On this day in 1349, the Basel Massacre occurred. It happened during the Black Death of 1346 through 1353. But in the years 1348 to 1350 there were a number of persecutions because of it. I mean: people were dying; somebody had to be blamed; and why not the Jews! This is a classic one: the Jews were accused of poisoning the wells. That’s such a common conspiracy theory throughout history that it is a silly stereotype like Borat thinking that Jews have horns.

It’s perhaps appropriate to talk about this right now, given the lead poisoning in Flint, Michigan. The thing about blaming the Jews is that they never had a motive, other than that the Christian majority thought they were evil. But Governor Snyder and his allies had very clear ideological and financial reasons to poison the people of Flint. Not that I’m saying they cared about poisoning the people; I’m just saying that they didn’t care — that the other concerns were greater.

Now it isn’t just that the Christians hated the Jews in Basel. It was also the case that the Jews weren’t dying as much. This was due to the fact that their dietary rituals kept their food cleaner. And they engaged in daily washing and periodic bathing. The Christians were the kind of filthy people so ably rendered in the film The Name of the Rose. (Yes, the book is thousand times better, but the filth is so clear in the film!)

One interesting thing about the Basel Massacre is that it occurred where France, Switzerland, and Germany meet. So the people there were a good cross-section of the people of Europe. Apparently, the town elders tried to stop the attack on the Jews. I do like that. As people get older, they do often get wiser. It’s interesting to watch it in our own country where conservatives are convinced the sober voices of knowledge are just wimps. Things haven’t changed much in 666 years.

So 600 local Jews were put inside a barn on an island in the Rhine, and it was set on fire. There were only a few survivors. And the Black Death continued on unabated for another four years.

On this day two hundred years ago, the Battle of New Orleans started. Oh my, but don’t we make a big deal out of it! I went to New Orleans when I was a kid and you could barely walk for all the monuments to it. And we as a nation love to talk about it, because it is the one part of the War of 1812 that wasn’t humiliating. This was the war that included the burning of Washington and President Madison having to flee the White House. It’s very likely we would have lost the war right then if it hadn’t been for a hurricane that blew through.

The thing about the Battle of New Orleans is that it happened two weeks after the British and Americans had ended the war with the Treaty of Ghent. The thing is, we always want to glorify war. And so we pick and choose those things that make it all sound glorious, when it was just a rotten war with lots of people killed and wounded with the result being that nothing changed.

On the other hand, we do have Johnny Horton’s song, “Battle of New Orleans.” It makes it sounds like we just destroyed the British. But that isn’t really true. The main thing is that the British were invading and the American forces had intelligence of the coming attack and so set up very good defenses. But in total, less than 400 British soldiers were killed out of 11,000 total troops. Roughly 50 Americans wee killed out of 5,000 troops. Yes, it was a clear victory for the Americans. But it was in no way a defeat that would have broke the backs of the British military.

This is a point of some annoyance to me. People think of war in very romantic terms. “If one side is just or has the will to fight, they can win the day!” Not really. There are cases where errors are made like the British getting bunched up at the Battle of Stirling Bridge. But when a seemingly weaker side wins, there is always a clear reason, like the use of the longbow at the Battle of Agincourt. Americans tend to think there was something special about the Texans at the Battle of the Alamo, but it wasn’t that; it was that they occupied the Alamo Mission. And as it turned out, the Mexicans didn’t lose that many men in taking it anyway.

If people understood just how systematic war is, I don’t think they would be so keen on it. But the power elite love wars. And that’s why they provide myths like the romantic heroes at the Battle of New Orleans, when it was just a stupid battle that cost hundreds of lives in a war that was effectively over.

On this day in 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his Four Freedoms speech. It was actually the 1941 State of the Union address. It’s a good list:

1. Freedom of speech
2. Freedom of worship
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear

Now let’s think about these Four Freedoms in a modern context. Freedom of speech is still pretty good here. It has taken a beating over the years, but I don’t think it is any longer true that someone would get thrown in jail for passing out anti-war pamphlets. Just the same, I wonder if any subversive speech started to get traction, whether the government wouldn’t find that it was like shouting fire in a crowded theater.

Freedom of worship is certainly under attack — but not as the conservatives say. It is under attack from conservatives themselves. See, for example, pretty much anyone who is running to get the Republican presidential nomination.

In general, in the US, we don’t care about freedom from want. This is the country of the myth of the rugged individual. And on the right, everyone has fallen under the spell of Ayn Rand. If you want in America, they claim, it is your own damned fault. It has nothing to do with a rigged system. And we completely ignore the way our system is set up to help those who already have a great deal of money. Republicans claim to care about redistribution of income. But they only care about it when the redistribution goes down. When it goes up (which is most of the time), they don’t even believe it exists.

As for fear, well, I think we are the most fearful people on the planet. Both parties push fear, but the Republicans are the ones who make a brand out of it. And it’s amazing to think: they’ve managed to convince their base that the bravest thing is to be constantly afraid.

If FDR were alive today, he would weep. Of the Four Freedoms, the two we had are roughly the same; and the two we didn’t have are even further away from us.

On this day in 1974, Richard Nixon refused to provide materials to the Senate Watergate Committee, which it had subpoenaed. This led eventually to the Supreme Court case United States v Nixon, where a unanimous Court found on 24 July 1974 that the president did have to turn over those materials. Nixon resigned two weeks later.

I have two thoughts on the matter. First, part of Nixon’s defense was that there was an executive privilege for the president to protect “those who advise and assist them in carrying out their duties.” This is exactly what we heard again and again during the George W Bush administration. And now we’ve added the argument that releasing audio of the president urinating would risk the nation security. I’ve long thought that Nixon went down more because he just wasn’t liked than that there was anything that the power elite actually had a problem with. I’m not saying that Nixon shouldn’t have been thrown out of office; I’m saying that a hell of a lot of other people should have been thrown out too.

