Author: Tom Engelhardt

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Here’s the strange thing. It never crossed my mind — how could it have? — but in work terms I’ve been testing out a Covid-19 world for the last decade and a half. I ran TomDispatch in those years, full time, from a small office in my own apartment in relative isolation. Yes, I could take the subway to see friends, read more

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

Think about this: in the wake of the president’s bungled response to Covid-19 — even Oklahoma’s governor came down with it after attending read more

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“The Bleeding Wound”
Osama bin Laden Won (Twice)
By Tom Engelhardt

It’s July 2020 and I’m about to turn 76, which, as far as I’m concerned, officially makes me an old man. So put up with my aging, wandering brain here, since (I swear) I wasn’t going to start this piece with Donald J. Trump, no matter his latest wild claims or bizarre statements, increasingly white read more

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A century ago, on a less populated planet, a pandemic disease took out an estimated 50 million to 100 million people, 675,000 in the United States alone, leaving the casualties of World War I (some caused by that very virus) in read more

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Here’s one thing you can say about America’s “war on terror,” which has morphed into a set of forever wars across the Greater Middle East and Africa: those conflicts falter, they flop, they fade (only to resurge), but they never truly seem to end. In the case of the Afghan War, for instance, the Bush administration invaded that country in the wake of the 9/11 attacks read more

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Few remember anymore how a growing antiwar movement in the Vietnam era morphed into one significantly led by and filled with veterans who had fought in ‘Nam and soldiers still in the U.S. military but in distinct opposition to the American war there. In the last years of that grim conflict, I was working as a (very) young editor at Pacific News Service (PNS), an alternative read more

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It’s true that, since George Floyd died, the protests have never quite ended, but in all these weeks what’s generally been protested might be called the war at home. (After all, according to a recent New York Times report, Floyd was only one of 70 read more

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

It’s true that, since George Floyd died, the protests have never quite ended, but in all these weeks what’s generally been protested might be called the war at home. (After all, according to a recent New York Times report, Floyd was only one of 70 read more

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

Ever more often, as I face the latest news from this increasingly woebegone American world of ours, I imagine bringing my long-dead parents back to view it. After all, they knew bad times and good. They lived through the Great Depression as young adults, World War II (my father was in the U.S. Army Air Corps), and the 1950s and 1960s. Those were the decades of my youth when, read more

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

Since it began in 2002, TomDispatch has been following the twenty-first-century rise of the Pentagon and the rest of the U.S. national security state, amid distant wars that simply never seem to end. While much has, in this Covid-19 era of read more