اغتيال الأمل

by William Blum, محمود ثروت (ترجمة)

"مرجعًا لا غنى عنه لفهم الإمبريالية الأمريكية الحديثة"
— نعوم تشومسكي
من الصين في أربعينيات القرن الماضي إلى العراق في الألفية الجديدة، ومن أمريكا اللاتينية إلى الشرق الأوسط، يكشف هذا الكتاب النقاب عن سجلٍّ طويل من التدخلات الأميريكية التي غيّرت مصائر شعوب بأكملها.
في اغتيال الأمل، يجمع ويليام بلَم، بدقة الباحث وجرأة المؤرخ، وثائق وشهادات وتحليلات تكشف كيف استخدمت الولايات المتحدة أدواتها العسكرية والاستخباراتية لفرض نفوذها، غالبًا باسم "نشر الديمقراطية"، بينما كانت في الواقع تزرع الفوضى وتدعم الانقلابات وتُسقط الحكومات المنتخبة.
هذا الكتاب هو مرآة تعكس الوجه الآخر للهيمنة العالمية، ومرجع لا غنى عنه لفهم السياسة الدولية من منظور الشعوب المتضررة.

"كتاب بالغ القيمة. البحث والسرد فيه مذهلان".
- أ. ج. لانغَث، كاتب ورئيس مكتب نيويورك تايمز سابقًا
"مرجع ثمين لكل من يهتم بالسياسة الخارجية الأميركية".
- مجلة تشويس الجمعية الأميركية للمكتبات

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, War, American History, American, The United States Of America

914 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1995

About the author

Jewish-American writer and critic of US foreign policy.

William Blum got wide media coverage, when his book "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower" was recommended by Osama Bin Laden in a speech.

Reviews

[Eli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Death to America

[Clif · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only reason I don't give this book 5 stars is the author gets a little carried away in his commentary. Not that he is inaccurate, only that the book would be more powerful with less sarcasm, deserved though that sarcasm may be.

Killing Hope proves beyond a doubt that the United States of America is the unchallenged leader of hypocrisy in the world. And that title is well earned to the present time.

Presidents, Secretaries of State and Defense, department spokespersons, and all manner of government officials at home and abroad lie without qualm, they also condone acts of terror and sabotage, killings, assassinations, coups, warlords and death squads. John Yoo is nothing new.

Is the Central Intelligence Agency responsible to the American people? Try asking your congressperson what CIA current missions might be. Try to get a figure on what the CIA spends. Have you ever seen the CIA in the federal budget appropriations? Think what Blackwater did (does now under a different name) was bad? It's just business as usual.

George W. Bush said "We do not torture". A lie but nothing new. Pick a president - they had their hands in the dirt. Where GWB really topped the pack was in his declaration of a "war on terror" when terror has been a much used tool of American foreign policy since WW2.

Blum builds an irresistible case that the United States has been empire building. The USSR and communism were never close to being the threat that they were portrayed to be. Latin American countries shed blood for decades as behind the scenes the CIA and the military, with Presidential approval, raised counter-revolutionary hell through bribery, training and equipping armies and thugs, and outright intervention across the Central and South American landscape. To this day the pointless embargo on Cuba continues.

I don't believe I have ever read such a depressing book, because all of the horror visited on foreign lands has been done in my name, without my knowledge and while my elected leaders have lied to me about it all.

Killing Hope is not a pleasurable read, but it should be read by all of us to understand why so many countries are less than enthusiastic about the policy (not declared but the REAL policy) of our nation. It is also an excellent example of why every effort for openness in government should be supported fully and all claims of national security examined carefully.

[Terence · Rating 3 out of 5]

Killing Hope should be read in tandem with Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes. Legacy is the more polished, unified and better argued account of the internal history of the CIA; Killing Hope is a collection of case studies of the miserable repercussions of the CIA in action -- a relentlessly grim and unjustifiable roll call of murder, rape, torture, subversion of democracy and pointless war.

All the tactics that the second Bush Administration has used openly for the last eight years have been part and parcel of our arsenal to preserve "freedom and liberty" since before the ink dried on our Constitution (at least one gets that from reading Appendix II, which chronicles our CIA and military interventions from 1798 to 1945).

The book is sad commentary on the corruption of power, the hypocrisy of our leaders, and the willful blindness of most Americans, as well as (in terms of practice) how "nonunique" America among the nations of the world.

It also brings home impossibility of being a "patriot" in any meaningful sense. To preserve one's morality, the thinking person has to rise above the petty tribalisms of race, state or ideology and ask "Who suffers?" and "What good comes from destroying the lives of innocents?"

Unfortunately, the only edition my library had brings things up to 1994. I'd like to get my hand on the latest version eventually to get Blum's take on subsequent events.

[Brad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don't ever look for the moral factor. US foreign policy has no moral factor built into its DNA. One must clear one's mind of that baggage which only gets in the way of seeing beyond the clichés and the platitudes.

The title is fairly self-explanatory.

"Washington knows no heresy in the Third World but independence."

A usefully comprehensive panoramic view of mostly the "Cold War"-era history of CIA interventions. Many of the national case studies are fleshed out in greater depth in a litany of other works ("Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala" for the Guatemalan case study, "All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror" for Iran, "The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World" for Indonesia, and beyond). Readers familiar with those works will find much of this amounts to a helpful refresher course on the depravity of imperial arrogance.

