Norman Solomon

Decades Later, the U.S. Government Called Hiroshima and Nagasaki ‘Nuclear Tests’

By Norman Solomon

In 1980, when I asked the press office at the U.S. Department of Energy to send me a listing of nuclear bomb test explosions, the agency mailed me an official booklet with the title “Announced United States Nuclear Tests, July 1945 Through December 1979.” As you’d expect, the Trinity test in New Mexico was at the top of the list. Second on the list was Hiroshima. Third was Nagasaki.

So, 35 years after the atomic bombings of those Japanese cities in August 1945, the Energy Department -- the agency in charge of nuclear weaponry -- was categorizing them as “tests.”

Later on, the classification changed, apparently in an effort to avert a potential P.R. problem. By 1994, a new edition of the same document explained that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “were not ‘tests’ in the sense that they were conducted to prove that the weapon would work as designed . . . or to advance weapon design, to determine weapons effects, or to verify weapon safety.”

But the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually were tests, in more ways than one.

Take it from the Manhattan Project’s director, Gen. Leslie Groves, who recalled: “To enable us to assess accurately the effects of the bomb, the targets should not have been previously damaged by air raids. It was also desirable that the first target be of such size that the damage would be confined within it, so that we could more definitely determine the power of the bomb.”

A physicist with the Manhattan Project, David H. Frisch, remembered that U.S. military strategists were eager “to use the bomb first where its effects would not only be politically effective but also technically measurable.”

For good measure, after the Trinity bomb test  in the New Mexico desert used plutonium as its fission source on July 16, 1945, in early August the military was able to test both a uranium-fueled bomb on Hiroshima and a second plutonium bomb on Nagasaki to gauge their effects on big cities.

Public discussion of the nuclear era began when President Harry Truman issued a statement that announced the atomic bombing of Hiroshima -- which he described only as “an important Japanese Army base.” It was a flagrant lie. A leading researcher of the atomic bombings of Japan, journalist Greg Mitchell, has pointed out: “Hiroshima was not an ‘army base’ but a city of 350,000. It did contain one important military headquarters, but the bomb had been aimed at the very center of a city -- and far from its industrial area.”

Mitchell added: “Perhaps 10,000 military personnel lost their lives in the bomb but the vast majority of the 125,000 dead in Hiroshima would be women and children.” Three days later, when an atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki, “it was officially described as a ‘naval base’ yet less than 200 of the 90,000 dead were military personnel.”

Since then, presidents have routinely offered rhetorical camouflage for reckless nuclear policies, rolling the dice for global catastrophe. In recent years, the most insidious lies from leaders in Washington have come with silence -- refusing to acknowledge, let alone address with genuine diplomacy, the worsening dangers of nuclear war. Those dangers have pushed the hands of the Doomsday Clock from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to an unprecedented mere 90 seconds to cataclysmic Midnight.

The ruthless Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 quickly escalated the chances of nuclear war. President Biden’s response was to pretend otherwise, beginning with his State of the Union address that came just days after the invasion; the long speech did not include a single word about nuclear weapons, the risks of nuclear war or any other such concern.

Today, in some elite circles of Russia and the United States, normalized talk of using “tactical” nuclear weapons has upped the madness ante. It can be shocking to read wildly irresponsible comments coming from top Russian officials about perhaps using nuclear weaponry in the Ukraine war. We might forget that they are giving voice to Russia’s strategic doctrine that is basically the same as ongoing U.S. strategic doctrine -- avowedly retaining the option of first use of nuclear weapons if losing too much ground in a military conflict.

Daniel Ellsberg wrote near the close of his vital book The Doomsday Machine: “What is missing -- what is foregone -- in the typical discussion and analysis of historical or current nuclear policies is the recognition that what is being discussed is dizzyingly insane and immoral: in its almost-incalculable and inconceivable destructiveness and deliberate murderousness, its disproportionality of risked and planned destructiveness to either declared or unacknowledged objectives, the infeasibility of its secretly pursued aims (damage limitation to the United States and allies, “victory” in two-sided nuclear war), its criminality (to a degree that explodes ordinary visions of law, justice, crime), its lack of wisdom or compassion, its sinfulness and evil.”

Dan dedicated the book “to those who struggle for a human future.”

A similar message came from Albert Einstein in 1947 when he wrote about “the release of atomic energy,” warning against “the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms” and declaring: “For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of 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 a dozen books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in June 2023 by The New Press.

