Chalmers Johnson > Quotes

“History teaches us that the capacity for things to get worse is limitless.”
― Chalmers Johnson

“It is time to realize, however, that the real dangers to America today come not from the newly rich people of East Asia but from our own ideological rigidity, our deep-seated belief in our own propaganda.”
― Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

“The Nature of Political Terrorism The suicidal assassins of September 11, 2001, did not “attack America,” as political leaders and news media in the United States have tried to maintain; they attacked American foreign policy. Employing the strategy of the weak, they killed innocent bystanders, whose innocence is, of course, no different from that of the civilians killed by American bombs in Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.”
― Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

“In a sense, blowback is simply another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows. Although people usually know what they have sown, our national experience of blowback is seldom imagined in such terms because so much of what the managers of the American empire have sown has been kept secret.”
― Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

“Ronald Steel noted, “Unlike Rome, we have not exploited our empire. On the contrary, our empire has exploited us, making enormous drains on our resources and energies.”
― Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

“Even an empire cannot control the long-term effects of its policies. That is the essence of blowback.”
― Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

“Even though the American people may not know what has been done in their name, those on the receiving end certainly do: they include the people of Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1959 to the present), Congo (1960), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Vietnam (1961–73), Laos (1961–73), Cambodia (1969–73), Greece (1967–73), Chile (1973), Afghanistan (1979 to the present), El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua (1980s), and Iraq (1991 to the present). Not surprisingly, sometimes these victims try to get even. There is a direct line between the attacks on September 11, 2001—the most significant instance of blowback in the history of the CIA—and the events of 1979.”
― Chalmers Johnson, Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope

“On this issue, the United States is an outlaw, waiting to be brought to justice.”
― Chalmers Johnson, Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope

“The historical record is unequivocal. The United States is ham-handed and brutal in conceiving and executing clandestine operations, and it is simply no good at espionage; its operatives never have enough linguistic and cultural knowledge of target countries to recruit spies effectively. The CIA also appears to be one of the most easily penetrated espionage organizations on the planet. From the beginning, it has repeatedly lost its assets to double agents.”
― Chalmers Johnson, Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope

“As explained by Carlos Marighella, the Brazilian guerrilla leader whose writings influenced political terrorists in the 1960s and 1970s, if a government can be provoked into a purely military response to terrorism, its overreaction will alienate the masses, causing them to “revolt against the army and the police and blame them for this state of things.”
― Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

“This book is a guide to some of the policies during and after the Cold War that generated, and continue to generate, blowback—a term the CIA invented to describe the likelihood that our covert operations in other people’s countries would result in retaliations against Americans, civilian and military, at home and abroad.”
― Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

“Americans believe their ideas are universal—the supremacy of the individual and free, unfettered expression. But they are not. Never were . . .”
― Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

“economic relations with our East Asian satellites have, for example, hollowed out our domestic manufacturing industries and led us into a reliance on finance capitalism, whose appearance has in the past been a sign of a hitherto healthy economy entering decline.”
― Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

“But how “good” are we, really? If we’re so good, why do we inspire such hatred abroad? What have we done to bring so much “blowback” upon ourselves?”
― Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

“Americans generally think of Pol Pot as some kind of unique, self-generated monster and his “killing fields” as an inexplicable atavism totally divorced from civilization. But without the United States government’s Vietnam-era savagery, he could never have come to power in a culture like Cambodia’s,”
― Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire