43 posts tagged with Empire. (View popular tags)
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"Liberal Hawk" Peter Galbraith played a major role in justifying the American invasion of Iraq. Later he helped write the new Iraqi constitution. Turns out he failed to disclose the hundreds of millions he stands to make on Kurdish oil fields, in part because of his engineering of the same constitution to put him in a favorable business position. Another blogger remembers the good ol' days of 2003 when the media and politicians were shocked --shocked! -- that anyone would dare suggest that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was "all about oil."
posted by bardic
on Nov 12, 2009 -
75 comments
Dismantling the Empire.
According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of US military bases around the world, the Empire consists of 865 facilities deploying over 190,000 troops in 46 countries and overseas U.S. territories. The United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its global military presence.
The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony -- that is, control or dominance -- over as many nations on the planet as possible.
(Related I & II).
posted by adamvasco
on Aug 8, 2009 -
162 comments
From 1864 to 1904, the Russian Empire tried to quelch the nationalism of Lithuanians by ordering all Lithuanian texts to be printed with Cyrillic characters instead of in the Latin-derived Lithuanian or Polish alphabets. But they didn't count on the Knygnešiai - the Booksmugglers. [more inside]
posted by mdonley
on Jul 12, 2009 -
18 comments
The American Empire Is Bankrupt (via The Agonist)
posted by Substrata
on Jun 18, 2009 -
81 comments
Touch screen. Awesome graphics. Online community. No, I'm not talking about the latest handheld device to hit the market, I'm talking about Control Data's PLATO system. [more inside]
posted by WolfDaddy
on Apr 27, 2009 -
31 comments
Field Force to Lhasa 1903-04 Captain Cecil Mainprise accompanied General Sir Francis Younghusband's expedition to Tibet in 1903. He wrote 50 letters home which trace the expedition’s progress into Tibet. Read this insider's account on the day they were written some 105 years later. Final post is 18 November 2009. [Via]
posted by Abiezer
on Apr 4, 2009 -
8 comments
Welcome to the Garden States of the Mughal Empire.
posted by hadjiboy
on Mar 10, 2009 -
7 comments
Empire State Building Stolen. The News swiped the 102-story Art Deco skyscraper by drawing up a batch of bogus documents, making a fake notary stamp and filing paperwork with the city to transfer the deed to the property. Previously
posted by Xurando
on Dec 5, 2008 -
19 comments
Mission Creep: "Bush and Rumsfeld may be history, but America's new global footprint lives on." [more inside]
posted by homunculus
on Aug 26, 2008 -
33 comments
Ret. Col. Andrew Bacevich speaks to Bill Moyers (transcript) about the American empire and his new book "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism."
posted by geos
on Aug 18, 2008 -
81 comments
The Death Star rises over San Francisco. A video. Just some footage shot during Imperial Fleet Week in SF.
posted by uaudio
on Aug 16, 2008 -
51 comments
Learning from history's mistakes? In the summer of 2002, the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment (ONA), run for 35 years by a man nicknamed Yoda, published an 85-page report titled "Military Advantage in History" (PDF). Drawing on Sun Tzu, Jared Diamond and Roman historian Titus Livius, the book analyzes the rise & fall of the empires of Alexander the Great, Imperial Rome, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon's France and attempts to plot a course for a Pax Americana that can avoid the pitfalls that led to the collapse of those earlier kingdoms. (via)
posted by scalefree
on Aug 5, 2008 -
36 comments
End of Empire : A collaboration of all areas of geopolitics affecting countries of the world in relation to the 'Empire' of the United States of America, and the 'sub-Empires', such as the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia and any other country which seeks to exploit poorer nations and their people in the quest for domination.
posted by adamvasco
on Nov 27, 2007 -
11 comments
Yipee ti-yi - zap! The original Singing Cowboy, Gene Autry, defends his Radio Ranch (Autry was a radio star at the time) from gunslingers and Indians evil scientists, and robots from an underground civilization, in a 1935 twelve-chapter movie serial. It's Autry's first movie role (playing a singing cowboy named Gene Autry), and the first talking science fiction film. Longer plot summary of Chapter 1 and Chapter 4.
posted by Kirth Gerson
on May 18, 2007 -
8 comments
Chalmers Johnson whose Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic is out today, provides something the CIA won't: a National Intelligence Estimate for the United States.
posted by inoculatedcities
on Feb 6, 2007 -
44 comments
Empire Falls. "They called it 'the American Century,' but the past hundred years actually saw a shift away from Western dominance. Through the long lens of Edward Gibbon's history, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Rome 331 and America and Europe 2006 appear to have more than a few problems in common." By Niall Ferguson, whose views on the American hegemony have been discussed previously.
posted by homunculus
on Oct 25, 2006 -
46 comments
She's she's been pawed by apes, strafed by a bomber, and snubbed by the daleks. But today, at 75, the Empire State Building still looks great.
