My Advice to Bernanke: 2007 - Gary North - (He ignored it.)

From 2007.

People ask me, “What should the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy be?” The answer, theoretically and practically, is simple: paralysis.

Are prices rising? The FED should cease buying or selling assets, e.g., U.S. Treasury debt.

Are prices falling? The FED should stop buying or selling assets.

Are prices stable? The FED should cease buying or selling assets.

What about the members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), who decide as a committee how many assets to buy or sell? Offer them early retirement at 120% of their present salaries.

Do the same for their respective staffs.

What if interest rates fall in a recession? Let them fall.

What if they rise, due to a war? Let them rise.

In short, let participants on a free market decide what the rate of interest should be.

Why is the collective, competitive judgment of profit-seeking investors who put their own money on the line inferior to a group of salaried bureaucrats who create money out of nothing to be put on the line?

BANKRUPTCIES

There is a serious possibility that, in a recession, some large banks might not be able to stay in business.

This is true of every line of business. Why should banks be exempt from the threat of bankruptcy?

But, critics may say, the government has promised to pay off depositors in insolvent banks. How? Through its Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

I respond: Why not let Congress find the money needed, if any, to pay off depositors? Why call on a privately owned, government-chartered central bank to counterfeit money in order to pay off depositors? Congress made the promise. Let Congress bear the responsibility.

That, of course, is the whole point. Congress wants credit for a good economy. “Re-elect us! We helped made things good!” It also wants to shift blame for a bad economy. “Re-elect us! We’ll get to the bottom of all this!”

Political promises should be paid for politically. But political promises are made by politicians who want to avoid the bills when they come due. They rely on the Federal Reserve System’s Board of Governors to keep the bills from ever coming due. The FED does this by creating money and buying assets, especially U.S. Treasury debt.

The result since 1933 has been an increase in the supply of money, which helps political debtors to meet their monthly payment schedules.

Instead of bankrupting the political debtors, the FED has just about bankrupted the dollar and all those creditors who have loaned long-term money at fixed interest rates.

The bills keep coming due. The FED keeps paying them off with depreciated money. “Shut up. You’ve been paid.” So, creditors accept this and seek to get higher rates of interest to compensate them for the depreciating dollar. They can’t always get what they want.

At some point, creditors look abroad in search of promises to pay, denominated in stable money. But central banks are universal in our day, and they are all inflationary. Fiat money is the standard of our era. The world’s economy rests on promises to pay. Central banks back up these promises with fiat money. The politically unsustainable promises become politically sustainable inflation. Congress can blame something else for inflation. In contrast, it would have to blame itself for default on promises.

The central bank cartel in one nation is always threatened by stable money in other economies. This is why central banking is a growing cartel. Every new nation is told by central bankers to start a domestic central bank. All but two countries today have a central bank. The two exceptions are Monaco, which has a casino instead, and Andorra, which has mostly sheep. Since neither of them has an army to pay for, they don’t need a central bank. (The old leftists Malvina Reynolds and Pete Seeger wrote “I Want to Go to Andorra” in 1962. I have had that song in my collection ever since 1963. I can still sing it. They were right.)

FOREIGN EXCHANGE

If the FED were to stabilize the monetary base by refusing to buy or sell assets, the value of the dollar in relation to other nations’ currencies would be determined by currency speculators’ competing assessments of the future effects of everything that might conceivably affect the purchasing power of the dollar.

The best economic forecasters on earth are currency speculators. The uncertainty is enormous, the leverage is high, and the markets are relentless. You can make or lose more money faster and with lower commissions in the currency futures markets than any other. The market is essentially unregulated, since the assets it trades are international. Any attempt by governments to regulate this market has the effect of driving the computers off shore to some island nation that doesn’t regulate it.

If the FED did nothing for a year or two, world currency speculators would conclude that the U.S. dollar had become the world’s only stable currency. It would become the benchmark. For as long as the FED did nothing, the dollar would be established as the world’s reserve currency even more than it is today.

