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Festival
    “Chalmers Johnson’s voice has never been more urgently needed, and in
Nemesis
it rings with eloquence, clarity, and truth.”
    —James Carroll, author of
House of War

NEMESIS
    NEMESIS

ALSO BY CHALMERS JOHNSON
    The Sorrows of Empire:
Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic
    Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
    Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary
China, 1937–1945
    Revolution and the Social System
    An Instance of Treason: Ozaki Hotsumi and the Sorge Spy Ring
    Revolutionary Change
    Change in Communist Systems
(editor and contributor)
    Conspiracy at Matsukawa
    Ideology and Politics in Contemporary China
(editor)
    Autopsy on Peoples War
    Japans Public Policy Companies
    MITI and the Japanese Miracle:
The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975
    The Industrial Policy Debate
    (editor and contributor)
    Politics and Productivity: How Japan’s Development Strategy Works
(with Laura D’Andrea Tyson and John Zysman)
    Japan: Who Governs? The Rise of the Developmental State
    Okinawa: Cold War Island
(editor and contributor)

NEMESIS
     
    THE LAST DAYS OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC
     
    CHALMERS JOHNSON

     

 
    Holt Paperbacks
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Publishers since 1866

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New York, New York 10010
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    A Holt Paperback® and® are registered trademarks of
Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
    Copyright © 2006 by Chalmers Johnson
All rights reserved.
    Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Johnson, Chalmers.
    Nemesis: the last days of the American Republic / Chalmers Johnson. p. cm.
    Includes index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8728-4
ISBN-10: 0-8050-8728-1
1. United States—Foreign relations—1989– 2. United States—Military policy. 3. United States—Politics and government—1989– I. Title.
    E840.J633 2007
    973.931—dc22 2006047200
    Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and
premiums. For details contact: Director, Special Markets.
    Originally published in hardcover in 2006 by Metropolitan Books
    First Holt Paperbacks Edition 2008
    Printed in the United States of America
    13579 10 8642

NEMESIS
     
    In Greek mythology,
    the goddess of retribution,
    who punishes human
    transgression of the natural,
    right order of things and
    the arrogance that causes it.

Prologue: The Blowback Trilogy
     
Who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is Osama bin Laden? He’s America’s family secret. He is the American president’s dark Doppelganger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilized. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America’s foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of “full-spectrum dominance,” its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable.
     
    ARUNDHATI ROY ,
The Guardian,
September 27, 2001
    Nemesis
is the last volume of an inadvertent trilogy that deals with the way arrogant and misguided American policies have headed us for a series of catastrophes comparable to our disgrace and defeat in Vietnam or even to the sort of extinction that befell our former fellow “superpower,” the Soviet Union. Such a fate is probably by now unavoidable; it is certainly too late for mere scattered reforms of our government or bloated military to make much difference.
    I never planned to write three books about the decline and fall of the American empire, but events intervened. In March 2000, well before 9/11, I published
Blowback,
based on my years of teaching and writing about East Asia. I had become convinced by then that some