‘Howl at the Moon’: NASA’s bid to boost space enthusiasm

By AFP
April 11, 2026


This handout picture released on April 7, 2026, by NASA shows crescent Earth setting along the Moon's limb, as seen from the Orion spacecraft on April 6, 2026 - Copyright NASA/AFP Handout
Maggy DONALDSON

When NASA flight director Zebulon Scoville was working a shift during the uncrewed Artemis I test flight, he realized the US space agency wasn’t consistently livestreaming the spacecraft’s journey to Earth.

“They said, well, we don’t have bandwidth, we’ve got to get all this vehicle and engineering data down,” Scoville recalled. “I was like — wrong.”

“This program will be over if people don’t buy it and they don’t come with us.”

NASA eventually got a low-bandwidth live stream up for that 2022 uncrewed mission.

And once it was over, senior officials named the NASA veteran “imagery czar” to boost engagement.

He told AFP he spent two years working across the agency to figure out how better to take the public on NASA’s new Moon missions.

That included adding an optical communications system onto the Orion spacecraft, a laser that transmitted to a ground station on Earth, sending streaming video in higher resolution.

Throughout the more than nine-day Artemis II crewed test flight — which ended Friday with an emotional splashdown off the California coast — NASA has maintained live programming on its own streaming platform and across social media.

That, combined with third-party streamers and broadcast news, has earned millions of views.

And as NASA official Lori Glaze said Friday: “To all of our new followers out there, please stay tuned.”

– NASA on Twitch –

From social media posts clipped from livestreamed events with the astronauts to an extraordinary portfolio of celestial photographs, viewers caught an eyeful of Artemis II.

Insitutions including museums held Artemis splashdown parties, and some teachers integrated the launch into their lessons.

Alex Roethler, a Wisconsin physics teacher, said watching the mission helped his students get “more engaged,” and made lessons “feel more real.”

“I love having the livestream available, and I also think it’s cool that they use Twitch,” Roethler said, referring to a video streamer site favored by gamers. “That is a platform more of our students use.”

The crew themselves have been integral to the storytelling.

During the nearly seven-hour lunar flyby, astronauts Christina Koch, Victor Glover, Jeremy Hansen and Reid Weisman gave near-literary descriptions of lunar surface features and left scientists in Houston awe-struck.

With Artemis II, there have been “just smiles and actually showing emotion through NASA, where we have sometimes had a history of being a little bit dry,” Scoville said.

“It’s okay to jump up and down and howl at the moon,” he added.

– Apollo-Artemis parallels –

Before Artemis II, the United States hadn’t sent astronauts around the Moon since 1972 for the Apollo 17 mission — the last of that famed space program that saw humans walk on the lunar surface.

In the lead-up to the 10-day test flight, NASA faced both a blase populace and a fractured media environment.

The space agency had to battle for attention across traditional and social media in a way the three-TV-channel era of Apollo never experienced. The Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969 saw approximately one-fifth of the global population tune in.

Yet for all the mythical qualities of Apollo, Jack Kiraly, director of government relations at the Planetary Society, said “nostalgia” perhaps “glosses over some of the issues that the program at the time faced.”

“Everything that led up to that was actually broadly unpopular with the American electorate, with the public writ large,” Kiraly told AFP.

Still, even with that in account, the analyst said “I don’t think this moment is living up to the hype” of most Apollo missions, and added he hopes NASA’s communications strategies continue to improve.

– ‘Longing for something good’ –

Ahead of Artemis II, Scoville had conversations with mission commander Reid Wiseman in which they reflected on parallels between the Apollo 8 lunar mission and this most recent Moon flyby.

The United States in 1968 was politically fractured and at war.

Nearly 60 years later, not so much has changed.

“We’re watching the news today, with wars, with division, and, like, how much everyone is just so longing for something good to happen,” Scoville said.

In a recent space-to-Earth press conference, Wiseman said their only news source during the mission was their families, who said Artemis has captivated people worldwide, though he admitted they are “biased.”

