Chalmers Johnson Quotes

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

  Chalmers Johnson

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• “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

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• “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

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• “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

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• “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

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• “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

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• “On this issue, the United States is an outlaw, waiting to be brought to justice.”

  Chalmers Johnson

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• “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

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• “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

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• “Even an empire cannot control the long-term effects of its policies. That is the essence of blowback.”

  Chalmers Johnson

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• “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

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