Crispus Attucks, first martyr of the American Revolution (2 of 2)

The concept of a secular and/or patriotic “martyr” is conceptually a little dicey. But people do see certain figures as martyrs in the kind of secular sense that Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. are seen as martyrs.

So I’m not inclined to split hairs over that concept here. Despite the gaps in the available documentation, the specifics of the 1770 Boston Massacre are clear enough to say there were five American colonists killed by British soldiers on that day and that they were then and later seen by American patriots as secular martyrs in the event.

Just a week after the massacre, Paul Revere engraved a story reporting on a funeral procession for four of the five victims: Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverick, James Calwell, and Crispus Attucks. The coffin on the right is for C.A. and he is named in the story. (1) The fifth martyr of the event, Patrick Carr passed away soon afterwards.

As the text in that story notes, their fellow citizens staged a procession for the bodies on their way to the cemetery of “the unhappy Victims who fell in the bloody Massacre of the Monday Evening proceeding.”

Thomas Jefferson also invoked the martyr theme when he wrote in 1787, “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots..." The quote in its original context is followed by a sentence that sounds a bit odd in the context of 2026: (2)

[W]hat country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure. [my emphasis]

Couldn’t he have said “fertilizer” instead of “manure”? :)

Paul Revere also did this engraving of the Boston Massacre later that month, which was titled “The Fruits of Arbitrary Power, or the Bloody Massacre." (3)

The Wikimedia page on the image describes it as a “sensationalized portrayal of the skirmish, later to become known as the ‘Boston Massacre,’ between British soldiers and citizens of Boston on March 5, 1770.” It also notes that the image is “Not entirely an accurate depiction of the event that transpired.”

And it notes Revere’s published version included these verses, likely from him, as part of the pamphlet A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston:

Unhappy BOSTON! see thy Sons deplore,

Thy hallow'd Walks besmear'd with guiltless Gore:

While faithless P--n and his savage Bands,

With murd'rous Rancour stretch their bloody Hands;

Like fierce Barbarians grinning o'er their Prey,

Approve the Carnage, and enjoy the Day.

If scalding drops from Rage from Anguish Wrung

If speechless Sorrows lab'ring for a Tongue,

Or if a weeping World can ought appease

The plaintive Ghosts of Victims such as these;

The Patriot's copious Tears for each are shed,

A glorious Tribute which embalms the Dead

But know, FATE summons to that awful Goal, 

Where JUSTICE strips the Murd'rer of his Soul:

Should venal C--ts the scandal of the Land,

Snatch the relentless Villain from her Hand,

Keen Execrations on this Plate inscrib'd,

Shall reach a JUDGE who never can be brib'd.

The “P—n” in the first verse clearly refers to Captain Thomas Preston, the British commander of the massacre. He was acquitted. Eight other soldiers were tried for murder, of whom six were acquitted and two were convicted of manslaughter. Revere obviously did not take a generous view of the killer – nor should he have!

In a 1918 article for a American historical journal by Lousie Pehlps Kellogg – whose account is notable for its sympathetic description of the British killers – wrote, “Revere was an ardent patriot, and in all probability formed one of the crowd of spectators in King Street Square when the soldiers fired upon the populace. In the Boston Public Library is still preserved a sketch by his hand.” Even though it doesn’t seem that she meant it as a compliment, her description of Revere as “an ardent patriot” was certainly true!

And she does give a detailed account of the effects the image itself conveys. Including the backhanded compliment that the picture has “the charm peculiar to primitive productions.” But she also notes, “The passionate appeal for sympathy for the slain made by these inscriptions indicates the depths of feeling aroused by the massacre.” She also notes that a another Boston engraver, Henry Pelham, accused Revere of having plagiarized his work in the image, a claim to which she seems all too eager to give credence.

She closes by criticizing Revere’s image for being too patriotic: From a trivial encounter between imperial troops and the Boston mob, the incident [the Boston Massacre] arose to a position of international importance.” An outcome she obviously regretted! (4)

Karsten Fitz over a century later called attention to the problem of Crispus Attucks getting shortchanged in images of the massacre. She also examines the Revere engraving, noting that the image was “originally engraved-though most likely not produced - by Paul Revere.” She considers it likely that he took the image from an original engraving by Pelham. (5)

It’s notable in Revere’s color image that there are no dark-skinned individuals on the Patriot side. But Revere himself knew that Attucks was one of the victims, and he was very likely from the available evidence of African and indigenous American descent. The Wikimedia source page notes image is “[n]ot entirely an accurate depiction of the event that transpired.” But it doesn’t elaborate.

Fitz argues unambiguously, “All available textual sources consider Crispus Attucks as the leader of the Boston crowd which harassed the guard of the Custom House on March 5, 1770.”

She notes that John Adams himself in his closing arguments for the British defendants that Attucks was the leader of the protesters, quoting from the following passage:

... this Attucks ... appears to have undertaken to be the hero of the night; and to lead this army with banners, to form them in the first place in Dock square, and march them up to King street with their clubs ... this man with his party cried, do not be afraid of them . . . to have his reinforcement coming down under the command of a stout Molatto fellow, whose very looks was enough to terrify any person, what had not the soldiers then to fear? He had hardiness enough to fall in upon them, and with one hand took hold of a bayonet, and with the other knocked the man down: this was the behaviour of Attucks ... a Carr from Ireland, and an Attucks from Framingham, happening to be here, shall sally out upon their thoughtless enterprizes, at the head of such a rabble of Negroes, &c. as they can collect together. ...

Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan make a strong argument for Attucks as the leader of the protest. They write, “At the trial of the king's officers, the fallen Attucks seemed very much alive. The evidence given in court, the newspaper reports, the earliest tradition, all single him out, in praise or blame, as the shaper of the event.” (6)

There is no official register of Martyrs Of The American Revolution. But Phyllis Wheatley, a slave who according to the Kaplans, one of the two “first black poets whose poems were in print at the time of the Revolution, and who they also identify as the first slave and third woman to publish in a book of poems in the US, gave the first-martyr designation to Christopher Steel. Steel had protested against British soldiers in Boson and was executed for the murder of a Tory customs officer the 1769, a year before the Boston Massacre. She eulogized him in one of her poems:

In heaven's eternal court it was decreed
Thou the first martyr for the cause should bleed
To clear the country of the hated brood
He whet his courage for the common good.

Notes:

(1) Photo: Four coffins of men killed in the Boston Massacre. Library of Congress - Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-45586. <http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a45777> Originally appeared in The Boston-Gazette, and Daily Journal 03/12/1770. Also included in: Hinderaker, Eric (2017): Boston’s Massacre, 14. Belknap Press: Cambridge & London.

(2) The tree of liberty... (Quotation). Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia. <https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/tree-liberty-quotation> (Accessed: 2026-26-06).

(3) Gallery Slideshow File:Boston Massacre high-res.jpg. Wikimedia Commons. <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boston_Massacre_high-res.jpg> (Accessed: 2026-26-06).

(4) Kellogg, Louise Phelps (1918): Paul Revere Print of the Boston Massacre. Wisconsin Magazine of History 1:4, pp. 377-387. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/4630108>

(5) Fitz, Karsten (2005): Commemorating Crispus Attucks-Visual Memory and the Representations of the Boston Massacre. Amerikastudien/American Studies 50:3, 463-484. <htps://www.jstor.org/stable/41158169>

(6) Kaplan, Sidney & Kaplan, Emma Nogrady (1989): The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, Revised Edition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Crispus Attucks, first martyr of the American Revolution (1)

The Boston Massacre of 1770 is generally considered to be the opening act of the American Revolution. The famous slogan of “no taxation without representation” referred to the facts that Americans shippers and merchants resented the restriction and demands for tax revenue imposed by London on their American colonies.

The Seven Years War of 1756-63 in Europe grew out of the military struggles between King Frederick the Great’s Prussia and the Habsburg Empire ruled from Vienna over the Polish province of Saxony. It wound up expanding in 1740 to a war pitting Britain and Prussia against France and Russia. And it included Britain and France fighting it out over territory in North America, which was known to the American colonists as the French and Indian War. That was the conflict in which Washington gained the military experience he would apply to great effect as head of Continental Army in the American Revolution.

France maintained its Canadian colony and claimed colonial ownership of much of what is now the eastern half of the United States until President Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase of 1803. But the post-1763 period ended the direct challenges of France to the British colonies that became the United States. It also gave a boost to Britain’s imperial plans for its North American subjects. But new successes bring new problems:

The immense acquisitions of the Seven Years War persuaded British statesmen that their bigger empire required more ships and soldiers. These would cost money; and unless the British taxpayer supplied it all, the colonies, which also benefited, should contribute to the cost. Revenue could be extracted from the colonies only through a stronger central administration, at the expense of colonial self-government. As Governor Hutchinson [colonial governor of Massachusetts 1771-1774] wrote in a sentence that lost him his job, 'There must be an abridgement of so-called English Liberties in America.' Furthermore, the Acts of Trade were strengthened to an extent that began to impose real hardships on important colonial interests. [my emphasis] (1)

The Seven Years War also carried a particular significance for the city of Boston. The intensification of military preparations and fighting in that war meant that, as Eric Hinderaker explains:

... the town of Boston and the colony of Massachusetts Bay had been enthusiastic partners. With deeply rooted militia traditions and a strong, assertive sense of Protestant English identity, New Englanders Were especially well prepared to join in the task of fighting Catholic New France. Massachusetts Bay soldiers participated in the military campaigns of the eighteenth century in large numbers, while its merchants supplied the provisions and ships that carried the effort forward. Britain’s victory in the Seven Years’ War validated New Englanders’ confidence in the righteousness of their cause and the efficacy of their institutions. (2)

The beginning of the American Revolution is conventionally taken to be the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770. Tensions between British soldiers and the citizens of Boston had been growing due to the increased pressure being exerted by the British for revenue and against smuggling by the colonists to evade British regulations. A Boston man name Crispus Attucks became famous as the “first martyr” of the Revolution when he became one of several people killed by British occupying soldiers on March 5 in front of the Boston Customs House. There were no mobile phones in those days, and photography was yet to be invented. So the available evidence from the time is considerably less clear and explicit than, say, the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota earlier this year by masked ICE Gestapo thugs. Presumably the British killers in the Boston Massacre were the same kind of cowardly goons that Good’s and Pretti’s murderers are. Nevertheless, as Eric Hinderaker writes, “the facts of the case and their meaning were examined repeatedly in the months and years following the massacre.” And that included a formal trial of the soldiers for murder.

Captain Thomas Preston was the commander of the soldiers that committed the massacre.

Crispus Attucks likely worked as a sailor and dockworker out of Boston. He is also thought to have had a black father and an indigenous mother and was very likely a fugitive slave. He has often been described as the leader of the protest at which the massacre took place and the first of the five patriots to be killed. (3)

Henry Wilson wrote a three-volume work after the US Civil War, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America. Abolitionists before and during the war referred to the hostile, subversive slavery-based regime and economy in the slave states as the Slave Power. And it was an apt label.

Some of these bore an honorable part in the War of Independence. Crispus Attucks, a colored patriot, was a leader, and the first martyr in the Boston massacre, on the 5th of March, 1770, which so fired the hearts and aroused the patriotism of the people. One of that race mingled his blood with the fallen patriots of the 19th of April, 1775. The sons of Africa fought side by side with their countrymen of the white race at Bunker Hill, where Major Pitcairn, as he stormed the works, fell mortally wounded by the shot of Salem, a black soldier. soldier. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that some of the most heroic deeds of the War of Independence were performed by black men. (3)

There are some historical ironies surrounding the Boston Massacre. John Adams, who decades later would serve as Washington’s Vice President and then as the second President, defended the British soldiers who were arrested and prosecuted for the massacre. He claimed that he did so because he supported the principle that even the worst villains deserved competent counsel at trial. And his claim to that effect may well have been sincere. On the other hand, as President he later supported and enforced the Alien and Sedition Acts, which in today’s terms we would say was an attempt to turn the new government in an authoritarian direction.

Paying attention to facts in history is critical for honest history writing. But history in the broader sense is also a source of icons and of reflections of how tradition can inform and inspire contemporaries on topical questions. Eric Hinderaker writes of the evolving image of the Boston Massacre, which “occupies a timeworn niche in the American memory palace” as “a half-forgotten event in a shared patriotic past.” But that also makes it available as a framework for understanding contemporary events.

[N]ew contexts can bring new meanings to the fore. Initially, memories of the Boston Massacre provided a vital spark of outrage in the growing conflict with Great Britain. But at the end of the American Revolution, the usefulness of that function faded. Recollections grew more ambivalent, and the event fell into disfavor in public memory. When memories of the Boston Massacre were revived in the nineteenth century, they came with a surprising new twist: Crispus Attucks, one of the men killed in King Street, was recast as the most important figure in the shootings. A sailor of mixed African American and Wampanoag ancestry, Attucks was taken up by Boston’s African American community in the decades before the Civil War as the first martyr in the struggle for American liberty. This rhetorical move triggered a decades-long dispute in Boston about whether Attucks and the other victims were lawless rioters or a patriot vanguard. Eventually that conflict was settled and the Boston Massacre resolved, once again, into a vague and uncontroversial memory.

In more recent times, the Boston Massacre has been invoked for political purposes when the firepower of the U.S. government has been directed against its citizens. It happened during the Vietnam War; more recently, it has framed discussions of the militarization of policing in the twenty-first century. And as race has become increasingly salient to those discussions, Crispus Attucks has again been invoked, this time as a new kind of symbol of African American citizenship. Identified in the nineteenth century as the first martyr of American independence, in the twenty-first century he has become the first African American victim of unrestrained police brutality. [my emphasis]

Hinderaker describes the available contemporary accounts as often vague and contradictory. But there is no doubt that the massacre of five people occurred, their names were known and published immediately after, and news of the event was popularized in the colonies and in Britain, particularly in a pamphlet issued two weeks after the event, A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston. As the title indicates, it expressed outrage against the British killers. Boston justices of the peace and British officials also collected testimony about the event. The published British versions of the story, true to imperialist practices to this day, accused the uncivilized natives of attacking the soldiers, forcing the poor, put-upon Brits to reluctantly murder them. They protesters were accused of throwing snowballs at the soldiers.

And here’s where democratic sentiments (including the expectation that government officials act within the law), nationalist impulses, and the rapidly developing patriotic sentiments among the colonists turned outrage at murderous official misconduct into a wider sentiment of identity and rebellion. As Hinderaker writes:

Events of the 1770s would show that this small port community, perched on a tiny North Atlantic peninsula, had the power to shape the fortune of the Western world’s greatest empire. Even as [the exact details of] the Boston Massacre remains an enigma, Boston’s massacre – a global event shaped by local sensibilities - rises in sharp relief.

He also describes how the after-effects of the Seven Years War in British policy wound up promoting democratic resentments against the British. And also how some colonists criticized the British by referring to older democratic principles:

When Parliament decided to station a large body of troops in North America following the Seven Years’ War, and political and military leaders subsequently chose to dispatch four regiments to Boston as a peacekeeping force, they were marching onto an unmapped landscape. The shootings in King Street that came to be called a massacre were one result. But they occurred only after seventeen long months of military occupation: a period marked by confusion, outrage, and endemic conflict. The clash between local and imperial authorities derived from Bostonians’ deep attachment to older republican principles, which were incompatible with the eighteenth-century rules under which British officials sought to manage imperial relations. [my emphasis]

In the British world prior to the eighteenth century, the English Magna Carta tradition demanded popular participation in the governments that made their laws, albeit to a very limited degree compared to today’s standards. (King Charles referred to that tradition in his 2026 address to the US Congress). This was very much a part of the notion of the rule of law. Which was not just a concept that laws should exist. It was a concept that for laws to be legitimate, they must be enacted by a government that provided representation for its citizens and that those laws should be applied equally. Democracy and the rule of law are inextricably bound together, really two sides of the same thing.

Those “older republican principles” were given expression in the colonists’ protest of “No Taxation Without Representation.” That slogan was not an earlier equivalent of rightwing libertarians today bitching and moaning about having to pay taxes. It was a demand for democratic representation in the making of the laws applied to the colonies, very much in Magna Carta tradition. They were making that argument as British citizens appealing to a fundamental British political tradition.

