Vance and Rubio are very worried about their favorite German political party

We already knew that our Opus-Dei-fan Vice President J.D. Vance has a real hard-on for Germany’s far right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Apparently, so does our Trumpista Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

In my immediately previous post, I mentioned the embarrassment that President Reagan got himself into back in 1985, when he accepted an invitation from German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to attend a ceremony at a military cemetery where soldiers of the regular German army (Wehrmacht) were buried. It was supposed to be a gesture of mutual reconciliation a few days before the 40th anniversary of V-E Day. But then someone publicized the fact that there were also buried there were soldiers from the Waffen-SS, which was part of the SS Nazi Party organization officially found to be a criminal organization at Nuremberg. It turned out to be a huge embarrassment even for a rightwing Republican like Reagan back then and drew broad criticism, including from senior Republicans in Congress and conservative Jewish leaders and organizations.

The times, they have a’changed.

Rubio is shocked, shocked, that Germany has laws that political parties can’t be involved in active attempts to violently overthrow the constitutional government. You know, by doing things like, say, sending an armed mob into the building where the national legislature meets and killing people in the process.

Germany’s foreign ministry has hit back at the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, following his criticism of Germany’s decision to label the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party as a “confirmed rightwing extremist group”.

On Thursday, Rubio took to X and wrote: “Germany just gave its spy agency new powers to surveil the opposition. That’s not democracy – it’s tyranny in disguise. What is truly extremist is not the popular AfD – which took second in the recent election – but rather the establishment’s deadly open border immigration policies that the AfD opposes.”

Rubio went on to say: “Germany should reverse course.” (1)

Rubio’s false claim that Germany has an “open border” policy is sleazy as it is dumb. The border of the European Union, of which Germany is a member, has had the deadliest borders in the world for years now because of their policies on refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea.

Deutsche Welle has this six-minute explainer on the AfD situation in English: (2)

This PBS segment reports on the AfD’s Björn Höcke and the positions he has taken that, well, don’t sound, uh, enthusiastically anti-Nazi: (3)

Rewriting the history of the Second World War

It’s not unusual – in fact, it’s common as dirt – for the US to try to put their fingers on the scales of foreign elections in some way or other. But senior official publicly emphasizing how much the Trump 2.0 regime loves the far-right German AfD party is pretty crass by normal diplomatic standards.

To understand how this came to be in Germany, a little historical background is needed. This latest de facto endorsement of the AfD by the Trump 2.0 regime comes just days before the 80th anniversary of May 8, heretofore known as V-E Day (Victory in Europe Day) commemorating the surrender of Germany to the Allies on that date in 1945. The US has never before used May 8 as an official celebration day. But the Orange Anomaly in the White House just declared that V-E Day will now be officially known as Victory Day for World War II:

Many of our allies and friends are celebrating May 8th as Victory Day, but we did more than any other Country, by far, in producing a victorious result in World War II,” Trump wrote Thursday night in a lengthy post on his Truth Social platform.

“I am hereby renaming May 8th as Victory Day for World War II and November 11th as Victory Day for World War I,” he continued. (4)

Trump’s official version of history is, not surprisingly, a bit shaky:

Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allied forces on May 8, 1945, a little over a week after Adolf Hitler died by suicide inside his Berlin bunker. Russian forces had captured the German capital on May 2 after their former Soviet Union lost an estimated 24 million people to the war.

Victory Day is celebrated annually on May 8 by several former members of the Allied Powers, such as France, Poland and the United Kingdom (which calls it VE Day). Other nations, including Belarus and Russia, however, commemorate the end of hostilities from the Axis Powers on May 9.

May 9, 1945 was when a second formal surrender ceremony took place in the Soviet Union.

The American version of the end of the Pacific War has tended in practice to come down to something like: We dropped our magic atomic bombs and the Japanese surrendered. Of course, there had been four years of combat against Japan before that time by US and British forces. And in the days before the a-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the Soviet Red Army was rapidly advancing against Japan in the Japanese-occupied Korean Peninsula. That’s how the demarcation lines between North and South Korea were first established.

So, victory in the Second World War for the US didn’t actually come until what is has been celebrated in the US as V-J Day (Victory over Japan).

Following Trump’s line of thinking is always a tricky undertaking. But part of his motivation for these symbolic moves may be that he’s ticked off that Russia didn’t play along with coming up with a hokey deal over Ukraine that Peace President Trump could brag about.

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council [who has previously served as both President and Prime Minister of Russia], said on Saturday that President Donald Trump's assertion that the U.S. had done more than any other country to win World War Two was "pretentious nonsense".

Trump posted on social network Truth Social late on Thursday that "nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery, or military brilliance" in both world wars, and that "we did more than any other country, by far, in producing a victorious result in World War II." (5)

This is turning out to be a good example about how people form broad impressions of historical events. And how those impressions evolve. The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, recently said, "The West as we knew it, no longer exists." (6) And those changing perspectives also change what questions people ask about the relevant history.

Is there a free speech issue with Germany’ regulation of political parties?

It actually is an interesting and important question how banning political parties is or is not compatible with an American, Jeffersonian approach to free speech.

Whether politician like Vance and Rubio actually care about the American constitutional order or give a flying flip about American principles and traditions of free speech is highly doubtful. Example: Have Vance or Rubio criticized their own Administration’s kidnapping and imprisoning legal residents of the US because they criticized US policy of essentially unconditional support for Israel’s current war on civilians in Gaza and the West Bank? (Hint: No, they haven’t.)

After the original V-E Day in 1945, Germany came under the four-power occupation of the US, the USSR, Britain, and France. The three western zones were combined and became West Germany, the Federal Republic of Germany (BRD). And the Soviet zone became East Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or DDR in its German initials) in 1949. The formal denazification program last in West Germany from 1945-1949, although restrictions and criminal investigations did continue after that, which could be distinguished as denazification procedures.

The left parties (Social Democrats [SPD] and Communists [KPD]) and the conservative Christian Democratic party (CDU) supported denazification with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The European-style liberal party (FDP) was highly critical of the process, nominally on the grounds of civil liberties concerns, but the FDP also attracted support from some who had more specific personal concerns about their own liability.

In other words, the position taken by the Allies was in favor of explicit political disadvantages being imposed on the old Nazi Party and any political movements that would attempt to restore a regime like that of Hitler’s. And both postwar German governments, the liberal-democratic one in the west and the Communist one in the East, considered it a duty to prevent any revival of the Nazi Party. That prohibition was enacted in the new German Constitution itself, known as the Basic Law. (The Third Reich had outlawed all parties except the Nazis.)

The Nazi Party itself was outlawed, but a complete rejection of Nazi sentiments had not taken place in 1949. The historian Norbert Frei writes of the 1949 elections in the BRD:

Several of the parties now vying for Bundestag seats had made it unmistakably clear that they did not feel bound to the anti-Nazi consensus of the “approved” parties. Above all in the crisis-ridden regions of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein, marked as they were by large groups of refugees and high unemployment, but also in Bavaria, political groups were on a vote hunt involving a well-aimed exploitation of antidemocratic resentment—the feeling focused, of course, upon the occupation authorities.

The reaction to this development by public opinion abroad was quick in coming. Particularly in the American press, fears of “renazification” and “new nationalism” were becoming increasingly prevalent. True, not much inclination was apparent on the part of serious Western journalists to make a political tragedy out of the entry of a handful of right-wing radicals into the Bundestag and the acceptance of the German Party into the coalition government. But it was also clear that there was a general expectation of determined resistance by the German government to (neo-)Nazi and nationalist agitation—and that in its absence intervention of the occupying powers was seen as called for.

As much as possible, Germany’s democratic parties did not make a theme out of latent Allied threats of intervention. They did, however, register the anticipatory pressure from “abroad” with extreme attentiveness; playing a central role in their general past-political argumentation, this pressure carried particular weight in combating political activity of a more or less openly Nazi nature. The young West German state’s political class felt a special obligation—going beyond the “normal” antinationalist guiding principles—to ostracize the relatively rare efforts at justifying Nazi anti-Semitism. Bonn experienced its first substantial challenge in this regard a few months after the parliament first convened. [my emphasis] (7)

The point here is that in West Germany, the state which was the direct legal predecessor to the united Germany of 1990, the western allies, especially the United States, expected the BRD to suppress overt Nazi-like activities. And that commitment became part of BRD law and practice, and remains so today.

