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US IMPERIALISM, WESTWARD/EASTWARD GLOBAL EMPIRE OF BASES ENCIRCLING RUSSIA AND CHINA, BOMBING SEVEN NATIONS IN THE MIDDLE EAST, NEW SERIES NEWSLETTER # 36, November 23, 2017.
Compiled by Dick Bennett, Building a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology.
What’s at Stake: “In a world convulsed by violence and unbelievable brutality the lines between ‘us’ and ‘the terrorists’ have been completely blurred. We don’t have to choose between imperialism and Terrorism; we have to choose what form of resistance will rid us of both. What shall we choose? Violence or nonviolence? –Arundhati Roy (sent to me by Don Timmerman of Casa Maria Catholic Worker Community, in its newsletter Casa Cry)
Contents: US Imperialism Newsletter, Series 2, #36,
November 23, 2017
OMNI’s imperialism newsletters series 1 and 2.
Shadow World DVD and Book
Shadow World DVD. 2017.
Book: Andrew Feinstein, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade. 2016.
Related Books
Tom Engelhardt. Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a
Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World. 2014.
Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World. 2014.
Alfred W. McCoy. In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power.
2017.
2017.
Nick Turse. Tomorrow’s Battlefield
Noam Chomsky. Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. 1999.
John Feffer. Splinterlands: The View from 2050. 2015.
(A famous novel anticipating all this war, deception, corruption, repression to dominate others is Orwell’s 1984.)
Related Newsletters include:
Military-Industrial Complex: http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2013/08/military-corporate-congressional.html (#2, August 19, 2013; #3 in preparation)
Foreign Bases: http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2017/09/us-foreign-military-bases-newsletter-3.html(#3, Sept. 21, 2017).
Drones: http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2017/05/omni-drone-war-newsletter-20-may-18-2017.html(# 20, May 18, 2017; #21 in preparation).
(#22, April 2, 2015; #23 in preparation).
OMNI IMPERIALISM NEWSLETTERS, SERIES 1: Imperialism Nos. 1-16 and Westward Imperialism Nos. 1-18. Series 2 begins with No. 35.
US Imperialism, Series I, 34 Newsletters
US Imperialism Newsletters (16) | US Westward Imperialism Newsletters (18) |
#1 July 3, 2007 | #1 May 8, 2012 |
#2 Sept. 20, 2007 | #2 August 22, 2012 |
#3 April 7, 2008 | #3 November 25, 2012 |
#4 Nov. 30, 2008 | #4 January 12, 2013 |
#5 September 13, 2011 | #5 March 27, 2013 |
#6 October 16, 2011 | #6 July 5, 2013 |
#7 January 16, 2012 | #7 August 12, 2013 |
#8 June 3, 2012 | #8 November 8, 2013 |
#9 Oct. 20, 2012 | #9 January 2, 2014 |
#10 April 5, 2013 | #10 February 3, 2014 |
#11 June 3, 2013 | #11 February 26, 2014 |
#12 July 19, 2013 | #12 April 21, 2014 |
#13 Sept. 3, 2013 | #13 June 26, 2014 |
#14 March 2, 2014 | #14 September 23, 2014 |
#15 June 22, 2014 | #15 February 18, 2015 |
#16 May 17, 2015 | #16 April 12, 2015 |
#17 July 13, 2015 | |
#18 December 19, 2015 |
SHADOW WORLD DVD AND BOOK
PBS INDEPENDENT LENS, “SHADOW WORLD,” 11-20-17
Shadow World - Trailer
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Shadow World reveals the shocking realities of the global arms trade, the only business that counts its profits in billions and its losses in human lives. Based on Andrew Feinstein's acclaimed book The Shadow World:Inside the Global Arms Trade, the film explores how governments, their militaries and intelligence agencies, defense contractors, arms dealers and agents are intertwined.
The Shadow World is the harrowing behind-the-scenes tale of the global arms trade, revealing the deadly collusion that all too often exists among senior politicians, weapons manufacturers, felonious arms dealers, and the military—a situation that compromises our security and undermines our democracy.
https://shadowworldfilm.com/about-the-film/
Directed by Johan Grimonprez (“dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y”) and in part based on Corruption Watch UK founder Andrew Feinstein’s globally acclaimed book The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, the film reveals how the international trade in weapons– with the complicity of governments and intelligence agencies, investigative and prosecutorial bodies, weapons manufacturers, dealers and agents – fosters corruption, determines economic and foreign policies, undermines democracy and creates widespread suffering.
