Author: Tom Engelhardt

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My parents certainly had college dreams for me. After all, they wanted me to move up in life, big time. Where exactly “up” was seemed less than clear to me then. But after a great fight — I wanted to go to Cornell (girls!) — I lost and, in 1962, ended up just where they wanted me to be, at Yale. Even in those days, it cost a significant pile of dough to go there, a read more

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My Extreme World
And (Un)Welcome to It

By Tom Engelhardt

Admittedly, I hadn’t been there for 46 years, but old friends of mine still live (or at least lived) in the town of Greenville, California, and now… well, it’s more or less gone, though they survived.  The Dixie Fire, one of those devastating West Coast blazes, had already “blackened” 504 square miles of Northern California in read more

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Only recently, almost four decades after his death, I discovered that my father still liked to have some of his friends call him “major.” That was his ultimate rank in what was then known as the U.S. Army Air Corps, not the U.S. Air Force, for which he volunteered within days of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. (He would, symbolically enough, die on Pearl Harbor Day read more

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Here’s my question of the week: When it comes to America’s twenty-first-century wars, does the word “end” have any meaning at all? Almost 20 years after George W. Bush and crew invaded Afghanistan, the war there is officially “ending” (as the Taliban takes read more

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In what seems like another life, I used to interview American veterans of the Vietnam War. Over the course of a decade, I spoke with hundreds of them, mostly about one topic: war crimes. Some were unrepentant. An interrogator who had tortured prisoners, for instance, told me that such actions — beatings, waterboarding, electric shock — were standard operating procedure read more

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Seven years after the Soviet Union collapsed in a heap of post-Afghan-War rubble and seven years after President George H.W. Bush fought the First Gulf War against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to what looked like typical all-American success, we were on a planet that seemed unimaginably all-American. That February of 1998, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was read more

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The Forbidden Word Is This Country Heading for the Exit? By Tom Engelhardt

It was all so long ago, in a world seemingly without challengers. Do you even remember when we Americans lived on a planet with a recumbent Russia, a barely rising China, and no obvious foes except what later came to be known as an “ read more

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In my younger years, I had significant experience with futuristic worlds, sometimes of the grimmest sort. After all, I went to the moon with Jules Verne; saw London being destroyed with read more

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Give Joe Biden credit. As a 78-year-old mainstream politician, he’s made some surprisingly bold moves domestically when it comes, for instance, to read more

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Almost 20 years after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, as the Taliban takes district after district, withdrawing American troops are discarding vast piles of junk on bases they are read more