Freeing the World to Death : Essays on the American Empire

Rating:
Summary: again, not Blum's piece de resistance
Review: ... but that's OK; I don't think he intended this to be another book on the scale of Killing Hope. Killing Hope is all about the US military & CIA interventions since WWII; Rogue State is about all the (highly) illegal & immoral stuff the US has been deeply involved in (torture, looting/kidnapping, etc). Freeing the World to Death, however doesn't seem to have as much of a focus, it's more like miscellaneous Bill Blum stuff. (I guess that's to be expected given the subtitle). The introduction has one of my favourite quotations:

"We can say the United States runs the world like the Taliban ran Afghanistan. Cuba is dealth 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 religious police whipping a man whose beard is not the right length."

The rest of the introduction explains that what the Bush admin does in the world has been done to death by virtually every president for a long time (100yrs+), but it's only now that people want to do something about it. After that the book is split into four parts: one containing the Anti-Empire Reports from the author's website, www.killinghope.org, the second is about US interventions, the third is about the Cold War & the last is about US domestic policy. I would say the highlights from the US interventions part is the transcript of a speech he gave on why terrorists keep picking on the United States (it's not because they "hate freedom") and the author's presentation & commentary on a debate on US foreign policy at Trinity College, Dublin. Part III (the Cold War) starts with commentary on anti-Communism with samples of American anti-Communst propaganda (which sound hilarious now). The highlight would have to be the chapter on the US bombing of Hiroshima & Nagasaki. It has been said that the bombing of those two cities wasn't the final shot of WWII, but the first shot of the Cold War. (see the book for more details ;) ) The last part is about "the Empire at Home" including email correspondence with some of his critics, Cuban political prisoners (in the US), John Kerry, & some articles of the author's in London's Ecologist, including a review of Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. This book isn't as heavily footnoted as Killing Hope or Rogue State, partly because some chapters are transcripts of talks he has given, or they are newspaper/magazine articles. If you're a fan of Blum (like me), I think this book is a good buy, but if not, I would say that his other two books would be better for non-fans since they have more of a focus and it's easier to find out where Blum found something out.