Tom Engelhardt

Walk through any art museum and you’re likely to see a mix of the classical and contemporary, impressionist and surrealist, refined and raw, beautiful, eerie, and provocative. Looking at art allows me at least a few moments of relief from the “that’s just the way it is” attitude of our hyper-consumerist, hyper-militarized, hyper-nihilist nation. I … Continue reading “The Art of the Submarine”

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Hey, electric cars? It’s obvious that they’ve come into their own now that Tesla’s Elon Musk has once again been granted his (no, this is not a misprint!) $44.9 billion pay package by that company’s shareholders after a Delaware judge all too unreasonably tossed it out last year. Admittedly, given court … Continue reading “Philosopher Kings or New-Age Militarists?”

Strange to think that, without Daniel Ellsberg, Watergate might never have happened, Richard Nixon might have remained president, and the war in Vietnam might have taken even longer to end. So many decades later, it’s easy to forget how, in June 1971, when Ellsberg released those secret government documents that came to be known as … Continue reading “How Daniel Ellsberg’s Moral Power Remains Alive”

Originally published at TomDispatch. It was truly another world. I’m thinking of my childhood years when to “duck and cover” under our school desks, imagining that those modest structures might somehow protect us from an atomic blast, was a normal part of life. And when you walked the streets of New York then, you couldn’t … Continue reading “Nuclear Armageddon Is Us”

Forget the dead for a moment and think about the living. We’re talking about a minuscule, 25-mile strip of land on which, before recent events began, an estimated 2.4 million people lived, went to school, worshiped, farmed, did whatever. When Israel responded to Hamas’s nightmarish October 7th attack by bombing northern Gaza into rubble and … Continue reading “Israel’s Onslaught of Revenge”

Originally appeared at TomDispatch. Yes, the number of deaths in Gaza in the last seven months is staggering. At least, 35,000 Gazans have reportedly perished, including significant numbers of children (and that’s without even counting the possibly 10,000 unidentified bodies still buried under the rubble that now litters that 25-mile-long stretch of land). But shocking … Continue reading “Constant Killing: The Pentagon’s .00035% Problem”

One, erratic and often unhinged, blew up the U.S.-Iran accord that was the landmark foreign policy achievement of President Obama’s second term. He then ordered the assassination of a top Iranian general visiting Iraq, dramatically raising tensions in the region. The other is a traditional advocate of American exceptionalism, a supporter of the U.S.-Iran agreement … Continue reading “Handling – and Mishandling – the Iran Nuclear Program”

Originally appeared at TomDispatch. I was born on July 20, 1944, barely a year before the world (potentially) ended. On August 6 and 9, 1945, the U.S., which had already been torching Japanese cities from the air, dropped the first atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The explosions were unlike anything humanity … Continue reading “There Is Only One Spaceship Earth”

Originally appeared at TomDispatch When you watch the latest TV news on Israel’s war in Gaza, it feels as if its military had invaded another country. So, it’s important to remind ourselves that the tens of thousands of weapons the Biden administration has been sending to Israel since October 7th, including most recently, as the … Continue reading “Dead on Arrival: Israel’s Blowback Genocide”

Guantánamo? Remind me, what’s that? Oh, wait, how could I have forgotten? It’s that all-American offshore prison of injustice, opened in January 2002, that became the holding area for this country’s prisoners in its “war on terror,” many of whom had been tortured at CIA “black sites” elsewhere on the planet. They had, in a … Continue reading “The Peril of Forgetting Guantánamo”