This would force any nation whose politicians wanted its currency to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency to instruct its central bank to imitate the FED’s policy of doing nothing.

Foreign investors would soon recognize that their capital is safe from depreciation by purchasing dollars and investing them at whatever market rate is available. The dollar would become as close to immune from competition as any currency on earth. The U.S. domestic capital markets are huge. The dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency makes the U.S. markets even more huge. Stable money would make the U.S. dollar the best widely available currency unit.

What about the trade deficit? That would depend on the comparative social rates of future orientation. Americans’ future orientation, when lower than foreign investors’ future orientation, is what produces the trade deficit. With foreign investors doing even more what they are doing today — buying assets denominated in dollars — foreigners would buy up even more American capital and debt. But they would do this at low rates of interest. If selling off income-producing assets is what Americans want to do — and they seem to — then they could buy more of what they want with stable money: more goods per dollar because the dollar would increase in value in relation to foreign currencies, whose central banks refuse to do nothing.

LAISSEZ FAIRE IN MONEY

The policy I am recommending is semi-laissez faire: “Let us alone.” The FED would let us alone as users of its currency. Congress would let the FED alone as the taxer and borrower of the FED’s currency.

Make no mistake about this: the currency is the FED’s. The FED has a monopoly over it. Paper bills are by law legal tender. Congress in 1913 passed sovereignty over money to a privately owned agency.

This policy recommendation is not pure laissez faire. Pure laissez faire in money would be based on legally enforceable debt contracts. Banks would not be allowed to promise two check-writers — the depositor and the borrower — the right to withdraw their deposits at the same time. In other words, there would be no fractional reserve banking.

Then it’s “Come one, come all!” Anyone could set up a bank. Anyone could issue a warehouse receipt for gold or silver or copper. The free market would allow money users to assess the reliability of every bank’s IOUs. The banks would compete.

Congress would get out of the money business entirely. It would merely identify the private currency or currencies that it is willing to accept for the payment of taxes. No more legal tender laws. No more government mint. No more monopoly central bank. Congress would do what the FED ought to do: nothing.

This suggestion is opposed by academic economists, commercial bankers, politicians, historians, and all other inflationists, who are, like the demons of old, legion. This would place the fate of every currency solely in the hands of the judges, who would enforce contracts, and currency speculators, a group which ultimately includes everyone who uses money. Such a view of money places sovereignty over money into the same hands as sovereignty over chewing gum: owners.

This view of money rests on a presupposition, best stated by Jesus in the parable of the employer. "Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good?" (Matthew 20:15)

When it comes to money, the evil eye is universal. Men do not trust the principle of exclusive private ownership. They may say they do, but they really don’t. The most flagrant masters of this evil eye are free market economists — Austrian School economists excepted — who praise the free market to the skies until they get to the chapter on money and banking. Then the free market needs the guiding hand of — you guessed it — academically certified economists.

Three decades ago, I knew a newly certified Austrian School economist. He showed considerable promise academically. But then he got an offer from the FED to become a staff economist. He disappeared into the bowels of the FED, never to reappear. He ceased writing. He maintained, when the deal was first offered to him, that he would write on the side. He never did. Somehow, his enthusiasm for the ideal of the free market ceased to motivate him enough to sit down and write. That monthly check from the world’s supreme monopoly undercut his ideology, which had been opposed to government-licensed monopoly. “Let us alone” was replaced by “fully vested pension.”

A free market in money and the enforcement of contracts in banking are ideas so utterly foreign to the modern world that they are simply not discussed in polite circles.

The best way to discover the heart, mind, and soul of a society is to discover those issues that are so widely taken for granted that they are not discussed in public. I don’t mean hate crimes. I don’t mean political correctness. Here, there have to be negative sanctions to keep them from being discussed. I mean ideas that are so off the mental radar of a society that they are essentially inconceivable.

A free market in money and banking is such an idea.

