Author: Colin Mooers
Translator(s)/ Edito: Colin Mooers
Publisher: Colin Mooersiva
Year: 2007
Language: English
Pages: 269
ISBN/UPC (if available): 185168462X
Description
Less than fifty years after the last throes of colonialism, a new imperialism is engulfing the globe. Intent on the expansion of Western capitalism rather than direct political domination, it is nevertheless underpinned by overwhelming military force.
“These very timely and wide-ranging essays make an enormous contribution to understanding American imperialism – and criticizing the apologists for it.”
Professor Leo V. Panitch, Senior Canada Research Chair,
York University, Toronto, Canada.
“Colin Mooers has brought together a set of incisive essays that lay bare the ideological rhetorics of empire in this neoliberal, post-Soviet era of globalized militarism.”
Aijaz Ahmad, author of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Imperialism of
Our Time.
In this landmark work, ten influential writers, including Tariq Ali, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and Aziz Al-Azmeh, question the intellectual justifications that underpin the ‘New imperialism’ of the United States. Dismissing as self-delusional the official rhetoric of democracy, human right, and liberty, they expose the ideological roots and broader motivations behind the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and their implications for the wider world.
Arguing that capitalist interests can only be policed on a global scale through the use of disproportionate military might, raising the specter of perpetual war, they point out the potentially ruinous consequences this would have on the very freedom and democracy that the New Imperialists claim as their own. Inclusive and passionately argued, this book is a chilling warming against intellectual complicity, and a vital tool for understanding global politics today.
Contents
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The New Watchdogs
Colin Mooers
Democracy as Ideology of Empire
Ellen Meiksins Wood
After the Fact:
Reading Tocqueville in Baghdad
Aziz Al-Azmeh
Tortured Civilizations: Islam and the West
Tariq Ali
Gender, Political Islam, and Imperialism
Shahrzad Mojab
Imperial Narcissism: Michael Ignatieff’s Apologies for Empire
David McNally
Nostalgia for Empire: Revising Imperial History for
American Power
Colin Mooers
When Might is Right: Ancient Lamentations, Straussian
Ministrations and American Dispensation
Thom Workman
Praising Empire: Neoliberalism under Pax Americana
Adam Hanieh
American Soft Power, or, American Cultural Imperialism?
Tanner Mirrlees
U.N. Imperialism: Unleashing Entrepreneurship in the
Developing World
Paul Cammack
Index