Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2007, Metropolitan) is the third book in what Chalmers Johnson decided was a trilogy on the contradictions -- the curse, really -- of the American empire. The following are quotes I marked. The last one attempts to sum up the three books. I haven't read Blowback yet, which is largely preoccupied with the SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement) with Japan, which largely exempts American soldiers stationed in Japan from the reach of Japanese law -- a point Johnson has returned to in both of the following books. The Sorrows of Empire introduced his "empire of bases" concept. I thought the book was one of the most compelling cases against American empire I've read.

No comments below; just quotes -- mostly a time crunch, which maybe I'll redress later, although for now I'm trying to hack through a rather large backlog of books. It's worth noting that the sections here on space militarization are particularly strong.

(pp. 21-22):

"Some years ago," [Hannah Arendt] wrote, "reporting the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem, I spoke of the 'banality of evil' and meant with this no theory or doctrine but something quite factual, the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was perhaps an extraordinary shallowness. However monstrous the deeds were, the doer was neither monstrous nor demonic, and the only specific characteristic one could deect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think."

Arendt was trying to locate Eichmann's conscience. She called him a "desk murderer," an equally apt term for George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld -- for anyone, in fact, who orders remote-control killing of the modern sort -- the bombardment of a country that lacks any form of air defense, the firing of cruise missiles from a warship at sea into countries unable to respond, such as Iraq, Sudan, or Afghanistan, or, say, the unleashing of a Hellfire missile froma Predator unmanned aerial vehicle controlled by "pilots" thousands of miles from the prospective target.

How to ordinary people become desk murderers? First, they must lose the ability tothink because, according to Arendt, "thinking conditionsmen against evil doing." Jerome Kohn adds, "With some degree of confidence it may be said that the ability to think, which Eichmann lacked, is the precondition of judging, and that the refusal as well as the inability to judge, to imagine before your eyes the others whom your judgment represents and to whom it responds, invite evil to enter and infect the world." To lack a personal conscience means "never to start the soundless solitary dialogue we call thinking."/p>

If an individual's thinking is short-circuited and does not rise to the level of making judgments, he or she is able to understand acts, including evil acts, only in terms of following orders, doing one's duty, being loyal to one's "homeland," maintaining solidarity with one's fellow soldiers, or surrendering one's will to that of the group.

(pp. 71-72):

The expatriate Scot and Harvard historian Niall Ferguson typically argues that the British Empir was motivated by "a sincere belief that spreading 'commerce, Christianity, and civilizaiton' was as much in the interests of Britain's colonial subjects as in the interests of the imperial metropole itself." He insists that "no organization [other than the British Empire] has done more to impose Western norms of law, order and governance around the world" and that "America is heir to the empire in both senses: offspring of the colonial era, successor today. Perhaps the most burning contemporary question of American politics is: Should the United States seek to shed or to shoulder the imperial load it has inherited?" The Los Angeles Times's right-wing columnist Max Boot thinks that "Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out fo the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets."

According to journalist Erik Tarloff, writing in the British newspaper Financial Times, "Claims that the British Raj redounded to the economic benefit of India as well as the mother country [are], I should think, irrefutable. Given that for two centuries -- between 1757 and 1947 -- there wa sno increase at all in India's per capita income, that in the second half of Victoria's reign between thirty and fifty million Indians perished in famines and plagues brought on by the British misrule, and that from 1872 to 1921, the life expectancy of ordinary Indians fell by a staggering 20 percent, the idea that India benefited from British imperialism is at least open to question.

(p. 75):

Actual, on-the-ground imperialists, as distinct from their political supporters and cheerleads back home, know that they are hated; that is one of the reasons they traditionally detested imperial liberals, socialists, do-gooders, and other social critics remote from the killing fields, who criticized their methods or advocated the "reform" of some particular imperial project or other. Whether the imperial power is itself a democracy or a dictatorship makes a differernce in the lives of the conquered, but only because that tends to determine how far the dominant country is willing to go in carrying out "administrative massacres," to use Arendt's potent term, when perpetuating its rule in the face of resistance. A split between those who support imperialism and those who enforce it is characteristic of all imperialist republics. Both groups, however, normally share extensive rationales for their inherent superiority over "subject races" and the reasons why they should dominate and impose their "civilization" on others.

