Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic
Read Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic Online
Authors: Chalmers Johnson
Nemesis
“Nemesis,
the final volume in the remarkable Blowback trilogy, completes a true patriot’s anguished and devastating critique of the militarism that threatens to destroy the United States from within. In detail and with unflinching candor, Chalmers Johnson decries the discrepancies between what America professes to be and what it has actually become—a global empire of military bases and operations; a secret government increasingly characterized by covert activities, enormous ’black’ budgets, and near dictatorial executive power; a misguided republic that has betrayed its noblest ideals and most basic founding principles in pursuit of disastrously conceived notions of security, stability, and progress.”
—John Dower, author of
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
“Chalmers Johnson, a patriot who pulls no punches, has emerged as our most prescient critic of American empire and its pretensions.
Nemesis
is his fiercest book—and his best.”
—Andrew J. Bacevich, author of
The New American Militarism
“Johnson s book is a sober reminder that the U.S. has become an empire.... His most searing commentary to date on the current state of U.S. politics.”
—Financial Times
“Nemesis
is a stimulating, sweeping study in which Johnson asks a most profound strategic question: Can we maintain the global dominance we now regard as our natural right? His answer is chilling. You do not have to agree with everything Johnson says—I don’t—but if you agree with even half of his policy critiques, you will still slam the book down on the table, swearing, ‘We have to change this!’”
—Joseph Cirincione, senior vice president for national security
and international policy, Center for American Progress
“Each of Johnson’s erudite chapters both enlightens and disturbs.... His writing is often described as ‘epolemic,’ but that doesn’t capture the heartfelt concern that underlies his distress about our country.”
—In These Times
“The three volumes
(Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, Nemesis)
constitute a well-written, detailed, and stimulating display of the radical anti-imperialist critique of American foreign policy.
Nemesis
is particularly good in sounding the alarm. Countervailing reactions are now clearly under way once again, and Johnson’s book is a primer on much that needs to be done.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune
“Nemesis
is a five-alarm warning about flaming militarism, burning imperial attitudes, secret armies, and executive arrogance that has torched and consumed the Constitution and brought the American Republic to death’s door. Johnson shares a simple, liberating, and healing path back to worthy republicanism. But the frightening and heartbreaking details contained in
Nemesis
suggest that the goddess of retribution will not be so easily satisfied before ‘the right order of things’ is restored.”
—Karen Kwiatkowski, retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel
“Last fall a treasonous Congress gave the president license to kidnap, torture—you name it—on an imperial scale. All of us, citizens and noncitizens alike, are fair game. Kudos for not being silent, Chalmers, and for completing your revealing trilogy with undaunted courage.”
—Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst;
cofounder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
“Before 9/11, when Chalmers Johnson warned us of Blowback, too few listened. When Johnson then urged us to rethink America’s imperial course in
The Sorrows of Empire,
he went deeper, exploring the wages of global American militarism. Now comes
Nemesis,
the third in the trilogy, an urgent warning for a country that, in the words of Dwight Eisenhower, risks ’destroying from within that which it is trying to protect from without.’ Johnson is a national treasure. Let’s hope we listen this time.”
—Eugene Jarecki, director of
Why We Fight,
Grand Jury Prize Winner, Sundance Film Festival
“Chalmers Johnson’s voice has never been more urgently needed, and in
Nemesis
it rings with eloquence, clarity, and truth.”
—James Carroll, author of
House of War
NEMESIS
NEMESIS
ALSO BY CHALMERS JOHNSON
The Sorrows of Empire:
Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic
Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary
China, 1937–1945
Revolution and the Social System
An Instance of Treason: Ozaki Hotsumi and the Sorge Spy Ring
Revolutionary Change
Change in Communist Systems
(editor and contributor)
Conspiracy at Matsukawa
Ideology and Politics in Contemporary China
(editor)
Autopsy on Peoples War
Japans Public Policy Companies
MITI and the Japanese Miracle:
The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975
The Industrial Policy Debate
(editor and contributor)
Politics and Productivity: How Japan’s Development Strategy Works
(with Laura D’Andrea Tyson and John Zysman)
Japan: Who Governs? The Rise of the Developmental State
Okinawa: Cold War Island
(editor and contributor)
THE LAST DAYS OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC
CHALMERS JOHNSON
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Copyright © 2006 by Chalmers Johnson
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Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Johnson, Chalmers.
Nemesis: the last days of the American Republic / Chalmers Johnson. p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8728-4
ISBN-10: 0-8050-8728-1
1. United States—Foreign relations—1989– 2. United States—Military policy. 3. United States—Politics and government—1989– I. Title.
E840.J633 2007
973.931—dc22 2006047200
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Originally published in hardcover in 2006 by Metropolitan Books
First Holt Paperbacks Edition 2008
Printed in the United States of America
13579 10 8642
NEMESIS
In Greek mythology,
the goddess of retribution,
who punishes human
transgression of the natural,
right order of things and
the arrogance that causes it.
1. Militarism and the Breakdown of Constitutional Government
2. Comparative Imperial Pathologies: Rome, Britain, and America
3. Central Intelligence Agency: The President’s Private Army
5. How American Imperialism Actually Works: The SOFA in Japan
Prologue: The Blowback Trilogy
Who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is Osama bin Laden? He’s America’s family secret. He is the American president’s dark Doppelganger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilized. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America’s foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of “full-spectrum dominance,” its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable.
ARUNDHATI ROY
,
The Guardian,
September 27, 2001
Nemesis
is the last volume of an inadvertent trilogy that deals with the way arrogant and misguided American policies have headed us for a series of catastrophes comparable to our disgrace and defeat in Vietnam or even to the sort of extinction that befell our former fellow “superpower,” the Soviet Union. Such a fate is probably by now unavoidable; it is certainly too late for mere scattered reforms of our government or bloated military to make much difference.
I never planned to write three books about the decline and fall of the American empire, but events intervened. In March 2000, well before 9/11, I published
Blowback,
based on my years of teaching and writing about East Asia. I had become convinced by then that some secret U.S. government operations and acts in distant lands would come back to haunt us. “Blowback” does not mean just revenge but rather retaliation for covert, illegal violence that our government has carried out abroad that it kept
totally secret from the American public (even though such acts are seldom secret among the people on the receiving end). It was a term invented by the Central Intelligence Agency and first used in its “after-action report” about the 1953 overthrow of the elected government of Premier Mohammad Mossadeq in Iran. This coup brought to power the U.S.-supported Shah of Iran, who would in 1979 be overthrown by Iranian revolutionaries and Islamic fundamentalists. The Ayatollah Khomeini replaced the Shah and installed the predecessors of the current, anti-American government in Iran.
1
This would be one kind of blowback from America’s first venture into illegal, clandestine “regime change”—but as the attacks of September 11, 2001, showed us all too graphically, hardly the only one.