"A powerful, necessary indictment of efforts to disguise the human toll of American foreign policy."
– Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A powerful, necessary indictment of efforts to disguise the human toll of American foreign policy."
– Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
August 11, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon / The Hill
The Democratic National Committee has just elected a new chair, but the old guard that has long dominated the party will not go quietly. Although there are some reasons for cautious optimism, the road ahead will be steeply uphill for the Democratic Party.
Ken Martin, longtime chair of the party in Minnesota, is replacing DNC Chair Jaime Harrison, whose four-year term was marked by steady subservience to his patron, former President Joe Biden. Martin has the opportunity to be a leader instead of merely following self-focused directives from the president. It shouldn’t be difficult to improve on Harrison’s job performance.
The DNC headquarters has functioned as a fortress, notorious among grassroots party activists as an unwelcoming place. Martin might be inclined to change that.
Many top executives at the DNC do not like Martin. Given their hidebound behavior, it’s an indication that badly needed change might be in the offing. What’s more, it is encouraging that the new chair overcame the opposition of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who all publicly endorsed Ben Wikler, Martin’s main rival for the post.
The national party has remained in the grip of leaders who have never acknowledged their abject failure. That failure can be summed up in a notorious statement Schumer made a few months before Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump in 2016: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
Rather than dissipate after Clinton’s shocking loss, this elitism lingered on and guided the strategy of former Vice President Kamala Harris eight years later. “The path to victory in a state like Michigan, Harris campaign officials are betting, is through suburban counties that are home to many college-educated and white voters,” the New York Times fatefully reported less than three weeks before the election.
Although countless party officials and pundits have scratched their heads over the drastic fall-off in working-class support for the 2024 Democratic ticket, the main reasons should not be mysterious. The faux populism of Trump’s Republican Party cannot be effectively countered by warmed-over liberal bromides and calls for incremental reform.
To shed its well-earned reputation for elitism, the DNC should stop running away from populism and instead embrace it — not by making peace with Trumpism, but by moving toward genuine progressive populism. That means showing that the party actually means business about siding with the interests of low- and middle-income Americans against the rapacious effects of unfettered corporate power — from systematic price gouging to regressive tax rates to runaway military spending — at the expense of programs that meet human needs.
February 06, 2025 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon / The Hill
More than 800 Americans in Northern California have now joined in a class-action lawsuit against their Democratic congressional representatives, charging them with illegally helping to provide weapons to Israel for use in committing genocide in Gaza. News of the suit has caused a stir in the Bay Area, with media coverage putting the pair, Rep. Jared Huffman and Rep. Mike Thompson, on the defensive.
Legal experts may be correct that the suit is destined to be thrown out of court. The judicial branch has rarely been willing to interfere with the foreign policy decisions of the legislative or executive branch, and issues like legal standing and the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause have routinely shielded legislators. But harping on the steep uphill climb for the lawsuit — and others like it now being prepared by plaintiffs elsewhere in the country — misses the political point.
I decided to join the lawsuit as a plaintiff and to help publicize it because I think that even if the action loses in court, it will win in public discourse. And that will, justifiably, make the congressional defendants the losers.
Like other plaintiffs in the Northern California case, I believe that our lawsuit is on solid ground of justice. The arms shipments to Israel’s military have violated the Constitution, the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide and U.S. federal laws — including the Leahy law, which prohibits the government from “using funds for assistance to units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights.” The namesake of the law, former Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), says it is being violated.
In effect, by enabling approval of $26.38 billion in military aid to Israel last spring, 366 members of the House voted to force constituents into being complicit in genocide. No amount of rhetoric can change that overarching reality. And no amount of legalistic arguments will deflect the profound effects that moral revulsion can have on politics.
Before the winter ends, dozens of members of Congress, mostly Democrats, are likely to be facing class-action lawsuits from constituents accusing them of illegal and immoral complicity in genocide. Such lawsuits promise to spotlight what many of those lawmakers would much prefer to keep in the shadows.
Legalistic issues of standing and the like avoid far deeper questions. Anyone who contends that the federal court system is immune from an era’s politics might want to ponder the difference between the Supreme Court’s 1896 “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy vs. Ferguson and its 1954 ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education.
Drawing media attention to congressional votes for massive arms shipments to Israel will expose lawmakers who staked out positions opposed by the majority of voters. While the defendants may triumph legally, victory will tend to be Pyrrhic — winning in federal court, but losing in the court of public opinion.
What’s more, as with the lawsuit against Huffman and Thompson, the plaintiffs will be largely organized by congressional district while pursuing community outreach strategies — a potentially ominous prospect for politicians seeking reelection. Liberal members of the House who have voted to arm Israel’s military would be wise to recall that entrenched liberal Democrats like former Reps. Eliot Engel, Michael Capuano and Joseph Crowley have fallen to primary challengers who were in part propelled by antiwar sentiment.
January 17, 2025 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon / Media North
A few days before the end of 2024, the independent magazine +972 reported that “Israeli army forces stormed the Kamal Adwan Hospital compound in Beit Lahiya, culminating a nearly week-long siege of the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza.” While fire spread through the hospital, its staff issued a statement saying that “surgical departments, laboratory, maintenance, and emergency units have been completely burned,” and patients were “at risk of dying at any moment.”
The magazine explained that “the assault on medical facilities in Beit Lahiya is the latest escalation in Israel’s brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, which over the last three months forcibly displaced the vast majority of Palestinians living in the area.” The journalism from +972 -- in sharp contrast to the dominant coverage of the Gaza war from U.S. media -- has provided clarity about real-time events, putting them in overall context rather than episodic snippets.
+972 Magazine is the work of Palestinian and Israeli journalists who describe their core values as “a commitment to equity, justice, and freedom of information” -- which necessarily means “accurate and fair journalism that spotlights the people and communities working to oppose occupation and apartheid.” But the operative values of mainstream U.S. news outlets have been very different.
Key aspects of how the U.S. establishment has narrated the “war on terror” for more than two decades were standard in American media and politics from the beginning of the Gaza war in October 2023. For instance:
The Gaza war has received a vast amount of U.S. media attention, but how much it actually communicated about the human realities was a whole other matter. The belief or unconscious notion that news media were conveying war’s realities ended up obscuring those realities all the more. And journalism’s inherent limitations were compounded by media biases.
Continue reading "How U.S. Media Hide Truths About the Gaza War" »
January 12, 2025 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
When news broke over the weekend that President Biden just approved an $8 billion deal for shipping weapons to Israel, a nameless official vowed that “we will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel's defense.” Following the reports last month from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch concluding that Israeli actions in Gaza are genocide, Biden’s decision was a new low for his presidency.
