Since Russia’s decision to militarily intervene into Ukraine, a darkness that had long remained in the shadows has been brought to the surface. This darkness took the form of an intention that could no longer hide behind the veneer of “plausible deniability” or self-congratulatory devotees of a ‘liberal rules-based international order’ that has been repeatedly blared like a broken record onto the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992.

Rather than continuing to play by the rules of those who wish all evidence to militarily contain Russia with a NATO-controlled Ballistic Missile Shield targeting Russian defenses, it was decided that a new approach was needed and the game was called out.

Was it the evidence of the bioweapons facilities in Ukraine long treated as conspiracy theory, though now admitted to having existed by Victoria Nuland as the straw that broke the camel’s back? Was it the evidence of an immanent assault led by neo-Nazi forces onto Donbass and Crimea that had been the deciding factor? Some speculate that it was Zelensky’s February 19 call for Ukraine to break the 1994 Budapest Treaty and adopt nuclear weapons.

In truth, we may never know the specific cause of Putin’s decision, but one this is sure.

A war was NOT begun on February 24 2022. The war against Russia was actually launched on February 22, 2014 when the USA finalized its regime change on the democratically elected government of Victor Yanukovych and began what some have termed a slow-motion Operation Barbarossa over a prolonged 8-year period with one objective in mind: The total destruction and subjugation of the Russian Federation as outlined in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard in 1997.

With the shadow creatures having been forced to the surface, it has become increasingly clear that the virtuous image projected by the western alliance is anything but peaceful, or democratic. Rather than capturing the many obvious opportunities to resolve the crisis diplomatically over the past eight years, the USA, UK, and Kiev have instead chosen only the path of sabotage, slander, and economic war via unilateral sanctions.

So what is to be done?

I honestly don’t know if today’s USA is too far gone for its better constitutional foreign policy traditions to be revived, but I do know that if this history continues to remain buried as it has for the past several generations, then any small chance to save the republic and preserve world peace will certainly be destroyed.

The Strategic Significance of 1776 on International Affairs

Although many have been fed the myth that the USA was a nation bred for global imperial ambitions at its birth, the truth is far different. Certainly, it was never a utopic bastion of liberty untainted by hypocrisy or corruption that some romantic historians have painted over years, but inversely it was never a unidimensional evil slaveocracy as cynical Critical Race Theoreticians maintain. The USA should rather be understood as an unfinished symphony of sorts, whose practical performance too often fell far short than its sound constitutional ideals.

For starters, it is important to appreciate the fact that America’s founding documents (the 1776 Declaration of Independence, and 1787 Constitution) were the first examples in history of a form of government premised on the idea that all people were made equal, endowed with inalienable rights with no mention for race, creed, gender or class. Additionally, the notion that the legitimacy of a nation’s laws arose from the consent of the governed, and mandated to support the general welfare both in the present and long into posterity, was a profound break from the previous notions of Hobbesian law of ‘might makes right’ that had governed hereditary institutions for eons.

The practical expression of these principles to foreign policy were discussed at length by President Washington who warned the young nation of avoiding the dual evils of foreign entanglements externally and party politics domestically when he asked his fellow citizens during his outgoing address of 1796:

“Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humour or caprice?”

President Washington painted by Gilbert Stuart featuring his right hand resting on the Constitution

During this speech, Washington explained that IF the USA were to survive, it would be due to an international policy of “extending our commercial relations, to have with them [foreign nations] as little political connection as possible.”

Some have slandered Washington’s call for reduced political enmeshment with other nations as isolationist, but he always promoted international commerce driven by mutual benefit. It was merely imperial operations, intrigue, deceit and the new age of color revolutions starting with the Jacobin Terror during Washington’s presidency which the great leader saw as an poisonous mess that would destroy the young republic if it became enmired in foreign escapades.

John Quincy Adams and the Anti-Imperial Origins of the Monroe Doctrine

John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) extended these ideas further still by drafting the Monroe Doctrine during his stint as Secretary of State from 1817-1825 which he knew could only work if America ventures “not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy”.