THE FUTILITY OF REFORM

People for four decades have asked me, “How can we reform the FED?” I always tell them: “Let it alone.” Laissez faire works both ways.

The FED is immune to reform because central banking is a universal phenomenon. Ever since the creation of the Bank of England in 1694, academics and opinion leaders have supported the idea. It has spread ever since, but especially in the 20th century. You cannot reform an institution that rests on a universally accepted idea — so universally accepted that to think otherwise is to join the lunatic fringe.

There have been Congressmen over the years who have exposed the FED. Some have thought there was hope. Others have used the FED as a whipping boy. Of all institutional boys to be whipped, the FED is at the top of my list. But we should recognize the difference between analysis and implementation.

To undermine the public’s confidence in the FED is impossible, except for one factor: the FED. Central banking is inherently immoral. It is inherently inflationary. It is inherently de-stabilizing. Why? Because it is inherently statist. It rests on coercion. It rests on the idea that a committee of tenured, salaried, government-protected people possesses greater insight into supply and demand than speculators who put their own money, or their clients’ money, on the line, moment by moment. It rests on the idea that government-enforced central planning is more efficient, more compassionate, and more profitable for a society than market planning by owners of capital.

Central planning is irrational. Ludwig von Mises proved this in 1920. In 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union finally verified what he had argued theoretically.

Central banking is irrational. Ludwig von Mises showed why in 1912 in his book, The Theory of Money and Credit. As yet, we have not seen a collapse comparable to the fall of the Soviet Union, although the Great Depression was a good first-stage early warning indicator. So is the decline of the dollar by 95% since 1914. But, ultimately, either central banking will be replaced by market institutions in a slow and steady way, or else there will be a replacement after a worldwide collapse. I hope for the former, but the latter is possible.

If the latter happens, I will want to be in Andorra.

CONCLUSION

For people who have read about the Federal Reserve System’s monopolistic power over the economy, it is frustrating to imagine that the voters can do nothing. Trust me: the voters can do nothing. Most voters have not heard of the FED, do not understand central banking, and do not have allies in Congress, other than Ron Paul.

Yet the FED is doomed, as is central banking in general. Government power cannot make the irrational rational. It cannot make coercion productive. It cannot make committees wise.

You might as well use the system to profit from it. You can’t change it.

If you want a good 42-minute introduction to the Federal Reserve System, watch the video produced by the Mises Institute.

If you want a simple introduction to the issue of central banking, read Murray Rothbard’s book, What Has Government Done to Our Money? It’s free.

For the most detailed book on fractional reserve banking — law, practices, results — read DeSoto’s 800-page book, Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles. It’s free.

_____________________________

Published on May 30, 2007. It's here.

https://www.garynorth.com/public/19661.cfm

Why are Americans so casual about war?

The last time war touched American soil was 160 years ago, and even then it was primarily in the South. For most of us, war is a television event.

That is a dangerous state of mind! Why?

First, let’s examine our facts on the ground – diversity is our greatest strength – really?

Do we understand the true nature of North Korea?

A war with Iran would be over in a few days?

Before a war can be waged, the first step is a propaganda war – and – a deliberatemisdirection campaign.

What is war like for those in it? Do we care?

Survey: Americans Have Remarkably Ignorant Attitude Toward Nukes And North Korea - Caitlin Johnstone

Pat Buchanan has some thoughts.

Question – when the scales of justice of history are balanced by our Lord and Master, are we responsible for the acts of the government that represents WeDaPeople?

Survey: Americans Have Remarkably Ignorant Attitude Toward Nukes And North Korea - Caitlin Johnstone

Half of the responders to an innovative new survey of 3,000 Americans conducted by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the British research firm YouGov reported that they would support a nuclear strike against North Korea if it tested a long-range missile capable of reaching the continental United States. A third said they’d actually prefer such a strike over other hypothetical responses.

“For example, while ‘only’ 33 percent of the US public prefer a US preventive nuclear strike that would kill 15,000 North Koreans, 50 percent approve,” the report reads.