It’s logical to focus on Biden as an individual. His choices to keep sending huge quantities of weaponry to Israel have been pivotal and calamitous. But the presidential genocide and the active acquiescence of the vast majority of Congress are matched by the dominant media and overall politics of the United States.
Forty days after the Gaza war began, Anne Boyer announced her resignation as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. More than a year later, her statement illuminates why the moral credibility of so many liberal institutions has collapsed in the wake of Gaza’s destruction.
While Boyer denounced “the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza,” she emphatically chose to disassociate herself from the nation’s leading liberal news organization: “I can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.”
The acclimatizing process soon became routine. It was most crucially abetted by President Biden and his loyalists, who were especially motivated to pretend that he wasn’t really doing what he was really doing.
For mainline journalists, the process required the willing suspension of belief in a consistent standard of language and humanity. When Boyer acutely grasped the dire significance of its Gaza coverage, she withdrew from “the newspaper of record.”
Content analysis of the war’s first six weeks found that coverage by the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had a steeply dehumanizing slant toward Palestinians. The three papers “disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict” and “used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians,” a study by The Intercept showed. “The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.”
After a year of the Gaza war, Arab-American historian Rashid Khalidi said: “My objection to organs of opinion like the New York Times is that they see absolutely everything from an Israeli perspective. ‘How does it affect Israel, how do the Israelis see it?’ Israel is at the center of their worldview, and that’s true of our elites generally, all over the West. The Israelis have very shrewdly, by preventing direct reportage from Gaza, further enabled that Israelocentric perspective.”
Khalidi summed up: “The mainstream media is as blind as it ever was, as willing to shill for any monstrous Israeli lie, to act as stenographers for power, repeating what is said in Washington.”
Continue reading "Genocidal President, Genocidal Politics" »
January 05, 2025 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
On the last day of 2024, the deputy general counsel for the House of Representatives formally accepted delivery of a civil summons for two congressmembers from Northern California. More than 600 constituents of Jared Huffman and Mike Thompson have signed on as plaintiffs in a class action accusing them of helping to arm the Israeli military in violation of “international and federal law that prohibits complicity in genocide.”
Whatever the outcome of the lawsuit, it conveys widespread anger and anguish about the ongoing civilian carnage in Gaza that taxpayers have continued to bankroll.
By a wide margin, most Americans favor an arms embargo on Israel while the Gaza war persists. But Huffman and Thompson voted to approve $26.38 billion in military aid for Israel last April, long after the nonstop horrors for civilians in Gaza were evident.
Back in February -- two months before passage of the enormous military aid package -- both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International found that, in the words of the lawsuit, “the Israeli government was systematically starving the people of Gaza through cutting off aid, water, and electricity, by bombing and military occupation, all underwritten by the provision of U.S. military aid and weapons.”
When the known death toll passed 40,000 last summer, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights said: “Most of the dead are women and children. This unimaginable situation is overwhelmingly due to recurring failures by the Israeli Defense Forces to comply with the rules of war.” He described as “deeply shocking” the “scale of the Israeli military’s destruction of homes, hospitals, schools and places of worship.”
On Dec. 4, Amnesty International released a 296-page report concluding that Israel has been committing genocide “brazenly, continuously and with total impunity” -- with the “specific intent to destroy Palestinians,” engaging in “prohibited acts under the Genocide Convention.”
Two weeks later, on the same day the lawsuit was filed in federal district court in San Francisco, Human Rights Watch released new findings that “Israeli authorities are responsible for the crime against humanity of extermination and for acts of genocide.”
Responding to the lawsuit, a spokesperson for Thompson said that “achieving peace and securing the safety of civilians won’t be accomplished by filing a lawsuit.” But for well over a year, to no avail, the plaintiffs and many other constituents have been urging him and Huffman to help protect civilians by ending their support for the U.S. pipeline of weapons and ammunition to Israel.
Enabled by that pipeline, the slaughter has continued in Gaza while the appropriators on Capitol Hill work in a kind of bubble. Letters, emails, phone calls, office visits, protests and more have not pierced that bubble. The lawsuit is an effort to break through the routine of indifference.
Like many other congressional Democrats, Huffman and Thompson have prided themselves on standing up against the contempt for facts that Donald Trump and his cohorts flaunt. Yet refusal to acknowledge the facts of civilian decimation in Gaza, with a direct U.S. role, is an extreme form of denial.
“Over the last 14 months I have watched elected officials remain completely unresponsive despite the public’s demands to end the genocide,” said Laurel Krause, a Mendocino County resident who is one of the lawsuit plaintiffs.
Another plaintiff, Leslie Angeline, a Marin County resident who ended a 31-day hunger strike when the lawsuit was filed, said: “I wake each morning worrying about the genocide that is happening in Gaza, knowing that if it wasn’t for my government’s partnership with the Israeli government, this couldn’t continue.”
Such passionate outlooks are a far cry from the words offered by members of Congress who routinely appear to take pride in seeming calm as they discuss government policies. But if their own children’s lives were at stake rather than the lives of Palestinian children in Gaza, they would hardly be so calm. A huge empathy gap is glaring.
In the words of plaintiff Judy Talaugon, a Native American activist in Sonoma County, “Palestinian children are all our children, deserving of our advocacy and support. And their liberation is the catalyst for systemic change for the betterment of us all.”
As a plaintiff, I certainly don’t expect the courts to halt the U.S. policies that have been enabling the horrors in Gaza to go on. But our lawsuit makes a clear case for the moral revulsion that so many Americans feel about the culpability of the U.S. government.
To hardboiled political pros, the heartfelt goal of putting a stop to the arming of the Israeli military for genocide is apt to seem quixotic and dreamy. But it’s easy for politicians to underestimate feelings of moral outrage. As James Baldwin wrote, “Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.”
Organizing together under the name Taxpayers Against Genocide, constituents served notice that no amount of rhetoric could make funding of genocide anything other than repugnant. Jared Huffman and Mike Thompson are the first members of Congress to face such a lawsuit. They won’t be the last.
In recent days, people from many parts of the United States have contacted Taxpayers Against Genocide (via [email protected]) to see the full lawsuit and learn about how they can file one against their own member of Congress.
No one should put any trust in the court system to stop the U.S. government from using tax dollars for war. But suing congressmembers who are complicit in genocide is a good step for exposing -- and organizing against -- the power of the warfare state.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," includes an afterword about the Gaza war.