It’s both important and interesting to look at the political theories motivating the Revolution and key documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that formalized and institutionalized the democratic ideas and sentiments motivating it. And it was very much part of a democratic awakening and the development of democratic movements. And that is so despite the fact that democracy in 2026 means something much more expansive than it did in 1776. A redwood tree spouting out of the ground early in its life looks very different than it does after a few hundred years of growth.

The reference to democratic sentiments in this context is not an anachronism. The Massachusetts colonial charter, writes Hinderaker, despite imposing a royally-appointed colonial governor, was “more democratic than that of any other royal colony” due to the role of the elected assembly. When people get the idea that the government is there to represent the people and establish stable and fair legal justice, that tends to make them not really open to the idea of foreign troops just being able to gun down protesting citizens just because they feel like it that day. We don’t have to rely on history books to see that. We’ve seen it on the daily news from the US in 2025 and 2026 as citizens resist the depredations of Trump’s ICE Gestapo.

Notes:

(1) Morrison, Samuel Eliot et al (1977): A Concise History of the American Revolution, 62. New York: Oxford University Press.

(2) Hinderaker, Eric (2017): Boston’s Massacre, 1-32. Belknap Press: Cambridge & London.

(3) "Crispus Attucks," by Herschel Levit, mural at the Recorder of Deeds building, built in 1943. 515 D St., NW, Washington, D.C. Library of Congress.

(4) Wilson, Henry (1875): History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Vol. 1 (4th edition), 18-19. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company.

Slavery and the American Revolution

Historian Sean Wilentz wrote in 2019 about the contradictory political impulses toward slavery involved in the American Revolution. (1) He was addressing a concern that he raises about an argument made as part of the 1619 Project that highlights the history of slavery in North America, which was that an major impulse for the Revolution was to defend slavery against British abolitionism.

The American Revolution is a key founding myth of the United States. Interpretations of it vary, of course, both in academic discussions and in popular political understandings of it. From the beginning, there were more conservative adherents and more radical ones. Paul Revere and Thomas Paine could be taken as symbols of those two poles, respectively.

And over time, there have been interpretations made from a range of ideological and partisan viewpoints. On the academic side of the discussion, a lot of the differences are related to how “revolutionary” the American Revolution was, in the sense of how drastically it altered fundamental social and class relations, how much it democratized governance, and what the sources of it were. And the status of slavery is a key issue in those perceptions, as is the question of to what extent the Constitution represented the democratic impulses of the Revolution.

Back in the days when Calvin Coolidge was in the White House, the historian J. Franklin Jameson shook up the dominant academic narrative with a series of lectures published in 1926 as The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement. The conservative consensus regarded the Revolution as basically a war of independence against Britain but not as a social revolution.

Jameson was one of several prominent historians who were emphasizing the Revolution’s social dimension, including Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., Carl Becker, and Charles Beard. Beard depicted the creation of the Constitution as a kind of sleazy backroom deal made by rich men to scam the system to the benefit of their own pocketbooks in his An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of The United States (1913). The stodgy-but-reliable Britannica is a bit more generous in describing it in its article on Beard:

In this book he claimed that the Constitution had been formulated by interest groups whose motivations were just as much personal financial ones as they were political ones. Although American politicians were generally outraged at the implications of material interests embodied in the Constitution by the Founding Fathers, the book was received by academicians as an innovative study on motivational factors among socioeconomic groups. (2)

This was generally taken to be a “left” version and Beard was counted as a Progressive historian. He became one of the founders of the left-leaning New School of Social Research in 1919. But his view of the Constitution and the purposes of the men who had led the Revolution also lent itself to a kind of everybody’s-in-it-for-themselves viewpoint which was more laissez-faire individualist dogma than a left view. And Beard’s turn later in life to what can reasonably be described as a crackpot rightwing isolationist viewpoint that he expressed in President Roosevelt and the Coming of War, 1941 (1948) certainly makes it reasonable to wonder to what extent his view earlier in his career was consistently “left”.

Similar ambiguity can be encountered with ethno-nationalist historical narratives of the American Revolution. They can be rhetorically similar to left perspectives in terms of looking at the dark, undemocratic, inhumane, anti-egalitarian realities of American history. But they can also play into a rightwing narrative which argues, for instance, that white racism is as American as apple pie and it pointless and un-American to challenge it. In fact, for people who are looking to shift their image from very left to very right, that kind of argument is a natural.

Wilentz defines a common historical view in more recent times of the American Revolution that proceeds from this assumption, “The American Revolution may not have overthrown the institution of slavery but its egalitarian principles were at least implicitly antislavery.”

He describes a problem he sees with this comfortable interpretation:

One problem with this familiar view is that it obscures how new, how radical, antislavery politics were during the revolutionary era, and how, for many patriots, American slavery and American freedom were perfectly compatible. I’m referring here not to those slaveholders with troubled consciences like Jefferson and James Madison, Virginians who perceived slavery as an intolerable offense yet who (at least after the 1780s, in Jefferson’s case) lifted not a finger toward ending it - critics of slavery who continued owning, buying, and selling human beings until the day they died. I’m referring instead to stridently proslavery figures like that young South Carolina grandee and signer of the Constitution, Charles Pinckney - a patriot who served as an officer in the revolutionary militia and who, as a delegate at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, asserted “if slavery be wrong, it is justified by the example of all the world.” I am also referring to those white Northerners, as well as most white Southerners, who believed that the Declaration’s egalitarian principles were perfectly sound but that they categorically did not apply to blacks, slave or free. Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney attempted finally to enshrine this racist egalitarianism in American national law in his notorious ruling on the Dred Scott case in 1857.

These proslavery Americans and apologists for slavery and their progeny were no less products of the American founding than the early abolitionists inspired by Woolman and Benezet or the conflicted enlightened Virginians like Jefferson. Plantation slavery grew stupendously in the United States after the Revolution, generating a well-organized slave power that long dominated national politics. Slavery’s defeat was not inevitable. Nor, obviously, did white supremacy die with slavery. Over the century and a half since slavery’s abolition, the racist Americanism of Charles Pinckney and Roger Brooke Taney has survived and flourished in new forms, along with dominating social and political structures that uphold it. Far from vanquished, it has morphed and resurged in ways expected and unexpected, from the bloody overthrow of Reconstruction to the menacing rise of Donald J. Trump. [my emphasis]

But Wilentz also contests an alternative view that the Revolution itself was motivated by the fear of the colonists that Great Britain would abolish slavery. In other words, one of the American Revolution’s central goal, if not the central one, was to preserve slavery. He describes the implication of this view as follows:

The American Revolution, in effect, anticipated the slaveholders’ rebellion eighty-odd years later: the American patriots allegedly declared their independence of Britain in 1776 for the same reason that the Southern states seceded in 1860–1861, to guarantee that slavery would endure. American independence, in this view, was a precursor of Southern secession.

Wilentz continues:

It is worth noting that Jefferson Davis and the rebellious slaveholders also depicted secession as a glorious replay of the American Revolution, although they did not go so far as to claim that the patriots of 1776 fought to protect slavery. Not for the first time, modern critics have concluded that the Confederates were basically correct about American history, whereas Lincoln as well as most abolitionists, above all Frederick Douglass, were wrong—as when Douglass, in his most famous speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” excoriated American hypocrisy and white racism but also praised the US Constitution as “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.”

That dig Wilentz makes about “modern critics” who conclude that the Confederates were basically correct about American history” seems to be mostly casting shade on those like today’s MAGA radicals who operate very much in the spirit of Confederacy, as most dramatically illustrated on January 6, 2021 when Trump sent his violent mob to try to facilitate a coup. But is also makes the point that there were tensions between the emancipatory impulses of the Revolution and considerable amounts of unfreedom, particularly for slaves and for native peoples.

I won’t go further into the controversy in this post. But the cynical perspective implied in Beard’s approach is inadequate to understanding the real historical of democratic and liberal ideals and practices. And any interpretation of the American Revolution that fits with Jefferson Davis’ or John Calhoun’s view of its values and meaning should not be lightly accepted.

