Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s Blog, page 2320

Marx’s Religion of Revolution

I began writing Marx’s Religion of Revolution in 1965. I was in graduate school at the University of California, Riverside. It was published in 1968. I was 26 years old.

I got the idea from R. J. Rushdoony. In 1965, he wrote a 20-page pamphlet, The Religion of Revolution. It was published by St. Thomas Press, the book publishing outlet of St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Houston. The pastor was a conservative, T. Robert Ingram. The booklet was going to be a chapter of a book. He wrote the follo...

A Conspiracy of Silence

During the past three weeks, Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed into law vast new powers for the NSA and the FBI to spy on innocent Americans and selectively to pass on to law enforcement the fruits of that spying.

Those fruits can now lawfully include all fiber-optic data transmitted to or in the United States, such as digital recordings of all landline and mobile telephone calls and copies in real time of all text messages and emails and banking, medical and legal records ele...

US Secrets, Lies, and Confusion

The announcements and denials of the Trump administration concerning military developments in the North of Syria reveal a heavy secret. Paradoxically, Turkey has come to the assistance of the United States to correct « the error » of their superior officers.

The denial expressed on 17 January by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson concerning the declarations of the commander-in-chief of CentCom, General Joseph Votel, on 23 December, and of the spokesman of the anti-Daesh Coalition, Colonel Thoma...

Patients Are Dying in Corridors

“Patients dying in hospital corridors.” So went the headline which appeared on the BBC’s website last week, detailing the newest outrages which have emerged from Britain’s crisis-beset healthcare system. This most recent revelation came as a result of an open letter sent to the prime minister by 68 senior doctors, offering details of the inhuman conditions which have become common in the National Health Service’s hospitals.

The letter, which collected statistics from NHS hospitals in England...

10 Mind-Blowing and Entertaining Uses

Some of us love that time of year when the leaves have all fallen off the trees, the air starts to turn colder, and the snow falls for the first time of the season. For everyone else, those white snowflakes bring back memories of slipping on ice, shoveling our cars out of our driveways, and that gray slush that covers the roads for months. (Of course, if you’ve never seen snow, you’ll just have to imagine.)

No matter how you feel about it, though, cool uses for snow and ice are limited only b...

Arctic Poised To Unleash

Paul Dorian sends word that there’s a change brewing in the Arctic that may result in a massive and extended cold outbreak for the Northern hemisphere, much like what we saw in late December and early January when record breaking cold swamped the eastern USA. He writes:

Overview

We are now experiencing warmer-than-normal weather conditions in the eastern US and there will be mild spells right into the first week of February, but the signs are increasing for a return to a cold pattern next mon...

The Property Rights of Wedding Cake Bakers Are Being Violated

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments last month in the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado, is a Christian who believes that marriage is the union of one man and woman. As such, he refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding. The case is widely considered to be one of the most important free speech cases in years. Yet, the views of the First Amendment held by defenders of Mr. Phillip...

Destroying Syria

The Donald Trump administration is planning to install a 30,000 strong armed “security force” in northern Syria along the borders with Turkey and Iraq. This presumably will tie together and support the remaining rag-tags of allegedly pro-democracy rebels and will fit in with existing and proposed U.S. bases. The maneuver is part of a broader plan to restructure Syria to suit the usual crop of neocon geniuses in Washington that have slithered their way back into the White House and National Se...

Chronological Isolation

Like other political movements, American conservatism offers predictable explanations as to where bad ideas arise.  During the Cold War, the explanation for this problem that one would have found with some regularity in conservative publications would have been communism, socialism, the welfare state, or “totalitarianism.”  More recently, socialism has alternated with “fascism,” or “Islamofascism.”  For today’s conservative media, moreover, these “isms” are mostly interchangeable designations...

We Don’t Need Bad Laws

President Donald Trump said, “We are going to take a strong look at our country’s libel laws so that when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts.” The president was responding to statements made in Michael Wolff’s new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.”

Our nation does not need stronger laws against libel. To the contrary, libel and slander laws should be repealed. Let’s say exactly what libe...