance to the carceral reservation system was a very violent one. It entailed the destruction of our pony herds. It entailed the turning in of our rifles. And oftentimes it wasn’t just rifles for killing human beings — it was rifles for hunting — and it made us dependent on the reservation system itself.
The reservations weren’t just physically coercive — it was almost impossible to leave them because we had to get our food sources from the rations that were being handed out there. The civilization regulations — implemented around 1885 — were incredibly important. They were only repealed in 1935 with the Indian Reorganization Act. They helped facilitate the taking of children to be put into boarding schools, and the banning and the outlawing of our language and our religious practices. It wasn’t until 1978 that indigenous languages and religious practices were “legalized.”
Still to this day, our Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood (CDIB) cards, issued by the US government, contain a notable detail. The first four numbers correspond to the prisoner of war camp to which our ancestors were assigned. For example, my card begins with numbers that signify the specific camp allocated to the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. It’s a system in which each tribe is associated with a unique number that links back to their historical assignment to a prisoner of war camp.
It’s how people became enrolled as “citizens” — what we now know as citizens of tribal nations. But they were also enrolled according to allotment. The letter “U” on my card means that I’m unallotted. I don’t have indigenous land on the reservation. Other people are “A” allottees who are descendants of people who were allocated land through the allotment system.
To this day, we live with that carceral system. It’s embedded in who we are as tribal citizens of our own nations. But it’s also embedded in our relationship to the land base that we come from.
So the reservation period hasn’t ended. Even though we’re allowed to leave the reservation today, many of those punitive policies persist. The allotment era may have ended in 1935, but the aftereffects of those policies exist to this day. The lasting legal and political justifications for the reservation system that went into creating these laws haven’t been entirely undone.
Prophets of Resistance
Daniel Denvir
I want to talk about the other side of this legacy, the legacy of resistance.
The first big moment of resistance after the end of mass armed struggle in the 1880s was the Ghost Dance. It prophesied that a messiah would destroy the colonial world and reinstate the indigenous one. You write that boarding school–educated students, people with a foot in both worlds, were key to facilitating its dissemination. What was the Ghost Dance and what conditions led to its emergence?
Why did the United States see it as such a threat that they ended it by massacring Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee and by killing Sitting Bull? And looking back, what is its place in this longer trajectory of indigenous resistance?
Nick Estes
Paiute prophet Wovoka was the first to envision the Ghost Dance. I’m not an expert on Paiute history, but there are many stories about him and how he came to these visions. I would take a materialist approach to history and say that many of his visions arose from the conditions in which he and his people lived during the reservation period.
Examining these prophet-inspired or prophecy-inspired movements among indigenous peoples reveals a pattern of response to specific social conditions. For instance, in the Ohio Valley, Tenskwatawa and his brother Tecumseh created Prophetstown. Together they united disparate indigenous nations into a kind of political confederacy to push back against the westward expansion of the United States into the Ohio River Valley. But Tenskwatawa’s vision and prophecy was very much a response to the specific social conditions of that particular time.
There may be a kind of esoteric spiritual element to it, but I think it’s more important to look at those kinds of material conditions that led to these kinds of uprisings. The Ghost Dance was another iteration of these sorts of prophecy-inspired movements.
Wovoka envisioned an indigenous future in which the colonial relation was abolished — indigenous people would go back to living the way they had, or at least return to a more just and equal realm. And the funny thing about it, and most people don’t talk about this, is that there were non-Indigenous people who participated in the Ghost Dance as well, specifically in Ute and Paiute territory.
The way it proliferated for Lakota people was when Lakota leaders traveled to Pyramid Lake, Nevada, where Wovoka was living. They traveled by train. They actually received permission from the Indian agent and passes to travel by train. This was a thoroughly modern affair. They weren’t riding by horseback through the desert on a horse with no name — they were riding the train on a modern transportation system. And so, they went to visit Wovoka and he instructed them how to perform the dance and the reason why they needed to perform the dance.
When they returned to the Pine Ridge and Rosebud agencies, boarding school–educated Lakota people there transcribed the prophecy into both Lakota and in English. James Mooney’s investigation of the Ghost Dance notes that they sent out these transcriptions as letters.
James Mooney was an ethnographer — an agent of empire — hired by the United States to investigate the root causes of the Ghost Dance. And his book on the Ghost Dance laid out what has now become the standard interpretation of the Ghost Dance movement itself. Its problems lie within James Mooney himself as an agent of empire.
He was a lawyer who was kind of an armchair ethnographer, as many ethnographers and anthropologists were at the time. He traveled out west and collected oral interviews. He visited multiple indigenous nations. Most of his focus was on the Lakota and Dakota interpretations of the Ghost Dance, which he says we misinterpreted. But boarding school–educated Lakota played a crucial role in the movement’s spread to different indigenous reservations.
The movement represented a thoroughly modern anti-colonial resistance. It wasn’t what James Mooney saw as a millenarian religious revitalization movement that believed in an apocalypse. Rather, it leveraged the prevailing conditions of reservation life and utilized tools introduced by colonizers, such as writing and speaking in English, to spread its message.
People were Ghost Dancing in the sense that they were withdrawing and refusing to participate in the reservation economies and reservation political life. They were no longer asking permission from the Indian agent to do things — to hold dances.
Dancing itself was illegal. So the very nature of the Ghost Dance was illegal because we weren’t allowed to dance. They would often withdraw from the agency towns and go out into these remote parts of the reservation and hold these dances — often in secret, but most often in public. Were they armed? Absolutely. This was a very violent time. The Indian policy at the time had created what was called the Indian police to essentially enforce the reservation order to prevent people from dancing, to prevent people from leaving the reservation.And what made this particularly nefarious was that it split up families, because boarding school–educated children would get recruited to the Indian Police and then be required to arrest their grandmother or grandfather for participating in a ceremony.
Ghost Dance Massacres
Daniel Denvir
And this is not so long after the final moments of mass armed conflict and armed resistance — Custer was sent in to enforce a federal decree that native people either had to immediately return to the reservations or be considered hostile.
Nick Estes
We also have to consider that 1889 was the year that North Dakota and South Dakota achieved statehood, and as part of the conditions set forth in their enabling acts — common to most Western states admitted into the Union — they were required to forego interference with indigenous people and indigenous nations. This was done to maintain the federal government’s exclusive jurisdiction over indigenous affairs.
South Dakota, establishing statehood, understood that the western half of its territory was carved up by large land-based tribes, and it wanted access to that territory. So as much as the repression of the Ghost Stance was initiated at the federal level, the rallying against Ghost Dancers really began at the local level with these white settlers. Places like Rapid City organized what were called cowboy militias, which were like armed vigilante groups that would go around and kill native people.
They massacred seventy-five native people who had left the reservation. This was all leading up to the Wounded Knee Massacre in the state of South Dakota. This was against the backdrop of the land boom in South Dakota upon its achieving statehood — white settlers were essentially squatting on indigenous land and near reservations.
There are a lot of towns in the western half of South Dakota where, if you ask some of these old landowners to produce the original title to the land, they can’t. They’re still eating away at reservation territory.
At the time, a lot of people weren’t getting their rations. So, they were going out and killing settlers’ cattle to eat, to prevent starvation. This was the context. It was a very tense moment. At the local level, white settlers were petitioning state governments to do something, and state governments were petitioning the federal government to do something.
So, they created a mass scare — very similar to what happened at Standing Rock. This caused the armament of the settler militias, such as the cowboy militia that was created in Rapid City. And their stance was, “if you don’t do something, we’re going to do something.” And so, the federal government deployed half of its standing army against starving, horseless, and unarmed people.
A lot of these Ghost Dancers, were they armed? Yes, but they weren’t armed in the sense that they could take over and have an armed revolution. They were protesting in the best way they knew how against the conditions that they were facing on the reservation — and yet they represented a political threat to the order of things.
The idea spread that if these Indians didn’t come under control, it could potentially lead to armed conflict with the white settlers that were surrounding the reservation. Spotted Elk — also known as Si Tanka or Bigfoot — fled from Cheyenne River and camped with Sitting Bull in December at that time.
And he had led a group of Ghost Dancers, which was primarily comprised of women and children and elders. There were a handful of men — but it definitely wasn’t a “war party” as it was called later on by the military that was deployed against them. They went to Standing Rock. They stayed near Sitting Bull’s encampment.
Sitting Bull was awakened one morning by Indian police who essentially assassinated him in his own house in front of his children. There was a scuffle, some Indian police got killed, and some of Sitting Bull’s followers got killed. The incident alarmed Si Tanka, or Bigfoot, prompting him to leave the reservation really quickly, without sufficient provisions. At the time, it was cold and Si Tanka had developed pneumonia, so he had to be carried by a horse-drawn wagon. They fled to Red Cloud’s agency to seek sanctuary.
As they traveled southwards to the Red Cloud agency, they were stopped at a place called Wounded Knee Creek, where they set up camp. There was a lot of confusion about why they were there, because it hadn’t been communicated to a lot of the military folks that were there.
Custer’s regiment, the 7th Cavalry, was deployed at that encampment to put them under armed guard. There’s a lot of questions about what happened that morning. An interesting fact about the day of the massacre was that it was actually 60 degrees — it was a very warm day.
The Cavalry came down and asked Bigfoot’s people to turn over their weapons — their hatchets — and to surrender themselves. There’s confusion over who fired the first shot. The widely accepted version is that a man who was deaf refused to give his hunting rifle over to the soldiers who were trying to confiscate it.
People who are part of the Lakota warrior tradition don’t own anything except for their weapons. To take a man’s weapon, even if he didn’t use it to kill other human beings, and even if it was just used for hunting, was to take away everything of that person, of that man.
So, he refused to give it over. He only spoke in signs. What was happening hadn’t been communicated to him. And his gun went off. And thus began the massacre of around three hundred Lakota people, primarily Miniconjou, at Wounded Knee. To this day, the military recognizes it as a battle. There is a battle banner of Wounded Knee that the military still flies — the 7th Cavalry still has the battle banner.
Eighteen of those soldiers were granted medals of honor — legitimating their actions as an engagement against an armed group of people. But the interesting thing about all this, and I document this in the book, is that it didn’t end there. A lot of the Ghost Dancers — the Oglala Ghost Dancers in Red Cloud’s agency — fled to a place called the stronghold in the Badlands.
People like Plenty Horses and Crow Dog, a former Indian police officer from Rosebud who became disillusioned with reservation life, went back to being Lakota people, speaking only Lakota, and wearing their hair long. They joined the Ghost Dance resistance, which evolved into a more armed resistance. Some churches burned down, and some settlers fled because their cattle were killed. But, by and large, most of the leadership didn’t want any more bloodshed after all of these people had been killed.
Lieutenant Edward Casey was dispatched to bring in this hostile group of Ghost Dancers in the stronghold. Plenty Horses, after being taken away from his family and educated at Carlisle Indian School, returned to the reservation to find that his acquired skills, such as blacksmithing, were incredibly useless. There were no jobs. There was no shop. The enforced cutting of his hair and the dressing as a white man caused him great humiliation and alienated him from his own family. And so, he had joined this resistance movement in the stronghold.
In a defiant act, when Lieutenant Edward Casey arrived to meet with the Ghost Dancers, Plenty Horses approached him from behind — when he was mounted on his horse — and shot him in the back of the head and killed him.
Plenty Horses was subsequently arrested. However, during his trial for the murder of Edward Casey, the court determined that a state of war existed at the time, which meant that he couldn’t be charged with murder. This ruling implicitly acknowledged that if Plenty Horses were guilty of murder, then the actions at Wounded Knee Massacre would have been acts of murder as well.
Accordingly, the legacy of the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee is very important for Lakota people. It’s a strong marker for us as a transition, beyond the reservation period toward a phase characterized by political repression, particularly against reservation leadership.
This period saw the emergence of the first treaty councils, which operated clandestinely, alongside cultural and spiritual societies that also went underground. This shift was driven by the fear of experiencing the same kind of repression that happened at Wounded Knee. The aftermath of these events was very traumatic. Nonetheless, the spirit of the Ghost Dance itself lived on.
Capitalism vs. Interdependence
Daniel Denvir
I want to talk more about the destruction of indigenous relationships with land and with nonhuman nature. In Lakota and Dakota cosmology, the buffalo are a nation, and so is the Missouri River. You write, “Capitalism is not merely an economic system but also a social system, and it was here abundantly evident that indigenous social systems offered a radically different way of relating to other people and the world.”
Explain how Oceti Sakowin kinship relationships function, not only between humans of various sorts, but also with other nonhuman entities — land, water, creatures. What sorts of lessons might this kinship model hold, especially for this current moment where we live under a dominant system and ideology that devalues nature as a waste dump, in part by invisibilizing the very real and intimate relationships that do exist between humans?
Nick Estes
To begin to answer that question, we have to talk about the concept of Wolakota, which, if you look up the definition in the Lakota language dictionary, is the translation for “treaties.” It’s taken on that meaning. But the term asks, what is it to live a good life as a Lakota person? It’s associated with peace, with harmony and good relations. Wolakota as a concept actually began before paper treaties — before colonization and European invasion.
And it began with P’te Sanwi, which is the White Buffalo Calf Woman. She was our primary prophet. She brought us into correct relations with the human and nonhuman world and, essentially, she made the Lakota people, as the story goes.
Winter counts are pictographic depictions of monumental events that took place during the four seasons. They were typically recorded during the winter, and then retold during the winter, hence the name. A notable entry in these records was the first treaty made with nonhuman entities, which included the elk nation, the buffalo nation, the wolf nation — the animal nations that lived on our lands — and brought us back into correct relationships with them. Included in this pictograph is a picture of water.
There’s a constellation associated with the buffalo nation. The constellation is called Tamni, which means “her water” and it’s a word for womb, reflecting a connection with this sort of biological or anthropocentric notion of our relationship to water in the sense that everyone is born in water.
That’s the original pictograph. Ironically, the white anthropologist who collected his winter count never explained what these earlier pictographs meant. Through interpretations by Lakota oral historians, we now know that this is one of the first documentations of when we became Lakota people as we know it today.
Fast forward to the nineteenth century, when we began making treaties with the United States. Article 11 of the Fort Laramie Treaty States something to the effect of, “so long as the buffalo shall roam to justify the chase” we shall have this hunting territory.
It was a very expansive hunting territory. It nearly doubled our treaty territory from the reservation — which was about thirty-two million acres — to the hunting territory, which is about thirty-five million acres. That hunting territory is trespassed by the Dakota Access Pipeline.
The legal foundation for this hunting territory is outlined in the 1868 treaty, emphasizing the tribe’s right to sustain itself through hunting or harvesting from the nonhuman world. The treaty spells out a direct relationship not just to the nonhuman world, in this case the buffalo nation — it spells out a relationship to the land.
If there are no longer buffalo roaming that territory, then we no longer have rights to use it and to hunt in that territory. The United States has interpreted that particular article as: if there are no buffalo, then there are no hunting grounds, and then there is no hunting territory. And so, to kill a buffalo literally translated into the taking of land.
The cultural aspect of that is that some of the buffalo hunters who came into the region were European aristocracy. They didn’t just come into our region; they came to all of the West and the Great Plains area. These hunters, often accompanied by US military guides, participated in expeditions, which were often called “war parties” or “the slaying of red skins.”
And that was associated with the taking of scalps off of the mutilated corpses of slain native people. They would also take hides and leave the carcasses to rot — sometimes they would poison the carcasses with strychnine to get rid of scavengers and the predatory animals such as coyotes and wolves.
