# entry

guid: https://karlof1.substack.com/p/interview-on-asian-and-brics-developments
title: Interview on Asian &amp; BRICS Developments Plus a Note of Interest
author: ;Karl Sanchez
link: https://karlof1.substack.com/p/interview-on-asian-and-brics-developments
hash: ��˽�#�S._O*��
content:
<h3 data-sanitized-class="subtitle">Interview with Director of the Third Asian Department of the Russian Foreign Ministry Lyudmila Vorobyeva to Rossiya Segodnya</h3><div dir="auto" data-sanitized-class="body markup">
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<p>Lyudmila Vorobyeva</p>
<p><span>Before getting into this interview, a point was brought to my attention about some specific verbiage made by President Putin in his</span> <a href="https://karlof1.substack.com/p/imagine-russian-prosecutor-general" rel>Prosecutor General talk</a> <span>of a few days ago. In his talk, he referred to the Donbass and Novorossiya as two distinct areas of Russia in ways that were simply matter-of-fact, which raised no special notice from me when I read them. Here are the two mentions:</span></p>
<blockquote>
<p>I consider it significant that these measures are now being implemented in our historical regions as well. In the territory of Donbass and Novorossiya, work continued to improve the regulatory framework and ensure property rights, as well as to preserve strategic and strategic state enterprises….</p>
<p>I would like to thank the Russian prosecutors for their professionalism and responsibility, for such an approach to their duties. Special words of gratitude go to the employees who work in the Donbass and Novorossiya, as well as in the regions of the Russian Federation located in the immediate vicinity of the combat zone.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><span>This was deemed significant by</span> <em>Topcor</em> <span>in “</span><a href="https://en.topcor.ru/57827-donbass-novorossija-i-koe-chto-esche-putin-nameknul-kak-budut-vygljadet-novye-territorii-rf-posle-okonchanija-svo.html" rel>Donbass, Novorossiya and something else: Putin hinted at what the new territories of the Russian Federation will look like after the end of the SVO</a><span>,” and provided this graphic to go with its short text:</span></p>
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<p>A curious depiction I haven’t seen before. The question begged is how important was Putin’s choice of words? Given the fact that negotiations are currently guaranteed to continue slower than a snail’s pace it’s very possible for the SMO to proceed as far or farther than what’s depicted. The ongoing mantra from Russia continues to be: Take the deal being offered now because the next one will be worse from your POV. Yet, Zelensky and the forces behind him refuse to speed up the process despite having lost so much territory and people already.</p>
<p><span>And now for</span> <a href="https://mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/news/2004698/" rel>today’s interview</a> <span>of Lyudmila Vorobyeva, Director of the Third Asian Department of the Russian Foreign Ministry, by</span> <em>Rossiya Segodnya</em> <span>about activities in the Asia-Pacific and with BRICS:</span></p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Question: Please</strong> <span>tell us about the planned contacts at the highest and high levels in 2025 with the leaders of the states supervised by your Department.</span></p>
<p><strong>Lyudmila Vorobyeva:</strong> <span>Political dialogue with the countries of the Asia-Pacific Region (APR) is developing intensively. In 2024, President of Russia Vladimir Putin paid a state visit to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (Vietnam), and the leaders of Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia and Vietnam visited us. Meetings were held with the foreign ministers of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. The potential of the BRICS platform (the summit in Kazan in October 2024 and the expanded session of the meeting of foreign ministers in Nizhny Novgorod in June 2024), as well as ASEAN events in Vientiane (Laos), were actively used. The results of the contacts confirmed the mutual commitment to further deepening mutually beneficial cooperation.</span></p>
<p><span>The year 2025 also promises to be very eventful. It began with Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin's trip to Vietnam. Most recently, Chairman of the State Administrative Council and Prime Minister of Myanmar Min Aung Hlaing paid an official visit to our country.</span> <em><strong>Secretary of the Security Council Sergey Shoigu held a number of meetings in Indonesia and Malaysia.</strong></em></p>
<p><span>The mutual interest of Russia and the countries of Southeast Asia (SEA) in the development of trade and economic cooperation, interaction in the field of defense and security, humanitarian exchanges, including education, science, culture, and people-to-people contacts is steadily growing.</span> <em><strong>The region highly appreciates Russia's firm commitment to the formation of a more just multipolar world order based on the principles of equal and indivisible security. We speak the same language with our partners, without moralizing, mentoring and neocolonial habits, and we respect their national characteristics. All this creates favourable conditions for further intensifying political dialogue.</strong></em></p>
<p>We expect the leaders of a number of states in the region to take part in the events dedicated to the celebration of the 80th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War.</p>
<p><strong>Question:</strong> <span>In the spring of 2024, the United States temporarily deployed Typhon medium-range missile systems in the Philippines, subsequently extending their deployment indefinitely. At the same time, there are reports in the media about Washington's intention to export Typhon systems to Japan. Has Russia conveyed its position on this issue to the Japanese and Philippine sides?</span></p>
<p><em><strong>Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said that Russia could consider deploying its intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles in Asia in response to such actions.</strong></em> <span>Which countries are you referring to in this context?</span></p>
<p><strong>Lyudmila Vorobyeva:</strong> <span>We do not question the right of individual states to strengthen their security. At the same time, we believe that the appearance of US ground-based intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles in various regions of the world, including the Asia-Pacific region, not only does not contribute to maintaining stability, but only spurs the arms race, increases the level of conflict and leads to an increase in strategic risks. This position was clearly formulated in public statements by the leadership of our country, repeatedly broadcast at international venues,</span> <em><strong>and also explained during bilateral contacts.</strong></em></p>
<p><span>As for Japan, we see how its government is purposefully, including in the public space, toughening its rhetoric about the threats allegedly emanating from the DPRK, as well as China's actions in the Taiwan Strait, thereby trying to justify the policy of accelerated militarisation and building up military-technical cooperation with Western allies.</span> <em><strong>We have repeatedly warned Tokyo that if such cooperation results in US medium-range missiles in Japan, we will be forced to take the necessary countermeasures to strengthen our own defence capability in order to counter the challenges to Russia's security emanating from Japanese territory.</strong></em></p>
<p>The specific content of the response steps will be worked out by the competent agencies in accordance with the long-term strategic objectives and interests of the Russian Federation.</p>
<p><strong>Q:</strong> <span>Japan has opened a mission to NATO independent of its embassy in Belgium. As part of the alliance's "Indo-Pacific strategies," its partnership with official Tokyo is strengthening. What will be Moscow's reaction to these actions?</span></p>
<p><strong>Lyudmila Vorobyeva:</strong> <span>The West's deliberate policy of implementing the strategic task of "NATOFICATING" Asia cannot but cause concern. In the schemes for scaling up the mandate of the North Atlantic Alliance in the Asia-Pacific region, "small geometry" formats are actively used, such as AUKUS, Quad and their extended derivatives, as well as various "fours", "troikas" and numerous bilateral allied ties with the participation of Washington.</span> <em><strong>NATO countries outside the region, such as Canada, Germany and France, are increasingly being drawn up to the Western-centric military-political architecture that it is forming in the Asian field, and the Nordic states are also being drawn up to certain segments of work.</strong></em></p>
<p><span>The range and composition of participants in NATO exercises in the Asia-Pacific region is constantly increasing, where all kinds of scenarios are being tested–-up to military interventions in countries affected by natural disasters and the conduct of an "all-out war". The logistics of transferring NATO forces and equipment to the region are being worked out.</span> <em><strong>Attempts to ensure the permanent presence of the strike air forces of Euro-Atlantic states here through rotational schemes are visible.</strong></em></p>
<p><span>Japan has consistently been one of the most active supporters of NATO's deeper involvement in the Asia-Pacific region, promoting the well-known thesis of the "indivisibility of the security of the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific region"</span> <em><strong>with clear anti-Chinese and anti-Russian overtones.</strong></em> <span>Against this background, we are witnessing an increase in the intensity of Tokyo's joint exercises with extra-regional European countries, including access for foreign units to the island state's military infrastructure.</span></p>
<p><span>They are also trying to draw Southeast Asia into the cooperative space "for their own people." At the same time,</span> <em><strong>most countries in the region are concerned about the dangerous processes of militarization of the Asia-Pacific region and the complex risks that ensue from it.</strong></em></p>
<p><span>In this regard, we regularly convey through diplomatic channels the thesis that such a foreign policy line carries obvious risks for security in East Asia and the Asia-Pacific region as a whole, stimulating a new stage of the arms race.</span> <em><strong>In turn, in order to strengthen peace and stability in the region, we are building up cooperation in the foreign policy and defense spheres with our partners, including China.</strong></em></p>
<p><strong>Question:</strong> <span>Has Tokyo decided to extend contracts for the supply of liquefied natural gas under the Sakhalin-2 project? Is Tokyo's readiness not to leave the Sakhalin-1 project still in force?</span></p>
<p><strong>Lyudmila Vorobyeva:</strong> <span>The energy sector is one of the few where Russia and Japan maintain constructive cooperation.</span> <em><strong>The Japanese side officially recognises the critical importance of joint oil and gas projects for ensuring national energy security, while maintaining the participation of its companies in them at this stage.</strong></em></p>
<p><em><strong>At the same time, Tokyo continues to declare its intention to "completely get rid of" dependence on Russian energy resources within the framework of the Group of Seven.</strong></em> <span>The Biden administration helped them in this: "thanks" to the illegal so-called sanctions, Japan's participation in another significant project for Tokyo–-the Arctic LNG-2–-was actually blocked. We also take into account the large-scale initiative proposed by Washington to the government of Shinzo Ishiba to produce gas in Alaska, which, according to experts, could be used in the future to oust Russian LNG from the Japanese market.</span></p>
<p>Of course, the choice of further actions is up to Japan. In any case, our fuel resources will find their consumers both in Asia and in other regions of the world.</p>
<p><strong>Question:</strong> <span>Thailand and Malaysia have become BRICS partner countries, Indonesia has become a full-fledged member of the association, and a number of other Southeast Asian countries–-Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia-–are showing interest in BRICS work. Is it possible for these countries to obtain partner status this year or full membership following the Brazilian presidency?</span></p>
<p><strong>Lyudmila Vorobyeva:</strong> <span>Dialogue with developing countries and emerging markets is one of the priority areas of BRICS activities. In this context, we welcome the expansion of the geography and economic potential of the association with the inclusion of Indonesia and partner countries. We believe that this will help strengthen the spirit of solidarity and international cooperation for the benefit of all.</span></p>
<p><span>We do not rule out a further increase in the number of BRICS members, whether in the category of full-fledged members or partners. We are committed to constructive interaction with all those who are committed to the principle of sovereign equality and share the ideals of equality and mutual respect, openness, pragmatism and solidarity.</span> <em><strong>At the same time, this year the association has formed a common opinion on the need to focus on consolidating our strategic partnership and integrating the newly admitted members and partner states into the BRICS architecture, taking into account the task of maintaining its effectiveness.</strong></em></p>
<p><strong>Question:</strong> <span>Following an official visit to Russia by Chairman of the State Administrative Council and Prime Minister of Myanmar Min Aung Hlaing, an intergovernmental agreement was signed on the construction of a low-power nuclear power plant in that country. When can the construction of a nuclear power plant begin? What are the prospects for Russia's involvement in the construction of a nuclear power plant in Vietnam?</span></p>
<p><strong>Lyudmila Vorobyeva:</strong> <span>Ensuring the national energy balance is one of the key tasks for the governments of almost all Southeast Asian countries, which in recent years have been consistently among the most dynamically developing economies. Naturally, in such conditions, our partners from ASEAN countries are showing interest to one degree or another in the possibilities of creating nuclear energy. It is known that Russia has traditionally been a global leader in the field of peaceful nuclear energy, and Rosatom State Corporation has all the necessary competencies and unique experience in this area.</span></p>
<p><span>Over the past few years, Rosatom has made a lot of efforts to assist its Myanmar partners in the development of national nuclear infrastructure and the training of specialized personnel, as well as the exchange of experience in the energy and non-energy applications of nuclear technologies and nuclear medicine.</span> <em><strong>Thanks to the signing of a relevant intergovernmental agreement in early March of this year, a legal framework has been created for the start of the implementation of the relevant project. At the same time, it is obvious that this is only the first step.</strong></em> <span>We are firmly committed to consistent painstaking work together with our partners from Myanmar.</span></p>
<p>Rosatom is also ready to join the construction of a nuclear power plant in Vietnam.</p>
<p><strong>Question:</strong> <span>Please tell us about cooperation with Vietnam in the oil and gas sector.</span></p>
<p><strong>Lyudmila Vorobyeva:</strong> <span>The fuel and energy complex has traditionally been a strategically important area of cooperation between the two countries. Its flagship is the Vietsovpetro joint venture, which was established by Zarubezhneft JSC and the Petrovietnam Oil and Gas Corporation in 1981.</span></p>
<p>In the Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Rusvietpetro Joint Company LLC, established in 2008 by Vietsovpetro members, is successfully producing hydrocarbons. [My Emphasis]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nenets is in the Arctic near the Yamal peninsula, so LNG would be shipped via tanker. I was unaware of Shoigu’s visit to Malaysia and Indonesia likely to discuss security issues. As most know, Russia’s overseas military sales window is currently closed for new contracts until the SMO ends or a waiver is provided. Both might be interested in constructing their own naval vessels which is one area where Russia can help. Indonesia’s new president is a former general and will want to modernize his military. We can see by ongoing escalation of NATO activity in the region that any thought of Trump pulling out of NATO seems to be magical thinking, same with the theatre in Europe about strained relations over Ukraine. Reduction of the Outlaw US Empire’s global military footprint to finance MAGA also looks unlikely.</p>
<p>The construction of regassification plants and a regional pipeline distribution network within ASEAN are moving ahead with capacity to increase 3X, so if Japan doesn’t want Russian gas it has a ready, hungry market as noted above. Indonesia will soon break the 300 million population mark, which is a fact few note. At some point this century it will pass the Outlaw US Empire in population. When one looks at the ASEAN plus Bangladesh and minus Philippines, the current population is over 700 Million—with the current US Filipino colony that increases to 825 Million. I expect that colony to be the focus of NATO activity over Trump 2.0. How that will affect its status within ASEAN is unknown but it’s unlikely to be positive. Of course, it’s of paramount importance to negate any further incursion by the Outlaw US Empire/NATO into the region as its intentions are not at all honorable or beneficial for the region’s members. Russia has much to gain from its excellent relations with the region. IMO, Indonesia is the nation to watch and learn more about.</p>
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</div>

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guid: yt:video:clrJoS4xHXg
title: Israel Exists Simultaneously As The Perpetual Aggressor And The Perpetual Victim
author: ;Caitlin Johnstone
link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clrJoS4xHXg
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guid: https://medium.com/p/e296ea098db2
title: Israel Exists Simultaneously As The Perpetual Aggressor And The Perpetual Victim
author: ;Caitlin Johnstone
hash: ��WA�S��G)����
tags: #propaganda #palestine #israel #gaza #antisemetism
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<figure><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/0*kmEtE5rU25tPMb8j.png"></figure><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clrJoS4xHXg"><em>Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley)</em></a>:</p><iframe src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FclrJoS4xHXg%3Ffeature%3Doembed&amp;display_name=YouTube&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DclrJoS4xHXg&amp;image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FclrJoS4xHXg%2Fhqdefault.jpg&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=youtube" width="854" height="480" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" allow="accelerometer; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin"><a href="https://medium.com/media/f5bb5a2dcc0d39c23b3dea1eccf0cd4a/href">https://medium.com/media/f5bb5a2dcc0d39c23b3dea1eccf0cd4a/href</a></iframe><p>One major challenge is that Zionists benefit from abusing Palestinians and exerting influence in western governments, and they <strong><em>also</em></strong> benefit from people opposing these things — because it can be used to feed their victim-LARPing “antisemitism” narrative.</p><p>This dynamic allows Israel to go all-out in committing mass atrocities and apartheid abuses while Zionist oligarchs like Miriam Adelson openly purchase western governments without having to worry about the damage it does to their public image, because any response to the damage it does to their public image can be reframed as “antisemitism” and used to advance their interests even further by stomping out civil rights.</p><p>People demonstrate against Israel’s genocidal atrocities? That’s antisemitism — those protesters need to be silenced, arrested, and deported. People object to blatant Zionist influence in their governments? Antisemitic conspiracy theories; we need more hate speech laws and internet censorship. Palestinians take up armed resistance against their oppressors? Israel is the victim of unprovoked attacks from Jew-hating Arabs.</p><p>Even real anti-Jewish prejudice benefits the Zionists, because it strengthens the narrative about an urgent crisis of antisemitism which must be crushed by any amount of force necessary, as well as the narrative that Jews need a nation of their own where they can feel safe. So Israel can openly mass murder children while Israeli officials make overt statements of genocidal intent, and if someone blames all Jews for this because they see a state committing atrocities under the banner of the Star of David while claiming to represent all Jews, it only benefits Israel and its supporters.</p><p>(As an aside, this is why it’s so important not to blame this on “the Jews”. It’s not just that it’s inaccurate — not all Jews are Zionists, the majority of Zionists are non-Jews, and some of the most effective anti-Zionists in the world happen to be Jewish — it’s that you’re doing exactly what the Zionists and the empire propagandists want you to do. You’re doing their job for them. Don’t be a pro bono Israel propagandist. Make them work for that shit.)</p><p>Zionism therefore benefits from abuse and influence, and also benefits from any backlash against its abuse and influence. It is able to do this because Israel is backed by the propaganda machine of the western empire — the most powerful weapon of mass psychological influence ever devised. If the western political-media class were not constantly running cover for Israel’s crimes and helping Zionism spin all opposition to Israel as antisemitism, Israel would not be able to pull off this freakish cognitive straddle where it is simultaneously both the aggressor and the victim at all times.</p><p>And this is why it’s so important to fight against the western empire’s propaganda about Israel. Israel’s reliance on the imperial propaganda machine is the only weak point in this otherwise unassailable dynamic where any backlash against Israel’s abuses is harnessed and turned into a weapon to defend Israel. Propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening to you, so the only way to keep people from buying into the victim-LARPing of the Zionists is to open people’s eyes to the truth.</p><p>Once enough people see with sufficient clarity the lies and manipulations which go into protecting the interests of this genocidal apartheid state, Israel loses one of its most powerful weapons, because nobody’s going to buy into the narrative framework wherein Israel and its supporters try to frame themselves as the victims of the opposition to their abuses.</p><p>You fight against the propaganda by spreading truth and understanding about this dynamic in whatever way you can. Talk to people. Share useful information. Attend demonstrations. Distribute literature. Tweet, blog, make videos, make zines, make street art; whatever tools you have at your disposal to help people understand what’s really going on with Israel and the western empire.</p><p>All positive changes in human behavior are always preceded by an expansion of consciousness. Consciousness and dysfunction cannot coexist. All we need to do to bring health to this world is to spread awareness of the truth, so that the dysfunction which can only survive in darkness is unable to sustain itself.</p><p>_____________</p><p><em>My work is </em><a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/05/24/my-experiments-with-hacking-capitalism/"><em>entirely reader-supported</em></a><em>, so if you enjoyed this piece </em><a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/about"><em>here are some options</em></a><em> where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. </em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU8Yu4WZJ11Il3TZmNiMUFQ?sub_confirmation=1"><em>Go here</em></a><em> to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on </em><a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/5336DPNn19xNci8UNOkAT4"><em>Spotify</em></a><em>, </em><a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/going-rogue-with-caitlin-johnstone/id1333112416"><em>Apple Podcasts</em></a><em>, </em><a href="https://soundcloud.com/going_rogue"><em>Soundcloud</em></a><em> or </em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU8Yu4WZJ11Il3TZmNiMUFQ"><em>YouTube</em></a><em>. </em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CF5YLBGD"><em>Go here</em></a><em> to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is </em><a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/reminder-all-my-work-may-be-freely"><em>free to bootleg and use</em></a><em> in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list </em><a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/"><em>on Substack</em></a><em>, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.</em></p><figure><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/417/0*8OO2QoyMM6M8wQ-O.jpeg"></figure><p>Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2</p><p>Featured image via Adobe Stock.</p><img src="https://medium.com/_/stat?event=post.clientViewed&amp;referrerSource=full_rss&amp;postId=e296ea098db2" width="1" height="1" alt="">

link:
https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/israel-exists-simultaneously-as-the-perpetual-aggressor-and-the-perpetual-victim-e296ea098db2?source=rss-c40ec5bece47------2


title: The art of Shaolin in pics: Poise, power and precision
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https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/The-art-of-Shaolin-in-pics-Poise-power-and-precision-1BOk0DUIM48/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Culture

content:
<div data-sanitized-class="cmsImagesCollectionOuter">
<div data-sanitized-class="cmsImagesCollection">
<div data-sanitized-class="m-slick">
<div readability="8.5" data-sanitized-class="cmsImage"><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/The-art-of-Shaolin-in-pics-Poise-power-and-precision-1BOk0DUIM48/img/780e7166e4bf4bca8dc3c13aa3c18772/780e7166e4bf4bca8dc3c13aa3c18772.jpeg" alt="Shi Yancong strikes a pose in front of the Shaolin Temple, Zhengzhou City, central China's Henan Province, March 3, 2025. /CGTN" layout="fixed-height" height="210" lightbox="collection" aria-describedby="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/The-art-of-Shaolin-in-pics-Poise-power-and-precision-1BOk0DUIM48/img/780e7166e4bf4bca8dc3c13aa3c18772/780e7166e4bf4bca8dc3c13aa3c18772.jpeg"><div readability="15.5" data-sanitized-class="imageCaption">
<p>Shi Yancong strikes a pose in front of the Shaolin Temple, Zhengzhou City, central China's Henan Province, March 3, 2025. /CGTN</p>
<div readability="12" data-sanitized-class="wrapper-visible">
<p data-sanitized-class="title">Shi Yancong strikes a pose in front of the Shaolin Temple, Zhengzhou City, central China's Henan Province, March 3, 2025. /CGTN</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div readability="7" data-sanitized-class="cmsImage"><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/The-art-of-Shaolin-in-pics-Poise-power-and-precision-1BOk0DUIM48/img/d5e27bfaf9104490aed39d8496fb23f9/d5e27bfaf9104490aed39d8496fb23f9.jpeg" alt="Shi Yancong showcases his kung fu skills in the snow at the Shaolin Temple, March 3, 2025. /CGTN" layout="fixed-height" height="210" lightbox="collection" aria-describedby="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/The-art-of-Shaolin-in-pics-Poise-power-and-precision-1BOk0DUIM48/img/d5e27bfaf9104490aed39d8496fb23f9/d5e27bfaf9104490aed39d8496fb23f9.jpeg"><div readability="11" data-sanitized-class="imageCaption">
<p>Shi Yancong showcases his kung fu skills in the snow at the Shaolin Temple, March 3, 2025. /CGTN</p>
<div readability="9" data-sanitized-class="wrapper-visible">
<p data-sanitized-class="title">Shi Yancong showcases his kung fu skills in the snow at the Shaolin Temple, March 3, 2025. /CGTN</p>
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</div>
</div>
<div readability="7" data-sanitized-class="cmsImage"><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/The-art-of-Shaolin-in-pics-Poise-power-and-precision-1BOk0DUIM48/img/c7a191e49a2a48198ce610043019c713/c7a191e49a2a48198ce610043019c713.jpeg" alt="Shi Yancong at the Shaolin Temple, March 3, 2025. /CGTN" layout="fixed-height" height="210" lightbox="collection" aria-describedby="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/The-art-of-Shaolin-in-pics-Poise-power-and-precision-1BOk0DUIM48/img/c7a191e49a2a48198ce610043019c713/c7a191e49a2a48198ce610043019c713.jpeg"><div readability="11" data-sanitized-class="imageCaption">
<p>Shi Yancong at the Shaolin Temple, March 3, 2025. /CGTN</p>
<div readability="9" data-sanitized-class="wrapper-visible">
<p data-sanitized-class="title">Shi Yancong at the Shaolin Temple, March 3, 2025. /CGTN</p>
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<div readability="41" data-sanitized-class="text en">
<p>Shaolin martial arts embody the balance of softness and strength. Rooted in centuries of tradition, its movements seem fluid and effortless, yet they conceal immense power. Through mastery of techniques, monks turn inner strength into swift sweeps and precise strikes, while flexibility can overcome brute force. The above photos show Shi Yancong, a warrior monk in his 20s, who has been practicing kung fu for over a decade.</p>
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<div data-sanitized-class="cmsImagesCollectionOuter">
<div data-sanitized-class="cmsImagesCollection">
<div data-sanitized-class="m-slick">
<div readability="7" data-sanitized-class="cmsImage"><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/The-art-of-Shaolin-in-pics-Poise-power-and-precision-1BOk0DUIM48/img/4c2d88b9cd7a47d4a11361d00a78734a/4c2d88b9cd7a47d4a11361d00a78734a.jpeg" alt="Shi Yanjie holds a Spring-Autumn Falchion at the Shaolin Temple, March 3, 2025. /CGTN" layout="fixed-height" height="210" lightbox="collection" aria-describedby="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/The-art-of-Shaolin-in-pics-Poise-power-and-precision-1BOk0DUIM48/img/4c2d88b9cd7a47d4a11361d00a78734a/4c2d88b9cd7a47d4a11361d00a78734a.jpeg"><div readability="11" data-sanitized-class="imageCaption">
<p>Shi Yanjie holds a Spring-Autumn Falchion at the Shaolin Temple, March 3, 2025. /CGTN</p>
<div readability="9" data-sanitized-class="wrapper-visible">
<p data-sanitized-class="title">Shi Yanjie holds a Spring-Autumn Falchion at the Shaolin Temple, March 3, 2025. /CGTN</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div readability="7.5" data-sanitized-class="cmsImage"><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/The-art-of-Shaolin-in-pics-Poise-power-and-precision-1BOk0DUIM48/img/1aa7de35e3e2465292fec1153b62a189/1aa7de35e3e2465292fec1153b62a189.jpeg" alt="Shi Yanlyu holds a podao against the backdrop of the Drum Tower at Shaolin Temple, March 3, 2025. /CGTN" layout="fixed-height" height="210" lightbox="collection" aria-describedby="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/The-art-of-Shaolin-in-pics-Poise-power-and-precision-1BOk0DUIM48/img/1aa7de35e3e2465292fec1153b62a189/1aa7de35e3e2465292fec1153b62a189.jpeg"><div readability="12.5" data-sanitized-class="imageCaption">
<p>Shi Yanlyu holds a podao against the backdrop of the Drum Tower at Shaolin Temple, March 3, 2025. /CGTN</p>
<div readability="10" data-sanitized-class="wrapper-visible">
<p data-sanitized-class="title">Shi Yanlyu holds a podao against the backdrop of the Drum Tower at Shaolin Temple, March 3, 2025. /CGTN</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div readability="7" data-sanitized-class="cmsImage"><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/The-art-of-Shaolin-in-pics-Poise-power-and-precision-1BOk0DUIM48/img/f8978d208cac4b1ba51df75afc7fd982/f8978d208cac4b1ba51df75afc7fd982.jpeg" alt="Shi Yanhe practices with Shaolin double broadswords at the Shaolin Temple, March 3, 2025. /CGTN" layout="fixed-height" height="210" lightbox="collection" aria-describedby="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/The-art-of-Shaolin-in-pics-Poise-power-and-precision-1BOk0DUIM48/img/f8978d208cac4b1ba51df75afc7fd982/f8978d208cac4b1ba51df75afc7fd982.jpeg"><div readability="11" data-sanitized-class="imageCaption">
<p>Shi Yanhe practices with Shaolin double broadswords at the Shaolin Temple, March 3, 2025. /CGTN</p>
<div readability="9" data-sanitized-class="wrapper-visible">
<p data-sanitized-class="title">Shi Yanhe practices with Shaolin double broadswords at the Shaolin Temple, March 3, 2025. /CGTN</p>
</div>
</div>
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</div>
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<div readability="44" data-sanitized-class="text en">
<p>Podao, Spring-Autumn Falchion and double broadswords represent the diversity and complexity of Shaolin weaponry. Both the podao and the <em>chunqiudao</em>, or Spring-Autumn Falchion, demand strength and balance. Their classic moves, including sweeping, lifting and chopping, require waist power and foot stability to control their momentum. Mastering the double broadswords requires practitioners to coordinate both hands and feet, combining swift swings with agile steps. Each weapon embodies the balance of strength and technique at the heart of Shaolin martial arts.</p>
<p>(All photos by CGTN's Chen Hongyu)</p>
</div>

link:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/The-art-of-Shaolin-in-pics-Poise-power-and-precision-1BOk0DUIM48/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Culture

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title: Xi&amp;#039;s key quotes on building community with shared future for mankind
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guid:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Xi-s-key-quotes-on-building-community-with-shared-future-for-mankind-1BY8fEujvfq/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Politics

content:
<div><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Xi-s-key-quotes-on-building-community-with-shared-future-for-mankind-1BY8fEujvfq/img/cabeb7c3f1d346a19b22f525f0cfa7fd/cabeb7c3f1d346a19b22f525f0cfa7fd-1920.jpeg" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><p>This year marks the 12th anniversary of the concept of building a community with a shared future for mankind, first proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping in March 2013.</p>
<p>Since then, the concept has evolved into a vision with global significance and has been recognized by more and more countries and international organizations.</p>
<p>Below are some of Xi's key quotes on the subject.</p>

link:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Xi-s-key-quotes-on-building-community-with-shared-future-for-mankind-1BY8fEujvfq/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Politics

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title: Blooming magnolias showcase spring charm in Nanjing
hash: ���:�ep���@v�x
guid:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Blooming-magnolias-showcase-spring-charm-in-Nanjing-1BYrXB0UGQw/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Culture

content:
<div data-sanitized-class="cmsImagesCollectionOuter">
<div data-sanitized-class="cmsImagesCollection">
<div data-sanitized-class="m-slick">
<div readability="8" data-sanitized-class="cmsImage"><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Blooming-magnolias-showcase-spring-charm-in-Nanjing-1BYrXB0UGQw/img/3d3c91f6bbe447b99d9555c5b387237e/3d3c91f6bbe447b99d9555c5b387237e.jpeg" alt="Blooming magnolias are seen at the Chaotian Palace in Nanjing City, Jiangsu Province, on March 9, 2025. /VCG" layout="fixed-height" height="210" lightbox="collection" aria-describedby="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Blooming-magnolias-showcase-spring-charm-in-Nanjing-1BYrXB0UGQw/img/3d3c91f6bbe447b99d9555c5b387237e/3d3c91f6bbe447b99d9555c5b387237e.jpeg"><div readability="14" data-sanitized-class="imageCaption">
<p>Blooming magnolias are seen at the Chaotian Palace in Nanjing City, Jiangsu Province, on March 9, 2025. /VCG</p>
<div readability="11" data-sanitized-class="wrapper-visible">
<p data-sanitized-class="title">Blooming magnolias are seen at the Chaotian Palace in Nanjing City, Jiangsu Province, on March 9, 2025. /VCG</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div readability="8" data-sanitized-class="cmsImage"><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Blooming-magnolias-showcase-spring-charm-in-Nanjing-1BYrXB0UGQw/img/e727d0ed2a80490c956e8cf99ca0baa1/e727d0ed2a80490c956e8cf99ca0baa1.jpeg" alt="Blooming magnolias are seen at the Chaotian Palace in Nanjing City, Jiangsu Province, on March 9, 2025. /VCG" layout="fixed-height" height="210" lightbox="collection" aria-describedby="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Blooming-magnolias-showcase-spring-charm-in-Nanjing-1BYrXB0UGQw/img/e727d0ed2a80490c956e8cf99ca0baa1/e727d0ed2a80490c956e8cf99ca0baa1.jpeg"><div readability="14" data-sanitized-class="imageCaption">
<p>Blooming magnolias are seen at the Chaotian Palace in Nanjing City, Jiangsu Province, on March 9, 2025. /VCG</p>
<div readability="11" data-sanitized-class="wrapper-visible">
<p data-sanitized-class="title">Blooming magnolias are seen at the Chaotian Palace in Nanjing City, Jiangsu Province, on March 9, 2025. /VCG</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div readability="8" data-sanitized-class="cmsImage"><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Blooming-magnolias-showcase-spring-charm-in-Nanjing-1BYrXB0UGQw/img/bac76c9c67df4c009f376118bdc37fad/bac76c9c67df4c009f376118bdc37fad.jpeg" alt="Blooming magnolias are seen at the Chaotian Palace in Nanjing City, Jiangsu Province, on March 9, 2025. /VCG" layout="fixed-height" height="210" lightbox="collection" aria-describedby="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Blooming-magnolias-showcase-spring-charm-in-Nanjing-1BYrXB0UGQw/img/bac76c9c67df4c009f376118bdc37fad/bac76c9c67df4c009f376118bdc37fad.jpeg"><div readability="14" data-sanitized-class="imageCaption">
<p>Blooming magnolias are seen at the Chaotian Palace in Nanjing City, Jiangsu Province, on March 9, 2025. /VCG</p>
<div readability="11" data-sanitized-class="wrapper-visible">
<p data-sanitized-class="title">Blooming magnolias are seen at the Chaotian Palace in Nanjing City, Jiangsu Province, on March 9, 2025. /VCG</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div readability="8" data-sanitized-class="cmsImage"><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Blooming-magnolias-showcase-spring-charm-in-Nanjing-1BYrXB0UGQw/img/8c970af1dfc04020a8cd5a62143d6b06/8c970af1dfc04020a8cd5a62143d6b06.jpeg" alt="Blooming magnolias are seen at the Chaotian Palace in Nanjing City, Jiangsu Province, on March 9, 2025. /VCG" layout="fixed-height" height="210" lightbox="collection" aria-describedby="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Blooming-magnolias-showcase-spring-charm-in-Nanjing-1BYrXB0UGQw/img/8c970af1dfc04020a8cd5a62143d6b06/8c970af1dfc04020a8cd5a62143d6b06.jpeg"><div readability="14" data-sanitized-class="imageCaption">
<p>Blooming magnolias are seen at the Chaotian Palace in Nanjing City, Jiangsu Province, on March 9, 2025. /VCG</p>
<div readability="11" data-sanitized-class="wrapper-visible">
<p data-sanitized-class="title">Blooming magnolias are seen at the Chaotian Palace in Nanjing City, Jiangsu Province, on March 9, 2025. /VCG</p>
</div>
</div>
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</div>
<div readability="36" data-sanitized-class="text en">
<p>Blooming magnolias have added vibrant hues and a touch of spring charm to the Chaotian Palace in the city of Nanjing, Jiangsu Province. First built in the Ming Dynasty, this ancient imperial palace is home to the largest and best-preserved traditional Chinese architectural complex in the region.</p>
</div>

link:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Blooming-magnolias-showcase-spring-charm-in-Nanjing-1BYrXB0UGQw/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Culture

