Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State

Often I find it difficult to read books about antiwar activities in the 60s and 70s. Perhaps it is because they are constructed like the tapes of good old boys sitting around a table with a bottle of wine reminiscing about old times. Made Love, Got War, on the other hand, is the story of the political awakening of one person and his continued engagement in peace and justice activities. However, it is not ego-centered. Instead, packed within are scenarios and stories that contain relevance for today. For example, the white-train action and trial in Washington in the mid-eighties uses specific incidences and real people to describe what he call "agencies of annihilation." Solomon brings to this story relevancy and relation to similar current peace and justice and antiwar activities. In the last year on trial for civil disobedience at Alliant Tech Systems, I (and my fellow arrestees) experienced exactly the same type of problems with judges who, as Solomon puts it, "proclaim their own versions of reality in the full expectation that we follow lockstep." The geography is different, the time is different but the system is unfortunately the same. The arrest at Alliant was because of a different type of crime against humanity, but the concept of the judicial system as one of the agencies of annihilation has as much relevance today as it did in 1983 in the white-train trials. In the last chapters, Solomon brings us into the current time--Iraq--thus showing a continuity of activities. The 60s and 70s are not an isolated incidence, an aberration or tear in the fabric of our history. They are part of a long tradition of similar activities by the people of this country built on the moral values of what we often call today "peace and justice" issues.

Norman Solomon's Made Love Got War is a fascinating read. Solomon interweaves personal history with major world events. As a member of the anti-war movement in the 1960's Solomon has lead a colorful life and his story is certainly uplifting for those of us trying to make a difference in this world. He discusses the faults of the New Left, the fight against nuclear proliferation, and the "Greased Path to Iraq." At times (especially towards the end of the book) Solomon seems a bit pessimistic as he reflects on how things have never really changed. Despite that pessimism, this work so is endearing and indeed inspiring because of Solomon's personal take on the events going on around him. While there is the cogent media analysis like in his other works, it is coupled with his own stories of activism. Norman Solomon has consistently been fighting for peace and justice in a world sorely lacking both. This book is a must buy for newcomers to his work and devoted fans as well.

This is an autobiographical account of the peace and disarmament movements in the United States over the past half century. Better than his other books, I think, this one achieves the level of artistic composition found in Solomon's brilliant and frequent columns on the media, war, and peace. But the value of "Made Love, Not War" lies in the lessons it provides for current and future activism, the accounts of pitfalls and seductive detours encountered in the past, the insights gained, and the analysis of how one can push on without hope or optimism or the desire for them, all as told by one of the most morally decent people we are privileged to live alongside today. "I was born in 1931," Daniel Ellsberg writes in the foreword, "and my generation had to reorient itself to the unprecedented threat of planetary nuclear suicide-murder. Norman Solomon was born twenty years later, and his generation has never lived under any other circumstance." Yes, but few in that generation have remained constantly aware of the fact and devoted to changing it. Human beings have always been able to put the fact of their fast approaching personal demise out of their minds, often aided by the pretense of an "afterlife." Solomon's and later generations have usually managed to put the possibility of our collective nuclear end out of our thoughts, often aided by the pretenses of the news and entertainment industry. Solomon has refused his entire life to forget that we are dangerously close to nuclear oblivion, and wishing others would also stop forgetting, he inevitably became something that most peace activists do not: a media critic. In a section toward the end of the book dated July 7, 2006, Solomon writes: "Today is my fifty-fifth birthday, and the feeling that despite all the changes so little has changed really torments me. Turn on a television and there's the president, giving hypocrisy a bad name, and this is normal. Always has been in my lifetime. Turn on the TV when I was fifteen and there's the president, some kind of perverse fount of lies. That was when I started to get it and not get over it. If I'd been born ten years earlier, it would have started with Ike instead of LBJ." Or it could have started earlier, with Truman. "[F]rom one president to another," Solomon writes, "one commander in chief to another: . . . they've all been ready to demolish us in an instant. That fact, alone, from Harry S Truman to George W. Bush and whoever comes next, is so ghastly that we can't really look at it . . . ." Solomon's recent book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," which has also been made into a movie, documents the similar lies all recent presidents have told about wars. This new book touches on that theme, with Truman (discussed by Ellsberg) pretending Hiroshima was a military base, Kennedy pretending the Soviet Union had more missiles, Johnson pretending he was for peace and restraint, and so forth. But here we learn not just what

Two well-known sayings came to mind as I read this remarkably compelling book: George Santayana's famous statement, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," and the variously-attributed "If you remember the '60's, you weren't really there." Solomon remembers the `60's, and he was really there. In recounting his odyssey from principled teenager to passionate political and social-justice activist, Solomon takes us back through the decades, starting with his childhood in the Cold War, proceeding through the "make love not war" `70's, then into the anti-nuclear age of the `80's and mid-`90's, finally bringing us to the never-ending wars in the Middle East. The book reads like a journal; it is a series of windows opening onto the important daily events of the past fifty years, and how he responded to those events. As a child of the same era, I was reminded at every page of how those events affected me, and what I was doing at the same time. Towards the end of the book, Solomon reflects on how much things have not changed over the years he's chronicled. Political and social-justice activism is like washing dishes - you have to keep doing it every day; the dishes don't stay washed. If we don't remember the past, we will be doomed to repeat it. Read the book; remember the past.