Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs

Magazine. Today, Norman Solomon returns to the program. Norman Solomon is a journalist,

media critic, activist. He's the author of a dozen books, the latest of which is right here. And it is war made invisible

how America hides the human toll of its military machine available from the new press.

Norman Solomon. Thank you so much for joining us on Current Affairs. Oh, pleasure. Thanks,

Nathan. I want to begin by just quoting a paragraph that stood out to me in your introduction.

Patterns of convenient silence and deceptive messaging are as necessary for perpetual war as the

Pentagon's bombs and missiles. Patterns so familiar that they're apt to

seem normal, even natural. But the uninformed consent of the governed is a perverse and hollow kind

of consent. While short on genuine democracy, the process is long on fueling a constant

state of war. To activate a more democratic

process will require lifting the fog that obscures the actual dynamics of militarism far away and

close to home. To lift that fog, we need to recognize evasions and decode messages that are routine

every day in the United States.

I liked that paragraph because it captured a lot of the themes that run through war made invisible,

one of which appears to me to be this connection between democracy and knowledge.

That is to say, you can't have in a system where supposedly the voters are

entrusted with holding power to account and have to decide who is going to be in charge.

They can't make those decisions if things that are really, really important are, as your

title puts it, made invisible. Well, really, the uninformed consent of the governed is what makes the government world go

around, you might say. If there were a really unfettered set of information streams,

then arguably the policy of the U.S. government, in terms of, say, war and peace, for instance,

...