By Norman Solomon

Have you heard the one about the U.S. government wanting a “rules-based international order”?

It’s grimly laughable, but the nation’s media outlets routinely take such claims seriously and credulously. Overall, the default assumption is that top officials in Washington are reluctant to go to war, and do so only as a last resort.

The framing was typical when the New York Times just printed this sentence at the top of the front page: “The United States and a handful of its allies on Thursday carried out military strikes against more than a dozen targets in Yemen controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia, U.S. officials said, in an expansion of the war in the Middle East that the Biden administration had sought to avoid for three months.”

So, from the outset, the coverage portrayed the U.S.-led attack as a reluctant action — taken after exploring all peaceful options had failed — rather than an aggressive act in violation of international law.

On Thursday, President Biden issued a statement that sounded righteous enough, saying “these strikes are in direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea.” He did not mention that the Houthi attacks have been in response to Israel’s murderous siege of Gaza. In the words of CNN, they “could be intended to inflict economic pain on Israel’s allies in the hope they will pressure it to cease its bombardment of the enclave.”

In fact, as Common Dreams reported, Houthi forces “began launching missiles and drones toward Israel and attacking shipping traffic in the Red Sea in response to Israel’s Gaza onslaught.” And as Trita Parsi at the Quincy Institute pointed out, “the Houthis have declared that they will stop” attacking ships in the Red Sea “if Israel stops” its mass killing in Gaza.

But that would require genuine diplomacy — not the kind of solution that appeals to President Biden or Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The duo has been enmeshed for decades, with lofty rhetoric masking the tacit precept that might makes right. (The approach was implicit midway through 2002, when then-Senator Biden chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s hearings that promoted support for the U.S. to invade Iraq; at the time, Blinken was the committee’s chief of staff.)

Now, in charge of the State Department, Blinken is fond of touting the need for a “rules-based international order.” During a 2022 speech in Washington, he proclaimed the necessity “to manage relations between states, to prevent conflict, to uphold the rights of all people.” Two months ago, he declared that G7 nations were united for “a rules-based international order.”

But for more than three months, Blinken has provided a continuous stream of facile rhetoric to support the ongoing methodical killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Days ago, behind a podium at the U.S. Embassy in Israel, he defended that country despite abundant evidence of genocidal warfare, claiming that “the charge of genocide is meritless.”

The Houthis are avowedly in solidarity with Palestinian people, while the U.S. government continues to massively arm the Israeli military that is massacring civilians and systematically destroying Gaza. Blinken is so immersed in Orwellian messaging that — several weeks into the slaughter — he tweeted that the United States and its G7 partners “stand united in our condemnation of Russia’s war in Ukraine, in support of Israel’s right to defend itself in accordance with international law, and in maintaining a rules-based international order.”

There’s nothing unusual about extreme doublethink being foisted on the public by the people running U.S. foreign policy. What they perpetrate is a good fit for the description of doublethink in George Orwell’s novel 1984: “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it . . .”

After news broke about the attack on Yemen, a number of Democrats and Republicans in the House quickly spoke up against Biden’s end-run around Congress, flagrantly violating the Constitution by going to war on his own say-so. Some of the comments were laudably clear, but perhaps none more so than a statement by candidate Joe Biden on Jan. 6, 2020: “A president should never take this nation to war without the informed consent of the American people.”

Like that disposable platitude, all the Orwellian nonsense coming from the top of the U.S. government about seeking a “rules-based international order” is nothing more than a brazen PR scam.

The vast quantity of official smoke-blowing now underway cannot hide the reality that the United States government is the most powerful and dangerous outlaw nation in the world.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in 2023 by The New Press.

By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon 

An avalanche of polling shows Joe Biden with abysmal approval ratings and grim re-election prospects, but Democratic leaders keep spinning away in dreamland. Even before the Israeli war on Gaza began three months ago, party loyalists were in denial about Biden’s unpopularity with key Democratic-leaning constituencies. Now the situation has worsened, with Biden’s standing in free-fall among young people as well as Arab and Muslim Americans, while support among people of color has seriously eroded.

