At Their Own Peril, Americans Are Fuzzy On History – OpEd

 July 3, 2025  

By Ivan Eland

The nation’s observed birthday—July 4th—always brings forth what passes for modern day “patriotism”: prominent displays of the flag everywhere, celebration of the military, picnics, backyard barbeques, and of course fireworks. There is even an occasional tribute to the nation’s “founders,” those men who supposedly signed the Declaration of Independence on that date, and the genius of Thomas Jefferson who purportedly masterminded and wrote the document. Yet Americans, although a great people, are usually vacant on their history, and many really admit it, because history seems a like a dusty little hobby that is irrelevant to the “here and now,” which self-help gurus on TV tell us we need to focus on. However, comparatively, people in other countries usually pay more attention to their own history and those of at least their region of the world.

Because many people in the United States don’t value history very much, they tend to allow politicians to be selective in their remembering of historical events—usually to manipulate public nationalism (which now passes for patriotism) for their own dubious policy goals. For example, if Americans had focused more on the fact that historically, the Vietnamese had been fighting fiercely over the centuries to throw out foreign invaders—such as the Japanese, the Chinese, and recently the French—perhaps they would have demanded that their politicians think twice, even three times, about invading that country. And if Americans had known that the historically fractious Iraq, an artificial country that had been created by the greedy colonial powers after World War I to exploit the country’s oil reserves, they might have wisely rejected George W. Bush’s attempt at military social work in one of the most unlikely places in the Middle East for democracy to flourish.

Similarly, if most of American public had been more aware that the mighty British Empire had failed three times to subdue Afghanistan in the 1800s and early 1900s, and that the Soviets had ignominiously withdrew in defeat from that country just over a decade before, perhaps they would have pressured George W. Bush to be more selective in his military response to 9/11, thus avoiding the current quagmire in that warlike and xenophobic country, which especially hates foreign invaders.

In fact, the vast majority of Americans would scratch their heads when asked about the causes of even traumatic events in the nation’s history. For example, they wouldn’t be able to tell you what motivated the British to burn Washington, D.C. in the War of 1812, the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor to begin World War II, or Osama bin Laden to launch his terror attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Centers on September 11, 2001. Yet only in the new physics can we have uncaused events. Americans just ignore such causes because they don’t like to complicate the story of their government heroically battling the forces of evil.

Americans are not the only country to distort history to their liking, but they do seem far too fuzzy on historical details, thus allowing their politicians to manipulate them into usually disastrous adventures at home and abroad. Let’s take a current example. The Obama administration just patted itself on the back by disclosing that since the president expanded Bush’s drone wars against terrorists to at least seven countries on two continents, this modern technology has allowed the killing of between 2.372 and 2,581 “combatants” from 2009 to through the end of 2015, but only between 64 and 116 civilians during that same period (most independent groups tracking such civilian deaths put the total about two-to-three times higher). All of these killings, however, were only “outside areas of active hostilities,” such as Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya, not in the designated war zones of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.

In a republic, there are several problems with these secret (well, not-so-secret) wars. The first is that the killing of any civilians by a foreign attacker is used as a propaganda tool by Islamist militants, thus helping to recruit more terrorists. In Yemen, documentation by journalists on the ground has shown that U.S. drone strikes and air strikes have motivated the angry Yemeni population to significantly swell the ranks of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula there. Second, and even more important, Americans have forgotten that their Constitution (much more important than the Declaration of Independence, because it is supposed to be a legally binding constraint on adventure-happy politicians of both parties) requires that Congress, the representatives of the American people, approve wars, which has not occurred with the secret drone wars. (Even the congressional resolutions approving U.S. military action in the three designated war zones are way more than a decade old and out of date (in Afghanistan and Iraq) or nonexistent (in Syria). The arrogance of the modern executive branch in conducting such constitutionally dangerous secret wars was brought forth by an unnamed administration official when defending the data release on drone war killings (which conveniently didn’t provide enough details to allow the media or private organizations to match it up with their higher totals), “We didn’t have to do this in the first place. We do believe we’re trying to go the extra mile here.” At least go the extra ten miles and make these illegal wars legitimate by getting congressional approval or, even better, go the extra hundred miles by ending such counterproductive adventurism.

