German Officers in Uniform Oppose Hitler: Appearances Can Be Deceiving

It’s easy to think that the German military during WW2 was a Nazi organization. It’s helpful to know a few words: The German Army was the Heer. The German Navy was the Kriegsmarine. The German Air Force was the Luftwaffe. The overarching term for the complete military — army, navy, and airforce together — was the Wehrmacht.

But most of the military weren’t Nazis.

Most historians estimate that 29% of the officers in the Wehrmacht were members of the National Socialist Party. Among those officers, 33% of the junior officers were members, while significantly less than 29% of the senior officers were members. Among the enlisted men, even fewer were members.

The majority of both officers and enlisted men in the German military were not members of the Nazi Party.

A significant number of them were active in the resistance. Not only were they not National Socialists, but they were taking specific concrete steps both to undermine the war effort and to impair the extermination of the Jews. These soldiers and officers helped the Allies to defeat the Nazis and liberate Germany, and saved thousands of Jewish lives in the process.

The general public in the first quarter of the twenty-first century is accustomed to seeing black-and-white photos of German soldiers and officers in uniform, and simply equating them with Nazis. Yet the majority of them were not Nazis, and many of them fought vigorously against the Nazis.

One such example is Harro Schulze-Boysen. He was a well-respected officer in the Luftwaffe who’d worked his way up to a responsible position. In the word of historians Gordon Thomas and Greg Lewis, Harro Schulze-Boysen worked “in the air force intelligence division, scanning foreign press reports and writing briefings for one of the most powerful figures in the Third Reich, Hermann Göring.”

By outward appearances, Schulze-Boysen was loyally supporting the Nazi war effort. But the reality was different:

Schulze-Boysen was in fact a daring, sometimes reckless anti-Nazi. Aided by his wife, Libertas, he planned not only to reveal some of the regime’s most heinous crimes, but also to turn over its military secrets to the enemy. As war consumed the world, he would become one of the most significant spies at the heart of the Third Reich.

Schulze-Boysen made contacts in the military and outside the military in order to form a resistance network. One of his contacts was Arvid Harnack.

Arvid Harnack was “one of the nation’s greatest academic minds,” having obtained both a doctorate in legal studies and a doctorate in philosophy. He had a job working in the Economics Ministry, where people supposed that he was making sure that Hitler’s plans were well-financed.

But in reality, Harnack was at the center of a growing opposition movement to Hitler, and was already sharing some of the Reich’s most confidential secrets with both Washington and Moscow.

In April 1939, before the war started, he and his wife Mildred were “busy passing Harnack’s secrets to America’s only spy in Germany.” Mildred was an American who’d moved to Germany. She was eager to protect the Germans from the Nazis.

Both Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid Harnack lived and worked in Berlin. Together they formed a group which sent Nazi military secrets to the Allies. Their efforts were effective and made a real difference in helping the Allies to defeat the Nazis.

They were discovered by the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo, and murdered in 1942.

Germans vs. Nazis: The Resistance Undermines Hitler’s Plans

In January 1933, two things happened. Adolf Hitler’s Nazis completed their political scheme to seize power and begin oppressing the people of Germany, and thousands of Germans began organizing a resistance movement which to reduce the effectiveness of Nazi war machine and save the lives of thousands of Jews.

The resistance took different forms in different times and places. Many of the leaders were Aristocrats, academics, military officers, and Christians. But some leaders were blue-collar factory workers. They had several things in common: they were opposed to Hitler’s “National Socialist” movement, and they were determined to oppose it in concrete and effective ways.

Such an explicit refusal to accept National Socialism was dangerous, and more than dangerous, as historians Gordon Thomas and Greg Lewis write:

These are the ones who through a love of Germany committed treason against it, rejecting the shackles of a warped, corrupt, and evil state.

They stood up in the knowledge that almost all dissent would be punished by death.

They gave their lives with one thing foremost in their minds: that through their actions they might redeem the honor of their nation.

The list of individual Germans who worked to defend their country from the Nazi oppressors is long. Specific names, dates, places, and actions reveal the ways in which this underground movement reduced the effectiveness of the National Socialist plans, weakened the Nazis, and assisted the Allies in the effort to liberate Germany.

One example is Robert Scholl. He and his wife Magdalena lived in the city of Ulm with their children. He’d been active in politics: he’d been the mayor Ulm at one point in time. When Hitler took power, Scholl could see the hidden intentions behind the Nazi propaganda, and realized that the National Socialists were preparing for war:

Fiercely independent-minded, he “translated” the Nazi propaganda on the radio for his family and told them war was coming. He had maintained his friendships with Jewish friends and associates in Ulm when others shunned them.