Norman Discussing "War Made Invisible" on The Katie Halper Show

 

 

A key minute from Norman's recent appearance on Democracy Now!

 

 

Biden and Cluster Munitions: “In a Dark Time, the Eye Begins to See”

By Norman Solomon

“In a dark time,” poet Theodore Roethke wrote, “the eye begins to see.”

Stanley Kunitz observed: “In a murderous time / the heart breaks and breaks / and lives by breaking.”

In the current murderous time, amid the dim media swirl, acuity arrived for some with the news that President Biden had approved sending cluster munitions to Ukraine. For entrenched elites in Washington, using taxpayer money to shred the bodies of children and other civilians isn’t a big deal when there’s serious geopolitical work to be done.

The same White House that correctly put cluster munitions in the category of a war crime when Russia began using them in Ukraine last year is now saying they’re just fine -- when the U.S. supplies them to an ally.

Top administration officials have been quick to emphasize the toughness of the choice. “It was a very difficult decision on my part,” Biden said.

That reminds me of the infamous 60 Minutes interview with Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, in May of 1996. CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl brought up impacts of the U.S.-led sanctions on Iraq, saying “we have heard that a half a million children have died,” and then asked: “Is the price worth it?”

Albright replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it.”

Eight months later, acting on the nomination of Albright to be secretary of state, the Senate confirmed her. The vote was 99-0. Maybe it would not have been unanimous if any of the senators’ children had died while she declared their deaths to be “worth it.”

Like Albright’s “very hard choice,” Biden’s “very difficult decision” was based on convenient abstractions and, ultimately, a willingness to sacrifice the lives of countless others, while claiming pristine virtue. Defending the president’s cluster-munitions decision, no one on the Biden team need worry that one of their own children might pick up a U.S.-supplied “bomblet” someday, perhaps mistaking it for a toy, only to be instantly assaulted with shrapnel.

The Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill who’ve been trying for the last week to justify shipping cluster weapons to Ukraine are evading a basic truth that BBC correspondent John Simpson reported long ago, in May 1999, while U.S.-led NATO forces were dropping cluster bombs onto the streets of Nis, Serbia’s third-largest city: “Used against human beings, cluster bombs are some of the most savage weapons of modern warfare.”

At the time, the San Francisco Chronicle reported: “In a street leading from the market, dismembered bodies were strewn among carrots and other vegetables in pools of blood. A dead woman, her body covered with a sheet, was still clutching a shopping bag filled with carrots.”

Today, with political fashion treating “diplomacy” as a dirty word, the resolute militarism of the U.S. government is bipartisan. While we should emphatically condemn Russia’s vicious war on Ukraine, we should be under no illusions about the moral character of U.S. foreign policy.

For example: During three presidencies, beginning with Barack Obama, the U.S. government has aided and abetted the Saudi-led war on Yemen, where the death toll since 2015 is now estimated at close to 400,000. Biden’s high-profile fist bump with Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman a year ago tells us a lot about the extent of the U.S. commitment to basic human decency in foreign affairs.

The murderous time that we live in now, organized as war, is reflexively blamed only on the barbarism of others. But President Biden’s decision to provide cluster munitions to Ukraine is shocking to many Americans because it has undermined illusions with no more actual solidity than sand castles before the tide of truth comes in.

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

 

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

Making Madness Normal in Wartime

By Norman Solomon

Midway through his cumulatively stunning new book “Soldiers Don’t Go Mad,” author Charles Glass quotes a declaration from The Times of London on August 18, 1917: “The war has brought new opportunities of heroism to us all. Every Briton in the full strength of manhood is a soldier, and the business of fighting is his duty.”

At that point, World War One had been going on for three years, and it was to continue for another 15 months. The war killed nearly 10 million soldiers and wounded many others, while destroying the lives of uncounted civilians. All the talk about “heroism” and “duty” greased the wheels for slaughter.

Such words have an unnerving echo in our era. They sound familiar, just as the massive profiteering from “the Great War” has its counterparts in the endlessly bullish marketplace for Pentagon contracts.

By telling “A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry, and Mental Illness During the First World War” -- the subtitle of his book -- Glass offers an opportunity for us to compare then and now. Despite all the differences in eras, the continuities are deeply significant: starting with the reality that wars are still war and humans are still human. And, whether called shell shock or PTSD, the human consequences are evaded by top officials who order young people to kill.

