TomDispatch

Time 2020-10-28 06:03:09

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Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single Superpower World In 1964, a book entitled The Invisible Government shocked Americans with its revelations of a growing world of intelligence agencies playing fast and loose around the planet, a secret government lodged inside the one they knew that even the president didn't fully control. Almost half a century later, everything about that "invisible government" has grown vastly larger, more disturbing, and far more visible. Book options Overview The United States of Fear In 2008, when the US National Intelligence Council issued its latest report meant for the administration of newly elected President Barack Obama, it predicted that the planet's "sole superpower" would suffer a modest decline and a soft landing fifteen years hence. In his new book The United States of Fear, Tom Engelhardt makes clear that Americans should don their crash helmets and buckle their seat belts... Book options Overview Reviews Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (A TomDispatch Book) The first history of drone warfare, written as it happened.From the opening missile salvo in the skies over Afghanistan in 2001 to a secret strike in the Philippines early this year, or a future in which drones dogfight off the coast of Africa, Terminator Planet takes you to the front lines of combat, Washington war rooms, and beyond. Book options Overview Buy now The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's In The American Way of War, Engelhardt documents Washington's ongoing commitment to military bases to preserve and extend its empire; reveals damning information about the American reliance on air power, at great cost to civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. Book options Overview Buy now The World According to TomDispatch For many of us, these are the key pieces of analysis that made sense of our post-9/11 world. - Naomi KleinThe publication of this splendid collection of dispatches is cause for celebration. - Andrew Bacevich Book options Overview Reviews Buy now The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation America Victorious has been our country's postulate since its birth. Tom Engelhardt, with a burning clarity, recounts the end of this fantasy, from the split atom to Vietnam. It begins at our dawn's early light and ends with the twilight's last gleaming. It is as powerful as a Joe Louis jab to the solar plexus.--Studs Terkel Book options Overview Reviews Buy now Mission Unaccomplished: TomDispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters At a time when the mainstream media leave out half of what the public needs to know, while at the same time purveying oceans of official nonsense, the public needs an alternative source of news. For years now, Tom Engelhardt's Tomdispatch has been that for me. He is my mainstream. Now he presents a series of brilliant interviews he has done for the site, and they, taken as a whole, themselves form a searching chronicle of our time.--Jonathan SchellClick to read about this book, author interview, reviews and blurbs, excerpt or to buy. Book options Overview Excerpts Reviews Buy now The Last Days of Publishing: A Novel A satisfyingly virulent, comical, absurd, deeply grieving true portrait of how things work today in the sleek factories of conglomerate book producers... a skillful novel of manners -- of very bad manners" --Herb Gold, LA Times Book options Overview Reviews Buy now War Without End: The Iraq War in Context In this razor-sharp analysis, TomDispatch.com commentator Michael Schwartz turns every mainstream conclusion about Iraq on its head. He shows how U.S. occupation is fueling civil war in Iraq and beyond, and how U.S. officials dismantled the Iraqi state and economy, helping to destroy rather than rebuild the country. Book options Overview Reviews Buy now The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan Leading commentators examine the Afghan debacle and its parallels with previous British and Soviet occupations. Book options Overview Buy now The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives Here is the new, hip, high-tech military-industrial complex -- an omnipresent, hidden-in-plain-sight system of systems that penetrates all our lives. Mapping out what should more properly be called the Military - Industrial - Technological - Entertainment - Scientific - Media - Intelligence - Corporate Complex, historian Nick Turse demonstrates just how extensively the Pentagon, through its little-noticed contacts (and contracts) with America's major corporations, has taken hold of the nation. Book options Overview Reviews Buy now Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb In a revelatory examination of urban terror, Author Mike Davis charts the car bomb's evolution from obscure agent of mayhem to lethal universality. Book options Overview Reviews Buy now Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities Book options Overview Reviews Buy now United States v. George W. Bush et al. In this book, former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega brings her twenty years of experience and passion for justice to what may be the most important case of her career. Book options Overview Reviews Buy now Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, A Well-Armed and Unpatriotic Far Right Posted by Andrea Mazzarino at 7:47AM, October 27, 2020.Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch. At this point in the presidential campaign, who doesn t know that Donald Trump essentially winked at the plot of 13 men, including two ex-Marines, to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer? Demanding at a rally in Muskegon that she reopen the state under pandemic conditions, the president responded to crowd chants of Lock her up! by saying, Lock them all up. No less unsubtly, at his first presidential debate, he called on the armed crew of nationalists who dub themselves the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by -- with the emphasis on that stand by. And, of course, you don t even have to ask, stand by for what, do you?Add in his never-ending claims about fraudulent mail-in ballots and a rigged election, the greatest scam in the history of politics, and you have the familiar aggressive Donald Trump, wooing his people in the way that we ve all become more or less accustomed to.But there s been another Donald Trump on the stump, too, in these last pandemic weeks of election season 2020, the one after which (at least in his nightmares) the crowds (and legal authorities) could be chanting, Lock him up! In fact, he s clearly begun to feel that, in the wake of November 3rd, he d better be prepared -- and consider this my suggestion for a future chant -- to Stand up and move out! In fact, he s been speaking with a certain pathos about possibly losing the election and implicitly facing endless legal charges as an everyday citizen. He s even threatened, post-election, to move to another country: Could you imagine if I lose? My whole life -- what am I going to do? I m going to say, I lost to the worst candidate in the history of politics! I m not going to feel so good. Maybe I ll have to leave the country, I don t know. (Saudi Arabia anyone?) We re talking about the Donald Trump who recently complained pathetically to suburban women You don t love me who said to his own fans pitifully enough at a rally in Pennsylvania, Nobody wants me, before dancing off stage. ("They don't want me, China doesn't want me, Iran doesn't want me... nobody wants me!" he added as the crowd chanted: "We want you!") He s similarly pleaded with those suburban women not to be so hostile to him. ( So can I ask you to do me a favor? Suburban women, will you please like me? I saved your damn neighborhood. )Here s one reality of the 2020 election that shouldn t be ignored: whether Donald Trump (god save us) ends up in the White House for a second term or in Saudi Arabia in flight from justice, he s going to leave behind a riven and -- because it s the United States of America -- wildly overarmed populace in the midst of a pandemic, in job hell, feeling angry and betrayed. And that brings me to Andrea Mazzarino, the co-founder of Brown University s Costs of War Project, a military spouse, and a TomDispatch regular. Today, she takes a careful and typically thoughtful look at one part of the torn tapestry of America: the armed, angry far-right men (and ex-military men in particular) who are already doing more than just standing by. TomHow the War Came Home, Big Time Perspectives From a Military Spouse By Andrea MazzarinoIt was July 2017, a few weeks before the Unite the Right Charlottesville riots, when white men marched through the streets of that Virginia city protesting the planned takedown of a confederate statue and chanting, Jews will not replace us. I was sitting at a coffee shop in my quiet town of Poulsbo in Washington State. I had set aside an hour away from my kids to do some necessary writing, while my husband, then second-in-command on a Navy ballistic missile submarine, sat suspended somewhere in the depths of the Pacific Ocean.Our toddler and infant were home with a babysitter, offering me a rare chance to write, peacefully, amid the stressors of my life. I had a clinical social-work internship then, counseling war-traumatized veterans, and had spent months single-mothering while my spouse was at sea. To my surprise, I was suddenly jolted from my daydreams by chanting men. Glancing out the window at the usually placid waterfront of our town, I caught sight of a group of surprisingly large white men wearing animal skin loincloths, vests, and horned hats. They were also holding torches and -- I kid you not -- spears. They were loudly chanting, Poulsbo! Poulsbo! Poulsbo! And that was when I suddenly remembered that this was our annual Viking Fest in which groups of Washington residents from near and far celebrated the town s Norwegian founders. Read more Tomgram: Rajan Menon, The Nightmare That Joe Could Inherit Posted by Rajan Menon at 4:06PM, October 25, 2020.Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch. Okay, I admit it, I ve been worried -- and no surprise there. In this world from hell, it s not hard to worry about untold numbers of things going wrong. Let me, however, lay out my own large-scale version of worry about this America of ours. What if Joe Biden does win? The world -- at least the world I know and read and watch and talk to -- has one giant anxiety then: that Donald Trump will declare the election a fake, refuse to leave office, send the lawyers into the courts, the troops or the dreaded feds into the streets, and call out all those armed Trumpsters for support. You more or less know the scenario(s) yourself, I m sure, and whether the U.S. military then would or would not decide to literally remove the president from office, it would indeed be a nightmare.Still, something else has long been on my mind: not what Donald Trump could try to stop from happening, but what he could actually do between November 3rd and January 20, 2021. This is, after all, the head of an administration that has tried to roll back nearly 100 environmental