In a passionate letter posted last week, an anonymous group of Biden 2024 campaign staffers urged Biden to reverse himself and work for “an immediate, permanent ceasefire” in Gaza. The letter from 17 current staff members said: “Biden for President staff have seen volunteers quit in droves, and people who have voted blue for decades feel uncertain about doing so for the first time ever.”

That letter echoed an appeal to Biden two months earlier – not anonymous – signed by 500 “former 2020 Biden for President and Democratic Party staff.” The two unprecedented letters – and other upheaval among seasoned Democrats – have failed to snap the Democratic leadership out of their wishful, magical thinking about Biden. 

Defenders of sticking with Biden glibly dismiss negative poll numbers while noting that polls in January can’t tell us where persuadable voters will end up in November. But there’s a serious problem beyond just polls. It’s the disaffection of activists – pivotal because thousands of talented, hard-working activists are needed to help persuade voters on the fence, and to get-out-the-vote of traditional Democrats who are only “occasional voters.” 

During the Covid-haunted election of 2020, thousands of grassroots activists and groups – including many who were Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren supporters – devoted months of their lives to defeat Donald Trump after Biden became the Democratic nominee. Overall, many progressive groups went all in for Biden when it came down to him or Trump in the fall of 2020. 

But in 2024, many of these experienced activists are disaffected from Biden if not outraged at him, over issues from Gaza to voting rights to climate to student debt. 

In 2020, Arab and Muslim American communities mobilized against the detested, Islamophobic Trump. Today, leading activists in key swing states have been sending a clear message to Biden in public forums: “No Ceasefire, No Votes.”

In 2020, climate activists mobilized to eject the climate-denying “drill baby drill” incumbent. Today, as a result of Biden’s reversals on climate policy – like his broken promise on drilling in Alaska – there is much disgust among activists. 

Five hundred people who were campaign or party staff members in 2020 – recalling that they “fought tirelessly to organize millions of Americans to cast their votes” for Biden – have now signed a well-informed letter urging Biden not only to work for a Gaza ceasefire, but also to “end unconditional military aid to Israel” and “take concrete steps to end the conditions of apartheid, occupation, and ethnic cleansing that are the root causes of this devastation.” 

Will there be enough diligent volunteers to get-out-the-vote for Biden in 2024? Not according to current Biden for President staffers who say volunteers have “quit in droves” over Biden’s handling of the Gaza war – adding: “It is not enough to merely be the alternative to Donald Trump.” 

For more than a year, we’ve been part of the RootsAction team that launched the Don’t Run Joe (now Step Aside Joe) campaign immediately after the 2022 midterm elections – urging progressives to insist on clearing the path for an open primary process that could lead to a dynamic progressive candidate capable of soundly defeating Trump. Now, the awful specter of a Biden vs. Trump contest is causing enormous distress and eagerness to develop an appropriate response. That’s why hundreds of people have already chosen to sign up for a livestream panel discussion on Jan. 16, “What Should Progressives Do About Biden?” 

While establishment Democrats are intent on whistling past the Biden graveyard, there’s a different kind of magical thinking among some who consider themselves to be on the left – a fantastical pretense that it doesn’t really matter whether Trump becomes president again. People who think that Trump and his leadership team are not fascistic, or that a Trumpite return to the presidency wouldn’t be much worse than abhorrent Bidenism, are out of touch with political reality.

     Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College, and author of "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media." In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR.

     Norman Solomon is national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in 2023 by The New Press.

By Norman Solomon

The vast majority of Congress members have refused to call for a ceasefire in Gaza during three months of slaughter by Israel’s military. Capitol Hill remains a friendly place for the Israeli government as it keeps receiving massive arms shipments courtesy of U.S. taxpayers.

“Israel would not be able to conduct this war without the U.S., which over time has provided Israel with about 80 percent of the country’s weapons imports,” Vox reports. The distance between the Capitol and Gaza can be measured by the vast disconnect between the standard discourse of U.S. politics and the terroristic carnage destroying Palestinian people.