January 01, 2025 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
This week, the New York Times reported that the U.S. government made war in Afghanistan while helping to “recruit, train and pay for lawless bands of militias that pillaged homes and laid waste to entire communities.” Those militias “tortured civilians, kidnapped for ransom, massacred dozens in vendetta killings and razed entire villages, sowing more than a decade of hatred toward the Afghan government and its American allies.”
Written by a former Kabul bureau chief for the Times, the article appeared under a headline saying that “U.S.-backed militias” in Afghanistan were “worse than the Taliban.”
Now they tell us.
The new reporting made me think of a chapter in my book War Made Invisible titled “Now It Can Be Told.” Here’s an excerpt:
* * * * *
Timing is crucial in media and politics -- and never more so than when war is at stake. It’s completely unsatisfactory for journalists to toe the war line for years and then finally report, in effect: Now it can be told -- years too late.
Virtually the entire U.S. media establishment gave full-throated support to the U.S. attack on Afghanistan in early October 2001. Twenty years later, many of the same outlets were saying the war was ill-conceived and doomed from the start.
Immediately after the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003, with very few exceptions, even the mainstream news organizations that had been expressing trepidation or opposition swung into line to support the war effort. Two decades later, many of the same media outlets were calling the invasion of Iraq the worst U.S. foreign-policy blunder in history.
But such framing evades the structural mendacity that remains built into the military-industrial complex, with its corporate media and political wings. War is so normalized that its casualties, as if struck by acts of God, are routinely viewed as victims without victimizers, perhaps no more aggrieved than people suffering the consequences of bad weather.
What American policymakers call mistakes and errors are, for others, more aptly described with words like catastrophes and atrocities. Attributing the U.S. wars to faulty judgment -- not premeditated and hugely profitable aggression -- is expedient, setting the policy table for supposed resolve to use better judgment next time rather than challenging the presumed prerogative to attack another country at will.
When the warfare in Afghanistan finally ended, major U.S. media -- after avidly supporting the invasion and then the occupation -- were awash in accounts of how the war had been badly run with ineptitude or deception from the White House and the Pentagon. Some of the media analysis and commentaries might have seemed a bit sheepish, but news outlets preferred not to recall their prior support for the same war in Afghanistan that they were now calling folly.
A pattern of regret (not to say repentance or remorse) emerged from massive U.S. outlays for venture militarism that failed to triumph in Afghanistan and Iraq, but there is little evidence that the underlying repetition compulsion disorder has been exorcized from America’s foreign-policy leadership or major news media, let alone its political economy. On the contrary: the forces that have dragged the United States into an array of wars in numerous countries still retain enormous sway over foreign and military affairs. For those forces, over time, shape-shifting is essential, while the warfare state continues to rule.
The fact that strategies and forms of intervention are evolving, most conspicuously in the direction of further reliance on airpower rather than ground troops, makes the victims of the USA’s firepower even less visible to American eyes. This presents a challenge to take a fresh look at ongoing militarism and insist that the actual consequences for people at the other end of U.S. weaponry be exposed to the light of day -- and taken seriously in human terms.
Despite all that has happened since President George W. Bush vowed in mid-September 2001 to “rid the world of the evil-doers,” pivotal issues have been largely dodged by dominant U.S. media and political leaders. The toll that red-white-and-blue militarism takes on other countries is not only a matter of moral principles. The United States is also in jeopardy.
That we live in one interdependent world is no longer debatable. Illusions about American exceptionalism have been conclusively refuted by the global climate emergency and the Covid-19 pandemic, along with the ever-present and worsening dangers of thermonuclear war. On a planet so circular in so many ways, what goes around comes around.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in paperback this fall with a new afterword about the Gaza war.
December 25, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon / The Hill
While analyzing the tailspin of the Biden presidency and the failed campaign of Kamala Harris, few pundits have questioned that militarism is a political necessity as well as a vital tool of U.S. foreign policy.
Harris checked a standard box at the Democratic National Convention when she pledged to maintain “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” Yet the erosion of the Democratic Party’s base is partly due to the alienation of voters who don’t want to cast their ballot for what they see as a war party.
That perception is especially acute among the young, and notable among African Americans. Many have viewed President Biden’s resolute support for the Israeli war in Gaza as a moral collapse. When Harris remained loyal to it during the fall campaign, her credibility sank.
Events in recent weeks have done nothing to reassure those repelled by the Democratic administration’s approach. Biden’s purported 30-day deadline for Israel to start allowing adequate food into Gaza expired shortly after the election — without Israeli compliance — while the humanitarian disaster in Gaza actually became worse than ever. Biden’s White House pretended otherwise.
The ongoing hellish realities for Palestinian civilians in Gaza caused 40 percent of Senate Democrats to vote for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) post-election resolution to block $20 billion worth of military aid to Israel. But near the end of November, Biden followed up by greenlighting an additional $680 million in arms sales to Israel. While Republicans remained in lockstep for arming Israel, the budding dissent from congressional Democrats remained ineffectual.
On Ukraine war policy, dissent has been rare from Democratic lawmakers. Two years ago, 30 progressive House Democrats sent a letter to Biden that suggested “a proactive diplomatic push” could be useful for achieving a ceasefire — but they quickly withdrew the letter after an angry backlash from hawkish leaders in their own party. (Republican lawmakers are split on Ukraine policy — many want the U.S. to recklessly confront China instead of Russia.)
Few Democrats have mustered more than feeble caveats about open-ended military aid to the Kyiv government, merely watching as the Biden administration repeatedly crosses its own red lines on such matters as approval of longer-range Ukrainian missile strikes into Russia. For the Ukraine war, in the lexicon of high-ranking Democrats, “diplomacy” has been a dirty word.
Overall, the president has accelerated the war train (sometimes hailing more war production as good for the U.S. economy), with party leaders providing fuel and Democratic constituents confined to the caboose. The opinions of the party faithful count for little.
December 21, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
President Biden has never wavered from approving huge arms shipments to Israel during more than 13 months of mass murder and deliberate starvation of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Biden’s crucial role earned him the name “Genocide Joe.”
That nickname might seem shrill, but it’s valid. Although Biden will not be brought to justice for serving as a key accomplice to the horrific crimes against humanity that continue in Gaza, the label sticks -- and candid historians will condemn him as a direct enabler of genocide.
Biden could also qualify for another nickname, which according to Google was never published before this article: “Omnicide Joe.”
In contrast to the Genocide Joe sobriquet, which events have already proven apt, Omnicide Joe is a bit anticipatory. That’s inevitable, because if the cascading effects of his foreign policy end up as key factors in nuclear annihilation, historians will not be around to assess his culpability for omnicide -- defined as “the destruction of all life or all human life.”
