All right, everybody, welcome back to the show.
So the sad news is that Chalmers Johnson has died.
He's the author of the incredibly important blowback trilogy, beginning and ending the first decade of this century.
First, blowback, the costs and consequences of American empire, the stars of empire, militarism, secrecy, and the end of the republic, and then nemesis, the last days of the American republic.
And then his last book was just out, Dismantling the Empire, America's Last Best Hope.
And now joining us is Tom Englehart, tomdispatch.com, antiwar.com/Englehart, original.antiwar.com/Englehart.
And you can also find Chalmers Johnson's last article with a great introduction by Tom in that archive at original.antiwar.com/Englehart.
It's called Portrait of a Sagging Empire.
And you can read Tom's obit at the antiwar.com blog.
Welcome to the show, Tom.
How are you doing, man?
Hey, Scott.
Well, you know, I mean, we lost a great one over the weekend.
But I hope to be upbeat about it.
All right, well, I am very sorry about the loss of your friend.
But I was hoping we could give him a pretty good sendoff here.
And you could kind of begin by telling us a bit of what you wrote about in your introduction to that last article.
And that was about how Chalmers Johnson had been on the opposite side from you during the days of the Vietnam War.
He was a self-described, in later days, a self-described spear carrier for empire.
And he made a transition quite far from that.
And I was wondering if you could explain the importance of that particular phrase and that particular admission of his in y'all's relationship in the beginning of how you became his editor and so forth like that.
Yeah, well, let me tell you.
I'll tell you how it began for me.
I was, at that point, this was 1998.
I was, Tom Dispatch didn't exist.
I was an editor, as I still am, at a place called Metropolitan Books, where I do the American Empire series now.
But I was just doing general books then.
And I knew Chalmers Johnson.
That is, I knew his work.
I had read his, he had done a classic book on China, on peasants in North China under the onslaught of the Japanese, rather like the Vietnam War, actually, but in the 1930s, which I had read when I was young.
I knew that he was on the, he had been on the other side for me in the Vietnam era.
I got a proposal for a book from Chalmers Johnson.
He was an eminent Japan scholar.
I started reading that proposal, which became the book Blowback.
And all there was was a chapter, an outline, and an introduction.
And in the introduction, it's there now.
So I thought I'd just read it to you.
He was complaining about anti-war radicals at that moment, and the fact that, of the 60s, and the fact that they were romantics about Asian communism, as was basically true.
And then there was this set of sentences.
He said, 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 anti-war protest movement for all its naivete and unruliness.
It was right, and American policy wrong.
Now, at that moment, when I read that, and that was just an early part of his introduction, I knew that there was no man like him of his age and particular eminence.
He had also been a CIA consultant during that period.
In America.
He taught kids the Cold War at USC.
And even Robert McNamara, who ran from his crimes for years, never actually said anything like that.
No other figure had said that.
And I went, oh my gosh, this is remarkable.
I basically said, of course, it turned out to be blowback.
Who wouldn't have published it?
Well, at that time, many people wouldn't have, but I certainly, I mean, the actual book, I was just rereading it, is remarkable and holds up remarkably today.
But at that moment, when I read that passage, I thought, I don't care what this book is.
I'm gonna publish this.
I've never seen anything like this statement before.
And it was very Chalmers Johnson.
I mean, what really happened was he was a Cold Warrior, but when the Soviet empire fell, he was shocked to discover that the structure of the American empire remained.
We didn't demobilize.
We didn't declare the Cold War.
We declared it officially over, but we didn't declare our imperial part of it over at all.
And then in 1994, he went to Okinawa and he saw the American Raj firsthand.
We had at that point about 37 bases on that small island, probably the greatest conglomeration of American bases still to this day, anywhere on the planet.
And he was shocked and this sent him on a different path.
I mean, his was a true American odyssey and it turned him into the most striking critic of American militarism and the American empire.
And when you go back and look at blowback, I put out blowback.
I said, yes, we, he worked on it.
We edited it.
It came out in 1999.
This was two years before, almost two years before the 9-11 attacks.
And it essentially predicted these 9-11 attacks.
I don't mean that literally, but that was what it was that blowback, which was a CIA term of trade, was the term for operations, for what happened after operations that were committed by Americans, by the American government that Americans didn't know about.
Those operations blew back on this country and Americans having no idea that they were in any way connected to American operations, you know, took them as mad acts, simply mad attacks on us.
He saw this, he warned about it.
His book, I mean, in this sense, he was literally a Cassandra because nobody paid any attention except for, you know, a few anti-war libertarians and some people on the left.
He basically, he was dismissed as formerly eminent professor, now ranting maniac, more or less, to the extent that anybody paid attention until the 9-11 attacks.
