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phubbard's review against another edition
5.0
It's good. Has some nice commentary on everyone's favorite war criminal, Obama. I think it's better than, for example, William Blum, and a pretty good, short overview.
washed_guapi_lee's review
dark
informative
medium-paced
4.0
Prashad explores the role the CIA, banks, politicians and the wealthy had in crushing social & political movements throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America that attempted to institutionalize leftist practices: nationalizing resources, paying a living wage, universal health care, reclaiming land from corporations, and eradicating poverty. Prashad locates the period after WWII as the moment that the United States became the global power, and began wrestling with how to handle the three pillars of global ideology: Democracy, Communism & Islam. Over the course of 150+ pages Prashad takes readers to Guatemala, Haiti, Libya, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Venezuela, Indonesia, Burkina Faso, Somalia, El Salvador and many more countries, and details the ways the U.S. government undermined democracy for the purpose of U.S hegemony, and the rapacious greed of multinational corporations & individuals. The 50s to the 80s are littered with coups, massacres, assassinations, bribery, and political theft initiated by the U.S. or supported to undermine the will & desire of the people. The U.S. was so deranged in its efforts it coordinated an attack on liberation theology and killed priests and nuns, all for land and profit. According to Prashad, this overt violent practice shifts in the 90s, as globalization takes root and banks become the method of violence through sanctions, embargoes, structural adjustment, inflation, and predatory loans. And while Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya faced mass death and destruction in the 00s, they were also signals of a failing empire. Still, it is startling the scale and depths to which conservative, greedy and powerful political organizations and militaries have gone to stop people from being fed and housed.
At times the book does suffer from its brevity and how many locations Prashad covers. I wonder if it would’ve been more effective to just focus on 8-10 places to outline the ways banks and the CIA have ruined hundreds of millions of peoples’ lives. Also because the focus is how movements were thwarted or defeated, it feels very hopeless even though the back of the book says it’s about hope. In particular in these times, on this soil, it is important to understand that not only is the government beginning to use these tactics on its own citizens, but that things have actually been much much worse for people across the globe, yet they endured and survived. We will too, hopefully.
srpraveen's review against another edition
5.0
It is a testimony to the power of American propaganda and its hegemony over all cultural production that despite being the one country which has carried out the most number of coups in other countries, despite being the country which has assassinated the most number of leaders and which has pushed the must number of people to poverty through crippling sanctions, it is still celebrated as the land of the free and home of the brave.
In 'Washington Bullets', Vijay Prashad accurately describes it as the country where liberty is just a statue. The book becomes a useful reference guide to all the US interventions in countries across the world in the past century, the planned coups, the assassinations of leftist national leaders, the mass murders and the many devious methods it still continues to employ to force other countries to toe their line, especially the ones who nationalise their resources, which American corporates have an eye on.
One only need to name the leaders and the countries which they preyed on and describe the method once, because the modus operandi has been faithfully replicated in almost every other country. In the early 1950s, Jacobo Arbenz tried to implement a moderate land reform agenda in Guatemala, which also undercut the land holdings of the United Fruit Company, a US conglomerate. Before long, the CIA engineered a coup, seized the presidential palace and sent him to exile. In the following years, they directly or indirectly assassinated tall leaders of several third world countries, all of them with a leftist inclination - Patrice Lumumba in Congo (1961. Yesterday was the 60th anniversary of that assassination), Mehdi Ben Barka of Morocco (1965), Che Guevara in Bolivia (1967), Salvador Allende in Chile (1973), Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso (1987), Amilcar Cabral in Cape Verde (1973) and many others. Not to forget the many failed assassinations.
Prashad poignantly notes that in the assassinations of such leaders, the biggest price is paid by the people. "For in these assassinations, these murders, this violence of intimidation, it is the people who lose the leaders in their localities. A peasant leaders, a trade union leader, a leader of the poor. The assassiantions become massacres, as people who are in motion are cut down. Their confidence begins to falter. In Indonesia, the price of the bullets was in the millions. In Guatemala, in the tens of thousands. The death of Lumumba damaged the social dynamic of the Congo, muzzling its history."
He goes back to the US's early days of occupying nations, especially the "great myth" of the American Revolution of 1776, which was marked by a genocidal attitude towards the native Americans, and the period after the Monro Doctrine of 1923, which the country saw as its right for the hemisphere. Prashad notes how even some of the UN's policies like its Article 41, became a legal justification for the inhuman sanctions policy of the US. However, during the period from 1945 to 1989, the USSR as one of the permanent members of the UN security council acted as an umbrella against the usage of these UN loopholes. It is a little known fact that the USSR made the first 56 vetoes in the UN Security council.
Prashad has an interesting manual for regime change, which operates in nine common steps - lobbying of public opinion through capitalist media, appointment of the right men on the ground (Juan Guaido in Venezuela, for instance), making sure the Generals are ready, making the economy scream (through sanctions), diplomatic isolation, fuelling of mass protests, the green light from the CIA, assassinations, denial and production of amnesia (This last one is pretty successful, since there is really no recollection of these events across the world now, which is why the world still invests hope in men like Obama and Biden. How many of you have even heard about the murder of close to a million communists in Indonesia in 1965, in a US-aided operation?).