That definition scarcely overstates what scientists tell us would result from an exchange of nuclear weapons. Researchers have discovered that “nuclear winter” would quickly set in across the globe, blotting out sunlight and wiping out agriculture, with a human survival rate of perhaps 1 or 2 percent.
With everything -- literally everything -- at stake, you might think that averting thermonuclear war between the world’s two nuclear superpowers, Russia and the United States, would be high on a president’s to-do list. But that hardly has been the case with Joe Biden since he first pulled up a chair at the Oval Office desk.
In fact, Biden has done a lot during the first years of this decade to inflame the realistic fears of nuclear war. His immediate predecessor Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of two vital treaties -- Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces and Open Skies -- and Biden did nothing to reinstate them. Likewise, Trump killed the Iran nuclear deal negotiated during the Obama administration, and Biden let it stay dead.
Instead of fulfilling his 2020 campaign promise to adopt a U.S. policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons, two years ago Biden signed off on the Nuclear Posture Review policy document that explicitly declares the opposite. Last year, under the euphemism of “modernization,” the U.S. government spent $51 billion -- more than every other nuclear-armed country combined -- updating and sustaining its nuclear arsenal, gaining profligate momentum in a process that’s set to continue for decades to come.
Before and after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, Biden showed a distinct lack of interest in actual diplomacy to prevent the war or to end it. Three days before the invasion, writing in the Financial Times, Jeffrey Sachs pointed out: “Biden has said repeatedly that the U.S. is open to diplomacy with Russia, but on the issue that Moscow has most emphasized -- NATO enlargement -- there has been no American diplomacy at all. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has repeatedly demanded that the U.S. forswear NATO’s enlargement into Ukraine, while Biden has repeatedly asserted that membership of the alliance is Ukraine’s choice.”
While Russia’s invasion and horrible war in Ukraine should be condemned, Biden has compounded Putin’s crimes by giving much higher priority to Washington’s cold-war mania than to negotiation for peace -- or to mitigation of escalating risks of nuclear war.
From the outset, Biden scarcely acknowledged that the survival of humanity was put at higher risk by the Ukraine war. In his first State of the Union speech, a week after the invasion, Biden devoted much of his oratory to the Ukraine conflict without saying a word about the heightened danger that it might trigger the use of nuclear weapons.
During the next three months, the White House posted more than 60 presidential statements, documents and communiques about the war in Ukraine. They all shared with his State of the Union address a stunning characteristic -- the complete absence of any mention of nuclear weapons or nuclear war dangers -- even though many experts gauged those dangers as being the worst they’d been since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
November 24, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon / The Hill
If the Democratic National Committee is trying to find a new leader proficient at alienating Black voters, it couldn’t do better than Rahm Emanuel.
Emanuel has indicated in recent days that he’s interested in the job. If he goes for it at the party’s upcoming meeting, much of the old Democratic guard is likely to back him, setting up an intra-party brawl.
Last week, David Axelrod served as a digital advance man for his former Obama White House colleague, posting that “Dems need a strong and strategic party leader, with broad experience in comms; fundraising and winning elections,” while touting Emanuel as just the man for the job: “Dude knows how to fight and win!”
In terms of well-connected power-brokering, Emanuel’s ties with Democratic elites and corporate donors have been second to none. And he can boast an impressive political resume — senior advisor to President Bill Clinton, congressman from Illinois, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Democrats’ 2006 sweep, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, and White House chief of staff for Barack Obama, before becoming mayor of Chicago in 2011.
But his eight-year record as mayor could trip up Emanuel if he runs for DNC chair. Long before leaving office in 2019, Emanuel had fallen into disrepute. By the end of 2015, a poll found that his approval rating among Chicago residents had sunk to 18 percent. No wonder he decided not to run for a third term.
Emanuel stands out at provoking bitter enmity from Black people, crucial voters in the Democratic Party base.
He earned notoriety for the cover-up of a video showing how Chicago police killed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald one night in October 2014. For 13 months, during Emanuel’s campaign for reelection, his administration suppressed a ghastly dashboard-camera video showing the death of McDonald, an African American who was shot 16 times by a police officer while walking away from the officer. (A jury later convicted the officer of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery.)
Memories of Emanuel’s malfeasance have remained vivid. In 2020, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) expressed a widely held view when she tweeted: “Rahm Emanuel helped cover up the murder of Laquan McDonald. Covering up a murder is disqualifying for public leadership.”
Last weekend, amid reports that Emanuel was weighing a bid for DNC chair, Ocasio-Cortez denounced him as a symptom of what ails the party: “There is a disease in Washington of Democrats who spend more time listening to the donor class than working people. If you want to know the seed of the party’s political crisis, that’s it.”
November 21, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
When some leading thinkers at the London School of Economics saw fascism take hold in the 1930s, Oxford history professor Ben Jackson said in a recent BBC interview, they “argued that in those circumstances the people with economic power in society, the property owners, are willing to cancel democracy, cancel civil liberties, and make deals with political organizations like the Nazis if it guarantees their economic interest.”
That analysis has an ominous ring to it now as many tech industrialists swing behind President-elect Trump. They can hardly be unaware that Gen. Mark Milley, who served as the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman under Trump, described him as “fascist to the core.”
“Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos tweeted the morning after the election. Weeks earlier, as the owner of the Washington Post, Bezos had blocked an endorsement of Kamala Harris by the newspaper’s editorial board.
Bezos could lose billions of dollars in antitrust cases, but now stands a better chance of winning thanks to a second Trump administration. During the last decade, Amazon Web Services gained huge contracts with the federal government, including a $10 billion deal with the National Security Agency.
No wonder Bezos’ post-election tweet laid it on thick -- “wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.”
Not to be left behind at the starting gun in the tech industry’s suck-up-to-Trump derby, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote: “Congratulations to President Trump on a decisive victory. We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country. Looking forward to working with you and your administration.”
As a nine-figure donor and leading purveyor of online lies for the 2024 Trump campaign, Elon Musk has been working closely with Trump. The Tesla magnate, X (formerly Twitter) owner and SpaceX mogul is well-positioned to help shape policies of the incoming administration. A week after the election, news broke that Musk has been chosen by Trump to co-lead an ill-defined “Department of Government Efficiency” with an evident mission to slash the public sector.
Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg rank first, third and fourth respectively on the Forbes list of the world’s richest individuals. The three of them have combined wealth of around $740 billion.
“In recent years, many tech elites have shrugged off the idealism once central to Silicon Valley’s self-image, in favor of a more corporate and transactional approach to politics,” the Washington Post gingerly reported after the election. The newspaper added: “A growing contingent of right-wing tech figures argue that Trump can usher in a new era of American dominance by removing red tape.”