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title: China&amp;#039;s role in global economic growth hailed during 2025 CDF
hash: ׬C`z�#��Ǐ���
guid:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/China-s-role-in-global-economic-growth-hailed-during-2025-CDF-1BYsQDQpxtu/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Politics

content:
<div readability="7.5" data-sanitized-class="cmsImage"><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/China-s-role-in-global-economic-growth-hailed-during-2025-CDF-1BYsQDQpxtu/img/02a45706f21244beae7ad5482a02f2d6/02a45706f21244beae7ad5482a02f2d6.png" alt="A cargo ship loaded with containers is seen at the Qingdao Port in east China's Shandong Province, June 7, 2024. /VCG" layout="responsive"><div readability="12.5" data-sanitized-class="imageCaption">
<p>A cargo ship loaded with containers is seen at the Qingdao Port in east China's Shandong Province, June 7, 2024. /VCG</p>
<div readability="10" data-sanitized-class="wrapper-visible">
<p data-sanitized-class="title">A cargo ship loaded with containers is seen at the Qingdao Port in east China's Shandong Province, June 7, 2024. /VCG</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div readability="87" data-sanitized-class="text en">
<p>Roland Busch, president and chief executive officer of Siemens AG, on Sunday hailed China's contribution to the growth of the global economy and green transition during an opening address at the China Development Forum 2025 (CDF) in Beijing.</p>
<p>Noting that the world's economy is undergoing a massive transformation driven by many aspects, Busch said China has found the answer to issues surrounding global growth by focusing on high-tech, higher efficiency, and high-quality growth.</p>
<p>"The government of China is taking action. China is even going one step further, changing the operating system of its economy to unleash new quality productive forces," Busch said, adding that the government of China is continuously working on creating a level playing field and a fairer business environment. </p>
<p>"To master the world's major challenges, to unleash further growth potentials, companies need to create powerful ecosystems, supported by governments," he said. "If we collaborate, we will turn challenges into opportunities. If we collaborate, we will create better lives, common prosperity – sustainably." </p>
<p>At the opening ceremony, Chinese Premier Li Qiang reaffirmed China's commitment to openness and international cooperation. He said China will further expand market access in various sectors for foreign investors.</p>
<p>In an interview with CGTN, Ola Kallenius, chairman of the Board of Management of Mercedes-Benz Group AG, reaffirmed China's significance as a key global market. He expressed confidence in China's future and pledged continued investment to drive mutual growth and shared success.</p>
<p>"China is our biggest and most important market," said Kallenius, adding that as China and the EU will celebrate a significant anniversary this year, Mercedes-Benz will take this opportunity to work closer and stronger with China. </p>
<p>He said Mercedes-Benz is introducing a complete new vehicle architecture for the vans and the company has an operation for their vans in south China's Fujian Province, suggesting more investment there.</p>
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<div data-width="1920" data-height="1080" data-ratio="1920:1080" data-news-id="492920" data-video="https://video.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/China-s-role-in-global-economic-growth-hailed-during-2025-CDF-1BYsQDQpxtu/video/wu_1in0v3krr1p3okkj1agj14u21462a/wu_1in0v3krr1p3okkj1agj14u21462a.m3u8" data-is360="false" data-is4k="false" data-poster="https://video.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/China-s-role-in-global-economic-growth-hailed-during-2025-CDF-1BYsQDQpxtu/video/wu_1in0v3krr1p3okkj1agj14u21462a/wu_1in0v3krr1p3okkj1agj14u21462a.jpg" data-title="China's role in global economic growth, green transition hailed during 2025 CDF" data-origin="web_list" data-sanitized-class="cg-player-container J_player_container">
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<div data-width="1920" data-height="1080" data-video="https://video.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/China-s-role-in-global-economic-growth-hailed-during-2025-CDF-1BYsQDQpxtu/video/wu_1in0v3krr1p3okkj1agj14u21462a/wu_1in0v3krr1p3okkj1agj14u21462a.m3u8" data-is360="false" data-newsid="492920" data-poster="https://video.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/China-s-role-in-global-economic-growth-hailed-during-2025-CDF-1BYsQDQpxtu/video/wu_1in0v3krr1p3okkj1agj14u21462a/wu_1in0v3krr1p3okkj1agj14u21462a.jpg" data-is4k="false" data-sanitized-id="c_videoGENERAL_NEWS_TIANFU_checkvideo2Play-myOverlay" data-sanitized-class="click-to-play-overlay J_player_container_main">


<p>02:11</p>
<img src="https://video.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/China-s-role-in-global-economic-growth-hailed-during-2025-CDF-1BYsQDQpxtu/video/wu_1in0v3krr1p3okkj1agj14u21462a/wu_1in0v3krr1p3okkj1agj14u21462a.jpg" alt></div>
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<p>Premier Li also pledged great efforts to enhance consumer spending at the opening ceremony. </p>
<p>Stephen Orlins, president of the National Committee on U.S.–China Relations praised these efforts. He said these bold moves will boost Chinese spending to shrink trade surpluses, and that could unlock a historic reset – more U.S. exports to China, fewer deficits, and a pragmatic path to stabilize global growth.</p>
<p>Ahead of the 2025 CDF, former Australian State Premier of Victoria Daniel Andrews also shared with CGTN his insights on China's high-quality development and its role in the global green transition.</p>
<p>As a reformer who spearheaded Victoria's shift away from fossil fuels, Andrews said, "formal Australia-China cooperation on decarbonizing heavy industries and advancing wind and solar technologies must be our next priority; this isn't just about our nations' futures, but the health of the planet." </p>
<p>He praised China's new quality productive forces as a transformative model, stressing that China's progress in renewable energy deserves far greater global recognition. He also noted that while the United States remains obsessed with "erratic and nonsensical tariff games," Australia and China are forging a new path toward global sustainability through pragmatic collaboration.</p>
<p>The theme for this year's forum is "Unleashing Development Momentum for Stable Growth of Global Economy." </p>
</div>

link:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/China-s-role-in-global-economic-growth-hailed-during-2025-CDF-1BYsQDQpxtu/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Politics

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title: Xiamen and George Town: Twin port cities with shared heritage
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https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Xiamen-and-George-Town-Twin-port-cities-with-shared-heritage-1BYwPGWwYda/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Culture

content:
<div readability="6.5" data-sanitized-class="cmsImage"><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Xiamen-and-George-Town-Twin-port-cities-with-shared-heritage-1BYwPGWwYda/img/d749ec108604476c8f8246a2428bccaf/d749ec108604476c8f8246a2428bccaf.jpeg" alt="A view of Gulangyu in Xiamen, Fujian Province. /VCG" layout="responsive"><div readability="9.5" data-sanitized-class="imageCaption">
<p>A view of Gulangyu in Xiamen, Fujian Province. /VCG</p>
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<p data-sanitized-class="title">A view of Gulangyu in Xiamen, Fujian Province. /VCG</p>
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<div readability="39" data-sanitized-class="text en">
<p>Xiamen in Fujian Province, China, and George Town in Penang, Malaysia, are both port cities that share many similarities, not only in their scenic coastal views but also in their rich cultural heritage.</p>
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<div readability="6.5" data-sanitized-class="cmsImage"><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Xiamen-and-George-Town-Twin-port-cities-with-shared-heritage-1BYwPGWwYda/img/3aeaeb3b65bc4407abf68c27ce64062d/3aeaeb3b65bc4407abf68c27ce64062d.jpeg" alt="A view of George Town in Penang, Malaysia. /VCG" layout="fixed-height" height="210" lightbox="collection" aria-describedby="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Xiamen-and-George-Town-Twin-port-cities-with-shared-heritage-1BYwPGWwYda/img/3aeaeb3b65bc4407abf68c27ce64062d/3aeaeb3b65bc4407abf68c27ce64062d.jpeg"><div readability="9.5" data-sanitized-class="imageCaption">
<p>A view of George Town in Penang, Malaysia. /VCG</p>
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<p data-sanitized-class="title">A view of George Town in Penang, Malaysia. /VCG</p>
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<div readability="6.5" data-sanitized-class="cmsImage"><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Xiamen-and-George-Town-Twin-port-cities-with-shared-heritage-1BYwPGWwYda/img/edd7ab3e94f144b990f752f6c038835a/edd7ab3e94f144b990f752f6c038835a.jpeg" alt="A view of George Town in Penang, Malaysia. /VCG" layout="fixed-height" height="210" lightbox="collection" aria-describedby="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Xiamen-and-George-Town-Twin-port-cities-with-shared-heritage-1BYwPGWwYda/img/edd7ab3e94f144b990f752f6c038835a/edd7ab3e94f144b990f752f6c038835a.jpeg"><div readability="9.5" data-sanitized-class="imageCaption">
<p>A view of George Town in Penang, Malaysia. /VCG</p>
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<p data-sanitized-class="title">A view of George Town in Penang, Malaysia. /VCG</p>
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<div readability="38" data-sanitized-class="text en">
<p>George Town is home to a large Chinese population, many of whom are descendants of Fujian immigrants. They have preserved many Fujian traditions, including the Mazu (sea goddess) belief, lion and dragon dances, and traditional Chinese temples.</p>
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<div readability="7" data-sanitized-class="cmsImage"><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Xiamen-and-George-Town-Twin-port-cities-with-shared-heritage-1BYwPGWwYda/img/e6310d38730e4fcb94c56f9b66b7cf03/e6310d38730e4fcb94c56f9b66b7cf03.jpeg" alt="One of George Town's famous attractions is the street art, with amazing murals and other art installations adorning many of the streets. /VCG" layout="responsive"><div readability="11" data-sanitized-class="imageCaption">
<p>One of George Town's famous attractions is the street art, with amazing murals and other art installations adorning many of the streets. /VCG</p>
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<p data-sanitized-class="title">One of George Town's famous attractions is the street art, with amazing murals and other art installations adorning many of the streets. /VCG</p>
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<div readability="39" data-sanitized-class="text en">
<p>Shaped by centuries of trade and cultural exchange in the Straits of Malacca, George Town features a unique multicultural heritage, with a diverse architectural landscape that blends Eastern and Western styles. In 2008, it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List together with Melaka. One of George Town's famous attractions is the street art, with amazing murals and other art installations adorning many of the streets.</p>
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<div readability="6.5" data-sanitized-class="cmsImage"><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Xiamen-and-George-Town-Twin-port-cities-with-shared-heritage-1BYwPGWwYda/img/86a810876856416a998c8c3bda4e3785/86a810876856416a998c8c3bda4e3785.jpeg" alt="Visitors tour around Gulangyu in Xiamen, Fujian Province. /VCG" layout="fixed-height" height="210" lightbox="collection" aria-describedby="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Xiamen-and-George-Town-Twin-port-cities-with-shared-heritage-1BYwPGWwYda/img/86a810876856416a998c8c3bda4e3785/86a810876856416a998c8c3bda4e3785.jpeg"><div readability="9.5" data-sanitized-class="imageCaption">
<p>Visitors tour around Gulangyu in Xiamen, Fujian Province. /VCG</p>
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<p data-sanitized-class="title">Visitors tour around Gulangyu in Xiamen, Fujian Province. /VCG</p>
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<div readability="6.5" data-sanitized-class="cmsImage"><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Xiamen-and-George-Town-Twin-port-cities-with-shared-heritage-1BYwPGWwYda/img/f3f580c7ca564d5d94b2a5d612dc8d95/f3f580c7ca564d5d94b2a5d612dc8d95.jpeg" alt="A view of Gulangyu in Xiamen, Fujian Province. /VCG" layout="fixed-height" height="210" lightbox="collection" aria-describedby="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Xiamen-and-George-Town-Twin-port-cities-with-shared-heritage-1BYwPGWwYda/img/f3f580c7ca564d5d94b2a5d612dc8d95/f3f580c7ca564d5d94b2a5d612dc8d95.jpeg"><div readability="9.5" data-sanitized-class="imageCaption">
<p>A view of Gulangyu in Xiamen, Fujian Province. /VCG</p>
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<p data-sanitized-class="title">A view of Gulangyu in Xiamen, Fujian Province. /VCG</p>
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<p>Gulangyu, a small island off the coast of Xiamen, is also an exceptional example of cultural fusion, featuring a mixture of Chinese and foreign architectural styles. The island was added to the World Heritage List in 2017.</p>
<p>Xiamen and Penang Island, where George Town is located, are sister cities.</p>
</div>

link:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Xiamen-and-George-Town-Twin-port-cities-with-shared-heritage-1BYwPGWwYda/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Culture

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guid: https://www.mondialisation.ca/?p=5697170
title: De l’Europe au Moyen-Orient les ruines de la démocratie
author: ;Manlio Dinucci
link: https://www.mondialisation.ca/de-leurope-au-moyen-orient-les-ruines-de-la-democratie/5697170
hash: �@J���1�6\�Z�Z�
tags: #Francais @fr #Mobile
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Tandis que se poursuivent les entretiens téléphoniques entre Trump et Poutine et les déclarations communes que la guerre doive se terminer avec une paix durable, la guerre continue en découvrant des aspects de plus en plus périlleux, notamment le fait que la société étasunienne Westinghouse est en train de construire en Ukraine de nouvelles centrales nucléaires...


title: Wang Yi meets Japan&amp;#039;s national security advisor Masataka Okano
hash: 4! � J@'r�+ � ,
guid:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Wang-Yi-meets-Japan-s-national-security-advisor-Masataka-Okano-1BYGU07bsis/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Politics

content:
<div><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Wang-Yi-meets-Japan-s-national-security-advisor-Masataka-Okano-1BYGU07bsis/img/aefd5daca2c24d6fabdd1f784d680c58/aefd5daca2c24d6fabdd1f784d680c58-750.png" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><div readability="45" data-sanitized-class="text en">
<p>Wang Yi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission, on Sunday met with Masataka Okano, secretary general of Japan's National Security Secretariat.</p>
<p>The two sides engaged in in-depth discussions on jointly implementing the important consensus reached by the leaders of the two countries, alongside comprehensively promoting the healthy and stable development of the mutually beneficial China-Japan strategic relations.</p>
<p>They agreed to continue communication through the China-Japan high-level political dialogue mechanism.</p>
</div>
<p>Source(s): Xinhua News Agency</p>

link:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Wang-Yi-meets-Japan-s-national-security-advisor-Masataka-Okano-1BYGU07bsis/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Politics

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title: &amp;#039;Ne Zha&amp;#039; franchise slays Chinese film record with 20b yuan earnings
hash: jz� ���mÃ�����
guid:
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content:
<div readability="8.5" data-sanitized-class="cmsImage"><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/-Ne-Zha-franchise-slays-Chinese-film-record-with-20b-yuan-earnings-1BYI61XfWMw/img/5bcdc11a4b7345389ef35f4741d1e0a5/5bcdc11a4b7345389ef35f4741d1e0a5.jpeg" alt="Image of Ne Zha painted on a village wall by students from the Fine Arts School of Lingnan Normal University, Zhuhai City, south China's Guangdong Province, March 16, 2025. /VCG" layout="responsive"><div readability="15.5" data-sanitized-class="imageCaption">
<p>Image of Ne Zha painted on a village wall by students from the Fine Arts School of Lingnan Normal University, Zhuhai City, south China's Guangdong Province, March 16, 2025. /VCG</p>
<div readability="12" data-sanitized-class="wrapper-visible">
<p data-sanitized-class="title">Image of Ne Zha painted on a village wall by students from the Fine Arts School of Lingnan Normal University, Zhuhai City, south China's Guangdong Province, March 16, 2025. /VCG</p>
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<div readability="56" data-sanitized-class="text en">
<p>The "Ne Zha" animated film franchise has reached another historic milestone for the Chinese film industry, with its total box office revenue surpassing 20 billion yuan (about $2.79 billion).</p>
<p>The latest installment, "Ne Zha 2," has grossed over 15.3 billion yuan as of Sunday afternoon, while its 2019 predecessor contributed an additional 5.035 billion yuan.</p>
<p>This remarkable achievement has made director Yang Yu the first filmmaker in Chinese cinema history to helm a franchise with a combined box office exceeding 20 billion yuan.</p>
<p>The "Ne Zha 2" screening has been extended on the Chinese mainland to April 30.</p>
<p>The Chinese blockbuster has also made waves globally, currently ranking fifth on the worldwide box office chart, including pre-sales and overseas earnings.</p>
<p>Released on Jan. 29 during Chinese New Year, "Ne Zha 2" soared to the top of China's all-time box office chart within just nine days, later becoming the highest-grossing animated movie of all time globally on February 18.</p>
</div>
<p>Source(s): Xinhua News Agency</p>

link:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/-Ne-Zha-franchise-slays-Chinese-film-record-with-20b-yuan-earnings-1BYI61XfWMw/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Culture

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guid: yt:video:LUyil3yHyaI
title: In Movies We Understand That The Genocidal Child Murderers Who Blow Up Hospitals Are The Villains
author: ;Caitlin Johnstone
link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUyil3yHyaI
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guid: https://medium.com/p/4c978486c77b
title: In Movies We Understand That The Genocidal Child Murderers Who Blow Up Hospitals Are The Villains
author: ;Caitlin Johnstone
hash: .�&<������G
tags: #gaza #israel #palestine
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<figure><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*GtOAvNcSBJ5Toe_diywR_w.png"></figure><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUyil3yHyaI"><em>Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley)</em></a>:</p><iframe src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FLUyil3yHyaI%3Ffeature%3Doembed&amp;display_name=YouTube&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DLUyil3yHyaI&amp;image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FLUyil3yHyaI%2Fhqdefault.jpg&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=youtube" width="854" height="480" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" allow="accelerometer; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin"><a href="https://medium.com/media/0b30a4cb752dee505c3d423ad52d5a1e/href">https://medium.com/media/0b30a4cb752dee505c3d423ad52d5a1e/href</a></iframe><p>Remember in The Dark Knight when we all applauded the Joker for heroically blowing up a hospital?</p><p>Or remember when we watched Star Wars and cheered for the protagonist Darth Vader as he destroyed a planet to punish the rebel scum for daring to resist him?</p><p>How about when we watched Schindler’s List anxiously hoping the Nazis would be able to thwart the diabolical scheming of the villain Oskar Schindler to prevent them from committing genocide?</p><p>Or when we watched Avatar and cheered for the interstellar megacorporation and its army of mercenaries to displace the indigenous people of Pandora to steal their land?</p><iframe src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?type=text%2Fhtml&amp;key=a19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07&amp;schema=twitter&amp;url=https%3A//x.com/muhammadshehad2/status/1903150301475115443&amp;image=" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" allow="accelerometer; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin"><a href="https://medium.com/media/4d8bc5bf0560c1d7365863a40e37e669/href">https://medium.com/media/4d8bc5bf0560c1d7365863a40e37e669/href</a></iframe><p>Or when we watched The Pelican Brief hoping the heroes would find some way to kill Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington to stop them from reporting the truth about their crimes?</p><p>Or when we watched The Pianist and wept at the evil Jews attacking innocent Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising?</p><p>Or when we watched The Lord of the Rings and booed the villainous men, elves and dwarves fighting to survive a siege by Saruman’s heroic army of orcs?</p><p>Or when we watched V for Vendetta on the edge of our seats worried that the government would fail to stomp out the rebellion, suppress the truth from coming out, and impose more authoritarian measures on the people?</p><p>Or when we watched Revenge of the Sith and cheered for the hero Anakin Skywalker mass murdering children in order to wipe the Jedi out of existence?</p><iframe src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?type=text%2Fhtml&amp;key=a19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07&amp;schema=twitter&amp;url=https%3A//x.com/aaronjmate/status/1903281804812964198&amp;image=" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" allow="accelerometer; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin"><a href="https://medium.com/media/ed59655773ed6593e3295acbb638cc73/href">https://medium.com/media/ed59655773ed6593e3295acbb638cc73/href</a></iframe><p>Yeah, I don’t remember that either.</p><p>Nobody seems to have trouble figuring out who the real villains are when it’s happening in the movies. The narrative managers and spinmeisters make it a lot harder to sort out the villains from the victims in real life.</p><p>Normally it’s misguided to view any conflict as simply evil villains murdering innocent victims, but not with Israel and Gaza. It’s an apartheid state that’s backed by a globe-spanning empire, raining bombs onto a giant concentration camp packed full of children because they’re the wrong ethnicity.</p><p>It’s pretty black and white, actually.</p><p>________________</p><p><em>My work is </em><a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/05/24/my-experiments-with-hacking-capitalism/"><em>entirely reader-supported</em></a><em>, so if you enjoyed this piece </em><a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/about"><em>here are some options</em></a><em> where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. </em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU8Yu4WZJ11Il3TZmNiMUFQ?sub_confirmation=1"><em>Go here</em></a><em> to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on </em><a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/5336DPNn19xNci8UNOkAT4"><em>Spotify</em></a><em>, </em><a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/going-rogue-with-caitlin-johnstone/id1333112416"><em>Apple Podcasts</em></a><em>, </em><a href="https://soundcloud.com/going_rogue"><em>Soundcloud</em></a><em> or </em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU8Yu4WZJ11Il3TZmNiMUFQ"><em>YouTube</em></a><em>. </em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CF5YLBGD"><em>Go here</em></a><em> to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is </em><a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/reminder-all-my-work-may-be-freely"><em>free to bootleg and use</em></a><em> in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list </em><a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/"><em>on Substack</em></a><em>, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.</em></p><figure><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/417/0*Xjg3HpE_x-BxykiH.jpeg"></figure><p>Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2</p><img src="https://medium.com/_/stat?event=post.clientViewed&amp;referrerSource=full_rss&amp;postId=4c978486c77b" width="1" height="1" alt="">

link:
https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/in-movies-we-understand-that-the-genocidal-child-murderers-who-blow-up-hospitals-are-the-villains-4c978486c77b?source=rss-c40ec5bece47------2


title: Istanbul mayor arrested over corruption: state media
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<div readability="8.5" data-sanitized-class="cmsImage"><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Istanbul-mayor-arrested-over-corruption-state-media-1BYPO7z4VWw/img/1e5d39aca5b04cd5a9e5cf8da1baa7b8/1e5d39aca5b04cd5a9e5cf8da1baa7b8.png" alt="A billboard of Ekrem Imamoglu, mayor of Istanbul, in Istanbul, Türkiye, March 20, 2025. /VCG" layout="responsive"><div readability="15.5" data-sanitized-class="imageCaption">
<p>A billboard of Ekrem Imamoglu, mayor of Istanbul, in Istanbul, Türkiye, March 20, 2025. /VCG</p>
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<p data-sanitized-class="title">A billboard of Ekrem Imamoglu, mayor of Istanbul, in Istanbul, Türkiye, March 20, 2025. /VCG</p>
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<p>Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu was officially arrested Sunday on corruption charges, the Turkish state-run Anadolu news agency reported.</p>
<p>Imamoglu faced accusations of "bribery, corruption, qualified fraud, illegally obtaining personal data for profit and tampering with a tender," according to the agency.</p>
<p>Imamoglu had been under interrogation in police custody at the Istanbul Police Headquarters since his detention on Wednesday, in connection with two investigations related to terrorism and corruption.</p>
<p>Upon completing his interrogation at the police station, he was escorted to the main courthouse at around 7 p.m. local time (1600 GMT) on Saturday under heavy police presence for further legal proceedings. The mayor denied all the accusations against him.</p>
<p>Imamoglu was released under judicial control in connection with the terrorism investigation, in which he is accused of aiding and assisting the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party, which is designated as a terrorist organization by Türkiye, the European Union and the United States.</p>
<p>In February, Imamoglu applied to the Republican People's Party (CHP) to become a presidential candidate for the 2028 elections.</p>
<p>The CHP is expected to officially declare Imamoglu as its presidential candidate following a vote by party members, which began at 8 a.m. local time (0500 GMT) and is set to end at 5 p.m. local time (1400 GMT) on Sunday.</p>
<p>Imamoglu was re-elected for a second term as mayor of Istanbul, Türkiye's largest city, after his decisive victory in the local elections held in 2024, over his rival Murat Kurum, a candidate from the ruling Justice and Development Party.</p>
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<p>Source(s): Xinhua News Agency</p>

link:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/Istanbul-mayor-arrested-over-corruption-state-media-1BYPO7z4VWw/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Politics

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guid: https://schillerinstitute.com/?p=108284
title: Take the Side of Humanity
author: ;tobi
link: https://schillerinstitute.com/blog/2025/03/23/take-the-side-of-humanity/
hash: �;��w��G~�0L��-A
tags: #International Peace Coalition
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<p><strong><em>International Peace Coalition #94 Report</em></strong></p>



<p>March 21, 2025 (EIRNS)—The 94th consecutive weekly online meeting of the International Peace Coalition (IPC) today was opened by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, who reported that March 18 was a “fateful day” due to two events:</p>



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<li>The phone call between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, which represents a return to diplomacy. “Any sane person should be highly happy about this event,” she said, but the Europeans are not happy.</li>



<li>The historic vote in the German Parliament to loosen the “debt brake,” not for productive purposes, but to “open the sluices” for a military buildup. They used “parliamentarian trickery” by scheduling the vote in a lame-duck session of the Bundestag, knowing that the incoming session would not vote to approve.</li>
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<iframe title="The Magical Disappearance of Democracy — International Peace Coalition #94" width="960" height="540" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xPRX9VC8Ujg?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin"></iframe>
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<p>Zepp-LaRouche went on to debunk various neocon narratives: One narrative is that “Putin” is preparing to attack Europe. But, according to military experts, Russia can only mobilize 1.5 million troops, not enough to attack Europe (if that were in fact Russia’s intention). Regarding the fiction that Russia’s entry into Ukraine was “unprovoked,” she cited eyewitness reports, including by Jack Matlock, who, as Ambassador to the Soviet Union, was one of many who called attention to the broken promise of no NATO expansion.</p>



<p>She reported that Israel has renewed its genocide campaign. This can lead to a blowback. We are “sitting on a time bomb, which is the pending financial collapse.” In a war with Iran, the U.S. would lose, not for military reasons, but because it would trigger the financial collapse.</p>



<p>Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and co-founder of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), reminded viewers that NATO was originally set up to “keep Russia out, America in, and Germany down.” Regarding the German plan to re-arm in order to take on Russia, Russians have “been there, done that.” The U.S. and Russia have a mutual interest in not letting this get out of hand.</p>



<p>McGovern addressed the issue of trust between nations. Putin pulled U.S. President Barack Obama’s chestnuts out of the fire after the 2013 false flag chemical-weapons attack in Ghouta, Syria. But trust plummeted after the 2014 Maidan coup and the bogus Minsk Agreements in Ukraine. McGovern displayed his “<em>Putin-Versteher</em>” button, noting that being a “Putin understander” is no longer completely pejorative.</p>



<p>Dennis Fritz, director of the Eisenhower Media Network and Command Chief Master Sergeant (ret., U.S. Air Force), responding to McGovern on the question of trust, and Zepp-LaRouche on the role of Jack Matlock, he described an <a href="https://eisenhowermedianetwork.org/russia-ukraine-war-peace/">ad</a> published by the Eisenhower Media Network. He went on that the Schiller Institute and social media have begun to counteract the devastating impact of pro-Israel propaganda in the U.S.</p>



<p><strong>Water for Peace</strong></p>



<p>Two Palestinian experts addressed the crucial issue of reconstruction for Gaza. A video was presented of H.E. Ambassador Prof. Dr. Manuel Hassassian, Palestinian Authority Ambassador to Denmark, interviewed by <em>EIR</em>’s Tim Rush. He emphasized that there is no military solution to this conflict, and we need to search for common ground in economic solutions to overcome political jingoism. He said that the reconstruction plan of the Palestinian Authority is compatible with the Egyptian plan, but strongly endorsed Lyndon LaRouche’s <a href="https://schillerinstitute.com/the-oasis-plan-the-larouche-solution-for-southwest-asia/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Oasis Plan</a> as a step further in the right direction.</p>



<p>Fernando Garzón, executive director of the Ecuadorian-Palestinian Union , a professor at Universities in Ecuador, and consultant on development and land use planning for international organizations, added to the Ambassador’s comments, saying that reconstruction cannot be done outside of regional development (as best seen in the Oasis Plan), and requires a sovereign government for Palestine, recognized by the UN.</p>



<p>Garzón reported that the UN has provided information as to the extent of the destruction in Gaza. More than 73% of structures have been destroyed, 68% of roads are impassable, 92% of all housing units are gone. This represents not only genocide, but terracide, the destruction of nature and the land itself. Some 95% of the water is not potable, and 90% is controlled by an Israeli private company. Billions of dollars in identified natural gas reserves belong to the Palestinians, and this will be essential for reconstruction. The BRICS New Development Bank should play a role, not the anti-development IMF. Trump’s “Riviera” proposal is “an offense to common sense.”</p>



<p>Marcia Merry Baker, an agriculture expert who serves on the editorial board of <em>Executive Intelligence Review</em>, gave a presentation on water development, beginning with a satellite photo of Egypt which shows the green delta of the Nile, in contrast to the great desert around it. Egypt has been studying how to transform that desert with water and agriculture. They built the largest wastewater treatment center in the world near Alexandria. She also reported on “precision agriculture” in Tunisia, successful despite lack of water, and terraforming the deserts east of the Aral Sea with canal building, which has progressed in Afghanistan despite the economic warfare against it. China has developed the concept of the Shelter Belt, made of trees and grassland, to defend against desertification. They have developed plant varieties that can tolerate desert climates. An area the size of Portugal has been reclaimed from desert, with the participation of the Chinese military.</p>



<p><strong>We Don’t Have To Kill Each Other</strong></p>



<p>Zepp-LaRouche commented that Baker’s presentation shows the possibility of a positive role for the military. She contrasted the neocons’ imperial conception of the military as a killing machine, typified by Samuel Huntington’s <em>The Soldier and the State</em>, versus the ideas of Gerhard von Scharnhorst and the Prussian Reformers. We must transform the military-industrial complex for peaceful reconstruction purposes, and establish a purely defensive role for the military, moving away from “this crazy world where people think they have to kill each other.”</p>



<p>The role of water development in building peace was explored in the discussion session. IPC co-moderator Dennis Small presented a report from Mexico, on how a large gathering of hydraulic engineering students heard a presentation on Schiller Institute water proposals for conflict zones around the world. This may be seen as a prelude to the upcoming <a href="https://schillerinstitute.com/blog/2025/03/01/conference-invitation/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Schiller Institute conference</a> in May.</p>



<p>Garzón added that planning requires taking into account national borders, but also ecosystem borders.</p>



<p>Marcia Merry Baker answered two questions which came in on this topic:</p>



<ol data-sanitized-class="wp-block-list">
<li>Why is solar energy not included in the Oasis Plan? Solar is good for remote regions where there is insufficient infrastructure to support energy-dense sources. However, for real development, energy-dense sources are indispensable.</li>



<li>What about Muammar Qaddafi’s water plan for Libya, and Egypt’s Aswan Dam? Baker gave these endeavors her hearty endorsement.</li>
</ol>



<p>IPC co-moderator Dennis Speed recalled Lyndon LaRouche’s accurate warning that unless there was an immediate move to get “shovels in the ground,” the 1993 Oslo Accords for peace between Israel and Palestine would fail.</p>



<p>New York congressional candidate Jose Vega said that he sees both sides in the conflict between Ethiopia and Egypt over how to exploit the water of the Nile. Baker intervened to say that border disputes over water are never justified; there will always be plenty with proper development. She recalled the Jonglei Canal project for the White Nile in Sudan, which was suppressed by environmentalists.</p>



<p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>



<p>Zepp-LaRouche closed on a philosophical note: “The big challenge in front of humanity at this conjuncture is how do we use aesthetic education to get more and more people to take the side of humanity.” We must stop going through the world as if everything were self-evident, and look at things with fresh eyes. In the Stone Age, we were using a stone to kill our neighbor to get his food. Now we look at the store and see iron ore or rare earths. Artificial Intelligence, for example, could be used for evil, or to free humanity for life-long learning “instead of having to labor like a mule.” “We will not be miserable forever”; every individual discovery enriches all of humanity. </p>



