Tag: history

America’s Greenland deal has a radioactive backstory

The US, Denmark, and Greenland have signed a new agreement to expand American military activity on the island. Washington calls Greenland vital to its security, but an expanded military presence also raises an older question: What risks does the Arctic island take on in return?

The agreement builds on a defense partnership dating back to 1951. That history includes an episode that brought the risks of Washington’s Cold War strategy into sharp focus: An American mission over Greenland that ended in a nuclear disaster.

The nuclear patrols over Greenland

In the 1960s, in the middle of the Cold War, the US Air Force launched Operation Chrome Dome. This mission implied keeping bombers armed with nuclear weapons on continuous airborne alert, ready to strike the USSR if necessary. If you’ve seen the film ‘Dr. Strangelove’, you’ll remember that Major T.J. ‘King’ Kong’s crew was involved in such a patrol mission.

Theoretically, this strategy was feasible: It would have made it impossible for the USSR to disarm the US with a single blow. However, in practice, as the number of nuclear-armed aircraft patrols increased, so did the number of incidents involving nuclear weapons.

Then-US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara advocated for ending this program, arguing that Americans had already established an effective early warning system for ballistic missile launches, so the US could take fewer risks and cut costs. However, the Strategic Air Command resisted this idea, fearing it would decrease their importance and result in budget cuts. 

A horrific incident occurred in 1966 over Spain when a bomber collided with a refueling tanker aircraft, resulting in several fatalities and nuclear bombs landing on beaches and in the Mediterranean Sea. Despite this incident, the US considered the nuclear threat from the USSR a matter of primary importance, one which justified any security measures. 

Eventually, after intense debates, a compromise was reached: The number of patrolling bombers would be reduced, but the airborne patrols would continue.

Thule Air Base in northern Greenland was established in the 1950s. A Mercator projection map gives a distorted sense of distance; in reality, its location was very convenient for potentially launching missiles at the USSR and monitoring missile launches from there. It also provided a convenient vantage point for reconnaissance of the Novaya Zemlya Soviet nuclear test site. 

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The Treatment Was Worse Than the Disease

On December 12, 1799, George Washington returned to Mount Vernon after several hours on horseback in snow, hail, and freezing rain. The next day he developed a sore throat and hoarseness, and in the early morning of December 14 he awoke struggling to breathe and swallow. Doctors were called, and what happened next is now one of the most talked-about medical cases in American history.

Washington did not lack medical care. In fact, he received a lot of attention from three skilled physicians, who used the treatments they thought best for someone as sick as he was, such as repeated bloodletting and other methods meant to reduce inflammation and restore balance. Late that night, Washington died.

Even now, more than 200 years later, we are not sure exactly what disease killed Washington. Some experts have suggested acute bacterial epiglottitis, severe pharyngitis, peritonsillar infection, or other causes of upper-airway blockage [1]. What is clear is that Washington lost a large amount of blood, by most estimates about 80 ounces, through repeated bloodletting while he was already very sick. His doctors did not mean to harm him. They thought removing blood would control the inflammation, but it made him worse. Their actions followed a long-standing medical tradition, supported by accepted theories, experience, and the authority of many generations of doctors.

It is easy to look back at this story and feel superior because of our modern knowledge. Today, we understand things like oxygen delivery, blood volume, shock, infections, airway care, IV fluids, antibiotics, and advanced life support. Washington’s doctors did not have this knowledge. But calling them primitive misses the real point. They were trained doctors using the best knowledge they had to try to save their patient. The real question is not why doctors in 1799 believed bloodletting would help. Instead, we should ask which treatments we use today with the same confidence that future doctors might find hard to believe.

