Donald Trump and maga Republicans must stop their asault on the American people.

Echo editorial published in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

As America prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, the state of the union is in turmoil.

In little more than a year in office, Donald Trump has assailed the country’s institutions, upset the constitutional system of checks and balances, flouted the law, undermined democracy at home and abroad, and ignored the rising cost of living for ordinary people while lining his family’s pockets.

Under Donald Trump — at the whims of his unelected billionaire buddy, Elon Musk — senseless funding cuts gutted U.S. medical research, led to thousands of federal employees losing their jobs, and more than 800,000 lives lost due to discontinued foreign aid.

Donald Trump's chaotic mass deportation efforts have a body count — including two American citizens — as the nation’s streets are overrun by heavily armed, masked federal agents who routinely use excessive force with little accountability. Meanwhile, the government continues to protect the rich and powerful listed in the Jeffrey Epstein files, perhaps hoping to redact away their sins.

When Donald Trump addresses Congress on Tuesday at the annual State of the Union address, he will do so with a 60% disapproval rating, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll. Those abysmal numbers echo those seen after the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by Trump followers.

The reproach has been hard-earned by Donald Trump, who has squandered away the goodwill of voters after his undeniable 2024, election victory.

Rather than focusing on the kitchen-table issues that won him a return trip to the White House, Trump ramped up the cruelty of his anti-immigrant policies and ignored the economic pressures many hard working people face.

Instead of presiding over cooling inflation, the president’s obsession with tariffs cost American families an extra $1,000 last year. 

In place of policies that would make owning a home more affordable and bring down the cost of rent, Trump said he wants to keep housing prices high. 

Contrary to what the administration wants people to believe, mass deportations don’t create jobs; they stunt economic growth.

Tax cuts promised in Trump’s signature piece of legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, mostly benefited the very wealthy. The law allots billions to hire U.S🤢. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (aka "evil ICE") agents and build vast detention facilities on the back of steep cuts to Medicaid and food assistance.

That people are roundly pushing back against Donald Trump's upside-down priorities and abuses of power seems to have restored some conservative leaders’ resolve.

The same U.S. Supreme Court that, in 2024, gave Donald Trump absolute immunity ruled last week that Trump’s tariffs exceeded the power of the presidency. 

In December, the justices also blocked Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Chicago, and have been skeptical in arguments regarding the president’s authority to fire a member of the Federal Reserve Board.

In Congress, a handful of Republicans have also rejected Trump’s wishes, denouncing his administration’s refusal to release the Epstein files and the president’s ill-conceived tariffs on Canada. 

GOP lawmakers have so successfully abandoned their authority to Trump that even these limited developments are heartening. (What I cannot understand is how Maine's Republican Senator Susan Collins with her political seniority will not openly criticize Donald Trump.)

When it comes to Donald Trump, perhaps the legislative branch should pay heed to the judicial.

In the same court decision that denied Trump his tariff authority,

Justice Neil Gorsuch, who is part of the conservative majority, laid it out clearly.

“Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises,” the Trump appointee wrote in his concurrence. “But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the Nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man.”

The American people and the courts are speaking. If the state of the union is to ever recover, ❗ Congress must listen. #ImpeachTrumpNOW❗

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must respond to Jeffrey Epstein victims like Virgnina Roberts Giuffre

Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times:

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former prince was arrested in England on suspicion of misconduct related to his ties to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. 

Immediately, I thought of the late (victim) Virginia Roberts Giuffre (1983-2025 😞😨😥), the brave survivor of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex trafficking ring, who’d won a civil settlement from Mountbatten-Windsor after she accused him of rape (and whose memoir I co-wrote).

My next thought was this: So far, only about half of the 6 million documents that comprise the Epstein files have been released, but in the UK their contents are already causing heads to roll. Why isn’t that happening here in America❓ I know at least part of the answer.

Since the January 30th,  release of 3.5 million pages of Department of Justice investigation files, many concerned citizens around the globe have been trying, in earnest, to wade through the muck. 

It’s not an easy job. Part of that must be by design. The documents are not organized to help readers understand their context. Instead, each page is just one fragment of an exploded jigsaw puzzle, and trying to assemble that puzzle without all the pieces (and without knowing what a complete picture should look like) is proving difficult for even the most seasoned experts on evil Epstein’s and Maxwell’s many crimes.

In the avalanche of news stories, boldface names grabbed the spotlight — Epstein helped director Woody Allen’s daughter get into college, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick spent time with his family (and nanny) on Epstein’s island, supermodel Naomi Campbell asked to fly on Epstein’s plane. 

