Killing Hope
William Blum
469 pages including index
published in 2003

William Blum is a veteran leftwing journalist, active since the 1960ties, who made his name leaking the name and addresses of 200 CIA employees back in 1969. Since then he has been working in relative obscurity until around the turn of the millennium when he wrote a bestselling book about the US's foreign police: Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower. It came at the right time to find its audience, just as interest in the subject soared due to the September 11 attacks. This succes is probably what got Killing Hope published, as it's an updated version of one of Blum's older books, originally published in 1986 as The CIA: A Forgotten History. It certainly has some of the hallmarks of a cash-in book, with the updating only going as far as the mid-nineties and the bulk of the book not noticably updated from the first edition. Many of the earlier chapters do not show much awareness of events and new revelations after 1986, if you see what I mean.

Killing Hope is the history of US military and covert interventions since World War II, with each chapter detailing a specific case. The chapters are in order of chronology, with several countries with a long history of US intervention having multiple chapters devoted to them. As Blum shows again and again in these chapters, the US talks a great deal about democracy and freedom, but the reality of its foreign policy at least since World War II is far different. With the excuse of "fighting communism" (or these days, "terrorism") again and again the US has interfered on the side of dictatorships, nobbled democracies or fought liberation movements in order to safeguard its interests, be they strategic geopolitical ones or commercial ones. And Killing Hope is far from exhaustive, even in its original timeframe of 1945-1985 with Vietnam e.g. only having one short chapter devoted to it and little attention paid to other Asian countries like Taiwan, Japan or South Korea or even the UK.

Though these interventions all took place in the name of anticommunism, the governments they operated against were rarely communist or even friendly to communism. Quite often CIA or other destabilistation operations are launched against friendly governments, even NATO governments, as with the US interference in the Italian elections of 1948 or the US support for the Colonels' Coup in Greece in 1967. What unites these operations is that in each case US interests were judged to be at stake. A leftwing government or party was threatening to nationalise holdings owned by American companies, or to push through land reform, or a new president was judged to be unfriendly to US security interests and CIA or military stations may be in danger, or a certain country is opposing US policy in their region, or protesting US intervention in their neighbour's politics, or might want to engage in diplomatic or commercial relationships with the USSR and its allies. Quite often these supposed threats are just conjectures with no base in reality or fabricated out of thin air entirely out of personal antipathy to a charismatic leftwing leader like Castro in Cuba or Aristede in Haiti.

As the mere fact of not a year going by without an intervention somewhere since World War II shows, they are an integral part of US foreign policy and not the work of rogue agents or bad apples. Both Democratic and Republican administrations engaged in it, even such supposedly ethical administrations like the Carter presidency engaged in it; most famously in Afghanistan, but Carter also supported the vile Somoza regime in Nicaraqua. At best, Democratic administrations hid the iron glove slightly better, paid slightly more lipservice to human rights and all that.

What becomes clear over the course of more than fifty chapters detailing individual interventions is how they work, what is used to destabilise a government or opposition movement, ranging from propaganda operations to fullscale warfare, usually through proxies. Sometimes these destabilisations are ordered from the highest levels of American government, as in the case of Chile and Greece, but often such operations are initiated almost on autopilot by the local embassy's CIA staff.

How America intervenes depends on the situation. In democratic countries where the wrong party threatens to win the elections (Italy in '47-48, Chile 1970, Greece in the early sixties) America financially supports the election campaigns of their preferred party or candidate. CIA backed newspapers both foreign and domestic run propaganda articles arguing such and such a candidate or party is secretly communist or backed by Moscow; fake documents are used to prove this, as is socalled false flag propaganda, where the CIA puts out leaflets supposedly from the candidate's organisation praising communism. In Catholic countries the Church will also be enlisted in the anti-communist campaign. Apart from warning the voters that their preferred candidate is communist, they are also warned of the dire consequences their election will have on relations with the US.

If a leftwing government is already in power, the same propaganda methods are used against it, but that's only the start of it. American aid is cut off, American as well as foreign investment is discouraged and often other economic warfare is waged against it. With countries that especially offend the US (Cuba for example) things move on to actual sabotage: Cuban airliners have had bombs put into them, sugar crops and exports were tampered with, as well as imports into Cuba. Another favourite trick is the use of rightwing unions to organise lockouts and cripple the country that way. In Chile the economy was made to "scream" this way.

Of course the US will automatically support any rightwing opposition -- and if there isn't any they'll manufacture it. Not just political parties, but wholesale terorist movemtns like the Contras in Nicaragua are used, to the point of civil war. American money and influence also corrupts a country's military and police, training them in torture and terrorism, getting them organised into death squads, organising military coups, getting them to wage war and genocide against their own population, as happened in Guatamala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Indonesia...

Once the offending government is overthrown or voted out of office in "free elections" driven more by fear of what America will do if they aren't (as in Nicaragua), all support is thrown behind the new rightwing government, unless that in turn starts to get uppity. As Noriega of Panama experienced, the next worst thing to being an enemy of the US is to be its ally... Many more dictators helped in the saddle by America later met their end because they displeased America.

America's sheer political, economical and military might makes it difficult for any country to defend itself against its meddling. If America wants you gone, it's usually a matter of time before you are gone. But as Hugo Chavez showed in 2002, even America can fail sometimes. He had the support of the majority of the people behind him and once the people rallied behind him and against the coupists, the coup quickly collapses. Since then Chavez has been smart enough to take precautions against a more professional attempt: taking one of the tv stations involved in the coup off air, getting rid of the military ties with the US and buying the airforce (always the most coup happy part of the armed forces) new toys in the shape of Russian Sukhoi fighters and reshaping Venezualan society through various grassroots organisations as well as cooperating with other South American leftist leaders like Morales. Whether that's enough will remain to see.