Wiseman said he hoped the trip could “have the world pause” to take in the beauty of our planet and universe.

“I think for the folks that decided to tune in — and it sounds like it was quite a few — this has happened,” he said.

Throughout their journey, all four astronauts emphasized how unified Earth looks from afar — a takeaway they hoped would permeate public consciousness.

“People are wanting to reach out to their inner rocket nerds,” Scoville said. “This is just a glimpse of what’s to come.”

After Artemis II, NASA looks to SpaceX, Blue Origin for Moon landings


By AFP
April 11, 2026


NASA official Lori Glaze says after Artemis II returns to Earth that 'all of industry' needs to work toward Moon landing - Copyright AFP RONALDO SCHEMIDT

Charlotte CAUSIT

With Artemis II successfully completing its historic lunar mission on Friday, NASA is banking on billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk for the next step: landing astronauts on the Moon.

The Apollo program — which sent the first and only humans to the Moon’s surface between 1969 and 1972 — was designed so that only two astronauts could land on the lunar surface for a maximum of a few days.

More than 50 years later, American ambitions and expertise have grown, with NASA hoping to send four people on a mission lasting several weeks and eventually building a lunar base.

For the second phase of its mission, the space agency is looking to commercial landers designed by Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’s Blue Origin to get its astronauts on the Moon.

After Artemis II splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on Friday after its record-breaking journey, NASA officials urged all hands on deck for a crewed landing in 2028.

“We need all of industry to work and come along with us, and they need to accept that challenge and come with us and really start the production lines that are going to be required in order to achieve that goal,” Lori Glaze, the acting associate NASA administrator, told a press conference.

The Apollo program relied on a single rocket, the Saturn V, which carried both the lunar lander and the capsule carrying the astronauts.

NASA has opted for two separate systems for Artemis: the first to launch the Orion spacecraft carrying the crew from Earth, and another to launch the lunar lander, which will be privately contracted.



– ‘Camping trip’ –



The decision was driven by the technical limitations of the Apollo program, Kent Chojnacki, a senior NASA official in charge of lunar lander development, told AFP.

“It was very not expandable to long-term exploration and long-term stays,” he explained.

Although spectacular, the Apollo missions were like “camping trips,” said Jack Kiraly, director of government relations at the Planetary Society, which encourages space exploration.

The systems NASA is looking at now are “huge compared to Apollo,” said Chojnacki, noting that the new lunar landers being developed by Blue Origin and SpaceX are two to seven times larger than before.

The space agency is also drawing from external partners, such as the European companies that built the propulsion module for Orion.

The new approach opens access to more equipment and resources, but also significantly complicates operations.

To send these giant spacecrafts to the Moon, the private space exploration companies will need to master in-flight refueling, a complex maneuver that has not yet been fully tested.

After the lunar lander is launched, additional rockets will be needed to deliver the fuel required for the journey to the Moon, some 250,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) from Earth.



– ‘Lose the Moon’ –



Given this risky undertaking and the numerous delays — particularly those experienced by SpaceX that was supposed to have its lander ready first — pressure has mounted in recent months.

“We are once again about to lose the Moon,” three former NASA officials warned in an article in SpaceNews last September.

China, which is hoping to send humans to the Moon by 2030, has been making progress as well, raising fears in the Trump administration that the United States could get left behind.

With that in mind, NASA raised the possibility last fall of reopening the contract awarded to SpaceX and using Blue Origin’s lunar lander first, sending shockwaves through the rival companies.

Both firms announced they were realigning their strategies to prioritize the lunar project — and keep their lucrative contracts with NASA.

But concerns remain, particularly regarding the feasibility of in-orbit refueling.

“We do have a plan,” Chojnacki said, noting that NASA has a back-up plan in case of failure.

The timeline is also up in the air.

NASA says it plans to test an in-orbit rendezvous between the spacecraft and one or two lunar landers in 2027, and carry out a crewed lunar landing in 2028.