The human toll includes upward of 22,000 dead, more than 85 percent of Gaza’s 2.2 million population displaced, and the emerging lethal combination of hunger and disease that could kill several hundred thousand more.

The impunity enjoyed by Israeli leaders is enabled by President Biden, who clearly does not want a ceasefire. The same can be said of the vast majority of Congress, with silences and equivocations if not outright zeal to voice support for the wholesale killing of civilians in the name of Israel’s “right to defend itself.”

Members of Congress, now providing such easy rhetoric in public statements to justify huge and ongoing military support to Israel, would not be so complacent if they had to dig their own dead children out of rubble.

Seventeen members of the House stepped forward in mid-October to sign on as cosponsors of the ceasefire resolution introduced by Congresswoman Cori Bush, “calling for an immediate de-escalation and ceasefire in Israel and occupied Palestine.” The number of those forthright representatives has not risen during the 11 weeks since then.

What we’ve gotten instead has been the molasses-pace drip of some other members of Congress calling for — or kind of calling for — a ceasefire.

Now in circulation from some antiwar organizations is what’s described as “a growing list of members of Congress who have publicly called for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.” But the basis for listing those names — 56 House members and four senators — ranges from solid to flimsy.

A case in point is my congressperson, Rep. Jared Huffman of California, whose name is on the list but doesn’t belong there. As ostensible documentation, the list provides a link to a Nov. 19 social-media post by Huffman stating that a ceasefire would require “Hamas releases all hostages, disarms & relinquishes control of Gaza” — in other words, full surrender by Hamas as a prerequisite for an end to Israel’s mass killing of civilians there.

Several other listed House members, such as Judy Chu (Calif.), Diana DeGette (Colo.), Teresa Leger Fernandez (N.M.) and Jamie Raskin (Md.), have “publicly called for a ceasefire” only with caveats and preconditions — without calling for the U.S.-backed Israeli government to immediately stop killing Palestinian civilians no matter what.

A lot of members of Congress have taken far worse positions. But we should not be grading on a curve. Constituents need accurate information — so they won’t be under the false impression that they’re being represented by an actual firm supporter of a ceasefire.

Even including the most dubious names that have been put in the category of ceasefire supporters, the current list comprises just 13 percent of the House and 4 percent of the Senate. That’s a measure of just how far we have to go in order to end what amounts to congressional support for Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza.

Outpourings of protests against U.S. support for that war have included large nonviolent actions at bridges, highways, train stations, airports, college campuses, legislatures and more. Some activists have also confronted members of Congress.

But mostly, congressional supporters of Israeli impunity have been spared the nonviolent confrontations that they deserve. Such confrontations can occur at their office on Capitol Hill, but traveling to Washington is not necessary.

Senators and House members have numerous offices back home that are conveniently located for most of their constituents to visit, picket and nonviolently disrupt — insisting that support for the mass murder in Gaza is morally unacceptable.

     Norman Solomon is national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in 2023 by The New Press.

By Norman Solomon / Marin Independent Journal — December 30, 2023

Reading social media posts and press releases from Rep. Jared Huffman, of San Rafael, is illuminating.

The House member repeatedly and quite properly condemned the horrific killings of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7 by Hamas. He repeatedly and quite properly condemned antisemitism. What he has not done is devote anywhere near the same amount of emphasis to condemning the horrific killings of Palestinian civilians in Gaza that have continued since that day.

This is particularly striking since Huffman has routinely joined with others in Congress to vote for supplying many billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and ammunition to the Israeli military. It has persisted in killing Palestinian civilians — estimates say at least 19,000 of them since early October. The wherewithal is largely courtesy of appropriations from Huffman and his congressional colleagues.

A pattern of civilian carnage was soon obvious. By mid-November, five weeks into Israel’s massive bombing of Gaza, the World Health Organization’s director-general told the United Nations that the Israeli military was killing Palestinian children at an average rate of about six per hour. That amounts to about 1,000 kids each week.