It's the same sordid story ad nauseam in various states and regions: Any whiff of a peripheral state taking or expressing interest in an independent path of development, and said state is presumed to be flirting with communism. Stay silent on socialism, and you're presumed soft. Loudly proclaim anti-communism and American liberal sympathies, and you're treated condescendingly as suspicious for presuming the same right to independent development. Either way, coups and machinations bring your state under the direct sway of pax Americana, and a "case" is retroactively constructed to justify American (in particular C.I.A.) intervention. The psychopathy of the Dulles brothers, especially, is once more on full display in the historical accounts in this book, but of course they are but a symptom of an imperial system.

Lest readers accuse or be wary of Blum at all romanticizing the societies or individual leaders in the C.I.A.'s crosshairs: expect a frank assessment that doesn't shy away from criticizing real or perceived opportunism, corruption, or betrayal of the ostensible internationalist cause by those proclaiming loyalty to their nation or the international working class. But expect a cautious approach willing to take space to parse out the difference between real shortfalls of leaders and the propaganda narratives propounded around them.

Blum by no means lets other American governmental institutions off the hook, but as you might expect he puts special emphasis on the C.I.A., in light of a uniquely extreme lack of oversight of its activities.

Each case study is crucial context to bear in mind any time you're faced with the prevailing narrative about U.S. interventionism's ostensible 'good intentions'. Beyond all of that, it's best to let the book speak for itself.

[Imran · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE book on US foreign policy since World War II (aka White War II). Blum covers 50+ US covert and overt interventions. Extremely well researched and footnoted. Will shatter many of the myths that Americans believe, even those who "just don't believe" the establishment side. Will provide the reader with the factual basis for demonstrating that the US is not in the business of overthrowing democracy.

Some tidbits from the book:

Did you know that the Bush Administration knew that Saddam Hussein was planning on invading Kuwait although they publicly claimed shock?

Did you know which story was told in the US Congress that garnered the support of US politicians in taking action? And that story had a PR firm behind it?

If you don't read this book, you CANNOT claim to know US foreign policy. That is unless you have researched US govt documents and the US press for the past 50+ years. Blum saves you that effort.

If you want a preview:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blu...
http://members.aol.com/bblum6/America...

[sologdin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Re-upping this review in the wake of the Trump regime's violation of UNC art. 2(4) in Venezuela. The Nuremberg IMT executed fascists because of unlawful invasions, recall. We should expect the matter to be referred to the ICC under the Rome Statute for commission of the crime of aggression.


Neither a thorough history of US foreign policy in general nor a rigorous examination of the CIA in particular, but rather a case study approach to 50 or so cold war interventions by the US, with appendices regarding interventions since the 18th century. Has a committed leftwing perspective.

Essential.

[Brian Napoletano · Rating 4 out of 5]

Goodreads' goofy interface erased my review so I'll give the condensed version this time. Blum's central thesis is that the US government, primarily through the CIA and military, has inflicted suffering, death, and oppression on people around the world whose only crime was to try to govern themselves without interference from Washington. From 1943 to 2003, every US president has been complicit in moral atrocities that, if they were undertaken by an enemy state against the US or one of its clients, would almost certainly have resulted in a full military siege and international condemnation.

[Randall Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

The least bloody way for the U.S. to have fought the Cold War would have been to support all oppressed people “yearning to be free” in their fight for independence/democracy, instead of invading them. This book is a long ledger of just the U.S. crimes committed against other countries since WWII. After spending time in America, Ho Chi Minh wanted to imitate the U.S. and declared all Vietnamese equal in 1945 – he even wrote the state department and Truman eight friendship letters but we totally spurned his advances – at what enormous cost? Ever wonder how Chiang Kai Shek got safely to Formosa/Taiwan from mainland China? Before he moved there, he massacred 28,000 people on the island who were not sufficiently impressed by him. The US decided to call Formosa China, if as mainland China was no longer China. “The United States evidently conspired to assassinate Chou (Zhou enlai/Chou En-lai) on several occasions.” However, the U.S. has a longer record of taking out nationalists than communists. During the entire Cold War, no policy planner ever found a valid reason why the Soviets, unprovoked, would want to either bomb the U.S. or attack western Europe. It was that ludicrous.

Carl Oglesby said, “The original commitment in Vietnam was made by President Truman, a mainstream liberal. It was seconded by President Eisenhower, a moderate liberal. It was intensified by the late President Kennedy, a flaming liberal. Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, Goldberg, the President (Johnson) himself. They are all liberals.” During the Phoenix Program, 20,587 Vietcong civilians were targeted by U.S. led forces and killed by being pushed out of helicopters, and dozens of techniques, all war crimes. The world talks non-stop about the Holocaust, but who talks about the what we did to the Vietnamese peasant? Bill muses, where’s the Vietnamese Anne Frank? We read the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg thought the Vietnam War was a war crime but –of course- when you are acting as a rogue state, you can do anything. The bombing of Cambodia rendered two million homeless and the old Cambodia was destroyed forever. One congressman said what we did in Cambodia was “a greater evil than anything we have done to any country in the world, and wholly without reason, except for own benefit to fight against the Vietnamese.” The only group in Laos that cared about social change was the Pathet Lao, so we branded them commie and tried to get rid of them. We poured $$$$ into Laos, a country that was 99 percent agricultural; it resulted in “unimaginable bribery, graft, currency manipulation, and waste.” As proof that “America always means well”, we read how the U.S. placed more bombs on Laos, than the US dropped on Germany and Japan during WWII. The result, an aid worker said, was “untold agony for hundreds of thousands of villagers” in fact, “village after village was leveled, countless people buried alive by high explosives, or burnt alive by napalm and white phosphorus, or riddled by anti-personnel bomb pellets.” In Ecuador, “CIA agents would bomb churches or right-wing organizations and make it appear to be the work of leftists.” Infiltration was the name of the game. They’d walk in marches in disguise and be deliberately provocative to hasten a coup. The CIA’s murder of Lumumba in the Congo backfired because he became a martyr and symbol for defiance and anti-imperialism throughout Africa. Oops…