When some of Scholl’s neighbors draped Nazi banners from their windows, the Scholl family did not: “There were no flags flying from their windows.” Robert Scholl “was a man of deep conviction and strongly held” Christian and civic “beliefs.” Scholl’s children agreed with the ideas they found in the sermons of Bishop Galen: Real Christians must oppose the Nazi practice of treating human life as worthless.

Among Scholl’s children, two of them — Hans and Sophie — would become the most influential in the resistance movement. They saw the National Socialists as insulting to Christ. True Christians could not support a party which offended God by murdering innocent people.

Opposition to the National Socialists had a unifying effect: academics and factory workers found themselves supporting the cause; military officers and pacifists joined forces; Lutherans, Catholics, and Calvinists found common ground. There was a terrible tension: on the one hand, basic humanity demanded opposition to the Nazis; on the other hand, such opposition not only risked one’s life, but more likely guaranteed the end of one’s life.

So it was that the entire Scholl family persevered solidly in their efforts against the National Socialists:

Scholl had brought up his five surviving children in his image. Hans, the elder boy, was the dominant character among them, but Sophie matched him in spirit. As they learned about the treatment of Jews across Germany, the words of one friend struck them deeply: “They are crucifying Christ a second time, as people!”

For the Scholls, opposition to Hiter was a moral imperative, a simple question of right versus wrong. No matter what the consequences. In the horrors that Hitler would create in the coming years, the family would pay a terrible price for its desire for a better Germany.

The price paid was this: Hans and Sophie would be executed by the Nazis in 1943 for their conscientious resistance.

In the blue-collar neighborhood of Neukölln in Berlin, Jews and non-Jews worked closely together. Led by Herbert Baum, they engaged in a number of actions to undermine National Socialist propaganda. They printed and distributed their own writings against the Nazis, and when the Nazis set up an exhibition about the Soviet Union, Baum and his colleagues set it on fire. Gordon Thomas and Greg Lewis report:

In areas like working-class Neukölln, Jews and Gentiles found common ground in their hatred of the Nazis. Many congregated around electrician Herbert Baum and his wife, Marianne, who were developing a flair for the dramatic, creating their own antifascist propaganda to counter that of Goebbels. They had already humiliated the “poison dwarf” once and intended to do so again.

The Baums and their Jewish friends intended to fight back.

Like Hans and Sophie Scholl, Herbert and Marianne Baum were murdered by the Nazis.

The underground resistance efforts against the National Socialists ultimately came from all income levels, from all regions of Germany, from Christians and Jews, from the highly educated and the blue-collar. Those who were part of the efforts understood that they were essentially signing away their lives, but they also understood that they were doing so in order to hasten the end of the evil which the Nazis were perpetrating.

Conspiracies Hidden within Conspiracies: The Agenda Is Never the Agenda

The political class seems never to tire of ‘socialism’ and ‘communism.’ There are those who openly embrace, by name, this single phenomenon which carries these two labels: those who speak fondly of socialism.

There are also those who embrace this one political spirit without using either of its names, having learned that ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ are still uncomfortable words for much of the public.

Finally, there are a few brave individuals who openly oppose socialism and communism, and are stigmatized both by their peers in the political class and by news media.

A majority of the people in each of the above-named three categories have at least this one thing in common: whether they openly support, covertly support, or directly oppose the international communist conspiracy, they do not realize that what they are supporting or opposing is merely one component of a much larger movement — a movement which is not communism or socialism, and which has nothing to do with what these people support or oppose.

This can be made clear by considering the following two questions: (1) Why is there a clique of ultra-wealthy individuals who are prominent advocates for socialism and communism? (2) Why do these same individuals ensure that their personal wealth is not touched by whichever measures are implemented to advance the causes of socialism and communism?

Why would people who have billions of dollars embrace and support movements which have the stated goal of confiscating that money? If they truly believe in helping those in poverty, would they not already be giving that money to worthy charities, rather than waiting for some future day when the socialist plan is ultimately implemented?

Under the slogan demanding that citizens “pay their fair share,” the incremental programs and legislations which advance the socialist agenda nonetheless seem to leave the ultra-wealthy in possession of their billions and hundreds of billions, while middle-class wage earners pay ever higher tax rates.

The most reasonable explanation is that these advocates of socialism do not want socialism, but rather have found that they can harness the socialist movement to do other, different, tasks. Rather than using the movement to advance socialism, they have found ways to use it to advance their own personal agendas.

At this level of operation, the difference between ‘communism’ and ‘socialism’ is a nuance left to academic debates. The vocabulary is chosen for its political leverage, not for precise definition of ideologies.

