Myth of the 20th Century

As a show that has primarily focused on geopolitical history, we at the Myth of the 20th Century have not touched on the subject of women as much as others. But given the importance of women to all societies, and especially those facing declining birth rates, existential ennui, and many other social ills seemingly common... Read More Get full access to The American Sun at theamericansun.substack.c...

Soon after the end of the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as ‘superpowers’, leaders of the two primary ideological power blocks across the world’s major continents. After nearly 50 years of competition, the United States emerged victorious, and led an unprecedented era of ‘globalization’ for the next 20 years... Read More Get full access to The American Sun at thea...

Viewed as a microcosm of Manifest Destiny beyond the confines of the geographical limits of the continental United States, the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands by the US in the late 19th century marked the beginning of what we now consider the global American Empire. To the Hawaiian peoples, it was a clearly just as... Read More Get full access to The American Sun at theamericansun.substack.com/...

The English word ‘bank’ meaning a depository and lending institution, derives from the Italian word ‘banca’, or ‘bench.’ This belies the origins of modern finance in Renaissance Italy, where deals initially struck at coffee house benches evolved into the great trading and banking houses of the Medicis, where double-entry book keeping enabled the matching of... Read More Get full access to The Amer...

Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, has written several books on the world of investing and the economy in general based on his years of experience as manager of the world’s largest hedge fund. In the latest of his ‘Principles’ series, Dalio applies his quantitative approach of macro investing to analyzing countries, seeking to identify... Read More Get full access to The American Sun at...

Stagflation. Fuel Prices. Shortages. Political Turmoil. War in Europe. Roe V. Wade. Crypto Collapse. Counter-counter culture. Most years have one or two seminal, defining events that set the societal zeitgeist, but in 2022 so many events vied for attention that most people had to take time not only to revaluate what it means for the... Read More Get full access to The American Sun at theamericansu...

The exchange of goods and services has existed since the earliest forms of civilization, from simple barter arrangements at the local town square to Phoenician traders navigating the Mediterranean with goods from Europe and North Africa. Today, however, the scope of exchange is truly massive, with online commerce coming to dominate nearly all segments of... Read More Get full access to The America...

Ever since the Great Recession and financial crisis of the late 2000s, the American economic model of building large suburban housing developments with cheap credit and sometimes even cheaper building materials and standards has been called into question. Setting aside all the jobs generated in construction, banking, and other financial intermediation, municipal governments also depend... Read Mor...

In the world of geopolitics, there are those that decide, and those that recommend. While it is debatable who wields more actual power, it is clear that the number of advisers, consultants, analysts, strategists and self-appointed experts clearly outweighs that of the policy makers. Peter Zeihan, a unique blend of the recommender class, has made... Read More Get full access to The American Sun at...

According to the BBC, “a false flag is a political or military action carried out with the intention of blaming an opponent for it. Nations have often done this by staging a real or simulated attack on their own side and saying the enemy did it, as a pretext for going to war. The term... Read More Get full access to The American Sun at theamericansun.substack.com/subscribe

Prior to 1900, the western United States comprised less than 5% of the country’s total population. By 2000, that number had quadrupled to over 20%, and was on track to continue growing as a percentage of the total until only recently, where the southern states have begun outpacing it in term of number of people... Read More Get full access to The American Sun at theamericansun.substack.com/subscri...

With the alleged assassination of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri by US forces and the shooting of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in the past few weeks, conspiracy theories abound as to the motives behind potential realignment in global politics and the media news cycle. Also in the news is economist Jeffrey Sachs making... Read More Get full access to The American Sun at theamericans...

Since the industrial revolution and the advent of fossil fuels in place of manual labor powering nearly all aspects of civilization from agriculture to transportation to manufacturing, human productivity and population have exploded, going from under 1 billion in 1750 to a projected population of 10 billion in 2100. In the 20th century, oil became... Read More Get full access to The American Sun a...

From the 14th through the early 20th century, the Middle East consisted of a hybrid civilization composed of various tribes and peoples stretching from the Balkans down through the Arabian Peninsula under the auspices of the Ottoman Empire. To its promoters, Constantinople administered a multicultural society that balanced ethnic and religious differences into a harmonious... Read More Get full ac...

As a $60 billion a year investment bank engaged in market making and asset management for equities, fixed income, commodity and derivative securities for large institutional clients, Goldman Sachs, having been founded in 1869, is arguably the world’s most recognizable name on Wall Street. Known for attracting some of the best financial talent, it is... Read More Get full access to The American Sun...

With a spate of recent news stories about fires and other incidents forcing closures of over 20 food processing and distribution centers in the United States, Canada and Europe this year, people have started wondering if there has been a concerted effort to undermine food security in and around the industrialized world. Comparing to previous... Read More Get full access to The American Sun at thea...

Published in 1992, political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ described a world in which he saw the 70+ year struggle between the authoritarian styles of government meeting an unequivocal end with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. What triumphed – principally the American system of ‘liberal democratic... Read More Get full access to The American Sun a...

In 2019, Airbus surpassed for the first time Boeing as the largest aerospace company in the world, as two crashes of Boeing’s 737-Max airplane forced a grounding of the fleet and a halt in sales, eventually costing it $20 billion in associated fines and delays. While Boeing maintains a relatively strong overall safety record as... Read More Get full access to The American Sun at theamericansun.sub...

Following our interview with Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson on the crisis in Ukraine, we wanted to do a brief follow up on the potential long-reaching supply chain implications of the broader conflict between the West and East. Russia, being targeted now by nearly all Western nations with sanctions aimed at its financial payments infrastructure, telecommunications,... Read More Get full access to The...

The Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine on February 24th, 2022 surprised many around the world for its speed and scale, making it the largest military operation in Europe since World War II. Western media was quick to condemn the action as a flagrant act of aggression on the part of Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin, while... Read More Get full access to The American Sun at theamericansun.substack.co...

In the founding myths of the Chinese Communist Party, youth and student movements play a crucial role, with the Red Guard and Cultural Revolution being ideological tidal waves that transformed the nation. In the founding myths of post Cold War neo-liberalism, it was another student movement – the one that took place on June 4th,... Read More Get full access to The American Sun at theamerican...

The history of the Trojan War, assiduously studied and thoroughly documented today, was passed down through the centuries not by academic text, but by oral tradition. The conduit for communication, rather than scholarly prose, was the campfire poetry best told in the Iliad by Homer, author of the other great Greek epic The Odyssey. How... Read More Get full access to The American Sun at theamerica...

In terms of sheer drama and trauma, few years in recent memory compare to 2020, with the CoViD scare and BLM riots reaching worldwide. In 2021, by comparison, the past year was really more a continuation and consolidation of the last, as the Kyle Rittenhouse trial came to a surprising end, and the power elite... Read More Get full access to The American Sun at theamericansun.substack.com/subscribe

The great upheavals which precede changes of civilization, such as the fall of the Roman Empire and the foundation of the Arabian Empire, seem at first sight determined more especially by political transformations, foreign invasion, or the overthrow of dynasties. But a more attentive study of these events shows that behind their apparent causes the... Read More Get full access to The American Sun...

“Cybernetics attempts to find the common elements in the functioning of automatic machines and of the human nervous system, and to develop a theory which will cover the entire field of control and communication in machines and living organisms.” -Dr. Norbert Wiener writing in The Scientific American. Taken slightly less literally, in communist Russia, central... Read More Get full access to The Am...