When 9-11 hit, that book suddenly appeared on the central, in the center of all those tables that went up in every bookstore across America.
And the book, of course, became a bestseller and we know what happened from there.
He never, he had great courage.
He never, he wrote what he thought when he saw something that was wrong, that he had done wrong, he said so.
His questions to his last moments were powerful.
I would say that his last major question for all of us was, what does it mean for a superpower to go bankrupt?
A question which has hardly been raised and to which we have no answers, but which we may live to experience.
Well, you know, certainly part of his legacy is the popularizing of that term blowback.
And I appreciate your clarification too.
It's not just unintended consequences.
It's unintended consequences of covert operations that seem to appear out of the clear blue sky and must be motivated only by madness, which makes us the defenders instead of the aggressors, when that's hardly the case.
And he really has, that was a major contribution too.
But also it's the empire of bases and his digging into the base studies and counting them up and saying, hey, look everyone, 700 something bases.
And I think David Vine says that now it's up over a thousand and that's admitted to, but still that term 700 bases, more than 700 bases around the world, that comes from Chalmers Johnson there.
And that is a major contribution because nobody brags about that.
Everyone says that as a criticism of what are we doing?
That's right.
No, I mean, there's no question he, to the extent that anyone could focus, as an American still to this day, if you want to talk about blowback like situations, Americans still are not focused.
I mean, despite the fact that millions of Americans pass through those bases every year, when you think about it, I mean, soldiers, civilians, spies, journalists, all pass through those bases.
Americans are remarkably unfocused on the fact that on our base, I mean, he saw that we were what he called an informal empire and that our empire was based not on holding land.
I mean, traditionally when an empire like Britain or Rome had bases or the Chinese, the bases or garrisons were garrisoning taken land.
They were garrisoning colonies, but we didn't do that.
Our empire in a way was our basis.
And one of the fascinating things, his second book, The Sorrows of Empire, the one after blowback, he went after the bases.
He did it chapter by chapter very methodically.
It's the absolute heart of that book and it's a brilliant book.
And nobody had done it like this before.
And what was fascinating to me, I was of course his book editor and I saw all the reviews when they came in and unlike blowback, which had been roundly ignored until it was in paperback and 9-11 happened, this book, because he was by then well-known to best-selling authors on and so forth, it was widely reviewed.
So I read all the reviews and the striking thing about the reviews was that like Americans on bases generally, the reviewers managed to read the book.
They often wrote very positive reviews without ever mentioning the issue of bases, which was the core of the book.
And I was amazed by this.
I thought this told me something very much what he was going after, which is that Americans, they refuse to look at our actual position in the world.
Millions of Americans run through those bases all the time, but somehow they don't register on us, they register out there in the world.
It took a year and a half until Jonathan Friedland, a writer for the British Guardian, and so a Brit who could see our bases, reviewed the book for the New York Review of Books and said, this is a book about bases.
You know, it was a simple thing, and yet Americans cannot see that.
This is what was on Chalmers' mind, and it was on his mind from the Sorrows of the Empire through to that final book, Dismantling the Empire.
He spent his last month thinking about how we could, unlike the Obama administration, the Bush administration before them, which saw the only options being more, more, and even more in their so-called reviews, he tried to imagine what less would be like, how we could demobilize, how we could, how before the real blowback hit us, you know, a blowback that went way beyond 9-11, how we could actually do what the Brits did, and, you know, after World War II, and begin to bring that empire down, to give it up to, and he actually, because he knew that functionally as a society, we were addicted, addicted to militarism, and so addicted to those bases that we like to ignore, he offered a 12, in that, the title essay of his new book, Dismantling the Empire, he offered a 12-step program involving getting rid of those bases for how to do it.
He began to try and think, let's try and plot it out, and that's what he was working on to the end.
Yeah, it is kind of like the three monkeys, see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, where people just, they can't wrap their head around the idea that America is the world empire, when we all know that America seceded from an empire, we're not supposed to be like that, so we just don't believe, we're still defending the world from the USSR or something out there, I don't know what.
Yeah, exactly, exactly, that's our situation, and he realized that you can either, in essence, imperially speaking, like so many empires, you can either go down with the ship, or you can decide to scuttle the ship beforehand, you know, and get off onto the rowboats and head back for your own place, you know, and that was what he was for, but he was an optimist, in a sense, that is, he always thought about, you know, what we could do, but he was pessimistic about what we would actually do, I mean, to his last day, he was pessimistic, and he basically, I mean, the question he was asking at the end, really, and it's a question that has yet to be really raised or answered is, what would it be like to be a bankrupt superpower?
