One of the most meaningful things I did on my last trip to Russia was to visit the Levoshovo Memorial Cemetery. I have spent a fair amount of my life poking around cemeteries, which have always fascinated me. But Levoshovo is like no other. Paved walkways lead into the forest, and before long you notice what makes Levoshovo unique. Pictures of the deceased are tacked to the trees in the forest. For this was the mass burial site for thousands of Russians executed under Stalin; primarily in 1937 and 1938, but with some burials as late as 1954. Estimates range from 20,000 to 45,000. Once it was no longer used, a forest grew over the site. But the memory remained. The best online treatment of Levoshovo is Vladimir Pomortzeff’s Victims of the Great Terror.

As soon as Communism collapsed, the families of the martyrs returned to the site and started tacking up memorials to their loved ones on the trees. There are now hundreds of them. I know of no people who cherish their history as do the Russians. They wear their history on their hearts. Even the terrible parts have to be reckoned with, and they do not shy away from it. Levoshovo is just a small part of this national healing. Churches have been rebuilt all over the country, exactly as they were before their Stalinist demolition (the best example being Christ the Savior in Moscow, where the finishing touches are still being added to the exterior.)

You might say that Russians have returned to type, which in this case is Orthodox (even if this is largely discounted in the West, which has different measurements of faithfulness). There is great devotion to the New Royal Martyrs (I found their icon in every church I visited). Nicholas II compares favorably with the better Soviet leaders in national polling, though no one is advocating a return to either monarchy or Communism. And monuments and memorials have been erected across the nation that restore Russia’s continuity with their history, rather than their break with it.

I went to Levoshovo in search of the tree with the picture of Pavel Florensky. Back in 2016, I wrote here about my fascination with Florensky. Jeremiah Carey posted a better, and more recent piece on Florensky. I walked five long blocks from my hotel to Gostiny Dvor Metro Station, from which I descended far undergrown. The Russian subways are deep, and St. Petersburg’s moreso than Moscow’s. Transiting through either system is an amazing experience for any Western traveler. The Russians are matter of fact about it, accustomed, it seems, to marble and chandeliers in their metro stations. I took the Blue line north to Parnas, the last station. There, I ordered a taxi on Yandex (just like Uber) and transited to the cemetery out past the outskirts of the city.

I planned to search the cemetery for the tree with Pavel Florensky’s photograph. Here, I was skirting dangerously close to tourism rather than travel, for I intended to “tag” the specific tree and leave. It is for our own good that our specific plans are often redirected. My inability to find Florensky among the hundreds made me abandon my quest, and contemplatively engage with the multitude, all the while trying to absorb the enormity of the crime.

I have no truck with Marxism in general, or the Bolshevik/Soviet period in particular. Marx got some things right, but like all idealogues, he forced humanity through his particular ideological prism, casting everything in the context of a proletariat class struggle. This not only misses a lot, it misses most of life. And it ultimately proved untenable in the long run. The Bolshevik/Soviet expression of the ideology was equally ruinous. A system that begins with the murder of children cannot be defended (of which point, I bring back to us later in this piece). Russian culture was redirected; and yet, writers kept writing, composers kept composing, and artists kept painting. Examples of each during the Soviet period are some of the most sublime cultural contributions imaginable. I freely admit to these Soviet achievements, as well as advances in general education and health care, science, and technology. I suppose the question must be asked, at this point, however, is “At what cost?” This is for the Russians to answer, and I believe they are fully engaged in this historical and cultural sorting-out.

The larger question, and the one that has gnawed at my conscience ever since is this: Have we even begun to engage the enormity of our own national crimes? I am not one who blames America for everything. I do, however, believe that self-criticism is not only warranted, but necessary for a healthy society. I have no patience with air-brushed histories of the United States. Yes, there is a lot of good in this country, mainly found close to the ground. And yet, we are not as good as we proclaim ourselves to be, nor is the good we proclaim what we say it is. The truth is that we are a rapacious people, and always have been.

How far back should we go? Hiroshima? 1 Nagasaki? If this argument resonates with you, I do not need to list everything since. But let’s just take a recent example: our bombing of the Iranian Middle School in Minab, killing over 150 schoolgirls and teachers. There has been no acknowledgement, nor has there been an apology. While Americans strongly oppose this war of choice, there has been no widespread public outrage over the murders. I am just saying that at some point we will have to come face to face with our crimes, individually and as a nation. The Russians are doing so, and they are the better people for it.

“He has done me no harm. But I played him a dirty trick, and ever since I have hated him.”

Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov

From the moment I left in 2025, I was determined to return to this incredible country. I never had any doubt as to where I would be traveling in the summer of 2026; I always intended to return to Russia, to finish what I had started. Of course, it is not finished at all, but really only the continuation of what I now realize to be a lifelong love affair with all things Russian—I say love affair because it transcends mere academic interest.

I do not have time for politics any more. The fact that the Russian government does not mirror our own—and let’s take a moment to thank our God in heaven for that—does not bother me one whit. I am amused that my unconcern does, however, cause angst and head-shaking among some acquaintances1.

My appreciation for Russia is centered in two realms. If America were teachable, this is something we could learn from them. But we are not. The two aspects of Russia that resonate the most with me are:

1. Their love and nurture of Beauty in all its forms: art, literature, music and dance; not to mention their churches with the iconography and the majesty of its liturgies. And of course there is Russian architecture; grand cities designed with grand public spaces.

2. Their appreciation and honest engagement with their own history, even the messy parts.

My 2026 journey differed in some respects from perhaps any trip I have taken before. I recognize and grudgingly accept that my body is slowing down, that I have a greater need for rest, and something unforeseen, suffer occasional weariness. I fear that the days of hiking 14 miles in the high Caucasus with Dato are all in my past. And so, I determined to devote more time to simply “being there.” For example, several Russian-American acquaintances said that I simply must see the Peterhof Palace when in St. Petersburg. Well, I didn’t in 2025, and choose not to again this year. I’m sure it is incredible, but it takes a bit of doing to get there from the city, and I have already seen plenty of examples of Romanov era excess in St. Petersburg and environs: the Winter Palace, the Catherine Palace, the Yusupov Palace, etc. I found my time better spent shopping for a nice gift for my wife, contemplating Anna Akhmatova’s life and work in her apartment, doing the same in Dostoevsky’s, communing with the martyrs in the Levashovo forest, and venerating the relics of two St. Johns; Kronstadt and Kochurov. That approach also served me well in Moscow.

I also traveled in a little higher style than I have ever done before. This reflects no sudden financial windfall on my part. Every year I plan to have my finances in order by travel time. They seldom are. My more upscale accommodations are rather a homage to my late, great friend Bill; my mentor in so many aspects of life beginning from 1988 to 2025. He and I traveled together in Buenos Aires in 1999 and in Bulgaria and Turkey in 2003, and talked incessantly of our individual travels before and after.

In his earlier life, circumstances allowed Bill to travel in the grand style, “high, wide, and handsome.” I suppose the epitome of this era of traveling, or at least the story that stands out in my memory, was his stay at the Ritz in Lisbon, right after the Portuguese Revolution of 1975. Outside of some refugees, they were the only paying guests in the hotel.

By the time we were traveling together in 2003, however, that was largely a memory for Bill, due to the tech bubble and some exuberant, ill-advised day-trading. And so, while our accommodations were more modest affairs; Bill still longed for the old days. In Sofia, Bulgaria, he insisted on checking out the lobby of the Sheraton (a former Communist Party headquarters, I think). He asked to look at their menu, just to see the options. And he tried out the chairs in the lobby. I was not the least interested in this pretense, and so went outside to wait, and where the hotel doorman tried to hook me up with a Bulgarian prostitute.

In Istanbul, he insisted on doing the same at the Four Seasons, where he asked one of the maids to open up a room, just so he could peek in. We did enjoy having a drink on their rooftop terrace, but approached no closer than that to staying there. Bill’s obsession with the grand hotels did pay off in one instance. Here again, we were snooping around the Pera Palace, of birdcage elevator and Agatha Christie fame. On a lark, he asked the front desk what a room for the night would cost for the two of us. The $100 tab was well within the arc of our affordability, so we jumped at it, and spent our last night in Istanbul in the Tsar Ferdinand I room. The hotel suffered in a blast from Kurdish activists against the nearby British embassy in the following year or so, resulting in a remodel of the hotel into the posh and pricier establishment of today.

The $100 included an incredible breakfast in the grand drawing room. This was in 2003, three months after Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and ominously, right after the publication of Charlie Wilson’s War. Wilson was a close friend of Bill’s. We sat down at a large round table with a couple: he was a Scots working for an oil company based in Ankara, while his wife was from Kazakhstan. Bill, half-Scots himself—took charge of the conversation as he was often given to doing. And to be honest, there was a bit of name-dropping going on, primarily that of Charlie Wilson. I played no part in this tableau, and just sat back and watched as Bill waxed eloquent. The woman became increasingly silent, and then visibly angry. Even Bill, later on, commented on her silence. But this was a demonstration of a particularly American form of hubris. Bill had no conception that Charlie Wilson’s Brzezinskian exploitation and adventurism might be seen very differently in other parts of the world. It was an early lesson for me, to-wit: Americans seem peculiarly unaware or unconcerned about how they are perceived by others. No doubt I have been guilty of it in the past myself.

But to bring it back to the story I am actually telling, my last night overseas was spent at the Pera Palace, in warm memory of my great friendship with Bill. And, in a continued homage, I stayed at the Savoy, earlier when I was in Moscow. I fell in love with this grand hotel. It is perfectly situated on a pedestrian street, two blocks from the Bolshoi, one block from a Metro station, and a short walk from the Sredentsky Monastery.

I particularly enjoyed eating dinner at the hotel, which was not as expensive as you might imagine. I always took a table next to the fountain pool, which contained a few orangish carp and twelve sturgeon (caviar on the hoof, you might say.) There are no more elegant women in the world than Russian women who set out to be so. I remember observing a young lady sitting across from me; perhaps 26 to 28, bejeweled and pearled, dressed in a simple, but exquisite long white dress, and high heels. But beyond that, she was doing something you would never see an American woman in similar circumstances doing. She was reading a book.

On my last night there, I also passed a long table filled with what for all the world looked to be a Russian oligarch’s cabal: shaved-headed leader at the head of the table, assorted women of questionable repute, and the degenerate men, slumping almost under the table. It all looked straight out of Hollywood central casting. But they were the exception.

I ate there four out of my five nights, primarily sampling the Russian dishes: borscht, rabbit dumplings, duck dumplings, etc. I often strike up conversations with waiters, and such was the case with Ivan. He was genuinely surprised, first that I was an American, and second that I was just a traveler, not in his country pursuing a business deal. He asked me why I had decided to come to Russia. This is a question I was asked repeatedly—not in a mean-spirited way, but with genuine curiosity, given the hostility exhibited by one American administration after another.

I began by saying that I disagreed profoundly with the foreign policy of my country as it pertained to Russia; that I chose to see for myself and make up my own mind. Second, I began to list the the things I love about Russian culture enumerated above. He interrupted me with, “Yes, but what about the Russians themselves?” Ah, I got his point. I responded with the observation that I had been treated with respect and genuine kindness every step of the way. The language barrier obviously presented a hurdle, but I had experienced no ill-will at any point. I concluded that I had been treated far better than any American has any right to expect, considering the bad things that we do in the world.

We talked on. He expressed his desire to visit the United States one day. I encouraged him in that, and gave him one of my cards. I told him that if he ever came to the United States, he could stay at my house in Texas. Like so many people overseas, the first thing he wanted to see in our country was the Grand Canyon. He asked how far it was from where I lived. And here, this Texan and this Russian spoke a common language. I said “two days.” Texans speak in terms of time, rather than miles, as do Russians tackling the enormity of their own country.2 My offer was genuine—I hope one day he is able to come to the U.S., and when he does, perhaps he will dig out my card. I promised him a road trip to the Grand Canyon (which I need to see as well). Later, with great flourish and aplomb, he came to my table and presented me with a large slice of Napoleon Cake, on the house.3

I was taken aback, and deeply gratified. I like these Russians; hearty, generous and good, with a flair for the dramatic gesture. And I felt that way even before the Napoleon Cake.

(“Eternal Russia”, by Ilya Glazunov, Ilya Glazunov Gallery, Moscow)

I am currently in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, after having spent 12 days in Russia. While there, I did not have access to Substack, or much of anything else, for that matter. I will be posting…in time; as these trips are harder on me than before. In the meantime, enjoy this mural by Ilya Glazanov. There’s not much market in “the West” these days for understanding Russia, but if someone were serious about it, I would advise them to go to Moscow and spend a half day in the Ilya Glazunov Gallery, easily one of the most moving aspects of my time there.

I recently speculated on how I thought Puritanism did a number on America and the West, all by way of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). I wish that I had access to the book pictured above before I posted. If you are not familiar with the works of Arthur Machen, then this volume of his rare and generally unknown essays and reviews is a good introduction. There may be a few hardback copies left at Darkly Bright Press. The editor and compiler of the book gives a thumbnail sketch on Machen:

Arthur Machen (1863-1947) charted a lonely and curious course through literature. Though never widely known , his work in horror fiction has gained him an appreciation from a circle of admirers over the years. Yet, as adept as he may have been in creating tales of horror, a careful study of his work shows that there is much more to explore and discover about the Welsh writer. At times, one finds a brilliant essayist or a pragmatic journalist, a gifted storyteller of mystery and fantasy, or a Christian apologist. Despite this breadth, Machen worked in an idiosyncratic style and kept doggedly to the theme which concerned him most: ecstasy as the highest purpose of art and that which is most beneficial to Man.1

The 17th-century Puritans who set about remaking the world on the shores of Massachusetts Bay did not emerge from a vacuum. Mark Valentine, an English author, friend and Machen expert (indeed, a founder of the Friends of Arthur Machen,) recently expressed to me that the one thing that Machen could not abide was “Puritanism in all its guises.” Not surprisingly, Machen had some definite ideas about how Puritanism unfolded, and in so doing, provides a prelude to my Presdestinated America. And he does it all in a short 1936 review of The Great Tudors, entitled Concealed Savages of Tudor England.2 One can only imagine how much Machen relished the opportunity to tear-in to such a self-important work.

Machen noted that every nation contained a considerable number of people who were, in fact, concealed savages. containing in their heart “the burning desire to defile, to degrade, to destroy everything seemly, ordered, or beautiful, whether it be material or immaterial…the physical basis of all revolution.” Machen then goes to lengths to describe the inexorable path of revolution:

The philosophic theorist, the reformer, the man of relentless logic finds out things in general or not all what they should be; he discovers that his country is being managed as if it were England or America, Italy or France, not as if were Utopia or Nephelococcygia; so he writes his book or makes his speeches exposing the vileness that is, and preaching the perfection that there can and should be. He finds, ready prepared, a big congregation: for everyone of us has his complaint to make, his quarrel with fortune, his sense that his merits have not been fitly rewarded; we are, very naturally, sure that our bad luck has come through no fault of our own, and are very ready to believe that under a juster order of things our merits would be amply rewarded. And so the reformer’s gospel goes slowly sinking down through the strata of society, till at length it reaches the savages, who proceed to translate the new theory of Humanity into blood and burning, slaughter and destruction, without understanding anything or caring anything for the theorems and conclusions of the philosophic gentleman in his study; he, likely enough, is horrified at the effect of his schemes of reform.

This is not a bad outline of the course of Revolution, whether it be English, American, French, Confederate, or Russian. We think ours was different; it was perhaps in scale, but not in type. Machen concluded that doctrine, whether right or wrong, when it reached the level of savagery, provided savagery “an excuse for the destruction which is its delight.”

Machen was no elitist, concluding that mankind should not be divided into the civilized and the savages, but rather the “makers and the breakers.” These breakers were, in Machen’s words, the “maggots bred in the sores of civilization.” One wonderful aspect about Machen is that he never lingers in abstraction, he always tells you who he was talking about. And for the Welsh writer, the rot always begins at the top. In this case, the sore was almost exactly 400 years old, when Henry VIII had the itch for…well, you know. He claims that this was the first step that England took on the path to modern civilization, “such as it is.”

