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West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Political Memoir

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This book relates the Homeric battle, not between the few and the many, but between the few powerful (who are in control of Imperialist America) and one individual (the author).
Nearly all his fellow travellers left the noble cause. But he persisted and brought us such important and extremely revealing and painful books as 'Killing Hope' and 'Rogue State'.
More, he is amazed that some fellow travellers were CIA infiltrators! Or, that Big Brother lurks nearly permanently over his shoulder.
It was not only a battle against the powerful, but also against himself: his strife to live an easy life (as he says himself: his true, greedy capitalist nature), instead of more or less one of an outcast.

At the end, he is disillusioned ('As a member of the human race, I was embarassed that the 20th century was ending the same way it began, with wars and violence') and scared ('that my own government, responsible for more of the misery than any other human agent, would scare me'). Nevertheless, he continues to fight.

This is a book by a courageous idealist, who continued to defend his political ideals in the face of many defeats, which he took terribly at heart.
As the Magistrate in Coetzee's 'Waiting for the Barbarians', he personifies the conflict between personal conscience on the level of the human race in its totality and the conscience of the member of a specific clan. In other words, it is the battle between the only Just and patriotic bloodthirstiness.

This is not to say that there are not some weaker points in this book: no mention of the fact that the URSS crushed revolutions in East Berlin, Budapest and Prague, or his total despise of social democrats or his big confidence (or should I say, illusion) in the real nature of mankind.

Of course, this autobiography contains a lot of strictly personal facts destined to the '(un)happy few', but I still learned a lot, e.g. Eisenhower, Patton and MacArthur crushed the Bonus Marchers of 1932 and got big promotions!

An exemplary account of a dissident life. Not to be missed.

William Blum ought to be jailed for a term of hard labour. He is criminally funny. Between the deceptive covers of a dusty coldwar memoir is wrapped a boundlessly absorbing tale of a unique time and place few today recall but most have heard of. A coruscating portrait of the Sixties zeitgeist, the narrative charts Blum's evolution from patriotic US civil servant to leftwing agitator against the backdrop of the Vietnam War in a surprising inversion of the conventional rightward drift in politics. Fond readers of his other titles will not be disappointed. No page is left unkissed by his wit saturated humour that will draw bucketfuls of tears to wash away the sins of American empire in this chronicle of a soul's odyssey across political loyalties and continents in search of humanity in the age of superpower conflict.

Blum has worn a thousand masks in his time. At various intervals in a riveting life he has been a US State Department official, antiwar activist, Hollywood screenwriter; he has suffered jail, deportation, and been twice almost killed. Behind his forays into the counter-culture lies the stirring influence of the Vietnam War against whose defenders he takes up cudgels in a folksy prose that is a potent inoculation against the contagion of imperialist cant which invades the immune system of the body politic and gnaws at the hearts and minds of men. Quite apart from being a thoroughly good yarn, the work may be read as a procession of colossal debunkings, of submission to state power, of the creed of militarism, of the whole foundation upon which the superstructure of free market fundamentalism stands, a series of well aimed shrapnel at the cultural elites "whose ideology is that they have no ideology". Fascinating!

Much of the book has the faint ring of a Cold War spy thriller. In a former life Blum shared an apartment with the 70s U.S. bomber Willie Brandt who left in his wake a trail of devastation in protest of American foreign policy. Brandt forcibly struck me as a creature descended from otherworlds, part angel, part fiend all compact, whose antiwar rage drove lunacy to escape velocity. As the narrative proceeds we learn by slow degrees that one of Blum's lifelong friends who helped to expose a list of the names of CIA employees is in fact bizarrely himself a covert CIA operative. All is not what it seems in this Republic of Duplicity. Everywhere covert agents lurk, everyone is suspect. I read with amusement as a good many of the fellow travellers among whom Blum dallied in his salad days had quit the good fight and crossed over to the other side. Amusingly, one of Blum's romantic liaisons turns out to be a honey trap set by the FBI to infiltrate the antiwar movement in a memorable scene that lingers in the mind perennially. Indeed, such is the frequency with which renegades and informers crop up in the memoir that his work might have been appositely titled "Political Apostasy: A History".

The author writes feelingly about his sojourn in Latin America in the height of the Cold War amid scenes of abject poverty. What joy then when Chile's Salvador Allende is swept to power on a radical prospectus for income redistribution. The ensuing climatic drama of the U.S. subversion of Chilean democracy is all the more haunting for being told at an angle without excessive documentation. Episodic snapshots of imprisoned friends capture the full horror to unfold as Pinochet's military junta roll into the history books. Perhaps wisely the grim narrative of that historical tragedy leaves off where the author ends his sojourn.

