{"id":124010,"date":"2018-12-17T12:00:11","date_gmt":"2018-12-17T12:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=124010"},"modified":"2018-12-11T13:01:51","modified_gmt":"2018-12-11T13:01:51","slug":"william-blum-6-mar-1933-9-dec-2018-renowned-u-s-foreign-policy-critic-dead-at-85","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/12\/william-blum-6-mar-1933-9-dec-2018-renowned-u-s-foreign-policy-critic-dead-at-85\/","title":{"rendered":"William Blum (6 Mar 1933 \u2013 9 Dec 2018), Renowned U.S. Foreign Policy Critic, Dead at 85"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

William Blum (1933 \u2013 2018)<\/p><\/div>\n

William Blum died in Virginia early this morning on December 9, 2018. He was surrounded by friends and family after falling in his Washington D.C. apartment and sustaining serious wounds 65 days ago.\u00a0He was 85 years old.<\/p>\n

Bill was born March 6, 1933 at Beth Moses Hospital in Brooklyn, N.Y. and became an American author, historian, and critic of\u00a0United States foreign policy. He worked in a computer-related position at the\u00a0United States Department of State\u00a0in the mid-1960s. Initially an\u00a0anti-communist\u00a0with dreams of becoming a\u00a0Foreign Service officer, he became disillusioned by the\u00a0Vietnam War.<\/p>\n

Blum left the State Department in 1967 and became a founder and editor of the\u00a0Washington Free Press<\/em>, the first \u201calternative\u201d newspaper in the capital. In 1969, he wrote and published an expos\u00e9 of the\u00a0CIA\u00a0in which were revealed the names and addresses of more than 200 CIA employees. He worked as freelance journalist in the United States, Europe and South America. In 1972\u20131973 Blum worked as a journalist in\u00a0Chile\u00a0where he reported on the\u00a0Allende\u00a0government\u2019s \u201csocialist experiment.\u201d\u00a0Its overthrow in a CIA designed coup instilled in him a personal involvement and an even more heightened interest in what his government was doing in various corners of the\u00a0world.<\/p>\n

In London\u00a0in the mid-1970s, Blum collaborated with ex-CIA officer\u00a0Philip Agee\u00a0and his associates \u201con their project of exposing CIA personnel and their misdeeds.\u201d The late 1980s found Mr. Blum living in Los Angeles pursuing a career as a screenwriter. Unfortunately, his screenplays all had two (if not three) strikes against them because they dealt with those things which makes grown men run away screaming in Hollywood: ideas and issues.<\/p>\n

For the rest of his long life, Bill lived in Washington, D.C. ineligible to renew his lapsed security clearance because of his political views. Instead, he\u00a0accepted many speaking engagements on college campuses around the world. Bill was a distinguished member of\u00a0CovertAction Magazine<\/a><\/em>\u00a0and the\u00a0Advisory Board<\/a>, and worked on staff for many years with\u00a0CovertAction Quarterly<\/em> and\u00a0CovertAction Information Bulletin<\/em>. His articles can be found in our archives<\/a>; See issues numbers 33, 46, 47, 51, 53, 66, and 77. Blum went on to write numerous books on U.S. foreign policy and became the go-to source on U.S. intervention.<\/p>\n

His book\u00a0Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II<\/a><\/em>\u2013first published in 1995 and updated in 2004\u2013has received international acclaim. \u00a0Noam Chomsky called it \u201cfar and away the best book on the topic.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1999, he was a recipient of Project Censored\u2019s awards for \u201cexemplary journalism\u201d for writing one of the top ten censored stories of 1998\u2013an article on how, in the 1980s, the United States gave Iraq the material to develop a chemical and biological warfare capability.<\/p>\n