Machen is a man after my own heart. I begin to lose interest in England with Henry VIII, and my interest dies along with Charles I. I have no real interest in the Commonwealth, the Restoration, the “Glorious Revolution” or, God forbid, the 18th-century and the road to Empire. I have poked around more old English churches than I can count, but in every one, if there is nothing there that predates 1536, then I am little interested. I am more excited about a 4-ft. remaining stretch of Anglo-Saxon wall than I am the glorious Victorian stained glass behind the altar. And so, the whole panoply of Anglicanism passes me by unphased—their doctrine, their ecclesiology, their hymnody, their liturgy, their arts.3 For at the end of the day, a church’s raison d’etre has to rest on more than just a lusty oaf of a king who couldn’t keep it in his pants.

The Great Tudors treats 40 personalities of the era, “the great, and the detestable,” as Machen describes them. He finds few of noble character: Catholic saints More and Fisher, Cardinal Pole and the Jesuit Edmund Campion. Machen does allow for the Protestant martyrs under Queen Mary; “ignorant and fanatical enthusiasts most of them, no doubt, but at least endowed with the virtue of constancy.” But perhaps thinking that even this qualification threw the net too wide, qualifies it even further: “It is perhaps true that most of them were burned not for disbelieving in trans-substantiation, but for violent abuse of them that did believe in it; still they were brave enough to die for their negations.”

Then Machen begins to circle his prey, so to speak. “I do not think that there is any story more dismal, deplorable, melancholy both in itself and its immediate effects, and also in its presage and omen for the future of our race, than a story of villainy triumphant.” Reading back over the Tudor era, one does indeed get the sense that the bad guys won. And this very triumphant villainy (“perfidious Albion” is an expression of this) was the context for the settlement of North America, including those oh-so-pious Puritans.

The villainy triumphant marches through the reigns of Henry and his unfortunate children. Machen describes Henry’s plunder of the shrine of St. Hugh at Lincoln Cathedral. All the gold, silver and jewels were carefully stripped, and deposited in the King’s Jewel House. This is mere greed and avarice. But Henry defended his actions by saying that “his conscience could bear it no longer.” The offense to the king, of course, being the supposed superstition and “dishonoring to Almighty God” by the devotion to St. Hugh. And so, we have “villainy complicated with the meanest and most contemptible hypocrisy.” And it doesn’t get any better.

Then, the queens duly decapitated, the abbots hanged, and their goods given to the rich, the said rich fight and scheme and go on thieving and destroying through the reign of the miserable little Edward.

The gloomy bigot Mary succeeds, and tries to neutralize the evil by burning people, most of whom should have been in mental homes.

Finally, comes Elizabeth. A glorious reign, indeed, in many ways. Shakespeare wrote in it, British navigators sailed all the seas of the world, the Armada was beaten, and the wilder the adventure the more it glowed in Elizabethan eyes. And yet there is this pity…the elements of most of Elizabeth’s policies consisted of a mixture of buccaneering and humbug. Elizabeth coveted her neighbor’s goods…but always declared that her buccaneering and filibusterings were done for the Gospel’s sake.

There you have it, the template for Anglo-American history: buccaneering and humbug done for the Gospel’s sake. From the Puritans expropriating a continent for the creation of their New Israel, to the “sun never setting on the British Empire”,4 to Manifest Destiny, to “the White Man’s Burden,” to American Exceptionalism, to the Democracy Agenda, and on and on right down to today. We deliver “democracy”, but at the tip of a ballistic missile and the appropriation of resources, which is just a twenty-first century rendering of buccaneering and humbug done for the Gospel’s sake.

But back to the Tudors. During the reigns of Henry through Elizabeth, the shrines were not plundered for the pleasure of destroying beauty, but rather that the treasures could be duly appropriated to the King’s Jewel House. Likewise, the country gentleman, on his way to becoming a great nobleman by virtue of stolen property, did not ruin the church because it was beautiful, but because the lead in the roof was valuable; leaving “God’s House an easy quarry.” But worse was to come.

Afterwards, no doubt, in the Cromwellian age the destructive element came to the surface. It called itself Puritanism, and perhaps believed that its fury of destruction was due to religious zeal. You smashed a glowing stained-glass window and burned the painted and carved rood-screen, and enjoyed the work heartily; but at the same time you had the additional enjoyment of believing that both objects were superstitious, and that by destroying them you did God service. Essentially, the dark figures that ran about England in those days came from the underworld of destruction; but they put on the masks and disguises of their time. Thus, once a week they ordained a day of black gloom and horror, because their delight was in darkness. But they called this observation “keeping the Sabbath.”

The Cromwellian Age of Puritanism was a revolution in every sense of Machen’s definition. Maybe everyone can’t see it. But for me, I can connect the dots in Anglo-American history, from Machen’s “the makers and the breakers,” and “bucaneering and humbug,” to “the City of a Hill” to “Presdestinated American” to the Capitalist West of today. It’s all one story: Villainy Triumphant.

Why write anything when the picture says it all?

It is, of course, waaay too early to tell. I never underestimate the ability of American neocons to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. But if this Memorandum of Understanding holds, then this is just about the best that the U.S., and the world, could hope for, given the magnitude of this colosssally stupid misadventure.

I could have simply entitled this piece American Foreign Policy for the Last 80 Years and let the cartoon speak for itself. But that wouldn’t be any fun. Words are needed—and in the case of this piece, probably too many words. When I look at the USA today, I see that the real divide is not between red and blue, or at least not at the Washington DC end of things. Their goals are largely identical, they just have their ballistic missiles aimed at different targets.

Admittedly there is a difference in style: one side prefers bellicosity while the other engages in smug condescension. Choose your poison. I find that the real divide—or at least the two poles to which our political intuitions are pulled—is rather between Populism and Elitism. At least for me, Populism carries a certain amount of baggage, so you may prefer the split to be characterized as between the Elites and Everybody Else.

My stance has always been to oppose elitism whenever I catch it casting a glance down its long nose. Much of this comes from my upbringing, and particularly, my dad, and is best relegated to a long footnote, below.1 But suffice to say, my radar has always been finely-tuned to detect either academic, social, or economic pretense. And these days, elitism is on my mind, a lot.

Both of our political parties practice it. Despite their Populist sloganeering, the Right is functionally elitist every bit as much as the Left. If you do not do as you are told, if you question the fundamentals, then the old guard will quickly cast you out as a pariah. Interestingly, the growth in this sector seems to be among the pariahs, as the Establishment is too preoccupied with keeping its remaining adherents from looking behind the curtain.

To those castaways, the Left offers no safe harbor at all. If you listen closely to the Loyal Opposition, there is little outrage at what is being done, just hand-wringing over the fact that they are not the ones directing it, and all-too-obvious anticipation of the day when they will again. As much as you detest the ham-fisted way the GOP mismanages most everything, the voice from the Left still repels. “We know what is best for you. Our information is truth. We are smarter and better informed, so do what we say, or suffer our scorn and judgement” (a judgment worthy of the Puritans from which no repentance is ever sufficient.)

This is weighing on my mind now for two reasons:

• a return to Russia in coming weeks, and

• a truly bizarre confrontation from earlier in the year.

  ***

I recently took notice of an online kerfuffle involving Candace Owens’ vacation to Russia. Let me just say that I don’t follow her, and have no strong opinions about her one way or the other. I know enough to recognize her as one of the dissident voices on the Right, in the camp with Tucker, MTG, the Pauls, etc. I am happy that she went to Russia to see for herself, just as I would be pleased for anyone to pursue this course. Apparently some critics, however, make it their business to follow her every move. A young writer for The Tablet who posted on the Free Press was Johnny-on-the-spot with his condemnation. It is a classic screed, chock-full of ad hominems. He starts:

Russia? Even for adventurous travelers, Russia is not at the top of many must-see lists in the summer of 2026. It is under heavy Western sanctions. Its major cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg, have been subject to semi-regular drone attacks in recent weeks. The State Department advises Americans not to travel there, and warns them that if they do go anyway, they will have their electronic devices hacked and may be kidnapped and held for ransom by the country’s all-powerful security services. So why visit?

Crap like this works for many people, but I will address his points, one by one:

1. Must-see lists are overrated. You can be a tourist standing like cattle awaiting slaughter in the long, hot over-priced queues in Paris, Rome, Venice, or Munich, or you can be an unharried traveler who discovers beauty at every turn in Russia.

2. Sanctions: we should all be so-sanctioned. They have only forced Russia to be self-reliant and self-sufficient in ways other countries can only dream of being. Slower growth in late 2025 and early 2026 was intentional, to address inflationary concerns. There are no shortages, as in the bad old days of the late Soviet period. Measured in purchasing power parity, Russia’s economy is the strongest in Europe, at least according to the IMF. Meanwhile, the leaders of the EU are crafting their 21st sanctions package, while simultaneously looking to reduce public services even further in order to ramp-up their military to address a threat from Russia that doesn’t exist. (On a personal note, I despise the sanctions mentality, on every level. This strong-arming has replaced the old respected ways of diplomacy. May they die soon!)

3. These “semi-regular drone attacks” mostly do not get through, as opposed to the drones Russia is sending Ukraine’s way. The few that do, directed at civilians, hit around the periphery and do not impact life in St. Petersburg or Moscow, according to recent travelers there; a few pinpricks, nothing more. I understand that they have been noticable around Smolensk, much closer to the border with Ukraine.

4. The State Department—who believes the State Department? You cannot expect truth-telling from the Belly of the Beast. I went to Syria in 2008, partially because the State Department told me not to do so. It was a defining event in my life. During my visit to Russia last year, I had no problem with my electronic devices, and felt safer than in American cities. My understanding about people who get in trouble in Russia is that they are either, a) meddling in domestic politics and/or, b) trying to transport something in or out of the country that they should not. In my case, absent-minded septuagenarians attract little suspicion or concern.

5. So why visit? Here’s why: History and Beauty. Russians love, cherish, and preserve their rich history. To a historian, they are my kindred spirits. And Beauty? Just pick one: architecture, churches, art, music, dance, literature, nature.

That’s why, Mr. Know-it-All; who is, in fact, 32-year old Georgia-born, New York City based Park MacDougald. The depressing thing about his body of work, is the fact that someone so young is so captive to these old Boomer tropes. He accuses Owens of lying about her trip being a vacation, as she was also a speaker at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. Oh, that’s damning, isn’t it? Surely no one has ever combined business and pleasure on one airline ticket before. The forum (SPIEF) is unknown in the West, receiving no coverage whatsoever, but is a really big event for most everyone else, that being 87.5% of the world’s population.

The writer labeled SPIEF as a “‘recruitment venue’ for the Russian security service,” his source being someone in “the Ukrainian press.” But of course. And Owens delivering a speech there means to him that she is being recruited as a Russian asset. MacDougald’s analysis is droll indeed. Our own security service—the CIA—is a known purveyor of destabilization, regime change, invalidation of elections, decapitation strikes on leaders (our own, if need be), and, objectively, the fount of much of the mischief and mayhem in the world for the last 80 years. This, of course, is just business as it should be to the likes of MacDougald. And speaking of assets, what is Keir Starmer, Mark Rutte, Kaja Kallas, Volodymyr Zelenskii, King Hussein, the leaders of Lebanon, even Benjamin Netanyahu, if not American assets? For a bit of perspective, consider the following thought exercise:

Over the last 25 years, who, exactly, has lied to us? Or, being charitable, who has intentionally misled us?

DJT, Rubio, Bessent, Hegseth? Or Vladimir Putin?

Blinken, Sullivan, Harris, Biden? Or Vladimir Putin?

DJT, Pence, Bolton? Or Vladimir Putin?

Obama, Clinton, Kerry, Rice, Power? Or Vladimir Putin?

Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Bush, Powell, Petraeus? Or Vladimir Putin?

Interestingly, Vladimir Putin hosted an hours-long press conference attended by the few Western journalists who chose to attend. When was the last time any Western leader did that?

Young MacDougald delights in the civil war within MAGA ranks, assigning Candace Owens to the conspiratorial wing of the movement, characterized by their emphasis on the alleged influence of Zionists and neocons in the party. If this makes one “conspiratorial,” then sign me up. He puts the words Zionists and neocons in air-quotes, implying that they are fantasies and illusions rather than tangible realities. One can debate the extent of their influence on Republican and Democratic politics, but to cast doubt on their very existence is not the mark of a journalist, but of an ideologically-bound hack.

MacDougald continues to expound upon the extent of the conspiracy. Surely, only one entity has the resources to mount such a broadly-based and deceptive campaign (other than, of course, our own security state apparatus). He answers his own question: of course it can be no one but Russia, and its evil mastermind, Vladimir Putin. MacDougald names his source, in this case: Laura Loomer. I mean, even Republicans do not quote her. She says, “I don’t think conservatives realize how much Russian propaganda we have been fed over the last few years.” Well, there you have it. Who can argue with substantive arguments like that?2

MacDougald’s worldview is simply Boris and Natasha updated for the 21st Century, forgetting that Rocky, Bullwinkle, Boris and Natasha was a high-brow spoof, directed more at our Cold War mentality than that of the Russians. His piece reads like a laundry list of neoliberal boogeymen: Alex Jones (of course), Tucker Carlson, Alexander Dugin, etc. For Tucker, he has this to say: “A full list of Carlson’s pro-Kremlin falsehoods would be tedious both to write and to read…” Well, I suggest that MacDougald should let me be the judge of that, for having read his entire article, I can clearly deal with tedium.

He treats Multipolarity as something cooked-up in the brain of Alexander Dugin, and indeed, sometimes puts the word in air quotes. MacDougald writes that multipolarity was “popularized by Dugin, that America should cede global influence to Russia and China.” Pay close attention to how he characterizes it. For him, it is some sort of zero-sum game, where dominance is transferred from the U.S. to Russia and China.

In fact, Multipolarity is already the way the world is beginning to work, or at least everyone but the Collective West: not dominated by Russia, or by China, or by the U.S. I believe the Trump Administration understands this while still utilizing the language of unipolarity; their current foreign policy being either, a) one last Hail Mary pass, or b) an attempt to position the U.S. for the strongest position possible once the post-unipolar world takes final shape.

Just for fun, MacDougald reveals that Michael Flynn is a lobbyist for Republika Srpska (so what?), and the absolutely essential reporting of Max Blumenthal is that of a “pro-Russian agitator.” In another article, the heroic and tireless Dr. Jeffrey Sachs is dismissed as simply a “Communist Chinese asset.” His tactic is painfully clear: any independent voice who questions the necessity of our constant state of war and the aims of our Security State is dismissed as a Russian or Chinese asset or agitator, financed by the “paranoid” Russian political system.

I dislike binary choices, as there are usually other options, but here is one of mine:

1. Either the U.S. is the force of good in the world as we have always been told, and any naysaying is simply part of a vast Russian plot, or

2. We have some real systemic problems in this country which cannot be blamed on Russia.

***

In imitation of my dad, I have tried to cultivate friendships with a broad range of people. They reflect my various interests: my church friends front and center, some co-workers, my close cousins, past traveling companions, my literary associations here and abroad, and fellow members of historical societies, etc. There is little overlap in these groups, nor should there be. Significantly, there are no associations defined by political leanings. I have always taken comfort in the fact that my friends on the Right tagged me a wild-eyed liberal, while my Progressive friends considered me a radical reactionary. And that is exactly where I wanted to be.3

Only after traveling to Russia last year have some of these friendships become frayed. In broad terms, my friends on the Right have been curious about what I did. My friends on the Left are not the least bit interested. This attitude came into sharper focus early this year when I learned that political alignment supersedes friendship. It seems my “politics” was a problem, though I never knew I had any. I hesitate to write too much about it, as I am sincerely trying to be less defensive and more open to criticism.