Two years after war broke out in 1914, the British government set up an innovative mental institution (for “officers only”) in Scotland. Aiming to help officers who’d been traumatized in battle, Craiglockhart War Hospital treated 1,801 of them during a 30-month period. The treatment was advanced and enlightened. Yet, as Glass points out, “many of the ‘cured’ officers from Craiglockhart suffered trauma for the rest of their lives.”

The book focuses largely on Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, two renowned poets of the First World War, who met at Craiglockhart and developed a close bond. Sassoon, a half-dozen years older than Owen, went public with his opposition to the war after experiencing its horrors in battlefields of France -- yet, later on, after some recuperation, he chose to go back into combat. Owen, more reluctantly, also returned to the bloody grind of trench warfare.

Owen wrote poetry during lulls in combat. Shot dead just days before the armistice, he was 26 years old.

A famous poem by Owen ends with a Latin phrase (from the Roman poet Horace) that translates as “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” The poem concludes this way:

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Yet both Owen and Sassoon were fierce and daring fighters who led men into battle, even as remorse hovered. A poem that Owen wrote in 1918, titled “Strange Meeting,” not only “revealed a poetic genius,” Glass observes, “but also guilt at killing even as he engaged it.” Owen, in command of a platoon, was determined to prove himself the epitome of courage rather than cowardice -- an excellent commander and killer -- yet his poetry depicted the results as hellish rather than glorious.

Such paradoxes, with fervent warriors who don’t necessarily believe in the war they’re fighting, give us a lot to think about in our own time. The disconnects between conformity and conscience might not be easy to comprehend.

As the war neared its end, Sassoon asked himself a hard question: “How could I begin my life all over again, when I had no conviction about anything except that the War was a dirty trick which has been played on me and my generation?” As Glass wrote, “The perpetual conflict between the warrior and the pacifist raged within him.”

It might seem odd that Owen and Sassoon, capable of writing such powerfully haunting poetry about the barbarism of war, would willingly return to -- and strive to excel at -- warfare that was steadily massacring people on a huge scale. But the solidarity of brotherhood among troops and the pressures of nationalism made few consider opting out of a deranged war. It didn’t help that, as Glass notes, 300 “shell-shocked men” were executed by the British government “for desertion or cowardice.”

The normalized baseline, from the top of the command structure, was basically insane. So, naturally, when Sassoon issued a public protest against the war, the government attributed his protest to insanity.

Technological “advances” had made it possible for governments to turn World War One into a merciless charnel house on a vast scale. Back then, the majority of war’s victims were soldiers. In the 21st century, most of war victims have been civilians.

All the changes aside, some basics are still in place. Ever since the invasions of Afghanistan in October 2001 and Iraq in March 2003, many people in the U.S. military have seen the evils of the warfare marketed under the “war on terror” slogan. But conformity has flourished in the service of the war machine. Government leaders remain masters of deception, while enormous numbers of human beings suffer the consequences.

As a journalist, Charles Glass has covered wars on the ground in the Middle East and elsewhere for several decades. His insights are subtle yet palpable in “Soldiers Don’t Go Mad,” evoking the power of war to haunt, traumatize and destroy long after the last bombs explode. Fittingly, his book’s title comes from a 1917 poem by Siegfried Sassoon -- titled “Repression of War Experience” -- that includes these lines: “And it’s been proved that soldiers don’t go mad / Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts / That drive them out to jabber among the trees.”

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

The Patriotism of Killing and Being Killed

By Norman Solomon

The Fourth of July -- the ultimate patriotic holiday -- is approaching again. Politicians orate, American Flags proliferate and, even more than usual, many windows on the world are tinted red, white and blue. But an important question remains unasked: Why are patriotism and war so intertwined in U.S. media and politics?

The highest accolades often go to those who died for their country. But when a war is based on deception with horrific results, as became clear during the massive bloodshed in Vietnam, realism and cynicism are apt to undermine credulity. “War’s good business so give your son,” said a Jefferson Airplane song in 1967. “And I’d rather have my country die for me.”

Government leaders often assert that participating in war is the most laudable of patriotic services rendered. And even if the fighters don’t know what they’re fighting for, the pretense from leadership is that they do. When President Lyndon Johnson delivered a speech to U.S. troops at Cam Ranh Bay in South Vietnam, he proclaimed that “you know what you are doing, and you know why you are doing it -- and you are doing it.”

Five decades later, long after sending U.S. troops to invade Panama in 1989 and fight the 1991 Gulf War, former President George H.W. Bush tweeted that he was “forever grateful not only to those patriots who made the ultimate sacrifice for our Nation -- but also the Gold Star families whose heritage is imbued with their honor and heroism.” Such lofty rhetoric is routine.

