Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire | Chalmers Johnson

Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire | Chalmers Johnson | Catastrophic consequences for America's "hopeless hypocrisy"

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Blowback, Second E...

	Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire Chalmers Johnson Holt Paperbacks, 2004 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 95 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Pull Your Head Out or Die With It In The Sand

This book deserves five stars, but I can tell you it's nothing like listening to this man speak in person. As in "Blowback" he lays it all out on the table. Sadly he says, "We just may have gone pass the point of no return." Americans now know that authors like Chalmers Johnson, Norm Chomsky, Webster Griffin Tarpley and Paul Waldman are not just over-educated nay sayers. We know that we're in real trouble, we just don't know what to do about it. If 9/11 proved nothing else, it proved that aircraft carriers, F16's, and smart bombs are useless against terrorists and apathy.

Dr. Johnson summarizes the status quo: "We have a strong civil society that could, in theory, overcome the entrenched interests of the armed forces and the military-industrial complex. At this late date, however, it is difficult to imagine how Congress, much like the Roman senate in the last days of the republic, could be brought back to life and cleansed of its endemic corruption. Failing such a reform, Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and vengeance, the punisher of pride and hubris, waits patiently for her meeting with us."

I am without the education to travel in the circles of the aforementioned authors, but I can in my own way address my fellow blue collar workers... The media has dubbed me one of America's most controversial writers. I think it's because I criticize my own party, the Republican Party, instead of the Democrats. This unorthodox approach of mine gives people the wrong idea about me. I don't hate predators. If there weren't hawks in this country, those in other countries would show up here. Do not misinterpret "Hawk" to mean I approve of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney and their Hermann Goering protégés in the Pentagon. Bush is a mouth and a pen; he's in a different league altogether than his vice president. Cheney is a vulgar, immoral, sadistic subhuman. Does that make me a Libertarian?

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Catastrophic consequences for America's "hopeless hypocrisy"

When Blowback was first published in the spring of 2000, about eighteen months before the 9/11 attacks, many foreign policy journals ignored it; a review in Foreign Affairs even said that it "read like a comic book." After all, Johnson's book was filled with gloomy warnings, including this one in his last few pages: "the United States will be a prime recipient in the foreseeable future of all of the more expectable forms of blowback, particularly terrorist attacks against Americans in and out of the armed forces anywhere on earth, including the United States (p. 223, my emphasis). While American critics ignored him, the international community resonated with Johnson, and the book was immediately translated into German, Italian, and Japanese. That his early critics could have been so badly wrong, and Johnson so presciently right, is symptomatic of the problems he describes, and only one indicator of the importance of this book and its two sequels, The Sorrows of Empire (2004) and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2007).

Blowback is "another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows." The term first appeared in a 1953 CIA document about its overthrow of the Iranian government, and described the predictable but unintended consequences of America's covert operations and foreign policies. What many people around the world "hate" about America, Johnson argues, is not our freedom and way of life, as Bush likes to say, but our global militarism and predatory economic policies which virtually assure future retaliations for decades to come. Even if most Americans are ignorant about our government's secret activities, and believe that our country's motivations are virtuous, most peoples and nations think differently and have long memories; cf., for example, Steven Kinzer's book Overthrow that documents the fourteen nations where America has toppled governments in just the last hundred years.

Johnson examines American foreign policy over the last fifty years, and the parallels between America and the demise of the Soviet Union. His special focus is Asia and the last ten years. The "peace dividend" at the end of the Cold War did not bring a period of American demilitarization, but the exact opposite. Instead of prudence, we have acted with what is now predictable condescension towards other nations and myopia about the certain consequences. Our deliberate "global military-economic dominion," and careless disregard for how the rest of the world understands our predations, are "seeding resentments that are bound to breed attempts at retaliation." Separate chapters look at Okinawa, South Korea, North Korea, China, Japan, and the 1997 economic meltdown in East Asia.

In characterizing America as a "rogue super power" Johnson is polemical but not partisan. The problems that he describes are far broader and deeper than any single administration. Given that many people around the world resent our "exploitative hegemony" as a "hopeless hypocrisy," "one must ask when, not whether, our accidental empire will start to unravel." Johnson asked that question over eight years ago. The subtitle of Nemesis (2007) gives his answer; we are already in "the last days of the American republic."

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Fresh as the morning news!

I would recommend this book to anyone thinking about America and our place in the world. It should be required reading for political science and civic courses. Too often it illustrates disfunctional government and the military industrial complex runnning the show. Read it, and do what you will. Your thinking can't help but be changed by the connections the author makes so very clearly.

Enlightening

The book's idea is that US foreign policy, made to win the cold war, has consequences. For instance, in '53 when we installed the Shah of Iran to act as a puppet for the West (overthrowing the democratically elected Mosaddeq because of oil) he repressed the people until he was overthrown in Jan. 1979. We'd be crazy to believe that the people who overthrew Persia's most ruthless dictator not be anti-American (since we installed that dictator). To this day I see people asking why Iran's government dislikes the US - "Do they hate us for our freedoms?" Taking this idea of "unintended consequences," Johnson talks specifically about East Asia and its history during the Cold War and after. In particular, he mentions Indonesia, Korea, China, and Japan.

I found the book very enlightening. Since 9/11 the US news and media's idea of international news coverage has been Middle-Eastern news coverage (except for natural disasters around the world and other frivolous events). Also, I went to public-school - I didn't know anything about Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries (and I took all AP history classes). So, there was this vacuum of knowledge about East Asia I had, which this book filled quite nicely.

Also mentioned in the book, briefly, are neoclassical economics, WTO, IMF, World Bank, 1997 economic crisis, Hungarian revolution, and the '73 Chilean coup as well as some other US interventions in the Middle-East.

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Very informative, but drawn out and wordy.....

This book is very informative and the first and last chapters are worth paying for the entire thing just to read them. Not the most Pro-American book I've ever read, but will give you an interesting take on things. Very in depth and revealing. Certainly shows how our American Empire can throw our weight around when necessary - and when not. Not bad, but a bit too wordy for me. Still good though.

reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

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