USA:
Cornering
The Market On Morality
By William Blum &
Jason Miller
23 April, 2007
Countercurrents.org
“We have morality on our side….”
---William Blum
Ironic
words flowing from the pen of a man who has devoted forty years of his
life to hard-core dissent against the United States, the most moral
nation in the history of civilization.
We are a nation founded upon
bedrock principles of Christianity.
Would Christ not have approved
of chattel slavery, the Native American genocide, and the millions of
“savages” we have slaughtered to expand our borders and
to maintain “Pax Americana?” Those who have died to sustain
our peace and prosperity were but martyrs for a cause greater than themselves.
In a sense, each one of them was a little Jesus.
Jesus certainly would have
approved of American Capitalism. He was a fisher of men. Our bourgeois
are fishers of men’s wealth. Those who reach the apex of our system’s
hierarchy enable Christianity to flourish. By clawing their way to the
top (driven by the greed and selfishness which our cynical culture rewards),
they provide a criminal ruling class for us to bestow our compassion
upon. More importantly, by condemning a large percentage of the population
to economic struggle or poverty, they present us with an endless supply
of hungry, broken people to whom we can minister and tend
The book of Genesis clearly
states that God gave us “dominion over the fish of the sea, and
over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth,
and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” So
relax. Rapacious consumption resulting in severe environmental damage,
the infliction of intense suffering upon animals, and species extinction
is a divine right. Who are we to argue with God’s edict that humans
rule?
Jehovah set the gold standard
when he deployed fire and brimstone, but we have managed to approximate
his divine wrath. Just ask the people of Nagasaki, Hiroshima, North
Vietnam, or a host of other malefactors we punished with a well-deserved
rain of fire.
Clearly we Americans are
fulfilling our divine mission to maintain the moral order of the world
each day. We continue to drive a stake through the heart of Godless
Communism. We torture terrorists. We execute murderers. We topple dictators,
spread liberty, and punish Islamofascist nations harshly.
Yet despite all we do for
the world, there are still those who hate us. Worse still, there are
Americans, like William Blum, who have the audacity to bad-mouth this
great nation. It is a tribute to our patience and humanity that we put
up with such ingratitude and calumny. Thankfully, he represents a tiny
segment of our overwhelmingly patriotic populace.
While people like him slander
our magnificent country with idiotic little T-shirt slogans like, “Fighting
for peace is like fucking for virginity”, our men and women in
uniform are fighting to keep the world safe for democracy.
How do such so-called progressives
think? Let’s find out by eavesdropping on that incessant moralist,
Jason Miller, as he questions Blum, a widely published author and scathing
critic of the land of the free:
JM: You
are quite a remarkable individual. False modesty aside, if you were
introducing yourself to an individual who didn’t know you and
giving them a summary of who William Blum is, how would that introduction
go?
WB: It would
of course depend largely on who the person was and what the circumstances
were, but I might say that I spent the first half of my life in the
"bourgeois" world, including IBM and the Department of State,
and then was radicalized by Vietnam and became a drug-using, semi-hippie,
underground-press writer, world traveler, book author, campus speaker,
commie terrorist threat to all that is decent and holy.
JM: In early
2006, Osama bin Laden told US Americans that they needed to read your
book, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. What
were the immediate effects and consequences for you?
WB: Instant
celebrity, on many of the major news programs, including CNN, CSPAN,
MSNBC, etc., with a chance to say things to the great unwashed that
I would never otherwise have had; 1000 emails, half hostile, a couple
threatening.
JM: Obviously,
the dust has had plenty of time to settle. How has bin Laden’s
“endorsement” affected your book sales and impact as a political
educator and social activist?
WB: About
15,000 extra copies of Rogue State sold. I use the experience in my
talks on campus, explaining why I was not embarrassed by the endorsement,
as I had mentioned on air, and which had bothered my interviewers, like
Wolf Blitzer, who wanted me to disown the entire endorsement.
JM: In Rogue
State, you write, "No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded
you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine.”
To what extent can you attribute this conclusion to first-hand knowledge
derived from your years with the State Department, or otherwise?
WB: I was
a computer systems analyst and programmer at the State Dept; not much
privy to important secrets except for the lists they kept of baddies,
foreign and domestic. Reading the news carefully, with a knowledge of
the past, is enough to make one suspicious.
JM: I note that you spent some time in Chile observing
Allende’s attempt to implement socialism. Had Allende survived,
how successful do you think he would have been in fending off the relentless
tide of neoliberalism?
WB: I think
he would have done pretty well at that. He was a sincere man of the
left, not a Democratic Party type liberal.
JM: How
much affinity did Allende have for Castro?
WB: As far
as I remember, a lot.
JM: Please
briefly compare and contrast Allende and Hugo Chavez.
WB: Allende
didn't deliberately antagonize the US as Chavez does. I wish Chavez
would cool it a bit. He's antagonizing homicidal maniacs, literally.
