Best of TomDispatch: Engelhardt, The Biggest Criminal Enterprise in History

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Terracide and the Terrarists
Destroying the Planet for Record Profit
By Tom Engelhardt

We have a word for the conscious slaughter of a racial or ethnic group: genocide. And one for the conscious destruction of aspects of the environment: ecocide. But we don’t have a word for the conscious act of destroying the planet we live on, the world as humanity had known it until, historically read more

Unique New U.S. Genre Emerges: The War-Is-Good-for-You Book

The New York Times loves the latest war-is-good-for-you book, War: How Conflict Shaped Us by Margaret MacMillan. The book fits into the growing and exclusively U.S. genre that includes Ian Morris’s War: What Is It Good For? Conflict and Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots (Morris came to the U.S. from the U.K. decades ago) and Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military.

According to Morris, the only way to make read more

Blockading Cuba Serves No Purpose Beyond Sadism


Me in Cuba on trip with Code Pink in 2015.

Here’s a preview of a new, 3-part mini-series:

I’ve seen the first part. It’s only 12 minutes. The series was made in Cuban by Cubans and non-Cubans working together, and executive producers are Oliver Stone and Danny Glover. It’ll be on Youtube on Friday, October 9th on the Belly of the Beast channel. The series has the unfortunate title “The War on Cuba.”

Share it on Facebook and Twitter.

Of course, what the U.S. government does to Cuba is read more

Top U.S. Enemy Was Its Ally, the U.S.S.R.

U.S. poster from 1953.

Excerpted from Leaving World War II Behind

Hitler was clearly preparing for war long before he started it. Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland, annexed Austria, and threatened Czechoslovakia. High-ranking officials in the German military and “intelligence” plotted a coup. But Hitler gained popularity with every step he took, and the lack of any sort of opposition from Britain or France surprised and demoralized the coup plotters. The British government was aware of the read more

What Waging War Is Really Like

The vast majority of people who experience war directly, first-hand, rather than through Hollywood movies or politicians’ speeches, are the people who live where wars are waged. In wars involving distant wealthy nations on one-side, some 95% of those killed or injured or traumatized, and 100% of those bombed out of their homes are people against whom war is waged, most of them civilians and the rest of them people doing exactly what any Hollywood movie or politician would tell them — have read more

The Long History of the Nazi Salute and the USA


Photo by Jack Gilroy, Great Bend, Penn., September 28, 2020.

If you do a web search for images of “Nazi salute” you find old photos from Germany and recent photos from the United States. But if you search for images of “Bellamy salute” you find countless black-and-white photographs of U.S. children and adults with their right arms raised stiffly out in front of them in what will strike most people as a Nazi salute. From the early 1890s through 1942 the United States used the Bellamy salute read more

Prediction: Biden is Going to Win the Nov. 3 Election

By Dave Lindorff

Fishs Eddy – I’m going to make a bold prediction based (admittedly on a small sampling):  Trump has lost the support of his non-college educated white base — or at least enough of it that he’s toast in a blue-collar working-class and rural state like Pennsylvania and probably Michigan and Ohio too.

I’ll admit that I haven’t been to those latter two states in ages, but there’s not much difference between a city like Flint, Michigan read more