Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s Blog, page 387

Who Was Pope Benedict XIII?

Three centuries have passed since Pier Francesco Orsini was elected pope on May 29, 1724, after a conclave lasting nearly three months, assuming the name Benedict XIII (†1730). This man, “whose labors in favor of keeping and restoring ecclesiastical discipline and of ensuring the splendor of churches have been most known,”[1] also made contributions to sacred music during his pontificate.

A quick glance at his biography reveals that Pier Francesco Orsini was born 75 years earlier in Gravina in P...

Ukraine Will Return to Neutrality or Face Partition or Annihilation

China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning has agreed to attend next month’s Ukrainian peace conference in Switzerland with one proviso, that Russia be invited. Mao said that Beijing supports the “timely convening of an international peace conference that is recognized by both the Russian and Ukrainian sides.”

That sounds reasonable, after all, one would expect that peace negotiations would include the representatives of the warring parties. But that is not the case here. And while more than ...

You Can’t Turn Back the Clock on Genocide

As Amal Nassar lay in pain on a bed at the Al-Awda Hospital in the Nuseirat refugee camp in northern Gaza, the echoes of explosions and artillery fire could be heard all around her. It was mid-January and she had made her way to the embattled hospital to give birth to a baby girl she would name Mira. While Amal should have been celebrating her infant’s delivery, instead she was engulfed in fear, surrounded by the relentless nightmare of death and suffering that she and her family had experienced...

Dune II – The Feminist Snake in Frank Herbert’s Garden

This article first appeared in the March issue of the Gold, Goats ‘n Guns Newsletter
Reprinted here with minor edits.

Frank Herbert’s Dune is a work of immense depth and subtlety. I never thought Denis Villeneuve would capture even half of that depth in his 5-plus hour film. After having seen the second part, I can say I was right.

This is not to denigrate what Villeneuve was able to capture. He rightly focused on a linear narrative supporting Paul Atreides’ journey from Duke-in-training, to lea...

The Privatization of Nuclear War

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If The Wars Go On

I suppose my title could have been couched in the singular form, as Hermann Hesse, the Nobel Prize winning German/Swiss author, did with his collection of anti-war essays about World War I (the war to end all wars that didn’t), If The War Goes On . . .  

Or more appropriately, I might have eliminated that conditional “If” since it seems Pollyannish.

It’s a long hard road, this anti-war business.  During the first Cold War and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis in the early sixties when Kennedy and Kr...

‘The Pale Rider of Revelation’

A few weeks ago, the Guardian published a video of U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken performing a cover of Neil Young’s “Keep On Rockin’ in the Free World” with noisy band in a bar in Kiev. The video conjured embarrassing memories from my own distant past, when I occasionally inflicted bad performances of three chord songs on an audience at a grungy bar in Vienna’s 8th District.

I console myself that I was a young and drunk bohemian ex-pat, and not the U.S. Secretary of State. When I saw t...

Think Inflation Is Done? Think Again!

In this article I focus on two reasons why inflation will rise leading to higher, not lower, interest rates and bond yields. The first is the destruction of credit’s value through its non-productive expansion, mainly by governments running budget deficits. The second has had almost no attention but is at least as serious: the consequences of the repatriation of supply chains being accelerated by trade tariffs and sanctions. I shall briefly comment on the first before turning my attention to the ...

Test, Test, Test

The night before my annual medical visit I spent a near sleepless night dealing with issues related to my daughter’s illness. During that night I felt irritation in my right eye. In the morning I realized I was spraying mouthwash all over the bathroom because I could not keep the right side of my mouth firmly closed. It was clear to me at that moment that I had developed Bell’s palsy, a paralysis of the facial muscles only on one side. “It results from a dysfunction of cranial nerve VII (the fac...

The End of the Nation-State

The nation-state is coming to its end. And thank god for that.

For five hundred years, since the emergence of Spain and England as more than a collection of defeated princedoms and duchies but coherent entities with shared customs, religions, allegiances, and language, the nation-state has been the way most societies have ordered their polities.

Indeed, nowadays there are as many as 195 recognized states in the United Nations, but many of those are known as failed states–Somalia, Haiti, Syria, a...