This warped travel book remixes three main themes: globalization, energy wars and the Pentagons Long War, originally packaged as the war on terror. Youre going to revisit the asymmetrical wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Youre going to crisscross the Islamic world. Youre going to follow a lot of pipelines. Youll be acquainted with the Iran the next war will probably hit. Youll see how national resistance wars have nothing to do with terrorism. Youll be confronted over and over again with strategic competitor Asiawhere the future of the 21st Century is being played out. Youre going to revisit how, where and who profits from economic globalization and especially war corporatism. Youll see how and where possible New Orders are emerging, and Old Orders disintegrating. And you will finish the pilgrimage back in the middle of apredictableglobal war of the privileged few against the excluded many.
This essay is a companion to my own Globalistan, published in early 2007, which I defined as a warped geopolitical travel book. I argued then that in a context of re-medievalization - the world fragmented into "stans" - we are now living an intestinal war, an undeclared global civil war. Borrowing from Zygmunt Bauman's concept of liquid modernity, I called it Liquid War - and not only because of the global scramble for "black gold" oil and "blue gold" gas. Globalistan was essentially a long reportage crisscrossing the world. This text reflects the fact that I spent most of 2008 in the U.S. following the presidential campaign. As far as New Rome is concerned I'm usually outside looking in - the point of view of my dying profession, the foreign correspondent. In this text I'm most of the time inside looking out. Globalistan can be read as an on the ground - and underground - report on the Bush administration wasteland. This text could be something of a last chapter - out of the belly of the beast. 2009 is the Mother of all celebratory years. The 20 years of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The 30 years of the Iranian Islamic revolution. The 50 years of the Cuban revolution. The 60 years of NATO. The 70 years of World War II. The 80 years of the Great Depression. The 90 years of the Versailles Treaty. It's as if the world was turning on its gyre as in a psychedelic kaleidoscope reviving modern history in high-speed. And which figure comes out of the kaleidoscope, grinning his cool, calm and collected best to deal with a 1929-style crisis, the new Cold War or perhaps to conduct Versailles-style diplomacy? Barack Hussein Obama.
In RAGING TWENTIES, Pepe Escobar smashes a triple-wide jumbo bulldozer of erudition and insight through the painfully narrow and now Big Tech-fortified Overton window of conventional American political discourse. This volume includes 25 essays written for Asia Times, Consortium News, and Strategic Culture in the incomparable year of 2020 and adds a new introduction, afterword, and table of abbreviations. Educated people of all political persusasions will enjoy Escobar's stinging prose and his display of his wide-ranging and truly global knowledge of poetry, history, and political philosophy. American readers already skeptical of the dominant narrative will enjoy this scintillating dissection of the mammoth hypocrisy involved in the standard governmental and corporate narrative. And those with perspectives similar to the American mainstream will benefit from reading a truly Other-centered exemplar of the several billion people who find the political perspectives that are commonplace in Asia, Europe, China, Russia, and Iran more congenial than those of a US establishment that has gifted the world with seventy-five-plus years of continuous war. Escobar's first book in the US, Globalistan (Nimble, 2007), brilliantly anticipated the future of a disintegrating international system in an era of "Liquid" (hybrid) war. These were followed by Red Zone Blues (2007); Obama does Globalistan (2009); Empire of Chaos (2014); and 2030 (2015), all by Nimble Books. From the Introduction: The Raging Twenties started with a murder. That lethality was amplified when a virus cannibalized virtually the whole planet, devouring time. As time has been standing still-or imploded-ever since, we cannot even begin to imagine the consequences of the anthropological rupture caused by SARS-CoV-2. A new world starts when language-either a living entity, or a virus from outer space (William Burroughs)-starts metastasizing new words. A basket of concepts already stand out. Circuit breaker. Biosecurity. Negative feedback loops. State of exception. Necropolitics. New Brutalism. Hybrid Neofascism. And, as we shall see, New Viral Paradigm. The proliferation of new words-and concepts-paradoxically developed in parallel with the slow fade out of The Word.Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe summed it all up: "This end of the word, this definitive triumph of the gesture and artificial organs over the word, the fact that the history of the word ends under our eyes, that for me is the historical development par excellence." We all now live in Google town. Suddenly, we were forced to identify the lineaments of a new regime. A new mode of production: a turbo-capitalist survival engineered as Rentier Capitalism 2.0, where Silicon Valley behemoths take the place of estates, and also the State. That is the "techno-feudal" option, as defined by economist Cedric Durand. Squeezed and intoxicated by information performing the role of a dominatrix, we were presented with a new map of Dystopia, packaged as a "new normal", featuring cognitive dissonance, a biosecurity paradigm, the inevitability of virtual work, social distancing as a political program, info-surveillance, and triumphant Trans-humanism.
