INTRODUCTION TO THE
NEW EDITION
from the book
Killing Hope
by William Blum
In 1993, I came across a review of a book about people who
deny that the Nazi Holocaust actually
occurred. I wrote to the author, a university professor, telling
her that her book made me wonder
whether she knew that an American holocaust had taken place,
and that the denial of it put the
denial of the Nazi one to shame. So great and deep is the
denial of the American holocaust, I
said, that the denyers are not even aware that the claimers
or their claim exist. Yet, a few million
people have died in the American holocaust and many more millions
have been condemned to
lives of misery and torture as a result of US interventions
extending from China and Greece in the
1940s to Afghanistan and Iraq in the 1990s. I enclosed a listing
of these interventions, which is of
course the subject of the present book.
In my letter I also offered to exchange a copy of the earlier
edition of my book for a copy of hers,
but she wrote back informing me that she was not in a position
to do so. And that was all she said.
She didn't ask to see my book. She made no comment whatsoever
about the remainder of my
letter -- the part dealing with denying the American holocaust
-- not even to acknowledge that I
had raised the matter. The irony of a scholar on the subject
of denying the Nazi Holocaust
engaging in such denial about the American holocaust was classic
indeed. I was puzzled why the
good professor had bothered to respond at all.
Clearly, if my thesis could receive such a non-response from
such a person, I and my thesis faced
an extremely steep uphill struggle. In the 1930s, and again
after the war in the 1940s and '50s,
anti-communists of various stripes in the United States tried
their best to expose the crimes of the
Soviet Union, such as the purge trials and the mass murders.
But a strange thing happened. The
truth did not seem to matter. American Communists and fellow
travelers continued to support the
Kremlin. Even allowing for the exaggeration and disinformation
regularly disbursed by the
anti-communists which damaged their credibility, the continued
ignorance and/or denial by the
American leftists is remarkable.
At the close of the Second World War, when the victorious
Allies discovered the German
concentration camps, in some cases German citizens from nearby
towns were brought to the camp
to come face-to-face with the institution, the piles of corpses,
and the still-living skeletal people;
some of the respectable burghers were even forced to bury
the dead. What might be the effect
upon the American psyche if the true-believers and denyers
were compelled to witness the
consequences of the past half-century of US foreign policy
close up? What if all the nice,
clean-cut, wholesome American boys who dropped an infinite
tonnage of bombs, on a dozen
different countries, on people they knew nothing about --
characters in a video game -- had to
come down to earth and look upon and smell the burning flesh?
Our leaders understand how this works. They make it a point
to keep our American eyes away
from our foreign victims as much as possible, even on television.
Before our boys were sent to
Somalia, they were given psychological briefings from military
psychiatrists to prepare them for
the sights of starvation and misery. Our leaders are men not
entirely insensitive. And it is because
the American people see and hear their leaders expressing
the right concern at the right time,
with just the right catch in their throats to convey "I
care!", they see them laughing and telling
jokes, see them with their families, hear them speak of God
and love, of peace and law, of
democracy and freedom -- it is because of such things that
the idea that our government has done
to the world's huddled masses what it did to the Seminoles
has so difficult a time penetrating the
American consciousness. It's like America has an evil twin.
George Bernard Shaw used three concepts to describe the positions
of individuals in Nazi
Germany: intelligence, decency, and Naziism. He argued that
if a person was intelligent, and a
Nazi, he was not decent. If he was decent and a Nazi, he was
not intelligent. And if he was decent
and intelligent, he was not a Nazi.
If, as we're told, the cold war is over and the United States
won, it's proper to ask: What do we
have to show for this victory? In human terms, that is. In
terms of people's lives.
The trillions of dollars spent on the American military machine
instead of on the cities, the
infrastructure, housing, schools, health care, etc., etc.,
did little to improve the quality of life for
the average person in the United States, though it did wonders
for the folks of the
military-industrial-intelligence complex. The M-I-I-C and
their supporters in Congress successfully
fought off the menace of a "peace dividend", and
they show little sign of releasing their death grip
on the society. Many years ago they insisted upon, and they
got, a permanent war economy.
