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Dismantling The Empire: America's Last Best Hope (2010)

by Chalmers Johnson(Favorite Author)

3.87 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0805093036 (ISBN13: 9780805093032)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Metropolitan Books

review 1: This book should be read by the Left and the Right if we don't want to go the way of former Empires. What Chalmers Johnson goes into here should not be labeled Left or Right. It's obvious he is comfortable as a Leftist with his Bush bashing in the first part of the book. He is right about Bush, however it's not gonna get a typical neo-conservative to go on reading the book, which is to bad because almost everything in here is so vital to the future of this country and the world. World domination actually escalated more in the 1990's under the GHW Bush and Clinton wars against Iraq, Sudan, Yugoslavia Somalia and more.I agree with him on the trillion dollar military budget must be eliminated, but Johnson then wants to spend that money here on domestic projects- and then rais... moree more taxes on the "Rich"- which is what I disagree with him about. The book still is a good read for anybody curious about the true extent of US foreign policy. I'd be interested to see an updated version of this book in 2016 so Chalmers Johnson can tell us how much the "war on terror" had been escalated by HIS Nobel Peace Prize winning boy in the White House.
review 2: The low rating is not because I disagree with what Johnson is saying. On the contrary, I admit that I picked up this book so that it can reconfirm my own standing on the issue, that is, we need to roll back the empire before it brings about our demise. No orchestrating military coups, no manipulating foreign governments, no wars, no regime changes, no military bases anywhere in the world, no military interventions even for humanitarian reasons, no taking side in other countries’ conflicts, no pushing democracy and human rights down other nations’ throats, no writing other nations’ constitutions, no taking a country and trying to remake it into a shining example for its region, no allowing large corporations to dictate our foreign policy for their profit, no being held hostage to our giant and blood-sucking leech of a military-industrial complex. You get the picture. Just mind our own business and fix our own problems. If after this, anybody messes with us, we go in, topple their government, kill their leaders, decimate their military, destroy their economy, and then get out. No liberal and neoconservative nation-building and winning-minds-and-hearts pipe dreams. This book is not a book. Johnson has thrown together a bunch of essays written over a span of years, and as a result, it lacks cohesion and direction, and is annoyingly repetitive. I don’t know Johnson, but he comes off as an anti-imperialist, anti-military leftist. That may be fine to some, but it makes the book a political polemic, not a presentation of hard facts showing that it’s in our own interest to liquidate the empire voluntarily, like the British did, if we want to survive as a prosperous, democratic, and virtuous nation. less

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