(p. 94):

Meanwhile, CIA covert operations were mobilized in support of various criminal, dictatorial, or militarist organizations around the world so long as they wee (or pretended to be) anticommunist. CIA operatives also planted false information in foreign newspapers and covertly fed large amounts of money to members of the Christian Democratic Party in Italy and the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, to King Hussein of Jordan, and to clients in Greece, West Germany, Egypt, Sudan, Suriname, Mauritius, the Philippines, Iran, Ecuador, and Chile. Clandestine agents devoted themselves to such tasks as depressing the global prices of agricultural products in order to damage uncooperative Third World countries, attempting to assassinate foreign leaders, and sponsoring guerrilla wars or insurgencies in places as diverse as the Ukraine, Poland, Albania, Hungary, Indonesia, China, Tibet, Oman, Malaysia, Iraq, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, North Korea, Bolivia, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Haiti, Guatemala, Cuba, Greece, Turkey, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua, to name only a few of those on the public record.

(p. 110):

The Carter administration deliberately provoked the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which occurred on Christmas Eve 1979. In his 1996 memoir, former CIA director Robert Gates acknowledges that the American intelligence services began to aid the anti-Soviet mujahideen guerrillas not after the Russian invasion but six months before it. On July 3, 1979, President Carter signed a finding authorizing secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime then ruling in Kabul. His purpose -- and that of his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski -- was to provoke a full-scale Soviet military intervention. Carter wanted to tie down the USSR and so prevent its leaders from exploiting the 1979 anti-American revolution in Iran. In addition, as Brzezinski put it, "We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War."

(pp. 120-121):

Secret police and state terrorist agencies normally try to disguise what they are doing by hiding behind bland euphemisms for their most odious operations. As long ago as the eighteenth century, Voltaire observed, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." On sanitizing language, the Stanford University psychologist Albert Bandura writes, "By camouflaging pernicious activities in innocent or sanitizing parlance, the activities lose much of their repugnancy. Bombing missions are described as 'servicing the target,' in the likeness of a public utility. The attacks become 'clean, surgical strikes,' arousing imagery of curative activities. The civilians whom the bomb kills are linguistically converted to 'collateral damage.' . . . In the vocabulary of the lawbreakers in Nixon's administration, criminal conspiracy became a 'game plan,' and the conspirators were 'team players,' like the best of sportsmen.

Typifying this deliberate whitewashing, the Nazi Party's SS had its "transportations," meaning the shipping of trainloads of prisoners to death camps; the British had their "civilizing mission" in Kenya, meaning the rounding up of members of the indigenous population and sodomizing, castrating,a nd killing thousands of them; the Japanes had their "comfort women," meaning girls and women they kidnapped in occupied countries and forced at gunpoint to work as frontline prostitutes; and the CIA has its "renditions." This is an unusual locution. In most dictionaries, a "rendition" is a performance or an interpretation of a piece of music or a role in a play, as in: "That was a nice rendition of Duke Ellington's 'Jubilee Stomp.'" But the CIA uses it as a transitive verb -- to render (as in "render undo Caesar the things that are Caesar's"), to hand over, to surrender.

(pp. 122-123):

On the basis of the enw agreement with Egypt, between 1995 and 1998 the CIA carried out a series of renditions aimed particularly at Islamic freedom fighters working int he Balkans, many of them originally from Egypt. Virtually all the people the CIA kidnapped in these operations were killed after being delivered into Egyptian hands. Predictably enough, these kidnappings generated blowback, although ordinary Americans did not perceive it as such because the actions that provoked the retaliation were, of course, kept toally secret. On August 5, 1998, the International Islamic Front for Jihad, in a letter to an Arab-langauge newspaper in London, promised a reprisal for recent U.S. renditions from Albania. Two days later, al-Qaeda blew up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania with a loss of 224 lives. The U.S. renditions continued with the CIA and FBI carrying out some two dozen of them in 1999 and 2000. These, in turn, helped provoke the attacks on the navy destroyer USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden on October 12, 2000. Former CIA director George Tenet testified before the 9/11 Commission that there were more than seventy renditions leading up to 9/11.

(p. 136):

The reality was and is that presidents like having a private army and do not like to be contradicted by officials not fully under their control Thus the clandestine service long ago began to surpass the intelligence side of the agency in terms of promotions, finances, and prestige. In May 2006, Bush merely put strategic analysis to sleep once and for all and turned over truth-telling toa brand-new bureaucracy of personal loyalists and the vested interests of the Pentagon.

