Taki Goes Online

The amazing Taki Theodoracopulos has started a webzine, Taki’s Top Drawer, a development that is sure to make waves from one end of the blogosphere to the other. The first issue features contributions from conservative academic Paul Gottfried, the delightful Taki himself, writer F. J. Sarto, and myself. I’ll be writing a column twice a month, where I’ll be dealilng with some issues that Antiwar.com is just not the right venue for, although my first contribution, “National Socialism and National Greatness,” would fit in nicely here.

I can’t resist quoting from the first paragraph of Taki’s credo, “Why I Publish This Magazine”:

I want to shake up the stodgy world of so-called ‘conservative’ opinion. For the past ten years at least, the conservative movement has been dominated by a bunch of pudgy, pasty-faced kids in bow-ties and blue blazers who spent their youths playing Risk in gothic dormitories, while sipping port and smoking their father’s stolen cigars.

Now you know why I call him delightful….

Gabriel Kolko

Antiwar Radio: Gabriel Kolko

Professor Gabriel Kolko discusses the catastrophic post World War II American Empire along the lines covered in his book The Age of War: The United States Confronts the World: the phony Cold War against the USSR, attempted domination of the third world, the Military Industrial Complex’s permanent function in the American economy, the true purpose and fate of the NATO alliance, and the coming destruction – on way or another – of America’s global position.

MP3 here.

Gabriel Kolko is the leading historian of modern warfare. He is the author of the classic Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914 and Another Century of War?

Chalmers Johnson

Antiwar Radio: Chalmers Johnson

Former CIA analyst, and author of the trilogy Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic and now Nemesis: the Last Days of the American Republic, Chalmers Johnson discusses his books, and the ways Republics die: the English model of losing an empire without total self destruction and the Roman way of dictatorship and destruction which America seems to be following instead.

MP3 here.

Chalmers Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, a non-profit research and public affairs organization devoted to public education concerning Japan and international relations in the Pacific. He taught for thirty years, 1962-1992, at the Berkeley and San Diego campuses of the University of California and held endowed chairs in Asian politics at both of them. At Berkeley he served as chairman of the Center for Chinese Studies and as chairman of the Department of Political Science. His B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in economics and political science are all from the University of California, Berkeley. He first visited Japan in 1953 as a U.S. Navy officer and has lived and worked there with his wife, the anthropologist Sheila K. Johnson, every year between 1961 and 1998.

Johnson has been honored with fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Guggenheim Foundation; and in 1976 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has written numerous articles and reviews and some sixteen books, including Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power on the Chinese revolution, An Instance of Treason on Japan’s most famous spy, Revolutionary Change on the theory of violent protest movements, and MITI and the Japanese Miracle on Japanese economic development. This last-named book laid the foundation for the “revisionist” school of writers on Japan, and because of it the Japanese press dubbed him the “Godfather of revisionism.”

He was chairman of the academic advisory committee for the PBS television series “The Pacific Century,” and he played a prominent role in the PBS “Frontline” documentary “Losing the War with Japan.” Both won Emmy awards. His most recent books are Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000) and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, which was published by Metropolitan in January 2004. Blowback won the 2001 American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation.

Trita Parsi

Antiwar Radio: Trita Parsi

Trita Parsi, the President of the National Iranian-American Council, discusses the “surge” distraction from the impending war with Iran, Bush’s false claims about Iran killing Americans in Iraq, the Walter Jones resolution, why the U.S. ought to try talking Iran for a change and how the average Iranian feels about the U.S.

MP3 here.

Trita Parsi is the author of the forthcoming Treacherous Triangle: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States (Yale University Press, 2007.) He wrote his Doctoral thesis on Israeli-Iranian relations under Professor Francis Fukuyama (and Drs. Zbigniew Brzezinski, R. K. Ramazani, Jakub Grygiel, Charles Doran) at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in 2006.

Dr. Parsi is one of the few people in the US – if not the only one – that has traveled both to Iran and Israel and interviewed top officials in these countries on the state of Israeli-Iranian relations. He has conducted more than 130 interviews with senior Israeli, Iranian and American officials in all three countries. He is fluent in Persian/Farsi.

He has followed Middle East politics for more than a decade, both through work in the field, and through extensive experience on Capitol Hill and the United Nations.

Dr. Parsi’s articles on Middle East affairs have been published in the Financial Times, Jane’s Intelligence Review, the Globalist, the Jerusalem Post, the Forward, BitterLemons and the Daily Star.

He is a frequent commentator on US-Iranian relations and Middle Eastern affairs, and has appeared on BBC World News, PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, CNN (Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room, Anderson Cooper 360°), CNN International (Your World Today), Al Jazeera, C-Span, NPR, MSNBC, Voice of America and British Channel 4.

Ray McGovern

Antiwar Radio: Ray McGovern

Veteran CIA analyst Ray McGovern explains what a putz his former subordinate Robert Gates is, Tyler Drumheller‘s efforts to exclude the phony bio-weapons trucks information from Colin Powell’s speech and kidnap and torture human beings, the indictment of some of them by the Germans, the suppression of George “Slam Dunk” Tenet’s book, the likelihood of war with Iran, the possibility of a manufactured pretext for war, the lack of evidence for the accusations against them, Bush’s phony 4 terror busts, Israel’s nukes, their influence over American foreign policy.

MP3 here.

Former CIA official, Ray McGovern, has leveled serious accusations at the Bush administration in connection with the war in Iraq. McGovern served as a CIA analyst for almost 30 years. From 1981 to 1985 he conducted daily briefings for Vice President George Bush. He is a co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.