Nothing Has Changed in the War in Ukraine, Europe’s Free Speech Problem, “Why Won’t Billionaire Rightists Fund Us?” USA’s Intangible Economy, Future Archaeology
Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.
I have been very, very frustrated for some time now as I desperately want to write full-length essays on the war in Ukraine but am not able to do so because the situation on the ground and in the world of diplomacy has barely changed since the failed Ukrainian summer offensive of two years ago. The fight continues to grind on, with the Russians chipping away at Ukrainian defenses in the southeast of the country, and with no breakthrough in sight (assuming that the Russian military seeks to do that in the first place). I know that many of you who are subscribed to this Substack share that same frustration, but I cannot write the same essay over and over again. Doing that would be a disservice to readers.
The two sides (Russia vs. USA/EU/NATO/Ukraine) continue to talk past one another, with the main actor on the side, the USA, hilariously positioning itself as a mediator. The fact of the matter is that there are two wars being fought simultaneously, and the USA is the main actor in the more important one (USA vs. Russia). A belligerent USA managed to position itself as a mediator in the conflict between Israel and Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran, but trying to pull the same trick with Russia is too tall an order to fulfill.
At the same time, Russia has to humour to the USA as a recognition of its unrivaled power. This was the reason for the recent summit in Alaska, one which ended quickly and served only to remind Trump and his team that the Russian position has not fundamentally changed. Russia came away from this summit with a small victory in which US demands for an immediate ceasefire were dropped.
Fast forward to this past Monday where Ukrainian President Zelensky arrived in Washington with the cream of the crop of the European National Branch Managers of USA Inc. (including EU VP of USA Inc. Ursula von der Leyen) to reiterate Ukraine’s position, one that is effectively unchanged from the time of Boris Johnson parachuting into Kiev in 2022 to urge Ukraine to keep fighting. The only thing of note to occur during that meeting was that Trump informed the world that the EU would buy weapons from the USA to continue to arm Ukraine so that it can defend itself against Russia.
Trump says a lot of things, and on this issue he has done a lot of flip-flopping. Maybe it’s his negotiating style? I don’t know. What we DO KNOW is that he claimed to be in favour of an American role in providing security guarantees to Ukraine, so long as there were no US boots on the ground there. He added that this could come in the manner of air support, with European forces providing boots on the ground. The second that Trump suggested that this could be in play was the very moment that the past week saw zero positive movement towards a resolution of this conflict.
This war is about setting the new border between Russia and the US Empire. The USA rejects Russia’s desire to re-establish spheres of influence in its ‘near-abroad’, because it feels that it can continue to turn its neighbours against Moscow and integrate them into Atlanticist structures. Russia views Ukraine as an existential matter, and insists on having a veto over its security future. This was the case in February of 2022, and this is still the case in August of 2025. Who in the right mind actually took seriously the idea that European soldiers would be stationed on the ground in Ukraine while the USA patrolled the skies? This would be an INTERVENTION on the side of Ukraine, and would be the EXACT kind of thing that Russia wanted to prevent in the first place by invading its neighbour.
The Russians aren’t dumb. They went to Alaska to humour Trump, but Russian FM Lavrov wearing a CCCP sweatshirt was the best indicator as to how low their expectations of the summit would be. They were proven right by Monday’s media show.
Of particular note is the cynicism on display from the UK and France. Both countries know that Russia will not permit the stationing of forces from NATO countries on Ukrainian soil, yet they tried to insert themselves anyway through the most thinly-hidden layer of “peacekeeping forces” or as part of a “security guarantee” for Kiev. Who are they trying to kid? Key EU states such as France and Finland, in tandem with the UK, have joined Kiev in pretending that they hold the cards in this conflict and can dictate the terms of peace to Moscow. The Americans are of two minds: on the one hand they are playing good cop to the EU/NATO/UK/Ukrainian bad cop, but they also want to end, or at least freeze, this conflict and park it on Europe’s plate so that they can finally turn their focus to countering China.