<p>[eir]</p>


guid: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/?p=138425
title: My Time in the Reagan Administration
author: ;pcr3
link: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2025/03/23/my-time-in-the-reagan-administration/
hash: � hgW��"Ŀ�~�
tags: #Articles &amp; Columns
attributes: {"enclosures":[]}
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<p>Support your website</p>
<p> </p>
<p><em>Reflections</em></p>
<p><strong>My Time in the Reagan Administration</strong></p>
<p>PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS</p>
<p><em>Paul Craig Roberts, who played a crucial role in enacting the tax cuts of the 1980s and in forging the political emergence of supply-side economics, reflects on his experience in Washington. He emphasizes that intra-party power struggles, not economics, are the main influence on policy.  — Editor, The Independent Review</em></p>
<p><em>Paul Craig Roberts is chairman of the Institute for Political Economy. He had academic careers as senior research fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University; journalism careers as associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week; government careers as a member of the U.S. congressional staff and as assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration; and business careers as a director of industrial and financial companies.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>When I was an economics professor, I often wondered if what my faculty colleagues and I were teaching students about economic policy had any validity. I left Stanford University, went to Washington, D.C., and joined the congressional staff in order to experience how policy is made. In the House, I helped Rep. Jack Kemp introduce supply-side economics to his colleagues. I became chief economist of the House Budget Committee on the Republican side, and then staff associate for Senator Orrin Hatch on the Joint Economic Committee.</p>
<p>My success in explaining to Congress that there was an alternative to Keynesian demand management, which had no solution for stagflation, led to President Reagan appointing me assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy. Having learned how policy is made (and unmade), I now had the assignment to implement a new one.</p>
<p>The story of my experience is useful to economists. As one of my graduate professors, Ronald Coase, used to tell his class, “It would help economists to occasionally look outside the window of the box they keep themselves in.”</p>
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<p>The conflict between merit and redistribution that is characteristic of the American political system and the influence of established explanations are not the only problems confronting a policymaker, especially if he is introducing a new approach. As Niccolò Machiavelli wrote in <em>The Prince</em>, “There is nothing more difficult, more perilous or more uncertain of success than to take the lead in introducing a new order of things.”</p>
<p><em>Intra-party Power Struggles, Not Economics, Are the Main Influence on Policy</em></p>
<p>One of the many problems a policymaker faces is that policies affect different interest groups in different ways. Some benefit, some don’t, and I don’t mean just in a material or economic way. Most of the things that influence economic policy have nothing to do with economics. They have to do with power. The party establishments that control the parties intend to stay in control. The organized interest groups that control the party establishments intend to continue in control.</p>
<p>Few Americans understand that the main political fight is not between the two parties but within the administration of the party in power. Within the parties the fight is over who controls the party. When the fight is between the establishment and a populist rival like Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump, it can get very nasty.</p>
<p>During the first year of the Reagan administration, much of the battle was between President Reagan and his Treasury allies (primarily me and Secretary Don Regan) on one side and Reagan’s chief of staff, Jim Baker, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Murray Weidenbaum, and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director David Stockman on the other.</p>
<p>The fight within the Reagan administration had its origin in Reagan taking the Republican nomination for president away from the establishment’s candidate, George H. W. Bush, former CIA director. Reagan was considered an outsider, and he was “dangerous” because the Republican establishment could lose its grip on the party to a populist whose basis was in the people and not in the organized interest groups.</p>
<p>Reagan was advised that he must take the defeated George H. W. Bush Republican establishment into his administration or suffer the fate of Barry Goldwater, who rejected Nelson Rockefeller after he defeated him in the Republican presidential nomination. Consequently, the Republican establishment helped the Democrats defeat Goldwater, the Republican populist candidate.</p>
<p>Nancy Reagan judged by appearances, and Bush’s man, Jim Baker, a polished dresser, presented to Nancy a better image than Reagan’s laidback California crew to be standing by her husband. Baker was appointed chief of staff. So, from the start Reagan and his supporters in the administration were handicapped by an establishment operative being chief of staff of the Reagan Revolution.</p>
<p>Only Reagan had offered a solution to the problem of “stagflation.” It was called supply-side economics. Lacking a solution to offer during the campaign for the nomination, Bush termed Reagan’s policy “voodoo economics.” This, of course, played into the hands of the Democrat opposition and the liberal media determined to undermine President Reagan as a Grade B movie actor who believed in fairy tales about tax cuts paying for themselves.</p>
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<p><em>Supply-Side Economics and Its Foes</em></p>
<p>The aspersion Bush cast on Reagan’s policy had some traction in Republican ranks because of Republicans’ traditional fear of budget deficits. Republicans such as Bob Dole and George H. W. Bush believed that budget deficits resulting from reduction in taxes would stimulate consumer spending, raise inflation and interest rates, crowd out private investment, and worsen the stagflation that emerged from Keynesian demand management during the Carter administration. Traditional Republicans had been well indoctrinated by Keynesian economists—whom, paradoxically, the Republicans opposed—that fiscal policy such as reductions in tax rates only affected the demand side of the economy. They believed that a tax rate reduction could only add to inflationary pressures by adding to consumer demand.</p>
<p>Many on Wall Street saw it the same way as Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker. The two main Wall Street economists—Dr. Doom and Dr. Gloom (Henry Kaufman and Albert M. Wojnilower)—stayed busy at work creating hysteria over the “coming Reagan deficits.”</p>
<p>Volcker was also obsessed by the belief that the deficits resulting from the tax rate reduction would fuel the already high inflation. Volcker’s concern was apparent in Treasury’s meetings with him. The Treasury found Volcker immune to under- standing the administration’s assault on stagflation by shifting the aggregate supply schedule instead of the aggregate demand schedule. The Treasury asked Volcker to gradually reduce the growth rate of money as the tax rate reductions, delayed at Stockman and Weidenbaum’s insistence, came into effect.</p>
<p>Having attended Volcker’s meeting with his outside advisers, I advised Secretary Regan that Volcker, fearful of being blamed for the higher inflation he believed the tax rate reduction would cause, would throw on the monetary brakes and into recession we would go before the tax rate reductions would go into effect. As OMB director, David Stockman was relying on inflation to offset the effect on tax revenues of the tax rate reduction (the tax system was not indexed at the time of Stockman’s forecasts) and thus balance the budget; the deficits implicit in Stockman’s inflation assumption and in Volcker’s monetary policy would be blamed on Reagan’s supply-side policy, which economists considered a threat to their investment in Keynesian macroeconomics. Ears would be closed to the Treasury’s explanation. The Treasury, lacking a dynamic revenue model, used the static revenue forecast that a dollar of tax cut would lose a dollar of revenue and, therefore, spelled out the deficits. Stockman hid the deficits with his high inflation forecast. Volcker then collapsed the money supply, and the drop in nominal GNP exposed Stockman’s deficits. A dishonest liberal media blamed the deficits on a mythical Treasury claim, a claim which it never made, that the tax cuts would pay for themselves.</p>
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<p>Art Laffer and Jude Wanniski talked at times of tax cuts paying for themselves by expanding the revenue base. Walter Heller made the same point in behalf of the Kennedy tax rate reductions. In testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress on February 7, 1977, Heller, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Kennedy administration, said: “Did it [the Kennedy tax rate reduction] pay for itself in increased revenues? I think the evidence is very strong that it did.” Economists with a redistributive agenda, hostile media, and politicians attributed statements made by Laffer and Wanniski to the Treasury and to Reagan. Laffer and Wanniski were trying to calm Republican fear of budget deficits by pointing out that incentives can improve the tax base. The Laffer Curve does not say tax cuts pay for themselves. It merely illustrates that there are two tax rates that will produce the same revenues: a high tax rate on a small base and a low tax rate on a large base.</p>
<p>Walter Heller, who as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers had championed President Kennedy’s large reduction in tax rates, said that Reagan’s similar tax rate reduction would inject too much inflationary purchasing power into the economy and asked, “How can the economy absorb that big an expansionary punch without aggravating our already intolerable inflation?” (Wall Street Journal, February 10, 1981). He didn’t ask this question when he was championing the Kennedy tax rate reduction.</p>
<p>Everyone, except Reagan, the Treasury, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, was still operating inside the Keynesian box. None had bothered, Fed chairman Paul Volcker least of all, to listen to the explanation that reductions in the marginal rate of taxation shifted the aggregate supply schedule and resulted in more production for the same money supply. The way to beat stagflation was to increase output relative to money, and inflation would decline. It is always difficult to introduce a new way of thinking. People have a vested interest in existing dogma because that is where their human capital is invested.</p>
<p>Another way of looking at the policy issue is that supply-side economics differed from the interest rate theory of the cost of capital. We were able to show that taxation substantially affects the cost of capital, whereas the cost of capital is inelastic with respect to changes in interest rates (Roberts, Robbins, and Robbins 1986). I have often wondered if economists missed the effect of taxation on the cost of capital because capital theory developed prior to the income tax.</p>
<p>Noting the rate at which liberal media was building opposition to Reagan’s supply-side policy, budget director David Stockman concluded that Reagan would not succeed and moved into the Republican establishment balanced-budget camp which had no solution to stagflation. Jim Baker thought that a small tax rate reduction—5 percent—would be sufficient for the administration to declare a victory, while not being large enough to add significantly to the budget deficit, inflation, and interest rates. Baker perceived the opportunity to use the media to portray the Bush people as modifying Reagan, which would position them for taking credit for Reagan’s successes and solidify the establishment’s hold on the Republican Party, thereby keeping Rep. Jack Kemp at bay.</p>
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<p><em>Losing Some Battles but Winning the War</em></p>
<p>The problem was Reagan didn’t go for it, and neither did I. Without retelling the story in my book (Roberts 1984), Jude Wanniski summed up 1981 in his Polyconomics newsletter: “If there is anyone who deserves a supply-side medal with oak-leaf cluster it is Craig Roberts.” I lost some skirmishes, Wanniski said, but I won the war. And I did get the medal, in fact two of them—the U.S. Treasury’s silver medal for “outstanding contributions to the formulation of U.S. economic policy” and the French Legion of Honor for “the restoration of economic science and policy after a half century of state interventionism.”</p>
<p>By August 1981, Reagan’s tax bill was passed into law. With my job done, there was nothing left for me to do in the Treasury. Normally, when a president signs a bill, those responsible for its successful passage are invited to a White House signing ceremony and given one of the pens used to sign the bill into law. As his way of letting me know that I wasn’t appreciated, Jim Baker or his deputy Richard Darman “forgot” to invite me to the signing ceremony. Reagan noticed and sent me the lovely letter that is displayed on the “About” page of my website (Roberts n.d.). The letter, of course, is worth more than a signing pen, and I thanked Jim Baker for it.</p>
<p>There was talk of shifting me to the Federal Reserve Board. Reagan confidant Justin Dart, Rep. Jack Kemp, Chase Manhattan Bank chairman and CEO George Champion, and other influential confidants of Reagan’s were behind it. It would have caused Volcker a heart attack. But Don Regan and I saw that it wasn’t yet time for me to go. Jim Baker and David Stockman were already at work controlling the narrative placed in the media that Reagan would repudiate his “excessive” tax rate reduction in his January 1982 State of the Union message. This, of course, ensured that no work or investment decisions would be made on the basis of a tax reduction whose life might be short-lived. Despite media reports that the tax reduction would be repealed, Volcker was nevertheless at work strangling the money supply.</p>
<p>Stockman began secret interviews with a left-wing journalist, William Greider, aimed at discrediting Reagan’s economic policy. A victory was being turned into a defeat. Jim Baker argued that even a small tax reduction could be successfully pre- sented as a Reagan victory. For Baker the issue was political perception, not fixing the economy. The threat to Reagan’s economic policy was serious, because his other agenda— an end to the Cold War—was based on the success of his supply-side policy. The George H. W. Bush Republican establishment had Reagan’s presidency set up to go up in flames.</p>
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<p>Whereas I had managed to keep the percentage reduction in marginal tax rates from being significantly molested, I had been unable to block Stockman’s insistence that the tax rate reduction be phased in over three years, with the first reduction being limited to 2.5 percent, which was cancelled by the high rate of inflation, as the income tax was not indexed for inflation at that time. Phased in over three years, the tax reduction would be cancelled by the inflation rate. The tax rate reduction needed to hit all at once to have its impact. But Stockman and Jim Baker had Senate Republicans and Republican business leaders all in a huff about deficits. They wanted to raise taxes instead of lowering them. For Republicans, the solution to every economic problem was to balance the budget. It was this mindlessness with which I was at war.</p>
<p>Stockman’s argument was, of course, the budget deficit. Phasing in the tax rate reduction would produce a smaller deficit. Additionally, inflation by raising nominal incomes would raise nominal GDP and produce more tax revenues to cover the deficit. Stockman was relying on inflation to balance the budget by pushing taxpayers into higher tax brackets. This was not the president’s policy, as I pointed out to Stockman.</p>
<p>I told Stockman that he was hiding deficits behind his high inflation projections, but that inflation was going to collapse either as a result of the supply-side policy if we were able to secure the Fed’s cooperation, or from the Fed in fear of our policy slamming on the brakes and bringing on recession, which the Fed did. Volcker’s recession collapsed GDP and tax revenues and created budget deficits that were promptly blamed on the tax cut, which, being delayed, had yet to be implemented. The “Reagan deficits” were the Volcker deficits and the Stockman deficits covered up by Stockman’s high projected inflation rates. Over the next years, the inflation rate collapsed, instead of hitting all-time highs as Wall Street and academic economists had predicted.</p>
<p>It is a myth that the Treasury said the tax cuts would pay for themselves. The Treasury’s official position, based on its traditional static revenue model, was that every dollar of tax reduction would lose a dollar of tax revenue. But the initial deficits would fade with the expansion that followed, unless spending was left out of control. We kept reminding people that the agenda was to cure stagflation, not to balance the budget. The tax system had to be used to increase the quantity supplied at every price by increasing the cost of leisure in terms of forgone current income and increasing the cost of current consumption in terms of forgone future income.</p>
<p>During the autumn of 1981, immediately following the passage of the tax rate reductions, the battle raged inside the administration to whittle down or even totally repeal the supply-side reduction in marginal tax rates. The George H. W. Bush part of the administration had turned against the Reagan administration’s victory.</p>
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<p>It was the Treasury against Stockman at OMB, the White House chief of staff, the vice president, and the Council of Economic Advisers. As neither side would yield, three times the decision was taken to the White House. Each time Ed Meese and President Reagan’s men sided with the Treasury. As soon as the presidential delegation left the room, Jim Baker would ask Don Regan, “Don, can’t the Treasury make a better case?” And it would start all over again. After the third time, Regan asked me why Reagan didn’t fire those who didn’t hear his decisions. My answer was that Reagan was very non-confrontational and was relying on the Treasury. I think it was December when Regan told me he had had enough and was going to Florida. “It’s in your hands.”</p>
<p><em>Triumph and Departure after Reagan’s 1982 State of the Union Address</em></p>
<p>The morning of Reagan’s State of the Union address in January 1982, the lead article on the Wall Street Journal’s front page, a plant by Baker or Stockman, said that Reagan was going to back away from his irresponsible tax cut in his State of the Union speech.</p>
<p>Roger Mudd, the anchor for NBC News in those days, called me. “Craig,” he said, “it looks like you are going to be repudiated tonight and the supply-side policy cast aside.” I had just finished reading Reagan’s State of the Union address, as the speechwriters had sent it over for my approval. I advised Roger not to take that line because Reagan was not backing off his policy. Roger laughed. Convinced that supply-side economics and I were done for, he offered to set me up in a room in the Capitol with a television so I could watch my repudiation in Reagan’s State of the Union speech, and he would come in immediately after Reagan’s address and we would go live on national TV as NBC’s lead interview on the president’s speech. He was surprised when I accepted.</p>
<p>In his State of the Union address Reagan delivered a stinging rebuff to his OMB director and chief of staff. Strongly reaffirming his commitment to his economic program, Reagan declared: “The doubters would have us turn back the clock with tax increases that would offset the personal tax-rate reductions already passed by this Congress. Raise present taxes to cut future deficits, they tell us. Well, I don’t believe we should buy their argument” (Reagan 1982).</p>
<p>Having heard the opposite of what he expected, Mudd was shaken. Immediately we went live: “Craig, the president has just repudiated the advisers who tried to get him to raise taxes. They have egg all over their faces! What can they do?” I replied, “They can wipe the egg off their faces and get back on the president’s team.” Within seconds of my statement, my wife got a furious call from a Stockman aide whose voice she recognized: “We are going to get Craig and all his friends.” Being a British lady, she was upset at the barbarity of the American government in Washington. I had served the president, which was my duty, not the establishment, and the establishment was going to “get me.”</p>
<p>At the White House press conference the next morning, the first question Larry Speakes had to answer was, “Is Jim Baker still employed today? . . . He led the losing fight, and the general who gets beaten usually gets thrown out.”</p>
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<p>Reporters and columnists began telling the story of how senior aides had worked to undermine congressional and business support for the president’s program. In a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal on February 2, 1982, reporters Rich Jaroslovsky, Ken Bacon, and Robert Merry told how Baker and Stockman operated against the president by building “momentum with leaks and pressure.”</p>
<p>I knew that Reagan could not throw out his vice president’s right-hand man, who had done so much to undermine the president of the United States, and that Reagan was stuck with Baker until Reagan’s second term, when Don Regan would take over as chief of staff. I knew that Baker, Stockman, Darman, and Larry Kudlow would use their friends in the media to destroy my reputation. I had done my job. Harvard University Press wanted the story. A prestigious chair was created for me, and I had no intention of spending years in internal administration fights. I explained the situation to Secretary Regan and President Reagan, and they agreed to keep my departure a secret so that the media could not make it look like I was driven out of the administration. Reagan said he would ensure that I escaped alive. He said he had further need for me in the future. I left and eased into the new William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University. Later Reagan appointed me to a secret presidential committee to assess the CIA’s opposition to Reagan’s plan to end the Cold War. This is another story, one that brought me up against the CIA.</p>
<p><em>Thwarting Continued Assaults on Reagan’s Policies from within the Party</em></p>
<p>My second victory over the establishment was as short-lived as my first victory. I was no longer in the Treasury to beat back the third assault from within the Reagan administration on Reagan’s supply-side policy. The assault was not coming from the Democrats. It was coming from the Republican establishment.</p>
<p>Determined not to be defeated in their agenda to “moderate” Reagan, by April 1982 Baker and Stockman were marching Reagan into a tax increase by lying to him that it was a tax reform, not a tax increase. They left the reductions in the personal income tax rates alone and focused on the business tax cut added to the Kemp-Roth bill by Treasury undersecretary Norman Ture. The business tax cuts consisted of accelerated depreciation.</p>
<p>The U.S. tax code specifies the years over which various kinds of business investments can be depreciated. Some of the schedules were very long, and inflation had eroded their real values. Something needed to be done to shorten the write-off periods. It is possible that too much was done to improve the situation for business, and that the pendulum had gone too far in the other direction. Nevertheless, this was a “tax reform” Reagan could accept as it left his personal tax rate reductions alone.</p>
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<p>Cleverly, Stockman and Baker tied Reagan conservatives’ demand for spending cuts to the tax increase. They told Reagan the tax increase was a necessary part of the deal for the Democrats to accept spending cuts. The taxes rose and so did spending.</p>
<p>Stockman was not content to mislead President Reagan only about taxes. He also misled Reagan about spending bills in order to discredit Reagan with Republican senators and humiliate him with overridden vetos. Stockman chose a spending bill that funded popular programs such as jobs for the elderly to help them make ends meet, which was funded $2 billion less than Reagan had requested. Stockman told Reagan that the appropriation was a “budget-buster” in order to get Reagan to veto the bill. Senate Appropriations Committee chairman Mark Hatfield said, “By no responsible account can this be called a budget-buster.” Many saw that Reagan was being manipulated by his chief of staff and budget director. Senator Mark Andrews declared, “Frankly I’m getting sick and tired of David Stockman and his mirror acts. . . . He’s not serving the nation well, he’s not serving the president well, he’s not serving his party well” (Dewar 1982).</p>
<p>Even Democrat Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill called on Stockman to resign for failure to keep the president correctly informed about the spending bills. Jim Baker had to be aware of Stockman’s perfidy, but he protected Stockman, who remained in office doing as much damage as he could to the Reagan Revolution. It was like what Trump’s appointees did to him during his first term.</p>
<p>Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, columnists who closely watched the Washington scene, saw the tax increase as Baker’s attempt to portray supply-side economics as a failure and thus to remove Jack Kemp as a contender for the presidential succession. Others concluded that Reagan was not sufficiently involved to take control of his policy. The liberal-left columnists had a field day.</p>
<p>The administration of Reagan’s successor, President George H. W. Bush, again raised taxes, and their target this time was the personal income tax rates. As Reagan and I were absent the scene, they had a free hand. Nevertheless, although they raised the personal tax rates, they left them significantly below the rates that prevailed prior to the supply-side reduction in Reagan’s personal tax rate reductions. Even today, the tax rates are lower than they were prior to the Reagan tax rate reduction.</p>
<p>The real value of the Reagan tax cut was due to Senator William Armstrong’s amendment and to my success in bringing the administration on board with Senator Armstrong’s amendment, which had passed the Senate, to index the personal income tax for inflation. Over time even a low rate of inflation would inflate all incomes into the top bracket. In the House, the Democrats had come up with their own supply-side tax cut. White House speechwriters were looking for a way to differenti- ate Reagan’s tax cut bill from the Democrat one that cut rates more in the first two years. My principal deputy, Steve Entin, produced a graphic showing that indexing provided the dramatic comparison that the White House was seeking. Reagan was delighted. He used it in his television address just prior to the vote. Reagan quipped that the Democrat’s tax cut is larger “if you’re only planning to live two more years.” Without indexing, inflation eroded the benefit of the Democrat tax cut bill.</p>
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<p>I can take satisfaction that my efforts, together with those of my Treasury colleagues, the White House speechwriters, and White House economist Martin Anderson, forty-four years ago in behalf of a supply-side economic policy have had a positive impact for four decades. Subsequent policymakers who offshored jobs, destroyed supply chains and the tax base of manufacturing and industrial states, created monopolies, financialized the economy, and weaponized the dollar, thus setting in motion the loss of the dollar’s role as reserve currency, have a great deal to answer for. For me, I can point to an enduring success. If the top marginal tax rates were still 70 percent on investment income and 50 percent on earned income, we would hardly have an economy at all.</p>
<p><em>The Permanence of the Supply-Side Revolution</em></p>
<p>There was no significant difference between the Kennedy tax cut in 1964 and the Reagan tax cut in 1981. The only difference is in the economic interpretation of tax rate reductions.</p>
<p>In the Keynesian view, a tax rate reduction stimulates consumer demand by leaving more money in the pockets of consumers to spend. The result is a rise in aggregate demand that leads to an increase in employment and investment in order to meet the higher demand, but it can also result instead in inflation with prices instead of output and employment rising if high tax rates discourage increases in output.</p>
<p>In the supply-side view, a tax rate reduction changes two important relative prices that cause an increase in aggregate supply. One of the prices is the price of leisure in terms of forgone current income. Lowering tax rates raises the cost of leisure in terms of the income you give up by, for example, taking Friday afternoons off. If you are in a 50 percent marginal tax rate, you only get to keep 50 cents of each additional dollar you earn. If the tax rate is cut to 30 percent, you get to keep 70 cents of each additional dollar you earn. Thus a lower tax rate makes leisure more expensive and encourages more labor supply.</p>
<p>The other price is the price of current consumption in terms of forgone future income. If you deplete your income in consumption instead of saving and investing, you forgo higher future income from investments not made. If the tax rate on investment income is 70 percent, each dollar of investment income only brings you 30 cents. If the tax rate is lowered to 50 percent, the reward to saving and investing rises to 50 cents for every dollar earned. Therefore, a reduction in the tax rate on investment income makes current consumption more expensive in terms of forgone future income and encourages more investment.</p>
<p>Whereas Keynesian demand-side economists believe fiscal policy such as changes in tax rates only affects aggregate demand, supply-side economists point out that some fiscal policies, such as changes in tax rates, directly affect aggregate supply. The supply-side revolution resulted from the realization after decades of demand management that fiscal policy directly affects aggregate supply. The Keynesian policy of stimulating consumer demand with Federal Reserve money creation while restraining output with higher tax rates resulted in stagflation. The supply-side solution was to remove the disincentives to work and invest caused by high tax rates.</p>
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<p>Paul Samuelson, the top-of-the-line Keynesian economist in those days, agreed with the supply-side correction of fiscal policy. But he wondered how powerful the supply-side effect would be. Was it strong enough to have a significant effect? Paul Evans, a Stanford University economist, had already answered Samuelson’s question. I asked the Treasury staff to re-estimate Evans’s work on the impact of the Kennedy tax rate reduction on consumption and saving. Had the Kennedy tax cut caused consumption to rise or saving to rise? The empirical record was clear. Consumers spent a smaller percentage of their lower-taxed incomes. There was a marked increase in the real volume of personal saving following the Kennedy tax cut, and the saving rate, which had been declining during the early 1960s, rose sharply. It remained high for a decade, until rising marginal tax rates from a non-indexed tax system pushed it down. It was clear that the Kennedy tax rate reduction worked because of its supply-side effects.</p>
<p>The two tax rate reductions in the latter half of the twentieth century kept the American economy alive. The Kennedy tax rate reduction in 1964 slowed the erosion of America’s economic potential, and the Reagan tax rate reduction in 1981, married with the indexation of the tax rates, boosted the economy’s potential. A return to sound economic policies that focus on boosting productivity in the long run would help return the country to the strong growth path it enjoyed during the Reagan era.</p>
<p>References</p>
<p>Dewar, Helen. 1982. Senate Joins House, Overrides Reagan Veto. Washington Post, September 10.</p>
<p>Heller, Walter. 1977. Testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, February 7.</p>
<p>Reagan, Ronald. 1982. Address Before a Joint Session of Congress Reporting on the State of the Union, January 26.</p>
<p>Roberts, Paul Craig. n.d. https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/pages/about-paul-craig-roberts/.</p>
<p>_______, 1984. The Supply-Side Revolution. Harvard University Press.</p>
<p>Roberts, Paul Craig, Aldona E. Robbins, and Gary F. Robbins. 1986. The Relative Impact of Taxation and Interest Rates on the Cost of Capital. Technology and Economic Policy, edited by Ralph Landau and Dale Jorgenson. Ballinger.</p>
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<p>VOLUME 29, NUMBER 4, SPRING 2025, pages 693-703</p>
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<p><a href="https://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_29_4_10_roberts.pdf">https://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_29_4_10_roberts.pdf </a></p>
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title: China, U.S. should tackle trade dispute through cooperation: premier
hash: �-��9� �aŝ�C
guid:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/China-U-S-should-tackle-trade-dispute-through-cooperation-premier-1BYX5KD5gLm/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Politics

content:
<div><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-23/China-U-S-should-tackle-trade-dispute-through-cooperation-premier-1BYX5KD5gLm/img/73bd682b13ad4ba58ba56930911ee69b/73bd682b13ad4ba58ba56930911ee69b-750.png" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><p>Chinese Premier Li Qiang emphasized that China and the U.S. should address trade imbalances by expanding cooperation and creating greater mutual benefits, highlighting the importance of working together to tackle economic challenges.</p>
<p>Li made the remarks on Sunday during a meeting with U.S. Senator Steve Daines and American business leaders attending the China Development Forum 2025 in Beijing.</p>
<p>He noted that China-U.S. relations have reached a critical juncture, stressing that history has proven both nations gain from cooperation and lose from confrontation. He urged both sides to choose dialogue over conflict and win-win cooperation over a zero-sum mindset.</p>
<p>Li called on the U.S. to engage in candid communication, build trust, and clear up misgivings based on mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation. He emphasized the need to deepen pragmatic cooperation and promote the stable, healthy, and sustainable development of bilateral relations.</p>
<p>He also underscored economic and trade cooperation as the foundation of China-U.S. relations, acknowledging the significant progress achieved over the past decades through joint efforts. He stressed that at times of difficulty in bilateral ties, preserving and advancing economic and trade cooperation becomes even more crucial.</p>
<p>Li reiterated that no one benefits from a trade war and that imposing tariffs cannot drive development and prosperity. Instead, he suggested expanding the "pie of cooperation" to address trade imbalances and create shared benefits.</p>
<p>"China always welcomes companies from all over the world, including the United States, to share development opportunities in China, and will actively address their legitimate demands, treat domestic and foreign companies as equals, and continue to foster a sound business environment," Li said.</p>
<p>U.S. business representatives acknowledged China's tremendous transformation in recent decades. They expressed their continued support for China's development, their willingness to increase investment, strengthen dialogue and cooperation, and contribute to mutual benefits for the sustainable growth of bilateral relations.</p>

link:
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guid: yt:video:0UIGhlUTak0
title: Trump, Musk and the World War II Industrial Mobilization - Saturday Class - March 22, 2025
author: ;Promethean In-Depth
link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UIGhlUTak0
hash: q� )^;v��z=�
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{"enclosures":[{"url":"https://www.youtube.com/v/0UIGhlUTak0?version=3","title":"Trump, Musk and the World War II Industrial Mobilization - Saturday Class - March 22, 2025","description":"Get our FREE newsletter at https://www.PrometheanAction.com — Members of President Trump's team, especially around Elon Musk, are reading Arthur Herman's Freedom's Forge, the story of the World War II mobilization. We will take a look at some of the lessons of that mobilization, through Lyndon LaRouche's concept of &quot;the machine tool principle.&quot;\n\nJoin us TONIGHT We will look at what can be learned from that history, was the nation takes up the challenge of fulfilling President Trump's pledge to make the U.S. a manufacturing superpower...in the near term!","type":"application/x-shockwave-flash","height":390,"width":640,"thumbnails":["https://i1.ytimg.com/vi/0UIGhlUTak0/hqdefault.jpg"]}]}


guid: yt:video:-T0jJhfyiXw
title: When the West Shows You Who They Are, Believe Them
author: ;Middle Nation
link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T0jJhfyiXw
hash: �kO�?�����l���
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{"enclosures":[{"url":"https://www.youtube.com/v/-T0jJhfyiXw?version=3","title":"When the West Shows You Who They Are, Believe Them","description":"In this video, Shahid Bolsen breaks down how Western elites and governments use familiar words—like morality, justice, and freedom—but assign them entirely different meanings than the public understands. When Western leaders call Israel’s military actions &quot;the most moral army in the world,&quot; they mean it—because their definition of &quot;morality&quot; is built on a worldview that dehumanizes Palestinians, Muslims, and non-Western peoples.\n\n🔍 Key Takeaways:\n\nDouble Meanings in Language: Terms like justice and values are redefined to justify violence against the oppressed.\n\nDehumanization: Palestinian lives are not seen as fully human—so bombing hospitals, schools, and families isn’t a &quot;crime&quot; in their eyes.\n\nHistorical Truth: Western &quot;civilization&quot; has always been built on extermination, enslavement, and subjugation—this is not hypocrisy, but doctrine.\n\nWake-Up Call: The West isn’t contradicting itself—it’s showing you exactly who they are. Believe them.\n\nThis isn’t about exposing hypocrisy—it’s about recognizing that the West’s moral framework is designed to oppress. When they label resistance as &quot;terrorism,&quot; it’s because their &quot;justice&quot; requires your submission.\n\n&quot;When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.&quot; — Maya Angelou\n\n💬 Let’s discuss in the comments: How do we challenge this system of linguistic and moral manipulation?\n\n#WesternHypocrisy #Palestine #GazaGenocide #FreePalestine","type":"application/x-shockwave-flash","height":390,"width":640,"thumbnails":["https://i2.ytimg.com/vi/-T0jJhfyiXw/hqdefault.jpg"]}]}


guid: https://risingtidefoundation.net/?p=28407
title: Trump, Tariffs and Treason: A Return to the True Economic Heritage of the USA
author: ;Matthew Ehret
hash: �e�ڙ4�R��jG:�X$
tags: #Uncategorized
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content:
[unable to retrieve full-text content]In this RTF lecture historian Sam Labrier introduces a masterclass of the American System of Political Economy from Ben Franklin and Alexander Hamilton through Henry Clay, Matthew Carey, Lincoln and the 20th century anti-imperial traditions of the USA which have driven world history in a positive direction over the past 250 years. This exercise in... <div data-sanitized-class="link-more"><a href="https://risingtidefoundation.net/2025/03/23/trump-tariffs-and-treason-a-return-to-the-true-economic-heritage-of-the-usa/">Read More</a></div>

link:
https://risingtidefoundation.net/2025/03/23/trump-tariffs-and-treason-a-return-to-the-true-economic-heritage-of-the-usa/


guid: https://risingtidefoundation.net/?p=28412
title: The Murder of JFK and Operation Gladio (f. Col. Towner Watkins)
author: ;Matthew Ehret
hash: ��Jpm� ����T�?p
tags: #Uncategorized
attributes: {"enclosures":[]}
content:
[unable to retrieve full-text content]This Sunday February 9 2025, The Rising Tide Foundation hosted Colonel Towner Watkins who delivered a lecture on the topic of the murder of JFK and the involvement of CIA/NATO/Gladio operations behind the assassination and its cover up. Follow Colonel Towner Watkins channel here: https://rumble.com/c/c-4232602 You can find Cynthia Chung’s’s work at: https://risingtidefoundation.net/ https://cynthiachung.substack.com/ Watch... <div data-sanitized-class="link-more"><a href="https://risingtidefoundation.net/2025/03/23/the-murder-of-jfk-and-operation-gladio-f-col-towner-watkins/">Read More</a></div>

link:
https://risingtidefoundation.net/2025/03/23/the-murder-of-jfk-and-operation-gladio-f-col-towner-watkins/


guid: https://thechainedmuse.substack.com/p/fret-not-with-michael-shindler-nlp
title: Fret Not with Michael Shindler - NLP # 39 (21/03/25)
author: ;David Gosselin
link: https://thechainedmuse.substack.com/p/fret-not-with-michael-shindler-nlp
hash: &�N�J����ed �2#�
content:
<div data-attrs='{"videoId":"JsIv0KO5emI","startTime":null,"endTime":null}' data-component-name="Youtube2ToDOM" data-sanitized-id="youtube2-JsIv0KO5emI" data-sanitized-class="youtube-wrap"><div data-sanitized-class="youtube-inner"><iframe src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/JsIv0KO5emI?rel=0&amp;autoplay=0&amp;showinfo=0&amp;enablejsapi=0" frameborder="0" loading="lazy" gesture="media" allow="accelerometer; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowautoplay="true" allowfullscreen="true" width="728" height="409" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin"></iframe></div></div><p>In this episode of the <em>New Lyre Podcast</em>, we speak with Washington, DC-based poet Michael Shindler. From Gabriele D’Annunzio and the poetry of pre-Fascist Italy to translating the inexplicable mysteries and beauty of existence, Michael shows us why he represents a new generation of poets and independent thinkers, reminding us to <em>Fret Not</em>! </p><div data-attrs='{"url":"https://thechainedmuse.substack.com/subscribe?","text":"Subscribe","language":"en"}' data-component-name="SubscribeWidgetToDOM" data-sanitized-class="subscription-widget-wrap-editor"><div data-sanitized-class="subscription-widget show-subscribe"><div data-sanitized-class="preamble"><p data-sanitized-class="cta-caption"><strong>The Chained Muse is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a paid subscriber to our journal.</strong></p></div><div data-sanitized-class="fake-input-wrapper"><div data-sanitized-class="fake-input"></div><div data-sanitized-class="fake-button"></div></div></div></div><p><em><strong>Michael Shindler</strong> is a writer living in Washington, DC. His work has been published in outlets including </em>The American Spectator, The American Conservative, Church Life, University Bookman<em>, </em>North American Anglican<em> and </em>New English Review<em>. His first book, </em>Fret Not<em>, a short collection of poetry, was published by Finishing Line Press in late 2024. Follow him on Twitter:<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20231206010119/https://twitter.com/MichaelShindler"> @MichaelShindler</a>. </em></p><p data-attrs='{"url":"https://thechainedmuse.substack.com/p/fret-not-with-michael-shindler-nlp?utm_source=substack&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_content=share&amp;action=share","text":"Share","action":null,"class":null}' data-component-name="ButtonCreateButton" data-sanitized-class="button-wrapper"><a href="https://thechainedmuse.substack.com/p/fret-not-with-michael-shindler-nlp?utm_source=substack&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_content=share&amp;action=share" data-sanitized-class="button primary"><span>Share</span></a></p><div data-attrs='{"id":1531118,"name":"Et In Arcadia We Go","logo_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa967587d-56b5-445d-996a-62ab53557ced_1280x1280.png","base_url":"https://michaelshindler.substack.com","hero_text":"Jackelope Territory ","author_name":"Michael Shindler","show_subscribe":true,"logo_bg_color":"#1c1d1f","language":"en"}' data-component-name="EmbeddedPublicationToDOMWithSubscribe" data-sanitized-class="embedded-publication-wrap"><div data-sanitized-class="embedded-publication show-subscribe"><a native="true" href="https://michaelshindler.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&amp;utm_campaign=publication_embed&amp;utm_medium=web" data-sanitized-class="embedded-publication-link-part"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa967587d-56b5-445d-996a-62ab53557ced_1280x1280.png" width="56" height="56" data-sanitized-class="embedded-publication-logo"><span data-sanitized-class="embedded-publication-name">Et In Arcadia We Go</span><div data-sanitized-class="embedded-publication-hero-text">Jackelope Territory </div><div data-sanitized-class="embedded-publication-author-name">By Michael Shindler</div></a></div></div><p>Essay: <a href="https://im1776.com/2023/05/09/bringing-dannunzio-to-dinner/">Bringing D'Annunzio to Dinner</a></p><p></p><div data-sanitized-class="pullquote"><p>Order Fret Not directly from <a href="https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/fret-not-by-michael-shindler/">Publisher</a> Press or <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Fret-Not-Michael-Shindler/dp/B0DJF2YQZM/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=17PY2SFAK7FGH&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.xzrFveNFWs-I5TL8OIqp7g.Xob7LAqE1gL3Oc16JWXIrG2As_SD8NfL9OmuK90PGVQ&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=fret+not+michael+schindler&amp;qid=1728876891&amp;sprefix=fret+not+michael+shindler%2Caps%2C65&amp;sr=8-1">Amazon</a>.</p></div><div data-sanitized-class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/Fret-Not-Michael-Shindler/dp/B0DJF2YQZM/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=17PY2SFAK7FGH&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.xzrFveNFWs-I5TL8OIqp7g.Xob7LAqE1gL3Oc16JWXIrG2As_SD8NfL9OmuK90PGVQ&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=fret+not+michael+schindler&amp;qid=1728876891&amp;sprefix=fret+not+michael+shindler%2Caps%2C65&amp;sr=8-1" data-component-name="Image2ToDOM" data-sanitized-class="image-link image2"><div data-sanitized-class="image2-inset"><picture><source type="image/webp"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa90e5d4b-38a6-4cc0-9906-426b934a1853_600x600.jpeg" width="728" height="728" data-attrs='{"src":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/a90e5d4b-38a6-4cc0-9906-426b934a1853_600x600.jpeg","srcNoWatermark":null,"fullscreen":null,"imageSize":null,"height":600,"width":600,"resizeWidth":728,"bytes":null,"alt":"Fret Not by Michael Shindler","title":"Fret Not by Michael Shindler","type":null,"href":"https://www.amazon.com/Fret-Not-Michael-Shindler/dp/B0DJF2YQZM/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=17PY2SFAK7FGH&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.xzrFveNFWs-I5TL8OIqp7g.Xob7LAqE1gL3Oc16JWXIrG2As_SD8NfL9OmuK90PGVQ&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=fret+not+michael+schindler&amp;qid=1728876891&amp;sprefix=fret+not+michael+shindler%2Caps%2C65&amp;sr=8-1","belowTheFold":true,"topImage":false,"internalRedirect":null,"isProcessing":false}' alt="Fret Not by Michael Shindler" title="Fret Not by Michael Shindler" loading="lazy" data-sanitized-class="sizing-normal"></picture><div></div></div></a></figure></div><div data-sanitized-class="pullquote"><p>Silent film with screenplay by Gabriele D’Annunzio</p></div><div data-attrs='{"videoId":"ZmMGw_TbiMU","startTime":null,"endTime":null}' data-component-name="Youtube2ToDOM" data-sanitized-id="youtube2-ZmMGw_TbiMU" data-sanitized-class="youtube-wrap"><div data-sanitized-class="youtube-inner"><iframe src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ZmMGw_TbiMU?rel=0&amp;autoplay=0&amp;showinfo=0&amp;enablejsapi=0" frameborder="0" loading="lazy" gesture="media" allow="accelerometer; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowautoplay="true" allowfullscreen="true" width="728" height="409" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin"></iframe></div></div><h1>Watch our latest videos</h1><div data-attrs='{"videoId":"9oSjk2_VzKM","startTime":null,"endTime":null}' data-component-name="Youtube2ToDOM" data-sanitized-id="youtube2-9oSjk2_VzKM" data-sanitized-class="youtube-wrap"><div data-sanitized-class="youtube-inner"><iframe src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/9oSjk2_VzKM?rel=0&amp;autoplay=0&amp;showinfo=0&amp;enablejsapi=0" frameborder="0" loading="lazy" gesture="media" allow="accelerometer; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowautoplay="true" allowfullscreen="true" width="728" height="409" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin"></iframe></div></div><div data-attrs='{"videoId":"7753eNplcRQ","startTime":null,"endTime":null}' data-component-name="Youtube2ToDOM" data-sanitized-id="youtube2-7753eNplcRQ" data-sanitized-class="youtube-wrap"><div data-sanitized-class="youtube-inner"><iframe src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/7753eNplcRQ?rel=0&amp;autoplay=0&amp;showinfo=0&amp;enablejsapi=0" frameborder="0" loading="lazy" gesture="media" allow="accelerometer; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowautoplay="true" allowfullscreen="true" width="728" height="409" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin"></iframe></div></div><div data-attrs='{"videoId":"QoalPLVwkxo","startTime":"0s","endTime":null}' data-component-name="Youtube2ToDOM" data-sanitized-id="youtube2-QoalPLVwkxo" data-sanitized-class="youtube-wrap"><div data-sanitized-class="youtube-inner"><iframe src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/QoalPLVwkxo?start=0s&amp;rel=0&amp;autoplay=0&amp;showinfo=0&amp;enablejsapi=0" frameborder="0" loading="lazy" gesture="media" allow="accelerometer; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowautoplay="true" allowfullscreen="true" width="728" height="409" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin"></iframe></div></div>

