William Blum: Quotes about the world

“For more than 70 years, the United States convinced much of the world that.. it somehow needed the United States to save it from communist darkness. "Just buy our weapons," said Washington, "let our military and our corporations roam freely across your land, and give us veto power over who your leaders will be, and we'll protect you."”

William Blum book Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower

third edition (2006), p. 1
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower

World

“We can say that the United States runs the world like the Taliban ran Afghanistan. Cuba is dealt with like a woman caught outside not wearing her burkha. Horrific sanctions are imposed on Iraq in the manner of banning music, dancing, and kite-flying in Kabul. Jean-Bertrand Aristide is banished from Haiti like the religious police whipping a man whose beard is not the right length.”

William Blum

Introduction to Freeing the World to Death

World , Music , Dance , Flying

“To the mind carefully brought to adulthood in the United States, the truths of anticommunism are self-evident, as self-evident as the flatness of the world once was to an earlier mind...”

William Blum

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Introduction

World , Truth , Adulthood , Self-confidence

“By the end of the Second World War, every American past the age of 40 had been subjected to some 25 years of anti-communist radiation, the average incubation period needed to produce a malignancy. Anti-communism had developed a life of its own.”

William Blum

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Introduction

War , Past , Communication , Age

“During the period between the two world wars, US gunboat diplomacy operated in the Caribbean to make "The American Lake" safe for the fortunes...”

William Blum

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Introduction

World , War , Making love

“Washington knows no heresy in the Third World but independence. In the case of Salvador Allende independence came clothed in an especially provocative costume—a Marxist constitutionally elected who continued to honor the constitution. This would not do. It shook the very foundation stones upon which the anti-communist tower is built: the doctrine, painstakingly cultivated for decades, that "communists" can take power only through force and deception, that they can retain that power only through terrorizing and brainwashing the population. There could be only one thing worse than a Marxist in power—an elected Marxist in power.”

William Blum

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Chapter 34. Chile 1964-1973: A hammer and sickle stamped on your child's forehead

World , Clothes

“Cuba had become what Washington had always feared from the Third World—a good example. Parallel to the military and economic belligerence, the United States has long maintained a relentless propaganda offensive against Cuba. A number of examples of this occurring in other countries can be found in other chapters of this book. In addition to its vast overseas journalistic empire, the CIA has maintained anti-Castro news-article factories in the United States for decades.”

William Blum

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Chapter 30. Cuba 1959 to 1980s: The unforgivable revolution

World , Fear , Books , Country

“This, then, was the American people's first experience of a new social phenomenon that had come upon the world, their introductory education about the Soviet Union and this thing called "communism."”

William Blum

The students have never recovered from the lesson. Neither has the Soviet Union.
Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Introduction

World , Education , People , Communication