posted by Smart Dalek
on May 1, 2006 -
25 comments
INTERNET AS HYPER-LIBERALISM: By the limitations of common sense and consensus. Sometime wacky ideas can help us look at things much clearer than a technical manual description of them by rational and well argued people. Paul Treanor is a one-of-a-kind writer. don't try to argue with him about being wrong. he does not believe in communication and therefore there is no CONTACT link anywhere on his site. He writes and lives in Amsterdam, Holland.
posted by sundaymag
on Jan 10, 2006 -
52 comments
The Lucifer Project. "This is a documentation and study of the feasibility of creating a sustainable fusion reaction from an initial fission reaction on Saturn caused by a significant quantity of Plutonium-238 being inserted deep into the atmosphere." [via: del.icio.us/blackbeltjones]
posted by gsb
on Nov 21, 2005 -
33 comments
"If you don't like that, I'm sorry." Jon Bolton, Bush nominee for Ambassador to the UN, discusses the United Nations with humility and patriotic aplomb.
posted by a thousand writers drunk at the keyboard
on Jun 2, 2005 -
124 comments
"There is no excuse for superior authority not choosing the most suitable agents for particular duties, and not removing unsuitable agents from particular duties." With all the talk of empires and resignations, a reflection to history turns up a remarkable story about an already remarkable man:
A tense time in British India came to a head when General Reginald Dyer's brigade opened fire on an unarmed crowd assembled in Amritsar with machine guns, killing 379 and wounding over 1500. Command wanted to relieve him of duty, but patriotic (and imperialist) fervor at home led to a parliamentary debate which was expected to repudiate this decision and honor him. Enter War Secretary Winston Churchill who defended the Government so eloquently that the minds and hearts of the entire deliberative body were turned.
posted by allan
on Dec 17, 2004 -
16 comments
The world's first multinational I found this informative piece via Arts&Letters. "Corporate greed, the ruination of traditional ways of life, share-price bubbles, western imperialism: all these modern complaints were made against the British East India Company in the 18th century. Nick Robins draws the lessons...
posted by Postroad
on Dec 10, 2004 -
12 comments
If we were having this conversation in 1985, and I had said to you, “Four years from now the Soviet Union will collapse and in six years it will disappear,” you would have thought, “This is not a reliable observer.” But the U.S.S.R. is gone -- disappeared -- and we didn’t predict it. Russia today is a much smaller country than the former Soviet Union. The CIA had all the wrong data. We also made a mistake when we concluded that we had won the Cold War. We had almost nothing to do with what happened in the Soviet Union: there were internal issues and it certainly wasn’t Star Wars. We now know in detail how Gorbachev brought Sakharov out of exile in Gorky to address the Politburo on, “What would you do about a ballistic missile defense?” Sakharov said, “It’s easy to overwhelm it with missiles. I wouldn’t spend a ruble on it.” And they didn’t. But in mistakenly thinking that we won the Cold War, we strongly imply that we did something to cause that. Instead, the Soviet Union collapsed because of overstretch, a case of imperial overstretch. An Empire of More Than 725 Military Bases
An interview with Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback and The Sorrows Of Empire (More Inside)
posted by y2karl
on Dec 1, 2004 -
33 comments
It all comes down do one question: Must France stay in Algeria? “If the answer is yes,” he says, “then you must accept the consequences.” Gillo Pontecorvo's "The Battle of Algiers", now out on a Criterion dvd, is a film of quiet, overwhelming power. The mix of subjective and documentary techniques holds the viewer's trust so authoritatively that many scenes come close to sneaking out of the mental "movies I saw" box to mix with the viewer's own memories. No matter how complicated or fragmented the action becomes, Pontecorvo gets the pace, tone and rhythm exactly right, filling the screen with eloquent details.
(Last year, Pontecorvo's masterpiece was discussed here, too. More inside)
posted by matteo
on Nov 3, 2004 -
9 comments
"It was surprising how thick the smoke had become. It seems like the world has always needed a scapegoat --someone to lead the charge against the Roman Empire. But America wasn't the Roman Empire and someone else would have to step up and volunteer. I really was never any more than what I was -- a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze. Now it had blown up in my face and was hanging over me." -- from Bob Dylan's new autobiography, Chronicles, with a brief interview, via Newsweek
posted by digaman
on Sep 26, 2004 -
14 comments
Teach Yourself the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 24 Hours. "our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism." Is a pithy Gibbon a more palatable one?
posted by weston
on Aug 16, 2004 -
14 comments
"Without American hegemony the world would likely return to the dark ages" according to historian Niall Ferguson, author of the book Colossus: The Price of America's Empire, which one of his former housemates is critical of.
posted by homunculus
on Jun 28, 2004 -
41 comments
POWER RANGERS: Did the Bush Administration create a new American empire—or weaken the old one?