But, despite the valiant efforts of so many outspoken survivors, the heart of this vile conspiracy is oddly pushed into the background: the brutal reality of what it felt like to be a girl caught in Epstein’s web.

Imagine❓ You are 14-year-old girl, recruited by an older female, who is being led into an upstairs room in Epstein’s Palm Beach, Fla., mansion. The man you’ve been told to call “Jeff” enters wearing only a towel and tells you to take off your clothes. You are afraid. Trapped. So you eventually strip down to your underwear. He orders you to do things to him. He masturbates. He gives you $300 and tells you to leave your phone number so he can summon you again. 

Imagine that you later get into a fight at school with a classmate who calls you a prostitute. 

Imagine that you are later involuntarily admitted to a juvenile-education facility “because of disciplinary problems that recently escalated.”

I worked for four years with Giuffre on her memoir, “Nobody’s Girl,” and the scenes I’ve just asked you to imagine are in her book. But Giuffre is not the girl at the center of that story (Giuffre was 16 — two years older — when Maxwell lured her into their den). No, the story above describes the experiences of one of more than 30 underage victims that Florida investigators interviewed in 2005 and 2006, which led to Epstein’s first arrest and, ultimately, his conviction as a sex offender. The girl in that story had her life ruined two decades ago. Imagine.

Now we know that hundreds if not thousands of girls and young women were abused by Epstein and Maxwell and their crony friends. And yet the cruel undoing of these young people keeps falling off the front pages. Is it because it’s too upsetting to imagine? Is it because it’s old news?

I’m a journalist, so I understand news cycles. But I’m still bothered by the way the visceral suffering at the core of this rotten story isn’t consistently claiming its rightful place at the front of our minds. I get it: There is so much to read about Epstein these days. But by letting our attention be drawn toward talent agent Casey Wasserman’s sexting with Maxwell, say, or by Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi’s meltdown about the high-flying Dow Jones Industrial Index being what really matters, we risk losing the plot.

This, for the record, is the plot: In 1996, a 14-year-old girl named Annie Farmer was flown to Epstein’s New Mexico ranch, where Maxwell told her to undress and began to massage her breasts; later, Epstein jumped into bed with her, saying he wanted to cuddle. This kind of grooming behavior was experienced by scores of girls and young women, many of whom reported it to the authorities. And this abuse often escalated into rape.

For Giuffre, what followed was being forced to sexually service Epstein and Maxwell’s influential friends. In sworn depositions that have been made public, Giuffre named Mountbatten-Windsor and several others of these men, all of whom issued strong denials. Some of these co-conspirators’ names have popped up in the latest tranche of public files, but Giuffre is no longer here to hold them to account, having died by suicide last April.

Only by holding our focus on what these girls and women endured will Americans have the fortitude to demand that the Trump administration give us our due. Some survivors say they cannot find their interviews in the files that have been released so far, which proves that the Department of Justice has still not met the requirements of the Epstein Transparency Act. 

Therefore, the solution is clear: Release the remaining 2.5 million pages in the Epstein files, with only the survivors’ names redacted. Next, law enforcement must rigorously interrogate the men and women who exchanged chummy emails with Epstein and played in his hideous sandbox. Until these two things occur, basic accountability and justice will remain out of reach.

Just based on what we already know, we should all find that unimaginable.

Amy Wallace is a journalist and author who collaborated with Virginia Roberts Giuffre on her memoir, “Nobody’s Girl.”

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must end this Trumpian political nightmare. Europe is a lead example!

Opinion echo letter published in the Boston Globe: Europe punishes those in the Epstein files❗ Why won’t America❓

In reading about how the Europeans 🙏are handling the fallout from the Epstein files (“Epstein revelations topple some top figures in Europe,” Nation/World, Feb. 8), I’m struck by how they are willing to hold accountable and prosecute those with the greatest influence.

This is such an unfortunate contrast to what’s happening here in the United States. We have a Donald Trump, whose name appears frequently in the files (too numerous to count, mostly redacted) and who was a known friend of Epstein’s for many years. With the help of his partisan and rabidly obsequious attorney general, his administration is shielding rather than prosecuting the guilty.

Recently, I read about the life sentence meted out to the former president of South Korea because he is guilty of fomenting rebellion. Instead of doing the same here, we re-elect an insurrectionist, an admitted molester of women, a fraudster who had to pay a $25 million settlement because he ripped off people who paid to be enrolled in his so-called university, and, on top of all that, a convicted felon.

