← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Angler
Thread ID: 12393 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2004-02-18
2004-02-18 06:31 | User Profile
[url]http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/features/20040210-9999-1c10chalmers.html[/url]
Cause for alarm
A local best-selling author foretells ruin for the American republic
By John Wilkens UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
February 10, 2004
There was a time not that long ago when Chalmers Johnson might have fit in nicely with Bill O'Reilly out on the right flank of political discourse.
A retired UCSD professor, Johnson once served as a consultant to the CIA. He supported the Vietnam War and thought the student protesters were annoyingly naive. He voted for Ronald Reagan for president ââ¬â twice.
He was, in his words, "a spear carrier for the empire."
So how did he wind up sounding like Al Franken?
His book "Blowback," released in the spring of 2000, harshly criticized American foreign policy and warned that the country was ripe for retaliation. When terrorists flew airplanes into buildings on a blue September day a year later, he looked like a prophet. "Blowback" became a best seller.
Now he's out with a new book, "The Sorrows of Empire." It's a scathing and scary indictment of America's military expansion to all corners of the globe. He sees a future of perpetual war and constitutional ruin and financial bankruptcy.
"It is nowhere written that the United States, in its guise as an empire dominating the world, must go on forever," he writes.
At public appearances, he's even more direct. Inevitably someone raises a hand and says, "OK, I buy your analysis, and I think the situation is serious, so what should I do about it?"
And Johnson, speaking in a resonant, almost musical voice cultivated over more than 30 years of lecturing in college halls, will sometimes answer: "If you have a little money, I'd prepare your escape route. You might want to go up to Vancouver and buy yourself a condo."
Gulp.
"My wife keeps saying to me that I have to come up with some more positive conclusion to this," Johnson said the other day in the living room of his Cardiff home.
"I think there are some optimistic things out there, but I don't see them going far enough. I'm not at all sure that we are not talking about the short, happy life of the American republic."
You may see him as an alarmist. Others do, including someone named Chalmers Johnson. "I am trying to ring an alarm," he said.
Johnson is 72. He lives with his wife, Sheila, in a comfortable two-story house with a swimming pool out back and a Russian Blue cat patrolling a living room decorated with items gathered in a lifetime of travel and work in East Asia.
He was born in Arizona and grew up in the Bay Area. He went to UC Berkeley and thought he would be an economist. Then he served two years in the Navy near the end of the Korean War and saw a lot of Japan. It changed him.
He returned to Berkeley, earned a master's degree and a doctorate in political science and was hired as a professor there. He eventually became known as one of the country's leading experts on Japan and China ââ¬â some dubbed him the "godfather" of new thinking that emerged in the 1980s about Japanese capitalism.
In 1988, after 26 years of teaching at Cal, he moved to UCSD to be part of the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. He readily admits that he and Sheila sized San Diego County up as a good place to retire.
Retire he did, in 1992, although he continued teaching for another two years. He departed amid the kind of nasty in-fighting that flares up on college campuses everywhere; he criticized the school as a failure, saying it had been taken over by ideologues he dubbed "flat-earthers." The dean called Johnson's behavior "unprofessional and hurtful to the school."
Johnson now runs the Japan Policy Research Institute, a nonprofit educational organization, from his home. He is a prolific writer, with 16 books to his name, and contributes regularly to such publications as The Los Angeles Times and The Nation.
By the time he left UCSD, Johnson was rethinking his positions on American foreign policy. A catalyst for him was the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. The Cold War was over, and he thought the nation was in for the same kind of celebration and peace dividends that had followed the end of World Wars I and II.
Instead, he said, "our government almost instantly began to search frantically for a replacement enemy for the Soviet Union." The national dialogue that he had expected about the size of our armed forces, especially deployments in other countries, never happened.
And he began to wonder why.
"Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire" was the result of his wondering. It took its name from a CIA term for the unintended consequences of covert actions, and it turned some heads.
Johnson argued that decades of U.S. involvement in various places had been misunderstood, and that for all the good things that had happened during the Cold War many bad things had occurred, too ââ¬â and resentment of our interference in other countries was building.
You reap what you sow, in other words.