For amoral gazillionaires like Bezos and Musk, ingratiating themselves with Trump is a wise investment that’s calculated to yield windfall returns. Evidently, the consequences in human terms are of no real concern. In fact, social injustice and the divisions it breeds create the conditions for still more lucrative political demagoguery, with the richest investors at the front of the line to benefit from corporate tax cuts and regressive changes in individual tax brackets.
After Election Day, the fascism scholar Jason Stanley offered a grim appraisal: “People who feel slighted (materially or socially) come to accept pathologies -- racism, homophobia, misogyny, ethnic nationalism, and religious bigotry -- which, under conditions of greater equality, they would reject. And it is precisely those material conditions for a healthy, stable democracy that the United States lacks today. If anything, America has come to be singularly defined by its massive wealth inequality, a phenomenon that cannot but undermine social cohesion and breed resentment.”
The threat of fascism in the United States is no longer conjectural. It is swiftly gathering momentum, fueled by the extremism of the party set to soon control both the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government as well as most of the federal court system.
It’s not only that, as Stanley notes, “the Republican Party’s domination of all branches of government would render the U.S. a one-party state.” Already set in motion are cascading toxic effects on social discourse and political dynamics, marked by widening acceptance and promotion of overt bigotries and brandished hatreds.
Continue reading "Looming Fascism and the Question of Hope" »
November 13, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon / The Hill
After years of serving as enablers for a faltering President Joe Biden, Democrats in Congress must finally break away from his leadership — for the sake of their party and the survival of democracy in this country.
Donald Trump, the man whom Gen. Mark Milley called “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country,” does not deserve to have the blue carpet rolled out for him at the White House. Yet such hospitality was key to Biden’s message in his Rose Garden speech on Thursday.
It’s one thing to pledge to “ensure a peaceful and orderly transition,” as Biden did. It’s quite another to proceed as though this is a normal transition and a normal incoming president.
Instead of rising to the historical moment with clarity about the grave and imminent challenges ahead, Biden opted for ominous silence about the clear and present danger to the republic that America will face beginning Jan. 20, 2025.
To the tens of millions of Americans who are deeply alarmed about the future of this country under a second Trump administration, Biden offered only some of his usual aphorisms, along with vague pep-talk phrases like “setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable.”
When Biden assured the nation that “we’re going to be okay,” the statement failed to live up to his responsibilities as someone who took an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
That Constitution is now under dire threat. But you wouldn’t know it from what Biden had to say. Instead, what screamed out were his silences, as though the well-founded and widespread worries about Trump’s fascistic qualities are no longer of great moment.
In effect, Biden began to blaze a post-election trail of conciliation toward the extremist politics of the present-day Republican Party. If congressional Democrats follow along that path, they will compound their grievous error of serving as yes-men and yes-women for Biden’s insistence on running for reelection, until his disastrous debate performance.
A huge looming question now is whether Democrats in office will fold up their tents and retreat — or fight back against the Trump forces that are on the march.
November 11, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
A pair of quotes, separated by eight years, spotlight a chronic political mentality at the top of the Democratic Party:
“The path to victory in a state like Michigan, Harris campaign officials are betting, is through suburban counties that are home to many college-educated and white voters,” the New York Times reported three weeks ago.
“For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin,” Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer said in July 2016.
The same basic approach of Democratic Party elites that first opened the door to the White House for Donald Trump has done it again.
After losing a national election, political parties sometimes muster the wisdom to compile an “autopsy” report -- assessing what went wrong and what changes are needed for the future. But after Hillary Clinton lost as a corporate war-hawk candidate in 2016, the Democratic National Committee showed that it had no interest in doing any such report.
So, at RootsAction we decided to do it ourselves, with a task force of researchers and activists who wrote “Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis.” Many of our key findings about the 2016 election apply to the latest one. For example:
Four weeks ago, when asked on ABC’s The View if she would have done anything differently than President Biden, the reply from Kamala Harris was more than notable: “Not a thing comes to mind.”
Such loyalty to the powerful is a repetition compulsion disorder with horrendous consequences. Harris’s reply -- after a full year of ongoing mass murder and genocide in Gaza, made possible by U.S. military aid -- was a moral failure and a prelude to electoral disaster. Harris stuck with her patron in the Oval Office and his role as an accomplice to Israel while disregarding the clear wishes of the Democratic Party’s base.
Now that a fascistic party has won the presidency along with the Senate and apparently the House as well, the stakes for people and planet are truly beyond comprehension. Grassroots organizing should include maximum possible nonviolent pressure on officials in government and other institutions, insisting that compromise with Republican leaders is completely unacceptable.
"If you're not worried about encroaching fascism in America, before long it will start to feel normal. And when that happens, we're all in trouble,” the author of How Fascism Works, Jason Stanley, warned in a video. That was six years ago.
"Normalization of fascist ideology, by definition, would make charges of 'fascism' seem like an overreaction, even in societies whose norms are transforming along these worrisome lines,” Stanley wrote in his 2018 book. “Normalization means precisely that encroaching ideologically extreme conditions are not recognized as such because they have come to seem normal. The charge of fascism will always seem extreme; normalization means that the goalposts for the legitimate use of 'extreme' terminology continually move."
Resisting such normalization is now imperative.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in paperback this fall with a new afterword about the Gaza war.
November 06, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
The conclusion that Donald Trump is a fascist has gone mainstream, gaining wide publicity and affirmation in recent weeks. Such understanding is a problem for Trump and his boosters. At the same time, potentially pivotal in this close election, a small proportion of people who consider themselves to be progressive still assert that any differences between Trump and Kamala Harris are not significant enough to vote for Harris in swing states.
Opposition to fascism has long been a guiding light in movements against racism and for social justice.
Speaking to a conference of the African National Congress in 1951, Nelson Mandela warned that “South African capitalism has developed [into] monopolism and is now reaching the final stage of monopoly capitalism gone mad, namely, fascism.”
Before Fred Hampton was murdered by local police officers colluding with the FBI in 1969, the visionary young Illinois Black Panther Party leader said: “Nothing is more important than stopping fascism, because fascism will stop us all.”
But now, for some who lay claim to being on the left, stopping fascism is not a priority. Disconnected from the magnitude of this fateful moment, the danger of a fascist president leading a fanatical movement becomes an abstraction.
One cogent critic of capitalism ended a column in mid-October this way: “Pick your poison. Destruction by corporate power or destruction by oligarchy. The end result is the same. That is what the two ruling parties offer in November. Nothing else.”
