militarism 
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SOURCE: Public Books
4/16/2021
Choosing Empire: America Before And After World War II
Historian Samuel Zipp reviews two new books by Nancy Cott and Stephen Wertheim that examine how the United States came to embrace, and perhaps become stuck with, a role as the world's policeman.
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SOURCE: TomDispatch
4/13/2021
Slaughter Central: The United States as a Mass-Killing Machine
by Tom Engelhardt
The American armanents industry is profiting from the sales of weapons of potential planetary destruction, mass shootings, and all manner of violence in between. We should understand the gun industry as a global public-private partnership of death.
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SOURCE: TomDispatch
4/4/2021
“The Greatest Purveyor of Violence in the World”
by Liz Theoharis
Martin Luther King's 1967 Riverside Church address pointed out that the cause nonviolent civil rights struggle required him to challenge the US government to end militarism. Today, the pandemic shows that an ethos of nonviolence must include an active approach to end suffering through global cooperation.
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SOURCE: Responsible Statecraft
3/30/2021
Will Afghanistan make Biden's Presidency Turn Out like Truman's or LBJ's?
by Joe Cirincione
"Joe Biden can be a great president. But not if he is so afraid of attacks from the right that he repeats LBJ’s blunder and stumbles into a war we cannot win and never need fight."
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SOURCE: TomDispatch
2/18/2021
The American Century Ends Early
by Tom Engelhardt
The American empire is now visibly in a state of rapid decay, the product of three decades of wasting the "peace dividend" of the end of the Cold War.
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2/14/2021
Heed the Cornerman's Cry
by Mike McQuillan
The failure to heed the warnings of the Kerner Commission in 1968 – of a society divided by racism and inequality – has led to ongoing suffering and a politics of resentment over an ethic of mutual care.
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2/14/2021
King’s Final Book: Both Political Roadmap and Passionate Sermon
by Fred Zilian
As Black History Month unfolds amid an atmosphere of crisis and division like that which prevailed in 1968, it's worth revisiting Martin Luther King's publication that year of "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community" – a call for reordering national priorities toward justice through politics and for renewed spiritual and ethical dedication to shared humanity.
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SOURCE: TomDispatch
2/11/2021
Beyond Donald Trump: When Poisons Curdle
by Andrew Bacevich
The writer regrets not absorbing the message of MLK's prophetic "Beyond Vietnam" sermon when it was delivered in 1967. But the years since have shown he wasn't alone, and the nation's failure to reflect on the interconnection of racism, materialism and militarism accounts for the dire state of affairs reflected in the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
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SOURCE: The Drift
2/2/2021
First-Person Shooter Ideology: The Cultural Contradictions of Call of Duty
by Daniel Bessner
"Right now, this one game is teaching millions of young Americans about the epic struggle between their government and the Soviet Union, a century-defining cataclysm that resulted in tens of millions of deaths, reshaped world history, and engendered the ideological struggles that presently bedevil the public sphere." But the lesson is one of cynical resignation to today's state of endless war.
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SOURCE: TomDispatch
1/26/2021
While America Was Sleeping
by Alfred McCoy
As journalist H.L. Mencken predicted back in 1920, America had finally come to the point where “the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
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SOURCE: Foreign Affairs
1/25/2021
Delusions of Dominance: Biden Can’t Restore American Primacy—and Shouldn’t Try
by Stephen Wertheim
To lead a successful foreign policy, Joe Biden must deeply reconsider the American commitment to foreign military intervention.
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SOURCE: TomDispatch
1/7/2021
Will They Ever Be Over? The 20th Anniversary of the War on Terror Arrives
by Nick Turse
Trump's incoherent foreign policy presents Joe Biden an opportunity to take genuine steps to end the entanglements of the war on terror.
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SOURCE: American Conservative
11/11/2020
The Origins Of U.S. Global Dominance
by Daniel Larison
A conservative historian reviews a new book on the history of American interventionism and advocates for reorganizing foreign policy without the imperative to dominate the world.
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SOURCE: TomDispatch
11/8/2020
Reclaiming American Idealism: We Could Use A Leader Like George McGovern Again
by William J. Astore
Since the American voters rejected the antimilitaristic candidacy of George McGovern in 1972 the country has come to tolerate astonishing levels of mass death, of which COVID is only the latest instance.
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SOURCE: TomDispatch
10/18/2020
Reframing America’s Role in the World: The Specter of Isolationism
by Andrew Bacevich
The release of Stephen Wertheim's book shoud prompt a reconsideration of American intervention abroad.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
10/19/2020
Why Is America the World’s Police? (Review)
by Sam Lebovic
A review of Stephen Wertheim's "Tomorrow, The World" concludes the new book shows how American military supremacy moved in a generation from a novel idea to embedded common sense, and demands rethinking the resources spent to maintain it.
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SOURCE: New York Times
10/15/2020
America Has No Reason to Be So Powerful
by Stephen Wertheim
"There was a time when Americans believed that armed dominance obstructed and corrupted genuine engagement in the world, far from being its foundation."
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
10/1/2020
How Trump Brought Home the Endless War
by Stephen Wertheim
The Global War on Terror reconfigured American foreign policy around military force against abstract ideas and indeterminate enemies. The divisions of domestic politics set the stage for Donald Trump to move the war to the streets of the United States.
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SOURCE: TomDispatch
6/23/2020
Martin Luther King’s Giant Triplets of Injustice
by Andrew Bacevich
Without addressing the fundamental evils of economic inequality and militarism American society will continue to fail to realize the promise of racial equality, as Martin Luther King warned in his 1967 speech at Riverside Church.
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6/14/2020
Let Them Eat Weapons: Trump’s Bizarre Arms Race
by Lawrence Wittner
The Trump administration's stated intention to "spend the adversary into oblivion" through arms buildup is likely to bring ruin to the American public before it harms Russia or China.
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