I Bet I Know Where You Got Your Jackboots: Immigration Sweeps in New Orleans

Kathleen Wallace

 December 3, 2025

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Another city is readying itself to be the recipient of an immigration force “deployment”. This time, it’s the Crescent City that’s up to bat. The details on the New Orleans plan aren’t entirely clear yet, but indications are leaking out that the forces that were in Charlotte earlier this year may be coming to Southeast Louisiana in December–snowbirds of the very worst kind.

It does seem interesting that a city with a fabulous overall winter climate would become the new focus during the holidays, even conveniently into Mardi Gras season. It will be an enjoyable diversion for the jackboots to partake in the celebrations that wouldn’t exist without a myriad of cultures mingling in the city. The kinds of cultures they will arrive to eradicate, of course. Deploying after Nov. 30 means they will be able to avoid hurricane season as well, and any concern about being pressed to actually help if one hit. Not that they would offer any assistance. This coming crew is about destruction and displacement, really more in common with the actual hurricanes than not.

It’s with an additional layer of cruelty that it is a city that has much of its immigrant community hailing from Central America. You know, the nations that were made unstable and violent due to American backed mayhem, often at the behest of corporations like United Fruit. New Orleans has a long history of being involved with such things. In 1910 a group of gangster plotters, led by the ridiculously named Lee Christmas, joined together in the New Orleans red-light district of Storyville at the behest of ridiculously nicknamed Sam “The Banana Man” Zemurray (of United Fruit). From Storyville, they planned their assault on a nation not pleasing current corporate interests. Zemurray needed them to get rid of President Miguel Davila’s government in Honduras. That leader wanted to limit foreign ownership of the nation and to make these profiteering groups actually pay taxes. Unacceptable! Unacceptable! You may know Sam’s old house, it’s where the president of Tulane today lives. Sam’s been kinda whitewashed of many misdeeds because he gave away a few things. Like if a thief clears your house of its antiques and gives you back, well…… a banana in return. But anyway, yeah the leader of Honduras was ousted and another nation was made unstable by ridiculous and greedy hands.

Of course, that type of US led destruction in Central America didn’t end there. The Honduran exploits were done by mainly corporate interests who were given a wink-wink nudge-nudge from the US government, but a more overt US government-backed plot was taking place in 1954. Democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz, a proponent of land reform in Guatemala was becoming unacceptable to US interests as well. He wanted the land reform due to foreign plunderers owning and controlling 40% of the nation’s arable land. Poor Arbenz was not only battling the US government, but he also had to contend with Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays. This was the PR guy who convinced women that by smoking they were lighting up “torches of freedom”. He was able to convince women that the ability to develop a smoker’s hack, obstructive lung disease and possibly cancer was actually quite liberating. But I digress, we are talking about Guatemala here.

So Bernays made a propaganda film called “Journey to Banana Land” to scare Americans that these banana lands were simply outposts of Soviet power and anything on the table was acceptable to neutralize the threat. Some of the propaganda included showing massacre scenes and blaming them on Arbenz when in fact the scenes were from other conflicts. The term banana republic stems from this era, of course. New Orleans was heavily involved in the infrastructure that made wide-scale banana distribution possible, from jerks like Sam the Banana Man and the “Ice Kings” that enabled some of the transport. Bananas were a very big deal, as odd as it is to consider today. Think of the petro wars over the years; there’s nothing new under the sun and any time a resource becomes valuable enough, horrible deeds will be performed to keep the profits coming in.

Back to Guatemala in the 50’s…… the well-known perfectly sane man Howard Hunt was the CIA point man in that particular coup. He helped others create a massively destabilized region. Cruel and greedy men showed up and disrupted entire countries. They took from the citizens their autonomy and attempted to steal their dignity. It was a sick spectacle and the ramifications continue. It created places with raging civil wars and drug violence. The corporate interests wanted a compliant serf style worker population and would happily leave vacuums of increased instability when it suited their fiscal interests.

