Recorded in the middle of November 2023, Norman Solomon speaks about North American militarism and also the Israel-Palestine conflict, among other topics.

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Norman Solomon

Norman Solomon is a political commentator and media critic. The National Council of Teachers of English honored him with the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language. He is the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and co-founder of RootsAction.org, an online activist group. He is the author of many books including Target Iraq, War Made Easy, Made Love, Got War and his latest is, War Made Invisible.

David Barsamian:

Many are familiar with Eisenhower’s 1961 warning of “the military industrial complex.” Veteran CIA analyst Ray McGovern has expanded on Ike’s phrase. He coined the term MICIMATT, the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Inteligence-Media-Academia-Think Tank complex. How does it work?  The notorious revolving door syndrome links the Pentagon to the arms manufacturers to Congress. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is a perfect example. Before being appointed by Biden he was on the board of Raytheon, a giant weapons corporation. Corporations bankroll politicians of both parties who then OK arms purchases. There’s tons of money to be made in cost overruns and repairing defective equipment. Just look at Zumwalt destroyers or the F-35. What boondoggles! Military madness continues apace.

Many are familiar with Eisenhower's 1961 warning of the military industrial complex. Veteran CIA analyst Ray McGovern has expanded on Ike's phrase. He coined the term Mickey Matt, the military industrial congressional intelligence media academia think tank complex. How does it work? The notorious revolving door syndrome links the Pentagon to the arms manufacturers to Congress. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is a perfect example. Before being appointed by Biden, he was on the board of Raytheon, a giant weapons corporation. Conflict of interest, you might say? Nah. And don't forget, no one wants to be labeled soft on defense. Corporations bankroll politicians of both parties who then okay arms purchases. There's tons of money to be made in cost overruns and repairing defective equipment. Let's look at zoom wall destroyers or the F-35. What a boondoggle. Military madness continues a pace. Our guest today is Norman Solomon. He's a leading independent political commentator and media critic. He's the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and co-founder of RootsAction.org, an online activist group. He's the author of many books, his latest is, War Made Invisible. He gave the second annual Daniel Ellsberg lecture at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in mid-November. And now, Norman Solomon.

Norman Solomon:

One day in 1995, I called Daniel Ellsberg and suggested that he run for president. And his response was instantaneous. He said, I'd rather be in prison. And when he asked why, he was very quick and very clear to explain. He said, I can't think of how awful it would be to keep talking about things I don't know much about. It doesn't seem to stop many candidates for president. But for Dan, that was a no-go. And I thought about that conversation many times. And it's often made me go back to an essential question, what did Dan Ellsberg know? He knew from the inside of the US war machine what almost no one who had reached his level of that apparatus was willing to talk about publicly. And my own words, what he knew and most importantly what he was willing to share with the public was that the leaders of the so-called defense department and the state department and people in the Oval Office not only could lie, but did lie frequently without regard for truth and without regard for human life.

That realization and that willingness to share that truth is as current at the end of 2023 and as crucial as it was in 1971 when the Pentagon Papers were released. A couple of years ago, when I talked with Dan Ellsberg with the recorder going, this is what he said, that there is deception that the public is evidently misled by it early in the game in the approach to war in a way that encourages them to accept a war and support a war is the reality.

How much of a role does the media actually play in this in deceiving the public and how difficult is it to deceive the public? I would say as a former insider, one becomes aware it's not difficult to deceive them. First of all, you're often telling them what they would like to believe that we're better than other people. We are superior in our morality and our perceptions of the world. In a book that is as important as any that I've ever read, The Doomsday Machine, Dan starts with an epigraph from Friedrich Nietzsche, goes as follows. Madness in individuals is something rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epics, it is the rule.

Think of that often in tandem with what Martin Luther King Jr. described as the madness of militarism as real in our day as when he uttered those words in 1967. Dr. King spoke about what he called the destructive demonic suction tube that drew tremendous quantities of resources away from this country, from human well-being, from healthcare, education, housing, infant care, elderly care, you name it, walk around Massachusetts or California or any other state and you won't be far from the deficits. As a result, in large measure, of that demonic destructive suction tube, George Orwell wrote about how sloppy thinking can corrupt language and language can corrupt thought and were immersed in that kind of corrosion and that kind of corruption. We hear and we routinely use terms like "defense spending" and "defense budget" and I'll grant you that there's an uppercase thing called "defense department", but we see it, we read it, we use it as though that's a lowercase word, defense.