Washington’s first fear is of “a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model (think Cuba or Allende’s Chile). Blum says, “Washington knows no heresy in the Third World but independence.” U.S. treatment of Cuba was pathetically juvenile, we put contaminants in their sugar, biological weapons in their turkeys, tried to poison Castro’s cigars, tried to give him LSD before a speech. Then, in 1996, it was found that Che Guevara told JFK’s advisor that Cuba would offer to answer the U.S. wish list: it would stop all Soviet ties, “pay for confiscated American properties in trade, and consider curbing Cuba’s support for leftist insurgencies in other countries. JFK and the advisor rejected this amazingly generous proposal and instead JFK authorized Operation Mongoose. So, thank JFK for the decades of untold and totally needless Cuban suffering – what a criminal douchebag.

Always the myth must be preserved: ‘communists’ only operate with ‘force and deception’ and “they can retain that power only through terrorizing and brainwashing the population.” Meanwhile the U.S. is only a source of good, like the time LBJ said to the Greek ambassador, “Fuck your Parliament and your Constitution, America is an elephant. And you...” Greece was trying to give its people a New Deal and had forgot that U.S. interests come before every other country’s interest. The Pentagon prefers the vague term “counter-insurgency” to “counter-revolutionary”. Citizens across Latin America were considered dangerous to U.S. authorities not because they were reading and applying Marx or Lenin, but because they were reading the New Testament from a Vatican II perspective. Regarding U.S. war crimes in Libya, the U.S. Navy awarded “158 medals to the pilots who dropped 500-pound and 2,000-pound bombs in the dark upon sleeping people.” In 1985, France sinks to new lows by sinking the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, killing a Greenpeace photographer. This book has stories of Contra violence in Nicaragua that everyone loving Reagan should be forced to read – crazy sadistic stuff more suited to horror films. In 1990, Nicaraguans got the message that the U.S. would never leave them alone unless the Sandinistas were voted out of office so that the dreams of the entire people had to die. As one peasant said, “Instead of seeing us as Communist subversives, the U.S. should see us as a people struggling to survive.”

“It seems that the American people need the rush of a regular patriotic-fix to maintain enthusiasm for the man occupying the White House.” We berate today’s Germans for wanting peace over joining our imperial military adventures in the Middle East, instead of thanking them for morally moving beyond war and bullying. Yemen today is a hell on earth. Yemen once voted against the U.S. in the UN and James Baker said, “this will turn out to be the most expensive vote they will ever cast.” Yemen is still paying hugely for defying the top bully on the global playground. In Iraq, this is what America did: “Tanks pulling plows moved along side of the trenches, firing into the Iraqi soldiers inside the trenches as the plows covered them with mounds of sand. Thousands were buried, dead, wounded, or alive.” No one can read this book without understanding that given the facts of what we’ve done, America cannot POSSIBLY always mean well. The 12 years of sanctions in Iraq was called by national security advisor Samuel Berger, the most pervasive sanctions ever imposed on a nation in the history of mankind.” The U.S. betrays the Kurdish people in Iraq twice. President Carter dared to say in an election year that the Soviet Union (and not the U.S.) was “the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War.” To start the Afghan War against the Russians, you had to be willing to destroy Afghanistan as well as lose more than three billion dollars of taxpayer money. A lot of U.S. arms falls into the wrong hands according to Tim Weiner; eight passenger planes were shot down by Mujahedeen with U.S. weaponry. This book exposes all the crimes of Jimmy Carter who liberals adore because AFTER he was president, he started developing morals about clear war crimes. Germany invades Poland in 1939 pre-emptively – it was called a war crime. Japan attacks Pearl Harbor in 1941 pre-emptively – it was called a war crime. But when U.S. invades ANYWHERE pre-emptively, it can never be called, even for a second, a war crime. Explain that… As Bill eloquently says, “The whole thing had been a con game. There never had been an International Communist Conspiracy. The enemy was, and remains, any government or movement, or even individual that stands in the way of the expansion of the American Empire.”

Instead of believing that American Foreign Policy always means well, Bill Blum shows us that since WWII, the U.S. has 1. “overthrown more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically elected. 2. grossed interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries. 3. attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders. 4. dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries. 5. attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement fighting against an intolerable regime in 20 countries.” This is one of the most important books ever written, and Noam Chomsky also loves this one!

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

An essential read for any US Citizen. Unfortunately, few of us will read it.

[Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you think you have a good grasp of history and US foreign policy, read this book to see how you may not have been told/taught the entire story. This book chronicles US intervention, always in the name of 'peace, democracy, and human rights' in countries all over the globe. Ostensibly the US was fighting communism (now terrorism); the reality is that it was in support of corporatism. Meticulously researched (although I thought there were some assertions that should have had an end note), this isn't the history you learned in school.

[Thomas Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II, William Blum, updated edition 2014, 471 pages, Dewey 327.1273 B625k 2014, ISBN 9781783601776


1945-1994 (with a few updates to 2014): Comprehensive, concise, matter-of-fact reports of each case, some with newly declassified or uncovered information. Fifty-six grim chapters. Three appendices: clandestine financing, U.S. military attacks 1798-1945, U.S. Government assassination plots.


The U.S. has sabotaged /every/ socialist experiment everywhere in the world. p. 20.

For all of this information that has made its way into popular consciousness, or into school texts, encyclopedias, or other standard reference works, there might as well exist strict censorship in the United States. p. 15.

Our fear that communism might someday take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anticommunism already has. --Michael Parenti. p. 7

In 1918, barons of American capital waged war against communism for its threat to their wealth. p. 10.