Almost nothing has changed in this conflict, which is frustrating for a writer like myself. I don’t even have a good article or essay to share with you on this topic, because so little is new. For the sake of format and consistency, I am resigned to sharing this piece from the Guardian UK which looks at potential security arrangements for Ukraine if peace should ever break out there:
Zelenskyy has said that the details will be worked out and “formalised on paper” within a week to 10 days. As many as 30 countries – called the “coalition of the willing” – are likely to be involved, with some help from the US, although what that might mean is unclear. Speaking after his meeting on Monday with Donald Trump and European leaders in the White House, Zelenskyy said their support could take many forms.
Okay.
One of those could be prysutnist (the Ukrainian word for presence), meaning they would provide troops. And it might include intelligence, as well as providing security in the air and on the Black Sea, or simply funds, he said.
A total non-starter, as it would violate the main reason for Russia’s decision to invade. Furthermore, Lavrov has stated that any conference on security guarantees to Ukraine must include Russia, meaning that it would have a veto on said guarantees. Rejecting this would mean agreeing to more war with Russia.
The key question is, which European governments are willing to take part in a peacekeeping mission inside Ukraine? The UK and France have indicated they are ready to send soldiers as part of a “reassurance force”. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, confirmed: “We have to help Ukraine on the ground.” Germany is more sceptical. Many details have yet to be worked out. Would western troops be stationed along a ceasefire line or provide a more limited training role in big cities such as Kyiv and Lviv? And what rules of engagement would they have if they came under Russian fire?
This would be NATO-by-stealth.
Trump has promised to coordinate a Europe-led peacekeeping operation in Ukraine. “When it comes to security, there’s going to be a lot of help,” he said on Monday, sitting next to Zelenskyy in the Oval Office. The US president made clear European countries would be expected to carry most of the burden. “They are a first line of defence because they’re there. But we’ll help them out,” he said.
Ukraine wants to buy $90bn worth of US weapons and says they could form part of the security guarantee. Overall, however, Trump has been vague about how much the US would contribute. He has ruled out Ukraine’s membership of Nato, which Kyiv believes would be the best deterrent against a future Russian onslaught. There seems no prospect the US would send its own troops to take part in a peace-keeping mission. One more realistic option would be for the Pentagon to provide logistical support to a proposed “sky shield”. The plan envisages an air protection zone in the west and the centre of Ukraine, including over the capital Kyiv, enforced by European fighter jets.
Once again, NATO-by-stealth.
According to Trump, Vladimir Putin agreed during their summit in Alaska that Ukraine required security guarantees. Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff has said that these would be outside the auspices of Nato, but would be the equivalent of article 5, Nato’s self-defence pact in which an attack on one is considered an attack on all. Russia’s interpretation of guarantees, however, seems different from Witkoff’s version. The Kremlin says it is categorically opposed to western troops in Ukraine. It is unlikely to accept a peacekeeping force as part of any deal.
This is just NATO. These people are shameless.
Left outside of my commentary is what has been agreed to in back channels between the relevant parties. There is a growing sense that Kiev is willing to accept territorial losses in return for strong security guarantees, but Russia will not accept security guarantees such as those that have been floated.
As the USA continues to swallow up Europe, there is one notable area of increasing divergence: how each treat speech. Attacks on free speech are common no matter which party is in power in the USA, but the First Amendment remains a remarkable bulwark in the protection of speech for American citizens.
Europe, on the other hand, is a different story. The trend on the continent (and in the UK) has been growing restrictions on speech in order to “defend democracy and democratic values” i.e. illiberalism to protect liberalism. Rather than following the American lead that bans speech only in the most severe cases, Europe has chosen instead to be legally intolerant towards those that they deem “intolerant” for expressing views that are considered to have committed that very same secular sin.
