West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Political Memoir
By William Blum
the present day, probing the aesthetics of a revolutionary who looks for beauty in the social arrangement as others look for it in art.
As someone who spent four years with IBM and more than two years with the Department of State, and then -- when the speeding locomotive of the Vietnam War and the Sixties roared headlong into his life and beliefs -- immersed himself in the anti-war and other leftist
and counter-cultural movements, Blum was particularly well situated to perceive people, events, and ideology in both the "bourgeois" and "alternative" societies and arrive at non-knee-reflex judgements.
Though serious in subject and purpose, the book nonetheless displays the author's vintage New York City sense of humor, with all the wit, satire and sarcasm the world associates
with the Big Apple. No one is spared, least of all Blum's "comrades" in "the movement".
An important thread running through the book is the acute, non-negotiable tension existing between individuals like Blum and the National Security State that America has been for
more than half a century now. The author takes on the CIA, FBI, State Department, the police, et al. He is, in turn, bedeviled by informers set upon him by the government.
We read of how the authorities labored to wreck the "underground" press, with which Blum
was intimately associated; also how the author wound up living with the leading bomber of the 1970s and his girlfriend who played a key role in the Patty Hearst kidnapping saga, a set of circumstances which gave rise to much irony and absurdity.
A chapter on Blum's stay in Chile under Salvador Allende before his CIA-organized
overthrow (of Allende, not Blum) is a particularly important slice of history.
There is also Blum's experience in Los Angeles, working with Oliver Stone to make a documentary film based on one of Blum's books on U.S. foreign policy. The film was stillborn, but the tale is replete with the well-known charms and idealism of
Hollywood that America has come to know and love.
Not least, West-Bloc Dissident is a desperately needed relief and antidote to the
noxious fumes of patriotism that are choking American society today.
Table of Contents
1. Exposing the CIA
2. Passing through State Department security
3. Judaism and Quakers
4. Commie dupe
5. The legendary Anti-Vietnam War Movement
6. IBM and LSD
7. The Washington Free Press
8. Government sabotage of the underground press
9. Surrounded by informers
10. California bombing
11. Kill your parents
12. Radical psychiatry
13. Ten thousand miles overland through Latin America
14. The Chilean socialist experiment
15. Chain gang, Soledad prison, and coup d'état
16. Down and out in Copenhagen, London, and Berlin
17. Patty Hearst and the gang
18. The author vs. Hollywood. Hollywood wins.
19. Farewell cruel world
Here is how the book begins:
The fourth day of August, 1969, 7:30 of a warm, clear
Monday morning, Route 123, Langley, Virginia. Before
the week is out, the sociopathic followers of Charles
Manson will carry out their gruesome murders. Strangely
enough, though what I'm about to do is completely
non-violent, many Americans would regard it with equal
abhorrence.
If you'd like to buy a copy, please specify to whom the author should
inscribe the book, and send check or international money order in
US dollars to:
William Blum
5100 Connecticut Ave., NW #707
Washington, DC 20008-2064
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* Portions of these two books can be read at: