[Peace-discuss] REelections on and by Norman Soloman

[Morton K. Brussel]

I find myself in great agreement with Norman Soloman, as he is  
represented in this review. I guess I'll buy the book. ---mkb

Made Love, Got War
Submitted by davidswanson on Sun, 2007-08-26 16:13. Media

By David Swanson

"Made Love, Got War" is the title of Norman Solomon's latest book, an  
autobiographical account of the peace and disarmament movements in  
the United States over the past half century. Better than his other  
books, I think, this one achieves the level of artistic composition  
found in Solomon's brilliant and frequent columns on the media, war,  
and peace. But the value of "Made Love, Not War" lies in the lessons  
it provides for current and future activism, the accounts of pitfalls  
and seductive detours encountered in the past, the insights gained,  
and the analysis of how one can push on without hope or optimism or  
the desire for them, all as told by one of the most morally decent  
people we are privileged to live alongside today.

"I was born in 1931," Daniel Ellsberg writes in the foreword, "and my  
generation had to reorient itself to the unprecedented threat of  
planetary nuclear suicide-murder. Norman Solomon was born twenty  
years later, and his generation has never lived under any other  
circumstance." Yes, but few in that generation have remained  
constantly aware of the fact and devoted to changing it. Human beings  
have always been able to put the fact of their fast approaching  
personal demise out of their minds, often aided by the pretense of an  
"afterlife." Solomon's and later generations have usually managed to  
put the possibility of our collective nuclear end out of our  
thoughts, often aided by the pretenses of the news and entertainment  
industry.

Solomon has refused his entire life to forget that we are dangerously  
close to nuclear oblivion, and wishing others would also stop  
forgetting, he inevitably became something that most peace activists  
do not: a media critic. In a section toward the end of the book dated  
July 7, 2006, Solomon writes:

"Today is my fifty-fifth birthday, and the feeling that despite all  
the changes so little has changed really torments me. Turn on a  
television and there's the president, giving hypocrisy a bad name,  
and this is normal. Always has been in my lifetime. Turn on the TV  
when I was fifteen and there's the president, some kind of perverse  
fount of lies. That was when I started to get it and not get over it.  
If I'd been born ten years earlier, it would have started with Ike  
instead of LBJ."

Or it could have started earlier, with Truman. "[F]rom one president  
to another," Solomon writes, "one commander in chief to  
another: . . . they've all been ready to demolish us in an instant.  
That fact, alone, from Harry S Truman to George W. Bush and whoever  
comes next, is so ghastly that we can't really look at it . . . ."

Solomon's recent book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep  
Spinning Us to Death," which has also been made into a movie,  
documents the similar lies all recent presidents have told about  
wars. This new book touches on that theme, with Truman (discussed by  
Ellsberg) pretending Hiroshima was a military base, Kennedy  
pretending the Soviet Union had more missiles, Johnson pretending he  
was for peace and restraint, and so forth. But here we learn not just  
what Solomon thinks of these lies today, but what he thought of  
Kennedy as a young man growing up in the suburbs, what he thought of  
Johnson as a teenager in full rebellion, and how he viewed the world  
as an activist through turbulent decades.

Solomon's early sins read more like the confessions of St. Augustine  
than the confessions of an economic hit man. He failed to fully  
appreciate the racism of his society or the horrors of war by the  
time he was 17. If that were the worst anyone had done in life, we  
would have utopia now. From the time Solomon was 17, he was on the  
path to try to better the world. The story he tells is of his own  
activism but also of trends in the movement. One point of frustration  
is reached around 1970, with unsuccessful saviors of the world  
beginning to advocate self-absorbed dedication to personal liberation  
rather than structural political change. "The idea that  
'consciousness' – or, for that matter, culture – can fundamentally  
change as swiftly as hats," Solomon writes, "was to cause enormous  
confusion, shallow posturing, and bitter disappointment in the 1970s  
and beyond." Later, Solomon describes the efforts of various people  
in 2006 to save the world by growing organic crops.

In the meantime, the Vietnam war was being declared officially on the  
way out. Air strikes were replacing ground fighting, meaning fewer  
U.S. casualties, but more Vietnamese. And a pundit, whom Solomon  
quotes, commented: "The American majority is against the war. To  
oppose it involves no risk: the only risk is in trying to stop it."  
The summer of 2007 has witnessed endless "anti-war" rallies outside  
the offices of Republican congress members, and TV advertisements to  
the same effect have funneled progressive dollars into the media war  
machine. No similarly funded effort has urged the Democratic  
leadership to actually end the occupation.

"Despite all the changes, so little has changed."

Solomon quotes James Baldwin: "They have destroyed and are destroying  
hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to  
know it. But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation  
should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the  
crime."

Solomon quotes these lines approvingly, but his goal is not just to  
make us aware of what the U.S. military state is doing, but to stop  
it. He offers no hope that we can, instead arguing that the demand  
that we be ever optimistic is another assumption imposed on us by the  
media, and something we can get along without. That may be, but  
clearly optimism breeds activism which in turn increases both the  
grounds for optimism and the likelihood of success. The fact that  
Solomon has done what he's done, seen what he's seen, and continues  
to insist on sanity and disarmament, should provide us at least with  
inspiration. That's a good enough substitute for optimism in my mind,  
so who am I to say it won't do for others as well?