While Franklin Roosevelt may not have said that Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza “may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch,” he probably thought it — just as other presidents have had similar thoughts about myriad brutal rulers. So if the U.S. government has forced the American people to support useful dictators, why is…

From the start, opponents of the American empire warned that the government could not violate the rights of foreigners without eventually violating the rights of Americans. An excellent example is William Graham Sumner’s post-Spanish-American War classic The Conquest of the United States by Spain. The anti-imperialists were spot-on, and the evidence for their case keeps…

L’atteggiamento isterico riguardo lo Stato Islamico ora incentra l’attenzione sui rifugiati che cercano di sfuggire alla violenza in Siria e Iraq. Prevedibilmente la camera dei deputati, a maggioranza repubblicana, ha deciso ieri di incrementare i controlli sulla vita dei potenziali rifugiati: una pretesa di onniscienza che si traduce in esclusione. Ma il progetto di legge…

Guardate, neanche i regimi autoritari e totalitari possono evitare il terrorismo interno. Allora, che speranze può avere una società relativamente aperta? Una società aperta abbonda di “facili bersagli”, ovvero di persone inermi che ogni giorno vanno e vengono liberamente. Sono un bersaglio facile per chi vuole il male, specie se gli assalitori cercano la morte….

Hysteria over the Islamic State is now focused on the refugees seeking to escape the violence in Syria and Iraq. Predictably, the Republican-controlled House yesterday voted to increase background checks on potential refugees, a demand for omniscience that would amount to exclusion. The bill faces trouble in the Senate, however, and President Obama, who wants…

Look, even authoritarian and totalitarian states can’t prevent domestic terrorism. What hope do relatively open societies have? Open societies abound with “soft targets”; that is, noncombatants going about their everyday lives. They are easy hits for those determined to inflict harm, especially if the assailants seek to die in the process. We also know, as…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Chad Nelson‘s “Obama’s Legacy Will Not Be One of Peace” read by Mike Godzina and edited by Tony Dreher. It’s important to Obama that the extent of his drone wars remain secret. His peaceful veneer would quickly disintegrate if we had an accurate Obama-death-toll. Drone wars have been kept so secret,…

Donald Trump’s indictment of the Bush II administration for failing to prevent the 9/11 attacks presents an opportunity for more of a bird’s eye view of American foreign policy in the Middle East, a policy that has killed many hundreds of thousands, maimed countless more, and laid waste to entire societies. As Peter Beinart reminds…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “‘Peace Through Strength’ and Other Lies” read by Tony Dreher and edited by Nick Ford.   Maybe we should ask ourselves, though, whether America really is the good guy — or whether it’s the power that needs to be deterred. And if you look at its record of invasions,…

Actor Adrien Grenier of the TV series Entourage has been caught up in quite a storm over a tweet he sent out on the recent anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. It was an animation of the World Trade Center and below it read, “R.I.P. the 2,996 Americans who died in 9/11. R.I.P. the 1,455,590 Iraqis…

Every year, we’re subjected to another round of mawkish, smarmy 9/11 memorial ceremonies whose main purpose is to maintain loyalty to the very national security state whose aggression brought the terror attacks of September 11 on us in the first place. It’s all part of an endless cycle, repeated over and over, dating back to…

The Financial Times recently reported that Nobel Peace Prize recipient Barack Obama has conducted ten times more drone strikes than his predecessor George W. Bush. As far as we can tell, that number is somewhere in the ballpark of 500 strikes and spans a wide array of countries including Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia…

This column was inspired by one of Rupert Murdoch’s tweets on September 6: “Big military brings peace through strength.” A cliched tweet by Murdoch isn’t what most people would consider a news hook. But it’s just the latest expression — caveman syntax perhaps included — of an insidious idea that anyone born in the United…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “We Need More Treason, Not Less” read by Mike Godzina and edited by Nick Ford. Let’s get something straight: The American state is and always has been, regardless of the political party controlling it, the executive committee of the propertied classes who use the state to extract rents from…

This image tweeted by Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has a lot of people upset. Is it supposed to be Barack Obama holding a gun to his own head?What if it is? The picture is hardly threatening or aggressive in any way. After all, it’s not a picture of Khamenei holding a gun to…

Di recente, la Casa Bianca ha annunciato che Obama ha approvato un piano per mandare 450 nuovi soldati in Iraq per combattere Isis. Queste “truppe” non sono truppe operative. Al contrario, avranno un ruolo di consiglieri per assistere le forze armate irachene. Se credete a questa storia vuol dire che avete un minestrone al posto…

The White House recently announced that Obama has approved a plan to send 450 new troops into Iraq to fight ISIS. These “troops” aren’t ground troops, but instead are going in an adviser role to assist the Iraqi military. Now, everyone who believes that please, go stand on your head. It’s been four years since…

American politicians frequently declare that the government’s first duty is to protect us from foreign threats. If that’s so, why have they embroiled us in the Middle East? Instead of keeping us safe, they seem to strive to put us in harm’s way by provoking one side or the other in sectarian, ethnic, tribal, and…

Kathy Kelly discusses ISIS and the war in Iraq. Douglas Macgregor discusses U.S. military intervention. Franklin Lamb discusses Syrian migrants and their plight. William Blum discusses the Berlin Wall. Sheldon Richman discusses torture and Obama. Lucy Steigerwald discusses the War on Drugs abroad. Richard M. Ebeling discusses Ludwig Von Mises and the business cycle. David…

The late Chalmers Johnson, the great analyst of the American empire, warned that if Americans didn’t give up the empire, they would come to live under it. We’ve had many reasons to take his warning seriously; indeed, several important thinkers have furnished sound theoretical and empirical evidence for the proposition. Now come two scholars who…