President John Quincy Adams with his hand resting on a sketch of Washington

That is to say, as long as the USA focused her efforts on fixing her own problems with a focus on internal improvements, then the Monroe Doctrine would be a blessing for both herself and the international community.

John Quincy Adams also understood the danger of the growing British-run fifth column inside of the heart of the USA then centered around the Federalist Party. While serving as U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Adams wrote to his mother in 1811 (just as Napoleon was preparing his Russian invasion and as Britain were on the verge of a new war against the USA):

“If that Party [the Federalist Junto of New England] are not effectually put down in Massachusetts, as completely as they already are in New York, and Pennsylvania, and all the southern and western states, the Union is gone. Instead of a nation, coextensive with the North American continent, destined by God and nature to be the populous and most powerful people ever combined under one social compact, we shall have an endless multitude of little insignificant clans and tribes at eternal war with one another for a rock, or a fish pond, the sport and fable of European masters and oppressors.” (1)

John Quincy Adams firmly understood the world historic significance of the American revolution not as a geographical phenomenon among 13 isolated British colonies, but potentially as the spark of a new paradigm for all humanity liberated from hereditary institutions. At the turn of the 19^th century, there were still French, British, Spanish and Russian imperial interests which all had ambitions to gain control of the territories of the Americas forcing the Hobbesian paradigm of war and intrigue into the new world. In the mind of Adams, as all great American patriots, this had to be stopped.

During the July 4 celebrations in 1821, Adams noted that the Declaration of Independence “was the first solemn declaration by a nation of the only LEGITIMATE foundation of civil government. It was the corner stone of a new fabric, destined to cover the surface of the globe. It demolished at a stroke the lawfulness of all governments founded upon conquest. It swept away all the rubbish of accumulated centuries of servitude. It announced in practical form to the world the transcendent truth of the unalienable sovereignty of the people.”

Did Adams believe that “destined to cover the surface of the globe” meant that the USA was destined to become a Pax Americana subduing the weak to her hegemony? Not at all.

On January 23, 1822 Adams wrote that colonial institutions “are incompatible with the essential character of our institutions.” He also said that “great colonial establishments are engines of wrong, and that in the progress of social improvement it will be the duty of the human family to abolish them, as they are now endeavoring to abolish the slave trade.”

Adams understood the importance of seeing the world as “a community of principle” where win-win cooperation based upon the self-improvement of all parts and the whole international community as more than the mere sum of parts, would constantly bring renewal and creative vitality to diplomacy. It was a top-down systemic approach to policy that saw economics, security and political affairs interwoven into one unified system. This is an integrative way of thinking that has been sorely lost in the hyper theoretical, compartmentalized mode of zero-sum thinking dominant in today’s neo-liberal think tank complex.

It was for this reason, that Adams advocated the use of Hamiltonian national banking and large-scale infrastructure projects like the Erie Canal and railways throughout his years as Secretary of State and President. IF this system were the causal force behind the growth of American interests across the continent or the world more broadly, it would not be through brute force, but rather by the uplifting of standards of living of all parties.

Adams, Lincoln and National Banking

Working with a young protégé named Abraham Lincoln, Adams fought tooth and nail against the Spanish-American War of 1846 which saw a deep abuse of his Monroe Doctrine.

Both a young Lincoln and John Quincy Adams had earlier organized to get Whig leader William Harrison (1773-1841) elected president in 1841 with a focus on reviving Hamilton’s national bank which had earlier been killed by President Andrew Jackson to great damage to the economic sovereignty of the USA itself.

Although this ugly chapter of history has been scrubbed from the popular records, the operation to kill the second National Bank in 1832 resulted in a total collapse of all public works in order to pay the national debts using a technique not that different from the IMF demands for austerity on debtor nations in our modern era. Credit was to farmers and entrepreneurs dried up, speculation ran rampant, thousands of local currencies (many counterfeit) ran rampant, and the growth of slave-picked cotton took over the production of the nation’s productivity like a cancer.