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guid: https://www.whitehouse.gov/?p=6731
title: SUNDAY SHOWS: Trump Administration Delivers Results
author: ;The White House
link: https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/03/sunday-shows-trump-administration-delivers-results/
hash: �r�� ��� ] ��PB4
tags: #Articles
attributes: {"enclosures":[]}
content:
<div><img src="https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/WH47-Social-Share-Card.jpg" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><p>This morning, officials from the Trump Administration took to the airwaves to update the American people on <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/03/week-nine-wins-president-trump-puts-america-first/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">another week of success</a> — from reforming education to ensuring the safety and security of the American people.</p>
<p><strong>Here’s what you missed:</strong></p>
<h4 data-sanitized-id="h-secretary-of-education-linda-mcmahon-on-state-of-the-union" data-sanitized-class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Secretary of Education Linda McMahon on State of the Union</strong></h4>
<ul data-sanitized-class="wp-block-list"><li><a href="https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/1903803492914823331">On the Trump Administration’s goal for education</a>: “Our goal is to make sure that we are providing the best education for students in our country. We cannot be last in the world in education … It is up to us and our responsibility to make sure we are giving them the best access to education.”</li>
<li><a href="https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/1903803139913896185">On local control in education</a>: “Am I, the secretary of education sitting in Washington, going to have a view into a school room where a teacher is trying to take care of a student with special needs? Or is that going to happen better at the local level?”</li>
<li><a href="https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/1903800569304658104">On school choice</a>: “[President Trump] wants to make sure that there is equal access to quality education for every student in our country — which is why he is such a proponent of school choice … He doesn’t believe that ANY child should be trapped in a failing school.”</li>
</ul><h4 data-sanitized-id="h-attorney-general-pam-bondi-on-fox-news-sunday" data-sanitized-class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Attorney General Pam Bondi on Fox News Sunday</strong></h4>
<ul data-sanitized-class="wp-block-list"><li><a href="https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/1903813318189408610">On overreach by activist judges</a>: “This is an out-of-control judge … trying to control our entire foreign policy, and he cannot do it… There are 261 reasons why Americans are safer today, and that’s because those people are now in an El Salvador prison … We are going to follow the law and we are going to protect Americans.”</li>
</ul><h4 data-sanitized-id="h-national-security-advisor-mike-waltz-on-face-the-nation" data-sanitized-class="wp-block-heading"><strong>National Security Advisor Mike Waltz on Face the Nation</strong></h4>
<ul data-sanitized-class="wp-block-list"><li><a href="https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/1898768890869555342">On strikes against Houthi terrorists in Yemen</a>: “75% of our U.S.-flagged shipping now has to go around the southern coast of Africa rather than going through the Suez Canal. Keeping the sea lanes open, keeping trade and commerce open, is a fundamental aspect of our national security. The last administration was not effective. The Trump Administration and President Trump have decided to do something much harder, much tougher.”</li>
<li><a href="https://grabien.com/file/getmedia?id=2856224&amp;key=97c74d2c46994fc28a52b02c7ade2377&amp;userid=17087">On Iran’s nuclear program</a>: “Iran has to give up its program in a way that the entire world can see. As President Trump has said, this is coming to a head. All options are on the table, and it is time for Iran to walk away completely from its desire to have a nuclear weapon.”</li>
</ul><h4 data-sanitized-id="h-special-envoy-steve-witkoff-on-fox-news-sunday" data-sanitized-class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Special Envoy Steve Witkoff on Fox News Sunday</strong></h4>
<ul data-sanitized-class="wp-block-list"><li><a href="https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/1903820461185671587">On talks to end the war in Ukraine</a>: “I’m not sure how anyone would expect an end to a conflict when you’re not communicating … [President Trump’s] philosophy of peace through strength brings people to the table to clear up misconceptions and to get peace deals done.”</li>
</ul><h4 data-sanitized-id="h-border-czar-tom-homan-on-this-week" data-sanitized-class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Border Czar Tom Homan on This Week</strong></h4>
<ul data-sanitized-class="wp-block-list"><li><a href="https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/1898732852054786191">On deporting illegal immigrant Tren de Aragua gang members</a>: “We’re actually using the laws on the books to enforce immigration law and secure the border … We’re not making this up. Everything we’ve done is based on a statute that was enacted by Congress and signed by a president.”</li>
<li><a href="https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/1903817159647564164">On illegal border crossings</a>: “We’ll use these assets as long as we can until we get to the point that we have total operational control of the border and national security threats have no avenue into this country.”</li>
</ul>


guid: https://www.mondialisation.ca/?p=5697193
title: Le symbolisme guerrier de Mark Carney
author: ;Robin Philpot
link: https://www.mondialisation.ca/le-symbolisme-guerrier-de-mark-carney/5697193
hash: B�!$/(��kŨa�
tags: #Francais @fr #Mobile
attributes: {"enclosures":[]}
content:
<p>Dans la semaine précédant le déclenchement des élections, Mark Carney a aligné une série de symboles visant à donner le ton. Les commentateurs politiques l’ont applaudi, y voyant un message dirigé contre l’administration américaine de Donald Trump du genre : …</p>


guid: https://raymcgovern.com/?p=8753
title: Debating the Level of Putin – Trump Trust
author: ;Ray McGovern
link: https://raymcgovern.com/2025/03/23/debating-the-level-of-putin-trump-trust/
hash: nOj�-69��F�C���
tags: #-
attributes: {"enclosures":[]}
content:
<p data-sanitized-class="excerpt">TRUST? Yes, the Russian’s were speaking of trust, even the morning after the Tues tel. summit. Putin’s spokesman: “Putin &amp; Trump trust and understand each other very well; there is a solid will by both presidents to restore ties.” John Helmer and I debate:</p><p data-sanitized-class="more-link-p"><a href="https://raymcgovern.com/2025/03/23/debating-the-level-of-putin-trump-trust/" data-sanitized-class="btn btn-default">Read more</a></p>


guid: https://raymcgovern.com/?p=8755
title: End Times?
author: ;Ray McGovern
link: https://raymcgovern.com/2025/03/23/end-times/
hash: ��J��R��~�M��9
tags: #-
attributes: {"enclosures":[]}
content:
<p data-sanitized-class="excerpt">END TIMES?: Bob-and-Ray II, March 18</p><p data-sanitized-class="more-link-p"><a href="https://raymcgovern.com/2025/03/23/end-times/" data-sanitized-class="btn btn-default">Read more</a></p>


guid: https://raymcgovern.com/?p=8757
title: Intelligence Roundtable Focused on Ukraine
author: ;Ray McGovern
link: https://raymcgovern.com/2025/03/23/intelligence-roundtable-focused-on-ukraine/
hash: �v�X���qT{Ue. &
tags: #-
attributes: {"enclosures":[]}
content:
<p data-sanitized-class="excerpt">Larry Johnson and I focused mostly on Ukraine during yesterday’s Intelligence Roundtable with Judge Napolitano.</p><p data-sanitized-class="more-link-p"><a href="https://raymcgovern.com/2025/03/23/intelligence-roundtable-focused-on-ukraine/" data-sanitized-class="btn btn-default">Read more</a></p>


guid: https://www.mondialisation.ca/?p=5697184
title: Infolettre: Les ruines de la démocratie…
author: ;Mondialisation.ca
link: https://www.mondialisation.ca/infolettre-les-ruines-de-la-democratie/5697184
hash: I��OOQ����� *��
tags: #Francais @fr
attributes: {"enclosures":[]}
content:
<h2><strong>Sélection d’articles :</strong></h2>
<p> </p>
<div data-sanitized-class="alignleft"><a href="https://www.mondialisation.ca/de-leurope-au-moyen-orient-les-ruines-de-la-democratie/5697170"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" src="https://www.mondialisation.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Capture-decran-le-2025-03-23-a-11.19.51-51x46.png" alt="" width="51" height="46" data-sanitized-class="attachment-featured_thumbnail size-featured_thumbnail wp-post-image alignleft"></a></div>
<p><strong data-sanitized-class="title"><a href="https://www.mondialisation.ca/de-leurope-au-moyen-orient-les-ruines-de-la-democratie/5697170">De l’Europe au Moyen-Orient les ruines de la démocratie</a></strong></p>
<p><em data-sanitized-class="date">Par <span data-sanitized-class="author"><a title="Articles par Manlio Dinucci" href="https://www.mondialisation.ca/author/manlio-dinucci">Manlio Dinucci</a></span>, 23 mars 2025</em></p>
<p>Tandis que se poursuivent les entretiens téléphoniques entre Trump et Poutine<b> </b>et les déclarations communes que la guerre doive se …</p>


title: U.S.-Ukraine talks in Riyadh &amp;#039;productive,&amp;#039; says Kyiv official
hash: �Q#x�����\�a�K
guid:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-24/news-1BZBrMAxzC8/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Politics

content:
<div readability="7.5" data-sanitized-class="cmsImage"><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-24/news-1BZBrMAxzC8/img/4849b015866742cd8382f1af7202e694/4849b015866742cd8382f1af7202e694.png" alt="A view of the Ritz-Carlton hotel where talks were held with U.S. mediation to try to reach a ceasefire in the Russia-Ukraine conflict on March 23, 2025 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. /VCG " layout="responsive"><div readability="12.5" data-sanitized-class="imageCaption">
<p>A view of the Ritz-Carlton hotel where talks were held with U.S. mediation to try to reach a ceasefire in the Russia-Ukraine conflict on March 23, 2025 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. /VCG</p>
<div readability="10" data-sanitized-class="wrapper-visible">
<p data-sanitized-class="title">A view of the Ritz-Carlton hotel where talks were held with U.S. mediation to try to reach a ceasefire in the Russia-Ukraine conflict on March 23, 2025 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. /VCG</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div readability="69" data-sanitized-class="text en">
<p>Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov announced Sunday that talks between U.S. and Ukrainian delegations have concluded in Saudi Arabia's capital Riyadh, saying the discussion was "productive and focused," with "key points including energy" addressed.</p>
<p>In a post on social media platform X, Umerov, who led the Ukrainian delegation, emphasized that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's goal is "to secure a just and lasting peace" for Ukraine and Europe at large, claiming, "We are working to make that goal a reality."</p>
<p>The Ukrainian and U.S. teams met earlier in the day in Riyadh.</p>
<p>According to the Ukrinform news agency, the Ukrainian delegation also included State Secretary of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry Oleksandr Karasevych, deputy heads of the President's Office, Pavlo Palisa and Ihor Zhovkva, as well as Deputy Energy Minister Mykola Kolisnyk.</p>
<p>The talks came almost two weeks after a previous meeting between the two sides in the Saudi port city of Jeddah saw Ukraine accept a U.S.-proposed 30-day ceasefire plan in exchange for Washington lifting its pause on military aid to and intelligence sharing with Ukraine.</p>
<p>Notably, the meeting precedes talks between U.S. and Russian delegations scheduled for Monday. Media reported late Sunday that the Russian delegation has arrived in Riyadh. The delegation includes Grigory Karasin, chairman of the committee on international affairs in Russia's upper house, and Sergey Beseda, adviser to the head of Russia's Federal Security Service, Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov said earlier.</p>
</div>
<p>Source(s): Xinhua News Agency</p>

link:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-24/news-1BZBrMAxzC8/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Politics

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title: Wang Yi meets Japan-China friendship groups to enhance ties
hash: Kx�9$��d ��PV�
guid:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-24/Wang-Yi-meets-Japan-China-friendship-groups-to-enhance-ties-1BZDYhXKKkg/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Politics

content:
<div><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-24/Wang-Yi-meets-Japan-China-friendship-groups-to-enhance-ties-1BZDYhXKKkg/img/85a4b05484284d7a8784f8600ea48591/85a4b05484284d7a8784f8600ea48591-250.png" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><p>Wang Yi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission, on Sunday met with representatives from seven Japan-China friendship groups, highlighting the importance of bilateral cooperation amid global uncertainties.</p>
<p>Noting the increasing instability in the international situation, Wang emphasized that China is determined to shoulder its responsibilities as a major power, work together with other nations to safeguard peace and security in Asia, and promote human development and progress.</p>
<p>As close neighbors and two major global economies, China and Japan must reassess the value of their relationship, reaffirm the significance of their friendship, strengthen mutually beneficial cooperation, and consolidate the strength of friendly people-to-people ties to promote the sustained, healthy, and stable development of China-Japan relations, Wang said.</p>
<p>While acknowledging the long-term dedication of the seven friendship groups in advancing bilateral friendship, Wang urged them to press forward in the direction of peaceful and friendly cooperation to make new contributions to safeguarding the fundamental interests of both peoples.</p>
<p>He outlined three key areas for strengthening ties, including maintaining the political foundation, enhancing dialogue and exchanges across various sectors, and cultivating successors for China-Japan friendship.</p>
<p>The China-Japan Joint Statement must be strictly observed, with particular emphasis on properly handling historical issues and the Taiwan question, and resisting any distortions, falsifications, or actions that undermine the foundation, Wang stressed.</p>
<p>He also called for encouraging the younger generation to participate actively in friendship initiatives, ensuring the legacy of bilateral cooperation is carried forward.</p>
<p>Attending the meeting were Hiroshi Moriyama, chairman of the Japan-China Friendship Parliamentarians' Union and secretary-general of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, President of the Japanese Association for the Promotion of International Trade Yohei Kono, as well as leaders of other friendship groups.</p>
<p>Representatives from the groups emphasized the critical importance of China-Japan friendship for both nations and their people, pledging efforts to continue fostering exchanges at local and youth levels and further strengthen the bond between the people of China and Japan.</p>

link:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-24/Wang-Yi-meets-Japan-China-friendship-groups-to-enhance-ties-1BZDYhXKKkg/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Politics

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guid: yt:video:kkp3po4QJMM
title: Your so-called civilization has duped you
author: ;Middle Nation
link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkp3po4QJMM
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title: South Korean PM reinstated as constitutional court rejects impeachment
hash: �©�F��ɰw��
guid:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-24/news-1BZKNuYumzu/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Politics

content:
<div readability="8" data-sanitized-class="cmsImage"><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-24/news-1BZKNuYumzu/img/b64fdafcd2894ba9914534e903df2914/b64fdafcd2894ba9914534e903df2914.png" alt="South Korean Prime Minister Han Duck-soo speaks to the media as he arrives at the Government Complex in Seoul, South Korea, March 24, 2025. /VCG" layout="responsive"><div readability="14" data-sanitized-class="imageCaption">
<p>South Korean Prime Minister Han Duck-soo speaks to the media as he arrives at the Government Complex in Seoul, South Korea, March 24, 2025. /VCG</p>
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<p data-sanitized-class="title">South Korean Prime Minister Han Duck-soo speaks to the media as he arrives at the Government Complex in Seoul, South Korea, March 24, 2025. /VCG</p>
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<p>South Korea's Constitutional Court ruled on Monday to strike down the impeachment motion against Prime Minister Han Duck-soo and restore his powers.</p>
<p>Han has already been reinstated as prime minister and acting president, as the ruling took immediate effect.</p>
<p>Of eight justices on the nine-member bench, five rejected the motion while one upheld it. The remaining two were in favor of dismissal.</p>
<p>The impeachment motion against Han was passed by the opposition-controlled National Assembly on December 27 last year following the impeachment of President Yoon Suk-yeol on December 14 over his botched martial law imposition.</p>
<p>Choi Sang-mok, the economy and finance minister who doubles as deputy prime minister for economic affairs, became acting president in December last year after the impeachments of both president and prime minister.</p>
<p>Despite confirmation that Han's impeachment process was legitimate, the court said neither evidence nor objective materials identified his involvement in impeached President Yoon Suk-yeol's martial law imposition and insurrection.</p>
<p>The court said Han's refusal to appoint constitutional court justices was unconstitutional, but it noted that evidence and objective materials failed to identify an intent to neutralize the ongoing deliberation on Yoon's impeachment.</p>
<p>Yoon declared emergency martial law on the night of December 3, but it was revoked by the National Assembly hours later.</p>
<p>(With input from agencies)</p>
</div>

link:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-24/news-1BZKNuYumzu/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Politics

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guid: yt:video:5Z6m63LLGRk
title: Palestinians Didn't Choose The Religion Of Their Oppressors
author: ;Caitlin Johnstone
link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z6m63LLGRk
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guid: https://medium.com/p/1ce4b4f14ba2
title: Palestinians Didn’t Choose The Religion Of Their Oppressors
author: ;Caitlin Johnstone
hash: e� ��\A%*Y�4�
tags: #gaza #israel #usa #israel-palestine-conflict #palestine
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<figure><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*r0p31d6OVwtI3schLXxSIQ.png"></figure><h4><strong>Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix</strong></h4><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z6m63LLGRk"><em>Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley)</em></a>:</p><iframe src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2F5Z6m63LLGRk%3Ffeature%3Doembed&amp;display_name=YouTube&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D5Z6m63LLGRk&amp;image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2F5Z6m63LLGRk%2Fhqdefault.jpg&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=youtube" width="854" height="480" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" allow="accelerometer; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin"><a href="https://medium.com/media/6499c9bc461c088330ccfb66e6c696b0/href">https://medium.com/media/6499c9bc461c088330ccfb66e6c696b0/href</a></iframe><p>❖</p><p>One of the dumbest narratives we’re asked to swallow about Palestinians is that they are guilty of anti-Jewish prejudice which makes them comparable to Nazis. Palestinians didn’t choose the religion of their oppressors; any hatred they have toward Israelis is because Israelis are the ones oppressing and murdering them, not because of their religion. Expecting Palestinians not to hate the oppressors who hate them just because those oppressors happen to be Jewish is shitbrained thinking.</p><p>Every so often you’ll see the IDF plant a copy of Mein Kampf in a building in Gaza and then wave it around as though it would somehow justify what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, and it’s just so stupid. The reason we’ve come to abhor hatred toward Jews in the west is because we know the west has an extensive history of committing atrocities against Jewish people because of their religion.</p><p>Palestinians harbor no such prejudice and are guilty of no such crimes. Any violence they’ve inflicted upon Israelis has been in an effort to keep their land and resist tyrannical oppression, not because they have some weird European Hitlerite hatred toward Jews. Anytime you hear Palestinians talk about “the Jews” they’re always talking solely and exclusively about their oppressors in the context of the occupation; they’re not talking about some Jewish guy in Canada.</p><p>Palestinians would hate their oppressors whether the oppression was being inflicted by Hindus, Buddhists or Catholics. That’s normal. That’s how people’s minds and emotions work; we hate people who hate us, and we hate people who abuse us. Any failure to understand this is a failure to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and imagine what it would be like to live in their situation. It’s a sign that you lack normal human empathy.</p><p>❖</p><p>The world needs Israel. Without Israel where would sexual predators go for safety and protection? Where would we get our surveillance technology? Who would use human targets to field test new kinds of murder robots, military explosives and AI systems used to kill entire families?</p><p>❖</p><iframe src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?type=text%2Fhtml&amp;key=a19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07&amp;schema=twitter&amp;url=https%3A//x.com/caitoz/status/1903250982538187176&amp;image=" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" allow="accelerometer; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin"><a href="https://medium.com/media/89c1b380c656982b802a77dacc867544/href">https://medium.com/media/89c1b380c656982b802a77dacc867544/href</a></iframe><p>❖</p><p>Critics of Israel should familiarize themselves with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor">Hitchens’s razor</a>: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”</p><p>Whether it’s beheaded babies, mass rapes, Hamas bases in hospitals, or Hamas killing the Bibas kids with their bare hands, if it’s being asserted without evidence, it can be immediately dismissed.</p><p>❖</p><p>It is a well-documented fact that Israel and its supporters use <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lSjXhMUVKE">lobbying</a>, <a href="https://x.com/mtracey/status/1837886438903357920">campaign funding</a> and <a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2024/11/05/israel-blackmail-the-presidents/">blackmail</a> to exert influence over western nations. It is also a fact that the US empire has the power to stop Israel from doing this at any time, but chooses not to. The empire managers in the official elected government don’t do anything to stop these influence operations, nor do the empire managers in the far more powerful unelected national security state. Does anyone really believe Israel would still be exerting such massive influence over the US government if the CIA determined that this was impeding their agendas of global domination?</p><p>It follows that the Zionist influence operations exist because the empire wants them to. The artificially manufactured support for Israel has been deemed a necessary evil to help ensure constant violence, division and instability in the middle east and justify endless military presence in a crucial geostrategic region which, if left to its own devices, might unite and conduct its affairs in a way that is disadvantageous to western interests.</p><p>There are many other nations in the middle east who are aligned with the US and are used to advance its interests in the region, but none of them are fully dependent on support from the US government for their continued existence. It’s a completely artificial construct that was inserted into the middle east like a glass shard into a foot, and its continued existence benefits both the settler colonialists who live there and the long-term hegemonic interests of the US-centralized empire.</p><p>I say all this to point out that the west isn’t some passive innocent victim of manipulations by the big mean tyrant Israel. It is just as guilty of Israel’s crimes as Israel itself, because those crimes are inseparable from the western empire as a whole. You see some on the right trying to argue that the west would be this wonderful virtuous place if not for the malign influence of those nasty Jews, but this narrative is refuted by the entire historical existence of the western world. The west has always been a warmongering, genocidal civilization driven by conquest and domination, and the western settler-colonialist project of Israel is just one more manifestation of the dystopia we are living in.</p><p>❖</p><iframe src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?type=text%2Fhtml&amp;key=a19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07&amp;schema=twitter&amp;url=https%3A//x.com/caitoz/status/1903215993645830509&amp;image=" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" allow="accelerometer; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin"><a href="https://medium.com/media/95652b1213d9372ddbfe8cb86de39753/href">https://medium.com/media/95652b1213d9372ddbfe8cb86de39753/href</a></iframe><p>❖</p><p>Defending Trump’s warmongering in the middle east by babbling about his peacemaking efforts in Ukraine is the same as saying it’s okay for him to torch Gaza because he’s not bombing Argentina. It’s nonsensical. You don’t negate your crimes by being less criminal somewhere else.</p><p>❖</p><p>Whenever I criticize Trump’s actions in the middle east I’ll get some Democrat going “I BET YOU WISH YOU’D SUPPORTED KAMALA NOW, HUH?”</p><p>That’s not what this is, idiots. I did this exact same commentary throughout the Biden administration, because Biden is also evil. I am simply criticizing the world’s most murderous and destructive power structure and whatever empire managers happen to be sitting at the front desk while it happens. This is just what it looks like when you apply scrutiny to the empire without being a partisan hack.</p><p>❖</p><p>Bernie Sanders has been such a worthless empire simp I sometimes wonder why the Democratic Party establishment even bothered sabotaging his primary campaigns. They would have gotten another Obama, selling people false hope while advancing the interests of oligarchy and empire.</p><p>❖</p><p>Our species evolved these brains of unprecedented sophistication only to use them to destroy our biosphere, invent new ways to blow each other up, and make ourselves miserable with our own thoughts.</p><p>❖</p><p>It’s not about hostages. It’s not about Hamas. It’s not about terrorism. Those aren’t the reasons, they’re the excuses. The excuses to expel Palestinians and turn more Palestinian land into Israeli land. That’s all this has ever been about. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.</p><p>__________________</p><p><em>My work is </em><a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/05/24/my-experiments-with-hacking-capitalism/"><em>entirely reader-supported</em></a><em>, so if you enjoyed this piece </em><a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/about"><em>here are some options</em></a><em> where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. </em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU8Yu4WZJ11Il3TZmNiMUFQ?sub_confirmation=1"><em>Go here</em></a><em> to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on </em><a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/5336DPNn19xNci8UNOkAT4"><em>Spotify</em></a><em>, </em><a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/going-rogue-with-caitlin-johnstone/id1333112416"><em>Apple Podcasts</em></a><em>, </em><a href="https://soundcloud.com/going_rogue"><em>Soundcloud</em></a><em> or </em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU8Yu4WZJ11Il3TZmNiMUFQ"><em>YouTube</em></a><em>. </em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CF5YLBGD"><em>Go here</em></a><em> to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is </em><a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/reminder-all-my-work-may-be-freely"><em>free to bootleg and use</em></a><em> in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list </em><a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/"><em>on Substack</em></a><em>, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.</em></p><figure><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/417/0*wec7VK5r2dJlq8nK.jpeg"></figure><p>Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2</p><p>Featured image via Adobe Stock.</p><img src="https://medium.com/_/stat?event=post.clientViewed&amp;referrerSource=full_rss&amp;postId=1ce4b4f14ba2" width="1" height="1" alt="">

link:
https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/palestinians-didnt-choose-the-religion-of-their-oppressors-1ce4b4f14ba2?source=rss-c40ec5bece47------2