It was only sixty years ago when Mario Savio led the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley out in California. Back then, he and other campus leftists were considered the vanguard of free speech activism in the USA. Protests were held, papers and articles were written, and many court battles were won over time to ensure that all kinds of speech were deemed acceptable and to be protected by law. By the time Savio’s colleagues wormed their way into power, it was time for them to begin to attack speech that they didn’t approve it, coining the term “hate speech” and insisting that “hate speech isn’t speech but is violence”.
This long campaign bore fruit in the very recent past where “de-platforming” became de rigeur. If you couldn’t ban speech that you didn’t approve of, you could pressure private businesses to ban it on your behalf. Social media worked hand-in-glove with the Obama and Biden regimes to do just this very thing, as all of you are already aware of. Despite these efforts to restrict speech, the culture of the USA has not permitted these restrictions to take hold (as of the present). The love of liberty that is encoded in the DNA of the USA will not permit restrictions on free speech. For the median American it simply does not compute.
There will be future efforts to restrict speech in the USA (and the Trump admin is guilty of doing this too), but America is a far cry from what is happening in Europe at present:
American officials are waging a multifront attack on Europe’s approach to free speech. This month, a congressional delegation traveled to Dublin, Brussels, and London to probe and decry European regulations on digital speech. A State Department human-rights assessment issued last week pointed to objectionable “restrictions on freedom of expression” in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. All of this follows Vice President J. D. Vance’s speech in February at the Munich Security Conference, where he accused European leaders of retreating from the continent’s “most fundamental values,” including free expression.
These assessments might seem untrustworthy, given the flagrant transgressions against free-speech principles from the Trump administration and its allies. But the fact is that European leaders are corroding the right to free expression, and show every sign of sliding further down a slippery slope into illiberalism.
I applaud Vance’s criticism directed at Europe that he delivered during his speech in Munich earlier this year, and I do that for entirely self-serving reasons. I do not believe that US criticism of Europe’s drive to restrict speech is altruistic, because such restrictions hamper the ability of social media giants to conduct their businesses, and negatively impact US soft power on the continent. It’s in the USA’s strategic benefit to have a regulatory environment in Europe that is very liberal because their social media giants are the biggest, and US influence and soft power emanate through them.
Europe and the U.S. have always had different free-speech cultures. In the postwar era, both confronted the question of how tolerant societies should treat intolerant factions. Much of Europe concluded that, although free speech is important, views that threaten democracy itself are different and can be criminalized; see laws in various European states against Nazi propaganda. In contrast, the American system protected expression as vile as neo-Nazis marching through a town of Holocaust survivors because, by First Amendment logic, fascist speech poses less of a danger than enabling the state itself to engage in viewpoint discrimination. Despite these differences, both Europe and America mostly expanded speech protections in the 20th century and pulled back from censorship, seeming to converge on liberal values by the time the Iron Curtain fell and the internet spread.
The shift:
The shift has been gradual, emerging in landmark cases at the European Court of Human Rights, as well as in legislation at the national level. But the new reality is stark. Last year, Amnesty International (hardly a Trump-administration ally) published a report about what the organization’s secretary-general, Agnès Callamard, called a “Europe-wide onslaught against the right to protest”; the report documented examples of restrictive laws, use of excessive police force, and arbitrary arrest. It’s not just protests. European judges have signed off on the criminalization of the kinds of hate speech that, while easy to revile, pose nothing like Hitlerite peril. When a middle-aged mother lashes out at asylum seekers in a social-media post (later deleted), or a pro-Palestinian marcher chants a slogan that some but not all see as genocidal, or a flyer calls gays “deviants,” a tolerant society can exercise forbearance and respond with counterspeech. European states are often deploying handcuffs instead. And European leaders are pushing to expand the speech that can get a person thrown in prison.
Think about how many resources are tasked with monitoring speech and arresting those who violate these ridiculous laws.
