“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”1
An aspiration unrecognized in any other country in Western Civilization in the 1700’s.
A hope that declared to the world the dawning of a new organizing principle.
What the hell went wrong?
Looking back, I observe an American history rife with critical inflection points that lead us to the crossroads we face today.
America transitioned from the Articles of Confederation to the U.S. Constitution by reaching a compromise between the states where underpopulated southern states were allowed to count slaves as three-fifths persons for Electoral College purposes. This compromise preserved slavery in the South until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
The United States is the culmination of Europe’s settler colonial project in America, where thousand of indigenous Native Americans where slaughtered and pushed off their land. The systematic displacement of Native Americans hit a major roadblock in the 1832 Supreme Court case, Worcester v. Georgia, where the court identified the relationship between the Indian Nations and the United States is that of nations, consistent with the principles of the law of nations. This recognition reserved to the federal government the constitutional responsibility to negotiate treaties that effected the rights of Indian Nations. Inspired by the discovery of gold on Cherokee land in Dahlonega, Georgia, the U.S. government signed the Treaty of New Echota with a minority faction of the Cherokee Nation that authorized the removal of the Five Indian Nations to western territories in modern day Oklahoma. The forced displacement of up to 60,000 Native Americans is known as the Trail of Tears because approximately 16,000 people died on the journey. It is critical to acknowledge the leadership of the effected Indian Nations did not approve the Treaty of Echota, nor was the Treaty supported by the majority of the Indian population.
The conflict between the Southern States and the Federal Government began in April 1861 when South Carolina militias attacked Fort Sumter forcing the surrender of the U.S. Army forces posted there. While there is much debate regarding the primary cause of the Civil War (Slavery, state rights, or the first election of an American President without any southern electors), President Abraham Lincoln used the conflict to resolve the legal rights of slaves. Empowered by super majorities of Republicans in the Congress, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and passed the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in January 1865. These provisions legally freed the slaves and constitutionally abolished slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime. In an effort to unite the nation, President Lincoln asked Andrew Johnson, a Democrat from Tennessee, to run as his Vice President in 1864. Andrew Johnson succeeded President Lincoln when he was assassinated in April 1865. Andrew Johnson has gone down in history as one of the worse U.S. Presidents for his tireless effort to scuttle President Lincoln’s vision for integrating freed slaves in the Reconstructed South. President Johnson supported a quick reinstatement of the southern states with no protections for the freed slaves. While the Congress was able to pass the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution over Presidential vetoes, freed slaves were left unprotected from the Black Codes instituted throughout the southern states. Segregation and other ‘Jim Crow’ laws were widely used until they were overruled by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, or repealed via the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The 19th century introduced the first of the great world wars in 1914 when the assassination of ArchDuke Ferdinand led to a series of declarations of war that pitted the Central Powers [Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire] against the Allied Powers [Great Brittain, France, Russia, Italy, Japan, and the United States joined in 1917]. The war ended fairly quickly after the entry of U.S. forces with an armistice signed in December 1918. Given America’s impact on the outcome of the war, President Woodrow Wilson had a significant impact on the final peace treaty when he issued his famous Fourteen Points. The Treaty of Versailles required Germany to disarm, relinquish captured territory, recognize newly independent states such as Poland, pay reparations to Allied nations, amongst other requirements. The Treaty also established the League of Nations, which was intended to be an international alliance of nations organized for the purpose of maintaining peace. The League of Nations never materialized to the intended organization because the United States failed to ratify the Treaty. The severity of the required reparations paid by Germany to the Allied nations destroyed the German economy and led to the radicalization of the German population under the National Socialist Party (Nazis).