These same people try to denigrate Europeans and their so-called failed political systems. Perhaps they could learn something from countries that try to protect the less fortunate and hold to account those in high places.

We now know that at least one member of his Cabinet, Howard Lutnick, and a host of donors were aslo involved with Epstein. 

If there are any self-respecting Republicans left, when are they going to hold their leader Donald Trump accountable❓ Their leader is gleefully enriching himself and his money-grabbing family.

Have any of them heard of the emoluments clauses❓Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution, prohibits federal officeholders from accepting gifts, payments, or titles from foreign states

From John Cotter in Melrose Massachusetts

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are hypocrites- say nothing about pardon of child sex molesters but prosecute for legal free speech

 Echo opinion letter published in the Southwest Florida News-Press

Donald Trump gave a pardon to an insurrectionist who turned out to be convicted of child sexual abuse but his corrupt administration insists on prosecuting legislative leaders who spoke truth to power. 

 

An upside-down United States: In one of the numerous Trump, politically driven, Pam Bondi directed Department of Injustice baseless persecutions of Donald Trump’s ever-expanding list of political enemies, a federal grand jury recently declined to indict six military and intelligence community veterans, real patriots who serve in Congress, for simply stating the law of the land, and on that same day here in the "free" state of Florida, Andrew Paul Johnson, a January 6th insurrectionist, a MAGA “patriot” pardoned by Trump, was convicted on five charges, including molesting a child under 12 and another under 16, as well as lewd and lascivious exhibition.  Insurrectionist Johnson is one of a number of January 6 “patriots” pardoned by our felonious president Donald Trump who has gone on to commit crimes that make being an illegal immigrant akin to being a Sunday school teacher. 

But, not a peep from our Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his attorney general, Republicans- Representative Byron Donalds or Senator Rick Scott, all of whom are like heat-seeking missiles for any nearby microphone when an illegal immigrant so much as jaywalks. 

Folks, please flock to the polls in November to deliver this country from this Trump Upside-Down Alice in Wonderland nightmare 😱 administration❗  

From:  Thomas Minor, in Bonita Springs, Florida

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are funding ICE fascist operations without accountability! Innocent people are detained.

Frictionless fascism: Technologies being used for immigration enforcement take human agency and discernment out of the equation.

#ICEOut❗ (Maine Writer- this was a painful opinion for me to include in my blog. Reading this brought me to tears. Yet, I thank Mr. Coleman for having the courage to write this opinion based on his own experiences. Warning⚠️❗ Fascism has no limits to how much cruelty is dispensed for the purpose of seizing and maintaining power.)

Flynn Coleman is a human rights attorney and author of “A Human Algorithm: How Artificial Intelligence Is Redefining Who We Are.” Echo opinion published in the Boston Glob by Flynn Coleman.

One weekend in January, two boys stood quivering at Mercado Central, a Minneapolis market. Their mother had dropped them off for haircuts and walked across the street to cash a check, but she didn’t return. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took her. The boys tried to find her in the detention database but couldn’t because they didn’t know her birthdate. The agents who took her didn’t need it.

This is how ICE now operates: Mobile Fortify — a facial recognition app it deploys — can verify her identity nearly instantly. The technology makes detention possible with nothing more than what a camera captures. The system already had what it wanted. And she was gone.

In my time documenting war crimes and crimes against humanity at the international tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, I learned that dehumanization requires infrastructure. 

In Rwanda, it took months of radio broadcasts to incite neighbors to kill neighbors. At roadblocks across the country, Hutu militias checked identity cards — Tutsi or Hutu — and made decisions about who would live or die. This took weeks. Even then, some refused to take part. Some hid Tutsis in their homes, risking their own lives. Human beings, even trained for atrocity, sometimes hesitated. 

Violence and dehumanization have always been limited by human friction — the pause before pulling a trigger, the moment when someone looks into another person’s eyes and cannot do the worst thing.

Mobile Fortify needs only seconds to scan a face. That’s the innovation.

This is what fascism without friction looks like. Adolf Hitler needed years of rallies, screaming himself hoarse to convince crowds, a steady drumbeat of dehumanization. 

Benito Mussolini needed propaganda campaigns. Even then, enforcement depended on human beings making decisions at every checkpoint. Mobile Fortify needs mere moments. Point your phone. The algorithm decides. The agent executes. No hesitation. No pause.