Frei describes three notable cases in the early days of the new Federal Republic that “Nazi” problems became significant political issues: the “Hedler Affair” that focused a figure in the far-right German Party who advertised his clear Nazi-like politics; the banning of the Socialist Reich Party: and, the “Naumann Affair” of 1953, an action including arrests against Werner Naumann, a former state secretary in the German propaganda minister and five others. The British High Commissioner in Germany warned that the liberal FDP could be implicated in the activities involved in the Naumann Affair. As Frei writes:

On 3 December 1952, the British High Commissioner took the opportunity to engage Otto Lenz, state secretary in the Chancellery, in a detailed conversation about the situation in the FDP. In precise German, Kirkpatrick expressed his “extreme concern” about the party’s “penetration” by “radical National Socialist circles.” Lenz noted Kirkpatrick’s intent to discuss the matter calmly with Adenauer at some point; he added that, “if need be,” the British “see themselves forced to take measures and reveal certain connections that gravely implicate the FDP.” (p. 281)

Those three cases illustrate how seriously the Allies took the responsibility of the BRD government, then headed by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (CDU), to enforce the prohibition on a revival of the Nazi Party incorporated into Germany’s Basic Law. Frei relates:

Regarding the arrests, Adenauer limited himself to citing the British foreign minister, whose declaration in the House of Commons, he explained, had confirmed his own position. “The activities of a small minority of incorrigible former National Socialists poses no direct danger for the democratic order in Germany.” Any additional points would have to be clarified after the investigation’s conclusion. But the “citizens of the Federal Republic and everyone abroad” could be sure “that Germany will never return to National Socialism.” (p. 287)

An Austria-related note

The Allied occupation of Austria formally ended in 1955 with what is called the State Treaty with the four occupying powers, whose 70th anniversary Austria celebrated this year. It committed Austria to the other signatories that Austria would prevent any revival of the Nazi Party. After the Soviet Union formally dissolved in 1992, Austria did not recognize Russia as a legal successor to the State Treaty.

But the anti-Nazi obligation remains binding on Austria for the US, Britain, and France. Since the US Constitution includes formally ratified treaties as part of the “law of the land” of the United States on a level with the Constitution itself, it would be fair to say that the basic law of the US requires the country to ban a revival of the Nazi Party in Austria. Lord knows the US finds an endless number of reasons to justify military interventions. But it could be argued that if Austria actually installed a Nazi-style regime, the US, France, and Britain would have the right in international law to militarily intervene to restore a democratic government there.

Meanwhile, the Trump 2.0 regime is threatening war against America’s NATO allies Canada and Denmark while openly propagating its preference for the far-right, anti-EU, authoritarian AfD party in Germany.

Are the “European” approaches to legal political party activity really “un-American”?

My definition of the classic liberal-democratic, Jeffersonian approach to freedom of speech and the press would go something like this: Things work out best when people are free to say any damn fool thing they want, as long as a everybody else is free to say what a damn fool thing it is.

But even the specific US Constitutional protection of freedom of speech has never meant that everyone is free to say anything they please anywhere and anytime they want. I think the classic yelling-“fire”-in-a-crowded-theater example is kind of dumb. But if you walk into a theater or church service or a classroom or a private home and just start ranting like a true Trump cultist (or anything else!) that has never been considered constitutional free speech. People can be removed and fined for such things.

Writing this brought to mind a former college friend of mine in Mississippi who in the 1970s went to some segregationist meeting that included a bunch of Klan types and he stood up and yelled “Long live Martin Luther King!” and got beaten up. He could have been legally removed by police for that but not charged with illegal speech. Assaulting him was illegal, though the Mississippi police of that time never got around to charging them.

Decades later in the 1990s, while living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I went to an event at a Catholic Church open to the public where a Jewish Holocaust survivor was giving a talk to young people. Two or three Holocaust-denier scumbags started standing up and talking over him to try to disrupt the meeting. The adults attending the event started telling them to shut up and somebody called the cops, who told them to get the hell out of there, and they did.

I use those examples to illustrate that most Americans not named J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio usually can normally distinguish between expression of opinions and fact, on the one hand, and people just shooting off their mouths because they feel like it, on the other. Most people can understand why it’s legal to say the President or the Governor is a miserable leader, and why it’s not legal to post on Facebook that your next-door neighbor you don’t like is a human trafficker and drug dealer. And why one is free speech and the other is slander. (Unless the latter is true and you can prove it, of course!)

But it’s not as though American law doesn’t put restraints on political parties. There are legal definitions of what political parties are, which activities they can pursue and which not, what kind of financial donations they can accept and which they can’t, how much they can spend on what, what tax regulations affect them, what their reporting requirements are, and so on.

Some of the things political parties are forbidden from doing would include organizing violent partisan goon squads to commit crimes, money laundering, and working with foreign powers to do espionage, to name a few. All the kind of things that might, for instance, get German political parties in legal trouble there.

Expressions of political sentiments, including criticisms of actions of liberal democratic governments or of democratic ideas, are also protected in both the US and German systems. In my-far-from-comprehensive knowledge of how this works in either country, I have the impression that the US system provides more of those kinds of protections for political parties. Banning entire parties as such is probably easier in the German system, though it doesn’t happen every day. Or every year. Or much at all.

It's worth noting that in the US, the Communist Control Act of 1954 actually did ban the Communist Party in the US. The text of the law itself describes the legislation as an Act to “outlaw the Communist Party, to prohibit members of Communist organizations from serving in certain representative capacities, and for other purposes.” (8) It was sponsored by Sen. Hubert Humphrey, who later served as Lyndon Johnson’s Vice President.

Jewish Currents reported in 2012:

The bill was sponsored by Senator Hubert Humphrey, a leading liberal, and drafted by his legislative assistant, Max M. Kampelman, and was widely embraced by liberals as well as conservatives. It was not until 1973 that a federal court in Arizona declared the act unconstitutional, [(9)] and the U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled on it; technically, the Communist Party USA is still an illegal organization.

“The Congress hereby finds and declares that the Communist Party of the United States, although purportedly a political party, is in fact an instrumentality of a conspiracy to overthrow the Government of the United States.” —Communist Control Act (10)

My own opinion of that law is that it was a real violation of civil liberties, passed at the height of McCarthyist “anticommunist” hysteria, directed against a tiny political party that in 1954 had about as close to zero political clout as it was possible to get.

But if J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio still talk to actual reporters, it would be interesting if a one would ask them, in light of how they object to the German government’s keeping tracking of far-right extremist activity in their beloved German AfD party, what they think about the Communist Control Act.

Notes:

(1) Yang, May (2025): Germany hits back at Marco Rubio after he panned labeling of AfD as ‘extremist’. The Guardian 05/03/2025. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/03/marco-rubio-germany-afd> (Accessed: 2025-04-05).

(2) Germany’s domestic intelligence agency finds strong evidence for AfD’s threat to democracy. DW News YouTube channel 05/03/2025. <https://youtu.be/K9ZGhEw-6ZA?si=cx6v5WcFKmiLbzoO> (Accessed: 2025-04-05).

(3) Why an AfD Politician Is Accused of 'Whitewashing' Nazi Crimes - Germany's Enemy Within. Frontline YouTube channel 07/30/2024. <https://youtu.be/brvgCMPPfkg?si=F36J0ipiZ757MVwu> (Accessed: 2025-04-05).

(4) Margaritoff, Marco (2025): Trump Announces Victory Day For WWII But Gets The Date Wrong: 'A Complete Moron'. Huffpost 05/02/2025. <https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-announces-victory-day-wwii-175110564.html> (Accessed: 2025-04-05).

(5) Russia's Medvedev says Trump's statement about US World War Two role was 'pretentious nonsense'. Reuters 05/03/1945. <https://www.reuters.com/world/russias-medvedev-says-trumps-statement-about-us-world-war-two-role-was-2025-05-03/> (Accessed: 2025-04-05).

(6) Adler, Katya (2025): Europe marks VE Day with Trump on its mind. BBC News 05/04/2025. <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn7x3v5d1y4o> (Accessed: 2025-04-05).

(7) Frei, Norbert (2002): Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration, 236. New York: Columbia University Press.

(8) Public Law 637/Chapter 886. US Congress 08/24/1954. <https://www.congress.gov/83/statute/STATUTE-68/STATUTE-68-Pg775.pdf> (Accessed: 2025-04-05).

(9) Blawis v. Bolin. Arizona District Court, Case No. Civ. 72-402 Phx. <https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/1zey0ee5l/arizona-district-court/blawis-v-bolin/> (Accessed: 2025-04-05).

(10) Bush, Lawrence (2012): The Communist Control Act. Jewish Currents 08/19/2012. (Accessed: 2025-04-05).

May 8: Liberation Day for Germany?

V-E Day – Victory in Europe Day – occurred on May 8, 1945, when German unconditionally surrendered to the United Nations alliance led by the US, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. This year is the 80th anniversary of that event. There will be commemorations and celebrations, such as the British Royal Mail special commemorative stamp issue:

On the 40th anniversary of the event in 1985, German President Richard von Weizsäcker surprised his country and the world in his reflections on the event:

"May 8 was a day of liberation." It's a statement that seems so obvious today, espousing a view shared by more than 80 percent of all Germans. But coming from the president of West Germany 30 years ago, it was nothing short of a sensation. Not only was Richard von Weizsäcker a member of the conservative party, he was also a soldier during World War II, ultimately earning the rank of captain. He was sent to one of the places where the war was fought with great brutality: the eastern front, following Germany's attack on the Soviet Union.

