For a tragically short time, the Spirit of the Prince of Peace drowned out the murderous demands of the State. In August 1914, Europe's major powers threw themselves into war with gleeful abandon. Germany, a rising power with vast aspirations, plowed across Belgium,...
Justice
TGIF: Beware Elitists in Populist Clothing
by Sheldon Richman | Dec 22, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles, History, Justice, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
We're led to believe that today's political struggles are largely a contest between populists and elitists. But something besides libertarians is missing from that simple tale: the elitists in populist clothing, or elitist populists. We have no better example than a...
TGIF: Ahad Ha’Am’s Prophetic Warning about Political Zionism
by Sheldon Richman | Dec 15, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy, History, Justice, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
Ukrainian-born Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg (1856-1927), whose pen name was Ahad Ha'Am (Hebrew for one of the people), was a proponent of Spiritual, or Cultural, Zionism, which made him a rival to Theodor Herzl and Political Zionism, the movement dedicated to creating a...
TGIF: Inspiration for the Nakba?
by Sheldon Richman | Dec 8, 2023 | Featured Articles, History, Justice, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
The unspeakable violence that plagues Israel and Palestine daily relates in part to the assertion of an ancient, ancestral, and even divinely bestowed property right to a parcel of land, which is often called "holy" and "promised." For background, here are a few...
TGIF: Jewish Dissent on the Balfour Declaration
by Sheldon Richman | Dec 1, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy, History, Justice, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
In the fateful year 1917 the British cabinet had one Jewish member: Edwin Montagu. He was also the only cabinet member to oppose the Balfour Declaration of that year, which paved the way for the self-declared creation of the state of Israel, the so-called Jewish...
TGIF: Bigotry versus Social Cooperation
by Sheldon Richman | Nov 17, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
We who value individualism, freedom, and social cooperation as essential to flourishing should be distressed by the hostile bigotry that has lately reared its ugly head, to some uncertain extent, on the streets and campuses of America and abroad. This is not new. In...
TGIF: When History Didn’t Begin
by Sheldon Richman | Nov 10, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy, History, Justice, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
I agree with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. I've never written those words before. But on Oct 24, Guterres said to the UN Security Council (emphasis added): The situation in the Middle East is growing more dire by the hour. The war in Gaza is raging and risks...
TGIF: The Glorious Bourgeois Peace Movement
by Sheldon Richman | Nov 3, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles, Foreign Policy, History, Justice, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
Those of us whose pro-peace/antiwar principles are of the bourgeois classical-liberal variety need reminding now and again that we have a glorious tradition going back hundreds of years. We need not get lost in the dominant rhetoric that opposes war, empire, and its...