Description:

In Killing Hope, William Blum, author of the bestselling Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, provides a devastating and comprehensive account of America's covert and overt military actions in the world, all the way from China in the 1940s to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and - in this updated edition - beyond. Is the United States, as it likes to claim, a global force for democracy? Killing Hope shows the answer to this question to be a resounding 'no'.

Review

"Our fear that communism might someday take over most of the world," reads the epigraph William Blum places at the head of Killing Hope, "blinds us to the fact that anti-communism already has." The line, borrowed from Michael Parenti, does more than announce a thesis. It names the peculiar inversion that structures every page of this book: the conviction that the twentieth century's dominant narrative — that the United States spent the Cold War defending freedom against a monolithic communist threat — is not merely incomplete but the precise reverse of the truth. In Blum's telling, anti-communism was the name Washington gave to an imperial project that crushed democratic self-determination wherever it appeared, and the "International Communist Conspiracy" was a fabrication so useful it outlasted the Soviet Union that supposedly anchored it. The Cold War, he writes in the concluding chapter, was "a con game." The real enemy was never communism. It was independence.

This is a staggering claim, and Killing Hope is the document Blum assembled to make it stick. Originally published in 1995 and updated through 2003, the book is organized as fifty-six country-by-country case studies, running chronologically from the 1918 Allied intervention in Soviet Russia through the post-9/11 invasion of Iraq. Each chapter presents a self-contained account of American covert or overt intervention, and together they constitute what Blum calls an "American holocaust" — millions dead, millions more immiserated, all of it systematically denied or obscured. The book is a prosecutorial brief, and it makes no pretense of neutrality. Blum writes as a committed anti-imperialist, and his method is to juxtapose official American rhetoric with the documented record of what American power actually did. He is less interested in interpreting documents than in letting them accuse. The result is a work of enormous documentary force and equally enormous analytical selectivity — a book that succeeds brilliantly at what it sets out to do while raising hard questions about what it declines to do.

Blum's central premise is that every significant twentieth-century experiment in socialism or genuine non-alignment was destroyed, corrupted, or destabilized by the United States. The list he assembles is exhaustive: Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala, Lumumba in the Congo, Goulart in Brazil, Sukarno in Indonesia, Allende in Chile, Manley in Jamaica, Whitlam in Australia, Bishop in Grenada — leaders who ranged from Marxist to social-democratic to merely reformist, all of them subverted or overthrown. What united them, in Blum's reading, was not adherence to Moscow but the assertion of sovereignty over resources, land, and foreign policy. United Fruit's expropriated lands drove the 1954 Guatemalan coup as directly as Anglo-Iranian Oil's nationalization drove the 1953 Iranian one. "Washington knows no heresy in the Third World but independence," Blum writes, borrowing from the decolonial tradition, and he treats the Cold War's ideological framing as a category error. The Soviet 'threat' was manufactured because a threat was needed — "clearer than the truth," as he puts it, citing invented missile gaps and phantom divisions — to sustain the militarized national-security state whose actual purpose was imperial expansion.

The sheer weight of documentation Blum brings to this argument makes Killing Hope difficult to dismiss, and uncomfortable even for readers inclined to resist its conclusions. His source base is formidable: declassified State Department cables and CIA memoranda released under the thirty-year rule, the Church and Pike Committee investigations, the memoirs of former intelligence officers (Stockwell, Agee, Marchetti, Cline, Braden), captured internal documents, contemporaneous press accounts, and Amnesty International and Americas Watch reports. He works these materials with the instincts of an investigator, not an academic historian — he cross-references, juxtaposes, catches officials in their own words, and treats any gap between stated policy and operational reality as evidence of deception. The chapter on Chile, for instance, begins with Nixon's directive to "make the economy scream" and traces the three-year campaign of economic strangulation, propaganda, and paramilitary action that preceded the September 1973 coup. Blum quotes CIA director Richard Helms's handwritten notes from the September 15, 1970 meeting — "One in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile! ... not concerned with risks involved ... $10,000,000 available, more if necessary" — and lets them speak. This is the book's signature move: the document laid bare, the official position exposed as alibi.

The chapter on Vietnam performs the same operation at greater length. Blum traces American involvement from the $1.4 billion in aid to the French through the cancellation of the 1956 elections, which Eisenhower himself, in a confession Blum quotes with relish, acknowledged Ho Chi Minh would have won with "possibly 80 percent of the population." He reconstructs the Gulf of Tonkin fabrication, the Phoenix Program's documented killings (between 20,587 and 40,994 by varying counts), and the postwar refusal to honor reconstruction pledges. The chapter's epigraph — "If you grab 'em by the balls, the hearts and minds will follow" — does the work of collapsing official counterinsurgency rhetoric into its actual practice. This is not a balanced history; it is an indictment, and it makes no room for the Cold War liberal's earnest hand-wringing. For Blum, the liberal interventionist was always the more dangerous figure precisely because he believed his own cover story.

That dynamic — the liberal as imperial functionary — recurs across the book's most devastating passages. Blum devotes sustained attention to the export of torture and surveillance infrastructure, treating the Office of Public Safety, the American Institute for Free Labor Development, and the School of the Americas as institutions that turned repression into a technical discipline. The chapter on Uruguay introduces Dan Mitrione, the OPS instructor whose motto was "the precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect" — a formulation Blum presents with a restraint that makes it more damning than any editorializing. Mitrione demonstrated electric shock techniques on four beggars who died; the Uruguayan police he trained would go on to staff the military dictatorship that seized power in 1973. Blum traces the same methods — the field-telephone shock, the "parrot's perch" — from Brazil to Guatemala, the equipment arriving via diplomatic pouch. He documents the CIA mail-opening program, the Greek KYP's bugging of the entire cabinet, the Italian "techno-fascism" program that taught security services to surveil citizens through bank and tax data. "We can hear the toilets flush in Managua," a CIA analyst boasts of the worldwide eavesdropping system, and Blum presents the line not as a colorful detail but as an epitaph for the country the contras were bleeding dry.

The economic dimension of intervention receives equally methodical treatment. Blum reads the Guatemala coup as a United Fruit operation, the Iran coup as an Anglo-Iranian Oil operation, and the post-Cold War interventions as operations of the transnational corporate order. He documents Gulf Oil's $460,000 payment to Bolivia's General Barrientos at the CIA's recommendation, the ITT-led credit squeeze on Allende's Chile, the bauxite retaliation and contaminated flour shipments used to destabilize Manley's Jamaica. In each case, nationalization or land reform — not communist affiliation — triggered American action. Blum is careful to note that the CIA's own September 1970 study found "no vital national interests" at stake in Chile beyond a psychological "set-back." The point is structural: the United States does not intervene because communism threatens it; it calls whatever threatens it communist. The term, in Blum's usage, approaches pure signifier — a name for the refusal to integrate into American-led circuits of capital and power.

The closing chapter makes this reading explicit by turning to the post-Cold War documentary record. Blum quotes the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance's directive to "prevent the re-emergence of a new rival," the 2000 Project for the New American Century report, and the 2002 National Security Strategy's doctrine of preemptive war, which he compares — with characteristic bluntness — to "the rationale imperial Japan, without being overly paranoid, used to justify its attack on Pearl Harbor" and "which Nazi Germany, as a sham pretext, used to justify its invasion of Poland." The Iraq war, in this reading, is not a departure but a culmination: an openly imperial war fought for oil and corporate access, justified by fabricated intelligence ("just a matter of emphasis," as one official admitted), and continuous with the seventy years of interventions that preceded it. "The Cold War is Over. Long live the Cold War," Blum writes, and the shift from anti-communism to anti-terrorism is presented as a mere rebranding. The enemy, he insists, is "any government or movement, or even individual, that stands in the way of the expansion of the American Empire; by whatever name the US gives to the enemy — communist, rogue state, drug trafficker, terrorist."

This is a powerful argument, and it is precisely at the point of its greatest rhetorical force that the book's limitations become most visible. Blum's method is to treat every official American statement as a lie and every declassified document as a confession, and while this interpretive framework produces tremendous critical energy, it is also self-sealing. Any US claim to democratic motivation is foreclosed by the model itself; there is no evidence that could count against the thesis, because evidence of benign intent would simply be further evidence of the effectiveness of the cover. This makes Killing Hope less a work of historical explanation than a work of exposé — and while exposé is a legitimate and necessary genre, it operates on different terms than those Blum sometimes seems to claim for himself. He is not, despite the footnotes, weighing counter-evidence. He is building a case.

