COMMENTARY by NATALIE M. ROSEN: Chalmers Johnson, Portrait of a Sagging Empire

Saturday, July 05, 2014

Chalmers Johnson, Portrait of a Sagging Empire

I find this opinion eminently interesting. I suggest you read it and click on its links to get more. It is somewhat lengthy but, in my opinion, worth it. It is prescient, eerily correct in most ways, and alarming because of that. We can, as a nation, though, change course. Will we is another question entirely. In hope that we do GET OUT THE DEMOCRATIC 2014 VOTE -- immigrants, Hispanics, African Americans, women, youth, the disabled and the elderly ALL OVER THE NATION. OUR FUTURE HANGS ON THE HOPE THAT WE DO.

July 5, 2014
Best of TomDispatch: Chalmers Johnson, Portrait of a Sagging Empire

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: It’s summer and in this season my mind turns to Chalmers Johnson, "Mr. Blowback,” who died in November 2010 and who, each year around this time, I like to remember at TomDispatch. Certainly, given recent events in Iraq and Syria, I have to resist the eerie urge to pick up the phone, dial his number, and get his thoughts. He was a towering figure at this site (and in my life) and recently, with that in mind, I went back and looked at the last piece he wrote for TD just months before his death. “The Guns of August” he called it. Perhaps sensing that the end was already closing in on him, he focused on the fogginess of the future and a particularly human inability to predict it. (Just check out any Tomorrowland or past World’s Fair to see how far our visions of the future stray from the surprises reality holds in store for us.) Yet he couldn’t help himself, as we generally can’t, our brains being prediction machines. The urge may, for all I know, be hardwired into us.

So, in those last moments, having fessed up to all that, “Chal” still had the urge to peer decades into the future and imagine what the world he would never see might turn out to be like. Rereading his piece almost four years into that fog of the future, I was not only moved, but struck by how on target he’s been thus far. Nothing in it seemed, as yet, discordant -- not so surprising for such a canny observer of our disastrous world -- and so much of his essay remains perceptive and filled with wisdom.

I’ve left in place as well the introduction I did that August, a little look at how he and I first met “on the page” and a little tip of the cap to someone who I undoubtedly feared wouldn't be around that long. This is the first of the summer’s “best of” pieces that will pop up from time to time. I hope you enjoy going down TomDispatch’s version of memory lane. The next new TD piece will be posted on Tuesday. Tom]

In September 1998, I was handed a submission for a proposed book by Chalmers Johnson. I was then (as I am now) consulting editor at Metropolitan Books. 9/11 was three years away, the Bush administration still an unimaginable nightmare, and though the prospective book’s prospective title had “American Empire” in it, the American Empire Project I now co-run with my friend and TomDispatch regular Steve Fraser was still almost four years from crossing either of our minds.

I remembered Johnson, however. As a young man, I had read his book on peasant nationalism in north China where, during the 1930s, Japanese invaders were conducting “kill-all, burn-all, loot-all” operations. Its vision of how a revolution could gain strength from a foreign occupation stayed with me. I had undoubtedly also read some of Johnson’s well-respected work on contemporary Japan and I knew, even then, that in the Vietnam War era he had been a fierce opponent of the antiwar movement I took part in. If I didn’t already know it, the proposal made no bones about the fact that he had also, in that era, consulted for the CIA.

I certainly turned to his submission -- a prologue, a single chapter, and an outline of the rest of a book -- with a dubious eye, but was promptly blasted away by a passage in the prologue in which he referred to himself as having been a “spear-carrier for empire” and, some pages in, by this passage as well:

”I was sufficiently aware of Mao Zedong’s attempts to export ‘people’s war’ to believe that the United States could not afford to lose in Vietnam. In that, too, I was distinctly a man of my times. It proved to be a disastrously wrong position. The problem was that I knew too much about the international Communist movement and not enough about the United States government and its Department of Defense. I was also in those years irritated by campus antiwar protesters, who seemed to me self-indulgent as well as sanctimonious and who had so clearly not done their homework [on the history of communism in East Asia]… As it turned out, however, they understood far better than I did the impulses of a Robert McNamara, a McGeorge Bundy, or a Walt Rostow. They grasped something essential about the nature of America’s imperial role in the world that I had failed to perceive. In retrospect, I wish I had stood with the antiwar protest movement. For all its naïveté and unruliness, it was right and American policy wrong.”

I was little short of thunderstruck. I knew then -- and I think it still holds today -- that no one of prominence with Johnson’s position on the war and in his age range had ever written such a set of sentences. At that moment, knowing nothing else, I made the decision to publish his book. It was possibly the single most impulsive, even irrational, and thoroughly satisfying decision I’ve made in my 30-odd years as an editor in, or at the fringes of, mainstream publishing.

Though I didn’t have expectations for the book then, the rest is, quite literally, history. After all, its title would be Blowback, a term of CIA tradecraft that neither I nor just about any other American had ever heard of, and which, thanks to Johnson, has now become part of our language (along with the accompanying catch phrase “unintended consequences”). On its publication in 2000, the book was widely ignored. In the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, however, it seemed nothing short of prophetic, and so, in paperback, stormed those 9/11 tables at the front of bookstores, and soared to bestsellerdom.

That I ever edited Blowback or Johnson’s subsequent books was little short of a fluke, one of the luckiest of my life. It led as well to a relationship with a man of remarkable empathy and insight, who was then on a no less remarkable journey (on which I could tag along). Now, a new book of his, Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope, has arrived, focused on the many subjects -- from our empire of bases to the way the Pentagon budget, the weapons industries, and military Keynesianism may one day help send us into great power bankruptcy -- that have obsessed him in recent years. It’s not to be missed. Tom

The Guns of August
Lowering the Flag on the American Century
By Chalmers Johnson

In 1962, the historian Barbara Tuchman published a book about the start of World War I and called it The Guns of August. It went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. She was, of course, looking back at events that had occurred almost 50 years earlier and had at her disposal documents and information not available to participants. They were acting, as Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara put it, in the fog of war.

So where are we this August of 2010, with guns blazing in one war in Afghanistan even as we try to extricate ourselves from another in Iraq? Where are we, as we impose sanctions on Iran and North Korea (and threaten worse), while sending our latest wonder weapons, pilotless drones armed with bombs and missiles, into Pakistan's tribal borderlands, Yemen, and who knows where else, tasked with endless "targeted killings" which, in blunter times, used to be called assassinations? Where exactly are we, as we continue to garrison much of the globe even as our country finds itself incapable of paying for basic services?

Click here to read more of this dispatch.