Before that, companies will need to test in-orbit refueling and send an unmanned lunar lander to the Moon to demonstrate its safety.

That all needs to happen within the next two years.

“It feels like a very small amount of time,” said Clayton Swope of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Faith has always gone to space. Artemis II shows how much it has changed.

(RNS) — Both Apollo 8 and Artemis II missions included public references to religion, but astronauts aboard the Artemis’ Orion spacecraft struck a broader, more global tone.

NASA’s Artemis II moon rocket lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39-B Wednesday, April 1, 2026, in Cape Canaveral, Fla. (AP Photo/Chris O’Meara)

Jack Jenkins
April 7, 2026

RNS

(RNS) — On Monday (April 6), NASA astronauts finally were about to commence Artemis II’s flyby of the moon, the first such close observance of Earth’s satellite in nearly 60 years. The four astronauts had spent days on the Orion spacecraft, hurtling toward the moon, and they were about to travel farther away from Earth than any human being in history.

But moments before the crew would enter into roughly 40 minutes of radio silence as they passed behind the moon, the voice of astronaut Victor Glover — who has been open about his Christian faith and worships at Churches of Christ congregations in Texas — crackled over the broadcast channel to offer a message of love.

“As we continue to unlock the mysteries of the cosmos, I would like to remind you of one of the most important mysteries there on Earth — and that’s love,” said Glover. “Christ said, in response to what was the greatest command, that it was to love God with all that you are. And he also, being a great teacher, said this: ‘I give you equal to it, and that is to love your neighbor as yourself.’”

Glover added: “And so, as we prepare to go out of radio communication, we’re still able to feel your love from Earth and to all of you down there on Earth, and around the Earth, we love you from the moon.”

The spiritual appeal recalled perhaps one of the most widely broadcast moments of religious expression: the 1968 Apollo 8 mission, when three astronauts read from Genesis on live television as they, too, orbited the moon. Both missions also happened to coincide with religious holidays: Apollo 8 circled the moon on Christmas Eve, and the 10-day Artemis II mission overlapped with the Christian celebration of Easter and the Jewish holiday of Passover.

RELATED: Vatican astrophysicists offer new way of studying gravity after the big bang

But for all their similarities, the four astronauts participating in the Artemis II mission have collectively showcased a broader, more pluralistic approach to public religious expression than the three men who rode aboard Apollo 8. It’s a subtle change that showcases NASA’s evolving relationship to public displays of faith, a tonal shift that likely traces its origins to the legal challenges that followed the reading of Genesis aboard the lunar module back in 1968.

Artemis II pilot Victor Glover, right, speaks about the role of Easter and the importance of unity across beliefs on Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026, from inside the Orion spacecraft. (Video screen grab)

Much of the God-talk on the Artemis mission has centered on Glover, who is also the most publicly religious astronaut on the mission. He reportedly brought a Bible along with him for the 10-day journey in space, which is something he’s done before: He told The Christian Chronicle in 2020 that he had a Bible and Communion cups sent to the International Space Station in preparation for his arrival aboard a Space X capsule in November of that year. At the time, Glover suggested he planned to worship virtually with his church while in orbit, as he had been doing throughout the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

NASA officials did not offer a direct response when asked by Religion News Service if Glover or other Artemis II astronauts have made special arrangements to worship while aboard the Orion capsule. But Glover did offer some public religious reflection while hurtling toward the moon over the weekend, when CBS reporter Mark Strassmann asked him to comment on the journey’s overlap with Easter.

“When I read the Bible and I look at all of the amazing things that were done for us who were created, it’s you have this amazing place, this spaceship. You guys are talking to us because we’re in a spaceship really far from Earth, but you’re on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe and the cosmos,” Glover said.

He added that whether listeners “believe in God or not, this is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that … we got to get through this together.”

A similar sentiment was expressed a few days before the astronauts blasted off from Earth. A reporter in the press pool asked the astronauts about traveling to the moon during Easter. Reid Wiseman, Artemis II’s commander, and the two other astronauts — Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen — all glanced over to Glover, who said something inaudible that sparked a chuckle among the group.

