[Peace-discuss] Bill Blum obit in NYT

[David Green]

Not sure if it's surprising that he has an obit in the NYT, but the
jaundiced language is no surprise of course. Chomsky must chuckle if he
thinks about his own future obit.


   NY Times, Dec. 11, 2018
   William Blum, U.S. Policy Critic Cited by bin Laden, Dies at 85
   By Sam Roberts

   William Blum, who *raged against United States foreign policy in
   relative obscurity *for decades until one of his published
   anti-imperialist broadsides received a surge in sales thanks to a surprise
   public tribute from Osama bin Laden, died on Sunday in Arlington, Va. He
   was 85.

   His son, Alexander, said the cause was kidney failure. Mr. Blum had been
   hospitalized after being injured in a fall in his apartment in October.

   Mr. Blum (pronounced “bloom”) was a computer programmer for the State
   Department who aspired to become a career Foreign Service officer and “take
   part in the great anti-Communist crusade,” he once recalled. But he became
   disillusioned over the Vietnam War.

   After helping to inaugurate a short-lived biweekly underground
   newspaper, The Washington Free Press, and joining in antiwar protests, he
   said he was pressured in 1967 to quit his government job.

   In the decades after that, he wrote *largely polemical articles and
   columns*, in print for publications like Foreign Policy Journal and
   Counterpunch and later online. He also produced, and contributed to,
   exposés in books and other media about *what he called misdeeds* by the
   United States at home and abroad that were carried out in the name of
   national security.

   Faking a flat tire near the gate to Central Intelligence Agency
   headquarters in Virginia, he surreptitiously recorded the license plates of
   employees who were entering and leaving. He revealed the names and home
   addresses of more than 200 of them in his book “The CIA, a Forgotten
   History: U.S. Global Interventions Since World War 2” (1986).

   “They could have been spies,” said Louis Wolf, a founder with Mr. Blum
   in 1978 of what is now called CovertAction Magazine. “They could have been
   clerks.”

   In an interview with The Washington Post in 2006, Mr. Blum encapsulated
   his life’s mission as “ending, at least slowing down, the American Empire,”
   or “at least injuring the beast.”

   Still, no one was more surprised than he when a recording emerged in
   2006 on which Osama bin Laden recommended that all Americans read Mr.
   Blum’s book “Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower,” first
   published in 2000 and updated in 2005. *It vaulted almost overnight from
   about 205,000 on Amazon’s sales ranking to the top 50. (It stood at about
   58,000 a few days after Mr. Blum’s death.) *

   “This is almost as good as being an Oprah book,” Mr. Blum said at the
   time.

   While Mr. Blum denounced the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New
   York and Washington and said he would not want to live under an Islamic
   fundamentalist regime, he did not disavow the recommendation or express
   regret that bin Laden, the orchestrator of those attacks, shared his
   disdain for the policies carried out by the department where he had once
   worked.

   He also *reiterated his unpopular, but not unique, position *that
   American intervention abroad had been breeding enemies and inviting
   terrorism. He blamed Washington for replacing secular governments in
   Afghanistan and other countries with Islamic fundamentalist regimes;
   reflexively favoring Israel over the Palestinians; and supporting Saudi
   Arabian dictators.

   While bin Laden recommended that Americans read “Rogue State,” he
   paraphrased a quotation that was actually from the back cover of another
   book by Mr. Blum, “Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American
   Empire” (2004).

   “If I were the president,” that quotation reads, “I could stop terrorist
   attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first
   apologize — very publicly and very sincerely — to all the widows and
   orphans, the impoverished and the tortured, and all the many millions of
   other victims of American imperialism.”

   William Henry Blum was born on March 6, 1933, in Brooklyn to Jewish
   immigrants from Poland, Isidore Blum, a machine operator, and Ruth (Katz)
   Blum.

   After graduating from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, he earned a
   bachelor’s degree in accounting from what is now Baruch College of the City
   University of New York.

   Found unfit for military service because of the kidney ailment that
   ultimately proved fatal, his son said, Mr. Blum was hired as a programmer
   by I.B.M. and subsequently by the State Department.

   He later collaborated in London with the former C.I.A. case officer
   Philip Agee, whose critical book “Inside the Company: CIA Diary” (1975),
   was followed by books and articles that made other disclosures about the
   agency’s covert operations.

   In 1979, Mr. Blum married Adelheid Zöfel. They later separated. She and
   their son survive him, along with two grandsons.

   Mr. Blum repeatedly challenged the idealistic premise of American
   exceptionalism and argued instead that world hegemony was Washington’s
   covert goal, for economic, nationalistic, ideological and religious
   reasons.

   He continued to write his monthly online newspaper, The Anti-Empire
   Report, until September. His last public appearance was at a panel
   discussion over the summer sponsored by Left Forum and CovertAction, at
   which he repeated his premise that most Americans have “a deeply held
   conviction that no matter what the United States does abroad, no matter how
   bad it may look, no matter what harm results, the United States government
   means well.”

   In an interview in 2016 with Richard Grove of the website Tragedy and
   Hope, Mr. Blum was asked what he loved most about America. He replied,
   “Baseball, Jewish food, many films.” Politically, he added, things could be
   worse:

   “I have not been put in prison because of what I’ve written or spoken.”
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