The following essay is adapted from Norman Solomon’s new book, Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State
When Martin Luther King Jr. publicly referred to “the greatest
purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government,” he had no
way of knowing that his description would ring so true 40 years later.
As the autumn of 2007 begins, the reality of Uncle Sam as an unhinged
mega-killer haunts a large minority of Americans. Many who can remember
the horrific era of the Vietnam War are nearly incredulous that we
could now be living in a time of similarly deranged official policy.
Despite all the differences, the deep parallels between the two war
efforts inform us that the basic madness of entrenched power in our
midst is not about miscalculations or bad management or quagmires. The
continuity tells us much more than we would probably like to know about
the obstacles to decency that confront us every day.
The incredulity and numbing, the frequent bobbing-and-weaving of our
own consciousness, the hollow comforts of passivity, insulate us from
hard truths and harsher realities than we might ever have expected to
need to confront — about our country and about ourselves.
Of all the words spewed from the Pet Crock hearings with General
Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, maybe none were more revealing than
Petraeus’s bid for a modicum of sympathy for his burdens as a
commander. “This is going on three years for me, on top of a year
deployment to Bosnia as well,” he said at the Senate hearing, “so my
family also knows something about sacrifice.”
There’s sacrifice and sacrifice…
Read the complete essay.