This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our listeners who support us at patreon.com

and by new left review. New left review is a bi-monthly journal of ideas covering world politics,

the global economy, social movements, theory, history, and culture. In the latest issue,

Perry Anderson reflects on two historic losses for the left, Mike Davis and Tom Nairn,

analyzing the relationship between their work. Andre Singer assesses the prospects for the third

Lula administration in Brazil. Cecilia recap asks whether digital monopolies have altered the

contours of capitalism itself, and Matthew Carp reflects on class dealignment in American politics.

Subscriptions start at only $49 per year, which gets you six issues plus access to the full NLR

archive, dating back to 1960. Featuring landmark texts by Theodore Derno, John Paul Sartre,

Frederick Jameson, and Nancy Frazier, among many others. Please subscribe to new left review.

It's one of my favorite publications.

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 anthropologists

Nadia Abou El-Haj on her book, Combat Trauma. Imaginaries of war and citizenship in post-9-11

America. Abou El-Haj 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,

Abou El-Haj argues, the traumatized American soldier has become the primary in really in many ways

the only true victim of war. In part one of our interview, which you should probably listen to

...