Mobile Fortify is a smartphone app that compares faces with more than 200 million photos, without individualized warrants, without meaningful consent, and — according to Department of Homeland Security documents — without any practical mechanism for refusal. Representative Bennie Thompson says ICE treats a biometric match as “definitive” — agents can ignore birth certificates if the app says otherwise. When the machine’s word contradicts yours, the machine wins.

The boys at Mercado Central could not find their mother. 😢

In fact, the government has billions of dollars in surveillance infrastructure. That power asymmetry isn’t accidental. It’s the architecture. Technology determines who can challenge decisions, who can trace targeting, who can find their parents. The algorithm designed the cage. The children cannot see the bars.

On Jan. 14, in Robbinsdale, Minn., another parent stood at a bus stop with their child, waiting for the school bus. ICE detained the parent in front of the child, in front of a bus full of elementary students. The child went to school that day not knowing if their parent would come home. The children on that bus learned what power looks like now: automated, inescapable.

America didn’t invent this template for making dehumanization systematic. China pioneered algorithmic targeting of Uyghurs in 2017. Iran deployed facial recognition for hijab enforcement. Russia built digital surveillance states. But when the United States adopts these tactics at home, it legitimizes them globally. Mobile Fortify doesn’t break new ground — it normalizes the playbook. What was once the domain of acknowledged autocrats becomes standard democratic practice.

The masked agents who surged into Minnesota have begun their retreat. The algorithmic infrastructure remains. Mobile Fortify still scans faces in seconds. Surveillance drones still circle neighborhoods. Administrative subpoenas (requiring no judge, no warrant 😢) still demand digital records — Google accounts, Discord metadata, Social Security numbers — often within hours. The facial recognition databases still hold 200 million images. 

The tech industry is spending hundreds of millions to ensure no regulation follows, building a political war chest to keep violence frictionless. The agents may withdraw. The algorithms never do.

Hundreds of children remain in detention facilities across the country. Thirteen-year-old Gustavo Santiago, detained in Dilley, Texas, wrote: “I feel like I’ll never get out of here. I just ask that you don’t forget about us.”

Frictionless fascism removes the last human barrier to atrocity: the pause — the moment one’s conscience might emerge from the depths. Even soldiers trained for systematic violence sometimes refuse orders. Even forces prepared for ethnic cleansing sometimes let people through. The algorithm never refuses. Never hesitates. Never witnesses. It doesn’t need years of propaganda or to convince anyone to hate. Doesn’t need belief, consent, or even your attention. It just needs a face to scan.

Republicans must impeach Donald Trump for violating the Constitution by giving illegal political directives to America's military

Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times by Jackie Calmes

President Bill Clinton, President George W. Bush, President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden, must speak against Donald Trump.

George Orwell (b, 1903 in India d. 1950 in London)

Where are the statesmen when the state is under siege by the current corrupt head of state❓

I’ve been mulling that question, hardly for the first time, but on three occasions just in the last few days.

On Monday, the federal holiday celebrating George Washington’s birth, former President George W. Bush posted an essay on the first U.S. president as part of a civic project commemorating the nation’s 250th year. Simply by hailing Washington for traits that Donald Trump utterly lacks — humility, integrity, dignity, self-restraint, willingness to forfeit power — the piece was widely read as a sneak attack on the current president. Bush never named Trump. He thus maintained his years-long, stupefying silence about the man who’s trashed him, his family, his party, his legacy PEPFAR program and, most of all, his country.

As Jonathan V. Last wrote for the right-of-center, anti-Trump Bulwark, if Bush’s words were a veiled attack on Trump, “the veil is so powerful that even light can’t escape it.”

Bush’s essay came two days after former President Barack Obama finally responded to Trump’s week-old racist post that caricatured the first Black president and his wife as apes, thereby mainlining into the body politic one of the most toxic tropes against Black Americans. Asked about it in a podcast interview, Obama was, as usual, too cool. He called Trump’s behavior “deeply troubling” and said “there doesn’t seem to be any shame about this among people who used to feel like you had to have some sort of decorum and a sense of propriety and respect for the office.”

But, like Bush, he never named Trump. And, it’s not even clear that Obama was referring to him. Certainly Trump never was one of those who, as Obama put it, “used to feel … some sort of decorum and a sense of propriety and respect for the office.”

Then there was the third trigger for my musings about America’s M.I.A. statesmen.

On Friday, before the weekend ahead of the holiday honoring George Washington, as the first president and military commander established the indispensable tradition of a nonpartisan military — Trump yet again violated Washington’s precedent. 