There is this esoteric and spiritual connection to the buffalo nation that goes back into our history, emblematized by the White Buffalo Woman. But there is also a direct material connection to the Buffalo — this can be seen in the legal, political connection that is codified within the treaties themselves.
When Red Cloud, Pia Luta, the leader of the Oglala, abdicated his leadership in the Pine Ridge reservation, he said that we were told that the land of the Lakotas was the land of the buffalo. “The buffalo shall have their land, so that they shall roam, and the Lakotas shall have their buffalo.” It wasn’t some kind of mystical, ahistorical relationship that he was articulating. He was talking about Article 11 in the treaty — that it was not just a protection of our hunting territory, but it was a protection of the buffalo nation itself, and that extends to the protection of water. When we look at the treaty, not only does it talk about where we’re going to get our food, such as hunting and agriculture, but it also asks about how our territorial boundaries are defined by water.
Nonhuman Nature
Daniel Denvir
Could you say more about this explicit naming of these very concrete and material relationships with nonhuman nature, and what lessons, at the risk of romanticizing indigenous knowledge, we might learn as so much of humanity remains in such intense denial of our relationship to nonhuman nature that we risk rendering much of the earth uninhabitable.
Nick Estes
Robert Williams is a native lawyer and jurist. He’s written extensively on how the legal canon has essentially bifurcated humans from “nature.” And that’s just one example in one institution of Western and capitalist society where that bifurcation functions.
He also points out that most indigenous people, prior to European invasion, had no Cartesian split between human and nonhuman. For example, as I just explained, there was no delineation between nations — human nations and nonhuman nations. They were all nations of people, essentially, that had equal rights and compacts and agreements.
The UN [United Nations] identifies at least a quarter of the world’s land area as being traditionally owned or occupied or managed by Indigenous peoples and local communities who have distinct connections, whether they’re cultural, spiritual, or political, to their homelands and bioregions.
Daniel Denvir
The breaking up and privatization of the land is critical to the story of settler colonialism that you tell. There was raw genocidal dispossession. There was the treaty system and its rampant violation by the United States. And there was the confinement of native people to reservations. And then, on the other end of this process, there was this concerted effort to recruit white settlers, including powerful laws like the 1862 Homestead Act, which transferred huge amount of land to settlers, and the 1887 Dawes Act, which privatized native land so that it could be sold to settlers.
Explain this history and what it reveals about, one, the relationship between settler colonialism and land, and two, between the settler-colonialist state and capitalism.
Nick Estes
First of all, just to kind of build off what we have been talking about, settler colonialism isn’t just an anthropocentric process, meaning that it’s not just about dispossessing or eliminating human people or human nations. It’s also about eliminating indigenous people’s relations with the land and with other-than-humans. Whereas other genocides have had a beginning and an end, the current one against Indigenous people and Indigenous land and relations has a beginning but no end. And it can be tracked specifically through land policy, as you just pointed out.
For example, the Homestead Act was a way, as people like Greg Grandin have argued, to create a pressure valve to open up the West in order to relieve the tensions arising from the expansion of slavery and its inherent contradictions in the South and in the East. The act aimed to prevent outright class war amongst white settlers themselves.
President John Quincy Adams once remarked that there’s one thing that all European Americans can unite around, and that’s the killing of Indians — a statement highlighting the destructive underpinnings of westward expansion. Jodi Byrd in her book, The Transit of Empire, talks about the paradigmatic Indianness in which settler colonialism creates the figure of the Indian to be destroyed and to dispossess. This manifests through the ways in which empire expands — not just within a territorial context but within an economic context. And it boils down to land, within North America specifically and within North American settler colonialism.
The Homestead Act opens up land. Very cheap land. For white settlers. And railroad companies played a major role in this. They have what are called colonization offices, specifically in the Nordic European countries to recruit poor folks to put them out as cannon fodder on the western frontier.
To occupy these places near railroads or near infrastructure is to create towns, essentially. The Homestead Act is a series of acts. The Desert Lands Act, which comes much later, provides federal subsidies to improve the land and provide irrigation.
There is a lot of public investment in creating value on this land, primarily through agriculture. And agriculture is an interesting form of settler colonialism because it’s considered permanent. It’s something that destroys the indigenous flora and fauna. It isn’t just about eliminating native humans, it’s also about eliminating native nonhuman life as well, including plants and animals.
Over time, it eats away at these territories, not just in a legal and political sense, but in an agricultural sense — entire species of plants and animals are being replaced by domesticated agriculture. We can look today at the effects of that. When you look at our homelands, as on the reservation, you’re surrounded by food production.
You’re surrounded by a food factory that’s producing corn, soybeans, and beef — but you can’t find a fresh tomato on the reservation. And it’s not these mom and pop, American Gothic landowners who are going out in the morning and milking the cows with their bare hands. These are amalgamated land enterprises. They’re large agricultural companies such as Monsanto and Cargill who have eaten up these parcels of land and drastically reduced the need for labor through mechanization.
This shift — especially in the rural areas of the Great Plains — has led to a lot of white flight. Many of the families who are descendants of the original settlers are leaving because the idea of the idyllic farming family is no longer economically sustainable.
However, they’re not leaving empty-handed; they’re selling land for which their ancestors paid bottom dollar. There’s an intergenerational inherited value for a lot of these settler families.
If we talk about the wealth gap, we can look at slavery and discuss this ongoing conversation around reparations. Well, when we look at a lot of these early slave plantations, most European people had time to go to school and to learn and to become diplomats because there were people taking care of their children.
There were people who were washing their clothes. There were people who were growing their plants. There were people who were feeding them — and that all went uncompensated. And that formed the bedrock for the accumulation of wealth. And it passed on intergenerationally through stolen labor.
Disease and Surveillance
Daniel Denvir
I want to talk about another form of violence that was central to the genocide of indigenous nations, smallpox, which absolutely devastated nations, killing 80 to 90 percent in some cases. Is there a way to theorize disease, in this case smallpox, politically, as a component of settler-colonialist genocide — beyond the narrow confines of individual human intentionality?
Nick Estes
The communities that were hardest hit by smallpox epidemics had the closest relationships, so to speak, to European traders. The Mandan, Arikara, and Hidatsa, sedentary river communities along the Missouri River basin, developed strong trade relations, first with the French, followed by the British, occasionally the Spanish, and, later, the United States.
As a result of those relationships, they had increased proximity to disease. It’s not necessarily accurate to say that it was purposely spread so much, as it was facilitated by trade itself. For instance, during the 1837 epidemics, one of the most devastating outbreaks on the Northern Plains, the disease was disseminated via steamship.
Traders on the ship had knowingly harbored an individual who was suffering from symptoms. But smallpox is interesting because after one acquires it, there may be a three- or four-day period where they feel absolutely fine. And then later on — days or sometimes even a week later — they develop really intense symptoms, which include fevers and pustules.
But the period between when it’s contagious and not is hard to determine. It was very much exacerbated and intensified by the fur trade itself. While we can’t necessarily pin it on intentionality — spreading disease to decimate populations — it’s clear that trade contributed to its intensification. It was knowingly spread in certain instances, not to kill off indigenous people, but to ensure profit making continued without hindrance. The decision to prioritize profit over human lives led to situations where infected individuals were kept aboard trade or steamships to safeguard profit quotas.
Daniel Denvir
You write that “today’s state violence and surveillance against water protectors is a continuation of the Indian wars of the nineteenth century.” You write that those Indian wars have also been a model for US empire abroad. How does the history of indigenous genocide and dispossession blur the distinction between domestic policies and international empire building in the context of American empire?
Nick Estes
In 1997, Miguel Alfonso Martínez, then Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples, did a study on treaties, agreements, and various compacts between Indigenous peoples and colonizing nation-states. One of his conclusions was that treaties are proof of international relationships between Indigenous people and colonizing powers.
And if they are proof of international relationships, what good does it do to reproduce the domestication of native nations within those colonial states? Why not challenge this domestication process and argue for genuine international relationships? For indigenous people in North America, counterinsurgency — the waging of war of irregular wars against civilian populations — serves as a method of domestication, framing indigenous peoples as external threats while simultaneously attempting to internalize them within the nation-state itself. This approach is unevenly applied across space and time and varies by context, but nonetheless we can see similar patterns emerge.
For example, the Pawnee Nation never fought against the United States, but nevertheless suffered almost an 80 percent population decline in the nineteenth century. And why is that? It wasn’t because of direct military confrontation. It was the reservation system itself — and the imposed starvation conditions of the reservation system — that actually killed off the majority of this population.
I would say that that was a form of counterinsurgency. The first boarding schools were created at one of the country’s oldest military barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. It’s no coincidence that the founder of the first boarding school was also an accomplished Indian fighter as well as a Civil War veteran.
The Indian fighters of the late nineteenth century were Civil War veterans who went on to command troops of mixed freed slaves alongside Indian scouts alongside white settlers against hostile Indian nations in the West. After the so-called Indian wars were “won,” those same commanders, those same generals, went on to fight in places like Cuba, or in some cases, if they lived long enough, Nicaragua.
The overseas imperial project was literally seen as an extension of the Indian wars. The involvement of these veterans in both domestic campaigns against Indigenous peoples and foreign imperial projects underscores the view of overseas expansion as a natural extension of the frontier.
The notion of the frontier’s closure was once mythologized as a definitive end to a chapter of American history. But a look at the institution of the United States military reveals a continuous transition, from one war to the next.
The military historian John Grenier has explored how the first Indian wars laid the groundwork for modern tactics of counterinsurgency — this is now part of the curriculum at West Point. These tactics come up in the question of international law. How do you wage war against people who are not considered human? In the past, they were not considered human, but now in the present, they’re not considered state actors. They’re “nonstate enemy combatants,” such as the “terrorist” opponents encountered in the war on terror.
There’s a direct lineage traced by the institution of the US military, back to its first enemies of empire, which were indigenous peoples.
Marxism: A Study of Power
Daniel Denvir
In one passage of your book, you allude to Marx, writing, “While traditional historians merely interpret the past, radical indigenous knowledge keepers aim to change the colonial present and to imagine a decolonial future by reconnecting to indigenous places and histories.”
How has Marxism informed your analysis? How do you relate a system of knowledge forged amid the birth of the European working class to indigenous American forms of knowledge? And finally, what do both forms of knowledge, together and in dialogue with one another, offer for this broader project of anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist liberation?
Nick Estes
When I first read Capital, I was really bored by the first half of it. I wasn’t engaged until the latter quarter of the book where he begins talking about colonialism. This framework, emerging from European working-class ideology, was incomplete. Marx was creating a project that was incomplete, and he knew it was incomplete — it was full of all these holes.
It doesn’t make his project any less important. He’s talking about the expansion of capitalist markets abroad, what we now know as colonialism and imperialism. Fundamentally, he’s examining what he calls primitive accumulation. There’s been a lot written on it and I think it’s been overtheorized in many ways. Primitive accumulation is essentially expropriation, and expropriation is a building block for settler-colonial societies.
It has a beginning, but it doesn’t have an end. There are just different forms of expropriation and different rounds of expropriation. Whether it’s the construction of oil pipelines or the mining of gold or the taking of land — it’s a form of expropriation. These acts of expropriation are key to integrating and defining racialized groups within the capitalist framework.
Marxism is fundamentally a study of power because it centers class and class is about power. In a settler-colonial society, power relations are structured — not to be too reductive — between the binary of the settler and the native.
I read people like Emma Goldman and [Peter] Kropotkin. Yes, I really loved Kropotkin, especially the concepts of mutual aid and his study of natural societies and, specifically, his critique of Social Darwinism. I read Marx when I was in college. I read the Communist Manifesto and it spoke to me in many ways, not just because of its analytical power, but because of the way it argued for organizing society from the ground up.
Exploring anti-colonial literature led me to discover that many of my favorite authors, notably [Frantz] Fanon, were Marxists. This explained how somebody who was a descendant of a slave from the Caribbean could become an anti-colonial revolutionary in Algeria — it was because of the principles of internationalism and the recognition of anti-colonial struggle as a global movement.
And it primarily circulated through these Marxists — through left, socialist, and communist traditions. The problem with Marxism in the United States is that it has ignored one of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism and imperialism, and that is what we now know as settler colonialism.
Reading the theories of settler colonialism reveals hints of Marxist analysis. Marx was a student of history, and I became a historian, not to glorify the past but to understand the present and what is required to undo the nightmarish present. By thinking about these histories, not in an idealistic way, but in a very concrete and material way, we can think about the project that confronts us with decolonization. However, within indigenous studies itself, there is an anti-communist and anti-Marxist tradition, especially in North America.
Conversely, places like Bolivia have developed indigenous socialist and left traditions, significantly advancing many of Marx’s theories. Similarly, in Peru, José Carlos Mariátegui contemplated national liberation within an indigenous context and on an international scale. And indigenous Marxists of the past, such as Archie Phinney, a Nez Perce anthropologist trained by Franz Boas, who studied Soviet indigenous policies in the Soviet Union in 1936–1937, have made significant contributions.
Phinney’s scholarship remains largely unrecognized due to a prevalent anti-Marxist sentiment, not just within indigenous studies but within the US academy. Phinney, a founder of the National Congress of American Indians, represents a crucial part of our heritage as indigenous people that remains underexplored.
We are missing so much in our own tradition as indigenous people by not looking at this. History shows that the most successful national liberation movements had some version of Marxism or some version of socialism as their vision for the future society that they were working toward. I think we would be remiss, and we would engage in a form of US exceptionalism, to say we’re somehow not a part of that history. Or, similarly, to try to understand the mechanics of decolonial thought and decolonial practice as removed from places like Africa and Asia. Such a stance is a disservice to our political and intellectual understanding.
Nachdem die Graichen-Crew lange genug Ihrer Zerstörungswut gefrönt hat, kommen nun andere Töne aus Berlin: Man will 10 Gigawatt an neuen Gaskraftwerken schaffen, die natürlich für Wasserstoff geeignet sein sollen. So soll das „Hochlaufen“ des Wasserstoffgeschäftes beschleunigt werden. So weit, so schön; immerhin eine Botschaft, die nicht von plattmachen, sondern von Aufbau redet. Die Distanz zwischen dem frommen Wunsch und den Tücken der Technik überbrückt Ricarda Lang: Sie amalgamiert das Wissen von Robert Habeck, also eine Art von Antimaterie, mit ihrer Sprachgewalt. Das hält wie eine gute Zahnfüllung und begeistert die Journalisten.
Die offizielle Verlautbarung der Bundesregierung ist, dass Deutschland bis 2045 ein “klimaneutrales Land” werden soll; ein vom Bundeskanzler im Ausland hoffnungslos überstrapazierter Textbaustein. Die Bundesregierung schafft mit den neuen Kraftwerken die Voraussetzung, damit Stahl und Zement künftig mit grünem Wasserstoff produziert werden. Überall soll genügend Strom fließen, auch bei wenig Wind und Sonne. Fehlt nur noch das Unterhaken und das gemeinsame Absingen von „You never walk alone“. “Ich will, dass jeder Bauer am Sonntag ein Huhn im Topf hat.” Das sagte um 1500 Heinrich IV von Navarra, der “gute König” von Frankreich. Der wusste noch, was er an seinen Bauern hatte.
