Title: Empire of defense :
Authors: Darda, Joseph,
Date: 2019
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press,
Physical description: 267 pages :b illustrations ; 23 cm
Language: English
LC classification: E
Abstract: Empire of Defense is an extensive and multilayered critique of the past seventy years of American military engagement. Joseph Darda exposes how the post-World War II formation of the Department of Defense and the subsequent Korean War set a course for decades of permanent conflict. Conflict, which the United States, he argues, ingeniously reframed as the defense of humanity from illiberal beliefs and behaviors. Empire of Defense shows how a string of rationales for war from the 1940s to the present-- anticommunism, crime control, humanitarianism, and counterterrorism-- paved the way for unprecedented military growth that secured rather than dismantled the existing racial order. A wide range of writers, filmmakers, and journalists - from I. F. Stone and Ishmael Reed to Stanley Kubrick and June Jordan - have struggled to tell the story of war without end, and Darda reveals how that struggle itself tells the bigger story. He draws a clear line from the Cold War to the War on Terror and makes sense of our collective cultural efforts to recognize the not-so-new normal of nonstop military empire-building.
Contents: Introduction: A perpetual wartime footing -- How to tell a permanent war story -- Antiwar liberalism against liberal war -- Dispatches from the drug wars -- Kicking the Vietnam Syndrome with human rights -- The craft of counterinsurgent whiteness -- Epilogue: Defense in the Fifth Domain.
Subject headings (LCSH): Militarism--United States.; Racism--United States.; United States--Foreign relations--20th century.; United States--Foreign relations--21st century.; United States--History, Military--20th century.; United States--History, Military--21st century.