Category Archives: Historical

Reflections on Tyranny, Democracy, Rights and Sovereignty

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It’s interesting and indeed important in this age where verity is an anachronism to reflect on the intellectual pillars on which seventeenth and eighteenth century political philosophers ruminated as they wove the fundaments on which they hoped “western” society might to be based.  They were not concerned with democracy at all.  Indeed, most disdained it as mob rule, but they were very concerned with avoidance of tyranny.  Not “tyranny” in the classical Greek sense of attainment of power by nontraditional means, Greek tyrants were among the most effective and populist leaders, but in the sense of abuse of power by an oligarch.  They realized, I believe, that rule of one man (a subject) by another (a sovereign) inevitably involves the appropriation, for benign or malign purposes, of the subject’s sovereignty (i.e., his or her autonomy) and they were most concerned with at least limiting the extent to which such bequeathed, stolen or otherwise acquired individual sovereignty would be subjugated.  In this, Thomas Hobbes was more sanguine than was the kinder and more idealistic John Locke but as history has demonstrated, Hobbes was more perceptive.

In the opinion of John Locke and perhaps also Thomas Hobbes, in a primordial, perhaps metaphorical past, individuals, theretofore fully vested of their individual sovereignty, surrendered it in exchange for a social system that provided some semblance of security and predictability because in a world where everyone was sovereign, no one was secure, the concept of private property could not exist, and though the strongest might rule, the weak, collectively or while the strong slumbered, could dispose of them.  Hobbes believed that individuals surrendered the totality of their individual sovereignty to a single individual, an autocrat, or to a group of individuals, an oligarchy, in exchange for promised personal safety and for “boons” from the sovereign which resembled rights, but could be modified, suspended or eliminated at the sovereign’s whim, so long as the sovereign provided security.

John Locke’s perspective was very different in that not all aspects of individual sovereignty were surrendered and the aspects retained were inviolable “rights”.  Further, that the surrender of the portion of individual sovereignty not retained was based on a social contract and thus, the surrender was conditioned on the sovereign’s compliance with the terms pursuant to which it had attained its authority, which included guarantees of security, but much more, especially respect for the aspects of sovereignty not surrendered.

Because “rights” were the purported residue of individual sovereignty, not granted but retained, they could not be conditioned, even when the conditions were benign, made sense and were necessary.  Consequently, if what seems a right is subject to any condition, it is no longer a right but a boon granted by one who has attained sovereignty over another or others, and the best that might be hoped for is a quasicontractual arrangement where the sovereign agrees to be bound by rules giving the subject limited means to enforce the boon granted.  Limited means because, as we see today in the United States, sovereigns tend to avoid or ignore the promises made to their subjects whenever the whim strikes them.  Thomas Hobbes did not believe in the concept of rights (other than as a primordial myth).  Because he believed that the totality of individual sovereignty had been surrendered to a central authority in exchange for security and for the grant of boons that sort of smelled like rights, he believed that mankind’s hope lay in enlightened sovereigns.

Today, “rights” appear everywhere, enumerated in countless constitutions and referenced constantly in treaties, legislation and political debates, indeed, they have morphed into diverse purported generations each expanding their purported scope.  But no so-called-right is unconditional and despite constant references to guarantees, no such right is consistently enforced.  Given that rights are purportedly self-enforcing, not having been granted but retained, it seems clear, at least to the author, that in reality, no rights, as understood by John Locke exist.  Rather, there are aspirational concepts towards which decent governments should seek to evolve, and what exists currently is solely the conception described by David Hume in his criticism of Locke as conventional, utility-based, and established human conditional agreements meant to maintain social order and property, essential, artificial rules that allow people to coexist peacefully, which may or may not be honored..

John Locke naively believed in rights and argued articulately in their favor albeit, as David Hume eventually pointed out, his logic was premise free, i.e., rather than articulated, his premises were purportedly self-evident.  However, clever politicians including those who betrayed their oaths of loyalty to the British monarchy in the latter half of the eighteenth century in order to appropriate the British monarch’s sovereignty for themselves, found Locke’s arguments useful, if perhaps not quite credible.  They were, after all, pragmatically practical men interested in practical results rather than the idealists that history portrays.  Indeed, their actions (think of Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence and slavery) with respect to their purported reformulation of John Locke’s conclusions were laced with hypocrisy.  That always has been the case and not just among the so-called Founding Fathers nor limited to the republic they founded.

Still, the Founding Fathers, like the political philosophers who preceded and followed them, were concerned with the issue of tyranny, at least with tyranny that impacted them directly and, in order to minimize tyranny, the founders of the United Colonies’ eventual republic sought to constitutionally disperse sovereignty in two ways: first by placing temporal limits on the human beings who might be charged with its employment and second, by fragmenting sovereignty into separate groupings of political power, thus avoiding “dictatorship” [1].  In this regard it is worth noting that the concept of dictatorship ought not to be considered a pejorative but rather, merely the result of un-fragmented sovereignty, i.e., when all political power was concentrated in one person or institution (the traditional segmentation of political power being, legislative, executive and judicial, to which should have been added a fourth, supervision and control over the other three to avoid usurpation[2]).

That democracy was not important at to the Founding Fathers seems obvious in the institutional structures they established through the Constitution promulgated in 1787 and set into full force in 1788:

  • The Senate was selected, not by the People but by the States. 
  • The membership of the House of Representatives was not based on population but on a complex system comprised in part of population, in another part based on equal numerical representation of the states, and in a third part by treating persons locked into involuntary servitude (slavery) as 3/5ths of a person, however, the right to vote was restricted in such manner as the states might determine so that, as in ancient Athens, less than ten percent of the population originally enjoyed the “franchise” (right to vote). 
  • The President was to be elected by designees of the states selected as they saw fit to serve in an organization that never actually met, the Electoral College.  And the federal Judiciary was to be selected for life by agreement between the president and the Senate. 

No trace of democracy anywhere. 

That system has somewhat morphed into a semblance of democracy by expansion of the right to vote, usurping functions originally assigned to the states, but not on a one person one vote basis as residents in smaller states exercise disproportional electoral power in the Senate, the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. 

Democracy should however be a majoritarian concept and that requires popular participation.  Unfortunately, unlike the ancient Athenians and Romans where political participation (at least by those eligible to participate) was deemed a duty, in the United States participation in the political process is deemed a sort of right and, consequently, rarely if ever do enough eligible voters participate in the electoral process to make attainment of a real majority (more than 50% of the eligible electorate) possible.  Hence electoral decisions are made by relatively small pluralities, usually less than 30% of the eligible electorate and that 30% is comprised of or controlled by elites with little or no interest in the common welfare (as opposed to their own privileges).