Until he uttered this sentence, May 8, 1945 was known as the day of "capitulation," the end of the war that Germany had "lost." (1)

This was one step in the ever-developing German process of doing historical memory. Given the destructive and catastrophic experience of German National Socialism with the Holocaust and the massive war it originated, developing sensible narratives for a democratic country to understand that experience in a realistic and serious way is a particularly challenging undertaking.

With his speech… von Weizsäcker was able to establish a new collective norm of historical remembrance. Not with the kind of distance we have now [2015] of 70 years, but at a time when millions of those involved in the events – whether as oppressor or victim – were still alive. And, in the face of much resistance from his own party, he gave Germans the task of never forgetting what happened in the years leading up to and during the war.

The fact that German reunification in 1990 provoked little fear or concern from the neighboring countries who suffered under the Nazis is a testament to the new historical identity of the Germans that Richard von Weizsäcker helped bring about 30 years ago. [my emphasis]

Remembering the past is something that nations do collectively, which is a process related to academic history but is by no means the same thing. Every country looks for historical and cultural markers to understand its own outlooks and approaches to problems. And, as times change, people ask new questions of the national past. To use a phrase popularized by New Left historians of the 1960s and 1970s, people look for a “usable past,” i.e., past experiences that provide meaningful perspectives on current challenges.

The nightmare of the Third Reich and its huge impact on Europe and the world has made German approaches to its own national history of special interest to other countries, as well. The Holocaust, the German-directed Nazi genocide against Jews, as well as against other targets groups like the Romany and Sente peoples (“gypsies”), has given Germany’s approach to its history even greater significance to other countries, as well.

And various issues since V-E Day have provided the occasion for public engagement with issues over interpreting the German past. This is a non-exhaustive list of some of the highlights:

Postwar Allied Occupation and Western “de-nazification” (the latter was 1945-1951).

Nuremberg Trials (1945-1946). These were the Allied trials of major German war criminals from the Second World War. (2)

Berlin Blockade and Airlift (1948-1949): This was one of many consequences of the war. But that experience was not specifically focused on the Nazis or the Holocaust, or even on the Second World War itself. (3)

Establishment of two separate German states, the Federal Republic of Germany in the West and the German Democratic Republic in the East (both in 1949).

West German recognition of Israel and payment of reparations related to the Holocaust. Formal diplomatic relation between Israel and the Federal Republic took place in 1965.

Trial of Adolf Eichmann (1961), famously recounted by Hannah Arendt in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963).

Auschwitz trials (1963-1968) (4)

Broadcast of the US-made mini-series The Holocaust in Germany (1979): This somewhat kitschy mini-series attracted a lot of attention when it was shown on German TV and generated a lot of interest and discussion on the Shoah. “A third of West Germany's population, some 20 million people, watched at least some of the four-part series in 1979.” (5) It was rebroadcast in German in 2019.

US President Ronald Reagan’s goes to Bitburg Cemetery (1985). This was a spectacularly ill-advised joint ceremony by US President Ronald Reagan and German Chancellor to Helmut Kohl at a German cemetery meant to be a celebration of German-US reconciliation on the 40th anniversary of V-E Day that turned into a big diplomatic embarrassment that generated new discussions about the role in the Second World War of the regular army (Wehrmacht) and the Nazi Party military units of the Waffen-SS. (6)

Historikerstreit [historians’ dispute] (1986-87): The Historikerstreit was an academic discussion that wound up being widely discussed in opinion columns and established some lasting themes in general discussion of the Holocaust. Included among them were the concepts of the “uniqueness” of the German Holocaust against the Jews and whether it can be or should be compared to any other genocides or mass killings. The impetus was an argument by a previously respectable German historian, Ernst Nolte, that the Russians were to blame for the mass killings of Jews at Auschwitz. Jürgen Habermas took the lead in publicly challenging this absurd claim, which was really a thinly-disguised version of Holocaust denial.

Goldhagen controversy: A book by American historian Daniel Goldhagen called Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) dealing with the motivation of ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers who participated in the Holocaust generated a great deal of discussion in Germany and the US over the nature and intensity of anti-Semitism in Germany. Despite the discussion it generated, Holocaust and German-history scholars like Omer Bartov, Christopher Browning, Norbert Frei and Volker Ullrich were underwhelmed by his arguments, which described German anti-Semitism as almost an inherited, ontological condition of Germans rather than a historical and ethnonationalist phenomenon. (7)

Wehrmacht Exposition (1995-1999, 2001-2004): The Institute for Social Research in Hamburg put together a museum exposition titled, Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944 (War of Extermination: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941-1944). It focused on war crimes committed by the Wehrmacht, the regular army. Popular understanding and even scholarly work in Germany had tended to focus on crimes committed by the Waffen-SS, a Nazi Party military unit, while the Wehrmacht was seen as an army engaged in regular military actions and not particularly involved in the Holocaust or civilian massacres. This exhibition and the discussion around it made more people aware that, yes, the Wehrmacht itself had committed massacres and other war crimes on a large scale. This was not news to historians of the war, but it surprised many people who had believed the popular version of the honorable Wehrmacht as compared to the evil Waffen-SS. Some of the photos turned out to be incorrectly labeled, so the exhibition was closed for several months and updated, then resumed in 2004. (8)

Postcolonialism, genocide and the Holocaust disputes (2020ff): The “postcolonial” perspective in history has grown more and important. It seeks to take a wider account of the role of colonialism in European history and its effects on both the formally colonized countries and also in the former “mother countries,” also called “metropoles” in relation to the “periphery” (colonized areas). The postcolonial perspective has also led to new scholarly considerations of how the behavior of colonial powers in the “periphery” made events like the Holocaust more possible. And public dispute took place in Germany around a invitation to the African scholar Achille Mbembe, a prominent advocate of the “postcolonial” perspective in history, to speak at a major conference in 2020. The dispute focused on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement aimed at pressuring Israel to pursue most just policies toward Palestinians. (9)

The Israel-Gaza War (2023ff): The dispute over whether Israel is currently conducting a genocide in Gaza and now in the West Bank has once again highlighted the role that the Holocaust plays as a political symbol for the State of Israel. It has led to some rather bizarre consequences, with some European countries including Germany and now the United States under Trump 2.0 sanctioning or forbidding criticism of Israeli actions as “genocide” on the grounds that it is on its face anti-Semitic to do so. This trend reduces the Holocaust to something like a brand identity for the State of Israel rather than a historical event of genocide. (10)

Notes:

(1) Steiner, Felix (2015): Historical speech. Deutsche Welle 02/11/2015. <https://www.dw.com/en/opinion-the-speech-about-history-that-made-history/a-18250339> (Accessed: 2025-24-04).

(2) Justice at Nuremberg. Truman Library, n/d. <https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/education/presidential-inquiries/justice-nuremberg> (Accessed: 2025-02-05).

(3) Editors (2025). Berlin blockade. Encyclopedia Britannica 03/24/2025. <https://www.britannica.com/event/Berlin-blockade> (Accessed: 2025-02-05).

(4) Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial. UNESCO n/d. <https://www.unesco.org/en/memory-world/frankfurt-auschwitz-trial> (Accessed: 2025-29-04).

(5) McGuinness, Damien (2019): Holocaust: How a US TV series changed Germany BBC News 01/30/2019. <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47042244> (Accessed: 2025-02-05).

(7) Schulkin, Carl (1996): Review of Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. H-Net Reviews Dec. 1996. <https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=746> Accessed: 2025-01-05).

(8) Wirbel um die Wehrmacht. Deutsche Welle 28.01.2004. <https://www.dw.com/de/wirbel-um-die-wehrmacht/a-1098134> (Accessed : 2025-02-05).

(9) Michaels, Ralf (2020): On the Mbembe Anti-Semitism Debate in Germany: A Decolonial Critique of German Universalism. Max Plank Law Perspectives 08/04/2020. <https://law.mpg.de/perspectives/mbembe-anti-semitism-debate-in-germany/> DOI: 10.17176/20220530-124418-0> (Accessed : 2025-02-05).

Kolonialismus mit Holocaust vergleichbar? ORF.at 02/06/2022. <https://orf.at/stories/3245944/> (Accessed : 2025-02-05).

(10) PBS News/AP (2024): Netanyahu frequently makes claims of antisemitism. Critics say he’s deflecting blame. PBS Newshour 05/29/2024. <https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/netanyahu-frequently-makes-claims-of-antisemitism-critics-say-hes-deflecting-blame> (Accessed : 2025-02-05).

Promoting respectable callousness – ICE thug version

Where we are with the Trump 2.0 regime?

For one thing, they are starting to deport US citizens and are issuing threats to attorneys who are US to get out of the country within a week: (1)

The ICE thugs, aka, la migra, are acting more like goons than ever, apparently:

On Thursday, April 24, about 20 armed agents stormed the property.

"I don't know who they were," Marisa told KFOR. "It was dark. All the lights were off." …

The woman said the agents had a search warrant for the home, but the people named in it do not live there.

Marisa said the agents forced her and her daughters outside into the rain before they had a chance to get dressed.

"They wanted me to change in front of all of them, in between all of them," she said. "My husband has not even seen my daughter in her undergarments—her own dad, because it's respectful. You have her out there, a minor, in her underwear."

