August 2005

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Deadly Spin Cycles

An Interview with Norman Solomon

War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, Norman Solomon, John Wiley & Sons, 320 pp, hb 24.95, 2005.
Norman Solomon is a syndicated columnist on media and politics, as well as founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. Solomon was interviewed by freelance writer Adrian Zupp. Norman Solomon can be emailed at mediabeat@igc.org, or see <www.WarMadeEasy.com>. Adrian Zupp can be reached at adrianz59@yahoo.com. Peacework intern Andrew Riedl assisted with the editing of the interview.

What prompted you to write the book?

At Baghdad's book market. Photo: © Darh Jamail

We keep getting scammed by one president after another. And it really hit me during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq that we've been seeing a lot of boilerplate propaganda techniques playing out. I was really bothered, not only by the effectiveness of time-worn propaganda techniques coming out of the Bush Administration and echoed by the mass media, but also a kind of mythology that built up in 2002 and 2003, from the likes of [presidential candidate] Howard Dean. I quote in the book a statement that came from the Dean campaign to the effect that this has never happened before -- America has always tried to find peaceful resolutions before going to war and that this record was shattered by the invasion of Iraq. "War Made Easy" as a book, among other things, refutes that mythology.

Did you have a conscious goal in writing this book? What do you hope it will achieve?

I hope it will help people to see through the lies of the present and the future, lies that drag the country into war. I don't just mean the war in Iraq. I mean the so-called war on terrorism. I believe that if we accept the terms of "war on terror," as presented by [corporate] media and politicians, then this war will not end in any of our lifetimes. It's so open ended and so tailored to the contours of a military-industrial-media complex that military finery will remain in fashion for a very long time.

What is the lesson from War Made Easy for peace workers and alternative media advocates? And what about folks from these groups who might say, "We didn't know all of this but we had the gist of it. What can we do?"

I think naming the propaganda techniques and confronting them is very important. And activism against war in this country could do a lot better job of engaging with, and challenging effectively, the propaganda mechanisms that make these wars possible. Just from the standpoint of debunking the prevalent arguments in the news media for war, those of us engaged in activism -- and I certainly include myself -- have nothing to be comfortable about. We're losing the propaganda wars. And it's small comfort that we can point to poll numbers that finally indicate disquiet or opposition to a war.

A peace activist put this to me, and I'm paraphrasing: "When people like us speak up for peace issues or media issues and so forth, are we really having a significant impact?" It sounds to me, if we're talking long run, that you're saying no. Is that correct?

I'm not critiquing action, I'm critiquing inaction. I think that there are huge effects that we sometimes have and don't even know it. The activity of keeping the flame going and trying to nurture and build flames is an essential process. And I think that most of us feel existential despair at some time or other. But I think to be active against the war-making mechanisms of our society is the only way to go. Nothing that I'm saying in the book or right now is intended to discourage people. I think if people were not active then the wars would be bigger, they'd be more frequent, and they'd last longer.

Speaking as a foreigner, I was amazed in the past -- though now I suppose I take it as a given -- by the extent to which Americans have bought into this whole belief system and these falsehoods and misconceptions that make up the chapters of War Made Easy. And it's been built on a foundation of "this is God's country" and so forth, which to many foreigners is a very arrogant perspective, but many in the US fall for these jingoistic appeals. Noam Chomsky has said that "they don't know that they don't know." Now specifically: Reporting on the current invasion has been more open in Europe, how is it that these perspectives can't permeate the American psyche?

Recurring Lies: The Chapter Headings of War Made Easy By Norman Solomon 1. America Is a Fair and Noble Superpower 2. Our Leaders Will Do Everything They Can to Avoid War 3. Our Leaders Would Never Tell Us Outright Lies 4. This Guy Is a Modern-Day Hitler 5. This Is about Human Rights 6. This Is Not at All about Oil or Corporate Profits 7. They Are the Aggressors, Not Us 8. If This War Is Wrong, Congress Will Stop It 9. If This War Is Wrong, the Media Will Tell Us 10. Media Coverage Brings War into Our Living Rooms 11. Opposing the War Means Siding with the Enemy 12. This Is a Necessary Battle in the War on Terrorism 13. What the US Government Needs Most Is Better PR 14. The Pentagon Fights Wars as Humanely as Possible 15. Our Soldiers Are Heroes, Theirs Are Inhuman 16. America Needs the Resolve to Kick the "Vietnam Syndrome" 17. Withdrawal Would Cripple US Credibility