guid: https://karlof1.substack.com/p/this-is-china-discusses-feudalism
title: This is China Discusses Feudalism &amp; Technofeudalism
author: ;Karl Sanchez
link: https://karlof1.substack.com/p/this-is-china-discusses-feudalism
hash: ����`u��d-�j �
content:
<h3 data-sanitized-class="subtitle">Zhang Weiwei, Fan Yongpeng and TV Hostess/Moderator</h3><div dir="auto" data-sanitized-class="body markup">
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<p>This is China TV Discussion Program #271 aired on 17 February 2025</p>
<p><span>I’ve previously provided several translations of this program featuring outstanding Chinese scholar Zhang Weiwei and probably ought to do more of them as they offer insights into China’s view of Western aspects, in this case technofeudalism and feudalism. The televised</span> <a href="https://www.guancha.cn/ZhangWeiWei/2025_02_23_766046_s.shtml" rel>program, “</a><span>The Feudal Nature of the Western System</span><strong>,”</strong> <span>lasts an hour that’s divided into three sections: discussion by the academics, roundtable discussion with the moderator, then some Q&amp;A from the audience. There are several other recent statements of importance made by the Chinese government that have seen no reproduction in the West I hope to translate and publish during the coming week so readers can obtain better insight into China’s system. The transcript begins with the hostess providing an introduction to the subject matter:</span></p>
<blockquote>
<p>"OpenAI and Nvidia hyped chips so expensive, and the United States originally wanted to monopolize it, and then we saw how DeepSeek broke the monopoly, which is very feudal."</p>
<p>"Feudalism in Western society is a systemic phenomenon, and it is by no means just the result of the development of technology and platform capital."</p>
<p><span>Not long ago, Professor Yannis Varoufakis, a left-wing scholar in Europe and former Minister of Finance of Greece, made the point that capitalism is declining and being replaced by another politically regressive form of "techno-feudalism". In Dragon TV's "This is China" program broadcast on February 17, Professor Zhang Weiwei, Dean of the Institute of China Studies at Fudan University, and Professor Fan Yongpeng, Vice Dean of the Institute of China Studies at Fudan University, discussed</span> <em><strong>the relationship between capitalism and feudalism</strong></em><span>.</span></p>
<p><strong>Fan Yongpeng:</strong></p>
<p><span>In September 2024, Prof. Zhang invited Yanis Varoufakis, a Greek economist and former Minister of Finance, to the Institute of China Studies at Fudan University as a visiting scholar. Yannis was an influential new intellectual,</span> <em><strong>whose main idea was that capitalism was dead; With the development of new technologies and industries, the West has entered the stage of "technological feudalism"</strong></em><span>.</span></p>
<p>Yannis refers to platform capital such as e-commerce and social media as "cloud capital". He believes that the relationship between platform capital and labor is no longer the free [non-slave] wage labor of the classic capitalist stage, and that platform labor is becoming more and more like a kind of "cloud serf".</p>
<p><em><strong>At the same time, those who hold these "cloud capitals" have the power to circumvent the market. They produce nothing, but they can charge producers three to four percent of the rent, which Yannis calls "cloud rent". Different platforms are isolated from each other and have strict barriers, similar to the feudal state of feudal society, which he called "cloud territory".</strong></em></p>
<p><span>And the power of the state, which used to be able to provide checks and balances on the power of capital, is becoming weaker and weaker.</span> <em><strong>Because these platforms are able to control not only people's lives, but also people's thoughts and speech, and even votes, it is also able to control political power.</strong></em></p>
<p><span>Platform capitalists like Mark Zuckerberg, the metaverse he created is to build an independent parallel world to compete with real countries.</span> <em><strong>Then in their own territory, "cloud capital" is the feudal prince who is in charge of everything.</strong></em></p>
<p><span>So Yannis thinks that capitalism is dead, but instead of being replaced by communism,</span> <em><strong>it is a return to feudalism.</strong></em> <span>As the American left-wing scholar</span> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodi_Dean" rel>Jodi Dean</a> <span>put it: "Capitalism is at a crossroads: should it choose communism or neo-feudalism?" The answer of these left-wing scholars is neofeudalism.</span></p>
<p>In addition to Yanis, many left-wing intellectuals in the West have been keen to discuss this topic in recent years. For example, the Slovenian writer Zizek and the French scholar Dylan are both talking about the feudalization of capitalism.</p>
<p>There are some right-wing intellectuals who have come to the same end as them. Although they also have a nostalgic rather than critical attitude towards old-fashioned capitalism, they also see the phenomenon of capitalism being feudalized.</p>
<p><span>In fact, more than 10 years ago, many scholars were keenly aware of this problem, such as Francis Fukuyama, an American ideological apologist, and Thomas Piketty, a French economist, who saw the hereditary trend of wealth and power in Western society from different standpoints. In response to Trump's recent re-election, Paul Krugman also wrote: "</span><em><strong>Crony capitalism is sweeping the United States</strong></em><span>.”</span></p>
<p><span>It is no coincidence that these people are concerned about the problem of neo-feudalism.</span> <em><strong>When we look back at the development of capitalism in the West in the past two decades, we can indeed see that the tendency of feudalism in all aspects is far beyond the realization of these intellectuals.</strong></em></p>
<p>It is easy to spot a series of signs of capitalist degradation:</p>
<p>First, the revival of feudal theocracy. In recent years, religion has seen a rise in influence on political power, from Trump and American conservatism to the European right. Not to mention the Middle East, Turkey, India, and other countries, all of which are re-religious to some extent.</p>
<p><span>Second, the power of the</span> <a href="https://koreaexpose.com/welcome-to-a-feudal-aristocracy-of-the-orient/" rel>feudal</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol" rel>chaebol</a> <span>rose. In the past, we may not have been unfamiliar with the chaebols in Japan and South Korea,</span> <em><strong>but today we find that the chaebol forces in Europe and the United States have also begun to come to the fore and directly participate in politics.</strong></em></p>
<p><em><strong>Third, the feudal warlords reappeared. The phenomenon of private or group armed forces, which seems to be alien to the modern state, is re-entering our field of vision.</strong></em> <span>In recent years, there have been signs of military interference in politics in the United States, France, and Germany, and the armed forces of the right and left wings of the civilian population have also begun to appear. The "color revolutions" promoted by the West have also led to the disintegration of many relatively mature countries such as Libya and Syria, leading to the emergence of various warlords.</span></p>
<p><span>Fourth, it is difficult to return to the feudal hereditary system. From Trump's cronyism, Biden's pardon for his son and some criminal politicians, to the frequent revelations in the United States in recent years that congressmen or public officials let their relatives take over and confer public office on the country.</span> <em><strong>These cases show that political power in the United States has become seriously hereditary.</strong></em> <span>Some studies have found that at the level of Congress alone, there are already more than 700 political warlords in the United States.</span></p>
<p><span>Fifth, the feudal manor reappeared. Not only the data and platform estates pointed out by scholars such as Yannis, but also</span> <em><strong>traditional landed estates never became extinct</strong></em><span>. Whether it is the aristocratic estate of Britain or the big landlords behind these cities in the United States, these</span> <em><strong>Western cities that seem to be very modern on the surface have always had a feudal property structure behind them.</strong></em></p>
<p>In addition to these "old money," the "new money" created by the information industry has also begun to buy land in realty. Bill Gates and others were once blown into the sky as innovative entrepreneurs, but today they have all begun to become big landowners in the United States.</p>
<p><em><strong>Therefore, we can see that the feudalization of Western society is a systemic phenomenon, and it is by no means the result of the development of technology and platform capital.</strong></em></p>
<p>Although the critical consciousness of Western scholars such as Yannis is very valuable, they still have not jumped out of the prison of capitalist discourse.</p>
<p>Their critique of capitalism is mainly that the rise of platform capital has led to the failure of the market economy, the decline of free wage labor, and the challenge of new technologies to representative elections. But I think this kind of criticism is still too superficial, and there are many problems with it, so I will briefly mention a few points.</p>
<p><span>First, the demise of the market and profits, as they point out,</span> <em><strong>does not necessarily mean the demise of capitalism, but only exposes the backwardness and barbarism inherent in capitalism itself</strong></em><span>. It is true that we all know that capitalism was built in the struggle against feudalism and that the main task of the bourgeois revolution was to overthrow feudalism. [Something seldom taught in the West.]</span></p>
<p><span>In 1843, Marx proposed a series of important concepts, including political emancipation, civil society, and so on. What he meant was that</span> <em><strong>one of the characteristics of feudal society was that people's economic status and political status were linked.</strong></em> <span>For example, if you are a big landlord or a big nobleman, you will enjoy the corresponding feudal privileges; And if you don't have land, you can only go and be a serf, a vassal.</span></p>
<p><span>One of the advances of capitalism is political emancipation, the decoupling of people's economic status from their political status, turning them into modern individuals, and achieving basic political equality.</span> <em><strong>In the future, economic inequality and the real emancipation of man will be solved by the socialist revolution, according to Marx.</strong></em></p>
<p><em><strong>But the problem is that capitalism is not completely anti-feudal.</strong></em> <span>Capitalism is exploited by the market economy and free wage labour, which is an economic exploitation, but that does not mean that it is not supra-economically exploitative.</span> <em><strong>Capitalism was born out of feudalism, and it itself dragged a long feudal tail</strong></em><span>.</span></p>
<p>From the long-standing slave labor in Europe, the white indentured slavery and black slavery in North America, to the child labor and unequal pay for equal work that are still rampant in the United States today; From the genocide and brutal exploitation of other regions by Western colonialism, to the plundering of India and the Qing Dynasty, to the global bloodsucking and world war of imperialism, to the subversion, resource grabbing and oil theft by the United States in recent years.</p>
<p><em><strong>When capitalism is able to kill people and oversell goods and engage in super-economic exploitation, it will never be polite. Only if it cannot engage in supra-economic exploitation, will it patiently sit down and engage in economic exploitation.</strong></em></p>
<p><span>From this point of view,</span> <em><strong>the retrogression of capitalism today, which runs counter to the principles of market economy and profit, is not a new thing at all, but a form of capitalism itself.</strong></em></p>
<p><em><strong>The greatest significance of China's rise in the world is to make it impossible for Western capitalism to plunder and exploit the world unscrupulously, so capitalism has been beaten back to its original form.</strong></em></p>
<p>Second, these Western scholars have not really touched on the problems of the Western system itself. When we look at these intellectuals, they basically don't talk about the problems of liberal democracy in the United States or the representative system in the West.</p>
<p><em><strong>In their view, the market economy is still healthy, and the representative system is democratic. Therefore, their criticism of neo-feudalism still contains a defense of capitalism to a certain extent.</strong></em></p>
<p><span>But what they don't see or don't want to talk about is that Western representative system itself is not so modern,</span> <em><strong>it is itself a kind of feudal legacy.</strong></em> <span>In the history of the ancient West, the system that can be called democracy is not based on elections, but on voting, drawing lots, and so on.</span></p>
<p><em><strong>Election is a typical institutional form of feudal aristocratic society.</strong></em> <span>Elections in the Catholic Church, elections in the Holy Roman Empire, aristocratic democracy in the Kingdom of Poland, and parliamentary systems in England</span> <em><strong>are all forms of aristocratic control and distribution of power.</strong></em></p>
<p><span>In modern times, the suffrage has proliferated, and the representative system has also taken on a false democratic veneer, but</span> <em><strong>it is still essentially an aristocratic system, except that the feudal aristocracy has been replaced by the commercial aristocracy, then the industrial aristocracy, then the monopoly bourgeois aristocracy, and gradually replaced by the Jewish and financial bourgeoisie after World War II.</strong></em></p>
<p><span>The story that is happening in the United States today is a new wave of replacement movement launched by the upstarts of technology and platform capital, and</span> <em><strong>it is always the capitalist aristocracy that holds the power.</strong></em></p>
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<p>The rise of the new right in Silicon Valley, represented by Musk, is the embodiment of the new aristocracy of technology and platforms.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><span>As the British thinker Lasky put it, the so-called representative system is a system in which different types of property rights share political power in proportion.</span> <em><strong>Western representative system is essentially a tool for the direct transformation of property power into political power.</strong></em></p>
<p><span>Then, when Western capitalism begins to stagnate,</span> <em><strong>the progressive nature of the capitalists begins to disappear, and the social differentiation between the rich and the poor and the accumulation of wealth have a hereditary tendency, it will inevitably bring about the hereditary transfer of power.</strong></em> <span>From hereditary property to hereditary power,</span> <em><strong>it's no wonder that today the West looks more and more like a feudal society.</strong></em></p>
<p>How to solve these problems? Yanis: They mentioned the idea of either techno-socialism or techno-communism. But as European left-wing scholars, their thinking is very limited and they lack intuitive experience of how socialism works.</p>
<p><em><strong>For example, a big capital platform like Mark Zuckerberg can only be invited by Congress in the United States to ask him for questioning, while in China we can regulate the development of platform capital through regulation, punishment, legislation, etc.</strong></em></p>
<p><span>The Western Left cannot jump out of the ideological routine of representative government, but we have actually explored a successful path.</span> <em><strong>We have played a fundamental role by relying on the vanguard political party, the public ownership system, the people's political power, and the people's army.</strong></em></p>
<p><span>Of course,</span> <em><strong>China is also facing many new challenges today, and it also needs to be reformed,</strong></em> <span>but my view is by no means the dogmatic liberalization or the reform in the direction of opening up, as advocated by some scholars or social figures today.</span></p>
<p><span>Third, the meaning of feudalism itself is complex. From the perspective of the political system alone, one of the characteristics of feudalism is the separation of local powers.</span> <em><strong>Western culture is particularly fond of emphasizing autonomy, which is itself part of the feudal tradition.</strong></em></p>
<p>It is very difficult for human beings to combine small societies into large societies and form a unified economic and political body, and it has extremely high requirements for institutions and cultures.</p>
<p><span>It was only from the Warring States Period that China gradually got out of the feudal state of political power after the unification of the Qin Dynasty, and after more than 2,000 years of practice of great unification, we still have to find a balance between national unification and local autonomy today.</span> <em><strong>But it is important that we must not allow the particular to prevail over the unity, and not to allow the local to jeopardize the wholeness.</strong></em></p>
<p><span>On the contrary,</span> <em><strong>in the history of the West, it is very lacking in unified political experience,</strong></em> <span>so in the process of modern anti-feudalism, except for some small countries in Europe that once established a relatively unified political entity, the political construction of slightly larger countries has never been able to break through this "ceiling".</span></p>
<p><span>For example, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States have not been able to achieve real integration and unification, and</span> <em><strong>the so-called federalism is a typical semi-finished product with feudal characteristics.</strong></em> <span>And the EU is an institutional experiment that has fallen into crisis before it is completed.</span></p>
<p><span>Therefore, when the development of capitalist modernization in the West came to a standstill and the construction of the state came to an end, these feudal factors began to rise, dissolving the unified country and re-entering the state of separation of various local and special forces.</span> <em><strong>The technological feudal separation, cloud separation, and data manor seen by Yannis and other scholars are just a special manifestation of this feudal political structure.</strong></em></p>
<p><span>There are so many other aspects that I can't go into them all. In short, the thinking and criticism of Western scholars represented by Yannis are very enlightening, but they are limited by the limitations of European and American civilization itself.</span> <em><strong>They have failed to see the whole picture of the problem</strong></em><span>, nor have they been able to thoroughly theorize, and it is difficult for them to really come up with effective solutions.</span></p>
<p>Thus, in the end, it will either degenerate into a pessimistic wail about the historical regression of capitalism, or it will fall into an idealistic utopia about the future direction.</p>
<p>For example, their proposed plan for the new feudalism and the inheritance of wealth and power is either to collect taxes without pain or itching; but the problem is that in a country ruled by capital, you collect taxes from capital. Isn't this just to seek skin with the tiger?</p>
<p><span>Either talk about communism in vain, including the Jodi Dean just mentioned, who is also talking about the vanguard party, talking about communism.</span> <em><strong>The problem is that in the bastions of capitalism and feudalism, communism does not grow automatically</strong></em><span>.</span></p>
<p>I really hope that these thinkers will put forward better theories, more powerful words, and be more proactive in helping the people of the world to oppose the oppression of capitalism and the restoration of feudalism, so as to build a better and more progressive modern world.</p>
<p>Thank you.</p>
<p><strong>【Roundtable Discussion】</strong></p>
<p><strong>Moderator:</strong> <span>We are talking about capitalism and feudalism today, and let's start with the word feudalism. Everyone may have learned about feudalism, feudalism, etc. when they studied politics in middle school, but it may not be so easy to learn and understand, especially it is difficult to explain this concept clearly in everyday language. So when we discuss some of the drawbacks of capitalism, let's start with the concept of feudalism, Mr. Zhang.</span></p>
<p><strong>Zhang Weiwei:</strong> <span>If we talk about the feudal system, perhaps one is in a narrow sense and the other is in a broad sense.</span></p>
<p>In a narrow sense, for example, the Zhou Dynasty divided the feudal system, and the land was distributed to their relatives, to their generals, and so on, and then such a system began to form. Europe was a feudal society for a long time throughout the Middle Ages. It is characterized by the fact that people, peasants or serfs are dependent on the land and have no freedom. But in China, since the Qin and Han dynasties, this system has collapsed.</p>
<p>But there is a more general sense, maybe the land system has changed, but many traditional habits, such as hereditary and nepotism, which we talk about, are part of feudalism.</p>
<p><strong>Fan Yongpeng:</strong> <span>The concept of feudalism is actually a very interesting concept. There is a very central debate topic in China's more than 2,000-year political history, that is, is it better to be feudal or county-wise?</span></p>
<p>Feudalism is the system of the Western Zhou Dynasty mentioned by Mr. Zhang, and the counties are the system of the Qin Dynasty, and the Qin system completely overthrew feudalism. The Qin Dynasty was very unfortunate and short-lived, so later generations have been arguing: is it better to make the Qin system or the Zhou system?</p>
<p>For example, in the early years of the Western Han Dynasty, it was thought that it was necessary to divide the feudals, and then Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty began to engage in integration again, and then to the Jin Dynasty, the local feudal forces began to rise again, and to the Sui and Tang Dynasties, they began to unify again, and they have been swaying repeatedly.</p>
<p>From the Song Dynasty to the Ming and Qing dynasties, there was also a certain degree of abandonment of local governance by the central government in China, called "the imperial power does not go down to the county", so there was a very deep-rooted feudal structure in the local structure, that is, the rule of the landlords over the peasants. But at the national level, it is not entirely feudal, there are unified laws and unified political systems.</p>
<p>This concept has been debated, and Chairman Mao and Guo Moruo have another debate. Liu Zongyuan in the Tang Dynasty was on the side of the county system, and Zhang Shizhao in the late Qing Dynasty wrote a book called "Liu Wen Instructions". Chairman Mao thought it was very good after reading it, and then debated with Guo Moruo, and wrote a poem called "Hundreds of generations are all practicing Qin politics and law", that is, the county system has its advantages.</p>
<p>But the word feudalism is not exactly the same as feudalism in the West, especially the feudalism proposed by Marxism. As Mr. Zhang said, from the disintegration of the Roman Empire to the time before modernization, Europe was feudal at this stage, and it was not exactly the same.</p>
<p>This word was translated by our great translator Yan Fu. Yan Fu himself talked very vividly in the book, he said that the word feudalism can be translated into feudal, he took the pen, threw the pen on the ground several times, and then circled around the room, and finally there was no way, or translated into feudal, so it brought a certain degree of confusion.</p>
<p><span>However, China's traditional feudalism and European feudalism actually have something in common, and Mr. Zhang just talked about it, and it has several characteristics: first,</span> <em><strong>it has a certain kind of large land, and then exploits it through land rent and labor</strong></em><span>, rather than through free labor and wages.</span></p>
<p><span>Second,</span> <em><strong>it exists in the relationship of human dependence</strong></em><span>. For example, I am a serf, and I am attached to a landlord; Or I am a nobleman and I am attached to my lord. To put it bluntly, this view of personal dependence means that people are not free, which is different from the concept in our society today. I go out into society, I am an independent individual, I am not attached to anyone.</span></p>
<p><em><strong>The third characteristic is the decentralization of political power, that is, the central government cannot centralize power,</strong></em> <span>and various separatist forces are formed at the local level, and the relationship between them and the central government is contractual, layer by layer, and power is divided through contracts. As soon as we unify these three characteristics, we will find that Chinese and Western feudalism actually have commonalities.</span></p>
<p><span>Since the end of the</span> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qing_dynasty" rel>Qing Dynasty</a><span>, with the decline of central power, China's local feudalism has become the main contradiction in Chinese society, coupled with the entry of imperialism, so at the Second National Congress of the Communist Party of China [1922], the party clearly put forward the slogan of "</span><em><strong>anti-imperialist and anti-feudal</strong></em><span>" in the program, and this diagnosis is very accurate. Under its guidance, the Chinese revolution has succeeded and construction has also succeeded. Therefore, the Chinese Communist Party's understanding of feudalism is correct.</span></p>
<p><strong>Moderator:</strong> <span>Just now you said that feudalism has many directions, dimensions, and characteristics. To put it simply, it may be anti-dependency, which is first of all a very important core content of anti-feudalism, and from this point of view, everyone may understand it at once.</span></p>
<p><strong>Zhang Weiwei:</strong> <em><strong>When we discuss issues with Western scholars, we often say that there has been no real freedom in European society for thousands of years, and once you have freedom, you cherish it very much, and you talk about freedom every day, because you have too little freedom in history.</strong></em></p>
<p><strong>Fan Yongpeng:</strong> <span>Let me add to Mr. Zhang's opinion. There is a very famous Marxist historian in the West, named</span> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Anderson" rel>Perry Anderson</a><span>. He said why do we Westerners attach so much importance to freedom? He said that it is only when you are faced with unfreedom that you become aware of the problem of freedom.</span></p>
<p>He said that Europeans valued freedom because slavery existed throughout European history. When you're a free man, as a nobleman, like a citizen of Greece, and you look at a large number of slaves laboring for you, you think I'm free.</p>
<p>In China, after the Western Zhou Dynasty, we did not have this kind of large-scale slavery, so the Chinese did not have this very strong motivation to speak of freedom. If you look at the novels in Chinese history, the texts of the Tang Dynasty, the novels of the Ming and Qing dynasties, a Chinese scholar, a farmer, and a businessman can travel all over the world, row a small boat along the Beijing-Hangzhou Canal to Beijing, run to Nanjing, and he is free.</p>
<p><em><strong>So Chinese, on the contrary, will feel that freedom is not a big deal. The freedom we Chinese talk about is a higher level, that is, Zhuangzi, I am free, I am careless, this is called freedom.</strong></em></p>
<p><strong>Moderator:</strong> <span>Let's talk about feudalism again. Because he is talking about the feudal nature of capitalism now, specific to the level of life, if this feudal nature still exists, what is its harm to a country and this society?</span></p>
<p><strong>Fan Yongpeng:</strong> <em><strong>I think number one, it's anti-productive. Marx made it very clear that capitalism grew out of feudalism.</strong></em> <span>There is a sentence in the "Communist Manifesto" that because the superstructure of the feudal system could not accommodate the development of new productive forces, it was "blasted" and "blown up".</span></p>
<p>Marx has a wonderful saying, he said that the hand mill produced the era of feudalism, and the steam mill produced the era of capitalism.</p>
<p><em><strong>The reason why this neo-feudal tendency has emerged in the West today is precisely that their productive forces have begun to stagnate and regress. Therefore, if we are faced with the resurgence of feudal forces, then we must first think that it is an obstacle to modern civilization, to modern material production, and to the development of productive forces.</strong></em></p>
<p><strong>Moderator:</strong> <span>In other words, when feudalism returns, it will bring damage to the whole of modernization and modernity.</span></p>
<p><strong>Fan Yongpeng:</strong> <em><strong>It will bring serious shackles to productivity. The second point is that feudalism brings injustice.</strong></em></p>
<p><span>A very important proposition put forward by Marx in 1843 is that in feudal society, your economic rights and political power are linked.</span> <em><strong>What is modern society? It's that how much money I earn is not tied to my rights as a citizen, which is a huge step forward in history.</strong></em> <span>[In theory, but seldom in practice.]</span></p>
<p><span>But now this re-peg is starting to happen again in the West, so it will bring injustice. Between wealth and political power to personal status, this equivalence began to emerge again.</span> <em><strong>This phenomenon is happening in many societies.</strong></em></p>
<p><strong>Zhang Weiwei:</strong> <span>We can also give some examples, such as equal pay for men and women for equal work. None of the Western countries have done it, whether Sweden, Denmark, or Switzerland,</span> <em><strong>this is feudalism. This is especially true in Japan and South Korea, where the difference in income between men and women can be 30 to 40 percent, which is severely feudal.</strong></em></p>
<p><strong>Fan Yongpeng:</strong> <span>Including the surname of their husbands after their women get married, it is a legacy of feudalism. Feudalism also has a very important harm, because it will break the modern nation-state that has been formed with great difficulty since modernization. After the emergence of various separatist powers, the central power is deconstructed, and then it will lead to the fragmentation of the country and the fragmentation of the world, which is not conducive to globalization. In fact, if you look at the "small courtyard and high walls" of the United States today, it is hindering the further development of globalization.</span> <em><strong>Globalization has its own problems, it is the domination of the whole world by big capital. But we need to domesticate globalization from another angle, to transform it.</strong></em></p>
<p>However, after the rise of feudal power, the world will be fragmented, and a large number of wars and turmoil will be brought about, including the rise of religious extremism, and human transportation and material exchanges will begin to be blocked.</p>
<p><em><strong>Today's modernization has brought a lot of global problems, infectious diseases, global crime, climate change, and finally the world is beginning to deconstruct. Who will solve these global problems? This is a very big problem.</strong></em></p>
<p><strong>Zhang Weiwei:</strong> <span>When I was debating with Francis Fukuyama in 2011, I said that</span> <em><strong>the American political system was pre-industrial revolution, that is, feudalism.</strong></em> <span>For example, when we talk about disaster relief, the U.S. government has very little disaster relief function, and it will be fine if it sends a notice. For a modern state, this is not a no-go.</span></p>
<p><span>When Trump was saying that he wanted Canada to become the 51st state of the United States, a Canadian politician began to retort, saying that we want California to become Canada's 11th province and that everyone in this province would have universal health care.</span> <em><strong>Universal health care is also part of modernity.</strong></em></p>
<p><strong>Fan Yongpeng:</strong> <span>Washington, Oregon, and California join Canada.</span></p>
<p><strong>Zhang Weiwei:</strong> <span>She said that Canada does not have people without health insurance like the United States, and Canada does not have anyone who can own guns like the United States.</span></p>
<p><strong>Moderator:</strong> <span>So</span> <em><strong>when we talk about feudalism, we are talking about the defects of the capitalist system itself.</strong></em> <span>Just now, Mr. Fan also said in his speech that the capitalist system was originally produced in anti-feudalism. But</span> <em><strong>because it is not complete, when its own development encounters obstacles, it will turn back and look for refuge in feudalism.</strong></em></p>
<p>Turning back to China, especially the history of the founding of New China, we have been very thorough in our anti-feudalism. The system is very thorough, but we may also observe in terms of living customs, and there may be certain local customs that still reflect a certain feudal nature, but this may not be a large proportion.</p>
<p><strong>Zhang Weiwei:</strong> <em><strong>There is no doubt that there are many feudal traditions in Chinese society</strong></em><span>. Even if we talk about the "second combination" now, it is also a combination of Marxism and China's excellent traditional culture, that is to say, there is a problem of taking the essence and eliminating the dross.</span></p>
<p><em><strong>There are some things that we actually do all the time, some that we haven't done enough, and some things that are still very ingrained. Fo</strong></em><span>r example, when it comes to seniority, there are quite a lot. At that time, Gong Zizhen said, "I advise Tiangong to be vigorous", he was a figure in the late Qing Dynasty, and such an expression was revolutionary.</span></p>
<p>Now we talk about selecting meritocracy, and some things are the essence. We invented the imperial examination system, which was the most advanced civil service examination system in the world at that time. But then it did become more and more rigid, and it became a test of eight strands; And it only focuses on writing poems and writing beautiful articles, rather than how to really solve practical problems.</p>
<p>Therefore, in our current cadre selection system, a very important point is to look at your practice, your political achievements, and how well you have done.</p>
<p><span>Moderator: In Mr.</span> <strong>Fan's speech,</strong> <span>he cited the concept of "cloud rent" charged by some platforms in the West. The platform economy is also quite familiar to us. Do we need to be particularly wary of such signs in China?</span></p>
<p><strong>Fan Yongpeng:</strong> <em><strong>It is definitely needed, because the platform itself is not an enterprise in the traditional sense, but has the nature of a certain public infrastructure</strong></em><span>. Let's think: Can we make our high-speed rail system, our aviation system, a private company to control? So it has a similar nature, but it's also a private enterprise, and it follows the logic of corporate rules.</span></p>
<p><span>Therefore, we need to find a suitable angle between the two, that is,</span> <em><strong>to let it unleash its creativity as an enterprise, and at the same time to ensure that it serves everyone as a public instrument of the world, and not as its own feudal territory.</strong></em></p>
<p>What does this boil down to? It is not possible to rely on the representative system, nor can it be done by relying on multi-party competition; in the final analysis, it is only by relying on the leadership of the Communist Party of China and relying on socialist culture that we can solve the problem.</p>
<p><strong>Zhang Weiwei:</strong> <span>When we discussed with Yannis here, his observation was quite perceptive. From the point of view of payment systems and digital currencies, China and the United States have parted ways.</span> <em><strong>The United States follows the road of feudalism, while China follows the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics.</strong></em></p>
<p><span>The biggest disagreement is why we can pay so much with mobile phones, but not in the United States?</span> <em><strong>Its credit card companies, banks, and other social media are reluctant to combine when it comes to the distribution of benefits.</strong></em></p>
<p><span>China is different, China has the leadership of the party.</span> <em><strong>Since the society has this demand, we want to represent the advanced productive forces, we will give it a try</strong></em><span>, hold a personal hearing, the mayor will hold a meeting, representatives from all parties will be invited, you will let go of the profits, and I will give up a little of it, and finally try, and we will make such a big world.</span></p>
<p><strong>Moderator:</strong> <span>You just talked about the platform, I did an interview some time ago, and introduced that there is a system called escort in Shanghai, which is actually in great demand. Because many elderly people, even young people, go to the hospital to see a doctor, they may need someone to take me, accompany me to register, get medicine, especially the doctor's order to translate, to remember how to eat in a day, how many meals to eat, etc., is such a service.</span></p>
<p>The government realizes that because of the lack of escorts in the elderly care service, the government will set up a platform to encourage third-party service agencies to enter the platform, and the service fee may be paid directly by the consumer to the third party, and the government will build the platform.</p>
<p><em><strong>Going back to what you just said, we will also build some platforms, and we will also encourage the relevant operators to serve the people on them, but if you go beyond the boundary, I will come to supervise you, and I will come to adjust. If it does not go beyond the border, it is very good, because there is one more social force that can do things for the common people, which is a manifestation of the attributes of our socialist system.</strong></em></p>
<p>The issues we are discussing today sound very professional at first glance, but when we put them into practice, we will find that we have a more intuitive understanding of modernity, modernization, capitalism, feudalism, and anti-feudalism.</p>
<p><strong>【Q&amp;A】</strong></p>
<p><strong>Audience: Hello two teachers, good host. The question I would like to ask today is: What is the difference between traditional feudalism and neo-feudalism in the definition of manifestations? What is deceptive and destructive to social progress? Thank you, teacher.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Moderator:</strong> <span>You may be seated. Good question, what is the difference between the feudalism we talk about in history and the feudalism we talk about today?</span></p>
<p><strong>Fan Yongpeng:</strong> <span>Traditional feudalism is a historical phenomenon because the feudal era has passed.</span> <em><strong>But the elites of the feudal era, in the process of modernization, whether in the West, Southeast Asia, Latin America and other non-Western countries, he has been transformed, because he controls resources, so he directly transformed into the political elite of the new era, and he has left.</strong></em></p>
<p><em><strong>Therefore, in many countries, there is such a very primitive and conservative political system as crony capitalism, which is a legacy of the old feudalism today.</strong></em></p>
<p><span>The new feudalism, which I am talking about today, is proposed by scholars like Yannis and Durand, and</span> <em><strong>on the basis of the development of new technologies, a trend close to feudalism has emerged. Strictly speaking, it is a metaphor, not strictly feudal, but it does have some feudal qualities, such as bringing people to dependence.</strong></em></p>
<p>In the field of culture, Mao Jian, a teacher from East China Normal University, has a very famous saying, she said that the most feudal place in China is in film and television dramas, which are full of mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationships, bride price, and domineering presidents, which are all typical feudal culture. This is contrary to the socialist culture advocated by our Communist Party. Therefore, we must rely on the party's propaganda and theoretical guidance to constantly overcome it.</p>
<p><span>In addition, there is a very important point, that is, what is the biggest resonance point between the traditional feudalism and the new feudalism?</span> <em><strong>This resonance point is that after having wealth, this wealth can be accumulated, and a direct relationship between wealth and power is established, which is the most dangerous problem.</strong></em></p>
<p><span>For example, I have dozens of properties at home, and I don't need to go to work anymore,</span> <em><strong>I can live on rent.</strong></em> <span>For example, my father has established a large platform capital, and I don't need to operate it anymore in the future,</span> <em><strong>just collect rent</strong></em> <span>and collect a lot of data. Data itself is an economic element, which is productivity.</span> <em><strong>Such a group of people will become a conservative feudal force in the new era.</strong></em></p>
<p><span>So you see, our party has been working hard to regulate and change this situation. Therefore, General Secretary Xi Jinping said in his speech at the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China that the Communist Party of China has "three non-represents": it does not represent any interest group, does not represent any powerful group, and does not represent the interests of any privileged class.</span> <em><strong>That is to say, it is necessary to break the inheritance, accumulation, and hereditary inheritance of power and wealth, which is a very important point in the fight against feudalism.</strong></em></p>
<p>Finally, I'll give you another example, which is how our system breaks this thing. The FBI once tried to interrogate a suspected terrorist, and his iPhone would not open, and then he went to the California Supreme Court to file a lawsuit. In the end, the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of Apple, and the state power just can't get this thing.</p>
<p><em><strong>And our People's Bank of China has issued a policy that requires that all digital transaction data must have a backup in the central bank. What is the purpose? It's creative activities that you can continue to do, but I'm going to keep a backup of the same here, and the state controls this resource through power on behalf of the people. This is an important example.</strong></em></p>
<p><strong>Zhang Weiwei:</strong> <span>On the one hand, with the digital economy, we see that China and the United States have begun to part ways, according to Yannis's words: one is "technological feudalism" and the other is socialism with Chinese characteristics. In terms of feudalism, the two sides also have something in common.</span> <em><strong>The domineering president is interesting, and if this is a feudal display, then this is also a humorous "soft power" that China exports to the United States.</strong></em></p>
<p>Short films of domineering presidents are very popular in the United States. They completely used the Chinese script, replaced it with American, changed it to English, changed people's names, and everything else remained almost unchanged, and the lines were all machine-translated. Then I filmed, and even went to China to shoot, and some of them were filmed in the United States, and it turned out to be very popular in the United States.</p>
<p><strong>Moderator:</strong> <span>Why do so many people like to watch the story of the domineering president?</span></p>
<p><strong>Fan Yongpeng:</strong> <span>People sometimes want to "lie flat". Independence and freedom are actually quite tiring. As a matter of fact, our party has said this a long time ago:</span> <em><strong>We must shape a new person of socialism and use new people and new ideas to break through this feudal trap.</strong></em></p>
<p><strong>Moderator:</strong> <em><strong>So it's not just about external feudalism, but also about your own inner feudalism.</strong></em></p>
<p><strong>Audience: Hello two teachers, good host. In contemporary society, anti-feudal movements are often closely linked to the pursuit of fairness in society. In the European bourgeois revolution, although the privileges of the feudal aristocracy were overthrown, inequality still existed within the European bourgeoisie. In the context of the new era, how should we balance different interests and avoid new social injustices after anti-feudalism? Thank you, teacher.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Zhang Weiwei:</strong> <span>I think this is also a matter of international comparison. For example, in the UK, the British themselves admit that their country is referred to as a "class society" in English, which is sometimes translated as "阶级社会" (class society) and sometimes as "阶层社会" (stratified society). Its classes and social strata are solidified.</span></p>
<p><span>Three hundred years ago, wealthy families and aristocratic families are still the richest today. There is a large body of research to prove this, and the family lineage continues to this day.</span> <em><strong>So in the UK, it's very, very difficult to get past the classes.</strong></em></p>
<p>In comparison, China is still a society with the greatest mobility. For example, the college entrance examination system, which is almost nonexistent in other countries. It is essential to take the college entrance examination, and admissions are strictly based on scores; many countries do not have this situation.</p>
<p><span>In Chinese culture, there is a saying: "Heaven helps those who help themselves." As long as you work hard, the people around you will say that this child is good, and we should lend him a hand.</span> <em><strong>Nowadays, whether in politics, society, or business, the vast majority of successful individuals have achieved their success through their own efforts.</strong></em></p>
<p><strong>Fan Yongpeng:</strong> <span>In the traditional sense, the injustice brought about by feudalism should be said to exist in China, but in the world, we are the best.</span></p>
<p><em><strong>If you look at the anti-feudal process in various countries around the world, such as Italy and Spain, the feudalism is more retained, because modern capitalism has not developed enough, so some feudal elements have been left.</strong></em></p>
<p>Some countries, such as Germany and France, developed particularly maturely in the feudal era, but because it has developed capitalism very maturely, and especially after the Great Revolution, the French aristocracy has killed several waves, and Germany has been bombed in World War I and World War II for several waves, and as a result, the aristocracy has basically been completely eliminated, so these two countries look relatively modern.</p>
<p><em><strong>So like Britain, as well as Northern Europe, Northwest Europe, and Low Countries these places, its royal power and aristocracy and feudal power are very strong. To this day, they have not yet jumped out of the era of feudal kingship.</strong></em></p>
<p><em><strong>It was mainly the Soviet Union and China that really experienced large-scale and profound social transformation, so we were relatively successful in the anti-feudal aspect</strong></em><span>.</span></p>
<p><span>But the question you asked is important.</span> <em><strong>A very big challenge we are facing today is that every time the development of new technologies in human history will inevitably bring about changes in the original structure of social interests.</strong></em></p>
<p><span>In today's era, we advocate science, so it is easy for everyone to have a romantic imagination of science and technology and think that science and technology must be good.</span> <em><strong>Historically, science and technology have not necessarily been good, and it has always been a "double-edged sword"</strong></em><span>. So</span> <em><strong>in today's era of highly developed technology, we are also facing this problem.</strong></em></p>
<p>Looking back on history, what are the special needs of all the periods of rapid development of science and technology in history? There is a special need to stress politics and the active political will that comes from society.</p>
<p><span>Whether it is through the peasant uprising, through the imperial examination, or through our communist revolution,</span> <em><strong>we must overcome the deviation in the distribution brought about by the development of science and technology by representing the will of the whole people</strong></em><span>. This is a very important challenge that we face today.</span></p>
<p><strong>Moderator:</strong> <span>Just now, Mr. Fan said that in history, science and technology have always been a "double-edged sword", but perhaps only China has clearly shouted four words, called "science and technology for good", that is, I hope that science and technology will serve the progress of mankind and the well-being of ordinary people.</span></p>
<p>So the challenges that you just talked about that you might encounter may also bring about a new phase of injustice. However, the characteristic and advantage of our system lies in ensuring the greatest fairness in the midst of all kinds of new changes.</p>
<p><strong>Zhang Weiwei:</strong> <span>I'll give you this example again, OpenAI and Nvidia hyped the chip so expensive, and then we came out with DeepSeek, which doesn't need to be so expensive to achieve the effect of the same product, and it's open source.</span></p>
<p><span>The United States originally wanted to monopolize it,</span> <em><strong>and we broke this monopoly, which itself is feudal</strong></em><span>.</span> <em><strong>The United States has created a lot of public opinion, and the whole world believes that this is the only way to go</strong></em><span>, and everyone can only buy expensive chips in the United States. Now the Chinese socialist forces,</span> <em><strong>DeepSeek represents the people's nature, which is revolutionary</strong></em><span>. That's what the world is all about.</span></p>
<p><strong>Moderator:</strong> <span>So you just said that I was thinking about this example, we all said to help everyone understand what is anti-feudal, what is feudal,</span> <em><strong>look at the role of DeepSeek, it is anti-feudal.</strong></em></p>
<p><span>I said in the program that China is actually the most modern country, and today's topic I think is a perfect footnote to this sentence.</span> <em><strong>How do we understand Chinese modernity? It lies in the thoroughness of our anti-feudal and anti-feudal nature.</strong></em></p>
<p><span>What Mr. Fan just talked about is capitalism, and there are still many remnants of its feudalism.</span> <em><strong>When it encounters obstacles to development, it will look back and magnify its feudal nature, so we must be very vigilant about this.</strong></em> <span>Finally, I would like to say that</span> <em><strong>let us oppose external feudalism, and at the same time we must oppose the feudal nature of ourselves and let us live a new self every day.</strong></em></p>
<p>Thank you all, and goodbye. [My Emphasis]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The discussions we have about the Rentier Class, rents, monopolies, and the financialization of capitalism and Dr. Michael Hudson’s work is all related to the above discussion. I’d characterize it as looking at a horse form two different angles—both see the horse but provide a different perspective of it. Capitalism has a “long feudal tail” that is very present when we look and the sort of technofeudalism described is very visible in Trump 2.0. There’s a great disdain for commonfolk that more and more people are seeing and feeling. An excellent observation was the US Constitution is a feudal instrument and the government a feudal construct made for rule by the upper-class oligarchy. That China needs to be observant that the latent feudalism that remains in its society is regulated along with the feudal structures that come with new technologies. And of course, China isn’t the only nation needing to be that observant. The feudal nature of Europe is prominently displayed today with the EU/NATO construct acting as the Feudal Lord over all the vassal nations which are in differing degrees of resistance. IMO, Xi Jinping understands that the way to keep feudalism controlled is to be diligently constantly reforming and modernizing the governmental structure and its laws. Furthermore, the structures and systems of many former colonial nations mirror that of the Colonial Master, which has caused a great many problems since the aim of those structures and systems was to eliminate any type of equalitarian nature that could be interpreted as socialism or a society devoid of classes. Humanity will have a shared future, but what will be the nature of that future? What might be deemed optimal and what shall be done with the selfish class that disagrees? And what to do with people thinking themselves exceptional, which are currently a different sort than the selfish class? Above, it’s asked who will solve these global problems, religious extremism being just one? We’ve seen how those controlling platforms aid such extremism along with feudalistic empires. Is the technology the danger, the humans that discover it or the governments that control the humans?</p>
<p><span>*</span><br><span>*</span><br><span>*</span><br><em><span>Like what you’ve been reading at Karlof1’s Substack? Then please consider subscribing and choosing to make a</span> <strong>monthly/yearly pledge</strong> <span>to enable my efforts in this challenging realm. Thank You!</span></em></p>

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title: Live: Enjoy a wonderful floral journey at Asia&amp;#039;s largest flower market
hash: �H�ӬK���x ��wg
guid:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-24/Live-Enjoy-a-wonderful-floral-journey-at-Asia-s-largest-flower-market-1BZMcmMVaus/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Video

content:
<div><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-24/Live-Enjoy-a-wonderful-floral-journey-at-Asia-s-largest-flower-market-1BZMcmMVaus/img/c92400a1ab8b4ce6b7646c66c5e1fd61/c92400a1ab8b4ce6b7646c66c5e1fd61-1280.jpeg" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><div readability="43" data-sanitized-class="text en">
<p>Thanks to the upgrading of the industrial chain and the rapid development of e-commerce platforms, flowers from Dounan Flower Market in southwest China's Kunming City, Yunnan Province, are now sold to more than 50 countries and regions overseas. The trading volume last year reached a staggering 11.5 billion yuan ($1.6 billion), and the total import and export volume of flowers hit a record high. It is not only Asia's largest fresh flower trading market but also a national 3A-level tourist scenic area. Follow reporter Zhang Zhenni and guest Bui Thi Tuyen, a student at Yunnan University from Vietnam, to embark on a wonderful floral journey, get to know this shining pearl of Asia's flower trade, and experience the vivid practice of Chinese-style modernization.</p>
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link:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-24/Live-Enjoy-a-wonderful-floral-journey-at-Asia-s-largest-flower-market-1BZMcmMVaus/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Video

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title: China welcomes multinational companies to expand investment in China
hash: �[m��0����ɭ
guid:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-24/China-welcomes-multinational-companies-to-expand-investment-in-China-1BZEWMKH8FG/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Politics

content:
<div readability="8" data-sanitized-class="cmsImage"><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-24/China-welcomes-multinational-companies-to-expand-investment-in-China-1BZEWMKH8FG/img/e2c2c2e101f34a5698ec77c12ab647e3/e2c2c2e101f34a5698ec77c12ab647e3.png" alt="Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (L) meets with Apple CEO Tim Cook in Beijing, China, March 23, 2025. /Xinhua" layout="responsive"><div readability="14" data-sanitized-class="imageCaption">
<p>Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (L) meets with Apple CEO Tim Cook in Beijing, China, March 23, 2025. /Xinhua</p>
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<p data-sanitized-class="title">Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (L) meets with Apple CEO Tim Cook in Beijing, China, March 23, 2025. /Xinhua</p>
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<p>China will continue to open up at a higher level, and welcomes multinational companies to expand investment in China to deepen mutual benefit and win-win results, Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng said on Sunday. </p>
<p>He, also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, made the remarks in a meeting in Beijing with business executives of leading global multinational companies, as they exchanged views on the global and Chinese economic situation, China-U.S. economic and trade cooperation, and expanding investment in China.</p>
<p>Noting that China's economy has strong resilience, vast potential and ample vitality, He said China is committed to promoting high-quality development, expanding high-standard opening up, and continuously improving the business environment, while welcoming increased investment by multinational companies in China to share in the country's development opportunities.</p>
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<div readability="9" data-sanitized-class="cmsImage"><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-24/China-welcomes-multinational-companies-to-expand-investment-in-China-1BZEWMKH8FG/img/392453afef9d41dea223f4de48233a47/392453afef9d41dea223f4de48233a47.png" alt="Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (L) meets with Albert Bourla, chairman and CEO of Pfizer, in Beijing, China, March 23, 2025. /Xinhua" layout="responsive"><div readability="17" data-sanitized-class="imageCaption">
<p>Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (L) meets with Albert Bourla, chairman and CEO of Pfizer, in Beijing, China, March 23, 2025. /Xinhua</p>
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<p data-sanitized-class="title">Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (L) meets with Albert Bourla, chairman and CEO of Pfizer, in Beijing, China, March 23, 2025. /Xinhua</p>
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<p>Business executives from multinational companies present at this meeting said they attached importance to the Chinese market and were optimistic about China's economic prospects, and also expressed their willingness to commit to long-term cooperation with China.</p>
<p>Attending the meeting were business executives including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Chairman and CEO of Pfizer Albert Bourla, Chair and CEO of Brookfield Asset Management Bruce Flatt, Chairman and CEO of Medtronic Geoff Martha, Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach, Chair and CEO of Eli Lilly David A. Ricks, Cargill President and CEO Brian Sikes, and Wendell P. Weeks, chairman and CEO of Corning Incorporated.</p>
<p>(With input from Xinhua)</p>
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link:
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title: Wang Yi: China, Japan can jointly promote, practice Asian values
hash: t/"��n���#É/
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<div readability="10.5" data-sanitized-class="cmsImage"><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-24/-Wang-Yi-China-Japan-can-jointly-promote-practice-Asian-values-1BZEeIbb6MM/img/98ca8f95e9c74716a00e425cacd143d7/98ca8f95e9c74716a00e425cacd143d7.png" alt="Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (R), also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, meets with Yasuo Fukuda, former Japanese prime minister and former chairman of the Boao Forum for Asia, in Tokyo, Japan, March 23, 2025. /Chinese Foreign Ministry" layout="responsive"><div readability="21.5" data-sanitized-class="imageCaption">
<p>Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (R), also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, meets with Yasuo Fukuda, former Japanese prime minister and former chairman of the Boao Forum for Asia, in Tokyo, Japan, March 23, 2025. /Chinese Foreign Ministry</p>
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<p data-sanitized-class="title">Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (R), also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, meets with Yasuo Fukuda, former Japanese prime minister and former chairman of the Boao Forum for Asia, in Tokyo, Japan, March 23, 2025. /Chinese Foreign Ministry</p>
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<p>China and Japan can advocate the Eastern wisdom of valuing harmony and practicing empathy, and promote and practice Asian values, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Sunday.</p>
<p>Wang, also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, made the remarks during his meeting in Tokyo with Yasuo Fukuda, former Japanese prime minister and former chairman of the Boao Forum for Asia.</p>
<p>Wang expressed appreciation to Fukuda for taking the lead in Japan to endorse and support China's vision of a community with a shared future for mankind and for taking the lead in establishing the cultural exchange institution for an Asian community.</p>
<p>China and Japan are geographically close and share many cultural similarities and intertwined interests, Wang said.</p>
<p>"We hope that the Japanese side will work with China to maintain the political and public support for China-Japan relations, push for the sound and stable development of bilateral ties, and jointly promote peace, stability and prosperity in Asia," Wang added.</p>
<p>Fukuda said it is of great significance to deepen exchanges in various fields such as people-to-people, cultural and academic interactions between Japan and China.</p>
<p>He affirmed his commitment to promoting dialogue and cooperation, enhancing mutual understanding, and contributing to the improvement and development of Japan-China relations.</p>
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<p>Source(s): Xinhua News Agency</p>

link:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-24/-Wang-Yi-China-Japan-can-jointly-promote-practice-Asian-values-1BZEeIbb6MM/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Politics

