WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS #7

 

#7 WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS 

Two Books on US Empire: Burbach & Tarbell, and Immerwahr.

BURBACH & TARBELL, IMPERIAL OVERSTRETCH: George W. Bush and the Hubris of Empire.  ZED Books, 2004. 240 pages.

Publisher’s Description:

 Publisher’s Description:

Burbach and Tarbell argue that George W. Bush has fundamentally changed America's place in the world – for the worse. Hijacked by neoconservatives and the petro-military complex, the nation that once broke from an empire is swiftly becoming an empire itself. Fed by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; a never-ending fear of terrorism; mushrooming defense expenditures; and the slow but steady erosion of civil liberties on the home front, is this empire in danger of becoming too large to survive? What are the costs – in lives at home and abroad – of failure? Who is driving these policies? And – most important of all – can Americans change direction and restore America's reputation in the world as the shining "city on the hill"?

 

Roger Burbach is director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (CENSA) and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley. He released late last year "The Pinochet Affair: State Terrorism and Global Justice."

 

Daniel Immerwahr. How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019.  528.

Publisher’s description:

A pathbreaking history of the United States’ overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire

We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an “empire,” exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories—the islands, atolls, and archipelagos—this country has governed and inhabited?

In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century’s most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress.

In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of colonies. Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history.

TAKE ACTION
Give friends an informal questionnaire: What is an empire? Does the US have an empire? Has it been good or evil for the world?   Do the 2 major political Parties agree?  We have one War Party?

Victoria Nuland has been nominated for U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs.
Nuland played a key role in facilitating a coup in Ukraine that helped create a civil war costing 10,000 lives and displacing over a million people.
She advocates radically increased military spending, dubious NATO expansion, and dangerous belligerence toward Russia.
Click here to email your Senators to reject this nomination.   (from World beyond War   https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?hl=en&shva=1#inbox/FMfcgxwLsJrrwwBRMhnVgjpQZhmPwvjs )