A country that spends more on military expenditures than the next nine nations on the planet combined and most of those countries are US allies. A country with 750 military bases overseas, with a huge military apparatus and we're encouraged to believe that all this is going to something called defense.

I spent a couple of years working on a book called War Made Invisible, and one of the key resonant truths that came to me anyway and that I tried to reflect in the writing is that we have come to be acclimated to seeing the world, experiencing the world most importantly, entering it described and depicted by elected officials and media with two tiers of grief. The entire planet divided into people whose lives really matter and people whose lives don't. We may not see it that way conceptually, but we're encouraged to see it that way day after day after day, lives that really matter and lives don't and the corrosion of our country, our governance, our media and even ourselves results.

Quick survey, anyone here in your neighborhood and your community and your travels in the United States in the last year or two, you ever seen a flag of the nation of Ukraine? Please raise your hand. Ukrainian flag, anybody? Wow, almost the whole room. Almost everybody here has seen the display and solidarity and with the humanity of Ukrainian people who are suffering a horrific invasion warfare imposed on them by another country. A really appropriate display of solidarity and compassion. Here's the other part of my survey. Please raise your hand if you've seen displayed in your neighborhood or your walk of life, your community, your travels in the United States, the display of a flag of the country of Yemen.

Not seeing a single hand and I can't raise my hand either. Every day when I go shopping or go to work in my little office, I see the flags of Ukraine. I don't see any Yemeni flags.

You may remember the fist bump in the middle of 2022 when President Biden went and met with the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. That kind of solidarity between a country that has sold billions of dollars worth of weapons, provided intelligence to help Saudi Arabia as its slaughter civilians in Yemen. The media watch group Fair did a study of MSNBC. That's the liberal network, right? It's not Fox. And found almost no coverage whatsoever of the slaughter going on in Yemen. As a matter of fact, this was during the Trump administration, 5,000 percent as much coverage of the Russia gate scandal, the Russia gate narrative, than what was happening in Yemen. And people might say, well, gee, that's in spite of the fact that ever since 2015, the U.S. government has been supporting the killing from the air and the massacres by Saudi Arabia of people in Yemen.

We might think, well, that's in spite, well, that's odd. The United States government's directly involved. That's in spite of that involvement. We don't have U.S. media hardly paying any attention to it at all. But then with the invasion of Ukraine, huge coverage, empathetic coverage, appropriate coverage of the suffering on the ground in Ukraine. But that was a different tier of grief that's officially sanctified and encouraged.

So in Yemen, when children were dying en masse, when the largest color epidemic in modern history was taking place courtesy of the Saudi regime with the support of the United States, not newsworthy. So then we might do another comparison. We could do a comparison between two invasions. The invasion of Ukraine, crime against humanity, terrible killing, mostly from the air, the mortars and the rockets and all the rest of it, the invading forces of Russia, that terrible invasion. And the invasion a couple of decades earlier of Iraq. Well, the media watch group Fair did a study and found during a comparable period, the beginning of those invasions, there were 14 front page prominent articles about the suffering of Ukrainian people, 14. And during the comparable period, there was one on the same outlets front page in The New York Times about the suffering of Iraqi people, 14 to 1, two invasions, two very different kinds of coverage. And as a matter of fact, I think the U.S. mass media coverage, if you set aside the political spin, which was huge, well, they didn't talk about the role of NATO expanding to Russia, its border, on and on and on. But when you talk about, when you look at the actual content of the coverage of U.S. news media, of the suffering of Ukrainian people, it's been exemplary.

Corporate media in the United States can convey the real suffering from war if it's inflicted by an official enemy of the United States. But on the other hand, if it's being inflicted by the United States, occasional human interest stories that don't last very long, don't hit the echo chamber, don't have much political effect.

This is what is part of what we're told is the rules-based order. You may have heard that phrase from President Biden. You might have heard that phrase from Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken. We have to have a rules-based order. We can't have chaos. We can't have countries going around invading each other. This became a very popular official phrase in Washington after the invasion of Ukraine.