I have been writing on this forum, in one fashion or another for almost 21 years. In searching through the archives for something, I recently read a piece I wrote after Vladimir Putin’s speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference. I was surprised at how well it conformed to my current thinking. So it seems I have not been overly swayed by current trends or conspiracy theories, but have maintained a generally consistent position for over 25 years. This was allowed to pass, I suppose, by some of Left-leaning friends, without comment. But traveling to Russian, validating Vladimir Putin in their eyes, was simply beyond the Pale.4

In late winter, I received a collaborative email from learned friends who took me to the woodshed, so to speak. The body of the email was a bit of a screed, a series of ad hominem attacks, expressing incredulity that I would go to Russia while Vladimir Putin was in charge. All sorts of links were provided to instruct me in the error of my ways. I did not open a single one. To add insult to injury, they included a slap at my church. I will take criticism from those who are serious about their own faith; I resent attacks from those who are not. The email contains every stereotypical complaint associated with academic pretense and elitism: there was arrogance, there was presumption, and there was extreme condescension.

My son took it harder than I did, exclaiming “How dare they!” I responded to the email as nicely as I could, but firmly telling them to cut it out. And I did make note that their attack on my church was particularly out of line. But of course, this fell on deaf ears. The Left is almost never perceptive, just assuredly right. And so, I received another shorter email about a month later, this time with an renewed attack on my church. My response was blunt and to the point, informing them that they had crossed a line with the first email, and to send no more of this sort of thing.

What has bothered me ever since is not the fact that they would send it, but the reason why they felt they had to do it. Why was our friendship of so much lesser value than being politically aligned? It has reminded me of a thing or two about the Left. When I was growing-up, those on the Left were the dissidents—perhaps to too great an extent for their own good. Those days are long gone. You will search in vain for much life in the anti-war Left these days. There is no room for dissent, only That Which Must Be Believed. I am slow to cut people off, and I like to leave the door open, so to speak. But in all honesty, I am assuming these friendships are now dead.

The reason why they wrote it brings me back to Park MacDougald. Looking back, the foundational tropes he employed, the ad hominems, the very tone, is the same as what I received in my email. The reason my acquaintances wrote to me is that their Truth is that of Park MacDougald, the Free Press, the Financial Times, CNN, the Economist, the BBC, Anne Applebaum, Timothy Snyder, Richard Blumenthal, our Security State, etc. My actions demonstrate that I am a non-believer in their Received Wisdom. What distinguishes them from the elites on the Right is their puritanism; where there is no forgiveness, only judgement. There can be no dissent.5 Thank you, no; I am fine aligning with Everybody Else.

I do not believe that our country is intellectually or institutionally capable of shaking free from the hold the elites (Right and Left) have on our government. It will have to happen the hard way, as the practical implications of multipolarity become impossible to deny over the remainder of this century.6 In the meantime, I am free to go ahead and adjust my thinking to the new realities. I welcome them—they are not frightening in the least.

(As always, the good stuff is in the footnotes.)

In recent weeks I have read Max Weber’s The Puritan Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). For this, I have to thank Jeff Rich, and the incredible resources he has assembled at Burning Archive. In an article here, he provides links to the entire book. I encourage you to check out the piece—he even provides an audio voice-over, in his soothing Australian accent.

Weber’s thesis is often short-handed as the Protestant Work Ethic, though he never used that exact wording. I have always referenced it in my history classes when explaining the Puritans of New England, and their out-sized influence on our country. But up until now, I had never actually read the book itself, an unpardonable oversight on my part. His work is deep and searing, seminal for understanding the foundations of this country, if not all Protestant cultures.

This is a poignant time to be reading the book, in the run-up to our 250th anniversary (a short history, as countries go). To begin with, I have always been ambivalent about July 4th, for a variety of philosophical,1 personal,2 and familial reasons34–all best relegated to the footnotes. But beyond that, in light of American history of the last few decades, and specifically what we are engaged in at this very moment leads me to question exactly what it is that we are celebrating. Perhaps sackcloth and ashes are more in order than flags rippling in the breeze. I will quietly note the date from afar.

But I understand that that is not the nature of our country. By and large, Americans remain blithely indifferent to the sufferings we are inflicting around the world, as we spread democracy one ballistic missile at a time. Some may counter that that is the behavior of our “leaders” (the Security State and its elected mouthpieces), and that the American people should not be held accountable. Perhaps. But this gives us a loophole that we do not allow those on the receiving end of our foreign policy: not necessarily leaders, but average Gazans, and Lebanese, and Cubans, and Iranian middle school girls, and the students in Russian dormitories.

So I imagine that this July 4th, our 250th, we can expect an explosion of propaganda about freedom, democracy, and liberty, in a land where these terms are rapidly losing any real meaning. But in a merely material (which is to say, deadened) sense, we have it okay, largely maintaining a just-believable semblance of continuity, if you will. And maybe we are allowed to ignore the obvious for one day. But at this point in our short history, I suggest that it would benefit us to take a long honest look at where we are now as a nation. Instead of blaming others, let’s drop the soothing propaganda, and concentrate on what we5 have done to ourselves at home.

And while we are at it, we should ask ourselves what in the Sam Hill we are doing to the rest of the world? What example are we setting? If we are “spreading democracy,” it is, at best, through destabilization and regime change, and at worst, at the tip of a ballistic missile. How many men, women, and children are dead or suffering on at least three continents—Ukraine, Russia, Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, Cuba? These conflagrations are not ones that we stumbled into, or rushed into to protect the innocent, but rather the calculated and purposeful projection of American power, based on the stated foreign policy of the United States.

I despair, of course, of any change short of our own defeat. But I do rack my brain trying to understand WHY? What was the fons et origo of this cancer in the American character that pushes us ever forward, maniacally never pausing, never satisfied or satiated, never reversing—bestriding the globe whether the world wants it or not? It is not a virtue, or something to be celebrated, but a fatal illness that will eventually devour us, as it has others before. Despite what Madeleine Albright said, we do not stand outside History.6

For historians, there are plenty of markers to note along our checkered history:

• The trumped-up war of choice we are currently losing in the Persian Gulf will not end well (for us) and…

• It should have been a non-starter to anyone with even the most rudimentary understanding of the region, and specifically our record over the last 25 years, which, of course, excludes the current Administration. But beyond that…

• We totally misread the meaning and lessons of the end of the Cold War in 1991, which set the stage for all subsequent conflagrations, but…

• The entire Cold War itself was not a shining moment for this country, the struggle being the natural outgrowth of the world we established at Bretton Woods in the summer of 1944, and yet…

• The Second World War itself was teed-up by Wilson’s broken promise engagement in the First. Every possible post-war scenario based on our non-entry sounds infinitely better than what actually transpired, but it started even earlier with…

• Our taste for international empire building from our war of choice with Spain in 1898, which was, in part, a continuation of…

• The settlement of the West as a colonial enterprise, and…

• The Monroe Doctrine of 1824, which was as much a ballsy reservation of the Americas for us as it was a No Admittance to Europe.

And so, on and on it goes on, marching back in time. Where to begin? I’m inclined to agree with Dr. Jeffrey Sach’s only half tongue-in-cheek conclusion that at the root of all world problems today, you find the British.

h/t to Louie Fourie

We are a polyglot nation today, but our beginnings and our institutions were solidly formed from the teachings we learned at the feet of the English. Indeed, we were their best pupils—the American Empire is in some ways simply the British Empire 2.0. But Canada (sans Quebec), Australia, and New Zealand are all British enterprises, formed from much the same stock as us. Why are these other British nations not as crazed as we are? Ah, here I think, we approach the root cause of our illness, for these other countries did not have a John Winthrop,7 and his City on a Hill.

Many say that slavery is our ancestral sin. I’m not so sure that it isn’t Puritanism.8 In fact, I can make a case for the outgrowth of Puritanism putting the wind in the sails of slave owners. Instead, I will lay two charges at the feet of the Calvinistic Puritans in America:

1. Avarice was refashioned as a virtue, and

2. Community was sacrificed to the solitary individual.

Weber explains both, so let’s dig deeper into the Protestant Work Ethic.

How the Puritans Ruined Everything (in a nutshell):

The sine qua non of Calvinism was their peculiar understanding of Predestination.9 The word does indeed exist, a time or two, in Scripture. But in over 1500 years, the Church never constructed an entire theological edifice upon this foundation. But to these novice Protestant interpreters of Scripture, no longer bound by the received teachings of the Church, the concept bespoke a sovereign God who had foreordained everything, and whose justice must be satisfied. Gone was the loving God of mercy, the Father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, etc. Gone was the forgiveness inherent in the sacramental cycle of liturgical life. In its place, a wrathful God, in His sovereign omnipotence, had decreed the fate of every living thing, and there was simply nothing that any individual could do to add or subtract from this judgment.

This doctrine was as cold and unforgiving as concrete. If that was all there was, if everyone’s fate was already cut and dried, as it were, then the best response would be to simply live the best life, with as much enjoyment and pleasure as possible, for in the end, nothing you did really mattered. There certainly wouldn’t be any need to go to church, as it wouldn’t move the needle an iota. There would be no need for preachers to pound pulpits, and no need for anyone to show up to listen to them even if they did.10 In fact, at one point, Roger Williams did point that out to the Puritan establishment in Boston; to-wit, we have Rhode Island.

This was obviously not the path taken by the Puritans. In the sheer force of their convictions, they fashioned a determined and convoluted alternative response; managing to bend Reason into a full circle. Having cut themselves adrift from the teachings of the historic church, these Calvinists were left to their own devices. And to their credit, they did not shrink from it! But the question haunting them remained: in light of their absolute certainty in the sovreign predestination of every soul by God, then how was one to live their life in light of this?

These Calvinists, racked with doubt, longed for the same certainty of their election by God, as they placed in the certainty that defined their belief in Predestination. As Weber notes, they began with the premise that God showers his material blessings on His elect. (I find that a faulty premise, one not at all supported by Scripture, much less by reality. The wicked prosper easily.) As Weber noted, “God Himself blessed His chosen ones through the success of their labours…” So, if a Puritan worked really hard, saving and accumulating, and amassing the things of this world-“prospering”, as it were-then that would be proof of their election (as long as they did not seek to enjoy the fruits of this labor in anything that smacked of the sensuous enjoyment of life.) In this manner, the Puritan self-created the certainty (proof) of their salvation—and certainty was the watchword of their beliefs.

And so, concentrated, purposeful labor—the “getting ahead”—was exalted as proof of one’s election by God. Greed has ever been with us, in all places and all times; but this hunger for money had always been called for what it was: avarice. Calvinism, combined with Luther’s concept of a calling in life, ennobled this vice into a virtue. Indeed, it became the way in which one served the Lord-the duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital, which is assumed as an end in itself…not simply a means of making one’s way in the world, but a peculiar ethic…an ethos. Weber describes this as a new Christian (Protestant) asceticism.

The source of the utilitarian character of Calvinistic ethics lies here…the doctrine of predestination. In practice this means that God helps those who help themselves. Thus the Calvinist, as it is sometimes put, himself creates his own salvation, or, as would be more correct, the conviction of it…There was no place for the very human Catholic cycle of sin, repentance, atonement, release, followed by renewed sin. Nor was there any balance of merit for a life as a whole which could be adjusted by temporal punishments of the Churches’ means of grace.

In short order, real virtues became redefined solely by their value to the accumulative process, such as in many of Benjamin Franklin’s utilitarian axioms. Franklin was an old rascal, but he was raised Puritan in Boston, and the belief system permeated most everything he wrote. Here we see the seedbed of the hypocrisy that the rest of the world often sees in us. We portray ourselves as upstanding and virtuous, while often our virtues are simply covers for own aggrandizement. We have an extremely long history of promoting “democracy” in a struggling or weak country as a means of appropriating their resources. (if this is a novel concept, you can start out easy, with our colonization of the American West, then move on to the history of Hawaii in the nineteenth century, and then look south of our border where you will find examples in every nation.)

If this behavior were confined to a cluster of religious zealots in New England, it would be nothing more than a sociological and historical curiosity. But the aggressive behavior of appropriation and acquisition became unmoored from its quasi-religious underpinnings and took on a life of its own. In short order, this became the template for American aggressivness in the accumulation of land, wealth, and capital, first here and then abroad.

Protestant theological tenets were fresh and new—untested by time, as it were. And I think we can objectively say that Predestination as a foundational belief system simply failed the test of time. It worked in the red-hot zealotry of the initial generations, whether in Geneva, Holland, Edinburgh, or New England. But one of the paradoxes of Protestantism is that association held on mutually agreed-upon intellectual constructs proves hard to maintain over the long haul. Succeeding generations of Puritans simply fell away from religious Puritanism. New England Congregationalism was still the social glue that held the region together, but the religious enthusiasm had faded. In time, these foundations either sloughed away, or were kicked free by the younger generations, leaving only the ingrained behaviour of the accumulative process remaining, now a good in its own right, apart from demonstrating any election by God.

That anyone should be able to make it the sole purpose of his life-work, to sink into the grave weighed down with a great material load of money and goods..[was] the product of a perverse instinct…

But out of this flowed what Weber described as the social ethic of capitalistic culture. The resulting economy gave birth to an immense cosmos…which…forces the individual…to conform to capitalistic rules of action. Weber finds greed and unscrupulousness in Catholic cultures as well, but their avariciousness was never formed into an ethos. Finally, Weber notes that traditionalism was the most important opponent to the spirit of capitalism.

Finally, I have always viewed American individualism with skepticism. Individuals do not build societies and create human flourishing; communities do that work. Weber credits this to the Calvinists as well.

One consequence was a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual…the most important thing in life, his eternal salvation, he was forced to follow his path alone to meet a destiny which had been decreed for him from eternity.

No priest could offer mediation. There were no sacraments by which the believer encountered God. There was not even a church, for churches contained both the elect and the damned. The latter were there, not to attain salvation, since this was impossible, but rather forced to obey the commandments of God for the glory of God. Finally, even God abandoned the Calvinist believer, as he must prove his election by his labor.

This thankfulness for one’s own perfection by the grace of God penetrated the attitude toward life of the Puritan middle class, and played its part in developing that formalistic, hard, correct character which was peculiar to the men of that heroic age of capitalism.

And there we have it. Does Puritanism explain everything about America? Of course not, but it does explain a lot.

I have been following with interest events in China the last ten days or so. First, Donald Trump and his entourage arrived, and President Xi handled them as a seasoned and patient tour director would a testy and self-important tourist. Trump was stroked and made to feel special, though when Air Force 1 lifted off from Beijing, the American delegation had no-thing, as in zip, nada, nothing to show for it; not one item was checked off their to-do list. Subsequent Truth Social posts highlighting supposed accomplishments are shot down as soon as they appear. And, apparently somewhere along the way, Xi had a Come to Confucius talk with DJT, explaining China’s position regarding Taiwan in terms that could not be misunderstood. Or so I hear. The optics said it all: Trump, hat-in-hand with nothing to show for it, XI calmly and even more confidently in control of the narrative.

This is in sharp contrast to the triumph of the XI-Putin Summit, following right on the heels of Trump’s visit. There is no need for me to comment when Pepe Escobar has done an excellent job, here. The site—Strategic Culture Foundation—is banned on Facebook. Wikipedia labels it a “Russian disinformation site.” I can think of no two better recommendations to check out the article. While we are at it, how many American disinformation sites can you name? I will need a new Yellow Pad to prepare my list.

The article contains a link to the Joint Declaration itself. In terms of global geopolitics, it may be the most important thing you will read this year. Escobar touts 20 May 2026 as the start of the “Eurasia Century.” We shall see, but it certainly heralds the end of the post World War II order. Unipolarity, hegemony, and Western-based “rules” are no longer globally enforceable. Polycentrism and multipolarity are the new watchwords, with civilizational respect for all, rather than any notion of “exceptionalism.” An excerpt:

The spiritual and moral system of any civilization cannot be considered exceptional or superior to others. All countries should advocate a view of civilizations based on equality, mutual exchange of experience, and dialogue, and should strengthen mutual respect, understanding, trust, and exchanges between different nationalities and civilizations, promote mutual understanding and friendship among the peoples of all countries, and protect the diversity of cultures and civilizations.

Meanwhile, we are debating a ballroom, voter ID laws, and how to bring Fidel Castro’s 94-year old brother to trial, while the Adults in the Room have moved on. We are simply not a serious nation. At some point we will have to leave behind the cartoon images we have of other leaders and relearn how to play well with others. I don’t see it happening any time soon.