Sadly even though legislation to revive a national bank had passed both Houses of Congress and only awaited the signature of President Harrison, his mysterious death after only three months in office put an end to that dream.

The best elements of the Whig party regrouped to form the anti-slavery republican party in 1856 after the second Whig president Zachary Taylor also died of poisoning in 1851 after only 2 years in office.

Abraham Lincoln Arises

Out of this small grouping of nationalists struggling to preserve the Union, Abraham Lincoln emerged with a concise plan to revive national banking, protectionism and a security policy founded upon the Monroe Doctrine. Describing the terms of the oncoming civil war from a global strategic perspective, Lincoln debated the pro-slavery candidate Judge Stephen Douglass in 1858 saying:

“That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.”

We all know essentials of the Civil War, but we may not appreciate the success of that conflict depending upon Lincoln’s activation of state banking via the issuance of greenbacks and 5-20 bonds that by-passed private financiers demanding usurious interest rates. These productive bonds and greenbacks also funded the execution of the war at the same time as they funded great infrastructure projects like the Trans Continental railway uniting the continent.

Lincoln found like-minded reformers in Russia whose new Czar Alexander II was intent on carving out the rot of oligarchism, serfdom and underdevelopment that had subverted Russian potential for far too long. To this end, Alexander II liberated over 25 million serfs, began sweeping anti-corruption reforms and overhauled the finances of his nation with a focus on industrial development in tandem with the United States. The czar’s decision to send a fleet of Russian naval ships to the eastern and western coasts of the USA as a message to the British and French imperialists to stay out of the war gave Lincoln a decisive edge he needed to end the secession and preserve the union.

Sadly, this victory did not play on either the national or international scale as it should have. Not only was reconstruction soon thwarted with a newly re-organized slaveocracy creating a new program of “share cropping” that pulled newly freed blacks into a new master-slave dependency, but Lincoln’s greenbacks were soon taken out of circulation under Anglophile puppet presidents. With the 1876 Specie Resumption Act, tying the U.S. dollar to a one-to-one parity with gold, internal improvements seized up, credit to industry evaporated, speculation began to run rampant once more and bank panics began to periodically wreak havoc on the nation’s stability.

With the assassinations of Lincoln, President Garfield, and Alexander II between 1865 to 1881, a mad effort to put the Constitutional genie back into the bottle as the fifth column operations within Boston and Manhattan pushed increasingly for a new imperial foreign policy modelled on the British Empire.

William McKinley Revives the American System

The last major 19^th century effort to break this traitorous network took the form of President William McKinley’s emergence into the White House in 1897. Once again, a program of national planning, protective tariffs, industrial growth both at home and abroad became the characteristic shaping U.S. domestic and foreign policy. Describing his understanding of the historic current that he was stepping into, McKinley eulogized both Lincoln and Washington in 1895 saying:

“The greatest names in American history are Washington and Lincoln. One is forever associated with the independence of the States and formation of the Federal Union; the other with universal freedom and the preservation of the Union. Washington enforced the Declaration of Independence as against England; Lincoln proclaimed its fulfillment not only to a downtrodden race in America, but to all people for all time who may seek the protection of our flag. These illustrious men achieved grander results for mankind within a single century, from 1775 to 1865, than any other men ever accomplished in all the years since first the flight of time began.”

Although he was sucked into an unjust war in the Philippines by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt (the story told here), McKinley fought consistently to defend the Monroe Doctrine by giving full U.S. support to the industrial growth of North, South and Central America. Internationally, McKinley fought to keep the USA out of the carving up of China in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion and worked closely with international co-thinkers like Russia’s Count Sergei Witte and France’s Gabriel Hanotaux to advance rail development and peace treaties across Eurasia. Had such programs not been sabotaged by murder, coups and regime change operations, then it is certain that the train wreck of World War One and its sequel would never have been possible.