It's a little odd coming from the mouths of Anthony Blinken and Joe Biden because if you flash back to the summer of 2002, Anthony Blinken was the chief of staff and Joe Biden was the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when they helped green light the invasion of Iraq. With bogus hearings in the summer of 2002, not allowing skeptics to even testify and ginning up the momentum for Congress to months later approve the invasion of Iraq. So it makes you wonder what does rules-based order really mean? And it sort of means it does mean we make the rules, we break the rules. That's what it really means. It really means do as we say, not as we do. It really means might makes right is our guiding star. That is our north star, the United States of America.

You may remember in 1999, President Clinton when the U.S. led the NATO bombing of Kosovo and Yugoslavia. We saw the news magazines with the cover stories and the TV accounts and the footage, ethnic cleansing. We can't allow ethnic cleansing. That's not the American way. Our values require us to stand firm against ethnic cleansing. President Bill Clinton made a speech and I'm quoting here he said, we must adhere to quote the moral imperative of reversing ethnic cleansing. What's happening right now in Gaza? To call it ethnic cleansing is perhaps too mild a term. We can have a academic or journalistic discussion about whether it's genocide or it's sociocide, but it's mass murder. That's what's going on. Ethnic cleansing, 1999, moral imperative to reverse it. 2023 out of the same Oval Office. Get those terrorists. It's unfortunate. Civilians are dying. We will hope that our Israeli allies will not kill so many civilians. That's the message.

The US government now rushing through another $14 billion with the B dollars of military aid to Israel as the death continues in Gaza. After several weeks of intensive bombing of Gaza, a total of 18 members of the US House of Representatives were willing to co-sponsor a ceasefire resolution. 18 out of 435. We're not talking deep red states here.

Let's talk about California. One of the House members from California signed on as a co-sponsor of a resolution urging a ceasefire in Gaza. In Massachusetts, one member of the US House willing to sign that resolution. Maybe it's significant. Maybe it isn't. You be the judge. Every one of those 18 House members who became or were willing to become a co-sponsor of the ceasefire resolution, every single one of them are people of color. Not a single white member of the House of Representatives willing to co-sponsor that resolution.

Back in late October, the Save the Children Organization had reported. I'm quoting here, the number of children reported killed in Gaza in just three weeks has surpassed the annual number of children killed across the world's conflict zones since 2019. On November 10, the Director General of the World Health Organization told the United Nations Security Council, quote, on average, a child is killed every 10 minutes in Gaza. Courtesy, I would add, of US taxpayers. And if you do the math, that's about 1,000 kids a week. We might think about the 96% of the US House of Representatives in 2023 who've declined to co-sponsor a ceasefire resolution. What if their children were being bombed? What if their children had to be pulled out of the rubble? It's not a stretch to say that those members of the House are accomplices to mass murder.

It's not a stretch to say that the President of the United States is an accomplice to mass murder, but it's virtually unsayable in US mass media. And the members of Congress, the few willing to even come close to talk about genocide going on. We're withstanding ferocious attacks. No good deed of truth to go unpunished. A few weeks into the bombing of Gaza, there were reliable reports that 180 doctors and nurses had been killed in Gaza. We've had reports of health care practitioners in Gaza in what's left of hospitals seeing their own families brought in dead on gurney's. That's part of US foreign policy. The poet William Stafford wrote, I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact. One time is to recognize the fact is just too painful, too difficult, too inconvenient.

During the first five weeks of the bombing of Gaza, more than 11,000 civilians were killed, including nearly 5,000 children. This in response to the atrocities that Hamas committed on October 7th in Israel, where the latest estimate of the death toll is 1,200, including at least 846 civilians and also about 200 hostages were taken. We so desperately need in our media, in our politics, in our discourse, a single standard of human rights of international law, no matter who is committing the atrocities, no matter who is engaging in terrorism.

