From the first attacks on Native Americans to the aggression on Iran, Americans have been at war, with perhaps the biggest one yet to come. Ray McGovern and Patrick Lawrence. Watch the replay.
Guests: Ray McGovern and Patrick Lawrence. Host: Joe Lauria. Producer: Cathy Vogan
Segments:
- A Warlike People From Massachusetts Bay to the Persian Gulf
- Iran: The Memo of Misunderstanding
- A NATO Summit Lusts for War With Russia
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
It began as part of the British Empire and morphed into an empire of its own.
The vaunted Founders looked at a vast continent stretching into the interior, saw an empire of the future and turned its back on the empires of Europe. It could only be brought about with war. First against the native population.
The initial war to annihilate a tribe began in 1636 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Connecticut. The genocidal Indian Wars, as the white man called them, ended nearly 300 year later with the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. The Americans had taken over this imperial war from Britain.
There were other Europeans to fight too. First the British imperial yoke had to be thrown off to set America free to conquer the continent. Allied France, strapped for cash after its own wars with Britain, turned over its vast American domains without a fight and for a bargain price.
The Mexicans were next and bloodshed yielded California, Nevada, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The Northwest was won eventually in a treaty with Britain after President Polk campaigned with the waer jingoist slogan of “54°40′ or Fight!”
Once the continent was seized the imperial drive crossed the Pacific to take Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines, and over the Caribbean to get Puerto Rico and occupy Cuba. George Washington’s edict not to get entangled in European imperial wars was discarded by Woodrow Wilson who put an American foothold into Europe in the great war.
The atomic bombings at the conclusion of the second great war sparked a megalomaniacal American quest to dominate a devastated world. A relatively unscathed U.S. was left with military bases around a globe rich in natural resources and cheap labor, ripe for the taking.
Seeking to control both led to cold war with America’s erstwhile Soviet allies. Central Intelligence Agency plots on five continents overthrew governments to keep them in the American camp.
When the 45-year struggle with Moscow ended, America triumphantly seized dominance of Russia’s government and economy until the rise of a Russian leader who took back control of his country.
The Western project since has been to replace him with another controllable leader, including by instigating war through its proxy in Ukraine. NATO now madly talks of direct conflict with Moscow.
In West Asia, U.S. dominance began by displacing the British and French and using a local ally to extend its influence including through genocide and unprovoked aggression.
The current U.S. administration does not cloak its imperial ambitions, reviving the language of 19th century colonialism.
All from that the first major Native American war in Massachusetts to bombing a school full of girls in Iran.
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as always, i marvel at your expertise and thank you for
sharing it w us in an entertaining way, despite the often
discouraging, pardon, “disgusting“ subject matter.
re israel’s existence:
isn’t it now fulfilling its task of turning into the dominant power
in the region called “the fertile crescent“? its task of reducing all
other states in the area to vassal status and to continue functioning
as the west’s prolonged arm, its foot in the door to all the resources
we global northerners want to deplete at turbo speed, quite selfish
and insatiably?
israel has been selling weapons, surveillance technology
in record amounts to countless countries — including my
shameful genocide-perpetrating and -enabling own —,
and its [“most moral“] army has been training police forces
around the globe in the most brutal, most ruthless IDF tactics.
how does that square w “israel will soon become a pariah state“
— while its economy is „boooom!“ing?
is it that good things take time while bad things happen all the time?
In amongst a broad exchange Patrick Lawrence states what I have been thinking for some time: given what has transpired since ct 7th, the ongoing genocide being carried out by Israel – fully enabled by the US- leads me to agree: Israel can no longer exist. I go further. The very founding of israel was both immoral and illegal . As Patrick notes, this leads one to ask, if the the US is complicit, a full partner, in this ongoing genocide, what should happen to the US? I offer the following: the US must be completely demilitarized. all overseas bases and black sites closed, reparations to ‘host’ countries’ as requested, all weapons destroyed. The country divided into four sections. Each governed separately. Repartions to both Ukraine and Palestinians. Palestine resotred. All remnants of Israel reomved. Compensation fromIsrael and the funders of Israel & the genocide. Palestinians to determine the detials.
Thank you CATHY VOGAN for your production of this episode. Excellent work.
Air Force Major Demands Trump’s Impeachment
On the origin of “July 4th”:
Noam Chomsky short text (via ZNet) from 1995:
“A Few Words on Independence Day”
hxxps://znetwork.org/znetarticle/a-few-words-on-independence-day/
“(…)
… Independence Day was designed by the first state propaganda agency, Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information (CPI), created during World War I to whip a pacifist country into anti-German frenzy and, incidentally, to beat down the threat of labor which frightened respectable people after such events as the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) victory in the Lawrence, Mass., strike of 1912. The CPI’s successes greatly impressed the business world; one of its members, Edward Bernays, became the leading figure in the vastly expanding public relations industry. Also much impressed was Adolf Hitler, who attributed Germany’s failure in World War I to the ideological victories of the British and U.S. propaganda agencies, which overwhelmed Germany’s efforts. Next time, Germany would be in the competition, he vowed. The influence of the great generalissimo on the propaganda front, as Wilson was described by political scientist Harold Lasswell, was not slight. Independence Day was one contribution.
