War Made Easy has gone into national home-video release. The DVD is also available online.
Reviews of the War Made Easy documentary
Video of Norman Solomon's interview on C-SPAN "Washington Journal" discussing Obama and the war in Afghanistan
Norman Solomon spoke about “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death" at a benefit for Global Exchange and Media Alliance at the Women's Building in San Francisco.
It was shown on C-SPAN 2 on Book TV.
Alternet has posted the audio online as an MP3 that can be downloaded or listened to online. There also are more photos.
A lot of people want to believe that the current war on Iraq is some kind of aberration -- a radical departure from the previous baseline of U.S. foreign policy. That's a comforting illusion.
Yes, the current administration in Washington is notable for the extreme mendacity and calculated idiocy of its claims. But -- decade after decade -- the propaganda fuel for one U.S. war after another has flowed from a standard set of lies.
Read the full piece adapated from War Made Easy.
Norman Solomon was on KQED's Forum and the Joy Cardin Show (audio is online for both).
War Made Easy was reviewed by David Swanson.
Evil that warrants the large-scale killing of war needs a face. But that face cannot belong to some amorphous mass of an enemy population; in fact, it's a ritual for the president to offer assurances that civilians who may be caught in the crossfire are not among the Pentagon's targets. The bull's-eye must be painted on someone who links the nascent war to an indisputably justified one of the past.
For this purpose, Hitler's name has been pressed into service, intermittently, for decades. Pointed mentions of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust open floodgates of emotion, connecting a present-day foe with a regime that slaughtered millions of people near the fulcrum of the twentieth century. What helps to do the trick is the message that while horrors of the past cannot be changed, they can be prevented in the near future.
At a press conference on July 28, 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson spoke...
Read the full excerpt from War Made Easy.
A transcript, audio, and video of the segment from Democracy Now on July 15th are online.
There is also an MP3 (10.4 MB) of his appearance on the Laura Flanders Show on Air America Radio.
Obsession with seeming unequivocal and immovable has been frequent in the Oval Office. During the Vietnam War, such fixations were indifferent to the fact that the war was losing the U.S. government moral credibility around the world. But from the outset, Lyndon Johnson invoked credibility as an argument for staying the course. "If we are driven from the field in Vietnam, then no nation can ever again have the same confidence in American promises, or in American protection," President Johnson said on July 28, 1965...
Read the full excerpt from War Made Easy.
In a review in the June 29th Los Angeles Times, Russ Baker calls War Made Easy "a must-read for those who would like greater context with their bitter morning coffee, or to arm themselves for the debates about Iraq that are still to come."
The table of contents and first chapter of War Made Easy are now online.
There are also more excerpts (first and second) from the book.
Norman Solomon's book tour currently includes a July 10th talk in Wilmington, Delaware, a July 11th mid-day event in Philadelphia, a July 14th event in New York City, and August events in the Bay area.
The book Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You, by Norman Solomon and Reese Erlich, is now available at Coldtype as a free PDF download (691kb).
Coldtype also has Media Beat columns from 2003 and 2004 as PDFs, plus columns from August to December 2002 collected in PDF form as The Media Marches to War.
* Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State - PoliPointPress (October 2007)
* War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death - John Wiley & Sons (July 2005)
Pre-order from Booksense by finding a store near you and entering the ISBN 0471694797 in the search box on their website or from Amazon.
Documentary (2007)
* “Target Iraq” (co-authored with Reese Ehrlich) - 2003 At Coldtype as a free PDF download (691kb)
* The Media Marches to War - 2002 Free PDF of Media Beat Columns from August to December 2002
* “The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media” - 1999
* “Wizards of Media Oz: Behind the Curtain of Mainstream News” (co-authored with Jeff Cohen) - 1997
* “The Trouble With Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh” - 1997
The book is online.
* “Through the Media Looking Glass: Decoding Bias and Blather in the News” (with Jeff Cohen) - 1995
* “False Hope: The Politics of Illusion in the Clinton Era” - 1994
* “Adventures in Medialand: Behind the News, Beyond the Pundits” (with Jeff Cohen) - 1993
* “The Power of Babble: The Politician's Dictionary of Buzzwords and Doubletalk for Every Occasion” - 1992
* “Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media” (co-authored with Martin A. Lee) - 1990
* “Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience With Atomic Radiation” (co-authored with Harvey Wasserman) - 1982
The book is online