Das Ende der europäischen Stahlherstellung
Man fragt sich, wer sich solche Texte ausdenkt: “Grüner Zement” und “grüner Stahl”. Wow! Mit einem Doppelwumms gleich zwei grüne Produkte als Erfolgsmeldung. Tatsächlich ist die Entwicklung von Kohlendioxid bei der Zementherstellung vom Heizmedium unabhängig. Es entsteht immer, und zwar prozessbedingt. Die Herstellung von “grünem Stahl” erfordert so riesige Mengen an elektrischer Energie, dass seine Herstellung in Deutschland auf absehbare Zeit nicht möglich ist. Die Hüttenindustrie wird nach Übersee verschwinden – samt aller Fördergelder. Es wird keine Stahlherstellung in Europa mehr geben.
Einige Worte zu den Wasserstoff-Kraftwerken; Die sehr hohe Verbrennungstemperatur des Wasserstoffs beansprucht jede Heizungsanlage außerordentlich. An besonders exponierten Stellen, wie den Spitzen der Turbinenschaufeln, kann Wasserstoff bei den harschen Bedingungen Kohlenstoff aus dem Stahl herauslösen, dessen Struktur schwächen und Versprödung auslösen. Eine für Wasserstoff geeignete Großturbine gibt es bislang nicht. Meldungen zufolge hat man bei Kawasaki erste Fortschritte mit einer Beschichtung mit Titan- oder Wolframcarbid erzielt; man wird sehen. Der Wirkungsgrad eines Gas-Wasserstoff-Kraftwerks erreicht im besten Fall 50 Prozent. Das bedeutet, dass die Hälfte allen mühsam und aufwendig aus Übersee herbeigeschafften Wasserstoffs eben keinen Nutzen bringt.
Technisch und terminlich eine Luftnummer
Die Graichen-Nachfolger stehen mit diesem Projekt ganz am Anfang. Es existieren, wenn überhaupt, nur die üblichen naiven Vorstellungen. Die Autoren erdichten rührende Geschichten über das baldige Auftauchen des Osterhasen. Ein fassbarer Plan fehlt. Sowohl terminlich als auch technisch hängt alles in der Luft. Der Strom fehlt aber bereits heute, und Millionen Wärmepumpen und E- Autos drängen auf den Markt. Die Zukunft ist düster. Eine ernste Stromkrise droht.
Bei seinem derzeitigen Besuch am Potomac strapaziert Scholz die Gebetsmühle: Unterstützung der Ukraine bis zum bitteren Ende. Voller Stolz verkündet er sogar, dass es nun seine Aufgabe sei, Biden zu motivieren. Was für ein denkwürdiger Tag: Ein Bundeskanzler als Anführer des freien, kampfbereiten Westens! Pistorius leiert seine Sprüche herunter, ein durchgeknallter Bundeswehrgeneral drischt Parolen. Dazu singt uns Roderich Kiesewetter kriegerische Arien aus der Oper “Flak und Zimmermann”. Absurd das Geschrei, Putin hätte uns “das Gas abgestellt”. Das hat er nicht. Aber er könnte jederzeit den verbliebenen Rest abdrehen. Und was dann?
Merkels Zerstörungswerk
Angesichts dieser Lage müsste man doch verrückt sein, sich vorzustellen, in diesen neuen Kraftwerken würde jemals ein Kubikmeter russisches Gas verbrannt? Über die sehr ernsten Vorgänge um die LNG-Terminals am Golf von Mexiko breitet man – so gut es eben geht – den Mantel des Schweigens. Das lässt für die Zukunft des „Freedom Gas“ aus USA nicht viel Gutes erwarten. Was, um Gottes Willen, werden diese neuen Kraftwerke verbrennen? Sofern Deutschland in einigen Jahren überhaupt noch Kraftwerke bauen kann… und dieser Zusatz ist todernst gemeint.
Blicken wir zurück ins Jahr 2010: Im Herbst dieses Jahres hatte Angela Merkel die deutschen Kernkraftwerke „gerettet“. Die „besten Kraftwerke der Welt“! Da war sie noch die kühl kalkulierende Physikerin, die Politikerin mit Augenmaß. Der Darling der deutschen Industrie. Diese Rolle hatte sie unter ihrem später gemeuchelten Ziehvater als Bundesumweltministerin schon einmal mit Bravour gespielt. Sie hatte, vorbei an Recht und Gesetz, in kurzer Zeit riesige Mengen Atommüll in den maroden Salzstock Morsleben in Sachsen Anhalt „verstürzen“ lassen (siehe hier). Ihr “Versturzverfahren” bestand darin, die 200-Liter-Stahlfässer einen 15 Meter hohen Abhang hinunterrollen zu lassen. Und so liegen sie heute noch. Als eine Landesministerin Bedenken anmeldete, wurde sie zuerst zum Schweigen gebracht und später weggemobbt.
Einsame Entscheidung
Erst ein Gerichtsurteil setzte diesem Treiben ein Ende. Morsleben schlummert bis heute als milliardenteurer, offener Sanierungsfall in Merkels geräumiger Asservatenkammer. Der aufmerksame Beobachter erkennt hier Parallelen zu späteren Aktionen: Eine einsame diktatorische Entscheidung, die mit tyrannischem Gehabe durchgesetzt wird – nötigenfalls auch am Gesetz vorbei. Die Duckmäuser kuschen. Die Medien haben Merkel dazu noch die Aura der absoluten Kompetenz verliehen. Auch der Startschuss zur Masseneinwanderung wurde in einem solchen Versturzmodus ausgelöst – ebenso wie der Ausstieg aus der Kernkraft, nur kurz nach ihrer “Rettung“.
Denn die Stromkrise begann am 11. März 2011: Fukushima löste eine Massenpanik aus. Dazu ist anzumerken, dass Tsunamis in Japan seit alters her gefürchtet sind. Man findet immer wieder Markierungssteine im Land, die die Reichweite historischer Tsunamis abstecken. In Fukushima gab es solche Markierungen, die das Kraftwerksgelände als Risikogebiet auswiesen. Irgendwer hat dann entschieden, dort trotzdem eines bauen. Das war das Problem mit Fukushima – nicht die Technologie. Der Ausfall des Kraftwerkes war eine Folge menschlicher Unfähigkeit – und keine unentrinnbare Naturkatastrophe. In Deutschland gibt es keine Tsunamis. Es gab allerdings vor 700 Jahren das Magdalenenhochwasser. Was würde heute in einem solchen Fall in Deutschland passieren? Man sollte sich deshalb vor voreiligen Feststellungen hüten; siehe Ahrtal.
AKW-Opferung als frühe Morgengabe Merkels an die Grünen
Im März 2011 brandete die Diskussion auf – und Merkel traf die Entscheidung. Solo. Ein Wochenende, Mutti allein zu Haus. Sie kam am Montag ins Büro und verkündete Ihren populistischen Entschluss. Die Mannschaft spurte, wie immer. Keine Maus rührte sich. Die perfekte Tyrannei. Alle dann veranlassten Aktionen dienten nur noch dazu, ihre irrationale, diktatorische Entscheidung zu verbrämen. Begann in diesen Tagen bereits eine klandestine, schwarz grüne Koalition? Es existiert ein Video, auf dem Merkel gemeinsam mit Trittin den Plenarsaal verlässt. Das Verschwörerische dieses Bildes springt ins Auge. War die Opferung der Kernkraft eine vorgezogene Morgengabe an die Grünen? Das, was als “Ruck durch das Land” verkauft wurde, war das verzweifelte Aufbäumen der Energiebranche und der Beginn ihres Todeskampfes. Die Kernkraft wurde geschleift. Greta und Luisa Neubauer tauchten auf, der Carboncid nahm seinen Lauf.
Das nachfolgende Diagramm zeigt, dass die Stromerzeugung bis 2011 auf den drei Säulen Kernkraft, Kohle und Gas ruhte:
(Quelle:Wikipedia)
Wo waren all die Leute, die dies genau wussten und die Folgen absehen konnten? Sie saßen geduckt unter Ihren Schreibtischen und hatten das Licht ausgeschaltet. Eine Armee von Duckmäusern. Obwohl ein Schuster nicht Physik studiert hat, weiß er, dass er an seinem dreibeinigen Schemel nicht nach Belieben ständig zwei Beine kürzen kann. Es wird zunächst unbequem und endet eines Tages damit, dass er auf die Nase fällt. Es soll Schuster geben die diese Prozedur so vornehmen, dass nach ihrem Abschied der neue Schuster den Absturz erleidet. So etwa könnte ein Satiriker die von Merkel gesteuerte Energiepolitik seit 2011 beschreiben; nach dem Motto: „Als ich noch da war, war alles in Ordnung.“ Hier findet sich sogar ein passender Anlass, Merkels ausgiebig strapaziertes Selbstlob zu analysieren. Gemäß ihrer Ansicht, die die willfährigen Reporter nur zu gern teilten, kann sie die Dinge ja “vom Ende her denken”.
Dieser Denkvorgang war aber beim Versturzverfahren nicht aktiviert. Auch nicht beim „Wir schaffen das“-Auftritt. Die Dysfunktionalität dieses Vorgehens wurde durch die diversen, sehr teuren Schadenersatzprozesse der AKW-Betreiber erneut offenbar. Ein besonders krasser Fall ist die Vereinbarung, nach der die Atombranche die Verantwortung für den ewig strahlenden Atomabfall beim Staat abladen durfte. Das war ein Morsleben der höchsten Ordnung: Etwas, das ewig Probleme bereitet, verursacht unendliche Kosten. Wer bei Verstand ist, kann sich so ein Problem nicht für ein Linsengericht andrehen lassen. Aber das ist ein anderes Kapitel dieser unendlichen Geschichte für sich.
“Vom Ende her denken”
Das mit dem „Vom Ende her denken“ sollte man sich als verantwortungsbewusster Akteur folglich gut überlegen: Man kann unter Umständen zwar richtig gedacht haben, böse Zungen könnten aber dann behaupten, dass man sich vorsätzlich nicht um die Folgen seines Tuns schert. Fest steht jedenfalls, dass das Fracasso der Energiepolitik allein auf Merkel zurückgeht. Durch ihren diktatorischen Führungsstil hat sie alle anderen neutralisiert. Wer konnte es wagen, „der Physikerin“ auf dem Olymp des Wissens zu widersprechen? Folglich muss sie auch die Verantwortung tragen.
Durch Inkompetenz und Verblendung hat die neue Regierung die Lage wesentlich verschlimmert. Ein Zyniker könnte behaupten, die grünen Gimpel sind in eine Falle getappt. Nun haben Sie den Kaugummi unter der Regierungsbank kleben. Mit den neu geplanten und als Fortschritt gepriesenen Kraftwerken ersetzen sie lediglich die seit 2015 insgesamt 10,6 Gigawatt der seitdem stillgelegten Kernkraftwerke. Man wäre also 2033 wieder auf dem Stand von 2015. Das verkauft Habeck der ehrfürchtigen Presse mit stolzgeschwellter Brust ernsthaft als Fortschritt. Und er glaubt es selbst, wenn es in der Zeitung steht. Pseudologie pur!
Ein kurzer Abriss des neuen Kraftwerksprojektes
Die elektrische Leistung wird mit 10 Gigawatt spezifiziert. Nach Lage der Dinge ist mit der Fertigstellung nicht vor 2033 bis 2035 zu rechnen. Sollte sich die zurzeit einsetzende Deindustrialisierung fortsetzen, wäre sogar eine Situation denkbar, in der man sie gar nicht mehr benötigen würde. Nach der momentanen politischen Lage wird Russland nicht klein beigeben, und nach seinen neuerlichen Ausfällen würde Olaf Scholz als Bittsteller für Gas in Moskau wahrscheinlich abgewiesen. Erdgas wird also zur Rarität werden. Erdgas aus Holland ist Vergangenheit. LNG wird sehr knapp, vom Wucherpreis gar nicht zu reden. Je eine Leitung durch die Ukraine und Polen gibt es noch. Polen ist das Land, in dem ein Minister die Sprengung von Nord Stream bejubelt hat. Beurteilen Sie, lieber Leser, diese Lage bitte für sich selbst.
Unter diesen Umständen müssen die geplanten Kraftwerke schnellstens ihre volle Leistung erbringen – mangels Erdgas mit Wasserstoff. Und das von Anfang an. Die Beschaffung des Wasserstoffs ist allerdings die Crux. Die Mengenberechnung erscheint ist einfach: 10 Gigawatt mal 7.500 Stunden pro Jahr ergeben 75 Terrawattstunden jährlich. Das könnten diese Kraftwerke ins Netz einspeisen. Isar 2 oder Grohnde lagen bei je 10-11 Terrawattstunden jährlich. Bei einem Wirkungsgrad der Kraftwerke von 50 Prozent wäre der Bedarf also 150 Terrawattstunden an Wasserstoff jährlich. Das sind, als Masse ausgedrückt, 4,5 Millionen Tonnen Wasserstoff. Die derzeit in Lüderitz geplante Anlage soll ab 2030 maximal 0,3 Millionen Tonnen jährlich liefern. Das wird nicht reichen.
Anbieter gibt es nicht
Damit gelangen wir zur Gretchenfrage: Wird es weltweit – ab etwa 2033 bis 2035 – ein Angebot von 35 Millionen Tonnen Wasserstoff für die Ammoniak-Herstellung geben? Falls nicht, ist das Kraftwerkprojekt gescheitert – ganz abgesehen davon, dass Deutschland nicht der einzige Nachfrager ist.
Was bilden diese Leute sich denn ein? Sie selbst haben es geschafft, dass niemand mehr auf der Welt geduldig und voller Ehrfurcht auf kompetente Politiker aus Deutschland wartet. Es wird so getan, als gäbe es weltweit Anbieter für grünen Wasserstoff. So als säßen in 20 Ländern die Firmenbosse und warteten nur auf Annalena Baerbock und Robert Habeck, um ihnen preiswerten Wasserstoff verkaufen zu dürfen – natürlich zertifiziert und ohne Kinderarbeit produziert! Diese Anbieter gibt es nicht. Wer seriös über Millionen Tonnen Bedarf an grünem Wasserstoff für das Jahr 2033 reden will, müsste schon längst am Tisch sitzen und mit Partnern der Lieferländer verhandeln – und zwar über dreistellige Milliardensummen. In diesem Team müssten dann außerdem die Besten der Besten sitzen. Wer soll die Berliner Delegation anführen? Anton Hofreiter? Claudia Roth? Emilia Fester?
Rechnet hier noch jemand nach?
Dazu ein Beispiel: Die Firma Enertrag aus der Uckermark plant eine Anlage zur Herstellung von 300.000 Jahrestonnen Wasserstoff in Namibia. Dieses Pionierprojekt ist auf 10 Milliarden Euro veranschlagt. Der Baubeginn ist für 2025 geplant, die Fertigstellung für 2030. Für die weiter oben erwähnten 4,5 Millionen Tonnen Wasserstoff für die neuen Kraftwerke wäre demzufolge eine Investition von 150 Milliarden Euro nötig. Wer soll diese Anlage bauen und finanzieren? Und was wird der Wasserstoff aus Namibia kosten? Das Enertrag-Projekt nennt ganz offen den Jahresausstoß der Anlage, und man legt sich sogar auf die Baukosten fest. Umso erstaunlicher ist es, dass sich noch kein Journalist an die nachfolgende einfache Berechnung gewagt hat.
Bei einer Abschreibung von 10 Prozent p.a und Zinsen von 5 Prozent p.a. ergeben sich jährlich 1.000.000.000 Euro Abschreibung, 500.000.000 Euro Zinskosten, 300.000.000 Euro Betriebskosten. Macht 1,8 Milliarden Euro, geteilt durch 300 Millionen Kilogramm. Das ergibt 6 Euro pro Kilo Wasserstoff, frei Hafen Lüderitzbucht. Da es keine Anhaltspunkt dafür gibt, dass ein 10-fach größeres Projekt wesentlich kostengünstiger sein wird – ganz im Gegenteil -, werden der “BER-Faktor” und Murphys Gesetz garantiert beim Projekt in Namibia noch ihre Spuren hinterlassen. Wetten? Die geplanten Kraftwerke sollten also unverzüglich gebaut werden… Allerdings mit Kohlefeuerung.