By 1945, Americans had absorbed 25 years of anticommunist venom. Anticommunism lived, independent of its capitalist father. "Good Americans vs. communist evil" had graduated from cynical propaganda to U.S. foreign policy. p. 11.

Saint George and the dragon needs a dragon. U.S. claims of a Soviet threat were all lies. p. 19. The U.S. knew the Soviets would not attack. But the U.S. continued its military build-up and cold-war propaganda. p. 119.

CIA officers behaved as if they were British colonial governors, and all the world was India. p. 149.

The Reagan administration transferred vast wealth from the poor to the rich, partly by huge increases in the military budget. p. 283.

This is the best book on the topic, according to Noam Chomsky.

Imperialism abroad leads to despotism at home. p. 383.




The U.S. massacred Filipinos after the two countries together defeated Spain. In WWII, the U.S. crushed the Filipino anti-Japanese resistance army, occupied the country, supported a corrupt government, and forced lucrative trading concessions to U.S. interests. pp. 39-44.

The U.S.-puppet government killed 100,000 South Koreans on /suspicion/ of opposing the government. pp. 51-52. The U.S. destroyed Korea, bombing and napalming. Why? Because there was a communist side to the civil war. p. 55.

Western recruitment of East German professionals and skilled workers led to the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. p. 63. The U.S. targeted 200 leading West German Social Democrats to be killed, for being willing to coexist with the Soviet bloc. p. 64.

The CIA persuaded Iranian military officers to overthrow their government in 1953, installing the Shah. He permitted the U.S. to build military bases; permitted profiteering Western oil companies; instituted a secret police force that imprisoned and killed thousands of dissenters. The U.S. lavished military aid on the Shah, used against the civilian population. pp. 64-72.

Guatemala, 1953-1954. 2.2% of landowners owned 70% of the land. Annual per-capita income of agricultural workers was $87. Before the revolution of 1944, which overthrew the Ubico dictatorship, the army roped laborers together for delivery to lowland farms, to be kept in debt slavery by the landowners. p. 74.

President Árbenz offered United Fruit (now Chiquita), $525,000, its own assessed valuation for tax purposes, for some of its unused land; the company wanted $16 million.

United Fruit owned Guatemala's rail, telephone, and telegraph facilities, administered its only important Atlantic harbor, monopolized banana exports.

Top men in Eisenhower's administration had financial interests in United Fruit. p. 75.

A U.S. disinformation campaign persuaded Guatemalan military officers to force President Árbenz to resign. p. 80.

The U.S. demanded that many Guatemalan leaders be killed, "because they're communists." When Guatemala's new president refused, the CIA bombed Guatemala.

Eisenhower's team installed Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas as president. He arrested thousands on suspicion of communist activity, tortured and killed many. He gave United Fruit its land back. Labor-union leaders were murdered. Castillo Armas disenfranchised 3/4 of Guatemala's voters, outlawed political parties, labor unions, and peasant organizations, closed opposition newspapers. p. 81.

The U.S. overthrow of Guatemala convinced Che Guevara that armed struggle was the only path to justice. p. 82.

The "anticommunist" terror would continue in Guatemala for over 40 years. p. 83.

[The U.S. spent far more money destroying Guatemala and Guatemalans than United Fruit claimed Árbenz took from them.]

Books on Guatemala:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...

Indonesia 1957-1958. President Sukarno organized a conference of underdeveloped-world countries in 1955 at Bandung, Indonesia, proclaiming neutrality. The CIA tried to overthrow him, killing hundreds of Indonesians. Sukarno was finally overthrown in 1965. pp. 99-103.

Vietnam, 1950-1973. To Truman, a communist government was intolerable. p. 122. Ho Chi Minh would've been elected president of a united Vietnam. So with Eisenhower's OK, South Vietnamese president Diem cancelled the election. p. 126.

The U.S. stopped fighting Vietnam in 1973, but embargoed all trade and assistance until 1994. Tens of millions of gallons of herbicides, including dioxin, the most toxic man-made substance, continue to poison the Vietnamese. pp. 132-133.

Cambodia, 1955-1973. Prince Sihanouk refused to join SEATO, the U.S. anticommunist military alliance. He was no communist, but had no quarrel with his neighbors. The CIA finally succeeded in overthrowing Sihanouk in 1970. The overthrow started a 5-year war, the U.S. and its Cambodian vassal against the Khmer Rouge. p. 137. The U.S. bombed Cambodia to dust after the end of the Vietnam war, destroying the country, leaving 2 million Cambodians homeless. After the Khmer Rouge won the war in 1975, the U.S. supported them. p. 139.

The U.S. dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs on the people of Laos, 1965-1973. p. 144. Because the Pathet Lao were led by people the State Department categorized as "communist." p. 140.

Congo's first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, wanted Congo to be independent. Top Eisenhower men had financial interests in Congo minerals. p. 157. CIA director Allen Dulles ordered Lumumba's assassination, probably on Eisenhower's orders. p. 158. After Lumumba's murder, the U.S. military and CIA supported opposite sides in Congo's civil war. p. 159. Mobutu became dictator, brutalized and impoverished his people, and cooperated with the CIA and Western mining interests. p. 162.

The U.S. overthrew the Brazilian government in 1964, beginning a 20-year dictatorship that aided U.S. efforts to overthrow the governments of the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, and Chile. p. 170. The U.S. funded Brazil's torture and death squads. p. 171.

The CIA and U.S. military armed, trained, and led Peru's military to crush insurgencies aimed at land reform. Peasants averaged 500 calories a day. 1960-1965. pp. 172-174.

