Author: Tom Engelhardt

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

War, What Is It Good For? Remarkably Little If You’re a “Great” Power on Planet Earth in the Twenty-First Century By Tom Engelhardt

I was born on July 20, 1944, amid a vast global conflict already known as World War II.  Though it ended with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 before I could say much more than “Mama” or “Dada,” in some strange fashion, I grew up at war.

Living in New York City, I was near no conflict in those years or in any since. My dad, however, had volunteered read more

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Today’s remarkable tax-time look at what TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon calls “the non-profit industrial complex” reminded me of just how lucky I’ve been running this website all these years. As a start, I’ve had you, the readers of TomDispatch, read more

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No wonder I’m wearing a short-sleeved shirt and shorts today! After all, it’s exceedingly warm this July, with temperatures only recently hitting a startling 90 in New York City where I live.

Whoops! What was I thinking? I meant this April, as record spring heat read more

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In our present social media world, who even remembers that the Internet’s first “mothership,” as Ben Tarnoff put it at the Guardian years ago, was the U.S. military, read more

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In some ways, it’s still hard to take in. In 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush and crew invaded Afghanistan, the very country in which the Soviet Union’s military had read more

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In 2002, TomDispatch was launched as a no-name email list for one reason and one alone: the unnerving decision of President George W. Bush to respond to the disastrous terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by invading Afghanistan. ( read more

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Despite fears of the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war — recently, Vladimir Putin ominously announced a plan to store some of Russia’s in neighboring Belarus — we are not (yet!) in a nuclear moment. In any case, the generation of young Americans growing up today seems far more focused on a different world-ending scenario: climate change.

Still, read more

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I’m proud to have lived through the last 20-odd years at TomDispatch with Noam Chomsky, now a remarkable 94. In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, I stumbled into creating this site and, in October 2003, first posted a piece of read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

The scientists of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued their first report in 1990. Only recently, they put out their sixth and latest assessment, a “final warning” on the read more

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It’s the military from hell — and, no, I don’t mean the Russian army, though, it certainly qualifies. Few now doubt that Vladimir Putin is a war criminal (and not just because read more