The book was widely discussed in academic circles ââ¬â Johnson's books almost always get talked about there ââ¬â with supporters praising its "brilliant" analysis and critics deriding its "cranky one-sidedness."
With the American public, though, it flopped. Almost nobody was reading it. There was more interest overseas, in places like Italy and Germany.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Johnson got a phone call from his publisher. Her offices were in New York, not far from the World Trade Center. "Blowback just hit big time," he remembers her saying, "and I'm clearing out of here."
The book went through eight printings in about a month and became a best seller. "Obviously I'm pleased that happened," Johnson said, "but it seems to me it was also testimony to how inattentive the American public actually was and how desperately interested all of a sudden they were in trying to give some context to what had happened on 9/11."
By the next spring, U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a liberal Democrat from Ohio who is now running for president, was quoting from the book during government hearings on foreign policy.
"Blowback" included some mea culpas from Johnson about his own beliefs and actions in support of "the empire." It didn't seem to hurt him in the eyes of critics or readers that he was changing his mind.
To deflect criticism that he is inconsistent, Johnson is fond of quoting noted British economist John Maynard Keynes, who, when accused of being wishy-washy, said, "When I get new information, I change my position. What, sir, do you do with new information?"
The new information he got, Johnson said, was America's response to the end of the Cold War.
That, and he visited Okinawa.
In 1996, Johnson was invited to Okinawa in the wake of a horrific incident: the rape of a 12-year-old girl by three American servicemen. The case had sparked large anti-U.S. demonstrations on the island and international outrage.
Johnson said he was "appalled" at the size of the American military presence there, some 50 years after the end of World War II: 38 bases on the "choicest" 20 percent of the island. He could see no strategic reason for it.
He figured that Okinawa was unique, that the deployment there had just kind of sprung up through complacency and neglect. He didn't see it as part of a larger picture.
Then, after he wrote "Blowback," he did some research, and then some more. By the time he was done he had another book, "The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic." It came out last month.
In it, Johnson argues that Okinawa is not unique ââ¬â that the United States, with more than 700 bases spread around the world, is "a military juggernaut intent on world domination."
That's not the way Americans like to see themselves, of course. We often equate "empire" with the Romans, the Nazis, and imperial Japan. Our leaders prefer to call their military forays "humanitarian intervention" and say our troops stationed in other parts of the world are a necessary counterbalance to threats like "the axis of evil."
Using a mountain of facts ââ¬â the footnotes alone run more than 50 pages ââ¬â Johnson traces the growth of the military from one George (Washington) to another (Bush), and explains how secrecy has enabled the Pentagon to undermine the public scrutiny and financial accountability the founding fathers built into the Constitution.
"I fear that we will lose our country," he writes in the opening chapter, and in the last one details the "four sorrows" he sees as inevitable: a state of perpetual war; the destruction of democracy; a system of propaganda and disinformation; and bankruptcy.
He thinks it's too late, that the presidential election this November won't make a difference in the long run (although that hasn't stopped him from putting a Howard Dean bumper sticker on his car).
And if he's wrong, as he now says he was about Vietnam, about the student protesters, about Reagan?
"If I am wrong you are going to forgive me," he said, "because you are going to be so pleased I was wrong."
2004-02-18 14:11 | User Profile
The coming collapse of Amerizog is becoming reality right before our eyes-wide-open. It's scary. Especially coming from the older generation folks like Johnson. I leave you with lyrics from a Morrissey song below. It tells about how many people were oblivious to the preludes leading up to WWII. I think it's still relevant today.
THE LAZY SUNBATHERS
A world war Was announced Days ago But they didn't know The lazy sunbathers The lazy sunbathers
The sun burns through To the planet's core And it isn't enough They want more
Nothing Appears To be Between the ears of The lazy sunbathers Too jaded To question stagnation The sun burns through To the planet's core And it isn't enough They want more
Religions fall Children shelled [I]"...Children shelled ? That's all Very well, but would you Please keep the noise Down low ? Because you're waking The lazy sunbathers ..."/I Oh, the lazy sunbathers The lazy sunbathers
(from Morrissey's album "Vauxhall & I")