I am posting this after a long absence. If you spend enough time with real people, you sometimes find yourself in the midst of their dramas, or at least dramas not of your making. I do not multi-task as well as I used to, so this has kept me from writing much here or anywhere else. And while I desperately want to write about something beyond geopolitics, I think I have to get this post out of my system first.

I believe it was back on April 29th, I watched a clip of Fox News on Larry Johnson’s excellent Sonar21 Telegram channel. I never intentionally watch Fox, and when I do, it is for entertainment purposes only. This particular clip did not disappoint. And it can be found in its smarmy entirety, here. Jesse Watters does what he is paid to do, and gives a reassuring pep talk to the Lazy Boy-bound base. Don’t believe all that distracting noise, no matter how real it seems, but continue to hold tight to what we tell you. DJT is about to inflict the “final blow,” in a “short and powerful wave of strikes [and] targets include the enemy’s remaining military assets, leadership and infrastructure.” Then there is an insert of the President, confidently claiming that the “Iranians want a deal badly.” I suppose if you want a deal really bad, you can get a badder deal from DJT than just about anyone.

Jesse continues with the propaganda news that the Pentagon is considering unleashing the “the mother of all hypersonics,” the Dark Eagle, with the “enemies last ballistic missiles in the crosshairs.” Not only that but “B1 bombers have been surging into the region.” Admiral Cooper reportedly briefed the President on his options: seizing the Straits of Hormuz, a ground assault on the coastline, or a ground assault on strategic islands. Perhaps to banish any remaining notion that he is an actual newscaster, in a homage to the Big Guy, he disparaged Iran’s “gay ayatollah,” who “has no lips.”1

Watters went on to catalog what a rip-roaring success the blockade has been, concluding that the regime can do nothing about it. Then I was surprised to learn that America’s alliances were ironclad, and that Israel and the Arabs were forging military and financial alliances. Finally, he concluded that it was Iran that was in the quagmire, with their “sugar daddies” in trouble: Putin getting nowhere in Ukraine, and China’s economy starting to crack.

So there’s the narrative for you. At that time, we were preparing to inflict the final blow with our “Dark Eagle” and B1 bombers. The US was contemplating which invasion they were going to pick, much like I linger over the pudding and cobbler bar at my favorite buffet restaurant. Iran was on the ropes: their stockpiles of missiles almost empty, no real leadership or infrastructure, their religious leader sexually compromised, with his lips blown off as we were in the process of assassinating his father. Beyond that, Iran was powerless to oppose us, all the while MBS and Bibi’s bromance was in full flower, ushering in the golden age of Israeli-Arab unity. Meanwhile, Ukraine had Russia pinned-down, and China was about to implode.

I listened for 3 minutes and 45 seconds, but could take no more. I paid close attention during that time, trying to pick out one true thing. But the clock ran out on me. None of it was true. It was all a complete fantasy.2 I suppose this was tailored to the Boomer base, who, incidentally, now make up less than 20% of our population. Of course, if measured in pure linear time, I am one myself, though not at all if measured by how I think and those I choose to hang out with.

Now that 9 days have passed, has any of this happened? No, not a single word of it. It was all pure bovine excrement. Well, what has happened instead? Briefly, for part of 2 days last weekend, DJT inaugurated his Project Freedom, or something of the sort. It didn’t stay up long enough for the name to stick. During those portions of 2 days, a grand total of 2 ships were escorted through the Straits. Before Trump and Bibi’s War, 130 ships passed through the Straits every day. The plan was unworkable and unenforceable at best, and was called off because the Saudis and the Kuwaitis absolutely forbade DJT to use the airbases in their countries to provide cover for this scheme. Hmm, first Israel, now Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. For the golden king of the world, leader of the big, bad hegemon, it sure seems like there is a lot of tail-wagging-the-dog going on here.

Iran remains in control of the Straits of Hormuz, and that is not likely to change. If a crazed bully king of the world’s supposed greatest power can’t knock them out, then I don’t think it is going to happen. This is the new normal. And in the process, Iran steps up, of which more later.

And we should all be hurting so bad as Iran’s allies. Anyone who thinks Ukraine is doing anything but barely holding on against Russia is probably reading from an old Keith Kellogg press release. Russia is moving forward in their own way, with the least possible casualties, and the least impact on their economy—which is doing just fine, thank you very much. Stories of Russia’s approaching economic collapse and/or political shakiness are the standard fare for the Russophobic West, trotted out at regular intervals over the decades. China just told its trading partners to ignore American sanctions or threats of sanctions. These things only work as long as everybody complies. But once a voice loud enough proclaims that the Emperor Has No Clothes, well, the bloated orange nakedness is there for all to see. Once the economic ramifications of Trump’s Folly really settles in here in this country, we may look at the economic stability in Eurasia with envy.

The Iranian government seems more secure and broadly supported than ever before. They have proven themselves to be clever, resourceful, committed, and above all, prepared—not greatly intimidated by the bluster from Washington. The depth of their missile reserves has been one of the greatest surprises for the Administration. Even the CIA admits that Iran has at least 70% of their missile reserves remaining; but as the agency is incapable of telling the truth, this itself may be some sort of perverse false flag signal. Either way, what they do have remaining is certainly far from Jesse Watters’ characterization.

Our blockade, which works on the principle of the sieve, is neither effective or sustainable. We do not have the resources to board more than a few ships that are slipping through, which then takes those U.S. vessels out of the blockade. The U.S. Gerald R. Ford and accompanying destroyers are limping home. Any type of invasion is looking less likely, particularly given the phone call DJT received from Vladimir Putin last week; only the second in his presidency. Look for DJT to fire a parting volley of missiles, declare Victory, start to inauspiciously pull the ships away and spend the rest of this election year avoiding the subject (among many).3

As bad as it seems for us, what about our erstwhile allies? Neither the state of Israel nor Benjamin Netanyahu are fading from the scene. I no longer believe that there is any significant portion of the Israeli population that objects to the Greater Israel project. So, they will survive this. But there has to be a gut realization that not only have they lost, but that they have lost bigly, in the language of their compatriot. After 35 years of trying, Bibi had finally found a President gullible enough, or compromised enough, to do his bidding. This was their last chance to set the region completely to their ordering. And like the animal caught in the steel trap, Judaism itself may have to knaw off the leg of Zionism, Christian or otherwise.

No one should waste time worrying about Saudi Arabia (which I have always considered a malevolent force in the geopolitical arena), nor the Gulf States, all perfectly capable of negotiating their way forward to a secure future. But all certainly realize, with the possible exception of the UAE, that the days of relying on the American military umbrella are over. Weapons will be purchased, deals will be done, but there is no avoiding the fact that the U.S. will be receding militarily from this arena.

And for Europe? They are left in the cold, literally. In a determined march to irrelevancy, they have cut off Russia, and China, and Iran, and now find that perhaps Americans are not as wild about them as before. All they have left is the Ukrainian pit, in which to toss the remains of their patrimony, and of course, their European values. Their Hail Mary Pass seems to be a contemplated 2030 war with Russia, in hopes of once again attracting the U.S. back to their clinging embrace. But for that, they will need a leader. Europe’s position is not, or should not be hopeless, though it may seem that way with the exisiting institutional structures and the current generation of leaders. We may have to see pitchforks in the streets for anything to change. In the meantime, I will spend my travel dollars outside the EU.

In East Asia, our allies—Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines—have already begun the painful process of reevaluating their relationship to the U.S., in light of America’s failure in the Persian Gulf. The Japanese will re-militarize. The other three nations perhaps should huddle around a globe, and contemplate the implications of geography.

Sergey Lavrov now speaks more and more of the U.S. being “agreement incapable” (dogovorosposobny). China, belatedly, seems to be coming around to the same opinion. Of course, this is nothing new, as the Biden Administration was just as bad. Even if DJT were to work out an agreement with Russia, or Iran, or China, there is little chance of it being approved, given the proclivities of the State Department, the Pentagon, Mark Levin, and the Headmistress of the Senate.4

But it is even worse than that, as Dr. Jeffrey Sachs points out in a recent video. Not only is the U.S. agreement incapable, we are also negotiation incapable. Russia and Iran will send experts to any negotiations; diplomats who have devoted their careers to perfecting their craft. In Islamabad, the Iranians sent 4 PhDs. We sent a couple of real estate investors, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. They only look good when compared with their predecessor, General Keith Kellogg. These guys go to the negotiating table with a set of demands, which they dictate to the other side of the table, and seem abashed when the others do not roll over and submit. Even more childish is the talk of making a “deal.” Diplomacy does not rest on “deals,” or at least not in the Trumpian understanding of the word. Larry Johnson sums it up succinctly in The Gulf Separating the U.S. and Iran is Too Wide to Bridge.

Dr. Sachs makes the point that since 1991, the U.S. has not negotiated in “good faith.” (His discussion on this particular point begins at about 27:30 in the video link). The behavior of the U.S. Security State has pursued dominance rather than good faith. The concept of U.S. statecraft is to “scare the sh*t out of the other side…you are with us or we destroy you.” In light of this, there can be no comprehensive settlement; perhaps only some face-saving measure to give DJT something that he can tout as victory. It will be a farce to everyone, except those looking to Jesse Watters for guidance.

Dr. Sachs characterized Iran as having “civilizational depth”:

a highly sophisticated society with a tremendous scientific and technological base…and…a professional class, an engineering class, a scientific class, outstanding universities, and a long record of state of the art scientific publications…something completely different from the stereotypes that have been different from the stereotypes favored by the U.S. since the 1979 Revolution…whether the Europeans like it or not, Eurasia is becoming highly technologically sophisticated and absolutely competitive or ahead of the United States and Europe in many many areas. Iran is part of that technological sophistication and if the US and Europe shut their door to Russia, to Iran, to China, it’s going to be 70 or 80% of the world anyway that’s going to keep the door open and keep trade and economy flowing,

What interests me more than the specifics of the Trump War or even of our proxy war in Ukraine, are the larger trends underway. I want to comment later on a remarkable article, The Coming Multi-World: A New Civilizational Theory of International Relations . Until then, here are a couple of sample paragraphs.

The collapse of the postwar order and its “rules” is therefore not a temporary crisis but a long-brewing reckoning with the contradictions of modernity itself. From the United Nations (UN) to human rights, postwar institutions and values are increasingly ceremonial or exist only in form; their legitimacy has evaporated, and they lack genuine enforcement mechanisms. By underscoring the inherent anarchy of international politics, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza are emblematic of this disintegration, exposing the limits of an order that once promised peace through abstract universality but instead delivered instability due to its hypocrisy, hubris, and hegemonic drive.

The unravelling of postwar globalism marks a historical watershed more significant than the inevitable end of unipolarity. The modern state, the liberal subject, and the global system are all outgrowths of the same modernistic metaphysical impulse: the will to unify, standardise, and homogenise through systematic atomisation. Despite its technological facades, modernity is a form of theology with an insatiable appetite for converts, and, ultimately, our era of general discontent is fuelled by a crisis of faith in modernity and its paradigms. What is emerging in the wake of this collapse is not a simple return to classical Westphalian balance-of-power politics but the birth of a new paradigm—one that is post-liberal, post-national, post-global, and decidedly multi-nodal.

Of those nodes, perhaps the 4th may very well by a country of true civilizational depth: Iran.

A few observations, in no particular order. This should not come as a shock to anyone paying attention, or who is not listening to Fox News.

• Old lessons, relearned the hard way: if you start a war, it takes on a life of its own. Chances are that you will lose the ability to direct the war as planned, or to end it on your predetermined conditions.

• Iran is standing firm, and they are in control of the narrative. Israeli decapitation strikes do not work in Iran (or apparently, elsewhere). It just makes martyrs of those killed, and there are always replacements in the wings to step in and take their place. So instead of weakening and toppling the regime, the Iranian government is stronger than before, with broad national support, even among those who were deeply critical of the government before.

• And let’s reflect a bit on the countries who practice foreign policy by assassination: USIsrael and Ukraine. The list is long. We even tried it on Vladimir Putin a few months back. How vile is this behavior? We throw the phrase “state-sponsored terrorism” around a lot. Who really practices it? Who are the real barbarians here?

• The stability of the Iranian government implies that the January street demonstrations may have been (and certainly were, at least in part), mere orchestrated color-revolutionary events, a show for the West.

• The negotiations in Islamabad were a farce, with nobody more aware of that fact than the Iranian delegation. Their team was headed by four PhDs. Our delegation was led by JD Vance and his Israeli minders: a real estate tycoon buddy of Trump, and the President’s son-in-law. The latter two were on the phone with Netanyahu during the negotiations. Bibi actually called Vance while he was talking to the Iranians, and the Vice-President took the call. I repent in sackcloth and ashes of my former excuse-making for Vance: an exercise in hope over experience.

• The Americans seemed generally taken aback when the Iranian negotiators dismissed their maximalist demands out of hand. They did not realize that they were at the negotiating table precisely because they had NOT defeated Iran. I am reminded of an anecdote from the time of the Iranian embassy hostage crisis of 1979. A reporter asked President Carter if he thought this was in any way connected to our overthrow of the Iranian government and our installation of the Shah in 1953? Carter dismissed the notion, calling it “ancient history.” That response reflects our deep-seated, generational ignorance of just about any culture outside our own; 26 years is but a moment in the life of a 2,600 year-old civilization.

• There is no military solution to the crisis. When you compare resources, one-on-one, America vs. Iran, then the U.S. overwhelms Iran on every level. But that is not how wars are fought these days, is it? The asymmetrical warfare of the Iranians has decimated our pretensions. We had no comprehension of the breadth and depth of their missile resources. Our military bases in the Gulf are currently uninhabitable. The Gerald R. Ford has limped away for repairs. Iran still controls the Straits of Hormuz. Our “blockade of the blockade” is a nonsensical counterproductive measure that cannot be sustained. The Chinese will not recognize it, for starters. And I thought the goal was to restore oil supply corridors?

• Even though no military victory is possible, look for the U.S. to escalate once the ceasefire deadline passes. We do not have a reverse gear. Trump’s mentality is always to double-down. If something is not working, for heaven’s sake do not stop to consider if you have made a mistake, but just throw more resources into the effort. So we will sink deeper into the abyss.

• I have always contended that our problem is the Empire, not the particular Emperor. But in this case, we have an Emperor who is quite mad. Consider in recent days:

1. Threatened the erasure of an entire civilization

2. Profaned western Easter with a profanity-laden rant

3. Allowed himself to be portrayed as Jesus Christ

4. Attacked the Pope for being “weak on nuclear weapons”

• It is now clear when the decision was made to attack Iran, and who made it: Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House while JD Vance was away in Azerbaijan. To be clear, the Israeli leader is a deranged warmonger, who has always held some sway over American presidents. But his power over Trump is something altogether new, suggesting dark forces and secrets in play. The President is seemingly powerless to defy Bibi. Perhaps part of the power lies in the name many give to this operation: Epstein Fury.

• In light of the madness alluded to above, I do not foresee DJT filling out his full four years. If the Cabinet were composed of anything other than lackeys and lickspittals, then I would say that the 25th Amendment would be an option. But it will not be. Many Democrats have their finger on the Impeachment button come next January. But other, more cynical Democrats (is that even possible?) figure that the best thing for them in 2028 is Donald J. Trump in office as long as possible, the country be damned. I’m not sure how, but I believe it will end early in some other way.

• There will be, in time, a diplomatic solution. It will not come from us. China, Russia, Pakistan and Turkey are doing the old-school hard work of diplomacy. China, Russia and Iran are beginning to act in concert as Eurasian powers that share a continent. The Emirates and the Saudis have learned that America cannot protect them. This has been clearly shown. The military bases will recede from the Arabian peninsula–not immediately, but inexorably. To quote Daniel Webster, these ties have been shown to be “ropes of sand.” A general security agreement will emerge, in time, addressing the concerns of countries on both sides of the Persian Gulf, maintained by outside parties such as China, Russia, Pakistan and Turkey. There are already 16,000 Pakistani troops in Saudi Arabia. What began with Great Britain and France’s blunder with the Suez Canal in 1956, ends with Donald Trump’s howling catastrophe in 2026.

