Author: Tom Engelhardt

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In a June 2012 piece headlined “Praying at the Church of St. Drone,” I wrote, “Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief.” At that read more

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The old anti-Vietnam War song that began, “War, what Is It good for? Absolutely nothing!” couldn’t be more on the mark these days. Just imagine that you live on a planet where the truest “war” may be the one we’re waging against nature — and that nature is increasingly waging on us. That “war” could, in the end, simply broil us all.

This summer, the war in read more

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I only hope I’ll be around in 2123 for Henry Kissinger’s 200th birthday celebration. (I’d be a mere 179 then.) Still, at least I made it to his 100th. Imagine, in fact, that when I was in my twenties and in the streets protesting the war in Vietnam (Cambodia and Laos), he was already Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, a crucial figure overseeing a conflict that read more

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Hey, it’s not just the number of guns Americans continue to buy (about 20 million a year) in a country already armed to the teeth, but read more

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You can hardly turn on the TV news or go online these days without seeing… well, Donald Trump, of course, and his extreme version of American politics. Every indictment of him only seems to add read more

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Okay, if you want to grasp the new world we’re now in, imagine this. No, not a Phoenix that set a record of 31 straight days above 110 degrees Fahrenheit (with, it seems, more to come); read more

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It’s little short of remarkable when you think about it. Last March, Bezalel Smotrich, the minister of finance in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government (as well as the head of the extremist Religious Zionist Party), read more

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I can still remember my parents singing a somewhat cleaned-up version of the World War I-era song “You’re in the Army Now.” (“You’re in the Army now, You’re not behind a plow; You’ll never get rich, you son of a read more

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Me First America 19th, the Planet Last By Tom Engelhardt

Hey, who knows? It could be the Gulf Stream collapsing or the planet eternally breaking heat records. But whatever the specifics, we’re living it right now, not in read more

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For more than 18 years, Karen Greenberg has been writing about the crimes the U.S. committed at its offshore prison of injustice at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It would be, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld assured Americans, “the least worst place” (a phrase read more