Perhaps more relevant is the reality that while the illusion of democracy seems to have evolved over time, the reality has not.  Elected officials for the most part (with fairly are exceptions) answer not to their constituents but to those who fund their political campaigns.  Institutionally, political power is purportedly concentrated in two privileged political parties supposedly in a relationship of collaborative opposition but today and for the past half century at least, both of those groupings are economically dominated by a purportedly private organization dedicated to imposing the will of a foreign country on the citizenry[3].  As a result, the residents of that foreign country, well, at least the residents who are members of that country’s official religion, obtain, at the expense of United States tax payers, massive social programs  unavailable in the United States (e.g., subsidized housing, free healthcare and education, etc.), massive funding for its armed forces, the use of the armed forces of the United States for its own quest for lebensraum and, use of the veto power of the United States in the United Nations (as directed by that foreign government).  In addition to the foregoing, the purported rights constitutionally guaranteed to the citizens of the United States are quickly becoming inapplicable if they are detrimental to the goals, aspirations or interests of that foreign state. Consequently, a foreign state, without temporal limitations such as are involved in terms of political office or limitations based on fragmentation of sovereignty has imposed a de facto tyrannical dictatorship over the United States, which it uses to impose its will over the Middle East.  Its ambitions however may well spread to other regions in the not too distant future.

Ironic but perhaps, something that was predictable as far back as 1787.  Indeed, George Washington, the first president of the United States under the Constitution of 1787 seems to have foreseen the possibility now existent in his farewell address.  The address was in the form of a letter entitled “The Address of General Washington to the People of America on His Declining the Presidency of the United States” published in Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser on September 19, 1796, about ten weeks before the newly appointed members of the Electoral College were to cast their votes in 1796.  In that address he sternly warned against the situation which the country finds itself in today, one that has been continually evolving since at least 1916.  Wikipedia, not the most reliable source but a useful one from time to time, describes the segment of George Washington’s Farewell Address dedicated to foreign sovereigns as follows (footnotes omitted)[4]:

Washington dedicates a large part of his farewell address to discussing foreign relations and the dangers of permanent alliances between the United States and foreign nations, which he views as foreign entanglements. He advocates a policy of good faith and justice towards all nations, again making reference to proper behavior based upon religious doctrine and morality. He urges the American people to avoid long-term friendly relations or rivalries with any nation, arguing that attachments with or animosity toward other nations will only cloud the government’s judgment in its foreign policy. He argues that longstanding poor relations will only lead to unnecessary wars due to a tendency to blow minor offenses out of proportion when committed by nations viewed as enemies of the United States. He continues this argument by claiming that alliances are likely to draw the United States into wars that have no justification and no benefit to the country beyond simply defending the favored nation. Alliances, he warns, often lead to poor relations with nations who feel that they are not being treated as well as America’s allies, and threaten to influence the American government into making decisions based upon the will of their allies instead of the will of the American people.

….

Washington makes an extended reference to the dangers of foreign nations who will seek to influence the American people and government; nations who may be considered friendly as well as nations considered enemies will equally try to influence the government to do their will. “Real patriots”, he warns, who “resist the intrigues” of foreign nations may find themselves “suspected and odious” in the eyes of others, yet he urges the people to stand firm against such influences all the same. He portrays those who attempt to further such foreign interests as becoming the “tools and dupes” of those nations, stealing the applause and praise of their country away from the “real patriots” while actually working to “surrender” American interests to foreign nations.

Washington goes on to urge the American people to take advantage of their isolated position in the world, and to avoid attachments and entanglements in foreign affairs, especially those of Europe, which he argues have little or nothing to do with the interests of America. He argues that it makes no sense for the American people to become embroiled in European affairs when their isolated position and unity allow them to remain neutral and focus on their own affairs. He argues that the country should avoid permanent alliances with all foreign nations, although temporary alliances during times of extreme danger may be necessary. He states that current treaties should be honored but not extended.

Washington wraps up his foreign policy stance by advocating free trade with all nations, arguing that trade links should be established naturally and the role of the government should be limited to ensuring stable trade, defending the rights of American merchants and any provisions necessary to ensure the conventional rules of trade.

Obviously, as in the case of President Dwight David Eisenhower’s farewell address, President Washington’s foresight has been utterly ignored.  Thus, while the postulations of the sixteenth and seventeenth century philosophers who sought to provide future generations with guidance with respect to the avoidance of tyranny to some extent impacted the Founding Fathers in the formulation of the Constitution of 1787, the results have proven singularly unsuccessful and have instead, resulted in the domination of three hundred and fifty million residents of the United States by ten million European Immigrants to the Middle East who have managed to leverage widespread control over economics, communication, entertainment and finance into total control over the … well, … seemingly everything.  Pretty much the definition of tyranny.

So, … In retrospect, reflecting on tyranny, democracy, rights and sovereignty, we have never had democracy or rights although for a while, to an extent, we managed to minimize tyranny, but whatever sovereignty we once had, or though we had, is now illusory as well.  Ironically, the efforts of the Founding Fathers to sunder Britain’s American colonies from British sovereignty in a manner minimizing the risks of tyranny have only resulted in subjugation to the tyranny of another foreign sovereign.

At least for now.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/

[1] A dictatorship is the most efficient form of government but more likely to lead to tyranny than fragmented sovereignty although, as can be seen today, the scheme of governance the Founding Fathers established on their second attempt, in 1787, can fairly easily be converted into a dictatorship when all elements of such fragmentation are reunited under one person, or one political group, as frequently occurs and as is the case in the United States today.

[2] Unfortunately, the Founding Fathers did not provide for an arbiter between the three traditional powers, although the concept was considered at the Constitutional Convention, and several proposed solutions rejected.  Instead, they appeared to assume that such function could be attained through granting the executive a power to veto legislation, for whatever reason, subject to override, and also the power to pardon.  They were, unfortunately mistaken as that power was quickly usurped by the Judiciary in a decision worthy of Machiavelli, the case of Marbury v. Madison (1803) where John Marshall, the recently appointed n Chief Justice of the United States provided his detested cousin, President Thomas Jefferson with a pyrrhic victory by deciding in his favor, but based on the dubious theory that the Judiciary was the arbiter of constitutional authority.  Theretofore, that function had been assumed to lie in the legislative branch (as it did in the United Kingdom) or in the executive as implied at the Constitutional Convention, although a number of colonies in their own systems of governance had been drifting towards the concept of judicial review under their own constitutions.  See generally, Calvo Mahé, Guillermo et. al. (Jiménez Ramírez, Milton Cesar, editor, 2020): “Capítulo I. Evolución del control de constitucionalidad en los estados unidos.”; El control de la constitucionalidad en episodios: acerca del control constitucional como límite al poder; Universidad de Caldas, Facultad de ciencias jurídicas y sociales; Bogotá.

[3] The American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

[4] George Washington’s Farewell Address; Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington’s_Farewell_Address.  Last edited on 23 February 2026, at 19:06 (UTC), accessed, March 10, 2026.

Reflections on the Unprovoked but Predictable United States and Israeli Attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran on the 28th day of February, 2026

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Shades of December 7, 1941, but in reverse.  And again, of the Nazi Holocaust, but in reverse.  This time it’s the United States that is the villain, as are Zionists and as is Israel.  Indeed, a more objective historical analysis of the causes of the Second World War and of the history of its protagonists would call into question just who the historical purveyors of genocide were.  Think of the indigenous population of the United States, think of the genocide against Africans and East Indians perpetrated by the British and the French and the Belgians, or more historically, of the genocide perpetrated on the Canaanites, and on Jericho, and on so many other peoples as reflected in the Tanakh.  Perhaps reality has just become a bit more clear, a bit more focused.  And reality is not all that pretty.