Dieser Beitrag erschien zuerst auf
Planlos und ahnungslos: “Wasserstoff-Visionär” Habeck (Foto:Imago)
Last week I published an article noting that although technology industrialist Elon Musk probably ranks as the most powerful and influential individual in the Western world, he recently humbled himself, deeply apologizing for some of his casual criticism of Jewish activities and pledging to mend his ways.
Traveling to Israel, he met with that country’s president and posed for photo-ops with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, promising to combat “antisemitism” on his Twitter platform. A few weeks later he undertook a pilgrimage to Auschwitz, making even stronger commitments to Jewish leaders, denying that he harbored any antisemitism in his own heart, and publicly declaring that he regarded himself as “aspirationally Jewish.”
These remarkable events reminded me of that famous incident of the Middle Ages in which Emperor Henry IV of the Holy Roman Empire had “gone to Canossa” and prostrated himself before Pope Gregory VII, seeking forgiveness for his challenge to the supreme authority of the Catholic Church:
Musk was only the latest and most extreme example of the many wealthy and powerful Gentiles who have publicly bent their knees in submission to Jewish power. Even if totally spurious, accusations of “antisemitism” have often proven fatal to the careers of even the highest-ranking individuals, and shortly before Musk’s submission, two presidents of Ivy League universities were politically brow-beaten and then forced to resign over their unwillingness to prohibit pro-Palestinian protests on their campuses, a sudden purge that was absolutely unprecedented in the history of American academia.
This is certainly an odd situation, warranting careful analysis and explanation. The word “antisemitism” merely means criticizing or disliking Jews, and in recent years, Israel’s partisans have demanded with some success that the term should be extended to encompass anti-Zionism as well, namely hostility to the Jewish state.
But let us suppose that we concede the latter point and agree with pro-Israel activists that “anti-Zionism” is indeed a form of “antisemitism.” Over the last few months, the Israeli government has brutally slaughtered tens of thousands of helpless civilians in Gaza, committing the greatest televised massacre in the history of the world, with its top leaders using explicitly genocidal language to describe their plans for the Palestinians. Indeed, the South African government submitted a 91 page legal brief to the International Court of Justice cataloging those Israeli statements, prompting a near-unanimous ruling by the jurists that millions of Palestinians faced the prospect of genocide at Israeli hands.
These days most Westerners claim to regard genocide in a decidedly negative light. So does this not syllogistically require them to embrace and endorse “antisemitism”? Surely a visitor from Mars would be very puzzled by this strange dilemma and the philosophical and psychological contortions it seems to require.
It is rather surprising for the extremely “politically correct” ruling elites of America and the rest of the Western world to be loudly cheering on the racially-exclusivist State of Israel even as it kills enormous numbers of women and children and works very hard to starve to death some two million civilians in its unprecedented genocidal rampage. After all, the far milder and more circumspect regime of Apartheid South Africa was universally condemned, boycotted, and sanctioned for merely the tiniest sliver of such misdeeds.
I think that part of the answer to this puzzle may be found in a famous literary work from a couple of generations ago. In 1962 British writer Anthony Burgess published his dystopian black comedy novel A Clockwork Orange, which was soon made into an Oscar-nominated film of the same name directed by Stanley Kubrick. The protagonist was Alex, a violent young hoodlum, and according to the plot government operatives subjected the miscreant to aversion therapy, severely conditioning him to avoid certain thoughts and behaviors lest he become physically ill.
As I wrote in a 2018 article, generations of Jewish media control and strident Jewish political activism have successfully subjected the 99% Gentile populations of the Western world to exactly this same sort of psychological process, with enormous social and political consequences, as we are now seeing unfold during the astonishing slaughter in Gaza:
I believe one factor is that over the years and the decades, our dominant media organs of news and entertainment have successfully conditioned most Americans to suffer a sort of mental allergic reaction to topics sensitive to Jews, which leads to all sorts of issues being considered absolutely out of bounds. And with America’s very powerful Jewish elites thereby insulated from almost all public scrutiny, Jewish arrogance and misbehavior remain largely unchecked and can increase completely without limit.
I’ve also sometimes suggested to people that one under-emphasized aspect of a Jewish population, greatly magnifying its problematical character, is the existence of what might be considered a biological sub-morph of exceptionally fanatical individuals, always on hair-trigger alert to launch verbal and sometimes physical attacks of unprecedented fury against anyone they regard as insufficiently friendly towards Jewish interests. Every now and then, a particularly brave or foolhardy public figure challenges some off-limits topic and is almost always overwhelmed and destroyed by a veritable swarm of these fanatical Jewish attackers. Just as the painful stings of the self-sacrificing warrior caste of an ant colony can quickly teach large predators to go elsewhere, fears of provoking these “Jewish berserkers” can often severely intimidate writers or politicians, causing them to choose their words very carefully or even completely avoid discussing certain controversial subjects, thereby greatly benefiting Jewish interests as a whole. And the more such influential people are thus intimidated into avoiding a particular topic, the more that topic is perceived as strictly taboo, and avoided by everyone else as well.
For example, about a dozen years ago I was having lunch with an especially eminent Neoconservative scholar with whom I’d become a little friendly. We were bemoaning the overwhelmingly leftward skew among America’s intellectual elites, and I suggested it largely seemed a function of our most elite universities. Many of our brightest students from across the nation entered Harvard and the other Ivies holding a variety of different ideological perspectives, but after four years departed those halls of learning overwhelmingly in left-liberal lock-step. Although he agreed with my assessment, he felt I was missing something important. He nervously glanced to both sides, shifted his head downward, and lowered his voice. “It’s the Jews,” he said.
One especially troublesome aspect of this near-total Jewish domination lies in the nature of the Jewish religion, especially in its traditional Talmudic form. As I explained in the same article:
If these ritualistic issues constituted the central features of traditional religious Judaism, we might regard it as a rather colorful and eccentric survival of ancient times. But unfortunately, there is also a far darker side, primarily involving the relationship between Jews and non-Jews, with the highly derogatory term goyim frequently used to describe the latter. To put it bluntly, Jews have divine souls and goyim do not, being merely beasts in the shape of men. Indeed, the primary reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve as the slaves of Jews, with some very high-ranking rabbis occasionally stating this well-known fact. In 2010, Israel’s top Sephardic rabbi used his weekly sermon to declare that the only reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve Jews and do work for them. The enslavement or extermination of all non-Jews seems an ultimate implied goal of the religion.
Jewish lives have infinite value, and non-Jewish ones none at all, which has obvious policy implications. For example, in a published article a prominent Israeli rabbi explained that if a Jew needed a liver, it would be perfectly fine and indeed obligatory, to kill an innocent Gentile and take his. Perhaps we should not be too surprised that today Israel is widely regarded as one of the world centers of organ-trafficking.
As a further illustration of the seething hatred traditional Judaism radiates towards all those of a different background, saving the life of a non-Jew is generally considered improper or even prohibited, and taking any such action on the Sabbath would be an absolute violation of religious edict.
Obviously the Talmud is hardly regular reading among ordinary Jews these days, and I would suspect that except for the strongly Orthodox and perhaps most rabbis, barely a sliver are aware of its highly controversial teachings. But it is important to keep in mind that until just a few generations ago, almost all European Jews were deeply Orthodox, and even today I would guess that the overwhelming majority of Jewish adults had Orthodox grand-parents. Highly distinctive cultural patterns and social attitudes can easily seep into a considerably wider population, especially one that remains ignorant of the origin of those sentiments, a condition enhancing their unrecognized influence. A religion based upon the principal of “Love Thy Neighbor” may or may not be workable in practice, but a religion based upon “Hate Thy Neighbor” might have long-term cultural ripple effects that extend far beyond the direct community of the deeply pious. If nearly all Jews for a thousand or two thousand years were taught to feel a seething hatred toward all non-Jews and also developed an enormous infrastructure of cultural dishonesty to mask that attitude, it is difficult to believe that such an unfortunate history has had absolutely no consequences for our present-day world, or that of the relatively recent past.
Throughout nearly their entire history in the Western world, Jews have existed as relatively small and weak minorities, so these troublesome aspects of traditional Jewish doctrine and belief were never able to manifest themselves except in the most secretive or attenuated fashion. But with Jews being the dominant, fully-empowered majority in the lands of Greater Israel, the world is seeing those attitudes expressed in their full force upon the hapless Palestinians.
As has been thoroughly documented, a very substantial fraction, perhaps even an outright majority of all the Israelis who died on October 7th were killed by their own trigger-happy military forces, in many cases becoming the deliberate victims of the notorious “Hannibal Directive.” Many others were IDF soldiers, security personnel, or armed civilian militiamen, and therefore perfectly legitimate targets of warfare. Putting all these elements together, I think that the number of unarmed Israelis killed by Hamas fighters may have been as low as 100 to 200, with many or most of those deaths being accidental, a conclusion supported by the statements of released hostages, who emphasized their decent and respectful treatment by their Hamas captors. Indeed, the relatively small number of unwarranted killings by Hamas militants has forced pro-Israel propagandists to promote the most outrageous sort of atrocity-hoaxes, ranging from forty beheaded Israeli babies to babies baked in ovens to Hamas gang-rapes and sexual mutilations, none of which seem to have any reality.
So in retaliation for perhaps 100 to 200 killings of unarmed civilians, the Israeli government has now gleefully slaughtered tens of thousands of helpless Palestinian civilians while apparently seeking to raise that body-count into the millions.
According to Max Blumenthal, public opinion surveys indicate that up to 98% of the Israeli public supports these exceptionally brutal retaliatory measures or even regards them as insufficiently strong. Numerous personal videos on TikTok, Telegram, and other platforms show ordinary members of the Israeli public gleefully mocking dead or starving Palestinian civilians, while Israeli troops have been just as sadistic in their destruction of civilian infrastructure and brutal killing of unarmed Palestinians, including women and children. Examples of public torture or cold-blooded murders seem increasingly common. Given these facts, several Grayzone videos have reasonably described Israel as an extremely sick society.
Fyodor Dostoevsky of Czarist Russia ranked as one of the greatest European writers, author of the classic novels Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and many other works. But although nearly all of his writings were translated into English and made easily available, his Diary of a Writer has remained obscure, and some have speculated that the reason may have been his brief 1877 remarks regarding Russia’s small Jewish minority. Although he recognized the plight of the Jews, who were sometimes oppressed or mistreated by the overwhelmingly Russian majority, he claimed that they greatly exaggerated their suffering and he also candidly speculated how they themselves would treat the Russians if the shoe were on the other foot and they were the ones with the upper hand.
However, at times, I was fancying: now, how would it be if in Russia there were not three million Jews, but three million Russians, and there were eighty million Jews,—well into what would they convert the Russians and how would they treat them? Would they permit them to acquire equal rights? Would they permit them to worship freely in their midst? Wouldn’t they convert them into slaves? Worse than that: wouldn’t they skin them altogether? Wouldn’t they slaughter them to the last man, to the point of complete extermination, as they used to do with alien peoples in ancient times, during their ancient history?
Dostoevsky died in 1881, but his prophetic words came to pass in 1917 when the Bolsheviks, whose leadership was overwhelmingly Jewish, seized power. Once they had established their new Soviet regime, they implemented an unprecedented slaughter of their Gentile subjects by bullets and starvation over the next couple of decades, a reality almost totally suppressed both at the time and subsequently by their ethnic cousins in overwhelmingly Jewish Hollywood and by Jewish political pressure across most of the rest of the media. As I wrote in 2018:
Indeed, the topic of Communism raises a far larger issue, one having rather touchy implications. Sometimes two simple compounds are separately inert, but when combined together may possess tremendous explosive force. From my introductory history classes and readings in high school, certain things had always seemed glaringly obvious to me even if the conclusions remained unmentionable, and I once assumed they were just as apparent to most others as well. But over the years I have begun to wonder whether perhaps this might not be correct.
Back in those late Cold War days, the death toll of innocent civilians from the Bolshevik Revolution and the first two decades of the Soviet Regime was generally reckoned at running well into the tens of millions when we include the casualties of the Russian Civil War, the government-induced famines, the Gulag, and the executions. I’ve heard that these numbers have been substantially revised downwards to perhaps as little as twenty million or so, but no matter. Although determined Soviet apologists may dispute such very large figures, they have always been part of the standard narrative history taught within the West.
Meanwhile, all historians know perfectly well that the Bolshevik leaders were overwhelmingly Jewish, with three of the five revolutionaries Lenin named as his plausible successors coming from that background. Although only around 4% of Russia’s population was Jewish, a few years ago Vladimir Putin stated that Jews constituted perhaps 80-85% of the early Soviet government, an estimate fully consistent with the contemporaneous claims of Winston Churchill, Times of London correspondent Robert Wilton, and the officers of American Military Intelligence. Recent books by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Yuri Slezkine, and others have all painted a very similar picture. And prior to World War II, Jews remained enormously over-represented in the Communist leadership, especially dominating the Gulag administration and the top ranks of the dreaded NKVD.
Both of these simple facts have been widely accepted in America throughout my entire lifetime. But combine them together with the relatively tiny size of worldwide Jewry, around 16 million prior to World War II, and the inescapable conclusion is that in per capita terms Jews were the greatest mass-murderers of the twentieth century, holding that unfortunate distinction by an enormous margin and with no other nationality coming even remotely close. And yet, by the astonishing alchemy of Hollywood, the greatest killers of the last one hundred years have somehow been transmuted into being seen as the greatest victims, a transformation so seemingly implausible that future generations will surely be left gasping in awe.
Although I have always generally accepted the mainstream scholarly account of the early decades of the Bolshevik regime and the enormous numbers of its human victims, a little hesitancy sometimes remained in the back of my mind. I had wondered if it could really have been possible for those heavily Jewish Bolshevik leaders to have willing slaughtered or starved to death so many millions, even tens of millions of their helpless fellow countrymen. But after seeing the unfortunate developments currently unfolding in Gaza, those slight nagging doubts have completely evaporated.
Similarly, anyone reading the contemporaneous accounts of Central Europeans describing the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century have sometimes encountered puzzled statements of how such seemingly meek and mild Jewish writers and intellectuals were suddenly transformed into bloodthirsty fiends once empowered by a Bolshevik uprising or ruling regime. I’d always wondered if those observations, mostly written in faded, long-forgotten works, were really true or were instead wildly exaggerated elements of anti-Jewish propaganda. But once again events in Gaza now seem to have completely vindicated and confirmed those widespread claims of the past.
As I emphasized in another 2018 article, such extreme Jewish behavior may also be a density-dependent phenomenon, with high concentrations of Jews working themselves into a terrible ideological frenzy, leading to extremely bloody actions that they might have been less willing to endorse under different circumstances.
Furthermore, this situation is exacerbated by the common tendency of Jews to “cluster” together, perhaps representing just one or two percent of the total population, but often constituting 20% or 40% or 60% of their immediate peer-group, especially in certain professions. Under such conditions, the ideas or emotional agitation of some Jews probably permeates others around them, often provoking additional waves of indignation.