Blum is also the author of\u00a0America\u2019s Deadliest Export: Democracy \u2013 The Truth About U.S. Foreign Policy and Everything Else<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(2013),\u00a0Rogue State: A Guide to the World\u2019s Only Superpower<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(updated edition 2005),\u00a0West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(2002), and\u00a0Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(2004). \u00a0His books have been translated into more than 15 languages.<\/p>\n

During 2002-2003, Blum was a regular columnist for the magazine\u00a0The Ecologist<\/em>, which is published in London and distributed globally. In January 2006, a tape from Osama bin Laden stated that \u201cit would be useful\u201d for Americans to read\u00a0Rogue State<\/em>, apparently to gain a better understanding of the enemy.\u00a0Blum found his public speaking engagements abruptly ending.<\/p>\n

Bill is also well-known for his highly popular and well-researched blog called \u201cThe Anti-Empire Report\u201d<\/a>\u00a0published from April 1 2003 to September 20, 2018.<\/p>\n

Following his 65-day fight to live after his devastating fall in his apartment on October 4th<\/sup>, Bill died this morning at 2:20 a.m. When his condition worsened several days ago, he was transferred from the Virginia Hospital Center to the Caring Care Hospice about one mile from the hospital. His son, Alexander S. Blum, flew in from Germany to be alongside friends and family.\u00a0His immediate cause of death was kidney failure\u2014combined with the various wounds on his body.<\/p>\n

His last speaking engagement was this past summer as the keynote speaker at the Left Forum panel entitled \u201cCovertAction: Persistent U.S. Attacks Against \u2018Democracy and Freedom,\u2019 Past and Present.<\/a>\u201d Hosted by\u00a0CovertAction Magazine<\/a><\/em>, Bill\u2013speaking with Louis Wolf and others\u2013entitled his presentation\u00a0\u201cAmerican Exceptionalism: The Naked Truth.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0He started his talk by acknowledging that\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can all agree I think that US foreign policy must be changed and that to achieve that the mind \u2013 not to mention the heart and soul \u2013 of the American public must be changed.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And in his iconic, wry humor\u2014coupled with chuckles in the audience\u2014Bill stated:<\/p>\n

\u201cConsciously or unconsciously, [the American people] have certain basic beliefs about the United States and its foreign policy\u2026The most basic of these basic beliefs, I think, is a deeply-held conviction that no matter what the US does abroad, no matter how bad it may look, no matter what horror may result, the government of the United States means well.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

See the full video of the panel here.<\/a> His talk starts at 44 min and 48 seconds into the video.<\/p>\n

Bill spent his life documenting the atrocities of the U.S. government and his contributions are deeply enlightening; without a doubt Bill has offered us ever lasting resources that will continue to inform generations to come.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=W3AW5Kd33f4<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

William Blum was an author, historian, and renowned critic of U.S. foreign policy. He authored Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II<\/a><\/em> and Rogue State: A Guide to the World\u2019s Only Superpower<\/a>, among others. He left the State Department in 1967, abandoning his aspiration of becoming a Foreign Service Officer, because of his opposition to what the United States was doing in Vietnam. He then became one of the founders and editors of the <\/em>Washington Free Press<\/em>, the first \u201calternative\u201d newspaper in the capital. Mr. Blum was a freelance journalist in the United States, Europe and South America. \u00a0His stay in Chile in 1972-3, writing about the Allende government\u2019s \u201csocialist experiment\u201d and its tragic overthrow in a CIA-designed coup, instilled in him a personal involvement and an even more heightened interest in what his government was doing in various parts of the world.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 covertactionmagazine.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

William Blum died in Virginia early this morning on December 9, 2018 after falling in his Washington D.C. apartment and sustaining serious wounds 65 days ago. Blum left the State Department in 1967 and became a founder and editor of the Washington Free Press, the first \u201calternative\u201d newspaper in the capital. In 1969, he wrote and published an expos\u00e9 of the CIA in which were revealed the names and addresses of more than 200 CIA employees.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":124011,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[226],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-124010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-obituaries"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124010\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/124011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}