How Should We Rethink Our Relationship to US Violence Around the World?

The outrages are raining down one after another: Trump’s suggestion that Ukraine is responsible for the war with Russia, which thus blames Ukraine for the deaths of its own people and implicitly supports Putin’s use of unrestrained military force. Trump’s proposal to forcefully relocate Palestinians from Gaza, which functions as an extension of ethnic cleansing. Trump’s exaggerated use of “invasion” to describe undocumented immigrants, which is a military term used to describe those “enemies” infiltrating a territory with the aim to conquer.

As news like this comes down, I often wonder just how far I am willing to go speaking against those power structures that are responsible for so much catastrophe, profound grief and actual and potential violent death.

Those power structures include what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism.” It can be argued that those triplets constitute the raison d’être of the U.S. — the purpose for its existence.

Speaking out against the Vietnam War on April 4, 1967, King quickly became an unpopular figure. In fact, notes Brian Jones at Jacobin, “Opinion polls conducted just prior to King’s death one year later indicated that 72 percent of white people and 55 percent of black people disapproved of his opposition to Vietnam.” But King was convinced that it was time to speak out: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.”

One fortifying source in our collective effort to speak out and resist the jingoistic nature of the U.S. is the courageous work of Norman Solomon, who is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His new book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, demonstrates that the U.S. is driven by warmongering. Indeed, he writes, “The militarism that propels nonstop U.S. warfare is systemic.”

In this exclusive interview for Truthout, Solomon discusses the mainstream media silence around U.S. militarism. He articulates ways of resisting such silence, of rejecting denial. He provides deep insights regarding U.S. participation in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, reminding us that the U.S. is run by those who qualify as war criminals, and how the political economy and anti-democratic forces are linked to the U.S. being a war criminal system. Furthermore, Solomon links forms of racist othering and U.S. warfare. The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

George Yancy: In your book, War Made Invisible, I get the sense that many Americans would rather not know about the horrible atrocities that the U.S. has committed around the world via military violence. In what way are corporate media outlets in the U.S. (what you call “mainline American media”) responsible for maintaining many Americans’ willful ignorance regarding the ugly and dehumanizing realities of what happens in war?

Norman Solomon: Patterns of media silence and evasion are crucial. When empathy is very selective about victims of war, it’s easy to fall into the tacit assumption that some grief is profound and some is trivial — lives that really matter and lives that don’t. That’s usually implicit in what’s communicated from mainline U.S. media and even more routinely from U.S. government officials. They emphasize the humanity of some and ignore or downplay the humanity of others, and I do mean “others.” For Americans and for the society as a whole, the dynamic is deeply corrosive in realms that we might call moral, ethical, spiritual, political — and the results are foreign policy that serves the U.S.’s warfare state while relying on hypernationalism and what George Orwell called “doublethink.” Windows on the world are tinted red, white and blue.

The essence of propaganda is repetition, and it keeps reinforcing a kind of mass media wall. There are cracks in the wall — some exceptional journalism can happen in even the largest news outlets — but overall, the structural constraints are unyielding. So, in this century, fairly rigid taboos have prevented much candid reporting or commentary in major U.S. media about the horrors that the U.S. military has directly inflicted on a huge scale, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and elsewhere, as well as indirectly in many other places, including Yemen, Lebanon and Gaza.

When an official enemy of Washington is responsible for massive war atrocities, as with Russia in Ukraine, the U.S. media try hard to convey the horrors in human terms. But when Pentagon firepower is responsible, the empathetic coverage of its victims is ratcheted way down, if not nonexistent. And in medialand, if the perpetrators are at the top of the U.S. government, the narrative has victims without victimizers, just well-meaning American policy makers who sometimes make mistakes and miscalculate. In tandem with the nonstop flow of official pronouncements, a premise of mass media is that U.S. policies might be flawed at times but the impetus is basically to do good in the world.

When Pentagon firepower is responsible, the empathetic coverage of its victims is ratcheted way down, if not nonexistent.