The study found little change in preference for a preemptive nuclear strike whether the hypothetical scenario offered to respondents entailed the death of 15,000 North Korean civilians or one million. Preferences for a preemptive strike only dropped when the hypothetical scenario reduced the probability of success (meaning elimination of North Korea’s nuclear retaliatory capabilities) was reduced from ninety to fifty percent.

The survey found a large knowledge deficit in responders regarding nuclear weapons, with a majority reporting an unrealistic amount of confidence in both the US military’s ability to eliminate all of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal in a preemptive strike and in its ability to shoot down North Korean missiles using current missile defense systems. This inaccurate perspective was significantly higher among Trump supporters.

While the study found that a majority of Americans would prefer to de-escalate against North Korea if given the choice, a jarring number of them would be willing to use nuclear weapons at the drop of a hat, and believe it’s possible to do so at relatively little risk to Americans.

“As we have previously found, the US public exhibits only limited aversion to nuclear weapons use and a shocking willingness to support the killing of enemy civilians,” write the report’s authors.

As we have previously found, the U.S. public exhibits only limited aversion to nuclear weapons use and a shocking willingness to support the killing of enemy civilians.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/one-third-of-americans-would-support-a-preemptive-nuclear-strike-on-north-korea-researchers-say/2019/06/25/25ed1314-9711-11e9-a027-c571fd3d394d_story.html …

One-third of Americans would support a preemptive nuclear strike on North Korea, researchers say

A survey shows significant support for a nuclear strike, even if it killed a million North Korean civilians.

washingtonpost.com

And really, why would we expect anything else? After all, Americans are taught the lie since they are children that their nation, the only nation ever to use nuclear weapons, did so with the goal of bringing a quick and painless end to a horrible world war. Like so much else, this ultimately boils down to the effects of propaganda.

“Most Americans have been taught that using atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was justified because the bombings ended the war in the Pacific, thereby averting a costly U.S. invasion of Japan,” reads an excellent 2016 LA Times article on this subject by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznik. “This erroneous contention finds its way into high school history texts still today.”

In reality, the sole purpose of dropping nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was not to end the war, but to show the rest of the world in general and the Soviets in particular that the United States had both the capability and the savagery to wipe out any city in the world with a single bomb. The war, in fact, had already been won, and the Japanese were already on the brink of surrender as the fearsome Soviet forces entered into the war in the Pacific. The narrative that the use of nuclear bombs was a tragic but necessary means to end World War II is a lie that the US has used its cultural hegemony to circulate around the world, much like the lie that America was mostly responsible for Germany’s defeat and not the USSR.

I always get a lot of pushback from Americans when I point to this, not because I don’t have facts on my side but because it’s so glaringly different from the dominant narratives that Americans are spoon fed in school. If you don’t believe me, read the aforementioned LA Times article titled “Bombing Hiroshima changed the world, but it didn’t end WWII“, or this article from The Nation, or this one from Mises Institute.

Seriously, read the articles if this is upsetting you. This is an established fact to which contemporary generals at the time have attested. The uncomfortable feeling you’re experiencing upon reading this is called cognitive dissonance. It’s what learning you’ve been lied to your whole life feels like.

"Using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability" said new DoD doctrine before it was taken offline http://bit.ly/2WTqfhZ 

This report on the American public’s widespread ignorance of and indifference to the consequences of nuclear weapons use comes shortly after the US Joint Chiefs of Staff briefly published and then removed from public access an update on their position on the use of nukes which contains the alarming line, “Using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability. Specifically, the use of a nuclear weapon will fundamentally change the scope of a battle and create conditions that affect how commanders will prevail in conflict.”

So the people responsible for forming America’s nuclear strategies believe using nuclear weapons is not just acceptable, but potentially beneficial. The mass media have been completely ignoring this horrifying revelation, and the public are too awash in disinformation to do anything about it themselves.