At Ft. Bragg in North Carolina, he essentially pushed uniformed young troops to violate the military codes enshrining Washington’s legacy of nonpartisanship. Trump treated them like props at a MAGA rally, lauding Republican candidates and officeholders on hand, mocking past presidents and urging the troops to vote Republican in November.

“You have to vote for us,” the commander in chief ordered them.

This is unprecedented, except by Trump himself. In October, he prodded sailors at Norfolk, Va., to boo “Barack Hussein Obama.” 

In September, he told commanders summoned from around the world that the fight is here at home, a “war from within” American cities. In June, also at Ft. Bragg, Trump damned Democrats and sold MAGA merch, over Army objections.

There’s a darn good reason for the wall that Washington built between the military and civilian government. As the Army Field Manual instructs troops: “Nonpartisanship assures the public that our Army will always serve the Constitution and our people loyally and responsively.” Not just Republicans, and not just Trump.

But, as multiple officers told the website Military.com, “holding troops to account when goaded by the president, who is ultimately the boss, would be impossible.” 

Commanders themselves are mute because, after all, Trump is the commander in chief. They’ve watched as one Pentagon purge has followed another, starting with Trump firing the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s top military officer. 

Trump chose, instead, an officer who, he often claims, once donned a MAGA cap and said, “I love you, sir. … I’ll kill for you, sir.”

It’s understandable that active-duty officers don’t make a stand. But, what about America’s roughly 7,500 retired generals and admirals❓ As veteran ML Cavanaugh wrote in the Los Angeles Times after Trump’s Ft. Bragg performance last year, “The military profession’s nonpartisan ethic is at a breaking point.” 

Sure, individuals have spoken out. But, as the military knows better than anyone, there’s strength in numbers.

It’s past time for a large, united front of veteran commanders to challenge Trump. (In fact, a group of National Security professionals are strategically organized to respond to Trumpzism. The group is now focused on support for the the military in Congress, including Captain Kelly, who created a video about the duty to refuse illegal orders.)

Why wait for him to make good on his talk of invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy troops at the polls in this midterm election year, based on trumped-up conspiracies about Democrats’ fraud?

You know who could give the veteran and active commanders some political cover? The former commanders in chief.

Even more conspicuous than the brass by their silence and virtual invisibility in the face of Trump’s assaults — on the rule of law, civil rights, elections, foreign alliances and America’s global reputation — are the nation’s four living former presidents: Democrats Joe Biden, Obama and Bill Clinton, and Republican Bush.

It’s past time for the not-so-fab four to come together to publicly demand that Trump honor the oath of office that each man took, and to school the electorate on the many ways in which he’s dishonoring it — including by continuing to justify his refusal to peacefully transfer power in 2021. But,  each man is so observant of the norm that former presidents should not publicly criticize the incumbent one — again, a precedent from George Washington — that they self-muzzle.

This is Americans’ quandary in these Trump times: Presidents and high-ranking veterans who could speak truth to power are so constrained by their devotion to norms and traditions that they won’t confront a president who’s daily shattering the norms, traditions and laws that form the foundation of this democratic nation.

“This is the master alarm flashing for our democracy,” Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat and veteran, said last week of Trump’s targeting of him and other critics.

That takes us back to my original question: Where are the statesmen to answer that alarm❓

Answer: They are  following ordinary rules despite these extraordinary times. And they must stop. #ImpeachTrumpNOW❗

History researchers uncover chilling correlations between Nazi Germany propaganda and Donald Trump racial profiling

Nazi letters reveal paper restorers’ role in compiling Holocaust ‘hitlist’. Researchers continue to uncover Nazi history to show the purposeful intent to create propaganda to support protecting a dominant race and to justify the evil Holocaust. 

Exclusive echo report published in The Guardian: Research uncovers program to make centuries-old records legible to detect people’s ancestry.

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) dictator of Germany

Large numbers of paper restorers and bookbinders were recruited by the Nazis and “contributed directly to genocide” during the second world war, according to research.

A British historian has uncovered a Europe-wide program in the 1930s, and 1940s, in which restorers repaired and cleaned historic church and civil records, making them legible so that the Nazis could detect anyone with Jewish ancestry.

Dr. Morwenna Blewett, a researcher in conservation history and associate member of Worcester College, University of Oxford, unearthed Nazi letters and other material showing the role played by craftspeople in restoring registers of births, conversions, baptisms and marriages to seek out inherited “racial” status.

