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      Amnesia and the 'Bleeding Wound': Afghanistan and the Implosion of America

      Amnesia and the 'Bleeding Wound': Afghanistan and the Implosion of America

      If you were against the single most disastrous, megalomanic foreign policy act of this century, there’s no place for you in present-day Washington, not in the administration, either party in Congress, or even in memory

      Tom Engelhardt
      Jan 23, 2019

      As I approach 75, I'm having a commonplace experience for my age. I live with a brain that's beginning to dump previously secure memories--names, the contents of books I read long ago (or all too recently), events, whatever. If you're of a certain age yourself, you know the story.

      Recently, however, I realized that this experience of loss, like so much else in our world, is more complex than I imagined. What I mean is that such loss also involves gain. It's turned my mind to, and made me something of an instant expert on, one aspect of twenty-first-century America: the memory hole that's swallowed up parts of our all-too-recent history. In fact, I've been wondering whether aging imperial powers, like old men and women, have a tendency to discard what once had been oh-so-familiar. There's a difference, though, when it comes to the elites of the aging empire I live in at least. They don't just dump things relatively randomly as I seem to be doing. Instead, they conveniently obliterate all memory of their country's--that is, their own--follies and misdeeds.

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      Opinion
      William Blum, US Policy Critic Derided by NYT, Dies at 85

      William Blum, US Policy Critic Derided by NYT, Dies at 85

      You know you’ve lived well—well enough to rattle the establishment—when the New York Times smears you in the obituary it runs about you

      Jim Naureckas
      Dec 16, 2018

      You know you've lived well--well enough to rattle the establishment--when the New York Times smears you in the obituary it runs about you (FAIR.org, 6/20/13).

      NYT: William Blum, U.S. Policy Critic Cited by bin Laden, Dies at 85

      That distinction was achieved by William Blum, historian and critic of US foreign policy. Once a State Department computer programmer who aspired to "take part in the great anti-Communist crusade," he quit government in 1967 out of disgust with the Vietnam War and became a founding editor of the Washington Free Press, one of the first alternative papers of the New Left. In books like The CIA: A Forgotten History (re-released as Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II) and Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Blum documented the violent and anti-democratic record of the US empire; he was a reference that FAIR frequently turned to when noting what was missing from the corporate media's version of history.

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      Opinion
      Trump's Trade Czar, The Latest Architect of Imperial Disaster

      Trump's Trade Czar, The Latest Architect of Imperial Disaster

      Five Academics Who Unleashed the “Demon” of Geopolitical Power

      Alfred W. Mccoy
      Dec 02, 2018

      As Washington's leadership fades more quickly than anyone could have imagined and a new global order struggles to take shape, a generation of leaders has crowded onto the world stage with their own bold geopolitical visions for winning international influence. Xi Xinping has launched his trillion-dollar "Belt and Road Initiative" to dominate Eurasia and thereby the world beyond. To recover the Soviet Union's lost influence, Vladimir Putin seeks to shatter the Western alliance with cyberwar, while threatening to dominate a nationalizing, fragmenting Eastern Europe through raw military power. The Trump White House, in turn, is wielding tariffs as weapons to try to beat recalcitrant allies back into line and cripple the planet's rising power, China. However bizarrely different these approaches may seem, they all share one strikingly similar feature: a reliance on the concept of "geopolitics" to guide their bids for global power.

      Over the past century, countless scholars, columnists, and commentators have employed the term "geopolitics" (or the study of global control) to lend gravitas to their arguments. Few, though, have grasped the true significance of this elusive concept. However else the term might be used, geopolitics is essentially a methodology for the management (or mismanagement) of empire. Unlike conventional nations whose peoples are, in normal times, readily and efficiently mobilized for self-defense, empires, thanks to their global reach, are a surprisingly fragile form of government. They seem to yearn for strategic visionaries who can merge land, peoples, and resources into a sustainable global system.

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      Opinion
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