Killing Hope Quotes

“Former Chinese Premier Chou En-lai once observed: “One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.”
― William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II

“While many nations have a terrible record in modern times of dealing out great suffering face-to-face with their victims, Americans have made it a point to keep at a distance while inflicting some of the greatest horrors of the age: atomic bombs on the people of Japan; carpet-bombing Korea back to the stone age; engulfing the Vietnamese in napalm and pesticides; providing three decades of Latin Americans with the tools and methods of torture, then turning their eyes away, closing their ears to the screams, and denying everything … and now, dropping 177 million pounds of bombs on the people of Iraq in the most concentrated aerial onslaught in the history of the world.”
― William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II

“In summing up the affair in his memoirs, president Eisenhower seemed to settle upon one rationale in particular, and this is probably the closest to the truth of the matter. This was to put the world—and specifically the Soviet Union and Nasser—on notice that the United States had virtually unlimited power, that this power could be transported to any corner of the world with great speed, that it could and would be used to deal decisively with any situation with which the United States was dissatisfied, for whatever reason.”
― William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II

“In a visit to San Salvador in February 1989, Vice President Dan Quayle told army leaders that death squad killings and other human rights violations attributed to the military had to be ended. Ten days later, the US-trained Atlacatl Battalion—which was believed to have a US trainer assigned to it at all times—attacked a guerrilla field hospital, killing at least ten people, including five patients, a doctor and a nurse, and raping at least two of the female victims before shooting them.”
― William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II

“And “them” can mean a peasant in the Philippines, a mural-painter in Nicaragua, a legally-elected prime minister in British Guiana, or a European intellect, a Cambodian neutralist, an African nationalist—all, somehow, part of the same monolithic conspiracy; each, in some way, a threat to the American Way of Life; no land too small, too poor, or too far away to pose a threat, the “communist threat”.”
― William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II

“To the mind carefully brought to adulthood in the United States, the truths of anti-communism are self-evident, as self-evident as the flatness of the world once was to an earlier mind;”
― William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II