• What about Europe? Indeed, what about it? They are desperately trying to remain relevant, when they haven’t been for over seventy years. Europe is like an aging courtesan who, with her rouge and lipstick, thinks she is still desirable. This ingrained cultural arrogance convinces them that Russia is warring against Ukraine only as a stepping-stone to them. The Russian attitude, firmly looking east these days, is “why would we want YOU?” There does seem to be some general European annoyance with Trump’s war, for it has distracted them from their highest priority, the pouring their wealth and their future into the Black Hole of Kyiv (Kiev, properly).

• Speaking of NATO, which was formed as a defensive alliance in the North Atlantic against a perceived Soviet threat, and said threat went away in 1989, then how did we get to the point in 2026 where Donald Trump thinks it would be acceptable for NATO to pile-on in a war he initiated in the Persian Gulf? (This is indeed just a rhetorical question to which I do know the answer. But I think that question needs to be asked.)

• What does this mean back home besides high gas prices and a recession? Politically, it spells the death of the MAGA movement. Donald Trump’s bitterest foes are not Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jefferies, but Republicans, or former Republicans, who refuse to kiss his golden posterior: Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Alex Jones, Megyn Kelly, etc. He is losing every part of his base except “Fox News Boomers.” For a demographic that begins at age 62, that does not exactly bode well for the future of the movement.

• I used to express skepticism that the Democrats would sweep the midterms, saying things like “you can’t beat Something with Nothing.” I was wrong: Nothing beats this sh*t-show hands-down. Unlike some of my old lefty friends who view MAGA as a virus which just hasn’t infected their neighborhood yet, I engage with MAGA all the time, and am happy to do so. Believe me, I find no one with my antiwar sympathies on the Left these days. Anecdotally, I find a number of MAGA types who now wouldn’t touch Trump with a ten-foot pole. That doesn’t mean they will vote Democrat, but rather that they will find another option. I have tremendous respect and admiration for my young friends who have never voted, nor do they plan to do so. They are not disinterested; rather, they are, in fact, extremely informed. They are not opting out. They recognize the process as a distraction to manipulate us. And they just don’t want to be played.

• Finally, Iran is holding the line against the Empire. This is existential for them, in the same way that the Soviets turned back the Nazis. But they are also doing this for their fellow BRICS nations, and the Global South. And, if you oppose Empire, they are doing it for you.

(as always, follow the footnotes, where some of the best stuff hides.)

I had lunch with one of my favorite godsons yesterday.1 As is so often the case when friends get together, the subject of conversation soon turned to President James Buchanan. American historians—armchair and academics alike—love nothing better than ranking Presidents, and then, of course, arguing with others whose lists differ. In most every case, however, President Buchanan is either ranked at the very bottom, or hugged-up to the man who is. His ignominy rests on his dilettantish inaction in the four long months between the Election of 1860 and the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln. I have never read a historical defense of Buchanan.

I avoid using the term “great” in my personal classifications. I note a handful of the usual Exceptional Presidents, followed by a few Above Average Presidents, a broad expanse of Mediocre Presidents, some Poor Presidents, and then those who are simply The Worst. My criteria for placing any one of them in the Presidential Dungeon leans heavily on my antiwar sensibilities: those presidents who, either by their actions or inactions, have unleashed generational death and destruction, bringing harm to ourselves and others. In short, these are the Presidents who have the most blood on their hands.

Andrew Johnson was a truly bad President, but using my benchmark, he does not deserve to be enumerated among the worst. Lyndon Baines Johnson and George W. Bush, however most decidely do deserve the appellation (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, NATO expansion, etc.). I am strongly tempted to toss Woodrow Wilson, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden down to join the other miscreants (the Great War, the Treaty of Versailles, NATO expansion, Belgrade, Kosovo, NATO again and Ukraine). I realize, however, that I would be letting my personal animosity towards their foreign policies color my reasoning. So for now, at least, they still cling to the bottom stratum of Poor Presidents.

Notice that my Presidential inmates and wannabees are bi-partisan. The partisan spin so many put on these characterizations frustrates me. The Imperial project transcends party divides. For decades I listened to those on the Right curse Jimmy Carter was the worst President ever; that is, until Barack Obama came along. The latter was tagged as “the Worst” almost before he took office, which hints at the disturbing motivation behind the charge. Both of these Presidents were solidly mediocre, there were, and are, far worse contenders. During the same period, Lefties demonized Ronald Reagan, a mixed-bag, to be sure. But whether you characterize him as mediocre or above average, he also is far from the worst.

But Trump unbound, in his second iteration, is something altogether different, sweeping past the pedestrian crimes of Buchanan, Johnson, and Bush. His callous complicity in the genocide of Gaza set the tone for what was to follow, foreign policy as spectacle: the 12-Day War, diversionary “Peace Plans” and “Peace Talks”, Greenland, Venezuela, decapitation attemps (including one in Russia), the ludicrous Board of Peace, Rubio’s “Reconquista Speech”, etc. But none of that compares to what he unleashed on the 28th of February. On that day, Trump embarked on the most foolish, ill-conceived, invincibly ignorant foreign policy misadventure in modern history. And that is saying something. I struggle to find a historical comparison. The only thing that comes to mind is Hitler’s invasion of Russia.

What do we make of it? In a 1997 interview with the New York Times, George F. Kennan charged that President Clinton’s expansion of NATO into eastern Europe “would be the most fateful error in American foreign policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” Bush in 2008, Obama in 2014, and Biden and Trump in the years following 2022 have proved Kennan correct once more. But in light of the path Trump has chosen, Kennan’s concern seems almost quaint.

Despite efforts to tamp it out, a vigorous debate is now underway concerning Israel’s influence and/or control over this Adminstration’s decision-making. These are the right questions that need to be asked—but we should avoid a “tail wagging the dog” conclusion. No doubt Trump did receive bad intel from the Pentagon and the Israelis; just as he as he was too incurious to consider good intel that conflicted with his presuppositions. Yes, Christian Zionist warpigs such as Lindsey Graham have Trump’s ear. So does Mirian Adelsen. It has been suggested that Bibi has certain leverage over the President. And yet, there is ample evidence that Trump has been obsessed with Iran all along. The overthrow of Iran has been has been a consistent American objective long before Trump.

So Bibi’s influence ultimately does not matter now. Empires will do what empires do. Emperors can spend decades saber-rattling. They do not have to do this. This one is all on Trump.2 This obstinate act of stupidity defines his Presidency. Whatever legacy he or his supporters hoped for is now shattered. Whatever is left of his Presidency (which may be considerably less than three years) will be spent trying to obscure the ramifications of what he has wrought.

For all DJT’s usual bluster about winning, the real picture is altogether different. Let’s consider his original objectives, to the extent they are knowable.

1. Regime Change: The Administration anticipated a swift decapitation strike, followed by civil unrest which would, in turn, lead to the formation of a new friendly government (even though Israeli intentions were more exacting). We even had a Shah-in-Waiting. True, we assassinated the leader of 200 to 260 million Shia Muslims, along with innocent members of his family. They are now martyrs, and a new leader has been selected without incident. The government continues on as before, only more radicalized and more under the influence of the IRGC. What opposition there was (always overblown, I think) has largely evaporated as Iranians have rallied to their government, just as we would if attacked by a belligerent bully. And has anyone heard a peep from the mini-Shah in the last couple of weeks? So the verdict here is Epic Fail.

2. Destruction of Iran’s nuclear weapon capacity: Of course, the President assured us that this was resolved back in the 12-Day War. The American governing oligarchy has always refused to believe that Iran was not building a nuclear bomb. I suppose they cannot imagine anyone acting differently than we would. The issue was painstakingly addressed by the JCPOA, which Trump dumped, largely I think, because it was an initiative of President Obama. No matter, the late Ayatollah had a fatwa against Iran constructing a nuclear bomb, finding it to be in conflict with the tenets of Islam.3 But we killed him, which eliminates that obstacle to the development of nuclear weapons. His successor, considering recent events, may be less inclined in this direction. In recent days, Trump said we had to act because Iran was within two weeks of having a nuclear bomb that they would use on Israel and the rest of the Middle East (?). Of course, this is the same song that Netanyahu has been singing for over thirty years. Disappointingly, Vice President JD Vance piled-on, suggesting that Iran could develop nuclear “suicide vests.” And yet, the sources within our government tasked with knowing these things have repeatedly stated that there was no evidence of Iran engaging in activity leading to the creation of nuclear weapons. But the voice of reason only speaks to those with a willing ear, which DJT does not possess. And indeed, if you are a public figure in this country, speaking too loudly against invading Iran and/or Israel’s push for us to do so is one way to get yourself killed.4 On the other side of this conflict, I suspect Iran will indeed pursue obtaining nuclear weapons, either by development or by gift.5 Better to be North Korea than Libya. And once they have them, the Saudis and Turks will follow suite in short order, bringing Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the Middle East to a screeching halt. So the verdict here seems headed for another Epic Fail.

3. Destruction of Iran’s long-range ballistic missile capacity: Events in recent days expose the fact that the U.S./Israel had little real knowledge of the extent of Iran’s stockpile of weapons, and even less of what missiles they have remaining. Bombs fall on Israel,6 and Kuwait,7 and Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, and the UAE, Diego Garcia, and our ships in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. The verdict on this objective is also well on its way to an Epic Fail.

The obvious, embarrassing defeat of our stated objectives is only the beginning. A yawning global economic, social, and geopolitical catastrophe is slowly unfolding. It is unclear just widely this is understood in the West. The Global South sees it clearly; and a growing number in the U.S. sense what may be coming.8 Consider the following, in no particular order:

• 20% to 25% of the world’s oil supply has simply been taken out of the equation with damage to the oil and gas infrastructure in the Persian Gulf. The reopening of the Straits of Hormuz will not change that.

• 20% of the world’s supply of LNG has also been removed—long-term.

• The Straits of Hormuz remains closed to the West, but open to everyone else. Attempts to open it militarily are not viable or sustainable.

• At least 13 U.S. military bases in the Persian Gulf have been made uninhabitable, according to the Pentagon.9

• A ground operation is anticipated, probably on one or more of the islands in the Straits of Hormuz. We should reflect on how this has worked for us in the past. This may trigger widespread, open opposition to the war by Americans. Or we may meekly go along with it.

• For the first time in our history, we are fighting an adversary that has the full intel support of other desgnated adversaries: the largest country in the world, and the most populated country in the world. In short, we will be fighting a proxy war against Russia and China, similar to the proxy war we are currently losing against Russia in Ukraine.

• The U.A.E. and Qatar are no longer the safe American-protected enclaves of the past. They may never again be a desired investment destination. Money is already flowing out to Hong Kong and/or Singapore. Guest workers account for 90% of the population in Dubai. What happens when those jobs dry up and they have to return home?

• Bahrain, ruled by a Sunni monarch, is 80% Shia Muslim.

• Iran has exposed the fragility of urban life in the Gulf, with their attacks on desalinization plants. This is the real Achilles heel of the Persian Gulf. 4.2 million people were not meant to live in Riyadh, and cannot with these plants.

• Russia produces 40% of the world’s commercial fertilizer for export. Another 20% came from the Gulf. What happens when European farmers have neither fertilizer for their crops nor diesel for their tractors?

• China has started cutting off the export of rare earths.

• And perhaps worst of all, the U.S. has precious little control over its rogue vassal state. If cornered, Israel will use a nuclear weapon against Iran.

This is just a starter list. It is clear that tough times lie ahead for us—and much tougher times for Europeans, lacking our reserves and resources. This may be both beginning and end: the beginning of a wider war—already being called World War III, and the end of American hegemonic impunity. Whatever emerges will not be a continuation of the way the world worked before 28 February 2026. That much is certain. Wise leaders will begin beating a path to certain doors; none of which will be in Washington DC.

Life has been good to me recently. I enjoyed an incredible 40 day visit at home with a son; we left nothing unsaid before he had to return to his world, leaving me to resume whatever I was doing before. Simple pleasures abound: the grass greened almost overnight, and the irises, azaleas, and dogwoods are in bloom; songbirds are suddenly in evidence everywhere, chirping their way into Spring; and my dog, his soccer ball, and the backyard beckon.

Friends call and text me regularly. I have enjoyed visits with cousins who think I am wonderful. I am easing back into the simple rhythm of church life—what to fix when it is our Sunday for Coffee Hour. The wife and I enjoyed a recent milestone anniversary, low-key and private, as we prefer. But a new painting found its way to our wall in connection with that event.1 I look forward to my classes at school, and enjoy my interaction with students.

In short, I am surrounded by pleasant, good and decent family, friends, neighbors and acquaintances; none of whom mean any harm to anyone. My life is here, and while I will travel at the drop of a hat, I wish to live nowhere else. Here I have cast my lot, and I contemplate no escape.2

Even so, knowledge of the larger world is unavoidable. I live amidst the trappings of a once proud republic, though we are no longer citizens in the proper understanding of that word. Rather, we are subjects of an Empire turned mean, one that is neither great nor good, but one now careening towards ruin. I have heard it said that our country is like a drunken bully in a bar, itching for a fight with all comers, while everyone else is trying to stay out of his sight. You may think the comparison is unkind. It is not. Just listen to the pronouncements coming from our designated “leaders”. It is dark and ugly stuff; full of megalomania and disdainful arrogance.

Like everyone else, I make a sharp distinction between us and our governing elites, of whom we have no control. Nor am I naive enough to think that a change in political parties will address the situation. Our policy remains the same, year in, year out, through successive administrations.3 Perhaps it is more overt and in-your-face now, but the plan is nothing new. It is the only hand we know to play, even though the rules of the game have shifted under our feet. No matter, we bluster madly on as always, in defense of hegemony.

The question I never hear asked in the U.S. is this: Who gave us the right? Who gave us the right to impose our will around the world? The belief is simply an unquestioned American presupposition; it is assumed that we do, and it is never examined. But I wonder when it came to be such a natural assumption. It goes at least as far back as the Monroe Doctrine. In separate talks with one of my sons and with a godson, we all agreed that the root of the problem was the British. In this we agree with Dr. Jeffrey Sachs. Follow a geopolitical problem back to its source, and there you will find the British Empire (sometimes the French, but usually the British).

So, are we culpable in the evil that is done in our name? This is the question that haunts me these days. Are we so incurious, so blase about anything beyond our immediate material comforts, that we have no voice left? Certainly there are those brave souls who speak Truth to Power these days, and God bless them. But America is largely silent in the face of the harm we unleash upon the world. Our brains have been rotted, our capacity for critical thinking has been obliterated by over sixty years of our own unrelenting propaganda.

Consider the record. I could go back through the years and catalogue them one by one. But let’s just look at the last eighteen months, in only one particular corner of the world. We and our designated assassins have made over six million people homeless. How is that, you ask? Our indiscriminate pounding of Tehran has made 3.2 million Persians homeless. Add to that 2,000,000 Gazans in tents and rubble, and now 800,000 in the south of Lebanon. I overheard some geopolitical commentary at the “Table of Wisdom” in a local eatery. The opinion was a variation of “those people have been fighting each other for thousands of years” etc. Our broad understanding often goes no deeper than that. We are a clever-but deeply ignorant-people.

So what can we do? As I see it, there are only two things we can do. First, we should speak out and not be silent. The right of Free Speech is the most important right left to us from the old Constitutional. Second, we can pray. We should pray for peace. We should pray that we do not suffer the consequences of our actions. But we should not pray for victory. That is the last thing we need.

February 28, 2026 is a day of shame for this country. There is no ambiguity about who are the bad guys. Our leaders, along with the leaders of the other Rogue Nation in the world today, have unleased an unprovoked attack on Iran. They seem committed to making the world safe from Iranian middle-school girls.

So, for now:

Bibi has won.

La Lindsey Graham has won.

The Huccabites have won.

But the American people have lost. Don’t be silent—call this out for what it is. Shame!