Marisa discovered that the names on the search warrant didn't belong to her or anyone in her family. Instead, she recognized them from mail still being delivered to the house—likely addressed to former residents.

"We just moved here from Maryland," Marisa said. "We're citizens. That's what I kept saying. 'We're citizens.'" (2)

She reported that the migra goons took “their phones, laptops and their entire cash savings [amount unspecified] as "evidence."

ICE now admits that their goons realized they had attacked the wrong people – if “wrong” people to attack is even a concept for la migra thugs. KFOR news in Oklahoma City reports, “The U.S. Department of Homeland Security admits they know the mom and three daughters who say ICE agents left them traumatized when they raided their Oklahoma City home were not the suspects they were after.” (3)

The Northern District of Oklahoma U.S. Attorney’s office told KFOR that U.S. federal agents arrested eight Guatemalan Nationals during a set of raids across the country last Thursday as part of an operation cracking down on illegal immigration ordered by President Trump.

The names of the eight suspects they arrested are the same suspect names listed on the warrant served on Marissa’s house, where none of them were located.

For days, we have been asking the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, for answers.

They finally responded Wednesday, confirming the raid on Marissa’s house was part of that nationwide operation, and admitting for the first time that Marissa and her family were not supposed to be targeted. [my emphasis]

In a world where there was a responsible majority in either House of Congress, the punks who head ICE, and anyone else who’s calling the shots like Border Czar Tom Homan (officially the “White House Executive Associate Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations”) would be hauled in front of Congress and asked why they are taking such criminal actions. Ask them specifically whether they approve of how la migra treated this woman and her daughters. Is forcing them to stand outside in their underwear in the rain acceptable to these Republican officials who profess to be such fine Christian white folks?

She said they ordered her and her daughters outside into the rain before they could even put on clothes.

“They wanted me to change in front of all of them, in between all of them,” she said. “My husband has not even seen my daughter in her undergarments—her own dad, because it’s respectful. You have her out there, a minor, in her underwear.” (3)

And they should be forced to state what they will do to la migra goons who break the law in the course of their official actions. And also Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem, who is apparently auditioning for the lead role in the remake of Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS:

That’s probably being too generous: starring in gross porno movies would be a more constructive contribution to society than what she’s currently doing.

(I’ll confess that in my wild youth, I saw that film in a theater on a dare. I can say confidently it’s genuinely disgusting. I almost threw up during it.)

Continuing with what the woman who KFOR identified just as “Marissa”:

Marissa said the agents tore apart every square inch of the house and what few belongings they had, seizing their phones, laptops and their life savings in cash as “evidence.”

Before they left, Marissa said one of the agents made a comment.

“One of them said, ‘I know it was a little rough this morning,’” she said. “It was so denigrating. That you do all of this to a family, to women, your fellow citizens. And it was a little rough? You literally traumatized me and my daughters for life. We’re going to have to go get help or get over this somehow.”

Now, Marissa said they have, quite literally, nothing.

“I said, ‘when are we going to get our stuff back?’ They said it could be days or it could be months,” she said.

Marissa said she is left with nothing but questions.

“What if I would have been armed,” she said. “You’re breaking in. What am I supposed to think? My initial thought was we were being robbed—that my daughters, being females, were being kidnapped. You have guns pointed in our faces. Can you just reprogram yourself and see us as humans, as women?

This is who supporters of MAGA, the Trump Cult, are. This is who today’s Republican Party is. They get off on hearing stories like this. You often hear critics of authoritarianism reminding us, “The cruelty is the point.” And that’s true.

But giving people permission to enjoy and the cruelty – when it’s done to someone else, of course, someone part of The Others – is also a conscious goal of the Trumpista movement.

I’ve been citing the German sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer’s concept of “respectable callousness” (röhe Bürgerlichkeit), which means the phenomenon of people thinking it’s fine, socially acceptable, and even enjoyable to celebrate cruelty committed against other people. More specifically, celebrating the government committing such acts of cruelty. It’s something that authoritarian regimes like Trump 2.0 actively promote.

Raids like those la migra has been performing in a state-terror style like Marissa’s case are examples of such cruelty and Trumpista officials don’t mind them being publicized. They want people to be aware that the regime could do the same to them.

Marissa’s comment to KFOR, “What if I had been armed?” is a reminder of the twisted nature of Trumpista ideology. Remember those Trump fans that Trump celebrated as "Second Amendment people" in 2016? “Donald Trump suggested at a rally Tuesday afternoon that the "Second Amendment people" could do something about Hillary Clinton choosing judges if she is elected president, a comment some took to mean he was implying violence against the Democratic nominee.”

The aspiring rightwing terrorists who refer to themselves as “patriot militia” types have been saying since forever that we need an unlimited flood of pistols, rifles, shotguns, and combat rifles among American citizens because that’s the only sure protection against jack-booted thugs from the federal gubment bustin’ into your house, holding you illegally, stealing your stuff, and doing things like making you and your children stand outside at night in the rain in your underwear. We’ll see how many Second Amendment enthusiasts are willing to criticize this action in public.

According to the “castle doctrine” and “stand-your-ground“ concepts that the "Second Amendment people" have been promoting and even getting enacted into state laws, if an individual or an armed gang of thugs come busting into your house at night, it actually would be legal to shoot them.

It’s highly advisable for people who keep loaded guns available in their houses for self-defense to stay well-trained on how to use them. And I believe the usual law-enforcement advice is still that if you hear someone breaking into the house, getting out of the house if possible is the preferable approach. And also to call emergency services right away, and also for single-home units to have an alarm system that is connected to the local police department.

The truth of it is that what Melissa referred to, that busting into a house could get the home invaders shot. And presumably the pervy migra goons would immediately respond with deadly force without a second thought, since a lot of them are working at ICE anyway because they could pass police academy training to meet the standard to be local cops.

And if a house alarm connected to the local police went off and the cops showed up and saw people carrying guns outside the house and some of them were masked, the cops themselves could be the ones who initiate the shooting. I don’t know if la migra makes a practice of notifying the local cops of raids like this beforehand. And even Kristi Noam’s thuggish operation probably wouldn’t care if they killed a few actual police officers because they would then blame it DEI programs, or treasonous mayors, or something, and use that as a reason to be even more unprofessional.

My guess is that at least some bad operators in the Trump 2.0 regime are hoping for shootouts to happen so they can use it to promote the narrative that they are fighting terrorists and gang members and violent criminals.

KFOR also reports, “Marissa said the men identified themselves as federal agents with the U.S. Marshals, ICE, and the FBI.” They quote the U.S. Marshals Service as saying they had advance knowledge of the migra raid “but did not assist in any capacity.“ Also: “News 4 reached out to the FBI. Last week, a spokesperson said they were assisting on this case and directed inquiries to Homeland Security.”

I believe it’s a crime for law-enforcement officials to lie about who they are. Or does that no longer apply to migra Brownshirts?

To top it all off, the Trump 2.0 regime is lying about the actual number of people they are deporting. Because of course they are:

To meet President Donald Trump's goal of deporting 1 million people a year, the administration would have to have sent well over 100,000 people packing in his first 100 days.

On Trump's 99th day in office, his border czar says the administration is on track, deporting 139,000 people since Trump's inauguration.

"The numbers are good," Tom Homan said April 28 during a news conference at the White House.

But immigration experts say the figures don't add up. (5)

Notes:

(1) Victims of Trump's irresponsible anti-immigrant crusade include American citizens. MSNBC YouTube channel 04/30/2025. <https://youtu.be/zbSMcIDwdmg?si=990M0PRkmrAnhBgM> (Accessed: 2025-01-05.

(2) ICE Agents Raid Home, Force Family Out in Their Underwear: 'Traumatized' Newsweek 04/30/2025. <https://www.newsweek.com/ice-agents-force-family-underwear-oklahoma-2065984> (Accessed: 2025-01-05).

(3) Humphrey, Spencer/KFOR (2025): ‘We’re citizens!’: Oklahoma City family traumatized after ICE raids home, but they weren’t suspects. Oklahoma News 4 04/30/2025. <https://kfor.com/news/local/were-citizens-oklahoma-city-family-traumatized-after-ice-raids-home-but-they-werent-suspects/> (Accessed: 2025-01-05).

See: also: Homeland Security admits Oklahoma raid targeted wrong people. Oklahoma News 4 05/01/2025. <https://kfor.com/news/local/homeland-security-admits-oklahoma-raid-targeted-wrong-people/> (Accessed: 2025-01-05).

(4) Schultheis, Emily (2016): Trump: "Second Amendment people" could do something about Clinton judge choices. CBS News 08/09/2016. <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-second-amendment-people-could-do-something-about-clinton-judge-choices/> (Accessed: 2025-01-05).

(5) Villagran, Lauren (2025): White House touts nearly 140,000 deportations, but data says roughly half actually deported. USA Today 04/28/2025. <https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/28/trump-100-days-touts-deportation-surge/83280907007/> (Accessed: 2025-01-05).

