Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations
162 pp, $17 pbk, ISBN 978-1-58367-906-7
By Vijay Prashad
Reviewed by Jeremy Kuzmarov
‘According to Prashad, while “many of the assassins’ bullets have been fired by people who had their own parochial interests, petty rivalries and small-minded gains, more often than not, these have been ‘Washington’s bullets.’”
Their main purpose, he says, was to “contain the tidal wave that swept from the October Revolution of 1917 and the many waves that whipped around the world to form the anti-colonial movement.”
Prashad, as these comments indicate, roots the CIA’s crimes in the larger history of colonialism and hostility of the world’s capitalist elites to the working-class empowerment bred by the Russian revolution.
Imperialism, he reminds us, is the attempt to “subordinate people to maximize the theft of resources, labor, and wealth.”
The targets of Washington’s bullets, in turn, have been those like Sankara and many others who tried to assert their nation’s economic sovereignty.
The pattern for the CIA’s behavior was established in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when it supported political factions in Europe which collaborated with the Nazis against the communists, who had led the resistance against Nazism.
The Agency’s work, as Prashad writes, helped “bring back to life the cadaver of Europe’s reactionary political bloc.”’
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