In your book, you argue courageously about the necessity for changing mainline reporting in the United States. You point out how mainline reporting avoids telling the truth about the horrors of wars and how the U.S. explicitly engages in wanton violence. Furthermore, the U.S. military-industrial complex seems invested in perpetuating a narrative or a form of framing that “exculpates” it from charges of warmongering. Talk about the ways in which mainline reporting needs to be challenged.

The needed transformations are concentric: growing individual awareness, strengthening truly independent journalism, challenging corporate media outlets (as the media watchdog group FAIR does so well), freeing artistic expression from constraints of the profit motive, organizing for basic political change inside and outside electoral arenas, and developing mass movements against the corporate power that fuels the country’s runaway militarism along with countless destructive effects of neoliberal capitalism at home and abroad. In the process, I think it’s much healthier to shift away from emphasis on “speaking truth to power” and toward speaking truth about power. Realism about 24/7 class warfare is necessary for building vital capacities.

A straightforward look at U.S. military interventions in the last 80 years brings into focus clear pictures of methodical policies on several continents. And that means overcoming chronic avoidance. Few grow up comprehending that their government has been, and is being, run by people who qualify as war criminals. But that has been the case for many decades, not simply as a matter of individuals in power, but most importantly because of the political economy and the anti-democratic forces that are dominant. We could call it a war criminal system. Such understanding is at odds with acceptable discourse in mainstream media. One result can be cognitive dissonance. If people reject denial, they’re left facing inconvenient and often horrific truths — and, in the usual U.S. frameworks of media and politics, likely marginalization or excommunication for the sin of ethical realism. We need to expose these dynamics, bring them out into the open and confront them.

When finishing War Made Invisible, of course, I thought a lot about how to end the last chapter. I could do no better than quoting these words from James Baldwin: “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Speaking of warmongering, in my discussion with scholar Nurit Peled-Elhanan, she clearly points out how Israeli children are taught to perceive Palestinians/Arabs as “racially other,” as “primitive” and “disposable.” In War Made Invisible, you discuss how race (or racism) frames other human beings as “racialized enemies” within the context of war. As a philosopher who writes about race/racism, I am painfully aware of how this framing is used to “justify” the killing of human beings. Speak to how you understand anti-Palestinian or anti-Arab racism as a powerful and nefarious factor impacting the current and ongoing slaughter of innocent Palestinians by the State of Israel. I would be remiss not to mention that Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of the interrelationship between “the sickness of racism, excessive materialism and militarism.”

It’s been chilling to see videos of Israeli children singing and waving Israeli flags at right-wing rallies for relentless war on Gaza while Palestinian children there are being bombed and starved along with their relatives. So many descriptive words come to mind: Racism. Ethnocentrism. Religious fanaticism. Spiritual rot. Fascistic cruelty. And parallel with the deadly hate is the nationalism of Israel that strives for Jewish supremacy and a warped sense of superiority over Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular. Meanwhile, in the United States, strong currents of such attitudes can be discerned in the claims of America’s Jewish Zionists, and the more numerous Christian Zionists for that matter. Twisted religious passions get tangled up in racist pathologies and belief in serving God by extinguishing the lives of those perceived to be obstructing the purity of holy agendas.

Few grow up comprehending that their government has been, and is being, run by people who qualify as war criminals. But that has been the case for many decades

Racial and religious toxins are constantly swirling around U.S. politics, as personal biases combine with functionality within the U.S. warfare state, which is tightly synced up with Israel’s military. Last year — even though polls showed that a majority of Americans opposed shipping weapons to Israel as long as its war in Gaza continued — Congress kept approving huge arms shipments to Israel while it went on with ethnic cleansing and genocide. The conformity that took hold was stark from the outset in October 2023, and there was a racial aspect. Here’s a telling fact: Two weeks after Israel’s siege of Gaza began, just 4 percent of the House of Representatives had signed on to a resolution calling for “an immediate de-escalation and ceasefire in Israel and occupied Palestine”; the sponsor and all 18 co-sponsors were legislators of color. The speed and intensity of their response stood out. As the war on Gaza continued, not a single white House member’s name went onto the resolution.