Anyone who believes it’s acceptable to use nuclear weapons for any other reason than retaliation against another nuclear attack shouldn’t be allowed to operate heavy machinery, much less participate in the formation of nuclear strategy for the most powerful military force in the history of civilization. The correct response to North Korea having nuclear retaliatory capabilities is the same as the response to any other nuclear power: leave them alone. The narrative that North Korea’s leadership is likely to launch an unprovoked attack is exactly as baseless and moronic as the narratives about Iraq or Iran launching an unprovoked attack. It’s not a thing.

Tim Wright@TimMilesWright

Accounts of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima should compel any reasonable person to support the UN #nuclearban treaty http://www.sbs.com.au/hiroshima/ 

Twitter Ads info and privacy

As tensions continue to escalate between nuclear powers around the world while the faltering US empire becomes increasingly desperate to maintain its global hegemony, human extinction via nuclear annihilation is just as real a possibility as it was at the height of the last Cold War.

But it isn’t just the use of nuclear weapons which threatens us. Their very existence warps us as a species. Arundhati Roy writes the following in her book The Algebra of Infinite Justice:

“It is such supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they are used. The fact that they exist at all, their very presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behaviour. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meathooks deep in the base of our brains… The nuclear bomb is the most anti-democratic, anti-national, anti-human, outright evil thing that man has ever made. Through it, man now has the power to destroy God’s creation.”

This needs to change. And it won’t be changed by those in power who benefit from the status quo. Humanity itself must awaken from the propaganda cages which have been built around our minds so that the people can use the power of their numbers to force a change. The time to wake up is now.

________________________

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/06/26/survey-americans-have-remarkably-ignorant-attitude-toward-nukes-and-north-korea/

“What Does War Have to Do With Me?” - By Nick Turse - Combat Viewed from the Rooftops and Beyond

Combat Viewed from the Rooftops and Beyond

Tomgram: Nick Turse, Some Notes on War Watching

Of all the things I don’t remember anymore, here’s one I do. As a boy, I dreamt about being a foreign correspondent, a war reporter in particular -- and I think that Bob Shaplen must have been the reason why. He was a friend of my family’s, perhaps because, in the 1950s and 1960s, he was the New Yorker’s Far East correspondent and my mother drew for that magazine, or perhaps because of a history I’ve long forgotten or never knew. What I still remember, though, is how kind he was to the young boy who was then Tom Engelhardt. It wasn’t often in those days that a grownup, no less a grownup war reporter, would spend time with someone else’s son barely into his teens. I remember, for some reason, those hands of his, large and wrinkled, that carried pen and paper into battle. I doubt, though, that I grasped much of what he had experienced when it came to war, but here’s how the New York Timesdescribed his reportorial life in his 1988 obituary. In World War II, as Newsweek’s Asia correspondent, he had

“plunged ashore with the Marines on Leyte in the Philippines in 1944 amid withering machine-gun and mortar fire. He flew over Nagasaki hours after it was devastated by the atomic bomb in August 1945 and wrote of ‘looking over a volcano in the process of eruption.’ He was with Mao Zedong in the mountains of Yanan in 1946; reported on the rise and fall of Indonesia's President Sukarno in the 1960s; wrote strategic and battlefield pieces from Korea and Vietnam and [in 1975] provided a gripping firsthand account of the fall of Saigon as panic swept over the city of abandoned refugees.”

Who could blame me, under the circumstances, for dreaming that I might someday be like him? As it happened, I never came close, never made it to Vietnam, notepad in hand, or experienced war directly in any way. Still, he left me with a fascination about covering war and perhaps in some sense led me, a half-century later, to focus TomDispatch on America’s disastrous wars of the twenty-first century, the ones Donald Trump, whatever his impulses, hasn’t generally been able to bring himself not to fight (though he did at least ground a first wave of planes set to strike Iranian missile sites last week). 