Individuals fled these troubled areas and often found backbreaking low paid work in the US. They worked in the places that birthed the instability of their own nations. In today’s narrative making machine that would make Bernays proud; these people are now considered the villains. Paradoxically, if you had Puritan weirdos in your family tree like I did, those who left Europe because people couldn’t stand them—well that’s truly a pedigree we can get behind. It’s a mark of honor, told by families to their children. That of “your ancestors left to build a life in a new world and for that we are so incredibly proud of them” If you fled for honest to God safety reasons from Central America or simply the ability to provide for your family through hard work, but were not white, this makes you the bogeyman du jour. Classic abuser rationale. It’s why they want to erase true history and create nothing but a contrived Bernays style narrative.

Another layer to all of this is that much of the current imperial directive to hate those here from Mexico and Central American nations is most likely just a contrived scapegoat attempt due to the prevalence of tech bros and their infiltration of the MAGA movement. Curtis Yarvin, the latest in a line of “I’m selfish and need a way to justify it” Ayn Rand sewage philosophers has taken another guy’s theory (Rene Gerard) and basically said that society has to have a scapegoat to channel an inherent ugly energy. Lord knows they don’t want it channeled their way, so they find another to blame. It’s a craven and calculated move to keep the masses distracted. Look over here as the magician moves his hand to the right while he shoves a rabbit up your ass from the left. It’s a calculated, cowardly plot. They found a scapegoat to blame, and they hope other Americans will be stupid enough to buy into it while they continue to profiteer in every manner possible.

The cold malice involved in targeting groups who have literally built much of this country is pretty breathtaking. After Katrina, the city of New Orleans relied on those very groups to rebuild after the massive damage. They say tents were pitched in City Park, full of laborers, their campfires lit as they grouped together to rest. They worked the daylight hours, simply to wake up and do it again the next day. The kind of work most of us would fail at miserably if we attempted it. A UC Berkeley study indicated that ½ of reconstruction after Katrina was performed by Latino workers and ¼ were said to be undocumented, primarily coming from Mexico and Honduras. Many in the famously blue city remember this and most citizens definitely aren’t behind any of the upcoming depraved sweeps. This is an outside occupation force planning to arrive.

The forgiveness that individuals from these locations have shown to the very nation that upended their home countries’ stability is noteworthy. Then they experience having that country come in to victimize them again….this is the time when people need to know the true history of what their nation has done and to atone. Not to be in that hole of hatred and greed and to keep digging because sooner or later that behavior will land you and yours in a well-deserved hell.

So here’s to hoping that the city comes together and protects those vulnerable individuals they are targeting. New Orleans needs to fight back with what comes readily to it. Portland used inflatable dinosaurs. New Orleans has eccentricity and some good old-fashioned street hustling at the ready. May every fake monk demanding money who walks the French Quarter put so many bracelets on the interlopers that they are completely weighted down by them. May every street hustler walking Bourbon Street say to ICE members: “I bet you $20 I know where you got your jackboots” and clog their paths, exasperating them to exhaustion until they give them all their money. Every city fights back in its own way, perhaps the New Orleans way forward needs to be expanding our already impressive pothole population. No tanks will pass! Of course, neither will our cars, but we can iron that out later. It can be a multi-pronged approach to bring about sheer capitulation and retreat from this beautiful and flawed city. The city that is beautiful due to the multicultural presence and flawed due to treating so many as “others” over the centuries, enslaving and taking, plotting the harm of our southern neighbors for the almighty dollar.

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Public Service Announcement for readers, but not for immigration guys…….. the correct answer to anyone in the French Quarter who comes up to you saying “I bet you $20 I can tell you where you got your shoes” is 1. “Go away, I live here” or 2. “On my feet.”

Kathleen Wallace writes out of the US Midwest. Her writing is collected on her Substack page.

How Australia plans to ban under-16s from social media


By AFP
December 1, 2025


Starting December 10, some of the world's largest social media platforms will be forced to remove all users under the age of 16 in Australia - Copyright AFP/File David GRAY

Australia will soon ban under-16s from the likes of Facebook and TikTok, a world-first move of huge interest to all those worried about the harms of social media.

Internet regulators the world over are watching to see if Australia can rein in the tech giants — but questions remain as the ban approaches on December 10.

Here’s what we know about how Australia will enforce the new restrictions.

