Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire by William Blum (Common Courage, 2005, 314 pp.)

Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire is the latest addition of William Blum’s growing canon of books exposing the brutal realities of U.S. government actions. This compilation of essays, written from 1995 to the present, covers a broad range of subjects in the arenas of U.S. foreign and domestic policy, effectively cutting through the fog of propaganda that inevitably obscures such topics. 

The book starts with a collection of entries from Blum’s monthly online newsletter, “The Anti-Empire Report,” in which he comments on various issues, including the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the coup in Haiti, U.S. rejection of international legal institutions, actions toward Cuba and Libya, the aggressive role of NATO in Eastern Europe, and the domestic effects of U.S. capitalism to name a few. 

Next, Blum presents a series of essays further discussing U.S. foreign policy, including an insightful analysis of the relationship between U.S. state violence and anti-U.S. terrorist attacks that refutes the official “terrorists hate us for our freedom” line. Continuing in this vein, he presents essays on the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, the U.S. role in arming Iraq with chemical and biological weapons, and the actual (as opposed to fabricated) reasons the U.S. invaded Iraq. 

The chapter entitled, “Interventions: The Unending List” is particularly useful and informative. Supplementing his extensive chronicling of U.S. interventions in the books Killing Hope and Rogue State, as well as the cases of Haiti, Iraq, and Afghanistan described elsewhere in Freeing the World to Death, Blum presents Washington’s most recent interferences into the affairs of defenseless and sovereign nations in Eastern Europe and Latin America. These include Slovakia, Nicaragua, Bolivia, El Salvador, and Venezuela. In this last case, Blum traces the U.S. government’s efforts to remove Hugo Chavez from power, from its role in the 2002 coup up to the partial financing of the recent referendum in Venezuela by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a known front for the CIA. 

Blum’s section of chapters on the Cold War helps put Washington’s interventions in historical perspective and details the many instances in which the U.S. government destroyed the possibility of any alternative to the capitalist system. His essay entitled, “Hiroshima: Needless Slaughter, Useful Terror” makes a compelling case that the atomic attacks on Japanese civilians in World War II were more likely an attempt to intimidate the Soviet Union than end the war. 

Subsequently, Blum also discusses contemporary domestic issues, including electoral politics, the economic status of those ignored by elites in this country, and the increasing police state mentality in the United States. In his essay on presidential candidate John Kerry, he lays to rest any illusions the reader may have about a humane foreign policy under a Kerry administration. Kerry’s criticism of Bush for not providing more funding for the NED, as well as his stated intention to “order direct military action” against terrorist groups (i.e., wage preventative war) are among some of the damning examples that Blum provides. 

The book ends on an apolitical and humorous note as Blum recounts his surreal interactions with members of the Los Angeles New Age movement, or “California Metaphysical Fruitcakes” as he calls them. This provides a much-needed comic relief to the atrocities he describes in the preceding pages. 

Throughout Freeing the World to Death, Blum does not hesitate to challenge the defenders of U.S. government actions, be they establishment politicians or ordinary people in the U.S. who believe that their government is a benevolent world force. In various sections of the book, he reproduces some of his heated dialogues with these apologists, including an attempt at discourse with former leftist and current bombing enthusiast Christopher Hitchens.