As a rough analogy, a small quantity of uranium is relatively inert and harmless, and entirely so if distributed within low-density ore. But if a significant quantity of weapons-grade uranium is sufficiently compressed, then the neutrons released by fissioning atoms will quickly cause additional atoms to undergo fission, with the ultimate result of that critical chain-reaction being a nuclear explosion. In similar fashion, even a highly agitated Jew may have no negative impact, but if the collection of such agitated Jews becomes too numerous and clusters together too closely, they may work each other into a terrible frenzy, perhaps with disastrous consequences both for themselves and for their larger society. This is especially true if those agitated Jews begin to dominate certain key nodes of top-level control, such as the central political or media organs of a society.
Whereas most living organisms exist solely in physical reality, human beings also occupy an ideational space, with the interaction of human consciousness and perceived reality playing a major role in shaping behavior. Just as the pheromones released by mammals or insects can drastically affect the reactions of their family members or nest-mates, the ideas secreted by individuals or the media-emitters of a society can have an enormous impact upon their fellows.
A purely Jewish state such as Israel contains the highest density of Jews so as a consequence we are witnessing the most extreme form of such behavior.
The film version of A Clockwork Orangewas released in 1971 and when I watched the clip on Youtube I noticed something intriguing. According to the plot, Alex was psychologically-conditioned against violence by being forced to watch horrifically violent acts on the screen while being made ill with drugs. But although some of the images shown fell into that category—planes dropping bombs during wartime—many others merely showed Nazi parades and Adolf Hitler reviewing his huge array of German supporters at a public rally, scenes containing no visible violence whatsoever. So apparently in the America of the early 1970s, mere Nazi imagery was inherently considered “violent,” either reflecting an earlier conditioning process or more likely intended to now produce exactly that result in the audience.
The director was Stanley Kubrick, widely acclaimed as one of history’s greatest film-makers, whose credits include a long list of such landmark productions as Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odysesy, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket. As someone who spent decades near the top of the Hollywood talent hierarchy, Kubrick surely would have been privy to many important realities that never reached our mainstream newspapers or history books, with his insider knowledge perhaps further enhanced by his personal roots as a Jewish New Yorker.
In the 1990s Kubrick hired Frederic Raphael, also Jewish, to work with him on the screenplay to his last film. Given Kubrick’s background, many were surprised when Raphael later reported that the famed director declared to him that Adolf Hitler had been “right about almost everything,” while also disparaging the landmark Holocaust film Schindler’s List, produced and directed by his good friend Steven Spielberg, a revelation that greatly shocked the latter when he learned of it.
That final 1999 film by Kubrick was Eyes Wide Shut starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Despite the director’s enormous stature and his two extremely bankable stars, he had encountered considerable difficulties in getting it produced, with the project consuming many years of effort and only reaching the theaters after Kubrick’s sudden death from a heart-attack at the untimely age of 70, just days after he had shown his completed film to the studio executives. The plot was a strange and extremely conspiratorial one, telling the story of two affluent, successful New Yorkers who were suddenly drawn into a secretive hidden world, in which the ultra-rich and powerful regularly engaged in ritualistic sex orgies in enormous private mansions, with potentially deadly consequences for outsiders who revealed those facts. Ironically enough, some of the key scenes were filmed at the palatial estate of the British Rothschilds, themselves the subjects of many such notorious conspiratorial beliefs.
Despite featuring such top stars the box-office results suggest that the film lost money or barely broke even. But if Eyes Wide Shut had instead been released during the later Jeffrey Epstein scandal or the somewhat related QAnon/Pizzagate controversy, I suspect that enormous audiences might have flocked to it. During the last couple of decades, the notion that our world is controlled by hidden forces whose existence remains unreported in our mainstream media outlets has become far more widespread. The Epstein case certainly raised strong suspicions that many of the individuals at the top of our society were subject to sexual blackmail at the hands of secretive, nefarious organizations.
Our memory sometimes plays tricks on us. I’d last watched A Clockwork Orange more than a decade ago and vaguely remembered that the horrifying visual images Alex had been forced to watch were those of the Nazi death camps. So I was surprised to discover that instead they only showed Hitler peacefully reviewing his massed Nazi supporters at a huge popular rally. But I suspect that if the 1971 film had been produced in the 1980s or later, Holocaust imagery would have dominated those scenes, perhaps even to the exclusion of anything else.
Over the last generation or two, the extent to which Hollywood and the broader media have conditioned the population of the Western world with the story and images of the Holocaust is absolutely extraordinary. As I explained in 2018:
According to Finkelstein, Hollywood produced some 180 Holocaust films just during the years 1989-2004. Even the very partial subset of Holocaust films listed on Wikipedia has grown enormously long, but fortunately the Movie Database has winnowed down the catalog by providing a list of the 50 Most Moving Holocaust Films.
Some 2% of Americans have a Jewish background, while perhaps 95% possess Christian roots, but the Wikipedia list of Christian films seems rather scanty and rudimentary by comparison. Very few of those films were ever widely released, and the selection is stretched to even include The Chronicles of Narnia, which contains no mention of Christianity whatsoever. One of the very few prominent exceptions on the list is Mel Gibson’s 2004 The Passion of the Christ, which he was forced to personally self-fund. And despite the enormous financial success of that movie, one of the most highly profitable domestic releases of all time, the project rendered Gibson a hugely vilified pariah in the industry over which he had once reigned as its biggest star, especially after word got around that his own father was a Holocaust Denier.
It is important to recognize that the conditioning process controls the behavior of even those unaffected by it. Although Emperor Henry IV did not himself accept the supremacy of the Pope, most of his vassals and subjects did, so he was forced to submit. Similarly, the personal views of Elon Musk regarding antisemitism or the Holocaust are less important than the power those notions seem to exert over so many of his customers, employees, and business associates.
The Economist is probably the world’s most influential print publication and last week its cover focused on the tremendous importance of “Ending the Middle East’s Agony.” Yet its leader on that topic opened with the words “In the months since Hamas committed the worst atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust…” Constant, overwhelming media conditioning has ensured that the European events of more than three generations ago still remain central to the thinking of most of the Western world.
I recently considered ordering some books from Amazon related to the Holocaust, and noticed that one of these, hardly obscure, was ranked by that website as roughly the 7,100th most popular title in that genre. This indicates the vast number of Holocaust works that have been published in English, probably totaling at least ten or twenty thousand and perhaps representing a substantial fraction of all the books relating to the events of World War II.
Yet this is a relatively new development. In a number of articles, I’ve emphasized that from soon after the end of World War II until the early 1960s the colossal events of the Holocaust—certainly the greatest crime ever committed in the history of the world—had received almost no mention anywhere from mainstream American journalists or historians and the same was apparently true for the rest of the Western world. Indeed, no intelligent, thoughtful individual who carefully read our major newspapers, magazines, and books from (say) 1947 to 1959 would probably have ever even suspected that any Holocaust had occurred, an absolutely extraordinary historical fact.
This very striking point had originally been made to me years ago in the pages of The Holocaust in American Life, a widely-praised if controversial book published in 1999 by Prof. Peter Novick, a historian who founded the Jewish Studies program at the University of Chicago. Having recently focused once again on this issue, I decided to reread Novick’s work for the first time in five or six years, and was well-rewarded for my effort, as it fully confirmed all my recollections.
Some of the facts that Novick raises near the beginning are remarkable. The 1938 German Kristallnacht riots in which dozens of Jews had been killed spent more than a full week on the front pages of the New York Times, yet America’s Jewish-owned newspaper of record hardly gave even a sliver of that coverage to the Holocaust when it began a few years later, consigning reports of hundreds of thousands or millions of Jews being killed in very grotesque fashion to small items buried in the back pages. The Zionist movement in the Middle East took much the same position, with their flagship newspaper the Palestine Post treating those stories with equal disdain, relegating them to just a couple of paragraphs often on the inside pages and totally overshadowed by minor local political disputes. Given such obvious Zionist disregard for those wartime claims of Jewish extermination, it is hardly surprising that in 1940 and 1941 a small right-wing Zionist faction, led by a future prime minister of Israel, made repeated attempts to join the Axis military alliance of Hitler and Mussolini.
Novick notes that even after the end of the war, when the Allies publicly declared at Nuremberg that the Nazis had brutally exterminated six million Jews, surveys taken of American Jewry revealed that around half of them regarded those figures as totally ridiculous, perhaps exaggerated by a factor of five or ten. Lt. Col. Leonard Weinstein served on Eisenhower’s staff and was heavily involved in Jewish community activity, but when he was informed that a million or two million Jews had been killed at Auschwitz, he was absolutely astonished and said he’d never heard of such a thing. And Novick emphasizes that while Jewish awareness of the Holocaust was hardly substantial, Gentile awareness was totally negligible. Indeed, popular representations of Axis atrocities focused almost entirely upon those committed by the Japanese, including such incidents as the notorious “Bataan Death March,” while relatively little attention was given to any German war-crimes.
According to Novick, an important reason that the mainstream media, whether Jewish or Gentile, treated those Holocaust stories with such tremendous disdain was that many of the senior editors remembered that during the First World War two decades earlier they had been completely deceived by the many ridiculous anti-German atrocity-hoaxes manufactured by Allied propagandists leaving them very reluctant to repeat that humiliating mistake. And as it happens, many of the major Holocaust stories did indeed fall into exactly that same category. For example, Novick reports that “the most important single report on the Holocaust that reached the West” during those years was provided by the World Jewish Congress, whose informant claimed to have “personal knowledge” that Jewish corpses were being rendered into soap, an assertion now uniformly dismissed as pure fiction.
Although by late 1944 three-quarters of the American public had been persuaded that the Germans “murdered many people in concentration camps,” the most common estimate of that total was 100,000 or less.
Novick’s extensive scholarship seemed to fully confirm my understanding of the pattern of coverage. The reality of the Holocaust was widely ignored or disregarded during the Second World War even as it was actually occurring. The Holocaust then received a major burst of public attention and media coverage around the time of the 1946 Nuremberg Tribunals at which the Allies tried, convicted, and executed many of the defeated Nazi leaders, with the extermination of the Jews being one of the major charges against them. But soon afterwards, the Holocaust once again almost totally disappeared from Western media coverage and public attention until the beginning of the 1960s.
As Novick so forcefully puts it at the start of one of his postwar chapters:
Between the end of the war and the 1960s, as anyone who has lived through those years can testify, the Holocaust made scarcely any appearance in American public discourse, and hardly more in Jewish public discourse—especially discourse directed to gentiles.
Although Jewish publications did still occasionally refer to the Holocaust during this period, they generally did so in a rather strange manner. For example, in 1952 Stalin executed the overwhelmingly Jewish Communist Party leadership of Czechoslovakia in one of his periodic purges, leading Commentary and the New Leader to describe the deaths of that handful of Jewish appartchiks as being very similar to Hitler’s Holocaust: “He will finally wipe out the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe…The parallel to the policy of the Nazi extermination is almost complete.” Apparently the difference between less than a dozen Jewish victims and six million deaths was not considered significant. Indeed, as a consequence of those events the ADL and other leading Jewish organizations publicly declared that Communism and Nazism were “basically identical” in their policies towards Jews. Organizations and publications that take such a cavalier attitude to factual realities hardly inspire great confidence in their other claims, whether past or future.
Perhaps the most substantive and influential Jewish treatment of the topic during this period came in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the classic 1951 work of political philosophy published by Hannah Arendt, a German-Jewish emigre scholar who had come to America in 1941 and spent the next decade heavily immersed in Jewish and Zionist circles. Given the very considerable length and depth of the book, she had probably begun working on it during the Nuremberg Tribunals or in their immediate aftermath, and she devoted several pages to the Holocaust, drawing upon the facts documented during those landmark war crime trials. However, her personal expertise and focus was philosophy and ideology rather than history, so she primarily emphasized that the fanatical Nazi project to exterminate all of Europe’s Jews severely detracted from the German war effort, thereby demonstrating the utter “madness” of Hitler and his ruling regime.
In a lengthy footnote, she also debunked some of the popular misconceptions surrounding that issue, pointing out that the gripping visual images of starved, emaciated corpses and survivors that had so horrified the American public at the end of the war were totally unrealistic and had nothing to do with the Holocaust since the Germans hadn’t used starvation as their method of killing. Instead, she suggested those scenes reflected the total breakdown of German organization in the last days of the war due to America’s strategic bombing campaign, a claim that many others have more recently made.
Rereading Novick’s book did remind me of one important point that I’d previously forgotten. Raoul Hilberg’s weighty 1961 volume The Destruction of the European Jews is universally acknowledged as having ignited the scholarly study of the Holocaust. But Novick suggests that the considerable success of Hilberg’s book, which eventually launched an entire scholarly discipline, was probably due to its fortuitous timing.
During the 1930s the Zionist movement had forged an important economic partnership with Nazi Germany, which laid the basis for the eventual creation of the state of Israel. The Nazi liaison officer to the Zionists was Adolf Eichmann, who studied Hebrew and became known as something of a philo-Semite. After the resounding Allied victory in the war, those dangerous secrets of Zionist history were deeply suppressed, but during the mid-1950s they suddenly threatened to leak out again into the media, perhaps with very serious political repercussions for Israel’s standing with America and the other Western nations. Possibly as a consequence, the Israeli government soon undertook a major effort to track down and eliminate their former close Nazi collaborator. After kidnapping Eichmann in 1960, the Israelis staged a high-profile show trial heavily focused upon the horrors of the Holocaust and culminating in Eichmann’s 1962 execution. Novick plausibly argues that Hilberg’s book owed much of its success to its release in the middle of that media extravaganza.
Thus, the combination of the Eichmann trial and Hilberg’s book meant that during the early 1960s the Holocaust for the first time began receiving some attention in the mainstream media and also gradually became a topic of serious academic study. Many of those researchers had posts in the newly-established Jewish Studies programs that proliferated at American universities as part of the broader ethnic studies movement of the late 1960s. But this media coverage was hardly enormous, and it may not have much penetrated into the American consciousness outside the Jewish community or Jewish activists.
According to Novick, the crucial development was the involvement of Hollywood, beginning in 1978 with the TV miniseries Holocaust starring James Woods and Meryl Streep, which for the first time firmly established that narrative in Western popular consciousness. Watched by nearly 100 million Americans, it was widely described as providing more information about that historical event to more Americans in four nights than the combined total of all past media coverage over the previous thirty years. I’ve sometimes suggested that television broadcast may have been the first time most Americans had ever heard of that enormous wartime crime. Novick notes that NBC’s huge marketing campaign was dwarfed by a vastly larger effort undertaken by all the various Jewish organizations, leading to the inescapable conclusion that Hollywood and Jewish activists working together did indeed create the Holocaust.
With Hollywood dominating global entertainment, the effect was also felt far outside our own borders, notably in Germany. As Novick puts it, thirty years of German silence on Nazi war crimes was suddenly overturned by a lavish Hollywood production, based upon the important principle that seeing is believing.
Novick’s important historiographical analysis was glowingly praised by many leading Jewish scholars, but other researchers sharply disputed it, so I recently read one of the main academic rebuttals to get the other side of the story. After the Holocaust turned out to be a fairly short 2012 collection of essays edited by David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist, bearing the descriptive subtitle “Challenging the Myth of Silence.”
I wasn’t greatly impressed by the contents, and felt that the book actually seemed to reinforce Novick’s case. The contributors included more than a dozen historians who had carefully scoured the media and literature of the period for evidence to refute Novick’s thesis, but they seemed to come up almost totally empty. They described some some sharp denunciations of antisemitism, whether in Hitler’s Germany or Truman’s America, but except for a short spike right around the time of the Nuremberg Tribunals, there was almost no indication in the media that any Holocaust had ever occurred. There were occasional glancing references to the Nazis having killed Jews, but in nearly all these cases the implied death-toll could just as easily have been six hundred as six million, and indeed in the bitter postwar struggle over Palestine, some of the angry Zionists and their American polemicist allies sometimes denounced the British for being almost as cruel to the Jews as the German Nazis had been.
