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, 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 |
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Views Thursday, March 01, 2018 The Ultimate Blowback Universe You want to see “blowback” in action? That's easy enough. All you need is a vague sense of how Google Search works. Then type into it phrases like “ warmest years ,” “ rising sea levels ,” “ melting ice ,” “ lengthening wildfire season ,” or “ future climate refugees ,” and you’ll find yourself... Read more |
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Views Friday, February 16, 2018 And the Winners (in America’s Wars) Are… When it comes to America’s wars, more than 16 years later our generals are victorious. Not, of course, in the distant lands where those conflicts grind on unendingly, but in the one place that matters: Washington, D.C. Could there be a more striking sign of that than the elevation of three of those... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, February 13, 2018 Whistling Past the Graveyard (of Empires) If you’re in the mood, would you consider taking a walk with me and, while we’re at it, thinking a little about America’s wars? Nothing particularly ambitious, mind you, just — if you’re up for it — a stroll to the corner. Now, admittedly, there’s a small catch here. Where exactly is that corner? I... Read more |