Political Media Review

Why do we go to war? Adam Berinsky says that it is because elites that we trust cue us to the worthiness of the cause of war. Public opinion regarding the decision to go to war and support for war follows the same domestic partisan cues that lead the public to support or oppose quotidian issues such as tax hikes and whether to tinker with Social Security.

Investigative journalist Naomi Klein speaking on “The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” is a PM Press DVD produced by Bonobo Films. It consists of a brilliant 65-minute talk Naomi gave on May 19, 2008

Haymarket Books’ 2009 release, The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, by Dahr Jamail, is the most important nonfiction book published this year. In Will, Jamail captures the lives of our men and women in uniform, in their own uncensored words, as they relate the true situation of the occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Victoria Fontan offers a fascinating perspective on the Iraq War and War on Terror, arguing that humiliation plays a key role in both. She starts with the premise that humiliation was instrumental in the shift from liberation to counterinsurgency in Iraq and, more generally, serves as the central rallying cry for fundamentalist terrorism across the globe.

Why We Fight, produced by Eugene Jarecki, is a brilliant critical film about how the military industrial complex has been developed and promoted post-9/11. It includes clips of the Iraq War, speeches by former President Bush, and amazing interviews with top scholars and experts, from former CIA agents to members of the Department of Defense such as Gore Vidal, Chalmers Johnson, Joseph Cirincione, Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, Wilton Sekzer, Sen. John McCain, James Roche, and Gwynne Dyer.