INTRODUCTION TO THE
NEW EDITION

from the book

Killing Hope

by William Blum

 

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 great and deep is the denial of the American holocaust, I

said, that the denyers are not even aware that the claimers or their claim exist. Yet, a few million

people have died in the American holocaust and 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

1940s to Afghanistan and Iraq in the 1990s. I enclosed a 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 informing me that she was not in a position to do so. And that was all she said.

She didn't ask to see my book. 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 non-response from such a person, I and my thesis faced

an extremely steep uphill struggle. In the 1930s, and again after the war in the 1940s and '50s,

anti-communists 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 disbursed by the

anti-communists 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 institution, the piles of corpses, and the still-living skeletal people;

some of the respectable burghers were even forced to bury the dead. What might be the effect

upon the American psyche if the true-believers and denyers were compelled to witness the

consequences of the past half-century of US foreign policy close up? What if all the nice,

clean-cut, wholesome American boys who dropped an infinite tonnage of bombs, on a dozen

different countries, on people they knew nothing about -- characters in a video game -- had to

come down to earth and look upon and smell the burning flesh?

 

Our leaders understand how this works. They make it a point to keep our American eyes away

from our foreign victims as much as possible, even on television. Before our boys were sent to

Somalia, they were given psychological briefings from military psychiatrists to prepare them for

the sights of starvation and misery. Our leaders are men not entirely insensitive. And it is because

the American people see and hear their leaders expressing the right concern at the right time,

with just the right catch in their throats to convey "I care!", they see them laughing and telling

jokes, see them with their families, hear them speak of God and love, of peace and law, of

democracy and freedom -- it is because of such things that the idea that our government has done

to the world's huddled masses what it did to the Seminoles has so difficult a time penetrating the

American consciousness. It's like America has an evil twin.

 

George Bernard Shaw used three concepts to describe the positions of individuals in Nazi

Germany: intelligence, decency, and Naziism. He argued that if a person was intelligent, and a

Nazi, he was not decent. If he was decent and a Nazi, he was not intelligent. And if he was decent

and intelligent, he was not a Nazi.

 

 

If, as we're told, the cold war is over and the United States won, it's proper to ask: What do we

have to show for this victory? In human terms, that is. In terms of people's lives.

 

The trillions of dollars spent on the American military machine instead of on the cities, the

infrastructure, housing, schools, health care, etc., etc., did little to improve the quality of life for

the average person in the United States, though it did wonders for the folks of the

military-industrial-intelligence complex. The M-I-I-C and their supporters in Congress successfully

fought off the menace of a "peace dividend", and they show little sign of releasing their death grip

on the society. Many years ago they insisted upon, and they got, a permanent war economy.

There are, after all, always new enemies out there who threaten us -- America, the perpetually

aggrieved innocent in a treacherous world. In 1994, defense contractors began pitching the need

for new advanced aircraft because so many countries of the world were now equipped with

advanced fighters -- sold to them by the United States -- and "what if one of those ... countries

turns against us?" asked the man from Lockheed.{1} When Lockheed announced a proposed $10

billion mega-merger with fellow defense giant Martin Marietta, it put to rest any lingering doubts

about whether "defense conversion" had a future, collapsing decisively the bull market in

high-tech plowshares.

 

In the same year, we learned for the first time of the almost-completed construction of new

headquarters for the super secret National Reconnaissance Office. This espionage-mentality

throwback to the 1950s dug into taxpayers' pockets for more than $300 million, but there's a

whole planet out there to fly over and spy on, and ten thousand file cabinets, million-megabyte

hard disks, and billion-megabyte CD-ROMs waiting to be filled with photos and maps and other

vital information that hardly anyone will ever look at, and which will do nothing for people's lives.

A little earlier, the Defense Department was not at all embarrassed to announce that it needed

funding sufficient to enable it to fight two regional wars at the same time. In 1978 they were trying

to be prepared to fight only "1 ? wars at once".{2} Is this just inflation, or is Dr. Strangelove alive

and well at the Pentagon? After the "two-wars" declaration came the completely manufactured

scare about North Korean nuclear weapons. And so it goes. Our rulers do their best to make sure

that we shall never be at peace.

 

Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the

territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of

that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. ... we must account sufficiently for the

interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our

leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. ... we

must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring

to a larger regional or global role.