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Vaccines have never been safe and effective: A century of documented failures of smallpox vaccination

“At one time it was believed and generally understood that after we had once had the disease we were for ever secure against it, but it is now proved that a second and even a third attack is by no means uncommon among persons of a peculiar habit of body, and whose lives are spent in opposition to all sanitary laws. This error led to that blind infatuation of being inoculated for the Small-pox which became so fashionable in the last century, and which, after much controversy, was adopted by the London College of Physicians, who considered it ‘highly beneficial to mankind’.”—William Job Collins, MD, twenty-five years public vaccinator, London, England, 1869[1]

“Millions of vaccinations are made every year, and nobody knows what they are made with. The whole process is a haphazard game with chance. Vaccination was accepted on the simple dictum of Jenner that it would stamp out smallpox. The medical profession of today buys its vaccinal virus of those who make merchandise of it on their simple dictum that it is the right thing to use … I compiled a list of upwards of a thousand instances of persons who had suffered permanent injury, or death [from vaccination] … Of these, nine have been personally known to me.”—George William Winterburn, PhD, MD, author of The Value of Vaccination: A Non-partisan Review of Its History and Results, 1886[2]

“Cow-pox was exceedingly virulent and fatal disease coming to fag end of its career in Jenner’s time. He found it difficult to get lymph from the cow, and therefore he resorted to the heels of horses; and the original lymph we use from the Royal Vaccine Institute has never been vaccine lymph at all; from the day it was introduced into London to the present time – it was derived from the arm of Jane King, who was inoculated from a horse with greasy heels.”—John Le Gay Brereton, Esq., MD, MRCS, LAC, 1881[3]

“This madness – first filtered through the brain of Jenner by the superstitious old women of Berkeley and its neighbourhood, who had long secretly practised vaccination upon children – was, after some few years of hard fighting, transmitted to Sir Gilbert Blane and a few of his class; and as these were the great ‘medicine men,’ whose wisdom excelled all others, the delusion was soon shared by the King. From the King it passed to the Court, from the Court to the Government, from the Government to the profession, and from the profession to all who readily move by example in high places. In this way, not England alone, but every part of the civilised world, more or less, went mad; and humanity is now reaping its reward – not in the extirpation of small-pox, as promised by these fanatics, but in the increase of diseases more frightful in their character, and in their general results more fatal.”— Dr. Skelton, Licentiate in Medicine and Surgery, London and Edinburgh[4]

In 1796, Edward Jenner tested a popular belief: that cowpox protected against smallpox. He obtained cowpox material from a milkmaid and used it to inoculate an eight-year-old boy named James Phipps, whom he then deliberately exposed to smallpox. Because the boy did not fall ill, Jenner concluded that the procedure – cowpoxing, later given the more scientific-sounding and mysterious name vaccination (from vacca, Latin for cow) – was effective and conferred lifelong protection. On 17 March 1802, he informed the House of Commons that vaccination was entirely safe, granted lifelong immunity and would rid the world of smallpox.[5]

From the outset, however, many regarded this new notion – built on eighty years of smallpox inoculation – as anything but safe or effective. Yet the idea took hold almost immediately. As Dr. William Rowley, MD, observed in 1805 – less than a decade since vaccination had started – “Whoever had not taken the oaths of supremacy and allegiance to vaccination, or who dared to doubt the infallibility of Cow-pox inoculation even in its infancy, even before any judgment could be formed, were ignominiously treated as traitors to the royal vaccinating state, as rebellious subjects to the Jennerian despotic power.”[6] Decades later, Dr. Charles Creighton likewise noted how firmly this idea had taken root: by 1801, he wrote, professors and others of his class “on the Continent as well as in England were already deeply committed“ and that “anyone who undertakes to answer for Jenner and his theories, must shatter his own reputation for scientific and historical knowledge.”[7]

What follows is not a history of vaccination’s triumphs but a record of its failures – drawn almost entirely from the testimony of physicians who witnessed them firsthand. The timeline that unfolds across the following decades chronicles smallpox vaccination’s inability to shield against the very disease it promised to conquer, together with the injuries and deaths that followed in its trail. The quotations assembled here, spanning 1799 to 1910, call into question the triumphant narrative so widely accepted about this medical intervention.