The only major exception to this climate of near total silence was found in the newly created State of Israel, which featured a very widespread and popular Holocaust literature throughout this period. But most of this material consisted of bizarre accounts of sadomaschistic sexual perversion in Nazi death camps, and over the years these have gradually been recognized as merely being pornographic fiction.
Meanwhile, other academics of widely different ideological perspectives seem to reach conclusions very similar to those of Novick. Norman Finkelstein’s lengthy review of Novick’s work soon appeared in the London Review of Books and eventually led him to extend the latter author’s analysis and publish The Holocaust Industry in 2005, which became an international bestseller. Although the two scholars diverged in their emphasis and their sharp ideological differences provoked some hostile exchanges—Novick was a mainstream liberal Zionist and Finkelstein a fervent anti-Zionist—I think that their descriptions were quite complementary.
Finkelstein’s area of historical expertise is the Middle East and his brief foray into the subject of the Holocaust was probably inspired by what he regarded as its very pernicious political impact upon the Israel/Palestine conflict. But around the same time I’d originally read Novick’s book, I also read those of Holocaust experts Deborah Lipstadt and Lucy Dawidowicz, and found that they fully confirmed and amplified Novick’s conclusions, although they presented their findings in a very different tone and manner.
Lipstadt’s 1986 book Beyond Belief demonstrated that despite the loud outcries of agitated Jewish activists, during the war years neither the major American media nor the American public seemed to believe that any Holocaust was actually occurring. She reported that as late as 1944:
Writing in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, [Arthur] Koestler cited public opinion polls in the United States in which nine of ten average Americans dismissed the accusations against the Nazis as propaganda lies and flatly stated that they did not believe a word of them.
A few years earlier in 1981, Harvard University Press had published Dawidowicz’s The Holocaust and the Historians, in which the author roasted nearly all our postwar mainstream historians for almost totally ignoring the Holocaust, writing their histories as if it had never occurred.
Her sharp condemnation even extended to Britain’s Alan Bullock, although he seems to have been the only mainstream historian to have mentioned the Holocaust during this era. In 1952 while still in his thirties, he had published Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, the first comprehensive biography of the German dictator and hardly a flattering one as indicated by the title, with his treatment remaining the standard work during the decades that followed, greatly influencing those that came afterward. Yet although the Holocaust supposedly accounted for roughly 10% of all the wartime deaths and his book ran nearly 800 pages, he only apparently devoted three sentences to that topic, merely quoting the prosecution claims made at the Nuremberg Tribunals, whose trial transcripts had been a primary basis for his entire text. By the time of his revised 1962 edition, those three sentences had grown into several paragraphs among the 850 pages, and he now cited the testimony from Eichmann’s recent show trial in Israel as well as the book published by a Jewish art historian.
Both Lipstadt and Dawidowicz came across as hard-edged Zionists, who probably despised Novick for his much more moderate views let alone Finkelstein’s strident anti-Zionism, so these scholars presented their conclusions in a very different fashion, but they all provided essentially the same view of the underlying historical reality.
For those who would like to review some of these findings in convenient, online form, I’d strongly recommend a 2004 undergraduate research paper produced for a Holocaust Studies class taught by Prof. Harold Marcuse at UCSB. Apparently Marcuse considered the work sufficiently good that he decided to put it online at his own website:
One additional book I read was much more narrowly focused, carefully exploring the wartime Holocaust coverage—or rather the lack thereof—of the Jewish owned New York Times, America’s most influential newspaper. Buried by the Times was published in 2005 by Laurel Leff, who had spent 18 years as a reporter with the Wall Street Journal and other mainstream outlets before becoming a professor of Journalism at Northeastern University, and her exhaustive, scholarly study was released by Cambridge University Press. As implied by the title, she lambasted America’s national newspaper of record for completely downplaying and minimizing the wartime reports they received of a massive ongoing Jewish extermination campaign, with many of the key editors apparently dismissing them as ridiculous fabrications. She analyzed the internal workings of the Times on that subject in great detail and her overall conclusions seemed broadly consistent with those of the other authors.
Finally, as further examples of this strange pattern of silence, I should mention the curious fact that the 1948-1959 postwar memoirs and histories by the three great Allied leaders, Churchill, Eisenhower, and De Gaulle totaled more than 7,000 pages, but contained no mention of the Holocaust or any of its major elements. The same was also true of the voluminous, posthumously published diaries of Gen. George Patton and James Forrestal, our first Secretary of Defense.
As I’ve repeatedly emphasized, the sole brief exception to the widespread pattern of minimizing or ignoring the Holocaust both during and after the Second World War came in the immediate postwar period, especially surrounding the 1946 Nuremberg Tribunals in which the top Nazi leaders were tried and executed for those crimes. But by the 1950s, more and more prominent Americans had come to regard those very high-profile legal proceedings as deeply shameful, a kangeroo court whose preordained verdicts had been based upon confessions extracted by torture, forged documents, and perjured testimony.
This was certainly the position taken by Prof. John Beaty, who had held a crucial position in our wartime Military Intelligence, and in 1951 he published The Iron Curtain Over America, which became a huge bestseller among conservatives:
Furthermore, he was scathing toward the Nuremberg Trials, which he described as a “major indelible blot” upon America and “a travesty of justice.” According to him, the proceedings were dominated by vengeful German Jews, many of whom engaged in falsification of testimony or even had criminal backgrounds. As a result, this “foul fiasco” merely taught Germans that “our government had no sense of justice.” Sen. Robert Taft, the Republican leader of the immediate postwar era took a very similar position, which later won him the praise of John F. Kennedy in Profiles in Courage. The fact that the chief Soviet prosecutor at Nuremberg had played the same role during the notorious Stalinist show trials of the late 1930s, during which numerous Old Bolsheviks confessed to all sorts of absurd and ridiculous things, hardly enhanced the credibility of the proceedings to many outside observers.
In his 1981 memoirs, Prof. Revilo Oliver, another important former figure in wartime Military Intelligence, had taken the same position, and Prof. Joseph Bendersky’s ten years of archival research indicated that this was also the view of many or most of our top generals and Military Intelligence officers.
In 1962 American historian and philosopher Thomas Kuhn published his influential study The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He introduced the notion of a “paradigm shift” in which the gradual accumulation of anomalous or unexplained facts eventually causes an established framework of understanding to suddenly be overturned and replaced by a radically different one, a process exemplified by the Copernican Revolution.
I think that any thoughtful readers who carefully digested the works of leading mainstream Holocaust scholars such as Novick, Lipstadt, Dawidowicz, and Bendersky, supplemented by a little additional material, would surely be primed for undergoing such an intellectual transformation on that subject, whether or not they were willing to recognize it.
Consider that almost none of our mainstream journalists or historians had acknowledged the reality of the Holocaust either during or after World War II, while the 1946 Nuremberg Tribunals that supposedly established those facts were heavily fraudulent. Therefore, it seems the height of arrogance to assume that all those very knowledgeable contemporaneous observers were wrong and we should instead rely upon authors publishing many years, sometimes many decades after those events.
Instead, we must consider the very real possibility that the Holocaust is merely a hoax, a half-forgotten residue of dishonest wartime propaganda that was eventually resurrected by gullible or biased researchers decades later, then afterwards transformed into a gigantic cultural icon by ignorant Hollywood producers and scriptwriters. Indeed, in his very popular 1951 book Prof. Beaty had casually ridiculed the Holocaust story in exactly those terms, and although he came under ferocious attack by the ADL and other groups on all other grounds, none of them had ever challenged his very explicit “Holocaust Denial.”
To his considerable credit, near the very end of his excellent book Novick did note the existence of “Holocaust Deniers” but treated the subject in dismissive and very cursory fashion, giving it only a couple of pages in his lengthy book. He casually besmirched them as “cranks, kooks, and misfits,” “screwballs,” “fruitcakes,” and “nuts,” while giving no indication that he had ever bothered reading let alone seriously considering any of the material their movement had produced. In all fairness, a number of the persons whom he named did fall into exactly that very disreputable category, hardly surprising since marginal, severely anathematized ideological movements naturally tend to attract more than their fair share of such crazy or anti-social individuals. But the validity of any doctrine should obviously be judged by the work of its most credible proponents rather than its weakest ones.
In discussing this issue, Novick briefly mentioned Lipstadt’s 1993 book Denying the Holocaust, which was entirely devoted to that topic. I found that latter author almost hilarious in her dim-witted and self-defeating ideological blindness. As I described the contents in my 2018 article:
Reading the book was certainly a tremendous revelation to me. Lipstadt is a professor of Holocaust Studies with an appointment in Emory University’s Department of Theology, and once I read the opening paragraph of her first chapter, I decided that her academic specialty might certainly be described as “Holocaust Theology”…
Lipstadt’s absolute horror at having someone actually dispute the tenets of her academic doctrine could not have been more blatant. Surely no zealous theologian of the European Dark Ages would have reacted any differently.
The second chapter of her book supported that impression. Since many of the individuals she castigates as Holocaust Deniers also supported the Revisionist perspective of the underlying causes of the First and Second World Wars, she harshly attacked those schools, but in rather strange fashion. In recent years, blogger Steve Sailer and others have ridiculed what they describe as the “point-and-sputter” style of debate, in which a “politically-incorrect” narrative is merely described and then automatically treated as self-evidently false without any accompanying need for actual refutation. This seemed to be the approach that Lipstadt took throughout her rather short book.
For example, she provided a very long list of leading academic scholars, prominent political figures, and influential journalists who had championed Revisionist history, noted that their views disagree with the more mainstream perspective she had presumably imbibed from her History 101 textbooks, and thereby regarded them as fully debunked. Certainly a Christian preacher attempting to refute the evolutionary theories of Harvard’s E.O. Wilson by quoting a passage of Bible verse might take much the same approach. But few evangelical activists would be so foolish as to provide a very long list of eminent scientists who all took the same Darwinist position and then attempt to sweep them aside by citing a single verse from Genesis. Lipstadt seems to approach history much like a Bible-thumper, but a particularly dim-witted one. Moreover, many of the authors she attacked had already become familiar to me after a decade of my content-archiving work, and I had found their numerous books quite scholarly and persuasive.
This last passage came from my very long 2018 article on that subject, and last month I revisited the same topic in a new article.
Officially relegating the Holocaust to the category of discredited historical frauds would be a very momentous act, something not undertaken lightly and having far-reaching implications.
Among the lesser consequences would be that ten or twenty thousand books published in English over the last half-century would suddenly be rendered obsolete and their authors revealed to be gullible fools. A vast multitude of other books and articles would suffer serious injury as well, with future readers always snickering when they came across certain paragraphs or chapters, while our basic textbooks would necessarily be forced to reverse the same revisionary process on that subject they had experienced from the 1960s onward. But all the Ptolemaic astronomers who had devoted their lives to calculating increasingly complex epicycles in order to explain the motions of the heavenly bodies were similarly swept away by the Copernican Revolution, and the political ramifications of declaring that the Holocaust was merely a hoax would be far more dramatic, not least with regard to our current Middle East policy.
Indeed, given the extent to which most Western peoples have undergone a half-century of intensive Holocaust conditioning at the hand of our media and entertainment industries, perhaps the collapse of Soviet Communism would be a better historical analogy. But even that shattering event might fall short since in many respects the Holocaust has been transmuted into a quasi-religious faith—“Holocaustianity”—that serves as the reigning creed of much of our deeply secular West, featuring its own venerated martyrs, sacred texts, and holy places, with Auschwitz being its chief pilgrimage site. The collapse of an established and powerful religious doctrine is fraught with huge difficulties.
Some figures now greatly celebrated would be cast down into ignominy, while others now obscure or reviled would be raised up to take their places. In my 2018 article I had briefly sketched out a few of those latter individuals:
A professor of Electrical Engineering at Northwestern named Arthur R. Butz was casually visiting some libertarian gathering during this period when he happened to notice a pamphlet denouncing the Holocaust as a fraud. He had never previously given any thought to the issue, but such a shocking claim captured his attention, and he began looking into the matter early in 1972. He soon decided that the accusation was probably correct, but found the supporting evidence, including that presented in the unfinished and anonymous Hoggan book, far too sketchy, and decided it needed to be fleshed out in much more detailed and comprehensive fashion. He proceeded to undertake this project over the next few years, working with the methodical diligence of a trained academic engineer.
His major work, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, first appeared in print late in 1976, and immediately became the central text of the Holocaust Denial community, a position it still seems to retain down to this present day, while with all the updates and appendices, the length has grown to well over 200,000 words. Although no mention of this forthcoming book appeared in the February 1976 issue of Reason, it is possible that word of the pending publication had gotten around within libertarian circles, prompting the sudden new focus upon historical Revisionism.
Butz was a respectable tenured professor at Northwestern, and the release of his book laying out the Holocaust Denial case soon became a minor sensation, covered by the New York Times and other media outlets in January 1977. In one of her books, Lipstadt devotes a full chapter entitled “Entering the Mainstream” to Butz’s work. According to a December 1980 Commentary article by Dawidowicz, Jewish donors and Jewish activists quickly mobilized, attempting to have Butz fired for his heretical views, but back then academic tenure still held firm and Butz survived, an outcome that seems to have greatly irritated Dawidowicz.
Another regular IHR participant was Robert Faurisson. As a professor of literature at the University of Lyons-2, he began expressing his public skepticism about the Holocaust during the 1970s, and the resulting media uproar led to efforts to remove him from his position, while a petition was signed on his behalf by 200 international scholars, including famed MIT professor Noam Chomsky. Faurisson stuck to his opinions, but attacks persisted, including a brutal beating by Jewish militants that hospitalized him, while a French political candidate espousing similar views was assassinated. Jewish activist organizations began lobbying for laws to broadly outlaw the activities of Faurisson and others, and in 1990, soon after the Berlin Wall fell and research at Auschwitz and other Holocaust sites suddenly became far easier, France passed a statute criminalizing Holocaust Denial, apparently the first nation after defeated Germany to do so. During the years that followed, large numbers of other Western countries did the same, setting the disturbing precedent of resolving scholarly disputes via prison sentences, a softer form of the same policy followed in Stalinist Russia.
In exploring the history of Holocaust Denial, I have noticed this same sort of recurrent pattern, most typically involving individuals rather than institutions. Someone highly-regarded and fully mainstream decides to investigate the controversial topic, and soon comes to conclusions that sharply deviate from the official narrative of the last two generations. For various reasons, those views become public, and he is immediately demonized by the Jewish-dominated media as a horrible extremist, perhaps mentally-deranged, while being relentlessly hounded by a ravenous pack of fanatic Jewish-activists. This usually brings about the destruction of his career.
Fred Leuchter was widely regarded as one of America’s leading expert specialists on the technology of executions, and a long article in The Atlantic treated him as such. During the 1980s, Ernst Zundel, a prominent Canadian Holocaust Denier, was facing trial for his disbelief in the Auschwitz gas chambers, and one of his expert witnesses was an American prison warden with some experience in such systems, who recommended involving Leuchter, one of the foremost figures in the field. Leuchter soon took a trip to Poland and closely inspected the purported Auschwitz gas chambers, then published the Leuchter Report, concluding that they were obviously a fraud and could not possibly have worked in the manner Holocaust scholars had always claimed. The ferocious attacks which followed soon cost him his entire business career and destroyed his marriage.
