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WAMM Book Report
Rogue State. A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
by William Blum
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review by Joyce Wallace, W A M M
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William Blum writes that in the absence of an official Truth Commission in the United States, Rogue State. A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (Common Courage Press, 2000) is offered up as testimony to what the U.S. military, the CIA, and other branches of our government have done to the peoples of the world. My time of reckoning, wondering why my government was always on the wrong side of “third world” countries in their struggle to create a better way of life, began with my solidarity work with Central and Latin America during the 1980s. One key component in learning and understanding the issues was making connections to their very powerful neighbor north of the border. I was a late bloomer, or perhaps a late “blumer.” The “third world” label served well to conceal the real agenda of U.S. intervention, which is to dominate regions and make safe corporate interests and investments after World War II for the coming New World order.
In making a selection for WAMM’s book club, it’s important to know something about the author. William Blum worked at the State Department with intentions of joining the Foreign Service. However, his career plans changed and in 1967 he left the State Department due to his opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam. In Rogue State, Blum chronicles interventions conducted by the U.S. military and the CIA in a litany of countries since World War II. It is a history difficult to acknowledge and easy to deny, while we remain unsure how to confront, no less end, this pattern, for it continues to be the cornerstone of our foreign policy.
Blum writes that U.S. foreign policy is driven by “three imperatives”—namely, protecting interests and expansion of corporations by making the world stable for neoliberal globalization (defense contractors come in mighty handy); preventing any society’s attempt in creating an alternative model, which is seen as a threat to the corporate capitalism model; and lastly, “expanding the empire: establishing political, economic and military hegemony over as much of the globe as possible.” Then Blum proceeds to bring the rogue state back to the homeland. He writes of attacks to our civil liberties and the dismantling of our Bill of Rights at home.
Blum believes that “overtly and covertly, legally and illegally, the military-industrial complex has joined forces with the prison-industrial complex, linked further to the omnipresent national security-police complex.” Can it be that the American Experiment is a fraud, a failure? If so, a question we must ask is, what is our responsibility? |
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© 2008 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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Complete June 2008 Index - click here
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