Sadly, after McKinley was assassinated, Teddy Roosevelt’s “big stick” diplomacy launched a new 20^th century trend that saw the USA extending its hegemony over weak states rather than keeping out foreign imperial intrigue as Adams had envisioned.

Assassination of President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz at Pan-American Exposition reception on Sept. 6, 1901. (BY AMERICAN PAINTER T. DART WALKER, 1905/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

FDR and Wallace Attempt to Revive a Sane American Foreign Policy

Since 1901, we have seen small but significant attempts to revive Adams’ overarching security doctrine.

We saw it come alive again with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s program for internationalizing the New Deal across China, India, Ibero America, the Middle East, Africa and Russia. FDR’s Vice President Henry Wallace laid out the terms of this international New Deal in his 1943 book “The Century of the Common Man” laid out this vision for the post-war world saying:

“The new democracy by definition abhors imperialism. But by definition also, it is internationally minded and supremely interested in raising the productivity, and therefore the standard of living, of all the peoples of the world. First comes transportation and this is followed by improved agriculture, industrialization, and rural elecrification…. As Molotov so clearly indicated, this brave, free world of the future can not be created by the United States and Russia alone. Undoubtedly China will have a strong influence on the world which will come out of the war and in exerting this influence it is quite possible that the principles of Sun Yat Sen will prove to be as significant as those of any other modern statesman.”

Sadly after FDR’s untimely death on April 12, 1945, the Anglo-American special relationship was again revived and all international New Dealers were quickly purged from all positions of influence. Despite an Orwellian age of anti-Russian hysteria then taking hold, Henry Wallace still maintained some influence in the U.S. government (although having been downgraded to Secretary of Commerce under President Harry Truman).

In the September 12, 1946 speech that got him fired, Wallace clearly laid out the two paths forward for the USA:

“Make no mistake about it—the British imperialistic policy in the Near East alone, combined with Russian retaliation, would lead the United States straight to war…

“… It is essential that we look abroad through our own eyes and not through the eyes of either the British Foreign Office or a pro-British or anti-Russian press…. The tougher we get, the tougher they get.

“I believe that we can get cooperation once Russia understands that our primary objective is neither saving the British Empire nor purchasing oil in the near East with the lives of American soldiers. We cannot let national oil rivalries force us into a war….”

Eisenhower to Kennedy: The Battle for the Soul of America Continued

Eisenhower made some positive moves towards this renewal by ending the Korean War and attempting his Crusade for Peace driven by U.S.-Russian cooperation and advanced scientific investments into India, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Latin America. Eisenhower’s many positive plans were sadly derailed by a growing parasite in the heart of the U.S. deep state which he addressed in his famous “military industrial complex” speech of 1960.

Kennedy’s efforts to extract the U.S. military from Vietnam, revive FDR’s New Deal spirit in the 1960s, while seeking entente with Russia was another noble effort to bring back Adams’ security doctrine, but his early death soon put an end to this orientation.

From 1963 to 2016, tiny piecemeal efforts to revive a sane security doctrine proved short-lived and were often undone by the more powerful pressures of unipolarist intrigue that sought nothing less than full Anglo-American hegemony in the form of a New World Order whose arrival was celebrated by the likes of Bush Sr and Kissinger in 1992.

‘America First’ Revives a Sane Security Doctrine

Despite his many limitations, President Trump did make an effort to restore a sane security doctrine by focusing American interests on healing from 50+ years of self-inflicted atrophy under globalized outsourcing, militarism and post-industrialism.

Despite having to contend with an embarrassingly large and independent military-intelligence industrial complex that didn’t get less powerful after Kennedy’s murder, Trump announced the terms of his international outlook in April 2019 saying:

“Between Russia, China and us, we’re all making hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons, including nuclear, which is ridiculous.… I think it’s much better if we all got together and didn’t make these weapons … those three countries I think can come together and stop the spending and spend on things that are more productive toward long-term peace.”