It’s difficult to put into words the infamy involved in the latest United States’ collaboration with the pedophilic, genocidal regime which has obviously taken control over politics, governance and communications throughout the so called Western World.  The actions undertaken by the United States and Israel on that infamous day at the end of February in 2026.

On December 7, 1941, less perfidious actions by the Empire of Japan against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor were labelled “a day that would live in infamy” by then president Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  But sneak attacks during negotiations have become the norm for the United States, in each instance, based on obvious lies, but not involving United States’ interests nor United States territorial expansion, just the sacrifice of the lives of United States citizens and of millions of innocent victims to further the ethnic cleansing, genocidal and expansionist goals of the worst people in modern history, worse even that the Nazis whom they emulate.

That all of the foregoing is applauded and facilitated by Christian fundamentalists mainly in the United States, Israeli firster despite Zionist disdain for Christians (who Zionists loathe and as to whom they claim a god given right to expectorate) is not just sickening but amazing.  However, Christianity, at least in its Pauline version, has always been hypocritical, but rarely has it been so self-delusional, subordinating its interests to those of the people who most despise them, those who claim that Yešu was the black magician bastard child of a prostitute (see, Toledot Yeshu).

It all once again proves the accuracy of the Orwellian premises published in 1948.  All of them.  Self-delusion is as prevalent as the delusion imposed by the Zionists who have attained control over virtually the entirety of United States and Western media, both official and social, just as they acquired, or at least rented, both major United States political parties in the United States through AIPAC and in the United Kingdom through the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), the Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland (ZF), and the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM).  That more and more United States citizens and citizens of countries in Western Europe are awakening to the foregoing, especially among the young (including young Jews who ought never to be confused with Zionists), may not be enough and certainly will not be timely.

A large segment of the population in the United States, including people I’ve loved and admired and with whom I was educated, people with whom I once felt I shared values of decency and morality and equity and justice, are delusionally applauding the actions of the United States and Israel, having somehow, despite all the evidence to the contrary, become convinced that Iran was the power mad international villain set on conquest.  It makes me understand, at long last, how the peaceful and socially aware German people became Nazi supporters, able to look in their mirrors and admire what they saw.  But that understanding brings no solace. 

The sins of the Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden and Trump administrations against even the semblance of human decency and especially of the values the United States purports to represent, are eradicable and if history is a guide, may all too soon come home to roost.  Certainly the reputation, even if illusory, of which former president Ronald Reagan once spoke, the metaphorical “shining city on a hill”, has been utterly destroyed, at least among the people of the world, if not among their leaders. 

February 28, 2026, a day that will live in infamy indeed.

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Zionism, Antisemitism, Jeffrey Epstein and the Purported Protocols of the Elders of Zion

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No matter how frequently stakes are driven into the heart of the claim that all Jews are part of a sinister plot to enslave all non-Jews, a plot intricately woven into the fraudulent “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” which seemingly refuse to die[1], related suspicions and rumors resurface.  It is worth analyzing why.  Most recently they are resurfacing on a worldwide basis as a result of the impunity with which Israel has conducted a campaign of land theft, ethnic cleansing and genocide in Palestine as well as throughout the Middle East, a campaign that has lasted, not since October 7, 2023 but during the past three quarters of a century; but now, even more given the ghastly revelations concerning the depredations of Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplices, almost all of whom were devout Zionists.  Recent related events have exacerbated the problem due to the facility with which Israel has manipulated the United States, and indeed, most of Western Europe since the end of the Second World War to engage in a series of armed conflicts in the Middle East on Israel’s behalf[2].  Indeed, the roots of that issue precede the First World War, you know, the one that was originally referred to as the War to End All Wars, and the role in all of the foregoing of a small group of Jewish atheists (sort of an oxymoron) and Christian adventists (with a small “a” to distinguish them from the denomination of that name), both identifying as “Zionists”.

The so-called “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” have been characterized as fraudulent for over a century.  They were likely initially written by Russian anti-Semites to slander Jews. Ironically however it seems that Zionists[3] may have used at least some of the suggestions contained therein as mechanisms to become the world’s most powerful group, one reveling in related impunity.  Disturbingly, Zionists actions now reflect some of the most horrific calumnies attributed to Jews during past millennia because Zionists in Israel engage, not only in genocide and ethnic cleansing, but apparently in the ghoulish harvesting of human organs from involuntary “donors”, in the wholesale murder of women and children and have praised rape as a legitimate instrument of social control.  An indicia that not all Jews are Zionists and indeed, that many strongly oppose Zionist atrocities was recently illustrated when the Israeli army’s chief legal officer, Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, resigned and was subsequently arrested (earlier this month for leaking a surveillance video that evinced the brutal rape of a Palestinian detainee at the Sde Teiman military detention facility during 2024.

What an irony. 

Unfortunately for non-Zionist Jews who reflect real traditional Jewish values, while the Elders of Zion, at least as reflected in the purported Protocols, may well have been fictional, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) certainly is not nor are the numerous Zionist billionaires whose atrocities are reflected in the so called Epstein files.  Nor are AIPAC’s Zionist counterparts in the United Kingdom which destroyed the political career of statesman Jeremy Corbin, replacing him with Keith Stammer, and in France, gave us Rothschild protégé Emmanuel Macron and, in Germany, Joachim-Friedrich Martin Josef Merz as well as German Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen in the European Union.   

In the United States, AIPAC exercises de facto veto power over all the presidential and most of the Congressional candidates in both the Democratic and Republican parties, choices most voters would rather not support, but the AIPAC controlled portion of the national media constantly convinces us that there are no other choices and manages to keep us too divided and polarized to do anything but accept AIPAC’s dictates, no matter the cost to us in taxes diverted for Israel’s benefit, or the cost in human lives lost or destroyed, both here and abroad in senseless military adventures and interventions.  Zionist media control is growing as illustrated by the recent acquisitions by Larry Ellison and his son David, two of the world’s wealthiest billionaires[4] and passionate supporters of Zionism, of Israel and of AIPAC who have recently consolidated their media influence through a series of strategic moves, most notably through the Paramount-Skydance merger which provided them with control over the Warner Bros. Discovery and its CNN news network and a significant portion of TikTok’s U.S. operations, one of the few social media platforms that have previously permitted broad uncensored criticism of Israel.  Furthermore, the accelerating evolution of artificial intelligence, especially as used in Internet browsers and search engines now also “coincidentally” censors comments deemed “unfairly” critical of Israel, AIPAC or Zionism in general, an area in which the Ellisons have also recently invested heavily.

Given the Jeffrey Epstein related horrors being revealed daily which include not only pedophilia but unimaginable vampiric blood drinking rituals and cannibalism by world economic and political leaders, it seems to many people all over the world that we are in a hopeless downward ethical and moral spiral and that instead of the perpetual peace envisioned by German philosopher Immanuel Kant, we are trapped in perpetual war engaged in primarily to generate profits and that, to a great extent, that downward spiral is led by Zionists.  And that such downward spiral continues with circuses, if not bread, keeping us carefully anesthetized, circuses like sports and television programs and cinema and concerts, and fake news.  Arenas where we can futilely rail against each other, wasting our energy but somehow feeling as though we’ve won something, perhaps even as if someone had heard us and acted. 

