Skip to content

History

Birthing A New International Order

April 15, 2025 Jeffrey D. Sachs, Consortium News. , , , , , , , , , ,
Writing in his cell as a political prisoner in fascist Italy after World War I, the philosopher Antonio Gramsci famously declared: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” A century later, we are in another interregnum, and the morbid symptoms are everywhere. The U.S.-led order has ended, but the multipolar world is not yet born. The urgent priority is to give birth to a new multilateral order that can keep the peace and the path to sustainable development. We are at the end of a long wave of human history that commenced with the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama more than 500 years ago.

Return Of The Robber Barons: Trump’s Distorted View Of US Tariff History

April 15, 2025 Michael Hudson, Geopolitical Economy. , , , , ,
Donald Trump’s tariff policy has thrown markets into turmoil among his allies and enemies alike. This anarchy reflects the fact that his major aim was not really tariff policy, but simply to cut income taxes on the wealthy, by replacing them with tariffs as the main source of government revenue. Extracting economic concessions from other countries is part of his justification for this tax shift as offering a nationalistic benefit for the United States. His cover story, and perhaps even his belief, is that tariffs by themselves can revive American industry. But he has no plans to deal with the problems that caused America’s deindustrialization in the first place.

Opportunities And Challenges To A Global Community With A Future

April 13, 2025 Sam-Kee Cheng, Orinoco Tribune. , , , , , ,
The predominance of US economic, political and military power in the world was established at the end of the Second World War.1 With just 6.3 percent of the global population, the United States held about 50 percent of the world's wealth in 1948. As the only power that has used nuclear weapons on civilian targets, it demonstrated unchecked power and military might. The postwar world order was rebuilt with the United States at the core, including the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949 and Japan–US Security Treaty in 1951. The political order of major industrial powers, as well as some newly independent states, which were key in the containment strategy during the Cold War, were shaped in the image of the United States as vehemently anti-Communist bulwark economies.

50 Years Since Lebanese Civil War, Palestinian Refugees Cling To Hope

April 13, 2025 Sabah Haider, Mondoweiss. , , , ,
On April 13, 1975, a busload of Palestinian civilians was ambushed in Ain al-Rummaneh, a predominantly Maronite Christian neighborhood in East Beirut, by Phalangist militiamen who committed a massacre. That moment, often cited as the spark of the Lebanese Civil War, did not emerge from a vacuum — it followed years of tension between the Lebanese state, sectarian militias, and the growing Palestinian armed presence in Lebanon, which started in 1971 when the PLO arrived after being forcibly expelled by the Jordanian state following the events of Black September. Fifty years have passed, and the debate over the role of Palestinians — specifically Palestinian factions under the PLO — in the Lebanese Civil War remains mired in a murky combination of emotions, facts, myths, scapegoating, and to some extent, political erasure.

Buchenwald Concentration Camp Was Liberated By Communist Prisoners

April 11, 2025 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , , ,
Eighty years ago, on 11 April 1945, units of General George S. Patton’s 4th Armoured Division of the US armed forces drove toward the city of Weimar, Germany, where the Buchenwald concentration camp was located. Patton’s troops eventually took control of the camp, but soldiers’ statements, which were collected later by historians, suggest that the US tanks were not what liberated Buchenwald: the camp had already been seized by the organisation and courage of the prisoners who took advantage of the flight of German soldiers in the face of the Allied advance.

Mass Migration And The Echoes Of Late Rome

April 10, 2025 John Wight, Consortium News. , , , ,
The ancient world can teach us much, if we only let it. One of its key lessons is that mass migration is capable of destroying even the mightiest of empires. At the height of its power, the Roman Empire was so vast and so omnipotent that it was run on the basis of the dictum: “Roma locuta est. Causa finita est!” (Rome has spoken. The cause has finished). The names of its most powerful figures have been so heralded through the ages, they remain almost as familiar to us today as if they’d only passed from the stage yesterday. Pompey, Caesar, Augustus, Nero, Hadrian, Vespasian, Constantine; these were men whose rule over the ancient world was so dominant that the only real threat they faced came from within Rome itself.

10 Years Ago, Baltimore Cops Killed Freddie Gray

April 10, 2025 Baynard Woods, Truthout. , , , ,
In the 10 years since Baltimore police officers killed Gray, roughly 3,100 people — mainly Black men — have been murdered in Baltimore; more than twice that many have suffered fatal overdoses; one mayor, one state’s attorney and one police commissioner have been convicted on federal charges; more than 15 police officers have been implicated in the Gun Trace Task Force RICO case, where officers conspired to illegally detain and rob Baltimore residents; more than $70 million has been paid out in settlements relating to police misconduct; the Baltimore Police Department’s (BPD) budget has increased by nearly $150 million...