April 30 –Vietnam War anniversary and Trump celebrates 100 days

Responsible Statecraft looks at what the US learned – or didn’t – from the spectacularly misguided US war in Vietnam:

The nation had been ruptured politically and socially over the war, a divide that one could say has never really healed.

Yet ironically, Washington’s proclivity to intervene in other countries’ affairs and to use military power as the first resort has only grown. It would seem the true lessons of Vietnam were left on that iconic rooftop from which the last helicopter left Saigon 50 years ago.

Some say after WWII, U.S. power and intervention has always maintained the global liberal order and that Vietnam was a “mistake” — a one-off. Others say it was a sign that the pretense of America as the "indispensable nation” was folly from the beginning, that the Cold War had blinded us to the realities of the world and the limits of military intervention. [my emphasis] (1)

Andrew Bacevich offers this observation:

The United States has yet to reckon fully with the causes and consequences of the Vietnam War. Why? Because American foreign policy elites have spent the last 50 years engaged in a concerted effort to evade their responsibility for that disaster. Their success in doing so helps explain the dubious record of U.S. policy since. Yesterday's mistakes become the basis for tomorrow's actions.

And he has more to say in this interview: (2)

David Cay Johnston is an actual expert on Donald Trump’s career. Michael Shore interviews him to talk about where 100 days of Trump 2.0 has taken us: (3)

Notes:

(1) Symposium: Was the Vietnam War a mistake or fatal flaw in the system? Responsible Statecraft 04/30/2025. <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/vietnam-war/> (Accessed: 2025-30-04).

(2) How Vietnam Ushered in a New Era of Endless Wars with Andrew Bacevich | Always at War. Quincy Institute YouTube channel 04/30/2025. <https://youtu.be/v0qrnZL7_0w?si=6u85KhBYAtHwxrkD> (Accessed: 2025-30-04).

(3) ‘I Run the Country and the World' Donald Trump believes He’s Invincible, David Cay Johnston. The Mark Thompson Show YouTube channel 04/30/2025. <https://youtu.be/N3JQBjcfAUQ?si=DvjC6ianxmF4Odoa> (Accessed: 2025-30-04).

April 30: 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War

Tomorrow, April 30, is the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam. The occasion is celebrated by Vietnam as Reunification Day.

Despite the relatively good relations at the moment between Vietnam and the US, the Trump 2.0 regime is making a point of turning down the Vietnamese invitation to be present at the anniversary ceremony this year.

Last week, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration had told its senior diplomats in Vietnam not to take part in events related to the anniversary including a reception on April 29 and the military parade the next day.

While not confirming the report, a State Department spokesperson told NPR that the United States and Vietnam "have a robust bilateral relationship and we are committed to deepening and broadening those ties."

For its part, Vietnam's foreign ministry said that Hanoi and Washington have now formed "a comprehensive strategic partnership for peace, cooperation and sustainable development."

The comprehensive strategic partnership is the highest level of bilateral relations between Vietnam and any other country. [my emphasis] (1)

Par for the course in the chronically chaotic diplomacy of Trump 2.0 so far, it’s not entirely clear why they want to make such a point of the boycott. Paul Pillar notes:

In the five decades since, the United States and Vietnam forged a warm, multifaceted relationship. Diplomatic relations were normalized in 1995. In the words of a State Department fact sheet published this January, “U.S.-Vietnam relations have become increasingly cooperative and comprehensive, evolving into a flourishing partnership that spans political, economic, security, and people-to-people ties.” Bilateral trade grew from $451 million in 1995 to nearly $124 billion in 2023.

In 2023, during a visit to Vietnam by President Joe Biden, the two nations declared a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership that extends to defense and security matters. A key shared interest underlying such cooperation is to limit the expanding influence and power of China.

This later history has demonstrated how badly wrong the major assumptions underlying the U.S. decision to go to war in Vietnam were. The military adversary there was not, as was assumed, part of a communist monolith led by Moscow and Beijing. The subsequent history has shown how the United States can have a mutually beneficial relationship even with a regime that still avows an ideology foreign to America’s own. [my emphasis] (2)

Historian Amanda Demmer also why April 30 is now taken as an official endpoint of the war:

April 30, 1975 is commonly understood to be the dramatic endpoint of the Vietnam War. For the victorious Vietnamese, what they called the liberation of Saigon marked a “total victory after thirty years of grim and bloody sacrifice.”[1] For those Vietnamese who lost, the events of late April evoke the collapse of their country, the erasure of their nation from the geopolitical map, an indescribable loss. Accordingly, for Vietnamese communities in the United States, April 30th is commemorated as a day of grief and mourning, “Black April.” For the U.S. government, the rapid fall of Saigon spurred a hasty, humiliating exit immortalized in Dutch photographer Hubert Van Es’ (in)famous image of a U.S. helicopter frantically evacuating individuals off a rooftop in downtown Saigon. Although the Peace of Paris Accords had brought the last of U.S. combat troops home in March 1973, the inglorious exit in April 1975 was depicted then and has been generally remembered since as a fitting conclusion to the nation’s first military loss, the exclamation point at the end of a long line of failures and embarrassments in which the limits of American power were thrown into sharp relief. Concluding the narrative of the Vietnam War on April 30, 1975 seems obvious (even if for many, painful) insofar as the war was finally over. [my emphasis] (3)

Then she concludes that paragraph with, “Except, it wasn’t.”

In other words, wars don’t end on a single point of time and then everything reverts back to conditions before the conflict. “The dualities, ironies, and paradoxes of the decades after 1975 are only decipherable once we acknowledge that, rather than diametrically opposed, war and peace are often entangled.”

She mentions that mass migration that was often at the time known as the story of the “Boat People.”

The departure of over three million people from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia between 1975 and 1995 marked one of the largest migrations of the late twentieth century. In the twenty years after 1975, over one million Vietnamese ultimately resettled in the United States through journeys that involved clandestine flight or emigration programs that brought individuals directly from Vietnam to the United States. The vast majority were former American allies and their close family members. Despite the tendency to frame refugee migrations as parenthetical to or found in the postscript of the “real” war, the recent conflict in Ukraine serves as a vivid reminder that displacement and dislocation are part and parcel of the wartime experience.

The Austrian migration expert Gerald Knaus (4), who heads the European Stability Initiative (ESI), describes the international response to the Vietnamese refugee crisis organized through a 1979 conference in Geneva as a very successful response to such a crisis, one from which European countries today could still learn a lot. (5)

Knaus provides the following graph indicating the scope of the international cooperation in voluntarily taking in those refugees, with columns showing the number of Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodians, and the total who were taken on by country:

Notes:

(1) Pham, Nga (2025): Despite improving relations, U.S. will be absent from Vietnam's war anniversary parade. NPR 04/29/2025. <https://www.npr.org/2025/04/29/g-s1-63164/despite-improving-relations-u-s-will-be-absent-from-vietnams-war-anniversary-parade> (Accessed: 2025-29-04).

(2) Pillar, Paul (2025): Trump can boycott, but the failure and end of Vietnam War is a fact. Responsible Statecraft 04/28/2025. <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-vietnam-anniversary/> (Accessed: 2025-29-04).

(3) Demmer, Amanda (2023): The Many Ends of the Vietnam War. Organization of American Historians 04/25/2023. <https://www.oah.org/process/demmer-many-ends-of-the-vietnam-war/> (Accessed: 2025-29-04).

(4) Knaus, Gerald (2020): Welche Grenzen brauchen wir? 96-120. München: Piper.

(5) Thea, Jessica (2018): Lessons for Today as Refugees International Marks an Important Anniversary. Refugees International 07/19/2018. <https://www.refugeesinternational.org/lessons-for-today-as-refugees-international-marks-an-important-anniversary/> (Accessed: 2025-29-04).

Seymour Hersh on Trump, Ukraine, Israel

Seymour Hersh after decades of digging up interesting news is still doing the same. He looks at Trump’s first (almost) one hundred days on Ukraine and Israel policy. (1)

Like most reporters following the Trump 2.0 diplomacy on the Russia-Ukraine War, Hersh sees the negotiations as a mess, like pretty much his entire second term so far:

But there seemed to be, if not a plan, at least a clear presidential voice on foreign policy. Trump was a self-declared friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and together they would settle the Ukraine War. There were communications between Trump and Putin and talk about possible Trump resorts in Russian-occupied Crimea and Donbass. There was discussion of American investments in Russia’s oil and gas fields and rare earth mines. Despite their hatred of Putin and fear of Russia, the European members of NATO would have no choice but to come along.

A negotiating team was assembled, led by Vice President JD Vance and Army General Keith Kellogg, to head the talks with the Russians. It has not worked out. Putin apparently was not interested in dealing with the Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, although he has continued to meet with various emissaries from Washington. [my emphasis]

Hersh suggests that Trump is basically ready to toss up his hands on those negotiations:

There were some members of the US negotiating team who thought that Trump would not keep up an endless commitment to negotiate a settlement, if one did not come easily. “At some point,” I was told, “he will turn it over to the UN and offer help in enforcing whatever they can work out.”