There are, after all, always new enemies out there who threaten
us -- America, the perpetually
aggrieved innocent in a treacherous world. In 1994, defense
contractors began pitching the need
for new advanced aircraft because so many countries of the
world were now equipped with
advanced fighters -- sold to them by the United States --
and "what if one of those ... countries
turns against us?" asked the man from Lockheed.{1} When
Lockheed announced a proposed $10
billion mega-merger with fellow defense giant Martin Marietta,
it put to rest any lingering doubts
about whether "defense conversion" had a future,
collapsing decisively the bull market in
high-tech plowshares.
In the same year, we learned for the first time of the almost-completed
construction of new
headquarters for the super secret National Reconnaissance
Office. This espionage-mentality
throwback to the 1950s dug into taxpayers' pockets for more
than $300 million, but there's a
whole planet out there to fly over and spy on, and ten thousand
file cabinets, million-megabyte
hard disks, and billion-megabyte CD-ROMs waiting to be filled
with photos and maps and other
vital information that hardly anyone will ever look at, and
which will do nothing for people's lives.
A little earlier, the Defense Department was not at all embarrassed
to announce that it needed
funding sufficient to enable it to fight two regional wars
at the same time. In 1978 they were trying
to be prepared to fight only "1 ? wars at once".{2}
Is this just inflation, or is Dr. Strangelove alive
and well at the Pentagon? After the "two-wars" declaration
came the completely manufactured
scare about North Korean nuclear weapons. And so it goes.
Our rulers do their best to make sure
that we shall never be at peace.
Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new
rival, either on the
territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses
a threat on the order of
that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. ... we must account
sufficiently for the
interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage
them from challenging our
leadership or seeking to overturn the established political
and economic order. ... we
must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors
from even aspiring
to a larger regional or global role.
So reads the Pentagon's Planning Guidance for the Fiscal Years
1994-1999.{3} Since the United
States dispatched its breathtaking killing machine to the
Persian Gulf in 1990, the American
people have been treated to this world view on a number of
occasions, along with chest-beating
bragging by high-ranking military and civilian officials about
the US being the world's only
superpower, and assertions like that of former Assistant Secretary
of Defense Richard Armitage
that "the United States alone possesses sufficient moral,
economic, political and military
horsepower to jump-start and drive international efforts to
curb international lawlessness"{4} -- a
manifesto, politically and poetically, on a par with "The
defense of proletarian internationalism is
a sacred duty of each communist and workers' party and of
every Marxist-Leninist."
Why do Washington policy-makers trumpet their strategies,
their victories, and their power so? Is
it because the demise of the communist enemy has left the
M-I-I-C thrashing about for a new
mission, a new raison d'être? At those moments when
their defense mechanisms are stilled, the
more honest among them know that they've been cut off at the
knees. And for this do they trumpet
and cry: "Look! We do have a purpose! With a grand design!"
Why else does the Pentagon make
it all so public? Such policy planning used to be classified
top-secret for 30 years.
The people of Utah and Nevada who lived downwind from the
nuclear test sites don't have too
much to show from the cold war except clusters of cancer;
after 87 open-air tests more fallout had
settled on St. George in Utah than on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
... and the hapless islanders of
Micronesia who were terribly deceived about the H-test fallout;
the Interior Department told the
people of Bikini that they could return to their homes --
provided they ate no home-grown food
until the late 21st century ... and the soldiers who were
forced to watch the tests from too close;
and the uranium miners whose lungs inhaled radon gas; and
the people who lived too close to
the wrong nuclear reactors, Chernobyl in slow motion; and
the unknowing guinea pigs of all the
radiation experiments, injected with plutonium, uranium, radium,
and other nice things ... and the
folks whose brains were washed with LSD, "truth serums",
and other nice things; and the people
of Florida and New York and San Francisco who were secretly
dusted and sprayed and
chemicalized and biologicalized by the CIA and the Army, just
to see what the (bad) effects would
be ... and always, in each case, there were men in Washington
who knew very well about the
dangers of the fallout and the radiation and the germs, but
said nothing; they knew about the
accidents and the leaks, but said nothing; they knew about
it early on, at least as early as 1947:
"It is desired that no document be released which refers
to experiments with humans and might
have adverse effect on public opinion or result in legal suits.