Response To Trump’s Order To Restore ‘Truth’ To American History

April 8, 2025 Jim Mamer, Scheer Post. , , , , ,
I have now read almost a dozen of President Trump’s executive orders issued since January. It has been an experience I will remember. They all begin with the same statement, “By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered…” So, I feel I have a right to respond similarly: By the authority vested in me as a citizen of the United States, protected by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, I hereby respond to the Executive Order of March 27, 2025 on Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.

Militarizing The Ledger, Colonizing The Future

April 7, 2025 Arnie Saiki, Onibaba. , , , , , ,
When we begin to examine U.S. hegemony, the Military-Industrial Complex often serves as the shorthand for understanding the entangled relationship between investment capital, militarism, neocolonial extraction, and unipolar power. But to truly unravel this system, we must look deeper into how the Military-Debt Nexus is legitimized—not only through ideological alignment or geopolitical pressure, but through institutional mechanisms such as trade agreements, national accounting rules, and debt-financed militarization. The intersection between military expenditure and global trade is not incidental; it forms the core infrastructure of compliance and control, shaping everything from resource acquisition to sanctions enforcement, all under the veil of economic normalcy.

McKinley Or Lincoln? Tariffs Vs. Greenbacks

April 7, 2025 Ellen Brown, Scheer Post. , , , , ,
President Trump has repeatedly expressed his admiration for Republican President William McKinley, highlighting his use of tariffs as a model for economic policy. But as critics note, Trump’s tariffs, which are intended to protect U.S. interests, have instead fueled a stock market nosedive, provoked tit-for-tat tariffs from key partners, risk a broader trade withdrawal, and  could increase the federal debt by reducing GDP and tax income.  The federal debt has reached $36.2 trillion, the annual interest on it is $1.2 trillion, and the projected 2025 budget deficit is $1.9 trillion – meaning $1.9 trillion will be added to the debt this year. It’s an unsustainable debt bubble doomed to pop on its present trajectory.

Restoring Lies And Insanity To American History

April 5, 2025 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. , , ,
President Donald Trump’s latest executive order titled “RESTORING TRUTH AND SANITY TO AMERICAN HISTORY” replicates a tactic used by all authoritarian regimes. In the name of countering bias, they distort the nation’s history into self-serving mythology. History will be used to justify the power of the ruling elites in the present by deifying the ruling elites of the past. It will disappear the suffering of the victims of genocide, enslavement, discrimination and institutional racism. The repression and violence during our labor wars — hundreds of workers were killed by gun thugs, company goons, police and soldiers from National Guard units in the struggle to unionize — will be untold.

Andrée Blouin Is Our Kind Of Pan-African Revolutionary

April 4, 2025 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , ,
In 1962, Florence Nwanzuruahu Nkiru Nwapa (1931–1993), mostly known as Flora Nwapa, sent a book manuscript to the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe (1930–2013). Four years earlier, Achebe, at the tender age of twenty-eight, had published his landmark novel Things Fall Apart with Heinemann. The novel arrived in Heinemann’s London office as the decolonisation movement began to change the shape of the African continent (Ghana won its independence in 1957, three years after Nigeria – both countries with an English-speaking population, however small, that used Heinemann’s science and English books in their education system).

What Can And Cannot Be Done, Cannot Be Undone

April 4, 2025 Arnie Saiki, Oni's Substack. , , , ,
The sediment of history accumulates through class struggle, imperial conquest, and the shifting modes of production. The wreckage promoted by U.S. exceptionalism does not erase this sediment—it lies atop it like a hideous flesh, giving the skeleton of history a monstrous form, shaping its contours while masking its deeper truths. This neoliberal flesh is not merely ideological but structural—built into the very institutions that manage global capital and coercion. What has been done in the name of democracy, security, or market liberalization reflects not just policy choices, but the material interests of a ruling class determined to privatize and reproduce its dominance.

A People’s History Of Palestine

April 2, 2025 Ramzy Baroud, Consortium News. , , , ,
My journey into the realm of people’s history began during my teenage years when I first read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. This initial exposure sparked my curiosity about how history is constructed and it led me to delve deeper into historiography — particularly the evolution of people’s history as an intellectual movement. Over the years, a wide range of historians, from Michel Foucault and Marc Bloch to Lucien Febvre and Chris Harman, each offered unique perspectives on the study of ordinary people in history.

Backlash To Transgender Health Care Isn’t New

April 1, 2025 Samantha Rosenthal, Scheer Post. , , ,
In the past century, there have been three waves of opposition to transgender health care. In 1933, when the Nazis rose to power, they cracked down on transgender medical research and clinical practice in Europe. In 1979, a research report critical of transgender medicine led to the closure of the most well-respected clinics in the United States. And since 2021, when Arkansas became the first U.S. state among now at least 21 other states banning gender-affirming care for minors, we have been living in a third wave. In my work as a scholar of transgender history, I study the long history of gender-affirming care in the U.S., which has been practiced since at least the 1940s.
«12345678910»