David Irving had ranked as the world’s most successful World War II historian, with his books selling in the millions amid glowing coverage in the top British newspapers when he agreed to appear as an expert witness at the Zundel trial. He had always previously accepted the conventional Holocaust narrative, but reading the Leuchter Report changed his mind, and he concluded that the Auschwitz gas chambers were just a myth. He was quickly subjected to unrelenting media attacks, which first severely damaged and then ultimately destroyed his very illustrious publishing career, and he later even served time in an Austrian prison for his unacceptable views.
Dr. Germar Rudolf was a successful young German chemist working at the prestigious Max Planck Institute when he heard of the controversy regarding the Leuchter Report, which he found reasonably persuasive but containing some weaknesses. Therefore, he repeated the analysis on a more thorough basis, and published the results as the Chemistry of Auschwitz, which came to the same conclusions as Leuchter. And just like Leuchter before him, Rudolf suffered the destruction of his career and his marriage, and since Germany treats these matters in harsher fashion, he eventually served five years in prison for his scientific impudence.
Most recently, Dr. Nicholas Kollerstrom, who had spent eleven years as a historian of science on the staff of University College, London, suffered this same fate in 2008. His scientific interests in the Holocaust provoked a media firestorm of vilification, and he was fired with a single day’s notice, becoming the first member of his research institution ever expelled for ideological reasons. He had previously provided the Isaac Newton entry for a massive biographical encyclopedia of astronomers, and America’s most prestigious science journal demanded that the entire publication be pulped, destroying the work of over 100 writers, because it had been fatally tainted by having such a villainous contributor. He recounted this unfortunate personal history as an introduction to his 2014 book Breaking the Spell, which I highly recommend.
The lives and careers of a very sizable number of other individuals have followed this same unfortunate sequence, which in much of Europe often ends in criminal prosecution and imprisonment. Most notably, a German lawyer who became a bit too bold in her legal arguments soon joined her client behind bars, and as a consequence, it has become increasingly difficult for accused Holocaust Deniers to secure effective legal representation. By Kollerstrom’s estimates, many thousands of individuals are currently serving time across Europe for Holocaust Denial.
Despite suffering years of German imprisonment for his skeptical investigation of the scientific evidence for the Holocaust, Rudolf perservered and eventually created the most comprehensive published collection of Holocaust Denial literature. This includes the works of Butz and Kollerstrom as well as dozens of other books by various scholars, nearly all of them freely available for downloading, and quite a number of video documentaries on the same subject.
Most recently, Rudolf has also released an exhaustive Holocaust encyclopedia, summarizing much of this mountain of research material into a series of manageable entries.
If Prof. Arthur Butz probably stands as the founding father of academic Holocaust Denial, I think that the late Ernst Zundel might hold similar honors with regard to Holocaust Denial activism and publishing, having launched his own efforts around the same time. But while Butz was shielded by our First Amendment and academic tenure, Zundel, a German national who had emigrated to Canada in 1958, had no such protections, so he eventually faced several public trials, deportations, and many years of imprisonment, both in Canada and in his native Germany, while his Toronto home was fire-bombed by Jewish militants. Although both his Canadian trials of the 1980s ended in convictions and subsequent incarceration, they actually played a very important role in advancing his broader efforts, prompting both Leuchter and Irving to become involved in the topic, as well as providing invaluable cross-examinations of leading academic scholars of the Holocaust.
At the time of his death in 2017, I was only very slightly familiar with Zundel or his history, and therefore was quite surprised to read his long and remarkably temperate obituary in the New York Times, which led me to suspect that some Times editors may have quietly held heretical views regarding the cause Zundel had long championed, or at least entertained a few serious doubts in that regard.
Although I’d been unaware at the time, during the 1980s and early 1990s the Holocaust Denial controversy had sometimes received substantial attention on various broadcast television shows. For example, in 1994 the theatrical success of Schindler’s List prompted Mike Wallace to interview Zundel for 60 Minutes, and I recently discovered the segment was available on Youtube:
The notion that the world is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine has often been misattributed to the British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington, and over the last fifteen-odd years I’ve sometimes begun to believe that the historical events of our own era could be considered in a similar light. I’ve also sometimes joked with my friends that when the true history of our last one hundred years is finally written and told—probably by a Chinese professor at a Chinese university—none of the students in his lecture hall will ever believe a word of it.
Don’t let the alarmist sound of this column’s title put you off. It is not a “conspiracy theory.” This column is a factual report as you will see if you read on.
Everyone needs to understand that the ruling elite in the US are implementing a decision to redefine democracy in a way that eliminates democracy, makes Congress superfluous, voting pointless, and discards the Constitution as an outdated document inconsistent with the power the ruling elite intend to wield over Americans and the rest of the world.
The decision has been made to redefine democracy from the will of the people to protecting “the sanctity of democratic institutions.” Precisely, what are “democratic institutions”? They are not the institutions, such as Congress and representative government or the rule of law and an independent judiciary, that we currently regard as democratic institutions. “Democratic institutions” are the institutions of the censorship industry, such as the military/security complex, State Department, NATO, CIA, FBI, IMF, World Bank, NGOs, the Atlantic Council, the Aspen Institute, the presstitutes, Black Rock, JP Morgan/Chase and other of the consensus-building institutions that set agendas and control the narratives. To express disagreement with the consensus these elite institutions build is considered to be “an attack on democracy.” In other words, “democracy” is the property of the elite institutions, and the sanctity of these elite institutions must be protected from the people defined by Hillary Clinton as “the Trump deplorables.” The will of the people is eliminated from the picture.The Devil is in the De…Blunt, MalcolmBuy New $24.00(as of 05:39 UTC — Details)
It might surprise you, but universities (Stanford, for example, is fully involved), major corporations especially the tech companies and social media, law schools, medical associations, and governors and members of Congress associated with the WEF accept the redefinition of democracy that excludes the will of the people. They also agree that the Constitution is inconsistent with the power they intend to wield over citizens. As I write the State Department is busy at work obstructing the House of Representatives inquiry into the executive branch’s use of taxpayers’ money to censor what we may hear about Covid, the Covid “vaccine,” election fraud, the Ukraine war, Iran, Russia, China, etc. See here.
On February 16, Tucker Carlson interviewed Mike Benz, the world’s leading expert on the censorship industry. Here you have a complete and accurate explanation of who rules us–and No it is not the Rothschilds and the Bilderbergs–and why the US government has decided to deep-six the First Amendment. See here.
The decision has been made, and it is currently being implemented. It means that suppression will be used to convert the entirety of the Internet and social media into a propaganda ministry serving official narratives. All of the hope that libertarians had of the freedom to speak that the Internet would provide has turned out to be unrealistic. You can see already the trouble Elon Musk is in for permitting free speech on X. The government has launched investigations of Musk and his companies with the intent of forcing him out. Both the state of California and the EU have moved against Elon Musk to force him via enormous financial penalties to turn over to the censorship industry the information that the previous owner was supplying, information used in AI programs to determine who to ban and what tweets to take down.
Soon the alternative and social media will exist only as propaganda sites for the “consensus-building elite institutions.”
The disintegration of Western civilization is proceeding so rapidly that I cannot keep up with it even as a full time job. As I reported yesterday the French government has just criminalized medical truth, and WHO is about to do so in May of this year. People will no longer have control over their own health decisions.
The US government not only keeps the US border wide open for “people of color,” Washington also supplies the NGOs who are recruiting the immigrant-invaders with hundreds of millions of dollars with which to provide the immigrant-invaders with food, water, medical care, and sleeping accommodation along the mapped routes. See here.
It can’t happen you say? But it is happening right in front of our eyes.
Insouciant gullible Americans are expert at fleeing from unsettling bad news. Thus, they pave their own path to tyranny. Tyranny is easy to establish over peoples who have confidence in their Constitutional rights and integrity of their institutions. The more patriotic the population is, the more susceptible it is to deception and betrayal by government. Try telling patriots what is happening to them, and they will call you a commie for speaking badly about their beloved country.
Christian evangelicals have no opposition to the evil that is engulfing us, because they have been brainwashed that they will escape it by being wafted up to Heaven. The growth of evil is actually their escape from a sinful world into Heaven. The more evil, the sooner their escape.
For most of the rest, liberal interventionists and hegemonic neoconservatives have taught that America is exceptional and indispensable, so how can anything go wrong.
Combine these awareness-blockers with the fact that uncomfortable truths are a bad news turnoff, and that censorship is being established as a national security matter with the argument that it makes us safe and “protects democracy.”
Consequently, the criminalization of truth is rushing ahead. Even the word “truth” is slated to become a hate word that cannot be spoken.
Any information that you have saved that helps you to understand the tyranny that is engulfing us should be stored in thumb drives and not in the cloud as all information undermining of the “consensus-building institutions” will be consigned to the memory hole.
Note: at the 47-48 minute mark in the interview, the redefinition of democracy is explained. As there are more US government agencies committed to the death of the First Amendment than you have ever heard of, watch the one hour video several times in order to gain an appreciation of how deep the rabbit hole is.
Note: The Atlantic Council, one of the main anti-democratic “consensus-building (false narrative) organizations,” is possibly associated with the Burisma/Hunter Biden scandal. Burisma, a Ukrainian company, put Hunter Biden on its board and paid him large sums of money for his father’s protection against prosecution of the company by Ukrainian authorities. US Vice President Biden actually admitted on TV, indeed he was proud of it, that he used billions of dollars in US taxpayers money to threaten Ukraine to withhold the US aid unless Ukraine fired the prosecutor, an offer Ukraine could not refuse. Atlantic Council board members Sally Painter is under investigation by the US Justice (sic) Department for illegal lobbying on behalf of Burisma. She and former Atlantic Council board member Karen Tramontano created a partnership between the Atlantic Council and Burisma.Dr. Mercola, Complete …Buy New $29.94(as of 10:54 UTC — Details)
Burisma contributed $300,000 to the Atlantic Council. Perhaps it was the purchase price for Burisma officials to speak at Atlantic Council forums and for prestigious Atlantic Council members to speak at a Burisma conference in Ukraine in 2018. All of this to show American protection of the company to Ukrainian prosecutorial authorities.
In 2021 the United Arab Emirates Embassy donated more than $1 million to the Atlantic Council, and the UAE’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs added another $100,00-250,000. This might have been the purchase price for the Atlantic Council to use its influence to have the UN choose the UAE for the location of its 2023 climate change conference.
Apparently, the Atlantic Council did not make the required or proper disclosures of the UAE’s donations.
The Atlantic Council, a principal member of the anti-democratic censorship industry is supported by the hapless, unaware American taxpayers by grants of taxpayer’s money from the Departments of Defense, State, and Energy and by the US Agency for International Development. Thus, it is clear that “our” government in Washington is financing the replacement of American Democracy subject to the will of the people with the government’s protection of the elite institutions that have changed the definition of democracy to mean the service of their agendas.
Here are other major donors to the Atlantic Council:
Adrienne Arsht, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, the Rockefeller Foundation, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the United Arab Emirates, a Swiss company System Capital Management, Abu Dhabu National Oil Company, the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the US Department of State, the Embassy of Bahrain, the Embassy of Japan, the Finish Ministry of Defense, the Lithuanian Minister of Defense, the Norwegian Ministry of Defense, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Chevron Corporation, Google, Crescent Petroleum, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Raytheon Technologies, John F.W. Rogers (Goldman Sachs), Carnegie Corp of New York, Delegation of the EU to the US, Foreign Ministry of Germany, JP Morgan Chase Foundation, US Department of Defense, US Department of Energy, Charles Koch Foundation. Amazon, Verizon, Pfizer, Aramco, Lockheed Martin, Omidyar Network.
In 1933, Albert Einstein renounced his German citizenship soon after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor. Although that left him without a legal home, he was welcomed in England and later, the US, and eventually became a US citizen in 1935.
This was quite a risky move at the time, as he had no certainty of a better life outside of Germany, or even a prospective job. But he saw the writing on the wall. As a man of reason, he focused not on the present condition in Germany, but where events would ultimately lead. His focus was on the Germany of the future and he made a difficult call that those with less vision might not have made.
In 1940, Ludwig von Mises was perhaps the most gifted economist in Austria, as well as being a visionary of libertarian thinking. But he left Austria in that year. The Nazi expansion was already under way and he understood that, if anything, he was leaving late in the game, but before it became impossible to leave. On that day, Austria lost one of its best minds.The Puppeteers: The Pe…Chaffetz, JasonBest Price: $6.53Buy New $9.56(as of 09:32 UTC — Details)
When Fidel Castro came suddenly to power on 1st January 1959, many business leaders understood immediately what effect that would have on them in the future and made a hasty exit from Cuba. Then, in the following years, as the socialist confiscations of businesses and property began to take place, larger numbers of businessmen made their exit. In the end, hundreds of thousands left.
Many similar examples can be studied, evidencing that, when a systemic collapse is imminent and, even more so, after it has begun, it’s invariably the best and brightest that choose to head for the exit doors first.
In most cases, it begins with a few forward-thinking people making their exit, followed by a small wave of others who see what’s coming. That wave is followed by a larger wave, made up of those who need a bit more evidence of decline before they see the writing on the wall. After that, the waves become ever-larger, as the most inventive and productive people realise that they may become collateral damage of the decline.
But why should this be? Is it coincidence that the greatest contributors to a society leave prior to a major decline, or does it simply seem that way after the fact – after they’ve been proven to be correct?
Well, if we observe any society, we learn that the bottom 10% tend to contribute very little. Indeed, they tend to be a drag on the economy and to remain so throughout their lives.
Then there’s the main bulk of society – say, 60% – who merely accept whatever the leaders dictate. They may complain that they want more, but for the most part, as long as they don’t experience extreme hardships, they accept their lot in life and tend not to be especially analytical. Therefore, when a systemic decline is in the works, they tend not to notice, as they’re not in the habit of analysing change.
Then there are the people at the management level – say, 20% – who are more expansive in their thinking. They tend to be the class of people who, whatever their field of expertise, make day-to-day analysis and day-to-day decisions.
At the top, there are those who consistently think outside the box – the Einsteins, the Mises, etc., who are gifted and are capable of perceiving the larger picture. They’re also the visionaries, who are capable of imagining and planning a greater future.
Not surprisingly, it’s this group that recognise the coming danger first, since they habitually analyse events. The decline is simply the next series of events.
It’s important to note that those who recognised the coming problem first had the greatest amount of time to prepare. Thus, they were not only more able to take their wealth, however large or small, with them, they also arrived at their destination of choice at a time when few others were doing so. This made it more likely that the “welcome mat” was out and they were well-received.
For each successive wave of exiters, the ability to leave freely became less likely, as did the possibility of being welcomed in the destination of choice.
Today, we’re witnessing the unravelling of the “First World” – the group of nations that were launched into prosperity following World War II. All of them – Canada, the UK, Australia, Japan and much of Europe – hopped on the US train to prosperity after the war and benefitted from the post-war prosperity that the US created. But unfortunately, they were still on the train when the US changed from being the world’s greatest creditor nation into the world’s greatest debtor nation. And now, still on the train, they will follow the US over the economic cliff that it’s headed for.
And so, as always transpires, a brain drain will occur. I first began warning of this, some twenty years ago, well in advance. The actual exodus did not begin until 2008, and even then, it was just a trickle. Now, it’s speeding up.
Of course, for anyone who lives in an exit jurisdiction, such as the EU or US, this is hardly noticeable. Indeed, most people in these jurisdictions are preoccupied with the flood of immigrants – the largely unproductive refugees in their tens of thousands, who are flooding in, based upon promised largesse from the government.
