Middle Nation Book Discussion: "Killing Hope" by William Blum (pages 20-30)

Of this information that has made its way into popular consciousness or into school text, encyclopedias, or other standard reference, reference works, there might as well exist strict censorship in The United States. Well, I mean, is he saying that that isn't the case? Obviously, that's the case. There is strict censorship in The United States. The reader is invited to look through the relevant sections of the three principal American encyclopedias, Americana, Brit Britannica, and Colliers.

The image of encyclopedias as the final repository of objective knowledge takes a beating. What is tantamount to a nonrecognition of American interventions may very well be due to these esteemed works employing a criterion similar to that of Washington officials as reflected in the Pentagon Papers. The New York Times summarized this highly interesting phenomenon thusly. Clandestine warfare against North Vietnam, for example, is not seen as violating the Geneva Accords of 1954, which ended the French Indochina the in French Indochina war or as conflicting with the public policy pronouncements of the various administrations. Clandestine warfare, because it is covert, does not exist as far as treaties and public posture are concerned.

Further, secret commitments to other nations are not sensed as infringing on the treaty making powers of the senate because they're not publicly acknowledged. That's devastating. They're saying right there, whatever you do that people don't know about is legal. As long as you keep it secret, it's legal. So if you're gonna do something that is that is unlawful, just make sure that you never get caught.

Just just make sure that you don't do it publicly. Just make sure that you do it in the shadows, and you'll never get in trouble for it, and we'll cover for you. They're just saying it right there. The de facto censorship which leaves so many Americans functionally illiterate about the history of US foreign affairs may be all may be all the more effective because it is not so much official heavy handed or conspiratorial as it is woven artlessly into the fabric of education and media. Expert propaganda.

No conspiracy is needed. The editors of Reader's Digest or US News and World Report did not need to meet covertly with the representatives from NBC in an FBI safe house to plan next month's stories and prop and programs. For the simple truth is that these individuals would not have reached the positions that they occupy if they themselves had not all been guided through the same tunnel of camouflaged history and emerged with the same selective memory and conventional wisdom. So you see what he's saying is that you're not going to get into a position in the media, in journalism, so called journalism. You're not going to get into a position if you actually care about, for example, journalism, actually doing journalism, actually doing investigative work, research work.

You're not going to get into that position. You'll only get into that position through a filtering process that makes sure that you are on board with the official narrative and that you believe in the official narrative because the the mainstream media in The United States is nothing but a platform for delivering state propaganda, the propaganda of the rich and powerful because I I have to make that distinction rather than just saying state propaganda because as I've talked about many times, the power in The United States and in the West generally, but especially in The United States, power has been transferred from the public sector into the private sector. So that's why we talk about, for example, corporate media. When we talk about corporate media, it's the same as if you were talking about state media in an authoritarian regime under a under an authoritarian regime. So when we say corporate media like CNN or New York Times or what have you, when you say when you refer to these and you refer to it as corporate media, what you're basically saying is is the equivalent of state run media, state controlled media.

And so you're not going to rise up into a position of writing or editing, being a being a managing editor or having any sort of an executive position with control over content. You're not gonna have that kind of a position unless you fully subscribe to the official narrative and have no intention whatsoever of contradicting it. Okay. Continuing the book. The upheaval in China is a revolution which if we analyze it, we will see it is prompted by the same things that prompted the British, French, and American revolutions.

A cosmopolitan and generous sentiment of Dean Rusk, the assistant secretary for far eastern affairs, later secretary of state. At precisely the same time as mister Rusk's talk in 1950, others in his government were actively plotting the downfall of the Chinese revolutionary government. Now you can have you can you can think whatever you wanna think about the revolution in China, and you can think whatever you wanna think about Mao, and you can think whatever you wanna think about communism. But just look at the statement. He said the upheaval in China is a revolution, which if we analyze it, we will see it is prompted by the same things that prompted the British, the French, and the American revolutions.

In other words, they're doing in China today, which is in 1950, they're doing in China today the same thing that we did two hundred years ago, getting our independence and fighting against basically monarchy and the aristocratic rule and so forth and the oppression and exploitation of the poor. That's even their their official narrative about why America did what they did, why the French did what they did, and why the British did what they did. But when the Chinese do it, they're that that has to be undermined and that has to be overthrown and you have to and you have the government of the United States, which was founded officially was founded as the result of a revolution against tyranny. You find now that government is plotting the downfall of the Chinese revolutionary government, which they're saying themselves was prompted to its revolution for the same reasons that the British, the French, and the Americans were. Look at the hypocrisy.