The international communist conspiracy is a small part of a far bigger, and very different, conspiracy, as historian Gary Allen writes:

What you call "Communism" is not run from Moscow or Peking, but is an arm of a bigger conspiracy run from New York, London and Paris. The men at the apex of this movement are not Communists in the traditional sense of that term.

The paradox of individuals who have hundreds of billions of dollars making common cause with the “workers of the world” presents a contradiction. This contradiction points to the hidden agenda. The prima facie agenda is the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. Clearly, the billionaires have proven by their actions that they have no desire to relinquish their wealth. When it appears that two disparate parties are united to achieve a shared aim, and that shared aim is clearly detrimental to one of the parties, and that party has already shown that it in truth does not embrace this allegedly shared aim, then the conclusion is that there is a different hidden aim.

The power brokers who are fueling the socialist movements, and whose names are well-known as proponents of socialism, “feel no loyalty to” to these movements and ideologies. They feel no loyalty to socialist governments and parties around the globe, even as they passionately advocate for them.

Individuals who live in first-world democracies, and who have hundreds of billions of dollars, are products of, and depend upon, free-market economies. Socialism and communism would destroy them. Why, then, do they promote these redistributionist ideologies? Only because they have found a different, hidden purpose for which they can use these ideologies — or more precisely, for which they can use these movements and parties.

Gary Allen explains how the ultra wealthy utilize these ideologies for their own purposes:

They are loyal only to themselves and their undertaking. And these men certainly do not believe in the clap-trap pseudo-philosophy of Communism. They have no intention of dividing their wealth. Socialism is a philosophy which conspirators exploit, but in which only the naive believe. Just how finance capitalism is used as the anvil and Communism as the hammer to conquer the world will be explained in this book.

At this level, both capitalism — “finance capitalism” as Gary Allen phrases it — and communism are merely tools for the powerful to gain yet more power.

The capitalists and socialists who fight each other in the trenches of street-level politics are equally pawns in a game being played at a higher level. Gary Allen continues:

The concept that Communism is but an arm of a larger conspiracy has become increasingly apparent throughout the author's journalistic investigations. He has had the opportunity to interview privately four retired officers who spent their careers high in military intelligence. Much of what the author knows he learned from them. And the story is known to several thousand others. High military intelligence circles are well aware of this network. In addition, the author has interviewed six men who have spent considerable time as investigators for Congressional committees. In 1953, one of these men, Norman Dodd, headed the Reece Committee's investigation of tax-free foundations. When Mr. Dodd began delving into the role of international high finance in the world revolutionary movement, the investigation was killed on orders from the Eisenhower-occupied White House. According to Mr. Dodd, it is permissable to investigate the radical bomb throwers in the streets, but when you begin to trace their activities back to their origins in the "legitimate world," the political iron curtain slams down.

The Reece Committee discovered, e.g., that the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) published a list of its members, but maintained a separate list of clandestine members. This finding raises many questions.

The top-level conspiracy has employed the lower-level conspiracies to occupy the attention of the public. Debates between the major parties in the United States are mere sideshows. Protests and demonstrations serve to keep the news media busy reporting about them, and keep the commentators busy having opinions about them.

These distractions successfully prevent the public from discovering the true conspiracy.

At the highest levels of functioning, the conspiracy is truly global — beyond international — and is utterly indifferent to the geographical boundaries and legal domains of various nation-states. They see and treat the world as a large undifferentiated mass. They merely adjust their tactics to suit the context of locally varying conditions.

An axiom, which can be found in slightly different phrasings in the writings of those investigate such things, explains that the agenda is never the agenda, and the issue is never the issue. Despite its stated purpose, a movement is being used to achieve other and different goals — and the members of the movement are unaware.

Bilderberg: The Little-Known Group and Whether It’s Part of a Conspiracy

The average citizen or voter in any country is likely to know nothing about the Bilderberg Group. The group’s main function is to organize an annual or biannual private conference. It seems that the group has no formal membership list; people are simply invited to attend its meetings. There is a defined “steering committee,” and vague indications that there is also a separate “advisory group,” but otherwise the group seems to have little formal structure.

The group seems to be prima facie a networking and discussion group. It has no legal authority and is not recognized by, or as a part of, any national government. As of November 2022, the group’s website stated:

The Bilderberg Meeting is an annual conference designed to foster dialogue between Europe and North America. Every year, between 120-140 political leaders and experts from industry, finance, labor, academia and the media are invited to take part in the Meeting. About two thirds of the participants come from Europe and the rest from North America; approximately a quarter from politics and government and the rest from other fields.