– Prove age –

Starting December 10, some of the world’s largest social media platforms will be forced to remove all users under the age of 16 in Australia.

Hundreds of thousands of adolescents are expected to be impacted, with Instagram alone reporting about 350,000 Australian users aged 13 to 15.

Not every Australian will have to prove their age, only those suspected of falling foul of the ban.

And young users will still be able to access some social media without logging in — they just cannot register for their own accounts.

– Verification –

Social media platforms will be held responsible for weeding out underage accounts.

A number of trials have looked at different ways to do so, but the Australian government has so far refused to settle on a universally agreed method.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has started deactivating accounts based on information such as the age given when they were created.

Account holders flagged by mistake could verify their age using a “video selfie” or by providing government-issued ID, Meta said.

– Who’s in and out –

Which platforms fall under the ban continues to be debated.

Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok are covered, as are streaming platforms including Kick and Twitch.

YouTube was added, despite the government’s suggestion that it would be exempt so that children could watch lessons online.

Other popular apps and websites such as Roblox, Pinterest and WhatsApp are currently exempt — but the list remains under review.

– Just browsing –

Australia expects rebellious teens will do their best to skirt the laws.

Guidelines warn they might try to upload fake IDs or use AI to make their photos appear older.

Platforms are expected to devise their own means to stop this happening.

“Of course, no solution is likely to be 100 percent effective all of the time,” the internet safety watchdog has said.

– Harsh penalties –

Australia concedes the ban will be far from perfect at the outset, and some underage users will fall through the cracks as issues are ironed out.

But platforms face the threat of $32 million fines if they fail to take “reasonable steps” to comply.

It remains unclear how Australia’s internet safety regulator would interpret or enforce what counts as reasonable.

“‘Reasonable steps’ means platforms have to act to enforce the restrictions in a way that is just and appropriate in the circumstances,” the regulator’s guidelines say.

Australia ban offers test on social media harm


By AFP

Dec 1, 2025


Researchers are pondering the impact of Australia's world first teen ban on social media - Copyright AFP Marvin RECINOS
Katie Forster

Australia’s under-16 social media ban will make the nation a real-life laboratory on how best to tackle the technology’s impact on young people, experts say.

Those in favour of the world-first December 10 ban point to a growing mass of studies that suggest too much time online takes a toll on teen wellbeing.

But opponents argue there is not enough hard proof to warrant the new legislation, which could do more harm than good.

Adolescent brains are still developing into the early 20s, said psychologist Amy Orben, who leads a digital mental health programme at the University of Cambridge.

A “huge amount” of observational research, often based on surveys, has tracked a correlation between teen tech use and worse mental health, she told AFP.

But it is hard to draw firm conclusions, because phones are so ingrained into daily life, and young people may turn to social media because they are already suffering.

“With technology, because it’s changing so fast, the evidence base will always be uncertain,” Orben said.

“What could change the dial are experimental studies or evaluations of natural experiments. So evaluating the Australia ban is hugely important because it actually gives us a window on what might be happening.”

– No ‘smoking gun’ –

To try and shed light on the cause-and-effect relationship, Australian researchers are recruiting 13- to 16-year-olds for a “Connected Minds Study” to assess how the ban affects their wellbeing.

A World Health Organization survey last year found that 11 percent of adolescents struggled to control their use of social media.

Other research has shown a link between excessive social media use and poor sleep, body image, school performance and emotional distress, such as a 2019 study of US schoolchildren in JAMA Psychiatry that found those who spent over three hours a day on social media could be at heightened risk for mental health problems.

So some experts argue the right time to act is now.

“I actually don’t think this is a science issue. This is a values issue,” said Christian Heim, an Australian psychiatrist and clinical director of mental health.

“We’re talking about things like cyberbullying, the risk of suicide, accessing sites on anorexia nervosa and self-harm,” he told AFP.

Evidence of a risk is growing, Heim said — pointing to a 2018 study by neuroscientist Christian Montag that linked addiction to the Chinese messaging app WeChat to shrinking grey matter volume in part of the brain.

“We can’t wait for stronger evidence,” Heim said.