I teach three classes of American History this semester–all covering the period from Reconstruction down to contemporary times. I have not taught this section for a couple of years, so my reacquaitance with the material has been enjoyable. As I always do at this point in the course, I introduce our road to Empire. a story where the dots are easy to connect:

• The megalomania of William H. Seward’s purchase of Alaska,

• The comic-opera overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii,

• The all-too-serious (and illegal) annexation of Hawaii,

• The rush to war against Spain in 1898,

• The American-decreed independence of Cuba, with strings attached,

• The bonus prizes of Guam and Puerto Rico, and

• The question of what to do with the Philippines, resulting in the horrific and almost unknown Philippine War.

With the Philippine independence movement finally quashed in the early years of the 20th-century, the United States was now an official, card-carrying member of the Empire Club. And since then our global presence is best understood in that context, regardless of how deep we smother our real intentions under a comforting drapery of Democracy. So, the real question is this: Did something fundamentally change in the nature of Americans in the late 19th-century, or, perhaps were we, what with the “end of the frontier,” unleashing on the world stage what had been within us all along?

For example, just this week, our navy pursued and captured a Venezuelan oil tanker in the Indian Ocean. It seems we have displaced the Somali pirates in this particular corner of the news feed. A Pentagon spokesman explains:

No other nation on planet Earth has the capability to enforce its will through any domain…By land, air, or sea, our Armed Forces will find you and deliver justice. You will run out of fuel long before you will outrun us.

Well, I am glad he cleared up my confusion on the issue. Indeed, that must be what this was all about: delivering justice. Thus described, it seems that “delivering justice” is a top priority with us these days. Seriously, though, I am disturbed by just how normative this sort of thing is now, hardly an eyebrow was raised.

Of course, we do seem to have a lot on our plate beyond mere piracy: the Greenland gambit (remember that?), our ongoing (?) take-over of Venezuela, and our intention to starve Cuba into submission (with Russia and China committed to support their ally of 65 years standing)--and that is just in this hemisphere. We are also currently waging (and losing) a hot war against Russia using Ukrainians as cannon fodder. Meanwhile, a third of our fleet is massing in the Persian Gulf for a strike against a country that poses no threat to us, ahem. Again, Russia and China are on board to support their neighbor and ally. Meanwhile, sanctions are served-up for everyone!

On a personal note, I attended an Orthodox church event in the DFW area last night. I learned that some Georgians who were scheduled to be there could not attend because their visas had been denied. How very Bidenesque of the current Administration. Since spunky Georgia refuses to fall into line with Washington on sanctions and a whole host of anti-Russian measures, they have to be penalized. Neighboring Armenia and Azerbaijan, however, are compliantly reading from the script. (And what was Vice-President J.D. Vance doing in those countries in recent days?) But of course, when push comes to shove, will Uncle Sugar be there to protect them? Maybe they should have a chat with their Kurdish neighbors; or perhaps they should arrange a prison visit to Mikheil Saakashvili.

As bad as all this orchestrated chaos seems to be, I was recently reminded that the Left is no safe haven, either. If anything, the lust for war among the bien pensants of totalitarian neoliberalism runs even deeper, though hidden underneath soothing platitudes about democracy, values, and—even still—the rules-based order. And there is to be no questioning of the narrative, for their “values” are self-proclaimed to be both self-evident and irrefutable.

At the end of the day, they too will support the Empire. Always. What is clear, at least to me, is that our current chaos is not the action of a rising empire, or even a resurgent empire. This scattershot bellicosity is more like the lashing out of a wounded rogue beast, desperately trying to hold on to that which has, in truth, already slipped away. Perhaps on some level the forces that run our country understand this, and this is all a kabuki theater to mask the decline.

But let’s get back to my classes. I presented my students with the following proposition:

Are any of you bothered by the fact that we have 800 military bases in over 80 countries around the world? Are you uneasy with our unthinking and perpetual bellicosity against particular nations either by attempted regime changes, destabilizations and/or “decapitation strikes”, or our sanctions obsession and the weaponization of our financial power? If so, you might well wonder, “Where did THAT sort of thing begin? You could do worse by pegging 1898 as the start-up date of the American Empire project.

To be sure, the author of our text strongly suggests that we had it in us all along, years before 1898. And to this I concur. Our 19th-century westward expansion was a straight-out colonial undertaking. We have presented the Monroe Doctrine as a benign and well-meaning foreign policy statement meant to keep European powers from re-entering the Western hemisphere. Would that it were simply that. Jeff Rich at the Burning Archive is currently conducting a book study of Greg Grandin’s America, América: A New History of the New World. In connection with that, he has posted four masterful videos dissecting the Monroe Doctrine, here, here, here, and here. This first is an excellent introduction to our motivations at the time.

Clearly, much more was intended than just deterring the Europeans, even from the beginning. And it is even more relevant today, given some contemporary re-imaginings of the Monroe Doctrine. But still, at some point you have to drive a stake in the ground as a place of beginning. And for my students, at least, I will be pleased if they just understand 1898 as the beginning of overt empire-building, the point when we became at least halfway honest about it.

Propelled by Hearst and Pulitzer’s yellow journalism, American public opinion clamored for a military response to the very real humanitarian crisis on our doorstep, particularly after the explosion of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor. The relationship between the press and public opinion is one area where I always take a jaundiced view. But in this case, a humanitarian crisis did, in fact, exist. But when you read McKinley’s request for a declaration of war from Congress (to which my online textbook provides a link), there was little to nothing mentioned about the starving reconcentrados. The plea was couched in terms of the damage that had been done to our commercial interests in the Caribbean.

The course of Cuban independence is an interesting one. It was the U.S. Congress who declared independence on April 20, 1898, not the Cuban insurgents. In a sense we wrested Cuba from Spain and set it up as an independent country. Our high-minded Teller Amendment disavowed any intention to intervene in the new republic. By 1901, of course, this was replaced with the Platt Amendment which expressed our more obvious intentions. In short, we had every intention of intervening; and we did, making Cuba an American protectorate. One thing I recall from the Museum of the Cuban Revolution in Havana, is that Castro’s revolution was portrayed as just the continuation of the same fight that started in 1865; first against the Spanish, and finally against the Americans. You do not have to agree with that, but that is their narrative.

While Washington orchestrated Cuba’s independence, they ignored the June 12, 1898 declaration of independence in the Philippines, led by Emilio Aquinaldo. But McKinley simply reflected the mood of the country at large, or at least the portion of it that elected and re-elected him by wide margins in 1896 and 1900. Henry Watterson, a prominent newspaper editor, wrote at the time:

We are a great imperial Republic destined to exercise a controlling influence upon the actions of mankind and to affect the future of the world.

This could be a 2026 Truth Social post without changing a single word. But there were voices speaking out against the path to Empire; primarily the American Anti-Imperialist League. The organization never really caught on with the American public, which was more interested in spreading democracy at the point of a bayonet. But it did attract an odd assortment of adherents, which united for multifarious reasons:

• Andrew Carnegie

• Jane Addams

• Samuel Gompers

• Mark Twain

• William Jennings Bryan

• Grover Cleveland

• Benjamin Harrison

• Charles Francis Adams, Jr.

• William Graham Sumner

• Henry James

To be sure, the motivation of some were hardly noble or selfless, just as is the case for the contempary voices depicted in the caricature at the beginning of this piece. Whatever their particular motivations, however, they did all agreed on one thing: that the path to Empire meant the ultimate death of the Republic. From my textbook, I have attached a few quotes from am 1898 speech given to the League by Rev. Charles Ames in Boston:

How can we undertake to rule subject provinces in distant parts of the globe without trampling on the principles of free government? Once accepting this way of dealing with other people, how long will it be before some occasion will arise for applying it at home? In committing ourselves to permanent military methods of government anywhere, we give up the republic, for we abandon its fundamental principle, even while boasting of the name…

and:

The imperial scheme requires us to go very deeply into military and naval expenditure, that we may be ever on fight footing. We must girdle the earth with strategic possessions, every one of which must be fortified and garrisoned…We are to be a great military nation!...If you object, you are no patriot! But where will be the republic?

and:

The policy of imperialism threatens to change the temper of our people, and to put us into a permanent attitude of arrogance, testiness and defiance toward other nations…We shall be one more bully among bullies. We shall only add one more to the list of oppressors of mankind….The program of imperialism reads to me like a declaration of war for the new century.

These were our Cassandras of that day, ignored and dismissed as unprogressive cranks. The League disbanded in 1920. Who would be the American Anti-Imperialists of today, were we fortunate enough to have such an organization? A few names come to mind:

• Dr. Jeffrey Sachs

• Ron Paul

• Rand Paul

• Thomas Massie

• Marjorie Taylor Green (yes)

• Tucker Carlson

• Larry Johnson

• Col. Lawrence Wilkerson

• Douglas MacGregor

• Judge Andrew Napolitano

• Max Blumenthal

• Glenn Greenwald

• Edward Snowden

• Aaron Maté

• Cenk Uygur

• Michael Hudson

These are the names of Americans that readily come to my mind; no doubt I am omitting many others. History will be kind to them. I just know that if a contemporary Anti-Imperialist League existed, there would definitely be a chapter here close at hand in East Texas, if it depended on me.

My attitude about all this is almost Luddite. I do not wish to return to before the Unipolar Moment; nor before 1963: nor before 1945; nor before 1919; but rather back to something more identifiable with the old Republic that once existed. I hesitate to use the P-word (progress), for it is a false god loaded with too much toxic baggage. True human flourishing often involves repentance and return, to something left behind. There may be no straight path back, if there is one at all. But the attempt must be undertaken. Ilya Glazanov’s The Return of the Prodigal Son (1977) depicts it as good as any.

When people question my sons about why I am traveling to such and such a place, they have been known to answer with the phrase, “because he wants to.” Even so, the eldest asked me the other day, “Why, Paraguay?” I have wanted to travel there for over 35 years, and an opportunity presented itself at year’s end. I have a friend—a generation younger than myself—who has been hesitant to travel. He recently applied, however, for his first passport, though was unsure of how to tackle overseas travel. I volunteered to help him over the hurdle, as long as it was someplace inexpensive and warm, and doable on my Christmas break. Belize seemed an easy and obvious choice, but I did not want to return to a place I had been before. And so, I pushed for Paraguay. His wife was going on a cruise with her mother in early January, so we booked it for between Nativity and Theophany.

I always knew about Paraguay, even growing up. We did not have books, but we did have a set of encyclopedias, in which I kept my head buried. And so, I knew of Alfredo Stroessner before I was in Middle School. Then in the late 1980s, I stumbled upon a copy of Lord Frederic Hamilton’s The Vanished Pomps of Yesteryear, the reminiscences of a career British diplomat from about 1880 into the 1920s. This particular volume took him from Vienna to Berlin to St. Petersburg to Trinidad to Lisbon to Petropolis (Brazil) to Buenos Aires to Paraguay to Canada to St. Petersburg again and finally to Japan.1

I paid more attention to the book then than I would today. His writing is lively and candid, and while some observations are noteworthy, many seem breezily dismissive of the world beyond Britain, and most fall within the expected condescension of an aristocratic diplomat at the height of the British Empire. (For example, Hamilton found St. Petersburg “dreary,” was bored by the Winter Palace and the Catherine Palace, and compared the city unfavorably to Trinidad.)2 Channeling Tennyson, he discovered in quirky Paraguay the land of “lotus-eaters” where “it was always afternoon.” But the chapter did spur me on to read further, and soon I had nabbed Harris Gaylord Warren’s Paraguay: An Informal History (1949).

My investigation proceeded little further, but Paraguay always remained on my travel short list. And that list looks different these days. I may have reached the end of my poking-around the odd corners of the U.K.-it is not the same anymore, and is much too expensive for my budget, even given the way I travel. Western Europe holds no interest for me (and really hasn’t since I first went East in 2003). And so, I hope for one more trip to Russia, then South America beckons, and perhaps Southeast Asia, given the restrictions of time, finances, and health. When I head South again, I definitely plan to return to Paraguay.

Speaking broadly, as I often do, I find three things that set Paraguay apart from the rest of the continent, to-wit:

1. It is hard to imagine Spanish colonization with a light touch, but that does seem to be the case with Paraguay, which had the advantage of being remote and isolated, with no silver deposits. The encomiendas never really took hold there. The Jesuits directed the Spanish presence in Paraguay, not the conquistadores. They founded well-ordered towns—reducciones—with schools and beautiful churches. A civic culture developed, which boasted printing presses and even orchestras. Not only did the Guarani culture survive, it flourished under the Jesuits. Today, Guarani is the first language of the nation, Spanish the second. Few Spanish women made the long river journey from Buenos Aires to settle in Paraguay. The Spanish men quickly formed families with the Guarani women, and the Mestizo culture has dominated ever since, without the social stratification found elsewhere in Spanish America. This inland kingdom was eventually brought down by the jealousy of the Spanish in Argentina and the Portuguese in Brazil, but not before it had laid the foundation for the Paraguayan mythos.3

   

   (How Paraguay views Spanish colonialism: 2 Spaniards and 6 Guarani.)

2. Paraguay almost committed national suicide in the 1860s. The fact that the country survived at all is remarkable. In the early 1850s, Francisco Solano Lopez, son of the Paraguayan ruler, was sent to Paris to further his education. There, Lopez became enthralled with Napoleon and sought to emulate him upon his return to Asuncion. Also while in Paris, he became equally enthralled with Eliza Lynch, an Irish-born courtesan. She returned to Paraguay with Lopez, and bore him six children, although they could never marry because of her divorce. “Madame Lynch” was, nevertheless, the First Lady of Paraguay in all respects. Lopez managed to stumble into a war with Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay at the same time, the War of the Triple Alliance. Paraguay was defeated and Asuncion occupied, but Lopez fought on, refusing to surrender. Ultimately, the war and starvation reduced Paraguay’s population 60-70%. Perhaps 150,000 to 160,000 Paraguayans survived, mainly women, old men and children. In postwar Paraguay women outnumbered the remaining men 7 to 1. And it was these women who rebuilt the country, establishing a mythic tradition of maternal resilience equal to that of paternal heroism. In so doing, some norms had to be bent. In this staunchly Catholic country, the dearth of men dictated that practical polygamy and illegitimacy were tolerated (though never sanctioned) in order for the Paraguayan nation to survive. Their story is unique to South America.

3. Most people have never heard of the Chaco War. Between 1932 and 1935, Paraguay fought a fierce little-known war with Bolivia over the disputed Chaco District. The barren area was hardly populated at all, but the fact that Royal Dutch Shell supported Paraguay and what is now Exxon/Mobil supported Bolivia tells you everything you need to know about the root causes of the war. Paraguay won the dispute, recovering two-thirds of the Chaco. Some have described the struggle as a forerunner to the Spanish Civil War, a laboratory of how wars in the modern era would be fought.

(Madame Lynch in 1864)

(Corinne Adelaide Lynch, 1856-1857, daughter of Francisco Solano Lopez and “Madame Lynch.”)

There are no tourists in Paraguay. I encountered other travelers, but no tourists. The country does not cater to them, nor do they seem at all concerned about it. Sites in Asuncion that could appeal to tourists are often inexplicably closed for days at a time. I could not have bought a postcard if I had wanted to do so. All this just makes it easier for travelers to maneuver.

The Silvio Pettirossi International Airport, with its six gates, is perhaps the easiest and calmest transition in and out of a country that I have ever experienced. Lower prices enabled us to stay at the grand old hotel of Asuncion: the Gran Hotel del Paraguay, run by the fourth generation of a German-Paraguayan family. Hidden behind high walls, it is everything you would expect: a grand lobby and bar, every room opening onto a deep veranda, lush secluded gardens, excellent restaurant with complimentary breakfast buffet, tennis court, an extensive cabana area, and the best pool I have ever swam in; all for what you might pay for a Motel 6 in this country. I found the same thing, on a smaller scale, in Caazapa, a boutique hotel for half the price of Asuncion.

(Outside my room at the Gran Hotel del Paraguay)

I enjoyed walking the streets of the city, but Uber works in Paraguay just as it does everywhere else. For our jaunt into southern Paraguay, they addressed me by name when I walked into the Enterprise Car Rental office not two blocks from my hotel. From first to last, Paraguay was easy. You just have to be interested in the world around you, and not in search of entertainment.