The selectivity is structural and acknowledged. Blum's subject is American intervention against left and progressive movements, and he does not pretend to cover interventions that fit the pattern less neatly — the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia are noted in passing, not treated as parallel case studies. His reading of declassified documents, while meticulous, sometimes takes internal memos at face value as accurate representations of operational reality rather than as bureaucratic artifacts with their own strategic purposes. The claim that "there had never been an International Communist Conspiracy" is asserted with more confidence than the evidence can fully sustain — the Soviet Union did fund and coordinate communist parties internationally, even if the scale and coherence of that effort were radically exaggerated by American propaganda. Acknowledging this would not vindicate the interventions Blum documents, but it would complicate a thesis that sometimes reads the Cold War as entirely an American projection. Blum's framework, in the end, inverts the Cold War narrative without transcending its binary structure. The United States remains the sole agent; the targets remain largely reactive.

At the same time, what Blum accomplishes within his chosen frame is substantial and, in the American context, genuinely counter-hegemonic. The book belongs to the anti-imperialist and decolonial traditions — it extends the critique of neo-colonialism developed by Nkrumah (whom Blum explicitly cites), sharpens the materialist analysis of corporate-state collusion, and documents, in granular primary-source detail, a record of intervention that mainstream American political discourse has largely succeeded in rendering invisible. Blum draws on figures like Philip Agee and John Stockwell, former CIA officers who turned against the Agency and whose memoirs provide some of the book's most incriminating material. He engages, often by name and always combatively, with the pro-empire intellectuals of the post-Cold War moment — Krauthammer and his "benign imperium," Kagan's "benevolent hegemony" — and treats their frankness as useful confirmation: the empire, having lost its Soviet enemy, was beginning to say openly what it had always done covertly. This is not intellectual history in the conventional sense, but it is historically significant as a document of the anti-imperialist counter-tradition at the moment of its greatest marginalization.

The book's treatment of media and propaganda is especially sharp. Blum documents the CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom, its thirty-plus periodicals, its funding of over a thousand books, and its penetration of European and Latin American intellectual life. He traces the mechanics of disinformation — planted articles, recycled fabrications, the use of Reader's Digest as a transmission belt — and makes the structural point that conspiracy is unnecessary when editors have internalized the same worldview as the planners. The New York Times, he notes, ran ninety-one stories suggesting the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse before it actually was, each one a "rope's end" being jumped upon. This is not a claim about a cabal; it is a claim about the ideological production of reality, and it is one of the book's more durable insights. When Blum turns to the Reagan-era disinformation campaigns — the fabricated Libyan "hit squads," the phantom Grenada weapons caches, the Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare manual that instructed the contras to assassinate judges and hire criminals — his method of juxtaposing official statements with documented operations reaches its fullest expression. Reagan declared Grenada "a Soviet-Cuban colony being readied as a major military bastion"; a Guardian correspondent found five mortars and a recoilless rifle.

The human cost is never abstracted. Killing Hope is, among other things, a book of the dead: the half-million to one million Indonesians killed in 1965 after the US Embassy compiled and passed five thousand PKI names to the army; the 20,000 to 40,000 Vietnamese killed in the Phoenix Program; the Guatemalan Indians subjected to what Blum calls "a less publicized 'final solution'"; the Kurds abandoned in 1975 with Kissinger's cynical dismissal — "covert action should not be confused with missionary work"; the Cambodians whose country was bombed for five years and then handed to the Khmer Rouge. Blum does not attempt the novelist's trick of making individual deaths vivid; his method is cumulative, and the effect is of an atrocity so vast and so repetitious that it constitutes its own category. Whether one accepts his "American holocaust" framing or recoils from it, the scale of documented killing is staggering, and Blum is right that it has never been metabolized by the American public in anything like proportion to its magnitude.

Who, then, should read Killing Hope? The book is not an introduction to Cold War history — it assumes too much background knowledge and moves too fast through too many cases to serve that function. It is a work of radical historiography, a compendium of the counter-narrative, and it is best read as such: not as a substitute for more conventional accounts but as a corrective to their silences and evasions. Readers seeking balance will not find it here, but readers seeking the evidence that balance routinely excludes will find it in overwhelming abundance. The book is also, in ways Blum may not have fully intended, a period piece — a document of the anti-imperialist left at the moment the Soviet collapse seemed to foreclose its analysis, written by an author who refused to accept that foreclosure and who lived just long enough to see American empire become, briefly, a subject of mainstream debate again. Blum died in 2018, fifteen years after the edition reviewed here, and the interventions he documented have not stopped. The book's final warning — that imperialism abroad "will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home" — was lifted from the 1900 Democratic platform. It sounds less antique now than it did when he quoted it.