In various public institutions including the German federal archives in Berlin, she found documents that show the complicity of these conservators, restorers and paper chemists, who used their skills within Germany and in occupied countries.

“They were creating an accumulated record of who might potentially be killed – a kind of hitlist, really,” she said. “They went above and beyond to enforce their ‘racial’ registration of populations.”

Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. “Even though it was known that there was this need to prove your heritage,” Blewett said, she “looked into the actual technical nuts and bolts of how this was achieved through cleaning documents.

“I found in the archives official documents about engaging bookbinders, as well as letters between various officials talking about cleaning documents, in the hope that these records would represent ‘racial purity’.”

Surviving administrative records show that by 1940 a master bookbinder called Franz Krause, from Neisse, a town now in south-west Poland, was among those recruited.

Art Restoration Under the Nazi Regime' book launch - Worcester College

In one passage, a Nazi official wrote: “German church books, which capture the smallest place and every little farmstead in their closely bound mass of more than a hundred thousand volumes, are by far the most important source for the German population history, the proof of descent and the genealogy.”

Manuscripts dating back several centuries were illegible because they had become fragile, dirty and moldy.

Despite their potential importance as historical papers, the restorers used “quite destructive processes”, Blewett said. “They weren’t ensuring the safety of the historic objects, they were making them readable. It didn’t really matter to them what these objects were.”

For example, manuscript pages were saturated with glycerin to make the entries legible, even though that fell short of accepted conservation practice of the time. 

“The physical rubbing in of glycerin risked tearing already damaged paper as well as softening the paper fibes by swelling them,” Blewett said. “I also found promotional material from technical companies that made laminating material that was used to preserve very fragile pages to make them more readable.”

Blewett, who previously worked as a paintings conservator at the National Gallery in London, stumbled across the material in researching cultural heritage organizations set up under the Nazis. “I just found all this material and I didn’t understand why they were talking about bookbinding and cleaning church documents. That led me to look further into what the scheme was and what was related to producing proof of Aryan ancestry.”

Her research features in her new book, Art Restoration Under the Nazi Regime, published by Palgrave Macmillan this month. “Through their work, restorers conspired with the Nazi regime to aid and abet criminal acts,” Blewett writes in the book. “Their rewards were rich. But their reputations have largely remained unsullied.”

Michael Daley, the director of the ArtWatch UK restoration watchdog, said the research revealed a “shocking abuse of skill”. “How much power accrues to those who control the appearance of things – for good or ill,” he said.

In his first presidency, Donald Trump called journalists the enemy; a year into his second term, it’s clear that this time around, he’s treating us like one.

From Hungary to Russia, authoritarian regimes have made silencing independent media one of their defining moves. 

Sometimes, outright censorship isn’t even required to achieve this goal. In the United States, we have seen the administration apply various forms of pressure on news outlets in the year since Trump returned to office. One of our great disappointments is how quickly some of the most storied US media organizations have folded when faced with the mere specter of hostility from the administration – long before their hand was forced.

While private news organizations can choose how to respond to this government’s threats, insults and lawsuits, public media has been powerless to stop the defunding of federally supported television and radio. This has been devastating for local and rural communities, who stand to lose not only their primary source of local news and cultural programming, but health and public safety information, including emergency alerts.

While we cannot make up for this loss, the Guardian is proud to make our fact-based work available for free to all, especially when the internet is increasingly flooded with slanted reporting, misinformation and algorithmic drivel. 🙏

Donald Trump's evil intentions to take over Greenland has roots in Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, writes Timothy W. Ryback

Ouch! This is another example to describe Donald Trump's delusions about living in the shadow of "evilisms" and re-enacting the worst dictators in modern times.  

Hitler’s Greenland Obsession:  After creating an economic mess with ill-advised tariffs, Hitler looked north in pursuit of resources and national security. By Timothy W. Ryback published in The Atlantic.

 

(Maine Writer- not sure if I should file this article under "history's déjà vu" or with the headline "Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose".)

Greenland appears to have been a lifelong preoccupation of Adolf Hitler’s. According to stenographic notes from a lunchtime conversation dated May 21, 1942, Hitler recalled that hardly anyone “interested him more in his youth” than Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer who in 1888, led the first team to cross Greenland’s interior. A surviving volume from Hitler’s private book collection contains firsthand accounts of the geologic and Arctic explorer Alfred Wegener’s Grönland Expedition, which left Wegener dead in 1930, and inspired the 1933, adventure film S.O.S. Eisberg, starring the actor and eventual filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.