Yet, Allende's moderation in language and policy didn't save him from
Washington's wrath. Once you're an ODE (Officially Designated Enemy)
of Washington, your days are numbered, or at least your life and program
will be made next to impossible.
JM: What
chance do you believe the Bolivarian Revolution has of succeeding in
becoming a viable alternative and genuine threat to the hegemony of
the militaristic, rapacious imperialism which is inextricably linked
to “American Capitalism?”
WB: Based
on past experience, not much chance. But what's new is the oil money.
That changes the picture. But I can't predict what's going to happen.
JM: You
left the State Department in 1967 because of your opposition to the
Vietnam War. What do you think the opposition to the Iraqi Occupation,
which obviously comprises many people, needs to do to increase its effectiveness?
WB: All
I can ever suggest is education. Educate yourself and as many others
as you can. I write my books and give public talks with that in mind,
giving activists talking points to help them to convince others, giving
newcomers new food for thought, planting seeds. Our numbers are indeed
growing and I can only hope that at some point it will reach a critical
mass and "explode". I can't offer more than that.
JM: During
the Vietnam War, you founded and edited the Washington Free Press. Since
there was no Internet, how did you distribute your underground publication?
WB: Mainly
in street sales and at events, plus dozens of book stores and other
venues; at our peak we sold maybe 20-25 thousand each issue.
JM: What
contact, if any, did you have with radical groups like the Black Panthers
and the Weathermen, whose members were investigated, pursued, incarcerated,
or in some cases, murdered, by our government?
WB: I knew
individual members, some wrote for the Free Press, but I personally
was never a member of any group. In later years, I was a member of Trotskyist
groups in the US and the UK.
JM: While
there are distinct parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan/Iraq, there
are also a number of differences. Would you kindly lend us your insight
by briefly comparing and contrasting the two?
WB: The
US had no intention of occupying Vietnam. But in Iraq and Afghanistan
they have done so because of oil and oil pipelines.
JM: What
did your work with Philip Agee, former CIA agent and author of Inside
the Company: CIA Diary, entail?
WB: I didn't
work with him so much as with other people in London who had a relationship
with him. We were engaged in exposing covert CIA officers in the US
embassy.
JM: You
publicly supported Ralph Nader’s bids for the presidency. I have
been repeatedly lambasted for voting for Nader. How would you respond
to critics who claim that voting outside the deeply corrupt duopoly
is a “wasted vote”?
WB: It would
be hard to imagine a more wasted vote than voting for someone you don't
like or support. I should add that I think that most people who voted
for Nader would not have voted at all if he was not a candidate. So
for all these people, Nader votes did not rob the Democrats of a vote.
JM: When
can we expect another book from you?
WB: I don't
know. I'm sort of burnt out. I'm not an author who feels obliged to
keep turning out book after book. I have to see a gap to fill.
JM: Your
words here: "I'm committed to fighting U.S. foreign policy, the
greatest threat to peace and happiness in the world, and being in the
United States is the best place for carrying out the battle. This is
the belly of the beast, and I try to be an ulcer inside of it."
As a veteran of this struggle, you are a true inspiration to the rest
of us aspiring ulcers. What words of advice and encouragement do you
have for us?
WB: See
my reply above about education. And when you're in ideological conflict
with one of the bad guys, and he's mouthing the usual patriotic/conservative
clichés, don't be shy of challenging any of those clichés.
He's so unused to having them challenged that he's often thrown for
a loss. Like always, question the motivation of the US in their interventions
from a MORAL point of view. We have morality on our side -- look at
Iraq, et al. The conservatives have a very difficult time dealing with
this.
As we can plainly see, these
two men—Blum and Miller-- are representative of that nefarious
counter-culture which began to rear its ugly head in the sixties, aborted
our valiant efforts to save Vietnam, and persists to this very day.
Their utopian, and let’s be candid here, utterly inane attempts
to universally apply moral principles such as compassion, justice, and
human dignity are roadblocks to American progress and success.
As we know, civilization
would devolve into chaos if the United States collapsed. Ergo, regardless
of the cost in human lives or damage to the environment, the truly moral
thing to do is to pursue America’s interests.
Now who has morality on their
side?
[Author’s Note: I extend
my sincere thanks to William Blum for granting me a cyber-interview.
It was truly an honor to engage in the Q&A and a joy to write the
accompanying satirical analysis.]
William Blum is
the author of:
Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2,
Rogue
State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Freeing
the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire, and
West-Bloc
Dissident: A Cold War Memoir. Visit his website: http://www.killinghope.org/.
He can be reached at: [email protected].
Jason Miller is
a wage slave of the American Empire who has freed himself intellectually
and spiritually. His essays have been widely published, he is Cyrano's
Journal Online's associate editor (http://www.bestcyrano.org/),
and he volunteers at homeless shelters. He welcomes constructive correspondence
at [email protected]
or via his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/
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