This has been a common common phenomenon. For many of the cases described in the following pages, one can find statements of high or middle middle level Washington officials which put into question the policy of intervention, which expressed misgivings based either on principle, sometimes the better side of American liberalism, or concern that the intervention would not serve any worthwhile end or that it might even end in disaster. I have attached little weight to such dissenting statements as indeed in the final analysis, Washington decision makers who in controversial world situations would be relied upon to play the anti communist card, they also gave very little weight to such dissenting statements. In other words, these dissenting statements ended up ultimately having no sway over what the policies actually were. In presenting the interventions in this manner, I am declaring that American foreign policy is what American foreign policy does, and that is something that I've talked about many times, which is that we have to look at them, we have to look at America, we have to look at the West based on their actions, not based on their words.

Because if you were to listen to their words, like, for example, in the earlier part here where Dean Rusk is saying about the the revolution in China, you would almost think that they're that they would support the revolution in China because they're saying that the revolution is based on the same things that we revolted against the British over. So you would naturally think, well, that's a positive statement. That's a supportive statement. But as he said, at the same time that he was saying that, the government was plotting the downfall of the revolutionary so called revolutionary government of China. Okay.

Now the next part of the introduction, he has excerpts from the introduction from the 1995 edition. So that's some eight years after the original publication of the book. 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 broad and so deep is the denial of the American Holocaust, I said, that the deniers are not even aware that the claimers, or that their claim even exists.

Yet a few million people have died in the American Holocaust and many 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 nineteen forties to Afghanistan and Iraq in the nineteen nineties. And, of course, again, this is before the actual invasion and occupation of Iraq and of Afghanistan in the February. I enclosed the 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, she wrote back informing me that she was not in a position to do so, and that was all she said. 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 nonresponse from such a person, I and my thesis faced an extremely steep uphill struggle. In the nineteen thirties and again after the war in the nineteen forties and fifties, anticommunists 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 dispersed by the anticommunists, 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 institutions, the piles of corpses, and the still living skeletal people. Some of the, respected burghers, were even forced to bury the dead.

What might be the effect upon the American psyche if the true believers and the deniers were compelled to witness the consequences of the past half century of US foreign policy close-up. So here he's saying that after the second World War, when they discovered the concentration camps, the people who live close to the camps and who lived in denial about the existence of those camps and what those camps what was happening inside those camps, people who denied all of that, Germans, after the war, they were forced to come to those camps to see them themselves, to see the concentration camps, to see those institutions, to see the dead bodies, to see the mass graves, and to see the victims. The concentration camp, detainees, and the state that they were in and sometimes they even forced them to bury the dead as a kind of a punishment if not an atonement, but as a kind of a punishment for the years and years of denial that had allowed for these concentration camps to continue operating. So then he so then he's saying, what would be the effect if the American people were forced to actually face the the consequences or witness the consequences of their of of what their country has done all around the world?

And that's a very good question. What if all the nice clean-cut wholesome American boys who dropped an infinite tonnage of bombs on a dozen different countries, on people that they knew nothing about, characters in a video game? What if they had to come down to Earth and look upon and smell the burning flesh, that they had caused? This is the author. It has been conventional wisdom 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 began to chisel this thesis into marble. The Tories in Great Britain say that Margaret Thatcher and her unflinching policies contributed to the to this 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, quote, unquote. Even many leftist analysts, particularly those of a conspiracy bent, are believers.

But this view is not universally held nor should it be. Long the leading Soviet expert on The United States, Georgy Arbatov, head of the Moscow based Institute for the Study of the USA and Canada, wrote in his memoirs in 1992. A Los Angeles Times book review by Robert Shear summed up a portion of it. Abattov understood all too well the failings of the Soviet totalitarianism in comparison to the economy and politics of the West. It's clear from his 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.

Arbitov knew sorry. Arbitov not only provides considerable evidence for the controversial notion that this change would have come about without foreign pressure. He insists that The US military buildup during the Reagan years actually impeded this development. That's believable. George f Kennen agrees.