But Americans don’t pressure their politicians to follow the Constitution, because most regard it as a dusty old historical document, which has become less important as people began excessively worshipping the American flag, the alleged signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 (it was not, and only became an important document many years later when its lead plagiarizer, Thomas Jefferson, became a prominent national politician), and the U.S. military (the anti-militarist founders, who didn’t even allow a standing army in the Constitution, would pass out on this one). Rather, Americans should probably instead celebrate September 17, 1787—the date the newly signed Constitution brought forth the resilient system of popular government Americans have enjoyed for well over 200 years—even over July 2, 1776, the important date on which the Continental Congress voted for independence from Britain. That Constitution was designed to make the country a peaceful republic, not a voracious globe-girdling empire, which it became only after World War II—because its citizens sought imperial glory, because they had the power to do so, rather than remembering the history of why the country was founded. True patriotism demands more work from the American people.

• This article was originally published by Huffington Post 

Ivan Eland

Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute. Dr. Eland is a graduate of Iowa State University and received an M.B.A. in applied economics and Ph.D. in national security policy from George Washington University. He has been Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, and he spent 15 years working for Congress on national security issues, including stints as an investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. He is author of the books Partitioning for Peace: An Exit Strategy for Iraq, and Recarving Rushmore.

The American Revolution Was A Culture War – OpEd

US LIBERTARIAN REVISIONIST HISTORY 

Boston Tea Party. W.D. Cooper. "Boston Tea Party.", The History of North America. London: E. Newberry, 1789. Engraving.

 July 3, 2025  

By MISES

By Ryan McMaken

Two hundred and forty-seven years ago this month, a group of American opponents of the Crown’s tax policy donned disguises and set about methodically destroying a shipment of tea imported into Boston by the East India Company. The vandals trespassed on privately owned ships in Boston Harbor and threw the tea into the ocean. These protesters were thorough. Not content with having destroyed most of the company’s imported tea that night, the activists later discovered another tea shipment which had been unloaded at a warehouse in Boston. The activists then broke into the warehouse and destroyed that tea, too. Total damages amounted to more than $1.5 million in today’s dollars. 

This was the work of the Sons of Liberty, a group led in part by Samuel Adams and which would become known for acts of resistance, arson, and violence committed against tax collectors and other agents of the Crown. Notably, however, as time went on, acts of resistance in America escalated, at first into widespread mob violence, and then into military action and guerrilla warfare. 

Why did many Americans either engage in this behavior or support it? The simplistic answer has long been that the colonists were angry that they were subjected to “taxation without representation.” This is the simplistic version of history often taught in grade school. The reality, of course, is that the conflict between the “Patriots” and their former countrymen eventually became a deeply seated (and violent) culture war.

It Wasn’t Just about Taxes

The taxation-without-representation argument endures, of course, because it is useful for the regime and its backers. Advocates for the political status quo insist there is no need for anything like the Boston Tea Party today because modern Americans enjoy representation in Congress. We are told that taxation and the regulatory state are all necessarily moral and legitimate because the voters are “represented.” Even conservatives, who often claim to be for “small government,” often oppose radical opposition to the regime—such as secession—on the grounds that political resistance movements are only acceptable when there is no political “representation.” The implication is that since the United States holds elections every now and then, no political action outside of voting—and maybe a little sign waving—is allowed. 

It’s unlikely the Sons of Liberty would have bought this argument. The small number of millionaires who meet in Washington, DC, nowadays are hardly ”representative” of the American public back home. The 1770s equivalent would have consisted of throwing the Americans a few bones in the form of a handful of votes in Parliament, with seats to be reliably held by a few wealthy colonists, far beyond the reach or influence of the average member of the Sons of Liberty.

But attempts to frame the revolution as a conflict over taxes largely misses the point. Political representation was not the real issue. We know this because when the 1778 Carlyle Peace Commission offered representation in Parliament to the Continental Congress as part of a negotiated conclusion to the war, the offer was rejected. 