Official flattery elevates the warriors and the war, no matter how terrible the consequences. In March 2010, making his first presidential visit to Afghanistan, Barack Obama told the assembled troops at Bagram Air Base that they “represent the virtues and the values that America so desperately needs right now: sacrifice and selflessness, honor and decency.”

From there, Obama went on to a theme of patriotic glory in death: “I’ve been humbled by your sacrifice in the solemn homecoming of flag-draped coffins at Dover, to the headstones in section 60 at Arlington, where the fallen from this war rest in peace alongside the fellow heroes of America’s story.” Implicit in such oratory is the assumption that “America’s story” is most heroic and patriotic on military battlefields.

A notable lack of civic imagination seems to assume that there is no higher calling for patriotism than to kill and be killed. It would be an extremely dubious notion even if U.S. wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq had not been based on deception -- underscoring just how destructive the conflation of patriotism and war can be.

From Vietnam to Iraq and beyond, the patriotism of U.S. troops -- and their loved ones as well as the general public back home -- has been exploited and manipulated by what outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex.” Whether illuminated by the Pentagon Papers in 1971 or the absence of the proclaimed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction three decades later, the falsehoods provided by the White House, State Department and Pentagon have been lethal forms of bait-and-switch.

Often lured by genuine love of country and eagerness to defend the United States of America, many young people have been drawn into oiling the gears of a war machine -- vastly profitable for Pentagon contractors and vastly harmful to human beings trapped in warfare.

Yet, according to top officials in Washington and compliant media, fighting and dying in U.S. wars are the utmost proof of great patriotism.

We’re encouraged to closely associate America’s wars with American patriotism in large part because of elite interest in glorifying militarism as central to U.S. foreign policy. Given the destructiveness of that militarism, a strong argument can be made that true patriotism involves preventing and stopping wars instead of starting and continuing them.

If such patriotism can ever prevail, the Fourth of July will truly be a holiday to celebrate.

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

The USA’s Systemic Racism Includes Its Wars

By Norman Solomon

A recent Justice Department report concluded that “systemic” racial bias in the Minneapolis Police Department “made what happened to George Floyd possible.” During the three years since a white police officer brutally murdered Floyd, nationwide discussions of systemic racism have extended well beyond focusing on law enforcement to also assess a range of other government functions. But such scrutiny comes to a halt at the water’s edge -- stopping short of probing whether racism has been a factor in U.S. military interventions overseas.

Hidden in plain sight is the fact that virtually all the people killed by U.S. firepower in the “war on terror” for more than two decades have been people of color. This notable fact goes unnoted within a country where -- in sharp contrast -- racial aspects of domestic policies and outcomes are ongoing topics of public discourse.

Certainly, the U.S. does not attack a country because people of color live there. But when people of color live there, it is politically easier for U.S. leaders to subject them to warfare -- because of institutional racism and often-unconscious prejudices that are common in the United States.

Racial inequities and injustice are painfully apparent in domestic contexts, from police and courts to legislative bodies, financial systems and economic structures. A nation so profoundly affected by individual and structural racism at home is apt to be affected by such racism in its approach to war.

Many Americans recognize that racism holds significant sway over their society and many of its institutions. Yet the extensive political debates and media coverage devoted to U.S. foreign policy and military affairs rarely even mention -- let alone explore the implications of -- the reality that the several hundred thousand civilians killed directly in America’s “war on terror” have been almost entirely people of color.

The flip side of biases that facilitate public acceptance of making war on non-white people came to the fore when Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022. News coverage included reporting that the war’s victims “have blue eyes and blond hair” and “look like us,” Los Angeles Times television critic Lorraine Ali noted. “Writers who’d previously addressed conflicts in the Gulf region, often with a focus on geopolitical strategy and employing moral abstractions, appeared to be empathizing for the first time with the plight of civilians.”

Such empathy, all too often, is skewed by the race and ethnicity of those being killed. The Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association has deplored “the pervasive mentality in Western journalism of normalizing tragedy in parts of the world such as the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and Latin America. It dehumanizes and renders their experience with war as somehow normal and expected.”

Persisting today is a modern version of what W.E.B. Du Bois called, 120 years ago, “the problem of the color line -- the relation of the darker to the lighter races.” Twenty-first century lineups of global power and geopolitical agendas have propelled the United States into seemingly endless warfare in countries where few white people live.

