About book Nemesis: The Last Days Of The American Republic (2007)
Stunning! This is an even better book than Blowback, which I thought was mind blowing. I am going to have to track down part two of this trilogy. This was almost painful to read. The detailed retellings of US involvement in torture at the start left me once again reeling in disbelief – no matter how often I hear this story I still find it hard to believe. The lies, deceptions and shameful punishments handed out to those who went against the President and told the truth reads like the most improbable of Le Carré novels, except we all know that this is pure fact. The future will struggle to believe our times, and we, as the citizens and electors of governments that have allowed this to happen have much to answer for.His thesis in this book is a simple one. The US has two choices, it can retain its empire or it can remain a democracy – he cannot see how it can have both. If it is to retain its empire then there will need to be a move towards some form of military dictatorship. He believes the transfer of power to the executive under Bush came all too close to ending the democratic project in the US. The slow but inexorable diminishing of freedoms under the Bush regime truly takes the breath away once they are catalogued. There are so many things I don’t know about the US political system and when people explain them to me I realise the true depth of my ignorance. It took me years to work out what GOP stood for – I knew it had something to do with the Republican Party, but just what it was in relation to the Republican Party I had no idea. Like I said, the depths of my ignorance can be quite astounding. Who’d have thought it could just mean, Grand Old Party? But when this book explained the CIA I really had to wonder how it could be I could get to be this old and never have known how the organisation worked. I had no idea that the CIA isn’t answerable to Congress or anyone else other than the President. Here is an organisation that seeks to kill the heads of state of other nations (as it did successfully in South Korea and attempted at on numerous occasions in Cuba and Libya) or that sells drugs to buy weapons to give to murderers in Nicaragua or that ‘successfully’ organises the overthrow of a democratically elected government and replaces it an evil monster, as in Chile and Iran – and not even the American Government gets to have over-sight of what it is up to. I’m stunned and shocked, ladies and gentlemen. Emperor Bush seems to have made exceptionally good use of this arm of his Royal Guard.This book’s dismantling of the excuse for much of the US military budget (I’ve heard of pork barrels, but this is incomprehensible) should be required reading for anyone with the right to vote in the US – witnessing the sheer waste of so many billions upon billons of taxpayer dollars (well, those that will need to be paid back by future generations that have been borrowed from Communist China and Japan) would, surely, have to send a patriotic American nearly insane. His description of military Keynesianism is as fascinating as it is disturbing. The section on Star Wars is nothing less than a case in point. This project is not about building a missile defence system, the idea is virtually laughable, this is about handing trillions of dollars over to a few obscenely wealthy corporations knowing that they can only fail to ever build what it is they are claiming to be seeking to build. His explanation of why any sort of war in space has to be a bad idea does beg the question why the US is contemplating such lunacy. As is his explanation of why the EU is building its own GPS system (Galileo) rather than rely on the current system that is run by the US Military (yes, it might have something to do with the fact that the US Military has threatened to turn this increasingly essential piece of infrastructure off at will if it decides this would be a good idea in its ‘war on terror’).This book is named after a Greek God – the god of righteous punishment for those engaged in hubris – and it is written by someone who reminds me of another character from Greek myth – Cassandra. For surely, here is a man blessed with the gift of prophesy and yet, no one ever seems to believe him. His predictions for what will happen next to the US may have been forestalled by the election of Obama – but given the depth of the problems outlined here and the arrogance and bloody-mindedness of the US ruling elites his concerns still require careful consideration.There is much at stake if he is ever proven right.
I've been a big fan of Johnson's past two books, Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire and have been looking forward to reading this most recent work since I first heard of it. However, where the previous two books clearly positioned US' foreign policy as an off-shoot of the militarism which infects every level of our economy and warned that the US' overseas adventures (everything from overthrowing unfriendly governments to funneling arms to other governments) would eventually lead to a blowback against the US- a theory that was proven true when the US' strategy of arming and training the Afghani mujahideen in the 1980s came back to bite it on September 11- this new book seems like a collection of scraps that were left on the editing room floor when Johnson's previous books were published.There's nothing especially new or ground-breaking here, though Johnson does a fantastic job of analyzing the Roman and British empires and juxtaposing their downfalls with the current state of US foreign affairs. Charting the vast network of American bases, prisons, and secret torture facilities is a vast task, but definitely one that Johnson is up to and the portrait he paints of a web of American influence is a very disturbing picture. Unfortunately, by trying to tie his three most recent books together under a unifying theme, Johnson stretches his premise to absurd lengths and never really focuses, until the last 10 pages, on how all of the examples that he recites tie together into the sad picture of a flailing American empire that poses a threat not only to treasured systems of American governance but also the future existence of Western Civilization.If this is the first Johnson book you're looking at, I'd recommend looking to his earlier work first.
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It was an interesting read. Recommended by Bill Moyers' of 'Bill Moyers' Journal', I expected a tad bit of exaggeration and *doom & gloom* type reading. As it turns out, there was quite a bit of interesting material regarding amateur plane spotters, our military role in Japan after WWII and the roles sovereignty play in allowing the locals in Japan to enforce their laws on unruly American troops.The book described the expenditures involved with what the author alludes to as the military indu
—Vintagejunkeedotcom
This book is the the third installment from Chalmers Johnson that was preceeded by Blowback and The Sorrows Of Empire. It is the continuation of his thesis that spans the three books contending that militarism and a permanent war economy are incompatible with our republican form of government. In Nemesis (with a subtitle of "The Last Days of the American Republic," Johnson's primary objective is to demonstrate his fear of what the future will hold in terms of current patterns of preventive war and the role the US military, the CIA, and especially the power of the Executive will have in shaping that future. This is by far Johnson's most dire and chilling warning as the book never fails to reach with validity, evidence, and solid allusions to the past. It is a vital read for any who still believes there is something to be salvaged of the United States' constitutional democracy.
—Eric Gulliver
One is not an America or USA basher/hater for reading and recommending Johnson's books. He -- like Zinn, Chomsky and Vidal -- I think genuinely wants to protect his homeland from opportunistic exec-level intellectuals (= certain upper-level politicians in govt. and/or corporate execs [often they are one and the same!]) with either deliberate imperialistic agendas ... and/or self-interest agendas that result in imperialistic consequences. It gets complicated! But the results are not: expensive wars and 1000+ military bases, 2008 econ. meltdown, gov. (taxpayer) bailout of major US banks and auto industry.
—Hollowman
