ROGUE STATE by Willian Blum
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 Viet Nam, the Middle East or Central America.
In reality, the greatest 'rogue state' has been and remains the United
States itself. 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 is a wild and ferocious beast that has terrorised
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 Duvaliere. 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 has armed terrorists, trained right-wing guerilla
movements in the art of torture and financed armies intent on overthrowing
democratically elected governments. A powerful indictment against the
world's only superpower? Maybe. However, as Blum reveals the above just
touches the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
Not content with terrorising the world in the interests of its own
corporate elite - and many times Blum's makes this connection - the US is
just as 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, as Blum reveals, is guilty of
the most barbarous and heinous acts imaginable. Whilst for most of us the
Kafkaesque nightmare is the stuff of fiction, for many Americans it is the
harsh reality of everyday life. 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 shows the same disrespect for
its own civilians in peace time, using them as guinea pigs at every
opportunity. It has released zinc cadmium aroun! d 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 videotapes,
bugs 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. Indeed, you'll be
hard-pressed to imagine any activity that US authorities are not
perpetrating against the US public. Political prisoners? Police army/
commando-type raids on housing suburbs? Racial harassment? Torture?
Homophobia? Prison guards having sex with female prisoners (legal in 14
states)? Blum reveals this and very much more to be little more than
everyday occurrences for 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, help 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 - it's 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.
Rogue State - A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, 308 pages, has just
been published by Common Courage Press.
--
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