You know, this is, I mean, we know what it was like for Argentina, not a superpower, it was just a nation that went bankrupt, we know what happened, but we don't know what happens when a superpower goes bankrupt, I mean, I suppose you have to look back to something like Imperial Spain of the 16th century or something, 17th century, something like that, you know, when you actually go bankrupt, this was the question he was answering, he didn't have the answer to it, nobody else has the answer, I don't think, but we may live to see it, Chalmers won't, unfortunately.
Yeah, well, I don't know, I'm not sure if any of us will see the end of it, but we may live to see the bankruptcy, because this country, it's going down faster than people think, you know, the decline, you know, I see phrases for it when Washington types are writing like Kaplan, that fellow Kaplan, you know, kind of one of these Washington journalistic hangers on, you know, he had a phrase for it recently, something like elegant decline or something like that, yes, we're gonna decline, this is what the government tends to tell, we're gonna decline as a great power, it'll take 20 or 25 years, I think, no, actually, just under the surface, this is happening faster, and Americans know this, Washington doesn't know it, but you know, some of the polls now, and this would have interested Chalmers, some of the polls, when people are asking, well, actually, yes, I didn't know polls did this, but I found out this during the last election, some of the big polls ask, you know, not just is America on the wrong track, which is the thing you always hear, but do you think America's in decline?
65% of Americans in one of these polls just before the election said, yes, America's in decline, they know, people know, this is not gonna be as good for our kids as it was for us and our grandkids as it was for them, you know, they know this, Chalmers knew this.
But you know, the thing is, and this is the biggest problem is, well, there's this poll from Fox News, no, actually, I don't think it was a Fox News poll now that I think about it, but it's half good and half bad, and the half good is people don't have any trust in the government anymore, the executive departments or the Congress at all, it's the lowest approval numbers ever for politicians in general, especially in Washington, D.C., but they still love the Pentagon, they still believe, despite all we've seen, that honor and glory and valor and sharp suits and shiny swords like in the commercials and none of the truth and all of the window dressing of military service, that's the one thing they all still believe in, the power of generals to get things done with their will.
And it worries me that, you know, as you say, we're going bankrupt here because all the profits are being made by people basically as the money's going out, we're not, you know, really just plundering and I mean, the Spanish at least started off making a profit before it became unprofitable to be an empire anymore and then they pushed it too far, I don't know if it was ever profitable for America really, but now we're pushing it to bankruptcy and it seems like my worry is that the more chaotic things get, the more our empire comes home here and after all, if we're all broke and they still need money for their wars and their bases all over Eurasia and whatever, then they're going to have to have police state powers to clamp down on us to get the last of what we're worth.
Yes, I mean, this was exactly what Chalmers was worried about.
Yeah, he said, you give up your empire or you live under it.
That's what he said to me on his show.
Yeah, that's absolutely right and I mean, one of the startling things to me is that, you know, everybody talks on, everybody argues about the stimulus package here.
Should we have more?
Should it have been bigger?
Should it have been less?
Shouldn't it have happened?
You know, but nobody really discusses the fact that without any discussion, there is an enormous stimulus package happening abroad.
I mean, we just, you know, just the other day, there was a $511 million contract given up out for, to a large American construction firm for, to build another one of these huge citadel-like embassies in Kabul, $790 million when you include the consular things around Afghanistan.
This was going to make work for 1,500 Afghans, you know?
Nobody minds handing out the money for that, you know?
And it's just typical of the stimulus package that's going on throughout the empires.
We build bases and embassies and so on and so forth.
It's not that there's no stimulus package.
It's that the stimulus package isn't for us.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, Gareth Porter likes to talk about, you know, some general who has a base in BFE, Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan or something.
He'll never give that up.
He'll come up with a million reasons why he has to keep his little fiefdom there.
And the economics of the generals and their little flags they get to wear on their shirts and whatever is a whole incentive structure in itself.
You know, never even mind the contracts for the weapons, just these guys and their little prestige, you know?
All I can say is that this is why it's a blow to us that Chalmers, who was a great one, died last Saturday.
I mean, it really is a blow because we need him more than ever now.
I mean, we need people who will tell us this in the striking way that he was able to tell us.
And we need people to stay with it until this really breaks through to Americans.
And if I could do it, which I can't, I would bring him back from the dead today.
Well, Tom, I sure appreciate all the work that you've done in bringing Chalmers Johnson's work, editing his books and bring it to the attention of the American people.
And especially to me, he's meant a lot to me, his writings and his time on the show over the years.
I've learned a lot from him.
And he certainly was one of the last knights of the old Republic.
And it's too bad he's gone.
But so we're sorry for your loss.
And I think it's very appropriate the way you've sent him off here with your obituaries and your time on this show today.
And I appreciate you for that too.
Thanks, Scott.
Everybody, that's Tom Englehart, tomdispatch.com, antiwar.com/Englehart.
And that's all for the show today.
See you all tomorrow.