The difference between a woman’s right to an abortion vs. abortion being illegal is nothing?
“The end result is the same” -- so it shouldn’t matter to us whether Trump becomes president after campaigning with a continuous barrage against immigrants, calling them “vermin,” “stone-cold killers,” and “animals,” while warning against the “bad genes” of immigrants who aren’t white, and raising bigoted alarms about immigration of “blood thirty criminals” who “prey upon innocent American citizens” and will “cut your throat”?
If “the end result is the same,” a mish-mash of ideology and fatalism can ignore the foreseeable results of a Republican Party gaining control of the federal government with a 2024 platform that pledges to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.” Or getting a second Trump term after the first one allowed him to put three right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court.
Will the end result be the same if Trump fulfills his apparent threat to deploy the U.S. military against his political opponents, whom he describes as “radical left lunatics” and “the enemy from within”?
Capacities to protect civil liberties matter. So do savage Republican cuts in programs for minimal health care, nutrition and other vital aspects of a frayed social safety net. But those cuts are less likely to matter to the polemicists who will not experience the institutionalized cruelties firsthand.
Rather than being for personal absolution, voting is a tool in the political toolbox -- if the goal is to avert the worst and improve the chances for constructing a future worthy of humanity.
Trump has pledged to be even more directly complicit in Israel’s mass murder of Palestinian people in Gaza than President Biden has been. No wonder, as the Washington Post reports, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has shown a clear preference for Trump in this election.” During a call this month, Trump told Netanyahu: “Do what you have to do.”
Palestinians, Muslim leaders and other activists in the swing state of Arizona issued an open letter days ago that makes a case for defeating Trump. “We know that many in our communities are resistant to vote for Kamala Harris because of the Biden administration’s complicity in the genocide,” the letter says. “We understand this sentiment. Many of us have felt that way ourselves, even until very recently. Some of us have lost many family members in Gaza and Lebanon. We respect those who feel they simply can’t vote for a member of the administration that sent the bombs that may have killed their loved ones.”
The letter goes on:
As we consider the full situation carefully, however, we conclude that voting for Kamala Harris is the best option for the Palestinian cause and all of our communities. We know that some will strongly disagree. We only ask that you consider our case with an open mind and heart, respecting that we are doing what we believe is right in an awful situation where only flawed choices are available.
In our view, it is crystal clear that allowing the fascist Donald Trump to become President again would be the worst possible outcome for the Palestinian people. A Trump win would be an extreme danger to Muslims in our country, all immigrants, and the American pro-Palestine movement. It would be an existential threat to our democracy and our whole planet.
Exercising conscience in the most humane sense isn’t about feeling personal virtue. It’s about concern for impacts on the well-being of other people. It’s about collective solidarity.
The consequences of declining to help stop fascism are not confined to the individual voter. In the process, vast numbers of people can pay the price for individuals’ self-focused concept of conscience.
Last week, the insightful article “7 Strategic Axioms for the Anxious Progressive Voter” offered a forward-looking way to put this presidential election in a future context: “Vote for the candidate you want to organize against!”
Do we want to be organizing against a fascistic militaristic President Trump, with no realistic hope of changing policies . . . or against a neoliberal militaristic President Harris, with the possibility of changing policies?
For progressives, the answer should be clear.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in paperback this fall with a new afterword about the Gaza war.
October 27, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
While the name of the next president is unknown, some outcomes of the election can be foreseen. For instance:
Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are supporters of boosting already-huge Pentagon budgets along with continuing U.S. warfare in many forms. Trump likes to pander to voters who don’t want endless wars, but his actual policies as president kept them going. Harris’s glimmers of senatorial interest in scaling back military largesse faded into standard bellicosity. Both candidates beat cold-war drums, with Trump focusing on China rather than Russia.
Progressive ideas, as usual, will be convenient scapegoats for the failures of Democratic Party elites.
The establishment is ever alert to the danger that progressive populism could majorly reduce income inequality and subdue corporate power.
The disasters with a second Trump administration will include unleashed nativism and official bigotry. As one liberal commentator observed weeks before the election, “More than ever, Trump’s rhetoric is steeped in racism, xenophobia and dehumanization. He routinely calls immigrants ‘vermin’ and says they are ‘poisoning the blood’ of the country. He claims they are ‘stone-cold killers,’ ‘animals’ and ‘the worst people’ who will ‘cut your throat.’ . . . He called migrants from Latin America, Congo and the Middle East ‘the most violent people on Earth.’ . . . He’s even suggested that nonwhite immigrants have ‘bad genes’ that make them genetically inferior.”
In October, this year’s Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein campaigned in swing states and declared: “This is a very dire situation that will be continued under both Democrats and Republicans. So we say there is no lesser evil in this race.”
Really?
“For anyone who doubts Trump will be even worse than Biden is on Gaza,” Mehdi Hasan tweeted a mid-October video clip of Trump saying that Netanyahu “is doing a good job, Biden is trying to hold him back... and probably should be doing the opposite. I'm glad that Bibi decided to do what he had to do.’”
If Trump wins, virtually all Republicans and many Democrats in Congress will support his unequivocal backing for whatever Israel does. If Harris wins, we can expect her policies toward Israel to be dreadful, while she’ll be subject to increasing pressure from much of her party’s base and some Democratic members of Congress for an end to arming Israel.
The burden will be on activists to demand actions commensurate with the realities described in The 2024 State of the Climate Report: “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.”
A Trump presidency will push progressives back on our heels, in a dire defensive position as we fight to protect rights and programs won during many previous decades. With a Harris presidency, progressives will have some space to organize, with potential to actually move some U.S. government policies in a positive direction.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in paperback this fall with a new afterword about the Gaza war.
October 21, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
With Election Day just three weeks off and voting already underway in some states, the race for president is down to the wire. Progressives could make the difference.
While no one in their left mind plans to vote for the fascistic and unhinged Donald Trump, some say they won’t vote for Kamala Harris because of her loyalty to President Biden’s support for the Israeli war on Gaza. That might enable Trump to win with enough electoral votes from swing states -- Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Those seven states are where progressives may well hold the future in their voting hands.
The policy that Harris has defended for the war on Gaza is despicable. At the same time, she is the only candidate who can spare us from another Trump presidency, which -- from all indications -- would be far worse than the first one.
The need is urgent for dialectics -- “a method of examining and discussing opposing ideas in order to find the truth” -- in this case, the truth of what’s most needed at this electoral crossroads of fateful history.