And “someones” have seemingly heard us, and they have acted, just not who we think or in the manner we hoped, and certainly not in the manner we need.  But the foregoing does not mean that terrible the status quo will continue without meaningful opposition.  Increasingly, younger people all over the world, the United States and Western Europe, many of them Jewish, are protesting against the perpetual war we have been involved in seemingly forever, including against the genocide, ethnic cleansing and massive violations of human rights being orchestrated by the government of Israel, supported by the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Germany.  A number of countries have taken affirmative actions to minimize the new holocaust taking place by filing complaints with the International Criminal Court in Rome and with the International Court of Justice, as well as by formally recognizing the existence of a Palestinian State and by restricting or even breaking off relationships with Israel.  While such opposition, to date, has been no match for the political, financial and cultural power amassed by Zionists, both Jewish and Christian[5], and by the billionaire class in general, perhaps the all-pro consummate politician, Abraham Lincoln, had a point when he asserted that “you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time”, and to an extent, that hypothesis may be proving at least partially accurate.  However, the growing reaction to Zionist atrocities and abuses is not without significant danger of its own.  It may well lead to abuses as malign as those it is initially seeking to eliminate.  Rather than a temporary moral and ethical awakening, it appears that a reactive increase in the age old immorality of antisemitism is also occurring.  And that solves nothing.  It never has.

It is essential therefore to forcefully acknowledge that neither AIPAC nor Zionism in general represent all Jews and indeed, to note that Zionism was founded by atheists rather than religious Jews, and that Zionists, rather than being descendants of the ancient Hebrews, or even of the Jews who inhabited Palestine at the dawn of the Common Era, are, for the most part, descendants of Turkish, Kazhar and Russian converts to Judaism who today primarily comprise only one segment of Judaism, the Ashkenazi.  And it is also essential, notwithstanding the insistence by Zionists that they represent all Jews and notwithstanding the reality that the creation of Israel in Palestine against the wishes of those who had inhabited those lands for millennia was a travesty, especially in light of the judgments of the Nuremburg Tribunals, it is critical to acknowledge that Jews and Judaism have been a force for decency and tolerance for millennia and have positively contributed a great deal towards Western civilizations. 

As an aside, it is incredibly frustrating and sad that the three branches of the Abrahamic faiths have proven so internecinely fratricidal and that, rather than sharing Abram of the Sumerians as their founder, they all seem to be offspring of the mythical Cain.

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

[1] I most recently reencountered references to the purported protocols in an Instagram post I found at https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOko_JjjmpG/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link (but which may have been removed).  That post led me to write and share these observations.

[2] Recent revelations, although circulation has been limited due to de facto media self-censorship, indicate that a great deal of Zionist power may be the result of blackmail and extortion activities targeting political, military and business leaders such as those which have been attributed to the abuse of underage girls and boys orchestrated by Jeffery Epstein, possibly acting on behalf of the Israeli Mossad and perhaps even United States, British and French intelligence agencies. 

[3] Note, it is essential to emphasize that not all Jews are Zionists nor, as described above, are all Zionists Jews.

[4] Studies indicate that while the Jewish population in the United States is approximately 3%, Zionists represent 40% of its billionaires.

[5] There may well be more Christian than Jewish Zionists, especially among “fundamentalist” Christians in the United States.

On the GOP’s Save Act and Critical Related Issues

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Opposition to the so called Save Act (H.R.22 – 119th Congress, 2025-2026) by Democrats based on their current arguments concerning threats to democracy seems stupid, nonsensical and counterproductive (to the glee of the GOP).  The requirement for photo identification verifying citizenship and right to vote as a prerequisite to voting is something common all over the world, something usually accompanied by required signature and fingerprint verification.  In the United States the issue is a bit more complicated because of states’ rights under our federal system and the historical aversion to a national identification card and because of the transient nature of United States society with voting at federal, state and local levels predicated not only on citizenship but on residency.  Thus it would seem that appropriately reliable verification documentation would be required at each such level depending on the election involved.  A problem, true, but not an irresolvable problem given available technology.  However, it could well require implementation of a national identification smart card, centrally updated; not an insurmountable obstacle as credit card companies make clear on a quotidian basis.  Mail in voting, the other serious wedge issue, clearly facilitates electoral fraud and just as clearly, makes voting easier.  But safeguards can be added to minimize its deficiencies.  In addition to the danger of facilitating electoral fraud, mail in voting has been abused in order to “lock in” votes before relevant issues come to light by providing for early voting, but that too can be regulated in order to minimize its abuse, rather than eliminated.  Wise Democrats would be much better off electorally by resolving the deficiencies noted rather than by focusing on hyperbolic platitudes.

Still, constitutional arguments based on federalism and states’ rights do have merit.  The Constitution vests decisions concerning electoral qualifications and related issues in the states but provides Congress a role should it elect to exercise it, something which Congress has done from time to time albeit not coherently, that is because Congress has limited its role to issues involving “federal elections” and the only real federal election is that “virtual” election taken when state departments of state submit the results of state level elections for electors to the Electoral College (which never, in fact, meets) to the United States Congress for tabulation and consideration.  All other elections involving the national government are taken at the state level.  The House of Representatives is elected through state district elections in districts established and supervised by the states, the same being true with respect to the Electoral College and, of course, despite the ill-considered and antidemocratic 17th Amendment to the Constitution, election of Senators is also done on a state basis.  The members of the Supreme Court are not elected at all but rather appointed through agreement between the Senate and the president.  The issue however is, or ought to be, more complex.  The truth is that a constitutional amendment related to a number of electoral issues is desperately required. 

Issues that need to be dealt with constitutionally include:

  • Financing of electoral campaigns which should, in all probability, be limited to eligible voters in the electoral districts involved, excluding thereby corporate and related entities (e.g., unions, political action committees, etc.).  The Supreme Court’s abhorrent Citizens United decision also needs to be obliterated.
  • The use of the national census for purposes of determining state representation in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College needs to be clarified so that for those purposes, only citizens are counted.  Not even permanent residents should be counted although for other purposes the census should include everyone resident in a state, regardless of their nationality or electoral status.
  • The issue of birthright citizenship, poorly dealt with in the 14th amendment, should be clarified.  As interpreted by the Supreme Court, it has been seriously abused and is a goad to illegal immigration.  Mr. Trump is not always wrong.
  • The status of undocumented immigrants for diverse purposes should also be dealt with, perhaps creating national standards in order to avoid forum shopping.

Those issues each require serious consideration involving a much more fundamental issue as well.  The United States Constitution adopted in 1789 and implemented in 1791 envisioned a federal state comprised of purportedly sovereign states.  Really, a fragmentation of sovereignty predicated on the concept of enumerated powers dealt with both in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution and in its 9th and 10th amendments.  However, as I noted quite a while ago in an article entitled Motley Constitutionalism: a Labyrinthine Aphorism, the concept of federalism has been drastically and negatively impacted since shortly after adoption of the Constitution; first, by John Marshall’s usurpation of constitutional control in the case of Marbury v. Madison, then by the usurpation of issues involving secession, supremacy of legislation and related factors by the federal government as a result of the Civil War of 1861-65 and through the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments imposed following the Civil War (justifiable though they were), then, in the series of Wilson administration constitutional amendments that shattered state power, especially the 16th (taxation), 17th (representation through the Senate), 18th (state police power) and 19th (state control of the right to vote) and finally, by Supreme Court decisions ostensibly based on the Commerce Clause of the Constitution during the middle of the 20th century.  The foregoing constitutional proposals would further the trend away from federalism and towards a unitary state, as would consistent proposals to do away with the Electoral College in favor of direct, popular election of the president.

