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The Great Satan | Fourth of July Reading List

Books about the United States of America – the greatest enemy of peace on Earth.

2 July 2025

A collage depicting the statue of liberty with a wolf's skull in place of the face with the American flag in the background. Text reads "America, the Great Satan"

July 4th marks the 249th anniversary of the declaration of America's independence. This is no reason to celebrate. Let it instead serve as an opportunity to remind ourselves that the most pressing threat to humanity is a bloodthirsty pack of private interests hellbent on resource extraction and willing to use the full extent of its military might to destroy every living thing between it and capital accumulation.

In a word: America.

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The Spoils of War

by Andrew Cockburn

Fully updated from the original edition. As the retreat from Kabul shows, America goes to war not to bring democracy, or glory, but in the pursuit of profit. In The Spoils of War, leading Washingto...

Empire of Capital

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

Capitalism makes possible a new form of domination by purely economic means, argues Ellen Meiksins Wood. So, surely, even the most seasoned White House hawk would prefer to exercise global hegemony...

Incoherent Empire

by Michael Mann

In this book, noted sociologist Michael Mann argues that the “new American imperialism” is actually a new militarism. Dissecting the economic, political, military and ideological resources availabl...

American Imperatives

by Anders Stephanson

What was the cold war? Conventional wisdom makes it coextensive with an epoch stretching from the end of the Second World War to the collapse of the Soviet Union, a geopolitical period dominated by...

American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers

by Perry Anderson

Since the birth of the nation, impulses of empire have been close to the heart of the United States. How these urges interact with the way the country understands itself, and the nature of the dive...

America's Fatal Leap

by Paul W. Schroeder

Introduction by Perry Anderson

America's Fatal Leap deconstructs US geopolitics after the end of the Cold War, informed by its author's unsurpassed command of modern history. Paul W. Schroeder, an acclaimed historian of internat...

Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire

by Deepa Kumar

In this incisive account, leading scholar of Islamophobia Deepa Kumar traces the history of anti-Muslim racism from the early modern era to the “War on Terror.” Importantly, Kumar contends that Isl...

The Muslims Are Coming!

by Arun Kundnani

The new front in the War on Terror is the “homegrown enemy,” domestic terrorists who have become the focus of sprawling counterterrorism structures of policing and surveillance in the United Stat...

Homeland

by Richard Beck

For twenty years after September 11, the war on terror was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. With all of the military violence occurring overseas, Americans found themselves living in two worl...

Combat Trauma

by Nadia Abu El Haj

Americans have long been asked to support the troops and care for veterans' psychological wounds. Who, though, does this injunction serve?As acclaimed scholar Nadia Abu El-Haj argues here, in the A...

The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan

by Tariq Ali

The NATO occupation of Afghanistan is over, and a balance-sheet can be drawn. These essays on war and peace in the region reveal Tariq Ali at his sharpest and most prescient.Rarely has there been s...

None of Us Were Like This Before

by Joshua E. S. Phillips

None of Us Were Like This Before recounts the dark journey of a tank battalion as its focus switched from conventional military duties to guerilla warfare and prisoner detention. Author Joshua E. S...

The Rise of Islamic State

by Patrick Cockburn

Born of the Iraqi and Syrian civil wars, the Islamic State astonished the world in 2014 by creating a powerful new force in the Middle East. By combining religious fanaticism and military prowess...

The Apocalypse and the End of History

by Suzanne Schneider

In this authoritative, accessible study, historian Suzanne Schneider examines the politics and ideology of the Islamic State (better known as ISIS). Schneider argues that today’s jihad is not the r...

The Invention of Terrorism in Europe, Russia, and the United States

by Carola Dietze

This book examines key cases of terrorist violence to show that the invention of terrorism was linked to the birth of modernity in Europe, Russia and the United States, rather than to Tsarist despo...

Whiteout

by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair

On March 16, 1998, the CIA’s Inspector General, Fred Hitz, finally let the cat out of the bag in an aside at a Congressional Hearing. Hitz told the US Reps that the CIA had maintained relationships...

Quick Fixes

by Benjamin Yen-Yi Fong

This is your nation's history on drugsAmericans are stumbling through a world-historic drug binge. Opiates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, marijuana, antidepressants, antipsychotics—across the boar...