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guid: yt:video:uwmHvhE-0f0
title: LaRouche 2013 Speech: Rid Mankind of British Oligarchical Evil!
author: ;Diane Sare
link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwmHvhE-0f0
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guid: yt:video:Tp8imVSH-28
title: LaRouche 2013 Speech: Rid Mankind of British Oligarchical Evil!
author: ;The LaRouche Organization
link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp8imVSH-28
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title: Live: Flights carrying migrants deported from U.S. arrive in Venezuela
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<div><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-24/Live-Flights-carrying-migrants-deported-from-U-S-arrive-in-Venezuela-1BZVPndPRfO/img/a3bce4df6cdf45aba331d37afbf1a750/a3bce4df6cdf45aba331d37afbf1a750-750.png" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><div readability="36" data-sanitized-class="text en">
<p>Venezuela's government has announced that deportation flights from the U.S. resumed on Sunday, following U.S. President Donald Trump's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 that led to hundreds of Venezuelans being transferred to prison in El Salvador. Join us live in Caracas and La Guaira as flights carrying migrants deported from the U.S. arrive.</p>
</div>

link:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-24/Live-Flights-carrying-migrants-deported-from-U-S-arrive-in-Venezuela-1BZVPndPRfO/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Video

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guid: https://www.unz.com/?post_type=item&amp;p=545102
title: Surrendering to Authoritarianism, by Chris Hedges
author: ;Chris Hedges
link: https://www.unz.com/article/surrendering-to-authoritarianism/
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<div><img src="https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/f9e10db9-8dee-4da0-92d3-689e8c4f7325_3900x5431.jpg" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><p wcount="100" data-sanitized-id="p_1_1" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">I was not surprised when Columbia University’s interim president Katrina Armstrong <a title="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/22/how-columbia-gave-in-to-trumps-demands-to-get-its-400m-funding-back" href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/22/how-columbia-gave-in-to-trumps-demands-to-get-its-400m-funding-back">caved</a> to the demands of the Trump administration. She <a title="https://president.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/03.21.2025%20Columbia%20-%20FINAL.pdf" href="https://president.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/03.21.2025%20Columbia%20-%20FINAL.pdf">agreed</a> to ban face masks or face coverings, prohibit protests in academic buildings and create an internal security force of 36 New York City Police officers empowered to “remove individuals from campus and/or arrest them when appropriate.” She has also surrendered the autonomy of academic departments, as demanded by the Trump administration, by appointing a new senior vice provost to “review” the university’s department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies.</span></p>
<p wcount="70" data-sanitized-id="p_1_2" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Elite universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Columbia or Yale, were created to train and perpetuate the plutocracy. They are not and never have been centers of cutting-edge intellectual thought or hospitable to dissidents and radicals. They cloak themselves in the veneer of moral probity and intellectualism but cravenly serve political and economic power. This is their nature. Don’t expect it to change, even as we fall headlong into authoritarianism.</span></p>
<p wcount="87" data-sanitized-id="p_1_3" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Armstrong, like most of the heads of our universities, is fruitlessly humiliating herself. She would, I expect, happily make space on her office wall to hang an oversized portrait of the president. But what she does not know, and what history has taught us, is that no appeasement is sufficient with autocrats. She, and the rest of the liberal elites, groveling abjectly in an attempt to accommodate their new masters, will be steadily replaced or dominated by buffoonish goons such as those seeded throughout the Trump administration.</span></p>
<p wcount="87" data-sanitized-id="p_1_4" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The Department of Education has <a title="https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-educations-office-civil-rights-sends-letters-60-universities-under-investigation-antisemitic-discrimination-and-harassment" href="https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-educations-office-civil-rights-sends-letters-60-universities-under-investigation-antisemitic-discrimination-and-harassment">warned</a> 60 colleges and universities that they could face “potential enforcement actions,” if they do not comply with federal civil rights law that protects students from discrimination based on race or nationality, which includes antisemitism. Columbia, <a title="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/trumps-war-on-education" href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/trumps-war-on-education">stripped</a> of $400 million in federal grants, is desperately trying to restore the funding. I doubt it will work. Those mounting these assaults against universities intend to turn them into indoctrination machines. The so-called campaign against antisemitism is simply a cynical tool being used to achieve that end.</span></p>
<p wcount="81" data-sanitized-id="p_1_5" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The warning follows an <a title="https://www.columbiaspectator.com/main/2025/02/12/nearly-200-faculty-members-sign-letter-urging-columbia-to-implement-safety-measures-for-jewish-students/" href="https://www.columbiaspectator.com/main/2025/02/12/nearly-200-faculty-members-sign-letter-urging-columbia-to-implement-safety-measures-for-jewish-students/">open letter</a> signed by 200 faculty members on Feb. 3 urging Columbia University implement measures to “protect Jewish students.” Amongst their demands are the removal of Professor Joseph Massad who teaches Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at the university and beginning a Title VI investigation against him, that the university adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticism of Israel with racism against Jews, and the university hire tenured pro-Israel faculty.</span></p>
<p wcount="105" data-sanitized-id="p_1_6" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">These institutions of privilege — I attended Harvard and have taught at Columbia and Princeton — have always been complicit in the crimes of their times. They did not, until the world around them changed, speak out against the slaughter of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the crushing of labor and socialist organizations at the turn of the twentieth century and the purging of institutions, including the academy, during the <a title="https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z7spn9q/revision/3" href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z7spn9q/revision/3">Red Scare</a> in the 1920s and 1930s, and later the <a title="https://spartacus-educational.com/USAmccarthyism.htm" href="https://spartacus-educational.com/USAmccarthyism.htm">witch hunts</a> under McCarthyism. They <a title="https://forward.com/opinion/607021/columbia-1968-protests-vietnam-gaza-war/" href="https://forward.com/opinion/607021/columbia-1968-protests-vietnam-gaza-war/">turned</a> on their students protesting the war in Vietnam in the 1960s as viciously as they are turning on them now.</span></p>
<p wcount="115" data-sanitized-id="p_1_7" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Many of the dregs of the Trump administration are products of these elite academic institutions. I can assure you their children will also attend these schools despite their public denunciations. Rep. Elise Stefanik, who <a title="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/us/politics/elise-stefanik-antisemitism-congress.html" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/us/politics/elise-stefanik-antisemitism-congress.html">humiliated</a> in congressional hearings the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, graduated from Harvard. Vice President JD Vance graduated from Yale Law School. Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth went to Princeton University and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who has ordered a <a title="https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2025/03/03/hhs-ed-gsa-announce-additional-measures-end-anti-semitic-harassment-college-campuses.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CAnti%2DSemitism%20%E2%80%93%20like%20racism,Kennedy%2C%20Jr." href="https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2025/03/03/hhs-ed-gsa-announce-additional-measures-end-anti-semitic-harassment-college-campuses.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CAnti-Semitism%20%E2%80%93%20like%20racism,Kennedy%2C%20Jr.">review</a> of grants to universities from his agency over allegations of antisemitism — graduated from Harvard.</span></p>
<p wcount="63" data-sanitized-id="p_1_8" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Professor Katherine Franke, who taught at Columbia Law School for 25 years, <a title="https://ccrjustice.org/home/press-center/press-releases/solidarity-katherine-franke-our-former-board-chair" href="https://ccrjustice.org/home/press-center/press-releases/solidarity-katherine-franke-our-former-board-chair">recently lost</a> her position at the university for defending Columbia students’ right to protest in favor of a ceasefire of the Israeli slaughter in Gaza and for Columbia University to divest from Israel. She also condemned the spraying of pro-Palestinian protesters on the campus with a toxic chemical that left students hospitalized.</span></p>
<p wcount="77" data-sanitized-id="p_1_9" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">“Part of why I think Colombia was such an easy target — and it’s not just Columbia, I think this is true for Harvard, for Yale, for the elite universities — is that the boards of trustees are no longer made up of people who are involved in education — committed to the educational mission, in some way professionally or otherwise — see themselves as custodians of the special role that the academy plays in a democracy,” she told me.</span></p>
<p wcount="21" data-sanitized-id="p_1_10" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">“Instead, they are hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, corporate lawyers and in our case, arms manufacturers as well.” She went on:</span></p>
<blockquote readability="24" data-sanitized-class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
<p wcount="215" data-sanitized-id="p_1_11" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">And they see that responsibility is to protect only the endowment. I often describe Columbia — which is the largest residential landlord in New York City — as a real estate holding operation that has a side hustle of teaching classes. It has evolved over time into just a business that enjoys nonprofit status. And so when the pressure started here, there were no voices on the boards of trustees to say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, we have to be the front line of resistance.’ Or at a minimum, we have to defend our academic mission.’ When I was sitting in my living room watching [former] president Minouche Shafik testify before that House committee…I was upset because they mentioned me, but more importantly, the fact that president Shafik did not even begin to defend Columbia, its faculty, its students, our project, our history of being one of the premier universities in the world. Instead, she groveled before a bully. And we all know that when you grovel before a bully, it encourages the bully. And that’s exactly what’s happened here up until today, where they’re still negotiating with the Trump administration on terms that the administration has set. And this university, I think, will never be the same if it survives at all.</span></p>
</blockquote>
<p wcount="9" data-sanitized-id="p_1_12" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">You can see my interview with Professor Franke <a title="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/americas-constitutional-crisis-w" href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/americas-constitutional-crisis-w">here</a>.</span></p>
<p wcount="113" data-sanitized-id="p_1_13" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Universities and colleges across the country have shut down free speech and squandered their academic integrity. They have brutalized, arrested, suspended and expelled faculty, administrators and students that decry the genocide. They have <a title="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/revolt-in-the-universities" href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/revolt-in-the-universities">called</a> <a title="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-nations-conscience-part-i-read" href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-nations-conscience-part-i-read">police</a> to their campuses — in the case of Columbia three times — to arrest students, often charging them with trespassing. Following the lead of their authoritarian masters they subjected students to <a title="https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2024/09/12/inside-columbias-surveillance-and-disciplinary-operation-for-student-protesters-3/" href="https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2024/09/12/inside-columbias-surveillance-and-disciplinary-operation-for-student-protesters-3/">internal surveillance</a>. Columbia University, out front on the <a title="https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/columbia-university-gaza-student-disclinary-office" href="https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/columbia-university-gaza-student-disclinary-office">repression</a> of its students, <a title="https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2023/11/10/cu-appalling/" href="https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2023/11/10/cu-appalling/">banned</a> Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace a month after Israel’s genocide in Gaza had begun in November 2023, when both organizations called for a ceasefire, long before the protests and encampments began.</span></p>
<p wcount="81" data-sanitized-id="p_1_14" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Columbia’s violent suppression of protests and decision to lock down its campus, which is now surrounded by security checkpoints, paved the way for the <a title="https://apnews.com/article/columbia-university-mahmoud-khalil-ice-15014bcbb921f21a9f704d5acdcae7a8" href="https://apnews.com/article/columbia-university-mahmoud-khalil-ice-15014bcbb921f21a9f704d5acdcae7a8">abduction</a> of Mahmoud Khalil, who was a graduate student at the School of International Public Affairs. He is a <a title="https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/mahmoud-khalil-attorney-interview-lawsuit-trump-pam-bondi-linda-mcmahon" href="https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/mahmoud-khalil-attorney-interview-lawsuit-trump-pam-bondi-linda-mcmahon">legal permanent resident</a>. He did not commit a crime. But the university administration had already demonized and criminalized Khalil and the other students, many of whom are Jewish, who dared to protest the mass slaughter in Gaza.</span></p>
<p wcount="52" data-sanitized-id="p_1_15" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The <a title="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZAOdGcminY" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZAOdGcminY">video</a> — shot by his wife on March 8 — of Khalil being taken away by plainclothes federal agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who did not identify themselves, is a chilling reminder of the secret police abductions I witnessed on the streets of Santiago during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.</span></p>
<p wcount="60" data-sanitized-id="p_1_16" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The law in authoritarian states protects the criminality of the powerful. It revokes due process, basic freedoms and the rights of citizenship. It is an instrument of repression. It is a very small step from the <a title="https://zeteo.com/p/marco-rubio-personally-signed-off" href="https://zeteo.com/p/marco-rubio-personally-signed-off">stripping</a> of rights from a legal resident holding a green card to the stripping of rights of any citizen. This is what is coming.</span></p>
<p wcount="155" data-sanitized-id="p_1_17" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Khalil was ostensibly arrested under the <a title="https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/immigration-act" href="https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/immigration-act">Immigration Nationality Act of 1952</a>, also known as the <a title="https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/immigration-act" href="https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/immigration-act">McCarran-Walter Act</a>. It <a title="https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid%3AUSC-prelim-title8-section1227&amp;num=0&amp;edition=prelim" href="https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid%3AUSC-prelim-title8-section1227&amp;num=0&amp;edition=prelim">gives</a> the Secretary of State the power to deport foreign nationals if he has “reasonable ground[s] to believe” their presence or activities in the U.S. “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” It was used to <a title="https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/document/the_excluded_report.pdf" href="https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/document/the_excluded_report.pdf">deny entry</a> to the Chilean poet <a title="https://www.openculture.com/2014/06/pablo-nerudas-historic-first-reading-in-the-us-1966.html" href="https://www.openculture.com/2014/06/pablo-nerudas-historic-first-reading-in-the-us-1966.html">Pablo Neruda</a>, the Colombian writer <a title="https://www.americantheatre.org/1984/12/01/artists-fall-victim-to-mccarthy-era-law/" href="https://www.americantheatre.org/1984/12/01/artists-fall-victim-to-mccarthy-era-law/">Gabriel Garcia Márquez</a> and the British author <a title="https://knightcolumbia.org/content/censorship-border-threatens-free-speech-everywhere" href="https://knightcolumbia.org/content/censorship-border-threatens-free-speech-everywhere">Doris Lessing</a>. It was also used to deport the poet and essayist <a title="https://ccrjustice.org/home/what-we-do/our-cases/matter-randall" href="https://ccrjustice.org/home/what-we-do/our-cases/matter-randall">Margaret Randall</a> and civil rights activist and journalist <a title="https://www.aaihs.org/the-deportation-of-claudia-jones/" href="https://www.aaihs.org/the-deportation-of-claudia-jones/">Claudia Jones</a>. Senator Patrick McCarran, an <a title="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wYzGTelSjcsC&amp;pg=PA89&amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false" href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wYzGTelSjcsC&amp;pg=PA89&amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false">open admirer</a> of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and a rabid <a title="https://lasvegassun.com/news/2021/feb/16/state-leaders-back-rename-las-vegas-airport-reid/" href="https://lasvegassun.com/news/2021/feb/16/state-leaders-back-rename-las-vegas-airport-reid/">antisemite</a>, formulated the act to target not only dissidents and communists, but also Jews. When the law was enacted, it was <a title="https://forward.com/news/702427/mccarran-walter-act-state-department-plan-deport-pro-hamas-students/" href="https://forward.com/news/702427/mccarran-walter-act-state-department-plan-deport-pro-hamas-students/">used</a> to ban Eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors from entering the U.S. due to their alleged sympathies with the Soviet Union.</span></p>
<p wcount="113" data-sanitized-id="p_1_18" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">“The irony of that is not lost on any of us, that these are laws that are at their core, deeply antisemitic, that are now being deployed in the name of protecting Jewish citizens or our foreign policy goals with the state of Israel,” Franke said. “And that’s the cynicism of this administration. They don’t give a darn that there’s that history. They’re looking for every piece of power that they can get, every law, no matter how ugly that law may be. Even the laws that <a title="https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/executive-order-9066" href="https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/executive-order-9066">interned</a> Japanese people during World War Two. I’m sure they would be more than happy to use those at some point.”</span></p>
<p wcount="71" data-sanitized-id="p_1_19" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">James Luther Adams, my mentor at Harvard Divinity School, was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 until he was arrested and deported by the Gestapo. He worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by dissident clergy such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams saw how swiftly and cravenly German universities, which like ours were considered some of the best in the world, surrendered to the dictates of fascism and self-destructed.</span></p>
<p wcount="126" data-sanitized-id="p_1_20" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich, a close friend of Adams, was fired from his teaching post and blacklisted ten weeks after  the Nazis came to power in January 1933. Tillich’s book “<a title="https://wipfandstock.com/9781620322918/the-socialist-decision/" href="https://wipfandstock.com/9781620322918/the-socialist-decision/">The Socialist Decision</a>” was immediately <a title="https://christiansocialism.com/2021/12/09/paul-tillich-socialism-capitalism-nazism-postliberalism-christianity/" href="https://christiansocialism.com/2021/12/09/paul-tillich-socialism-capitalism-nazism-postliberalism-christianity/">banned</a> by the Nazis. Tillich, a Lutheran pastor, along with  the sociologist <a title="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Mannheim" href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Mannheim">Karl Mannheim</a> and the philosopher <a title="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Max-Horkheimer" href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Max-Horkheimer">Max Horkheimer</a>, who wrote “<a title="https://www.amazon.com/Eclipse-Reason-Bloomsbury-Revelations-Horkheimer/dp/1780938187" href="https://www.amazon.com/Eclipse-Reason-Bloomsbury-Revelations-Horkheimer/dp/1780938187">Eclipse of Reason</a>” which examines the rise of authoritarianism, were branded as “enemies of the Reich,” blacklisted and forced into exile. The 1933 “<a title="https://www.dfs.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2020/08/nazi_laws_summary_english.pdf" href="https://www.dfs.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2020/08/nazi_laws_summary_english.pdf">Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service</a>” saw all Jewish professors dismissed. The vast majority of academics cowered in fear or, as with the case of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, joined the Nazi Party, which saw him appointed as the Rector of Freiburg University.</span></p>
<p wcount="62" data-sanitized-id="p_1_21" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Adams saw in the Christian Right disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi. He was the first person I heard refer to the Christian Right as “<a title="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/trumps-christian-fascists-and-the" href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/trumps-christian-fascists-and-the">Christian fascists</a>.” He also warned us about universities and academics which, if the country fell into authoritarianism, would debase themselves to protect their status and privileges. Few would speak out or defy authority.</span></p>
<p wcount="22" data-sanitized-id="p_1_22" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">“If the Nazis took over America, 60 percent of the Harvard faculty would happily begin their lectures with the Nazi salute,” he quipped.</span></p>
<p wcount="73" data-sanitized-id="p_1_23" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">And this is where we are. None of the liberal institutions, including the universities, the commercial media and the Democratic Party, will defend us. They will <a title="https://www.amazon.com/Death-Liberal-Class-Chris-Hedges/dp/1568586795/ref=sr_1_1" href="https://www.amazon.com/Death-Liberal-Class-Chris-Hedges/dp/1568586795/ref=sr_1_1">remain</a> supine, hypocritically betray their supposed principles and commitment to democracy or willingly transform themselves into apologists for the regime. The purges and silencing of our most courageous and accomplished intellectuals, writers, artists and journalists — begun before Trump’s return to the White House — is being expedited.</span></p>
<p wcount="10" data-sanitized-id="p_1_24" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Resistance will be left to us. Enemies of the state.</span></p>


guid: https://www.unz.com/?post_type=item&amp;p=545090
title: Shut Down the Department of Education!, by Ron Paul
author: ;Ron Paul
link: https://www.unz.com/rpaul/shut-down-the-department-of-education/
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content:
<div><img src="https://www.unz.com/wp-content/themes/unzSite/IMAGES/unz_large_logo.png" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><p wcount="32" data-sanitized-id="p_1_1" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">President Trump’s executive order from last week titled “Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities” could help bring about a major step toward restoring constitutional government and improving education.</span></p>
<p wcount="66" data-sanitized-id="p_1_2" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The executive order directs that the secretary of education, “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities.” This action is directed to be taken, though, “while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”</span></p>
<p wcount="36" data-sanitized-id="p_1_3" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The order points out that the Department of Education was created in 1979. Thus, the American people somehow managed for a long time to educate children without a federal education department! They could certainly do so again.</span></p>
<p wcount="52" data-sanitized-id="p_1_4" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The federal government introduced significant funding to local schools the 1950s. Some of this early funding was targeted at science education and was a response to the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite. The first major legislation providing funding for, and imposing regulations on, local government schools became law in 1965.</span></p>
<p wcount="60" data-sanitized-id="p_1_5" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The Department of Education has been given nearly 50 years to work on improving education. Yet, instead of the Department of Education ushering in an education golden era, education in America has declined. According to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, approximately 70 percent of eighth graders are below proficiency in reading, while around 72 percent are below proficiency in math.</span></p>
<p wcount="49" data-sanitized-id="p_1_6" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The problem is not that the federal government spends too little on education. Further, Washington, DC imposing another “reform” on schools will only ensure that more children are left behind. The real problem is education funding is controlled by politicians and bureaucrats who impose a “one-size-fits-all” model on schools.</span></p>
<p wcount="29" data-sanitized-id="p_1_7" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The key to improving the education system is putting control of education back in the hands of those who best know a child’s unique needs and abilities — parents.</span></p>
<p wcount="45" data-sanitized-id="p_1_8" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Moving education programs from the federal government to state and local governments is a good first step toward improving the education system. In addition, President Trump must follow up his executive order by working with Congress to pass legislation shutting down the Department of Education.</span></p>
<p wcount="18" data-sanitized-id="p_1_9" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Homeschooling is one course many parents have chosen as an alternative to sending their children to government schools.</span></p>
<p wcount="66" data-sanitized-id="p_1_10" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Parents looking for a homeschooling curriculum incorporating the ideas of liberty should consider my online curriculum. My curriculum provides students with a solid education in history, literature, mathematics, and the sciences. It also gives students the opportunity to create their own websites and internet-based businesses. This provides students with “real world” entrepreneurial experience that will be useful to them no matter what career path they choose.</span></p>
<p wcount="49" data-sanitized-id="p_1_11" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The curriculum is designed to be self-taught, with students helping, and learning from, each other via online forums. Starting in the fourth grade, students are required to write at least one essay a week. Students post their essays on their blogs. Students also take a course in public speaking.</span></p>
<p wcount="29" data-sanitized-id="p_1_12" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The curriculum does emphasize the history, philosophy, and economics of liberty, but it never substitutes indoctrination for education. The goal is to produce students with superior critical thinking skills.</span></p>
<p wcount="20" data-sanitized-id="p_1_13" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">If you think my curriculum may meet the needs of your child, please visit <a title="http://www.ronpaulcurriculum.com/" href="http://www.ronpaulcurriculum.com/" rel="noreferrer noopener">www.RonPaulCurriculum.com</a> for more information.</span></p>


guid: https://www.unz.com/?post_type=item&amp;p=545084
author: ;Paul Craig Roberts
hash: [�_ |�ݽ9�Pt����
attributes: {"enclosures":[]}
title:
Highly Partisan Judge Boasberg Played Key Role in Fomenting “Russiagate” Hoax, by Paul Craig Roberts

content:
<div><img src="https://www.unz.com/wp-content/themes/unzSite/IMAGES/unz_large_logo.png" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><p wcount="51" data-sanitized-id="p_1_1" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Obama-appointed district judge Boasberg, who tried to prevent the deportation of a dangerous criminal gang of illegal aliens allowed into the US by the Biden regime, played a key role in fomenting the “Russiagate” hoax used by the FBI in the Democrats’ effort to destroy President Trump during his first term.</span></p>
<p wcount="40" data-sanitized-id="p_1_2" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">It also turns out that this highly partisan judge while presiding over the Foreign intelligence Surveillance Court renewed on false grounds the overreaching surveillance powers for us spy agencies, powers used for the purpose of trying to destroy President Trump.</span></p>
<p wcount="74" data-sanitized-id="p_1_3" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">This partisan Democrat judge seems to be a protege of the US Supreme Court’s Chief Justice, John Roberts, who appointed Boasberg to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and who defended Boasberg against Trump’s response that Boasberg gives higher priority to illegal alien criminal gangs than to the safety of American citizens. The elevation of immigrant-invader “rights” over the rights of US citizens is a foundation of the Democrat Party’s domestic policy.</span></p>
<p wcount="6" data-sanitized-id="p_1_4" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><a href="https://www.breitbart.com/law-and-order/2025/03/20/report-judge-who-blocked-trump-deportations-played-key-role-in-russia-collusion-hoax/" title="https://www.breitbart.com/law-and-order/2025/03/20/report-judge-who-blocked-trump-deportations-played-key-role-in-russia-collusion-hoax/">https://www.breitbart.com/law-and-order/2025/03/20/report-judge-who-blocked-trump-deportations-played-key-role-in-russia-collusion-hoax/</a></span></p>
<p wcount="22" data-sanitized-id="p_1_5" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Questions are being raised over the left-wing company that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is keeping: <a title="https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/03/if-chief-justice-john-roberts-is-hobnobbing-most/" href="https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/03/if-chief-justice-john-roberts-is-hobnobbing-most/">https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/03/if-chief-justice-john-roberts-is-hobnobbing-most/</a></span></p>

link:
https://www.unz.com/proberts/highly-partisan-judge-boasberg-played-key-role-in-fomenting-russiagate-hoax/


guid: https://www.unz.com/?post_type=item&amp;p=545024
title: How Israel Killed the Kennedys, by Ron Unz and Mike Whitney
author: ;Ron Unz
link: https://www.unz.com/runz/how-israel-killed-the-kennedys/
hash: ����F�s��$�x�
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<audio preload="none" controls="controls" data-sanitized-id="audio-545024-1" data-sanitized-class="wp-audio-shortcode"><source type="audio/mpeg" src="https://www.unz.com/CONTENTS/AUDIO/runz/Unz-KennedysIsrael.mp3?_=1"><a href="https://www.unz.com/CONTENTS/AUDIO/runz/Unz-KennedysIsrael.mp3" target="_blank">https://www.unz.com/CONTENTS/AUDIO/runz/Unz-KennedysIsrael.mp3</a></audio><div data-sanitized-id="i_1" data-sanitized-class="image imageright container">
<div data-sanitized-class="image-holder"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><a href="https://www.unz.com/ebook/the-jfk-assassination-ebook/"><img src="https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/JFK_Assassination-Cover-200x300.jpg" alt="EPub Format"></a></span></div>

</div>
<p wcount="32" data-sanitized-id="p_1_1" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><a href="https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Ron_Unz_How_Israel_Killed_the_Kennedys.pdf" data-sanitized-class="pdflink"><img src="https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/ViewAsPDF2.jpg"></a><em>Was Israel involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy? (Is there any hard evidence or is it mostly conjecture?). And if Israel was involved, then what was the alleged motive?</em></span></p>
<p wcount="48" data-sanitized-id="p_1_2" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><strong>Ron Unz</strong>—Although there exists no smoking gun proof implicating Israel and its Mossad in the JFK Assassination, <strong>there is an enormous mass of circumstantial evidence that they played a central role in the conspiracy, and they certainly stood very high with regard to means, motive, and opportunity.</strong></span></p>
<p wcount="31" data-sanitized-id="p_1_3" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Moreover, no other organization has such a remarkably long and bold record of very high-profile political assassinations, with many of the targets having been important Western leaders, even including American presidents.</span></p>
<p wcount="32" data-sanitized-id="p_1_4" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Yet as I emphasized in one of <a title="https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-jfk-assassination-part-ii-who-did-it/" href="https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-jfk-assassination-part-ii-who-did-it/">my earliest 2018 articles</a> on the subject, for more than thirty years after JFK’s death almost no one had ever suggested any possible Israeli involvement.</span></p>
<blockquote readability="71.918042813456">
<p wcount="191" data-sanitized-id="p_1_5" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">For decades following the 1963 assassination, virtually no suspicions had ever been directed towards Israel, and as a consequence none of the hundreds or thousands of assassination conspiracy books that appeared during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s had hinted at any role for the Mossad, though nearly every other possible culprit, ranging from the Vatican to the Illuminati, came under scrutiny. Kennedy had received over 80% of the Jewish vote in his 1960 election, American Jews featured very prominently in his White House, and he was greatly lionized by Jewish media figures, celebrities, and intellectuals ranging from New York City to Hollywood to the Ivy League. Moreover, individuals with a Jewish background such as Mark Lane and Edward Epstein had been among the leading early proponents of an assassination conspiracy, with their controversial theories championed by influential Jewish cultural celebrities such as Mort Sahl and Norman Mailer. Given that the Kennedy Administration was widely perceived as pro-Israel, there seemed no possible motive for any Mossad involvement, and bizarre, totally unsubstantiated accusations of such a monumental nature directed against the Jewish state were hardly likely to gain much traction in an overwhelmingly pro-Israel publishing industry.</span></p>
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<p wcount="95" data-sanitized-id="p_1_6" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">However, in the early 1990s highly-regarded journalists and researchers began exposing the circumstances surrounding the development of Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal. Seymour Hersh’s 1991 book <a title="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0394570065/" href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0394570065/"><em>The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy</em></a> <strong>described the extreme efforts of the Kennedy Administration to force Israel to allow international inspections of its allegedly non-military nuclear reactor at Dimona, and thereby prevent its use in producing nuclear weapons.</strong> <em>Dangerous Liaisons: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship</em> by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn appeared in the same year, and covered similar ground.</span></p>
<p wcount="85" data-sanitized-id="p_1_7" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Although entirely hidden from public awareness at the time, the early 1960s political conflict between the American and Israeli governments over nuclear weapons development had represented a top foreign policy priority of <strong>the Kennedy Administration, which had made nuclear non-proliferation one of its central international initiatives.</strong> It is notable that John McCone, Kennedy’s choice as CIA Director, had previously served on the Atomic Energy Commission under Eisenhower, being the individual who leaked the fact that <strong>Israel was building a nuclear reactor to produce plutonium.</strong></span></p>
<div data-sanitized-class="book-unit premblock alignright"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XK7Y41S/"><img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/513lXatxobL.jpg"></a>
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<p wcount="100" data-sanitized-id="p_1_8" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The pressure and financial aid threats secretly applied to Israel by <strong>the Kennedy Administration eventually became so severe that they led to the resignation of Israel’s founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in June 1963. But all these efforts were almost entirely halted or reversed once Kennedy was replaced by Johnson in November of that same year.</strong> Piper notes that Stephen Green’s 1984 book <a title="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XK7Y41S/" href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XK7Y41S/"><em>Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations With a Militant Israel</em></a> had previously documented that U.S. Middle East Policy completely reversed itself following Kennedy’s assassination, but this important finding had attracted little attention at the time.</span></p>
<p wcount="65" data-sanitized-id="p_1_9" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Skeptics of a plausible institutional basis for a JFK assassination conspiracy have often noted the extreme continuity in both foreign and domestic policies between the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, arguing that this casts severe doubt on any such possible motive. Although this analysis seems largely correct, America’s behavior towards Israel and its nuclear weapons program stands as a very notable exception to this pattern.</span></p>
<p wcount="193" data-sanitized-id="p_1_10" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">An additional major area of concern for Israeli officials may have involved the efforts of the Kennedy Administration to sharply restrict the activities of pro-Israel political lobbies. During his 1960 presidential campaign, <strong>Kennedy had met in New York City with a group of wealthy Israel advocates, led by financier Abraham Feinberg, and they had offered enormous financial support in exchange for a controlling influence in Middle Eastern policy.</strong> Kennedy managed to fob them off with vague assurances, but he considered the incident so troubling that the next morning he sought out journalist Charles Bartlett, one of his closest friends, and expressed his outrage that American foreign policy might fall under the control of partisans of a foreign power, promising that if he became president, he would rectify that situation. And indeed, <strong>once he had installed his brother Robert as Attorney General, the latter initiated a major legal effort to force pro-Israel groups to register themselves as foreign agents, which would have drastically reduced their power and influence. But after JFK’s death, this project was quickly abandoned</strong>, and as part of the settlement, the leading pro-Israel lobby merely agreed to reconstitute itself as AIPAC.</span></p>
</blockquote>
<p wcount="53" data-sanitized-id="p_1_11" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">These new disclosures about the bitter, hidden political struggle between the Kennedy Administration and the Israeli government over the latter’s secret nuclear weapons development program caught the attention of <a title="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Collins_Piper" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Collins_Piper">Michael Collins Piper</a>, a longtime journalist at <a title="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spotlight" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spotlight"><em>The Spotlight</em></a>, and he soon began exploring the possible connection to the Kennedy’s subsequent assassination.</span></p>
<p wcount="53" data-sanitized-id="p_1_12" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Pursuing that lead, Piper quickly amassed a great deal of circumstantial evidence suggesting that the Israeli Mossad together with its American collaborators had probably played a central role in the 1963 killing in Dallas, evidence that previous assassination researchers had missed or perhaps deliberately ignored. For example, Green’s very mainstream 1984 book had noted:</span></p>
<blockquote readability="13">
<p wcount="48" data-sanitized-id="p_1_13" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Perhaps the most significant development of 1963 for the Israeli nuclear weapons program, however, occurred on November 22 on a plane flying from Dallas to Washington, D.C., as Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as the 36th President of the United States, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy.</span></p>
</blockquote>
<p wcount="45" data-sanitized-id="p_1_14" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Within a few months Piper had produced the manuscript for the first edition of <a title="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0722R7K46/" href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0722R7K46/"><em>Final Judgment</em></a>, his seminal work presenting and documenting the Piper Hypothesis, by far the most controversial and explosive analysis of one of the most infamous world events of the twentieth century.</span></p>
<p wcount="89" data-sanitized-id="p_1_15" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">As I began reading some of the most popular and important books in the Kennedy assassination genre by leading researchers such as David Talbot, James W. Douglass, and Roger Stone, I noticed that they carefully excluded any mention of Piper’s work, apparently regarding it as just too radioactive to even acknowledge. Similarly, Piper’s close friendship with attorney Mark Lane, the founding father of JFK assassination conspiracy studies, may have severely clouded the latter’s treatment in the movement that he himself had done so much to create.</span></p>
<blockquote readability="108.49924460926">
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<p wcount="189" data-sanitized-id="p_1_16" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><a title="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0722R7K46/" href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0722R7K46/"><em>Final Judgment</em></a> went through a number of a reprintings following its original 1994 appearance, and by the sixth edition released in 2004, had grown to over 650 pages, including numerous long appendices and over 1100 footnotes, the overwhelming majority of these referencing fully mainstream sources. The body of the text was merely serviceable in organization and polish, reflecting the total boycott by all publishers, mainstream or alternative, but I found the contents themselves remarkable and generally quite compelling. Despite the most extreme blackout by all media outlets, the book sold more than 40,000 copies over the years, making it something of an underground bestseller, and surely bringing it to the attention of everyone in the JFK assassination research community, though apparently almost none of them were willing to mention its existence. I suspect these other writers realized that even any mere acknowledgement of the existence of the book, if only to ridicule or dismiss it, might prove fatal to their media and publishing career. Piper himself died in 2015, aged 54, suffering from the health problems and heavy-drinking often associated with grim poverty, and other journalists may have been reluctant to risk that same dismal fate.</span></p>
<p wcount="146" data-sanitized-id="p_1_17" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">As an example of this strange situation, the bibliography of Talbot’s 2007 book contains almost 140 entries, some rather obscure, but has no space for <em>Final Judgment</em>, nor does his very comprehensive index include any entry for “Jews” or “Israel.” Indeed, at one point he very delicately characterizes Sen. Robert Kennedy’s entirely Jewish senior staff by stating “There was not a Catholic among them.” His 2015 sequel is equally circumspect, and although the index does contain numerous entries pertaining to Jews, all these references are in regards to World War II and the Nazis, including his discussion of the alleged Nazi ties of Allen Dulles, his principal <em>bête noire</em>. <strong>Stone’s book, while fearlessly convicting President Lyndon Johnson of the JFK assassination, also strangely excludes “Jews” and “Israel” from the long index and <em>Final Judgment</em> from the bibliography, and Douglass’s book follows this same pattern.</strong></span></p>
<p wcount="189" data-sanitized-id="p_1_18" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Furthermore, the extreme concerns that the Piper Hypothesis seems to have provoked among JFK assassination researchers may explain a strange anomaly. Although Mark Lane was himself of Jewish origins and left-wing roots, after his victory for Liberty Lobby in the Hunt libel trial, he spent many years associated with that organization in a legal capacity, and apparently became quite friendly with Piper, one of its leading writers. According to Piper, Lane told him that <em>Final Judgment</em> made “a solid case” for a major Mossad role in the assassination, and he viewed the theory as fully complementary to his own focus on CIA involvement. I suspect that concerns about these associations may explain why Lane was almost completely airbrushed out of the Douglass and 2007 Talbot books, and discussed in the second Talbot book only when his work was absolutely essential to Talbot’s own analysis. By contrast, <em>New York Times</em> staff writers are hardly likely to be as well versed in the lesser-known aspects of the JFK assassination research community, and being ignorant of this hidden controversy, they gave Lane <a title="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/13/us/mark-lane-who-asserted-that-kennedy-was-killed-in-conspiracy-dies-at-89.html" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/13/us/mark-lane-who-asserted-that-kennedy-was-killed-in-conspiracy-dies-at-89.html">the long and glowing obituary</a> that his career fully warranted.</span></p>