This call for a U.S.-Russia-China cooperative policy ran in tandem with the first phase of the U.S.-China Trade deal which went into effect in January 2020 guaranteeing $350 billion of U.S. finished goods purchased by China. None other than Soros himself suffered a public meltdown that month when he announced that the two greatest threats to his global open society were 1) Trump’s USA and 2) Xi’s China.

Of course, a pandemic derailed much of this momentum and the trade deal slowly broke apart. Despite these failures, the idea of returning the USA to an “American first” outlook by cleaning up its own internal messes, extracting CIA operations from the military, cutting the USA out of the Big Pharma-led World Health Organization, defunded regime change organizations like NED abroad and returning to a traditionally American policy of protective tariffs were all extremely important initiatives that Trump put into motion, and set a precedent which must be capitalized upon by nationalist forces from all parties wishing to save their republic from an oncoming calamity.

America’s Slide into Self-Destruction

One year into Biden’s “rules based international order”, the hope for stability and peaceful cooperation among the nations of the earth has been seriously undermined. Unlike Trump, who rightfully severed U.S. cooperation with NATO, the current neo-con heavy administration has made absorbing Ukraine and other former Soviet States into NATO a high priority going so far as to infuse private mercenary forces, and Al-Qaeda-affiliated fighters from Syria into Ukraine to fight the Russians. To this dangerous policy we have also seen billions of dollars of lethal weapons sent into a neo-Nazi infested Ukrainian military with confused untrained citizens from Ukraine being told to fight and die for a cause that even western geopoliticians admit they cannot win.

Today’s USA has committed to a full-scale policy of self-destruction both on economic and military levels promoting a war which risks escalating out of control into a thermonuclear exchange both against Russia and also China.

When looking at Russian demands for security guarantees from this standpoint and holding in mind the new form of a Eurasian Manifest Destiny emerging with Putin’s Far Eastern Vision, Polar Silk Road and China’s Belt and Road Initiative, it is a rich irony that the spirit of John Quincy Adams’ security doctrine is alive in the world. Just not in the USA.

The author can be reached at matthewehret.substack.com

(1) Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Foundation of American Foreign Policy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950).

A beloved and twice-elected nationalist president was assassinated and replaced by a passionate supporter of the British Empire and America was on its disastrous path to empire in Asia and war in Europe.

The strategic context of the murder of William McKinley is seldom discussed. The extraordinary and deeply disturbing parallels between his murder and the sadistic slaughter 20 years before of Russia’s heroic Tsar Alexander II, friend of Abraham Lincoln and liberator of 24 million slaves has, to my knowledge, never before been explored or even suggested by anyone. Yet the same dark mastermind and imperial interests can be clearly identified behind both assassinations.

McKinley ended a 20-year-long economic depression that started in 1873, the longest in American history. He was pulled reluctantly into war with Spain and into annexing the Philippines but was strongly opposed to any further moves towards empire.

On September 6, 1901 McKinley was shot and mortally injured while visiting the World’s Fair in Buffalo in New York State. He died eight days later. His assassin was a Polish-American former steel worker called Leon Czolgosz who had been taken up by leading figures in the Anarcho-Syndicalist movement led with great prominence and charisma by former Russian Prince Peter Kropotkin from his secure, protected haven in Britain.

It was just over 20 years since Tsar Alexander II, the liberators of the serfs and joint architect with Otto von Bismarck of the Russian-German alliance that ended the 30 years of unparalleled invasions and destructions of great nations around the world by Britain and France, was assassinated on March 13, 1881 by Ignacy Hryniewiecki, also known as Ignaty Grinevitsky, another Polish anarchist recruited by the tiny secret anarchist cell of that grandly called itself the Narodnaya Volya, the People’s Will.