I’ll close by noting that a central factual-historical argument that Wilentz makes is to emphasize how rapidly antislavery ideas emerged in a particular time-frame, relying on the eminent historian of slavery David Brion Davis:

Suddenly, in the late 1740s and early 1750s, Western culture reached a turning point, producing what the great modern scholar of slavery and the antislavery movement David Brion Davis called “an almost explosive consciousness of man’s freedom to shape the world in accordance with his own will and reason.” The causes of this moral revolution were manifold and remain much debated, but need not detain us here; what is important is that it brought, in Davis’s words, “a heightened concern for discovering laws and principles that would enable human society to be something more than an endless contest of greed and power.” That concern made slavery appear for the first time - to the un-enslaved - as a barbaric offense to God, reason, and natural rights. [my emphasis]

And Wilentz adds, “Between 1767 and 1775, a wave of antislavery petitions, sermons, pamphlets, and private missives swelled across the colonies, from New England as far south as Virginia - a political outburst unprecedented in the Atlantic world.”

Notes:

(1) Wilentz, Sean (2019): American Slavery and ‘the Relentless Unforeseen’. NYR Daily <https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/11/19/american-slavery-and-the-relentless-unforeseen/>(Accessed: 2019-28-12).

(2) Britannica Editors (2026): Charles A. Beard. Encyclopedia Britannica, 11/23/2025. <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-A-Beard> (Accessed 2026-24-06).

Atari could beat today’s AI LLMs on chess?

The current AI hype seems to be encountering some gravity at the moment. Gravity as beeing pulled back toward the earth, and its consequences may obviously be "grave" in important ways.

This is an engaging discussion by Chris Hayes with Ed Zitron about the business of AI and the financial bubble that we’re experiencing right now: (1)

The following is an hour and a half discussion with Gary Marcus that focuses on the development, capabilities, and limitations of AI than on the status of the AI business or the current AI bubble. (2)

Zitron also did a appearance last week on The Majority Report, in which he also talks about his jaded and skeptical take on the recent, dodgy, Space X IPO: (3)

Science fiction writer Cory Doctorow recently published a book on the topic, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It’s Too Late (2026) from Verso, a left-leaning publisher with something of an academic tilt.

In a report on Doctorow’s position, Dorian Lynskey writes: (4)

A decade ago, when the likes of Elon Musk and Sam Altman were still passionate advocates of heavily regulated ethical AI (ha!), the technology’s most widely discussed downside had an apocalyptic glamour: superintelligent AI could one day destroy the human race. But since Altman’s company OpenAI released its large language model ChatGPT in November 2022, AI’s public image has fallen to earth: it’s now widely seen as a job crusher, a fact mangler, a slop maker, a privacy invader, a climate trasher and a general pain in the neck. Never before has a new technology been rammed down our throats with such speed, determination and complete disregard for public opinion. [my emphasis]

Doctorow in this podcast discusses the present moment: (5)

And even Paul Krugman has waded in on the current AI situation in this 11-minute clip. (6) Krugman is not afraid to go against the consensus opinion of those he has famously and ironically labeled the Very Serious People. And he very often right in his analysis – and often point out how he has gone wrong on some expectation.

Notes:

(1) Is the AI Boom About to COLLAPSE? MS NOW YouTube channel 06/10/2026. <https://youtu.be/-Mn-TNLwQys?si=rHa2yF0O0d6OGwwW> (Accessed: 2026-06-22).

(2) The Uncomfortable Truth About AI “Reasoning”. World Science Festival YouTube channel 05/16/2026. <https://youtu.be/iFYF_e1GSGI?si=J_noG6NqQ9p2jBpv> (Accessed: 2026-06-25).

(3) The AI Bubble Crash Will Be Worse… The Majority Report YouTube channel 06/16/2026. <https://youtu.be/8_2nB68Ruig?si=395Lk7AFp3e8Lj3P> (Accessed: 2026-06-22).

(4) Lynskey, Dorian (2026): The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow review - the real price of artificial intelligence. Guardian 06/22/2026. <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jun/22/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai-by-cory-doctorow-review-the-real-price-of-artificial-intelligence> (Accessed: 2026-06-25).

(5) AI Was Never About Helping You | Cory Doctorow. The Atlantic YouTube channel 06/19/2026. <https://youtu.be/SPQNPJ0CEPo?si=4nJZPQYPDzUsG1RV> (Accessed: 2026-06-25).

(6) The Chips Are Down. Paul Krugman YouTube channel 06/24/2026. <https://youtu.be/erdyFIwkXk0?si=b6wQUAFLMgKQWJYn> (Accessed: 2026-06-25).

Looking at a sloppy German news report on immigrants

The German news service Tagesschau just ran an article about expulsion of refugees from Afghanistan that illustrates part of the problem with the politics of xenophobia in Germany and other European countries.

The three opening paragraphs read as follows:

Afghan criminals are to be deported more consistently in the future, according to the German government. A corresponding increase in flights was agreed at a confidential meeting with representatives of the Taliban government [of Afghanistan].

According to a media report, the German government is significantly expanding the deportations of Afghan criminals to their homeland. After confidential negotiations at technical working level between representatives of the Federal Ministry of the Interior and the Afghan Taliban government, the number of deportation flights to Kabul is to be increased, reports the Bild am Sonntag [a notoriously conservative tabloid].

So in the future, up to three charter flights per month will be possible. In addition to charter flights, repatriations via regular scheduled flights will continue to be possible at any time, the newspaper writes. With the increase to the almost weekly frequency, the Ministry of the Interior wants to establish a permanent "deportation airlift". (1)

As a general rule, the earlier paragraphs in a news story get read more than the later ones. And sometimes what some readers would find to be the most important information may be in the middle or later parts of the story.

So what does a casual reader get from the first three paragraphs?

We are talking about “criminals” from Afghanistan. What kinds of crimes? Murder? Rape? Petty theft? Assault-and-battery? Speeding in a 30-kilometers-per-hour zone? Spray-painting graffiti on a wall? Walking in a demonstration where some people are chanting “from the river to the sea”?

Well, it doesn’t say. But it matters. The xenophobes understandably try to associate immigrants of a type they don’t approve with violence, crime, fanaticism and immorality. Yet vague references to “criminals” in news articles like this just reinforce general and often mindless or malicious stereotypes - which plays exactly to the nationalist-xenophobic political agitation from groups like the far-right AfD in Germany or the UK Reform Party in Britain.

Before readers even get to the first three paragraphs, they are presented with this image of a large plane flying in the direction of strands of razor wire.

Because we must be talking here about some really dangerous characters, right?

A few more factual assertions creep into view in the fourth paragraph: “This has to do with serious criminals and dangerous people who are in prison in Germany. According to the report, at least 100 Afghan offenders willing for deportation are currently still in regular detention or in detention pending deportation.” And it adds, “According to the information, the criminals are rapists, dangerous people [Gefährder] and drug dealers.”

The Gefährder category refers to people who in American terms would be persons detained under suspicion of having committed a crime and who are considered a flight risk. It’s a category often applied in Germany to suspected Muslim terrorists.

But if you’re not just looking for a fig-leaf reason to rant about how foreign Muslim criminals are all over the place, there come some obvious questions. Germany is a country of nearly 84 million people. So according to the skimpy factual information in the article, there are around one hundred people who are Afghan citizens that fall into this category of dangerous characters who need to be sent to Afghanistan who are (apparently) in custody in Germany, including rapists, drug dealers, and Gefährder (suspicious characters). We could be generous to the Tagesschau and assume we’re not talking about two convicted rapists, five people who were illegally selling cannabis, and 93 people who some local cop busted because he thought they “looked suspicious.”

My point in writing more words about the article than it contains is to say that sloppy reporting like this helps give credibility to some of the most irresponsible and antidemocratic elements in European politics. There are also laws - German laws, EU laws, international humanitarian laws – that address whether it is legal to repatriate people to a country where there is a likelihood they will be killed or tortured by the government or subject to lawless conduct in violent civil conflict or extreme gang violence. It’s also worth remembering that Germany was one of the NATO allies officially supporting the US war in Afghanistan. Sending a Gefährder suspected of illegally selling pot back to Afghanistan could be a death sentence - especially if they had worked for NATO during the war. Which for xenophobes is a feature, not a bug.