Otherwise, perhaps the closest I ever came to sensing the persona of a true war correspondent was sometime in the 1990s in what might have been the most peaceable city on the planet, Stockholm. There, I found myself at a conference with another of the great war reporters of our age, Gloria Emerson. She had covered the Vietnam War up close and personal for the New York Times and her award-winning book on that grim disaster, Winners and Losers, was a classic of the era, of perhaps any era. Little as I knew Stockholm, whenever we had free time, I found that the woman who took on Vietnam on her own was incapable of getting her bearings in a peacetime city and I had to lead her wherever we went. You could -- or so, at least, I suspected then -- sense in her confusion that a totally peaceable land felt disorienting to her.

In his bestselling book Kill Anything That Moves,TomDispatch’s own Nick Turse wrote memorably of the war Gloria Emerson covered.  He then experienced (civil) war himself in South Sudan, which he captured in his book, Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and again witnessed it firsthand in the Congo. He has now returned from Libya where another civil war, part of the spreading planetary chaos created by America’s never-ending war on terror, is fiercely underway. In his account today of war as a civilian hell -- from the U.S. Civil War to the present disaster in Libya -- you can feel both the strange attraction of such warscapes and just why, under the circumstances, peace might prove disorienting indeed. Tom

“What Does War Have to Do With Me?”
Combat Viewed from the Rooftops and Beyond
By Nick Turse

TRIPOLI, Libya -- Sometimes war sounds like the harsh crack of gunfire and sometimes like the whisper of the wind. This early morning -- in al-Yarmouk on the southern edge of Libya’s capital, Tripoli -- it was a mix of both.

All around, shops were shuttered and homes emptied, except for those in the hands of the militiamen who make up the army of the Government of National Accord (GNA), the U.N.-backed, internationally recognized government of Libyan Prime Minister Fayez al-Serraj. The war had slept in this morning and all was quiet until the rattle of a machine gun suddenly broke the calm.

A day earlier, I had spent hours on the roof of my hotel, listening to the basso profundo echo of artillery as dark torrents of smoke rose from explosions in this and several other outlying neighborhoods.  The GNA was doing battle with the self-styled Libyan National Army of warlord Khalifa Haftar, a U.S. citizen, former CIA asset, and longtime resident of Virginia, who was laudedby President Donald Trump in an April phone call. Watching the war from this perch brought me back to another time in my life when I wrote about war from a far greater distance -- of both time and space -- a war I covereddecades after the fact, the one that Americans still call “Vietnam” but the Vietnamese know as “the American War.”

During the early years of U.S. involvement there, watching the war from the hotels of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, was a rite of passage for American journalists and the signature line of unfortunate articles that often said far more about the state of war reporting than the state of the war. “On clear days patrons lunching in the ninth-floor restaurant in the Caravelle Hotel can watch Government planes dropping napalm on guerrillas across the Saigon River,” Hedrick Smith wrote in a December 1963 New York Timesarticle. 

As that war ground on, the pastime of hotel war-watching never seemed to end, despite a recognition of the practice for what it was. Musing about the spring of 1968 in his fever dream memoir, Dispatches, Esquire’s correspondent in Vietnam, Michael Herr, wrote: 

“In the early evenings we’d do exactly what the correspondents did in those terrible stories that would circulate in 1964 and 1965, we’d stand on the roof of the Caravelle Hotel having drinks and watch the airstrikes across the river, so close that a good telephoto lens would pick up the markings on the planes.  There were dozens of us up there, like aristocrats viewing Borodino from the heights, at least as detached about it as that even though many of us had been caught under those things from time to time.”

“It Has Been Said That There Was a Woman Killed There by Our Guns”

Today, few know much about Borodino -- unless they remember it as the white-hot heart of the war sections of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace -- a Napoleonic victory that proved so pyrrhic it would have been regarded as the French Emperor’s Waterloo, if the actual battle of that name hadn’t finally felled him. Still, even for those who don’t know Borodino from Bora Bora, Herr’s passage points to a grand tradition of detached war-watching. (Or, in the case of Ernest Hemingway’s famed Spanish Civil War coverage, war-listening: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away.”)