Hitler’s personal copy of History of the Expedition, the narrative of the tragic Wegener venture, can be perused in the rare-book collection at the Library of Congress among the 1,200 or so remnant volumes from Hitler’s private library. The 198-page monograph bears his personal bookplate—ex libris, eagle, swastika—like many of the others, but is notable because unlike most, it does not include a handwritten inscription by an author, a close associate, or a distant admirer. This suggests that the volume was a personal acquisition rather than a gift, a fact made all the more interesting by the 1933 publication date, the first year of the Hitler chancellorship, when the Nazi leader’s interest in Greenland transitioned from personal to strategic.

From the May 2003 issue: Hitler’s forgotten library

By April 1934, Hitler’s government had inventoried Greenland: 13,500 Eskimo, 3,500 Danes, and 8,000 sheep, as well as the world’s largest deposit of a strategic natural resource—cryolite, a mineral essential to American aluminum production. In 1938, Hermann Göring dispatched an expedition to Greenland, ostensibly to explore the island’s flora and fauna. However, Hitler’s true intent may have been not scientific, but economic—the expedition was headed by a mining engineer, Kurt Herdemerten, who had been a member of the ill-fated Wegener expedition. Hitler had inflicted countless economic wounds on his country over his five years as chancellor, and this foray into the Arctic was part of a broader effort to remedy one of them.

In a drive to move Germany toward economic self-sufficiency, Hitler had imposed draconian tariffs, refused to honor foreign-debt obligations, and sought to wean the nation off Norwegian whale-oil consumption. The problem was that Germany used whale oil not only for margarine, a staple of the German diet, but also in the production of nitroglycerin, a key component for the munitions industry. Whale-oil imports ranged from 165,000 to 220,000 tons annually, representing the country’s single largest foreign-currency expenditure. To replace Norwegian whale oil, it was proposed that “German ships with German fishermen using German equipment” could harvest “the riches of the sea”—or Fischreichtum—“without giving a single penny to foreign countries.” So Hitler mobilized a German whaling fleet that gradually depleted whale populations in the North. By 1938, the Germans also had 31 whale-oil-processing ships in the frozen South, off the coast of Antarctica, along with two processing stations on land supplied by 257 “catcher boats.” Plans were made to declare the “whaling enterprises” German colonial possessions.

In mid-January 1939, two twin-engine Dornier “flying boats”—model Do 18-D—coursed along the coast of Antarctica, dropping weighted steel rods stamped with swastikas and bearing Nazi flags every 15 miles or so. The secret expedition, overseen by Göring and led by Alfred Ritscher, one of Germany’s top Arctic explorers, was intended to stake a territorial claim “corresponding to the expansion of the economic interests of greater Germany,” as Ritscher later put it.

The Antarctic demarcation project undertaken by Ritscher in January 1939, was part of Hitler’s aggressive peacetime land grab in the name of ethnic unification and national security, beginning with the annexation of Austria in March 1938, and continuing with the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in September of that year.

Hitler dismissed those who opposed the acquisition of land on the grounds of human rights as “scribblers.” No divine authority dictated how much land a people possessed or occupied, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “National borders are made by men, and they are changed by men.” A country’s claim to territory was based on its ability to impose brute force over another, a principle that dated back, Hitler continued, to days of the “might of a victorious sword,” when Germanic tribes asserted themselves with blood and iron. “Und nur in dieser Kraft allein liegt dann das Recht,” Hitler wrote, a maxim that, distilled into English, translates as “Might makes right.”

Following the invasion of Poland, in 1939, Hitler’s interests in the Far North expanded from economic to military. On April 8, 1940, Hitler briefed his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, on an imminent military operation in Denmark and Norway. 

The preemptive strike, Hitler explained, was a defensive measure against an anticipated attack by Britain and France that he believed might come via Scandinavia. (Sweden had already declared its neutrality.) “Approximately 250,000 men will carry out the operation,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. “Most of the artillery and ammunition have already been transported across, hidden in coal steamers.” The next morning, six infantry divisions, two motorized brigades, a paratrooper unit, and hundreds of aircraft, including 186 Heinkel bombers, launched Operation Weser Maneuver. Denmark capitulated. Norway resisted and was crushed. “Once we have the two countries,” Goebbels recorded, “England will be flattened” because Germany could use Scandinavia as “a base of attack.”

As for the United States❓ That country “is of no interest to us,” Goebbels wrote, because by the time the Americans could deliver any material assistance (eight months, in Goebbels’s reckoning) or put boots on the ground in Europe (18 months), the war would be over.