The left's favorite blogger,
Talking Points Memo's Joshua Michah Marshall has been published in this week's New Yorker.
posted by jpoulos
on Jan 26, 2004 -
29 comments
From the guy that predicted back in 1976 the demise of the Soviet Union: “There will be no an American Empire”. Emmanuel Todd (scroll down for another Todd interview) is the author of “After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American System". His arguments? economic weakness (debt, massive trade imbalance, internal deficit), and emphasis on military power are signs that US power is in decline.
posted by samelborp
on Jul 28, 2003 -
47 comments
Chalmers Johnson is an provocative proponent of the American Empire theory, indeed. Here are excerpts from his Blow Back: The Cost And Consequences of American Empire
I heard Johnson interviewed on Episode II, War And Conflict In The Post-Cold War, Post-9/11 Era of The Whole Wide World
The Cold War and its central conflict - the physical and ideological battles between the United States, the Soviet Union and their proxy states - imposed a certain logic and consistency on the world. Take that away and add the bloody wars in the Balkans, Africa and the Middle East in the ‘90s as well as the terror attacks and warnings of more recent times and you get a very confused picture of a world at war. Is this breaking storm in Iraq about oil, democracy, freedom, empire, culture, water, diamonds, modernizing Islam or nation building in the Middle East? Some, one or all of these things?
It was an excellent program and well worth your listen, either by RA now or mp3 later. (From listening to the radio)
posted by y2karl
on Mar 13, 2003 -
15 comments
Confronting Empire
"Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness - and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."
Arundhati Roy in her inimitable style speaking at Life After Capitalism at the World Social Forum, 2003, Porto Alegre, Brazil, January 27, 2003, organised by Znet.
posted by nofundy
on Feb 3, 2003 -
53 comments
Forget about the US. Walmart is the real empire.
posted by Beholder
on Jan 5, 2003 -
52 comments
The Burden. In a lengthy piece in tomorrow's NYT magazine (reg. req.), historian Michael Ignatieff explores the costs and benefits of America's shift from republic to empire.
posted by xowie
on Jan 4, 2003 -
16 comments
The film - starring Pierce Brosnan and Halle Berry - "clearly proves" the US is "the root cause of all disasters and misfortune of the Korean nation" and is "an empire of evil", according to the Secretariat of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland.
I can't get enough of these people.
posted by Pretty_Generic
on Dec 14, 2002 -
24 comments
Hegemon, hyperpower, empire. "As the United States marches to war, no other label quite seems to capture the scope of American power or the scale of its ambition."
posted by four panels
on Nov 24, 2002 -
3 comments
Eight hundred years ago, the Empire of Mali was the West African equivalent of Byzantium (succeeding Ghana's Rome), and its legendary founder was Sundiata. [more]
posted by languagehat
on Nov 11, 2002 -
9 comments
The End of Empire? "You can't sustain an empire from a debtor's weakening position--sooner or later the creditors pull the plug. That humiliating lesson was learned by Great Britain early in the last century, and the United States faces a similar reckoning ahead."
posted by homunculus
on Sep 9, 2002 -
39 comments
The British Empire in Colour -- a three-part documentary series from the producers of the BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) award-winning Britain at War in Colour will air this month. The series is supposed to include "a treasure-trove of early colour movies filmed before 'technicolour' transformed film making in the 1930s. Unique colour footage of the Edwardian splendour of 1906 British India, soldiers of the First World War and class divided Britain in 1926 as seen for the first time by a modern visually sophisticated audience."
Apparently, it also includes Horrifying footage of last days of Raj.
posted by Bixby23
on Sep 2, 2002 -
17 comments
Pat Buchanan the voice of reason? in times of insane government decree's of "with us or against us" and "shoot first ask questions later." Its amusing that wackos like Buchanan's viewpoints start making sense. So what is the price of the american empire?
posted by vincentmeanie
on Jun 5, 2002 -
36 comments
Is this the last days of the Empire, or just the beginning? America the most powerful country since Roman Empire.
I for sure hope that the good old US of A don´t meet the same destiny as the Roman Empire...But!?
Has there been any country (empire) that survived being the biggest and best(?). Usually i read a lot about Swedens time of glory some couple of hundred years ago, now hoping that my grandchildren won´t read the same about the States.
Should we be worried about what the history tells us?
posted by Ulwen
on Feb 10, 2002 -
68 comments
Fall of the Muslim Empire
posted by bunnyfire
on Feb 5, 2002 -
7 comments
Intellectualism's Hottest Ticket? (New York Times link; my apologies) According to the cultural arbiters at the NYT, this book is picking up heat as one of the most important philosophical works of the new century. As near as I can tell, it's about the cultural and sociological impact of globalization, creating the new political state they call "Empire." Anybody heard of this, or read it yet? Wank or insight?
posted by logovisual
on Jul 6, 2001 -
19 comments
The Olsen Twins. A magazine. A new tv show. Bestselling videos. Music publishing. Dolls. Six different video games. Did their agent negotiate a good deal with Beelzebub or what? Talking about their show in EW: "We're putting chocolate sauce all over the place and dancing. It's a really cute scene." They're 14. Does Uncle Joey know what's going on?
posted by owillis
on Jun 16, 2001 -
42 comments