The CIA and U.S. military occupied the Dominican Republic, 1960-1966, eventually scaring the Domicans into submitting to a U.S.-business-friendly government. pp. 175-184.

Cuba, 1959-1980s. The CIA spent $50 million/yr. in the 1960s sending Cuban exiles back to Cuba to sabotage and murder, to try to damage and discredit the socialist experiment. The total U.S. trade and credit embargo against Cuba continues to this day. p. 187. [Noam Chomsky explains the embargo in Rogue States, 2000:
https://chomsky.info/roguestates03/ ] Cuba became what the U.S. feared: a good example. Land reform, education, medical care, no death squads. p. 191.

Indonesia 1965. U.S. diplomats listed thousands of suspected communists, for the Indonesian army to kill. p. 194.

Ghana 1966. President Kwame Nkrumah published a book, /Neo-Colonialism--The Last Stage of Imperialism/. The CIA then overthrew him. p. 198.

Uruguay 1964-1970. The CIA trained Uruguayan police in torture and assassination, and supplied explosives for their death squads. p. 201. From 1972 to 1983, Uruguay's dictatorship had the most political prisoners per capita in the world, all tortured. p. 203.

Chile 1964-1973. The CIA spent vast sums influencing the 1964 Chilean election, preventing Salvador Allende from winning the presidency that year. pp. 206-208. Allende's program would've included income redistribution (the top 2% got 46% of the income), to nationalize copper mining, and agrarian reform. p. 208. Allende won in 1970, despite heavy CIA propaganda and the murder of the Chilean military commander-in-chief. p. 210.

The U.S. then prevented imports and bank loans from reaching Chile, funded and trained the Chilean military, hoping for a coup, and bankrolled labor strikers so strikes could be prolonged. p. 211. The CIA- and U.S.-military-sponsored Chilean military coup brought down Allende in 1973, succeeded by a murderous, authoritarian regime. p. 214.

Greece 1964-1974. A CIA agent became prime minister of Greece in 1967. p. 218. Thousands of Greeks were tortured under the new regime.

Bolivia 1964-1975. With U.S. help, a military coup installed a brutal right-wing government. p. 228.

Guatemala 1962-1980s (postscripts to 1995). A few hundred families possess almost all arable land. Three-quarters of the people are malnourished. Almost half the children die before age 5. The U.S. lavished arms, training, and assistance to a succession of brutal dictators, who unleashed a bloodbath to keep it that way. pp. 229-239.

Australia 1973-1975. Australia's Labour government objected to the CIA's use of Australia and Australians to commit genocide in East Timor and Southeast Asia, overthrow governments in Greece and Chile, and surveil the world, including Australia and Australians, without the knowledge or consent of the Australian government. The British queen's appointed governor general--who was CIA's man--dismissed the Australian government. pp. 244-249.

Angola 1975-1980s. The CIA fomented, fought in, and prevented the end of a civil war in Angola, to no purpose. Kissinger and the CIA lied to Congress and the media, and to the Angolan client tribe, about everything. The Soviet-supported tribe won the war. The world did not end. American oil companies continued to profit there. Reagan, though, restarted CIA and military attempts to destroy the Angolan government. pp. 249-257.

The CIA located Nelson Mandela for the South African government in 1962, which then imprisoned him for 28 years. p. 253.

Zaire 1975-1978. Purposeless U.S. intervention in civil war. pp. 257-263.

Jamaica 1976-1980. The Jamaican government taxed bauxite extraction. The CIA responded with violence, mass murder of Jamaicans by poisoning rice and flour, fomenting labor unrest, economic destabilization, and assassination attempts. pp. 263-267.

Seychelles 1979-1981. pp. 267-269. The CIA tried to overthrow the Seychelles government, out of concern that Seychelles might not renew the U.S. lease of a military base.

Grenada 1979-1984. pp. 269-277. A socialist government presented the danger of a good example. The U.S. unleashed indiscriminate death and destruction on the tiny island, occupied it indefinitely, and ensured an authoritarian government.

Morocco 1983. pp. 278-279. CIA client state Morocco assassinated one of its generals for advocating closer relations with France, which made the CIA unhappy.

Suriname, 1982-1984. pp. 279-280. Reagan's CIA tried to overthrow the Suriname government, on unsubstantiated claims of Cuban influence there.

Libya, 1981-1989. pp. 280-289. The Reagan administration bombed Libya, shot down Libyan jets, destroyed Libyan ships. The Reagan administration told outrageous lies about alleged Libyan crimes. Qaddafi's crime in Reagan's eyes was, he supported the /wrong/ terrorist groups. (The one terrorist group both men supported was the Afghanistani Moujahedeen.) But even when Qaddafi stopped supporting terrorist groups, and adopted business-friendly policies, the U.S. maintained its crusade against him. He had value as an enemy. pp. 283.

Nicaragua 1978-1990. pp. 290-305. In 1979, the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza kleptocracy, installed by the U.S. military in 1933. In 1979, two-thirds of the population earned less than $300 per year. Jimmy Carter authorized the CIA to give money and other support to the Sandinistas' opponents. The Reagan administration stopped international bank loans to Nicaragua, slashed sugar imports by 90%, destroyed fuel depots and pipelines, destroyed ports and ships coming to and from Nicaragua, destroyed agricultural infrastructure and produce, destroyed roads, bridges, trucks, houses. The U.S. provided the formerly small-time "contra" thugs with military planes, landing strips, docks, radar stations, training, reconnaissance, surveillance. The contras destroyed schools, health centers, agricultural cooperatives, community centers. The contras killed 9,000 Nicaraguans, 1981-1984, as the CIA taught them to. The Reagan administration blocked all attempts to make peace between the contras and the Nicaraguan government.