In fact, the classic American instance of war-as-spectator-sport occurred in 1861 in the initial major land battle of the Civil War, Bull Run (or, for those reading this below the Mason-Dixon line, the first battle of Manassas). “On the hill beside me there was a crowd of civilians on horseback, and in all sorts of vehicles, with a few of the fairer, if not gentler sex,” wrote William Howard Russell who covered the battle for the Times of London. “The spectators were all excited, and a lady with an opera glass who was near me was quite beside herself when an unusually heavy discharge roused the current of her blood -- ‘That is splendid, Oh my! Is not that first rate? I guess we will be in Richmond tomorrow.’”

That woman would be sorely disappointed. U.S. forces not only failed to defeat their Confederate foes and press on toward the capital of the secessionist South but fled, pell-mell, in ignominious retreat toward Washington. It was a rout of the first order. Still, not one of the many spectators on the scene, including Congressman Alfred Ely of New York, taken prisoner by the 8th South Carolina Infantry, was killed. 

But that isn’t to say that there were no civilian casualties at Bull Run.

Judith Carter Henry was as old as the imperiled republic at the time of the battle. Born in 1776, the widow of a U.S. Navy officer, she was an invalid, confined to her bed, living with her daughter, Ellen, and a leased, enslaved woman named Lucy Griffith when Confederate snipers stormed her hilltop home and took up positions on the second floor.

"We ascended the hill near the Henry house, which was at that time filled with sharpshooters. I had scarcely gotten to the battery before I saw some of my horses fall and some of my men wounded by sharpshooters,” Captain James Ricketts, commander of Battery 1, First U.S. Artillery, wrote in his official report. “I turned my guns on that house and literally riddled it. It has been said that there was a woman killed there by our guns.” Indeed, a 10-pound shell crashed through Judith Henry’s bedroom and tore off her foot. She died later that day, the first civilian death of America’s Civil War.

No one knows how many civilians died in the war between the states. No one thought to count. Maybe 50,000, including those who died from war-related disease, starvation, crossfire, riots, and other mishaps. By comparison, around 620,000 to 750,000 American soldiers died in the conflict -- close to 1,000 of them at that initial battle at Bull Run.

“What You Saw Was Them Shelling My Home.”

 A century later, U.S. troops had traded their blue coats for olive fatigues and the wartime death tolls were inverted. More than 58,000 Americans lost their lives in Vietnam. Estimates of the Vietnamese civilian toll, on the other hand, hover around two million. Of course, we’ll never know the actual number, just as we’ll never know how many died in air strikes as reporters watched from the rooftop bar of Saigon’s Caravelle Hotel, just as I’ll never know how many -- if any -- lives were snuffed out as I scanned the southern edge of Tripoli and watched smoke from artillery shells and rockets billow into the sky.

That same afternoon in Libya’s capital, while taking a break from war watching, I met Salah Isaid and his two children. They were, like me, guests at the Victoria Hotel, although we were lodged there for very different reasons. When I mentioned having spent the previous hour on the roof as a suburb was being shelled hard, a glimmer of recognition flashed across Isaid’s face. “That’s Khalat Furjan,” he replied with a sad smile. “What you saw was them shelling my home.”

Isaid, his wife, and his two boys had found it difficult to escape the war zone, but finally made it to the safer north side of Tripoli, to this very hotel, in fact, a few weeks earlier. Worried that his house had been looted or destroyed, he tried several times to investigate only to be turned away at militia checkpoints. Now, he was homeless, jobless, and -- even with the hotel’s special displaced-persons’ rate -- rapidly burning through his savings.  “I sold real estate, but who wants to buy a house in a war zone?” Isaid asked me with a wry smile that faded into a grimace. 