Racial, cultural and religious differences have made it far too easy for most Americans to think of the victims of U.S. war efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and elsewhere as “the other.” Their suffering is much more likely to be viewed as merely regrettable or inconsequential rather than heart-rending or unacceptable. What Du Bois called “the problem of the color line” keeps empathy to a minimum.

“The history of U.S. wars in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America has exuded a stench of white supremacy, discounting the value of lives at the other end of U.S. bullets, bombs and missiles,” I concluded in my new book War Made Invisible. “Yet racial factors in war-making decisions get very little mention in U.S. media and virtually none in the political world of officials in Washington.”

At the same time, on the surface, Washington’s foreign policy can seem to be a model of interracial connection. Like presidents before him, Joe Biden has reached out to foreign leaders of different races, religions and cultures -- as when he fist-bumped Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at their summit a year ago, while discarding professed human-rights concerns in the process.

Overall, in America’s political and media realms, the people of color who’ve suffered from U.S. warfare abroad have been relegated to a kind of psychological apartheid -- separate, unequal, and implicitly not of much importance. And so, when the Pentagon’s forces kill them, systemic racism makes it less likely that Americans will actually care.

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

Daniel Ellsberg Has Passed Away. He Left Us a Message.

By Norman Solomon

When Daniel Ellsberg died on Friday, the world lost a transcendent whistleblower with a powerful ethos of compassion and resolve.

Ellsberg’s renown for openly challenging the mentalities of militarism began on June 23, 1971, when he appeared on CBS Evening News ten days after news broke about the Pentagon Papers that he’d provided to journalists. Ellsberg pointedly said that in the 7,000 pages of top-secret documents, “I don’t think there is a line in them that contains an estimate of the likely impact of our policy on the overall casualties among Vietnamese or the refugees to be caused, the effects of defoliation in an ecological sense. There’s neither an estimate nor a calculation of past effects, ever.”

And he added: “The documents simply reflect the internal concerns of our officials. That says nothing more nor less that that our officials never did concern themselves with the effect of our policies on the Vietnamese.”

Ellsberg told anchor Walter Cronkite: “I think we cannot let the officials of the Executive Branch determine for us what it is that the public needs to know about how well and how they are discharging their functions.”

The functions of overseeing the war on Vietnam had become repugnant to Ellsberg as an insider. Many other government officials and top-level consultants with security clearances also had access to documents that showed how mendacious four administrations had been as the U.S. role in Vietnam expanded and then escalated into wholesale slaughter.

Unlike the others, he finally broke free and provided the Pentagon Papers to news media. As he said in the CBS interview, “The fact is that secrets can be held by men in the government whose careers have been spent learning how to keep their mouths shut. I was one of those.”

Ellsberg’s mouth, and heart, never stayed shut again. For the 52 full years that followed his release of the Pentagon Papers, he devoted himself to speaking, writing and protesting. When the war on Vietnam finally ended, Ellsberg mainly returned to his earlier preoccupation -- how to help prevent nuclear war.

This spring, during the three months after diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, Ellsberg made the most of every day, spending time with loved ones and speaking out about the all-too-real dangers of nuclear annihilation. He left behind two brilliant, monumental books published in this century -- “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers” (2002) and “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner” (2017). They illuminate in sharp ghastly light the patterns of official lies and secrecy about military matters, and the ultimate foreseeable result -- nuclear holocaust.

Ellsberg was deeply determined to do all he could to help prevent omnicide. As he said in an interview when “The Doomsday Machine” came out, scientific research has concluded that nuclear war “would loft into the stratosphere many millions of tons of soot and black smoke from the burning cities. It wouldn't be rained out in the stratosphere. It would go around the globe very quickly and reduce sunlight by as much as 70 percent, causing temperatures like that of the Little Ice Age, killing harvests worldwide and starving to death nearly everyone on earth. It probably wouldn't cause extinction. We're so adaptable. Maybe 1 percent of our current population of 7.4 billion could survive, but 98 or 99 percent would not.”

During the profuse interviews that he engaged in during the last few months, what clearly preoccupied Ellsberg was not his own fate but the fate of the Earth’s inhabitants.

He was acutely aware that while admiration for brave whistleblowers might sometimes be widespread, actual emulation is scarce. Ellsberg often heard that he was inspiring, but he was always far more interested in what people would be inspired to actually do -- in a world of war and on the precipice of inconceivable nuclear catastrophe.