Documents covering such work field
should be classified secret." ... and kindly old Ike
who told the Atomic Energy Commission to keep
the public "confused" with its explanations about
fallout that had caused cancer concern in Utah
... and those that said anything were ignored, or fired.{5}
It was all called national security. The American republic
had been replaced after World War II by
a national security state, answerable to no one, an extra-constitutional
government, secret from
the American people, exempt from congressional oversight,
above the law.
As to what the rest of world, primarily the Third World, derived
from the cold war, the reader is
referred to the pages that follow. It is not a pretty picture.
The end of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe
has meant great tribulation for
the large majority of the citizens, who had better and more
secure lives before the great blind
leap into the raging cold waters of capitalism. Perhaps the
reason Americans have been so eager
to help them -- sending in a small army of industrial, financial
and technical experts, and assorted
cheerleaders, along with all the material goodies -- is their
almost childlike desire to be like us:
they rush to copy our political system, our economic system,
to wear our jeans, drink our Pepsi,
drive our cars, listen to our music, read our novels, publish
our novels, become "entrepreneurs";
they condemn communism, sing paeans to the market, and believe
sincerely that there's no
option other than the one or the other unadulterated; they
confess their sins, abolish the Warsaw
Pact, and plead to join NATO and the European Union. And our
media eat it all up; we squeal with
delight at each new sign of "democracy"; even the
Russians making their first "horror" film is a
newsworthy occasion in the West, like our baby is taking his
first steps; our precocious babies we
call "pro-democracy", the ugly little infants who
still don't get it we call "hard-line"; we pooh-pooh
our babies' setbacks, they're only growing pains, they have
to learn how to live with freedom ...
and it all makes us feel like we actually won something in
the cold war; a validation of sorts. It
ain't much, but it may be all there is.
At least that's how it was the first couple of years or so
of reform. Now, the thought may be slowly
penetrating that our baby is not growing normally, he's developing
our worst habits, including
huge gaps in wealth and all kinds of criminal rackets he never
even knew existed; at times he
even yearns for the good ol' days ...
A series of graffiti scrawled on a Warsaw building:
"Bring back communism!"
"We never had communism!"
"Then bring back what we had!"{6}
Is this malaise in the genes, or in the system? But there's
no turning back, we insist -- they
haven't privatized enough yet, the shock therapy wasn't shocking
enough. The quality of
individual lives matters little, so long as the overall numbers
and the graphs drawn up by the boys
from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and
the Harvard and Washington think-
tanks look good. It doesn't bother a ruling elite very much,
noted Eduardo Galeano, "that politics
be democratic so long as the economy is not."
The Stalinists in the Soviet Union used to denounce international
financial organizations like the
World Bank and the IMF as agencies by which the rich imperialist
nations kept the poor countries
in servitude. Now that Russia and its former fellow republics
have thrown themselves on the
mercy of these institutions, the born-again capitalists may
decide that the Stalinists were right
after all.
notes
We've also been told that it was the relentlessly tough anti-communist
policies of the Reagan
Administration with its heated-up arms race that led to the
collapse and reformation of the Soviet
Union and its satellites. American history books may have
already begun to chisel this thesis into
marble. The Tories in Great Britain say that Margaret Thatcher
and her unflinching policies
contributed to the miracle as well. The East Germans were
believers too. When Ronald Reagan
visited East Berlin, the people there cheered him and thanked
him "for his role in liberating the
East". Even some leftist analysts, particularly those
of a conspiracy bent, are believers.
But this view is not universally held.
