Max Blumenthal (born December 18, 1977) is an American journalist, author, blogger, and filmmaker. He is a regular contributor to Sputnik and RT. He was formerly a writer for The Nation, AlterNet, The Daily Beast, Al Akhbar, and Media Matters for America, and has contributed to Al Jazeera English, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Blumenthal has written four books. His first, Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party (2009), made the Los Angeles Times and New York Times bestsellers lists.[10] He was awarded the 2014 Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Notable Book Award for Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, which was published in 2013.
The Management of Savagery (2019)
Blumenthal's book The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump was published in 2019 by Verso Books. Lydia Wilson, in a review in Times Literary Supplement was critical of The Management of Savagery. Wilson wrote that Blumenthal overstates his case "with misleading or one-sided examples" in an account of the United States involvement in wars during the previous two decades which "tips sufficiently and with enough regularity into full-scale conspiracy to allow any careful reader to dismiss it." Wilson commented that Blumenthal "uses long-debunked myths", originating from Russian and Syrian sources, to explain the Ghouta chemical attack in 2013. Journalist Chris Hedges, in a positive review in Truthdig, called the book "insightful". A review by Nasser Baston in the British newspaper Morning Star stated that it is a "useful antidote to the torrents of pro-empire bilge promoted by conservatives and liberals alike".
In the Management of Savagery, Max Blumenthal excavates the real story behind America’s dealings with the world and shows how the extremist forces that now threaten peace across the globe are the inevitable flowering of America’s imperial designs.
Washington’s secret funding of the mujahedin provoked the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. With guns and money, the United States has ever since sustained the extremists, including Osama Bin Laden, who have become its enemies. The Pentagon has trained and armed jihadist elements in Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya; it has launched military interventions to change regimes in the Middle East. In doing so, it created fertile ground for the Islamic State and brought foreign conflicts home to American soil.
These failed wars abroad have made the United States more vulnerable to both terrorism as well as native ultra-nationalism. The Trump presidency is the inevitable consequence of neoconservative imperialism in the post–Cold War age. Trump’s dealings in the Middle East are likely only to exacerbate the situation.