Czolgosz, one of life’s losers had come only recently to revolutionary anarchism, which advocated the murder of national leaders as “the propaganda of the deed,” only three years before in 1898. He had been taken up by the deeply rooted anarchist cell in Buffalo. Czolgosz was personally counseled and taught in the movements ideals and methods by Emma Goldman, who remains a beloved romantic figure of the American Left to this day,

Goldman (1869-1940) was a Lithuanian Jewish anarchist who came to the United States and is revered by the American Left and feminists as Red Emma for championing free speech, labor protests, women’s rights and birth control. In reality, she played no discernible role in achieving any of them. She also openly advocated bomb throwing by anarchists and unsuccessfully attempted to murder industrialist Henry Clay Frick, the right hand man of Andrew Carnegie in his Pittsburgh steelmaking empire.

Czolgosz met Goldman for the first time during one of her lectures in Cleveland, Ohio in May 1901. By then, Goldman had already met Kropotkin often including during his most recent American tour the previous month. Czolgosz openly admitted that Goldman had been his inspiration in the anarchist movement and after listening to her, he was ready to do anything he could to advance the cause.

After Goldman gave her lecture in Cleveland, Czolgosz approached the speakers’ platform and asked for reading recommendations. On the afternoon of July 12, 1901, he visited her at the home of Abraham Isaak, publisher of the newspaper Free Society in Chicago and introduced himself as Fred Nieman, (which means “nobody” a clear sign he was already thinking in conspiratorial terms.) Goldman later admitted to introducing him to her anarchist friends who were at the train station.

After the assassination, Goldman refused to condemn Czolgosz. Highly suspicious police and federal officials questioned Goldman, already a national figure. She complained they had given her “the third degree” and later writers have uncritically taken her at her word. But this was certainly just her lifelong pattern of wild, melodramatic exaggerations and outright lies.

She praised Czolgosz as a “supersensitive being,” an unlikely poetic description from someone who claimed to have only casually met him for a few minutes. It was language more likely to have been used by a lover inspiring a man to some “heroic, great deed” and it is quite likely they had had intimate relations.

Far from igniting a passionate mass anarchist movement across America, the murder of President McKinley did the opposite and discredited anarchism forever in the United States after 25 years of popularity tirelessly fanned by Kropotkin. Socialism, which angrily rejected the anarchists’ love of violence and assassination, superseded it and Eugene Debs won a million votes when he ran as head of the Socialist Party for president in 1912 against Woodrow Wilson, and Theodore Roosevelt.

Goldman was deported from the United States in 1919 after serving several short jail terms for minor offenses. She visited Russia but disapproved of the Soviet Union (she disapproved of everything she did not run or imagine) and eventually died in Canada in 1940.

Thirty years after her death, Goldman enjoyed a bizarre revival among American feminists which continues to this day. Adulation continues to pour down on her.

L. Doctorow’s pretentious, reverently praised and execrably bad 1975 novel “Ragtime” makes her the central, prophetic inspiring figure of the Ragtime era, a fantasy more unreal than Tolkien. The novel later became an embarrassingly awful though also acclaimed Broadway musical.

In real life, Goldman was an intimate friend and colleague for at least 30 years of the man who called himself Mephistopheles, after Goethe’s poetic version of Satan, Russian Prince Peter Kropotkin, who led the international anarchist movement for more than 40 years following the death of Mikhail Bakunin in 1876.

Goldman worshipped Kropotkin. She wrote of him: “We saw in him the father of modern anarchism, its revolutionary spokesman and brilliant exponent of its relation to science, philosophy, and progressive thought.”

So close were Kropotkin and Goldman that she visited him in Moscow in 1920 a year before his death and later attended his funeral. She always referred to him as “Peter.” It is likely they had been lovers. Her role in the McKinley assassination exactly parallels that of Sophia Perovskaya, the infamous, hate-crazed director of Hryniewiecki’s grenade murder attack on Tsar Alexander.

The most striking parallel with the murder of the Liberator Tsar was Kropotkin’s remarkable proximity to both crimes. As I have previously noted in these columns, Kropotkin is documented as having known Perovskaya in the notorious Nikolai Tchaikovsky Circle of Russian anarchists as early as 1872, nine years before the assassination. And he was later close to Goldman for the rest of the his long life (He lived to the age of 79.)

