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Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin Magazine. My name is Daniel Denver and I'm broadcasting

from Providence, Rhode Island. This is the second of my two-part interview with anthropologist Nadia

Abu Alhaj on her book Combat Trauma. Imaginaries of war and citizenship in post-9-11 America.

Abu Alhaj identifies the barely or rarely visible ideological foundation of the war on terror,

and of the new American militarism more generally. Americans don't pay much attention to our country's

constant overseas wars, much less actively organized to stop them because the figure of the traumatized

American soldier and the injunction that us ordinary civilians support our troops has become

the key way in which Americans see and interpret the permanent armed conflicts that characterize

our crisis-ridden empire. In dominant American culture, Abu Alhaj argues that traumatized American

soldier has become the primary in many ways the only true victim of war. In part one of our

interview, which you should probably listen to first if you haven't already, but you don't have to,

...