Scott Griffiths of the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences said a “smoking gun research study” was unlikely to emerge soon to prove the harms of social media.

But the ban was worth trying, he said.

“I’m hopeful that the major social media companies seeing this full-throated legislative action come into play will finally be motivated to more meaningfully protect the health and wellbeing of young people.”

– ‘Too blunt’ –

More than three-quarters of Australian adults agreed with the new legislation before it passed, a poll indicated.

However, an open letter signed by more than 140 academics, campaigners and other experts cautioned that a ban would be “too blunt an instrument”.

“People were saying: ‘Well, kids are getting more anxious. There must be a reason — let’s ban social media’,” argued one signatory, Axel Bruns, a digital media professor at Queensland University of Technology.

Children may simply have more reasons to be anxious, under pressure from pandemic-interrupted schooling and troubled by wars in Gaza and Ukraine, he told AFP.

And a ban might push some teens to more extreme, fringe sites, while preventing other marginalised young people from finding community.

Noelle Martin, an activist focused on image-based online abuse and deepfakes, feared the Australian ban would do little to help, given the country’s history on enforcement of existing laws.

“I don’t believe it will stop, prevent or do much to meaningfully combat this issue,” Martin said.

In any case, the political decision has been taken in Australia.

“Social media is doing social harm to our children,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said this year.

“There is no doubt that Australian kids are being negatively impacted by online platforms, so I’m calling time on it.”

 

An Unexpected Con To End Free Speech

How Trump Uses Jews

by Mattea Kramer and Tom Engelhardt | Nov 27, 2025 

Rooting out terrorism and antisemitism was the supposed reason that plainclothed ICE agents arrested doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk on a street in Somerville, Massachusetts, after she coauthored an op-ed calling on Tufts University to divest from companies with ties to Israel due to the killing and starvation of Palestinian civilians. There is an international movement to boycott, sanction, and divest from Israel, but in the United States, President Donald Trump is imperiling the freedom even to publicly discuss such ideas, which should, in effect, be considered a test case for his larger attack on free speech. So far, the test is going well for Trump.

In what seems a long time ago, in 2024, the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, released a blueprint for what it called “a national strategy to combat antisemitism” by addressing what it described as “America’s virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American ‘pro-Palestinian movement.’” In essence, and in what’s amounted to an extraordinarily effective work of political theater that has been sold to my own state, Massachusetts, among other places, that foundation dubbed its political opponents “supporters of terrorism.” It also labeled organizations working in opposition to its agenda a “terrorist support network,” and claimed for itself the noble mantle of “combating antisemitism” — even as it deftly redefined antisemitism from hatred of Jewish people to criticism of the U.S.-Israel alliance. President Trump has put the Heritage Foundation strategy into action and gone even further.

It may be his most original idea. As political scientist Barnett Rubin put it in September, “President Trump always says he’s very creative and accomplishes things no one has ever done before. And now he is building a fascist regime which is legitimized by the fight against antisemitism. Nobody ever thought of doing that before.”

How the Defense Department (Oops, Sorry, the War Department) Promotes World Peace

I attended Hebrew school as a child, and today, when I try to recall what I learned there about Israel and Palestine, I find in my memory an image of a desert, replete with flowers, and the pleasant recollection that the State of Israel was founded in that empty landscape. In 1998, I visited Israel with my family. My brother had his bar mitzvah at the mountain-top fortress of Masada overlooking the Dead Sea. Though I enjoyed an enviable private school education, I didn’t hear the word Nakba until adulthood. That Arabic word for catastrophe refers to the displacement of 700,000 Palestinian people for Israel’s founding in 1948. A majority of the population of the modern-day Gaza Strip descended from refugees of the Nakba.

According to Amnesty International and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, Israel has imposed a system of oppression on Palestinians across Israel and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories through an enforced system of segregation that constitutes apartheid. For decades, Israel has controlled who could enter or exit the Gaza Strip and, from 2007 on, that 25-mile strip of land functioned as what Human Rights Watch called an “open-air prison.” As of 2022, the unemployment rate in Gaza had hit 45%, and 65% of the people there were living in poverty. On October 7th of the following year, an armed group broke out of Gaza and waged attacks on Israel that killed 1,195 people, 815 of whom were civilians.