 

So reads the Pentagon's Planning Guidance for the Fiscal Years 1994-1999.{3} Since the United

States dispatched its breathtaking killing machine to the Persian Gulf in 1990, the American

people have been treated to this world view on a number of occasions, along with chest-beating

bragging by high-ranking military and civilian officials about the US being the world's only

superpower, and assertions like that of former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage

that "the United States alone possesses sufficient moral, economic, political and military

horsepower to jump-start and drive international efforts to curb international lawlessness"{4} -- a

manifesto, politically and poetically, on a par with "The defense of proletarian internationalism is

a sacred duty of each communist and workers' party and of every Marxist-Leninist."

 

Why do Washington policy-makers trumpet their strategies, their victories, and their power so? Is

it because the demise of the communist enemy has left the M-I-I-C thrashing about for a new

mission, a new raison d'être? At those moments when their defense mechanisms are stilled, the

more honest among them know that they've been cut off at the knees. And for this do they trumpet

and cry: "Look! We do have a purpose! With a grand design!" Why else does the Pentagon make

it all so public? Such policy planning used to be classified top-secret for 30 years.

 

 

The people of Utah and Nevada who lived downwind from the nuclear test sites don't have too

much to show from the cold war except clusters of cancer; after 87 open-air tests more fallout had

settled on St. George in Utah than on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ... and the hapless islanders of

Micronesia who were terribly deceived about the H-test fallout; the Interior Department told the

people of Bikini that they could return to their homes -- provided they ate no home-grown food

until the late 21st century ... and the soldiers who were forced to watch the tests from too close;

and the uranium miners whose lungs inhaled radon gas; and the people who lived too close to

the wrong nuclear reactors, Chernobyl in slow motion; and the unknowing guinea pigs of all the

radiation experiments, injected with plutonium, uranium, radium, and other nice things ... and the

folks whose brains were washed with LSD, "truth serums", and other nice things; and the people

of Florida and New York and San Francisco who were secretly dusted and sprayed and

chemicalized and biologicalized by the CIA and the Army, just to see what the (bad) effects would

be ... and always, in each case, there were men in Washington who knew very well about the

dangers of the fallout and the radiation and the germs, but said nothing; they knew about the

accidents and the leaks, but said nothing; they knew about it early on, at least as early as 1947:

"It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans and might

have adverse effect on public opinion or result in legal suits. Documents covering such work field

should be classified secret." ... and kindly old Ike who told the Atomic Energy Commission to keep

the public "confused" with its explanations about fallout that had caused cancer concern in Utah

... and those that said anything were ignored, or fired.{5}

 

It was all called national security. The American republic had been replaced after World War II by

a national security state, answerable to no one, an extra-constitutional government, secret from

the American people, exempt from congressional oversight, above the law.

 

As to what the rest of world, primarily the Third World, derived from the cold war, the reader is

referred to the pages that follow. It is not a pretty picture.

 

The end of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has meant great tribulation for

the large majority of the citizens, who had better and more secure lives before the great blind

leap into the raging cold waters of capitalism. Perhaps the reason Americans have been so eager

to help them -- sending in a small army of industrial, financial and technical experts, and assorted

cheerleaders, along with all the material goodies -- is their almost childlike desire to be like us:

they rush to copy our political system, our economic system, to wear our jeans, drink our Pepsi,

drive our cars, listen to our music, read our novels, publish our novels, become "entrepreneurs";

they condemn communism, sing paeans to the market, and believe sincerely that there's no

option other than the one or the other unadulterated; they confess their sins, abolish the Warsaw

Pact, and plead to join NATO and the European Union. And our media eat it all up; we squeal with

delight at each new sign of "democracy"; even the Russians making their first "horror" film is a

newsworthy occasion in the West, like our baby is taking his first steps; our precocious babies we

call "pro-democracy", the ugly little infants who still don't get it we call "hard-line"; we pooh-pooh

our babies' setbacks, they're only growing pains, they have to learn how to live with freedom ...

and it all makes us feel like we actually won something in the cold war; a validation of sorts. It

ain't much, but it may be all there is.

 

At least that's how it was the first couple of years or so of reform. Now, the thought may be slowly

penetrating that our baby is not growing normally, he's developing our worst habits, including

huge gaps in wealth and all kinds of criminal rackets he never even knew existed; at times he

even yearns for the good ol' days ...