“The harms of the other options” mean that the best course of action is to vote for Harris, 25 Islamic clerics said in a letter released last week. They focused on an overarching truth: “Particularly in swing states, a vote for a third party could enable Trump to win that state and therefore the election.” The U.S. clerics called such a vote “both a moral and a strategic failure.”
Personally, as a resident of solid-blue California, I have no intention of voting for Harris. But if I lived in one of the seven swing states, I wouldn’t hesitate to join in voting for her as the only way to defeat Trump.
Some speak of the need to exercise conscience rather than voting for Harris. Yet in swing states, what kind of “conscience” is so self-focused that it risks doing harm to others as a result of a Trump presidency?
Continue reading "Time for a United Front Against Trump and Realism About Harris" »
October 13, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
Everything is at stake. Everything is at stake with nuclear weapons.
While working as a nuclear war planner for the Kennedy administration, Daniel Ellsberg was shown a document calculating that a U.S. nuclear attack on communist countries would result in 600 million dead. As he put it later: “A hundred Holocausts.”
That was in 1961.
Today, with nuclear arsenals vastly larger and more powerful, scientists know that a nuclear exchange would cause “nuclear winter.” And the nearly complete end of agriculture on the planet. Some estimates put the survival rate of humans on Earth at 1 or 2 percent.
No longer 100 Holocausts.
More than 1,000 Holocausts.
If such a nuclear war happens, of course we won’t be around for any retrospective analysis. Or regrets. So, candid introspection is in a category of now or never.
What if we did have the opportunity for hindsight? What if we could somehow hover over this planet? And see what had become a global crematorium and an unspeakable ordeal of human agony? Where, in words attributed to both Nikita Khruschev and Winston Churchill, “the living would envy the dead.”
What might we Americans say about the actions and inaction of our leaders?
In 2023: The nine nuclear-armed countries spent $91 billion on their nuclear weapons. Most of that amount, $51 billion, was the U.S. share. And our country accounted for 80 percent of the increase in nuclear weapons spending.
The United States is leading the way in the nuclear arms race. And we’re encouraged to see that as a good thing. “Escalation dominance.”
But escalation doesn’t remain unipolar. As time goes on, “Do as we say, not as we do” isn’t convincing to other nations.
China is now expanding its nuclear arsenal. That escalation does not exist in a vacuum. Official Washington pretends that Chinese policies are shifting without regard to the U.S. pursuit of “escalation dominance.” But that’s a disingenuous pretense. What the great critic of Vietnam War escalation during the 1960s, Senator William Fulbright, called “the arrogance of power.”
Continue reading "“Escalation Dominance” . . . and the Prospect of More Than 1,000 Holocausts" »
September 30, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
Kamala Harris won the debate. People being bombed in Gaza did not.
The banner headline across the top of the New York Times home page -- “Harris Puts Trump on Defensive in Fierce Debate” -- was accurate enough. But despite the good news for people understandably eager for Trump to be defeated, the Harris debate performance was a moral and political tragedy.
In Gaza “now an estimated 40,000 Palestinians are dead,” an ABC News moderator said. “Nearly 100 hostages remain. . . . President Biden has not been able to break through the stalemate. How would you do it?”
Vice President Harris replied with her standard wording: “Israel has a right to defend itself. We would. And how it does so matters. Because it is also true far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Children, mothers. What we know is that this war must end. It must when, end immediately, and the way it will end is we need a ceasefire deal and we need the hostages out.”
“End immediately”? Anyone who isn’t in fantasyland knows that the only way to soon end the slaughter of Palestinian civilians would be for the U.S. government -- the overwhelmingly biggest supplier of Israel’s armaments -- to stop sending weapons to Israel.
Meanwhile, a pivot to advocating for a cutoff of weapons to Israel would help Harris win the presidency. After the debate, the Institute for Middle East Understanding pointed out that the need to halt the weapons is not only moral and legal -- it’s also smart politics. Polls are clear that most Americans want to stop arming Israel. In swing states, polling has found that a large number of voters say they’d be more likely to cast a ballot for Harris if she would support a halt.
What Kamala Harris and Donald Trump said about Israel and Gaza in their debate was predictable. Even more certain was what they absolutely would not say -- with silences speaking loudest of all. “Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth,” Aldous Huxley wrote, describing “the greatest triumphs of propaganda.”
By coincidence, the debate happened on the same date as publication of a new afterword about the Gaza war in the paperback edition of my book War Made Invisible. To fill in for the debate’s abysmal silences, here are a few quotes from the afterword about the ongoing carnage:
That and so much more -- left unsaid from the debate stage, dodged in U.S. mass media and evaded from the podiums of power in Washington -- indict not only the Israeli government but also the U.S. government as an accomplice to mass murder that has escalated into genocide.
Silence is a blanket that smothers genuine democratic discourse and the outcries of moral voices. Making those voices inaudible is a key goal for the functioning of the warfare state.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in paperback this month with a new afterword about the Gaza war.
September 10, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
One evening in early September 1964, a frightening commercial jolted 50 million Americans who were partway through watching “Monday Night at the Movies” on NBC. The ad began with an adorable three-year-old girl counting petals as she pulled them from a daisy. Then came a man’s somber voiceover, counting down from ten to zero. Then an ominous roar and a mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb explosion.
The one-minute TV spot reached its climax with audio from President Lyndon Johnson, concluding that “we must love each other, or we must die.” The ad did not mention his opponent in the upcoming election, Sen. Barry Goldwater, but it didn’t need to. By then, his cavalier attitude toward nuclear weapons was well established.
Goldwater’s bestseller The Conscience of a Conservative, published at the start of the decade, was unnervingly open to the idea of launching a nuclear war, while the book exuded disdain for leaders who “would rather crawl on knees to Moscow than die under an Atom bomb.” Closing in on the Republican nomination for president, the Arizona senator suggested that “low-yield” nuclear bombs could be useful to defoliate forests in Vietnam.
His own words gave plenty of fodder to others seeking the GOP nomination. Pennsylvania Gov. William Scranton called Goldwater “a trigger-happy dreamer” and said that he “too often casually prescribed nuclear war as a solution to a troubled world.” New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller unloaded with a rhetorical question: “How can there be sanity when he wants to give area commanders the authority to make decisions on the use of nuclear weapons?”
So, the stage was set for the “daisy ad,” which packed an emotional wallop -- and provoked a fierce backlash. Critics cried foul, deploring an attempt to use the specter of nuclear annihilation for political gain. Having accomplished the goal of putting the Goldwater camp on the defensive, the commercial never aired again as a paid ad. But national newscasts showed it while reporting on the controversy.