These days, right wingers often point at Venezuela as the example of a leftist country that has "failed", without mentioning the fact that the US's stringent sanctions are directly responsible for the state of that country. In 1996, when the then US State Secretary Madeleine Albright was asked about the death of 5.67 lakh Iraqi children due to US sanctions, she replied - "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it". In 2019, the supply of essential medicines and critical drugs including that for epilepsy patients and chemotherapy medicines to Iran was cut off, putting the lives of many in peril. Through "secondary sanctions", the US penalises even the countries who deal with the countries which are facing US sanction.
Vijay Prashad points at the hypocrisy of the liberals who close their eyes to these mass murders. "If the US sanctions regime could be shown to have been responsible for the death of half a million children, that was not to be seen as the operations of a rogue state or of a terrorist - that was simply unfortunate. If a rogue state or a terrorist killed a few hundred or even ten people, it was a human rights catastrophe. The sequestering of the narrative of human rights and liberalism by the US was as significant a triumph as its overwhelming military superiority."
For those who raise a hue and cry about the situation in Venezuela, this is what the William Brownfield, the former US ambassador to Venezuela said in 2018 - "We have to accelerate the collapse of Venezuela. We should do it understanding that it's going to have an impact on millions and millions of people who are already having great difficulty finding enough to eat." Neither Venezueala nor Iran can easily buy medical supplies, nor can they easily transport them into their countries, not can they use them in their largely public sector health systems. This embargo, which counts as a war crime under the Geneva conventions, continued even during the COVID-19 pandemic period. Vijay notes that due to the US sanctions google removed an app that Iran had developed for its population following the COVID-19 crisis.
He also connects the fake corruption cases that were fabricated against Brazilian leftist national leaders Dilma Rousseff and Lula of the Workers' Party, to the attempts by American firms to gain control of Brazilian oil and airline companies. Judge Sergio Moro who brought a case of corruption against Lula was in touch with US Department of Justice officials. Moro later joined the cabinet of right wing loony Jair Bolsonaro. This part reminded me of the likes of our own Judge Ranjan Gogoi and the many others waiting in the wings, looking at plum posts after retirement. "The persecution of Lula is a story that is not merely about Lula, nor solely about Brazil. This is a test case for the way oligarchies and imperialism have sought to use the shell of democracy to undermine the democratic aspirations of the people," writes Prashad ominously. That line also brought to my mind the attempts being made now in Kerala, through central agencies and a sanghified media to tarnish and bring down a left Government, which has been reviving public sector undertakings and vastly improving public health and education. These are actions that corporates would want to stop at all costs. Back in 1959, caste-religious and capitalist forces did manage to do just that when they pulled down the first Communist ministry in Kerala headed by EMS.
'Washington Bullets' is a rather small volume that packs some punch in each of its pages. It is essential reading for those who invest hope in the likes of Biden and Obama. (The fact that Evo Morales and Roger Waters have written glowingly about this book should be reason enough to read it! )
In 'Washington Bullets', Vijay Prashad accurately describes it as the country where liberty is just a statue. The book becomes a useful reference guide to all the US interventions in countries across the world in the past century, the planned coups, the assassinations of leftist national leaders, the mass murders and the many devious methods it still continues to employ to force other countries to toe their line, especially the ones who nationalise their resources, which American corporates have an eye on.
One only need to name the leaders and the countries which they preyed on and describe the method once, because the modus operandi has been faithfully replicated in almost every other country. In the early 1950s, Jacobo Arbenz tried to implement a moderate land reform agenda in Guatemala, which also undercut the land holdings of the United Fruit Company, a US conglomerate. Before long, the CIA engineered a coup, seized the presidential palace and sent him to exile. In the following years, they directly or indirectly assassinated tall leaders of several third world countries, all of them with a leftist inclination - Patrice Lumumba in Congo (1961. Yesterday was the 60th anniversary of that assassination), Mehdi Ben Barka of Morocco (1965), Che Guevara in Bolivia (1967), Salvador Allende in Chile (1973), Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso (1987), Amilcar Cabral in Cape Verde (1973) and many others. Not to forget the many failed assassinations.
Prashad poignantly notes that in the assassinations of such leaders, the biggest price is paid by the people. "For in these assassinations, these murders, this violence of intimidation, it is the people who lose the leaders in their localities. A peasant leaders, a trade union leader, a leader of the poor. The assassiantions become massacres, as people who are in motion are cut down. Their confidence begins to falter. In Indonesia, the price of the bullets was in the millions. In Guatemala, in the tens of thousands. The death of Lumumba damaged the social dynamic of the Congo, muzzling its history."
