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Had Enough?
A handbook for fighting back, from the Ragin' Cajun. "I've had enough of losing elections. I've had enough of losing arguments. I've had enough of seeing Americans losing their jobs... I don't know about you, but I've had enough of the whole damn thing."

“The Sorrows of Empire”
(Owl Books 2004)

President Eisenhower once famously warned of the dangers of “the military-industrial complex.”  Chalmers Johnson, a well-respected Asia specialist, shows how a slowly creeping militarism of American society blossomed, especially after 9/11, into full-blown American empire, complete with ever-larger military budgets, an expanding string of U.S. military bases worldwide, and open disdain for the welfare of the rest of the globe.  Most troubling is that much of what has transpired since 9/11 has occurred in secret, and in ways designed purposefully to circumvent the law and avoid both Congressional and international oversight.  Johnson draws comparisons between post-9/11 U.S. hegemony and earlier European imperialism, and concludes that unless the American people can reclaim their political process from the Pentagon and special interests, our overextended empire will also crumble, along with our civil liberties and our economy.  This is truly a ‘must read’ book!

Greg P. Guelcher

What Everyone Needs to Know About Islam
(Oxford University Press, 2002)

Confused about Islam?  Tired of the knee-jerk, right-wing bigots who see behind every head scarf a would-be terrorist?  Professor John L. Esposito of Georgetown University has made a career educating Americans about one of the world’s fastest-growing but least understood religions: Islam.  “What Everyone Needs to Know about Islam” provides a comprehensive yet highly accessible overview of the major beliefs and concerns of Islam through an engaging method of providing brief answers to “frequently asked questions.”  I’ve used this book in class with good results.

Greg P. Guelcher

Occidentalism
(Penguin Books, 2004)

Buruma & Margalit follow the earlier example of Edward Said’s pathbreaking study “Orientalism” (1979), and trace the supposed roots of an anti-liberal, anti-Western mode of thought they term “Occidentalism.”  Occidentalism, which has won over religious and intellectual leaders throughout Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, isn’t simply the recent brainchild of Osama Bin Laden and his ilk.  Rather, Buruma and Margalit find its roots in the writings of 19^th Century German Romantics and Russian Slavophiles, with later important contributions from the WWII Japanese, from Mao Zedong of China, and from a host of Islamist thinkers of the postwar era.  Occidentalism rails not so much against “our freedoms,” as Bush so simplistically put it after 9/11, but against a machinelike “City of Man” that apparently rejects God in favor of secularism, individualism, materialism, cosmopolitanism, as well as the superficial and trivial.  As with Orientalism’s reductionism and anti-Eastern biases, the portrait of the West painted by Occidentalism is just as mechanistic and dangerously dehumanizing.  Fortunately, Buruma and Margalit reject Bush’s call to arms, and conclude with a plea for the West to engage its critics instead in a “war of ideas” designed to win over what is, so far, still a disparate minority of mostly underground critics.

Greg P. Guelcher

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