I think it was Will Rogers who said "It's not what they don't know that bothers me, it's what they know that just ain't so." Deeply held beliefs can be almost intractable and very resistant to other messages. Many Americans, especially those who were of more liberal mindsets, if you showed them the catch-phrase titles of the book chapters, would say, "Oh I don't believe that!" But in fact in many cases, perhaps a little more subtly stated, those phrases do reflect some basic assumptions. Is America a great and noble superpower? There's a very powerfully held belief that that's true. Even though, if it's stated too boldly, people will feel a little embarrassed about it. So there's a constant need to try to undermine the false belief. The reasons why so many Americans have such a willingness to accept such outrageous militaristic policies out of Washington are multi-factoral. It's in the culture, it's in the mass media environment, it's constant messages from politicians and news outlets, and part of the political economy that reinforces it.

Between 1965 and the present, do you believe there's been a positive shift in terms of popular perceptions and public knowledge of what's going on?

I think we start with a stronger base of skepticism towards war. If one were to compare the lead-in to the Vietnam War, and the lead-in to the Iraq war, we had a vastly larger number of people in the streets, we had a lot of dissent, even in the [corporate] media, until the invasion of Iraq began and then there was a hiatus for many months. We've learned, but at the same time the militarists have learned too. They're very slick and they've learned to use cable television, for instance.

Your answer raises an issue that I noticed in the book. You talk quite a lot -- directly and tangentially -- about war as reality TV, which is a phenomenon of the cable age. Could you talk a little about that?

The embedding of reporters for the Iraq invasion was a brilliant propaganda mechanism. The Pentagon reversed the tactics they used during the Gulf War a dozen years earlier, but to the same end. The tactics during each war were designed to channel media coverage so that the point of view portrayed was that of the US military. This time it wasn't just the briefings and the screened videos of 1991 and the selected interviews at discreet locations. The embedding process implemented by the Pentagon was a way to make grand use of cable television, in particular, and turn the war into a more multi-dimensional TV show. The embedding gamble, if it was even a gamble, certainly paid off for the Pentagon.

We're visual creatures…Is it going to require people actually seeing certain horrendous things for themselves for things to really change? Will it take television? With presidents and pundits so capable of spinning the facts, as you point out in the book's subtitle, just what will it take for the truth to get through?

I think that any effective anti-war movement needs to combine the emotional with the intellectual. People respond in a wide variety of ways. One person may be changed by a totally intellectual argument, with the marshalling of facts and historical evidence. Another person may be moved by the story of a mother who lost her child. I'm really in favor of trying to combine all of that because I think it's part of the picture. Television and visual images, in and of themselves, may reinforce militarism as much as undermine it. We need it all. There's a real deficiency when we just make intellectual arguments, but there's also a real gap if we rely only on the human suffering of war.

What do you think about this notion that Michael Moore and others have propounded: Are Americans too afraid? Is fear a powerful tool that helps prop up this propaganda status quo as well?

I think fear is definitely powerful. And the antidote to fear that's being pedaled is the military fist that Uncle Sam can keep swinging to keep adversaries at bay. Many people around the world have much more reason to be fearful than Americans in terms of their own physical well-being. And yet our national narcissism is cranked up to such an extent that, with a straight face, media outlets could say that 9/11 changed everything everywhere. We are the world. Our pain dwarfs the pain of anybody else. And so our fear must trump anybody else's fears, which are often simply unrecognized.

In your afterword, you remind us that we are capable of free thinking and taking action by stating: "Conscience is not on the military's radar screen and it's not on our television screen but government officials and media messages do not define the limits and possibilities of conscience. We do." Are you optimistic?

I once heard Latin American writer Eduardo Galeano recall some graffiti he saw proclaiming: "Let's save pessimism for better times."

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