But, unbeknownst to Goebbels, U.S. Coast Guard cruisers were already on their way to Greenland. A strategic analysis had determined that a well-directed shot from a German U-boat or an act of sabotage could cripple the cryolite-mining operations at Ivittuut, in the Arsuk Fjord in South Greenland, which America was determined to safeguard to protect its aluminum production.

Henrik Kauffmann, the Danish ambassador in Washington, D.C., distanced himself from the government in German-occupied Copenhagen and declared himself the representative of “the interests of the free Denmark,” a status the United States readily recognized. The American Greenland Commission was formed, and an American consulate was opened in Godthaab, the island’s capital city (today known as Nuuk), with the consent of Eske Brun, Greenland’s colonial administrator, who was an ally of Kauffmann’s. “Adaptability of areas for installation of airfields was the first consideration governing location of forces,” Kaufmann later recalled. “Since these areas were of the same value to Germany as to the United States, these, in addition to the cryolite mine*, were the localities actively defended.”

“The Eskimos in Greenland will be astonished to see how the Americans are staffing their newly established consulate,” the German newspaper Schwäbischer Merkur reported on June 9, 1940, questioning the purpose of the “ten officers and 167 men” that the Americans had dispatched to “peaceful” Greenland. “Under international law,” the newspaper observed, “Greenland belongs to Denmark.”

Another Nazi-aligned newspaper, Stuttgarter NS-Kurier, reminded its readers of Greenland’s status under international law, noting that the American presence was causing “serious disquiet” in Denmark: “It goes without saying that there cannot be any talk of a change in the Danish position toward an apparent American interference in the administration of Greenland, Denmark’s last colonial holding.”

On April 9, 1941, exactly one year after the German occupation of Denmark, U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Kauffmann, with the assent of the Greenland colonial administrator, signed the Agreement Between the United States of America and Denmark Respecting the Defense of Greenland. The preamble of the agreement highlighted the imminent danger that Greenland “may be converted into a point of aggression against nations of the American continent.” The subsequent articles allowed the United States to “improve and deepen” harbors and to “construct, maintain and operate such landing fields, seaplane facilities and radio and meteorological installations as necessary” for the protection of the North American continent against foreign aggression.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt publicly hailed the agreement the next day. In America, Ambassador Kauffmann, as the defender of “free Denmark,” was proclaimed “king of Greenland”; in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen, he was charged with treason.

On April 27, Danish Foreign Minister Erik , claiming to act on instructions from the Danish king, issued a formal note to Hull protesting Kauffmann’s actions. 

By signing the bilateral agreement, Scavenius wrote, Kauffmann had acted “against the will and knowledge of His Majesty,” as well as against the “Cabinet and the Danish Rigsdag,” the equivalent of the U.S. Congress. “From real as well as from formal points of view,” Scavenius wrote, “the Danish Government has therefore been obliged to consider the agreement as invalid in point of Danish constitutional as well as international law.” For the United States to have entered into an agreement with “a person who has no country and no head of state behind him” was, Scavenius wrote, “a fiction.”

If so, this fiction was similar to the one the British government had endorsed a year earlier, after Germany had invaded France and installed the collaborationist Vichy regime. 

In June 1940, a 49-year-old colonel who had led the French army’s 4th Armored Division in counterattacks against the Germans at Abbeville retreated to London after France surrendered. The British recognized the colonel, Charles de Gaulle, as the self-declared representative of the “free French”; the Vichy government denounced de Gaulle as a traitor and deserter, stripping him of his military rank, convicting him of treason, and sentencing him to death in absentia.

The Americans, like the British, recognized the distinction between a fascist takeover by force and the prerogatives of a democratically elected government. So just as de Gaulle was recognized as the legitimate representative of France, Kauffman was recognized as the legitimate representative of Denmark and Greenland. 

Over the next four years, Greenland became a vital transit point for the Allies—it had as many as 17 military facilities, including airfields and naval installations that protected the cryolite-mining operation at Ivittuut—and assisted in the liberation of hundreds of millions of Europeans across the continent. 

When the war was over and the democratically elected government in Denmark was restored, it willingly reaffirmed this American protection in the 1951 Defense of Greenland agreement, which remains in effect today.

*A rare, white/translucent sodium aluminum fluoride mineral primarily used as a flux in the electrolytic extraction of aluminum from bauxite ore. Known as "ice stone" for its ice-like appearance