Author: Tom Engelhardt

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

Here’s something strange about our all-too-nuclearized planet: in my youth during the 1950s and early 1960s, the possibility of an obliterating nuclear war played a significant role in our everyday nightmares. We schoolkids then regularly engaged in “ read more

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

What a criminal enterprise our country truly is. And I do mean enterprise. After all, according to the latest figures, there are… honestly, you’re not going to believe this… but, according to PrisonPolicy.org, read more

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In September 2007, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore emailed me out of the blue. He’d been reading TomDispatch articles on this country’s Global War on Terror, especially the invasion of, and never-ending conflict in, Iraq. And as a former military man, something struck him: the staggering rows of medals and ribbons our military read more

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Yes, I know, I know. There are all-too-modern ways to keep your friends’ addresses, phone numbers, and emails, but this old guy still uses an address book. Unfortunately, the pages of the one I’d kept for endless years finally grew so worn, so tattered, that I bought a new one and, name by name, copied my contacts, my friends, my family from one to the other.

That, however, read more

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It’s strange to try to come to grips with this increasing wreck of a planet. When you’re my age, you have to wonder about the future. That’s especially true in a world where the two top greenhouse gas emitters, the historically most massive one (the United States) and the present leader read more

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At an earlier moment in history when anti-immigrant and racist feelings were soaring, a silent film, The Birth of a Nation, helped revive the Ku Klux Klan. That movie had been adapted from a novel with the ominous read more

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I began writing this introduction on a record-breaking September day in New York City. It was 93 degrees (and humid as hell). Until then, my hometown had largely missed the worst read more

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Just what we don’t need, right? On a planet increasingly frying — just consider this summer’s megafires that read more

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A Global Maui Moment Ready, Aim, Fire! By Tom Engelhardt

From the earliest kingdoms to late last night, history has been the story not just of the rise of great powers but of their decline and fall. So, normally, there would be nothing particularly out of the ordinary about the aging America of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, a classic imperial power distinctly in decline and threatening to split into pieces.

As it happens, though, there’s read more

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

On September 11th, 22 years later, what are we to make of it all? Who even remembers that, as the Pentagon burned, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld picked up a read more