Europe’s slide towards illiberal speech laws:
Since shortly after its inception in 1959, the European Court of Human Rights, also known as the Strasbourg Court, has heard cases of alleged violations of the 1953 convention. The court’s strongest precedent affirming liberal free-speech values was articulated in a 1976 case called Handyside v. United Kingdom. In it, the court actually ruled in favor of the British government’s censorship of a book, for schoolchildren, whose content was deemed obscene. Yet its judgment stated that, in general, freedom of expression is “applicable not only to ‘information’ or ‘ideas’ that are favourably” or indifferently received, “but also to those that offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population.” That ethos would be a powerful bulwark for expressive rights, if enforced. Yet in a series of rulings that began in the aughts, the court betrayed that ethos until it was all but abandoned.
One influential case, in 2009, concerned Daniel Féret, a Belgian politician who founded a far-right political party. He published campaign leaflets that included statements such as “stop the Islamization of Belgium” and “save our people from the risk posed by Islam, the conqueror.” A Belgian court convicted Féret of inciting discrimination, hatred, or violence, and punished him with a suspended prison sentence, 250 hours of community service, and 10 years of ineligibility for office. His punishment “had the legitimate aims of preventing disorder,” the court ruled, stating that “incitation to hatred” need not involve calls “for specific acts of violence.” Rather, “insults, ridicule or defamation aimed at specific population groups or incitation to discrimination, as in this case, sufficed.” Punishing insults that could lead to discrimination is a much lower standard than punishing calls for imminent violence that are also likely to lead to it.
In a 2012 case, Vejdeland and Others v. Sweden, four Swedes challenged their conviction for distributing to high schoolers leaflets that called homosexuality a “deviant sexual proclivity” and argued that promiscuous gays were responsible for spreading HIV. The court ruled that discrimination based on sexual orientation is as serious as racial discrimination, and that although the four Swedes might have been trying to initiate debate on “a question of public interest,” they had a duty to avoid “as far as possible” statements that are “unwarrantably offensive,” such as disparaging homosexuals as a group. How far such a duty to avoid offense might extend was unclear. In 2015, the court concluded that European states could be justified in punishing speech that is contrary to the “underlying values” or “spirit” of the European Convention on Human Rights, “namely justice and peace,” but didn’t clearly define those values or set forth a test for what violates them.
In short, what constitutes “hate speech” is a moving target.
This is very applicable to yours truly as I moderate comments on here:
With online speech offering national authorities more occasions to launch prosecutions, the court set another speech-chilling precedent in 2015: An online news portal in Estonia could be punished for failing to remove hateful comments posted beneath a news article that itself was unobjectionable, the court found. In a similar case, in 2023, the court ruled against a far-right politician from France, Julien Sanchez, who had been punished for failing to delete hateful comments left beneath a Facebook post he wrote, even though he apparently hadn’t seen the comments. That ruling included the sweeping statement that because “tolerance and respect for the equal dignity of all” are foundational in a pluralistic democracy, “it may be considered necessary in certain democratic societies to penalise or even prevent all forms of expression that propagate, encourage, promote or justify hatred based on intolerance.” Not only must wrongthink be banned, the court suggested; justifying the wrongthink of others, or failing to adequately monitor and censor it, can be penalized, too.
(So please understand why I will sometimes delete comments in the replies).
Europe seeks to get even more restrictive:
European leaders are pushing for even more sweeping restrictions. In part, they seek to expand the categories of persons that, according to the Council of Europe, are protected from incitement to hatred or discrimination to include gender, disability, sexual orientation, language, and age, in addition to already protected categories (race, color, religion, and descent or national or ethnic origin). Many are pushing to expand what counts as hate speech, too. In a 2022 strategy paper on how to better combat hate speech, the Council of Europe defined it as “all types of expression that incite, promote, spread or justify violence, hatred or discrimination against a person or group of persons”––note that justifying hatred is a lower standard than advocating it. The European Commission has been pushing a proposal to require that all European Union states make hate speech a crime. And in 2024, the European Parliament urged the European Commission to adopt an open-ended approach to the sorts of discrimination that are banned, rather than a closed list, so that authorities “can adapt to changing social dynamics.”
