‘Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower’. By William Blum. (Zed Books, 2002)
The name William Blum will not be familiar to many readers in Britain and the majority of those in the USA who learn about him will probably despise him as a traitor. He was intending to make a career in the State Department but found that he could not accept America’s policy in the Vietnam war and left the service. True-blue Americans might have let this “weakness” pass by condemning him as a “wimp”, but he then committed the unpardonable sin of starting to disclose the truth about the shadier actions of their glorious government . He wrote about the members of the CIA and followed that up by an on-the-spot exposure of their involvement in the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile. Soon afterwards he extended his searches to CIA staff and activities in Europe.
The recent up-date of his book Rogue State, first published in 2000, collects together not only his wide and carefully researched exposure of CIA tricks and misdeeds worldwide. It also looks in devastating detail at a whole range of US government actions and policies and at the totally amoral and illegal methods used to carry them out. Lying, murder, criminal interference in elections and other affairs of nations across the globe, covert and overt terrorism, corruption of the UN, continuous brainwashing of its own electorate… The list is almost endless; and all this carried out under the most cynical worldwide propaganda umbrella of “developing democracy” and spreading the “noblest civilised values”.
Many of us will already know, or suspect, some of what Blum has to say, but the sheer power of his detailed exposures makes his book , if not a “must”, a very fine source of ammunition against the present leader of world capitalism, in fact of the world. His listing (with comments) of US global interventions since 1945 and his detailing of little-known US voting at the UN General Assembly over a period of about ten years; these alone are worth the cost of the book.
The slight weakness from a socialist viewpoint is his failure to make a strong enough connection between his many trenchant criticisms and their direct link with the capitalist drive for control and profit. He is quite clear about America’s fifty-year long imperialist expansion and all the accompanying hoodwinking of the American people with endless “wicked enemy” propaganda. He has no illusions about 11 September (“after the attack it was Christmas every day for the security establishment and its corporate cohorts”) : and he knows that the US destruction of Afghanistan was carried out to safeguard its proposed oil pipeline to the Indian Ocean. All this is excellent; it’s just a pity that Blum does not add the clincher argument for socialism that, to those who can see, is so implicit in all his facts.
Cyril Oldfield
Blogger's Note:
An earlier edition of this book was reviewed in the September 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard.
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