Many readers of Mondoweiss will, I’m sure, be familiar of the work of Chalmers Johnson. In my last review, dealing with the relevance of imperial and postwar Japan for current American policy in the Middle East, I cited Johnson as notable American scholar of Japan whose work has, I believe, shown us how badly awry we have gone during the War on Terror. It is with great sadness that I learned that Johnson died a few days ago. What I offer is a quick reflection on Johnson’s work and went it meant to me personally. It is important to pay tribute, I think, in however small a way, as a number of rare and indispensable voices have been passing away recently (in the past year and a half alone, the names Howard Zinn, Tony Judt and Amos Elon come to mind, though there are undoubtedly many others). Needless to say, we hardly maintain a surplus of honest and reasonably courageous intellectuals eager to fill the void.
One day perhaps someone will put together an anthology showing how and when some of our dissident voices came to the realization that their country was not the very essence of virtue it pretends to be. For Howard Zinn, this apparently came as a bombardier in World War II, when he was involved in air raids over France only weeks before the war in Europe came to an end. For Chalmers Johnson, his awakening came at the end of the Cold War, when he saw that the collapse of the Soviet Union, rather than compelling us to drastically reduce our military posture in the world, had the opposite effect. Johnson observed the immediate replacement of our traditional adversary with new justifications for our militarism, whether it was the defense of George H.W. Bush’s “New World Order” or the neo-liberal economic policies of Clinton and the moral crusade of “humanitarian intervention”. When the Soviet Union collapsed, in other words, so did an entire rationale—that the outrageous amount of money spent on “defense” was necessary because of our conflict with communism. Noting with alarm how desperate we were to find another enemy to justify our posturing (quickly settling on fundamentalist Islam), Johnson would devote the rest of his work, in part, to undermining this central myth of the Cold War.
If there is a word often associated with Johnson’s name, it is “prophetic”. This is the label Johnson readily acquired when his book Blowback was published just before the 9/11 attacks. In Blowback, Chalmers Johnson argued that “blowback” (a term the CIA coined after its 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran ) was the anticipated consequence of not only American actions abroad but also, and crucially, covert actions. Because of the secrecy attending American violence abroad, Johnson argued, if retaliation ever did come the American people would have no way of contextualizing the events. It goes without saying that the Bush administration’s effort to invoke a ready-made answer to the 9/11 attacks, specifically with regard to what Johnson called “that forensic question”—“why do they hate us?”— became a paradigmatic example of what Johnson was warning of in Blowback. Having no real knowledge of U.S. support for dictators, the stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia, U.S crimes against the Iraqi people, or the Palestinians, the only conceivable answer to the question was “they hate us because we are free”, nonsense that Johnson ridiculed but nonsense that was spouted vociferously, and with equal conviction, by both republicans and democrats.
This last point brings me to the main lesson that I learned from Johnson, which is that the terms “left” and “right”, and especially the term “conservative”, have become utterly devoid of meaning in the U.S. I’m not sure if he said this explicitly but it was the inescapable conclusion of reading his work. Johnson was undoubtedly an authentic “conservative”, one of the very few remaining, a man loyal to the principles of republican government. The central tenet of Johnson’s writing was that imperial ambitions abroad necessarily corrupt the virtues of republicanism at home. Period. There were no exceptions to this rule, and Johnson was fond of making historical comparisons of the U.S. to Rome in this respect.