Not surprising then, that few people notice those who are leaving.
This group is, however, quite visible to those of us who live in a destination country.
In my own country, larger numbers are applying for residency every year. And true to form, they tend to be those who are capable people, having been successful in their home countries and seeking a continuation of opportunity in their choice of destination.
For the most part, they invest whatever wealth they’ve earned in their lives in the target country, thus ensuring continuing prosperity for that country.
We’re now past the initial stage of the exodus – the trickle of the most-informed individuals – and are witnessing the first real wave of people making an exit.
As the waves increase in volume, we can expect the governments of the exit countries to react. First, they’ll create capital controls, making it difficult to expatriate your wealth.Hold The Line: My stor…Lich, TamaraBest Price: $7.98Buy New $28.99(as of 07:52 UTC — Details)
Indeed, this has already begun for Americans – an “exit tax” that is to be paid on any wealth you presently have, even though you’ve already paid a stiff income tax on it.
Next come the migration controls – the laws and regulations that seek to criminalise any sort of expatriation. We can expect that these will be explained by governments, not as a loss of freedom, but as a protection against those who expatriate, with the accusation that they’re involved in money laundering and/or terrorism.
But there’s a final point to be made here that’s rarely considered. Whenever a country experiences a systemic collapse, it rarely, if ever, recovers quickly. Generally, it takes a generation or more.
Why should this be?
Well, once all the best and brightest – the movers and shakers – have exited, they rarely return. They tend to get on with life in their new homes, where they then invest, and cause those nations to advance economically.
Once that’s happened, the exit country can’t quickly replace them. The large percentage who did not see the collapse coming are not equipped to take over in an inspired way.
And certainly, the refugees who entered that country as parasites, following promises of governmental largesse, will not pick up the slack.
Therefore, once a brain drain has occurred, that country is likely to slide into the doldrums – perhaps for a generation, and, as history has shown, often for much longer.
A great many have argued that my comparisons to the DDR are off-point. They suggest that National Socialism is a better historical analogy, and that we are seeing before us a re-manifestation of classic German fascist tendencies. I think this is a misreading, and at the risk of repeating myself to I’ll try to explain why. In a second piece later this week, I’ll write further about fascism and its nature, because I think this is a locus of particular confusion especially in the Anglosphere. (That will be a much more complicated essay, but I’ll try to get it finished by Wednesday; here, you need only know that I’m avoiding terms like ‘fascism’ and ‘totalitarianism’ very deliberately, for reasons I’ll soon clarify.)Great Wars and Great L…Ralph RaicoBest Price: $7.50Buy New $12.95(as of 05:45 UTC — Details)
In the beginning, there was liberalism. This is the political and moral ideology emphasising individual rights and equality that emerged alongside “capitalism,” which is just a loaded term for the economic relationships that arose spontaneously in industrial society. Liberalism sought to impose strict limits on the state, originally for the purpose of protecting individual freedoms, and as an ideology it had its critics. On the left, socialists and communists attacked liberalism for its failure to achieve true human equality. These leftists believed that illiberal interventions in the market economy and in many other areas of human society were required to achieve egalitarian ideals. On the opposite side of the political spectrum, right-nationalists explicitly rejected the universalist pretensions of both liberalism and the socialist left. These right-nationalists were generally ethnic particularists who explicitly embraced social hierarchy.
Importantly, both the socialist left and the nationalist right retained some liberal elements and vocabulary. Communists preached that a revolution of the proletariat would achieve true human freedom and democracy, while the right-nationalists adopted some liberal and even socialist terms, often expressing egalitarian concerns for ethnic in-groups. It is thus best to conceive of liberalism, socialism/communism and right-nationalism as overlapping electron clouds, which achieve mutual exclusivity only at the extremes.
One commonly hears that the left and the right are political illusions and that they no longer apply to modern politics. This is because World War II destroyed right-nationalism as a meaningful political force. Western Communism survived until the collapse of the wall in 1989, and in attenuated form socialist ideology lives on within our respective liberal democracies. In this new world, being “on the right” has acquired a different significance; it simply means “not being on the the left.” Thus libertarians, free marketeers, the traditionally religious, gun enthusiasts, free speech advocates and even certain strains of environmentalists who are not worried about carbon dioxide all find themselves “on the right.” While this is pretty stupid, it does not mean that the political spectrum is an illusion or mere propaganda. Leftism is still a thing, and leftists are easily identified by their egalitarian, universalist aspirations. Functionally, leftism operates as a political technology, whereby an elite at the top of society pursue patronage relationships with clients at the bottom, with promises to redistribute the wealth and privileges either of a displaced elite or of the middle classes.
Authoritarianism is much more ideologically neutral than often acknowledged. Illiberal socialists and right-nationalists alike have no problem taking repressive measures against their own people. As for liberalism, it is more complicated. Liberalism presents itself as anti-authoritarian, and the historical prosperity of liberal states has permitted liberal regimes to follow through on at least some of their promises to recognise individual liberties. People who are fat and happy are generally content with their political establishment, whatever its nature. Faced with restive or even potentially recalcitrant citizenries, however, liberal systems can become quite repressive. We saw this very clearly during Covid.
Even in the absence of popular uprisings, liberal regimes have been elaborating ever more authoritarian political programmes for generations now, because exercising control is simply something that states do. As one’s political concerns move away from core liberal commitments, authoritarian interventions also become easier to justify. A hypothetical liberal state dominated by right-nationalist parties would deprioritise individual freedoms in service of national goals. While such states hardly exist in today’s world, war or other external security threats awaken nationalist sentiments even in leftist governments and inspire much the same behaviour.
Vastly more common in the West are nominally liberal states dominated by left-leaning or socialist parties, whose politicians see liberal commitments as an obstacle to their egalitarian programme. At the national level, these leftist regimes have circumvented liberal constraints by developing an elaborate ideology of positive rights. Like their negative precursors, positive rights are constructed as prior to the democratic prerogatives of the people and they require state power to enforce. The entire Civil Rights regime in the United States and the Green policies currently destroying the German economy all unfold within a universalist positive rights regime.
The Politically Incorr…DiLorenzo, Thomas J.Best Price: $10.63Buy New $15.39(as of 10:17 UTC — Details)Internationally, left-liberalism has learned to abhor the autonomous politics of the nation-state, both as a breeding ground for its enemies on “the right” and as the culprit for the slaughter of the great twentieth-century wars. These left-liberals have erected an entire globalist postwar order, extending from international institutions like the United Nations and the European Union, to lobbying operations like the World Economic Forum, and to many other non-governmental organisations and philanthropic enterprises. It is very common to read that this phenomenon is somehow fascist, but this is a grave misunderstanding. These are institutions inspired by liberal egalitarian ideas and fears that overmuch national democracy will play into the hands of (right-wing) antidemocratic actors. Precisely because of its National Socialist past, Germany since the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949 has at its disposal robust enforcement mechanisms to defend our democratic constitution against undesirable democratic outcomes. These are now being deployed against notional “right-wing extremists” in a similar manifestation of illiberal liberalism domestically.
What is happening in Germany is therefore quite simple: Our left-liberal government, faced with a concrete electoral threat to their hold on power, are abandoning ever more of their liberal scruples to maintain their position. This makes them increasingly illiberal, but it does not make them fascists. (Fascism, as I’ll argue on Wednesday, is a specific historical phenomenon that emerged on the right in response to the pressures of modernity and the social consequences of the First World War.) The measures Nancy Faeser outlined are all directed against perceived enemies on “the right,” with the explicit goal of maintaining an “open society.” That sounds like a laughable joke and it is, but it also betrays the fundamentally leftist, universalist impulses behind this campaign.
Postwar liberalism has elaborated an entire mythology of itself rooted in its triumph over the right-nationalist Axis powers, and in consequence “right wing extremists” have become the only conceivable enemies. It is understandable that many observers, confronted with the authoritarian behaviour of the left-liberal establishment, can conceive of no other way than ‘fascism’ to conceptualise this new politics. I merely want to describe what is happening in different terms, because a world in which a zombie fascism is beckoning around every corner is precisely what Nancy Faeser uses to justify her repressive fantasies.
Everyone has undoubtedly heard about the shooting during the Super Bowl victory parade in Kansas City. These victory celebrations always bring the potential for trouble, what with all those young males consuming prodigious amounts of alcohol. And they draw the worst elements; the seemingly perpetually armed gang-bangers.
The shooting has triggered the yawningly predictable response from the “Woke” crowd. Which at this point means nearly our entire government and corporate leadership. One marvels at how many times clueless celebrities can breathlessly tweet out, “We have to do something about this!” or “We are failing the children!” It’s odd how the inanimate object- the gun- is always the Oswald-style patsy in these incidents. Often the names of those wielding the inanimate objects for no good are barely mentioned. Quick; name the Parkland school shooter. The Pulse gay night club shooter. It’s the guns, racist! The tweets in response to this most recent shooting, especially those emanating from the dying embers of Hollywood, are examples of insipid mindlessness. Digital postcards from the Idiocracy.Crimes and Cover-ups i…Donald JeffriesBest Price: $17.17Buy New $17.19(as of 06:20 UTC — Details)
The text of the Second Amendment itself reads, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” In my book Crimes and Cover-Ups in American Politics: 1776-1963, I devoted a section to the very clear comments by all the Founders, regarding what the Second Amendment actually meant. It would have been nice if they’d worded it better, so there wouldn’t be an opening for the usual suspects to interpret it to suit their agendas. But each and every one of those who ratified it, even the odious, bankers’ stooge Alexander Hamilton, left no doubt in their public comments, that the Bill of Rights protected the individual’s right to keep and bear arms.
It’s ironic that the word “militia” is in there, seeing as how that term has come to be demonized, especially since the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, when Bill Clinton exploited it like a poster child for muscular dystrophy. All the state controlled media has to do at this point is claim some poor sap was associated with some “militia,” and its de facto evidence of guilt. Of something. Anything. James Madison, considered the father of the Constitution, noted in The Federalist Papers that “a standing army….would be opposed [by] militia.” He wanted State governments to have the ability to “repel the danger” of a federal army. You know, like the Military Industrial Complex, which he could not have foreseen in his wildest dreams.
Thomas Jefferson in particular was vehemently opposed to a standing federal army. Like the rest of the Founders, he believed it was the responsibility of a citizens militia of ordinary Americans to defend their state, or in the rarest of circumstances, the entire country from an outside threat. He also made it clear that an armed citizenry was the best defense against government tyranny. As president, Jefferson slashed military spending. He noted, “Standing armies [are] inconsistent with [a people’s] freedom and subversive of their quiet.” In 1789, the author of the Declaration of Independence wrote, “There are instruments so dangerous to the rights of the nation and which place them so totally at the mercy of their governors….Such an instrument is a standing army.” No wonder he’s now a hopeless dead White “racist.”
By the time of Lincoln, our first imperial president, a national military was an unquestioned reality. No more fears about a standing army. Honest Abe instituted the first unconstitutional military draft, resulting in the bloody riots in New York. The immigrants du jour of the day, the Irish, quite naturally objected to being forced to participate in a senseless slaughter they had no historical or cultural association with. Lincoln’s federal army cut a deadly swath through the south, raping, destroying crops, burning homes, and engaging in the boldest larceny in the history of warfare, as they stole every valuable that wasn’t nailed down. For this, all Americans pay homage today. They were great American heroes.
The power of the national military grew, and we eviscerated George Washington’s warnings about “no entangling alliances,” and John Quincy Adams’ admonitions that we not “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” World Wars I and II were something Jefferson and the other Founders would have mortified by. They would have led chapters of the America First Committee. Another modern hero, Franklin Roosevelt, would have had them “cancelled” and perhaps imprisoned. That precedent had been set when Lincoln imprisoned his dissenters without any due process. Once the Pentagon was built, and the unconstitutional intelligence agencies established, we had something more than a standing army. We had an Occupying Force.
So this clash between individual firearm owners and a national military was inevitable. Individuals were not necessarily going to agree with the policies and actions of this national army, especially when it was given authority to run roughshod over American citizens. Look at what happened to the World War I “Bonus Army,” veterans of that senseless conflict, who naturally objected when their promised “bonus” was denied them. They set up tents on the Capitol, and U.S. forces, led by future superstars Douglas MacArthur and George Patton, defeated them as easily as William Sherman defeated the women and children of the Confederacy. So if you’re in our glorious federal military, don’t complain if they break a promise.
The distinction between Jefferson’s vision of a well armed citizens’ militia, and the modern Military Industrial Complex couldn’t be more obvious. Conservatives, however, generally adore this federal army, and the intelligence agencies that accompany it. They also worship our militarized police forces, and were ecstatic over the implementation of no-knock SWAT team raids on private homes. Until they raided Mar-a-Lago, that is. But all that’s been forgotten. The FBI was not abolished, and the Right seems cool with the Occupying Force again. Exactly how different is a gun aficionado saying “Thank you for your service” from a masochist saying “Thank you, may I have another?”
The individual right to bear arms conflicts with armed (and militarized) police officers, and certainly with the armed forces of the United States, the largest military the world has ever seen. When a citizen has an encounter with a law enforcement officer, regardless of the nature of the “law” they’re enforcing, the Second Amendment disappears. You’re not going to find a case where an armed citizen shot a cop in self-defense, without being prosecuted. It doesn’t matter how unjustified the officer was, the officer is by default considered to be in the right. If you don’t like it, take it to court. Where you will unquestionably lose. The courts are always going to be the final arbiter in any battle between armed citizens and the Occupying Force. And you know what side they’ll be on. Every single time.
It wasn’t until 2008 that the Supreme Court first ruled that the Second Amendment protected an individual’s right to self-defense in his own home. This hasn’t stopped some unfortunate homeowners, like Byron Smith of Minnesota, from being convicted of murder; he shot two home invaders who proved to be unarmed. Others in similar situations have been charged as well, while in some cases reason still prevails and the homeowner is considered to have acted understandably. From what I’ve heard, you are always considered justified in shooting someone if they are setting fire to your home. How this differs from robbery is something only our esteemed judges can fathom. So if you have a home invader, throw him some matches, and urge him to commit arson. Maybe he won’t understand the nuances of the law.Hidden History: An Exp…Donald JeffriesBest Price: $9.86Buy New $14.70(as of 04:30 UTC — Details)
So here we are today, in America 2.0. The battle lines have been drawn. In this corner, you have the challenger, the Second Amendment. An antiquated notion dreamed up by long dead White “racists.” And in the other corner, you have the Occupying Force, hailing from Washington, D.C., undefeated and untied. Second Amendment activists today concentrate on simply keeping their own weapons. Being able to hunt legally. To go target shooting. There is no emphasis on protection from government tyranny, which was the motivation behind the amendment in the first place. The Occupying Force knows it has nothing to fear from “gun nuts.” They remember the victories at Ruby Ridge. And Waco. And the Bundy ranch, to mention just a few examples.
If all the gun enthusiasts that Hollywood frets over really had government tyranny in mind, like the Founders did, they would have reacted differently during the unconstitutional COVID lockdown. I must have missed all of the standoffs between armed small business owners and the Occupying Force, which was denying them the right to earn a living. Or between concealed carry owners and authoritarian officers demanding they wear a mask, or stop letting their children play in a park. Presumably, the vast majority of those who came to the January 6 Stop the Steal rally in Washington, D.C. were gun owners. And yet, the authorities couldn’t find a single gun anywhere. That’s not only an odd way to conduct an “insurrection,” it’s indicative of the mindset of most gun activists. Just let me hang my weapons on the wall.
Der Friedensstifter 