( Tomdispatch.com ) – Allow me to come clean: I worry every time Max Boot vents enthusiastically about a prospective military action. Whenever that Washington Post columnist professes optimism about some upcoming bloodletting, misfortune tends to follow. And as it happens, he’s positively bullish about the prospect of Ukraine handing Russia a decisive defeat in […]
On Missing Dr. Strangelove: Or how Americans learned to Stop Worrying and forgot the Bomb
( Tomdispatch.com) – Bosley Crowther, chief film critic for the New York Times, didn’t quite know what to make of Dr. Strangelove at the time of its release in January 1964. Stanley Kubrick’s dark antiwar satire was “beyond any question the most shattering sick joke I’ve ever come across,” he wrote. But if the film […]
Annals of American Folly: Was Civilization Really at Stake in Iraq? Is it in Ukraine?
( Tomdispatch.com ) – “To defend civilization, defeat Russia.” Writing in the unfailingly bellicose Atlantic, an American academic of my acquaintance recently issued that dramatic call to arms. And lest there be any confusion about the stakes involved, the image accompanying his essay depicted Russian President Vladimir Putin with a Hitler mustache and haircut. Cast […]
Deaf to History’s Questions: A Tale of Two Elizabeths, One Joe, One Donald, and Us
( Tomdispatch.com ) – Britons mourned the recent passing of Queen Elizabeth II, and understandably so. The outpouring of affection for their long-serving monarch was more than commendable, it was touching. Yet count me among those mystified that so many Americans also professed to care. With all due respect to Queen Latifah, we decided way […]
US Smug about Russia’s Failures in Ukraine, Forgetting the Iraq and Afghanistan Quagmires
(Tomdispatch.com) – In Washington, wide agreement exists that the Russian army’s performance in the Kremlin’s ongoing Ukraine “special military operation” ranks somewhere between lousy and truly abysmal. The question is: Why? The answer in American policy circles, both civilian and military, appears all but self-evident. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has stubbornly insisted on ignoring the principles, […]
Imperial Detritus: Henry Luce’s “American Century” Comes Undone
( Tomdispatch.com ) – “The American Century Is Over.” So claims the July 2022 cover of Harper’s Magazine, adding an all-too-pertinent question: “What’s Next?” What, indeed? Eighty years after the United States embarked upon the Great Crusade of World War II, a generation after it laid claim to the status of sole superpower following the […]
Let’s avoid the Other F-Word: If it is Democracies versus Fascism, We’re Stuck in Forever Wars
( Tomdispatch.com ) – Timothy Snyder, Levin Professor of History at Yale University, is a scholar of surpassing brilliance. His 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin chronicles in harrowing detail the de facto collaboration of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union that resulted in the murder of millions of innocents. On any […]
Don’t Let War Hawks use Putin to Shift our Gaze from Our Huge Social Problems, from Racism to Climate
( Tomdispatch.com ) – I recently participated in a commemoration of Martin Luther King’s address “Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence,” originally delivered on April 2, 1967, at New York City’s Riverside Church. King used the occasion to announce his opposition to the ongoing war in Vietnam. Although a long time coming in […]
What advice would JFK have for President Biden about Putin and Ukraine?
( Tomdispatch.com ) – Dear Mr. President: I send greetings from the other side — and no, I don’t mean the other side of the aisle. I refer to the place where old politicians go to make amends for their sins. Apart from our shared Catholicism and affinity for sunglasses, I suspect you and I […]
© 2023 All Rights Reserved