(From the Lopez era)

Asuncion is not a grand South American capital in the way of Buenos Aires or Montevideo. The city is an architectural mix, but with enough to hold your interest. There are a few old buildings from the Spanish colonial era, monuments to Lopezian megalomania (the Government Palace, the Pantheon, the Train Station), modest nods at Beaux Arts classicism, and then some buildings epitomizing the worst of 1960s modernism. Glimpses of the homes of the elite can be seen as you whiz through the Mariscol Lopez, Villa Morra, and San Cristobal neighborhoods, while slums can be viewed from the upper gallery of the Centro Cultural (el Cabildo), with the skyscrapers of “new” Asuncion in the background. Most everyone lives between these extremes. Parks dot the city, but only the Plaza Uruguay can be described as anything other than “ill-kept.” Sidewalks are hit and miss. But the city is real and accessible; there is little pretense.

(From the Pantheon, looking southeast, towards the Plaza Uruguay)

(Asuncion Ugly)

I was excited to see the abundance of rural Paraguay; but only in the South, not in the Mennonite North. It is reported that 1.6% of the population owns 80% of the land in Paraguay. To be sure, this is extreme, but on a spectrum that includes many countries. From reading The Asuncion Times, I am pleased to know that there are genuine efforts at sustainability and wise, rather than exploitative, use of agricultural resources in Paraguay. So, leaving aside who owns the land, here is what I witnessed outside of Asuncion:

• Vast subtropical savannahs—not pampas—supporting large herds of Brahma cattle. These are the cattle my dad raised, and I kept thinking how he would have enjoyed seeing something like this. The pastures were peppered with what seem to be gigantic anthills. They are not, but rather are built by grass-eating termites. They are not considered pests, but actually add nutrients to the soil.

• Rice fields dot the alluvial plains. I was not expecting to see that in Paraguay.

• And towards the south, endless fields of sorghum and other feed crops.

• Tidy small towns, notably Caazapa and Fram, that support a visibly middle class Paraguayan element. Caazapa is the same age as Jamestown, founded in 1607 by Friar Luis de Bolaños. I visited his holy well on the outskirts of the city.

  

  

  (Holy Well of Friar Luis de Bolaños and poster of St. Cayetano in Trinidad)

• Farm houses are almost always located in shaded groves, usually stuccoed, painted rose or turquoise, and surrounded often on all four sides with a deep veranda.

• Orthodox churches can be found here and there, particularly in the South. Paraguay has more of these churches than most more populated South American countries. A Saturday wedding in progress prevented our exploration of the church in Fram.

  

  (Orthodox church in Fram).

• I was amazed by the eucalyptus plantations. The endless rows of trees had a surreal look, reminding me of a Theora Hamblett painting. When I return, I want to spend more time with the eucalyptus.

• The South of Paraguay contained what I was really wanting to see; the Jesuit ruins. The Jesuit Mission of Jesús de Tavarangüe did not disappoint.

  

  (Jesuit Mission of Jesús de Tavarangüe)

There is much more I wanted to see, so Lord willing, next winter I hope to return.

(This rather grand painting is by the improbably named Adolf Jossefowitsch Charlemagne.)

We have always been magazine people, stacks of them around the house in the way people used to live; from the wife’s Southern Living to journals reflecting my particular historical and literary enthusiasms. Today we have precious few, letting-go of subscriptions lasting decades. But through thick and thin, I retained subscriptions to the oh-so-pretentious London Review of Books and New York Review of Books. Each publication usually contained a book review of historical and/or literary interest to me. Back in the before time before the internet, it was a way of connecting to a world beyond East Texas.

I always knew the elitism was there–and no doubt, I bought into a little of it myself. The typical reader of the NYRB is ensconced in the Upper East Side, or wishes they were. In recent years this stance began to rub me the wrong way as I started paying attention to their editorials and extended essays on social issues and geopolitics. Much of our country seems incomprehensible-a great mystery-to the editors. America-between-the-Seaboards is certainly not incomprehensible to me (though, of course, that doesn’t mean I agree with that which I comprehend.) And so, I began to regret these subscriptions, finally determining to cut myself free.

My NYRB subscription will run its course in April. A recent issue was typical. An article by Diarmaid McCullough on the Virgin Mary confirmed my disinterest; while an article by Yuri Slezkine, reviewing Georgios Varouxakis’ recent The West: The History of an Idea, reminded me of why I had kept the subscription in the first place. But submissions like the latter are the exception, not the rule.

Varouxakis does not examine so much the composition of “the West,” but rather the historical development of the term; one which has no meaning at all without Russia. In an age when Japan and South Korea can be considered components of “the West”, the concept exists on something beyond a strictly geographical plane. Older classifications no longer work either. The term Christendom is a non-starter, mainly because a) most constituent states have abandoned their Christian foundation, and 2) Russia would have to be included, by extension. Use of the term Free World is no longer applicable, given the behaior of the primary players in the West today. Europe and/or Euro-American don not work either, for again, such terminology would not exclude the onion-domed East. So, “the West” must be simply that which is in contradistinction to Russia: in short, the Atlanticist coalition and their major allies; sometimes sloppily and incorrectly equated with the World.

The concept began to form after the defeat of Napoleon. We shorthand Napoleon’s defeat into the Russian winter and, in the British telling of the story, Wellington at Waterloo. But it not merely the Artic blasts which conquered the Grande Armée. It was Czar Alexander I who led the continent’s largest army in formation into Paris. This is Europe’s nightmare; an irrational one, to be sure, given France’s much closer neighbor given to bouts of “marching into Paris.” And if not for Czar Alexander, you would have been left with Napoleon. By the 1830s, various western Europeans began to voice their fear of growing Russian might–the genesis of Russophobia. The Marquis de Custine published his hatchet piece Russia in 1839, an easily discredited text that was being reissued in the 1970s as a reliable guide to dealing with the U.S.S.R.

But it was “the inventor of sociology, positivism, altruism, and the ‘religion of Humanity’”, who started the characterization of the West as a culture with a shared history. That man was Auguste Comte, and it was his British disciple, Richard Congreve, who first outlined a new European order without Russia. To Congreve, the Treaty of Vienna had outlived its usefulness. Ironically, given their own later history, German intellectuals also began to view Russia and “Cossack barbarism” with alarm—a threat to the new Germany. Germans have learned little, it seems, with Freidrich Mertz trying to rally today’s Germany to the eastern battlements. Nietzsche, however, contrasted the weakness and self-doubt of Europe with that brave, rebellious fatalism that still gives the Russians…an advantage over us Westerners in the way they handle life…the only power nowadays which has endurance, which can wait, which still has promise…the conceptual opposite of Europe’s pitiful petty-statery and nervousness.

Americans have always been apt students, and were not far behind their European schoolmasters. In 1897, Benjamin Ide Miller, after spending four years in Germany, wrote of a final showdown between the Orient and the “the Occidental idea.” What was this idea? It seemingly centered around individual rights and equal justice, which he contrasted against the “awful consistency” of Russia’s foreign policy–”ruthless of right, reckless of truth, framed on a plan that spans generations, conceived in terms of world-empire.” A British imperialist could not have said it better. I think it wise to pause a minute and reflect on this late 19th-century bit of Black Kettleism, for this was voiced during the height of the British Empire. If an objective person were tabulating the abuses of empire during this time, I am afraid the British Empire would far outpace that of the Russian.

These ideals have now morphed into human rights and democracy, the skeleton supporting the ideology of liberal democracy. Some remain skeptical of the project. One commentator put it thusly:

...the message remains familiar: a belief that one worldview possesses the right to correct, discipline, or reshape others. Beneath the polished language of “rights” and “development” lies the same impulse to guide and govern, revealing continuity rather than rupture in the long history of Western claims to superiority.1

Overuse and misuse of these stock phrases by those justifying empire have stripped substance and meaning from the language; deployed by U.S. Presidents as long as I can remember. Another American scholar piled on with this: Russia…has loomed larger and larger in men’s minds, and the strange fascination which her power exercises in modern political life is due in no small measure to the anti-individualistic tendencies of her civilization.2

By the end of the twentieth century the idea of “the West” had congealed into European civilization + British and Iberian settler colonies - Russia. Most people agreed that it had grown out of classical antiquity and Latin Christianity, owed something to the Renaissance, the Reformation, and perhaps the Enlightenment, and stood for some version of liberalism. The opposite of this understanding was “the East” (inclusive of Easter Europe) + everything else not settled by Western Europeans, irrespective of cardinal directions. Of all the non-Wests, Russia was the “closest, largest, mightiest, and least obviously non-Western, requiring repeated acts of estrangement and boundary marking.” This made Russians no nevermind because, while some considered themselves Europeans, none claimed to be Western.

The shock of the Great War and the crisis of liberalism generated a steady stream of doomsday prophecies, none more popular or portentous than Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918), which argued, at great length, that the once vigorous “West-European-American” culture, falsely linked to Russia as a result of the promiscuous use of the word “Europe,” had reached the “age of sterile senescence.”

Even so, the West survived conceptionally for several reasons. “Western Civ” courses at American universities were first crafted in support of “US belligerence in 1917.” By World War II, Walter Lippman coined the term “Atlantic community,” headed by Washington. He described this crossing of the Atlantic by the controlling power in western civilization to be one of the “greatest events in the history of mankind.” Then the Cold War consolidated the idea by placing Western Europe under U.S. military protection, as well as aligning it more thoroughly with political and economic liberalism. Jewish émigrés to the U.S., Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Melvin Lasky and Michael Josselson, among others, refined and defined the doctrine.

(Oswald Spengler; drawing by Rudolf Grossmann, from the German satirical magazine Simplicissimus, 1922)

But even these defenders of the West admitted that the greatest danger came not from the East, but with a fatal flaw in its own makeup, having been “born sick” and had been ailing ever since.

The “barbarization” of Europe in the twentieth century had been the result of “a gradual corrosion and destruction of the heritage of Western civilization,” Strauss wrote. The distinction between good and evil had been replaced by the distinction between progressive and reactionary. Progress was a function of history; history was too elusive to serve as a standard; hence “no standard whatever was left.” In Suicide of the West, published in 1964, James Burnham attributed the physical “contraction of the West” to a spiritual failing associated with “the decay of religion” and marveled at the “dazzling ingenuity” with which the “ideology of liberalism” managed to represent “defeat as victory, abandonment as loyalty, timidity as courage, withdrawal as advance.”

Varouxakis marshals a host of commentators on the subject:

Francis Fukuyama: the West’s present was everyone’s future (describing the itinerary as “getting to Denmark” and leaving no choice to those who’d rather stay where they are or go somewhere else).

Samuel P. Huntington: the West was “unique, not universal,” that it ended where Islam and Orthodoxy began, and that NATO should limit itself accordingly (with regard to Ukraine in particular).

James Kurth: the West had abandoned Christianity and liberalism, adopted an eclectic mix of human rights, multiculturalism, expressive individualism, and popular culture, and turned into a global anticivilization waging war on all traditional cultures, especially its own.

Michel Houellebecq: one possible outcome in his novel “Submission”: “Islam” means submission to God; “the West” means nothing in particular; the West’s future is submission to Islam.

William H. McNeill: in the “Rise of the West”...the largest community united by a “shared literary canon and expectations about human behavior framed by that canon. The advantage of this definition is that it introduces clear criteria; the problem is that “the West” no longer fits it.

Ultimately, a “pan-European revolution of cultural nationalization” had transformed “Christendom” into Europe + colonies, with “uncertain eastern boundaries.” This revolution fitted the political at the expense of the cultural. Hence, the West: a post-Christian Europe from the Atlantic to the Pacific, “a thin and fragile civilization but… a civilization nevertheless.” But, a “new magic spell” would be required.

“The West” was born with two congenital conditions, both diagnosed by Comte on day one: chronic aversion to Russia and the “continuous revolt of individual reason against the totality of human antecedents.” The first has to do with space, the second with time; the first with the limits of its domain, the second with the mystery of its origins. “The West” makes no sense without an antagonist in the East, and there is no better (worse) enemy than a false friend. Because its name emerged amid the ruins of a collapsed civilization as a code for its fractious heirs, the West appears to be in perennial decline. “Christendom” has a content, “Europe” has a shape, both had a past. The West remained to be defined.

On a philosophical level, America again came to the rescue with its Western civilization courses, the Blooms, and their canon of “great books.” The new order found martial expression in NATO, “an extension of American power into Europe posing as a mutual defense alliance.” Later still, the U.S. would pledge to defend the “Free World,” which was arrogantly presumed to equate with “the West.”

But actual history did not progress according to plan. The U.S.S.R. died “after a protracted battle with dementia.” Almost simultaneously, the West lost its way.

The collapse of communism coincided with the triumph of West-as-universal over West-as-unique, as the U.S. and its allies turned into “the international community.” The Free World became the World. World History courses replaced Western Civ, liberal democracy was extended to the rest of humanity as global human rights, universal “values” replaced any remaining Romantic raison d’êtres. “Western individualism, examined and deplored by Comte and his countless successors, gained new ground as liberated selves set about crafting ever more novel, pliable, and elaborately customized ways of being human,” as “schools, corporations, and government agencies committed themselves to transcending the division of humanity into men and women. Western civilization as a community…had ceased to exist because it no longer shared one. Western civilization as a cultural and political concept had ceased to exist because it had disappeared from political rhetoric, college curricula, and, in most quarters, cultural imagination.”

The West was still there, but its civilization was not…It was at this moment that NATO, a military institution Western in membership, anti-Soviet in design, and suddenly bereft of a mission, set about fulfilling its foundational prophecy. What mattered was not the nature of the engagement (war on terror, democracy promotion, humanitarian intervention, and struggle against autocracies are universal, not Western-specific campaigns) but whom it was directed against. The West was ready to reassert itself as post-Christian Christendom fearful of Russia. NATO, as the West’s military arm (the US empire’s European branch), needed the Russian threat to keep fear alive.

Varouxakis goes on at length, but the main point is clear; the West has defined itself in opposition to the Other. Whatever you may think of Russia, absolutely no one believes that they suffer any such constraints. Russian identity is foundational, not at all dependent on opposition to the West. The questions posed here are similar to those put to the shell-shocked Eurocrats at the Munich Security Conference last February by Vice-President Vance, and a month later at the Heritage Foundation: we know what you are against, but what, exactly, are you for? One thing is for certain, it will have to be something more substantial than “values.” Vance even suggests a rediscovery of the shared “single sacred language” that birthed a thousand-year civilization.

There is no way to put a pretty face on our most recent regime-change adventure. It is pig-ugly, and not defendable on any level, or from any angle or perspective. The reality of it all is plain to see. The Administration boldfacedly asks, as the old saying goes, Who are you going to believe; me or your lying eyes?. Only a political toad like, say, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, would respond that they needed more information to get the “full picture” before they could possibly comment on America’s action against the sovereign government of Venezuela.

I carry no water for the Chavez/Maduro regime. I am about as ambivalent towards the Venezuelan government as a person could be. This is for two reasons: 1) I am not a Cuban-American who, at least politically, are obsessesed with anything even tangentially connected to Castro’s Cuba, and 2) Maduro is their business, not ours-it is for them to sort out. The silly charge of narcoterrorism is the WMD of this generation.

At this point, it is not exactly clear what the Administration has accomplished. The Presidential couple has been surgically extracted from Caracas. The blockade is still in place, but then so is the Venezuelan government under Delcy Rodriquez, who is decidedly off-script. (I do find the tangential side-lining of the the ever-so-eager recent Nobel “Peace” Prize winner to be extremely satisfying. She has learned the hard way what many others before her have so learned. Her support in Venezuela is apparently so minimal that she does not even rise to the level of a useful puppet for Rubio.) I suppose that, in time, we will have a show trial in New York City for the Maduros, its outcome fore-ordained; the very thing we condemned the Soviets for back in the bad old days. But then, this should not be surprising in what I have heard called our “post-Constitutional” age.

