John Nichols: Chalmers Johnson and the Patriotic Struggle Against Empire

[unhappycamper]

Chalmers Johnson and the Patriotic Struggle Against Empire
by John Nichols
Published on Tuesday, November 23, 2010 by The Nation

With one word, "blowback," Chalmers Johnson explained the folly of empire in the modern age.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, true American patriots-as opposed to the jingoists and profiteers whose madness and greed would steer a republic to ruin-needed a new language for a new age.

They got it from Johnson. His 2000 book, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (Macmillan), gave currency to the old espionage term-which referred to the violent, unintended consequences of covert (and sometimes not so covert) operations that are suffered even by superpowers such as the United States-and became an essential text for those who sought to explain the attacks and to forge sounder and more responsible foreign policies for the furture.

Johnson, who has died at age 79, was no liberal idealist. He was the an old Asian hand who had chaired the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California-Berkeley from 1967 to 1972 and then served as president and co-founder of the Japan Policy Research Institute. In other words, he was a man of the world who knew how the world worked. And what he tried to explain, to political leaders and citizens, was that the old ways of empire building (and maintaining) no longer worked in an age of instant communications, jet travel and doomsday weaponry.

"In Blowback, I set out to explain why we are hated around the world," Johnson explained in Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, another of his series of three books on imperialism and empire, which became best sellers in the period after the 9/11 attacks. "The concept 'blowback' does not just mean retaliation for things our government has done to and in foreign countries. It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public. This means that when the retaliation comes-as it did so spectacularly on September 11, 2001-the American public is unable to put the events in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback. In the first book in this trilogy, I tried to provide some of the historical background for understanding the dilemmas we as a nation confront today, although I focused more on Asia-the area of my academic training-than on the Middle East."