A Quote by Chalmers Johnson

The term blowback, which officials of the Central Intelligent Agency first invented for their own internal use, . . . refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as the malign act of terrorists or drug lords or rogue states or illegal arms merchants often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations.

Chalmers Johnson

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Chalmers Johnson
American - Author
August 6, 1931 - November 20, 2010

Believers are often thought of as people who have some kind of private conviction or repudiation of something, whereas "the faithful" refers to a relationship, which was also incidentally the earlier sense of "faith" in premodern, preliberal Christianity. This is not to say, incidentally, that "faith" refers simply to external behavior as opposed to internal belief but that it refers to an act.

Talal Asad

Without a clear picture of where the military's covert forces are operating and what they are doing, Americans may not even recognize the consequences of and blowback from our expanding secret wars as they wash over the world.

Nick Turse

The Latin American debt that reached crisis levels from 1982 would have been sharply reduced by return of flight capital - in some cases, overcome, though all figures are dubious for these secret and often illegal operations.

Noam Chomsky

Shouldn't the American leadership be addressing what is happening in America, with its domestic policies on racism, discrimination, illegal monitoring, solitary confinement, torture, Guantanamo Bay and any other social and political issues related to the American society not directly connected to Islam? American Muslims must speak out and be involved as well in international policies and, through their institutions, they should raise their voice. This is the way you serve the community.

Tariq Ramadan

We were American citizens. We were incarcerated by our American government in American internment camps here in the United States. The term 'Japanese internment camp' is both grammatically and factually incorrect.

George Takei

I hope I'm wrong, but I am afraid that Iraq is going to turn out to be the greatest disaster in American foreign policy - worse than Vietnam, not in the number who died, but in terms of its unintended consequences and its reverberation throughout the region.

Madeleine Albright

You look at the steamboat, the railroad, the car, the airplane - not all of these were invented in the Anglo-American world, but they were popularized and extended by it. They were made possible by the financial architecture, the capital intensive operations invented and developed by the Anglo-Americans.

Walter Russell Mead

The main implication is a remapping of the world in line with American policy and American interests. Natural resources are limited, and the United States wants to make sure that its own population is kept supplied. The principle effect of this will be for the United States to control large parts of the oil which the world possesses.

Tariq Ali

I'm absolutely convinced of that. Israel is the representative of the United States in that part of the world. Its policies are so integrated with American policies that they use the same language.

John Pilger

'Blowback,' as many 'Nation' readers are aware, was a term introduced into popular circulation by the late political scientist Chalmers Johnson, an old Cold Warrior turned dissident.

Greg Grandin

In the US, we consider our foreign policy as something rooted in the protection of American ideals of democracy and human development. However, we often fail to see the damaging consequences, many of which may be unintended, on others - including Christians - living in other parts of the world.

Ed McBain

Look at the history of the printing press, when this was invented what sort of consequences this had. Or industrialization, what sort of consequences that had. Very often, it led to enormous transformational processes within individual societies. And it took awhile until societies learned how to find the right kind of policies to contain this and manage and steer this.

Angela Merkel

The United States is not nearly so concerned that its acts be kept secret from its intended victims as it is that the American people not know of them.

Ramsey Clark

When the United States first went into Afghanistan in 2001, it devastated the Taliban and Al Qaeda in a matter of weeks using only a few hundred C.I.A. and Special Operations personnel, backed by American air power. Later, when the United States transitioned to conventional Pentagon stability operations, this success was reversed.

Erik Prince

My dad is Chinese, and my mom is a white American, and they married only ten years after the United States Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal to ban mixed marriages. Imagine that. Marriages between people of different races - now common and accepted - were illegal in many states up until the late Sixties.

Marjorie Liu

This is so like the way the Americans deliberately erroneously refer to Afghans and Iraqis as terrorists when they fight back killing American soldiers to protect their young from the illegal American invasion.

Bob Barker

A Quote by Chalmers Johnson

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