One wonders whether members of Congress, now providing such easy rhetoric in public statements to justify huge and ongoing military support to Israel, would be so comfortable with those appropriations if they had to dig their own dead children out of rubble.

As a Jewish American, I know about antisemitism. I grew up with the frightening stories of storm troopers and concentration camps, where some of my relatives perished. I know full well that antisemitism is a real problem. None of that justifies continuing to vote in the House of Representatives for massive military aid to Israel — aid that has been and is being used to slaughter civilians as innocent as ones you would see at a shopping mall in Corte Madera, San Rafael or Novato.

By mid-October, there was an opportunity for members of Congress to take a clear stand for a cease-fire. Eighteen Democrats in the House signed on as co-sponsors of the cease-fire resolution (House Resolution 786). But Huffman chose not to be among them and he is still not a cosponsor.

Instead, Huffman has basically supported President Joe Biden’s policies toward the conflict. On Nov. 19, Huffman posted on social media that a cease-fire would require “Hamas releases all hostages, disarms & relinquishes control of Gaza” — in effect, first unconditional surrender. While a letter to Biden that Huffman signed two days later urged “immediate cessation of hostilities against targets with a civilian presence to facilitate the timely evacuation and protection of children and babies,” it notably did not call for a cease-fire.

In the White House and on Capitol Hill, ethnocentric and racial biases have combined with geopolitical priorities and political expediency to enable U.S. government support of ongoing atrocities by the Israeli military. Huffman is a participant in this dynamic.

Congressman Huffman would better represent the decency of people in this congressional district by actually supporting a single standard of human rights.

Unfortunately, proclaiming opposition to antisemitism sometimes serves as a smokescreen for egregious and lethal double standards.

In early December, Huffman distanced himself — a bit — from the ridiculous and manipulative conflation of the Israeli government with the religion of Judaism, writing in a tweet that “anti-Zionism is often antisemitism, but not always.” Since many Jews are anti-Zionist, that should hardly be a revelation.

Yet, last month, Huffman touted his “long-standing opposition to BDS” — the effort to boycott, divest and sanction Israel — and he flatly called it a form of “antisemitism.” Such labeling evades the fact that authoritative human rights groups — including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli organization B’Tselem — have declared that Israel is an apartheid state.

It sounds as if Huffman is claiming that such nonviolent measures as boycotting Israel are antisemitic. That’s absurd. Much as it would have been absurd to call such nonviolent measures that were aimed at South Africa’s apartheid government “anti-White.”

Someday, hopefully, a member of Congress representing Marin will have the minimal courage to apply a single standard of human rights to foreign policy.

Author Norman Solomon is national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. A former candidate for Congress, Solomon lost a primary election to Rep. Jared Huffman in 2012.

By Norman Solomon / The Hill

The publication of Liz Cheney’s new book “Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning” has thrust her back into the national spotlight. Friendly interviews with liberal TV icons like Rachel Maddow and Stephen Colbert helped the book reach the top of bestseller lists. Such enthusiasm for the former GOP representative in Democratic and liberal circles is understandable — but it’s also a hazardous dynamic if Democrats want to retain the White House for another four years. 

During her last term as Wyoming’s representative in the House, Cheney was an admirable truthteller as she excoriated Donald Trump with key facts and deft rhetoric. Her attacks on Trump as a dire threat to American democracy rang true. But the Democratic establishment’s embrace of Cheney could actually end up damaging the Biden campaign by reducing the turnout of voters who believe in the Democratic Party’s core precepts.

The current problem was foreshadowed in early January 2022, when Liz Cheney’s father Dick Cheney visited the House floor to mark the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. While showing up to support his daughter’s brave anti-Trump stand, the former vice president was met with profuse accolades from top Democrats. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went out of her way to ignore past differences, shaking the elder Cheney’s hand and later telling reporters, “We were very honored by his being there.”

But many Democrats don’t want to see their leadership embracing prominent Republicans just because they speak out against Trump. When Liz Cheney was a member of Congress, she voted in line with President Trump 93 percent of the time. On matters like abortion rights, environmental protection, racial justice, civil liberties and national security, the younger Cheney has consistently fought for positions that the vast majority of Democrats see as inimical to the best interests of the country.