As readers of his know, he was never shy about using the term “empire” to describe the United States (if I were to offer one mild criticism of Johnson, it would be that he could become somewhat dogmatic in his use of the concept of “empire”, a term, I think, he somewhat over-relied on). That being said, his concept of the “empire of bases” came as something of a revelation to me. Johnson saw the military base as serving roughly the same function for the American “empire” as the colony did for its European antecedents. His 2005 book The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic brilliantly analyzed the system of bases (of which there were, at the time, approximately seven hundred spread out in over one hundred countries) and the culture of militarism they represented, at home and abroad. The book puts the nightmare of Iraq, which was only beginning, in its proper context, along a continuum of American policy (Johnson called them “Iraqi Wars”). The book came out shortly after I began college, when justifications for the war were shifting from nonexistent WMD to democratization, a pretense Johnson utterly demolished. It should be said that Johnson was far more than just a critic of war. He primarily understood war as the inevitable consequence of our military industrial complex, which was his real concern (Johnson, witnessing the total collapse of the legislative branch as a mechanism of oversight, added a third party to Eisenhower’s formula; in Johnson’s words, it became the “military-industrial-
Johnson was nothing if not scathing when he came to the national security state and it’s dissembling, which he felt stole money from Americans to start of fires overseas, while shredding the constitution to boot. On this particular subject, the only one who can match Johnson in the relentlessness of his critique (and wit) is Gore Vidal. That being said, Johnson was essentially a careful and (in another sense) conservative scholar, and was thus quick to emphasize how incomplete his analysis was, given the lengths many governmental agencies go to conceal not only their actions but also—as with the pentagon’s budget—simply the amount of money they spend. When it came to the issue of “secrecy”, another critical harbinger of the unraveling of democracy, the impression one gets from reading Johnson is that of a first-rate private detective hired to discover the inner workings of a supposedly open institution, and coming up short. In any event, if the Republican Party, as well as its Tea Party faction, were in any way “conservative”, Johnson’s The Sorrows of Empire would be their foreign policy handbook.
It wouldn’t be unfair to Johnson, I hope, to point out that he was mainly concerned in his work with might be called “costs to us”. Johnson was outraged by U.S. actions abroad, and consistently demonstrated that such interests had nothing to do with the interests of the American people. Johnson wrote much about the costs of what he dubbed “military Keynesianism”, which he defined as the pernicious belief that “public policies focused on frequent wars, huge expenditures on weapons and munitions, and large standing armies can indefinitely sustain a wealthy capitalist economy”. He understood how absurd it was to feign outrage about the economy while continuing to tolerate the astronomical “defense” budget. I think Johnson believed that given the narrowness of the spectrum of opinion in the U.S., the most effective way to protest against policies he deplored would be to focus on why they were harming the American people. Johnson’s academic interests, however, show that he was hardly any kind of caricature of an “isolationist”— the economic histories of Japan and China were his forte. His popular writing demonstrates that he was widely read in ancient history; and my favorite essay of his from his last book—Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope—is called “Smash of Civilizations”, where he recounts the looting of the National Museum in Baghdad, a site once host to some of the most invaluable treasures in mankind’s possession. As Johnson makes clear, the destruction of the museum, whose responsibility lies solely with the occupation forces, can never be forgiven or forgotten.
I’ve always thought that the description of Johnson as “prophetic”, however appropriate it is in describing his warnings about the consequences of American policy, might perhaps obscure what I think was Johnson’s most impressive accomplishment: changing his mind. Johnson, who spent years as an analyst for the CIA, once described himself as a “spear-carrier for the empire”. Accused of being inconsistent, Johnson would quote Keynes, who famously responded to the same charge by noting “When I get new information, sir, I change my position. What do you, sir, do with new information?” Unlike neoconservatives such as Norman Podhoretz, who have written tomes describing how remarkable they have been in going from one illusion to the next, Johnson was relatively quiet, as far as I can tell, about his actually meaningful intellectual trajectory. By the end of his life, however, he had become as strident a critic to be found, all the more valuable because of his perspective as one who had once subscribed to the illusions that he worked hard to disabuse himself of. Considering the way in which most people become more entrenched in their thinking as they grow older, this is no small thing. Had Johnson devoted himself to telling himself (and all of us) comforting lies, his writing, given his unimpeachable credentials, would undoubtedly have been featured in op-eds throughout the press and he would have been a frequent guest on television panels alongside David Brooks. He didn’t, however, and outlets like antiwar.com, truthdig and especially tomdispatch.com, the website run by the remarkable Tom Engelhardt, greatly profited from his contributions instead. Johnson’s passing, while undoubtedly an enormous loss, gives an occasion to reflect on the example of a man who had the courage to reconsider the world around him. Readers of Mondoweiss will agree, I think, that a just peace in Israel/ Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East crucially depends on many Americans similarly revising deeply-held opinions, though we surely have less time in which to do so. In any event, for his wisdom and personal integrity, Chalmers Johnson deserves to be remembered.