Czolgosz was apparently recruited in Cleveland by the anarchists and Goldman was his inspiration to do whatever he could for the movement.

Buffalo is not a large city and is relatively remote. It is 637 kilometers (about 400 miles) by road from New York City. Yet Kropotkin took the time to visit it and its anarchist cells for leisurely trips twice in close succession in 1897 and 1901. He spoke English fluently. His visit in late April 1901 at the end of a popular and very high-profile U.S. tour was only five months before the shooting of President McKinley in September. He had established warm personal ties with Buffalo’s anarchist leader Johann Most on his previous visit there three years before as documented in the study “Kropotkin in America” by Paul Avrich.

Avrich notes, “Kropotkin exerted an increasing influence on American anarchists, not to speak of socialists, Single Taxers and other reformers. During the 1880’s and 1890’s, his articles appeared in all the leading anarchist journals.”

It was much easier for violent anarchist cells in America to operate in small towns or obscure industrial cities where the police were far smaller, less well equipped, far less sophisticated and not attuned to the threat of revolutionary violence than in major metropolises like New York City, Los Angeles or Chicago.

All this Kropotkin knew well. In Buffalo, since his 1897 visit, his key contact was Most, a German expatriate who even in those circles was regarded as a wild and violent “firebrand,” according to Avrich. The World’s Fair had already been arranged to be held in Buffalo – a surprisingly remote and small location for such an event – and President McKinley was certain to visit it.

In other words, when poor, doomed President McKinley took his fatal train to obscure little Buffalo he was going to a stronghold of the most violent anarchist leader on the North American continent who had recently been in close personal contact with the movement’s international leader.

Kropotkin did not operate secretly or fearfully in the United States. He had enormous protection and influence. He was an honored guest in 1897 at meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and gave a speech to the National Geographical Society in Washington, DC.

In 1901, Kropotkin stayed at the prestigious and luxurious Colonial Club in Cambridge Massachusetts. He was invited to the United States by the Lowell Institute. He also gave a guest lecture at Harvard. Goldman organized his busy and successful speaking schedule on the East Coast.

Like Tsar Alexander, McKinley was no evil tyrant but a successful reformer who had decisively improved terrible living conditions for scores of millions of people. He restored the U.S. economy by reviving the “national system ” of previous presidents such as Abraham Lincoln and James Garfield (both also assassinated). He especially increased industrial tariffs to keep British and German industries from undermining the U.S. industrial base with floods of subsidized and artificially supported “dumped” exports.

McKinley also settled a miners’ strike giving the oppressed workers decent rights and significant improvements in pay and conditions, the first such successful development in U.S. history. He was at the same time a trusted partner to Wall Street in maintaining business confidence and favorable investment conditions.

All this changed when McKinley’s vice president, the youngest in U.S. history, Theodore Roosevelt, succeeded to the presidency when McKinley succumbed to his wounds on September 14, 1901 after eight days of agony.

Roosevelt was named to the vice presidency supposedly to remove him from a position of real power as governor of New York State as the Wall Street moguls did not like or trust him. He filled the slot vacated by previous Vice President Garret Hobart, the highly capable former governor of Ohio, who died at the age of only 55 in 1899 after developing heart problems over that summer. Hobart’s death has been suggested but never seriously investigated as a possible poisoning. Had he lived, Roosevelt could never have been seriously considered as McKinley’s running mate in 1900.

Roosevelt devoted his next eight years in the presidency and the rest of his life to integrating the United States and the British Empire into a seamless web of racial imperialist oppression that dominated Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia and that destroyed the cultural history and heritage of the Native North American nations. But that is another story.

All this change was made possible by Czolgosz’s convenient two shots into President McKinley’s abdomen: Goldman lived in comfort and acclaim in different countries, always protected by the British Empire until her death in Canada in 1940 at the age of 71.