Like I said, a moving target. Lots of people will get ensnared for the simple reason that the definitions keep changing. “But they can defend themselves in court”, some might argue. The problem is that the process is very often the punishment itself.
My writing is ridden with references to powerful NGOs that are funded by billionaires, huge corporations, etc. in order to sway public policy. I like to say that NGOs are an end-run around democracy. You know it, and I know it.
The gutting of USAID shed light on just how enmeshed USGov is with these NGOs, and how entangled it is with these huge corporations and the super rich that fund them. A significant number of educated people in western countries are employed by them, and they all have a tendency to lean in one political direction: that of western liberal democracy (whatever that means on this exact day). They all have a tendency to converge on the same side of any issue, which makes a lot of sense as all the major NGOs tend to be funded by the same entities time and time again.
Right wingers have long lamented that such infrastructure is largely unavailable to them due to lack of funding, and especially due to lack of interest from wealthy individuals who share their beliefs, but won’t fork out the cash to found the necessary institutions/media outlets/etc. needed to actively push their views. I remember Mike Cernovich once describing how he would be called to meet with some of these types, and when he would pitch an idea to them, they would all inevitably ask: “Okay, so when can I expect a return on investment?”
There is no financial return on investment in this realm, unless you’re an arms dealer funding The Atlantic Council to agitate for Ukraine to keep fighting its war against Russia. George Soros doesn’t make profits on his philanthropy, because he is more interested in wielding power through his strategic investments in NGOs. He does it to win, not to add more zeroes to his bank account.
aka “Big Curt” tackles this dilemma in his own idiosyncratic way:
Gray Mirror
The riddle of the niggardly billionaires
Unfortunately, I recently had to delete a million-view tweet because of a grammatical error. In this unfortunate tweet—this fatal banger!—I described the behavior of our beloved tech billionaires as “negrous.” My enemies pounced…
Read more
a day ago · 94 likes · Curtis Yarvin
Philanthropy is not lobbying. Lobbying exercises power directly. Philanthropy creates structural power. The dividends of lobbying are direct, and generally aimed at some financial return. Lobbying converts money to power back to money.
Philanthropy generates power by generating prestige. “Soft power” is the attribution of prestige to a perspective. However many tanks the Red Army still had, the USSR was doomed once Western New Left ideas had established themselves among its young elites. Fashion flows downward. The ideas of the elites quickly become the ideas of the masses. All regimes rest on public consent.
Always and everywhere, prestige is generated by “elite human capital.” The power strategy of philanthropy is to capture, maintain and improve this human capital, which has or will obtain high status, causing its ideas to flow naturally down the stream of fashion, thus acquiring structural consent and becoming governing ideas. New, radical ideas first become socially acceptable, then socially required. This process is not fast. At least, it is not naturally fast. But its result is very stable.
Fundamentally, there are two ways to pursue prestige: inside prestige and outside prestige. Inside prestige is prestige within existing prestige-creating institutions. Sometimes, inside prestige is formal (ranks, credentials, offices, etc), sometimes it is reputational, and sometimes, lo, it even correlates with actual merit.
Outside prestige is prestige outside of existing institutions, unconnected to power. There is little outside prestige in the present world, but there is some. It can only correspond to two things: merit, and money.
Outside prestige may even include credentialed insiders—but rank them on a divergent reputation schedule. Their outside identities may even be opaque pseudonyms, to which this prestige becomes attached. Insiders are not bad. We love our insiders. Their inside rank, however, is not our outside rank.
Orban and Fidesz get this, which is why they have generously funded the creation of think tanks and other institutions in Hungary: to prepare the country for a post-Fidesz regime, and to give conservatives there a strong power base while out of power so that they are not lost in the wilderness.