In the two years since then, Israel has responded by killing more than 67,000 Palestinians in Gaza in a military campaign of such horror that, as the head of Doctors Without Borders reported to the U.N. Security Council, children as young as five said that they preferred to die rather than continue living in fear while witnessing the slaughter of their family members. A girl named Sham was born in Gaza in November 2023 and survived smoke poisoning as an infant. As a toddler, she was diagnosed with acute malnutrition, before being killed on May 6th of this year when Israel dropped explosives on the shelter where she was living with her family. The United Nations and prominent experts, including Israeli-American professor of Holocaust and genocide studies Omer Bartov, have concluded that Israel’s war on Gaza is a genocide. The current ceasefire has slowed, not stopped, the death toll.

By 2024, the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, had ruled that Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem was illegal; that Israel needed to halt all settlement construction, evacuate its settlers, pay restitution to Palestinians, and allow them the right of return. It also indicated that all states and international organizations have a legal obligation not to assist Israel’s further occupation of the area.

However, since October 2023, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry and the Council on Foreign Relations, using 800 transport planes and 140 ships, my own country has delivered 90,000 tons of arms and equipment to Israel, including tanks, artillery shells, bombs, and rockets. The U.S. government gives Israel billions of dollars annually in military aid, which that country spends mostly on purchases made through the U.S. “Foreign Military Sales” program. According to a Defense Department website, that program sells “articles and services [that] will strengthen the security of the United States and promote world peace.”

Despite how, as Israeli historian Lee Mordechai described it, Israel has limited the flow of information out of Gaza and campaigned to discredit critical voices, a July Gallup poll found that 60% of Americans disapprove of Israel’s military actions there. Even more strikingly, a September Washington Post poll found that nearly half (48%) of Jewish Americans disapprove (and only 46% approve).

But according to recommendations issued by the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism, a group created by state law in 2024, a teacher discussing such polling in a classroom could precipitate an anonymous complaint filed with the state police on the grounds that the educator has rendered the learning environment in my state hostile to Jewish students.

School Teachers Are the Problem!

Last February, Special Commission co-chair and State Representative Simon Cataldo conducted an inquisition — yes, an inquisition — into the president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (who is himself Jewish), including presenting a series of materials on Israel/Palestine that Cataldo had obtained from a database of educator resources. He displayed a graphic called “Born Unequal Abroad,” which lists the different rights afforded to an American Jewish child and the child of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The former can visit Israel and even become an Israeli citizen at any time, while the latter is barred from visiting and has no pathway to citizenship (even through marriage). Cataldo seemed to regard that graphic (and others like it) as self-evidently antisemitic and displayed it as a smoking gun that revealed the supposed antisemitism festering within the Massachusetts Teachers Association.

In other words, in my home state today, “combating antisemitism” means a governor- and legislature-appointed commission conducting an inquisition of a (Jewish) union leader for the offense of failing to suppress critical discussion of a foreign nation that the world’s leading human rights organizations have found to be upholding a system of apartheid and committing genocide. At the same time, actual antisemitism — that is, the hatred of Jewish people by xenophobic nationalists — has gone largely unexamined by the Commission in the midst of its campaign to shut down criticism of Israel. (I imagine President Trump and the Heritage Foundation applauding in the background.)

Indeed, over the course of a year of hearings, the Special Commission has perhaps irreparably merged the concept of antisemitism with criticism of Israel, which seems to have been the point. State Senator and Commission Co-Chair John Velis actually uses the terms “anti-Israel” and “antisemitic” interchangeably, though they do have different meanings and anyone charged with the responsibility of leading a state panel on antisemitism should know that. Velis, who is not Jewish, has taken multiple trips to Israel paid for by the Israeli government as well as a charity affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the lobby group known as AIPAC.

The Special Commission has unveiled recommendations for Massachusetts schools that include utilizing a definition of antisemitism that, according to the ACLU, will have the effect of chilling free speech. It has also recommended launching a statewide reporting system in which anonymous allegations of antisemitism in schools would be collected by the state police.

