War Made Invisible

How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine

Norman Solomon

• Publisher: The New Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781620979259
• Edition: 0
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

With a new preface by the author on the Gaza war

An unflinching exposé of the hidden costs of American war-making written with “an immense and rare humanity” (Naomi Klein) by one of our premier political analysts

Every election cycle, candidates across the political spectrum repudiate what has become one of the most consequential and enduring components of American foreign policy: the forever war. Yet, once the ballots have been cast and the camera crews go home, the American war machine chugs along in almost complete obscurity.

The journalist and political analyst Norman Solomon’s War Made Invisible is a “gripping and painful study” (Noam Chomsky) of the mechanisms behind our invisible, but perpetual, national state of war. From ever-compliant journalists serving as little more than stenographers for the Pentagon to futuristic military technology, horrifying in its destructive power, that makes dropping a bomb or pulling the trigger on a drone strike more of an abstraction than a moral calculation, Solomon’s “staggeringly important intervention” (Naomi Klein) exposes the profoundly human consequences at home and abroad of the bipartisan commitment to war making.

In an era of increasing global instability in which it is all too easy to succumb to despair, Solomon pierces the “manufactured ‘fog of war’ . . . [and] casts sunlight, the best disinfectant, on the propaganda that fuels perpetual war” (Amy Goodman). Now in paperback with a new preface by the author on the Gaza war, Solomon’s incisive, ever-timely analysis “provide[s] the fresh and profound clarity that our country desperately needs” (Daniel Ellsberg) now more than ever.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Repetition and Omission
• 2. Over the Horizon
• 3. Unintended Deaths
• 4. Media Boundaries
• 5. “Humane” Wars
• 6. Lives that Really Matter, Lives that Don’t
• 7. The Color of War
• 8. Costs of War
• 9. Now It can be Told
• Afterword: The Gaza War
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Publishing in the Public Interest
• About the Author
• Copyright