The Bilderberg Meeting is a forum for informal discussions about major issues. The meetings are held under the Chatham House Rule, which states that participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s) nor any other participant may be revealed.

Thanks to the private nature of the Meeting, the participants take part as individuals rather than in any official capacity, and hence are not bound by the conventions of their office or by pre-agreed positions. As such, they can take time to listen, reflect and gather insights. There is no detailed agenda, no resolutions are proposed, no votes are taken and no policy statements are issued.

The group could seem to be innocent and even laudable. Perhaps it is. Yet it has continually attracted skepticism and criticism. Some historians see it as possibly part of an international conspiracy. The group’s privacy and informality fuel such conjectures.

The news media have made the phrase “conspiracy theory” a commonplace. Some allegations of conspiracy are lunatic inventions with no supporting evidence. Other conspiracies have been demonstrated, either in the legal system or by scholars, to be concrete realities.

Some scholars have attempted to link the Bilderberg Group to another possible node in a conspiracy network, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), as historian Gary Allen notes:

It should not be surprising to learn that there is on the international level an organizational equivalent of the C.F.R. This group calls itself the Bilderbergers. If scarcely one American in a thousand has any familiarity with the C.F.R., it is doubtful that one in five thousand has any knowledge of the Bilderbergers. Again, this is not accidental.

Serious scholars who investigate possible conspiracies run the risk of being categorized among the paranoid yellow journalists who publish baseless speculations. How do historians analyze the conspiracies while maintaining high academic standards?

The CFR publishes, among other things, a periodical titled Foreign Affairs. This journal includes relatively prosaic articles which don’t reek of conspiracy. On the other hand, individuals associated with the CFR include Cyrus Eaton. There are two men with that name — Cyrus Eaton, Sr. and Cyrus Eaton, Jr. — and their connection with the Soviet Socialists, i.e., with the international communist conspiracy, is clear, as historian Gary Allen explains:

Cyrus Eaton Jr. is the son of the notoriously pro Soviet Cyrus Eaton, who began his career as secretary to John D. Rockefeller. It is believed that Eaton’s rise to power in finance resulted from backing by his mentor. The agreement between Tower International and IBEC continues an old alliance. Although Eaton’s name does not appear on the CFR's membership rolls, the Reece Committee which investigated foundations for Congress in 1953, found that Eaton was a secret member.

The two entities named above — Tower International and the International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC) — both appear to be, at first glance, business enterprises: the former in mining and metals, the latter in agronomics. Yet both had ties to the Stalinist economic system in the USSR. Cyrus Eaton, who brought Tower International into being, was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the Soviet government; he had easy access to East Germany and Russia at a time when most U.S. citizens found it difficult to obtain visas and travel papers to such places. IBEC was associated with David Rockefeller, who also launched the Americas Society; between IBEC and the Americas Society, Rockefeller had numerous connections to the leaders who were hoping to give the Soviet Union a foothold in South America and Central America.

Cementing the ties to Stalin, Khruschev, and Moscow were the joint efforts by Cyrus Eaton and Aramand Hammer to plan and carry out massive building projects, through the Tower Corporation, in the Soviet Union. As historians Stan Evans and Herbert Romerstein write,

The importance of Hammer’s U.S.-Soviet business dealings can’t be overstated, as the Communists would be chronically reliant on Western funding, credits, and technology to help them through their economic troubles. (Conversely, it was when the credits and technical assistance were cut back under Reagan that the creaking Soviet machinery collapsed and Mikhail Gorbachev had to adjourn the Cold War.) U.S. capitalists who followed the trail blazed by Hammer included W. Averell Harriman, Henry Ford, the Morgan interests, Cyrus Eaton, Mack Truck, Chase Manhattan, Control Data, and several other U.S. corporations. Such dealings were of utmost importance in keeping the Soviets economically afloat for a span of nearly seven decades.

The CFR, of which Cyrus Eaton was a member, was founded in 1921, in the same milieu as the League of Nations. The CFR was founded in the spirit of Woodrow Wilson, but by that time, he was out of office and mentally disabled. More directly relevant to the founding of the CFR was Edward House, known as “Colonel House,” who had been an associate of Wilson’s, although the two had also disagreed and eventually parted ways.

These organizations — the Bilderberg, the CFR, the League of Nations — are large enough, and structurally ambiguous enough, that they could house conspiracies, even if the organizations themselves were unaware of the conspiracies, or more likely pretended not to notice such conspiracies. The informal backchannel conversations and the overlapping memberships held by various individuals make it possible and even probable that secret deals and plans were developed in such an environment.