Agency of Fear

by Edward Jay Epstein

President Bush has made the war against drugs the number one issue on the contemporary American political agenda. In this revised edition of his classic book, available for the first time in paperb...

The Management of Savagery

by Max Blumenthal

Since the 1970s, Washington has been secretly funding some of the worst terrorists in the Middle East. America has supported extremists with money and hardware, including enemies such as Bin Laden...

Afflicted Powers

by Iain A. Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts

Afflicted Powers is an account of world politics since September 11, 2001. It aims to confront the perplexing doubleness of the presentits lethal mixture of atavism and new-fangledness. The world c...

Deport, Deprive, Extradite

by Nisha Kapoor

When Minh Pham was extradited from Britain to the US to face terrorism related charges, his appeal against the deprivation of his British citizenship was still pending. Soon after he arrived his ap...

Underground America

by Voice of Witness

Foreword by Luis Alberto Urrea

Edited by Peter Orner

They arrive from around the world for countless reasons. Many come simply to make a living. Others are fleeing persecution in their native countries. Millions of immigrants risk deportation and imp...

Empire of Borders

by Todd Miller

The twenty-first century has witnessed the rapid hardening of international borders. Security, surveillance, and militarization are widening the chasm between those who travel where they please and...

All-American Nativism

by Daniel Denvir

It is often said that with the election of Donald Trump nativism was raised from the dead. After all, here was a president who organized his campaign around a rhetoric of unvarnished racism and xen...

The US Antifascism Reader

Edited by Bill Mullen and Christopher Vials

Since the birth of fascism in the 1920s, well before the global renaissance of “white nationalism,” the United States has been home to its own distinct fascist movements, some of which decisively i...

First-Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship

by Richard Lachmann

The extent and irreversibility of US decline is becoming ever more obvious as America loses war after war and as one industry after another loses its technological edge. Lachmann explains why the U...

Alt-America

by David Neiwert

Just as Donald Trump’s victorious campaign for the US presidency shocked liberal Americans, the seemingly sudden national prominence of white supremacists, xenophobes, militia leaders, and mysterio...

Behind Enemy Lies

by Patrick Cockburn

In this urgent and timely book, Patrick Cockburn writes the first draft of the history of the current crisis in the Middle East.Here he charts the period from the recapture of Mosul in 2017 to Tur...

Corruptions of Empire

by Alexander Cockburn

“The implied narrative of this collection is the journalist’s background, the imperial myths that helped to shape him, the impulse to exile and his encounter with the Reagan era. The background, th...

An Act of State

by William F. Pepper

On April 4 1968, Martin Luther King was in Memphis supporting a workers' strike. By nightfall, army snipers were in position, military officers were on a nearby roof with cameras, and Lloyd Jowers ...

War and Money

by Maurizio Lazzarato

Translated by Jason Francis McGimsey

Maurizio Lazzarato’s War and Money explores the connections between capitalist expansion, international economic conflict, and war, via an analysis of the imperialism of the American dollar. He exa...

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

by Andreas Malm

The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a...

Prisoners of the American Dream

by Mike Davis

Prisoners of the American Dream is Mike Davis’s brilliant exegesis of a persistent and major analytical problem for Marxist historians and political economists: Why has the world’s most industriall...

The Good Die Young

Introduction by Greg Grandin

Edited by Rene Rojas, Bhaskar Sunkara and Jonah Walters

If the American foreign policy establishment is a grand citadel, Henry Kissinger is the specter haunting its dusty hallways. For half a century, he was an omnipresent figure in war rooms and at pre...

The Secret World of Oil

by Ken Silverstein

Oil is the lifeblood of modern civilization, and the industry that supplies it has been the subject of intense interest and scrutiny, as well as countless books. And yet, almost no attention has be...

American Breakdown

by David Bromwich

American Breakdown is the brilliant political diary of one of America’s leading essayists, David Bromwich, whose work has drawn wide appreciation for its incisive portraits and accurate prognosis. ...

The Contours of American History

by William Appleman Williams

Introduction by Greg Grandin

William Appleman Williams was one of America’s greatest critics of US imperialism. The Contours of American History, first published in 1961, reached back to seventeenth-century British history to ...