Those damned two sides to every issue can be utterly frustrating.  However, there is also a third side.  The truth is that a broad and serious discussion concerning the federal nature of the Republic is very much past due, a nature that has become largely illusory as chip by chip its federal foundation has become eroded.  The reality is that the original concept, first of a confederation of independent states, sort of like the United Nations, and then of a hybrid between a confederation and a unitary state (a federation) has in practice perhaps become obsolete as the United States has “sort of” become one nation rather than a conglomeration of regions, although, politically, it has become divided between urban and rural areas with totally different voting perspectives and an utterly polarized citizenry.  That discussion should have been undertaken before each and every decision impacting federalism but apparently the topic and its strategic aspects were ignored in favor of the interests of the moment, pretty much in the same manner as the Save Act is being currently considered: ironically, a legislative act proposed by traditional proponents of states’ rights and opposed by traditional proponents of a powerful central government.

Perhaps it’s way past time for a profound discussion concerning the nature and deficiencies of the Constitution adopted in 1789, two-hundred-and-thirty-seven years ago, and so patched up that it resembles the “motley of ill-matched patches” worn by ancient court jesters.  Like the Bible and other sacred treatises, the current Constitution is honored and revered, oaths taken to preserve and defend it, but not really followed.

Perhaps it’s time for a new constitutional convention, one led by serious technocrats and academics rather than politicians, a constitution to then be presented directly for approval or rejection, in whole or in part, by the citizenry it will be meant to govern.  A constitution to effectively, efficiently and equitable harmonize our society in order to really attain the common welfare.  But the sad truth is that neither major political party is interested in the foregoing as it would eliminate too many of the useful wedge issues through which we are each manipulated, divided and controlled.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

On the Organic Ancestry of MAGA and of Its Ironic Incoherence

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The “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) Trumpian political movement[1] within the United States Republican Party, is hardly original.  It is merely a reflection of the profound xenophobia that has characterized the United States since well before its founding; at least since descendants of English invaders[2] deemed new German immigrants during the colonial era unworthy of sharing the colonial society the English were in the process of founding.  But MAGA has a more direct historical ancestor: the mid-nineteenth century “American Party” (better known as the Know-Nothing Party).  The latter was a name it proudly applied to itself based on a pledge required of its members to preserve secrecy concerning party activities by answering all queries with the phrase “I know nothing”, a phrase ironically adopted by a comic character in a sitcom set in a German prisoner of war camp over a century later[3], rather than in praise of ignorance (although a pretty good case might be made for the latter).

The American Party was an outgrowth of secretive groups like the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner[4] (which somewhat explains its paranoiac tendencies) and became a major third party political movement during the 1850s (interestingly, a time as polarized as our own) rivaling not only the traditional parties at the time (the Democratic and Whig parties) but also the emerging abolitionist (and industrialist[5]) Republican Party.  It was ideologically characterized by nativist Protestant supremacism and anti-immigrant sentiment particularly targeting Irish and German immigrants and, like MAGA today, advocated for stricter naturalization laws (proposing to extend the residency requirement for citizenship from five to twenty-one years) and seeking to keep the foreign-born, even if they had attained United States citizenship, from voting or holding public office.  They did not address the “birthright” citizenship issue as the 14th amendment to the constitution on which it is based had yet to be adopted, but they would assuredly have agreed with MAGA on that issue as well.  The party gained significant power during the 1854 – 1855 electoral period, capturing several state governments and sending numerous representatives to Congress.  Former President Millard Fillmore was their 1856 candidate securing 21% of the popular vote but winning only Maryland.  However, the party quickly fragmented into northern and southern factions leading to its collapse by the time of the Civil War.

While similar to MAGA in ideology, the American Party was a bit more coherent than MAGA in its xenophobia given the control exerted over MAGA by Israel through its American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).  AIPAC finances the political campaigns of all MAGA affiliated members of Congress who are then required to place Israeli interests over those of the United States (which would have been anathema to the American Party); however, that subservience is not limited to MAGA or the GOP given that such phenomenon equally impacts the Democratic Party.  Indeed, using the “wag the dog” analogy, there are international analysts who view the United States as a mercantilist Israeli colony, regardless of which domestic political party attains political power, a hypothesis supported by the immense transfer of United States tax revenue directly to Israel for both domestic and military purposes.

So, not much new with MAGA, just a rehash of old prejudices but this time, ironically, in the service of a foreign, non-Protestant power. 

The foregoing brings to mind the Peter Allen song published in 1974, “Everything Old is New Again”:

When trumpets were mellow and every gal only had one fellow, no need to remember when because everything old is new again.  Dancing at church, Long Island jazzy parties; waiter bring us some more Bacardi.  We’ll order now what they ordered then because everything old is new again. 

Get out your white suit, your tap shoes and tails; let’s go backwards when forward fails and movie stars you thought were alone then are now framed beside your bed.  Don’t throw the past away, you might need it some rainy day; dreams can come true again when everything old is new again

Get out your white suit, your tap shoes and tails; put it on backwards when forward fails.  Better leave Greta Garbo alone, be a movie star on your own and don’t throw the past away; you might need it some other rainy day.  Dreams can come true again when everything old is new again.

When everything old is new again, I might fall in love with you again

Well, at least sort of new.  Perhaps, with an innovation or two. 

An anthem of sorts for MAGA.

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

[1] One wonders whether Donald John Trump (or, “The Donald” as he styles himself) has registered intellectual property rights to the “MAGA” name?  I wouldn’t be surprised; indeed, I’d be surprised if he hasn’t.

[2] They called themselves colonists but the indigenous population of the continent saw them somewhat differently, actually, saw them pretty much in the same way as the invaders saw all subsequent undocumented “immigrants”.

[3] Hogan’s Heroes.

[4] A nativist, anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant secret society founded in New York City in 1849 by Charles B. Allen.

[5] Indeed, despite its abolitionist veneer, the emerging Republican Party was largely a pro-industrial revolution, pro-capitalist political movement that sought to centralize the government in order to facilitate the consolidation of the North American continent and the imperialistic expansion of the United States.

A Very Brief Primer on Policy Related Ideologies

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Political ideologies are not policy specific, rather, they are based on how the decision making process should function:

  • Conservatism in the context of democracy is based on the premise that democracy is not temporally static but has three components, past, present and future, all of which must be considered when engaging in fundamental decisions thus change has to be considered from all three perspectives, respect for tradition, dealing with current needs but considering impact on future generations.
  • Liberalism is more present oriented, problems should be promptly addressed and resolved, notwithstanding tradition, but taking impact on future generations into account.
  • Socialism is based on the realization that we have two distinct and sometimes incompatible natures, the individual and the collective, and that tensions between them should be resolved taking both into account, when possible, but when the conflict cannot be resolved, the interests of the collective should prevail.  A concept illustrated by the fictional Star Trek Vulcan, Spock when he would proclaim that the goof of the many outweighed the good of the few, and as a corollary, of the one.
  • Libertarianism has components similar to socialism but the primacy when conflict is irreconcilable is in favor of the individual rather than the collective, thus, the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many.  It is the foundational pillar for the antidemocratic concept of “individual rights” such as were championed in the United States’ Bill of Rights.

