On 25 August 2026, I was on “Judging Freedom” where the Judge and I mainly talked about the Trump administration’s latest plan to strangle Iran’s economy and get its leaders to surrender.
In addition to talking about why this latest formula for victory won’t work, the Judge made the point that such a policy will kill many innocent civilians — many “little people that have nothing to do with governmental policy.” He then asked: “does the United States have any moral compass?”
My response was simple: “The US and the West more generally are morally bankrupt.” After all the US and its Western allies are complicit in the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Moreover they back Israel’s pogroms in the West Bank and Israel’s ongoing efforts to turn southern Lebanon into another Gaza.
For those who are convinced that the Israelis are the good guys and the Iranians are the bad guys, I have two questions: 1) when was the last time that Iran committed a genocide? 2) When was the last time that Iran initiated a war against another country?
When William L. Shirer wrote The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, he possessed a distinct, historical advantage. The Nazi regime had been physically annihilated, and its immaculate, terrifyingly precise ledgers of mass murder were captured intact by the Allied armies. Shirer did not have to guess at the mechanics of the Holocaust; he simply read the receipts.
The American empire affords no such convenience to its historians. The United States did not lose the Cold War; it won it. Therefore, its architects were never dragged before a tribunal at Nuremberg (yet), and its filing cabinets were never seized by an invading army. Instead, the architects of the American proxy wars were allowed to retire to corporate boardrooms, write sanitized, ghostwritten memoirs, and classify their own operational directives until the year 2085.
https://griobhtha1.substack.com/p/hemisphere-of-plunder-foreward-or
Its not just the open or more obvious wars and genocides of the last 500 years. According to a study by The Lancet, US and EU economic sanctions have killed at least 38 million people between 1970 and 2022.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/9/3/us-and-eu-sanctions-have-killed-38-million-people-since-1970
All the evidence suggests the West is morally bankrupt, ethically bankrupt, ideologically bankrupt and financially bankrupt. Twas probably always the case!