There‘s also a factor at play that articles like this don’t help address. Too much of the official rhetoric on immigration enforcement in the EU is based on proposals that are essentially scams, sometimes expensive scams. The repeated talk of exiling immigrants to “third countries” for indefinite warehousing are often largely scams. And prolonged detention of asylum seekers in substandard “processing centers” for months are years is not much different from the ICE concentration camps that the Trump 2.0 regime has established for accused unauthorized immigrants in the United States. The “third country” approach is also called “externalizing” immigration and asylum issues. As the immigration scholar Judith Kohlenberger wrote in 2024:

Externalizing asylum responsibility is still being hailed as a key instrument, if not indeed the solution to the EU’s “migration question” - from processing asylum claims off territory to providing neighbouring countries with aid and monetary incentives to host refugees to full-scale offshoring of migrants to third countries with which they have no actual ties. Despite growing evidence that such deals offer no sustainable solution (see the notorious EU-Turkey Declaration or the intended deal with Tunesia struck in summer 2023) or are not, in face, practically feasible (e.g. various European governments’ botched attempts to offshore asylum seekers to Rwanda), both heads of state and the EU commission continue to consider such “partnerships” with third countries a viable solution to growing anti-refugee sentiment, the rise of right-wing populist parties and deteriorating social cohesion across Europe. [my emphasis in bold] (2)

It’s important to remember that “third country” solutions can be practical and effective in the face of an immediate refugee crisis. But the idea of just warehousing refugees indefinitely in a third country is not a decent long-term solution. It needs to be followed up with a systematic resettlement policy like that of the 1970s in the crisis of the Vietnamese “boat people.” (3)

I would say that much of Europe, including Germany, are still struggling with the disastrous effects of how the euro crisis that reached its apex in the confrontation with Greece in 2015 coincided so closely with the peak immigration surge of that same year when nationalistic posturing among EU countries became a barrier to a decent solution.

And though it’s not discussed very prominently in this context, it is always worth remembering that the surge of Ukrainian refugees into EU countries after the Russian invasion of 2022, a surge considerably larger than that of 2015-16, was handled without the massive freakout and the prolonged retention of refugees in a third country (Turkey) that occurred in that earlier situation.

Kohlenberger rightly says, “The long-term effects of externalization on the EU includes diminished credibility, increased vulnerability to coercion, and the legitimization of an authoritarian, deterrence-focused stance on migration control.”

They need to do better.

And the United States should be setting a better example itself than sending masked Gestapo goons into US cities to terrorize the Latino population, both immigrants and native-born.

Notes:

(1) Deutlich mehr Abschiebeflüge nach Afghanistan. Tagesschau 21.06.2026. <https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/afghanistan-abschiebungen-dobrindt-100.html> (Accessed: 2026-15-10). My translation to English.

(2) Kohlenberger, Judith (2024): Migration Policy: European Union Increasingly Outsources Responsibility for Asylum Heinrich Böll Stiftung 10/15/2024. <https://www.boell.de/en/2024/10/15/migration-policy-european-union-increasingly-outsources-responsibility-asylum> (Accessed : 2026-15-10).

(3) See: Knaus, Gerald (2024): Statement on Migration agreements with safe third countries. European Stability Initiative June 2024. <https://www.esiweb.org/pdf/Knaus-BMI-Statement-on-migration-agreements-with-safe-third-countries-June-2024.pdf> (Accessed: 2026-15-10).

Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s 1991 book on multiculturalism and nationalism (It's more interesting than you might think)

I’ve been looking through some retrospectives on the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. I’ve been mostly thinking of it in its Enlightenment context (With all the ambiguity that comes with that!)

In the process, I took a look at Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s 1991 book, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. (1)

That year 1991 was part of a particular transition time, when Reaganite neoliberal thought combined with Christian-nationalist social conservatism was dominant in American politics. But it was also the period when the Warsaw Pact was disappearing into history’s rearview mirror, and then the Soviet Union itself. (Spoiler: results were mixed!)

Dramatic changes in politics were taking place and the Western countries were looking for liberal-democratic approaches with a fresh eye. At least nominally, with some misfires like “the end of history” idea that was famously applied to the moment. More wars and rampant oligarchic abuses changed that tone soon enough.

One of the trends of the time was “multiculturalism,” which for people who are now Trumpistas was a horror vision that threatened their cherished goal of America as a white Christian homeland, in which African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants, and uppity wimmin all knew their assigned places in the social hierarchy.

Along with the increasing popularity of Rush Limbaugh, who used the term “feminazi” to describe those uppity wimmin – truly one of the weirdest rightwing concepts ever – many good conservatives started weeping over “political correctness.” That was yet another schizophrenic rightwing concept by which they meant ideas like equal protection of the law with which they disagreed, So conservatives were bragging about being politically INcorrect, meaning to them being right about political issues, i.e., politically correct from their own viewpoint.

Yes, that whole schtick was demented. But that’s the direction the Republicans went, a direction that wound up with the Orange Anomaly in the White House.

And that weird conservative trend is still with us, thanks to a crackpot narrative popularized by William Lind, which said that a group of German Jewish Marxists (the Frankfurt School) who invented something called Cultural Marxism (they didn’t) that spawned Postmodernism (it didn’t) that created Political Correctness (it didn’t) which spawned Critical Race Theory (it didn’t) that morphed into DEI and Wokeism, which stills seems to be the current Trumpista term. Because Asleepism is the Trump Cult’s preferred state of mind among voters and citizens.

This strange conspiracy theory was analyzed just recently. by Patrick Iber:

In this telling, the movements for civil rights, women’s rights, and gay liberation are not responding to real forms of discrimination. Instead, the cultural shifts that have taken place since the 1960s can be dismissed as the influence of radical foreign Marxists who have undermined the foundational unities of American life through their control of cultural institutions. It is poor intellectual history, but powerful pseudo-history. It frees the believer from considering the demands of people facing oppression as legitimate and justifies the destruction of knowledge-producing institutions. For the right, it replaces hard questions with obfuscation, using obscurity to create a false sense of clarity. [my emphasis] (2)

Schlesinger was never part of that kind of crackpot thinking. But in his Disuniting period, he was particularly irritated by some instances of what he considered to be sloppy history-writing by some historians who indulged in an ethno-nationalist approach to history. John Henrik Clarke, Asa Hillard, Leonard Jeffries, and Maulana Karenga were four historians who he particularly criticized on those grounds. As he put it in Disuniting:

Cultural pluralism is not the issue. Nor is the teaching of Afro-American or African history the issue; of course these are legitimate subjects. The issue is the kind of history that the New York task force, the Portland Baseline essayists, and other Afrocentric ideologues propose for American children. The issue is the teaching of bad history under whatever ethnic banner. [my emphasis]

He also cites several major black scholars who contributed solid historical accounts of race-related issues: W. M. Brewer, John Hope Franklin, Rayford W. Logan, Alruthius Taylor, Charles Wesley, Carter G. Woodson. Franklin’s textbook From Slavery to Freedom went through many editions and is one of the most important contributions to African-American history.

Schlesinger did have a very pro-democracy, New Deal/Great Society liberal who was opposed to the kind of racial discrimination and xenophobic politics that are central to Trumpist attitudes and ideology – to the extent that a “Trumpist ideology” can be said to exist. Massive corruption and illegal diversion of public funds don’t really count as an ideology. Schlesinger was very much a liberal Cold Warrior, though he became critical of ill-conceived imperial wars and the authoritarianism of the “imperial Presidency.”

He is known especially for his books on John and Robert Kennedy and for his early book, The Age of Jackson (1945). It focused in particular on the Jacksonian reform era as a predecessor of the New Deal. He later expressed regret that he had not dealt with Jackson’s Indian policy in that work. I’m a bit cranky in today’s terms by insisting that the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democratic movements were an important part of the development of what we know today as democracy. Because history involves processes. By today’s standards, America in 1900 could be considered a democracy because black citizens and women did not have the right to vote nationally. But the US was radically more democratic in 1900 than it was a century earlier.

In his 1991 book, Schlesinger praised the work of Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), neither of whom could be considered conservatives on racial issues and democracy in American history.

