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 »

Courtesy is one thing, but did Pelosi have to applaud so…enthusiastically?

NOTE from CJO editors: When it happens, Americans won’t be able to say they didn’t get enough warnings. The lights are being shut off in this nation, one by one, while most of the public remains glassy-eyed, glued to the latest idiocy performed by one of the innumerable decadent movie starlets of this patethically self-indulgent culture. And as the Constitution gets torn asunder, piece by piece, don’t count on that old hypocritical whore, the corporate media, or the US Congress, to sound the alarm. If anything, given their abject careerism, incurable stupidity, and disconnection from the realities that define life for most people, they can be counted on to compound the problem by serving as propaganda megaphones for the tyrants in the making. Here’s some of the accumulating signs that catastrophe is imminent unless we serve notice to the usurpers in Washington that the American people will not allow the Constitution and what remains of our democracy to be buried under a wave of manufactured pretexts. Read the rest of this entry »