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How War Propaganda Justifies Conscription into Unjust Wars

Conscription is a form of indentured servitude. Murray Rothbard argued that everyone has a natural right to self-defense, but “we have no moral right to use coercion—the bayonet or the revolver—to force someone else to defend us.”

Rothbard argued that if we want men to stand in our defense, “the way to induce people to volunteer for hazardous jobs is to pay them extra as compensation.” And yet, instead of offering a wage that would reward men who sign up willingly, governments rely on force to press conscripts into service. The conscript is,

. . .seized by the authorities and inducted into the armed forces. There his body and will are no longer his own: he is subject to the dictates of the government; and he can be forced to kill and to place his own life in jeopardy if the authorities so decree.

This debate recently returned to public attention when it was reported that the United Kingdom is reconsidering conscription due to what the UK government sees as escalating hostilities with Russia.

Campaigners are protesting over the prospect of conscription returning amid mounting Russian threats against Britain. A coalition of 13 British peace and faith organisations has launched a petition demanding the Government rule out military conscription, or any compulsory form of national service involving the armed forces. . . There is currently no conscription in Britain, although concerns about World War 3 have fuelled renewed discussions on how the armed forces could be expanded.

For conscription to be even remotely tolerable by the public, it is, at the very least, necessary for warmakers to persuade the public that the war is just, and worth fighting. Otherwise, people are likely to revolt, as happened in New York when the Enrollment Act of March 1863 drafted men to fight Lincoln’s war.

On July 11, 1863 the first names for induction into the army were called. The next day, New York erupted into some of the most violent riots in American history. The office of the provost marshal—charged with enforcing the draft—was burned, railroad lines were destroyed, and telegraph lines cut. . . . Over one hundred people died in the rioting, thousands were wounded, and thousands of African Americans fled New York.

This attempt to corral New Yorkers into the war against their will followed soon after the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863. The implication, following the Proclamation, was that what had started out as a politically-driven war to save the Union was now a moral crusade to free the slaves of the South—surely a just cause! But very few were convinced. John M. Taylor observes that, under the Enrollment Act of 1863,

Wealthy Northerners could either fight or pay a $300.00 exemption from the draft. The Irish, mostly coming from meager circumstances, typically lacked the funds to buy exemptions. Whereas large numbers of wealthy Southerners fought, few wealthy Northerners did. William Tecumseh Sherman alluded to this, stating, “that without conscription there would have been no way to ‘separate the sheep from the goats and demonstrate what citizens will fight and what will only talk.’”

The Emancipation Proclamation was not seen by the draftees as moral justification to fight. For one, the Proclamation belied its own moral authority by failing to free all slaves and only purporting to free those under Confederate control. Freeing only the slaves of one’s enemies, almost two years into the war, marked the Proclamation as a war measure rather than a humanitarian edict.

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How the British Crown profited directly from human trafficking

The question of slavery and reparations has recently returned to the center of international debate, particularly in Africa and the Caribbean. The conference held in Ghana on reparations for the transatlantic slave trade and slavery, as well as the petition filed by a Jamaican delegation to the British king, engaged in the struggle for historical recognition. The debate has also been brought into sharper focus by an investigation published by The Guardian, which examined the involvement of the British monarchy in the system of slavery and the historical links between the Crown and the trafficking of Africans.

Taken together, the developments raise a fundamental question: How can the British monarchy and the British state genuinely address a past in which the Crown was directly connected to the economic and political structures of slavery?

There are symbols that, on their own, encapsulate centuries of history. A crown branded with a red-hot iron onto the skin of an enslaved human being is one of them. It was a real, documented practice carried out by the South Sea Company, directly supported by the British monarchy during the reign of Queen Anne.