Directed by Johan Grimonprez (“dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y”) and in part based on Corruption Watch UK founder Andrew Feinstein’s globally acclaimed book The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, the film reveals how the international trade in weapons– with the complicity of governments and intelligence agencies, investigative and prosecutorial bodies, weapons manufacturers, dealers and agents – fosters corruption, determines economic and foreign policies, undermines democracy and creates widespread suffering.
The film unravels a number of the world’s largest and most corrupt arms deals through those involved in perpetrating and investigating them. It illustrates why this trade accounts for almost 40% of all corruption in global trade, and how it operates in a parallel legal universe, in which the national security elite who drive it are seldom prosecuted for their often illegal actions. SHADOW WORLD posits alternatives through the experience of a peace activist and war correspondent, as well as through the voice of Eduardo Galeano who contributed selections from his stories for the film.
Ultimately SHADOW WORLD reveals the real costs of war, the way the arms trade drives it, how weapons of war are turned against citizens of liberal democracies and how the trade decreases rather than enhances security for us all. In shedding light on how our realities are being constructed, the film offers a way for audiences to see through this horror, in the hopes of creating a better future.
BOOK The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, By Andrew Feinstein. 2016.
82 |
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The Independent Culture
The Independent Culture
Arms manufacturers do particularly well when they sell to both sides. Even better is when one side uses lots of expensive weaponry to destroy the other's. That way the arms dealer can make decent profits re-vamping the victor's arsenals. On very rare occasions things turn out even better, especially if the loser gets deposed and the new regime buys weapons from the very same companies. MOREhttp://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-shadow-world-inside-the-global-arms-trade-by-andrew-feinstein-6263579.html
RELATED BOOKS
Polity, 2009.
The multi-billion dollar business of the international conventional arms trade involves virtually every country in the world. Around the globe, people's lives are being irrevocably changed by the effects of guns, tanks, and missiles. These weapons have the potential to cause a deadly and current threat - one responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths a year.
This succinct and accessible new book explores the complexities and realities of the global conventional weapons trade. The first book on the subject in nearly a decade, The International Arms Trade provides an engaging introduction to the trade, the effects, and the consequences of these weapons. The authors trace the history of the arms trade and examine how it has evolved since the end of the Cold War. In particular, they assess the role of the largest arms exporters and importers, the business of selling conventional arms around the world, and shed new light on the illicit arms trade and the shadowy dealers who profit from their deadly commerce. The book also looks closely at the devastating effect the business can have on countries, societies, and individuals and concludes with an evaluation of the various existing control strategies and the potential for future control opportunities.
The International Arms Trade will be invaluable for students and scholars of international relations and security studies, and for policymakers and anyone interested in understanding more about the conventional arms trade.
Tom Engelhardt. Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single Superpower World. at 12:00am, October 27, 2014.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch.
In 1964, a book entitled The Invisible Government shocked Americans with its revelations of a growing world of intelligence agencies playing fast and loose around the planet, a secret government lodged inside the one they knew that even the president didn't fully control. Almost half a century later, everything about that "invisible government" has grown vastly larger, more disturbing, and far more visible. In his new book, Tom Engelhardt takes in something new under the sun: what is no longer, as in the 1960s, a national security state, but a global security one, fighting secret wars that have turned the president into an assassin-in-chief. This is a powerful survey of a democracy of the wealthy that your grandparents wouldn't have recognized. MORE
The Rise and Decline of US Global Power. 2017.
Explores the distinctive instruments of American ascent to global domination and hegemony--including covert intervention, client elites, psychological torture, and surveillance.
In a completely original analysis, prize-winning historian Alfred W. McCoy explores America’s rise as a world power—from the 1890s through the Cold War—and its bid to extend its hegemony deep into the twenty-first century through a fusion of cyberwar, space warfare, trade pacts, and military alliances. McCoy then analyzes the marquee instruments of US hegemony—covert intervention, client elites, psychological torture, and worldwide surveillance.
Peeling back layers of secrecy, McCoy exposes a military and economic battle for global domination fought in the shadows, largely unknown to those outside the highest rungs of power. Can the United States extend the “American Century” or will China guide the globe for the next hundred years? McCoy devotes his final chapter to these questions, boldly laying out a series of scenarios that could lead to the end of Washington’s world domination by 2030.