The Revolution Was Partly a Culture War 

By the late 1770s, the fervor behind the revolution had already gone far beyond mere complaints about taxation. This was just one issue among many. Rather, the revolution quickly became a culture war in which self-styled “Americans” were taking up arms against a foreign, immoral, and corrupt oppressor. Mere offers of “representation” were hardly sufficient at this point, and it’s unlikely any such offers were going to be enough after the events of 1775, when the British finally marched into Massachusetts and opened fire on American militiamen. After that, the war had become, to use Rothbard’s term, a “war of national liberation.” 

This ideological and psychological divide perhaps explains the ferocity with which the American revolutionaries resisted British rule. 

The “Patriots” Initiated Real Violence—against Innocents

For example, when we consider the many other protest actions by the Sons of Liberty in the lead-up to the revolution, many of them could easily be described as acts of nondefensive violence, intimidation, and destruction. Many tax collectors resigned from their offices in fear. Others, including citizens merely suspected of supporting the British, were tarred and feathered (i.e., tortured) by the protestors.

Known loyalists were routinely threatened with physical harm to themselves, their families, and their property. Many loyalists fled the colonies in fear for their lives, and after the closure of Boston Harbor, many fled to inner Boston seeking protection from the mobs. Loyalist homes were burned, and theft committed by members of the Sons of Liberty was routine (hundreds of pounds were stolen from Governor Hutchinson’s private home after it was ransacked by a mob of poor and working-class Bostonians). Caught up in all of this, it should be remembered, were children and spouses of the guilty parties, who in many cases were just low-level bureaucrats.

In the southern theater of the war, for example, the British Army armed loyalist militias who engaged in a scorched earth campaign against the rebels. They burned private homes to the ground, cut up and murdered pregnant women, displayed the severed heads of their victims, and employed other tactics of terrorism.

The rebels responded in kind, attacking many who had no role in the attacks on Patriot homes, including women, and torturing suspected Tories with beloved torture methods such as “spigoting” in which the victims are spun around and around on upward-pointing nails until they are well impaled.

This sort of thing cannot be explained by mere disagreement over taxation. Acts of violence like these represent a meaningful cultural and national divide.

How Big Is the Cultural Divide in America? 

For now, the cultural divide in the United States today has yet to reach the proportions experienced during the revolution—or, for that matter, during the 1850s in the lead-up to the American Civil War.1

But if hostilities reach this point, there will be little use in discussions over the size of the tax burden, mask mandates, or the nuances of abortion policy. The disdain felt by each side for the other side will be far beyond mere compromises over arcane matters of policy. 

And just as discussions over “taxation without representation” miss the real currents underlying the American rebellion, any view of the current crisis that ignores the ongoing culture war will fail to identify the causes. 

Yet, the culture war has also likely progressed to the point where national unity is unlikely to be salvaged even by charismatic leaders and efforts at compromise. When it comes to culture, there is little room for compromise. It is increasingly apparent that the only peaceful solution lies in some form of radical decentralization, amounting to either secession or self-rule at the local level with only foreign policy as “national” policy. Had the British offered these terms in 1770, bloodshed would have likely been avoided. Americans must pursue similar solutions now before it is too late. 

About the author: Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is executive editor at the Mises Institute, a former economist for the State of Colorado, and the author of two books: Breaking Away: The Case of Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities and Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre. He is also the editor of The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought. Ryan has a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s degree in public policy, finance, and international relations from the University of Colorado. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and Power and Market, but read article guidelines first. 

Source: This article was published by the Mises Institute

• 1The issue of slavery was a catalyst for a larger cultural divide that grew between the slave states and the free states during the mid-nineteenth century. For many northerners, slavery was just an example of the south’s moral degeneracy. For southerners, those who tolerated abolitionism were “atheists,” “communists” and unpatriotic subversives of various types. The two sides began to see themselves as fundamentally incompatible, even beyond the slavery issue. Thus, southern diarist Mary Chestnut was only exaggerating the true situation when she simplified the mounting hostilities to a matter of a cultural divide: “We separated North from South because of an incompatibility of temper. We are divorced because we have hated each other so. If we could only separate, a ‘separation a l’agreable,’ as the French say it, and not have a horrid fight for divorce.“ After all, had northerners viewed the secession as merely a disagreement over taxes or over slavery, it’s unlikely nearly as many northerners would have flocked to the US army in hopes of invading the south and burning down southern cities. 

