Indian author Pankaj Mishra writes a brutal
takedown of Niall Ferguson's latest book,
Civilisation: The West and the Rest in the
London Review of Books.
Ferguson responds to the critical book review with a
lawsuit.
[more inside]
posted by bodywithoutorgans
on Dec 5, 2011 -
107 comments
Over 143 episodes of audio, Mike Duncan has covered the founding of Rome through the Crisis of the Third Century in his
History of Rome podcast [
previously], having now reached the last pagan Emperor,
Julian The Apostate. Enlivened by drawing on comparisons to popular culture, from
The Empire Strikes Back (when Hannibal makes his appearance) to
The Godfather (as a metaphor for Rome's social client system), Mr Duncan's work makes for fun, informative 25-minute sessions with the greatest empire of the ancient western world. If you're interested in more, the podcasts could be handily supplemented with...
[more inside]
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul
on Jul 10, 2011 -
42 comments
Bill Moyers interviews David Simon "Again, we would have to ask ourselves a lot of hard questions. The people most affected by this are black and brown and poor. It’s the abandoned inner cores of our urban areas. As we said before, economically, we don’t need those people; the American economy doesn’t need them. So as long as they stay in their ghettos and they only kill each other, we’re willing to pay for a police presence to keep them out of our America."
posted by bitmage
on Apr 17, 2011 -
67 comments
The American Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World War II, will be tattered and fading by 2025, its eighth decade, and could be history by 2030.
posted by Joe Beese
on Dec 8, 2010 -
80 comments
Leigh Brackett's original script for
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back was leaked online some time in the past couple of months. This isn't the more widely circulated
Kasdan treatment, but apparently the original, original draft submitted to George Lucas. Brackett died of cancer shortly thereafter. Ice castles, Wampa raids, transport guilds, Lando clones, Minch the Jedi master, a disturbing lack of incest and no, that's not your father, why do you ask?
[more inside]
posted by obiwanwasabi
on May 30, 2010 -
51 comments
It is not our role to take power. It is our role to make the powerful frightened of us. And that's what we've forgotten. Give up that dream! Chris Hedges talks neoliberalism and neofeudalism, the civil rights movement, Camden, Obama, Clinton, Tea Parties, moral nihilism, inverted totalitarianism and corpocracy, NAFTA, welfare reform, health care, labor, poverty, Yugoslavia, post-industrial capitalism, economic crisis, imperial collapse, socialism, and democracy, among other things.
[more inside]
posted by gerryblog
on Apr 24, 2010 -
51 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 EmpireI 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
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
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
