The Crimes of Empire serves to bookend Boggs’ troika of works which detail the gradual entrenchment of militarism in the American social consciousness and its role in powering global imperial designs. A penetrating foreword by Canadian Marxist scholar Peter McLaren opens with the obligatory swipe at Wall Street, but Boggs’ project is much broader here: as ever, a caustic confronting of the American zeitgeist, now coupled convincingly with a wide-ranging and diligent historical exposé. Subjects range from the classic cases of “regime change” in Latin America, to the “humanitarian” rhetoric of Yugoslavia, to Iraq and Guantanamo. Though much of this ground has been covered before, Boggs’ ambitious survey succeeds largely on the strength of his incisive linking of the political with the socio-historical.

This article appeared in the November/December 2010 issue of Canadian Dimension (The New Feminism).