<p wcount="66" data-sanitized-id="p_1_19" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">When weighing the possible suspects for a given crime, carefully considering their past patterns of behavior is often a helpful approach. As discussed above, I can think of no historical example in which organized crime initiated a serious assassination attempt against any American political figure even moderately prominent on the national stage. And despite a few suspicions here and there, the same applies to the CIA.</span></p>
<p wcount="175" data-sanitized-id="p_1_20" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">By contrast, <strong>the Israeli Mossad and the Zionist groups that preceded the establishment of the Jewish state seem to have had a very long track record of assassinations, including those of high-ranking political figures who might normally be regarded as inviolate.</strong> Lord Moyne, the British Minister of State for the Middle East, was assassinated in 1944 and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator sent to help resolve the first Arab-Israel war, suffered the same fate in September 1948. Not even an American president was entirely free of such risks, and Piper notes that the memoirs of <strong>Harry Truman’s daughter Margaret reveal that Zionist militants had tried to assassinate her father using a letter laced with toxic chemicals in 1947 when they believed he was dragging his heels in supporting Israel</strong>, although that failed attempt was never made public. The Zionist faction responsible for all of these incidents was led by Yitzhak Shamir, who later became a leader of Mossad and director of its assassination program during the 1960s, before eventually becoming Prime Minister of Israel in 1986.</span></p>
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<p wcount="113" data-sanitized-id="p_1_21" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">If the claims in the 1990s tell-all <a title="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0312056133/" href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0312056133/">bestsellers of Mossad defector Victor Ostrovsky</a> can be credited, <strong>Israel even considered the assassination of President George H.W. Bush in 1992 for his threats to cut off financial aid to Israel during a conflict over West Bank settlement policies</strong>, and I have been informed that the Bush Administration took those reports quite seriously at the time. And although I have not yet read it, the recent, widely-praised book <a title="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1400069718/" href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1400069718/"><em>Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations</em></a> by journalist <strong>Ronen Bergman suggests that no other country in the world may have so regularly employed assassination as a standard tool of official state policy.</strong></span></p>
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<p wcount="120" data-sanitized-id="p_1_22" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">There are other notable elements that tend to support the Piper Hypothesis. Once we accept the existence of a JFK assassination conspiracy, the one individual who is virtually certain to have been a participant was Jack Ruby, and his organized crime ties were almost entirely to the huge but rarely-mentioned Jewish wing of that enterprise, presided over by Meyer Lansky, an extremely fervent supporter of Israel. Ruby himself had particularly strong connections with Lansky lieutenant Mickey Cohen, who dominated the Los Angeles underworld and had been personally involved in gun-running to Israel prior to the 1948 war. Indeed, <a title="https://forward.com/news/187793/lee-harvey-oswalds-killer-jack-ruby-came-from-stro/" href="https://forward.com/news/187793/lee-harvey-oswalds-killer-jack-ruby-came-from-stro/">according to Dallas rabbi Hillel Silverman</a>, <strong>Ruby had privately explained his killing of Oswald by saying “I did it for the Jewish people.”</strong></span></p>
<p wcount="132" data-sanitized-id="p_1_23" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">An intriguing aspect to Oliver Stone’s landmark <em>JFK</em> film should also be mentioned. Arnon Milchan, the wealthy Hollywood producer who backed the project, was not only an Israeli citizen, but had also reportedly <a title="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/business/global/new-book-tells-tale-of-israeli-arms-dealer-in-hollywood.html" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/business/global/new-book-tells-tale-of-israeli-arms-dealer-in-hollywood.html">played a central role in the enormous espionage ring</a> to divert American technology and materials to Israel’s nuclear weapons program, the exact undertaking that the Kennedy Administration had made such efforts to block. Milchan has even sometimes been described as <a title="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-the-israeli-james-bond-milchan-and-his-ties-to-the-secret-services-1.5822493" href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-the-israeli-james-bond-milchan-and-his-ties-to-the-secret-services-1.5822493">“the Israeli James Bond.”</a> And although the film ran a full three hours in length, <em>JFK</em> scrupulously avoided presenting any of the details that Piper later regarded as initial clues to an Israeli dimension, instead seeming to finger America’s fanatic home-grown anti-Communist movement and the Cold War leadership of the military-industrial complex as the guilty parties.</span></p>
</blockquote>
<p wcount="25" data-sanitized-id="p_1_24" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">For those interested in reading Piper’s very lengthy analysis, the 2005 edition of his seminal work is available on this website in convenient HTML format.</span></p>
<ul><li><a title="https://www.unz.com/book/michael_collins_piper__final-judgment/" href="https://www.unz.com/book/michael_collins_piper__final-judgment/">Final Judgment</a><br><em>The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy</em><br>Michael Collins Piper • 2005 • 310,000 Words</li>
</ul><p wcount="43" data-sanitized-id="p_1_25" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">This edition actually incorporates several much shorter works, originally published separately. One of these, consisting of an extended Q&amp;A, describes the genesis of the idea and answers numerous questions surrounding it, and for some readers might represent a better starting point.</span></p>
<ul><li><a title="https://www.unz.com/book/michael_collins_piper__final-judgment/#default-judgment" href="https://www.unz.com/book/michael_collins_piper__final-judgment/#default-judgment">Default Judgment</a><br><em>Questions, Answers &amp; Reflections About the Crime of the Century</em><br>Michael Collins Piper • 2005 • 48,000 Words</li>
</ul><div data-sanitized-class="book-unit premblock alignright"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/2957170418/"><img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61Z00cal-OL.jpg"></a>
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<p wcount="96" data-sanitized-id="p_1_26" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">One of the tiny handful of later writers willing to embrace and promote the Piper Hypothesis has been Laurent Guyénot, a leading French conspiracy-researcher. Although I might not necessarily endorse every particular element, I would strongly recommend his 2019 book <a title="https://www.amazon.com/dp/2957170418/" href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/2957170418/"><em>The Unspoken Kennedy Truth</em></a> <strong>as the best single exposition of the Israel/Mossad case for the JFK Assassination.</strong> This paperback summarizes all the important information and is short enough that it can easily be read in just a day or two. His 2018 article on the same subject covers the same information in much more abbreviated form:</span></p>
<p wcount="38" data-sanitized-id="p_1_27" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Guyénot also presented this same controversial material in the form of a 2022 documentary available on YouTube. Although perhaps too hagiographic, <a title="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a37FM542MXE" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a37FM542MXE">“Israel and the Assassinations of the Kennedy Brothers”</a> likewise constitutes the best video introduction to that subject.</span></p>
<p><iframe width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/a37FM542MXE?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" title="Israel &amp; The Assassinations of the Kennedy Brothers: A Documentary By Laurent Guyénot" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin">[embedded content]</iframe></p>
<p wcount="2" data-sanitized-id="p_1_28" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><a title="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a37FM542MXE'" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a37FM542MXE" target="_blank" data-sanitized-class="caption">Video Link</a></span></p>
<p wcount="34" data-sanitized-id="p_1_29" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Despite being somewhat disorganized, I would also recommend Ryan Dawson’s complementary 2023 documentary <a title="https://rumble.com/v1a6xdr-numec-how-israel-stole-the-atomic-bomb.html" href="https://rumble.com/v1a6xdr-numec-how-israel-stole-the-atomic-bomb.html">NUMEC: How Israel Stole the Atomic Bomb and Killed JFK</a>, which focuses very heavily upon Israel’s nuclear weapons development program.</span></p>

<p wcount="9" data-sanitized-id="p_1_31" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><strong>Candace Owens wraps up the entire story in 3 minutes:</strong></span></p>
<blockquote readability="12.590361445783" data-sanitized-class="twitter-tweet">
<p wcount="33" data-sanitized-id="p_1_32" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">At this stage, if you don’t fully agree that Israel Mossad was the main culprit behind JFK assassination, then you’re either blackmailed, reetarded, bribed, and/or jewish. <a title="https://t.co/ZNwXepIdd6" href="https://t.co/ZNwXepIdd6">pic.twitter.com/ZNwXepIdd6</a></span></p>
<p wcount="3" data-sanitized-id="p_1_33" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">— Machiavelli (@TheRISEofROD) <a title="https://twitter.com/TheRISEofROD/status/1902929655272772089?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" href="https://twitter.com/TheRISEofROD/status/1902929655272772089?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 21, 2025</a></span></p>
</blockquote>


<p wcount="14" data-sanitized-id="p_1_34" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><em>How does the later 1968 assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy fit into this story?</em></span></p>
<div readability="7" data-sanitized-id="i_2" data-sanitized-class="image imageright container">
<div data-sanitized-class="image-holder"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><a href="https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Rfk_assassination.jpg"><img src="https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Rfk_assassination.jpg" alt="Credit: Boris Yaro for the Los Angeles Times/Wikimedia Commons"></a></span></div>
<p><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Credit: Boris Yaro for the Los Angeles Times/Wikimedia Commons</span></p>
</div>
<p wcount="33" data-sanitized-id="p_1_35" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><strong>Ron Unz</strong>—I believe that the widespread tendency to disassociate the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy from the 1968 assassination of his younger brother Sen. Robert F. Kennedy has been a major mistake.</span></p>
<p wcount="57" data-sanitized-id="p_1_36" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The two men were the closest of political allies and partners. Robert served as Attorney-General in the administration of his elder brother and was widely regarded as the second most powerful figure in America during that period. Furthermore, a careful consideration of the evidence suggests that those two assassinations were closely connected, as might naturally be assumed.</span></p>
<p wcount="39" data-sanitized-id="p_1_37" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">In <a title="https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-jfk-assassination-part-i-what-happened/" href="https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-jfk-assassination-part-i-what-happened/">my first 2018 article</a> on the JFK Assassination, I explained that I had spent almost my entire life so brainwashed by the mainstream media narrative that I had never once suspected the possibility of any conspiracy in that killing.</span></p>
<p wcount="59" data-sanitized-id="p_1_38" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">But as I gradually became suspicious and decided to finally investigate the topic, the first book I happened to read was David Talbot’s 2007 national bestseller <a title="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0743269195/" href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0743269195/"><em>Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years</em></a>, focused on the relationship between John F. Kennedy and his younger brother Robert. I explained that this turned out to be an extremely fortuituous choice:</span></p>
<blockquote readability="101.55674410831">
<div data-sanitized-class="book-unit premblock alignright"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0743269195/"><img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51N6l2RZ9%2BL.jpg"></a>
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<p wcount="83" data-sanitized-id="p_1_39" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The Talbot book especially impressed me, being based on over 150 personal interviews and released by <em>The Free Press</em>, a highly reputable publisher. Although he applied a considerable hagiographic gloss to the Kennedys, his narrative was compellingly written, with numerous gripping scenes. But while such packaging surely helped to explain some of the favorable treatment from reviewers and how he had managed to produce a national bestseller in a seemingly long-depleted field, for me the packaging was much less important than the product itself.</span></p>
<p wcount="55" data-sanitized-id="p_1_40" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">To the extent that notions of a JFK conspiracy had ever crossed my mind, I’d considered the argument from silence absolutely conclusive. Surely if there had been the slightest doubt of the “lone gunman” conclusion endorsed by the Warren Commission, Attorney-General Robert Kennedy would have launched a full investigation to avenge his slain brother.</span></p>
<p wcount="110" data-sanitized-id="p_1_41" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">But as Talbot so effectively demonstrates, the reality of the political situation was entirely different. Robert Kennedy may have begun that fatal morning widely regarded as the second most powerful man in the country, but the moment his brother was dead and his bitter personal enemy Lyndon Johnson sworn in as the new president, his governmental authority almost immediately ebbed away. Longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had been his hostile subordinate, probably scheduled for removal in JFK’s second term, immediately became contemptuous and unresponsive to his requests. Having lost all his control over the levers of power, Robert Kennedy lacked any ability to conduct a serious investigation.</span></p>
<p wcount="182" data-sanitized-id="p_1_42" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">According to numerous personal interviews, he had almost immediately concluded that his brother had been struck down at the hands of an organized group, very likely including elements from within the U.S. government itself, but he could do nothing about the situation. As he regularly confided to close associates, his hope at the age of 38 was to reach the White House himself at some future date, and with the government in his hands then uncover his brother’s killers and bring them to justice. But until that day, he was powerless and any unsubstantiated accusations he made would be totally disastrous both for national unity and for his own personal credibility. So for years, he was forced to nod his head and publicly acquiesce to the official story of his brother’s inexplicable assassination at the hands of a lone nut, a fairy tale publicly endorsed by nearly the entire political establishment, and this situation deeply gnawed at him. Moreover, his own apparent acceptance of that story was often interpreted by others, not least in the media, as his wholehearted endorsement…</span></p>
<p wcount="156" data-sanitized-id="p_1_43" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">If the first two dozen pages of the Talbot book completely overturned my understanding of the JFK assassination, I found the closing section almost equally shocking. With the Vietnam War as a political millstone about his neck, President Johnson decided not to seek reelection in 1968, opening the door to a last minute entry into the Democratic race by Robert Kennedy, who overcame considerable odds to win some important primaries. Then on June 4, 1968, he carried gigantic winner-take-all California, placing him on an easy path to the nomination and the presidency itself, at which point he would finally be in a position to fully investigate his brother’s assassination. But minutes after his victory speech, he was shot and fatally wounded, allegedly by another lone gunman, this time a disoriented Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan, supposedly outraged over Kennedy’s pro-Israel public positions, although these were no different than those expressed by most other political candidates in America.</span></p>
<p wcount="228" data-sanitized-id="p_1_44" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">All this was well known to me. <strong>However, I had not known that powder burns later proved that the fatal bullet had been fired directly behind Kennedy’s head from a distance of three inches or less although Sirhan was standing several feet in front of him. Furthermore, eyewitness testimony and acoustic evidence indicated that at least twelve bullets were fired although Sirhan’s revolver could hold only eight, and a combination of these factors led longtime LA Coroner Dr. Thomas Naguchi, who conducted the autopsy, to claim in his 1983 memoir that there was likely a second gunman. Meanwhile, eyewitnesses also reported seeing a security guard with his gun drawn standing immediately behind Kennedy during the attack, and that individual happened to have a deep political hatred of the Kennedys.</strong> The police investigators seemed uninterested in these highly suspicious elements, none of which came to light during the trial. With two Kennedy brothers now dead, neither any surviving members of the family nor most of their allies and retainers had any desire to investigate the details of this latest assassination, and in a number of cases they soon moved overseas, abandoning the country entirely. JFK’s widow Jackie confided in friends that she was terrified for the lives of her children, and quickly married Aristotle Onassis, a Greek billionaire, whom she felt would be able to protect them….</span></p>
<p wcount="27" data-sanitized-id="p_1_45" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Taken as a whole, I found Talbot’s narrative quite convincing, at least with respect to demonstrating the existence of a substantial conspiracy behind the fatal event.</span></p>
<p wcount="58" data-sanitized-id="p_1_46" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Others certainly had the same reaction, with the august pages of <em>The New York Times</em> <em>Sunday Book Review</em> carrying the strongly favorable reaction of presidential historian Alan Brinkley. As the Allan Nevins Professor of History and Provost of Columbia University, Brinkley is as mainstream and respectable an academic scholar as might be imagined and <a title="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/books/review/Brinkley-t.html" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/books/review/Brinkley-t.html">he characterized Talbot as</a></span></p>
<p wcount="47" data-sanitized-id="p_1_47" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><em>the latest of many intelligent critics who have set out to demolish the tottering credibility of the Warren Commission and draw attention to evidence of a broad and terrible conspiracy that lay behind the assassination of John Kennedy — and perhaps the murder of Robert Kennedy as well.</em></span></p>
</blockquote>

<p wcount="64" data-sanitized-id="p_1_48" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">In many respects, I think that the RFK Assassination is the Rosetta Stone of the two killings since the existence of a conspiracy is so absolutely obvious and undeniable. In recent years, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has publicly declared that Sirhan was innocent and should be freed from prison, and in early 2022 I published <a title="https://www.unz.com/runz/rfk-jr-vs-i-f-stone-on-the-kennedy-assassinations/" href="https://www.unz.com/runz/rfk-jr-vs-i-f-stone-on-the-kennedy-assassinations/">an additional article</a> discussing the case in much greater detail:</span></p>
<blockquote readability="69.419864559819">
<p wcount="69" data-sanitized-id="p_1_49" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Over the years, the 1968 Robert Kennedy assassination has attracted merely a sliver of the books and research devoted to the earlier killing of his elder brother in Dallas, and Talbot’s text spent only a few pages sketching out the <strong>strong evidence that the convicted gunman was merely an innocent dupe, manipulated by the true conspirators.</strong> But in 2018, two additional books appeared that were entirely focused on the case.</span></p>
<div data-sanitized-class="book-unit premblock alignright"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1627310703/"><img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41Xc-TmJMSL.jpg"></a>
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<p wcount="79" data-sanitized-id="p_1_50" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><a title="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1627310703/?tag=unco037-20" href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1627310703/?tag=unco037-20"><em>A Lie Too Big To Fail</em></a> by longtime journalist and conspiracy researcher Lisa Pease ran 500 pages and covered the events of that fatal California evening in exhaustive detail, winning the endorsements of filmmaker Oliver Stone and renowned JFK researcher James W. Douglass. When I read it a few months ago, I found the huge volume of material quite useful but felt that it relied too heavily upon the recollections of eyewitnesses, which can easily grow attenuated over the decades…</span></p>
<div data-sanitized-class="book-unit premblock alignright"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1839012730/"><img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41lEvvVjutS.jpg"></a>
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<p wcount="83" data-sanitized-id="p_1_51" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Meanwhile, <a title="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1839012730/?tag=unco037-20" href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1839012730/?tag=unco037-20"><em>The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy</em></a> by Tim Tate and Brad Johnson was released that same year and suffered from none of these flaws. The two conspiracy researchers had spent some 25 years heavily involved in the case, and although their volume was only around half the length of the Pease book, it seemed a far more effective treatment of the topic, including eyewitness accounts but focused primarily upon the undeniable physical and forensic evidence while avoiding any damaging bouts of unwarranted speculation.</span></p>
<p wcount="109" data-sanitized-id="p_1_52" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">While working at <em>CNN</em>, one of the authors had originally obtained the audiotape establishing the number of shots fired, which probably constitutes the single strongest piece of evidence in the case. The book analyzed and evaluated that crucial item in tremendous detail, and also focused upon the fatal shot, which was fired at point-blank range from behind the candidate while Sirhan, the supposed gunman, was standing several feet in front. But since both the publisher and the lead author were British, the work seems to have received much less attention in this country, and I only discovered and read it after Kennedy cited it in his <em>SF Chronicle</em> column.</span></p>
<p wcount="49" data-sanitized-id="p_1_53" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Unlike many other controversial American killings or terrorist attacks, the powerful evidence of a conspiracy in the case of the RFK assassination was physical and seemingly undeniable. Wikipedia is notoriously reluctant to promote conspiratorial narratives, but in this case <a title="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Robert_F._Kennedy#Second_gunman_hypothesis" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Robert_F._Kennedy#Second_gunman_hypothesis">the striking facts are presented</a> with only rather weak challenges.</span></p>
<p wcount="40" data-sanitized-id="p_1_54" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The conclusive proof from the audio recording only came to light in 2004, but I was surprised to discover that all the other strong evidence, including the large number of unexplained bullet holes, had already been known and reported for decades.</span></p>
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<div data-sanitized-class="image-holder"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><a href="https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/SaturdayRev-1977feb19-Lowenstein-Cover.jpg"><img src="https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/SaturdayRev-1977feb19-Lowenstein-Cover.jpg" alt></a></span></div>
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<p wcount="87" data-sanitized-id="p_1_55" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Former Congressman Allard K. Lowenstein had been heavily involved in the 1968 election campaign, playing a major role in the effort to unseat incumbent President Lyndon Johnson. In 1977 he published a long cover-story in the influential <em>Saturday Review</em>, setting forth the overwhelming evidence that a second gunman had been involved in the shooting, and my content-archiving system provides <a title="https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/SaturdayRev-1977feb19-Lowenstein.pdf" href="https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/SaturdayRev-1977feb19-Lowenstein.pdf">a convenient PDF copy</a>. So nearly <strong>all the crucial facts in the case have been known for 45 years, but were almost always ignored by our dishonest or cowardly American media.</strong></span></p>
<p wcount="44" data-sanitized-id="p_1_56" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Three years after publicly revealing that explosive information, Lowenstein himself was dead, <a title="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allard_K._Lowenstein#Death" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allard_K._Lowenstein#Death">supposedly shot</a> at the age of 51 by a deranged lone gunman who had been a former student of his, but I have been informed that his personal friends never believed that story.</span></p>
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<p wcount="32" data-sanitized-id="p_1_57" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">As I explained in <a title="https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-mossad-assassinations/#final-judgment-on-the-jfk-assassination" href="https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-mossad-assassinations/#final-judgment-on-the-jfk-assassination">a different article</a>, some of the strange circumstances of the RFK Assassination provided additional evidence for the Piper Hypothesis of Mossad involvement in the death of our president.</span></p>
<blockquote readability="30.664700098328">
<p wcount="119" data-sanitized-id="p_1_58" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">David Talbot’s influential 2007 book <a title="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0743269195/" href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0743269195/"><em>Brothers</em></a> revealed that Robert F. Kennedy had been convinced almost from the first that his brother had been struck down in a conspiracy, but he held his tongue, telling his circle of friends that he stood little chance of tracking down and punishing the guilty parties until he himself reached the White House. By June 1968, he seemed on the threshold of achieving that goal, but was felled by an assassin’s bullet just moments after winning the crucial California presidential primary. The logical assumption is that his death was engineered by the same elements as that of his elder brother, who were now acting to protect themselves from the consequences of their earlier crime.</span></p>
<p wcount="67" data-sanitized-id="p_1_59" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">A young Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan had fired a pistol at the scene and was quickly arrested and convicted for the murder. But Talbot emphasizes that the coroner’s report revealed that the fatal bullet came from a completely different direction, while the acoustical record proves that far more shots were fired than the capacity of the alleged killer’s gun. Such hard evidence demonstrates a conspiracy.</span></p>
<p wcount="142" data-sanitized-id="p_1_60" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Sirhan himself seemed dazed and confused, later claiming to have no memory of events, and Talbot mentions that various assassination researchers have long argued that he was merely a convenient patsy in the plot, perhaps acting under some form of hypnosis or conditioning. Nearly all these writers are usually reluctant to note that the selection of a Palestinian as scapegoat in the killing points in a certain obvious direction, but Bergman’s recent book also includes a major new revelation. <strong>At exactly the same moment that Sirhan was being wrestled to the floor of the Ambassador Hotel ballroom in Los Angeles, another young Palestinian <a title="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/magazine/how-arafat-eluded-israels-assassination-machine.html" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/magazine/how-arafat-eluded-israels-assassination-machine.html">was undergoing</a> intensive rounds of hypnotic conditioning at the hands of Mossad in Israel, being programmed to assassinate PLO leader Yasir Arafat; and although that effort ultimately failed, such a coincidence seems to stretch the bounds of plausibility.</strong></span></p>
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<p wcount="15" data-sanitized-id="p_1_61" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><em>I asked Grok the following question: “Did JFK try to prevent Israel from acquiring nukes?”</em></span></p>
<p wcount="5" data-sanitized-id="p_1_62" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><em>Here’s how Grok responded:</em></span></p>
<blockquote readability="22">
<p wcount="61" data-sanitized-id="p_1_63" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><em>In a May 1963 letter to Ben-Gurion, Kennedy explicitly warned that U.S. support for Israel could be jeopardized if Israel pursued nuclear weapons, stating, “<strong>This Government’s commitment to and support of Israel could be seriously jeopardized if it should be thought that we were unable to obtain reliable information on a subject as vital to peace as the nuclear field.”</strong></em></span></p>
<p wcount="32" data-sanitized-id="p_1_64" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><em><strong>Kennedy also tied U.S. military aid to Israel’s cooperation on Dimona.</strong> While he approved some arms sales (like Hawk missiles in 1962), he used these as leverage to press for transparency…..</em></span></p>
<p wcount="45" data-sanitized-id="p_1_65" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><em>By the time of Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, Israel hadn’t openly weaponized, but its program was advancing covertly…. Kennedy’s push delayed Israel’s progress but didn’t stop it—Israel likely achieved nuclear capability by the late 1960s, after his death.” (Grok)</em></span></p>
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<p wcount="30" data-sanitized-id="p_1_66" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><em><strong>This excerpt suggests that Israel had a strong motive for disposing of Kennedy.</strong> It also suggests that Israel finally achieved nuclear capability under Lyndon Johnson (which casts suspicion on Johnson.)</em></span></p>
<p wcount="13" data-sanitized-id="p_1_67" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><em>In your opinion, was Lyndon Johnson aware of the plot to kill Kennedy?</em></span></p>
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<div data-sanitized-class="image-holder"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><a href="https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/JohnsonGoldaMeir.png"><img src="https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/JohnsonGoldaMeir.png" alt></a></span></div>
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<p wcount="102" data-sanitized-id="p_1_68" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><strong>Ron Unz</strong>—I actually think <strong>it’s very likely that Johnson was an important participant in the plot to kill Kennedy. During his entire political career, he had been known as one of America’s strongest supporters of Zionism, even willing to take illegal actions on behalf of that movement while still a Congressman. As Senate Majority Leader during most of the 1950s, he led the pro-Israel political opposition to the more balanced Middle East policies of President Dwight Eisenhower. Therefore, he certainly had direct channels of communication with the top Israeli leaders as their assassination plans might have moved forward in 1963.</strong></span></p>
<p wcount="25" data-sanitized-id="p_1_69" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Moreover, Johnson was then facing political destruction at Kennedy’s hands, so would have had a powerful personal motive for involving himself in that plot.</span></p>
<p wcount="64" data-sanitized-id="p_1_70" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">When I first began investigating the topic of the JFK Assassination a dozen years ago, I was very surprised to discover that only a tiny fraction of the books focused on Johnson’s possible involvement, while the overwhelming majority either completely ignored that issue or else explicitly dismissed the idea. In <a title="https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-jfk-assassination-part-ii-who-did-it/" href="https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-jfk-assassination-part-ii-who-did-it/">my earliest 2018 article</a> on the likely participants, I noted this very curious omission:</span></p>
<blockquote readability="99">
<p wcount="150" data-sanitized-id="p_1_71" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">If a husband or wife is found murdered, with no obvious suspect or motive at hand, the normal response of the police is to carefully investigate the surviving spouse, and quite often this suspicion proves correct. Similarly, if you read in your newspapers that in some obscure Third World country two bitterly hostile leaders, both having unpronounceable names, had been sharing supreme political power until one was suddenly struck down in a mysterious assassination by unknown conspirators, your thoughts would certainly move in an obvious direction. Most Americans in the early 1960s did not perceive their own country’s politics in such a light, but perhaps they were mistaken. As a total newcomer to the enormous, hidden world of JFK conspiracy analysis, I was immediately surprised by the mere sliver of suspicion directed towards Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, the slain leader’s immediate successor and the most obvious beneficiary.</span></p>
<p wcount="170" data-sanitized-id="p_1_72" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The two Talbot books and the one by Douglass, totaling some 1500 pages, devote merely a few paragraphs to any suspicions of Johnson’s involvement. Talbot’s first book reports that immediately after the assassination, the vice president had expressed a frantic concern to his personal aides that a military coup might be in progress or a world war breaking out, and suggests that these few casual words demonstrate his obvious innocence, although a more cynical observer might wonder if those remarks had been uttered for exactly that reason. Talbot’s second book actually quotes an apparent low-level conspirator as claiming that Johnson had personally signed off on the plot and admits that Hunt believed the same thing, but treats such unsubstantiated accusations with considerable skepticism, before adding a single sentence acknowledging that Johnson may indeed have been a passive supporter or even an accomplice. Douglass and Peter Dale Scott, author of the influential 1993 book <em>Deep Politics and the Death of JFK</em>, apparently seem never to have even entertained the possibility.</span></p>
<p wcount="110" data-sanitized-id="p_1_73" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Ideological considerations are probably an important reason for such remarkable reticence. Although liberals had grown to revile LBJ by the late 1960s for his escalation of the unpopular Vietnam War, over the decades those sentiments have faded, while warm memories of his passage of the landmark Civil Rights legislation and his creation of the Great Society programs have elevated his stature in that ideological camp. Furthermore, such legislation had long been blockaded in Congress and only became law because of the 1964 Democratic Congressional landslide following JFK’s martyrdom, and it might be difficult for liberals to admit that their fondest dreams were only realized by an act of political parricide.</span></p>
<p wcount="109" data-sanitized-id="p_1_74" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Kennedy and Johnson may have been intensely hostile personal rivals, but there seem to have been few deep ideological differences between the two men, and most of the leading figures in JFK’s government continued to serve under his successor, surely another source of enormous embarrassment to any ardent liberals who came to suspect that the former had been murdered by a conspiracy involving the latter. Talbot, Douglass, and many other left-leaning advocates for an assassination conspiracy prefer to point the finger of blame towards far more congenial villains such as hard-line, anti-Communist Cold Warriors and right-wing elements, notably including top CIA officials, such as former director Allan Dulles.</span></p>
<p wcount="145" data-sanitized-id="p_1_75" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">An additional factor helping to explain the extreme unwillingness of Talbot, Douglass, and others to consider Johnson as an obvious suspect may be the realities of the book publishing industry. By the 2000s, JFK assassination conspiracies had long become passé and were treated with disdain in mainstream circles. Talbot’s strong reputation, his 150 original interviews, and the quality of his manuscript broke that barrier, and attracted <em>The Free Press</em> as his very respectable publisher, while later drawing a strongly positive review by a leading academic scholar in the <em>New York Times Sunday Book Review</em> and an hour long television segment broadcast on <em>C-Span Booknotes</em>. But if he had devoted any space to voicing suspicions that our 35th president had been murdered by our 36th, surely the weight of that extra element of “outrageous conspiracy theory” would have ensured that his book sank without a trace.</span></p>

<p wcount="27" data-sanitized-id="p_1_76" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">However, if we cast off these distorting ideological blinders and the practical considerations of American publishing, the <em>prima facie</em> case for Johnson’s involvement seems quite compelling.</span></p>
<p wcount="116" data-sanitized-id="p_1_77" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Consider a very simple point. <strong>If a president is struck down by an unknown group of conspirators, his successor would normally have had the strongest possible incentive to track them down lest he might become their next victim. Yet Johnson did nothing, appointing the Warren Commission that covered up the entire matter, laying the blame upon an erratic “lone gunman” conveniently dead.</strong> This would seem remarkably odd behavior for an innocent LBJ. This conclusion does not demand that Johnson was the mastermind, nor even an active participant, but it raises a very strong suspicion that he at least had had some awareness of the plot, and enjoyed a good personal relationship with some of the principals.</span></p>
<p wcount="90" data-sanitized-id="p_1_78" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">A similar conclusion is supported by a converse analysis. If the plot succeeded and Johnson became president, the conspirators must surely have felt reasonably confident that they would be protected rather than tracked down and punished as traitors by the new president. Even a fully successful assassination would entail enormous risks unless the organizers believed that Johnson would do exactly what he did, and the only means of ensuring this would be to sound him out about the plan, at least in some vague manner, and obtain his passive acquiesce.</span></p>
<p wcount="34" data-sanitized-id="p_1_79" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Based on these considerations, <strong>it seems extremely difficult to believe that any JFK assassination conspiracy took place entirely without Johnson’s foreknowledge, or that he was not a central figure in the subsequent cover-up.</strong></span></p>
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<p wcount="19" data-sanitized-id="p_1_80" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Last year I published <a title="https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-jfk-lbj-and-our-great-national-shame/" href="https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-jfk-lbj-and-our-great-national-shame/">another article</a> summarizing the very strong case for Johnson’s involvement in much greater detail:</span></p>
<blockquote readability="221.60887169336">
<p wcount="50" data-sanitized-id="p_1_81" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">My impression is that until the last dozen years or so, merely a sliver of the books and articles on the JFK Assassination ever even hinted at the possible role of LBJ, apparently regarding the notion as too radioactive to mention and ignoring the obvious logical case for his involvement…</span></p>
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<p wcount="151" data-sanitized-id="p_1_82" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">As the Vietnam War escalated and President Johnson became an object of intense hatred in leftist circles, I think that suspicion of his personal role in the death of his predecessor may have gradually spread. In 1966 a young Berkeley anti-war activist named Barbara Garson reworked the treachery and regicide of Shakespeare’s <em>Macbeth</em> into a modern day sketch involving the recent death of our own president at the hands of his successor, in which the murderous usurper was finally avenged and slain by the character representing Robert F. Kennedy. <a title="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBird!" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBird!"><em>MacBird!</em></a> first appeared in <em>Ramparts</em>, a leading antiwar publication of the Left, and it was soon developed into a play, running for many hundreds of performances in New York City, Los Angeles, and elsewhere despite pressure from the authorities. But that short work of allegorical, almost satirical fiction aimed at Johnson seems to have been very much the exception to the pattern.</span></p>
<p wcount="27" data-sanitized-id="p_1_83" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Johnson never received even a hint of suspicion in Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning 1991 film and a closely-related book endorsed by that famed director took a similar position…</span></p>
<p wcount="73" data-sanitized-id="p_1_84" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The appearance of JFK Assassination books has tended to come in waves. The tremendous success of Stone’s 1991 film led publishers to open their doors, and another such wave followed in the wake of Talbot’s 2007 best-seller, further boosted by the considerable sales success and favorable reviews of Douglass’ 2009 work. But this latter period finally saw the appearance of several important books arguing that Johnson had been the central figure in the plot.</span></p>
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<p wcount="73" data-sanitized-id="p_1_85" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The first and most important of these works was <a title="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1616083778/" href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1616083778/"><em>LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination</em></a>, a hefty 2011 volume running well over 600 pages by Phillip F. Nelson, a retired Texas businessman. Nearly fifty years had elapsed since Johnson’s death, and Nelson did an excellent job of collating and compiling the overwhelming evidence of Johnson’s long and extremely sordid political career, a career that allegedly culminated in the murder of his predecessor.</span></p>
<p wcount="140" data-sanitized-id="p_1_86" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Johnson had been a product of Texas politics and during the first half of the twentieth century his state seems to have borne a strong resemblance to a corrupt Third World country, whose vast oil wealth and lucrative federal programs offered enormous financial opportunities for those clever and ruthless enough to take advantage of them. Thus, Johnson was born dirt-poor, held low-paying government jobs throughout his entire life, yet in 1963 he took the oath of office <a title="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States_by_net_worth" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States_by_net_worth">as the wealthiest president in modern American history</a>, having accumulated a personal fortune of over $100 million in present-day terms, with the financial payoffs from his corporate benefactors laundered through his wife’s business. Johnson’s striking wealth is so little remembered these days that a prominent political journalist with Texas roots expressed total disbelief when I mentioned those facts to him fifteen-odd years ago.</span></p>
<p wcount="139" data-sanitized-id="p_1_87" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Johnson’s political and financial rise had relied upon stolen elections and massive government corruption schemes and these sometimes placed him in legal jeopardy. Given such difficulties, <strong>Nelson makes a strong case that the future president may have protected himself by arranging a long series of murders, with some of the stories being absolutely astonishing but apparently true.</strong> For example, in one bizarre 1961 incident that strangely foreshadowed the Warren Commission’s “lone gunman” finding, a federal government inspector investigating a huge Texas corruption scheme involving a close LBJ ally rejected various attempts to buy him off and was then found dead, shot five times in the chest and abdomen by a rifle; but his death was officially ruled a “suicide” by the local authorities, and reported as such with a straight face in the pages of the <em>Washington Post</em>.</span></p>
<p wcount="130" data-sanitized-id="p_1_88" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><strong>Many of these murders may have been committed by a certain <a title="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Wallace" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Wallace">Malcolm “Mac” Wallace</a>, whom Nelson identifies as Johnson’s personal hitman</strong>, kept on the federal payroll of the Department of Agriculture between his periodic lethal assignments. In one remarkable 1951 incident, <strong>Wallace shot dead in broad daylight a local celebrity golf pro who was involved in a messy affair with Johnson’s troublesome sister Josefa, leading a jury to convict him of first degree murder.</strong> Although under Texas law such a verdict would normally carry a mandatory death penalty, Wallace instead astonishingly escaped with <strong><em>a suspended sentence</em></strong> allowing him to immediately walk free, courtesy of Johnson’s massive political influence. The Texas of that era seemed to share characteristics similar to those of Chicago during the reign of Al Capone.</span></p>
<p wcount="91" data-sanitized-id="p_1_89" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Although he operated much more cautiously away from his Texas domain, Johnson seems to have adopted similarly ruthless methods in DC, heavily relying upon corruption and blackmail to solidify his power base in the U.S. Senate over which he reigned during much of the 1950s. He also immediately recognized the power wielded by J. Edgar Hoover, whom he enlisted as one of his closest political allies, shrewdly buying a house just a few doors down from the longtime FBI director and living as a close neighbor for nearly twenty years.</span></p>