Wiseman then stepped forward and acknowledged the legacy of Apollo 8, gearing his answer to a multireligious audience.

“We have our own different opinions, our own individual opinions and our own individual beliefs,” he said, gesturing to his fellow astronauts. “I think that’s one of the best parts about this mission right now: As we have said from the beginning, we really are for all, by all, and we want to take the whole world along with us.”

Wiseman then referenced Ramadan — “we just came out of a very important Muslim holiday” — noting that it ended less than a month before Easter.

“I think that that’s great — that we celebrate all of this all the way around the world,” he said.

It’s a different tone than the one struck by astronauts aboard the Apollo 8 mission.

Apollo 8 astronaut Jim Lovell speaks during an event commemorating the 50th anniversary of his 1968 space mission at the Washington National Cathedral, Dec. 11, 2018. (RNS photo/Jack Jenkins)

Whereas Artemis II shot past the moon only once before heading back to Earth, the Apollo 8 mission entered into lunar orbit, circling Earth’s satellite multiple times over the course of 20 hours. As the astronauts rounded the planet for the ninth time, all three astronauts — William Anders (a Catholic at the time), Jim Lovell (Presbyterian) and Frank Borman (Episcopalian) — took turns reading from the Book of Genesis on a broadcast, reciting verses 1-10 from the King James translation of the Bible. The men read from the mission’s flight manual, where the Scripture passages had been printed after Christine Laitin suggested them to her husband, a government official assisting with the mission.

“From the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth,” Borman said.

Fifty years later, Lovell reflected on the moment while addressing a crowd at the Washington National Cathedral.

“I arrived on a planet with a proper mass to have the gravity to retain water and an atmosphere — the essentials for life. I arrived on a planet orbiting a star at just the right distance to absorb that star’s energy,” he said. “In my mind, the answer was clear: God gave mankind a stage on which to perform. How the play ends is up to us.”

That broadcast prompted a lawsuit from atheist activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who argued it violated the First Amendment’s establishment clause. Although the U.S. Supreme Court eventually threw out the case due to “want of jurisdiction” — presumably referring to space — historians have long argued the lawsuit had a lasting impact on NASA, as astronauts were effectively discouraged from openly engaging in worship or religious activity during a mission.

Many point to Buzz Aldrin, who celebrated Communion on the moon shortly before walking out onto the lunar surface, but waited more than a year before commenting on the moment publicly.

The Artemis II crew captured this view of an Earthset on April 6, 2026, as they flew around the moon. (Photo courtesy of NASA)

In the intervening years, it has become common for astronauts to speak publicly about religious practices that occurred during their missions, even as the space-farers and NASA have taken pains to avoid giving a specific faith tradition center stage as on Apollo 8. Bibles were brought to the moon and returned in the Apollo era, and Christians of several varieties brought crucifixes, icons and other religious symbols with them aboard various rockets. Teams of Islamic scholars were convened to help guide Muslim astronauts who wanted to pray and maintain their religious observance while orbiting Earth on the International Space Station — including during Ramadan. Jewish astronauts have brought Torah scrolls aboard the space shuttles, with one reading from Genesis while in orbit.

Sometimes religious expression can be more subtle. Aboard the Artemis II, the personal mission patch worn by Canadian astronaut Hansen includes references to spirituality embraced by Indigenous communities he has spent time with. According to the Canadian government, his patch, which was designed by Anishinaabe artist Henry Guimond, includes a representation of the “Seven Sacred Laws, a traditional First Nations teaching shared with (Hansen) in preparation for his journey around Grandmother Moon.”

But while religious ritual is space is common, the profundity of a moon mission appears to have inspired Artemis astronauts to broaden their public religious appeals. It’s an approach that may be drawn from the wisdom of past astronauts: Wiseman’s desire to “take the whole world along with us” is reminiscent of Aldrin’s thoughts on his moon Communion. In his 2010 memoir, he explained he now envisions major space missions as something for all people — be they religious or otherwise.