The former US ambassador to the Soviet Union and father of the theory of containment of the same country, meaning the Soviet Union, 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 hardliners 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. Though the arms race though 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 forty years by the time Mikhail Gorbachev came to power without the slightest hint of of impending doom. Gorbachev's closest close adviser, Alexander Yakovlev, when asked whether the Reagan administration's higher military spending combined with its, quote, unquote, evil empire rhetoric forced the Soviet Union into a more conciliatory position, he responded, it played no role.

None. I can tell you that, 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. 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 nineteen forties to around the mid nineteen sixties, 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, captured many of these men, was, of course, fully aware of who was behind all of this.

Let me just mention here. Everything that he just mentioned that the CIA was up to in Eastern Europe and in Russia, the Soviet Union, all of that is illegal. But here you have to remember what he said earlier, which was that they regarded anything that was done covertly as being beyond the jurisdiction of the law. In other words, anything that you're doing in secret, can get away with, and it's technically legal. It doesn't have to comply with any of the treaties and obligations international obligations that America is treaty is a signatory to.

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 persuasive sorry. 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 there was for many years a close association between the amicability of US Soviet relations and the number of Jews allowed to emigrate from the Soviet Union. Softness produces softness. If there's anyone to attribute the changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to, both the beneficial ones and those that are 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 and Thatcher's unremitting malice towards 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 superstate military juggernaut, its early warning systems, and air raid drills, its nuclear silos, and U Twos, but that after the war in Europe, the Soviets did indeed appear to be a 10 foot tall worldwide monster threat. This argument breaks up on the rocks of a single question, which was all 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 nineteen eighties, the question that still dared not be asked had given birth to a 300,000,000,000 military budget and Star Wars. That's the Star Wars defense program. 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 so called Soviet threat, revealing the Russians' critical military weakness and or questioning their alleged aggressive intentions. While high officials including the president were publicly presenting a message explicitly the opposite.

Historian Roger Morris, a former member of the National Security Council under president Johnson and Nixon described this phenomenon. This is a quote from Roger Morris. Architects of US policy have had to sorry. Architects of US 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, a systematic overstatement of Soviet military expenditures. Magically, the, sclerotic Soviet economy is made to and climb on US government charts to Stalin's horse drawn army complete with shoddy equipment, war torn roads, and spurious spurious morale. The Pentagon adds phantom divisions. The Pentagon adds phantom divisions, then attributes invasion scenarios to the new forces for good measure. You understand what he's saying?

He's saying that they make a an accurate assessment. The those days, they made an accurate assessment. Some people within the government made an accurate assessment of Soviet military strength and power and Soviet intentions. And that accurate assessment was not particularly dramatic, and it wasn't particularly threatening. The accurate assessment showed that the Soviet Union was not the big bad bear that they thought it was, that it was actually just sort of limping along and trying to survive.

So rather than basing their policy on this reality, they invented power. They invented, as it says here, phantom divisions of the army that don't even exist. They create an image of a of a terrifying, aggressive, hostile, and powerful Soviet Union, and then they base their policy towards the Soviet Union, how they deal with the Soviet Union, based that upon this imaginary country, this imaginary Soviet Union that does not that doesn't actually exist, which is which just goes to tell you that they knew exactly what they were doing and it had nothing to do with trying to defend The United States or defend American interests from the Soviet Union because they knew perfectly well that it didn't actually pose a threat. It was the idea of creating the perception of a threat so that your own aggressive action would not appear to be aggressive. US officials exaggerated Soviet capabilities and intentions to such an extent, says a subsequent study in the archives of the archives, that it is surprising anyone even took them seriously.

Fed by somber government claims and reverberating public fear, The US press and the people have no trouble. Nonetheless, the argument insists 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 members of the British parliament Enoch Powell observed in 09/1983, international misunderstanding is almost wholly voluntary. It is the it it 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 of The USSR has the function of sustaining a myth, the myth of The United States as the, quote, last best hope of mankind. Saint George and the dragon in 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 that myth. It can be argued as well that the belief of this of the Nazis, in the great, sorry. It can be argued as well that the belief of the Nazis in the great danger posed by the, quote, unquote, 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. In reading Mein Kampf, one is struck by the fact that a significant part of what Hitler wrote about Jews reads very much like an American anticommunist writing about communists.