During the last decades of his life, standard assumptions and efforts by mainstream media and the political establishment aimed to consign Ellsberg to the era of the Vietnam War. But in real time, Dan Ellsberg continually inspired so many of us to be more than merely inspired. We loved him not only for what he had done but also for what he kept doing, for who he was, luminously, ongoing. The power of his vibrant example spurred us to become better than we were.

In a recent series of short illustrated podcasts created by filmmaker Judith Ehrlich -- who co-directed the documentary “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers” -- Ellsberg speaks about the growing dangers of global apocalypse, saying that nuclear war planners “have written plans to kill billions of people,” preparations that amount to “a conspiracy to commit omnicide, near omnicide, the death of everyone.” And he adds: “Can humanity survive the nuclear era? We don’t know. I choose to act as if we have a chance.”

     Norman Solomon is national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine was published this week by The New Press.

The Convenient Myth of “Humane” Wars

By Norman Solomon  /  The Nation

The physical and psychological distances of high-tech killing have encouraged belief in frequent claims that American warfare has become humane. Such pretenses should be grimly absurd to anyone who has read high-quality journalism from eyewitness reporters like Anand Gopal, who worked in Afghanistan for several years while often going to remote areas, bringing into focus lives usually relegated to US media’s unseen shadows. Civilian deaths were “grossly undercounted” during the 20-year US war in Afghanistan, Gopal said during an interview on Democracy Now! soon after the withdrawal of US troops from that country in August 2021. With 70 percent of the Afghan population living in rural areas, Gopal was one of the few reporters for US outlets to spend a lot of time there—particularly in such places as the large Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan, “really the epicenter of the violence for the last two decades.”

This spring, estimates from the Costs of War project at Brown University averaged 375,506 for civilians “killed directly in the violence of the US post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere,” while “several times as many more have been killed as a reverberating effect of the wars.” But the US government is not oriented toward counting such numbers. Civilian anonymity cuts against accountability.

With extremely rare exceptions, the people killed and maimed by the US military aren’t on American screens or in print; their names are unknown, their lives a blank of un-personhood. In aggregate, those lives must remain impersonal and insignificant if war efforts are to go on unimpeded. By dint of repetition compulsion, with virtual distancing in a hype-digital era, making war has taken on a life, and death, of its own; doing more than just blending in with the everyday, the normalized fatal violence disappears from view for all who are insulated from its cruelties.

[Click here to continue reading.]

The Wars We Don’t (Care to) See: Aggression Made Easy

By Norman Solomon and David Barsamian / TomDispatch.com

[The following is excerpted and adapted from David Barsamian’s recent interview with Norman Solomon at AlternativeRadio.org.]

David Barsamian: American Justice Robert Jackson was the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. He made an opening statement to the Tribunal on November 21, 1945, because there was some concern at the time that it would be an example of victor’s justice. He said this: “If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down the rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”

Norman Solomon: It goes to the point that, unless we have a single standard of human rights, a single standard of international conduct and war, we end up with an Orwellian exercise at which government leaders are always quite adept but one that’s still intellectually, morally, and spiritually corrupt. Here we are, so long after the Nuremberg trials, and the supreme crime of aggression, the launching of a war, is not only widespread but has been sanitized, even glorified. We’ve had this experience in one decade after another in which the United States has attacked a country in violation of international law, committing (according to the Nuremberg Tribunal) “the supreme international crime,” and yet not only has there been a lack of remorse, but such acts have continued to be glorified.

The very first quote in my book War Made Invisible is from Aldous Huxley who, 10 years before the Nuremberg trials, said, “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” Here we are in 2023 and it’s still a challenge to analyze, illuminate, and push back against that essential purpose of propagandists around the world and especially in our own country where, in an ostensible democracy, we should have the most capacity to change policy.

Right now, we’re in a situation where, unfortunately, across a lot of the political spectrum, including some of the left, folks think that you have to choose between aligning yourself with U.S. foreign policy and its acts of aggression or Russian foreign policy and its acts of aggression. Personally, I think it’s both appropriate and necessary to condemn war on Ukraine, and Washington’s hypocrisy doesn’t in any way let Russia off the hook. By the same token, Russia’s aggression shouldn’t let the United States off the hook for the tremendous carnage we’ve created in this century. I mean, if you add up the numbers, in the last nearly twenty-five years, the country by far the most responsible for slaughtering more people in more lands through wars of aggression is… yes, the United States of America.

Barsamian: What’s your assessment of the war coverage of PBS and NPR? You know, a rarified, polite media where people speak in complete sentences without any shouting. But have they presented dissident voices to challenge the hegemonic assumptions you just cited when it comes to American war policies?

