Originally published Apr 19, 2003 Historical Revision Outflanked One of the noteworthy features of the very late 20th and very early 21st centuries is the way in which everything that was once an historical accusation has become a defense. Thus, if on the evidence,...
An Anti-Imperialist’s Reading List: Part Two
This timeless article first appeared on February 20, 2001. COLD WAR IMPERIALISM, OR LEADERSHIP OF THE FREE WORLD With the ritual bombing of Iraq taking on symbolic importance as the first foreign policy act of any incoming US administration, it is...
An Anti-Imperialist’s Reading List: Part One
This timeless article first appeared on January 30, 2001. GOING ALL PEDAGOGICAL I thought that this week I would sketch out a reading list for those wishing to pursue the themes dealt with in this column and at antiwar.com generally. Some of the works listed are...
Murray N. Rothbard on States, War, and Peace: Part II
This timeless article (see Part I) first appeared on June 20, 2000 I promised last week to go further into what the late Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) teaches us about foreign policy, peace, and war. Those who keep up with such things will have noticed that there exists...
Murray N. Rothbard on States, War, and Peace: Part I
This timeless article first appeared on June 12, 2000 The sheer amount of writing done by the late Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) continues to astound. The quality of his work accounts for the impact it has had, and the attention it now draws, but its volume cannot...
Inventing Iraq Yet Again?
THE SETTING Toby Dodge's Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied 1 (03) constitutes a very interesting guide to the British period in Iraq - or Mesopotamia, as it was then called. The period began, naturally enough, in World War I. Like...
Kantians With Cruise Missiles: The Highest Stage of ‘Liberal’ Imperialism
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...
The ‘Necessary’ Hegemon Revisited
Lately, we have been hearing quite a lot from our Cousins across the water. All eaten-up with post-imperial malaise and envy of US leaders' apparent good fortune, the Cousins are hard at work handing out friendly advice on how best to rule the world. They gave us a...
A Homeland So Secure We Wouldn’t Want To Live There
Whence comes the asserted power of the current President and his new Sicherheitsdienst to inspect, search, spindle, mutilate, etc., everything and everyone found within the generous bounds of their authority? Leave aside the claim of these people that US law prevails,...
Asymmetric Politics
In 1967, as the War in Vietnam dragged on and on, Carl Oglesby, then President of Students for a Democratic Society, commented on how the Right Wing saw that war. Most of the Right, he noted, "accepts the political description" of the war and, therefore, "wants it the...