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Five Years Later, Media Blame Afghans for US-Engineered Disaster 

Last month marked five years since the US withdrew its military forces from Afghanistan and the Taliban returned to power. The US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and the resultant war, directly killed more than 176,000 Afghan people, including more than 46,000 civilians. Yet major US media outlets have covered the anniversary by muddying the US’s role in the country’s hardships—writing as though Afghanistan’s history began in August 2021.

A CNN article (8/15/26) by Kara Fox offered an egregious bit of historical revisionism:

In the five years since the chaotic US withdrawal from Kabul and the Taliban’s return to power, Afghanistan has become home to one of the world’s worst human rights and humanitarian emergencies.

Afghanistan hasn’t “become” a human rights and humanitarian emergency “since” the US troop withdrawal. It was a disaster during—and in no small part because of—the US war and occupation.

For instance, in November 2019, towards the end of the US occupation, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) estimated that approximately 2.44 million Afghan were in an “emergency situation” in terms of food insecurity. The next year, Amnesty International noted that four million Afghans were internally displaced and facing widespread problems of “inadequate housing, food insecurity [and] insufficient access to sanitation.”

Both years, the International Rescue Committee put Afghanistan in its top 10 “crises the world should be watching.” Evidently such conditions don’t meet CNN’s threshold for a “humanitarian emergency.”

In terms of rights, a 2019 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report documented Afghan strike forces that were “recruited, trained, equipped and overseen by the CIA” committing

serious abuses between late 2017 and mid-2019. They are illustrative of a larger pattern of serious laws-of-war violations—some amounting to war crimes—that extends to all provinces in Afghanistan where these paramilitary forces operate with impunity.

In 2020, HRW would go on to criticize the US-installed Afghan government for “fail[ing] to prosecute senior officials responsible for sexual assault, torture and killing civilians.” One can debate what constitutes a human rights “emergency,” but it’s clear that rights violations were a defining feature of the US occupation.

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The Crony Capitalists Who Financed The Bolshevik Revolution

The United States is not a free-market or true “capitalist” society but rather a crony capitalist/welfare-state society. That is, many big businesses don’t compete to please the consumer but instead for coercive government privilege.

It is well documented that monopoly can’t exist in a free-market society; the forces of competition will always introduce new competitors to any particular field, especially when there is large amounts of money to be acquired. However, some astute businessmen notice that they can strangle their competition in the womb through government. They lobby for legislation that creates artificial barriers to entry, insane regulations for how productive processes must be run, subsidies, special taxes, or other inventive hurdles. It is far easier to “go political” and join the government in its parasitic extraction of wealth from the economy. A monopolist’s dream is to have a government grant it an exclusive monopoly over an industry.

There are many examples of crony capitalism in action. However, one historical example proves particularly interesting, for it shines a light on just how far monopolists are willing to go to acquire such government privilege. The event in question is the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Much evidence points to the fact that big business firms in the US—centered around the J. D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan conglomerates—helped bankroll the Bolsheviks using their massive funds and influence. While the jury is out whether the Bolsheviks would have succeeded in their takeover of Russia and the subsequent creation of the Soviet Union without this assistance, these big business firms absolutely played a part.

Why would these “capitalist” business firms help fund the Marxist Bolshevik revolutionaries? Were they secretly wooed by the false promises of communism? Most likely, no; some firms that aided the Bolsheviks also aided their enemies, presumably so they could have influence within whichever party was victorious. As monopoly capitalists, they realized that an inefficient economy run by totalitarian socialist central planning provided the perfect captive market for them, assuming they are on good terms with the socialist power-brokers. In this situation, the monopolists can easily achieve “protection” from the totalitarian government and take advantage of the consumers who are forced to buy from them because there is no alternative. This arrangement is especially advantageous when the captive market in question is as large as Russia. Therefore, the alliance between these two groups of seemingly enemies is actually not hard to imagine.