“We had come to space in the name of all mankind — be they Christians, Jews, Muslims, animists, agnostics, or atheists,” Aldrin wrote. “But at the time I could think of no better way to acknowledge the Apollo 11 experience than by giving thanks to God.”

NO GOD!

Trump’s Tone-Deaf Sales Pitch for More War

by Dennis Kucinich | Apr 3, 2026 | 

Former Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich (1997 to 2013) challenged three administrations, Clinton (Serbia), Bush (Iraq), and Obama (Libya), over unauthorized military action under the War Powers Resolution, led Congressional opposition to the Iraq War, and delivered 155 speeches in Congress warning against war with Iran.

The President’s address to the nation was a tone-deaf sales pitch for more war, delivered on the first night of Passover.

Civilian and military casualties are mounting across the region. Lives are being extinguished while triumphalist and violent rhetoric is offered as justification. War is being escalated in the name of peace, a contradiction that demands moral clarity, not political acceptance.

Each life lost carries equal value. No nation’s suffering is expendable. No people exist as collateral.

Iran is not an abstraction, nor just a target on a map. It is one of the great cradles of civilization, a society whose cultural and intellectual contributions long predate the rise of the modern West. To speak casually of bombing such a nation ‘back to the Stone Age’ reveals a colonial mindset that dehumanizes others and diminishes our own humanity in the process.

The extensive bombing of Iran by the United States and Israel, along with Iran’s counterstrikes, is already taking innocent lives. The global economy is destabilizing as a result.

Energy markets are being disrupted. Oil and gas production is constrained. Fertilizer supply chains are impaired. Critical materials are being cut off.

These consequences will be felt worldwide. Yet the deeper crisis is not economic, it is moral.

We have seen this before. The repeated invocation of a nuclear threat echoes the false claims of ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ used to justify the invasion of Iraq. That war cost thousands of American lives, the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and trillions of dollars, while leaving a legacy of instability and grief that endures to this day.

If the President truly sought to prevent a nuclear Iran, he would not have abandoned the JCPOA, an agreement that placed verifiable limits on Iran’s nuclear program. Instead, we are presented with a cycle of escalation that defies logic and invites catastrophe.

Political rhetoric is becoming increasingly radical and dangerous. This is not a question of partisan politics. It is a question of conscience with very real global and domestic consequences.

The American people are not called to accept this. They are called to stand against it.

Members of Congress must have the courage to exercise their constitutional authority and rein this in.

War framed as strength is destruction. Violence presented as necessity is gratuitous violence, with consequences already accelerating destabilizing shifts in the global order.

Congress must act. The Constitution vests in Congress the authority to bring this, and any war, to an end through the power of the purse.

The American people must immediately contact their representatives and demand a NO vote on any supplemental funding that would continue this war. Congress must VOTE NO.”

Dennis J. Kucinich served sixteen years in the United States Congress and twice ran for President of the United States on a platform of peace, truth, and constitutional integrity. He led the opposition to the Iraq War and introduced Articles of Impeachment against President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for misleading the nation into war.

Iran-linked hackers claim breach of Israeli air defence contractor PSK Wind

Alleged images from Iranian hack. / bne IntelliNews

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By bnm Gulf bureau April 2, 2026

The Handala Hack Group, a cyber outfit aligned with Iran's "axis of resistance," claimed on April 2 to have breached the networks of PSK Wind Technologies, an Israeli firm that designs integrated command and control systems for the country's air defence network.

The group said it had extracted "all sensitive data" from PSK Wind's servers, including classified documents relating to command and control centres and communication systems. It claimed the stolen information had been "transmitted directly to the missile units of the Axis of Resistance."

The claims could not be independently verified. PSK Wind Technologies and the Israeli military did not immediately comment on the alleged breach.