Solomon: The style there is different, of course, but consider it just a long form of the very same propaganda framework. So, you can listen to a 10-minute segment on All Things Considered or a panel discussion on the PBS NewsHour and the style and civility, the length of the sentences, as you say, may be refreshing to the ear, but it also normalizes the same attitudes, the same status-quo assumptions about American foreign policy. I won’t say never, but in my experience, it’s extremely rare for an NPR or PBS journalist to assertively question the underlying prerogatives of the U.S. government to attack other countries, even if it’s said with a more erudite ambiance.

You’ve got NPR and PBS unwilling to challenge, but all too willing to propagate and perpetuate the assumption that, yes, the United States might make mistakes, it might even commit blunders — a popular word for the U.S. invasion of Iraq that resulted in literally hundreds of thousands of deaths. Still, the underlying message is invariably that yes, we can (and should) at times argue over when, whether, and how to attack certain countries with the firepower of the Pentagon, but those decisions do need to be made and the U.S. has the right to do so if that’s the best judgment of the wise people in the upper reaches of policy in Washington.

Barsamian: Jeff Cohen, the founder of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), has talked about the guest list on such PBS and NPR programs. There’s a golden Rolodex of what he calls “formers” — former undersecretaries of state, former lieutenant colonels, retired generals, et al. But what about dissident voices like Medea Benjamin, yourself, or Noam Chomsky?

Solomon: Over the years, FAIR has done a number of studies ranging from commercial networks to NPR and the PBS NewsHour, and found that, particularly when issues of war and peace are on the table, it’s extremely rare to have opponents of U.S. military action on the air, sometimes below one percent of the interviewees. And this is considered “objective journalism” and goes hand in hand with a deeper precept, usually unspoken but certainly in play in the real world: that if an American journalist is in favor of our wars, that’s objectivity, but if opposed, that’s bias.

I’m sometimes asked: Why do journalists so often stay in line? They’re not, as in some other countries, going to be hauled off to prison. So, what makes them feel compelled to be as conformist as they are? And a lot of the explanation has to do with mortgages and the like — hey, I want to pay for my children’s college education, I need financial security, so on and so forth.

To my mind, it’s a tremendous irony that we have so many examples of very brave journalists for American media outlets going into war zones, sometimes being wounded, occasionally even losing their lives, and then the ones who get back home, back to the newsrooms, turn out to be afraid of the boss. They don’t want to lose their syndicated columns, their front-page access. This dangerous dynamic regiments the journalism we get.

And keep in mind that, living in the United States, we have, with very few exceptions, no firsthand experience of the wars this country has engaged in and continues to be engaged in. So, we depend on the news media, a dependence that’s very dangerous in a democracy where the precept is that we need the informed consent of the governed, while what we’re getting is their uninformed pseudo-consent. Consider that a formula for the warfare state we have.

Barsamian: At the White House Correspondents’ dinner President Biden said, “Journalism is not a crime. The free press is a pillar, maybe the pillar of a free society.” Great words from the White House.

Solomon: President Biden, like his predecessors in the Oval Office, loves to speak about the glories of the free press and say that journalism is a wonderful aspect of our society — until the journalists do something he and the government he runs really don’t like. A prime example is Julian Assange. He’s a journalist, a publisher, an editor, and he’s sitting in prison in Great Britain being hot-wired for transportation to the United States. I sat through the two-week trial in the federal district of northern Virginia of CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling and I can tell you it was a kangaroo court. That’s the court Julian Assange has a ticket to if his extradition continues.

And what’s his so-called crime? It’s journalism. WikiLeaks committed journalism. It exposed the war crimes of the United States in Iraq through documents it released, through the now-notorious video that came to be called “Collateral Murder,” showing the wanton killing of a number of people on the ground in Iraq by a U.S. military helicopter. It provided a compendium of evidence that the United States had systemically engaged in war crimes under the rubric of the so-called War on Terror. So, naturally, the stance of the U.S. government remains: this man Assange is dangerous; he must be imprisoned.

The attitude of the corporate media, Congress, and the White House has traditionally been and continues to be that the U.S. stance in the world can be: do as we say, not as we do. So, the USA is good at pointing fingers at Russia or countries that invade some other nation, but when the U.S. does it, it’s another thing entirely. Such dynamics, while pernicious, especially among a nuclear-armed set of nations, are reflexes people in power have had for a long time.

