Tom Engelhardt
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His sixth and latest book, just published, is A Nation Unmade by War (Dispatch Books).Previous books include: Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World (with an introduction by Glenn Greenwald). Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (co-authored with Nick Turse), The United States of Fear, The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's, The End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.
Articles by this author
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Views Thursday, August 16, 2018 The War Piece to End All War Pieces Fair warning. Stop reading right now if you want, because I’m going to repeat myself. What choice do I have, since my subject is the Afghan War (America’s second Afghan War, no less)? I began writing about that war in October 2001, almost 17 years ago, just after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan... Read more |
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Views Friday, July 27, 2018 Three Failing Experiments? Mine, America’s, and Humanity’s There was a period in my later life when I used to say that, from the age of 20 to my late sixties, I was always 40 years old; I was, that is, an old young man and a young old one. Tell that to my legs now. Of course, there’s nothing faintly strange in such a development. It’s the most ordinary... Read more |
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Views Monday, July 09, 2018 America’s Addictions: Opioids, Donald Trump, and War When you think of addiction in America today, one thing comes to mind: the opioid epidemic. And it should. It’s serious. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, almost 64,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses in 2016 ( more than died in the Vietnam War), an average of 175 people a... Read more |
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Views Thursday, June 14, 2018 A Twenty-First-Century History of Greed Think of it as the all-American version of the human comedy: a great power that eternally knows what the world needs and offers copious advice with a tone deafness that would be humorous, if it weren’t so grim. If you look, you can find examples of this just about anywhere. Here, for instance, is a... Read more |
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Views Thursday, May 31, 2018 Duck-and-Cover America: Advice to College Graduates in The Age of Trump Class of 2018, I’ve always been told that a joke’s a good way to launch any talk. It’s a matter of breaking the ice, though on your graduation day, with the temperature soaring into the upper eighties, that may not be the perfect image. Still, you know what I mean: an attempt to lighten the... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, May 15, 2018 A Staggeringly Well-Funded Blowback Machine Note from Tom: Today’s post is an excerpt from my newest book, A Nation Unmade by War , my personal portrait of our increasingly mad world. It’s just hitting the bookstores, so do support TomDispatch (and me) by picking up a copy. As I was putting the finishing touches on my new book, the Costs of... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, May 08, 2018 The Caliphate of Trump They are the extremists. If you need proof, look no further than the Afghan capital, Kabul, where the latest wave of suicide bombings has proven devastating. Recently, for instance, a fanatic set off his explosives among a group of citizens lining up outside a government office to register to vote... Read more |
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Views Monday, April 30, 2018 Swamping the Drain in Washington Recently, I visited New York’s Guggenheim Museum for a show of conceptual art by Danh Vo , whose family fled Vietnam as the American war there ended in 1975. He was four years old when he became a refugee and, through a series of flukes, found himself in Denmark, which has been his home ever since... Read more |
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Views Thursday, April 12, 2018 A Tale of American Hubris The lessons of history? Who needs them? Certainly not Washington's present cast of characters, a crew in flight from history, the past, or knowledge of more or less any sort. Still, just for the hell of it, let’s take a few moments to think about what some of the lessons of the last years of the... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, March 27, 2018 Donald Trump and the White Ford Bronco Presidency A record? Come on! Don’t minimize what’s happening. It’s far too unique, too unprecedented even to be classified as “historic.” Call it mega-historic, if you wish. Never from Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar to Soviet despot Joseph Stalin, from the Sun King Louis the XIV to President Ronald Reagan,... Read more |