A Black Wednesday for the World Trade

Bye-bye Toblerone

Day of Liberation, so called it Trump. The European translation reads Day of Despotism.

Trump's tulips are watching their master's ceremony

The tariffs announced in the Rose Garden of the White House will restrict exports to the US and make imported goods more expensive. The logical consequence iś that consumer prices will increase in the United States.

Most economists predict the new tariffs will lead to more bankruptcies and rising unemployment figures in many countries. The tariffs could plunge the world into a dangerous trade war in which there will be only losers.

This view is not shared by Ms. Miller Wellington, who sells candies in Delta, a village of around 3000 people less than 100 miles south of Detroit. She is unfazed by the possibility of price increases predicted by most economists. "Sometimes you have to walk through fire to get to the other side," she says, echoing the president's main argument: "If tariffs bring companies and business back to hard-working people like the ones who live here, then it's worth it."

The Washington Post writes," Wall Street worries Trump tariffs could wreck the souring economy." 

Let Stephen Colbert enlighten us: 

"And Trump's toadies are out there defending the tariffs. Here's Louisiana Senator John Kennedy on FOX Business arguing that ultimately nothing is knowable, 'The truth is that nobody knows. I've listened to economists for the last month. Some say this will cause a recession; his tariffs will cause a recession. Others say it will cause growth. In my eight years in Washington, I've learned that for every economist, there's an equal and opposite economist.'"

(Laughter from the audience) And Stephen continued, "Sounds crazy, but it is actually true. For example, Milton Friedman was always opposed by the equal and opposite economist Friedmil Manton."

"Most experts dispute the idea that these tariffs would lead to any growth at all. Instead, they say we could be looking at a prolonged recession, higher prices, and higher unemployment. Okay, a little more practice. Man, awww, damn, these grapes smell like wrath."

The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 2,200, and the S&P 500 tumbled 6% as Wall Street's worst crisis since the COVID crash deepened after China matched President Donald Trump's big raise in tariffs announced earlier this week. 

Still, leaving Washington to watch a golf tournament at Mar-a-Largo, the "stable genius" claimed in one of his chopper talks:

Like this?

To be continued ...

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Freiburg and the Breisgau in the Peasants' War

Organization, execution, and consequences of peasant violence against castles, towns, and monasteries 1524/1525

Red Baron blogged about the Peasants' War before, and there is no end to it yet. This two-day conference was highly professional and too specialised for a physicist. Still, I found two lectures devoted to Freiburg.

The evening before the conference proper, aimed to present a history book: The Peasants' War in Freiburg and the Breisgau. A reader on the history of a crisis. This book, written by experts, formed the basis for the lectures of the following two days.

A lecture followed the book presentation: Punishing and Killing - Excessive Violence in the Peasants' War. There was looting, arson, rape and the occasional homicide on the part of the peasants, but the reaction of the authorities was excessive.

What held the authorities back from a general massacre of the peasants was that they were needed for food production.

A letter from the patrician and Nürnberg councillor Caspar Nützel to AlbrechtFriedrich of Prussia documents the authorities' overreaction, "... I do not think that anyone with any sense can deny how unjustly, unchristianly and even too excessively the authorities have torn the hair of their subjects, whom they are supposed to shepherd, provide for, govern and not oppress. Whether the punishment they inflict by disemboweling, burning, taking their possessions, driving them into misery making widows and orphans, and other cruel persecutions or even imposing penalties on the guilty and the innocent without any prior truthful inquiry and hearing of their answers and excuses is in proportionate to the ignorant acts of the subjects, Your Reverend Grace, as a praiseworthy and understanding prince, has to judge*."
*Mark Twain wrote in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, "Whenever the literary german dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth."

Massacre of peasants in an open field

On the other hand, Thomas Müntzer referred to the Old Testament and called for open violence: Do not take pity on yourselves, even if Esau suggests good words to you (Genesis 33).

 
Do not look on the wretchedness of the wicked. So they will ask you kindly, weeping and pleading like children. Do not be pitied, as God commanded through Moses and has revealed to us (Deuteronomy 7).

Violence begets counter-violence. In the south of the Reich, the high-born prince, Margrave Casimirius of Ansbach, came with horsemen and several servants and attacked the new noble peasants from the Ries. A horseman drove a spear through the one who wore the chasuble, thus mocking it. The spear was left stuck until the third day, so God's punishment was revealed.