It's really fascinating in an Orwellian analytical sense to see how routinely Hamas is described as a terrorist organization. And it is. And how we can't find, I can't find a single instance where the US mass media, any one of the outlets, has described the Israeli government as a terrorist organization. But if we have the same standard, that would be appropriate. And then what do we say about the biggest accomplice to that terrorist organization called the Israeli government? That would be the United States government. What does it mean when you're an active accomplice? They're busting gun dealers for selling assault rifles to somebody who shoots up a supermarket or a school. Those people are prosecuted. But 400 and more members of the House of Representatives, the guy behind the office, desk in the Oval Office, dare not even say that they have an accomplice role. That's a bridge too far. That's not a left.

We have to mind our peace and cues because terrorism is defined as is convenient. And so when the US government and it's very good at this, kills from the air, we're above it all. That's not terrorism. It's a 180 we're made to understand from packing a bunch of explosives in the trunk of a car and driving it into a target. Something that I've wrestled with a lot and wrote about in war made invisible is that question of intentionality. That's part of the conceit in the United States and Israel and elsewhere. Oh, we don't target civilians. I'm like those bad terrorists. We don't target civilians. And yet throughout the so-called war on terror and now what's going on in Gaza, the effect is absolutely the same because the civilian deaths are absolutely predictable. And the people giving the orders at the top know that. But it's a sort of a shell game pretense, but we don't target them. No, we kill them. We know we will kill all those civilians so many, but that's okay. We've given ourselves an out. And the mass media, of course, go along with that. That's fine. There's a lot of talk these days, of course, about we shouldn't make students uncomfortable. I'm not just talking Florida here. I'm talking every state in this country.

We have people saying, sometimes in very high places, positions of authority, mass media, civic groups saying, we must not make students uncomfortable. They shouldn't have to hear things that make them uncomfortable. And of course, we could think, hmm, I wonder how comfortable students have been in Gaza for the last few weeks when our own country is directly involved, directly complicit, but we shouldn't make anybody uncomfortable by sharing information about it, showing some of the results.

The problem is not people being too uncomfortable. The problem is people being too comfortable and encouraged to be too comfortable. Whether it's the US warfare state, whether it's corporate power, whether it's the grievous inequities of wealth and terrible poverty and the systemic racism, comfort, that we're supposed to be comfortable. We're supposed to adjust ourselves to that. The whole mentality that is officially promulgated and encouraged is that when the United States does things that aren't quite right, that's an anomaly. It's not system. Oh, it's just an anomaly. The mistakes are made, but actually the mistakes are systemic because they're not mistakes. The atrocities become routine, they become built in because they are organized that way.

Aldous Huxley said, the propagandist purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

That's the unspoken messaging that is so much a part of these two tiers of grief. On the planet, the United States has 4% of the world's population. And yet with the window on the world tinted red, white and blue, we're encouraged to believe that, hey, it's about us. It's really about us. The anomalies were encouraged to believe that's not who we are. Maybe it is, but part of who we are is to tell each other that that's not who we are.

Even after the US military slaughtered huge numbers of people in the Philippines, the American author William Dean Howells wrote a short story. [...] And in that short story, one of the characters says, "what a thing it is to have a country that can't be wrong, but if it is, is right anyway". Again, think of a more contemporary comment than one that was written more than a century ago. And coming along with that is the absence of remorse. It's really stunning.

I'm in my early 70s, so I've been alive going on from the Vietnam War. Keep looking for remorse. Three million Vietnamese people, the slaughter in Laos and Cambodia, illegal, immoral, people being killed in the plane of jars in Laos, who had never even heard of the United States. Where was the remorse and where is the remorse?

Well, there's not enough time to do justice to the United States. You've been to the war since then. Grenada Panama in the 1980s, 1991, according to the Pentagon, 100,000 Iraqis killed in six weeks. That was taken as a great triumph. And first President Bush saying, quote, by God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all. 1999, 78 straight days of bombing led by the United States. Yugoslavia and Kosovo, not a single American, died. Great triumph. Cluster bombs being used. By the way, it's not a secret. You can go to the Congressional Research Service and find that during the first three weeks of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States used between 1.8 and 2 million cluster munitions bomblets to shred the bodies of everybody. And one of the most heinous, terrible weapons in modern warfare, we heard ever heard about it.

