{"id":290625,"date":"2025-03-24T12:00:05","date_gmt":"2025-03-24T12:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=290625"},"modified":"2025-03-21T09:08:40","modified_gmt":"2025-03-21T09:08:40","slug":"how-should-we-rethink-our-relationship-to-us-violence-around-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/03\/how-should-we-rethink-our-relationship-to-us-violence-around-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"How Should We Rethink Our Relationship to US Violence Around the World?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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<\/p><\/div>\n

20 Mar 2025\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0The outrages are raining down one after another: Trump\u2019s suggestion that Ukraine is responsible for the war with Russia, which thus\u00a0blames Ukraine for the deaths of its own people<\/a>\u00a0and implicitly supports Putin\u2019s use of unrestrained military force. Trump\u2019s proposal to\u00a0forcefully relocate Palestinians from Gaza, which functions as an extension of ethnic cleansing<\/a>. Trump\u2019s exaggerated use of\u00a0\u201cinvasion\u201d to describe undocumented immigrants<\/a>, which is a military term used to describe those \u201cenemies\u201d infiltrating a territory with the aim to conquer.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Those power structures include what Martin Luther King Jr. called \u201cthe giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism.<\/a>\u201d It can be argued that those triplets constitute the\u00a0raison d\u2019\u00eatre<\/em>\u00a0of the U.S. \u2014 the purpose for its existence.<\/p>\n

Speaking out against the Vietnam War on April 4, 1967, King quickly became an unpopular figure. In fact, notes Brian Jones at\u00a0Jacobin<\/em>, \u201cOpinion polls conducted just prior to King\u2019s death one year later indicated that 72 percent of white people and 55 percent of black people disapproved of his opposition to Vietnam.<\/a>\u201d But King was convinced that it was time to speak out: \u201cA time comes when silence is betrayal.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u00a0RootsAction<\/a>\u00a0and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His new book,\u00a0War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine<\/em><\/a>, demonstrates that the U.S. is driven by warmongering. Indeed, he writes, \u201cThe militarism that propels nonstop U.S. warfare is systemic.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

TO CONTINUE READING Go to Original – scheerpost.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

20 Mar 2025 – The outrages are raining down one after another. In this interview, Norman Solomon discusses the mainstream media silence around U.S. militarism and articulates ways of resisting such silence, of rejecting denial.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":290626,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[417,101,100,2462,112,2159,99,95,70],"class_list":["post-290625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","tag-bullying","tag-cultural-violence","tag-direct-violence","tag-military-industrial-media-complex","tag-pentagon","tag-rogue-states","tag-structural-violence","tag-us-military","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290625"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":290631,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290625\/revisions\/290631"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}