Eric Walberg’s POSTMODERN IMPERIALISM: Geopolitics and the Great Game is a riveting and radically new analysis of the imperialist onslaught which first engulfed the world in successive waves in the 19th–20th centuries and is today hurtling into its endgame. The term “Great Game” was coined in the nineteenth century, reflecting the flippancy of statesmen (and historians) personally untouched by the havoc that they wreaked. What it purported to describe was the rivalry between Russia and Britain over interests in India. But Britain was playing its deadly game across all of Eurasia, from the Balkans and Palestine to China and southeast Asia, alternately undermining and carving up “premodern” states, disrupting the lives of hundreds of millions, with consequences that endure today. With roots in the European enlightenment, shaped by Christian and Jewish cultures, and given economic rationale by industrial capitalism, the inter-imperialist competition turned the entire world into a conflict zone, leaving no territory neutral. The first “game” was brought to a close by the cataclysm of World War I. But that did not mark the end of it. Walberg resurrects the forbidden “i” word to scrutinize an imperialism now in denial, but following the same logic and with equally horrendous human costs. What he terms Great Game II then began, with America eventually uniting its former imperial rivals in an even more deadly game to destroy their common revolutionary antagonist and potential nemesis-communism. Having “won” this game, America and the new player Israel-offspring of the early games-have sought to entrench what Walberg terms “empire and a half” on a now global playing field-using a neoliberal agenda backed by shock and awe. With swift, sure strokes, Walberg paints the struggle between domination and resistance on a global canvas, as imperialism engages its two great challengers-communism and Islam, its secular and religious antidotes. Paul Atwood (War and Empire: The American Way of Life) calls it an “epic corrective”. It is a “carefully argued-and most of all, cliche-smashing-road map” according to Pepe Escobar (journalist Asia Times). Rigorously documented, it is “a valuable resource for all those interested in how imperialism works, and sure to spark discussion about the theory of imperialism”, according to John Bell (Capitalism and the Dialectic).
Based on a series of reports for AsiaTimes, this is a snapshot of George W. Bush's surge on the ground - focused on the people of Iraq, as waves are driven to exile in Damascus and Baghdad bleeds outside of the Green Zone.
From Syria and Iraq to Ukraine, from AfPak to Libya, from Iran to Russia, and from the Persian Gulf to China, foreign correspondent Pepe Escobar, author of The Roving Eye column for Asia Times/Hong Kong, crisscrosses what the Pentagon calls the "arc of instability." As Escobar tells it in the introduction, "the columns selected for this volume follow the period 2009-2014 - the Obama years so far. A continuum with previous volumes published by Nimble Books does apply. Globalistan, from 2007, was an extended reportage/warped travel book across the Bush years, where I argued the world was being plunged into Liquid War - alluding to energy flows but also to the liquid modernity character of post-modern war. Red Zone Blues, also from 2007, was a vignette - an extended reportage centering on the Baghdad surge. And Obama does Globalistan, from 2009, examined how the hyperpower could embark on a "change we can believe in". The outcome, as these columns arguably reflect, is Empire of Chaos - where a plutocracy progressively projects its own internal disintegration upon the whole world.""You will find some key overlapping nations/themes/expressions/acronyms in these columns; Iran, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia, China, Russia, Ukraine, Pipelineistan, BRICS, EU, NATO, GCC, the Global South, GWOT (the global war on terror), The New Great Game, Full Spectrum Dominance. You will also find a progressive drift towards not conventional war, but above all economic war - manifestations of Liquid War.""Incrementally, I have been arguing that Washington's number one objective now is to prevent a full economic integration of Eurasia that would leave the U.S. as a non-hegemon, or worse still, an outsider. Thus the three-pronged strategy of "pivoting to Asia" (containment of China); Ukraine (containment of Russia); and beefing up NATO (subjugation of Europe, and NATO as Global Robocop)."Book the ultimate trip to the Empire of Chaos, and see how the U.S. - and the West - are tackling the emergence of a multipolar world. Pepe Escobar is an independent geopolitical analyst. He writes for RT, Sputnik, TomDispatch, Strategic Culture Foundation, and is a frequent contributor to websites and radio and TV shows ranging from the US to East Asia. He is the former roving correspondent for Asia Times Online, where he also wrote the column The Roving Eye from 2000 to 2014. Born in Brazil, he's been a foreign correspondent since 1985, and has lived in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Washington, Bangkok and Hong Kong. He is the author of "Globalistan" (2007), "Red Zone Blues" (2007), "Obama does Globalistan" (2009) and "Empire of Chaos" (2014), all published by Nimble Books. Follow him on https: //www.facebook.com/pepe.escobar.77377 Facebook
For half a century, people have debated the Kennedy assassination. Some claim that the Warren Commission got it right - that Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone-nut assassin. Others contend that Kennedy was killed as part of a conspiracy. It is not the purpose of this book to engage in that debate. The purpose of this book is simply to focus on what happened at Bethesda Naval Hospital on the evening of November 22, 1963. What happened that night is so unusual that it cries out for truthful explanation even after all these years. In this book, you will learn that 1. Kennedy's body was actually delivered to the Bethesda morgue twice, at separate times and in separate caskets. 2. Some photographs and x-rays from the autopsy went missing from the record, and other photographs in the record were forged or otherwise fraudulent. 3. The president's body was altered by tampering with the wounds before the autopsy took place. And much more.
From award-winning columnist and favorite talking head Gustavo Arellano, comes this explosive, irreverent, smart, and hilarious Los Angeles Times bestseller. ¡Ask a Mexican! is a collection of questions and answers from Gustavo Arellano that explore the clichés of lowriders, busboys, and housekeepers; drunks and scoundrels; heroes and celebrities; and most important, millions upon millions of law-abiding, patriotic American citizens and their illegal-immigrant cousins who represent some $600 billion in economic power. At a strong eighteen percent of the U.S. population, Latinos have become America's largest minority—and Mexicans make up a large part of that number. Gustavo confronts the bogeymen of racism, xenophobia, and ignorance prompted by such demographic changes through answering questions put to him by readers of his ¡Ask a Mexican! column in California's OC Weekly. He challenges readers to find a more entertaining way to understand Mexican culture that doesn't involve a taco-and-enchilada combo. From lighter topics like Latin pop and great Mexican food to more serious issues like immigration and race relations, ¡Ask a Mexican! runs the gamut. Why do Mexicans call white people gringos? Are all Mexicans Catholic? What's the best tequila? Gustavo answers a wide range of legitimate and illegitimate questions, in the hopes of making a few readers angry, making most of us laugh, sparking a greater dialogue, and enhancing cross-cultural understanding.
