Book review: Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, by Chalmers Johnson

This is the third and final book of Chalmers Johnson's Blowback trilogy. I previously reviewed the first book, Blowback, which focused on the harmful consequences of American military intervention and covert operations around the world. The title is a word used by the Central Intelligence Agency to refer to such consequences of operations, and Johnson argued that because such operations are kept secret from the American public--and even their elected representatives--when blowback occurs, citizens are often unable to comprehend the reasons why. Published in mid-2000, Blowback became a bestseller after 9/11, though sadly not enough people seemed to have learned its principle argument.

I reviewed the sequel, Sorrows of Empire, which dealt with the extent of American military colonialization around the world, and how this anticipated the United States becoming a militaristic empire, a new Rome, where generals and admirals are no longer accountable to their civilian leaders.

Now, in Nemesis, Johnson gives a final call, warning that the dissolution of the American Republic is imminent. Summarizing the main arguments from the first two books, he compares the United States to the two other imperialist powers contemporary pundits frequently juxtapose with it: Ancient Rome and Colonialist Britain. Both were democratic states that became empires, at great cost to their economies and their democracy. Prevailing wisdom holds that the Romans sacrificed their democracy for their empire, while the British (eventually) sacrificed their empire for their democracy. This is not entirely accurate; the bloody British attempts to retain Kenya after World War II hardly indicates a magnanimous sacrifice on their part.

The book isn't seamless; one factual error I noted (being the space geek that I am) was identifying Sally Ride as the first woman in space. Dr. Ride was the first American woman in space but she was preceded by the Soviet cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982. I also feel that Johnson doesn't really introduce any new arguments in this book, rather he adds to the arguments from Blowback in Chapters 3 and 5, and Sorrows of Empire in Chapters 1 and 4. Chapter 2 is the comparison with Rome and Britain: instructive, but kind of a simplification of history. Chapter 6 discusses the militarization of space and the potential for disaster it entails, but again this just builds on the arguments from the second book. Still, Nemesis is excellent as a survey of the arguments of the first two books.

UPDATE (August 1, 2008): I found the complete text of the poem Johnson quotes in the introduction.

Neighborhood Girl by John Shreffler

She's new to the neighborhood, her family just moved in
From Greece or somewhere, she's a great, tall gawky girl
With braces and earrings and uneven skin:
Hormones and acne, her change is coming in.

And today, she's playing hooky, January fog.
Orange lights on the school zone sign beat out their tattoo
And caution the Homeland's socked-in morning rush
With their strobe-light samba: Condition Amber,

As she sits invisible, swinging her legs to the beat,
Perched up high on aluminum over
The uncanny Day-Glo of the key-lime fluorescence
That says: School at the top of this composition.

I see her and she lets me. I'm an old family friend:
Sometimes I play poker with her Aunt Erato.
Her name is Nemesis and she's just moved in,
She's new to the neighborhood, she's checking it out.

Heartless War

Today is the 63rd anniversary of the firebombing of Dresden, Germany during World War II:

The bombing of Dresden by the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and United States Army Air Force (USAAF) between February 13 and February 15, 1945, 12 weeks before the surrender of the German Wehrmacht, remains one of the most controversial Allied actions of the Second World War. The raids saw 1,300 heavy bombers drop over 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices in under 15 hours, destroying 13 square miles (34 km²) of the city, the baroque capital of the German state of Saxony, and causing a firestorm that consumed the city centre. Estimates of civilian casualties vary greatly, but recent publications place the figure between 24,000 and 40,000.

The Allies described the operation as the justified bombing of a military and industrial target, which was a major rail transportation and communication centre, housing 110 factories and 50,000 workers in support of the German war effort. Against this, several researchers have argued that Dresden was a cultural landmark of little or no military significance, a "Florence on the Elbe," as it was known, and the attacks were not proportional for the commensurate military gains.

In the first few decades after the war, some estimates of the number killed were as high as 300,000, in part because of misinformation spread just after the bombing by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda. As a result, many charged that it was a callous slaughter of civilians comparable to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with some historians arguing that it was a war crime. Later assessments lowered the casualty figures by a factor of ten or more, yet the raids continue to be included among the worst examples of civilian suffering caused by strategic bombing, and have become one of the moral causes célèbres of the Second World War.

I've discussed the aerial bombardment of civilian population centres before, and Dresden is a particularly noteworthy part of the controversy. It has been immortalized in Kurt Vonnegut's most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, which drew upon his experiences as a POW in Dresden during the attack, and how he and his fellow prisoners were drafted by the Germans to assist in the mass burials. Infamously, the chief authority of the devastation of the attack (even quoted by Vonnegut in his novel), was David Irving's The Destruction of Dresden. Irving's casualty figures cleaved closely to Goebbel's and for decades were considered authoritative. With Irving now largely seen as a Nazi sympathizer, much of his work is considered discredited by most historians.

This has spurred me to finish reading Frederick Taylor's Dresden: Tuesday, Feb. 13, 1945, which presents evidence that counters much of the conventional understanding about the bombing, notably:

• The casualty figures were probably between 25,000 and 40,000, not 130,000 and 500,000


• Contrary to the conventional understanding, Dresden was home to several industries vital to the German war effort


• Far from being an "innocent" city, Dresden enthusiastically supported National Socialism and anti-Semitism before Hitler even came to power. The handful of Jews left in Dresden were scheduled for a likely death march a few days after the bombing


• Dresden was an important rail hub and supply trains to the Eastern Front went through it almost exclusively.


• There is no doubt spreading terror among the civilian populace was among the goals of RAF Bomber Command. However, as my earlier post noted, this was hardly a discredited tactic among bombing strategists--London and Paris were still targets of German V-1 and V-2 rocket attacks, so even among the many pilots who took issue with the bombing of a civilian population centre, most would have found a good reason to get past it

Taylor doesn't deny that the question of whether it was worth stooping to such tactics remains a painful one. His quarrel is with the notion that Dresden was exceptional, or at least intentionally so. He points out that previous and subsequent raids on other cities aimed to be just as destructive, but didn't succeed because weather or human error or some other unforeseen factor interfered. Hamburg, a larger city than Dresden, took more casualties when it was bombed in 1943, and the towns of Pforzheim and Darmstadt lost a greater percentage of their population when their turn came. Conditions in Dresden combined to create the firebombing equivalent of a perfect storm. That the same thing did not happen elsewhere wasn't because the Allies didn't try.

I will post my own review of Taylor once I finish. Until then, let's all hope we are never the victims of such mass destruction like the citizens of Dresden, nor will we have to make a choice concerning a city full of the enemy's civilians.