A Former Spear-carrier for the Empire
One of the things I dislike about academic social science is this tendency to mesh it all in framework by people who don’t really know what they’re talking about. Cassandra was the only social scientist who was any good, and she was right: there was something in that horse, and beware of Greeks bearing gifts.
I retired from the University of California in 1992, after thirty years […] But Blowback was not written because I needed tenure. I was not doing one more book for an academic dean/bean counter. It certainly grew out of my main specialty in East Asian politics, and in Japan, the growing realization that Japan was a satellite to the United States — that its foreign policy was entirely in an orbit around Washington, D.C., and that this required explanation.
I conceived of Blowback — as a warning to the American public. It was: you should expect retaliation from the people on the receiving end of now innumerable clandestine activities, including the biggest one of all, the recruiting, arming, and putting into combat of Mujahideen freedom fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s who are the main recruiting group for al Qaeda today.
a conversation with Chalmers Johnson
[x]#451 fan donderdag 18 maart 2004 @ 15:40:29