 

A series of graffiti scrawled on a Warsaw building:

"Bring back communism!"

"We never had communism!"

"Then bring back what we had!"{6}

 

Is this malaise in the genes, or in the system? But there's no turning back, we insist -- they

haven't privatized enough yet, the shock therapy wasn't shocking enough. The quality of

individual lives matters little, so long as the overall numbers and the graphs drawn up by the boys

from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Harvard and Washington think-

tanks look good. It doesn't bother a ruling elite very much, noted Eduardo Galeano, "that politics

be democratic so long as the economy is not."

 

The Stalinists in the Soviet Union used to denounce international financial organizations like the

World Bank and the IMF as agencies by which the rich imperialist nations kept the poor countries

in servitude. Now that Russia and its former fellow republics have thrown themselves on the

mercy of these institutions, the born-again capitalists may decide that the Stalinists were right

after all.

 

notes

 

We've also been told 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 begun to chisel this thesis into

marble. The Tories in Great Britain say that Margaret Thatcher and her unflinching policies

contributed to the 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". Even some leftist analysts, particularly those of a conspiracy bent, are believers.

But this view is not universally held.

Long the leading Soviet expert on the United States, Georgi Arbatov, head of the Moscow-based

Institute for the Study of the U.S.A. and Canada, wrote his memoirs in 1992. A Los Angeles

Times book review by Robert Scheer summed up a portion of it:

 

Arbatov understood all too well the failings of Soviet totalitarianism in comparison to

the economy and politics of the West. It is clear 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. Arbatov not only provides

considerable evidence for the controversial notion that this change would have come

about without foreign pressure, he insists that the U.S. military buildup during the

Reagan years actually impeded this development.{7}

 

George F. Kennan agrees. The former US ambassador to the Soviet Union, and father of the

theory of "containment" of the same country, 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 hard-liners 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."{8}

 

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 40 years by the

time Mikhail Gorbachev came to power without the slightest hint of impending doom. Gorbachev's

close adviser, Aleksandr Yakovlev, when asked whether the Reagan administration's higher

military spending, combined with its "Evil Empire" rhetoric, forced the Soviet Union into a more

conciliatory position, responded:

 

It played no role. None. 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.{9}

 

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 1940s to around the mid-1960s, 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, which captured many of these men, was of

course fully aware of who was behind all this.

 

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 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 for many years a close correlation between the

amicability of US-Soviet relations and the number of Jews allowed to emigrate from the Soviet

Union.{10} Softness produced softness.

 

If there's anyone to attribute the changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to, both the

beneficial ones and those 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 unremitting malice toward 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-supra-state-military juggernaut, its early-warning systems and air-raid drills, its nuclear

silos and U-2s, but that after the War in Europe the Soviets did indeed appear to be a ten-foot-tall

world-wide monster threat.

 

This argument breaks up on the rocks of a single question, 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 1980s, the question that still dared not be asked had given birth to a $300 billion budget

and Star Wars.

 

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 Soviet Threat" -- revealing the Russians'

critical military weaknesses and/or questioning their alleged aggressive intentions -- while high

officials, including the president, were publicly presenting a message explicitly the opposite.{11}

 

Historian Roger Morris, former member of the National Security Council under Presidents

Johnson and Nixon, described this phenomenon:

 

Architects of U.S. 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 of Soviet military expenditures. Magically, the sclerotic Soviet

economy is made to hum and climb on U.S. government charts. To Stalin's

horse-drawn army -- complete with shoddy equipment, war-torn roads and spurious

morale -- the Pentagon adds phantom divisions, then attributes invasion scenarios to

the new forces for good measure.

U.S. officials "exaggerated Soviet capabilities and intentions to such an extent," says

a subsequent study of the archives, "that it is surprising anyone took them seriously."

Fed by somber government claims and reverberating public fear, the U.S. press and

people have no trouble.{12}

 

Nonetheless, the argument insists, the fact remains that 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 member of the British Parliament Enoch Powell observed in 1983:

 

International misunderstanding is almost wholly voluntary: 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 USSR has] the

function of sustaining a myth -- the myth of the United States as "the last, best hope

of mankind." St. George and the Dragon is 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 it.{13}

 

It can be argued as well that the belief of the Nazis in the great danger posed by the

"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. If one

reads Mein Kampf, one is struck by the fact that a significant part of what Hitler wrote about Jews

reads very much like an American anti-communist writing about communists: He starts with the

premise that the Jews (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 to manipulate societies and economies. He blames Jews

for the ills arising from the industrial revolution, e.g., class divisions and hatred. He decries the

Jews' internationalism and lack of national patriotism.

