From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age
The audiobook for You Can Leave is now live and available for sampling and purchase. Be among the first to listen to this harrowing tale of struggle and survival in a world gone morally mad and bureaucratically bad.
You Can Listen to a 5 minute sample or download the entire recording free with a trial membership to Audible:
“You Can Leave is a work of metafiction. Any resemblance of fictional characters to persons in reality may or may not be coincidental…”
When is a suicide not a suicide? You Can Leave, a novel by Laurie Calhoun, portrays a dark, disturbing, dystopic world where dissenters are permanently silenced whenever perceived of as threats by ruthless sociopaths occupying the highest corridors of power. The narrator relays her experiences at the hands of “the new mob”, a coordinated network of operatives enlisted from all walks of life on a “need to know” basis to carry out what appear to be trivial tasks for enticing sums of money. Lost in the labyrinth of an insane bureaucracy run amok, the heroine charts her path to survival using the only available means: her capacity to think. But will that be taken away from her as well?
Where Franz Kafka meets George Orwell meets Jorge Luis Borges, the world of You Can Leave is fraught with paranoia and fear but illuminated by the light of pure reason. As the targeted protagonist uses logic alone to surmount hurdle after hurdle, she leaps in and out of the frame created for her by the author, thereby forcing the reader to confront an unsettling possibility: Could this be the world in which we currently live?
Available now in ebook formats (Kindle, Nook, and epub) at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo books
This 56-page Google Books preview includes the new foreword to the 2016 paperback edition:
There is a big 50% off sale going on at Palgrave Macmillan, including all formats–hardcover, softcover and ebook–of War and Delusion: A Critical Examination:
https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137294623
Click here to read David Swanson’s review essay, “Just War Lies.”
“The Jig is Up” offers an overview of the arguments of War and Delusion: A Critical Examnation.
At this time in history, people are understandably more worried about the spectre of nuclear war than about drone assassination. Palgrave Macmillan is having a sale, so the ebook of War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, can be purchased through August 30, 2017, for 40% off. (use promo code PB2S17).
In War and Delusion, first published in 2013 and reissued as a paperback in 2016, I consider questions such as whether wars abroad can be construed as acts of self-defense and what we can infer from the treatment of veterans in the United States. The primary thesis of the book is that, in the modern world, just war theory has served primarily as a tool of pro-war propaganda.
In this short interview, Laurie Calhoun takes issue with the recent report in the Wall Street Journal to the effect that Trump has turned the CIA into a killing machine. No, that is Obama’s legacy.
https://sputniknews.com/us/201703151051619733-trump-reaffirming-cia/
In this 28-minute interview on Sputnik Radio Edinburgh, guests Laurie Calhoun and Peter Lee (a Reader in Politics & Ethics at the University of Portsmouth) discuss with host John Harrison whether lethal drones have fundamentally changed the conduct of warfare, to the point where international protocols grounded in the “just war” tradition are now being ignored.