One sign of a conspiracy is the collaboration between individuals whose interests and motives should be opposite. A capitalist business owner, whose livelihood comes from a free-market economy, would seemingly find very little common cause with a bureaucrat who operates within the Soviet Socialist command economy. Yet such connections arise. These connections might be innocent — if both parties find a working relationship advantageous. But such connections, especially when they present the union of what should be diametrically opposed ideologies, point to a hidden agenda.

Economic support for, or even cooperation with, the Soviet Union worked against the causes of peace and justice. An array of individuals demonstrably engaged in activities which supported the Soviet Socialists economically or in other ways. These individuals held memberships in a variety of organizations, including the CFR, the Bilderberg Group, and the League of Nations. (Other such organizations include the Institute of Pacific Relations.)

A preponderance of evidence points to these organizations having — knowingly or not — hosted conspiracies. The likelihood of these individuals having used these organizations as occasions for communication constitutes a clear and convincing case for conspiracy.

Each of these organizations had numerous connections to other organizations and to various businesses, extending the network, as historian Gary Allen reports:

The strange name of this group is taken from the site of the first meeting in May, 1954 — the Hotel de Bilderberg — in Oosterbeek, Holland. The man who created the Bilderbergers is His Royal Highness Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. The Prince is an important figure in Royal Dutch Petroleum (Shell Oil) and the Societe General de Belgique, a huge conglomerate cartel with worldwide holdings. The Bilderbergers meet once — or sometimes twice — a year. Those in attendance include leading political and financial figures from the United States and Western Europe. Prince Bernhard makes no effort to hide the fact that the ultimate goal of the Bilderbergers is a world government. In the meantime, while the “new world order” is being built, the Bilderbergers coordinate the efforts of the European and American power elites.

Among the remaining questions is to which extent these organizations were deliberately the homes for conspiracy, and to which extent they were unwitting dupes. The probability is overwhelming that there were also individual members of these groups who were unaware of such secret conspiracies. Indeed, it belongs to the nature of such conspiracies that they operate behind and among innocent and unwitting individuals and organizations: they are not merely conspiracies, but covert conspiracies.

Skepticism about the Bilderberg Group can only be fueled by the fact that Stacy Abrams is listed as a member of the Group’s “steering committee.”

Also on the steering committee was Jack Sheinkman. He was a member of the Workmen’s Circle, a social organization whose membership was largely innocent. But within that organization was a group of leftist, pro-communist members. As the New York Times explains,

In an era when labor leaders were reluctant to defend leftist movements overseas, Mr. Sheinkman led labor’s opposition to President Ronald Reagan’s efforts to remove the leftist government of Nicaragua.

Daniel Ortega, supported by Jack Sheinkman, is now largely seen as someone who egregiously violates human rights. The New York Times reports that Ortega has an “increasingly brutal and repressive strategy to quell the opposition movement and has tightened his grip on his power.” Ortega “shut down a popular television station, jailed its news director and expelled international human rights observers.”

Jack Sheinkman was one of the people who enabled Daniel Ortega to become the dictator of Nicaragua. Jack Sheinkman was not only a part of the Bilderberg Group, but rather also a member of its steering committee.

The question about the Bilderberg Group, then, is not a simple “yes or no” question, rather a question about the extent to which the official organizers of the group are aware of the conspiratorial activity, and to which extent conspiracies were the purpose for the creation of the group.

Slavery in America: How It Started

The societies which inhabited North, Central, and South America prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus can be measured both by their strengths and by their weaknesses.

Pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas made advances including agriculture, irrigation, metalwork, astronomical calendars, and architecture. Some of their building projects indicate a mastery of geometry.

But there were less appealing aspects to pre-Columbian cultures. They routinely committed human sacrifices; large numbers of healthy young people were killed to satisfy the spirits which these cultures imagined. Women had little to no legal standing; they could be physically captured and forced to marry the men who captured them; they could be bought and sold.

The societies in the Americas prior to 1492 practiced cannibalism. The two ideas — human sacrifice and cannibalism — were sometimes united in a single event. Historian Nathaniel Knowles writes:

Cannibalism apparently invariably accompanied torture among all Iroquois speaking people. It was also most important to eat at solemn feasts the flesh of the woman sacrificed to the war god.

Centuries before any European contact, the natives of South America used cocaine for both medicinal and recreational purposes. While the medicinal applications were beneficial, the recreational usage brought about many of the usual problems of addiction. Some of the communities fell into neglect as their residents made imprudent decisions under the influence of the drug. The warriors of these societies often consumed cocaine prior to battle, which energizes the user even as it impedes rational decision making. The natives obtained cocaine by chewing the leaves of the coca plant, sometimes mixing coca leaves with tobacco leaves.