“Left” and “Right” are incoherently variable terms with reference to the foregoing, as are the concepts of statist (in favor of power vested in the state) and anti-statists, as they tend to change based on what political group controls the state and at what level or the goals of political policies being considered.

These four aspects of decision making need not always be in conflict and wise policy makers should take all three into account.  Unfortunately, most current policy makers are not wise and are dedicated primarily to the perspective that the many exist to serve the few and must be controlled by any means possible, while making it seem that the many, rather than the few, are the decision makers, when the truth is the obverse, and that generalized individual liberty is an impediment to such control.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

“Heil” Rather than “Hail” to the Chief

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The United States finally has a Führer!

It’s been a long time coming.  At least since the administration of William Jefferson Clinton.  And at each stage it has become seemingly worse but the sad truth is that is has just become a more and more obvious reality.  Donald J. Trump is just a more blatant and more honest version of Joseph Robinette Biden. Then again, perhaps today’s United States Führer is really Benjamin Netanyahu (well, really Mileikowsky, but that’s another story), and he has probably been the Führer since before he even became prime minister of Israel.

The United States Constitution has been illusory since the Civil War, evolving from a confederate structure to today’s unitary state in all but name, and unitary in the dictatorial sense, where the semblance of separation of powers is only a sad delusion.  Today’s system of governance in the United States of North America (as we in South America prefer to call it), both domestically and internationally, has become one that emulates Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, a corporatist state in training with plenty of billionaires surfing happily in the current president’s wake.  I don’t state that as an insult but rather an acknowledgement that all power has become concentrated in the presidency, something that occurred historically in ancient Rome when the Republic morphed into the Empire.  The judiciary has become subsumed at the highest level and although numerous members of the federal judiciary at the District and Circuit levels remain loyal in their decisions to “they who appointed them” now, given the composition of the Supreme Court, that is at best a stalling tactic.

One of the most repulsive aspects of “fascism” (the sociopolitical and economic philosophy common to Nazis, Zionists and today’s United States rather than the meaningless pejorative aphorism used to describe political enemies), in addition to its proclivity for genocide, ethnic cleansing and the quest for lebensraum, is how it turns decent people, moral people, into willing accomplices.  Fascism is democratic, it wouldn’t work if it wasn’t.   Mussolini, Hitler, Netanyahu and Mr. Trump (as well as Messrs. Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden) all enjoyed broad popular support from the electorates which, for whatever reasons (and the reasons were and are diverse), their members had been led to enthusiastically espouse.  Not that there wasn’t opposition to fascist governments then and now but thuggery by masked agents of the state, masked to assure the anonymity essential for impunity, took care of that in each case, and violently so.  Interestingly, fascism (as well as other related systems) relies heavily on a sense of outraged victimhood and purported moral and xenophobic ethnic superiority as essential unifying elements.  And the foregoing describes todays United States and its idol Israel, to a tee.

Ironically, most of the United States electorate is aware of the internal fascist problem (though they have no idea what fascism is) but they have been successfully polarized so that the principle of “divide and conquer” is effectively used to completely blunt such realization.  At the federal level, the United States political system is not democratic in any sense, it was designed to create the illusion of democracy but without democracy’s impediments to control by political and economic elites.  Moreover, a two party dictatorship was imposed through legislative favoritism so that at the federal level, it is virtually impossible to attain public office unless one is sponsored by either the ill-named Democratic Party or the equally ill-named Republican Party.  In reality, they are two sides of the same coin and the coin is owned by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee which not only funds approximately 90% of all federal elective officials but destroys any candidate who rejects its dominance, in each case, through massive expenditures that in an ethical system would be identified as “bribes”.  Those voters whose allegiance is pledged to the Democratic and Republican parties clearly see the fascist tendencies in the other party but are certain that their own party is pristinely patriotic and dedicated to the ideals pursuant to which the United States was purportedly founded, i.e., democracy, liberty, justice under law, etc., although few have any idea what such ideals mean.  Thus, the fascist cancer has successfully invaded and conquered the United States body politic, … now apparently terminally.

That fascist leaders (e.g., a Führer) behave in a manner that any normally aware person would recognize as insane apparently poses no problem.  Indeed, the insanity of the Führer’s conduct is an asset, at least in the beginning, as opponents, having no idea how to deal with it, initially acquiesce to numerous ludicrous demands, demands that all too often have horrific consequences.  Demands that become incrementally more ludicrous until all aspects of organized civil conduct are replaced by the Führer’s personal morality of the moment, something that Mr. Trump personally clearly and unequivocally specified when faced with challenges based on international, constitutional and ordinary legal impediments.  Had he a bit more historical acuity he probably would have quoted French King Luis XIV by adding “L’État, c’est moi”!

It is amazing to me, and very disturbing, that so many career military officers in the United States who I have known for most of my life and who I respect and admire, men who have taken an oath to “uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States”, now take umbrage at the observation by a retired senior military officer and current member of Congress that members of the United States armed forces “must not obey illegal orders”.  That was the crux of the law imposed by the United States and its allies on the entire world immediately following World War Two through the decisions of the Nuremburg tribunals, decisions against the leaders, civil as well as military, of the defeated Nazi regime.  Hypocritical decisions, that’s true.  The United States and its allies had engaged in conduct at least as evil as had the losers in that conflict and the decisions were based on purportedly prohibited ex post facto “legislation”.  But at any rate, those decisions have proven farcical, especially with respect to the Zionists who were so active as judges and prosecutors in such tribunals but whose descendants today claim that “international law does not apply to them”.   And by extension, it cannot apply to their chief enablers, primarily the United States, but also the United Kingdom, the Federal Republic of Germany, the Fifth French Republic.  Indeed, to any of the member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

So we now live in the Hobbesian “State of Nature”, one essential for functional Führers where, as enunciated recently by a senior United States official, this time against Denmark, one of the United States own allies, that “only might makes right”.  And the chickens have come home to roost, as they tend to do.  The bullying of other countries is now not only all inclusive but it is now being applied to citizens and nationals of the United States by heavily armed, anonymous, poorly trained uniformed thugs, members of an evolving constitutionally proscribed virtual federal police force, and the states be damned.  After all, states rely on the Constitution first put into effect in 1791 for their authority, and that Constitution is now a zombie….

At best.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Paradoxical Reflections as 2025 Morphs into 2026

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Dateline, January 4, 2026

For many historians the assassinations of Roman reformers Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BCE and of his brother, Gaius Gracchus, in 121 BCE, both tribunes of the plebs who pushed for agrarian and social reforms against powerful Senate opposition, marked the end of the Roman Republic, at least in constitutional terms.  The rational system of governance represented by the Republic broke down after that with the dictatorships of Marius and Sulla, and then the triumvirates of Julius Caesar, Gnaeus Pompeius (self-denominated Magnus), and Marcus Licinius Crassus until Octavian Caesar initiated the Imperium a century later. 

