War Made Invisible – How America Hides the Human Toll or Its Military Machine
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How Sputnik contributed to the marriage of science and weaponry
When the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite on Oct. 4, 1957, American horizons darkened with self-reproach and fear. Sputnik was a shock to the system. "The fact that we have lost the race to launch the satellite means that we are losing the race to produce ballistic missiles," the influential columnist Walter Lippmann wrote. At a diplomatic party, when an official in the Eisenhower administration commented that Sputnik would be forgotten in six months, Washington’s famed hostess-with-the-mostest Perle Mesta shot back: "And in six months, we may all be dead."
Yet we all know the fabled story line: A resilient America rose to the challenge and bested the Soviets in space. A dozen years after its propaganda perigee, the United States landed a man on the moon. And the nation’s zeal for cutting-edge technology continues to shape the American experience…
Read the full article in the San Francisco Chronicle.
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Sputnik, 50 Years Later: The Launch of Techno-Power
[This is an excerpt from Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State]
A story could start almost anywhere. This one begins at a moment startled by a rocket.
In the autumn of 1957, America was not at war … or at peace. The threat of nuclear annihilation shadowed every day, flickering with visions of the apocalyptic. In classrooms, “duck and cover” drills were part of the curricula. Underneath any Norman Rockwell painting, the grim reaper had attained the power of an ultimate monster.
Dwight Eisenhower was most of the way through his fifth year in the White House. He liked to speak reassuring words of patriotic faith, with presidential statements like: “America is the greatest force that God has ever allowed to exist on His footstool.” Such pronouncements drew a sharp distinction between the United States and the Godless Communist foe.
But on October 4, 1957, the Kremlin announced the launch of Sputnik, the world’s first satellite. God was supposed to be on America’s side, yet the Soviet atheists had gotten to the heavens before us. Suddenly the eagle of liberty could not fly nearly so high.
Sputnik was instantly fascinating and alarming. The American press swooned at the scientific vistas and shuddered at the military implications…
Read the full excerpt.
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Political ‘Science’ and Truth of Consequences
[This article is excerpted from Norman Solomon’s new book Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State]
Contempt for the empirical that can’t be readily jiggered or spun is evident at the top of the executive branch in Washington. The country is mired in a discourse that echoes the Scopes trial dramatized in “Inherit the Wind.” Mere rationality would mean lining up on the side of “science” against the modern yahoos and political panderers waving the flag of social conservatism. (At the same time that scientific Darwinism is under renewed assault, a de facto alliance between religious fundamentalists and profit-devout corporatists has moved the country further into social Darwinism that aims to disassemble the welfare state.) Entrenched opposition to stem-cell research is part of a grim pattern that includes complacency about severe pollution and global warming — disastrous trends already dragging one species after another to the brink of extinction and beyond.
Disdain for “science” is cause for political concern. Yet few Americans and no major political forces are “antiscience” across the board. The ongoing prerogative is to pick and choose. Those concerned about the ravages left by scientific civilization — the combustion engine, chemicals, fossil-fuel plants, and so much more — frequently look to science for evidence and solutions. Those least concerned about the Earth’s ecology are apt to be the greatest enthusiasts for science in the service of unfettered commerce or the Pentagon, which always seeks the most effectively “advanced” scientific know-how. Even the most avowedly faithful are not inclined to leave the implementation of His plan to unscientific chance…
Read the full excerpt.
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Here’s the Smell of the Blood Still
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.
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Thomas Friedman: Hooked On War
Reading his “Letter From Baghdad” column in the New York Times on Wednesday, you’d never know that Thomas Friedman has a history of enthusiasm for war. Now he laments that Iraq is bad for the United States — “everyone loves seeing us tied down here” — stuck in the “madness that is Iraq.” And he concludes that the good Americans who have been sent to Iraq will not be deserved by Iraqis “if they continue to hate each other more than they love their own kids.”
The column, under a Baghdad dateline, is boilerplate Friedman: sprinkled with I-am-here anecdotes and breezy geopolitical nostrums. For years now, the man widely touted as America’s most influential journalist has indicated that his patience with the war in Iraq might soon run out. But, like the media establishment he embodies, Friedman can’t bring himself to renounce a war that he helped to launch and then blessed as the incarnation of virtue.