Panama, 1969-1991. Noriega had been /our/ thug. When he started getting independent, the G.H.W. Bush regime invaded Panama, killed a lot of people, installed a puppet government, left the economy in shambles, drug-traffickers and money-launderers freer than ever. pp. 305-314.

Bulgaria 1990/Albania 1991. pp. 314-320. The socialist government won the Bulgarian elections. So the U.S. poured money into the opposition, which staged strikes and demonstrations, until the socialist prime minister resigned. The U.S. won banker-friendly policies in Bulgaria: freely-rising prices, shortages of everything, IMF and World Bank demands for ever-tighter belts. Living conditions are bad: communism was "the good old days:" people had housing, employment, and enough to eat. The U.S. made sure socialism would have no chance to succeed, though capitalism fails. Same story in Albania.

Iraq 1990-1991. pp. 320-338. Iraq seems to have been goaded into attacking Kuwait, so the U.S. would have reason to attack Iraq. pp. 323-324. U.S. senators immediately called for more military spending, despite the end of the cold war. pp. 325-326. The U.S. curtailed aid to Yemen for voting in the U.N. to disapprove of the coming U.S. attack on Iraq. p. 327. The U.S. put more than 500,000 troops in the Gulf area--100,000 more than in Europe at any time in the Cold War. p. 328. The U.S. Army insisted on a ground war; this prolonged the war; the bombing was already decisive. p. 328. The U.S. had armed both Iraq and Iran in the Iran-Iraq war, so they would inflict maximum damage on each other. p. 332. The U.S. targeted many nonmilitary facilities, and slaughtered refugees trying to leave Iraq. p. 336. Bomb damage and the U.S. embargo dropped electricity to 3 to 4% of prewar level, water to 5%, oil production negligible, food distribution devastated, sewage system collapsed, flooding houses with raw sewage, gastroenteritis and extreme malnutrition prevalent. Water-borne disease and malnutrition killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis after the war. p. 335.

Afghanistan 1979-1992. pp. 338-352. The Carter administration began supporting Afghan Islamic fundamentalists--despite their penchant for kidnapping U.S. embassy personnel and exploding airliners--to try to destroy the fledgling socialist Afghan government. pp. 338-345. The Afghan government then invited the Soviet Army's help--first time since WWII the Soviets fought outside the USSR. p. 344. The U.S. was eager to fight to the last Afghan to give the Soviets a Vietnam-style defeat. pp. 345-346. The Soviets did suffer a bleeding in Afghanistan, leaving in 1989. But the U.S. kept arming Islamist terrorists. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the CIA's anti-aircraft guns, missiles, rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47 automatic rifles, ammunition and mines were stolen by Pakistani Army officers or sold to Iranians or to criminals. pp. 348-350. As little as 20% of the arms reached the intended Islamist terrorists. The Iranian military then used U.S. missiles against U.S. aircraft. The CIA helped Islamist terrorists transport heroin: Afghanistan supplied 75% of Western Europe's heroin, and 1/3 to 1/2 of heroin to the U.S. p. 351.

The war killed more than a million Afghanis, disabled 3 million, made 5 million refugees: in total about half the population. Destroyed the government, destroyed the country. p. 351.

Veteran Moujahedeen terrorists exploded a bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center in New York in 1993, that only just failed to demolish the building. p. 352.

The Islamists won. Afghanistan had an Islamist government for the first time since it became independent in the mid-1700s. And this was an anti-modernity perversion of Islam. pp. 351-352.

Out of the Moujahedeen came Al Qaeda. p. 388.

El Salvador 1980-1994. pp. 352-369. El Salvador since 1932 has suffered a succession of U.S.-approved dictatorships, serving 14 ruling families, while people starve. p. 353. The CIA aids death squads. p. 354. The government, with U.S. help, began land reform: troops told workers the land was theirs, elect leaders. Troops then killed the leaders. Carter, Reagan, and G.H.W. Bush kept the murderous government armed, supplied, and trained. pp. 356-358. Reagan lied to Congress to keep the funding coming. p. 366.

Haiti 1986-1994. pp.
370-382. Most U.S. military aid to the Duvalier dictatorships was covertly routed through Israel. p. 370. The Duvaliers' yet-more-murderous successors enjoy U.S. Government approval. A popular priest, President Aristide, was deposed by the military with U.S. complicity. As a "leftist," he antagonized U.S. power centers. p. 375. The U.S. and international financial institutions ensure that Haiti is ruled so as to enrich the rich and impoverish the poor. p. 382.

The U.S. killed a 1992 agreement among Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs for a unified state. p. 389.


Your tax dollars at work!


More:

Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, William Blum, chapter 17.

The System: An Insider's Life in Soviet Politics, Georgi Arbatov, 1992:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
https://search.library.wisc.edu/searc..."

Books on neocolonialism:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...

Prensa Latina (Cuba): https://www.prensa-latina.cu

[John Petersen]

Should be mandatory reading in all US high school history classes.

[Chris Chester · Rating 4 out of 5]

A systematic chronicle of more than 50 documented U.S. interventions into the affairs of countries across the globe, including but not limited to China, Italy, Germany, The Philippines, Korea, Albania, Iran, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Syria, Indonesia, British Guiana, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Haiti, France, Ecuador, Congo, Brazil, Peru, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Gana, Uruguay, Chile, Greece, Bolivia, Iraq, Australia, Angola, Zaire, Jamaica, Grenada, Morocco, Suriname, Libya, Nicaragua, Panama.

Obviously, the circumstances and level of U.S. involvement varies in every case and every intervention you talk about. Some are borderline cases of real politik gone a bit too far, but many more are blatant campaigns of destruction built on very willful lies.

