Author Archives: William Blum

The Washington Post has a regular “fact checker,” Glenn Kessler, who checks the accuracy of statements made by politicians and other public figures. On September 3, he announced that President Trump’s first 592 days in office had produced 4,713 false or misleading claims; that’s about 8 per day. Continue reading →

The world will long remember the present immigrant crisis in Europe, which has negatively affected countless people there, and almost all countries. History will certainly record it as a major tragedy. Could it have been averted? Or kept within much more reasonable humane bounds? Continue reading →

Each day I spend about three hours reading the Washington Post. Amongst other things I’m looking for evidence—real, legal, courtroom-quality evidence, or at least something logical and rational—to pin down those awful Russkis for their many recent crimes, from influencing the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election to use of a nerve agent in the UK. But I do not find such evidence. Continue reading →

One reason it’s so easy to get an American administration, the mainstream media, and the American people to jump on an anti-Russian bandwagon is of course the legacy of the Soviet Union. To all the real crimes and shortcomings of that period, the US regularly added many fictitious claims to agitate the American public against Moscow. That has not come to a halt. During a debate in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, candidate Ben Carson (now the head of the US Housing and Urban Development agency) allowed the following to pass his lips: “Joseph Stalin said if you want to bring America down, you have to undermine three things: Our spiritual life, our patriotism, and our morality.” This is a variation on many Stalinist “quotes” over the years designed to deprecate both the Soviet leader and any American who can be made to sound like him. The quote was quite false, but the debate moderators and the other candidates didn’t raise any question about its accuracy. Of course not. Continue reading →

In the Cold War struggles against the Soviets/Russians, the United States has long had the upper hand when it comes to political propaganda. What do the Russkis know about sales campaigns, advertising, psychological manipulation of the public, bait-and-switch, and a host of other Madison Avenue innovations? Just look at what the American media and their Western partners have done with the poisoning of the two Russians, Sergei Skripal and his daughter, in the UK. How many in the West doubt Russia’s guilt? Continue reading →

Much ado about nothing. Continue reading →

On March 7, British police said that a former Russian double agent, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a bench in Salisbury, a city southwest of London. The police said that Skripal had been “targeted specifically” with a nerve agent. Skripal was jailed in Russia in 2006 for passing state secrets to Britain. He was released in 2010 as part of a spy swap. Continue reading →

On January 24, I went to the Washington, DC, bookstore Politics & Prose to hear David Cay Johnston, author of “It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America.” To my surprise he repeatedly said negative things about Russia, and in the Q&A session I politely asked him about this. He did not take kindly to that and after a very brief exchange cut me off by asking for the next person in line to ask a question. Continue reading →

“I’m happy to have a president that will bluntly speak the truth in negotiations,” Eric Prince commented on Breitbart News. “If the president says some places are shitholes, he’s accurate.” Thus did Mr. Eric Prince pay homage to Mr. Donald Trump. Prince of course being the renowned founder of Blackwater, the private army which in September 2007 opened fire in a crowded square in Baghdad, killing 17 Iraqi civilians and seriously wounding 20 more. Continue reading →

2018 is going to be a fun, fun year. And to better prepare yourself for all the merrymaking here is a calendar of some of the more delightful things to look forward to. Continue reading →

Here the man thinks that everyone will be impressed that the American military has never been stronger. Continue reading →

It has recently been reported that Senator John McCain has an aggressive brain tumor. Not long ago I would have thought: “Good. It’ll be great to be rid of that Neanderthal reactionary bastard!” Continue reading →

I hadn’t planned on returning to this subject so soon, if ever, because of the distasteful experience of last summer when at least 50 of my subscribers canceled because I said that terrorism carried out by Islamics was to some extent motivated by their religion, an hypothesis rejected by what I see as the “politically correct” who took it to be an unjust attack upon an ancient and noble religion. The fact that I, a leftist, a comrade, would say such a thing was especially hard for them to take. Continue reading →

Conservatives have had a very hard time getting over President Trump’s much-repeated response to Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly’s calling Russian president Vladimir Putin “a killer.” Replied Trump: “There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers. You think our country is so innocent?” Continue reading →

If anyone knows where to find this long list please send me a copy. Continue reading →

So much cheaper. So much easier. So much more humane. So much more popular. . . . Just stop overthrowing or destabilizing governments south of the border. Continue reading →

The most frequent comment I’ve read in the mainstream media concerning Fidel Castro’s death is that he was a “dictator”; almost every heading bore that word. Since the 1959 revolution, the American mainstream media has routinely referred to Cuba as a dictatorship. But just what does Cuba do or lack that makes it a dictatorship? Continue reading →

Louis XVI needed a revolution; Napoleon needed two historic military defeats; the Spanish Empire in the New World needed multiple revolutions; the Russian Czar needed a communist revolution; the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empire needed World War I; Nazi Germany needed World War II; Imperial Japan needed two atomic bombs; the Portuguese Empire in Africa needed a military coup at home; the Soviet Empire needed Mikhail Gorbachev . . . What will the American Empire need? Continue reading →

“Russia suspected of election scheme. U.S. probes plan to sow voter distrust.” Continue reading →

For 50 years I’ve been painstakingly cataloguing the brutal militarism and human-rights violations of US foreign policy, building up in the process a very loyal audience. Continue reading →

From the early days of America’s War on Terror, and even before then, I advocated seeing terrorists as more than just mindless, evil madmen from another planet. I did not believe they were motivated by hatred or envy of American freedom or democracy, or of American wealth, secular government, or culture, although George W. Bush dearly wanted us to believe that. The terrorists were, I maintained, driven by decades of terrible things done to their homelands by US foreign policy. There should be no doubt of this I wrote, for there are numerous examples of Middle East terrorists explicitly citing American policies as the prime motivation behind their actions. And it worked the same all over the world. Continue reading →

The candidacy of Bernie Sanders, a “democratic socialist”, for the US presidency has produced an unprecedented barrage of discussion in the American media about just what is this thing called “socialism”. Most of the discussion centers around the question of government ownership and control of the economy versus private ownership and control. This is, of course, a very old question; the meat and potatoes of the Cold War ideological competition. Continue reading →

“The trade embargo can be fully lifted only through legislation—unless Cuba forms a democracy, in which case the president can lift it.” Continue reading →

On May 31, 1999, a lawsuit for $181 billion in wrongful death, personal injury, and economic damages was filed in a Havana court against the government of the United States. It was subsequently filed with the United Nations. Since that time its fate is somewhat of a mystery. Continue reading →