It’s one thing to strive for a united front — which will be necessary — to defeat Trump if he is the GOP nominee. But if Democratic leaders are seen as aligning themselves with Cheney, her record of voting against virtually everything that the Democratic base believes in could add to the alienation that’s already felt by millions of young people who voted for Biden in 2020 but now see him as an unprincipled compromiser undeserving of their vote next year.

[To continue reading, on The Hill website, click here.]

By Norman Solomon / The Massachusetts Review

     Editor’s note: On November 15, 2023, Norman Solomon delivered the Second Annual Ellsberg Lecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a lecture series hosted by University’s Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy. The text below is based on a transcript of his remarks, excerpted and edited for publication. In 2019, Ellsberg made UMass the home for his papers; with the help of an anonymous donor, this treasure trove of some 500 boxes of material became part of the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center.

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By Norman Solomon

To: President Joe Biden

You’ve often spoken of how much you care about children and how terrible it is when they’re murdered. “Too many schools, too many everyday places have become killing fields,” you said at the White House last spring on the one-year anniversary of the school shooting in Uvalde. At the time of that tragedy in Texas, you had quickly gone on live television, speaking gravely.

“There are parents who will never see their child again,” you said, adding: “To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away. . . . It’s a feeling shared by the siblings, and the grandparents, and their family members, and the community that’s left behind.”

And you asked plaintively: “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen? Where in God’s name is our backbone to have the courage to deal with it and stand up to the lobbies?”

This year you’ve asked similar questions many times, as in the aftermath of shootings at a grade school in Nashville, Michigan State University and the University of Nevada.

The massacre in Uvalde took the lives of 19 children. For nearly three months, the ongoing massacre in Gaza has taken the lives of that many children every few hours.

In mid-November, after five weeks of Israel’s bombing of Gaza, the director-general of the World Health Organization reported that children were being killed at an average rate of six per hour, adding that “nowhere and no one is safe.” Palestinian civilians of all ages continue to undergo slaughter, with the death toll surpassing 20,000.

You have continued to voice support for Israel’s military assault on Gaza and its residents. After 10 weeks of the carnage, when you got around to expressing a bit of concern about Israel’s “indiscriminate bombing,” you were meanwhile still doing everything you could to greenlight and fast track massive U.S. shipments of weapons and ammunition to Israel so that the indiscriminate bombing could continue.

Even your belated and inadequate words on Dec. 12 about “indiscriminate bombing” apparently caused you to have second thoughts. The next day, Voice of America reported that “the White House appears to be walking back” your comment about “indiscriminate bombing.”

Most important, of course, are not words but deeds. As commander-in-chief, since early October you have approved large-scale shipments to Israel of 2,000-pound bombs — described by the New York Times as “one of the most destructive munitions in Western military arsenals,” a weapon that “unleashes a blast wave and metal fragments thousands of feet in every direction.”

In a Dec. 21 video report based on analysis of “aerial imagery and artificial intelligence” — headlined “Visual Evidence Shows Israel Dropped 2,000-Pound Bombs Where It Ordered Gaza’s Civilians to Move for Safety” — the Times indicated that “Israel used these munitions in the area it designated safe for civilians at least 200 times.” Those 2,000-pound bombs have been “a pervasive threat to civilians seeking safety across south Gaza.”

Since the war in Gaza began 11 weeks ago, the Times reported, “the U.S. has sent more than 5,000 2,000-pound bombs” to Israel. And after a long phone conversation with Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu on Dec. 23, you told the press: “I did not ask for a ceasefire.”

With your ongoing help, Israel is continuing to murder children and other civilians in Gaza just as methodically as the gunman murdered children at the elementary school in Uvalde. And you have continued to provide weaponry for the murders just as surely as the gun shop in Uvalde sold firearms and ammunition to the man who went on to kill at the elementary school.

