Customer Reviews

Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving Into Liquid War

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Tour de Force! That's the only way to describe Pepe Escobar's remarkable achievement with Globalistan: How the Globalized World Is Dissolving into Liquid War. In page after page, Mr. Escobar demonstrates his remarkable erudition gained in a peripatetic career, spanning the caves of Tora Bora to the slums of Sao Paolo and Mumbai; from the halls of venality to the palaces of the gluttonously wealthy; from conversations with forgotten Pentagon warlords to raps with Brazilian gang lords.

Our Neocon leaders seem to think the rest of the World is frozen in situ, waiting for them to hatch their nefarious schemes. Globalistan shows us the consequences of such a blindered [or should I say "blundered"] attitude.

Producers for the talking heads of "mainstream" media will have to have this book. It is the one volume necessary to make sense of our churning humanity in the 21st Century. A quick scan can provide the background on every crisis from Iran to "Chindia"; from Shiiteistan to the Gazprom Nation; from PetroEurostan to the Bush White House.

Escobar demonstrates why it is true that if we don't find ways to spread our prosperity around the World, the have-nots will come and take it away from us with guns and bombs and box cutters. All of the walls and fences cannot protect the United States, Europe, and Saudi Arabia from overwhelming illegal immigration. Weapons and fences doom us, like the Texans at the Alamo. Eventually they will be overrun by 3 billion human beings living in abject poverty, but with access to the latest episodes of "24" and "Sleeper Cell," unless we help the Mexicans achieve their dreams of Texas in Mexico.

A special ring of "Hell" is reserved for the mainstream media, who trumpet terrorist propaganda and minor successes around the World with lethal effect; providing Al Qaeda and other miscreants with the raw material for their recruiting campaigns. Jihad Inc. is a Neocon invention, designed to manipulate American ignorance with World class fear mongering.

I found Escobar's analysis of Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, most compelling. He points out that Chavez's position is that Venezuela can't develop nuclear energy or the United States will bomb it away, so he has decided to fight with pipelines. Indeed, pipelines are a major theme of Globalistan, criss crossing, as they do, some of the most formidable territory on the planet, both because of their location and the brigands that guard them [or not].

What came to my mind about Mr. Escobar, after reading his encyclopedic presentation of the dark under side of global venality, was Albert Einstein's quote once applied to another, "Men will scarce believe that such a one as this ever walked upon the earth." Pepe Escobar's Globalistan is an achievement without parallel!

There's such a different viewpoint. Even the US professors he quotes are people I've never heard of. And I thought I was well-read, at least by internet standards.

And he's funny. I'm not sure I was expecting that.

Perfect it's not. It reads as if it were written fast. With places that should have been edited. So read it the same way, fast. Stopping at passages that make you think. There are plenty of those, ranging from a discussion of how many suicide bombers are Islamic fundamentalists, (and what they are instead) to asserting that none of us is truly apolitical.

Someone who is a committed neocon or globalist could gain a lot by reading it. And by checking Escobar's facts, reading the people he admires and quotes. Probably so could the rest of us.

... though be forewarned.

Escobar writes from a vantage point well outside what Dr. John McMurtry has termed 'The Ruling Group Mind' --- that social construct, rigidly ensconced and enshrined in the US --- that forces reality to conform to manufactured delusions... submerging the group and its members within a pre-conscious field of hysteria, denials and projections...

One need not be a "committed Leftist" to appreciate what Mr Escobar has done here; the simple realisation that the current structure of global hegemony by large corporations is an end game for all of us is sufficient. Wonderful, enlightening and incisive.

This review is on the Kindle edition of this work. The book has been pulled in from PDF format to the Kindle and the publisher didn't bother to even look at the result. There is no working table of contents and the format is full of random line breaks and run together words on nearly every line. Unreadable. I can't speak to the content, which I was interested in reading just as a contrast to some of the other views on the subject, because the Kindle edition is unreadable (though sold at full price).

