Saturday, April 26, 2008

Chalmers Johnson.
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.
New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007.

Book information: The American Empire Project, Google Books, Amazon.com.

I recommend viewing the Conversations with History episodes in which Johnson discusses his books. See the links in the Online Video section below.

Chalmers Johnson:
Online Video:
Miscellaneous Reviews, Essays, etc:
  • Jonathan Freedland, Bush's Amazing Achievement, The New York Review of Books, Volume 54, Number 10, 15 June 2007.
    "One of the few foreign policy achievements of the Bush administration has been the creation of a near consensus among those who study international affairs, a shared view that stretches, however improbably, from Noam Chomsky to Brent Scowcroft, from the antiwar protesters on the streets of San Francisco to the well-upholstered office of former secretary of state James Baker. This new consensus holds that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a calamity, that the presidency of George W. Bush has reduced America's standing in the world and made the United States less, not more, secure, leaving its enemies emboldened and its friends alienated. Paid-up members of the nation's foreign policy establishment, those who have held some of the most senior offices in the land, speak in a language once confined to the T-shirts of placard-wielding demonstrators. They rail against deception and dishonesty, imperialism and corruption. The only dispute between them is over the size and depth of the hole into which Bush has led the country he pledged to serve."

  • Michael Ignatieff, The Burden, The New York Times Magazine, 05 January 2003.
    A copy of the essay is also available at http://empirelite.ca/ as "Empire Lite."
    A comment on Ignatieff's essay which elegantly reveals Ignatieff's blindness.
    In this essay Ignatieff writes as an explicit advocate of American imperialism, a position he has since renounced. Useful in attempting to understand how and why the U.S. establishment (beyond the Neoconservatives) supported the conquest and occupation of Iraq.

  • Howard Zinn, Empire or Humanity?: What the Classroom Didn't Teach Me About the American Empire, TomDispatch.com, 01 April 2008.