The Native Americans (“Indians”) also used peyote. While cocaine is a stimulant, peyote contains a psychoactive drug. It alters the user’s perceptions of sights and sounds.

The use of cocaine, peyote, and other drugs slowed the improvement of civilization.

Diplomatic relations between tribes were often uneasy. Warfare between tribes was ubiquitous. Given both constant armed conflict and an inability to unite politically, the isolated tribes devoted large amounts of energy and resources to military activity, with little left for refining civilization. Population levels failed to grow and social structures developed little.

“Slavery between tribes existed before the coming of Europeans,” writes David Treuer in the Los Angeles Times.

Involuntary servitude was deeply ingrained in the pre-Columbian societies of North, Central, and South America. It pervaded cultures from the Arctic Circle to the southern tip of South America.

“Slavery was practiced by the Native Americans before any Europeans arrived in the region. People of one tribe could be taken by another,” agrees historian Joshua Mark.

By the time Columbus set foot on Hispaniola, millennia of bondage had shaped the societies of the Americas.

“Europeans did not introduce slavery to this continent,” writes Rebecca Onion. “The Native groups in the land that later became the United States and Canada practiced slavery before Europeans arrived.”

These many defects of pre-Columbian American cultures were connected. The natives who practiced one of them also practiced others. These social flaws encouraged each other in a vicious circle.

“The pre-Columbian world was a place where slavery, trafficking, sexual exploitation, oppression, and even genocide was commonplace prior to any European contact,” writes David Barton. He gives an example:

Take briefly for instance, the Carib tribes who had widespread institutions of perpetual slavery, captive mutilation, and even villages dedicated to the sexual exploitation of captured Taino women forced to produced children which their masters then ate.

Archeologists and scholars continue to unearth more evidence of social problems which the original Americans inflicted upon each other.

In an NPR radio interview, University of California Professor Andres Resendez said:

What we do know is that there is plenty of archaeological and pictorial evidence, as well as some of the early chronicles of the New World depict the enslavement of natives prior to the arrival of Europeans. In the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, Iroquois peoples waged wars on neighboring groups for the purpose of avenging their dead and replacing them with captives. In the Pacific Northwest, elite marriages were often sealed by providing slaves. So we know that these activities went on.

After thousands of years of slavery, the arrival of Columbus in 1492 and the subsequent European presence in the Americas marked the beginning of change. By November 1542, European governments were beginning to enact laws to eliminate slavery. By 1652, abolishist Roger Williams led the legislature of Rhode Island to illegalize slavery. In 1863 Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and by 1865 slavery had been eliminated in the United States.

Other countries, inspired by the United States, also abolished slavery. By 1888, there was no more slavery in the Americas. The last country to abolish slavery in the Americas was Brazil, 23 years after the U.S. had done so.

After more than 5,000 of institutionalized slavery in the Americas, it took less than 500 years for the effects of European contact to erase slavery from the Western Hemisphere.

Ending a Decade of Diplomatic Stalemate: Applying Maximum Pressure to North Korea

Since 1945, North Korea has been under the repressive regime of a three-generation hereditary dictatorship. In succession, the grandfather, the father, and the son have oppressed the citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). The name of the country is unintentionally ironic: the government is not democratic, it’s not chosen by the people, and it’s not a republic.

Kim Il-sung was placed into power by the Soviet Union, which obtained the northern half of the Korean peninsula in a post-WW2 agreement. The USSR wrote the constitution for North Korea and created the structure of the state, which was officially codified as the DPRK in 1948. Kim Il-sung led the provisional government from 1945 until 1948, and then led the DPRK from 1948 until his death in 1994.

In 1994, Kim Jong-il became the leader of North Korea, inheriting the power from his father.

By 2006, the DPRK had developed a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program, and the growth of that program was significant and troubling. World leaders were divided on how to deal with this situation. Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense at the time, advocated placing significant economic pressure on North Korea. But Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State, argued for continued purely diplomatic talks, without concrete actions. Rumsfeld recalls:

Instead of offering inducements of financial aid and heating oil, I thought there might be a remote possibility that if we put enough diplomatic and financial pressure on the country, some of its senior generals might overthrow Kim Jong Il. By 2006, Rice and the State Department envoy to North Korea, Christopher Hill, made clear that North Korea was the State Department’s issue alone, and that the views of the Defense Department would carry little weight. Rice and Hill seemed to believe they could obtain an agreement with North Korea to end its WMD programs. Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Affairs Richard Lawless, a veteran expert on the region with years in the CIA, was no longer included in discussions.