(p. 143):

In August 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld unveiled his "1-4-2-1 defense strategy" to replace the Clinton era's plan for havinga military capable of fighting two wars -- in the Middle East and Northeast Asia -- simultaneously. Now, war planners were to prepare to defend the United STates while building and assembling forces capable of "deterring aggression and coercion" in four "critical regions": Europe, Northeast Asia (South Korea an dJapan), East Asia (the Taiwan Strait), and the Middle East, be able to defeat aggression in two of these regions simultaneously, and "win decisively" (in the sense of "regime change" and occupation) in one of those conflicts "at a time and place of our choosing." As the military analyst William M. Arkin commented, "[With] American military forces . . . already stretched to the limit, the new strategy goes far beyond preparing for reactive contingencies and reads more like a plan for picking fights in new parts of the world."

(p. 200):

What the Bush strategists and the Pentagon do not seem to understand is that China has real grievances against Japan and that American policy is exacerbating them. During World War II, the Japanese killed apprixmately twenty-three million Chinese throughout East Asia -- higher casualties than the staggering ones suffeed by Russia at the hands of the Nazis -- and yet Japan refuses to atone for or even acknowledge its historical war crimes. Quite the opposite, it continues to rewrite history, portraying itself as the liberator of Asia and a victim of European and American imperialsim. In what for the Chinese is a painful act of symbolism, Junichiro Koizumi made his first official visit to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo after becoming JApanese prime minister in 2001, a practice he has repeated every year sine. Koizumi likes to say that he is merely honoring Japan's war dead, but Yasukuni is anything but a military cemetery or a war memorial. It was established in 1869 by Emperor Meiji as a Shinto shrine (though with its torii archways made of steel rather than the traditional red-painted wood) to commemorate the lives lost in domestic military campaigns aimed at returning direct imperial rule to Japan. During World War II, Japanese militarists took over the shrine and used it to promote patriotic and nationalistic sentiments. Today Yasukuni is said to be dedicated to the spirits of approximately 2.4 million Japanese who have died in the country's wars, both civil and foreign, since 1853.

(p. 210):

By manipulating a Republican Congress and creating a missile defense lobby in both houses, they achieved all their goals, although actual missile defense remained as distant as ever. General Eugene Habiger, head of the U.S. Strategic Command in the mid-1990s, said, "A system is being deployed that doesn't have any credible capability." Philip Coyle, former assistant secretary of defense for test and evaluation in the Clinton administration, concluded that the United States had squandered over $100 billion dollars of taxpayers' money on a "high-tech scarecrow."

(p. 215):

The head of the Air Force Space Command, General Lance Lord, has led the charge. "Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny," he told an air force conference in September 2004. "Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future." "Simply put," he said to Congress, "it's th American way of fighting." We must have "freedom to attack as well as freedom from attack" in space.

(p. 216):

Simiarly today, there can be no rationale for a space war because one unintended but unavoidable consequence would be to destroy our own preeminent position in space. A major but little-noticed reason for this is because a conflict in space using antisatellite weapons of any kind would vastly increase the amount of orbiting garbage, which would threaten our whole network of military and commercial spacecraft. That, in turn, would threaten the whole American -- even planetary -- way of life. Yet space debris is a subject that the air force's "counterspace doctrine" never so much as mentions.

(pp. 219-220):

Thirty years ago, during the period of Japan's high-speed economic growth, I was in Tokyo talking with an official from that country's trade ministry. Japan was then, as today, totally dependent on imported petroleum from the Middle East. I pointed out that Japan's supertankers were highly vulnerable. What, I asked, would Japan do if a hostile power sank one of its tankers in the narrow straits around Singapore? His answer was straightforward: call Lloyd's Insurance Company. It would be much cheaper to construct a new tanker than to defend the sea-lanes from Japan to the Persian Gulf by building a navy. There is a lesson in this for the United States. We cannot afford our air force's plans to protect our space assets militarily, and the air force does not know how to do so in any case.