The seeds sown by the ruinous Treaty of Versailles led to World War II between the Axis forces [Germany, Japan, Italy] and the Allied nations [Great Brittain, France, United States, Soviet Union and China]. By the time the Unites States joined in December 1942, France had been defeated. While the Soviet Red Army faced the brunt of Nazi ground forces on the Eastern European front, U.S. and British forces fought the Nazis and Italian forces on the Western front and across northern Africa. U.S. forces also engaged Japan in a naval war in the Pacific ocean and joined with Chinese forces in various land and amphibious battles in far east Asia. Emboldened by the success against Russian forces in WWI, Adolf Hitler underestimated the magnitude of the sacrifice the Soviet Red Army was willing to incur without surrendering. By the end of the War in Europe, the Soviet Union had suffered the deaths of over 20 million people at the hands of the Nazi military. Yet by Victory in Europe Day on May 8th 1945, the Red Army freed survivors of Nazi concentration camps throughout Eastern Europe, as U.S. and British forces freed survivors and prisoners of war throughout Southern and Western Europe. A great victory in Europe was forever tarnished by the resolution of the War in the Pacific.
At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt requested the Soviet Red Army to join the War in the Pacific once the War in Europe was resolved. Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, agreed to send the Red Army to fight in the Pacific three months after the end of the War in Europe. FDR died on April 12th, 1945 and was succeeded by newly elected Vice President Harry Truman. Very much like Andrew Johnson eighty years earlier, President Truman opposed FDR’s vision for the resolution of the War against Japan. Instead of waiting for the Red Army set to arrive by the end of August 1945 as FDR had requested, President Truman ordered the dropping of two atomic bombs on civilian targets in Japan on August 6th and 9th just as the Soviet Union had declared war against Japan.
There is much speculation regarding the motivation of dropping two atomic bombs on Japan. Given the secret nature of America’s Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bombs, I lean in the direction of President Truman wanting to send a message to Stalin regarding America’s new weapon: the Soviet Union is next. Further proof of my interpretation is the expectation by historians of an imminent Japanese surrender once the Red Army joined the War in the Pacific because the Soviet Union had demonstrated their historic willingness to sacrifice ground forces for victory in Europe. America compounded the animus toward the Soviet Union by including West Germany in the Marshall Plan in 1948, where the United States invested 15 billion dollars to rebuild Western Europe. In the 1950’s, America also purged U.S. citizens who had any pre-war association with the Communist Party, including Robert Oppenheimer, Director of the Los Alamos Laboratory where the atom bomb was designed. Imagine for a moment the magnitude of betrayal America would feel if we sacrificed 20 million Americans in a World War, and before the end of the war our ally threatened us with their deadliest weapon?
Quoting President Kennedy in his famous Speech on Peace given June 10th, 1963:
“No nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and families were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory, including nearly two-thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland, a loss equivalent to the destruction of this country east of Chicago.”
Yet as soon as WWII ended, we made them our enemy. We now know who started the Cold War.
The world has been on the brink of a nuclear war more than once in recorded history. The most famous time was the Cuban Missile crisis in October 1962. At the height of the Cold War, U.S. reconnaissance flights over Cuba discovered the presence of intercontinental ballistic missiles being deployed on Cuban launch sites. These missiles had the capability to carry nuclear warheads and had the delivery range to hit most of the continental United States. When the United States confronted the Soviet Union at the United Nations, the Soviet Ambassador denied the presence of the missiles. The incident escalated to a full blown international crisis when the United States was able to obtain the unanimous consent of the Organization of American States to execute a naval blockade of Cuba preventing any further supplies from the Soviet Union. Various near skirmishes between U.S. and Soviet naval ships and reconnaissance aircraft occurred as America attempted to enforce the blockade while the Soviet Union insisted the blockade was illegal. The conflict was resolved by two agreements between President Kennedy and Chairman Khrushchev:
Official Agreement – The United States promises to never attack Cuba in exchange for the Soviet Union removing nuclear missiles from Cuba.
Secret Agreement – President Kennedy gave Chairman Khrushchev a ‘Private Assurance’ that the United States would secretly remove six months later the medium range nuclear missiles America had installed in Turkey in 1961. These missiles had a delivery range that included Moscow. If the secret agreement was discovered the deal is off and the U.S. would deny making the agreement.
