Norman Solomon

This article was originally published by The Nation. Forty years ago, across a dozen pages of The Nation magazine, I was in a debate with the English historian E. P. Thompson about the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race, the relative culpability of both governments, and how activists should approach it all. At the time, Cold War hostility was rampant. … Continue reading “How the US Has Darkened the Nuclear Cloud Over Humanity”

For U.S. mass media, Henry Kissinger’s quip that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac” rang true. Influential reporters and pundits often expressed their love for him. The media establishment kept swooning over one of the worst war criminals in modern history. After news of his death broke on Wednesday night, prominent coverage echoed the kind that … Continue reading “For Media Elites, War Criminal Henry Kissinger Was a Great Man”

The governments of Israel and the United States are now in disagreement over how many Palestinian civilians it’s okay to kill. Last week – as the death toll from massive Israeli bombardment of Gaza neared 10,000 people, including several thousand children – top U.S. officials began to worry about the rising horrified outcry at home and … Continue reading “Israel’s Military Is Part of the US War Machine”

For three weeks, President Biden has played a key role in backing Israel’s war crimes while touting himself as a compassionate advocate of restraint. That pretense is lethal nonsense as Israel persists with mass killing of civilians in Gaza. The same crucial standards that fully condemned Hamas’s murders of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7 should … Continue reading “Biden Is a Genocide Denier and the ‘Enabler in Chief’ for Israel’s Ongoing War Crimes”

Labels are central to the politics of media. And no label has been more powerful than “terrorist.” A single standard of language should accompany a consistent standard of human rights, which the world desperately needs. “If thought corrupts language,” George Orwell wrote, “language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and … Continue reading “Hamas Is a Terrorist Organization. So Is the Israeli Government.”

When Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations spoke outside the Security Council on Sunday, he said: “This is Israel’s 9/11. This is Israel’s 9/11.” Meanwhile, in a PBS NewsHour interview, Israel’s ambassador to the United States said: “This is, as someone said, our 9/11.” While the phrase might seem logical, “Israel’s 9/11” is already being … Continue reading “‘Israel’s 9/11’ Is a Slogan to Rationalize Open-Ended Killing of Palestinian Civilians”

When Joe Biden flew out of Hanoi last week, he was leaving a country where U.S. warfare caused roughly 3.8 million Vietnamese deaths. But, like every other president since the Vietnam War, he gave no sign of remorse. In fact, Biden led up to his visit by presiding over a White House ceremony that glorified … Continue reading “Biden Is the Latest President To Tout the Vietnam War as Proud History”

On September 11th, 22 years later, what are we to make of it all? Who even remembers that, as the Pentagon burned, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld picked up a scrap of hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 from the smoking ruins of that building. Soon after, he would tell his aides (as one of them … Continue reading “How 9/11 Bred a ‘War on Terror’ From Hell”

In 1980, when I asked the press office at the U.S. Department of Energy to send me a listing of nuclear bomb test explosions, the agency mailed me an official booklet with the title “Announced United States Nuclear Tests, July 1945 Through December 1979.” As you’d expect, the Trinity test in New Mexico was at … Continue reading “Decades Later, the US Government Called Hiroshima and Nagasaki ‘Nuclear Tests’”

“In a dark time,” poet Theodore Roethke wrote, “the eye begins to see.” Stanley Kunitz observed: “In a murderous time / the heart breaks and breaks / and lives by breaking.” In the current murderous time, amid the dim media swirl, acuity arrived for some with the news that President Joe Biden had approved sending cluster munitions … Continue reading “It’s Always a ‘Difficult Decision,’ They Tell Us”