Modern History (1800 – present)

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The press is like bad grass.

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On Seeing the Future Too Clearly
By Rebecca Gordon
August 19, 2025

Introduction:

(TomDispatch) I spent the summer of 1965 arguing about the Vietnam War. I was 13, and my interlocutor was my 18-year-old camp counselor in Vermont. She was headed for U.C. Berkeley in the fall, where she would, as she later described it, “major in history and minor in rioting.”

Meanwhile, I was headed back to junior high school. I was already convinced that our government was lying about why we were fighting in Vietnam (supposedly to protect our sworn ally, the South Vietnamese government, in response to a trumped-up “incident” in the Gulf of Tonkin). I was also convinced that the war was unjustified and wrong. She seemed less certain about the war but was similarly convinced that expending energy opposing it would distract activists from supporting the Civil Rights movement.

As it turned out, we were both right.

Our summer camp subscribed to the Boston Globe, which I read daily, probably when I was supposed to be doing something more physically edifying like playing tennis. I remember the day the Globe ran a story quoting an informal advisor to President Lyndon B. Johnson — it might have been Dean Acheson — suggesting that, even if the South Vietnamese government were to ask the United States to withdraw its forces, it wouldn’t do so. I cut the article out (property damage is not violence!) and ran to show her. “See? I was right. They’re lying about the war.”

Addditional Extract:

That war would eventually result in the deaths of 58,000 members of the American military and millions of Vietnamese, both soldiers and civilians. We’d see a generation of Vietnam veterans come home with visible (and invisible) injuries: amputations; cancers born of exposure to the herbicide Agent Orange, used by the U.S. Air Force to defoliate jungle terrain; heroin habits; the illness we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD; and moral injuries caused by following orders to murder civilians. It tells you something about that war that Vietnam vets would prove more likely to become homeless than the veterans of previous or later wars. They would also suffer contempt from many of their fellow Americans for having been drafted into a vicious and ultimately pointless conflict.

To further develop the theme of the article, it also discusses the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) resolution that permitted the invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11, genocidal policies in Gaza, and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that fought in the Spanish Civil War prior to World War II.

Read more here: https://tomdispatch.com/for-once-in-our-lives/

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Trump’s Use of FBI to Target ‘Enemies’ Echoes FBI’s Dark History of Mass Surveillance, Dirty Tricks and Perversion of Justice Under J. Edgar Hoover
By Betty Medsger
September 23, 2025

Introduction:

(The Conversation) J. Edgar Hoover, director (of the FBI) until his death in 1972, operated a secret FBI within the FBI that he used to destroy people and organizations whose political opinions he opposed.

A burglary’s revelations

Hoover’s secret FBI was revealed, beginning in 1971, when a group of people called the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into an FBI office and removed files.

This group suspected Hoover’s FBI was illegally suppressing dissent. Given Hoover’s enormous power, they thought it was unlikely any government agency would investigate the FBI. They decided documentary evidence was needed to convince the public that suppression of dissent – what they considered a crime against democracy – was taking place.
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The files they stole and made public confirmed the FBI was suppressing dissent. But they revealed much more: Hoover’s secret FBI and the startling crimes he had committed. These secret operations had become so extensive that they eventually diminished the bureau’s capacity to carry out its core mission: law enforcement.

Read more of The Conversation article here: https://theconversation.com/trumps-use ... r-265364

On January 8, 2024, Democracy Now! did a full show on this topic: https://www.democracynow.org/2014/1/8/ ... o_do_more

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Civil Society Helps Uphold Democracy and Provides Built-in Resistance to Authoritarianism
By Christopher Justin Einolf
September 25 , 2025

Extract:

(The Conversation) The term “civil society” isn’t familiar to all Americans. But it’s part of what helped this country grow and thrive because it encompasses many of the institutions that uphold the American way of life. As a sociologist who studies nonprofits and civil society in the U.S and around the world, I have always been interested in the relationship between the health of a nation’s civil society and the strength of rights and freedom within its borders.
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In 1835, when the French scholar and diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville visited the country, he marveled at the tendency of Americans to “constantly unite.” They created associations, he wrote, “to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools.”

Whereas the government initiated grand projects in France and the nobility did so in England, in the United States voluntary associations of ordinary individuals were behind most great endeavors.

Read more here: https://theconversation.com/civil-soc ... sm-265 705

(From Democracy in America by Alexander DeTocqueville) I do not wish to speak of those political associations with the aid of which men seek to defend themselves against the despotic action of a majority or against the encroachments of royal power. I have already treated this subject elsewhere. It is clear that if each citizen, as he becomes individually weaker and consequently more incapable in isolation of preserving his freedom, does not learn the art of uniting with those like him to defend it, tyranny will necessarily grow with equality.

Here it is a question only of the associations that are formed in civil life and which have an object that is in no way political.

The political associations that exist in the United States form only a detail in the midst of the immense picture that the sum of associations presents there.

Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools. Finally, if it is a question of bringing to light a truth or developing a sentiment with the support of a great example, they associate. Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.

In America I encountered sorts of associations of which, I confess, I had no idea, and I often admired the infinite art with which the inhabitants of the United States managed to fix a common goal to the efforts of many men and to get them to advance to it freely.

Read more: https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/805328.html

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post is based but god the horde of atlantic slave trade minimizers

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Milan prosecutors investigate alleged ‘sniper tourism’ during Bosnian war

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/ ... osnian-war

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Teaching Deportation History to Meet the Moment
By Sylvia Zamora
December 11 , 2025

Introduction:

(Zócalo) My college students are always shocked when they learn that the U.S. deported an estimated 1.8 million people to Mexico in the 1930s, including some who had never stepped foot in the country. “Sixty percent of the deported were U.S. citizens! Most were the children of Mexican immigrants,” I tell them.

But this year marked the first time I couldn’t offer my usual conclusion: that the mass repatriation during the Hoover Administration represented a singular and unprecedented violation of constitutional rights in U.S. history. Instead, I had to acknowledge—somberly—that the nation is once again deporting Latino immigrants, including U.S. citizens.

Since I started teaching “Latino L.A.” seven years ago, my central objective has been to help my first-year students—the majority of whom come to my classroom with little to no background in Latino history—connect the past to the world they’re living in right now. This fall, that meant stepping away from my standard lecture to incorporate real-time examples of ongoing ICE raids, and the community’s mobilization in response.

My lesson about the 1930s deportation campaign—L.A. County officials referred to it as a “Mexican Repatriation” to make the “return home” sound legal, voluntary, and benevolent—became especially pertinent in this context.

Read more here: https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/tea ... e-moment/