Today, a campaign ad akin to the daisy spot is hard to imagine from the Democratic or Republican nominee to be commander in chief, who seem content to bypass the subject of nuclear-war dangers. Yet those dangers are actually much higher now than they were 60 years ago. In 1964, the Doomsday Clock maintained by experts at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was set at 12 minutes to apocalyptic midnight. The ominous hands are now just 90 seconds away.
Yet, in their convention speeches this summer, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were silent on the need to engage in genuine diplomacy for nuclear arms control, let alone take steps toward disarmament.
Trump offered standard warnings about Russian and Chinese arsenals and Iran’s nuclear program, and boasted of his rapport with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Left unmentioned was Trump’s presidential statement in 2017 that if North Korea made “any more threats to the United States,” that country “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Nor did he refer to his highly irresponsible tweet that Kim should be informed “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
When Harris delivered her acceptance speech, it did not include the words “atomic” or “nuclear” at all.
Now in high gear, the 2024 presidential campaign is completely lacking in the kind of wisdom about nuclear weapons and relations between the nuclear superpowers that Lyndon Johnson and, eventually, Ronald Reagan attained during their presidencies.
Johnson privately acknowledged that the daisy commercial scared voters about Goldwater, which “we goddamned set out to do.” But the president was engaged in more than an electoral tactic. At the same time that he methodically deceived the American people while escalating the horrific war on Vietnam, Johnson pursued efforts to defuse the nuclear time bomb.
“We have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each other’s thinking on a number of questions,” Johnson said at the conclusion of his extensive summit meeting with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey, on June 25, 1967. But fifty-seven years later, there is scant evidence that the current or next president of the United States is genuinely interested in improving such understanding between leaders of the biggest nuclear states.
Two decades after the summit that defrosted the cold war and gave rise to what was dubbed “the spirit of Glassboro,” President Reagan stood next to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and said: “We decided to talk to each other instead of about each other.” But such an attitude would be heresy in the 2024 presidential campaign.
“These are the stakes,” Johnson said in the daisy ad as a mushroom cloud rose on screen, “to make a world in which all God’s children can live, or to go into the dark.”
Those are still the stakes. But you wouldn’t know it now from either of the candidates vying to be the next president of the United States.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in paperback this month with a new afterword about the Gaza war.
September 08, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
With nearly 18 million students on U.S. college campuses this fall, defenders of the war on Gaza don’t want to hear any backtalk. Silence is complicity, and that’s the way Israel’s allies like it. For them, the new academic term restarts a threat to the status quo. But for supporters of human rights, it’s a renewed opportunity to turn higher education into something more than a comfort zone.
In the United States, the extent and arrogance of the emerging collegiate repression is, quite literally, breathtaking. Every day, people are dying due to their transgression of breathing while Palestinian.
The Gaza death toll adds up to more than one Kristallnacht per day -- for upwards of 333 days and counting, with no end in sight. The shattering of a society’s entire infrastructure has been horrendous. Months ago, citing data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, ABC News reported that “25,000 buildings have been destroyed, 32 hospitals forced out of service, and three churches, 341 mosques and 100 universities and schools destroyed.”
Not that this should disturb the tranquility of campuses in the country whose taxpayers and elected leaders make it all possible. Top college officials wax eloquent about the sanctity of higher learning and academic freedom while they suppress protests against policies that have destroyed scores of universities in Palestine.
A key rationale for quashing dissent is that anti-Israel protests make some Jewish students uncomfortable. But the purposes of college education shouldn’t include always making people feel comfortable. How comfortable should students be in a nation enabling mass murder in Gaza?
What would we say about claims that students in the North with southern accents should not have been made uncomfortable by on-campus civil rights protests and denunciations of Jim Crow in the 1950s and 1960s? Or white students from South Africa, studying in the United States, made uncomfortable by anti-apartheid protests in the 1980s?
A bedrock for the edifice of speech suppression and virtual thought-policing is the old standby of equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Likewise, the ideology of Zionism that tries to justify Israeli policies is supposed to get a pass no matter what -- while opponents, including many Jews, are liable to be denounced as antisemites.
But polling shows that more younger Americans are supportive of Palestinians than they are of Israelis. The ongoing atrocities by the Israel “Defense” Forces in Gaza, killing a daily average of more than 100 people -- mostly children and women -- have galvanized many young people to take action in the United States.
“Protests rocked American campuses toward the end of the last academic year,” a front-page New York Times story reported in late August, adding: “Many administrators remain shaken by the closing weeks of the spring semester, when encampments, building occupations and clashes with the police helped lead to thousands of arrests across the country.” (Overall, the phrase “clashes with the police” served as a euphemism for police violently attacking nonviolent protesters.)
From the hazy ivory towers and corporate suites inhabited by so many college presidents and boards of trustees, Palestinian people are scarcely more than abstractions compared to far more real priorities. An understated sentence from the Times sheds a bit of light: “The strategies that are coming into public view suggest that some administrators at schools large and small have concluded that permissiveness is perilous, and that a harder line may be the best option -- or perhaps just the one least likely to invite blowback from elected officials and donors who have demanded that universities take stronger action against protesters.”
Much more clarity is available from a new Mondoweiss article by activist Carrie Zaremba, a researcher with training in anthropology. “University administrators across the United States have declared an indefinite state of emergency on college campuses,” she wrote. “Schools are rolling out policies in preparation for quashing pro-Palestine student activism this fall semester, and reshaping regulations and even campuses in the process to suit this new normal.
“Many of these policies being instituted share a common formula: more militarization, more law enforcement, more criminalization, and more consolidation of institutional power. But where do these policies originate and why are they so similar across all campuses? The answer lies in the fact that they have been provided by the ‘risk and crisis management’ consulting industries, with the tacit support of trustees, Zionist advocacy groups, and federal agencies. Together, they deploy the language of safety to disguise a deeper logic of control and securitization.”
Countering such top-down moves will require intensive grassroots organizing. Sustained pushback against campus repression will be essential, to continually assert the right to speak out and protest as guaranteed by the First Amendment.
Insistence on acquiring knowledge while gaining power for progressive forces will be vital. That’s why the national Teach-In Network was launched this week by the RootsAction Education Fund (which I help lead), under the banner “Knowledge Is Power -- and Our Grassroots Movements Need Both.”
The elites that were appalled by the moral uprising on college campuses against Israel’s slaughter in Gaza are now doing all they can to prevent a resurgence of that uprising. But the mass murder continues, subsidized by the U.S. government. When students insist that true knowledge and ethical action need each other, they can help make history and not just study it.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in paperback this month with a new afterword about the Gaza war.
September 05, 2024 | Permalink