My own experience as a reporter, in country after country, has more than confirmed his assessment. The “real estate” I saw in Tripoli’s war-ravaged suburbs was spectral, the civilian population having fled. Other than a car that had been hit by an air strike, the only vehicles were tanks or “technicals” -- pickup trucks with machine guns or anti-aircraft weapons mounted in their beds. Many buildings had been peppered with machine-gun fire or battered by heavier ordnance.  The sole residents now were GNA militiamen who had appropriated homes and shops as barracks and command posts.     

Real estate, as Isaid well knows, is a losing proposition on a battlefront. After Judith Carter Henry’s hilltop home in Manassas Junction, Virginia, was blasted by artillery, its remains were either demolished by Confederate soldiers or burned down during the Second Battle of Bull Run, another staggering U.S. defeat with even heavier casualties in August 1862. A photograph of Henry’s home, possibly taken in March 1862, months before that battle, already shows the house to be a crumpled ruin. (It wouldn’t be rebuilt until 1870.) Judith Henry was buried in a small plot next to her devastated home. “The Grave of Our Dear Mother Judith Henry” reads the tombstone there, which notes that she was 85 years old when “the explosion of shells in her dwelling” killed her.   

One hundred and fifty years after Henry became the first civilian casualty of the Civil War, Libyans began dying in their own civil strife as revolutionaries, backed by U.S. and NATO airpower, ended the 42-year rule of dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Before the year was out, that war had already cost an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 lives.  And the killing never ended as the country slid into permanent near-failed-state status. The current conflict, raging on Tripoli’s doorstep since April, has left more than 4,700 people dead or wounded, including at least 176 confirmed civilian casualties (which experts believe to be lower than the actual figure). All told, according to the United Nations, around 1.5 million people -- roughly 24% of the country’s population -- have been affected by the almost three-month-old conflict. 

“Heavy shelling and airstrikes have become all too common since early April,” said Danielle Hannon-Burt, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross’s office in Tripoli. “Fierce fighting in parts of Tripoli includes direct or indiscriminate attacks against civilians and their property. It also includes attacks against key electricity, water, and medical infrastructure essential for the survival of the civilian population, potentially putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk.”

In this century, it’s a story that has occurred repeatedly, each time with its own individual horrors, as the American war on terror spread from Afghanistan to Iraq and then on to other countries; as Russia fought in Georgia, Ukraine, and elsewhere; as bloodlettings have bloomed from the Democratic Republic of Congo to South Sudan, from Myanmar to Kashmir. War watchers like me and like those reporters atop the Caravelle decades ago are, of course, the lucky ones. We can sit on the rooftops of hotels and listen to the low rumble of homes being chewed up by artillery. We can make targeted runs into no-go zones to glimpse the destruction. We can visit schools transformed into shelters. We can speak to real estate agents who have morphed into war victims.  Some of us, like Hedrick Smith, Michael Herr, or me, will then write about it -- often from a safe distance and with the knowledge that, unlike Salah Isaid and most other civilian victims of such wars, we can always find an even safer place.

War has an all-consuming quality to it, which is at least part of what can make it so addictive for those blessed with the ability to escape it and so devastating to those trapped in it. A month of war had clearly worn Isaid down. He was slowly being crushed by it. 

In the middle of our conversation, he pulled me aside and whispered so his boys couldn’t hear him, “When I go to bed at night, all I can think is ‘What is going on? What does war have to do with me?’” He shook his head disbelievingly. Some days, he told me, he gets into his car and weaves his way through the traffic on the side of the capital untouched by shelling but increasingly affected by the war. “I drive by myself. I don’t know where I’m going and don’t have any place to go. My life has stopped. This is the only way to keep moving, but I’m not going anywhere.”

I kept moving and left, of course. Isaid and his family remain in Tripoli -- homeless, their lives upended, their futures uncertain -- pinned under the heavy weight of war. 

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch. He reported from Libya for Yahoo News in partnership with Type Investigations. He is the author of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan and the award-winning Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. 

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Copyright 2019 Nick Turse

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