Handala issued a threat timed to the Jewish holiday of Passover, stating: "What you celebrate as Passover will soon turn into a day of unforgettable mourning." The group warned that "none of your command or defence centres will be secure."

The claimed hack is the latest in a series of cyber operations targeting Israeli military infrastructure since the war began on February 28. Iran and its allied groups have pursued a parallel cyber campaign alongside conventional missile and drone strikes, seeking to degrade Israeli intelligence and defence capabilities.

If confirmed, a breach of PSK Wind's systems would be significant. The firm is described by the hackers as the "mastermind behind the command and control centres" of Israel's air defence network, which has been under sustained pressure from daily Iranian, Houthi and Hezbollah missile and drone attacks throughout the conflict.

Israel's air defence systems, including Iron Dome, David's Sling and Arrow, have been central to the country's ability to intercept incoming projectiles. Any compromise of the command architecture linking these systems could have operational consequences.

Iran's IRGC separately threatened on March 31 to target 18 US technology and AI companies it accused of providing targeting data for assassination operations against Iranian nationals.

Stephen Miller and the Passover Message

Robert Koehler

 April 2, 2026

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Stephen Miller, President Donald J. Trump’s repellent senior advisor, deputy chief of staff, and director of the interagency Homeland Security Council, posted on social media two months ago:

“Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class. The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights, including welfare & the right to vote. All visas are a bridge to citizenship. In America, for generations now, the policy has been that anyone who would economically benefit from moving to the US can do so, exercise the franchise in the US and their children, the moment they are born, will be full American citizens with all the rights and benefits therein.”

Miller called for a “labor class” excluded from citizenship and a voice in government. “Democrats just flatly reject any concept of nationhood that has ever existed in human history,” he said.

Miller was presumably exposed annually from an early age to the Passover story from the biblical Book of Exodus, ritualized according to the textual telling in the Haggadah every year at this time around the seder table. Here we learn that the Jewish people were enslaved in Egypt for 400 years and had none of the rights accorded the non-Jewish members of that society – such as they might have been living under the pharaonic god-kings. They were, you know, a “labor class” without rights.

The lesson commonly drawn from the story since ancient times is that slavery – having a designated labor class with no capacity to influence the conditions of servitude – is, you know, really abhorrently bad. This has engendered an ethic of inclusivity, an embracing of the other, that has been a core value of Jewish culture.

Let’s revisit the stirring admonition from Leviticus 19:34: “But the stranger who dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself, for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”

This is resoundingly rejected by Miller, an Ashkenazi Jew whose family escaped Russian pogroms and the Holocaust. His forbearers along with millions of diaspora Jews arrived on our shores in the late 19th and early 20th century fleeing oppression born of bigoted exclusion by the dominant societies of the countries where they had been living and here aspiring to social and political inclusivity. They slaved away in sweatshops in this country while living in some of the most appalling conditions of poverty in the world, struggling for full participation in a pluralistic society in a nation where they would be full members.

Now that he has benefitted from the activism of his forbearers and attained residency in the inner sanctum of the citadel of power he is dedicated to ensuring that others, particularly people of color, cannot be welcomed into the same privileged circle of full citizenship as he, essentially supporting the Egyptian side of that ancient conflict.

Further revealing his deeply odious philosophy, in January, Miller told Jake Tapper on CNN that:

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power … These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

The only iron in this discussion is between Miller’s ears.

His nearly unimaginable moral monstrousness exhibits an arresting consistency. If it is righteous for any stronger person to brutalize a weaker person, then one must be always vigilant, in essence perpetually paranoid, because assailants may be lurking anywhere and there is no respite, no protection, that a humane society or government can, or what is more, ought to even aspire to provide.

There are other worlds, like mystical nesting vessels, co-existing right here in the same space and time as the one Miller proclaims we live in, that are invisible to him and his supporters due to stunted and distorted dimensions of human consciousness. The world of most of the folks I hang out with features awareness of our mutuality as fellow beings sharing a fragile planetary biosphere where, in the poignant words of the poet Auden written at the outset of the second world war, “we must love another or die.” I encourage anyone who has not read his poem September 1, 1939 in a long time to revisit it now.