But the “some members” may have been hoping for something like divine intervention. If the US and Russia can’t agreement on a substantive settlement in Ukraine, why would the UN – where both Russia and the US would have to agree in the Security Council for any substantive action to take place – be able to conclude a deal? Russia is extremely unlikely to sign on to any agreement not endorsed in some clear way to the US. And they also see, like every government on the planet, that what Trump agrees to today, he may just toss out the window tomorrow.

Trump is clearly only interested in diplomatic deals that do one of two things and preferably both: (1) increase his personal wealth, and/or (2) make him look good on television for a day or two. Countries like Ukraine and Russia, who both have seriously high stakes in the outcome of the war, aren’t going to agree to something that doesn’t meet their substantive national security needs as they understand them.

This is an interesting observation, which Hersh doesn’t elaborate further in his piece:

In fact, as [as involved American] official had earlier told me, the American negotiators have long been following the recommendation of a few senior officers in the Russian Army that the focus should be on a ceasefire “and do not let Putin turn the talks into details of a ‘final’ settlement which will be endless. Stop the killing now.” [my emphasis]

Hersh argues, “Any vague notion of Trump being a rational figure in international diplomacy was blown apart” on Wednesday, April 24, when Zelenskyy publicly rejected the latest obviously unserious Russian proposal for a settlement. Which prompted Trump to issue his sad, pathetic “Vladimir, STOP!” message on his social media platform.

Until that public blast, the official said, there had been no sign from Trump that Zelensky’s ability to garner support and promises of military aid from European leaders, along with favorable press coverage, was a reason [for Trump’s frustration]. But the official told me that he had predicted that Zelensky’s glowing European press coverage would eventually lead to trouble. “A fairytale gone bad,” he said. “Prince Charming’s slipper didn’t fit the evil step-sister.”

Given the fog of bizarre TrumpThink in which Trump 2.0 functions, fairy tales are as good a guide to explaining his actions as anything else. More appropriate, even.

Historian Anne Applebaum, who is married to current Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, recently discussed the current Ukrainian situation: (2)

On the Bibi Netanyahu front, Hersh seems to think Trump has been somewhat less cooperative with him than expected. Netanyahu, he writes, “has been complaining bitterly about the collapse of his relationship with Trump.”

Then again, Netanyahu always complains bitterly when US Presidents don’t jump to comply the moment he demands that they do something he wants. He’s been trying for two decades to get the US into a direct war with Iran and has so far been disappointed. How Hersh comes to the following conclusion is a mystery: “[Netanyahu] has been able to be direct and often challenging to other US presidents, especially Joe Biden, but he does not dare say no to Trump.”

Hersh also does state the obvious here, though: “In past years he was able to come to Washington and give a talk to a joint session of Congress in which he took on an American President with no fear of retribution.”

But Trump’s willingness to support Israel’s ongoing war on civilians in Gaza doesn’t indicate that Netanyahu and Israel have little reason to fear anything remotely resembling “retribution” from the Trump 2.0 regime.

And US war with Iran is still a live possibility:

A powerful explosion occurred on Saturday at Shahid Rajaei port in the southern Iranian city of Bandar Abbas, wounding over 500 people, according to Iranian media reports. The port was reportedly targeted by an Israeli cyberattack in 2020. …

The Iranian fuel company announced that the explosion did not affect energy facilities in the country. The blast occurred as the third round of talks between Iran and the United States on a nuclear agreement are taking place in Oman's capital, Muscat. (3)

Peace President Trump isn’t sounding entirely defiant against Netanyahu’s demands on Iran:

On Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump said he was not concerned about the possibility of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dragging him and the United States into a war with Iran."He may go into a war, but we're not getting dragged in," Trump said. "I may go in very willingly if we can't get a deal."

Trump reiterated statements he has made several times recently that an attack on Iran is a possible scenario and added that he did not say no to an Israeli strike.

Trump’s Inauguration stunt of getting Israel to agree to a ceasefire which now has long since ended created a useful PR position for the Peace President:

The agreement held firm for two months, during which Hamas released 33 Israeli hostages, 25 of them alive. But just before the second stage of the deal, during which Hamas was supposed to release all the remaining hostages, with Israel withdrawing its forces from Gaza, everything fell apart. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused to enter negotiations over the withdrawal from Gaza and tried to impose new terms on Hamas for a deal in which only a handful of hostages would be released, with the cease-fire prolonged for several weeks instead of becoming permanent.

More than a month has passed since Netanyahu's failed attempt to renegotiate the agreement that he himself signed, and so far, not one of the 59 hostages still in Gaza has been released. The renewal of the war, against loud, heartbreaking protests by the families of the hostages, hasn't made Hamas budge in its refusal to accept partial or temporary agreements. …

Though Israel isn't officially part of the nuclear talks, Netanyahu and [Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron] Dermer have put forward their own demands. They want the "Libyan model" implemented in Iran – a complete dismantling of the country's nuclear infrastructure, both military and civilian. But since the man who signed on to this model, Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi, was lynched – even if for other reasons – this model is never going to be adopted by Iran's extremist rulers. Its very introduction is nothing but an attempt to kill the negotiations. (4)

One seeming diplomatic accomplishment of the Trump 1.0 Administration was the Abraham Accords, which was aimed at improving relations between Israel and Arab countries while leaving the Palestinians to their fate at the hand of the Israelis. But even that concrete achievement of the Peace President isn’t working out so will in that regard:

Even as recently as February, news reports and commentaries on a potential Saudi-Israel normalization deal continued to surface, despite mounting anger across the region. Brokered by Washington, the proposed peace effort would aim to secure a defense pact between the United States and Saudi Arabia in exchange for normalizing ties with Israel. U.S. decisionmakers insisted that a deal was in its final stages, and recently, a giant billboard appeared in Washington, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv depicting Trump and Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) shaking hands with an Israeli flag in the background. The sign proclaimed, “Israel is ready.”

However, news of the negotiations has grown sparse, likely due to the resumption of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza and explicit plans to ethnically cleanse the enclave that have only escalated public outrage in Saudi Arabia. Thus to the extent that talks are ongoing, they are volatile and fragile, and will remain closely guarded by the Saudi leadership — as the kingdom continues to call out Israel’s actions in Gaza and position itself as a champion of the Palestinian cause. [my emphasis] (5)

And the Peace President’s ongoing diplomatic incompetence isn’t playing a constructive role in that situation, either:

Saudi Arabia’s patience was nearly completely eroded when Trump, in a meeting with Netanyahu at the White House on Feb. 4, proposed that the United States should take over Gaza and permanently displace the Palestinian population. To make matters worse, Trump claimed that Saudi Arabia was not demanding a Palestinian state as a precondition for normalizing ties with Israel.

Branko Marcetic summed up the Peace President’s foreign policy so far in an April 9 essay:

It’s not just that all of the wars that were going on under Biden - Ukraine, Yemen, and Gaza - are still going under Trump. That last one, incidentally, Trump had first forced a cease-fire on before, in a Biden-like move, he capitulated to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and let him restart the war and the accompanying siege of Gaza and escalate seizure of Palestinian land.

This is all for the goal, according to Netanyahu, of fulfilling Trump’s wish to clear the territory of Palestinians and put it under US control - an idea Trump just reiterated again this week, and which would put US lives at risk to permanently occupy hostile Middle Eastern land in intimate service of a bloody ethnic cleansing campaign.

If that weren’t all, the Trump administration is now looking to add new wars to this slate. After restarting the Biden administration’s aimless and illegal bombing of the Houthis with no success, the administration is now reportedly mulling backing a ground invasion of Yemen whose aim would be regime change - which, if it happens, will be reviving another former Washington forever war that had actually seemed to wind to a close under Biden. Besides that, Trump’s CIA is looking seriously at bombing Mexico, the president has refused to rule out military force to capture Greenland, and the White House has inched slowly but surely toward war with Iran … [my emphasis] (6)

Other than that, the Peace President is making the world more peaceful by the minute!

Notes:

(1) Hersh, Seymour (2025): One Hundred Days of Chaos. Seymour Hersh Substack 04/24/2025. <https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/one-hundred-days-of-chaos> (Accessed: 2025-26-04).

(2) Top Historian: How the Ukraine War is Going to End. The Jordan Harbinger Show YouTube channel 04/19/2025. <https://youtu.be/tKdpLFvxJxg?si=K3h_udHIDWne4xr3> (Accessed: 2025-26-04).

(3) Khoury, Jack & Reuters (2025): Over 500 Reportedly Wounded in Port Explosion in Southern Iran's Bandar Abbas. Haaretz 04/26/2025. <https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/2025-04-26/ty-article/close-to-300-reportedly-wounded-in-port-explosion-in-southern-irans-bandar-abbas/00000196-7198-d41c-a7ff-fdffe0440000> (Accessed: 2025-26-04).

(4) Tibon, Amir (2025): Netanyahu Killed Trump's Gaza Cease-fire. Now Will He Sabotage the U.S.-Iran Talks? Haaretz 04/20/2025. <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-04-20/ty-article/.premium/netanyahu-killed-trumps-gaza-cease-fire-now-will-he-sabotage-the-u-s-iran-talks/00000196-537d-d1c7-a3b7-5fffae280000> (Accessed: 2025-26-04).