The Private Assurance was necessary because the President Kennedy wanted to save face for causing the Cuban Missile crisis by first installing nuclear missiles near the Soviet Union in Turkey. Premier Khrushchev agreed to accept the public humiliation of backing down over the objection of Cuba because he believed President Kennedy would honor the Private Assurance by removing the nuclear missiles from Turkey. Yet, there were no guarantees. President Kennedy did honor his Private Assurance.
9-11 is by far the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil in American history. Yet 23 years later, what do the American People know about why the attack occurred? In the aftermath of the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City, our leaders told us “They hate us for our freedom.” What they failed to tell us at the time was what our government knew about Osama Bin Laden. More information was made available on July 22, 2004 with the release of the 9/11 Commission Report, which stated in summary: “In February 1998, Osama Bin Laden issued a fatwa declaring it was God’s will that every Muslim should try his utmost to kill any American because of America’s occupation of Islam’s holy places and aggressions against Muslims.” What this summarized quote reveals is our government knew why as early as 1998 Osama Bin Laden was intent on killing many American civilians.
As it turns out, Osama Bin Laden published a Letter to America on November 24th, 2002, which explained in detail why he is attacking America and what he is asking of Americans. The reason why you are unlikely to have known this letter exists is because our government and their media lap dogs suppressed the letter, which languished on the digital archives of the Guardian newspaper website from the time it was published until it was removed in November 2023.
Why was it removed after 21 years?
Israel’s response to the Hamas’ attack on October 7th, 2023. Israeli leadership framed the response based on Hamas’ role as the political leadership of the Palestinians in Gaza. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant stated “he has ordered a full siege on the Gaza Strip adding no power, no food, no gas will reach the Palestinian territory.” There are no innocent Palestinians in Gaza because Hamas was the Palestinian’s elected leadership. Osama Bin Laden made the same argument in his Letter to America:
“The American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will; a choice which stems from their agreement with their policies. The American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the blockade in Iraq.”
After the Israeli leadership began announcing their planned response to the Hamas attack, Bin Laden’s Letter to America began going viral on TikTok. One TikTok poster with over 900,000 views stated, “everything we learned about the Middle East, 9/11, and terrorism was a lie.” The backlash from the government and media was so intense the Guardian was forced to remove the letter from the website. TikTok also banned thousands of TikTok posters including all of their related posts.
Why did Osama Bin Laden attack and kill nearly 3,000 Americans on 9-11?
The explanation starts with the Soviet-Afghanistan war in the early 1980’s. In response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a Muslim militia called the Mujahideen was gathered from around the Muslim world to repel the Red Army. The leader of the Arab Mujahideen was Osama Bin Laden. The United States committed to arm and train the Mujahideen in the war against the Soviet Union. The success of this proxy war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was chronicled in the Hollywood movie “Charlie Wilson’s War”. The Soviet Union’s failure to stabilize the pro-communist regime in Afghanistan is broadly viewed as a major contributing factor to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which occurred within two years of the Red Army retreat from Afghanistan in 1989. Also in 1989, Osama Bin Laden formed al Quida to take on future holy wars on the global stage.
In August 1990, Saddam Hussein led Iraq to attack and defeat the country of Kuwait. Saddam’s motivation for attacking Kuwait is not widely confirmed, but Kuwait had lent Iraq $14B USD to conduct the war with Iran which led to some speculation the conflict was over debt forgiveness. Regardless of the cause, the presence of Iraq on the Arabian peninsula raised international concerns that Iraq may also attack Saudi Arabia. The international community led by the United States condemned Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. When reports began indicating the United States was entering military defense talks with the Saudi Royal Family, Osama Bin Laden offered to gather the victorious Mujahideen to repel Iraq out of Kuwait. Instead, Saudi Arabia signed a defense agreement with the United States which granted the establishment of permanent military bases in Saudi Arabia in exchange for repelling Iraq out of Kuwait. In Osama’s eyes, this was sacrilege: Saudi Arabia is home to Islam’s two most sacred sites, Mecca and Medina, where the presence of non-Muslims is explicitly forbidden in the Koran. Fueled by this perceived sacrilege, al Quida led by Osama Bin Laden began engaging in terrorist attacks including destroying two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters in the Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia in 1993, as well as the World Trade Center Bombing in New York in 1993, and a car bombing in 1995 that destroyed a U.S.-leased military building in Saudi Arabia.