So it was that talks continued, but no concrete actions were taken to make the DPRK feel the consequences of its bad behavior. In fact, after 2008, some of the few economic sanctions which had been enacted against North Korea were relaxed.

Kim Jong-il died in 2011, and his son, Kim Jong-un became the DPRK’s dictator.

From the time North Korea achieved nuclear weapon capability in 2006, a decade has passed. During those years, the DPRK continually conducted weapons tests: either exploding a nuclear warhead, or launching a long-range missile. These tests were not primarily “tests” in the sense of determining whether the technology would function correctly. These “tests” were threats to other nations: a belligerent saber-rattling exercise.

These tests became more and more dangerous, and the world’s diplomats, organized as NATO, the UN, the G7, the G20, and the Six-Party Talks, hoped to persuade North Korea to abandon the continuous testing.

While various nations, in the organizations listed above, or in other ad hoc organizations, or individually, were persistent in their efforts to dissuade the DPRK from its bullying behavior, they were also ineffective in those efforts. North Korea was not influenced by words. Diplomacy was futile. The nations of the world would need a different approach if the DPRK’s warmongering was to be moderated.

From January 2017 to December 2018, Nikki Haley was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. During that time, she would be instrumental in developing and applying a new strategy. This “maximum pressure” strategy would employ more than words. The collected nations of the world would inflict economic pain on North Korea. The pain would be presented as a consequence of the DPRK’s belligerence, and the pain would be removed when the warlike behavior stopped.

Various nations would impose financial penalties on North Korea as a consequence of its weapons development and weapons testing programs. These penalties — called “sanctions” in diplomatic jargon — would make life uncomfortable for the ruling elite in the DPRK, as Nikki Haley explains:

At the center of the pressure campaign was sanctioning the North Korean regime — making Kim Jong Un and the ruling elite “bleed” until they finally agreed to serious, unconditional negotiations that would ultimately eliminate their nuclear weapons. After the North Koreans launched their first ICBM capable of reaching the United States on July 4, we began to work at the United Nations on the first of what would be three sanctions packages.

Nikki Haley presented the “maximum pressure” approach to the UN Security Council. “When I took to the Security Council chamber to announce our new, more aggressive approach,” she recalls, the torture and murdered carried out by the DPRK was “very much on my mind.” Statistics reveal the millions of people arrested, beaten, imprisoned, and executed by the North Korean government. A single case can give a human face to impersonal numbers: she spoke to the UN in July 2017, only a few weeks after an American college student named Otto Warmbier died as a result of the physical abuse he’d received from the DPRK. Warmbier had been touring North Korea as part of a study trip to several east Asian countries.

The North Korean government had arrested and detained Otto Warmbier for allegedly taking a poster off the wall in his hotel. Whether he in fact took the poster is unclear. What is clear is that the DPRK organized a trial — dictatorships tend to present “show trials” or “mock trials” in “kangaroo courts,” events with no legal legitimacy, but which serve as a pretext for imprisoning and killing anyone who displeases the dictatorship. Warmbier was declared guilty after this meaningless trial. The court sentenced him to fifteen years of hard labor, but less than two years after his conviction, he was released to the U.S. government. He was in a coma, and had been for some time. In June 1017 he was flown back to the U.S., where he died only a few days after landing.

Nikki Haley alluded to Otto Warmbier in her speech at the U.N.; she spoke to those present in the assembly, but she was aware of the larger audience as excerpts of the speech would be televised:

I spoke directly to the American people about the unique evil of the North Korean regime.

“Americans had seen how barbarous the North Koreans treated” a college student who had deserved no such treatment. It was a crystalizing incident, and Warmbier gave a human face to those millions of people who’d been tortured and killed. Brutality on an individual level was indicative of brutality on a massive scale: why would the world allow North Korean to continue to build an arsenal of nuclear weapons? Nikki Haley writes about the case of Otto Warmbier:

It was a sign to all of us that the Kim regime was capable of barbaric acts on a much larger scale.

The DPRK’s profile among the world’s nations was, and is, shaped by two factors: its relentless drive to build a significant WMD arsenal, and its brutality toward both its own citizens and other individuals.

After a decade of diplomatic stalemate from 2006, when North Korea had its first fully operational nuclear weapon, to 2016, when Nikki Haley was nominated to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, a new tactic was implemented. The “maximum pressure” campaign did not rely on words alone, but on real-world economic measures which affected the daily functioning of Kim Jong-un and his dictatorship.

After Haley was confirmed and took office in early 2017, and after the implementation of the maximum pressure strategy, some detectable progress was made: North Korea dramatically reduced both the number of nuclear weapons tests and the number of long-range missile tests. After dozens of missile tests in 2017, the DPRK performed none in 2018.