As a child of the 90s, my instruction about U.S. military history was basically: WWII, then Korea, then Vietnam, Desert Storm, all with a mostly non-violent though potentially disastrous Cold War looming in the background.

The tapestry that Blum weaves with these disparate stories is quite different. It is a 20th century virtually defined by American interference and warmongering. In the same way that the nebulous threat of Islamic fundamentalism is used to justify wars today in the middle east, it's clear that the Cold War communism phobia was a coordinated bit of hand-waving to distract the voting public from actions taken in the interest of American commercialism and capitalist expansion. This includes the often brutal client regimes put in place to facilitate the conditions for this economic exploitation.

In most cases, the governments that were being toppled by the CIA and the Pentagon were less dominoes in the expansion of international communism than they were earnest attempts for post-colonial states to implement badly-needed social and land reforms. Countries that didn't want to align with either the Soviet Union or the United States, but which wanted merely to focus on their own internal affairs, were targeted for destruction. Many of them were also democratically elected, which more than anything exposes the truth of the lie that the United States was attempting to export American values.

What would be funny if it wasn't so tragic is the tremendous failure rate of CIA interventions. Often by installing right-wing client regimes, they wind up radicalizing opposition groups, like in Iran for example. Or sometimes the mad dogs that they train, like the mujaheddin in Afghanistan, wind up turning on the United States in spectacular ways.

Contemporary news items like the release of the CIA torture report suddenly don't seem quite so surprising when viewed in the context of decades of political corruption, mass murder, and repression. Blum's exhaustive research makes this conclusion nearly inevitable.

Just in terms of pure readability, I have to confess that this book is somewhat wanting. I liked that it was broken up into specific interventions that could be consumed in anywhere from 20-40 minutes. But the staccato nature of the writing, jumping from place to place does get in the way of a larger narrative that he could tell.

I could also have done without some of Blum's more editorial comments and sarcasm at various points. For such an important book, which could go a long way towards changing peoples' minds about American foreign policy, it just doesn't pay to be flippant.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

An ugly, truthful, no holds barred report on the actions the US Military and CIA have taken on world interestes since WWII. Astounding, hardly believable, this is depressing but essential reading.

[Jesse Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

The number of atrocities committed by the CIA and US military since WWII is so large that the author was only able to dedicate a few pages to each of their largest-scale interventions here. Blum covers everything from US collaboration with fascists & mobsters in post-war Italy, to the CIA installing brutal dictators in Guatemala and Iran, to US-backed death squads in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Indonesia ... While brief, Blum's summaries of these events are very useful as a launching point for more in-depth investigations.

I love sharing this book with Democratic party hacks who talk as if George Bush had tarnished an otherwise respectable nation with his horrible war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. What Blum clearly demonstrates is that Bush (and now Obama) was simply continuing a decades-long pattern (centuries, really .. but that's beyond the scope of this book) of vicious US imperialism that has slaughtered millions of people all over the world.

If someone asked me for my favorite history of US foreign policy in the 20th century, I would without hesitation offer them this book.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Without reading Killing Hope, or other books like it, it is impossible to understand the way the US has shaped the world over the last 75 years. After reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Open Veins of Latin America, and Killing Hope, it is hard to come up with a time in US history when it was not actively engaged in a war and/or genocide somewhere. In the future the Cold War should be called the long American holocaust, or something similar that better describes the horrors the US inflicted, and continues to inflict, in the Global South.

[Dale · Rating 4 out of 5]

You don't have to be a popular, democratically elected government to be overthrown by the CIA - but it helps. In the years since WWII the CIA has developed an impressive and effective playbook, one that they have refined through long practice, designed specifically to oust elected leaders considered unfriendly to US business interests.

In this book, Blum walks us through the 50 or so coups, political manipulation, and invasions engineered by the CIA and by the US military in countries in every region of the world, beginning with China, Greece, and Italy immediately after the war.

I was at least somewhat familiar with most of the coups described in the book, but there were a few surprises - Australia in the mid 70s was the most shocking. Gough Whitlam, the prime minister of Australia, attempted to rein in the security state and exercise civilian control over it - very naive, and doomed to failure. The CIA put heavy pressure on the governor-general of Australia to dissolve parliament and remove Whitlam from office - and what the CIA wants, the CIA gets, more often than not.

During the entire period of the cold war (the subject of roughly 90% of this book), as the US overthrew, disrupted, and invaded one country after another, the US press parroted State Department propaganda, claiming continuously and without evidence that it was really International Communism that posed the threat to Free Capitalist Democracies everywhere. In most cases where CIA or military involvement couldn't be completely hidden, the official line was that US intervention was necessary to counter communist "infiltrators". Infiltrators were coming out of the woodwork, it seemed, and were so skilled at deception that actual evidence of their existence was seldom offered.

The book only covers the period up to the mid 90s - an accounting of the intervening 18 years would fill another 100 or so pages. But, no matter: the playbook hasn't changed very much, other than an increasing reliance on private "contractors" to carry out the wet work.

[Carson Stones · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book could have been so good but William Blum desperately needed a better editor. The whole book reads like an extended series of blog posts from the 90s without any kind of unifying storyline to pull it all together. While the table of contents for Killing Hope is the best summary I've come across for US interventions around the world since 1945 and the appendix of US military interventions since 1798 is essential reading, I would strongly recommend supplementing this book with other histories of the Cold War (like Odd Arne Westad's The Global Cold War) or even one off books about specific invasions (like Steve Coll's Ghost Wars about the CIA in Afghanistan or Nick Cullather's Secret History about Operation PBSuccess in Guatemala) to read alongside Blum's series of wikipedia-esque essays. Again, there's nothing wrong with each chapter and I'm not criticizing his research or methodology, my critique is simply that this book is unreadable from cover to cover for anyone other than the most diehard anti-interventionists. With this series of essays, Blum makes no attempt to reach beyond the Noam Chomsky/Oliver Stone/Howard Zinn crowd and I would never recommend this book to my normie friends who wanted to learn more about the subject of US interventions from 1945-2003.