This particular propaganda exercise began with business-government initiatives to Americanize immigrants, to inculcate loyalty and obedience and expel from their minds alien notions about the rights of working people. Such programs would turn immigrants into the natural foe of the IWW and other destructive forces that undermine the country’s ideals and institutions, the CPI founding document read. At a major conference of civic organizations (organized labor excluded), government and private organizations of all kinds and creeds had pledged themselves to cooperate in carrying out Americanization as a national endeavor, the organizers reported, while issuing plans for a successful Americanization program for the coming Fourth of July. The CPI took up the cudgels, now using the wartime fanaticism it had helped engender as another weapon against pacifists, agitators and other anti-American groups, notably the hated Wobblies. The Generalissimo joined in with a May 1918 endorsement. The title of the indoctrination ceremonies was to be Americanization Day; on reflection, Independence Day seemed preferable.
Labor leaders were aware of what was happening. A United Mine Workers (UMW) official objected that the business-government project was
attempting to set up a paternalism that will bring the workers of this country even more absolutely under the control of the employers, … strengthening the chain of industrial tyranny in this country. … [That is what lies behind these efforts] to sanctify and confirm oppression by waving the American flag in the face of its victims and by insidiously stigmatizing as unpatriotic any attempts they may make to throw off the yoke of the exploiting interests [that the organizers] represent.
But labor could not compete with state-corporate power, and lost this battle just as it failed to save May Day. (A jingoist holiday in the U.S., it is celebrated elsewhere as a labor festival which was begun in solidarity with the struggles of brutalized American workers.) …
(…)”
Is the US really all that bothered about Hormuz? So long as enough oil trickles through to calm the financial markets. Please elucidate Patrick/Ray re the real US stance on the Hormuz situation.
The US is the world’s largest LPG producer with sales jumped now owing to Qatari difficulties exporting their gas …….through Hormuz.
It’s difficult to believe that US /Israeli strategists weren’t always aware of this opportunity.
Trump’s personal behaviour is a ruse to deflect attention well away from his interests : making lots and lots of money for himself, his family and friends. It is a tragedy that this is the limit of his intelligence.
15:33 Ray, DNA analysis of ancient skeletons in the Americas indicate syphilis was native to the New World, making it likely Columbus transmitted it to Europe, not the other way around.
Indeed. If you visit the Larco Museum (Museo Larco) in the Pueblo Libre neighborhood of Lima, Peru, which I did multiple times during my two visits to that city in 2019 and 2024, initially to see one of the most extensive collections of historic Andean artifacts and art in the world, and later to dine in the courtyard restaurant (one of the nicest in that part of the city), you can view the extensive collections of Moche ceramics depicting scenes of eroticism and sexuality from around 1,200-1,900 years ago, which showcase pre-Columbian evidence of sexually-transmitted diseases that existed in the Americas, including symptoms that bear a remarkable visual resemblance to syphilis.
Thank you for your program tonight Joe, Ray and Patrick. Food for thought.
Patrick, you are absolutely correct that Iran needs to possess nuclear weapons to be safe from Israel.
Israel always claims they cannot be safe if Iran possesses nuclear weapons. Why should the US help Israel to enforce this fiction? If Israel has nuclear weapons, why can’t Iran?
I previously noted the following in a comment on Judge Andrew P. Napolitano’s article “Does the US Still Have a Constitution?,” syndicated by Consortium News on Feb. 5, 2026, and it bears repeating now:
“The United States has been ignoring the requirement for congressional declaration of wars contained in Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the US Constitution all but five times in its history (War of 1812, Mexican-American War, Spanish-American War, WWI, and WWII) ever since its ‘Quasi-War’ with France in 1798-1800 under the administration of the United States’s second president John Adams (authoritarian proponent of the Alien and Sedition Acts), merely eleven years after every delegate at the 1787 Philadelphia Convention unanimously agreed upon this definition of ‘war powers’ (with the lone exception of Pierce Butler from South Carolina, whose views on executive power to declare war have somehow become the de facto interpretation even though he lost that debate). Likewise, the United States government has also ignored myriad treaties that it signed and ratified, thereby constituting the law of the land under the ‘Supremacy Clause’ of the US Constitution, including but certainly not limited to the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, the 1945 United Nations Charter, and the 1948 Organization of American States Charter that contain prohibitions on warfare as an instrument of statecraft and other casual violations of nation-state sovereignty.”
But we just took over the western superiority complex in its honor the capture the entire world . We weren’t free from Europe because we took aid from countries competing with Great Britain. Soon we were adding old empires threatened by indigenous rebellion.
Now the world hereditary wealthy of empire past is investing in our deficit spending military industrial technological system for religious full spectrum dominance at risk from Asia and their ability to finally develop defense from military and economic warfare.
The problem is human civilization cannot afford endless wasted resources and morality on male dominance behavior chasing a pot of gold at the end of the high intelligence god driven rainbow.
Ever since nationhood, immigrants have flocked to the US seeking a better life. But the ruling class has remained British. And that’s your problem.
Perfectly stated. America’s history in a nutshell. I prefer not to celebrate today.
A great posting.
Thank you