MISES

The Mises Institute, founded in 1982, teaches the scholarship of Austrian economics, freedom, and peace. The liberal intellectual tradition of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) guides us. Accordingly, the Mises Institute seeks a profound and radical shift in the intellectual climate: away from statism and toward a private property order. The Mises Institute encourages critical historical research, and stands against political correctness.

Trump’s Travel Ban Will Not Make Americans Safer – OpEd

LIBERTARIAN ANTI IMPERIALISM

 July 3, 2025

By Benjamin Powell

President Donald Trump recently banned travel and immigration to the United States for nationals of a dozen countries, insisting that this would protect the U.S. from terrorists and criminals.

The ban applies to Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. (It allows minor exceptions for immediate family members of U.S. citizens and adoptions, as well as a few other limited categories.)

Trump’s proclamation states that the restriction is intended to “protect [Americans] from terrorist attacks and other national security or public-safety threats.” Those countries’ “vetting and screening information is so deficient,” the administration insists, that such procedures can’t help U.S. officials identify and deny entry to terrorists and criminals.

But we already know that people from those countries do not pose a substantial risk to the United States.

The president is probably correct that many of those countries’ regimes either can’t or won’t properly identify terrorists and criminals, or are unwilling to share that information with the United States. That still doesn’t make his travel ban necessary.

If the lack of information sharing by those countries posed a significant terrorism risk, we should have seen evidence already. Considering all immigrants or visitors from those dozen banned countries over the past 50 years, one terrorist attack occurred on U.S. soil, killing one U.S. citizen. It was committed by a single individual, Emanuel Kidega Samson from Sudan. (He committed a shooting at a Tennessee church in 2017, killing one victim and wounding seven others.)

Put another way, your annual risk of being killed, in the U.S., by a terrorist from one of those dozen countries was approximately one in 13.9 billion over the past 50 years. To put this risk in perspective the annual chance of being killed by lightning (one in 1.6 million) is approximately 8,700 times higher.

The risk of being killed in a terrorist attack by anyone in the U.S. is incredibly low. Over the last 50 years, including 9/11, the risk of dying from a terrorist attack is only one in 4.5 million. (Dying in a lightning strike is almost three times more likely.)

Travelers and immigrants from the named countries don’t pose a disproportionate criminal risk of any sort. The 2023 national incarceration rate for travelers and immigrants, aged 18 to 54, from those countries is 37 per 10,000. That’s approximately 70 percent below the incarceration rate of native-born Americans.

While the risks to Americans from letting in people from those countries are minimal, the travel and migration benefits to the targeted people are massive. Those countries have autocratic, socialist, totalitarian, theocratic, or otherwise dysfunctional governments. Allowing people to escape them, even temporarily, can and does increase prosperity and help spread ideas for reform.

An immigrant from Yemen, for example, earns more than 15 times as much in the U.S. as in his home country; the average Haitian immigrant earns 10 times more in the U.S. than in Haiti. Furthermore, as people flee those regimes, there is evidence that salutary pressure is created for more political and economic freedom in the origin countries.

Instead of banning them, the U.S. should welcome immigrants and travelers who flee oppressive governments. It poses little security risk to the U.S., can massively help those who escape, and may even promote freedom in in the countries they flee.

• This article was also published in Reason

Benjamin Powell

Benjamin Powell is Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, Director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University, and former President of the Association of Private Enterprise Education. Dr. Powell received his Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University and his Bachelor of Science degree in Finance and Economics from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. He has been Associate Professor of Economics at Suffolk University, Assistant Professor of Economics at San Jose State University, a Fellow with the Mercatus Center's Global Prosperity Initiative, and a Visiting Research Fellow with the American Institute for Economic Research.