Long the leading Soviet expert on the United States, Georgi
Arbatov, head of the Moscow-based
Institute for the Study of the U.S.A. and Canada, wrote his
memoirs in 1992. A Los Angeles
Times book review by Robert Scheer summed up a portion of
it:
Arbatov understood all too well the failings of Soviet totalitarianism
in comparison to
the economy and politics of the West. It is clear from this
candid and nuanced memoir
that the movement for change had been developing steadily
inside the highest
corridors of power ever since the death of Stalin. Arbatov
not only provides
considerable evidence for the controversial notion that this
change would have come
about without foreign pressure, he insists that the U.S. military
buildup during the
Reagan years actually impeded this development.{7}
George F. Kennan agrees. The former US ambassador to the Soviet
Union, and father of the
theory of "containment" of the same country, asserts
that "the suggestion that any United States
administration had the power to influence decisively the course
of a tremendous domestic
political upheaval in another great country on another side
of the globe is simply childish." He
contends that the extreme militarization of American policy
strengthened hard-liners in the Soviet
Union. "Thus the general effect of Cold War extremism
was to delay rather than hasten the great
change that overtook the Soviet Union."{8}
Though the arms-race spending undoubtedly damaged the fabric
of the Soviet civilian economy
and society even more than it did in the United States, this
had been going on for 40 years by the
time Mikhail Gorbachev came to power without the slightest
hint of impending doom. Gorbachev's
close adviser, Aleksandr Yakovlev, when asked whether the
Reagan administration's higher
military spending, combined with its "Evil Empire"
rhetoric, forced the Soviet Union into a more
conciliatory position, responded:
It played no role. None. I can tell you that with the fullest
responsibility. Gorbachev
and I were ready for changes in our policy regardless of whether
the American
president was Reagan, or Kennedy, or someone even more liberal.
It was clear that
our military spending was enormous and we had to reduce it.{9}
Understandably, some Russians might be reluctant to admit
that they were forced to make
revolutionary changes by their arch enemy, to admit that they
lost the cold war. However, on this
question we don't have to rely on the opinion of any individual,
Russian or American. We merely
have to look at the historical facts.
From the late 1940s to around the mid-1960s, it was an American
policy objective to instigate the
downfall of the Soviet government as well as several Eastern
European regimes. Many hundreds
of Russian exiles were organized, trained and equipped by
the CIA, then sneaked back into their
homeland to set up espionage rings, to stir up armed political
struggle, and to carry out acts of
assassination and sabotage, such as derailing trains, wrecking
bridges, damaging arms factories
and power plants, and so on. The Soviet government, which
captured many of these men, was of
course fully aware of who was behind all this.
Compared to this policy, that of the Reagan administration
could be categorized as one of virtual
capitulation. Yet what were the fruits of this ultra-tough
anti-communist policy? Repeated serious
confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union
in Berlin, Cuba and elsewhere,
the Soviet interventions into Hungary and Czechoslovakia,
creation of the Warsaw Pact (in direct
reaction to NATO), no glasnost, no perestroika, only pervasive
suspicion, cynicism and hostility
on both sides. It turned out that the Russians were human
after all -- they responded to toughness
with toughness. And the corollary -- there was for many years
a close correlation between the
amicability of US-Soviet relations and the number of Jews
allowed to emigrate from the Soviet
Union.{10} Softness produced softness.
If there's anyone to attribute the changes in the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe to, both the
beneficial ones and those questionable, it is of course Mikhail
Gorbachev and the activists he
inspired. It should be remembered that Reagan was in office
for over four years before Gorbachev
came to power (and Thatcher for six years), but in that period
of time nothing of any significance
in the way of Soviet reform took place despite Reagan's unremitting
malice toward the communist
state.
The argument is frequently advanced that it's easy in hindsight
to disparage the American
cold-war mania for a national security state, with all its
advanced paranoia and absurdities, its
NATO-supra-state-military juggernaut, its early-warning systems
and air-raid drills, its nuclear
silos and U-2s, but that after the War in Europe the Soviets
did indeed appear to be a ten-foot-tall
world-wide monster threat.
This argument breaks up on the rocks of a single question,
which was all one had to ask back
then: Why would the Soviets want to invade Western Europe
or bomb the United States? They
clearly had nothing to gain by such actions except the almost
certain destruction of their country,
which they were painstakingly rebuilding once again after
the devastation of the war.
By the 1980s, the question that still dared not be asked had
given birth to a $300 billion budget
and Star Wars.