North Korea exploded atomic bombs in 2016 and 2017; it exploded none in 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021.

In addition to a significant reduction in weapons activity, diplomatic progress was made in the first-ever summit meetings between a member of the Kim dynasty and a U.S. president. Summit meetings occured in Singapore in June 2018, in Hanoi in February 2019, and in the DMZ in April 2019. The DMZ is the demilitarized zone, a strip of land along the border between North Korea and South Korea.

The actions taken by the world’s nations, acting together, prompted by the U.S. policy of maximum pressure as presented by Nikki Haley, made a measurable and quantifiable difference.

In 2022, however, the DPRK resumed both missile tests and nuclear weapons tests. This was apparently in response to a perceived laxness which had crept into the implementation of the maximum pressure strategy.

Roman Military Success: Strategy, Not Tactics

Around 27 B.C., the Roman Empire replaced the Roman Republic. The republic had already begun an era of amazing expansion, growing from the city-state of Rome, to much of the Italian peninsula, to other parts of Europe, to North Africa, to the British Isles, and to the Ancient Near East.

Indeed, one of the factors in the morphing of the republic into an empire was the need for a new form of government which could manage this large and growing territory. The republic was a type of government best suited to a city-state which had a modest amount of surrounding land under its rule. A large, multi-continental required a different governmental structure.

Although not as sharply distinguished as in the twenty-first century United States, it can still be said that in the Roman Empire there was some distinction between the civilian government and the military. To be sure, that distinction was at times blurred, as in the case of the civil wars between 49 B.C. and 27 B.C. which led up to the end of the republic and the beginning of the empire.

The Roman military featured private armies which owed their primary allegiance to their commanding generals, and not to the nation or government.

While the military devoted attention to tactics — the different types of weapons and how they were used, various formations of soldiers in combat, etc. — historian Edward Luttwak argues that it was not tactics, but rather strategy, which primarily shaped the Roman armies and which led to their victories and defeats.

Luttwak writes that the successes of the Roman military were achieved, not because of their tactics, but rather despite their tactics:

Had the strength of the Roman Empire derived from a tactical superiority on the battlefield, from superior generalship, or from a more advanced weapons technology, there would be little to explain, though much to describe. But this was not so. Roman tactics were almost invariably sound but not distinctly superior, and the Roman soldier of the imperial period was not noted for his élan. He was not a warrior intent on proving his manhood but a long-service professional pursuing a career; his goal and reward was not a hero’s death but a severance grant upon retirement. Roman weapons, far from being universally more advanced, were frequently inferior to those used by the enemies whom the empire defeated with such great regularity. Nor could the secular survival of the empire have been ensured by a fortunate succession of great feats of generalship: the Roman army had a multitude of competent soldiers and a few famous generals, but its strength derived from method, not from fortuitous talent.

Over time, there were shifts in emphases: At some times, the Romans looked more toward fortifications — walls, watchtowers, fortresses — to solidify the borders; at other times there was less emphasis on such structures, and more emphasis on keeping mobile groups of soldiers ready to move into regions of sudden or unexpected conflict. Likewise, there were variations between times in which the army was composed mainly of Romans, and other times in which many of the soldiers were mercenaries, foreigners, or both.

Changes in the priorities of the civilian government led to changes, Luttwak asserts, in the strategies employed by the military:

Three distinct methods of imperial security can be identified over the period. Each combined diplomacy military forces, road networks, and fortifications to serve a single objective, functioning therefore as a system up to a point, albeit with local variations, interruptions, and exceptions. But each addressed a distinct set of priorities, themselves the reflection of evolving conceptions of empire: hegemonic expansionism for the first system; territorial security for the second; and finally, in diminished circumstances, sheer survival for the imperial power itself. Each system was based on a different combination of diplomacy, direct force, and fixed infrastructure, and each entailed different operational methods, but more fundamentally, each system reflected a different Roman world view and self-image.

This tripartite division of the imperial era can be illustrated with examples. The first, expansive, phase is seen in, e.g., the conquest of Gaul, or the invasion and occupation of the southern half of Great Britain. The second phase, securing the borders, led to the construction of structures like the limes between the Rhine and the Danube, or the construction of Hadrian’s Wall between England and Scotland. The final phase, during the gradual contraction of the empire, included defensive fighting against Germanic tribes, Huns, and Persians.

While the five centuries of imperial military activity make for a rich and complex narrative, Edward Luttwak’s identification of these three stages creates a useful larger framework for understanding both the military history of the Roman Empire, as well as the interrelations between the civilian and military histories.