As the late Buddhist monk and revered teacher Thich Nhat Hanh illuminates:

“There is a tendency to be individualistic in us, a seed of egoism, but that isn’t all that is in us. There is the other seed, the seed of togetherness, the desire to help and be kind to others. If you have the chance to be exposed to a loving, understanding environment where the seed of compassion can be watered every day, then you become a more loving person.”

Which seed are you watering?

Robert Koehler is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor.

SEE 

 https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2007/04/passover-song.html

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Pagan Origins of Easter 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PASSOVER

Stumbling Along in Hitler’s Footsteps

Dave Lindorff

 April 2, 2026

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World War II, at least in Europe, can be blamed on a single man — a dictator who gained absolute power because of the fecklessness of democratically elected politicians in his country. Afraid to challenge a politician popular with much of their lumpen proletarian base, they hoped to be rid if him by making him head of the representative body that was supposed to control him. They even granted him unusual emergency powers, in hopes that he’d mess up and be destroyed politically.

They gave this power to a man who had a thuggish cult-like following and who had earlier been jailed for organizing a failed putsch that was intended to topple the government and put them and their leader in power, The violent coup attempt failed, with some putschists and a few police killed. Their leader, who fled and hid out for two days was arrested. Tried and convicted of treason, he remained popular among his followers, and only served 9 months of his five-year sentence before being released.

Had Adolph Hitler, whose popularity was owed to his scapegoating the blame for Germany’s economic woes onto Jews, Communists, Socialists and European countries, been kept in jail to serve his full sentence, and had he been properly barred from running for national office because of his record of treason and fomenting revolution, he might  never have been able order the annexation of Austria, the takeover by force  of the German-speaking “Sudetenland” region of Czechoslovakia, or the invasion of Poland. That last decision set the war in Europe in motion because of mutual assistance pacts that obligated France and Britain to come to Poland’s defense,  Thus began the war that ultimately led to the destruction of most of Europe and much of Asia and to the deaths of over 60 million people, most of them civilians, in what remains most terrible and bloody conflict in human history.

If this story sounds oddly—and disturbingly—familiar, it should, for it is being repeated before our eyes right now in the United States of America and the Middle East. In this version, a more porcine and less articulate, but at least as narcissistic and psychopathic a man, Donald Trump, was returned to the presidency in 2024 by the slimmest of pluralities and, despite his having four years earlier attempted to foment a coup to overturn the election of his Democratic rival, Joe Biden.

Once his oath of office vowing to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States had been sworn to, he took advantage of a July 2024 ruling by a stacked right-wing Supreme Court  majority. That ruling, Trump v. United States granted all presidents absolute immunity from prosecution for any of their “presidential acts,” and pardoned all the Make America Great Again (MAGA) cultist insurrectionists, who four years earlier had, upon his orders, stormed Congress, hoping to prevent Congressional  certification of the 2020 election that Trump had just lost. Subsequent to that, Republicans, with control of both houses of Congress, but still nearly all afraid of this modern-day “Hitler’s” cult followers’ ability to deny them renomination as candidates in their next re-election bids, acted much like like the cowards in the Bundestag (German parliament) in 1933: they granted Trump the powers of an absolute monarch, unconstrained by Constitution, courts or even moral qualms.

Trump’s MAGA cult is kept stoked by his endless fear-mongering about a nonexistent “tidal wave” of immigrants of color —“murderers and rapists” that he claims are “diluting the blood” of “real” (meaning White) Americans.

It’s nonsense, but the hate-spewing tactic works just as well in 2026 on the down-trodden MAGA working class-whites in the US looking for some group to blame for their failure to earn a decent living, as it worked 1933 for Hitler on the downtrodden German masses in the depths of the Great Depression years of the 1930s.