There are available, in fact, numerous internal documents
from the State Department, the
Defense Department, and the CIA from the postwar period, wherein
one political analyst after
another makes clear his serious skepticism of "The Soviet
Threat" -- revealing the Russians'
critical military weaknesses and/or questioning their alleged
aggressive intentions -- while high
officials, including the president, were publicly presenting
a message explicitly the opposite.{11}
Historian Roger Morris, former member of the National Security
Council under Presidents
Johnson and Nixon, described this phenomenon:
Architects of U.S. policy would have to make their case "clearer
than the truth," and
"bludgeon the mass mind of top government," as Secretary
of State Dean Acheson ...
puts it. They do. The new Central Intelligence Agency begins
a systematic
overstatement of Soviet military expenditures. Magically,
the sclerotic Soviet
economy is made to hum and climb on U.S. government charts.
To Stalin's
horse-drawn army -- complete with shoddy equipment, war-torn
roads and spurious
morale -- the Pentagon adds phantom divisions, then attributes
invasion scenarios to
the new forces for good measure.
U.S. officials "exaggerated Soviet capabilities and intentions
to such an extent," says
a subsequent study of the archives, "that it is surprising
anyone took them seriously."
Fed by somber government claims and reverberating public fear,
the U.S. press and
people have no trouble.{12}
Nonetheless, the argument insists, the fact remains that there
were many officials in high
positions who simply and sincerely misunderstood the Soviet
signals. The Soviet Union was, after
all, a highly oppressive and secretive society, particularly
before Stalin died in 1953. Apropos of
this, former conservative member of the British Parliament
Enoch Powell observed in 1983:
International misunderstanding is almost wholly voluntary:
it is that contradiction in
terms, intentional misunderstanding -- a contradiction, because
in order to
misunderstand deliberately, you must at least suspect if not
actually understand what
you intend to misunderstand. ... [The US misunderstanding
of the USSR has] the
function of sustaining a myth -- the myth of the United States
as "the last, best hope
of mankind." St. George and the Dragon is a poor show
without a real dragon, the
bigger and scalier the better, ideally with flames coming
out of its mouth. The
misunderstanding of Soviet Russia has become indispensable
to the self-esteem of
the American nation: he will not be regarded with benevolence
who seeks, however
ineffectually, to deprive them of it.{13}
It can be argued as well that the belief of the Nazis in the
great danger posed by the
"International Jewish Conspiracy" must be considered
before condemning the perpetrators of the
Holocaust.
Both the Americans and the Germans believed their own propaganda,
or pretended to. If one
reads Mein Kampf, one is struck by the fact that a significant
part of what Hitler wrote about Jews
reads very much like an American anti-communist writing about
communists: He starts with the
premise that the Jews (communists) are evil and want to dominate
the world; then, any behavior
which appears to contradict this is regarded as simply a ploy
to fool people and further their evil
ends; this behavior is always part of a conspiracy and many
people are taken in. He ascribes to
the Jews great, almost mystical, power to manipulate societies
and economies. He blames Jews
for the ills arising from the industrial revolution, e.g.,
class divisions and hatred. He decries the
Jews' internationalism and lack of national patriotism.
There were of course those cold warriors whose take on the
Kremlin was that its master plan for
world domination was nothing so gross as an invasion of Western
Europe or dropping bombs on
the United States. The ever more subtle -- one could say fiendishly-clever
-- plan was for
subversion ... from the inside ... country by country ...
throughout the Third World ... eventually
surrounding and strangling the First World ... verily an International
Communist Conspiracy, "a
conspiracy," said Senator McCarthy, "on a scale
so immense as to dwarf any previous such
venture in the history of man."
This is the primary focus of this book: how the United States
intervened all over the world to
combat this subversion by the ICC, wherever and whenever it
reared its ugly head.
Did this International Communist Conspiracy actually exist?
If it actually existed, why did the cold warriors of the CIA
and other government agencies have to
go to such extraordinary lengths of exaggeration? If they
really and truly believed in the existence
of a diabolic, monolithic International Communist Conspiracy,
why did they have to invent so
much about it to convince the American people, the Congress,
and the rest of the world of its evil
existence? Why did they have to stage manage, entrap, plant
evidence, plant stories? The
following pages are packed with double-density double-sided
anti-commiespeak examples of
US-government and media inventions about "the Soviet
threat", "the Chinese threat", and "the
Cuban threat". And all the while, at the same time, we
were being flailed with scare stories: in the
1950s, there was "the Bomber Gap" between the US
and the Soviet Union. Then came "the
Missile Gap". Followed by "the Anti-ballistic missile
(ABM) Gap". In the 1980s, it was "the
Spending Gap". Finally, "the Laser Gap". And
they were all lies.{14}
We now know that the CIA of Ronald Reagan and William Casey
regularly "politicized intelligence
assessments" to support the anti-Soviet bias of the administration,
and suppressed reports, even
those from its own analysts, which contradicted the bias.