This situation is in the same line as the creation of the Federal Reserve System. As Murray Rothbard details in his history of the Federal Reserve, these same monopolist interests—centered largely around the Morgans and Rockefellers—pushed through the parasitic Federal Reserve System. This gave them a banking monopoly at home in the US similar, in principle, to the monopoly they worked to obtain in Russia. It is worth noting that monopoly “capitalists” are the enemies of laissez-faire capitalists who follow the tradition of Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, etc. The monopolists may run businesses, but they still owe their wealth to government power, not pleasing the consumer.

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Bank Of England Spends £85k Researching How Best To Erase Churchill

The Bank of England has spent more than £85,000 of research money to justify wiping Winston Churchill, Jane Austen, J.M.W. Turner and Alan Turing off Britain’s banknotes and swapping them for hedgehogs, foxes and puffins.

A Freedom of Information trail shows Savanta was paid £49,000 to run focus groups that told officials historical figures were “elitist and divisive.”

Another £22,500 went on public consultations about which animals should replace them. The Bank called the result a “positive evolution,” not censorship.

The October 2025 Savanta report, delivered months before the nature theme was announced, warned that portraits of notable Britons were “contentious and not representative of the UK’s cultural and natural diversity.”

Officials were told historical figures represented “a backward-looking vision of the UK that carries too great a risk of division and controversy.”

Most of the 119 focus-group participants said featuring such people was “potentially divisive, elitist and disconnected from their own experiences.”

Churchill sits on the current £5. Austen is on the £10, Turner on the £20, Turing on the £50. All are scheduled to go. King Charles stays on the front.

Governor Andrew Bailey is due to pick the animals by the end of 2026 from a shortlist that includes the European hedgehog, red fox, Atlantic puffin, barn owl, common frog and bottlenose dolphin.

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Americans Were Hungry. FDR’s Government Was Killing Pigs to Raise Prices.

In 1933, about one-quarter of America’s workforce was unemployed. Hunger and malnutrition were widespread, families had lost homes and savings, and millions were trying to survive an economic catastrophe.

Franklin Roosevelt’s government responded to part of that crisis by paying farmers to destroy things Americans could use.

From the Library of Congress:

In a country with abundant resources, the largest force of skilled labor, and the most productive industry in the world, many found it hard to understand why the depression had occurred and why it could not be resolved. Moreover, it was difficult for many to understand why people should go hungry in a country possessing huge food surpluses. Blaming Wall Street speculators, bankers, and the Hoover administration, the rumblings of discontent grew mightily in the early 1930s. By 1932, hunger marches and small riots were common throughout the nation.

In June of 1932, nearly 20,000 World War I veterans from across the country marched on the United States Capitol to request early payment of cash bonuses for their military service that weren’t due to be paid until 1945. The marchers, who the organizers called the “Bonus Expeditionary Force” but who became widely known as the Bonus Army, spent several days in Washington, D.C., pressing their case, but a Congressional bill to pay the bonus was defeated. On July 28, U.S. troops and tanks commanded by General Douglas MacArthur dispersed the marchers and destroyed their makeshift camps in the city.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act rested on an economic theory that sounded tidy in Washington. Farm prices had collapsed because farmers were producing more than markets could absorb.

Reduce the supply, officials reasoned, and prices would rise, and higher prices would restore farm income.

Farmers desperately needed help. The question is what Washington chose to do with that desperation.

In the summer of 1933, the government launched an emergency hog program. Federal officials bought about 6.2 million young pigs and another 222,000 sows to remove them from future markets.

Pigs that couldn’t economically be processed for food were turned into grease and tankage. About 100 million pounds of edible pork did reach relief programs.

The USDA’s own history says officials expected the slaughter to provoke public outrage but considered the action necessary. Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace later acknowledged how disturbing the policy looked, describing the destruction of growing production as a grim consequence of an economy Washington believed had become badly unbalanced.

The administration understood exactly what it was doing.

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