Month: December 2003

December 27, 2003 Another Christmas in China Christmas in Chengdu has reached great proportions. Shopkeepers have seen the frenzy with which people shop during the holidays and they therefore adorn their storefronts with Christmas trees, snowflakes and white-lettered exhortations to enjoy and buy. I even saw a Chinese version of the nativity scene at a … Continue reading “Another Christmas in China”

While the Democratic candidates battle for the presidential nomination in the first half of next year, Republicans will face a difficult choice of their own. No, it will not be for the presidential nomination, which George W. Bush – adding daily to his unprecedented campaign war chest by hopscotching to various gold-plated fund-raisers – has … Continue reading “Whither Cheney?”

Objector.org I have a young man that went and joined the army last January when there was a big patriotism thing going on and he has yet to go. … Now he … has decided this war is not what it was supposed to be and wants out of his so-called contract. What we need … Continue reading “”

History, Ismael Reed once said, is the story of warfare between secret societies. I’m not ready to go that far, but I think it’s fair to say the history of U.S. foreign policy over the past forty years has been the story of the war between two not-so-secret societies: the neoconservatives and the realists. And … Continue reading “Twilight of the Neocons?”

Another year has gone by, bringing no relief to the embattled people of the former Yugoslavia. Same as before, it has been a year of direct and political violence, plunder and extortion, with the ever-present Empire occasionally flexing its muscles to remind the restive vassals it was still the boss. Shards of the former South … Continue reading “Quo Vadis?”

Back in my tadpole days, sometime in the Pleistocene, my fellows at Roehm Junior High (Frederick, not Ernst) enjoyed hanging the name of "Scrooge" around my neck. Whether or not they did so in response to my "Bah! Humbug" attitude toward Christmas ("Angels we have heard on high, telling us go out and buy"), I … Continue reading “Marley’s List For Santa”

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Orange is not exactly a Christmas color: more like Halloween, but then there is definitely a Halloween-ish quality to our chieftain of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, who raised the color-coded terror alert from an “elevated yellow" to “high” orange, and furthermore warned: “The information we have indicates that extremists abroad are anticipating near-term attacks that … Continue reading “A Fearful Christmas”

While most of the world is still trying to come to terms with the neo-imperial ambitions of the post-Sept. 11 Bush administration, U.S. political analysts, particularly those on the libertarian right and the left, have been trying to map out the various forces behind the administration’s hawks in order to better understand and counteract them. … Continue reading “What a Tangled Web the Neocons Weave”

I. IDEOLOGICAL POWER REVISITED I have alluded at times in this space to John A. Hall’s division of power into three types – ideological, political-military, and economic.(1) I have also suggested, over the past several years, that in our time, the first of the trinity, ideological power, has risen in importance. It is not that … Continue reading “Kantians With Cruise Missiles: The Highest Stage of ‘Liberal’ Imperialism”