And in fact, you may remember to fast forward that when the Russians invaded Ukraine and it was reported that they were using cluster munitions, they were justifiably denounced by US media and the White House publicly suggested that might well be a war crime. Because then the Ukrainian forces were running out of weapons and ammunition and the US was running out of resupply ammunition, but the US had plenty of cluster munitions on the shelf. And so President Biden, with bipartisan support in Congress, gave the green light and there went on from their huge shipping of cluster munitions to Ukraine. It wasn't so bad after all.

So, how Orwellian can you get? 2022, a war crime, 2023, no problem.

This is one of countless examples of the tears of grief, the corruption, the corrosion, if you will, the spiritual desecration of US government, of mass media, and of our own lives, to the extent we accept it. In the fall of 2002 in Baghdad, I met a few of the surviving Iraqi children. Unicef's director in Baghdad took me around to some schools. The ones that had been refurbished were really nice. There was no smell of sewage. But other schools, I was taken to another one, had not yet been refurbished. They were working on it. The UNICEF office there was trying to provide schools for kids that didn't have sewage smell and broken windows. It was really impressive. And so we went back to the director's office, he was a Dutch person who was running the operations in Iraq for UNICEF. And we talked about how important the improvements were. And then I asked, what do you think will happen if the US invades? And there was a silence. And then he said, that would be a whole different matter. And it was. It was branded in Baghdad by the US media with great excitement. Shock and awe.

Daniel Ellsberg talked with me about the differences between media coverage of 9-11. And later the US military's shock and awe missile attack on Baghdad that started the Iraq invasion in March of 2003. In response to 9-11, he recalled the New York Times, and I'm going to quote Dan here, did something very dramatic. They ran a picture, a head picture, of each person who had been killed. 9-11. Each person had been killed with some anecdotes from their neighbors, their friends, their family. This person liked to skydive or this person liked to play in a band or little anecdotes about what made them human. What people remembered about them in particular. Very gripping, very moving. Then there was a pause and Dan went on and he said, after the Iraq war began in 2003, he said he thought, imagine if the Times were to run a page or two of photographs of the people who were burned on the night of shock and awe. It wouldn't be that hard if you were on the ground who weren't there then, but we were later to find people who were relatives of those people and say, look, each one had friends, had parents, had children, had relatives, each one had made their mark in some little way in the world until that moment when they were killed. And these were the people we killed. And these were the people who were dying under the bombing exactly as in our case. There were two planes filled with gas burned two buildings. Dan went on to say, but of course that kind of US media coverage was unthinkable. He put it this way. Of course, it's never happened. Nothing like it. Tears of grief.

In 2009, when I went to Afghanistan, I went somewhere that any US journalist was free to go. You didn't have to be embedded. It was on the outskirts of Kabul. It was a refugee camp, an internal refugee camp. And it was largely populated by people from the Helmand province in the south who had been driven out by the violence. And it was a very crude makeshift camp, just a bunch of ditches and canvas basically. And I met a girl named Goljuma at the time she was seven years old. And she talked about how one morning when she was still sleeping about 5 a.m. at her home in Helmand province, the walls fell in because a bomb had fallen in a neighborhood. The US was bombing the area.

And as she spoke, you could see, she kind of tilting her body because she only had one arm. And so the side with an arm was sort of in my direction. So she's in her early 20s now with one arm. And I found out that at that refugee camp, because they were internal refugees, the UN wasn't helping. The Afghan government wasn't helping, the US government was not helping. They took up collections for food from local business people in Kabul. As a US citizen, I thought about it. I thought, wow, my government had the money to bomb these people, but not to feed them.

The next year, in 2010, President Obama spoke to troops near Kabul at Bagram Air Base. He said, all of you represent the virtues and the values that America so desperately needs right now, sacrifice and selflessness, honor and decency. And he added, quote, you see dignity in every human being. But even though the United States, quote, lost the Afghanistan war, the fact is that military contractors never lose the war. And so Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, many other corporations, they always make a literal and figurative killing. William Hartung has authored a report, The Great Researcher. He found weapons makers have spent $2.5 billion on lobbying over the past two decades. They employ on an average over 700 lobbyists per year, more than one for every member of Congress. There's a revolving door between the lobbyists and members of Congress. It swings both ways.