This book describes in apt detail the minimalist morality and crass materialism of the glitzy and high tech age of mass consumerism and "disposability" that has come to characterise the world since the world's second incarnation of "British" power, the US Imperium, won the cold war back at the end of 1991 and took on its final form which people commonly refer to as "neo-con". This initiated the present violent epoch of chaos characterised by the typical but merciless Anglo robber capitalism at its peak that can be summed up as a "dog-eat-dog" creed of selfishness, greed, apathy, cynicism and devil-may-care ignorance. Its policies have caused social decay and explosive upheaval and instability leading to breakdown of order in backward countries and cultures - as we are witness to here in Pakistan. The Anglo powers and the West in general support corrupt westernised ruling elites in Third World countries that suck the blood of their own people, but who maintain a local status quo favourable to the interests their Western patrons and masters. For this, these toady elites are awarded a place at their masters'grand table. The West once even supported militant Islam as a geopolitical tactic (against their Soviet rivals) - till 2001 that is, when it turned around and bit its master like some diseased dog on 9/11. That is why Al-Qaeda exists today. Nowadays, as a result of all these policies and actions, within a short span of just fifteen years, the world has ended up as a dangerous, explosive and uncertain place which is on the boil as never before in recorded Human history. It is a sad fact that nowadays the only effective opposition to Anglo-American "globalism" comes from raving Islamist fanatics. It is clear that globalism as it exists is destined for destruction. We only hope that it doesn't take the world, as well as modern (European) mankind's positive technological, scientific and cultural achievements along with it. This globalism is surely the forerunner of the future system of all mankind; but it is defective and will need destruction and replacement after the rapacious Anglo powers are defeated, shorn from it and done to the dust. Then only can a true Eurasian-African-American global dispensation of the whole of humanity replace it.
The summary on globalism which I have given above is fully documented in the book under review, Globalistan by Pepe Escobar. Escobar is an intrepid Latino globetrotter and reporter from the USA who not only has an accurate grasp of the regions he visits, but he has also employed a unique glossary of terms in his book with which to describe the idiosyncrasies of this topsy-turvy bad new American world. In the process of doing so, he leads his readers to accurate new insights. His contextual reportage and background information are highly accurate and well researched. His style is somewhat jocular, but that again is a "modern" trend in today's informal and casual world, that can be forgiven. As I noted above, the world has been reduced to "black and white" when dealing with opposing issues such as Anglo-American globalist capitalism and Islam, both of which are reprehensible with one being worse than the other. But Escobar falls in neither category, and this fact strikes one as refreshing. This book is not a hyped-up criticism-for-criticism's-sake account of the type that we are nowadays deluged with by the Anglo-American corporate media nexus; it is a quality analysis. It is an original and contemporary work on the current state of the world and should therefore be read by all. Aside from the content of the book, I also consider the quality of its cover, printing, type-setting and paper: I must say that this edition excels in this aspect too.

Globalistan provides a picture of present conditions and the likely future in India, China, Russia and the "stans" as well as Africa and the mid-east.

The book contains names of people and places I was unfamiliar with. Far from confusing -- Mr. Escobar always gets his points across -- these essays made me realize how much is missed in the main stream or popular media.

Whether by design or incompetence we Americans are kept ignorant of the extent to which the planet is affected by the greed and corruption of those who consider themselves citizens of the world, and thus indifferent to any suffering of the place-bound rest of us.

This book helps dispel some of the ignorance and is therefore sobering. Be forewarned that reading it may permanently affect how you view even those sources you consider reliably informed.

Interesting, this book was written in 2007, and probably perceived years before that. Now we are heading for 2012, and what has the globalized world dissolved into? That's right, a "Liquid War". Sad but true.

Pepe Escobar is a virtuoso of the pen ! Globalistan is a must read... a beautiful fusion of 'Stan politics and history all to a back beat of James Brown and Bob Dylan... A real eye opener... even for those experineced on the global stage...

I hope this remarkable book brings Mr Escobar to the attention of the American public... "Yeh boy!"

Much of the political theory in this book is convincing to me and eye-opening. As for the content, it must have taken years to compile it, since I can see that a lot of his earlier articles and ideas went into this.

Globalistan is not a textbook, but really a long, spell-binding reportage on contemporary geopolitics. And it is that entertaining, too. A recurrent theme in Pepe Escobar's books and articles seems to be "war" (be it liquid, military, economical, cultural, energy, Long War, or just ideological etc.) or some form of "conspiracy theory". Thus, the rank and file, the presidents, supreme leaders, oligarchs, terrorists and dictators are just goofy pieces on "Ground zero of a global jihad".

"Welcome, comrade Maobama", "Liquid wars in Globalistan", 9/11, "Get Osama! Now! Or else...", Iran, Afghanistan, Africa, China, BRIC, "Scorpions in a bottle", Eurabia... name the players in the Great Game, and in Globalistan you'll got them all lined up, profiled and Good.