Author: Tom Engelhardt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The single scariest night of my life may have been on October 22, 1962, when I thought that all the duck-and-cover read more

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

On an unnaturally hot late June day in the Northeast, my eight-year-old grandson was walking back to a broiling car to continue a long trip. It was in the mid-nineties and he and his three-year-old sister were complaining about how miserable they were when, out of nowhere, he said, “This is why climate change is important!”

Startled, his mother agreed, and then he suddenly read more