BOOK REVIEW : ROGUE STATE
by Donald K Gutierrez "ROGUE STATE: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, " by William Blum, Common Courage Press, $16.95 pb., 308 pp., ISBN 1-56751-194-5 .
" . . . a survey showed that six times as many South Koreans feared the United States as feared North Korea."
-- The Economist (London, June 1994)
AS THE TITLE OF WILLIAM BLUM's BOOK "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Super-power" suggests, the rogue state is the United States. A formidable thesis, Blum's evidence and argumentation generally support his major idea-that the nation most dangerous and oppressive to other nations in the past fifty years has been America.
A guide book inclines towards a skimpy treatment of ideas, opinions and facts, and that is occasionally a flaw in Rogue State. In chapter 20, for example, Blum presents almost 150 examples of the United States taking extremely unsupported and immoral positions on such resolutions as "Cessation of all nuclear test explosions." Some of these resolutions could have profited by discussion. He also often fails, despite 31 pages of footnotes, to source material that a reader might want further information on, such as claiming that the INS and US Border Patrol are grossly mistreating "detained" illegal immigrants (pushing heads into toilets, for example). Further, some of Blum's irony is either corny or heavy-handed.
Nevertheless, Rogue State is invaluable. Ignited by a powerful introduction, Blum's book provides a sizable amount of striking data and discussion arguing that the US is hardly the beacon of democracy, freedom and justice it proffers itself to the world (and to itself) as being. Blum presents this point forcefully: "From 1945 to the end of the century, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements struggling against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned millions more to a life of agony and despair" (2).
Why America did all this soon follows: "·making the world open and hospitable for . . . globalization, particularly American-based transnational corporations, ·enhancing the financial statements of defense contractors at home . . . , ·extending political, economic and military hegemony . . . [over the world] to prevent the rise of any regional power that might challenge American supremacy . . . (13-14).
To elaborate these grave indictments, Blum divides his book into three crucial themes: Washington's ambivalent relationship with terrorists and human-rights violators, American's use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and "Rogue State" America versus the world. A chapter on assassinations running from 1949 to 1999 lists 35 foreign leaders our government either tried to -- or did -- assassinate, including Nehru, Sihanouk, de Gaulle, Allende, Guevara, Zhou Enlai. Another dealing with US Army and CIA training manuals indicates that the conduct of US intelligence services abroad is often savagely criminal. Particularly disturbing in these manuals is the total lack of any moral restraint in what they instruct the military or police of client nations to impose on political dissidents, including techniques ranging from psychological traumatization to electrocuting victims' genitals.
Blum lists 11 countries in which the CIA taught (and, occasionally, participated in) the torturing of a regime's critics. In Uruguay, an American associated with the US Office of Public Safety named Dan Mitrione would play in an adjoining room tapes purported to be the screams of a prisoner's family just then undergoing torture. Blum also offers evidence of torture in America, such as routine terrorization of Black and Hispanic prisoners by the Chicago police from 1973 to 1986, including, among other things, electric shocks to testicles and plastic-bag suffocations. Chapter 8 argues convincingly, if briefly, that Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton, and generals like Powell, Schwarzkopf, Westmoreland, and others (like Henry Kissinger) are all war criminals for a variety of specific offenses against civilian populations and nations who never attacked America.
The second section of Rogue State lists WMDs employed for decades by America both abroad and at home. Chapters 11 through 13, entitled, respectively, "Bombings," "Depleted Uranium," and "Cluster Bombs," introduce the most shocking chapters in this segment: American chemical and biological weapons used abroad and at home. Blum acutely observes that bombs are weapons of mass destruction, and that depleted uranium Tomahawk Cruise missile warheads are certainly chemical. Realizing the millions of American bombs dropped on other nations over the past fifty-five years, from China in 1945-46 to Yugoslavia in 1999, corroborates the title of Blum's book.
The United States, according to the Chinese, dropped quantities of bacteria on North Korea early in 1952, including plague, anthrax and encephalitis; it also, Blum asserts, dropped huge quantities of napalm on Korea, a well as Agent Orange during 1967-69. Vietnam was sprayed with "tens of thousands of tons of herbicides over 3 million acres of South Vietnam (as well as parts of Laos and Cambodia) . . . " (105). Panama, Cuba, the Bahamas and even Canada (Winnipeg, 1953) were also intentionally contaminated. Other sites poisoned by the US include Guam, the Philippines and . . . the United States.
This last CBW intrusion might constitute the biggest shock to the average American in view of the endless moralistic hype by Washington about foreign anti-American terrorism. Yet, Blum states, " . . . for two decades those two institutions /Department of Defense and the CIA/ conducted tests in the open air, exposing millions of Americans to large clouds of possibly dangerous bacteria and chemical particles . . . without informing the potentially affected populations . . . " (113). Further, the army admitted that between 1949 and 1969, "239 populated areas from coast to coast were blanketed with various organisms . . . " (114). Blum mentions nine areas (among others) affected, including the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, and New York City. His sources for these allegations are mainstream American newspapers, professionally researched studies and Senate investigatory committees. If only a tenth of these charges were true, they still would comprise a major instance of felonious hypocrisy on the part of the American government.
The final segment of Rogue State includes three particularly significant chapters. Chapter Seventeen lists 69 global interventions by the US from 1945 to the present. One of the most genocidal (and now well-known) was the American-supported Soharto takeover that led to the murder of perhaps over a million Indonesian political "suspects" by Soharto's military, lists of "Communists" supplied Soharto's forces by the American Embassy. Bolivia, Brazil, Ghana, Iraq (1972-75), Australia (l972-75), Mexico and the Zapatistas-the list of criminal intrusions by the American state seems endless. A Washington directive to Uruguayan Intelligence, that captured Tupamoros were first to be pressured for information (i.e., tortured) and then killed, is a further instance of America's realpolitik abroad.
The final chapter, "How Does the US Get Away With It?" contains some charges publicized elsewhere (Chomsky, etc.) and other material perhaps less familiar, such as the CIA and FBI opening citizens' mail, private corporations bugging their employees, offices and restrooms, law enforcement and intelligence agencies harassing activists, passengers on public transport having belongings searched by DEA agents, police cameras being set up with increasing frequency to scrutinize people on public streets, banks, telephone companies, utility companies, hotels and other businesses supplying various government authorities with desired information about their customers.
Unfortunately, Blum does not summarize his book. Also, he might have said something about the massive social terrorism imposed on their own populations by Stalin and Mao (not to mention, respectively, Eastern Europe and Tibet). Nevertheless, Rogue State is a guide indeed to ample and convincing evidence that the United States, citadel of global democratic idealism, has for over fifty years been -- and remains -- the most terrifying military force in the world to many nations. When will the American state's terrorism reach the average American? "They," Blum concludes, "only have to wait" (273). William Blum's website includes ordering information. See <http://members.aol.com/superogue/homepage.htm>.
-- The review was originally published in "The Bloomsbury Review"(Denver) and in the campus publication "Common Sense" (University of Notre Dame).