Living the American Nightmare
Ron Jacobs
Hanian Media £8.50

 
IF YOU want to understand US imperialism in the here and now, you could do worse than to read the work of Ron Jacobs.

A serial contributor to Counterpunch, essayist and novelist, Jacobs is one of those veteran activist-journalists steeped in the defiant critiques of US counter-culture that equip him with a uniquely incisive take on reality.

The radical pen that he wields as a result, and the consistency of his observations about US foreign policy and its domestic reverberations in a deeply divided society, put him into a category of writers to whom we should all listen.
 
This collection of essays written from 2018–22, mostly culled from Counterpunch, offers a dyed-in-the-wool critique of Washington’s deadly imperial hypocrisy.

It weaves a thread of insights from a lifetime of refusing to swallow the lies pumped out by the Pentagon, State Department and Capitol to justify their murderous overseas adventures.

While Jacobs spends time reflecting on past struggles that might at first sight seem nostalgic—such as protests against the Vietnam War, Nixon, Reagan etc — it becomes clear by the end of American Nightmare that this is a skilful curation to weave a narrative about the genetic relationship between imperialism, militarism and capitalism.

This is most evident in his writing on recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Ukraine, in which he pulls no punches in exposing the US’s cynical motives.

He writes of Afghanistan: “The Taliban are not crazy. They are primarily Afghans who are sick of foreign occupation. The crazy ones are the foreigners who thought they could occupy a people and a land and turn them into puppets of the US.”
 
He is even more audacious on Ukraine, described as “imperial idiocy’s newest battleground” where Washington’s provocative motives through Nato have always been part of an arrogant strategy to wrest control of the country’s markets while encircling Russia. All the while, the corporate media in the “land of the free” knit a blanket censorship to ensure that anyone who disagrees is tarred as a Russian asset.

Jacobs writes: “Relatively few in the world see this conflict as a national liberation struggle. Many consider it as a war between two imperial powers … with the people of Ukraine so far paying the highest price, with the energy and arms industries of nations involved seeing the highest profits.”

The domestic corollaries of militaristic US nationalism abroad in a country deformed by capitalist diseases are police brutality, racism, white supremacism, misogyny and homelessness. With refreshing honesty, Jacobs can also be as critical of deluded liberals and the unthinking left as he is of their enemies.

While this book is about the US, it matters to us here in Britain—because the UK is still the US’s aircraft carrier and its conservative elite still in thrall to Washington.

Jacobs has a gift: the ability to analyse current affairs in an accessible way that speaks to readers without fancy abstraction, just blunt common sense.