More than a century ago, William Dean Howells wrote a short story called “Editha.” Keep in mind that this was after the United States had been slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people in the Philippines. In it, a character says, “What a thing it is to have a country that can’t be wrong, but if it is, is right, anyway!”

Now, here we are in 2023 and it’s not that different, except when it comes to the scale of communications, of a media that’s so much more pervasive. If you read the op-ed pages and editorial sections of the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets of the liberal media, you’ll find such doublethink well in place. Vladimir Putin, of course, is a war criminal. Well, I happen to think he is a war criminal. I also happen to think that George W. Bush is a war criminal, and we could go on to all too many other examples of high U.S. government officials where that description applies no less than to Vladimir Putin.

Can you find a single major newspaper that’s been willing to editorialize that George W. Bush — having ordered the invasion of Iraq, costing hundreds of thousands of lives based on a set of lies — was a war criminal? It just ain’t gonna happen. In fact, one of the things I was particularly pleased (in a grim sort of way) to explore in my book was the rehabilitation of that war criminal, providing a paradigm for the presidents who followed him and letting them off the hook, too.

I quote, for instance, President Obama speaking to troops in Afghanistan. You could take one sentence after another from his speeches there and find almost identical ones that President Lyndon Johnson used in speaking to American troops in Vietnam in 1966. They both talked about how U.S. soldiers were so compassionate, cared so much about human life, and were trying to help the suffering people of Vietnam or Afghanistan. That pernicious theme seems to accompany almost any U.S. war: that, with the best of intentions, the U.S. is seeking to help those in other countries. It’s a way of making the victims at the other end of U.S. firepower — to use a word from my book title — invisible.

This is something I was able to do some thinking and writing about in my book. There are two tiers of grief in our media and our politics from Congress to the White House — ours and theirs. Our grief (including that of honorary semi-Americans like the Ukrainians) is focused on those who are killed by official enemy governments of the United States. That’s the real tier of grief and so when the media covers, as it should, the suffering of people in Ukraine thanks to Russia’s war of aggression, their suffering is made as real as can be. And yet, when it’s the U.S. slaughtering people in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, that’s something else entirely. When it comes to the people at the other end of U.S. weaponry, the civilians, hundreds of thousands of them directly slaughtered, and millions indirectly killed by U.S. warfare, their tier of grief isn’t, with rare exceptions, on the media map. Those human beings just don’t matter.

Here in the USA, people find this unpleasant to hear or even think about. But our own humanity has been besmirched, damaged, undermined by such silences, which, in many ways, represent the most powerful propaganda of all. We need to break that silence.

Barsamian: The media landscape is radically changing from podcasts to blogs to all kinds of new media. Will that help?

Solomon: Technology’s never going to save us. Robert McChesney, the scholar of media history, has written eloquently about this. Every advance in technology was accompanied by these outsized promises that therefore we will have democracy. That’s going back to the first telegraphs, then radio, then broadcast TV, then cable television. At every step, people were told, hey, this technology means that no longer do we have a top-down relationship to power, we can make the changes happen ourselves. And yet as we’ve seen with all of those technologies, and this includes the Internet, technology never freed anybody.

Barsamian: What’s to be done? What practical steps would you recommend?

Solomon: I believe in organizing as the key element in turning around such dire circumstances, including corporate power, class war waged from the top down, and the militarization of our society and our foreign policy. That means a shift in mindset to see that we’re not consuming history off the shelf like Wonder Bread. As the saying goes, whatever your first major concern may be, your second should be the media. We need to build media organizations and support the ones that are doing progressive work, support them financially, support them in terms of spreading the word and also of learning more about how to — and actually implementing how to — organize both people we know and those we don’t. And I think that’s pretty antithetical to the messages the media regularly sends us, because really, the main messages from, say, television involve urging us to go out and buy things (and maybe vote once in a while). Well, we do need to go out and buy things and we certainly should vote, but the real changes are going to come when we find ways to work together to create political power both inside and outside the electoral arena.

When you look at the corruption of the Federal Communications Commission, for instance, that’s not going to change until different people are in office — and we’re not going to get different people in office until we elect them to overcome the power of Big Money. And there’s also the real history that we need to be reminded of: that everything we have to be proud of in this country was a result of people organizing from the bottom up and generating social movements. That’s truly where our best future lies.

Barsamian: You conclude War Made Invisible with a quote from James Baldwin.

Solomon: “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

     Originally published: The Wars We Don't (Care to) See - TomDispatch.com