Washington Bullets

by Pa Rock
Reader

My little rural nirvana sits near the end of a mail route which means that I often don't get the mail until late in the afternoon.  A couple of times this winter, especially when the regular driver was off and a sub had the route, it had been after dark before the day's mail arrived.  And Saturdays, for some reason are the worst.  I have often joked that if the Saturday mail arrived much later my end of the route would be experiencing a government first - Sunday mail deliveries!

So imagine my surprise a couple of Sundays ago when I was sitting in front of the living room window typing - around lunchtime - when I looked up and noticed my regular mail lady pulling up to my rural mail box, lights-a-flashing, and watched in amazement as she put mail in the box!  I hustled out to the mailbox and found a single package, a book from Amazon addressed to me, a book that I had not ordered and that arrived without the name of the purchaser.

But hey, I like books.

(My son, who can be a bit of a conspiracy theorist, later informed he that he heard Amazon has a special arrangement with the postal service that includes Sunday deliveries.  Jeff Bezos has more money than the government, so I guess that is possible!)

The book was titled:  "Washington Bullets:  A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations,"   The author was Vijay Prashad who is described on the book's cover and on his Wikipedia page as "an Indian historian, journalist, commentator, and a Marxist intellectual.  He is an executive-director of Tricontinental:  Institute for Social Research and the Chief Editor of Leftward Books."  Leftward Books had published the book that I had just received in the mail.

"Washington Bullets," is relatively short, 160 pages, and a fairly easy, though uncomfortable, read.   The material presented by the author is basically a history on the origins and impacts of American foreign policy from World War II to the present, and it is presented from the perspective of the peoples whose lives and movements were subjugated by those policies.

It is an alternative history, or a account of history which includes events or perspectives not usually presented in standard history texts or courses.  Reading "Washington Bullets" brought to mind the historical interpretations presented in Dee Brown's classic on America's wars against our native peoples, "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," and Howard Zinn's monumental "A People's History of the United States, 1492-Present."

Mr. Prashad sees American foreign policy as being set up to benefit capitalism and the country's corporate interests, with the history of the country being focused on controlling other nations as a way of securing natural resources for the manufacture of goods and markets for the sale of goods.   He cites the Monroe Doctrine as a uniquely American justification for control of the Western Hemisphere from the early 19th century onward, and the containment of communism, war on drugs, and war on terrorism as more recent justifications for our continuing exercise of military muscle on the world stage.

Prashad points out that in world geo-political affairs, it is always the colonizers, or nations attempting to control situations and peoples beyond their borders, who are seen as the civilizing forces, and indigenous or subjugated people who are labeled terrorists. He cites a litany of examples of our government (as well as other world governments) continually rushing into prop up dictators and undemocratic regimes at the expense of the local people whose sweat and labors create the wealth that others seek to exploit.  

The author stakes out a trail of human exploitation and suffering that stretches across Central America and Africa, through the Middle East, across Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and into Southeast Asia, a trail of greed and rancor in which America's corporate needs continually took precedence over the needs of the native populations.

Like I said, "Washington Bullets" is an uncomfortable read - but it also clearly depicts a very real part of America's complicated history.

(The sender turned out to be an open-minded young in-law who felt that the book would be something that I would enjoy - and I did.  Thanks, Jason!)