The only meaningful mission of right-wing philanthropy (not lobbying) in the 21st-century is to use patronage to develop informal networks of outside prestige. These networks must blossom into institutions, which will develop soft power.
If these institutions are designed to be self-funding, they will turn into slop factories, or fail. Or both. But success has to be tested. Money is easy to test. How can we test prestige? There are actually two questions here: whether we can define it, and whether we can measure it. Immeasurable success is still success, if it can be defined.
Big Curt gets it.
The power of prestige:
Consider the New Yorker. While the New Yorker is not my favorite publication, it is prestigious. Why? Because not only does everyone who subscribes to the New Yorker wish they could write for the New Yorker, everyone who doesn’t subscribe to the New Yorker wants to be someone who subscribes to the New Yorker—even if they hate it. Draw that as a social graph. It is not a symmetric graph. Fashion flows downward.
And always, money complicates the picture. New Yorker writers are not well-paid. They are, in fact, terribly paid. Yet it is not hard to recruit for the position. Whether or not the magazine as a whole turns a profit is unclear—it might—but if it does, its market cap might not buy Jeff Bezos’s shoes. It would certainly not buy his yacht.
Generally speaking, although some media companies are profitable, they are the exception that proves the rule. Unless they are slop populist media, they exist in order to matter, not in order to profit—regardless of the details of their corporate structure.
While it is difficult to recognize the very lucrative New York Times as a patronage organization, it is absolutely that—with an absolute hereditary monarch, no less. The NYT could not go out of business. Before it would go out of business, it would turn into ProPublica. It can be a business—it does not need to be a business.
But the NYT unites existing prestige and existing power. It is specialized in sitting on the throne, not in getting the throne. If we want the left to give us lessons in getting the throne—we have to look to the past.
Big Curt provides us 5 filters for why Big Tech punches below its weight philanthropically:
Let’s look at the filters that make the “tech right” punch far below its weight in the philanthropic department.
The first filter is that most people who matter or want to matter are liberals, because liberalism is the ideology of mattering.
Every element of liberal ideology makes sense only when you realize that the ideology always has to match what makes liberals matter more. Normal rich people want to matter and so are infected by the normal ideology.
The second filter is that the people who are left may be weirdos, but they aren’t idiots. Very few billionaires are idiots. It happens, but…
Because they are not idiots, they realize that any public action against the regime will, at least in the short term, have negative personal expected value. While sponsoring outside prestige is one of the least confrontational possible actions, it still marks you as an enemy. Who needs that? Whose life is too easy? Certainly not a billionaire. It’s not like he’s retired. These people don’t retire.
Scientists estimate that just these two filters remove 98% of the financial potential for (genuine) philanthropic action. Worst, these are the most sensible people. The remaining 2%, though priceless and essential, are all unstable or irrational in some way. They are not responding in a normal way to normal human drives and incentives.
Lots of food for thought thanks to Big Curt. Click here to read the rest.
Fifty years ago, the assets held by S&P 500 companies were predominantly physical — factories, equipment, inventory et cetera. But today, it is estimated that around 90 per cent of their assets are intangible, ranging from intellectual property, brand value and networks, to code, content, talent and knowledge.
This week I argue that this transformation helps to explain four prevailing themes in the US stock market: high concentration, exceptionalism, volatility and bubble-like valuations.
90%!!!!!!!!!
America is also, by far, the largest source of measured intangible investment in the WIPO’s sample. Last year, investment reached $4.7tn in current prices, nearly twice the combined total of France, Germany, the UK and Japan.
For all intents and purposes, the US is an intangibles-driven economy.
Crucially, disembodied assets have very different economic properties to physical ones.
“Intangibles are much more scalable: they have high upfront fixed costs and zero marginal costs. Once code is written, producing additional units of software costs nothing,” says Kai Wu, founder of Sparkline Capital, who has developed a methodology to measure firm-level intangible value.