He starts with the premise that the Jews, put in your mind 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, power to manipulate societies and economies. He blames Jews for the ills arising from the industrial revolution.

For example, class divisions and hatred. He decries the Jews internationalism and lack of national patriotism. There were, of course, those cold warriors who take on the 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. Barely an international communist conspiracy, a conspiracy, said senator Joseph McCarthy, on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.

Look at this rhetoric. Look at this hyperbole. And we we still hear the same things today. If the if I'm I'm sorry to say, if if the Kufar are not saying these types of things about us, you still have us saying these types of things about Jews, and it's all nonsense. This is the primary focus of this book, how The United States intervened all over the world to combat this conspiracy 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 diabolical monolithic international communist conspiracy, why did they have to invent so much about it? Why did they have to invent so much about it to convince the American people, to convince the congress and the rest of the world of its evil existence? Why did they have to stage why did they have to stage manage and trap plant evidence, plant stories, and create phony documents?

That's the right there, you can say that's everything that has happened with regards to the to homeland security in The United States and all of the the Patriot Act and what they've done against Muslims based on their claim of an international you can change the words, a diabolical monolithic international Muslim extremist conspiracy to take over the world. This the same thinking. They just changed the word from communist to radical Islam, jihadi, whatever you wanna say. The homeland security and the Patriot Act, they have been responsible for, I don't even know how many arrests of Muslims that they entrapped, that they planted evidence on, they planted stories, and they created phony documents. They stage manage these events.

They're doing the same thing now that they've always done. Like I've said many, many times, they never do change. The following pages are packed with numerous anti commie speak examples of US government and media inventions about the, quote, unquote, Soviet threat, the Chinese threat, the Cuban threat. And all the while, at the same time, we were being flailed with scare stories. In the nineteen fifties, there was the bomber gap between The US and The Soviet Union, the civil the civil defense gap, then came the missile gap followed by the anti ballistic missile gap.

In the nineteen eighties, it was the spending gap. Finally, the laser gap, and they were all lies. We know now that the CIA of Ronald Reagan and William Casey regularly politicized intelligence assessments to support the anti Soviet bias of their administration and suppressed reports even those from their own analysts which contradicted this bias. We now know that the CIA and the Pentagon regularly overestimated the economic and military strength of the Soviet Union and exaggerated the scale of Soviet nuclear tests and the number of, quote, unquote, violations of existing test ban treaties, which Washington then accused the Russians of, all to create a larger and meaner enemy, a bigger national security budget, and give security and meaning to the cold warriors' own jobs. Post cold war, new world order time, it looks good for the military industrial complex sorry, the military industrial intelligence complex and their global partners in crime.

The World Bank and the IMF. They've got their NAFTA and soon their World Trade Organization. This is before that was even established, this was written. They're dictating economic, political, and social development all around the third world in Eastern Europe. Moscow's reaction Moscow's reaction to events anywhere is no longer a restraining consideration.

The the United Nations code of conduct on transnational corporations fifteen years in the making is dead. Everything in sight is being deregulated and privatized. Capital prowls the globe with a ravenous freedom that it hasn't enjoyed since the since before World War one, Operating free of friction, free of gravity, the world has been made safe for transnational corporations. Will this mean any better life for the multitudes than they had during the Cold War? But it will will it mean a better life for the multitudes than the Cold War brought any more regard for the common folk than there has 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 world has has been banned the word socialism has been banned from polite conversation, and they hope 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. No, not one socialist government or movement from the Russian revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from communist China to the f l, FMLN in Salvador, no one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merit. Not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all powerful enemy from abroad and freely and fully relaxed control at home.

A more recent example of that would be Venezuela. 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 godfaring folk of the world looked upon this, took notice of the consequences, nodded their collective heads wisely, and intoned solemnly, man shall never fly. And that's, I believe yes. That's the end of the introduction.

So we're now on page 30, and that's gonna be enough for me. As you can probably tell, my voice on my my throat is a bit dry. So we'll begin, Insha'Allah, tomorrow on page 30, which is chapter one, China 1945 to the nineteen sixties. Was Mao Saitong just paranoid? That's the title of the chapter.

So I thank you all for joining me, and inshallah, we'll start again tomorrow.