 

Malians Report Torture At Prisons Run By Russian Mercenaries

Wagner Group sleeve patch. Photo Credit: Facebook

 July 3, 2025  

By Africa Defense Forum

Since arriving in Mali almost four years ago, Russia’s Wagner Group mercenaries have kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured hundreds of Malian civilians in conjunction with the country’s ruling junta. Some of those captured were held for ransom before being released to local police.

Many of those in the hands of Wagner are members of the Fulani community, which has been repeatedly targeted for attacks by Soldiers and mercenaries.

“Civilians have been deliberately targeted since Wagner’s arrival,” Yvan Guichaoua, a researcher at the Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies, told investigators with the media group Forbidden Stories. “Security forces tend to view populations living in jihadist-influenced areas as collaborators.”

Mali’s ruling junta, led by Col. Assimi Goïta, overthrew the country’s democratic leadership in 2021, claiming the government was failing to end the yearslong rebellion by Tuareg groups in the north. Since then, the junta has struggled to restore security to the country. Goïta’s group expelled French forces and invited Wagner Group mercenaries into Mali to train its military. Wagner mercenaries quickly went from trainers to executing attacks on communities across the country, part of a pattern of human rights violations they have demonstrated in the Central African Republic, Libya and Syria.

“Bringing in the Russians has direct implications for how force is used,” Guichaoua said.

Wagner’s strategy in Mali included operating prisons at six military bases where captured civilians were held, beaten, and tortured — many of them innocent of any involvement with extremist groups.

“Most people die in detention,” Attaye Ag Mohamed Aboubacrine, deputy secretary general of the Kal Akal human rights group, told Forbidden Stories investigators.

Investigators interviewed Malians living at a displaced persons camp in Mbera, Mauritania, who had survived contact with Wagner forces between 2022 and 2024. Captives were held in prisons at military bases in Bapho, Kidal, Niafunké, Nampala, Sévaré and Sofara. Former United Nations bases have also been turned into prisons.

“The total number of active detention centers during Wagner’s mission in the country is likely much higher than the six prisons our consortium identified, as numerous experts informed us,” investigators wrote.

Wagner has held some prisoners in metal containers sitting fully exposed to the broiling sun.

“At night, it was pitch black. There were just a few holes for light. There was nothing but a board on the floor,” a 25-year-old tailor identified as Ismail told investigators. “There were up to 10 of us inside during my 40 days there.”

Ismail told investigators his captors beat him unconscious on his first day in their custody. He was later forced to load trucks and dig holes.

A Fulani shopkeeper identified as Nawma spent four days in Wagner custody at a prison in Nampala, where he was tied up naked in a shower and beaten in the head.

“I lost a lot of blood,” Nawma told investigators. “They also burned my stomach with a lighter.”

According to human rights advocate Boubacar Ould Hamadi, president of the Collective for the Defense of the Rights of the Azawad People, the abuses by the Malian Armed Forces and Wagner mercenaries are part of a strategy to drive people out of the target regions.

The collective recorded more than 300 kidnappings or disappearance in northern Mali between October 2024 and March 2025 alone. In some cases, Malians captured by Wagner mercenaries were held for ransom or turned over to Malian authorities for prosecution. That’s what happened to Mohamed, a Tuareg medical assistant who was captured along with eight others at a market in central Mali in December 2022.

After being questioned for two days about a man Malian Soldiers were hunting, Mohamed was handed over to the gendarmerie on fake charges. He was released after his family paid $2,600.

In recent weeks, the Wagner Group announced it was leaving Mali to be replaced by the Russian Defense Ministry’s Africa Corps, a group comprised largely of former Wagner Group fighters. Guichaoua said the Malian junta’s invitation to the Wagner Group — and now Africa Corps — is part of a broader strategy of using greater force and avoiding accountability.

“The Malians probably wanted to change the way they wage war and get rid of external scrutiny of their Army,” Guichaoua told Forbidden Stories. “Bringing in the Russians has direct implications for how force is used.”

Africa Defense Forum

The Africa Defense Forum (ADF) magazine is a security affairs journal that focuses on all issues affecting peace, stability, and good governance in Africa. ADF is published by the U.S. Africa Command.