Over the course of the seven years since the first Gulf War, Osama Bin Laden observed the United States build the permanent military bases in Saudi Arabia, including installing the formerly NATO based M-1 Abrams tanks and M-2 Bradley Armored Personnel Carriers. In 1998, Bin Laden formerly issued a fatwa announcing a holy war against the United States and our allies (primarily Saudi Arabia). Immediately after, al Quida claimed responsibility for attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and in 2000, for the suicide bombings against the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, in which 17 American sailors were killed, and 39 injured.
In January 2001, when President Clinton briefed the incoming President, George W. Bush, the number one national security threat was al Quida led by Osama Bin Laden. Yet our government failed to alert the American public why Bin Laden was a threat. On September 11th, 2001, al Quida terrorists caused four commercial aircrafts to crash killing 2,977 innocent civilians and 19 hijackers. The reason was not because they hate us for our freedom. The reason was the existence of permanent U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia, home of Islam’s two holiest cities. Diplomatic professionals have a term for al Quida’s response: Blowback – is the unintended consequences and unwanted side-effects of a covert operation.2
Were permanent military bases in Saudi Arabia worth the price of nearly 3,000 lives? How many lives will be lost due to blowback from America’s funding, arming, and diplomatically enabling the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza today?
Since January 2020, America has faced the COVID-19 global pandemic starting in March 2020, the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and Israel’s response to the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7th, 2023. In each case, the prevailing narrative curated by U.S. government and the America media was verifiably untrue.
The heavy weight of available evidence indicates COVID-19 did not originate in the unsanitary wet markets in Wuhan, China, but was derivative of Gain of Function research funded by the National Institutes of Health led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Guidance regarding the wearing of masks was intentionally deceptive in order to protect supplies of masks for medical personnel. Congressional testimony confirmed the distancing guidelines were not based on scientific evidence. Information regarding the effectiveness of the vaccines included outright lies about permanence (boosters were announced once effectiveness started wearing off), transference (vaccination was supposed to prevent transmission), and prevalence of side effects.
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th, 2022, the unanimous chorus of U.S. government officials and establishment media ghouls was Russia had engaged in an unprovoked attack on Ukraine. Highly reputable professionals such as Economist Jeffrey Sachs and Professor John Mearsheimer have persistently laid out the verifiable facts that the United States had financed the violent overthrow of the democratically elected government of Ukraine in 2014 and installed an anti-Russian government intent on joining NATO. The newly installed government then proceeded to begin ethnically cleansing southeast Ukraine (particularly the Donbass region) killing up to 15,000 ethnically Russian Ukrainians. Russia intervened in 2014 to protect the Russian-Ukrainian people and in the process seized control over Crimea, a naval port city the Russians had been leasing from the Ukrainians.
In 2015, Russia and Ukraine signed the Minsk II agreements which were guaranteed by Germany, France, and Poland, and affirmed by the United Nations Security Council. Under the Minsk II agreements, the ethnically Russian regions of Ukraine would remain a part of Ukraine but have protected status from the new anti-Russian Ukrainian government. The Ukrainian government refused to abide by the agreement and the guarantors (Germany, France, and Poland) refused to enforce the agreement. The point of making the agreement was to delay further Russia action in Ukraine while the United States built military bases in Ukraine and began providing significant military assistance.