regulations, turning this country into a potential hell on earth. His people, now undoubtedly fearing defeat, are already moving fast to make sure that the U.S. will, in the worst sense imaginable, remain Donald Trump s land until that hell freezes over.My worry: what, in those months, could The Donald do to ensure that, when Joe Biden sits at that desk in the Oval Office for the first time, he finds himself waist deep in you-know-what (including potentially a future Great Depression) that he and his crew might never be able to shovel themselves out of? With that in mind, I asked TomDispatch regular Rajan Menon to consider just what shape we might find ourselves in economically in the Biden moment (if it ever arrives). So get your shovel ready and dig in. TomSo Trump LosesWhat Happens Then?By Rajan MenonDonald Trump isn t just inside the heads of his Trumpster base; he s long been a consuming obsession among those yearning for his defeat in November. With barely more than a week to go before the election of our lifetime, those given to nail biting as a response to anxiety have by now gnawed ourselves down to the quick. And many have found other ways to manage (or mismanage) their apprehensions through compulsive rituals, which only ratchet up the angst of the moment, among them nonstop poll tracking, endless what if doomsday-scenario conversations with friends, and repeated refrigerator raids.As one of those doomsday types, let me briefly suggest a few of the commonplace dystopian possibilities for November. Trump gets the majority of the votes cast in person on November 3rd. A Pew Research Center survey found that 60% of those supporting the president intend to vote that way on Election Day compared to 23% of Biden supporters; and a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll likewise revealed a sizable difference between Republicans and Democrats, though not as large. He does, however, lose handily after all mail-in and absentee ballots are counted. Once every ballot is finally tabulated, Biden prevails in the popular vote and ekes out a win in the Electoral College. The president, however, having convinced his faithful that voting by mail will result in industrial-scale fraud (unless he wins, of course), proclaims that he -- and the American people -- have been robbed by the establishment. On cue, outraged Trumpsters, some of them armed, take to the streets. Chaos, even violence, ensues. The president s army of lawyers frenetically file court briefs contesting the election results and feverishly await a future Supreme Court decision, Mitch McConnell having helpfully rammed through Amy Coney Barrett s nomination to produce a 6-3 conservative majority (including three Trump-appointed Supremes) that will likely favor him in any disputed election case. Read more Tomgram: Ariel Dorfman, Trump's Divine Fate Posted by Ariel Dorfman at 7:44AM, October 22, 2020.Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch. In case you hadn t noticed, they wear masks in hell. I didn t know that myself until this year. On the best evidence around, however, like most Americans, I m now in a circle of hell. I feel it particularly when I m out on streets that are starting to chill down, not heat up, as winter arrives (however slowly) and a pandemic spike in Covid-19 cases heads our way, as hospitals fill, panic grows, and the president from... well, hell... assures us that, by hook or crook (crook being perhaps the operative word here), in 2021 he plans to oversee the greatest economic comeback in history. And mind you, I m thinking about this nightmare while out walking New York City s streets half-blind as my glasses, just above that mask of mine, fog up with my own breath. I have no doubt that it s the fog of hell as, at my advanced age, my friends are increasingly isolated and alone in a city, a country, a world under siege.And bad as it might have been, it didn t truly have to be this way, not if we had a president who cared for any of us even faintly, even microcosmically like the way he cares for himself. That s why it gives me special pleasure today to post a piece by that wonderful Chilean writer, whose work I first began editing and publishing in book form back in the 1980s, my old friend (and TomDispatch regular) Ariel Dorfman. I read my first Dorfman piece in 1969 in another life entirely when I was still a printer at the New England Free Press. It was a critique of Walt Disney he had co-authored, years ahead of its time, called How to Read Donald Duck and I ve never forgotten it. Today, he does what so many of us, myself included, would love to do. He ushers our president, Donald Trump, through the gates of Hell. Join him for a moment, even if your glasses fog over. TomSending Trump to HellDante Alighieri Has Words for Donald J. Trump From the Other Side of DeathBy Ariel DorfmanFor some time now, I ve wanted to send Donald Trump to Hell. I mean this literally, not as a figure of speech. I want him to inhabit the palpable, sensory Hell that religions have long conjured up with scenes of sulfur, damnation, and screams of perpetual pain from those who once caused grievous harm to their fellow humans.The more Trump has abused his power and position in this world and the more he s escaped any retribution for his crimes, the more obsessed I ve become with visualizing ways for him to pay in some version of the afterlife.As I mulled over the treatment he deserved for the havoc he continues to wreak on the lives of countless others here in the United States and across the globe, I turned almost automatically to the work of Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet whose Divina Commedia minutely recreated in a verse called terza rima what awaited the readers of his time once they died. Dante (1265-1321) laid out his otherworldly landscape in three volumes -- Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso -- that have rightly been considered among the towering and influential literary achievements of humanity. Read more Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Campaigning on Planet A Posted by Rebecca Gordon at 7:41AM, October 20, 2020.Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch. Since I came of age (long ago in another century), I ve never missed voting in a presidential election. And I guarantee you one thing -- barring a health disaster -- I won t miss this one either. I m not in need of one of the movingly committed people TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon writes about today who are going door to door in Nevada to get out the vote in an election that could quite literally be the difference between life and death, between a White House (mis)managed in such an authoritarian fashion, so corruptly, so blindly, so grotesquely that it guarantees a future hell on Earth and one that at least gives us a chance to begin to imagine and press for another, better world. In fact, I expect to vote in person, masked, well distanced, and early in a city (New York) and state that isn t even in question this grim election year. No wonder Donald Trump said a bitter goodbye to my hometown and moved to Florida (with, unfortunately, an ever more dismal stop at the White House on his way down there).But everywhere in this country, let s hope that the urge to vote, to act as if this were still a genuine democracy (and not simply a democracy of the billionaires) worth saving, is as powerful as it is in the world Gordon has been inhabiting these last weeks. It matters beyond words. TomGuns, Germs, and SmokeUNITE-HERE! Canvassers Take on Trump in NevadaBy Rebecca Gordon Look, folks, the air quality is in the red zone today. The EPA says that means people with lung or heart issues should avoid prolonged activity outdoors. That was J.R. de Vera, one of two directors of UNITE-HERE! s independent expenditure campaign to elect Biden and Harris in Reno, Nevada. UNITE-HERE! is a union representing 300,000 workers in the hospitality industry -- that world of hotels and bars, restaurants and caterers. Ninety percent of its members are now laid off because of Trump s bungling of the Covid-19 pandemic and many are glad for the chance to help get him out of the White House. So some of you will want to stay in your hotel rooms and make phone calls today, JR continues. Fifty faces fall in the 50 little Zoom boxes on my laptop screen. Canvassers would much rather be talking to voters at their doors than calling them on a phone bank. Still, here in the burning, smoking West, the union is as committed to its own people s health and safety as it is to dragging Donald Trump out of office. So, for many of them, phone calls it will be. Read more Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Dominance in the Name of Internationalism Posted by Andrew Bacevich at 3:55PM, October 18, 2020.Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch. I was never in the military myself, but I did spend time at a U.S. military base and I have to admit that it remains a treasured experience among my memories. Sometime in the 1950s, my father ran a gas station on Governors Island in New York Harbor. Now largely a public park, it was then an Army base with two forts on it, both built by the early nineteenth century. To tell you the truth, though, what I remember was a really large swimming pool and a movie theater where, for maybe a dime, I could see Buck Rogers serials and cowboy or war films to my heart s content. Troops drilled on the island. Jeeps drove by. There was even a golf course (known as the world s crookedest ). Growing up on Manhattan Island, my Saturday ferry trips there with my dad were my thrilling introduction to the suburbs, military-style.Here s the thing, though. I never could have imagined then that such American bases -- approximately 800 significant ones (and many smaller outposts of various sorts) -- would by the twenty-first century be scattered in at least 80 countries and on every continent but Antarctica. As scholar Chalmers Johnson dubbed it back in 2004, this is America s empire of bases, its Baseworld. Though not all of those bases have the amenities of Governors Island in the early 1950s and some, from Afghanistan to Kenya, are now embattled parts of America s forever wars, here s the strange thing: except at places like TomDispatch, they are normally neither acknowledged nor discussed here in any significant way. Over the years, millions of American troops and contractors have passed through them. Wars have been launched from them. And yet they are not debated in Congress or investigated by the media. They are simply a given, the no-need-to-notice bedrock of a highly militarized imperial power now visibly in trouble in a pandemicized world that, in my childhood, no one could have imagined.TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich is one of the rare and memorable figures who, in his military life, spent time on embattled versions of just such bases in American war zones and came home to tell the tale. In his books, from The New American Militarism to The Age of Illusions, How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory, he has repeatedly focused on the curious militarization of this country and its global policies and what that meant. Today, in the midst of an America