World War II marked the apogee of industrialized “total war.” Great powers savaged one another. Hostilities engulfed the globe. Mobilization extended to virtually every sector of every nation. Air war, including the terror bombing of civilians, emerged as a central strategy of the victorious Anglo-American powers. The devastation was catastrophic almost everywhere, with the notable exception of the United States, which exited the strife unscathed and unmatched in power and influence. The death toll of fighting forces plus civilians worldwide was staggering.
The Violent American Century addresses the U.S.-led transformations in war conduct and strategizing that followed 1945—beginning with brutal localized hostilities, proxy wars, and the nuclear terror of the Cold War, and ending with the asymmetrical conflicts of the present day. The military playbook now meshes brute force with a focus on non-state terrorism, counterinsurgency, clandestine operations, a vast web of overseas American military bases, and—most touted of all—a revolutionary new era of computerized “precision” warfare. In contrast to World War II, postwar death and destruction has been comparatively small. By any other measure, it has been appalling—and shows no sign of abating. From publisher, The Nation.
You won't see segments about it on the nightly news or read about it on the front page of America’s newspapers, but the Pentagon is fighting a new shadow war in Africa, helping to destabilize whole countries and preparing the ground for future blowback. Behind closed doors, U.S. officers now claim that "Africa is the battlefield of tomorrow, today." In Tomorrow's Battlefield, award-winning journalist and bestselling author Nick Turse exposes the shocking true story of the U.S. military’s spreading secret wars in Africa.
Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. 7 Stories P, 1999.
Why is the Atlantic slowly filling with crude petroleum, threatening a millions-of-years-old ecological balance? Why did traders at prominent banks take high-risk gambles with the money entrusted to them by hundreds of thousands of clients around the world, expanding and leveraging their investments to the point that failure led to a global financial crisis that left millions of people jobless and hundreds of cities economically devastated? Why would the world's most powerful military spend ten years fighting an enemy that presents no direct threat to secure resources for corporations?
The culprit in all cases is neoliberal ideology—the belief in the supremacy of "free" markets to drive and govern human affairs. And in the years since the initial publication of Noam Chomsky's Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order, the bitter vines of neoliberalism have only twisted themselves further into the world economy, obliterating the public’s voice in public affairs and substituting the bottom line in place of people’s basic obligation to care for one another as ends in themselves. In Profit Over People, Chomsky reveals the roots of the present crisis, tracing the history of neoliberalism through an incisive analysis of free trade agreements of the 1990s, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund—and describes the movements of resistance to the increasing interference by the private sector in global affairs.
In the years since the initial publication of Profit Over People, the stakes have only risen. Now more than ever, Profit Over People is one of the key texts explaining how the crisis facing us operates—and how, through Chomsky’s analysis of resistance, we may find an escape from the closing net.
The culprit in all cases is neoliberal ideology—the belief in the supremacy of "free" markets to drive and govern human affairs. And in the years since the initial publication of Noam Chomsky's Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order, the bitter vines of neoliberalism have only twisted themselves further into the world economy, obliterating the public’s voice in public affairs and substituting the bottom line in place of people’s basic obligation to care for one another as ends in themselves. In Profit Over People, Chomsky reveals the roots of the present crisis, tracing the history of neoliberalism through an incisive analysis of free trade agreements of the 1990s, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund—and describes the movements of resistance to the increasing interference by the private sector in global affairs.
In the years since the initial publication of Profit Over People, the stakes have only risen. Now more than ever, Profit Over People is one of the key texts explaining how the crisis facing us operates—and how, through Chomsky’s analysis of resistance, we may find an escape from the closing net.
Julian West, looking backwards from 2050, tries to understand why the world and his family have fallen apart.
Part Field Notes from a Catastrophe, part 1984, part World War Z, John Feffer's striking new dystopian novel, takes us deep into the battered, shattered world of 2050. The European Union has broken apart. Multiethnic great powers like Russia and China have shriveled. America's global military footprint has virtually disappeared and the United States remains united in name only. Nationalism has proven the century's most enduring force as ever-rising global temperatures have supercharged each-against-all competition and conflict among the now 300-plus members of an increasingly feeble United Nations.
As he navigates the world of 2050, Julian West offers a roadmap for the path we're already on, a chronicle of impending disaster, and a faint light of hope. He may be humanity's last best chance to explain how the world unraveled—if he can survive the savage beauty of the Splinterlands. From publisher, The Nation.
END IMPERIALISM NEWSLETTER #36