But that is an unfair comparison — unfair to the Uvalde gun-shop owner, who did not know the intended use of the weapons and ammo. But you know what the billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and bombs gifted by the U.S. government are being used for.

When three 9-year-old students were among those shot to death at a school in Nashville last March, you spoke about them the next day. “A family’s worst nightmare has occurred,” you said. “Those children should all be with us still,” you said. And you said: “We know the names of the victims.”

But you don’t know the names of the children you’ve helped to murder in Gaza. And there are so many.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in 2023 by The New Press.

By Norman Solomon / TomDispatch

Top American officials in the “national security” establishment are notably good at smooth rhetoric and convenient silences. Their scant regard for truth or human life has changed remarkably little since 1971 when Daniel Ellsberg risked decades in prison to leak the Pentagon Papers to the world. During the years between then and his death six months ago, he was a tireless writer, speaker, and activist.

Most people remember him, of course, as the whistleblower who exposed voluminous official lies about the Vietnam War by providing 7,000 top-secret pages of classified documents to the New York Times and other newspapers. But throughout his adult life, he was transfixed above all by the imperative of preventing nuclear war.

One day in 1995, I called Dan and suggested he run for president. His reply was instant: “I’d rather be in prison.” He explained that, unlike typical candidates, he couldn’t stand to offer opinions on subjects he really knew little or nothing about.

However, for more than five decades, Ellsberg didn’t hesitate to publicly address what he really did know all too much about — the patterns of government secrecy and lies that sustained America’s wars in one country after another, along with the chronic deceptions and delusions at the core of the nuclear arms race. He had personally seen such patterns of deceit at work in the upper reaches of the warfare state. As he told me, “That there is deception — that the public is evidently misled by it early in the game… in a way that encourages them to accept a war and support a war — is the reality.”

And how difficult was it to deceive the public? “I would say, as a former insider, one becomes aware: it’s not difficult to deceive them. First of all, you’re often telling them what they would like to believe — that we’re better than other people, we are superior in our morality and our perceptions of the world.”

Dan had absorbed a vast array of classified information during his years working near the top of the U.S. war machine. He knew countless key facts about foreign policy and war-making that had been hidden from the public. Most importantly, he understood how mendacity could lead to massive human catastrophes and how routinely the key figures in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Oval Office openly lied.

His release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 — revealing crucial history about the Vietnam War while it was still underway — exposed how incessant deception got wars started and kept them going. He had seen up close just how easy it was for officials like Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to suppress doubts about American war-making and push ahead with policies that would, in the end, lead to the deaths of several million people in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. And Dan was haunted by the possibility that someday such deception might lead to a nuclear holocaust that could extinguish almost all human life on this planet.

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By Norman Solomon

One of the rare times that Noam Chomsky’s name has been mentioned on a big national NPR program came two months ago. On “Weekend Edition” in mid-October, a week into Israel’s murderous assault on civilians in Gaza, a correspondent reported while visiting a bookstore owned by a Palestinian in Jerusalem: “I’m seeing a lot of books by Noam Chomsky.”

Across the globe, people suffering from illegitimate power and violence have a lot of books by Noam Chomsky. A recent interviewer aptly introduced him this way: “One of the world’s most-cited scholars and a public intellectual regarded by millions of people as a national and international treasure, Chomsky has published more than 150 books in linguistics, political and social thought, political economy, media studies, U.S foreign policy and world affairs.”

Ever since his meticulous writing and strong activism against the U.S. war on Southeast Asia in the 1960s and ’70s, Chomsky has been exposing Orwellian and often-deadly maneuvers by the most powerful government on Earth. Along the way, he has been tireless, humanistic and uncompromising.

For many decades, the core of corporate greed and militarism has remained basically the same. So has the core of Chomsky’s message.

In 1982, while visiting Philadelphia, he appeared as a guest on “Fresh Air” — back then only a local program on WHYY Radio. Host Terry Gross asked: “Your radical thoughts in linguistics completely changed the field. Your radical thoughts in politics hasn’t completely changed America. Has it been interesting for you to watch how your contribution to politics and linguistics has or hasn’t affected things?”