Notes:

(1) 1991 edition from The Larger Agenda Series. Knoxville: Whitttle Direct Books. See also: the 1992 edition at the Internet Archive: <https://archive.org/details/disunitingofamer00arth>

(2) Iber, Patrick (2026): Dissent 73:2 Summer 2026, 101-108. <https://dissentmagazine.org/article/cultural-marxism-conspiracy-frankfurt-school/>

The US, Israel, and the MOU with Iran

We do have an official Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the US and Iran. It establishes a 60-day period of discussions designed to lead to definite agreements. The version published by Haaretz and Reuters continues this wording in the first if 14 points.

Commentators have noted the symbolism of the US and Iran official signing this agreement in Versailles, the site of the German acceptance of the Versailles Treaty in June of 1919. It was a humiliating moment for Germany, who was the loser in the agreement. And the Treaty itself is genuinely recognized as having been a terrible one from the viewpoint of preventing a future war.

At the moment, many politicians and news analysts are noting that in that analogy, the US is in the position of Germany, having started a war in partnership with Israel and is now essentially surrendering. It’s a valid point and critics are right to point out how it acknowledges in practice what a spectacular failure the war has been for the US and Israel since they began it on February 28.

The MOU text provided by the US even contains 14 numbered paragraphs, which surely some diplomats involved recognized as a remainder of Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points that he had hoped to make the basis for the peace treaty at Versailles.

Trita Parsi cautions antiwar critics about framing that point in such a way that it gives surface validation to the neocons, whose only objection to the MOU is that it could stop the war they want to see continued.

The criticism coming from some Democrats is particularly disappointing because it echoes the same bad-faith tactics Republicans deployed against the JCPOA in 2015. To be sure, Trump has invited some of this treatment. He spent years attacking Obama’s agreement with a barrage of misleading arguments and exaggerated claims.

But that does not make it wise for Democrats to return the favor.

Trump currently owns this failed war, but if the Democrats help torpedo the MOU and war resumes, then they will co-own the next war. Trump’s disaster will become theirs as well. (1)

He has this advice for opponents of the war:

Rather than attacking the terms of the MOU, Democrats should pressure the administration to protect it from those who are determined to see it fail. The main external threat is the Israeli government and Benjamin Netanyahu’s obsession with sabotaging any opportunity for Iran and the United States to bury the hatchet.

Instead of relying solely on angry phone calls and public rebukes of Netanyahu, supporters of ending the war should press Trump to act now: suspend military aid to Israel and curtail military and intelligence cooperation. Such measures would limit Israel’s ability to reignite the conflict and dispel any notion in Tel Aviv that Washington will automatically follow Israel into another war. If Israeli leaders understand that the United States will not be drawn into a future conflict on their behalf, their incentive to start one in the first place will be significantly reduced. [my emphasis]

The MOU is not a peace settlement. But the alternative for the US right now in not using the opportunity to push forward to one based on the MOU’s 60-day timetable is basically a choice between resuming the war (Israel’s and Netanyahu goal) or risking Iran continuing the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz indefinitely.

Trita on Substack Notes focuses on the potential political appeal of making a successful peace agreement with Iran:

However, Israel can be expected to work intensely during the MOU period to sabotage any peace deal. And is already doing so.

But the MOU itself states:

The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran and their allies in the current war, by signing this MOU (Memorandum of Understanding), declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. The final deal will confirm the permanent termination of the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and other provisions of this paragraph. [my emphasis]

To make Israel comply with a ceasefire with Lebanon, Washington will almost certainly have to actually cut off a significant portion of US aid to Israel and be willing to back that up with a basically complete halt if Netanyahu’s government doesn’t cooperate. Since Netanyahu’s critics in the current Israeli election campaign are criticizing him for not being hard enough with the US, Iran, Lebanon and with the illegal ethnic cleansing and land theft in Gaza and the West Bank, keeping Israel on-side with the ceasefire will require more determination and diplomatic skill than Trump has ever shown in his dealings with Israel so far.

David Hearst speculates that scuttling this deal will be a significant challenge for Israel, although they certainly are trying to do so already:

The pieces of the jigsaw of Israel’s regional strategy that could survive Netanyahu’s strategic setback - the land that Israel has occupied and cleansed of its inhabitants in Gaza, South Lebanon and Syria, the undeclared security pact with Abu Dhabi, the use of Somaliland as base of forward projection - all these remain.

The project could be continued at any time. But what Netanyahu has lost is the interest of the current US president in backing this dream.

It will be a long time before another Israeli prime minister will be allowed to sit opposite a serving US president in the situation room under the White House, as Netanyahu did with Trump on 11 February, this year, and spin him a bunch of lies. [my emphasis] (2)

After decades of both parties in the US celebrating Israel as a loyal and valuable ally of the US, that’s a hard argument for even Israel’s most devout supporters among in Congress to make coherently. The US support for Netanyahu’s literally genocidal response to the October 7 attack in 2023 drastically changed Israel’s image in American politics and implicated the US in that grotesque war. Now going along with Israel on the Iraq War has turned into a serious strategic setback for the US and further alienated the traditional European allies – who Trump doesn’t want to be allied with any longer anyway. Plus, it demonstrated how little meaning American security guarantees to its Arab allies like Saudi Arabia and Qatar may actually have.

Israel has even been saber-rattling against Türkiye, which is a NATO ally even though they can’t count on the Trump 2.0 regime’s support in a conflict. But the European NATO members do take their NATO commitments seriously. And with the US-Iran MOU:

Trump once again counted Turkey, alongside Pakistan and Qatar, among the countries that had significantly helped secure a memorandum of understanding with Iran. He also adopted an increasingly combative tone towards Israel.

... Turkish officials activated contingency plans along the eastern border with Iran to prevent a possible wave of refugees from entering the country. Secondly, Israeli officials had been pushing plans to use Iranian Kurds to spearhead an insurgency in western Iran.

Ankara was worried that the use of Kurdish groups could affect its own peace talks with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and push Turkey into a Syria-like scenario, in which Kurds based near its border took control of territory and posed a security challenge [to the Syrian state from its viewpoint].

As Israeli and US attacks on Iranian targets intensified, so too did rhetoric from within Netanyahu's cabinet that "Turkey is next after Iran", heightening concerns in Ankara about the potential spillover effects of a collapse in Iranian state authority. [my emphasis] (3)

Michael Nilshtein at Ynet Global looks at the current situation from an Israeli perspective:

Decision-makers are trying to present the difficult situation created by the bad agreement with Iran, the Lebanon entanglement and the crisis with Washington as a “collective challenge.” The damage and the threat are indeed national, but the failure that led to them stems from the policy of a leadership that does not enjoy internal consensus. …

In the face of the multi-front strategic trap in which Israel is sinking, only one achievement remains to wave about: the seizure of territory on three fronts and the claim that this has changed reality and strengthened Israel’s security. Some in the government are even promising to move toward expulsion, annexation and settlement in areas that were taken, in other words, imposing a sectoral vision disguised as “a project that serves us all.”

This is exactly the point at which the public must prove that it has learned the lessons of October 7 and challenge the assumptions handed down to it from above with such certainty. It must ask what the meaning is of a prolonged presence in all the territories that have been captured, what security and diplomatic price that presence carries, and whether there is a sober alternative in the form of bringing local and foreign forces into hostile areas while preserving freedom of action against the enemy. [my emphasis] (4)

Netanyahu’s current strategic approach involves establishing military hegemony of Israel in the Middle East, with weak regimes in Iran, Lebanon, and Syria; permanent Israeli control and eventual annexation of Gaza and the West Bank; and, periodic “mowing the lawn” attacks on its neighbors to keep their governments weak. Israel is also illegally occupying territory in southern Lebanon and conducting an ethnic cleansing operation there, as well. It has also annexed the Golan Heights and other Syrian territory.

So, achieving international stability in the Middle East and orderly passage through the Strait of Hormuz means that the US will have to restrain Israel, now and for the foreseeable future, from its habitual military aggressions against its neighbors.

And in that sense, American national interests are in serious conflict at the moment with the self-definition of Israeli national interest on which the Israeli government is currently operating.