(5) How Gaza’s horrors turned Israeli normalization into a Saudi domestic crisis. +972 Magazine 04/24/2025. <https://www.972mag.com/saudi-israeli-normalization-gaza-crisis/> (Accessed: 2025-26-04).

(6) Marcetic, Branko (2025): Donald Trump Is Doubling Down on All of Joe Biden’s Failures. Jacobin 04/09/2025. <https://jacobin.com/2025/04/trump-biden-inflation-wars-censorship> (Accessed: 2025-26-04).

Is liberal democracy a tool of Russian and Chinese warfare? You might think so from this piece

Then-President Trump Hosted Hungary's authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to the Oval Office back in 2019 as a signal of his Administration's support for far-right governments restricting democratic processes and overriding the rule of law for the benefit of authoritarian governments and the oligarchs they represent.

The relationship of the Trumpists and the Republican Party to particular authoritarian movement provides an important perspective on the argument made by Buddhika Jayamaha and Jahara Matisek in an article for the US Army's Strategic Studies Institute's journal Parameters, "Social Media Warriors: Leveraging a New Battlespace" Parameters Winter 2018-19.

Jayamaha and Matisek make a disturbing argument treating foreign governments surreptitiously using Facebook ads as a form of warfare.

Hungary's Embassy put on a conference for Christian Right Republicans promoting Orbán's brand of völkish family policy in 2019. Ariana Eunjung Cha reported for the Washington Post. (2)

The conservative Christian Post carried this report by Samuel Smith, 'Make Families Great Again': Hungary seeing more babies, fewer abortions through pro-family policies 03/17/2019:

“I was very proud to be a minister here and hearing from our American friends how much they admired the Hungarian family policies,” Katalin Novák, the Hungarian minister of state for family, youth and international affairs who gave a keynote address at the event, told The Christian Post in an interview. ....

Today, the Hungarian government spends nearly 5 percent of its GDP towards incentives for those in the predominantly-Christian nation to get married and have children — lots of them. ...

Participants in the conference included White House director of strategic communications Mercedes Schlapp, President Trump’s special assistant on domestic policy Kathryn Talento and Health and Human Services senior policy advisor Valerie Huber.

The event also included Reps. Chris Smith, R-N.J., Andy Harris, R-Md., Paul Gosar, R-Ariz and Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb.

Others included Family Research Council President and USCIRF commissioner Tony Perkins, former White House advisor Sebastian Gorka, American Conservative Union Chair Matt Schlapp and as Emilie Kao, the director of the Heritage Foundation's DeVos Center for Religion & Civil Society.

“We are working closely with the U.S. administration on family issues. They would also like to get some detail on our pro-family policies and the measures that we have introduced in the last nine years,” Novák, who is also the vice president of the Fidesz Party explained. (3)

The ever-odious Sebastian Gorka - whose public persona is that of a creepy James Bond movie villain - is now Senior Director for Counterterrorism in the Trump 2.0 regime. I'm not focusing here on Orbán's family policy, which is part of a broader xenophobic and anti-EU policy that promotes a conservative, traditionalist vision of society. It is also exceptionally unlikely to achieve even its stated goal of increasing Hungary's birth rate to the replacement rate by 2030. Rolling back time is just a hard thing to achieve.

But that 2019 conference, explicitly approved by the Trump 1.0 White House, is an illustration of one of many ways that politics in one country provides ideas to people elsewhere. And how governments promote that effect in ways that cover a full range from perfectly legitimate to illegal.

Jayamaha and Jahara Matisek in Parameters are addressing a real and legitimate national security issue. But I'm struck by their framing, which on a generous interpretation could be easily adapted to justify authoritarian policies. They lay out their perspective this way:

Civil society presents a fundamental blind spot in the American military understanding of warfare. Long associated by philosophers as a bulwark against tyranny in liberal democracies, civil society has been weaponized by hostile actors, such as Russia and China, and violent nonstate actors, such as the Islamic State. The adversaries’ strategy involves infiltrating Western civil society in order to foment dissent and create breaches along ethnic, racial, religious, and socioeconomic lines.

The new tactics create ideologically sympathetic individuals who desire policy changes that align with the adversarial state’s ideology or that promote detrimental and self-destructive views; these views, in turn, can undermine societal cohesion while disrupting foreign policy choices. This approach accentuates attacks on Western civil society across multiple dimensions by using social media warriors who indirectly receive orders from, and are secretly paid by, Moscow, Beijing, and other Western adversaries. These social media warriors and their handlers regard the internet as an unguarded, undersurveilled, and ill-defined human-to-human interface that can be easily manipulated. Subsequently, social media forums such as Facebook and Twitter become a battlespace of ideas, injected with disinformation in hopes of influencing individual, societal, and political behavior.

As a consequence, the discourse of Western civil society is shaped in ways fundamentally hostile to the effective functioning of pluralist liberal democracies. Fomenting dissension by spreading divisive social media posts and polarizing memes leads citizens in Western societies to like, and to share, the messages as well as to advocate for the ideas, thus creating a destructive civil discourse. In a homogenous society, such as Iceland, this type of campaign has less impact because the societal differences are primarily economic. [my emphasis]

Let me interrupt here to point out that the population of Iceland is roughly 360,000. The city of Atlanta GA alone has around 486 thousand.

But in countries with a variety of cultural and historical cleavages, malicious civil discourse deepens existing divisions that make social relations more acrimonious.

Disinformation tactics against civil societies in the United States and its Western allies are not particularly new. The novelty, however, is the use of free and open civil discourse, which is traditionally a Western strength, as the center of sociocultural strategy aimed at manipulating civil society into a new battlespace. The first component of this strategy relies on the existence of the internet and the use of social media. With the internet as the medium, individuals conduct essential societal interactions through a variety of apps and platforms that provide instantaneous, uberefficient, daily social contacts without the boundaries that affected civil interaction during the twentieth century. Anti-Western actors use these virtual networks to produce and to breed ideas degenerative to stable societal norms, which ultimately impact policy debates and elections. [my emphasis]

The rest of the article is filled with words, phrases, and comments to describe this process like these quotes:

• Many virulent Salafi-Jihadists preach Western destruction in Western capitals and large cosmopolitan cities where their dialogue is legally protected.
• ... undermining Western policy-making capacity and state power
• ... in liberal democracies that are easily exploitable by hybrid actors who face few mechanisms of enforcement.
• The value of freedom to liberal societies further complicates efforts to detect hostile attempts to create schismogenesis [social division] because recognizing the activity requires substantial domestic surveillance.
• ... the West’s adversaries rely on a strategy of socially embedding hostility into the political discourse, converting civil society from a constructive force into a destructive one.
• The strength of American democracy similarly promotes the same rights for all groups whether they are white supremacist groups in Charlottesville, Virginia, or Black Lives Matter marches in Houston, Texas.
• ... Western laws, traditions, and norms prevent governments from investigating the actions of civil society organizations without reasonable cause.
• Each individual has the potential to undermine the strengths of each aspect of civil society from within, sometimes with the complicity of individuals, sometimes via inadvertent foreign threats, and sometimes through soft power influence such as China’s educational exchanges through the Confucius Institute.
• Nefarious governments, state affiliated proxies, and nonstate actors can, and do, exploit this defining liberal principle.
• Many citizens with access to social media are subconsciously led to choose one side of a purely manufactured debate.
• Such warfare is difficult for political and military leaders to respond to adequately, which has dark implications for how democracies are supposed to work.
• ... the same Western culture and civil society institutions that made America and the West culturally stronger than the Soviet Union have been exploited by the losing side of the Cold War.

Parameters is not National Review. And the Strategic Studies Institute is not FOX News. But FOX and National Review are also not official military journals. Which means that these kinds of ideas in Parameters are considered part of the respectable spectrum of US military scholarship.

So, on the one hand, Jayamaha and Matisek are identifying some legitimate issues about information operations directed by governments.

But it's also striking that they raise some dilemmas that are as old as the concept of free speech as though they are dramatic new developments of the last decade or two. And they use vague, insinuating language that was actually common as dirt during the Cold War to blur distinctions that are actually not only much easier to make than their article suggests, but actually are extensively made in law and established political and diplomatic practices.