that would have been inconceivable in the 1950s, while recommending a new book by a colleague, he wonders again why not just those bases but so many aspects of American policy abroad remain ill-considered and undiscussed even in the midst of the most embattled presidential campaign of our lifetimes. TomReframing America s Role in the WorldThe Specter of IsolationismBy Andrew BacevichThe so-called Age of Trump is also an age of instantly forgotten bestselling books, especially ones purporting to provide the inside scoop on what goes on within Donald Trump s haphazard and continuously shifting orbit. With metronomic regularity, such gossipy volumes appear, make a splash, and almost as quickly vanish, leaving a mark no more lasting than a trout breaking the surface in a pond.Remember when Michael Wolff s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was all the rage? It s now available in hardcover for $0.99 from online used booksellers. James Comey s Higher Loyalty also sells for a penny less than a buck.An additional forty-six cents will get you Omarosa Manigault Newman s insider s account of her short-lived tenure in that very White House. For the same price, you can acquire Sean Spicer s memoir as Trump s press secretary, Anthony Scaramucci s rendering of his tumultuous 11-day stint as White House communications director, and Corey Lewandowski s inside story of the 2016 presidential campaign. Read more You'll receive 3 to 5 mailings per week and we'll never sell or share your email address. The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War IIWorld War II marked the apogee of industrialized total war. Great powers savaged one another. Hostilities engulfed the globe. Mobilization extended to virtually every sector of every nation. Air war, including the terror bombing of civilians, emerged as a central strategy of the victorious Anglo-American powers. The devastation was catastrophic almost everywhere, with the notable exception of the United States, which exited the strife unscathed and unmatched in power and influence. The death toll of fighting forces plus civilians worldwide was staggering.The Violent American Century addresses the U.S.-led transformations in war conduct and strategizing that followed 1945 beginning with brutal localized hostilities, proxy wars, and the nuclear terror of the Cold War, and ending with the asymmetrical conflicts of the present day. The military playbook now meshes brute force with a focus on non-state terrorism, counterinsurgency, clandestine operations, a vast web of overseas American military bases, and most touted of all a revolutionary new era of computerized precision warfare. In contrast to World War II, postwar death and destruction has been comparatively small. By any other measure, it has been appalling and shows no sign of abating. Overview SplinterlandsJulian West, looking backwards from 2050, tries to understand why the world and his family have fallen apart.Part Field Notes from a Catastrophe, part 1984, part World War Z, John Feffer's striking new dystopian novel, takes us deep into the battered, shattered world of 2050. The European Union has broken apart. Multiethnic great powers like Russia and China have shriveled. America's global military footprint has virtually disappeared and the United States remains united in name only. Nationalism has proven the century's most enduring force as ever-rising global temperatures have supercharged each-against-all competition and conflict among the now 300-plus members of an increasingly feeble United Nations.As he navigates the world of 2050, Julian West offers a roadmap for the path we're already on, a chronicle of impending disaster, and a faint light of hope. He may be humanity's last best chance to explain how the world unraveled if he can survive the savage beauty of the Splinterlands. Overview Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa You won't see segments about it on the nightly news or read about it on the front page of America s newspapers, but the Pentagon is fighting a new shadow war in Africa, helping to destabilize whole countries and preparing the ground for future blowback. Behind closed doors, U.S. officers now claim that "Africa is the battlefield of tomorrow, today." In Tomorrow's Battlefield, award-winning journalist and bestselling author Nick Turse exposes the shocking true story of the U.S. military s spreading secret wars in Africa. Overview Buy now Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single Superpower World In 1964, a book entitled The Invisible Government shocked Americans with its revelations of a growing world of intelligence agencies playing fast and loose around the planet, a secret government lodged inside the one they knew that even the president didn't fully control. Almost half a century later, everything about that "invisible government" has grown vastly larger, more disturbing, and far more visible. Overview They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars: The Untold Story At 73, having spent years focusing on the civilian toll from Washington s Afghan War, Ann Jones embedded on an American forward operating base to experience what that war was like for the U.S. troops in the field. The next year, she began following grievously wounded American soldiers from the moment they came off the battlefield all the way back home. Her journey proved to be nothing short of an odyssey. Despite all the talk in this country about our wounded warriors, no other book gives us a more powerful sense of the genuine cost of war to Americans. Overview

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