Across the way we meet the writer in a thousand uproarious incarnations in pursuit of what John Stuart Mill called "experiments in living", Blum the underground reporter, the terrorist accessory (of sorts), the pioneering abortion provider, the nude therapy practitioner and the LSD user. Between these diverting vignettes lie much penetrating insight and wisdom: By what process did a State Department employee decide the ends of his government's foreign policy were manifestly evil? What drives a U.S. patriot to snap out of a lifetime's political indoctrination? These questions form the skeletons of his story. And what a story! So many of us mortals reflexively inherit our politics as we do our theology from our milieu that half the memoir's power lies in Blum's journey from State Department commissar to activist to enemy of the state. It is a fine, fine tale. There is music in the telling, there is a mad swirling dance of pathos and comedy from whose cauldron of ambition, intrigue and betrayal is wrung a high art delicately spun. Blum is a philosopher in a cowboy suit: behind the comic style, behind the disarming humour with which he sweetens the horrors of US militarism lies a mind pregnant with a wealth of knowledge and insight.

If I had any criticism to voice, it is that Blum's unsympathetic portrayal of Norman Mailer may be open to question. Blum charges that Mailer was ill at ease with his left-wing identity. In support of this Blum cites Mailer's comment that he was a "left conservative"; but to the Mailer reader it is fairly transparent that his political creed lay to the left of the political spectrum as may be gauged from his support for the Cuban revolution notwithstanding his ideological eclecticism. True enough Mailer the literary showman was not entirely consistent in his public asseverations; artists seldom are, but one should make allowances for one so constructed as he.

Blum's worthy autobiography is a departure from his previous books, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II, and Rogue State: A Guide to the World's only Superpower. Whereas the earlier works are serious and scholarly, full of meticulous research and documentation, WBD is an airy narrative of hilarious wit, struggle, despair, and ultimately the equivocal triumph of a rebel and dissident.

Here the politics are incidental to the story and the man, as well as a large cast of characters. We see Blum grow from a gung ho, salute the flag American, who, when events such as the kidnapping of two United States Ambassadors dumbfounded him, couldn't understand why others couldn't "see what was so plain to me: that the United States had been a kind of Salvation Army to the rest of the world, disbursing freedom (and) democracy...to all the poor, ignorant and diseased peoples, and keeping communist darkness from descending upon them."

There is no question but what Blum is a bitter critic of US foreign policy. But then he's joined there by Nelson Mandela, who has called the US government the greatest threat to world peace; and for what it's worth, this writer. Blum challenges the reader to defy that upon rational examination, a socialist government is the only best alternative. He also comes to believe passionately that the economic system is the sine qua non of American imperialism, and its trampling of human rights around the globe. The politics are no less powerful for being a secondary focus of the narrative. Because they are expressed from an emotional rather than a documentarian perspective, Blum here expresses the same kind of despair and outrage in three paragraph bursts that he previously had taken chapters and whole books to achieve.

Blum worked as a contractor to the military at Planning Research Corporation early in what he hoped would be a career as a Foreign Service Officer in the State Department. Later he worked at the State Department and the White House. He jettisoned his ambition as he acquired a growing awareness and revulsion at what the US government was really doing in Vietnam and elsewhere.

There is no clear break between the patriotic and dissident Blum. It is rather a growing through one and evolving to the other. In the early sixties he is shocked and incredulous when a pen pal informs him that the US government has recently overthrown governments in Brazil and Guatemala. He is exposed to the teaching of the American Friends Service Committee, an organization he admires deeply to this day. By 1965 Blum is still naïve enough to listen with pride at US power to casualty reports from Vietnam. He is enough of a half-hearted Jewish liberal however, to attend some public functions of the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and other organizations. He also begins to leaflet and organize against the war even as he's working at the State Department. Blum refers to this era later as his "beloved sixties." Although he is glad to have been part of what he considers to be an important mass movement, ultimately he laments the fact that the movement only mitigated, and only slightly, the vast carnage.

During his "time at the State Department - December 1964 to March 1967 - my employers, the government of the United States of America, had seen fit to subvert elections in Italy, Chile, and Greece; suppress movements for social and political change in Peru and Bolivia, save the day for military dictatorship in the Dominican Republic and Guatemala; support armed attacks against Cuba; overthrow the government of Ghana; drench itself in the blood of half a million hapless human beings in Indonesia, and bomb the people of Laos back to the Paleolithic Age. Not to mention a place called Vietnam." Observations such as these are as common to Blum's books as the sun to a summer day. Blum's books, wittier and breezier here as a narrative rather than a treatise, despite the subject material, are therefore a delightful encounter with a devotee of truth; and something of an isolating burden in the depoliticized culture and willful evasion of the media wasteland that is the United States.

Along the way we meet Jerry Rubin, the "celebrated Berkeley activist;" Willie Brandt, attributed in Patty Hearst's book to have been responsible for more than 40 bombings of protest; an old friend elected to the House of Representatives, and subsequently indicted for conspiracy and bribery; the pompous Norman Mailer; Allen Ginsberg, who has the last word at a party in an argument with a supporter of the war by exposing himself; Oliver Stone, who hires Blum in a failed effort to turn his earlier books into documentaries; and many others.

