Rogue State (2000)

Book Review from the September 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rogue State – A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. By William Blum, Common Courage Press, 2000.

For over one hundred years, the United States has presented itself to the world as a bastion of freedom and democracy, a global defender of the weak and helpless against oppression and injustice. For much of this time it allegedly protected us from an International Communist Conspiracy, just as in recent years the US has fought a war against drugs on our behalf. Throughout this period, the US has always pointed out to us the “rogue states”, those countries that posed the international community and the peace they enjoyed the greatest threat, and has selflessly been at the forefront in every attempt to curb their evil ambitions, whether in Korea or Vietnam, the Middle East or Central America.

In reality, the United States has been and remains the United States a rogue state. In his newly-published Rogue State—A Guide to the World’s only Superpower, William Blum goes to great lengths to prove that rather than being “the greatest force for peace”, as one William Clinton would have us believe, the US has employed terrorist tactics throughout the world for decades. In over 300 well researched and well-argued pages, Blum helps put to death the myth that the US is the champion of liberty and human rights.

While the US fought a Cold War to defend us from the Communist threat—”the greatest protection racket since men convinced women that they needed men to protect them”—they relentlessly supported dictators and tyrannical regimes on every continent, from Pol Pot and Suharto to Saddam Hussein and Papa Doc Duvalier. Between 1945 and 1999, this same defender of the global well-being toppled 40 governments and helped crush 30 populist movements, assassinated scores of prominent individuals and perverted elections in every corner of the globe. During this same period the US armed terrorists, trained right-wing guerilla movements in the art of torture and financed armies intent on overthrowing democratically elected governments.

Not content with with employing such tactis outside its frontiers in the interests of its own corporate elite—and many times Blum’s makes this connection—the US has also been ruthless in the treatment of its own citizens as they pursue their American dream. Whilst we’re all at least suspicious of the crimes of governments against their own people, the US, Blum reveals, is guilty here. Just as it could casually use 600,000 of its own military personnel in mustard gas and blister gas tests in the 1940s, so too could the Pentagon calmly announce that 100,000 of its servicemen were exposed to sarin gas during the Gulf War. Not content with experimenting with its cannon fodder, the US has shown the same disrespect for its own civilians in peace time, using them as guinea pigs. It has released zinc cadmium around cities, as well as whooping cough and smallpox bacteria and all manner of chemical concoctions to test the effectiveness of biological warfare. It has released millions of infected mosquitoes and infected oat crops with cereal rust spores. All of this in spite of the fact that the first tenet of the Nuremberg Code, polished up by the US itself in anger at Nazi medical experimentation, states: “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.”

This “land of the free” is where the CIA and FBI will intercept and open domestic and foreign correspondence, where private corporations videotape, bug the offices of and requests urine samples of its own employers, where children are encouraged and enticed with monetary incentives to inform on their parents and fellow pupils, where state troopers enlist hotel workers to spy on guests, where schools ban hundreds of “subversive” books (Huckleberry Finn and Oliver Twist for example) and the FBI urges librarians to report the books taken out by patrons. Blum reveals this and very much more to be the experience of tens of thousands of US citizens.

Blum asks why does the US get away with all this? How can it connive in a global drugs trade, have helped incarcerate Nelson Mandela, increase its global interventions at a time when we’re supposed to be enjoying the benefits of the peace dividend bequeathed by the demise of the Cold War? How are its leaders not brought before international tribunals and charged with human rights violations and its institutions asked to account for themselves?

A major reason, he suggests, is the ongoing love affair with the mystique of America, the world’s adoration of what it perceives to be the relentless devotion to the cause of freedom and human rights that is “America”. And this adoration itself stems from the US as the inventor and perfecter of modern advertising and public relations—its existence as the world’s only information superpower perpetuating that same illusion.. Questioning why so much cruelty is endemic to US foreign policy, Blum relates it to the ”Peter Principle” which states that in a hierarchy every employee rises to their level of incompetence: “in a foreign policy establishment committed to imperialist domination by any means necessary, employees tend to rise to the level of cruelty they can live with”. And being the US means never having to say you’re sorry. As President George Bush once famously commented: “I will never apologise for the USA. I don’t care what the facts are.”

Whatever we may think we know about US foreign and domestic policy, Blum’s work, in all its grotesque detail, shows us it is not folly to imagine the lengths to which capitalism’s executive will go to secure their own interests.

John Bissett