He goes back to the US's early days of occupying nations, especially the "great myth" of the American Revolution of 1776, which was marked by a genocidal attitude towards the native Americans, and the period after the Monro Doctrine of 1923, which the country saw as its right for the hemisphere. Prashad notes how even some of the UN's policies like its Article 41, became a legal justification for the inhuman sanctions policy of the US. However, during the period from 1945 to 1989, the USSR as one of the permanent members of the UN security council acted as an umbrella against the usage of these UN loopholes. It is a little known fact that the USSR made the first 56 vetoes in the UN Security council.
Prashad has an interesting manual for regime change, which operates in nine common steps - lobbying of public opinion through capitalist media, appointment of the right men on the ground (Juan Guaido in Venezuela, for instance), making sure the Generals are ready, making the economy scream (through sanctions), diplomatic isolation, fuelling of mass protests, the green light from the CIA, assassinations, denial and production of amnesia (This last one is pretty successful, since there is really no recollection of these events across the world now, which is why the world still invests hope in men like Obama and Biden. How many of you have even heard about the murder of close to a million communists in Indonesia in 1965, in a US-aided operation?).
These days, right wingers often point at Venezuela as the example of a leftist country that has "failed", without mentioning the fact that the US's stringent sanctions are directly responsible for the state of that country. In 1996, when the then US State Secretary Madeleine Albright was asked about the death of 5.67 lakh Iraqi children due to US sanctions, she replied - "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it". In 2019, the supply of essential medicines and critical drugs including that for epilepsy patients and chemotherapy medicines to Iran was cut off, putting the lives of many in peril. Through "secondary sanctions", the US penalises even the countries who deal with the countries which are facing US sanction.
Vijay Prashad points at the hypocrisy of the liberals who close their eyes to these mass murders. "If the US sanctions regime could be shown to have been responsible for the death of half a million children, that was not to be seen as the operations of a rogue state or of a terrorist - that was simply unfortunate. If a rogue state or a terrorist killed a few hundred or even ten people, it was a human rights catastrophe. The sequestering of the narrative of human rights and liberalism by the US was as significant a triumph as its overwhelming military superiority."
For those who raise a hue and cry about the situation in Venezuela, this is what the William Brownfield, the former US ambassador to Venezuela said in 2018 - "We have to accelerate the collapse of Venezuela. We should do it understanding that it's going to have an impact on millions and millions of people who are already having great difficulty finding enough to eat." Neither Venezueala nor Iran can easily buy medical supplies, nor can they easily transport them into their countries, not can they use them in their largely public sector health systems. This embargo, which counts as a war crime under the Geneva conventions, continued even during the COVID-19 pandemic period. Vijay notes that due to the US sanctions google removed an app that Iran had developed for its population following the COVID-19 crisis.
He also connects the fake corruption cases that were fabricated against Brazilian leftist national leaders Dilma Rousseff and Lula of the Workers' Party, to the attempts by American firms to gain control of Brazilian oil and airline companies. Judge Sergio Moro who brought a case of corruption against Lula was in touch with US Department of Justice officials. Moro later joined the cabinet of right wing loony Jair Bolsonaro. This part reminded me of the likes of our own Judge Ranjan Gogoi and the many others waiting in the wings, looking at plum posts after retirement. "The persecution of Lula is a story that is not merely about Lula, nor solely about Brazil. This is a test case for the way oligarchies and imperialism have sought to use the shell of democracy to undermine the democratic aspirations of the people," writes Prashad ominously. That line also brought to my mind the attempts being made now in Kerala, through central agencies and a sanghified media to tarnish and bring down a left Government, which has been reviving public sector undertakings and vastly improving public health and education. These are actions that corporates would want to stop at all costs. Back in 1959, caste-religious and capitalist forces did manage to do just that when they pulled down the first Communist ministry in Kerala headed by EMS.
'Washington Bullets' is a rather small volume that packs some punch in each of its pages. It is essential reading for those who invest hope in the likes of Biden and Obama. (The fact that Evo Morales and Roger Waters have written glowingly about this book should be reason enough to read it! )
nat_sanchez's review against another edition
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
This is a very enlightening review of the multilateral playbooks the US (the hub) and its allies (the spokes) have used to militarily, economically, politically, and socially control lives and lands in Asia, Africa, and Latin America for the enrichment of transnational oligarchs and to maintain US domination at all costs. The details provided of the cruelty at play over so many years exposes the evil inherent to capital rule. Key quote -
It wants to steal the soul of the people so as to reduce people into zombies who must bow their heads down and work — putting their precious labor towards the accumulation of capital for the tyrants of the economy.
It wants to steal the soul of the people so as to reduce people into zombies who must bow their heads down and work — putting their precious labor towards the accumulation of capital for the tyrants of the economy.
mkmatheson's review against another edition
informative
fast-paced
3.0
Infuriating! Washington Bullets inverts the sentiment that “history is written by the victors,” looking at longstanding patterns of US intervention in other countrys’ liberty. Though its top-down scope can be hard to navigate (it’s more overview than examination), this is essential reading for those who don’t want to ignore the USA’s imperialistic reflexes.
flutterby's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
3.0
This felt less like storytelling and more like wrapping prose around a list.