More numbers:
These traits explain US business dynamics today. First movers have grown large, exponentially so, with their size acting like a competitive moat. A narrow set of superstar firms drives the country’s growth.
Using a sample of around 900 US companies between 2011 and 2019, the McKinsey Global Institute found that just 5 per cent — accounting for 23 per cent of employment share — generated 78 per cent of positive productivity growth.
For measure, the WIPO finds that intangible assets make up 90 per cent of the total enterprise value of the 15 largest American companies, considerably higher than that of the broader US corporate sector.
Relevance to today’s stock market:
Today, the top 10 stocks account for 40 per cent of the S&P 500’s market capitalisation and 33 per cent of its profits, according to Andrew Lapthorne, global head of quantitative research at Société Générale.
Market concentration has risen to these historical highs following steep growth since the mid-2010s, driven by the Magnificent 7 tech stocks.
This group includes Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, whose intangibles-heavy asset base of software, algorithms and digital platforms benefits from scalability and synergies. Today, these assets — alongside the data and talent the firms have amassed — are being used to power their shift into artificial intelligence.
One risk emanating from this is market volatility:
The rise of intangible assets within the S&P 500 could be adding to market volatility, too.
First, with a narrow group of companies driving the index, idiosyncratic risk causes it to be more volatile than a broader, more diversified portfolio, says David Kostin, chief US equity strategist at Goldman Sachs, in a November 2024 research note.
Second, intangible investments tend to be financed using internal funds or equity, as they are harder to pledge as collateral for loans. Still, their valuations can become particularly sensitive to both actual and expected changes in the interest rate path.
Intangibles often derive most of their current value from potential future cash flows. For example, a large language model monetised via subscriptions may produce steady earnings over many years. As rate forecasts shift — as they do frequently in response to data releases — the discount rate applied to future earnings changes too.
Third, non-physical assets are hard to value. For instance, a patent could be worthless or worth billions, with its value dependent on factors including regulation, competition and market adoption. Again, these idiosyncrasies can drive rapid fluctuations in value.
I found this to be mildly interesting due to its framing.
While archaeology is now practiced around the world, we shouldn’t overstate our society’s dedication to it. Serious archaeological work occurs only where it is politically and ideologically convenient. When the government approves of the work, such as the British Museum’s excavations buttressing the prestige of the empire, or recent Turkish backing for the Göbekli Tepe excavations to boost tourism revenue, a great deal is possible. But without the active support or at least the tacit permission of the state, archaeology remains small-scale and marginal, if not suppressed. This is most obvious under governments which actively destroy past artifacts for ideological reasons, such as the Taliban, the Islamic State, or Australia.
In Italy, stifling “legal mechanisms are straightforwardly to blame for throttling archeological discovery”, to the extent that “Many artifacts end up on the black market … or are even simply destroyed or hidden away.” Less dramatically, when a friend of mine led an expedition to find ancient sites in the Amazon, his partner at a Brazilian university advised him not to get the government involved, because they don’t like finds which could interfere with resource extraction. In the United States, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act gives federally recognized Native American tribes substantial power to veto or censor archaeological investigations, which is often used to block research that holds the possibility of contradicting a tribe’s mythology or complicating their claim to land.
Further east, excavations of Mississippi Mound Builder sites are only occasionally suppressed by the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, who have been granted de facto jurisdiction as one of the few surviving tribes from the region; nevertheless these excavations remain small-scale and niche, in large part because the possibility of finding more evidence that there were once sophisticated native civilizations in North America would be very inconvenient for the civic mythology of both European-descended and Native-descended Americans. The largest investigations of these enormous and poorly-understood mounds were conducted during the Great Depression, when the Works Progress Administration was looking for any excuse to mobilize workers and would gladly hire two hundred men to excavate and catalogue a single site, whereas an excavation today will consist of maybe half a dozen graduate students.
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