For almost a quarter of a century, the racial subtext embedded in the “war on terror” has been hidden in plain sight. Beginning with the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, virtually all the victims of Pentagon firepower have been people of color. Countries aren’t bombed because people of color are living there — but the fact that people of color are living there makes it easier to start and continue wars on them. While the liberal establishment is apt to concede that systemic racism is at work in a wide range of domestic institutions and policies, scarcely a word gets said about the systemic racism at work in foreign policy. Meanwhile, the powerful military of the Israeli apartheid state is a close partner with the Pentagon. When I was working on the afterword about the Gaza war for the paperback edition of War Made Invisible, I realized that the book’s subtitle directly applies: “How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.” The Israeli military is a major adjunct to the U.S. military machine. The command structures are different and the national leaders might differ about tactics at times, but their missions and operations remain firmly aligned.

Clearly, it is in the interests of the U.S. to keep the human toll of war invisible. The invisibility helps to construct the U.S. (and I would also include the State of Israel here) as a “victim,” and as “innocent.” This narrative of “victimhood” and “innocence” also enables U.S. citizens to see themselves as far removed from being complicit with U.S. violence. Because I grapple with this question constantly, I want to pose it to you: How should U.S. citizens rethink their relationship to U.S. violence around the world? There is a remark that you make in your book where you’re discussing “the hellish realities in Gaza” and you state how this is “largely courtesy of U.S. taxpayers.” I am ethically consumed by this issue of complicity, my own complicity. How do you think about this?

Silence is complicity. Inaction is complicity. In the Middle East and elsewhere, people’s homes have been on fire, sometimes literally, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers and civic acquiescence. Much of the U.S.’s entire culture revolves around buying things and looking out for real or imagined self-interest. For sure, many Americans are preoccupied with their personal struggles, whether financial, health, family troubles, all kinds of distress. Yet to the extent we can be more aware of the very real forms of violence and deprivation that the U.S. government is causing to be inflicted in many parts of the world, we have opportunities to escalate nonviolent opposition to the actual roles of “our” government on this beautiful and tormented planet.

While it is hard to admit, Donald Trump is now at the helm of the U.S. and head of its military might — yet again. I disdain Trump’s ethical ineptitude, his fascistic tendencies and his indifference to truth-telling. I recall he once said that he would not take the nuclear option off the table regarding Europe and the Middle East. When I think about the fact that we are now 90 seconds to midnight on the Doomsday Clock, a Trump presidency ought to scare all of us. Or perhaps motivate us to resist the possible consequences of his administration. Any thoughts on Trump and war?

Instead of “crackpot realism,” we now have crackpot egotism in control of the executive and legislative branches. As bad as many of Joe Biden’s cabinet members were, comparing them to Trump’s cabinet ought to make clear the absurdity of claims we’ve heard over the years that there is no significant difference between the Democratic and Republican parties. Noam Chomsky was correct when he described the Republican Party as the most dangerous organization in human history. This doesn’t let “Genocide Joe” and the neoliberal Democrats off the hook for their horrendous crimes and terrible policies.

We need to acknowledge simultaneous truths. While militarists are running both parties, one of them is emphatically racist, misogynist, resolutely anti-democratic and determined to crush virtually every major facet of social progress since the New Deal. The Trumpist Republican Party is hellbent on dismantling the remaining elements of democracy in this country. Militarism thrives on the destruction of democracy, and vice versa. To what extent Trump will be a war president remains to be seen, but his political agenda is clearly fascistic. Our responsibilities include fighting against militarism, racism, sexism and predatory corporatism — along with all the intermeshed evils — while also fighting for a truly progressive future to nurture life instead of destroying life.