How Should We Rethink Our Relationship to US Violence Around the World?
INTERVIEW, 24 Mar 2025
George Yancy | ScheerPost/Truthout - TRANSCEND Media Service
US Army soldiers provide security on a road while manning a checkpoint outside of Sadr City, Iraq, 25 Oct 2008.
Joshua E. Powell, U.S. Army, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
20 Mar 2025 – 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, 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.
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Tags: Bullying, Cultural violence, Direct violence, Military Industrial Media Complex, Pentagon, Rogue states, Structural violence, US Military, USA
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