( Tomdispatch.com) – 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 “duck and cover” drills, diving under our desks to protect ourselves from a possible nuclear […]
How War Divides Us: All the Ways our 21st Century Wars have Polarized Americans
( Tomdispatch.com ) – Blame Donald Trump and all too many of his followers, but don’t just blame him or them. Yes, he was indeed responsible for the nightmare of January 6, 2021, and, in his own fashion, for the incitement of right-wing militia (terror!) groups like the Proud Boys. (“Stand back and stand by!”) […]
Migration and the Shadow of War: How the Real Story of a Migrant Boat Disaster Escaped our Attention
( Tomdispatch.com ) – Seeking news coverage about the Adriana, the boat crowded with some 700 people migrating to Europe to seek a better life that sank in mid-June off the coast of Greece, I googled “migrant ship” and got 483,000 search results in one second. Most of the people aboard the Adriana had drowned […]
Americans in Pain: Confronting the Phantom Limbs of America’s Foreign Wars
( Tomdispatch.com ) – America’s War on Terror, launched in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has had a staggering impact on our world. The Costs of War Project at Brown University, which I helped found, paints as full a picture as possible of the toll […]
The Privatization of War, American-Style
( Tomdispatch.com ) – The way mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin and his private army have been waging a significant part of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has been well covered in the American media, not least of all because his firm, the Wagner Group, draws most of its men from Russia’s prison system. Wagner offers […]
America’s Callous disregard for its Veterans after the Wars are Over
( Tomdispatch.com) – Here’s something we seldom focus on when it comes to war, American-style, even during the just-passed 20th anniversary of our disastrous invasion of Iraq: many more soldiers survive armed conflict than die from it. This has been especially so during this country’s twenty-first-century War on Terror, which is still playing out in […]
Children of War: The War on Terror and the Battle for Young Minds
( Tomdispatch.com ) – During a Veterans Day celebration in my small Maryland community, a teacher clicked through a slideshow of smiling men and women in military uniforms. “Girls and boys, can anyone tell me what courage is?” she asked the crowd, mostly children from local elementary schools, including my two young kids. A boy […]
The Pentagon’s Hunger Games
( Tomdispatch.com ) – By any standard, the money the United States government pours into its military is simply overwhelming. Take the $858-billion defense spending authorization that President Biden signed into law last month. Not only did that bill pass in an otherwise riven Senate by a bipartisan majority of 83-11, but this year’s budget […]
How the Bush “War on Terror” Fed US White Nationalism and brought the Terror Home
( Tomdispatch.com ) – Recently, an agent of the Department of Homeland Security called me and started asking questions about a childhood acquaintance being investigated for extremism. I put him off. My feelings about this were, to say the least, complex. As a military spouse of 10 years and someone who has long written about […]
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