>From http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-
/books/0805062386/reviews/0805062386/002-2386411-4553643
}}>Begin
Amazon.com
If the 20th century was the American century, the 21st century may be a time of
reckoning for the United States. Chalmers Johnson, an authority on Japan and
its economy, offers a troubling prognosis of what's to come. Blowback--the
title refers to a CIA neologism describing the unintended consequences of
American activity--is a call for the United States to rethink its position in
the world. "The evidence is building up that in the decade following the end of
the Cold War, the United States largely abandoned a reliance on diplomacy,
economic aid, international law, and multilateral institutions in carrying out
its foreign policies and resorted much of the time to bluster, military force,
and financial manipulation," writes Johnson. "The world is not a safer place as
a result." Individual chapters focus on Okinawa (where American servicemen were
accused of raping a 12-year-old girl in "Asia's last colony"), the two Koreas,
China, and Japan. The result is a liberal-leaning (and Asia-centric) call for
the United States to disengage from many of its global commitments. Critics
will call Johnson an isolationist, but friends (perhaps admirers of Patrick
Buchanan's A Republic, Not an Empire) will say he simply speaks good sense. All
will agree he is an earnest voice: "I believe our very hubris ensures our
undoing." --John J. Miller
>From Booklist January 1, 2000
A veteran, and veteran academic on China and Japan, offers a serious indictment
of the security system the U.S. organized in East Asia circa 1950 to contain
the communists. Convinced the time has arrived to close down bases, bring
troops home, and renegotiate extant security treaties, Johnson examines, from a
highly critical, almost excoriating viewpoint, the American presence in Japan,
Korea, Okinawa, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia. He wants to connect
with general-interest readers, perceiving them blinkered to the resentments
engendered by U.S. military activity. When anti-Americanism erupts, Americans
tend to be perplexed by it (why are those ingrates rioting?), they and their
leaders believing their foreign policy to be animated by virtuous liberal
values, not hegemonic self-interest. These occasional but persistent reactions
Johnson calls "blowback," and his intimation of disasters to come, possibly
wars, drives his insistence on dismantlement of the cold war security
structures. This is edgy, unconventional wisdom that deserves hearing and
debating. Gilbert Taylor
>From Kirkus Reviews
In this timely book, noted Asian specialist Johnson (Japan: Who Governs?, 1994)
addresses the effects of American global interventionism, delivering a grim
warning that the United States will soon experience severe reprisals (or
blowback) from the victims of government policies kept secret from the American
people. Johnson begins his book with a confession. He admits that as a naval
officer after the Korean War, and as an academic who studied the formation of
Chinese communism, he was not in a position to witness the results of American
power disinterestedly. In fact, he wholeheartedly shared the assumption that
America was the necessary guarantor of world peace. Only after his pathbreaking
exploration of Japan's economic renewal in MITI and the Japanese Miracle (1973)
did he conclude that the US mission to protect the ``free world'' was a
justification for empire. This insight became especially clear in the wake of
the Cold War. That the US has not significantly reduced or adjusted its
military position after the fall of the Soviet Union reveals, to Johnson, this
country's imperialistic aims. Moreover, he argues that American fat-headedness
is not just confined to the upper echelons of the State Department. From rape
in Okinawa to the imposition of economic austerity in Indonesia (followed by
the quick purchase of its industrial plant on easy terms), Johnson sees the
imperialistic mentality as the defining style of American actions and
expectations abroad. In order to curb imminent and massive blowback, he calls
for a more humble American presenceboth militarily and psychologicallyin the
world. However, one has to wonder about the value of Johnson's dissent: Is
humility a realistic solution to the tangle of issues that this nation has
persistently involved itself in for half a century? Engrossing and at the same
time alarming, Johnson's well-researched book nevertheless presents an easy
solution to fundamental problems that have usually forced great powers into
catastrophic predicaments. -- Copyright �2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All
rights reserved.
John Dower, author of War Without Mercy, winner of the NBCC Award
"Chalmers Johnson is one of the most influential, brilliant, and provocative
intellectuals writing about Asia today."
Book Description
An explosive account of the resentments American policies are sowing around the
world and of the payback that will be our harvest in the twenty-first century.
Blowback, a term invented by the CIA, refers to the unintended consequences of
American policies. In this sure-to-be-controversial book, Chalmers Johnson lays
out in vivid detail the dangers faced by our overextended empire, which insists
on projecting its military power to every corner of the earth and using
American capital and markets to force global economic integration on its own
terms. From a case of rape by U.S. servicemen in Okinawa to our role in Asia's
financial crisis, from our early support for Saddam Hussein to our actions in
the Balkans, Johnson reveals the ways in which our misguided policies are
planting the seeds of future disaster.
