The United States of Fear

About TomDispatch

Tom Engelhardt launched TomDispatch.com in October 2001 as an email publication offering commentary and collected articles from the world press. In December 2002, it gained its name, became a project of the Nation Institute, and went online as “a regular antidote to the mainstream media.” The site now features three articles a week, all original. These include Engelhardt’s regular commentaries as well as the work of authors ranging from Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben, Andrew Bacevich, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Mike Davis to Michael Klare, Adam Hochschild, Noam Chomsky, and Karen J. Greenberg. Nick Turse, who also writes for the site, is its associate editor and research director. Andy Kroll is an associate editor and its economic correspondent. Timothy MacBain produces regular TomCast audio interviews with the authors who write the site’s weekly pieces. TomDispatch is intended to introduce readers to voices and perspectives from elsewhere (even when the elsewhere is here). Its mission is to connect some of the global dots regularly left unconnected by the mainstream media and to offer a clearer sense of how this imperial globe of ours actually works.

About Tom Engelhardt

^{© Don J. Usner}

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the TomDispatch.com website, a project of the Nation Institute, where he is a fellow. He is the author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, The End of Victory Culture, a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, and The Last Days of Publishing, a novel. Many of his TomDispatch interviews were collected in Mission Unaccomplished: TomDispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire, a collection of pieces from his site that functioned as an alternative history of the mad Bush years. TomDispatch is the sideline that ate his life. Before creating it he worked as an editor at Pacific News Service in the early 1970s, and, these last four decades, as an editor in book publishing. For fifteen years he was senior editor at Pantheon Books, where he edited and published award-winning works ranging from Art Spiegelman’s Maus and John Dower’s War Without Mercy to Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy. He is now consulting editor at Metropolitan Books, as well as the cofounder and coeditor of the American Empire Project (Metropolitan Books), where he has published best-selling works by Chalmers Johnson, Andrew Bacevich, and Noam Chomsky, ­ among others. Many of the authors whose books he has edited and published over the years now write for TomDispatch.com. For a number of years, he was also a teaching fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is married to Nancy J. Garrity, a therapist, and has two children, Maggie and Will.

About Haymarket Books

Haymarket Books is a nonprofit, progressive book distributor and publisher, a project of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change. We believe that activists need to take ideas, history, and politics into the many struggles for social justice today. Learning the lessons of past victories, as well as defeats, can arm a new generation of fighters for a better world. As Karl Marx said, “The philosophers have merely interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it.”

We take inspiration and courage from our namesakes, the Haymarket Martyrs, who gave their lives fighting for a better world. Their 1886 struggle for the eight-hour day reminds workers around the world that ordinary people can organize and struggle for their own liberation.

For more information and to shop our complete catalog of titles, visit us online at www.haymarketbooks.org.

Also from Haymarket Books

The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s

Tom Engelhardt

Breaking the Sound Barrier

Amy Goodman

Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War on the Palestinians

Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe

War Without End: The Iraq War in Context

Michael Schwartz

Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights

Omar Barghouti

Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations

Iraq Veterans Against the War and Aaron Glantz

A Note about Footnotes

This book has no footnotes. The original posts at TomDispatch.com were, however, heavily footnoted in the style of the Internet—through links that led readers to my sources and also sometimes offered directions for further exploration. Linking is, in fact, the first democratic form of footnoting, making sources instantly accessible to normal readers who, unlike scholars, may not have ready access to a good library. URLs in a book, however, are both cumbersome and useless. So if you want to check my sources, you’ll need to go to the originals online at TomDispatch.com. Fair warning, however: One of the debits of linking is that links regularly die, so the older the piece, the greater the chance that some of the links won’t work.

Copyright

Haymarket Books

Chicago, Illinois

© 2011 by Tom Engelhardt