This book is not all wit and piety. Blum drops LSD at work for IBM; if he is to be believed, stays just this side of criminality in protest; becomes involved with an interesting assortment of women (not all virtuous) including one with whom he falls in love and has a son; and many other adventures that are vicarious thrills, leavened with just a trace of vice.

This is the autobiography of a writer, no? We also get to know the growth, travails, travels and triumphs of a writer as important as Chomsky, Vidal, or Parenti. Blum cites Parenti as a huge influence even though his thought reads like Noam Chomsky.

An early journalistic escapade for Blum along with comrade Sal Ferrera, was to fake a flat tire outside CIA Headquarters in Langley. There they copied down license plates of employees, identified them, and published the names in the Quicksilver Times, an alternate weekly in Washington. Blum later learns from Philip Agee's landmark book about the CIA, that Ferrera actually worked for the Agency. Blum also works at the Washington Free Press, which took an early principled stand against the Vietnam War but still "marked by its anti-intellectualism," and the Berkeley Barb, "the granddaddy of the underground press." An article he began turns into a four-year project resulting in Killing Hope. It documents more than 60 US military interventions of appalling criminality, Vietnam being only the most egregious. It was published in 1986, and has had seven printings. These chilling insights into the machinery of US foreign policy make the events of September 11. 2001, look like an ice cream social. Blum also wrote news copy for KPFA radio in San Francisco, contributed to Covert Action Quarterly, and completed another book, Rogue State.

The election of Socialist Allende in Chile, 1972, is a watershed, for good and ill. Blum travels to Chile to witness a genuine socialist government. As he nears Chile after a long journey he hears that the US government has imposed an economic blockade of Chile. Blum gives a compelling witness to the Allende government and its achievements, along with an analysis of its failures, obstacles really, not yet overcome by the soon-to-be-assassinated Allende.

Kissinger and Nixon secretly plotted the economic warfare on the socialist government, an economic alternative to capitalism, and an example of what might be, absolutely anathema to US imperialism. A month after the assassination Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with Le Duc Tho. The day of Allende's assassination just happened to be September 11, 1973, a coincidence so monstrous just for its trivial significance, as to go unmentioned in the corporate mainstream media. "In Chile," laments Blum, "the military boots had marched, as they have always marched in Latin America."

Like all Blum's books, this fascinating memoir is immensely readable, lucid and free of jargon.

Like so many good people, Blum gained his political understanding through opposing the US state's criminal war against Vietnam. Blum reports that the anti-Vietnam war movement was not pacifist in general terms but specifically opposed the US attack on Vietnam.

Blum saw that time and again the US state intervened abroad not to back democracy but to smash it: the war against Vietnam was not an aberration, but it was typical and endemic to the capitalist system. How can anyone believe that the January elections in Iraq are about empowering the Iraqi people?

The anti-Vietnam war movement soon learned that "it was ridiculous to appeal to the President as if were some unaware innocent bystander who needed only to be `enlightened' before he would see the error of his ways." They saw how the CIA infiltrated the trade unions and the anti-war movement, and Blum notes that Blair's friend Bill Clinton snitched to the CIA about the anti-war protestors he joined in Britain.

Blum was in Chile from August 1972 to May 1973. In March 1973 the left gained 7% more votes in the congressional elections. So the ruling class, aided by the US state, decided that they could only get rid of Allende through a coup, which they duly carried out on 11 September.

Based on vast amounts of evidence, from official documents, rulers' memoirs, and investigative reporting, Blum's books are probably the best introduction to the US state's real role in the world. His first was The CIA: a forgotten history: US global interventions since World War II, published in 1986. Common Courage Press published a new edition of this, entitled Killing hope: US military and CIA interventions since World War II in 1995. In 2000, Zed Books published The rogue state: a guide to the world's only superpower and in 2004 Common Courage Press published Freeing the world to death: essays on the American empire.

A very well written, witty, interesting book. A fascinating history of a very turbulent time. A surprisingly honest history of the author's experiences, critical observations of the state, himself and people in general. A really good read.

Let me add my voice to the chorus heaping praise on Mr. Blum's memoir/biography. I've read this book twice. The second time, some elements of Blum's biography -- namely, that he grew up in a Orthodox Jewish household sporting payes and tzitzis -- jumped out at me, whereas they'd seemed background information during the earlier reading.

The other reviewers here have done a good job extolling the detail's of West-Bloc Dissident. I won't add to these except to say a portion of the book's denouement centers on a scene in a London apartment in which Blum -- sitting at his kitchen table reading Philip Agee's CIA tell-all 'Inside the Company' -- comes across the name of a friend in whom Blum had confided for decades. Blum's reaction alone is worth the book's price; moreso because it's a true event.

If you're at all leftist in political orientation you could do worse than read Blum's book. If you're a right-winger perhaps this book (to borrow a phrase from Hunter Thompson) will make you spill your tea. If reading it does make you spill your tea, take video and post it on You Tube. Please.

Elites of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your workforce!