Henry Miller once said that the purpose of the artist is to “inoculate the world with disillusionment.” We are in desperate need of disillusionment today — disillusionment on a vast scale, disillusionment as a constant discipline. Arthur Silber is one of the greatest such artists now at work, and he has just released a remarkable piece aimed at one the deadliest illusions of our time: the myth of American Exceptionalism. I cannot recommend strongly enough that you read the entire piece, but below are a few excerpts to highlight some of the salient points. Silber writes of the poisonous effects

In the last decade of the 20th century, a nation often hailed (not least by itself) as the “world’s greatest democracy” directed a program of savage economic warfare against a broken, defenseless country. This blockade, carried out with an exacting bureaucratic coldness, killed, by very conservative estimate, at least one million innocent people. More than half of these victims were young children. Dead children. Thousands of dead children. Tens of thousands of dead children, Hundreds of thousands of dead children. Mountains of dead children. Vast pestiferous slagheaps of dead children. This is what the world’s greatest democracy created, deliberately, coldly,

Written in Russia, recorded in England, rooted in Tennessee. Give it a listen, if you take a notion.

Perhaps this is America’s answer to Washington’s embarrassment over the Iranian scientist who got away this week: At least 21 people, including members of the elite Revolutionary Guards, were killed and 100 wounded in suicide attack at a Shi’ite mosque in the southeast Iranian city of Zahedan on Thursday, Iranian media reported. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the two suicide bombings in front of Zahedan’s Grand Mosque, although a lawmaker said he believed the Sunni rebel group Jundollah was behind the attack. We do know that the United States has been covertly aiding Jundullah — no doubt as part

Mark Twain is returning to us, in the unexpurgated editions of his much-censored autobiography which will be published in three volumes. And one of his most notable successors in the fine art of anti-imperialist polemic, Arthur Silber, has provided some useful context for some of the views that Twain and his literary executors thought too hot to print in their now-vanished present day. Many of these passages dealt with Twain’s angry railing against America’s militarist empire-builders, as they perpetrated mass murder and savage torture during the "liberation" of the Philippines from, er, the Filipinos. I will have much more to

Jason Ditz puts this week’s horrific bombing in Uganda by Somali extremists in perspective: the perspective of the relentless killing of civilians perpetrated by Western-backed forces in Somalia for years. The American-led meddling in the ravaged nation has led directly — and inevitably — to the rise of extremist militias like al-Shabab, and to the deaths of thousands of innocent people. As we noted here back in 2008: Somalia is the invisible third front of the Terror War, an American-backed “regime change” operation launched by the invading army of Ethiopia and local warlords in December 2006. In addition to helping

Imagine how great the "progressive" furor would be if the Bush Administration had suddenly denied a visa to an award-winning Colombian journalist because of his reportage on human rights abuses by his American-backed government. Would we not have heard, rightly, how this draconian action exemplified the administration’s tyrannical nature, its use of raw, arbitrary power to throttle any voices trying to shed light on the very murky corners of the Drug War and Terror War operations in Colombia that are armed and funded with billions of dollars from American taxpayers? Would this not have been added to a long train

As Arthur Silber pointed out so ably the other day, the high and horrendous crimes that the world’s governments will openly commit — and admit to, if not brag about — in their push for loot and power are by no means the full record of their depredations. This is, as Silber rightly says, “an absolute certainty given the testimony of history.” Indeed. For while we look on, shocked and awed, at the public parade of horrors rolling by each day, there are foul deeds afoot which will only come to light — in dribs and drabs, in shards and

William Dalrymple is one of the knowledgeable and experienced observers of Central Asia and India in the West. His insights are always valuable, and usually prescient, especially on the greatly variegated complexities — social, economic, cultural, political, historical — of the volatile region, where the American imperial impulse is now coming to grief in arrogance and ignorance … as so many others have done before it. In a New Statesman article rich with historical detail and direct reportage from the frontlines of "Af-Pak" front of the bipartisan Terror War, Dalrymple brings fresh confirmation of what everyone but the moronic masters

"The world continues to offer glittering prizes to those who have stout hearts and sharp swords." — F.E. Smith, Earl of Birkenhead Another day, another glittering prize for one of the great war criminals of our day. We speak of course of that tanned and gurning jackanapes, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair. It was announced this week that Blair would be receiving a great big bushel basket of simoleons — a hundred thousand of them — from some U.S. outfit called The National Constitution Center. It seems the sinister twit has been awarded the Center’s "Liberty Medal" for, among other things,