Norm Solomon:The Military-Industrial-Media Complex Is Spinning Us to Death

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Fri Feb-03-06 02:56 PM
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Norm Solomon:The Military-Industrial-Media Complex Is Spinning Us to Death

Edited on Fri Feb-03-06 03:00 PM by bigtree

Spinning Us to Death

An Interview with Norman Solomon
Norman Solomon interviewed by
Joel Whitney

February 03, 2006
http://www.guernicamag.com/interview/248/spinning_us_to_death/

{snips}

Guernica: What are the main forces that make it so easy to go to war?

Norman Solomon: We can talk about the drive for geopolitical advantage in various parts of the world; we can talk about the desire to open up or expand markets to gain stable access to raw materials, to line the pockets of huge military contracting corporations; the role of lobbyists in Washington, on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue; and the way in which the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned about almost half a century ago is now a military-industrial-media complex.

Guernica: What is the military-industrial-media complex?

Norman Solomon: This refers to the corporatization of mass media, which has meant that the profit-driven apparatus of disseminating news and information is largely drinking from the same corporatized trough as the governmental war-makers in Washington.

So I don’t think it’s an easy question that you’ve asked. I think that war has been made easy in the current era for reasons that keep accelerating each other. Once an attack starts—this is one of the key dynamics—once the president gets over the hump and the U.S. is at war, stopping the war becomes extremely difficult. This so-called “War on Terror” is a dream-come-true for those who believe that the U.S. should be at perpetual war.

Norman Solomon: Frequently we’ll see statements in a reportorial voice, without attribution, just matter-of-factly on the front pages, that go something like this: “In its effort to promote democracy in the Middle East, the Bush Administration….” You know, fill in the blank. Well, if we accept the premise, there’s not much left to talk about except the tactics. Any untoward or ugly motivation is filtered out; since the desire, we’re told, is to fulfill that mission, as a fair and noble superpower. What could be more noble than trying to create democracy in the Middle East? And this is a very common thread of news coverage, more effective probably than the Op-Ed pages—how the front pages convey a framework through which we’re encouraged to see the world.

I think related to the myth of America as a fair and noble superpower is the tacit assumption that, when you come right down to it, the United States is really the center of the world. I sometimes think of it as “jingo-narcissism.” That assumption is very psychological. Unless you’re Anne Coulter or something, you’re not gonna say it point blank. The contempt for the rest of the world is much more blatant and extreme coming from the current White House. But it’s always been fairly implicit and infuses a lot of the punditry that we get. So it’s the combination that the U.S. is so noble and the maybe kind of sheepish belief that, when push comes to shove, we’re the ones who matter most.

full article: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=9652