 

There were of course those cold warriors 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 ... verily an International Communist Conspiracy, "a

conspiracy," said Senator McCarthy, "on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such

venture in the history of man."

 

This is the primary focus of this book: how the United States intervened all over the world to

combat this subversion by the ICC, 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 diabolic, monolithic International Communist Conspiracy, why did they have to invent so

much about it to convince the American people, the Congress, and the rest of the world of its evil

existence? Why did they have to stage manage, entrap, plant evidence, plant stories? The

following pages are packed with double-density double-sided anti-commiespeak examples of

US-government and media inventions about "the Soviet threat", "the Chinese threat", and "the

Cuban threat". And all the while, at the same time, we were being flailed with scare stories: in the

1950s, there was "the Bomber Gap" between the US and the Soviet Union. Then came "the

Missile Gap". Followed by "the Anti-ballistic missile (ABM) Gap". In the 1980s, it was "the

Spending Gap". Finally, "the Laser Gap". And they were all lies.{14}

 

We now know that the CIA of Ronald Reagan and William Casey regularly "politicized intelligence

assessments" to support the anti-Soviet bias of the administration, and suppressed reports, even

those from its own analysts, which contradicted the bias. We now know that the CIA and the

Pentagon, partly from the pressure of the conservative establishment, regularly overestimated the

economic and military strength of the Soviet Union, and exaggerated the scale of Soviet nuclear

tests and the number of "violations" of existing test-ban treaties, which Washington then accused

the Russians of.{15} All to create a larger and meaner enemy, a bigger M-I-I-C budget, and give

security and meaning to the cold warriors' own jobs.

 

Post-cold war, New-World-Order time, it looks good for the M-I-I-C and their global partners in

crime, the World Bank and the IMF. They've got their NAFTA and their GATT World Trade

Organization. They're dictating economic, political and social development all over the Third

World and Eastern Europe. Moscow's reaction to events anywhere is no longer a restraining

consideration. The UN's Code of Conduct on Transnational Corporations, 15 years in the making,

is dead. Everything in sight is being deregulated and privatized. Capital prowls the globe with a

ravenous freedom it hasn't enjoyed since before World War I, operating free of friction, free of

gravity. The world has been made safe for the transnational corporation.{16}

 

Will this mean any better life for the multitudes than the cold war brought? Any more regard for

the common folk than there's 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 word has

been banned from polite conversation. And they hope that 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. Not one socialist government or movement --

from the Russian Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to the FMLN

in Salvador -- not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left

secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax

control at home.

 

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 god-fearing folk of the

world looked upon this, took notice of the consequences, nodded their collective heads wisely,

and intoned solemnly: Man shall never fly.

 

Winning the cold war means never having to say you're sorry. The Germans have apologized to

the Jews and the Poles. The Russians have apologized to the Poles as well, and to the Japanese

for abuse of prisoners; the Soviet Communist Party has even apologized for foreign policy errors

that "heightened tension with the West".{17} An East German TV newscaster apologized to

viewers for years of dishonest reporting.{18} The Japanese have apologized to the Chinese and

the Koreans; they've also apologized for failing to break off diplomatic relations with the US

before attacking Pearl Harbor. When will the United States apologize to Japan for the atomizing

of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, carried out after the Japanese were ready to surrender?{19} When

will we apologize to the Russians and the Vietnamese, the Laotians and the Cambodians, the

Chileans, the Guatemalans, and the Salvadoreans ... see the Table of Contents herein. And when

will the FBI and CIA be brought to public account, as the Soviet KGB and the East German Stasi

have, for their domestic crimes?

 

NOTES

 

return to beginning return to mid-text

 

1. David Evans, "Catch F-22", In These Times (Chicago biweekly newsmagazine), 11-24 July

1994, pp. 14-18.

 

2. 1 ? wars: San Francisco Chronicle, 27 January 1978; 2 wars: New York Times, 10 December

1993, p. 1.

