Sheehan friends and relatives in demonstration in Virginia. Cindy presents a HUGE problem to the system’s apologists: a person of unshakable conviction who is firmly “on the left.” So far efforts at character assessination have failed, but should she gain public office, the most likely tack will be to kill her credibility with faint praise, suggesting she’s too “naive” about the world, she’s a one-trick pony, and so on. Media whores have their work cut out for them with Cindy.

BY CINDY SHEEHAN Dateline: September 19th, 2007

I am consistently amazed at things that right-wing nut jobs throw at me to justify their support of an unjustifiable war. Seriously, when you watch Generals, Ambassadors, Senators and Congress Reps and pundits who still cheerlead for a miserable, failed and murderous policy you can almost see the skepticism in their eyes, too. They know they are lying for their masters now, if they, like George and Dick didn’t always know they were lying. Read the rest of this entry »

BY WILLIAM BLUM

“People on the March” (quarto stato)—An idealization tableau of the working class in Italy.

Editors’ Note: This is a chapter from Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. In our view this chapter by Blum raises a perennial question, namely, who gives the US the “right” to interfere at will as if it owned the world? American exceptionalism, inculcated among the US population by ubiquitous indoctrination, is nothing more than a malignant form of collective narcissism, a runaway case of selfishness blocking a decent analysis of our own actions. How would Americans feel if a superpower many, many times stronger than the US chose to meddle in US elections to the extent we routinely have done in other countries, and even openly threaten military action if the outcome of said elections was not to its liking? Is that the way to spread democracy and build good will around the world?

As Blum himself puts it:

“If you flip over the rock of American foreign
policy of the past century, this is what crawls out …

invasions … bombings … overthrowing
governments … suppressing movements
for social change … assassinating
political leaders … perverting
elections … manipulating labor unions …
manufacturing “news” … death squads …
torture … biological warfare …
depleted uranium … drug trafficking …
mercenaries …

It’s not a pretty picture.
It is enough to give imperialism a bad name.”

Chapter 2. Italy 1947-1948—Free elections: Hollywood style

“Those who do not believe in the ideology of the United States, shall not be allowed to stay in the United States,” declared the American Attorney General, Tom Clark, in January 1948.{1} Read the rest of this entry »

BY WILLIAM BLUM
This is a chapter (the Introduction) from Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II by William Blum, 1987 edition

American troops parade in Vladivostok, Siberia, in 1918, as part of a multinational intervention force to overthrow the new Soviet government.

Our fear that communism might someday
take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti-communism already has.–Michael Parenti(1)

It was in the early days of the fighting in Vietnam that a Vietcong officer said to his American prisoner: “You were our heroes after the War. We read American books and saw American films, and a common phrase in those days was “to be as rich and as wise as an American”. What happened?” (2) Read the rest of this entry »