At this point, with the  president claiming, without any objection from his party, which controls both houses of Congress, that he doesn’t need permission from Congress or the UN Security Council, he has launched an all-out war of choice on Iran, a country that poses no risk to the US, half a world away. It’s a war a large majority of Americans oppose, yet a sycophant Congress won’t even debate a War Powers Resolution that could bring it to a halt.

Like Hitler, Trump, who is known to have long admired the impetuous Nazi Führer,  is taking his own council in his war decisions, allowing genocidal Israel to do much of the bombing with its now honed and practiced lack of concern about mass casualties of civilians.  And like Israel, he has adopted the idiotic policy of murdering the enemy’s leaders—a practice called “decapitation.” It’s a short-sighted tactic long opposed by military leaders  and outlawed in the Geneva Accords because, as Trump is discovering, doing so makes it difficult if not impossible to negotiate an end to the fighting.

HItler basically lost his war before he started it, by failing to first plan on how he would obtain the massive amounts of oil needed to fuel his huge war machine — something he never managed to do successfully. Similarly Trump failed to realize how easy it would be even for a heavily bombed Iran to shut down shipping through the narrow Strait of Hormuz, cutting off 20% of the entire world’s oil supply and creating a massive global and domestic US economic, diplomatic  and political crisis.

Hitler, whose military experience was limited to his having been a private and a corporal during WWI was also overconfident in the power of his modernized military and his Aryan soldiers, and dismissive of his generals. He didn’t believe the Soviets, with their Slavik peasant army, could resist and defeat this massive Wehrmacht. He likewise assumed wrongly that he could conquer Britain quickly, either through mass bombing or a cross-Channel invasion. Trump, who had no military experience having dodged the Vietnam-era draft by claiming to have “bone spurs” on his feet, has similarly miscalculated how hard Iranians, faced with an existential threat to their nation, would rally to resist the US onslaught.

Like Hitler, Trump thinks he knows everything, and he clearly doesn’t.

Germany before the war had in its excellent universities some of the top physicists, chemists, engineers and mathematicians in the world. Some of them, like scientists in the US, Britain and eventually the USSR, were warning that there was a way to produce a super bomb based upon releasing the energy found inside the nucleus of the uranium atom. In the US, Britain and the Soviet Union, these warnings led to secret crash programs to develop an atomic bomb—ironically out of a fear the Nazis would get an atomic bomb first. But Hitler blew off his scientists’ dire warnings, dismissing the idea of such a weapon, as well as the theory of quantum mechanics that underlay it, as “Jewish science.” He refused to provide the funding for such a costly “crackpot” idea..

In a similar manner, the smug know-it-all current US Commander-in-Chief, who has bragged of having “The highest IQ of any president in history,” ignored expert advice from the State Department, the Pentagon and intelligence people that Iran would not be a pushover like Venezuela or ISIS in Syria. An ancient civilization with a unified language and national pride as well as an educated population, Iran has showed it will resist, and has the means to do so, proving this with its precision strikes on US bases across the Middle East, and with little evident public protest from the population being bombed.

We are at this moment being misled in the US by a man whom Rex Tillerson, the corporate CEO who served as Secretary of State for the first two years of Trump’s first term,  once inappropriately but aptly  labeled, “a moron.”

We can only hope that Trump’s blundering into a war the US cannot win, will not end up killing as many innocent people as Hitler did with his World War II blunder of invading Poland and later the USSR. And we can only hope that this biggest disaster of his political misadventure in The Middle East will drive  him out of office and end a most shameful chapter in US history — one that hopefully will also school Americans about the danger of supporting grandiose charlatans to rule as as kings.

There were good reasons American farmers craftspeople and others from all walks of life in the colonies took up arms against the most powerful military in the 18th century world: to throw off the yoke of King George’s tyranny,

This article by Dave Lindorff appeared originally in ThisCantBeHappening! on its new Substack platform at https://thiscantbehappening.substack.com/. Please check out the new site and consider signing up for a cut-rate subscription that will be available until the end of the month.