The Empire Reloaded: Socialist Register 2005 (Socialist Register)

Rating:
Summary: The best yet...
Review: This is arguably the best Socialist Register yet -- the issues covered have never been more pertinent or provocative. The lead article by Varda Burstyn, "The New Imperial Order Foretold", frames the whole volume and is a pleasure to read. It is organized around Orwell and Huxley and their relevance today, and ranges from Orwellian war to Huxleyan "militainment" to nano-technology to mind conditioning to advertising techniques to artificial procreation to criminalizing dissent: a wild, and ultimately chilling ride. The next three articles lay bare the fundamental role of neoliberalism in the shaping of the global order today. Next, Scott Forsyth's "Hollywood Reloaded" is a wonderful discussion of the new order's characteristic film genre: the action blockbuster. Harriet Friedmann's "Feeding the Empire" is a fundamental historical treatment of a critical topic that is simply not talked about enough: food. The regional articles on China, SE Asia, S. Africa, Russia and E. Europe are all good, but the one that boggled my mind was the one on "counterinsurgency" in Columbia -- a mind-bending expose' of the so-called war on drugs, which is in reality a war of terror against popular forces in order to protect forest and oil resources in Venezuela. The book closes with an interview with the "grand old man" of the British left, Tony Benn, focusing on the Bush-Blair relationship: a fitting end to an extremely thought-provoking volume. And all this in just over 300 pages!