Tom Dispatch Posted on January 30, 2024

 How fully the worlds of toy-making and war-making, of toy companies, video-game outfits, movie studios, and the Pentagon have meshed” was Nick Turse’s first piece for TomDispatch. That was in October 2003, only months after President George W. Bush and crew had ordered the invasion of Iraq. Nick then wrote: The military is now in the midst of a full-scale occupation of the entertainment industry, conducted with far more skill (and enthusiasm on the part of the occupied) than the one in Iraq.” Decades later, looking back, I’m struck that, in his initial piece for this site, he also had the following line: Last holiday season the Forward Command Post, a bombed-out dollhouse from hell, rankled many consumers who objected to a toy that seemed to glorify civilian casualties and so prompted an outcry that caused JC Penney to withdraw it from sale and KBToys to stop stocking the item.”

In all the years that followed, from the publication of his classic book Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam to late last night, one powerful focus for him has been just how expendable American forces have regularly found local civilians to be. As the remarkable Jonathan Schell wrote in 2013 of Nick’s masterwork on this country’s nightmarish Vietnam War of the last century, Turse discovers that episodes of devastation, murder, massacre, rape, and torture once considered isolated atrocities were in fact the norm, adding up to a continuous stream of atrocity, unfolding, year after year, throughout that country.” Similarly, in 2008 in a TomDispatch piece all too grimly entitled Big Game Hunting in Iraq,” he described how, from the commander-in-chief to low-ranking snipers, a language of dehumanization that includes the idea of hunting humans as if they were animals has crept into our world — unnoticed and unnoted in the mainstream media.”

Unnoticed and unnoted there indeed — but not by Turse. In fact, he’s never stopped noticing that grim reality. As he wrote at The Intercept only recently, During the first 20 years of the war on terror, the U.S. conducted more than 91,000 airstrikes across seven major conflict zones — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen — and killed up to 48,308 civilians, according to a 2021 analysis by Airwars, a U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group.”  So, today, it seems all too appropriate that he should focus on one tiny aspect of that never-ending war on terror he’s followed all these years deep into Africa — two dead Somali civilians, a child and her mother, taken out by an American drone and how little anyone responsible in this country gives a damn. Tom