Against Empire

Against Empire PDF Author: Michael Parenti
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 9780872862982
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Recommended by Jeff, City Lights Books Richly informed and written in an engaging style, Against Empire exposes the ruthless agenda and hidden costs of the U.S. empire today. Documenting the pretexts and lies used to justify violent intervention and maldevelopment abroad, Parenti shows how the conversion to a global economy is a victory of finance capital over democracy. As much of the world suffers unspeakable misery and the Third-Worldization of the United States accelerates, civil society is impoverished by policies that benefit rich and powerful transnational corporations and the national security state. Hard-won gains made by ordinary people are swept away.

Against Empire

Against Empire PDF Author: Michael Parenti
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 9780872862982
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book Here

Book Description
Recommended by Jeff, City Lights Books Richly informed and written in an engaging style, Against Empire exposes the ruthless agenda and hidden costs of the U.S. empire today. Documenting the pretexts and lies used to justify violent intervention and maldevelopment abroad, Parenti shows how the conversion to a global economy is a victory of finance capital over democracy. As much of the world suffers unspeakable misery and the Third-Worldization of the United States accelerates, civil society is impoverished by policies that benefit rich and powerful transnational corporations and the national security state. Hard-won gains made by ordinary people are swept away.

Enlightenment against Empire

Enlightenment against Empire PDF Author: Sankar Muthu
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400825881
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
In the late eighteenth century, an array of European political thinkers attacked the very foundations of imperialism, arguing passionately that empire-building was not only unworkable, costly, and dangerous, but manifestly unjust. Enlightenment against Empire is the first book devoted to the anti-imperialist political philosophies of an age often regarded as affirming imperial ambitions. Sankar Muthu argues that thinkers such as Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Gottfried Herder developed an understanding of humans as inherently cultural agents and therefore necessarily diverse. These thinkers rejected the conception of a culture-free "natural man." They held that moral judgments of superiority or inferiority could be made neither about entire peoples nor about many distinctive cultural institutions and practices. Muthu shows how such arguments enabled the era's anti-imperialists to defend the freedom of non-European peoples to order their own societies. In contrast to those who praise "the Enlightenment" as the triumph of a universal morality and critics who view it as an imperializing ideology that denigrated cultural pluralism, Muthu argues instead that eighteenth-century political thought included multiple Enlightenments. He reveals a distinctive and underappreciated strand of Enlightenment thinking that interweaves commitments to universal moral principles and incommensurable ways of life, and that links the concept of a shared human nature with the idea that humans are fundamentally diverse. Such an intellectual temperament, Muthu contends, can broaden our own perspectives about international justice and the relationship between human unity and diversity.

Black against Empire

Black against Empire PDF Author: Joshua Bloom
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520966457
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 562

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Book Description
This timely special edition, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party, features a new preface by the authors that places the Party in a contemporary political landscape, especially as it relates to Black Lives Matter and other struggles to fight police brutality against black communities. In Oakland, California, in 1966, community college students Bobby Seale and Huey Newton armed themselves, began patrolling the police, and promised to prevent police brutality. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement that called for full citizenship rights for blacks within the United States, the Black Panther Party rejected the legitimacy of the U.S. government and positioned itself as part of a global struggle against American imperialism. In the face of intense repression, the Party flourished, becoming the center of a revolutionary movement with offices in sixty-eight U.S. cities and powerful allies around the world. Black against Empire is the first comprehensive overview and analysis of the history and politics of the Black Panther Party. The authors analyze key political questions, such as why so many young black people across the country risked their lives for the revolution, why the Party grew most rapidly during the height of repression, and why allies abandoned the Party at its peak of influence. Bold, engrossing, and richly detailed, this book cuts through the mythology and obfuscation, revealing the political dynamics that drove the explosive growth of this revolutionary movement and its disastrous unraveling. Informed by twelve years of meticulous archival research, as well as familiarity with most of the former Party leadership and many rank-and-file members, this book is the definitive history of one of the greatest challenges ever posed to American state power.

Race against Empire

Race against Empire PDF Author: Penny M. Von Eschen
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801471702
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Marshaling evidence from a wide array of international sources, including the black presses of the time, Penny M. Von Eschen offers a vivid portrayal of the African diaspora in its international heyday, from the 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress to early cooperation with the United Nations. Tracing the relationship between transformations in anti-colonial politics and the history of the United States during its emergence as the dominant world power, she challenges bipolar Cold War paradigms. She documents the efforts of African-American political leaders, intellectuals, and journalists who forcefully promoted anti-colonial politics and critiqued U.S. foreign policy. The eclipse of anti-colonial politics—which Von Eschen traces through African-American responses to the early Cold War, U.S. government prosecution of black American anti-colonial activists, and State Department initiatives in Africa—marked a change in the very meaning of race and racism in America from historical and international issues to psychological and domestic ones. She concludes that the collision of anti-colonialism with Cold War liberalism illuminates conflicts central to the reshaping of America; the definition of political, economic, and civil rights; and the question of who, in America and across the globe, is to have access to these rights.