The current Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, is a former member of the Board of Raytheon Technologies, the country's largest military contractor. He was getting seven figures income from the military industry. Then if you go to open secrets online, you'll find that they discovered and documented before entering the Biden cabinet, Austin and State, anti-blink and work together at a place called Pine Island Capital Partners, described as a private equity firm investing in defense companies that touted its access to Washington. My only correction is they weren't defense companies. They were military companies.

ou might remember that the Pentagon came up with a name for the impending Iraq invasion in 2003. Naturally they wanted something that sounded rather grand and wonderful. Somebody there got approval to call the invasion Operation Iraqi Liberation. But there was something wrong. You can probably guess if you can't remember. There was something wrong with the think of the initials, Operation Iraqi Liberation.

Since the acronym spelled oil, somebody realized that wouldn't do. Of course it was considered a calumny to suggest with the impending invasion that oil had something to do with it because the United States government were virtuous, were altruistic, were trying to help other people. We were told that's what the invasion was about. But then the years went by and some people retired and some officials began to speak very differently.

So four years after the invasion, I'll give you a couple of quotes. The Senator and actually future Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said, "people say we're not fighting for oil. Of course we are." General John Abbisey, who knew something about fighting in Iraq, he was the former head of U.S. Central Command and military operations in Iraq, he said, "of course it's about oil. We can't really deny that." One of the great myths and Biden made a statement at the UN in September 2021 that we've turned to page. He said the U.S. is no longer at war, which of course would be confusing to people and countries the U.S. was continuing to bomb, including in the last week here in the middle of November 2023 in Syria.

We were told U.S. wasn't at war anymore because troops had come out of Afghanistan, which was really surprising to people who looked at reports from the cause of war projects at Brown University the same month that Biden made that statement. The project documented U.S. military was engaged in so-called counterinsurgency and war on terror operations in 85 different countries. That's quite a gap between no countries in 85. Coming missile strikes, drone attacks, joint maneuvers with foreign militaries on the ground advisors and trainers, secretive special ops. And then there's the militarization of our Khan Muir culture, a society teaching men to use guns to kill, domestic violence, which is clearly documented, way up among veterans, especially those engaged in the war on terror, terrifying for many women domestic violence through the roof, PTSD.

And then when George Floyd was murdered and there were Black Lives Matter demonstrations around the country, many demonstrators in many cities and towns found that they were facing off against Pentagon equipment. Because there's something called a 1033 program, MRAPs and other major weaponry systems and armaments are given by the Pentagon to local police forces around the country. And if they don't use them, they have to give them back. We've been hearing a lot, not enough, but since the death of George Floyd, we've been hearing more about systemic racism. And there's an assumption that it's only a domestic problem.

One of the things that was startling to me, I was working on the War Made Invisible book for months and then I started a chapter called Color of War and then I realized ever since the so-called war on terror began in October 2001 with the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Almost every victim of Pentagon firepower has been a person of color. You see it in plain sight. How many op-eds and commentaries have you seen and masked me to even mentioning that? To embarrassing, too obvious, it wouldn't have surprised W. E. B. Du Bois, wouldn't have surprised him at all.

The color line doesn't just run through this country, it's global. To be clear, the United States military doesn't bomb countries because they're inhabited by people of color. But if they're inhabited by people of color, that makes it easier for domestic politics and attitudes to engage in warfare in that country. Otherwise our entire analysis of systemic racism would make no sense. Institutional and individual, we have these biases and religious and cultural biases, too. And as the slaughter continues in Gaza, all of those factors are in play. The two tears of grief. Of all the wars that the United States has been part of, in so many ways with so many layers, there is invisibility. Even if it's on our TVs, even if it's in the newspapers and on our screens, the realities of the war are invisible. Yeah, we can see the images and we're virtually clueless. Where the old cliche television brings war into your living room, sounded good, didn't it? Completely preposterous.

Can you think of anything less like being in a war than scrolling on your smartphone or watching a television? But it's something that doesn't stand any scrutiny, but it's very popular because we need that conceit that we are witnessing, we're visible. But what Robert J. Lifton calls psychic numbing, the numbing is crucial to make these policies acceptable to the public. And most of all, in terms of war that would be invisible, is nuclear war. There would be virtually no one left to see the coverage.