But if the first couple of days of the 60-day ceasefire in the MOU are any measure, it’s going to be a major challenge to keep up with which side is saying what about who violated it when and how.

John Mearsheimer, perhaps defying Trita Parsi’s advice, argues that the MOU represents “unconditional surrender” on Trump’s part. (5)

Notes:

(1) Parsi, Trita (2026): Trump ended his idiotic Iran war. Good. Responsible Statecraft 06/18/2026. <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-ends-war-critics/> (Accessed: 2026-20-06),

(2) Hearst, David (2026): Trump's U-turn on Iran war has ended Israel's Middle East dream. Middle East Eye 06/17/2026. > (Accessed: 2026-20-06),

(3) Soyhu, Ragip (2026): Turkey emerges unscathed from the Iran war. Middle East Eye 06/17/2026. <https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/turkey-emerges-unscathed-iran-war> (Accessed: 2026-23-06).

(4) Milshtein, Michael (2026): Israel’s self-inflicted trap: How fantasy gave way to strategic retreat. Ynet Global 06/21/2026. <https://www.ynetnews.com/opinions-analysis/article/ry11hglrffl> Accessed: 2026-23-06).

(5) Prof. John Mearsheimer : Israel Undermining US/Iran Deal. Judge Napolitano-Judging Freedom. YouTube channel 06/20/2026. <https://www.youtube.com/live/YNME3CUvYpk?si=VDLFjoEQfYKK0VoC> (Accessed: 2026-21-06).

How does a Netanyahu ceasefire work?

Like this: they cease, we fire.

Iran is continuing to demand a settlement with Israel agreeing to stop invading and attacking Lebanon. This is not promising:

Haaretz, 4:36PM 06/19/2026:

Haaretz, around 45 minutes later:

Has the US-Israel War on Iran ended? (Hint: No)

The US-Israel War on Iran was a massive blunder for US foreign policy. Various commentators like Robert Pape are saying this may be the biggest US strategic defeat in the history of US foreign policy. Not in terms of lives lost, of course. But in terms of the failure to achieve the political goals of the war and in terms of a great increase in Iran strategic clout.

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon discusses the current situation in an interview with Maddie Hale of The Trump Report. (1)

Dan Perry – optimistically assuming the war is now over – writes:

A war that began with immense ambition has ended with profound setbacks for both the United States and Israel.

With an emerging U.S.-Iran peace agreement, what initially appeared to be a historic demonstration of military dominance evolved into a vivid illustration of the limits of both Israeli and American power. The conflict also exposed profound failures in strategic competence within that alliance. Washington and Jerusalem planned effectively for the initial decapitation strikes, but were unprepared for the economic and geopolitical consequences that followed.

The result is a war that may ultimately strengthen the Iranian regime politically, despite the damage it suffered militarily; has weakened international perceptions of American military might; and has diminished both Israel’s own strategic circumstances and its most important alliance. [my emphasis] (2)

Israel remains a wild card in the war. Iran is demanding that Israel pull out of Lebanon and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is carrying on the conflict there. Netanyahu’s goal is to make Israel the undisputed hegemon in the Middle East that will have the freedom to periodically attack its neighboring countries: “mowing the grass” periodically, as Israel describes its many colonial military operations in Gaza.

The US and Israel have divergent goals here. Netanyahu’s government wants the US to continually support its military attacks on its neighbors including Iran. That is not in the US national interest. And the public opinion polls in this election year show broad public support in Israel for an even more aggressive policy against Iran and the Palestinians. The blatantly illegal and violent aggressions against Gaza and the West Bank are continuing, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians proceeds. So even if Netanyahu is not able to stay as Prime Minister after this year’s elections, there is no obvious immediate prospect that a new Israeli government would back away from the attempt to have the US continue to back an aggressive Israeli military policy against its neighbors and its colonial possession in Gaza and the West Bank.

Meanwhile, Trump just bizarrely suggested that he wanted the current Islamist government of Syria under former Al-Qaida and ISIS terrorist leader Ahmed al-Sharaa.

Zvi Bar'el explains what a ridiculous idea that is – though that certainly doesn’t guarantee that Trump and Netanyahu won’t give it a try. It’s a New York real estate negotiating approach to the Middle East:

The president of the United States, in a moment of honesty and based on his experience as a real estate entrepreneur, presented his new plan for solving the war in Lebanon. "If Israel can't do the job without killing everyone else, he'll do the job, Syria will do the job," Donald Trump said on Tuesday, referring to Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, during a meeting with the Qatari prime minister at the G7 meeting in France.

"He's [al-Sharaa] very capable. And he's been very good for me. He's protected everything that I've asked for… And if Israel can't do the job without killing everyone else, he'll do the job."

That's how it is in a business where time is money. When a construction project takes too long to complete and results in too many houses being needlessly demolished, there's no choice but to replace the contractor. Israel should have been alert to the fact that Trump doesn't see eye to eye with it about the Lebanon theatre, which has rapidly turned from an Israeli battleground into a bargaining chip for Iran in a game Trump has already forfeited. [my emphasis] (3)

He also reminds us, “Lebanon is an inseparable part of the tangible guarantees Tehran is demanding as proof that the U.S. can meet its commitments.”

This war will not be over until there is actually a peace agreement that all relevant parties support. And it appears in the current political climate in Israel that the US will only be able to assure Israel’s compliance will be to credibly threaten them with a loss of US military support, which is only likely to be credible now if the US actually does seriously and visibly restrict that support, not just threaten it.

Is the current US President capable of managing the kind of international diplomatic moves that would be required to really establish a stable peace?

Also: Illy Pe’ery provides a description of the Israel army’s public-information efforts, aka, official propaganda:

[A]s a recent investigation by The Hottest Place in Hell revealed, the military does not limit these methods to the realm of “personal enrichment.” Between October 2023 and December 2024, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit conducted a psychological operation targeting both Israeli and international audiences, under the guise of a “non-profit news organization” specializing in “fact-checking” claims surrounding Israel’s war on Gaza.

As part of that operation, dozens of videos promoting the Israeli military’s talking points were published without proper disclosure, while influencers in Israel and abroad were recruited to amplify messages dictated directly by the military. What was exposed at the time as a discrete initiative now appears to be part of a broader, long-term effort by Israel’s defense establishment to institutionalize influence operations on a national - and even international - scale. [my emphasis] (4)

Notes:

(1) Perry, Dan (2026): The Iran war ended terribly for the US, and even worse for Israel. Pittsburg Jewish Chronicle 06/17/2026. <https://jewishchronicle.timesofisrael.com/the-iran-war-ended-terribly-for-the-us-and-even-worse-for-israel/> (Accessed: 2026-18-06).

(2) Trump would be 'completely bonkers' to make this next move - Hamish de Bretton-Gordon. The Trump Report YouTube channel 06/17/2026. <https://youtu.be/vTUlEhn3dbY?si=_Ln7H55bbMuwCcSC> (Accessed: 2026-18-06).

(3) Bar’el, Zvi (2026): Trump Wants a New Contractor in the War on Hezbollah. Syria Doesn't Want the Job. Haaretz 06/18/2026. Gift link: <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-security/2026-06-18/ty-article/.premium/trump-wants-a-new-contractor-in-the-war-on-hezbollah-syria-doesnt-want-the-job/0000019e-d7bf-d6a3-a5be-f7ff7ab30000?gift=1af2dbefa2984378890abeb5d6da4241> (Accessed: 2026-18-06).

(4) Pe’ery, Illy (2026): Revealed: Israel’s curriculum for ‘influencing public consciousness’. +972 Magazine 06/04/2026. <https://www.972mag.com/leaked-idf-propaganda-israel-intelligence/> (Accessed: 2026-18-06).

Early commentary on the latest memo-scheduled-to-be-signed event on the US-Israel War on Iran.

David Rothkopf was an editor and CEO of Foreign Policy magazine for several years. He does a podcast with two much younger reporters which give their commentary a kind of Grandpa-and-the-kids vibe that works well for them!