 

3. New York Times, 8 March 1992, p. 14.

 

4. Cited by Michael Klare in The Nation, 15 October 1990.

 

5. St. George: The Guardian (London), 6 March 1984; Bikini: ibid., 29 November 1983; CIA/Army:

see China chapter herein; 1947: letter from Col. O. G. Haywood, AEC, to Dr. Fidler, AEC, Oak

Ridge, Tenn., 17 April 1947 (cited in Covert Action Quarterly [Washington, DC] Summer 1994, No.

49, p. 28); Ike: San Francisco Chronicle, 20 April 1979.

 

6. Mark F. Brzezinski (son of former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski), Los Angeles

Times, 2 September 1994, op-ed column.

 

7. Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 27 September 1992, review of Georgi

Arbatov, The System: An Insider's Life in Soviet Politics (Times Books, New York, 1992)

 

8. International Herald Tribune, 29 October 1992, p. 4.

 

9. The New Yorker, 2 November 1992, p. 6.

 

10. Los Angeles Times, 2 December 1988: emigration of Soviet Jews peaked at 51,330 in 1979

and fell to about 1,000 a year in the mid-1980s during the Reagan administration (1981-89); in

1988 it was at 16,572.

 

11. a) Frank Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to

Deceive the Nation (St. Martin's Press, New York, 1993), passim, particularly Appendix A; the

book is replete with portions of such documents written by diplomatic, intelligence and military

analysts in the 1940s; the war scare was undertaken to push through the administration's foreign

policy program, inaugurate a huge military buildup, and bail out the near-bankrupt aircraft

industry.

b) Declassified Documents Reference System: indexes, abstracts, and documents on microfiche,

annual series, arranged by particular government agencies and year of declassification.

c) Foreign Relations of the United States (Department of State), annual series, internal

documents published about 25 to 35 years after the fact.

 

12. Los Angeles Times, 29 December 1991, p. M1.

 

13. The Guardian (London), 10 October 1983, p. 9.

 

14. Ruth Leger Sivard, World Military and Social Expenditures 1986 (Ann Arbor, Mich. 1986)

 

15. a) Anne H. Cahn, "How We Got Oversold on Overkill", Los Angeles Times, 23 July 1993,

based on testimony before Congress, 10 June 1993, of Eleanor Chelimsky, Assistant

Comptroller-General of the General Accounting Office, about a GAO study.

b) Los Angeles Times, 15 September 1991, p. 1; 26 October 1991.

c) The Guardian (London), 4 March 1983; 20 January 1984; 3 April 1986.

d) Arthur Macy Cox, "Why the U.S., Since 1977, Has Been Misperceiving Soviet Military

Strength", New York Times, 20 October 1980, p. 19; Cox was formerly an official with the State

Department and the CIA.

 

16. For further discussion of these points, see:

a) Walden Bello, Dark Victory: The United States, Structural Adjustment and Global Poverty

(Institute for Food and Development Policy, Oakland, CA, 1994), passim.

b) Multinational Monitor (Washington), July/August 1994, special issue on The World Bank.

c) Doug Henwood, "The U.S. Economy: The Enemy Within", Covert Action Quarterly (Washington,

DC), Summer 1992, No. 41, pp. 45-9.

d) Joel Bleifuss, "The Death of Nations", In These Times (Chicago) 27 June - 10 July 1994, p. 12

(UN Code).

 

17. Los Angeles Times, 26 June 1988, p. 8.

 

18. Newsbroadcast on American radio, 3 November 1989.

 

19. During the spring and summer of 1945, the Japanese made it very clear through third parties

and through internal messages that they were ready to surrender. But the United States, which

had broken the Japanese code and thus was fully aware of these communications, did not

respond. The only condition specified by the Japanese was the retention of the emperor system,

and, as matters eventually turned out, the emperor system was maintained anyway. See: Stewart

Udall, The Myths of August (Pantheon Books, NY, 1994), chapters 4 and 5; Hearings Before the

Committee on Armed Services and the Committee on Foreign Relations, US Senate, 25 June

1951, pp. 3113-4, re the Japanese offer in July via the Soviet Union; New York Times, 11 August

1993, p. 9

 

Taken from Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II; by William Blum

email:bblum6@aol.com


Killing Hope