Winter 2007

Review

Uncovering the Empire's New Clothes: Chalmers Johnson's Nemesis

by Chalmers Johnson
Metropolitan Books
2007, 320 pages (cloth), $26.00

Reviewed by Ethan Vesely-Flad

“KILL ARAB.” I stared at the graffiti on the #4 – Lexington Avenue subway train in disbelief. It was scrawled in large capital letters on an advertisement for flower displays, right at eye level. It was the morning rush hour in January, and I had to reach carefully over three people with my pen to scribble out the hateful words.

In New York City, the most diverse city on earth, what would have prompted such intolerance? A simple answer would be the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But those conflicts are symptoms of a deeper social and political malaise.

In his new book, Nemesis, Chalmers Johnson writes of an “imperial pathology” that has captured the United States. Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute and a former consultant to the CIA, wrote this book as the final entry in what he describes as an “inadvertent trilogy.”  

His first volume, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, was released in 2000 – but became a bestseller after the September 2001 al Qaida attacks on the United States. Johnson had essentially predicted the attacks by outlining the ways that the U.S.’s extensive and continuing legacy of global intervention would eventually spark a “blowback” of retaliation by those who bore the brunt of that imperial agenda. For those who demanded, “Why do they hate us?” Johnson had already provided an answer.

Three years later, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic described the inevitable breakdown of what many people insist is the “greatest country on earth.” Johnson outlined four fundamental results – what he called “sorrows” – of U.S. domestic and foreign policy: endless war;  the loss of constitutional freedoms; a culture of lying and deceit; and an impending national economic failure due to our massive investment in the military-industrial complex.

Through his denunciation of a morally and financially bankrupt American culture, Johnson has come to represent a modern-day explicator of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s warning four decades ago that ours is a nation approaching “spiritual death.”

Now, in Nemesis, Johnson seeks to “present historical, political, economic, and philosophical evidence of where our [U.S.] current behavior is likely to lead. Specifically, I believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and in the end produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent.”

Johnson outlines this dire scenario by analyzing the Roman and British empires, using Rome as an example of a government that abolished constitutional principles and abandoned its democracy in favor of a military dictatorship, and Britain as a somewhat more hopeful (albeit “less noble”) case due to a “post-World War II resurgence of democracy and popular revulsion at the routine practices of imperialism.” And in an intriguing bit of historical trivia, Johnson notes that in 2005 the U.S. held 38 large and medium-sized American military facilities worldwide – which is almost precisely the number held by the British and Roman empires at their zeniths (36 by Britain in 1898, and 37 by the Roman Empire in 117 C.E.)!

It is the sobering details of the U.S. military’s modern-day imperial presence that make Nemesis so invaluable. While many military bases in the U.S. have closed during the Clinton and Bush presidencies, “what sounds like a retrenchment in the empire abroad is really proving to be an exponential growth in new types of bases – without dependents and the amenities they would require – in very remote areas where the U.S. military has never been before.” And, as detailed elsewhere in this magazine, Johnson discusses how each of those bases leaves a dramatic imprint on local communities through the rape of its people, ecology, and economy.

In spring 2003, during the first weeks of the invasion of Iraq, countless historical and cultural artifacts were stolen, desecrated, or destroyed. One terrible example was the 6,000-year-old city of Ur: “the literal heartland of human civilization,” according to Johnson. On its huge ziggurat, which has stood for four millennia, U.S. Marines spray-painted their motto, Semper Fi. Not long afterward, the U.S. armed forces chose land nearby to construct a massive military base, wiping out a landscape with irreplaceable archaeological significance and replacing it with air fields, concrete buildings, and what the author describes as “American imperial ziggurats”: Burger King and Pizza Hut restaurants. Nemesis proves how such an imperial pathology – in which graffiti on ancient religious structures is even permissible – forms the foundation of a society where the murderous phrase “KILL ARAB” can be cavalierly displayed at home.

Ethan Vesely-Flad is editor of Fellowship magazine.

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©2007 Fellowship of Reconciliation