Here they talk about the proposed memorandum that would agree to work on setting up a deal between Iran and the US that may or may not still be on the table by the time this gets posted. (1)

Jeremy Scahill gives his take as of Monday on the latest memo-to-agree-to-talk-about-an-agreement. (2)

Notes:

(1) Peace in the Middle East...Maybe? The DSR Network YouTube channel 06/15/2026. <https://youtu.be/rXM0STBV8ZY?si=YJvPj3RLAFpU33l8> (Accessed: 2026-15-06).

(2) COMPLETE CAPITULATION': Jeremy Scahill Breaks Down Iran. YouTube channel 06/15/2026. <https://youtu.be/1kcBP3itmbM?si=CgUi1CQWUI8VXw2I> (Accessed: 2026-15-06).

Keeping our heads about war enthusiasm, Russia-Ukraine version

I’m genuinely surprised at some of the outspoken optimism of some of Ukraine’s most eager supporters in the commentariat.

The real issue practical issue right now as I understand it is, are Ukraine and Russia willing and able to make a long-term ceasefire agreement that freezes the current lines of occupation in place and addresses issues like prisoner-of-war exchanges and return of Ukrainian children kidnapped and sent into Russia?

If not, the most likely outcome is that the current war of attrition continues indefinitely. Russia’s occupation of one-fifth or so of Ukraine’s territory, Russia’s presumed (and clearly stated) goal of keeping Ukraine out of NATO is achieved for now. Since Trump has radically – and almost certainly permanently - undercut NATO’s reliability and Europe is scrambling to make collective-defense plans that do not rely on US participation, it’s understandable that European politicians and governments are stressing potential security issues with Russia. And, of course, companies that make huge profit margins on armaments have their own narrow incentives to promote a bogeyman of Russia as much as possible.

But neither unrealistic Russophobia or Russophilia – the latter at the moment most common among far-right parties (and some of them like Georgia Meloni’s ruling party in Italy are anti-Russia) – are conducive to realistic understanding of actual threats and opportunities. Reality does matter.

Ironically, the USSR and its Communist ideology are long gone, but the Western powers’ emphasis on ideology in its Cold War standoffs (and bouts of détente) with Moscow. Now Russia has a capitalist system with an authoritarian government based on rule through billionaire oligarchs – and Russia is still a favorite bogeyman. Trump’s weird admiration for Russia and Putin, whether it’s based on incompetence, corruption and/or blackmail – has not led to some more stable security arrangements or a resolution of the war with Ukraine. In fact, the last formal nuclear-arms-control agreement between the US and Russia expired under Trump 2.0. With no replacement, of course.

But when commentary and analysis become simple war boosterism, that can and often lead to real-world consequences. The Guardian’s Simon Tisdall often provides good analysis. But in a current column on the Russia-Ukraine war, he seems to get carried away by boosterism. (1)

Here’s a sample from just one paragraph:

“For Ukraine, the latest news is mostly good. Using sophisticated Ukrainian-made drones and missiles, it has forced the invaders on to the back foot.”

The front lines haven’t moved much from what it was by the end of 2023. But there does seem to be little question that Ukraine has been able to drone warfare with a notable measure of effectiveness.

“Russia’s tally of dead and wounded is said to be running to 30,000 each month.”

But the lines of engagement are largely unchanged. Russia also still has a volunteer army while Ukraine has been relying on draftees and is apparently having series difficulties with desertions. Russia does have large advantages in personnel and industrial capacity. However, Ukraine is fighting for what presumably most of its citizens consider to be its own territory and even its own national survival.

Ukrainian airstrikes deep into Russian territory are bringing the war home to a misled, disillusioned public.”

Yes, being bombed by an enemy country creates mass demands from the public of the country being bombed to immediately give up its war aims as has been shown by many examples since wartime bombing from airplanes began in the First Balkan War of 1912 including, uh, well … no examples. Because that has never happened.

“St Petersburg burns.“

Or, more precisely, Ukraine has made some attacks in Russia well behind the front lines. Whether those attacks have significantly reduced Russia’s warmaking capacity is very questionable. Also, this makes the limited strikes on Petersburg sound like the American firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945, which killed 80-100 thousand people. This is just silly.

“Fuel shortages cause panic buying. Prices and taxes are rising.“

Isn’t this happening pretty much everywhere thanks to the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz?

“Putin’s 2022 ‘special military operation’, which was supposed to bring swift victory, has now lasted longer than the first world war.”

The First World War was a good deal bigger than the current Ukraine war, though it was also heavily a war of attrition.

Tisdall does give examples of he presents likely Russian provocations in NATO countries:

Russia’s offensive is becoming more physically aggressive, too. Armed drone and combat jet incursions into Nato airspace are multiplying. Thousands of GPS interference incidents, disrupting civilian aviation and maritime navigation, are blamed on Russia. Poland’s rail network, which supplies Ukraine, has been sabotaged. Germany and the UK have suffered similar attacks. Baltic undersea pipelines and internet cables have been cut. In this undeclared war, Norway’s land border with Russia, the North Sea and the North Atlantic approaches are emerging fronts.

The big problem with claims like this is that they are often based on partial information that is often not independently verifiable. The sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines in 2022, for instance, has still not been definitively clarified in the public record. And it’s very possible that the US and/or Ukraine sabotaged them, although the story involving Ukraine doing it has also struck me as dubious. (2)

Scott Lucas, who is a good political analyst and one I follow regularly, also seems to fall into boosterism in this clip title, “Can Ukraine Cut Off Russian-Occupied Crimea?” (3)

The podcast episode is titled, “Can Ukraine Cut Off Russian-Occupied Crimea?” Which also raises the question: Given Ukraine’s success with drone warfare, how much does “cutting off” Crimea do for Ukraine’s side in the current war of attrition? If Ukraine were able to take back their Kherson province, they would cut off Russia’s land access to Crimea through Kherson it currently has. It’s not clear what the advantage of prioritizing isolating the Crimean Peninsula would be at this time if that doesn’t directly include re-securing Ukrainian land connection to Crimea.

The hawkish-leaning Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) did a report in early 2025 about Russia sabotage in Europe that I wouldn’t dismiss out of hand. (Welcome to international politics!) Its opening paragraph claims:

Russia is engaged in an aggressive campaign of subversion and sabotage against European and U.S. targets, which complement Russia’s brutal conventional war in Ukraine. The number of Russian attacks in Europe nearly tripled between 2023 and 2024, after quadrupling between 2022 and 2023. Russia’s military intelligence service, the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (or GRU), was likely responsible for many of these attacks, either directly by their own officers or indirectly through recruited agents. The GRU and other Russian intelligence agencies frequently recruited local assets to plan and execute sabotage and subversion missions. Other operations relied on Russia’s “shadow fleet,” commercial ships used to circumvent Western sanctions, for undersea attacks. [my emphasis] (4)

Not to be overly cynical, but this kind of stuff goes at various levels between adversary powers all the time. It’s still very important to evaluate the specificity and reliability of reporting on such incidents, from Russia or any other international actors including the US.

It’s also important to be mindful of what is being described as “hybrid war.” For instance, one of the Russian “active measures” is “Undermining the democratic norms and values that underpin the West.” Against, welcome to international politics. And, yes, Trump and J.D. Vance engage in doing exactly that with their political allies in the anti-democracy “Nationalist International.”

Notes:

(1) Tisdall, Simon (2026): Russia is losing the war in Ukraine, and Putin is desperate. But that’s when he’s at his most dangerous. Guardian 06/14/2026. <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/14/vladimir-putin-ukraine-war-borders-russian-president> (Accessed: 2026-14-06).

(2) Walker, Shun & Cole, Deborah (2026): The Nord Stream riddle: echoes of mistrust ripple through Europe. Guardian 11/03/2025. <https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/nov/03/the-nord-stream-riddle-echoes-of-mistrust-ripple-through-europe> (Accessed: 2026-14-06).

(3) Scott Lucas Worldview YouTube channel 06/14/2026. <https://youtu.be/izJkqpZC5Co?si=RwF_lHhnWQqV_GU4> (Accessed: 2026-14-06).

(4) Jones, Seth (2026): Russia’s Shadow War Against the West. CSIS 03/18/2025. <https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2025-03/250318_Jones_Russia_Shadow.pdf?VersionId=LHamL2L7HJwLgZ7a_wq6xkTIwMh3TFpk> (Accessed: 2026-14-06).