“I see them very differently,” Chomsky replied. “For one thing, in my view, linguistics is — well, it’s basically a branch of sciences, it’s hard intellectual work. Political analysis is not, quite frankly. I think it’s easily within the range of an ordinary person who doesn’t have any particular training and is simply willing to use common sense to pay attention to the available documentary record and to use a little diligence in searching beyond what’s on the surface.”

Chomsky continued: “There’s an elaborate pretense that this is an area that must be left to experts. But that’s simply one way of protecting power from scrutiny. So, my own interest in political analysis and writing and so on is simply to bring information to people who I think can use it for the purposes of changing the world.”

His anti-elitism has endured, and so has enmity from some elites. One response is to block access to mainstream media. “Fresh Air” is a case in point. A search of the program’s full archive shows that after it went national on NPR in the mid-1980s, “Fresh Air” never interviewed Chomsky again. The program’s local interview with him back in 1982 was the first and last.

With few exceptions, in major U.S. media — notably unlike major media in most of the rest of the world — Chomsky has been persona non grata.

A key reason is Chomsky’s implacable opposition to the many wars of aggression that the U.S. government has launched or supported. And a particularly unacceptable deviation from approved views has been his illuminating condemnations of Israel’s historic and ongoing suppression of Palestinian rights. For several decades, as a result, vast quantities of hostility and distortion have been directed at him.

Here's a sample: In the mid-1990s, the longtime host of NPR’s “All Things Considered” program, Robert Siegel — operating within a lofty “public radio” bubble — wrote a letter to the industry newspaper Current declaring that Chomsky “evidently enjoys a small, avid, and largely academic audience who seem to be persuaded that the tangible world of politics is all the result of delusion, false consciousness and media manipulation.”

Chomsky, who turned 95 last week, has been spotlighting the inherent and expansively violent cruelties of Zionism for a very long time. His landmark 1983 book “Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians” dispelled many readers’ illusions about the goals and consequences of U.S. support for Israel.

In 1986, journalist David Barsamian launched “Alternative Radio” — a national one-hour program that got underway by bringing Chomsky’s voice to listeners around the United States and far beyond. In the nearly 40 years since then, the weekly show has aired several hundred speeches and interviews with Chomsky (whose website also overflows with a cornucopia of vital information and analysis).

“Solidarity is not some abstract concept for him,” Barsamian told me. “If you needed advice, a signature, a check, a fundraising talk, Noam would be there.”

Behind the scenes, working with Chomsky for so long while seeing him interact with a wide array of people, “what always impressed me was his kindness and decency,” Barsamian said. “Behind the mental acuity, stunning level of knowledge and intellectual brilliance is a mild-mannered gentle man. Working with Noam over many years has been the most rewarding experience of my life.”

If you ever receive an email from David Barsamian, the bottom lines of it will be this quote from Noam Chomsky: “If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.”

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in summer 2023 by The New Press.

By Norman Solomon

[This article was originally published by The Nation.]

Forty years ago, across a dozen pages of The Nation magazine, I was in a debate with the English historian E. P. Thompson about the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race, the relative culpability of both governments, and how activists should approach it all. At the time, Cold War hostility was rampant. In a March 1983 speech to an audience of evangelicals, President Ronald Reagan declared that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire” and, for good measure, “the focus of evil in the modern world.” Weeks later, Soviet leader Yuri Andropov accused the United States of pursuing an arms buildup to win a nuclear war; in his words, “not just irresponsible, it is insane.” Both countries were gunning their military-industrial engines in a feverish drive for more advanced nuclear arsenals.

Such was the frightening distemper of the times. But a grassroots movement calling for a bilateral freeze on nuclear weapons had quickly gained wide support and political momentum since Reagan took office. In April 1982, he responded to the growing upsurge of alarm with a radio address that tried to reassure. “Today, I know there are a great many people who are pointing to the unimaginable horror of nuclear war. I welcome that concern,” Reagan said. He added that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

Two months later, not mollified by soothing words, 1 million people gathered in New York’s Central Park at a demonstration for nuclear disarmament and peace. That protest was part of a transatlantic uprising against reckless escalation of the arms race. Activists struggled to challenge a spiraling arms contest propelled by two nations with very different political systems but mutual reliance on brandishing huge quantities of nuclear weaponry.

