|
Showing 1 - 5 of
5 matches in All Departments
"History on an epic scale-sweeping, provocative, and unsparing in
its judgment." -Andrew Bacevich, author of After the Apocalypse:
America's Role in a World Transformed An immensely readable
history, To Govern the Globe narrates the rising empires and fading
world orders of the last seven centuries, from the Iberian Age to
the British Empire to the post-World War II American era. As
historian Alfred McCoy explains, each world order has been defined
by shifting principles of sovereignty, debates over human rights,
and the quest for profitable forms of energy. Today as the US world
order, with its voracious consumption of fossil fuels, faces
mounting crises, McCoy shows how past patterns of energy use will
trouble the planet for the rest of this century and beyond. This
paperback edition has a new preface by the author.
Campaigning for the presidency in 2008, Barack Obama offered an
impassioned denunciation of the 'enhanced' interrogation techniques
used by the Bush administration in its War on Terror - methods that
included sensory deprivation, self-inflicted pain, and
waterboarding. But four years later America has yet to prosecute or
punish these abuses. Tracing the origins of this knotty
contradiction from the 1950s to the present, Alfred W. McCoy probes
the political and cultural dynamics that have made impunity for
torture a bipartisan policy of the U. S. government under
presidents Bush and Obama. During the early years of the Cold War,
the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency covertly funded psychological
experiments designed to weaken a subject's resistance to
interrogation. For many of those subjected to these experiments,
the result was an experience akin to psychosis. Leaving its most
lasting scars on the psyche rather than the body, such torture lent
itself to propagation, and for three decades the U.S. shared these
methods with its anti-Communist allies around the globe. After the
terrorist attacks in the U.S. on September 11th, 2001, the CIA
opened its own prisons, and American agents began, for the first
time, to dirty their hands with waterboarding and wall slamming.
Simultaneously, mass media offered enticing, often eroticized
simulations of torture in film, television, and computer games that
normalized this illegal practice for millions of Americans. In the
absence of legal sanction for the perpetrators or the powerful who
commanded them, media exposes and congressional hearings have
proved insufficient deterrents. The American public, preoccupied
with the nation's failing economy, has seemingly moved on. But the
images of abuse from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are seared into
human memory, doing lasting damage to America's moral authority as
a world leader.
Throughout four millennia of recorded history there has been no end
to empire, but instead an endless succession of empires. After five
centuries of sustained expansion, the half-dozen European powers
that ruled half of humanity collapsed with stunning speed after
World War II, creating a hundred emerging nations in Asia and
Africa. Amid this imperial transition, the United States became the
new global hegemon, dominating this world order with an array of
power that closely resembled that of its European
predecessors.Brazil, Russia, India, China, and the European Union
now rise in global influence, twenty leading historians from four
continents take a timely look backward and forward to discover
patterns of eclipse in past empires that are already shaping a
decline in U.S. global power, including: erosion of economic and
fiscal strength needed for military power on a global scale; misuse
of military power through micro-military misadventures; breakdown
of alliances among major powers; weakened controls over the
subordinate elites critical for any empire's exercise of global
power; insufficient technological innovation to sustain global
force projection.
During the Vietnam War the United States government waged a
massive, secret air war in neighbouring Laos. Fred Branfman, an
educational advisor living in Laos at the time, interviewed over
1,000 Laotian survivors. Shocked by what he heard and saw, he urged
them to record their experiences in essays, poems, and pictures.
Voices from the Plain of Jars was the result of that effort. When
first published in 1972, this book was instrumental in exposing the
bombing. In this expanded edition, Branfman follows the story
forward in time, describing the hardships that Laotians faced after
the war when they returned to find their farm fields littered with
cluster munitions- explosives that continue to maim and kill today.
|
You may like...
Queen Of Me
Shania Twain
CD
R195
R165
Discovery Miles 1 650
|