Author: Tom Engelhardt

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

From the dawn of recorded history, humans have been making war and rape has been part of it.

In ancient Greece, the rape of a woman was considered a property crime; that is, a crime against her father, husband, or master. But in war, rape was read more

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

These days in Washington, it’s competition with and hostility to China all the way to the bank. The political class in Congress and the Biden White House, as read more

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

“A United States Coast Guard cutter fired 30 warning shots after 13 Iranian fast patrol boats menaced a group of American Navy ships sailing in the Strait of Hormuz, the Pentagon said on Monday…” — so began a minor read more

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

The pandemic should remind us that we increasingly live in two ever-less-equal worlds. Think of them as Planet A and Planet B. Right now, the one you read more

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

In this pandemic world of ours, there’s a pattern that couldn’t be grimmer. Odd that more isn’t made of it. The three true Covid-19 disaster zones on Planet Earth — the United States (583,000 dead, 32,000,000 confirmed cases), Brazil read more

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

Strange, isn’t it? Our secretary of state emphatically claims that China has been acting “more aggressively abroad” and behaving “increasingly in adversarial ways.” No, he read more

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

Here’s the strange thing: almost 20 years into a series of chaotic, staggeringly expensive, failing wars across significant parts of the planet, the U.S. military — “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known” (George W. Bush), aka read more

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

Shouldn’t we be amazed? After all, for almost 20 years, the U.S. military has been supporting, equipping, training, and building up the Afghan military to the tune of more than $70 billion. The result: read more

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

It seemed obvious enough to me in 2006. When you included the CIA’s “black sites” around the globe (where prisoners from the war on terror were being kept and regularly tortured), American military prisons like read more

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

American-Style War ’til the End of Time? A Lifetime “at War” By Tom Engelhardt

Here’s the strange thing in an ever-stranger world: I was born in July 1944 in the midst of a devastating world war. That war ended in August 1945 with the atomic obliteration of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by the most devastating bombs in history up to that moment, given the sweet code names “Little Boy” and “Fat Man.”

I was the littlest of boys at read more