And once after the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John Kennedy spoke at American University. And he drew lessons from that crisis that are now in the dumpster at the White House. This is what Kennedy said. Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence not only of the bankruptcy of our policy or of a collective death wish for the world.

At the time of that speech by JFK in 1963, Daniel Ellsberg was working for the Kennedy administration. As he told an interviewer a few years ago, Dan said, what I discovered to my horror, I have to say is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff contemplated causing with our own first strike 600 million deaths, including 100 million in our own allies. Now that was an underestimate even then because they weren't including fire which they found was too incalculable in its effects. And of course, fire is the greatest casualty producing effect of thermonuclear weapons. So the real effect would have been over a billion, not 600 million, about a third of the earth's population then, that was 60 years ago.

Speaking after his book, The Doomsday Machine, was published in 2017, Dan brought us up to date. He described research findings about nuclear winter. And this is what he said, it's a long quote, it's definitely worthwhile. What turned out to be the case 20 years later in 1983 confirmed in the last 10 years very thoroughly by climate scientists and environmental scientists is that the high ceiling of a billion or so was wrong. Firing weapons over the cities, even if you call them military targets, would cause fire storms in those cities like the one in Tokyo in March of 1945, which would loft into the stratosphere many millions of tons of soot and black smoke from the burning cities. It wouldn't be reigned out in the stratosphere, it would go around the globe very quickly and reduce sunlight by as much as 70%, causing temperatures like that of the little ice age, killing harvest worldwide and starving to death nearly everyone on earth, it probably wouldn't cause extinction or so adaptable. Maybe 1% of our current population of 7.4 billion could survive, but 98 or 99% would not.

So we have a double barreled climate emergency. The organizing on campuses and elsewhere on climate has been so crucial, so important. We have this existential crisis that is misnamed a climate crisis, it's a climate emergency. And then we have the specter of nuclear war, which if it occurs would be speeded up, speeded up climate crisis, climate emergency to an unfathomable degree. So as I wrap up here, I want to remind you that while Daniel Ellsberg was extremely well-informed about war and US war making, he had seen it unfold during the Vietnam War, his deepest passion has been to prevent nuclear war and to wake us up. He says that the single step that could be initiated to reduce the chance of nuclear war would be, yes, unilateral shutdown of all US ICBMs, the intercontinental ballistic missiles. They're on hair trigger alert because unlike the air and the sea nuclear weapons, they're vulnerable to a first strike, so they are by definition kept on launch on warning, hair trigger status. William Perry, former Secretary of Defense, said ICBMs are the most dangerous weapons in the nuclear arsenal, and yet we can't get anywhere so far in Congress to get them shut down. And part of the charge is, oh no, that would be unilateral disarmament. And I think of it as, let's say you're standing in a pool of gasoline. And your adversary is also standing in the pool of gasoline. And your lighting matches and your adversary's lighting matches. If you stop lighting matches, people might say, oh, that's unilateral disarmament. It would also be a step of sanity.

In The Doomsday Machine, Dan summed up this way: he described the overall policies of preparing for all-out thermonuclear war. No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about and how and why it has persisted for over half a century is a chronicle of human madness. Whether Americans, Russians, or other humans can rise to the challenge of reversing these policies and eliminating the danger of near extinction caused by their own inventions and proclivities remains to be seen. I choose to join with others in acting as if that is still possible.

We all know about Dr. King's speech. I have a dream. But when he went down by the Riverside to a church in New York City in 1967 and announced what he called the madness of militarism, that's a no-go for corporate media, the politicians, the Democrats and Republicans who embrace his memory have that part of his legacy down the Orwellian vacuum tube. Dr. King said, quote, I must honestly say to you that I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism. It's easy to feel overwhelmed. It's easy to feel powerless, but the only possibility of change is if we organize. And if we have a realistic view, not of the fantasy world provided to us by members of Congress overwhelmingly and by presidents and by media, but our own willingness to see. As James Baldwin said, "not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

The poet Stanley Koonitz wrote, in a murderous time, the heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking. It is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn. And from Theodore Rettke in a dark time, the eye begins to see. Daniel Ellsberg was accustomed to people telling him how much he inspired them. That I sensed in his eyes and in his heart a persistent question inspired to do what.