In the case of the United States of North America (a more accurate name than the United States or the United States of America), constitutional order, at least involving the constitution usurpatively adopted in 1789, first broke down in 1861 with the war between the states (now usually referred to as the Civil War except among conservative Caucasians in the South where it is known as the War of Northern Aggression), being thereafter replaced by a militarily imposed new constitutional order which was, in turn, more legally replaced during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson by a new antifederalist centrist variant through adoption of the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th amendments, amendments which, because they virtually destroyed the Constitution’s federalist premises, could well be considered unconstitutional constitutional amendments as described by Professor Richard Albert of the University of Texas’ School of Law.  But the end of any semblance of constitutionalism in the United States entered its death throes, as did the concept of international law, during the presidency of William Jefferson Clinton in 1992, culminating in their absolute demise during the second term of the presidency of Donald John Trump.  By that time, most of those who, upon assuming office in the United States, whether civil or military, took an oath to “defend and protect the Constitution of the United States” in truth were dedicated to serving the dictates of the de facto Führer, a more accurate term for the dictatorial presidents of the United States that started with Mr. Clinton and reached a high point (so far) with the presidency of Donald Trump.  They (the de facto führers), in turn, along with most of the bureaucracy and the members of the United States Congress, owed their loyalty to the unelected, secretive, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) which bought most of them with monetary contributions and “favors” and which in turn owed its fealty to the Hobbesian Zionist Israeli government.

The result, both domestically and internationally, was a return to what philosopher Thomas Hobbes had once described as “the State of Nature”, not a benevolent environmentally friendly status but one where brute power was the only reality that mattered.  In both cases, the Roman and that of the United States, indeed, in that of the entire global state system, the demise of constitutional government, in each case based on superficial principles of liberty and democracy, experienced a gradual, unperceived death which, by the time it had become permanent, was virtually ignored, unmourned by the vast majority of the populations they were meant to serve. 

Unbidden, the ancient Trojan prophetess Cassandra comes to mind as I write this, and the political prophets Aldous Huxley and his former student, Eric Arthur Blair (writing as George Orwell) as well, as do the warnings in the farewell addresses of presidents George Washington and Dwight David Eisenhower.  But all to no avail. 

In this world, evil, greed, impunity and hypocrisy seemingly always triumph.  At least where collectives are involved.  It turns out that collectives, meant to foster collaboration in the quest for mutual benefit instead serve as means for the most ruthless and selfish among us to concentrate power, facilitated by our fatal individual naiveté and immense capacity for self-deception.

As I all too frequently end my reflections nowadays, I again see Elphaba Thropp (albeit in her earlier 1930s incarnation in the film, “The Wizard of Oz”) slowly melting after having been inadvertently doused with water by the ingénue, Dorothy, with Elphaba desperately declaiming: “what a world, what a world”!

Welcome to 2026!

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Solstice Day, 2025

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Today, December 21st, 2025 we experience a solstice, really two: the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the shortest day and longest night of the year, and the Southern Solstice in the South with the longest day and shortest night.  In Colombia, which straddles the equator, in its southern regions it experiences the Summer Solstice, at the equator, well, perhaps nothing at all, all days being equal, and to the North, the Winter Solstice.  As in so many other things, Colombia has it all.

Like the equinoxes, to me the solstices are days for introspection and reflection and more, so than New Year’s Day, days for refocusing and resolutions.  Our world is in terrible shape, chaos and injustice reign in a replica of what philosopher Thomas Hobbes described many centuries ago as the “State of Nature”, a phrase having nothing to do with sound ecological practices but rather, with chaos, injustice, lawlessness and impunity.  The reality is that our world has seemingly always functioned (dysfunctioned would be more accurate) this way but, we have always been successfully deluded through false and fanciful narratives into believing that there are good guys on one side who believe in truth, justice and equity, and bad guys on the other who believe in nothing at all but power and pleasure for themselves.

Historians should know differently, as should journalists, but they don’t, or they don’t care because they’re an integral part of the problem.  Reflecting on how genocide and ethnic cleansing and the quest for lebensraum have become fashionable in Western and Central Europe and in the Anglo-Saxon world, rather than anathema (as we were told following the Second World War), I’ve come to doubt everything I was taught concerning World War Two and World War One, indeed, about the American Revolution and the American Civil War, and which I then, in turn taught others.  There were no “good guys” in any of those “conflicts”, only evil politicians and sacrificial victims on all sides, sacrificial victims who along with their families provided the fuel to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. 

In what we refer to as the Western World, the purportedly Democratic World, being seen as the good guys seems existentially important despite the hundreds of millions of people who have been slaughtered through our elective wars and through our colonialism, purportedly a “burden” imposed on us in order to raise our cultural inferiors to our intellectual and moral heights.  The Romans of two millennia ago, prior to their conquest by Christianity, were just as selfishly aggressive as are we in the Western World, the purportedly Democratic World, but they were much more honest.  They had no problem at all in being seen as the bad guys but, truth be told, we have easily surpassed them in savagery and in a lack of respect for legal institutions, all the while insisting that we do what we do in the name of justice, liberty, decency and democracy.  In the name of our Abrahamic god. 

We are masters of hypocrisy.  For example, followers of the Christian branch of the Abrahamic triad abhor the economic theses on which their religion is purportedly based, which ironically coincide with the premises underlying communism, i.e., not only political, social and economic equality and equity, but a dedication to lift up the poorest and most humble among us while preventing the accumulation of massive wealth by the few (remember the camel and the eye of the needle).  Among the followers of the Judaic branch of that triad, people who for millennia were victims of intense social and legal injustice, post-eighth-century Eurasian converts today purportedly acting in the name of all Jews have become oppressors and mass murderers in an apparent quest for political and economic hegemony.  The Islamic branch meanwhile looks on: Palestinians (descendants of real Jews) are sacrificed while wealthy Arab leaders pretend to care but at best, do nothing and at worst, secretly collude with Christian and Zionist Islamophobes.  Ironically, the atheists among us are those most inclined to avoidance of state sponsored murder and most supportive of equity, equality and social justice.

Reflecting on the foregoing on this day of solstices, a movie from the late nineteen thirties, the old movie version of the Wizard of Oz, one of the first to use color, comes to mind, specifically with reference to one of its final scenes.  The scene in which its purported villain, Elphaba, the fictional Wicked Witch of the East, exclaims (after she was accidentally soaked with water by the heroine, and began to melt), “what a world, what a world”!  That metaphor was certainly prescient, not only with respect to today’s world, but to our world since significantly before history was first recorded, perhaps since we first evolved as purported Homo Sapiens.

Anyway, … enough reflection and introspection.  What about resolutions?  Is there anything we can do to change the inequity that surrounds us? 

Well, maybe not.  But we can at least try.  The strange thing about we humans is that in large collectives we tend to be horrible while individually, although some of us are indeed horrible, the majority are decent albeit incredibly gullible and all too ignorant.  Thus, perhaps the first thing we need to do is to help each other shed our blinders by realizing that virtually everything we’re taught is false and then, by following our more humane instincts, for example, the so called Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, rather than its perverted analog, “do unto others whatever you can get away with before they do it unto you”.  Perhaps then, hopefully blinder free and well intentioned, we can reject leadership by all those who seek dominion through violence and deception, and who follow the creed of perpetual greed and perpetual war, albeit in disguise.