The second thing is that I just don’t see the current Supreme Court finding unanimously against the president with regard to Watergate. The court at that time worked very hard to come up with a unanimous opinion. I would have thought that the same would have been true in Bush v Gore. That was a clear case where everyone should have agreed that the count should have continued. Certainly David Souter thought the decision a sham. Here’s what Jeffrey Toobin wrote about him regarding the case:

And that Supreme Court was far more reasonable than today’s Court. I suspect that if the Watergate case came before the Court today and it were a Democratic president, it would be a unanimous decision. But if it were another Republican, the president would win 5-4. Maybe I’m too cynical. But after Bush v Gore, it’s hard to imagine the conservative justices not finding a way to make sure that their “side” wins.

On this day in 1967, Ronald Reagan was sworn in as governor of California. Mostly I think he was elected because he was going to go after those dirty hippies. But on the plus side, at least he thought it was a good idea to become a governor. Now it seems that Republicans think that anyone could be the president. According to these fools, unlike being a boiler tech, being a president doesn’t require any training or experience.

There were things to like about him as governor. As Alex Seitz-Wald has noted, he made abortion far more available in the state. Of course, then he ran for president stating that abortion should only be allowed when the life of the mother was at risk. And then as president, he didn’t do much of anything. The truth is that he didn’t care. But as we know, Reagan would do anything to get power.

Ronald Reagan also limited gun rights because he was terrified of the Black Panthers. It would be wrong to imply that Reagan was a racist; it should be stated clearly: Reagan was a racist. But lucky for him that he lived in a racist country.

Reagan also existed in that great period when Republicans were still honest about their tax policies. He raised state taxes in a big way while governor. And, of course, the taxes weighed most heavily on the poor. For example, he raised the top income tax rate by 43% and the corporate tax by 27%, but the sale tax by 67%. It was the same thing when he was president, Reagan’s Legacy: Tax Cuts for Rich, Tax Hikes for the Rest.

Overall, Ronald Reagan was terrible in every way imaginable. But it isn’t just what he did directly. I don’t think that Clinton would have ended welfare as we know it if it hadn’t been for Reagan. And despite his terms as governor of California, Reagan was unqualified to be president. And the sad thing is: he’s infinitely better than the bozos who the Republicans are looking to nominate.

On this day in 1951, the Marshall Plan ended. It had distributed over $13 billion to rebuild Europe after World War II. That represents over $130 billion in today’s money. And you have to think about it relative to government spending at the time. Federal spending at that time was roughly $45 billion. The Marshall Plan lasted for four years. So that’s something more than 7% of our federal budget. This is probably why people today think we spend so much money on foreign aid.

In fact, we only spend upwards of 1% on foreign aid. What’s more, most of it is military aid, which is hard to claim is us giving out of the goodness of our hearts. Furthermore, by far the biggest recipients of our aid are Afghanistan and Israel. Those are countries that most people think we ought to be giving money to — at least by the people most concerned that we are too nice to the other countries of the world. The UK gives over half as much in foreign aid than we do, even though our economy is six times the size. The entire European Union has the same size economy as we do, but gives almost three times as much in foreign aid. Think what you want to about the US, but we are a stingy country.

In a poll earlier this year, the average American thought that 26% of the federal budget went to foreign aid. No wonder Americans think we are exceptional! We are exceptional: in our minds. Americans have been convinced that all the money they pay in taxes goes to help unworthy others. They think this even while they get their Medicare and live in houses they own thanks to the mortgage interest deduction. They are totally unaware of just what a hellscape America would be without the government.

The thing about the Marshall Plan is that the money we spent didn’t just help Europe. It helped the whole world and arguably the United States most of all. But somewhere along the line, Americans got the idea that we were just too nice. And as a result, we’ve suffered for it. Now we are very clearly an empire in decline. Since I was a little boy, I’ve watched as our policies have shifted more and more away from forward looking innovation and toward backward looking efforts to hang onto the power that we once had.

The Marshall Plan was one of the shining achievements of this country. And it is one that we would never be able to accomplish now. That’s because we are weak minded people who only think of ourselves and only on the shortest of timescales.

On this day in 2006, Saddam Hussein was executed. It’s an odd thing. I have very mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, he was an evil despot. On the other, far worse men live their whole lives in the lap of luxury. I certainly think he should have been brought to justice. But by the Bush administration?! It’s especially interesting because the Iraq War was only possible because of the 9/11 attacks, which Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with. So the mastermind of 9/11, Osama bin Laden, was totally forgotten by the Bush administration, but they got Saddam Hussein. Hooray!

I just don’t like the idea that Bush and Cheney will go to their very comfortable graves thinking that they somehow did a good thing in capturing and killing him. As it is, the net effect of the Iraq War has been the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Is the death of Hussein in any way compensation for that? Indeed, his evil deeds were a thing of the past. He was a very useful tool in keeping Iraq stable without being able to do any major harm. He was put to death for things he did in 1982 — when he was our ally.

I don’t know. I suppose it is just the hypocrisy of the United States that most bothers me. And Saudi Arabia continues to be an absolutely horrible country, yet they are our ally. And it always will be. Because once fossil fuels become unimportant, we won’t care what despots in the Middle East do. We will just abandon them. We are a screwed up country. I remember watching during the lead up to the Persian Gulf War how Saddam Hussein was turned into some major villain. People like him are a dime a dozen. When they are useful to support, we support them. When they are useful to vilify, we vilify them. There is something really wrong with us. If the United States were a person, it would rightly be diagnosed as a psychopath.