We now know that the CIA and the
Pentagon, partly from the pressure of the conservative establishment,
regularly overestimated the
economic and military strength of the Soviet Union, and exaggerated
the scale of Soviet nuclear
tests and the number of "violations" of existing
test-ban treaties, which Washington then accused
the Russians of.{15} All to create a larger and meaner enemy,
a bigger M-I-I-C budget, and give
security and meaning to the cold warriors' own jobs.
Post-cold war, New-World-Order time, it looks good for the
M-I-I-C and their global partners in
crime, the World Bank and the IMF. They've got their NAFTA
and their GATT World Trade
Organization. They're dictating economic, political and social
development all over the Third
World and Eastern Europe. Moscow's reaction to events anywhere
is no longer a restraining
consideration. The UN's Code of Conduct on Transnational Corporations,
15 years in the making,
is dead. Everything in sight is being deregulated and privatized.
Capital prowls the globe with a
ravenous freedom it hasn't enjoyed since before World War
I, operating free of friction, free of
gravity. The world has been made safe for the transnational
corporation.{16}
Will this mean any better life for the multitudes than the
cold war brought? Any more regard for
the common folk than there's been since they fell off the
cosmic agenda centuries ago? "By all
means," says Capital, offering another warmed-up version
of the "trickle down" theory, the
principle that the poor, who must subsist on table scraps
dropped by the rich, can best be served
by giving the rich bigger meals.
The boys of Capital, they also chortle in their martinis about
the death of socialism. The word has
been banned from polite conversation. And they hope that no
one will notice that every socialist
experiment of any significance in the twentieth century --
without exception -- has either been
crushed, overthrown, or invaded, or corrupted, perverted,
subverted, or destabilized, or otherwise
had life made impossible for it, by the United States. Not
one socialist government or movement --
from the Russian Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua,
from Communist China to the FMLN
in Salvador -- not one was permitted to rise or fall solely
on its own merits; not one was left
secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy
abroad and freely and fully relax
control at home.
It's as if the Wright brothers' first experiments with flying
machines all failed because the
automobile interests sabotaged each test flight. And then
the good and god-fearing folk of the
world looked upon this, took notice of the consequences, nodded
their collective heads wisely,
and intoned solemnly: Man shall never fly.
Winning the cold war means never having to say you're sorry.
The Germans have apologized to
the Jews and the Poles. The Russians have apologized to the
Poles as well, and to the Japanese
for abuse of prisoners; the Soviet Communist Party has even
apologized for foreign policy errors
that "heightened tension with the West".{17} An
East German TV newscaster apologized to
viewers for years of dishonest reporting.{18} The Japanese
have apologized to the Chinese and
the Koreans; they've also apologized for failing to break
off diplomatic relations with the US
before attacking Pearl Harbor. When will the United States
apologize to Japan for the atomizing
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, carried out after the Japanese
were ready to surrender?{19} When
will we apologize to the Russians and the Vietnamese, the
Laotians and the Cambodians, the
Chileans, the Guatemalans, and the Salvadoreans ... see the
Table of Contents herein. And when
will the FBI and CIA be brought to public account, as the
Soviet KGB and the East German Stasi
have, for their domestic crimes?
NOTES
return to beginning return to mid-text
1. David Evans, "Catch F-22", In These Times (Chicago
biweekly newsmagazine), 11-24 July
1994, pp. 14-18.
2. 1 ? wars: San Francisco Chronicle, 27 January 1978; 2 wars:
New York Times, 10 December
1993, p. 1.