Deeply unsettling as that era was, the specter of omnicide now looms much larger. Inflamed tensions between Washington and Moscow while the Ukraine war rages — as well as between the U.S. and China, over Taiwan and the East China and South China seas — are making a nuclear conflagration plausible via any one of numerous scenarios. Meanwhile, disagreements over how to view relations between the U.S. and Russia are roiling peace groups and much of the left here at home. Fears of being perceived, if not smeared, as pro-Putin or sympathetic to Russia are palpable, with ongoing constraints on advocacy.

We hear next to nothing about the crying need to reinstate the Open Skies and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaties canceled by President Trump or the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty canceled by President George W. Bush, while the absence of those pacts today makes a nuclear war with Russia more likely. Neither Barack Obama nor Joe Biden tried to revive those agreements snuffed out by their Republican predecessors.

For his part, beginning with the Ukraine invasion, Putin has done much to boost atomic tensions. His threats to use nuclear weapons said the usually untrumpeted doctrine out loud. Both Russia (except for an eleven-year hiatus) and the United States have always been on record as asserting the option to be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict.

The war in Ukraine has thrown the world closer to a thermonuclear precipice than ever. And, while daily horrors are being inflicted on Ukrainian people by Russia’s warfare, the prevailing attitude in the U.S. is that Putin isn’t worthy of negotiations over much of anything.

But if efforts for détente and arms control should be backburnered when a superpower is making horrific war on a country after an illegal invasion, neither Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin nor President Ronald Reagan got the memo. In 1967, while the U.S. government was escalating the Vietnam War, Kosygin met with President Lyndon Johnson in direct talks that lasted for more than a dozen hours at the Glassboro Summit in New Jersey. Twenty years later, Reagan met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the White House, where they signed the INF treaty; at the time, Soviet troops were continuing their war in Afghanistan, which took an estimated 100,000 Afghan lives, while the CIA provided military aid worth billions of dollars to mujahadeen resistance fighters.

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Midway through 1983, at the end of the published exchanges between E. P. Thompson and me, The Nation told readers that “the debate ventilates important issues, tactical and philosophical, confronting the antiwar movements in this country and in Europe.” Echoes of those important issues are with us now, and the stakes could not be higher.

Renowned as a social historian, Thompson was also a prominent leader of the European disarmament movement during the 1980s. He warned against “sleepwalkers in the peace movement” of the West who, he contended, were toeing the Soviet line while blaming the arms race on the United States. “Neither moralism nor fellow-traveling sentimentalism,” he wrote, “can be of any service in guiding the peace movement in its difficult relations with the Communist states.” The rulers of those states “are the ideological look-alikes of their opposite numbers in the West, thinking in the same terms of ‘balance’ and security through ‘strength.’”

In my view, the history of the nuclear arms race remained significant, with the United States as always in the lead. The fact that the U.S. was a country with far more freedom had not made its government more trustworthy in terms of nuclear weapons. As the Soviet dissident historians Roy and Zhores Medvedev had written a year earlier in The Nation, “despite the more open character of American society . . . the role of successive U.S. administrations has been, and continues to be, more provocative and less predictable than the Soviet Union’s in the global interrelationship between East and West.” They added: “Military-industrial complexes exist in all modern industrial societies, but they are under much less responsible control in the United States than in the USSR.”

At the close of our debate, I expressed doubt that the U.S. movement for disarmament and peace was in danger of being insufficiently critical of the Soviet Union. “A far greater danger is that, eager for respectability and fearful of finding itself in the line of fire of our nation’s powerful Red-baiting artilleries, it may unwittingly reinforce chronic American-Soviet antipathies . . . . We cannot reduce our society’s Cold War fervor by adding to it.”

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