[Collin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well the only reason I am giving this book 3 stars is because of the wealth of information that it contains about US interventionism since the 50s. Every turn of the page I was learning something new. That being said each chapter is a different place, different people, at a different time, but the same story. The info about vietnam and cuba was interesting, but after 300ish pages of reading about how a left leaning liberal was democratically elected and subsequently overthrown via CIA backed coups gets a bit repetitive/depressing. I can't imagine the amount of research that went into this book. Not a conspiracy theory book, though it does read like one. Finally, what irritated me about this book was how the author peppered with latin phrases. So apparently we, as the readers, have the responsibility of knowing latin prior to reading this book. So that being said I find the author on the pretentious side. This goes on the shelf with Gandhi as books that beat me.

[Elijah Coutts · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is sad how successful the propaganda has been surrounding these events to the point where the state department view is the default. In reality, the US has spent the last 70+ years crushing any attempts to move away from its imperialism, with the full support of its western lapdogs. All this justified to the public as fights against the evils of Communism and Soviet control, which when looked into are not even existent 9 times out of 10. We in the west are appalled when nations on the end of CIA attack dare to not have the US approved “free press” and we arrogantly look down upon successful attempts to detach from western imperialism.

[Rachel Archelaus · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so important! If you aren't aware of how the US government works behind the scenes regarding foreign policy, you MUST read this book. It was a complete eye opener and I will never think of this country the same way. Blum does a great job of relaying the facts while making the read enjoyable. There are some tough moments, though. Very real, very necessary to know.

[Gage Hoefer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Physically revolting to read. A hearty [redacted] to all past, current, and future members of the CIA, NSC, NSA, DoD, and the multitude of other positions within the US state department. The US is a malignant tumor on the modern day world.

[Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

[Nick Backas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This took me a long time to finish as I kept getting pulled down rabbit holes on Wikipedia searching for more background context to the events described in this book. Not a breezy read or a necessarily enjoyable one, but an outstanding, authoritative collection of postwar US atrocities, and one that I would recommend to anyone.

While this is primarily a collection of primary and secondary sources, the overarching thesis, delved into most thoroughly in the introduction and conclusion of the book, is that anti-communism served as a quasi-religious pretext for the US to violate basic human rights, repeatedly and without provocation, around the world. Upon the downfall of the USSR, anti-communism gave way to a more general and malleable "anti-anti-americanism" which has been used as justification for more wars and coups.

I greatly appreciate William Blum's ability to present the facts without sensationalizing them, to make clear the delineation between truth and rumor, all while also being upfront about his perspective, which I think is what prevents the reader from growing numb. It serves as a great example, I aspire to see the world as clearly as he did.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

William Blum’s book contains a lot of useful information about the American military’s many interventions in the decades after the Second World War. This is information all Americans should know, but sadly don’t. That being said, this book feels more like a collection of articles, with the only real overarching analysis book ending the experience. This made it an absolute slog to read, if you couldn’t tell by the fact that it took me over a year to finish. I also have to say that Blum’s sarcasm was at times eye-rolling, and many of his conclusions felt shaky. I agree with most of his points, but this book definitely has some obvious blind spots. So much of his analysis exists without historical context. This is an important book, but for a more nuanced analysis of the CIA’s history, I’d recommend Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Slowly read through this one for just under a year now and finally finished it. Every incident in here is insane, be they the installations of fascist dictators, distributions of propaganda, using mythology of certain cultures against them, assassinations and attempted ones, etc. The fact that just between WWII and the late 90s, the US conducted all of these operations (and these were just the documented ones), proves in the lie of American Exceptionalism. Even if you don't read every entry, this books is worth looking through to see a few instances of what we've done. Plus, the Introduction and the new chapter in the updated edition are very worth reading on their own.

[Noah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very important if you want to learn about the torture, murder, and the destruction of democracy done by the United States government all over the world in the name of "anti-communism". The author does not shy away from talking about the issues with the groups being targeted in this piece, but I don't know how anyone reads this and comes away from it thinking that the USA has done unrepudiated evil to millions across the world. Extremely well-researched book that shows the lie that was the Cold War.

[Allenhuss]

🍉I'm not leaving a ☆ review bc I skipped around and read parts of this book. But damn. Absolutely great for when you want all your fears confirmed. The chapter about Panama, Double-crossing our drug supplier, was gut-wrenching.

Fav quote:

🍉"The de facto censorship which leaves so many Americans functionally illiterate about the history of US foreign affairs may be all the more effective because it is not official, heavy-handed or conspiratorial, but woven artlessly into the fabric of education and media. No conspiracy is needed."🍉

[jas · Rating 5 out of 5]

wtf

ps i started this book about a month ago. it’s very dense and took a while to get through. didn’t realize how topical it would be. and yes of course the trump administration should be getting rightful heat for what they’re doing in venezuela, but democrats need to realize that this type of cia action has been occurring regardless of party or political affiliation for a long long time

[Tam Linton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Feel like I'm being overly generous with some of the 5 star ratings but potentially just been blessed with some great books of late.

Horrifying and brilliant at the same time. If the effort, time and resources spent by the CIA was put into something more positive than their portfolio of coups, systematic destabalisation and general meddling in foreign affairs we'd live in a considerably better world. Each chapter feels like it can't get worse.. and then it does.