Anyway (again), … these are my reflections after a good deal of introspection on a shortest day and a longest night high in the central range of the Colombian Andes.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Reflections on Thanksgiving Day 2025

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I am drawn to the concept of giving thanks rather than asking for boons from the divine.  It was something I felt strongly at times of spiritual longing while I was still more of a traditional believer, times long gone.  I am still drawn to the concept, albeit in a more generic form while concurrently more specifically.  While reflecting on towards what and towards whom my thanks should be directed.

A deity is evoked by most for purposes of giving thanks on this holiday, at least in the parts of the world where I’ve lived, in Europe and in the Americas.  It is an Abrahamic deity worshipped by three antagonistic branches, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and that deity is purported to possess five principle unique attributes.  He (the deity is identified as masculine for the most part) is eternal, he has always existed and will always exist; he is omnipresent, i.e., he is ubiquitous, concurrently everywhere; he is omniscient, knows absolutely everything not only with respect to the past and the present, but also the future; he is omnipotent, all powerful, capable of anything and everything without reservation; and, he is omnibenevolent, all good without a trace of evil or negativity. 

I guess, if we humans did not exist, if our world did not exist, the concurrence of such attributes might conceivably be possible.  But we do exist, our world exists, and evil certainly exists and, on this Thanksgiving Day, evil seems to predominate, especially in the so called Western World.  And that evil seems to emanate directly from the purported Abrahamic Holy Land in the Middle East.

Today and for many years, decades really, It has been difficult, actually, impossible for me to be thankful to that incoherent complex of attributes that purportedly constitute “our” deity.  Or to believe that such an entity exists.  The three attributes most impossible for me to reconcile are the “omnis”: omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence.  When effective, logic, a premise based form of analysis that purports to lead to accurate conclusions, could accept an evil or amoral omniscient, omnipresent omnipotence; or, it could accept an omnibenevolent, omnipresent and omniscient but impotent reality.  But not the confluence of all three attributes.  In general, the logical exercise in which we claim to believe and which we use, or more accurately, misuse and abuse, rarely works because, when its conclusions are put to the test and fail, rather that reexamine the premises and the analysis which led to the deficient conclusions (as tested against reality), we rationalize and make excuses.  We do so with respect to our Abrahamic concept of divinity by introducing the concept of purported “free will”, an oxymoronic absurdity when its exercise is subject to horrific and perpetual punishment.

The Abrahamic faiths are, not surprisingly given the forgoing, fratricidal, albeit usually sequentially so.  And hypocrisy reigns among at least two of them, Christianity and Judaism, the polar aspects of Abrahamic religion with Islam, strangely, being the bridge between them but, frequently, the most despised, belittled and calumnied by the other two. 

Take Christianity for example.  It was purportedly founded by followers of a gentle and loving Hebraic Palestinian from the small town of Nazareth during its Roman era but in reality, the religion as it has almost always existed was the creation of a misogynistic Hellenized Jew, Saul of Tarsus who eventually used a more politically convenient Roman name, Paulus.  The original Nazarene variant was centered in a small communist community in Jerusalem led by a certain James, cognamed “the Just” and comprised of the original disciples and apostles of his brother, a certain Yešu (today Latinized to its Hellenic variant, Jesus). The bastard Pauline variant quickly deformed into a traditionalist hierarchical control mechanism used to accumulate wealth and power, so much so that it eventually became the official religion of the Roman Empire.  Today, “evangelical and other so called Christians have completely rejected the communist economic premises of the original followers of Yešu, in part, because of the distortion of a statement by the founder of modern communism, an atheistic Jew, Karl Marx, to the effect that “religion was the opiate of the masses”, a statement contextually related to Marxian dialectic theory concerning economic evolution rather than to criticism of religion by which he meant that, at a certain point in economic history, religion was essential to survival making terrible conditions tolerable in the way that modern medications and medical treatments aid in our survival.  Through distortion and manipulation, modern Christianity, at least in the United States, has become the opposite of what Yešu espoused.  It has become a selfishly capitalistic, xenophobic philosophy apparently enamored of mass murder under the guise of capital punishment and perpetual war.  Judaism has also undergone drastic devolution with a significant component splitting off into an atheistic political Zionist variant espousing genocide, ethnic cleansing and even rape as a legitimate control mechanism for dealing with non-Zionist dissidence.  To those Abrahamic variants, Thanksgiving Day has become a de facto celebration of injustice, inequality and inequity, but that is something the original celebrants of the holiday in New England, the religiously intolerant Puritans would likely have ascribed.

That version of the Thanksgiving Day holiday, the one celebrated today, Thursday, November 27, 2025, is not one I can subscribe to, although I do enjoy some of its incidentals, like football games designed to draw our attention and energy away from our quotidian problems.  Thus, while in my moments of most intensely positive feelings towards divinity during a time long ago when I accepted the traditional Abrahamic version of divinity as possible, back when I gave thanks to “whatever gods may be” (a phrase from the poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley), today, my attitude is profoundly different.  Today, my thanks are limited to more tangible subjects.  To people I’ve known and to people I’ve never met but admire.  To those among the subjected and abused and downtrodden and tortured and maimed and killed who struggle to protect those they love and to stand for principles of equity and justice and compassion and generosity and peace, today something that applies most clearly to the Palestinian victims of Zionist genocide as it once stood for the Jewish victims of Nazi genocide, or to the Armenian victims of Turkish genocide, or to the indigenous victims everywhere of European genocide.  To all the economically deprived parents who work constantly to provide for their families as best they can.  To the Quixotic who struggle for “the right” against invincible odds, knowing that they themselves will never see the fruits of their labors.  But also to those who, for whatever reason, earned or not, I just love.  Those special people who were my classmates at the Citadel, and those fellow Citadel graduates who preceded and followed me, the same being true with respect to the now long departed Eastern Military Academy.  But also to my former students and colleagues everywhere. 

Today I give thanks to and for my family, especially my late mother Rosario and my late grandmother Juanita and my late aunt Carola.  To the many fellow travelers in the quest for a more equitable, more just, more peaceful, more compassionate, more peaceful and more loving world; those I know and who I can call friends as well as those with whom I am only acquainted and those who I’ve never met but who I know exist, have existed or will exist.

That seems a great deal for which to be thankful, even in these truly terrible times where orchestrated polarization for fun and profit regardless of the cost is the rule.  When the United States I love, indeed most of the Global North, is ruled from abroad by an ethics free elite.  Perhaps it always been this way.  But perhaps, the wonderful has always coexisted with the horrendous among the strange life forms who now refer to ourselves as humans.

So, … about the poem “Invictus”, one of my favorites.  It seems appropriate to close out these reflections by sharing it, albeit reformatted into a more narrative, rather than verse format:

Out of the night that covers me, black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul.   In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud.   Under the bludgeonings of chance my head is bloody, but unbowed.   Beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the Horror of the shade, and yet, the menace of the years finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

 
Thank you William Ernest Henley (1849 – 1903).

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.