Category: War & Peace

  • Total War Meets Pure War

    This was one of the very first pieces of writing that I did in my life. I wrote it during the first two weeks of the Gulf War in 1991. I was living in New York City at the time. I tried to balance the perspectives of Chomsky and Baudrillard/Virilio.

  • A Taste of Armageddon

    The Enterprise is en route to the NGC 321 star cluster to try to establish diplomatic relations with Eminiar VII, the most technologically advanced planet in the area. More than fifty years earlier, the Federation starship U.S.S. Valiant was listed as missing in space after it transmitted a report from Eminiar and then vanished.

  • Jean Baudrillard and Albert Camus on the Simulacrum of Taking a Stance on War, by Alan N. Shapiro

    Unlike other thinkers such as Chomsky, Baudrillard is not ‘against war’. Baudrillard’s position is rather that of being ‘neither for nor against’ contemporary hyper-real mediatized wars, and seeing the imperative of choosing whether one is ‘for’ or ‘against’ war as being something of a forced and imposed simulacrum.

  • General Patton Memorial Museum

    General Patton Memorial Museum 62-510 Chiriaco Road, Chiriaco Summit, California 92201 “A Military History Museum With Exhibits from World War I through the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars And our Tank Yard with Armored Vehicles from World War II through Vietnam.”

  • Europe at War in Serbia and Kosovo, by Alan N. Shapiro

    On March 24, 1999, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization initiated a bombing campaign from 15,000 feet vectored towards designated targets inside the territory of Yugoslavia. NATO’s spokesmen stated that the systematic aerial assaults were a response to brutalities being carried out on the ground by Serb military and para-military forces against the ethnic Albanian majority.