I am fascinated by the logistics of this admittedly extraordinary and ruthlessly efficient covert attack. From what I can gather, these forces never engaged the Venezuelan army directly. Maduro relied on 22 Cuban bodyguards and a Security Detail, both operating outside of army channels. The U.S. had an army of covert CIA operatives and assets in Caracas, all trained in the fine art of engineering protests, demonstrations, color revolutions, and regime-change. These spooks were able to bribe his Security Detail. The commandos dropped in, while the Security Detail stood back as they killed the 22 Cubans and extracted the Maduros. The Russians were on the way, but arrived just after the completion of the mission. When they discovered who had been bribed to do this, it is my understanding that he was executed.

And there it is. No need to cue-up Lee Greenwood here. I recently read an accusation against someone as “being against everything this country stands for.” That is a loaded statement, to be sure. What does our country stand for anymore? One thing for certain is that we stand for is regime change. Dr. Lindsey O’Rourke’s Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War documents 70 such regime changes between 1947 and 1989 (excellent interview, here).

Dr. Jeffrey Sachs states that that number is now right at 100, which he characterizes as an addiction, overthrowing countries left and right when we wants something they have: Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, Syria in 2011-2025, Ukraine in 2014-present, etc.

As he often does, Dr. Sachs recently addressed the UN Security Council, commenting this time on the situation in Venezuela. A few points:

• The core of the UN Charter is Article 2 Section 4 which upholds the sovereignty of nations.

• The job of the Security Council is not to judge Maduro’s fitness as a leader, but to try to offer some protection to countries.

• Sachs then presented the Security Council was a brief outline of recent U.S./Venezuelan history, reminding them that the U.S. had been trying to topple the Chavez/Maduro regime since 2002.

• In 2007, a great tragedy befell Venezuela when it was discovered that they were sitting atop the largest oil reserves in the world.

• In 2014, a CIA/NGO color revolution was attempted.

• In 2015, Obama placed sanctions on Venezuela.

• In 2016, following orders, he declared the country to be a “threat to our national security.”

• In 2017, DJT wondered aloud to two Latin American Presidents why he could not just go in and capture Venezuela.

• He was informed of the danger in this, so he upped the sanctions to crush the Venezuelan oil industry. By 2020, production had fallen 75% and personal GDP had collapsed by 65% in Venezuela, according to the IMF.

• And then about the same time, his administration announced that the hitherto unknown Juan Guido was the real President of Venezuela. Many of our European vassal states went along meekly; in fact, you can hear echoes of that in Macron’s reaction now.

• He then asked the Security Council, “Do we have International Law, or do we have anarchy?”

The answer to the last question is pretty obvious. Threats have been made to six countries since the Venezuelan attack: Mexico, Columbia, Denmark, Nigeria, Cuba, and Iran. A great champion of the United Nations, Dr. Sachs claims that it is not dead, but it is on life-support. Any commitment for international law is certainly not coming from us. In fact, we are rushing back to the world of great power politics and spheres of influece, with all that that implies in terms of war and aggression. Dr. Sachs describes the situation as dire, given the nuclear age that we are all lulled into forgetting: being led by a “completely impulsive out of control ill-informed manipulable and manipulative individual atop the Deep State.” Dr. Sachs has a fearless aspect to his commentary. May he survive for many years yet.

I was in South America when we attacked Venezuela. I saw coverage on the Asuncion news channels, and spoke briefly to a couple of Paraguayans about it. They shrugged in resignation, and basically said that when America wants something, what can you do? Perhaps someday someone will do something. But in the meantime, I dug a Spanish phrase out of my memory: lo siento.

When teaching the first section of American history, I always introduce my students to Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, by David Hackett Fischer. Not wishing to trigger an exodus of readers here in my introductory paragraph, I will not use the dreaded “D” word.¹ But simply put, Fischer’s thesis is just that: the people who settled in various regions of colonial America were distinctive groupings of settlers who chose different colonies in which to settle.

The earnest shopkeeper from East Anglia who settled in Massachusetts was an altogether different sort than the young man trying to wrest a fortune from tobacco in a swampy backwater of southern Virginia, or the Quaker zealot transporting their ordered prosperity to the Delaware Valley, or the Scots-Irish masses who, upon exiting crowded ships, took a quick look around and headed straightaway to the backcountry. In recent years, Fischer has published a companion volume, African Founders: How Enslaved Peoples Expanded American Ideals. He found that slaves transported from different parts of Africa likewise ended-up in different colonies, with cultural distinctions even more pronounced that those of the Europeans.

Having made it my life’s work to know about my people, I thought it would be interesting to treat my own family history in the same manner. All of them have been here for a long time; that is, in the American understanding of what constitutes a long time. I am the 8th generation from my most recent immigrant ancestor. Some lines extend to 13 generations in America, though most fall into the 10th and 11th generation category.

Everyone has 562 ancestors in their 10th generation. So what makes one or two of them more special than the remaining 560? The answer to that is simple: the lines that are special are the ones whose stories survive. We are our stories, for better or for worse. Blood itself accounts for nothing. When the old country wag says “Blood will tell,” what she really means is that the person who is enculturated into a particular narrative—a “story”—will act accordingly. So, it does not bother me that a dozen or so stories have survived among the hundreds of so-called bloodlines. These stories define me.

So, my narrative here concerns only four Emigrants:

1. Edward Rainesford to Massachusetts Bay in 1630

2. Robert Taliaferro to the Virginia Tidewater in 1646

3. David Cowan to the Pequa Valley of Pennsylvania in 1719

4. Johannes Dingler to Long Island in 1776, but destined for the backcountry

For any of my extended cousinage reading this story, I will direct you particularly to the first and third accounts if you are on my paternal side of the aisle, and the second and fourth for the maternal. Interestingly, even my in-laws come in on the second account after a generation or two. For other readers—my kindred in spirit—I hope this simply reads as entertaining history, rather than, God forbid, genealogy. And I might add, as always, the good stuff is in the footnotes.

The Hessian

Johannes Dingler was the last of my ancestors to arrive in America, arriving on August 12, 1776 on Long Island, just shy of seventeen years old, when the American Republic was only one month old.1 His arrival coincided with the disembarkment of 29,866 other Hessian mercenary soldiers employed by the British army. Young Dingler set foot in North America as an enemy of the new nation. By the 27th of August, he had fought in his first battle, the Battle of Long Island.

And yet, his story is perhaps the most American of this quartet. The other three—Rainsford, Taliaferro, and Cowan—arrived as representatives of the English or Scots, intent on recreating the world they knew in a North American context. They were, in short, part of the Anglo-American cultural continuum. Dingler set foot in America with none of that. In time, he came to believe the story America told about itself—the land for liberty and opportunity. Historians of particular slants line up on either side of this issue. Yes, our country, and particularly its institutions, cannot be understood outside of the context of our English heritage and founding. This was indeed our foundation, but America can also be understood as an Idea— encompassing the pursuit of freedom and liberty (words which still have some meaning remaining, after having been shredded by both Right and Left.)

My position, as it is on so many things, is that this is a both/and situation, not either/or. Yes, America is not—cannot be—just an intellectual construct. We are a real place with real people, founded on a very particular foundation. And yet, since we are a new country, without the weight of centuries of tradition and nationalism to form and mold us, we are also informed by a very particular Idea that works to bind us together. Certainly this can be true, as many citizens today, not descended from our founding generations, are better Americans than I am. But ours is a Grand Experiment in history, not heretofore attempted. We will need a little more time (perhaps two centuries) to see if it is really going to work or not; to see if this thing called an American can take her place among peoples; to see if we are more than what we consume or conquer.

But back to young Johannes Dingler. He fought for three years under the British. The Hessian troops were despised by the Americans, primarily for two reasons: a) they were resented because their presence meant that their British cousins hired-out their fighting, and b) because they were fearsome warriors. One historian had this to say about the Hessians:

[They were] unwilling soldiers in a war that was of no concern to them. Perhaps of all those who fought in the Revolution, they are most to be pitied, speaking a strange language, given the dirty jobs by the military, hated by the Americans as foreign mercenaries, they nonetheless fought with the pride of professional soldiers and often died for no better purpose than to make a few pounds for the German Princes who had rented them out.

Johannes Dingler was part of the 3rd Jaeger Corps. Jaeger comes from the German word for hunter or marksman. These jaegers were noted as the elite marksmen in the British army. Their uniforms consisted of green coats, as opposed to the traditional British “redcoats.” They carried heavy, short-barrelled jaeger rifles instead of muskets, and utilized short hunting swords rather than bayonets.

After three years, Dingler had seen enough, or at least enough to figure out that he was on the wrong side of the battle lines. He was almost twenty years old, about to make the most momentous decision of his life. And it was a high-stakes gamble. We have the advantage of historical perspective. He did not. And to historians looking back, we see nothing in the stalemated late summer of 1779 that indicated that the British would not ultimately prevail to some degree. Maybe young Dingler, facing reality in the trenches, could sense that the rot had set. Whatever his reasons, on the night of 20 August 1779 he made his move and deserted. On 23 August 1779, Dingler was inducted into the American army at Cantita, north of New York City.

The British commanding officer who recorded his desertion, listed his birthplace as “Seyboldsdorf.” For over thirty years, this kept family researchers looking in the wrong place. There is a village of that name, but it is in northern Bavaria, and was home to no Dinglers. I researched the Dinglers early, published early, and with a lot of help, organized a national family reunion that lasted for about 40 years. But once I had published my research, I moved on to other families.

A remarkable cousin picked up the scent, you might say, and simply refused to accept that we could not find Johannes’ family in Germany. She just kept on pursuing the goal, with single-minded dedication. Due to her diligence, she discovered that the British officer misspelled Dingler’s birthplace, which was actually Siebelsdorf. This village was where it was supposed to be, in Hesse-Kassel. And yes, there were Dinglers there, including Johannes’ parents and grandparents.

The interesting fact was that in the great sorting-out from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, three Catholic villages were allowed to remain within the boundaries of staunchly Protestant Hesse-Kassel. They were administered by the Bishop of Mainz. Siebelsdorf was one of the three. Johannes Dingler was baptized in St. Michael Ruhlkirchen in Siebelsdorf on 2 September 1759, the son of Konrad Dingler and Catherine Krammel. If the family had been Protestant, the high probability is that there would have been no parish records for his birth.2

He enlisted as a dragoon in Col. Charles Armand’s Independent Corps of Light Dragoons, under Captain Carl Marckle. Dragoons were mounted soldiers who fought as cavalrymen on offense, and dismounted infantrymen on defense. Charles Armand was a young French aristocrat, the Marquis de la Rouerie. He believed the noble title to be inappropriate when fighting for republican ideals and so took the simpler name. Armand impressed General Washington, who allowed him to raise a corps of volunteers. It seems that Armand’s Corps consisted largely of foreign soldiers, with German deserters being the largest contingent.

The first battle involving Armand’s Corps subsequent to Dingler’s enlistment was the Battle of Jeffer’ds Neck in New York on 7 November 1779. General Washington wintered his troops at Morristown, New Jersey. The winter of 1779-1780 was said to be harder on the troops than that at Valley Forge. Dingler endured these hardships, and it is supposed that he also engaged in minor skirmishes and raids against the British.

In the spring of 1780, the main focus of the war shifted to the South. King George III believed that the sparsely populated Southern colonies were largely loyal to the Crown and would be easy to establish control. There was, in fact, considerable Loyalist sentiment in the South, but not as much as the king supposed. And no one counted on the ferocity of Southern opposition to the British. On April 3, 1780, General Washington sent some of his forces--about a thousand Maryland and Delaware continentals, as well as 120 dragoons under Col. Charles Armand to the South, to counter the British who had established their base at Charleston. General Horatio Gates took command of these troops at Coxe’s Mill, North Carolina on 25 July 1780, and two days later marched south towards Camden, South Carolina. Johannes Dingler saw action first at the skirmish at Gum Swamp, South Carolina on August 16, 1780 when the dragoons, being the advance guards, clashed with the advance guards of British General Cornwallis.

Dingler participated in the major campaigns in the South, including the Battle of Camden, which decimated the dragoons. He was most likely at Yorktown in October 1781. He technically remained in the army until 1784, when he was released in North Carolina. Somewhere along the way, he had made the acquaintance of the Paschall family of that state. By the mid 1780s they had married and begun their family.

By about 1789, John Dingler, as he was now known, relocated to Elbert County, Georgia. He participated in the campaign against the Indians in 1791, and his enlistment shows that he retained his sword from the Revolutionary War. He moved further into Georgia, settling in what became Morgan County. Here, he farmed, and significantly, became a Primitive Baptist minister.3 The most information about him survives in his capacity as a preacher. He died in Morgan County in 1816, a small farmer without slaves.

One interesting thing about the family is that there are none other of the name in the South. Another Dingler emigrant landed in Pennsylvania at a later date, and is the ancestor of a much smaller group in the North. But all Dinglers in the South are descended from Johannes Dingler and Nancy Paschall. It is like being in a club, for you know you are definitely related, no matter what, if you run across someone else with the lineage.

(Henry Dingler, son of Johannes & Nancy)

There is something not quite right about what is known of the family of his son Samuel Dennis Dingler, named after a maternal great-great-grandfather. Samuel, as he was known in Georgia, married Nancy Barnes, and they had several children. But then he disappears. At some point, she died, and the children were seemingly the wards of her family. Samuel swims upstream, moving to North Carolina. And once there, he only used his middle name, Dennis. By 1830 or so, he had begun a second family, completely unknown to the Georgia Dinglers. Descendants of the two sets of children of Samuel Dennis Dingler met for the first time at the first Dingler reunion in 1980.

John A. Dingler, the oldest son of Samuel Dennis Dingler, was living with maternal relatives in Alabama when he married Lucy Brewster, the daughter of Sheriff Brewster and Selinda Wortham. It is not known how much John A. Dingler knew of his family background, given the circumstances of his childhood. But the Brewsters and Worthams did have a history. Selinda Wortham Brewster was a Taliaferro descendant described in the second part of this series.

John and Lucy Brewster Dingler settled in East Texas before the Civil War. The southwest quadrant of Smith County, and the adjoining southeast quadrant of Henderson County defined their world. And other than a few years away at college, this has been where I have lived my entire life. These are the kinspeople with whom I had the most contact for the first part of my life, certainly my childhood years. And I loved many of them dearly, but they could be an odd bunch, a bit reserved and reticent at times, and not given to volubility. They are harder to summarize than the previous three lineages I have covered. There is mystery here.

Three of the Dingler children became successful farmers in their day: Aunt Mary Hudgins and her husband, Uncle Henry over in Henderson County, and my Sheriff Brewster Dingler here in Smith County. He accumulated over 800 acres, scattered up and down what used to be known as the Old Dingler Road. He owned a cotton gin. His home, purchased in 1885, remains in the family. As a child, I would ride my bicycle down this road, visiting my great-aunt and whoever she had visiting her at the time.

The way generations and memory work through history fascinates me. I knew people who knew my great-great-grandfather as well as they knew me. And that man, whose memory lived in the minds of people I knew, was only the great-grandson of the 17-year old soldier who disembarked on Long Island in 1776.

Sheriff Dingler gave over 200 acres off the west end of the place to his oldest son, John. He married Sallie Stripling, a descendant of one of the lines mentioned in Part 2, and as such, an exceedingly remote cousin. They are the couple on the right in the picture below. My sister’s family and I still own our portion of the 200 acres, while my brother’s portion was, in my thinking, thrown away. I am the 5th generation to own the land, and my sister’s daughter is the 6th on her portion. An Orthodox temple sits on the hillock where I used to go with my dad to feed his cows. I don’t think any of the previous generations would have understood that! It will be up to the church and my own 6th generation to determine what happens to the remaining 70 acres of my portion.

But the fact that our Dingler farm was preserved for my sister and I had nothing to do with the Dinglers. By the time my dad married into the family, my grandfather was farming the place, but he owned only a 1/20th interest in it. My dad, slowly, methodically, and purposefully bought out my mother’s grandmother and each of the ten children, share by share. If not for him, it would have been split into umpteen parcels. And so, it took a descendant of Edward Rainsford and David Cowan to save the land of the descendants of Robert Taliaferro and Johannes Dingler. And that is where the threads of these four stories are tied together—in a plot of land that is more than a piece of dirt, holding together, as it does—fragilly, for now—the memories and hopes of one American family.