Following the initial release of those recommendations, Governor Maura Healey issued a statement applauding the Commission’s work. Organizations like the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston have also sent out emails to their membership commending the Commission.

Perhaps in response to the hours of dissenting public testimony that (mostly Jewish) people as well as scholars and education experts have offered, the commissioners wrote in their most recent report, “We should listen to and respect people who say that they have been harmed by antisemitism; we should not gaslight them or tell them that their experience is invalid.”

Who could argue?

A Federal Judge Weighs In

After Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk was abducted from the street by ICE agents for the offense of co-writing an op-ed in the school paper asking the school to divest from companies with ties to Israel, a federal judge found that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem had violated the First Amendment through a policy of targeting for deportation noncitizens who criticized Israel or voiced support for Palestinians. The judge also found that executive orders issued by President Trump had relied on a definition of antisemitism that encompassed First Amendment-protected speech (the same definition recommended by the Massachusetts Commission!).

But will that federal court ruling even matter? According to the same judge, “The effect of these targeted deportation proceedings continues unconstitutionally to chill freedom of speech to this day.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Benjamin Moser has noted that, after October 7th, some American Jewish institutions not only supported Israel’s reign of terror over Palestinian civilians but also applauded the clampdown on free speech in order to sustain the killing. “The younger generations, people who have seen with their own eyes the crimes of the so-called Jewish state, and who feel the sacrilege, the impious desecration, of the values they thought were Jewish,” he wrote, “will never return to these institutions.”

But will it matter? Surely, it won’t stop Donald Trump from using his version of Jewish identity as a moral shield for his attack on free speech.

In Massachusetts, a coalition of organizations has publicly opposed the Special Commission’s recommendations and, in the western part of the state where I live, a group of residents has resorted to putting out yard signs with QR codes on them to call attention to this travesty. I’m part of that effort, but does it matter?

In California, a new law, ostensibly intended to protect Jewish students from discrimination, goes into effect on January 1st. It has, however, put educators on alert that they may be accused of antisemitism if they share information deemed critical of Israel.

Meanwhile, the leaders of civil society organizations appear ill-suited to resist such suppression of free speech and, in some cases, seem to embrace it. In January, members of the American Historical Association voted 428 to 88 in favor of declaring their opposition to “scholasticide” (the deliberate destruction of an education system) in Gaza. But the Association’s leadership council vetoed that vote. A similar episode occurred at the Modern Language Association.

Amy Hagopian, a professor emeritus of global health at the University of Washington, who for years taught a class on war and health, recently wrote about how she was expelled from the American Public Health Association after publicly protesting a decision by its executive board to halt consideration of a resolution on Palestinian health justice. (An anonymous complaint had alleged that the protest was antisemitic.)

An Alternative Could Look Like This

The usual line-toeing of politicians in both major parties has involved reciting statements of support for Israel, whatever it does. By contrast, Zohran Mamdani was clear during his victorious campaign to become mayor of New York City that he supports an end to apartheid for Palestinians and opposes the crimes against humanity committed by Israel. In American politics, that represented a fresh playbook. He focused successfully on his city’s absurdly high cost of living and did so as part of a coalition that included people of the Jewish faith and other faiths, even as powerful moneyed interests lined up against him. And he won.

Keep in mind that a clear majority of Americans do indeed disapprove of Israel’s actions in Gaza, so it makes sense that there was an electorate for a candidate who would tell the truth about the oppression of Palestinians, while rejecting claims that it’s antisemitic to do so. Mamdani won a third of voters who specified Judaism as their religion (just as he won a third of Catholics). He also overwhelmingly won among those with no religious affiliation (a quarter of the electorate) and those whose religious affiliation was described as “Other,” which is where exit pollsters put people who are Muslim.

Trump’s urge to suppress free speech may be about Israel today, but count on one thing: it will be about something else tomorrow. The real question is whether Americans will accept his violations of the First Amendment or fight to protect free speech even when they dislike things other people have to say.

Copyright 2025 Mattea Kramer

Mattea Kramer, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of the award-winning novel The Untended about capitalism and the American opioid crisis.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.