In the winter of 2021, Russia moved significant military assets to the Ukrainian border signaling their intent to invade Ukraine to prevent the country from joining NATO. In December 2021, Vladimir Putin sent a official communique to the NATO leadership proposing to negotiate regarding NATO expansion to the Russian border in Ukraine. NATO responded by refusing to negotiate and stating NATO expansion is not the business of Russia. It is important to note, during the discussions that led to the dismantling of the former Soviet Union in the early 1990’s, multiple members of the American leadership gave Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin a ‘private assurance’ if the Soviets supported the reunification of Germany as a part of NATO, NATO would not expand one inch east of Germany. This was a critical concession to preserve the security buffer for Russia against European aggressions dating back to the Napoleonic Wars, WWI, and WWII. This ‘private assurance’ was the same method used to resolve the Cuban Missile crisis at the height of the Cold War. The Russian leaders had a historical basis for trusting the use of a ‘private assurance’ by the American leadership. This is why in the two hour interview of Vladimir Putin by Tucker Carlson, Putin claimed “America tricked Russia in the 1990’s”. These are the events that led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Yet within two months of the start of the war, Russia and Ukraine were very close to a peace agreement when the United States sent UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to insist the Ukrainians walk away from the agreement, which they did. Now, over two years into the war, Ukraine has suffered the loss of up to 500,000 soldiers and are facing certain defeat unless NATO forces intervene directly. The United States and the United Kingdom have given Ukraine the authority to launch NATO provided missiles deep into Russian territory. Russia has delivered an official communique indicating the use of NATO missiles in Russian territory makes NATO a direct combatant in the war, fully subject to direct retaliation. WWIII is in the hands of a nearly defeated Ukrainian leadership.
On October 7th, 2023, Hamas militants broke through the walled Gaza encampment and slaughtered 1,139 people and took 251 hostages back into Gaza. In response, the Israeli government announced the total siege of Gaza stopping all food, water, electricity, gas, medical supplies, and other essential goods and services needed to sustain the 2.3 million people in Gaza. Israel then proceeded to engage in the worse onslaught of military force against a civilian population in modern history. The United States and our European allies have provided funding, military weapons & equipment, military logistical support, and diplomatic cover preventing the international community from taking action to limit the slaughter of Palestinian civilians. The official U.S. government and establishment media narrative is Israel was attacked on 10/7/2023, therefore has the right to defend itself. On the question of Genocide, National Security Council spokesperson, John Kirby, stated the claims of genocide in Gaza are “baseless and without merit.” Yet the question of genocide is governed by the Genocide Convention, which the United States and Israel have ratified. Under the Genocide Convention, any member state can bring a claim of genocide against any other member states if they follow the procedural requirements of the Genocide Convention.
On December 29, 2023, South Africa filed a claim of genocide against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Under the Genocide Convention, the ICJ has exclusive jurisdiction to decide questions of genocide. Israel filed a defense claim and requested the ICJ to grant summary judgment rejecting South Africa’s case for lack of evidence. For this consideration, the ICJ was comprised of 17 judges, two more than normal to include a South African Judge and an Israeli Judge. The President of the Court was American Judge Joan Donoghue. On January 26th, 2024, the ICJ ruled by 15-2 that the evidence provided by South Africa was sufficient to establish that Israel was plausibly committing genocide in Gaza, which means the case was allowed to proceed to a full trial. The ICJ also determined emergency provisions were necessary in order to protect the Palestinian people from irreparable harm if they waited for the completion of the full trial. The court ordered Israel to stop harming the Palestinians in Gaza as prescribed by the Genocide Convention. Further, the ICJ ordered Israel by a vote of 16-1 (including the Israeli judge) to stop publicly inciting genocide, to punish anyone who is publicly inciting genocide, and to stop preventing the delivery of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians in Gaza. All signatory nations are legally bound to enforce the rulings of the ICJ. Since the ICJ issued the provisional orders, Israel has systematically reduced the amount of humanitarian aid being delivered in Gaza, and has persisted to slaughter Palestinian civilians. The United States has continued to provide financial support, military arms, logistical support, and diplomatic cover utilizing the UN Security Council veto to circumvent the broad international consensus to protect the Palestinians in Gaza.
The prevailing American narrative is unfazed by the rulings of the ICJ in direct contravention of our obligations under the Genocide Convention, or even the growing opposition of the majority of the American people.
What is becoming self-evident to the American people is we are being ruled by a government of extreme wealth, for extreme wealth, and by extreme wealth.
Where once America was a nation pursuing our manifest destiny, instead we appear destined to become a manifest failure.
1Excerpt from the Declaration of Independence.
2Per Wikipedia