They allude to the dilemma of intolerant groups exploiting the freedom of expression in liberal states as though it were some relatively recent discovery. Here is how Rainer Forst in Toleration in Conflict (English version, 2013) describes the great liberal theorist John Locke's view on the limits of toleration as he laid them out in his Epistola de tolerantia (Letter Concerning Tolerance) of 1685:

In the second part of the essay, in which Locke rhetorically addresses the king, he recommends, for the sake of the preservation and stability of the kingdom, that the king should grant toleration to the Protestant Dissenters and also to the sects (which, in Locke's opinion, would then neutralise each other), but deny it to the 'papists'. For the latter defend opinions which are 'absolutely destructive' for the government because of their loyalty to the pope and possibly to foreign Catholic powers; they use toleration only for their own purposes but do not accept it as a claim on themselves; and) in contrast to Protestant groups) they cannot be integrated through toleration but would remain 'irreconcilable enemies'. Locke would continue to defend this, for his time typical, anti-Catholic position in the Epistola de tolerantia though he insists that in doing so he is guided not by dogmatic religious considerations but by political ones. [my emphasis]

Which brings us back to the March 2019 conference on family values sponsored by the Hungarian Embassy and hosted by the Library of Congress. There are elaborate laws and practices associated with such events. There is nothing illegal about attending such a conference. Presumably the attendees were generally sympathetic to the cause being promoted. Although the Christian Post quotes one of them, Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council, criticizing Hungary's program of providing direct government payments to encourage parenthood, apparently finding it too socialistic for his taste.

Is any of this illegal? No, certainly nothing that I see in these reports.

Is it somehow sinister? Well, I think pretty much anything to do with the hate group Family Research Council is politically sinister. But it's not because of the fact that they attended a Hungary-sponsored event.

I'm not attempting here to address in any detail the various issues raised in the Parameters piece. What I am doing is using the "Making Families Great Again" event as an illustration of how there is a broad, largely familiar range of official international functions that are well understood and well regulated under US and international law. If you go listen to a speech by a foreign ambassador, that's an entirely legitimate thing to do in the US. If you knowingly accept secret payments from a foreign government to do some kind of assignment for them, then you probably are violating the law against working as an unregistered foreign agent. (Although if you're as dumb as Don Trump, Jr., you might be able to convince a prosecutor that you're just not smart enough to have broken the law.)

Russian intelligence agencies using Facebook ads and troll farms is a legitimate legal concern. But that can be addressed without framing every idea that might transcend a national border as, "the same Western culture and civil society institutions that made America and the West culturally stronger than the Soviet Union have been exploited by the losing side of the Cold War." And, not to be picky. But I'm not sure that Russia, Hungary, or even China qualify as "the losing side of the Cold War."

It's also problematic to frame such efforts as cyber warfare. Knocking out a country's power grid or inserting malicious software into military communications systems, yes, those qualify.

But when military officials or spokespeople or publications start identifying civilian trolls, even ones paid by unfriendly foreign powers, as "warriors"; or describing people who repost memes from such trolls as "undermining Western policy-making capacity and state power" in a "battlespace" that benefits "nefarious governments, state affiliated proxies, and nonstate actors"; or griping that this here pussy-ass librul democracy nonsense is lettin' danjerous furriners git away with too much bad stuff - then it's worth it for people who actually support democracy to take a critical look at what's being advocated.

Trump’s miserably failed diplomacy in the Russia-Ukraine War

Über-Realist John Mearsheimer provides yet another gloomy update on the state of the Russia-Ukraine War and the obviously disintegrating peace negotiations by Peace President Trump’s Administration. (1)

Mearsheimer has been consistently if depressingly prescient about the state of the war. He argues that Russia is not interested in a peace agreement that is not entirely on its own terms. He also thinks that Russia has a distinctly superior position in the military conflict. We will unfortunately soon see how well the Russian forces do against Ukraine in 2025.

Russia's biggest advantage is manpower and it has shown a willingness to throw soldiers at Ukrainian positions to gain a few metres at a time. Ukrainian military intelligence says about 620,000 Russian soldiers are operating in Ukraine and Kursk and Kyiv believes thousands of troops have entered Ukraine since the start of the year.

Fighting between Ukrainian and Russian troops has also intensified in the past week with assaults on the front line up by about 30%, according to Ukrainian military chiefs, who believe they are part of a spring offensive by Russia.

Until now Russian forces have been advancing slowly north and west of Donetsk, towards the city of Pokrovsk, and have recently been closing a Ukrainian pocket along the front line south west of Toretsk, according to experts at the Institute for the Study of War. (2)

No one seems to think that either the Russian or the Ukrainian side is about to fall apart. Although surprises often happen in wars. Active advocates for more US and/or European aid to Ukraine sometimes make it sound like that Ukraine could clearly win if they just got more Western aid. Timothy Snyder, for instance, wrote in June of last year:

Ukraine can win if Europeans and Americans believe it can, and continue to help. ... The war is not going well for Russia on the actual battlefield. The Europeans and the Americans are bearing essentially no costs. But if they can somehow decide that they are weary, Russia can win. (3)

In February, the Steven Pifer of the Brookings Institute offered this sober evaluation:

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2022 decision to invade increasingly looks like an epic blunder, but he has continued the war, despite rising costs that also include sanctions on Russia. He placed his economy on a war footing and believes Russia can outlast Ukraine, given its larger population and economy. He has shown no serious interest in negotiating except on his terms.

Putin fundamentally does not accept Ukraine’s right to exist as a sovereign and independent state. He initially demanded that Ukraine demilitarize, accept neutrality, and recognize Crimea as Russian and the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” as independent states. In September 2022, Putin supposedly annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson—even though Russian forces did not occupy all of those territories. He made Kyiv’s acceptance of those annexations a condition for a settlement. It is not just land but the people on the land that are under Russian occupation. Those areas have been described as “a totalitarian hell” where “all traces of Ukraine are being expunged.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s top demands in 2022 were full Russian withdrawal and restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 borders, compensation for damages in Ukraine, and bringing war criminals to account (that would include Putin, indicted by the International Criminal Court for the removal of Ukrainian children to Russia). Many Ukrainians regard the war as existential, which explains the country’s fierce resistance. (4)

Now, if NATO were to throw its full force into fighting on Ukraine’s side, that would obviously change the military calculations. But one of the military calculations that would change would be the enormously altered potential for escalatory risk.

Ukraine is not a NATO member. Countries like Finland, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania that border on Russia are NATO members. So in the real world, NATO planners have to calculate what would happen if they made a major direct military commitment to fight Russia and Ukraine, and Russia responded by attacking some or all of those NATO countries just mentioned?

But that kind of coldly practical consideration rarely if ever comes up in Western discussions about the war, because cheering for Our Own Side takes center stage. And, at this point, Trump is clearly unwilling to do such a thing, and without full US participation, the other NATO allies would not be able to do that without full US support and involvement. Trump’s military threats against NATO allies Canada and Denmark (over Greenland) are at the moment far more credible that any suggestion that Trump would support a direct NATO war in Ukraine.

The more immediate real-world question is how much aid and what kind of aid Europeans will be able and willing to provide to Ukraine. There no magic bullet to drive Russia out of Crimea and the other Ukrainian territory it currently controls. And there also the gloomy consideration that as long as they can control the escalatory pressures, it may be to their immediately advantage to keep the combat in Ukraine going for the indefinite future, which would make overt aggression by Russia against actual NATO allies less likely.

Ukraine is fighting a foreign invader, and they have been holding out for over three years of active combat since 2022. Nationalism and patriotism are powerful political forces. They can’t always beat military force. But they can make the victory for the enemy costly.

If Donald Trump had any credibility as a negotiating partner, and if he had staffed the Trump 2.0 team with actual professionals instead of cronies and toxic clowns, he might have been able to come up with some kind of substantive and constructive peace deal. But that’s not who he is.

The Russians are unlikely to accept any kind of peace settlement to which the US isn’t also a party. And Trump’s remarkably chaotic diplomacy around tariffs has every country the US deals with wondering if it is willing to honor an international deal for more than two hours after it’s concluded.

Scott Lucas in this Times Radio presentation talks at some length about Trump’s chaotic and incompetent diplomacy and the developing situation in the Russia-Ukraine War. Lucas speculates that Russia assumed that Trump would be more functional in being able to deliver what they wanted from him. It’s safe to say that Trump has pivoted to a more pro-Russia position. But he’s showing himself to be remarkable incompetent at delivering anything of constructive substance in foreign policy – even a competently executed pro-Russia policy pivot. (5)

Notes:

(1) Prof. John Mearsheimer : Can Ukraine and Israel Embrace Peace? Judge Napolitano-Judging Freedom YouTube channel 04/24/2025.<https://www.youtube.com/live/k3ioQHvJrcs?si=5IIpqDvuVA7n9kju> (Accessed: 2025-24-04).

(2) Ukraine in maps: Tracking the war with Russia. BBC News 04/15/2025. <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60506682> (Accessed: 2025-24-04).

(3) Snyder, Timothy (2024): In Their Own Words. Thinking about ... 06/11/2024. <https://snyder.substack.com/p/in-their-own-words> (Accessed: 2025-24-04).

(4) Pifer, Steven (2025): Russia-Ukraine after three years of large-scale war. Brookings Institute 02/19/2025. <https://www.brookings.edu/articles/russia-ukraine-after-three-years-of-large-scale-war/> (Accessed: 2025-24-04).

(5) Trump worried and will try to 'disappear' once Ukraine peace talks collapse. Times Radio YouTube channel 04/24/2025. <https://youtu.be/4i9Sh2xBn3I?si=1NtAsYWIh3f5sMm9> (Accessed: 2025-25-04).