In the wake of the Cold War, the United States has imprudently expanded the
commitments it made over the previous forty years, argues Johnson. In Blowback,
he issues a warning we would do well to consider: it is time for our empire to
demobilize before our bills come due.
About the Author
Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, is author
of the classic MITI and the Japanese Miracle and Japan: Who Governs? He lives
near San Diego.
End<{{
>From http://www.latimes.com/cgi-bin/print.cgi
}}>Begin
Friday, September 8, 2000
Does the U.S. Really Want Peace in Korea?
By CHALMERS JOHNSON
Since peace started to break out in Korea last June, the United States has
responded only with bitter carping. The U.S. does everything it can to produce
a peace treaty--any treaty--between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but it
downplays steps toward reconciliation between North and South Korea.
The United States still keeps 37,000 combat troops in South Korea. The
South Korean people have become so irritated with the continued American
presence in their country that the U.S. 8th Army has ordered U.S. troops and
their dependents to use the "buddy system" when leaving their bases in order to
prevent assaults on them.
North Korea is the United States' dream boogeyman, its justification for
bases in South Korea and Japan and the most frequently cited reason why we need
a national missile defense system. Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) has
said that if the Republicans are elected, there would be an end to the offered
rapprochement with the North. This would preserve the huge vested interests of
the Pentagon and defense industry in keeping the Cold War alive in East Asia.
On Tuesday at Frankfurt Airport in Germany, a 15-member delegation from
North Korea was en route to the United Nations Millennium Summit. The delegates
had completed departure procedures and were about to board an American Airlines
flight to New York when people the North Koreans referred to as "U.S. air
security agents" stopped them. The Koreans said that after searching the
delegates' baggage, the agents searched "every sensitive part of the body."
When they came to the head of the North Korean delegation, Kim Yong Nam, who is
also head of North Korea's Assembly, the North Koreans balked. The Koreans say
the agents canceled their reservations to prevent them from departing. The
delegation then canceled its trip and returned to North Korea.
The U.S. later offered as an explanation that North Korea was one of eight
"rogue nations" (now called "states of concern") designated by the U.S. State
Department and that the delegates had to undergo U.S.-defined s
earch procedures to board a U.S. flag carrier.
North Korea is a member of the United Nations, and the delegation held visas to
enter the U.S. as well as invitations to a reception hosted by President Clinton. It
was expected that Kim Yong Nam would meet with Sout
h Korean President Kim Dae Jung in New York. It would have been the highest-level
meeting between the two Koreas since Kim's journey to North Korea last June, which
opened a peace process that has both sides declaring tha
t "the threat of war on the Korean peninsula is over."
After the hassle at the airport, the North Korean deputy foreign minister, Choe
Su Hon, said the airport incident was intended to derail the meeting between the two
Korean leaders and frustrate the Korean peoples' de
sire to reunify their country.
In Pyongyang, North Korea asserted that "the U.S. will come to know what a dear
price it will have to pay for having hurt our people's dignity" and that the United
States' "hostile policy toward the DPRK [North Korea
] has not changed even a bit." In Seoul, even the conservative English-language daily,
]Korea Times, demanded that Washington apologize and rejected its explanation that
]this was an "innocent mistake."
The Clinton administration waffled. White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said, "It
was a combination of unfamiliarity with our procedures [presumably on the part of the
North Koreans] and I think some unfamiliarity on
the part there [in Germany] with the delegation coming through." The State
Department's spokesman claimed that "this incident did not occur at the instigation or
with the knowledge of anybody in the United States governme
nt." However, he added that, while diplomats accredited to the United States or the
United Nations are exempt from searches, "this delegation did not qualify for that
exemption."
This incident in Germany appears to be the diplomatic equivalent of the
U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade--an outrageous act explained by
the flimsiest of excuses.
- - -
Chalmers Johnson's Latest Book Is "Blowback: the Costs and Consequences of
American Empire" (Metropolitan Books, 2000)
Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times
End<{{
A<>E<>R
Integrity has no need of rules. -Albert Camus (1913-1960)
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational
tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the
State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate
repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the
"democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist
by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse
of objective necessity. He strives to show that the existence of
taxation and the State necessarily sets up a class division between
the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that
the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State
has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to
accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a
share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded
subjects.
[[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard,
Fox & Wilkes, 1973, 1978, p. 25]]
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