3. New York Times, 8 March 1992, p. 14.
4. Cited by Michael Klare in The Nation, 15 October 1990.
5. St. George: The Guardian (London), 6 March 1984; Bikini:
ibid., 29 November 1983; CIA/Army:
see China chapter herein; 1947: letter from Col. O. G. Haywood,
AEC, to Dr. Fidler, AEC, Oak
Ridge, Tenn., 17 April 1947 (cited in Covert Action Quarterly
[Washington, DC] Summer 1994, No.
49, p. 28); Ike: San Francisco Chronicle, 20 April 1979.
6. Mark F. Brzezinski (son of former national security adviser
Zbigniew Brzezinski), Los Angeles
Times, 2 September 1994, op-ed column.
7. Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 27 September
1992, review of Georgi
Arbatov, The System: An Insider's Life in Soviet Politics
(Times Books, New York, 1992)
8. International Herald Tribune, 29 October 1992, p. 4.
9. The New Yorker, 2 November 1992, p. 6.
10. Los Angeles Times, 2 December 1988: emigration of Soviet
Jews peaked at 51,330 in 1979
and fell to about 1,000 a year in the mid-1980s during the
Reagan administration (1981-89); in
1988 it was at 16,572.
11. a) Frank Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of
1948: A Successful Campaign to
Deceive the Nation (St. Martin's Press, New York, 1993), passim,
particularly Appendix A; the
book is replete with portions of such documents written by
diplomatic, intelligence and military
analysts in the 1940s; the war scare was undertaken to push
through the administration's foreign
policy program, inaugurate a huge military buildup, and bail
out the near-bankrupt aircraft
industry.
b) Declassified Documents Reference System: indexes, abstracts,
and documents on microfiche,
annual series, arranged by particular government agencies
and year of declassification.
c) Foreign Relations of the United States (Department of State),
annual series, internal
documents published about 25 to 35 years after the fact.
12. Los Angeles Times, 29 December 1991, p. M1.
13. The Guardian (London), 10 October 1983, p. 9.
14. Ruth Leger Sivard, World Military and Social Expenditures
1986 (Ann Arbor, Mich. 1986)
15. a) Anne H. Cahn, "How We Got Oversold on Overkill",
Los Angeles Times, 23 July 1993,
based on testimony before Congress, 10 June 1993, of Eleanor
Chelimsky, Assistant
Comptroller-General of the General Accounting Office, about
a GAO study.
b) Los Angeles Times, 15 September 1991, p. 1; 26 October
1991.
c) The Guardian (London), 4 March 1983; 20 January 1984; 3
April 1986.
d) Arthur Macy Cox, "Why the U.S., Since 1977, Has Been
Misperceiving Soviet Military
Strength", New York Times, 20 October 1980, p. 19; Cox
was formerly an official with the State
Department and the CIA.
16. For further discussion of these points, see:
a) Walden Bello, Dark Victory: The United States, Structural
Adjustment and Global Poverty
(Institute for Food and Development Policy, Oakland, CA, 1994),
passim.
b) Multinational Monitor (Washington), July/August 1994, special
issue on The World Bank.
c) Doug Henwood, "The U.S. Economy: The Enemy Within",
Covert Action Quarterly (Washington,
DC), Summer 1992, No. 41, pp. 45-9.
d) Joel Bleifuss, "The Death of Nations", In These
Times (Chicago) 27 June - 10 July 1994, p. 12
(UN Code).
17. Los Angeles Times, 26 June 1988, p. 8.
18. Newsbroadcast on American radio, 3 November 1989.
19. During the spring and summer of 1945, the Japanese made
it very clear through third parties
and through internal messages that they were ready to surrender.
But the United States, which
had broken the Japanese code and thus was fully aware of these
communications, did not
respond. The only condition specified by the Japanese was
the retention of the emperor system,
and, as matters eventually turned out, the emperor system
was maintained anyway. See: Stewart
Udall, The Myths of August (Pantheon Books, NY, 1994), chapters
4 and 5; Hearings Before the
Committee on Armed Services and the Committee on Foreign Relations,
US Senate, 25 June
1951, pp. 3113-4, re the Japanese offer in July via the Soviet
Union; New York Times, 11 August
1993, p. 9
Taken from Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions
Since World War II; by William Blum
email:bblum6@aol.com
Killing
Hope