The next day, Red Baron listened to a lecture on Conquer Freiburg. Threatening, besieging, and liberating: a praxeology of the Peasants' War.

The people of Freiburg's greatest fear was that they would not know when the peasants would march against the city. The peasants played on their psychological warfare skillfully:

The Freiburg chronicler Huldrichus Zasius complained, "I would gladly write to Mr. Montaigne [...] if it were not for the unfortunate unrest that is shaking our city and indeed the entire province at the hands of the peasants; for all around us is so full of fear, sadness, danger and attack that hardly an hour goes by when we do not fear destruction."

To scout and find out where the enemies are.
Write to cites and neighbors and have a good correspondence with each other.

Still, the city council puzzles: 

Since Friday, we have received several messages from the forest and have truly learned that the peasants are gathering heavily against Bonndorf. Yesterday, 80 people from Löffingen came to gather against Bondorf. They let it be known that they want to go to Breisgau next. They know their way around here well and will take the region.

Freiburg prepares:

       

Furthermore, all guildsmen, young or old, physically able, when they hear the storm, shall really leave, with their armor, and hurry to the fish market under the banner.

A servant identified as a spy was captured and interrogated, but the rumors she had spread made Freiburg's citizens extremely nervous:

Peasants with heavy equipment are aiming at the Freiburg Minster church.

After I returned to the city from the peasants' camp, I spread the rumor among the community and publicly announced the power with which the peasants were equipped. They had everything at hand that was needed for a field camp and an assault: sound cannons, powder, fire, bullets, and even more provisions. They were so well equipped that it would be impossible to hold the city. 

 Eventually, the peasants who wanted to emancipate themselves in Lutherey, Ketzerey, and Uffrur went on the offensive. First, they diverted the Dreisam's water for the city's mills and cut off its drinking water supply. On May 23, 1525, the peasant bunch from the Black Forest occupied the Carthusian monastery and climbed up the Schlossberg. 

 "It was a beautiful May evening", recounts the eyewitness Huldrichus Zasius. "The lords were sitting, as usual, on the cathedral square in front of their guildhall 'Zum Ritter' when suddenly several hundred shots from arquebuses announced that the peasants had occupied the Schlossberg. Immediately, the citizens took up arms." 

 From the top of the Schlossberg, the leader Hans Müller, dressed in a red cloak and red beret, fired shots at the spire of the cathedral tower until it fell to the ground, to the great jubilation of the attackers: "We shall lay Freiburg's church tower, like that in Kirchzarten." 

 Müller called on the city to join the Christian Union so that the Gospel would be spread according to the wording and the peasants would be freed from illegitimate levies. Eventually, facing the city walls, the peasants made themselves big: 

So we want to live with our other brothers and relatives closer to you and break into your city. Therefore, we admonish you fraternally to stand by us today so that much bloodshed, great ruin, and evil, mainly the ruin of the vines, will be avoided. 

 Help from the Habsburg authorities for Freiburg did not come. The final decision to surrender was possibly due to the announcement that the vines would be uprooted: 

Dear friends, you see that we lost the Schlossberg, and for five days, we have had neither a well nor a cup. Moreover, they have shot into the spire of the cathedral. Although we have been assured that help has been sent to us, we see that no one has come to us. For the preservation of our lives, our honor, our property, and our lives, we are obliged to come to an agreement with the peasants. 

The peasants marched into Freiburg on May 24. They forced the city council to join the Christian Union in establishing a general peace and eradicating the unjust grievances of the gemeiner Mann (common man) against the word of God and the holy Gospel imposed on him by the spiritual and secular authorities.

When the authorities eventually gained the upper hand in the German territories, the peasants left Freiburg.

In June, a municipal delegation traveled to Innsbruck to the Austrian government. It declared that Feiburg had only joined the peasants' Christian Union to avert harm to the city and its citizens:

Furthermore, no one should become involved with the Lutheran sect. Still, everyone who wants to live in Freiburg should stick to the Christian statutes that have been commonly held for hundreds of years until the authorities and those allowed to do so order otherwise.

The Innsbruck authorities were not satisfied with this excuse.

But that is another story.

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