Revolution Against Empire

Revolution Against Empire PDF Author: Justin du Rivage
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300227655
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
A bold transatlantic history of American independence revealing that 1776 was about far more than taxation without representation Revolution Against Empire sets the story of American independence within a long and fierce clash over the political and economic future of the British Empire. Justin du Rivage traces this decades-long debate, which pitted neighbors and countrymen against one another, from the War of Austrian Succession to the end of the American Revolution. As people from Boston to Bengal grappled with the growing burdens of imperial rivalry and fantastically expensive warfare, some argued that austerity and new colonial revenue were urgently needed to rescue Britain from unsustainable taxes and debts. Others insisted that Britain ought to treat its colonies as relative equals and promote their prosperity. Drawing from archival research in the United States, Britain, and France, this book shows how disputes over taxation, public debt, and inequality sparked the American Revolution—and reshaped the British Empire.

Virginia Woolf Against Empire

Virginia Woolf Against Empire PDF Author: Kathy J. Phillips
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780870498336
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
From her first book to her last, Virginia Woolf consistently satirized British society. Only in recent years, however, has Woolf been recognized as a political thinker, let alone one with a sophisticated grasp of complex ideologies. In Virginia Woolf against Empire, Kathy J. Phillips makes a major contribution to the growing recognition of Woolf as a cultural commentator. Phillips argues that Woolf satirizes social institutions largely through incongruous juxtapositions that link empire making, militarism, and gender relations. One of Woolf's key insights, Phillips shows, is her exposure of a pervasive cultural image that equates women and land - a metaphor resulting from her culture's displacement of sexuality onto militarism and the transference of the individual's need to be included into an all-embracing empire. As Woolf's novels demonstrate, the metaphor works in both directions: to corrupt the relation of men to women with possessiveness and to turn England's relation to its colonies into a kind of substitute for sexual gratification. A unique feature of this study is Phillips's investigation of how Leonard Woolf's books on colonialism specifically influenced Virginia Woolf's novels and vice versa. Virginia Woolf drew her concepts of political systems and theories from her husband's anti-imperialist writings. Phillips also shows how specific factual details from Leonard Woolf's books help to illuminate some of Virginia Woolf's metaphors and allusions.

On Empire

On Empire PDF Author: Eric Hobsbawm
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0307489027
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
In these four incisive and keenly perceptive essays, one of out most celebrated and respected historians of modern Europe looks at the world situation and some of the major political problems confronting us at the start of the third millennium. With his usual measured and brilliant historical perspective, Eric Hobsbawm traces the rise of American hegemony in the twenty-first century. He examines the state of steadily increasing world disorder in the context of rapidly growing inequalities created by rampant free-market globalization. He makes clear that there is no longer a plural power system of states whose relations are governed by common laws--including those for the conduct of war. He scrutinizes America's policies, particularly its use of the threat of terrorism as an excuse for unilateral deployment of its global power. Finally, he discusses the ways in which the current American hegemony differs from the defunct British Empire in its inception, its ideology, and its effects on nations and individuals. Hobsbawm is particularly astute in assessing the United States' assertion of world hegemony, its denunciation of formerly accepted international conventions, and its launching of wars of aggression when it sees fit. Aside from the naivete and failure that have surrounded most of these imperial campaigns, Hobsbawm points out that foreign values and institutions--including those associated with a democratic government--can rarely be imposed on countries such as Iraq by outside forces unless the conditions exist that make them acceptable and readily adaptable. Timely and accessible, On Empire is a commanding work of history that should be read by anyone who wants some understanding of the turbulent times in which we live.

Against the Empire

Against the Empire PDF Author: Jude Watson
Publisher: Perfection Learning
ISBN: 9780756983116
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
Darth Vader, Emperor Palpatine, and Ferus Olin make up a dangerous triangle of deception, power, and revenge. Can the former Jedi apprentice survive the entanglement?

Against the Megamachine

Against the Megamachine PDF Author: David Watson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
The green world in which we evolved is being shredded by our instruments and our way of life. David Watson’s wide-ranging essays—published in Fifth Estate, one of North America’s most original radical journals—ponder such themes as the state, empire and war; humanity’s tragic relation to the natural world; and the contemporary mass society generated by industrial capitalism and modern technology. His impassioned critique offers a vision of social transformation open to diverse possibilities, and suggests where a new politics must begin: as a radical challenge to the mystique of progress, in defense of nature, memory and spirit.

From the Ruins of Empire

From the Ruins of Empire PDF Author: Pankaj Mishra
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
ISBN: 0385676115
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
The Victorian period, viewed in the West as a time of self-confident progress, was experienced by Asians as a catastrophe. As the British gunned down the last heirs to the Mughal Empire, burned down the Summer Palace in Beijing, or humiliated the bankrupt rulers of the Ottoman Empire, it was clear that for Asia to recover a vast intellectual effort would be required. Pankaj Mishra's fascinating, highly entertaining new book tells the story of a remarkable group of men from across the continent who met the challenge of the West. Incessantly travelling, questioning and agonising, they both hated the West and recognised that an Asian renaissance needed to be fuelled in part by engagement with the enemy. Through many setbacks and wrong turns, a powerful, contradictory and ultimately unstoppable series of ideas were created that now lie behind everything from the Chinese Communist Party to Al Qaeda, from Indian nationalism to the Muslim Brotherhood. Mishra allows the reader to see the events of two centuries anew, through the eyes of the journalists, poets, radicals and charismatics who criss-crossed Europe and Asia and created the ideas which lie behind the powerful Asian nations of the twenty-first century.