(pp. 228-229):

The Topol-M was Russia's original answer to President Reagan's Star Wars fantasies. It was designed during the late 1980s, but Russia did not produce it immediately because of the collapse of the USSR and because it discovered that Star Wars itself could be rather easily defeated by decoys and large numbers of conventional ICBMs. However, on June 13, 2004, the very day that George W. Bush succeeded in killing off the Anti-ballastic Missile Treaty of 1972, Aleksei Arbatov, one of Russia's leading experts on military affairs, advocated in parliament that Russia respond by speeding development of the Topol-M. A year and a half later, on December 24, 2005, Colonel General Nikolai Solovtsov, chief of the Strategic Missile Forces, attended a ceremony at the Tatishchevo missile base int he Volga River's Saratov region. He wsa commissioning a new set of Topol-Ms, which he declared to be "capable of penetrating any missile defense system." The Topol-M was first put into service in December 1998 but was deployed only in silos. An off-road mobile version entered combat service in 2006. It is a truly formidable weapon. [ . . . ] There is no known defense against such a weapon. Diplomacy and deterrence ar eth eonly means to ensure that it will never be used, and the Bush administration has repeatedly rejected diplomacy as a useful tol of American foreign policy. The conclusion is unavoidable: Washington has given us at best the illusion ofprotection against a nuclear attack without reducing the odds of such an attack.

(p. 230):

The raw monetary figures have been literally astronomic. From Reagan's 1983 "Star Wars" speech to 2006, depending on which expert you listen to, the Unitd States has spent between $92.5 billion and $130 billion on the basic problem of shooting down an ICBM in flight -- and that's without even once having succeeded in doing so. One comprehensive analysis of the ultimate cost of the entire ballastic missile defense system by its distinctly theoretical date of completion in 2015 -- and excluding its most expensive and problematic component, a space-based laser -- is $1.2 trillion.

(pp. 270-271):

On February 6, 2006, the Bush administration submitted to Congress a $439 billion defense appropriation budget for fiscal 2007. At the same time, the deficit in the United States' current account -- the imbalance in the trading of godos and services as well as the shortfall in all other cross-border payments from interest income and rents to dividends and profits on direct investments -- underwent its fastest-ever quarterly deterioration. In the fourth quarter of 2005, the deficit hit a staggering $225 billion, up from $185.4 billion in the previou squarter. For all of 2005, the current account deficit was $805 billion, 6.4 percent of national income. In 2005, the U.S. trade deficit, the largest component of the current account deficit, soared to an all-time high of $725.8 billion, the fourth consecutive year that America's trade debts set records. The trade deficit with China alone rose to $201.6 billion, the highest imbalance ever recorded with any country. Meanwhile, since mid-2000, the country has lost nearly three million manufacturing jobs.

To try to cope with these imbalances, on March 16, 2006, Congress raised the national debt limit from $8.2 trillion to $8.96 trillion. This was the fourth time since George W. Bush took office that it had to be raised. THe national debt is the total amount owed by the government and should not be confused with the federal budget deficit, the annual amount by which federal spending exceeds revenue. Had Congress not raised the debt limit, the U.S. overnment would not have been able to borrow more money and would have had to default on its massive debuts.

(pp. 278-279):

In Blowback, I set out to explain why we are hated around the world.The concept "blowback" does not just mean retaliation for things our government has done to and in foreign countries. It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public. This means that when the retaliation comes -- as it did so spectacularly on September 11, 2001 -- the American public is unable to put the events in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback. In the first book in this trilogy, I tried to provide some of the historical background for understanding the dilemmas we as a nation confront today, although I focused more on Asia -- the area of my academic training -- than on the Middle East.

The Sorrows of Empire was written during the American preparations for and launching of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. I began to study our continuous military buildup since World War II and the 737 military bases we currently maintain in other people's countries. This empire of bases is the concrete manifestation of our ghlobal hegemony, and many of the blowback-inducing wars we have conducted had as their true purpose the sustaining and expanding of this network. We do not think of these overseas deployments as a form of empire; in fact, most Americans do not give them any thought at all until something truly shocking, such as the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, brings them to our attention. But the people living next door to these bases and dealing with the swaggering soldiers who brawl and sometimes rape their women certainly think of them as imperial enclaves, just as the peoples of ancient Iberia or nineteenth-century India knew that they were victims of foreign colonization.

In Nemesis, I have tried to present historical, political, economic, and philosophical evidence of where our current behavior is likely to lead. Specifically, I believe that to maintain our empir eabroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and in the end produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent. The founders of our nation understood this well and tried to create a form of government -- a republic -- that would prevent this from occurring. But the combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, military Keynesianism, and ruinous military expenses have destroyed our republican structure in favor of an imperial presidency. We are on the cusp of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation is started down that path, the dynamic sthat apply to all empirse come into play -- isolation, overstretch, the uniting of forces opposed toimperialism, and bankruptcy. Nemesis stalks our life as a free nation.