<p wcount="68" data-sanitized-id="p_1_90" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">After spending the years of Eisenhower’s second term widely regarded as the most powerful Democrat in America, Johnson decided to seek the Presidency in 1960, hardly regarding the much younger Kennedy, whom he greatly outranked in political stature and somewhat despised, as a serious threat. His confidence was reinforced by the fact that no Catholic had been nominated by a major party since Al Smith’s epic 1928 disaster.</span></p>
<p wcount="106" data-sanitized-id="p_1_91" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Unfortunately for Johnson’s political plans, patriarch Joseph Kennedy had already spent a quarter century as a powerful political figure, relentlessly plotting his own family’s path to the White House. His liquid wealth was far greater than Johnson’s and he was willing to freely spend it on his son’s nomination drive, swamping all other candidates in the bribes and secret payoffs that determined the voting outcomes in some of the crucial but very corrupt primary states such as West Virginia. So by the time of the Democratic convention, the younger Kennedy had the nomination all locked up and Johnson had been politically humiliated.</span></p>
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<p wcount="122" data-sanitized-id="p_1_92" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">At this point, matters took a strange turn. Both Kennedy and his younger brother Robert detested Johnson and they had already selected Sen. Stuart Symington as the Vice Presidential nominee when suddenly at the last moment Johnson was placed on the ticket instead. Both Nelson and Seymour Hersh in <a title="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0316360678/" href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0316360678/"><em>The Dark Side of Camelot</em></a> told this story and strongly argued that heavy use of personal blackmail was responsible for this sudden change of political plans rather than geographical ticket-balancing or any other legitimate factor. But Kennedy’s paper-thin 1960 victory would have been far more difficult without Texas narrowly falling into the Democratic column, and the massive election fraud orchestrated by Johnson’s ruthless political machine had been crucial in achieving that result.</span></p>
<p wcount="152" data-sanitized-id="p_1_93" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Johnson had begun 1960 as the most powerful Democrat in America and he reasonably believed that his efforts had been crucial in winning the November race, so he naturally expected that he would play a major role in the new administration, even issuing grandiose demands for a huge political portfolio. But instead he was immediately sidelined and treated with complete disdain, soon becoming a forlorn figure in DC with no authority nor influence. <strong>With Johnson having lost his longtime power-base in the Senate, the Kennedys eventually made plans to get rid of him, and just a few days before the assassination, they were already discussing whom to place on the 1964 reelection ticket in his stead. They recognized that once purged, Johnson might become a dangerous and vindictive political foe, so they decided to remove that possibility by using the record of his massive corruption and many crimes in Texas to completely destroy him.</strong></span></p>
<p wcount="101" data-sanitized-id="p_1_94" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The recent fall of Bobby Baker, Johnson’s key political henchman in the Senate, presented an excellent opportunity. So <strong>the Kennedys began orchestrating a media campaign to expose Johnson, intended to result in his political destruction and perhaps a lengthy prison sentence.</strong> James Wagenvoord was then the 27-year-old assistant to <em>Life Magazine</em>‘s executive editor, and in early November 2009 he emailed a note <a title="https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/14966-life-magazine-lbj-and-the-assassination-of-jfk/" href="https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/14966-life-magazine-lbj-and-the-assassination-of-jfk/">breaking his long decades of silence</a> and telling the story of the massive expose against Johnson that had been pulled at the very last moment. Nelson quoted this astonishing revelation at length, only correcting minor typos and errors:</span></p>
<blockquote readability="12">
<p wcount="235" data-sanitized-id="p_1_95" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Beginning in later summer 1963 [<em>Life</em>] magazine, based upon information fed from Bobby Kennedy and the Justice Department, had been developing a major newsbreak piece concerning Johnson and Bobby Baker. <strong><em>On publication Johnson would have been finished and off the ’64 ticket ([the] reason the material was fed to us) and would probably have been facing prison time.</em></strong> At the time <em>Life</em> magazine was arguably the most important general news source in the United States. The top management of Time Inc. was closely allied with the USA’s various intelligence agencies and we were used…by the Kennedy Justice Department as a conduit to the public…The LBJ/Baker piece was in the final editing stages and was scheduled to break in the issue of the magazine due out the week of November 24 (most likely one of the next scheduled editions, November 29th or December 6th, distributed four or five days earlier than those dates). It had been prepared in relative secrecy by a small special editorial team. <em>On Kennedy’s death research files and all numbered copies of the nearly print-ready draft were gathered up by my boss (he had been the top editor on the team) and shredded.</em> The issue that was to expose LBJ instead featured the Zapruder film. Based upon our success in syndicating the Zapruder film I became Chief of <em>Time/Life</em> editorial services and remained in that job until 1968. (emphasis added.)</span></p>
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<p wcount="67" data-sanitized-id="p_1_96" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Thus, <strong>by mid-November 1963, Johnson seemed a desperate political figure at the absolute end of his rope. But a week later he was the President of the United States, and all those swirling scandals were suddenly forgotten</strong>, with the huge block of magazine space reserved for the story of his political destruction apparently instead filled by the coverage of the assassination that placed him in the White House.</span></p>
<p wcount="224" data-sanitized-id="p_1_97" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">These crucial facts about Johnson’s desperate personal situation address a criticism commonly raised by conspiracy skeptics, such as establishmentarian historian Stephen Ambrose. By 1992, Oliver Stone’s very successful film had unleashed a flood of JFK Assassination books and <a title="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/22/specials/ambrose-knoll.html?_r=2" href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/22/specials/ambrose-knoll.html?_r=2">Ambrose published a lengthy 4,100 word review and rebuttal</a> of these in the <em>New York Times Sunday Book Review</em>, emphasizing the very long list of the alleged anti-Kennedy conspirators across those different volumes, including elements of the Mafia, the CIA, the Pentagon, J. Edgar Hoover, Vice President Johnson, Texas oil millionaires, Southern racists, Defense contractors, and international bankers. But Kennedy’s extremely narrow 1960 victory had heavily relied upon an overwhelmingly solid Democratic South, and given his subsequent tilt towards black Civil Rights, this was unlikely to recur, placing his reelection prospects in serious doubt. The 1964 vote was less than a year away, and Ambrose plausibly argued that all those bitter Kennedy enemies would surely have focused their efforts on removing him through the ballot-box, perhaps by revealing his numerous sexual indiscretions, rather than taking the unprecedented risk of organizing a Presidential assassination. But although that argument applied to the roster of Kennedy’s other powerful enemies, LBJ was the obvious exception since his political life and personal freedom were hanging by a thread. So in that long list, only Johnson had the motive to strike immediately.</span></p>
<p wcount="131" data-sanitized-id="p_1_98" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><strong>Johnson and his close allies entirely controlled the city of Dallas and Nelson explained how the Vice President lured Kennedy there to his doom.</strong> During that fatal motorcade, Johnson occupied a vehicle following Kennedy’s and Nelson devoted more than a dozen pages to discussing the photographic and eye-witness evidence demonstrating Johnson’s awareness of the shooting that was about to take place, with the very nervous Vice President making repeated excuses to lower his head as his vehicle approached the target area and then reacting before anyone else in the procession, completely ducking down in his car the moment the first shot was fired. Although this hardly proves that Johnson was the central mastermind of the plot, the evidence of his direct foreknowledge of the planned shooting seems overwhelmingly strong.</span></p>
<p wcount="94" data-sanitized-id="p_1_99" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Nelson further reported the striking detail that <strong>more than three decades after the assassination, a previously unknown fingerprint on a box in Oswald’s alleged sixth floor sniper’s nest in Dallas Book Depository was finally <a title="https://medium.com/@bartholoviews/conflicts-in-official-accounts-of-the-cardboard-carton-prints-99f4ed97a19" href="https://medium.com/@bartholoviews/conflicts-in-official-accounts-of-the-cardboard-carton-prints-99f4ed97a19">identified by an expert as being that of Mac Wallace</a>, Johnson’s longtime hit man.</strong> Wallace himself may not have been one of the shooters and Nelson actually suggested that his role had instead been to place the shells and clean up the scene, but this obviously greatly strengthens the evidence of Johnson’s involvement in the killing.</span></p>
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<p wcount="125" data-sanitized-id="p_1_100" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The success of Nelson’s lengthy, heavily documented volume prompted others to come forward as well. Longtime Republican political operative Roger Stone had gotten his start under Richard Nixon and on the fiftieth anniversary of the JFK assassination, he drew on Nelson’s ground-breaking research to publish his own book <a title="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1629144894/" href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1629144894/"><em>The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ</em></a>, co-authored by Mike Colapietro and similarly implicating Johnson. The Stone book became a national bestseller and by reading it in 2016 I first encountered Nelson’s analysis, years before I read the latter’s own book on the subject. Stone successfully brought Nelson’s material to the attention of a much wider audience, but he also added several important items of his own as <a title="https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-jfk-assassination-part-ii-who-did-it/" href="https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-jfk-assassination-part-ii-who-did-it/">I explained</a> in 2016:</span></p>
<p wcount="169" data-sanitized-id="p_1_101" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Aside from effectively documenting Johnson’s sordid personal history and the looming destruction he faced at the hands of the Kennedys in late 1963, Stone also adds numerous fascinating pieces of personal testimony, which may or may not be reliable. According to him, as his mentor <strong>Nixon was watching the scene at the Dallas police station where Jack Ruby shot Oswald, Nixon immediately turned as white as a ghost, explaining that he had personally known the gunman under his birth-name of Rubenstein. While working on a House Committee in 1947, Nixon had been advised by a close ally and prominent mob-lawyer to hire Ruby as an investigator, being told that “he was one of Lyndon Johnson’s boys.” Stone also claims that Nixon once emphasized that although he had long sought the presidency, unlike Johnson “I wasn’t willing to kill for it.”</strong> He further reports that Vietnam Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and numerous other prominent political figures in DC were absolutely convinced of Johnson’s direct involvement in the assassination.</span></p>
<p wcount="98" data-sanitized-id="p_1_102" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Stone has spent more than a half-century as a ruthless political operative, a position that provided him with unique personal access to individuals who participated in the great events of the past, but one that also carries the less than totally candid reputation of that profession, and individuals must carefully weigh these conflicting factors against each other. Personally, I tend to credit most of the eyewitness stories he provides. But even readers who remain entirely skeptical should find useful the large collection of secondary source references to the sordid details of LBJ’s history that the book provides.</span></p>
<p wcount="80" data-sanitized-id="p_1_103" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Although Stone’s book had already given me a second-hand account of much of Nelson’s ground-breaking research, in late 2021 I finally read the original work and found it extremely detailed and persuasive, while it also provided many important elements that Stone had excluded from his considerably shorter and more personal volume. I’d certainly rank Nelson’s book as one of the dozen or so crucial texts that should be read by anyone seriously interested in the JFK Assassination…</span></p>
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<p wcount="35" data-sanitized-id="p_1_104" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Nelson’s heavily documented work echoed many of the dramatic accusations against Johnson made decades earlier in a short, self-published book, one lacking any index or bibliography, but that still sold an astonishing 7.5 million copies.</span></p>
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<div data-sanitized-class="book-unit premblock alignright"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000TXDMYO/"><img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51%2BONZXs6UL.jpg"></a>
<p>ORDER IT NOW</p>
</div>
<p wcount="137" data-sanitized-id="p_1_105" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Sixty years ago on the eve of the 1964 elections, J. Evetts Haley, a conservative Texas Democrat and historian who had himself unsuccessfully run for governor in 1956, released <a title="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000TXDMYO/" href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000TXDMYO/"><em>A Texan Looks at Lyndon</em></a>, a scathing attack against the occupant of the White House, which focused entirely upon the dark side of an extremely dark political figure, presenting many of the same facts and plausible suspicions regarding massive corruption and multiple murders that would be documented in such considerable detail by Nelson almost a half-century later. According to <a title="https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/a-texan-looks-at-lyndon/" href="https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/a-texan-looks-at-lyndon/">a short and hostile retrospective 1987 account</a> in the liberal <em>Texas Monthly</em>, no publisher would touch Haley’s book and under pressure from Johnson’s allies, it was eventually banned from newsstands and airports, but at one point sales still reached 50,000 <em>per day</em>, becoming the most successful political book of all time.</span></p>
<p wcount="39" data-sanitized-id="p_1_106" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Haley was a long-time member of the right-wing John Birch Society and some of his accusations of Communist influence do seem considerably exaggerated, but according to the dismissive verdict of that mainstream Texas reviewer writing in the late 1980s:</span></p>
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<p wcount="26" data-sanitized-id="p_1_107" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">In his most outrageous claim, Haley insinuated that Johnson was involved with the Kennedy assassination. The problem was that Haley’s polemic lost touch with reality.</span></p>
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<p wcount="109" data-sanitized-id="p_1_108" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Thus, it’s rather strange to discover that for sixty years a reasonably accurate account of LBJ’s nefarious activities has probably been sitting on millions of private bookshelves across America while being almost totally ignored by our entire political and media class. During 1966 and 1967 liberal activists had become intensely hostile toward Johnson and sometimes quietly speculated that he had gained the White House through murder, but very few of them would ever open the pages of a book published just a couple of years earlier that provided so many of the crucial details, rejecting that work as having been written by a zealous Bircher and ardent Goldwater supporter.</span></p>
<p wcount="61" data-sanitized-id="p_1_109" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Meanwhile, I suspect that few right-wingers paid much attention to Haley’s speculations regarding the JFK assassination. In March 1964 <a title="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revilo_P._Oliver" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revilo_P._Oliver">Prof. Revilo Oliver</a>, a very influential Far Right figure who had co-founded the John Birch Society and edited its monthly magazine, had published “Marxmanship in Dallas,” blaming the assassination upon the Communists, and that became the widely-accepted narrative in such ideological circles.</span></p>
<p wcount="47" data-sanitized-id="p_1_110" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Ironically enough, Johnson himself took the same position in his own private conversations with top American political leaders, regularly diverting suspicion towards the Soviet Communists, and there is considerable evidence that this clever ruse had been a planned element of the assassination plot from the very beginning.</span></p>
<p wcount="73" data-sanitized-id="p_1_111" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">John Newman spent twenty years in Military Intelligence and afterward became a professor of history at the University of Maryland. Over the last several decades he has applied the technical skills he honed in his many years of government service to analyzing the bureaucratic minutia of declassified government files and in 1993 he published <a title="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1602392536/" href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1602392536/"><em>Oswald and the CIA</em></a>, an important work whose revised 2008 edition contained a new epilogue, summarizing some of his crucial conclusions.</span></p>
<p wcount="98" data-sanitized-id="p_1_112" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Prof. Newman <a title="https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-jfk-assassination-and-the-covid-cover-up/#manipulating-the-jfk-assassination-cover-up" href="https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-jfk-assassination-and-the-covid-cover-up/#manipulating-the-jfk-assassination-cover-up">makes a very strong case</a> that in the months prior to the killing a false intelligence trail was deliberately created suggesting that Oswald might have been a Soviet agent. This allowed Johnson to use such misinformation to compel the leading figures of the Warren Commission to suppress all evidence of any conspiracy in Dallas in order to avoid “kicking us into a war that can kill forty million Americans in an hour.” While Newman’s important findings do not prove that Johnson had been part of the plot, they are obviously very consistent with that hypothesis.</span></p>
</blockquote>
<p wcount="6" data-sanitized-id="p_1_113" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><strong>Gaddafi Figured It Out Long Ago:</strong></span></p>
<blockquote readability="5.3333333333333" data-sanitized-class="twitter-tweet">
<p wcount="12" data-sanitized-id="p_1_114" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Gaddafi once said that ISRAEL killed JFK! <a title="https://t.co/Ffb1xQXhbS" href="https://t.co/Ffb1xQXhbS">pic.twitter.com/Ffb1xQXhbS</a></span></p>
<p wcount="4" data-sanitized-id="p_1_115" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">— Jackson Hinkle (@jacksonhinklle) <a title="https://twitter.com/jacksonhinklle/status/1902695439528300833?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" href="https://twitter.com/jacksonhinklle/status/1902695439528300833?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 20, 2025</a></span></p>
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<p wcount="36" data-sanitized-id="p_1_116" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><em>What can you tell us about CIA officer <a title="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Jesus_Angleton" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Jesus_Angleton">James Jesus Angleton</a> and his connection to Israeli intelligence? Did Angleton subvert JFK’s policy of preventing Israel from acquiring nuclear weapons or are the facts still unclear?</em></span></p>
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<div data-sanitized-class="image-holder"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><a href="https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/AngletonIsrael.jpg"><img src="https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/AngletonIsrael.jpg" alt></a></span></div>
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<p wcount="108" data-sanitized-id="p_1_117" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><strong>Ron Unz</strong>—<strong>Angleton spent decades as the CIA’s head of Counter-Intelligence, ranking as one of the most powerful figures in that organization, while also serving as its exclusive liaison with the Israeli Mossad.</strong> As Piper documented in his book, Angleton’s Mossad ties were so strong, he has sometimes been seen as a Mossad asset, and after his forcible retirement in 1975, the Israeli government took the step of awarding him singular honors it never extended to any other American intelligence officer. <strong>According to Seymour Hersh and other highly-regarded writers on intelligence matters, Angleton secretly provided the Israelis with technical nuclear information during the late 1950s and 1960s.</strong></span></p>
<p wcount="35" data-sanitized-id="p_1_118" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Obviously, given his counter-intelligence position, he was responsible for thwarting penetration of the CIA by foreign intelligence services, so if his own loyalties had shifted to Israel, he would have remained safe from any investigation.</span></p>
<p wcount="24" data-sanitized-id="p_1_119" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">For exactly those reasons, <strong>Piper’s seminal 1994 work pointed to Angleton as likely being the key CIA official involved in the JFK assassination plot.</strong></span></p>
<p wcount="61" data-sanitized-id="p_1_120" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Meanwhile, on entirely different grounds, Prof. John Newman came to exactly the same conclusion in his own important book on the JFK Assassination. In late 2022 Tucker Carlson broadcast <a title="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAiRmhXvJHs" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAiRmhXvJHs">his landmark show</a> declaring that elements of the CIA had been heavily involved in the JFK Assassination, prompting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. <a title="https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1604139690629730304" href="https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1604139690629730304">to praise the segment</a> as “The most courageous newscast in 60 years.”</span></p>
<p><iframe width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PAiRmhXvJHs?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" title="Tucker Carlson: We were shocked to learn this" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin">[embedded content]</iframe></p>
<p wcount="2" data-sanitized-id="p_1_121" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><a title="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAiRmhXvJHs'" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAiRmhXvJHs" target="_blank" data-sanitized-class="caption">Video Link</a></span></p>
<p wcount="13" data-sanitized-id="p_1_122" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">This prompted me to write an article <a title="https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-jfk-assassination-and-the-covid-cover-up/#manipulating-the-jfk-assassination-cover-up" href="https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-jfk-assassination-and-the-covid-cover-up/#manipulating-the-jfk-assassination-cover-up">describing Newman’s very important analysis</a>:</span></p>
<blockquote readability="39.725085910653">
<p wcount="106" data-sanitized-id="p_1_123" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">By purest chance, Carlson’s show had aired just a few days after I had finished reading an important book on the JFK assassination that someone had brought to my attention last year. Originally published almost thirty years ago, this work provided some crucial insights into how the political cover-up of the conspiracy had been arranged, a cover-up that has now endured for nearly six decades. The most powerful man in the world had been killed at the very height of America’s postwar success and prosperity, yet <strong>nearly all of America’s political elites were successfully enlisted to suppress the truth of what had happened.</strong></span></p>
<div data-sanitized-class="book-unit premblock alignright"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1602392536/"><img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71U8i0QHBAL.jpg"></a>
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</div>
<p wcount="106" data-sanitized-id="p_1_124" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">John Newman had spent twenty years in Military Intelligence and afterward became a professor of history at the University of Maryland. Since then, he had applied the technical skills that he had honed in his many years of government service to analyzing the bureaucratic minutia of declassified government files and using this material to produce a series of books on the hidden side of American government policies during the 1960s, including our growing involvement in Vietnam and especially the complex circumstances of the JFK assassination. <a title="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1602392536/" href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1602392536/"><em>Oswald and the CIA</em></a> originally appeared in 1993, but the 2008 edition included a new epilogue, summarizing some of his most important findings.</span></p>
<p wcount="88" data-sanitized-id="p_1_125" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The book is a lengthy one, running over 650 pages with notes and appendices, and his exhaustively detailed analysis of the released intelligence files and their interpretation can be eye-glazingly dull at points, but his broader conclusions are not difficult to state. <strong>The profusion of internal CIA documents regarding Oswald and his movements seems completely inconsistent with any institutional plot at the Agency to kill Kennedy, but might fit very well with the hypothesis of a “rogue faction” at the CIA having played a central role in the affair.</strong></span></p>
<p wcount="113" data-sanitized-id="p_1_126" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Newman argued that Oswald was exactly the “patsy” that he claimed to be, but more importantly he drew a very sharp distinction between the small group of plotters who had actually organized the JFK assassination itself and the much larger group who carried out the subsequent cover-up, with the motives of many of those latter individuals being entirely different. As he persuasively explained in his epilogue, the conspirators had created a false intelligence trail suggesting that Oswald might have been a Soviet agent, and then used that misinformation to force our fearful government leadership into become their unwitting accomplices after the fact, compelling them to suppress all evidence of any conspiracy in Dallas.</span></p>
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<p wcount="9" data-sanitized-id="p_1_127" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Newman’s crucial conclusions are worth quoting at length:</span></p>
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<p wcount="106" data-sanitized-id="p_1_128" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><strong>It is now clear that most of the U.S. leaders and officials who participated in the national security cover-up had nothing to do with the plot that was hatched before the president’s murder.</strong> Many of them—including leading legislators and Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren—were motivated by the perceived threat of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. Inside the executive branch of government, many others were motivated by the desire to protect their jobs and their institutions. Their collective actions, however, were not the result of an accident; rather, they were the forced checkmate in the endgame of an ingenious plan.</span></p>
<p wcount="90" data-sanitized-id="p_1_129" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The plan was designed to force official Washington to bury a radioactive story in Oswald’s files in order for America to survive. The plan worked. No matter how sloppy the performance of the shooters in Dallas was, no matter how bungled the autopsy and the handling of the evidence was, all would be trumped by the threat of WWIII and 40 million dead Americans. From the beginning, the plot was based upon the assumption that, when presented with this horrific possibility, everyone would fall into line. This assumption was correct.</span></p>
<p wcount="165" data-sanitized-id="p_1_130" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">…There was a darker purpose for Oswald’s visit to Mexico City. He was sent there to seek visas from the Cuban Consulate and Soviet Embassy…the objective was simply incidental contact between Oswald and the man who issued Soviet visas in Mexico City: Valery Kostikov. The value of this contact derived from what only a handful of counterintelligence officers in Washington knew: Kostikov was an important operative of the KGB assassinations in the Americas…The handler’s purpose in having both Oswald’s and Kostikov’s names mentioned was to place evidence into the CIA’s records that, on 22 November, would link KGB assassinations to the murder of President Kennedy. The activities of this impersonator are what made it possible for President Johnson to tell Senator Russell on 29 November that those investigating the case were “testifying that Khrushchev and Castro did this.” Johnson insisted that this must be prevented “from kicking us into a war that can kill forty million Americans in an hour.”</span></p>
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<p wcount="5" data-sanitized-id="p_1_131" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">I went on to say:</span></p>
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<p wcount="80" data-sanitized-id="p_1_132" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">So under Newman’s convincing reconstruction, <strong>most of the powerful American officials who played such a pivotal role in concealing the conspiracy may have been acting under the best of intentions, seeking to protect our country from the risk of a devastating retaliatory war with the Soviets.</strong> And obviously these concerns would have been deliberately fanned by those among them who had been involved in the plot and created the false trail of evidence connecting Oswald with KGB assassination efforts.</span></p>
<p wcount="87" data-sanitized-id="p_1_133" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The author therefore argued that creating that false trail had constituted an absolutely crucial element of the assassination plot, <strong>and by a very careful examination of the intelligence files, he concluded that longtime CIA Counter-Intelligence Chief James Angleton had been the likely culprit, thus identifying him as one of the key conspirators. This conclusion meshes perfectly with the entirely different <a title="https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-mossad-assassinations/#final-judgment-on-the-jfk-assassination" href="https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-mossad-assassinations/#final-judgment-on-the-jfk-assassination">arguments advanced by the late Michael Collins Piper</a> in <a title="https://www.unz.com/book/michael_collins_piper__final-judgment/" href="https://www.unz.com/book/michael_collins_piper__final-judgment/"><em>Final Judgment</em></a>, his 1994 landmark work, which had also argued that Angleton was a central figure in the assassination.</strong></span></p>
</blockquote>
<p wcount="9" data-sanitized-id="p_1_134" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><strong>Homage To The American Spy Who Gave Israel Nukes?</strong></span></p>
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<div data-sanitized-class="image-holder"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><a href="https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/AngletonIsraelHonor.jpg"><img src="https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/AngletonIsraelHonor.jpg" alt></a></span></div>
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<p wcount="36" data-sanitized-id="p_1_135" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><em>While the Internet is abuzz with theories linking Kennedy’s assassination to Israel, I was unable to find one mainstream news agency that even alluded to the story. Can you explain this puzzling omission to me?</em></span></p>
<p wcount="31" data-sanitized-id="p_1_136" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><strong>Ron Unz</strong>—The total silence of the mainstream media on this very controversial issue is hardly surprising given the extremely strong protection it has always provided to Israel on all matters.</span></p>
<p wcount="45" data-sanitized-id="p_1_137" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">For example, the unprovoked 1967 Israeli attack on the <em>U.S.S. Liberty</em> in international waters killed or wounded more than 200 American servicemen, but although all the facts have been thoroughly documented for decades, the media has almost totally concealed that story from the American public.</span></p>
<p wcount="75" data-sanitized-id="p_1_138" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Similarly, the very strong evidence that Israel played a central role in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy was first presented by Michael Collins Piper more than thirty years ago. His book became an underground best-seller, with 40,000 copies in print, but the Piper Hypothesis was so radioactive that almost no members of the supposedly fearless community of dissident JFK conspiracy-researchers would even acknowledge its existence, let alone hint that it might possibly be correct.</span></p>
<p wcount="70" data-sanitized-id="p_1_139" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">So far I’m not aware of any true bombshells contained in the more than 63,000 pages of government documents released last week, though some of these do seem to further substantiate the claims made by Piper and other JFK conspiracy-researchers over the decades. The headline of the 9,000 word article in the <em>New York Times</em> was <a title="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/03/18/us/jfk-mlk-rfk-assassination-files" href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/03/18/us/jfk-mlk-rfk-assassination-files">“New Trove of Kennedy Files Offers Few Revelations So Far,”</a> and this is probably correct.</span></p>
<p wcount="26" data-sanitized-id="p_1_140" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">But once many experienced researchers begin collating and analyzing all those isolated, fragmentary bits of evidence and connecting the dots, important conclusions might begin to emerge.</span></p>
<p wcount="20" data-sanitized-id="p_1_141" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">However, I think that the more immediate impact of the release of documents will be due to a different factor.</span></p>
<p wcount="48" data-sanitized-id="p_1_142" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">I believe that most of the basic facts of the assassination, the likely identity of some of the most important conspirators, and their main motives have probably been quietly known for years or even decades by conspiracy-researchers and others who have been sincerely interested in discovering the story.</span></p>
<p wcount="69" data-sanitized-id="p_1_143" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">But the sudden release of all these documents may focus a great deal of renewed public attention on the case. Perhaps this will encourage many more prominent public figures who had long kept silent to finally come forward and admit that a conspiracy had been involved and that the battle over Israel’s nuclear weapons development program had been the likely reason for the death of our 35th president.</span></p>
<p wcount="60" data-sanitized-id="p_1_144" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">For example, as I discussed earlier, longtime political consultant and Trump advisor Roger Stone had completely excluded any reference to Israel in his JFK Assassination book published more than a decade ago. But last week, he mentioned the conflict over the Israeli nuclear weapons program and Tweeted it out to his more than 800,000 Followers, with the Tweet viewed 1.3 million times:</span></p>
<blockquote readability="15.011695906433" data-sanitized-class="twitter-tweet">
<p wcount="10" data-sanitized-id="p_1_145" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Kennedy was also in conflict with the State of Israel.</span></p>
<p wcount="11" data-sanitized-id="p_1_146" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Israel sought to develop nuclear weapons, but Kennedy opposed the idea.</span></p>
<p wcount="16" data-sanitized-id="p_1_147" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">After JFK’s assassination, President Lyndon Baines Johnson approved Israel’s pursuit of the nuclear bomb.</span></p>
<p wcount="10" data-sanitized-id="p_1_148" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Another factor in all of this. <a title="https://t.co/82ISNOqGuQ" href="https://t.co/82ISNOqGuQ">pic.twitter.com/82ISNOqGuQ</a></span></p>
<p wcount="4" data-sanitized-id="p_1_149" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">— Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) <a title="https://twitter.com/RogerJStoneJr/status/1901997024330887194?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" href="https://twitter.com/RogerJStoneJr/status/1901997024330887194?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 18, 2025</a></span></p>
</blockquote>
<p wcount="37" data-sanitized-id="p_1_150" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">With these ripples of information spreading across social media and the rest of the Internet, the true circumstances behind the assassinations of the Kennedys may finally reach a large portion of the American public after six decades.</span></p>
<p wcount="2" data-sanitized-id="p_1_151" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><strong>Related Reading:</strong></span></p>


title: Live: Follow Boao Lighthouse and feel the vibe of Hainan
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content:
<div><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-24/Live-Follow-Boao-Lighthouse-and-feel-the-vibe-of-Hainan-1C013Gc7HIA/img/02436ef4c0234c59bdeb48f53cab0a00/02436ef4c0234c59bdeb48f53cab0a00-1280.jpeg" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><div readability="49" data-sanitized-class="text en">
<p>The Boao Forum for Asia (BFA) Annual Conference 2025 takes place from March 25 to 28 in Boao, south China's Hainan Province. With the theme "Asia in the Changing World: Towards a Shared Future," this year's event focuses on development, fostering dialogue, exploring innovative formats and valuing tangible outcomes – all aimed at promoting international development and cooperation.</p>
<p>Hainan, known for its year-round sunshine and pristine beaches, has much to offer travelers from all over the world. Boao Lighthouse, situated on the northern side of the entrance to the harbor in Boao, is a vital navigation aid on Hainan's eastern coast. Installed with advanced navigation equipment, this iconic landmark adds maritime charm to Boao. Join us and feel the vibe of Boao.</p>
</div>

link:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-24/Live-Follow-Boao-Lighthouse-and-feel-the-vibe-of-Hainan-1C013Gc7HIA/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Video

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title: Live: Meet giant pandas in Hainan
hash: ,���"8T<З��l w4
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content:
<div><img src="https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-24/Live-Meet-giant-pandas-in-Hainan-1C07GRIxLWw/img/1d825db83823486e9ea632f516a970f3/1d825db83823486e9ea632f516a970f3-1280.jpeg" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><div readability="46" data-sanitized-class="text en">
<p>The Boao Forum for Asia (BFA) Annual Conference 2025 is taking place from March 25 to 28 in Boao, south China's Hainan Province. With the theme "Asia in the Changing World: Towards a Shared Future," this year's event focuses on development, fostering dialogue, exploring innovative formats and valuing tangible outcomes, all aimed at promoting international development and cooperation.</p>
<p>Hainan, known for its year-round sunshine and pristine beaches, has much to offer travelers from all over the world. Join us on a tour around Hainan Tropical Wildlife Park and Botanical Garden in Haikou City to meet giant pandas Gong Gong and Shun Shun. Let's see how they spend their days.</p>
</div>

link:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-24/Live-Meet-giant-pandas-in-Hainan-1C07GRIxLWw/p.html?UTM_Source=cgtn&amp;UTM_Medium=rss&amp;UTM_Campaign=Video

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guid: https://www.mondialisation.ca/?p=5697197
title: Le «macronisme» ou la fin inéluctable des régimes anachroniques et du mythe néocolonial français
author: ;Amar Djerrad
hash: �����6 �s���a�Ӽ
tags: #Francais @fr #Algérie #France
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content:
<p><strong>Beaucoup d’observateurs dénoncent régulièrement la politique absurde et dangereuse des dirigeants français, sur tous les plans, interne et externe, qui se manifeste par une déconnexion stupéfiante de la réalité, abandonnant les valeurs, s’affublant des «habits de Don Quichotte», les conduisant </strong>…</p>

link:
https://www.mondialisation.ca/le-macronisme-ou-la-fin-ineluctable-des-regimes-anachroniques-et-du-mythe-neocolonial-francais/5697197


guid: https://www.mondialisation.ca/?p=5697201
title: L’Europe était belle autrefois. Sa tragédie est qu’elle n’a jamais su s’arrêter…
author: ;Dominique Muselet
hash: �չ�zV9����t%�
tags: #Francais @fr #Mobile
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content:
<p><em>« Regardez l’Europe : un continent au stade final de la consommation, qui siffle des slogans creux évoquant la « démocratie » et les « droits de l’homme » tandis que ses villes brûlent et que ses frontières se dissolvent. </em>…</p>

link:
https://www.mondialisation.ca/leurope-etait-belle-autrefois-sa-tragedie-est-quelle-na-jamais-su-sarreter/5697201


guid: https://www.mondialisation.ca/?p=5697214
title: La divulgation chaotique des dossiers tant attendus sur l’assassinat de JFK
author: ;Kevin Gosztola
hash: Z �&� w5ϫ�}�
tags: #Francais @fr #Mobile
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content:
<div>Les Archives nationales ont publié deux séries de documents du fonds d’archives sur l’assassinat du président John F. Kennedy après que le président Donald Trump a spontanément annoncé que tous les dossiers encore en leur possession seraient rendus publics.</div>
<blockquote><p><em>“C’est </em></p></blockquote>…

link:
https://www.mondialisation.ca/la-divulgation-chaotique-des-dossiers-tant-attendus-sur-lassassinat-de-jfk/5697214


guid: https://antonchaitkin.substack.com/p/conjuring-banquos-ghost
title: Conjuring Banquo&amp;#039;s Ghost
author: ;Anton Chaitkin
link: https://antonchaitkin.substack.com/p/conjuring-banquos-ghost
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<h3 data-sanitized-class="subtitle">By Anton Chaitkin; Copyright Anton Chaitkin</h3><div dir="auto" data-sanitized-class="body markup">
<h2 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post">You are invited to a presentation by Anton Chaitkin, followed by questions and answers.</h2>
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<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><a href="https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86191959672?pwd=6cyqXCg9qsOOObszr0Lb6B544rRKOb.1" rel>Click here to enter the meeting</a> <span>on Monday 7 p.m. Eastern time.</span></h3>
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<h4 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>Learn from inner history of our country –</strong></h4>
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<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>Vital lessons for the present administration.</strong></h3>
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<h4 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>(Note: We shall conjure Banquo’s ghost for this meeting.)</strong></h4>
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<figure><a target="_blank" href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0f4addf5-e5fc-45d5-be4d-27e21376e7be_442x549.png" data-component-name="Image2ToDOM" rel data-sanitized-class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img">
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<h4 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post">Only those who break from imperialism can serve their nation’s interests.</h4>
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<h4 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post">The Imperialist Theodore Roosevelt</h4>
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<h4 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post">vs. the True Nationalist Abraham Lincoln</h4>
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<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post">Theodore Roosevelt:</h3>
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<p>One race managing or controlling another . . . in the interest and for the benefit of that other race. This is what our [English-speaking] peoples have . . . done, and must continue in the future in even greater degree to do, in India, Egypt, and the Philippines alike . . . [in] this period of unquestioned supremacy of the so-called white race.</p>
<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post">Abraham Lincoln:</h3>
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<p><span>When the white man governs himself that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs</span> <em>another</em> <span>man, that is</span> <em>more</em> <span>than self-government---that is despotism. If the negro is a</span> <em>man</em><span>, why then my ancient faith teaches me that "all men are created equal;" and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man's making a slave of another . . . [No] man is good enough to govern another man,</span> <em>without that other's consent</em><span>. I say this is the leading principle---the sheet anchor of American republicanism.</span></p>
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