Read the full column.
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Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State
A column on Norman Solomon and an interview.
A December 6th interview on KOPN.
On Counterspin.
He was interviewed on Forum on KQED.
He was on Democracy Now on Wednesday, October 3rd. Audio and video are online.
A review.
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Six Years of 9/11 as a License to Kill
It evokes a tragedy that marks an epoch. From the outset, the warfare state has exploited “9/11,” a label at once too facile and too laden with historic weight — giving further power to the tacit political axiom that perception is reality.
Often it seems that media coverage is all about perception, especially when the underlying agendas are wired into huge profits and geopolitical leverage. If you associate a Big Mac or a Whopper with a happy meal or some other kind of great time, you’re more likely to buy it. If you connect 9/11 with a need for taking military action and curtailing civil liberties, you’re more likely to buy what the purveyors of war and authoritarian government have been selling for the past half-dozen years.
“Sept. 11 changed everything” became a sudden cliche in news media. Words are supposed to mean something, and those words were — and are — preposterous. They speak of a USA enthralled with itself while reducing the rest of the world (its oceans and valleys and mountains and peoples) to little more than an extensive mirror to help us reflect on our centrality to the world. In an individual, we call that narcissism. In the nexus of media and politics, all too often, it’s called “patriotism.”
What happened on Sept. 11, 2001, was extraordinary and horrible by any measure. And certainly a crime against humanity…
Read the full column.
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Your Call Media Roundtable
Norman Solomon was on the Your Call Radio Media Round Table with Danny Schechter on Friday, September 7th.
Audio is online.
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Let’s Face It: The Warfare State Is Part of Us
The USA’s military spending is now close to $2 billion a day. This fall, the country will begin its seventh year of continuous war, with no end in sight. On the horizon is the very real threat of a massive air assault on Iran. And few in Congress seem willing or able to articulate a rejection of the warfare state.
While the Bush-Cheney administration is the most dangerous of our lifetimes — and ousting Republicans from the White House is imperative — such truths are apt to smooth the way for progressive evasions. We hear that “the people must take back the government,” but how can “the people” take back what they never really had? And when rhetoric calls for “returning to a foreign policy based on human rights and democracy,” we’re encouraged to be nostalgic for good old days that never existed.
The warfare state didn’t suddenly arrive in 2001, and it won’t disappear when the current lunatic in the Oval Office moves on.
Born 50 years before George W. Bush became president, I have always lived in a warfare state. Each man in the Oval Office has presided over an arsenal of weapons designed to destroy human life en masse. In recent decades, our self-proclaimed protectors have been able — and willing — to destroy all of humanity.
We’ve accommodated ourselves to this insanity. And I do mean “we” — including those of us who fret aloud that the impact of our peace-loving wisdom is circumscribed because our voices don’t carry much farther than the choir. We may carry around an inflated sense of our own resistance to a system that is poised to incinerate and irradiate the planet.
Read the full column.
Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State will be out in October. -
Backspin for War: The Convenience of Denial
The man who ran CNN’s news operation during the invasion of Iraq is now doing damage control in response to a new documentary’s evidence that he kowtowed to the Pentagon on behalf of the cable network. His current denial says a lot about how “liberal media” outlets remain deeply embedded in the mindsets of pro-military conformity.
Days ago, the former CNN executive publicly defended himself against a portion of the “War Made Easy” film (based on my book of the same name) that has drawn much comment from viewers since the documentary’s release earlier this summer. As Inter Press Service reported, the movie shows “a news clip of Eason Jordan, a CNN News chief executive who, in an interview with CNN, boasts of the network’s cadre of professional ‘military experts.’ In fact, CNN’s retired military generals turned war analysts were so good, Eason said, that they had all been vetted and approved by the U.S. government.”
Inter Press called the vetting-and-approval process “shocking” — and added that “in a country revered for its freedom of speech and unfettered press, Eason’s comments would infuriate any veteran reporter who upholds the most basic and important tenet of the journalistic profession: independence.”
But Eason Jordan doesn’t want us to see it that way. And he has now fired back via an article in IraqSlogger, which calls itself “the world’s premier Iraq-focused Web site.” Jordan runs that Web site…
Read the full column.