...is here. An excerpt:
What hope is there for the international community?
The main prospect for the future of the world is that perpetual war waged by the United States against small countries it declares to be "rogue states" will lead to the slow growth of a coalition of enemies of the United States who will seek to weaken it and hasten its inevitable bankruptcy. This is the way the Roman Empire ended.
The chief problem is that the only way an adversary of the United States can even hope to balance or deter the enormous American concentration of military power is through what the Pentagon calls asymmetric warfare ("terrorism") and nuclear weapons. American belligerence has deeply undercut international efforts to control the nuclear weapons that already exist and has rendered the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty more or less moot (the U.S., in particular, has failed to take any actions it contracted to do under article 6, the reduction of stockpiles by the nuclear armed nations).
The only hope for the planet is the isolation and neutralization of the United States by the international community. Policies to do so are underway in every democratic country on earth in quiet, unobtrusive ways. If the United States is not checkmated and nuclear war ensues, civilization as we know it will disappear and the United States will go into the history books along with the Huns and the Nazis as a scourge of human life itself.
Who is Chalmers Johnson? This profile is from California Monthly:
To put it mildly, Chalmers Johnson has changed his mind. During his long Berkeley career (nearly four decades as student and East Asia scholar), Johnson was a strong proponent of American foreign policy. He was a consultant to the CIA from 1967 to 1973, and in those days was a fierce opponent of campus anti-war demonstrators, whom he considered naïve and unruly. He was, he says, “a spear-carrier for the empire.”
No longer. Johnson’s changed tune comes out full blast in his new book, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (Henry Holt Metropolitan Books). The book has been called “stunning,” “brilliant,” and “very important” by its admirers; critics have charged that Johnson’s once “respected voice” has descended into “strident and unbalanced vitriol,” full of “cranky one-sidedness.”
Born in Arizona, Johnson grew up in Alameda and came to Cal in 1949 with no thought about East Asia other than a strong distaste for the recent Communist revolution in China. After his B.A. in economics in 1953, he served for two years with the Navy in post-war Japan, and this experience opened his eyes and changed his life. Johnson returned to Berkeley for graduate study on Japan, but fell under the spell of Joseph R. Levenson, the University’s preeminent historian of China. Johnson earned a master’s degree (in 1957) and Ph.D. (1961) in political science, and married another Berkeley triple degree-holder, anthropologist Sheila Knipscheer ’58, M.A. ’64, Ph.D. ’71.
He joined the political science faculty here in 1962 and became a prominent Asia scholar, serving as chair of both the Center for Chinese Studies (1967-1972) and the Department of Political Science (1976-1980). He directed more than 45 Ph.D. dissertations at Berkeley. His path-breaking study of the role of Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry in that country’s economic development, MITI and the Japanese Miracle (1982), earned him the sobriquet of “godfather” of the new thinking on Japanese capitalism. “I did not realize then,” Johnson says now, “that my research would inadvertently lead me to see clearly for the first time the shape of the empire that I had so long uncritically supported.”
The title of his new book, Blowback, is a term used by the CIA to refer to “unintended consequences” of U.S. policies and actions around the world. “The most direct and obvious form of blowback,” Johnson writes, “often occurs when the victims fight back after a secret American bombing, or a U.S.-sponsored campaign of state terrorism, or a CIA-engineered overthrow of a foreign political leader.” Johnson gives as one example the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 259 passengers and 11 people on the ground. This, he says, “was retaliation for a 1986 Reagan administration aerial raid on Libya that killed President Muammar Khadaffi’s stepdaughter.” Johnson’s book warns that “All around the world today, it is possible to see the groundwork being laid for future forms of blowback.”
This is not the way most of us think of U.S. foreign policy. As Johnson himself points out: “We Americans deeply believe that our role in the world is virtuous—that our actions are almost invariably for the good of others as well as ourselves. Even when our actions have led to disaster, we assume that the motives behind them were honorable.” But, Johnson now believes, “the evidence is building up that in the decade following the end of the Cold War, the United States has largely abandoned a reliance on diplomacy, economic aid, international law, and multilateral institutions in carrying out its foreign policies and resorted much of the time to bluster, military force, and financial manipulation.”
Chalmers Johnson left Berkeley in 1988 to teach at UC San Diego, retiring in 1992. He and Sheila live in Cardiff, where he is currently president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, a non-profit organization devoted to public education about Japan and international relations in the Pacific.
You say in your new book that you were wrong to support the war in Vietnam. Was that a difficult thing to acknowledge?
Yes, it was. No doubt about it. It’s a way of acknowledging one’s infinite capacity for self-deception. I remember, during that time, when a distinguished colleague, whose son was in Vietnam, asked me, an Asia specialist, if I really believed the war was justified. I said to him in all sincerity that I believed it was. I now terribly regret having said that. The war in Vietnam was a horrible mistake; and it is worth studying how and why we deluded ourselves into a war against quite legitimate aspirations for liberation from European colonialism.
Which was said at the time.
Which was said at the time. I wasn’t paying enough attention to it. I was irritated by the campus protesters, because they knew very little about East Asian communism. But they knew quite a bit about the United States, about the Pentagon, the national security state, the way the Cold War was being waged.
And you were the opposite. You knew a lot about East Asian communism— —and was not sufficiently sensitive to the abuses of the Pentagon, of Washington, D .C., and of the United States as it was maturing into what I now argue was an imperial role. How would you describe your politics, then and now?
I’m dubious about the question. I think it’s politicians who have politics, not scholars. As John Maynard Keynes once said, when he was challenged on whether or not he had changed his opinions: “When I get new information, I change my opinions. What, sir, do you do with new information?” I think I’ve gotten new information.
What is your new information?
It’s that with the end of the Cold War—the disappearance of the Soviet Union—the United States did not dismantle its Cold War apparatus, particularly in East Asia. If anything, it tended to shore it up. And the fact that we continue to maintain this Cold War apparatus—particularly in East Asia, which is the main area of my research—has caused me to look back on the Cold War in a new light, to study it with a different perspective. And this has led me to a much more critical stance toward American foreign policy.
What’s been the reception of your critique?
I’m a little startled, and so is my publisher, that I’m receiving a better reception than one might have expected. That is to say, the American public seems more interested in hearing a radical critique of this sort than I would have anticipated.
Why would that be?
I think people are deeply disturbed by the triumphalism of the United States, they believe that pride does go before a fall, that we are behaving like a bully, like a bad winner, that we’re not paying attention to fundamentals, and that our political process is in deep trouble. Washington, D. C. is almost surely the most corrupt capital of any major advanced industrial democracy.
What do you mean?
I mean it’s offered for sale. Money can achieve anything it wants to, and the electoral process is largely debased by a kind of entrenched incumbency that is not structurally different from that of authoritarian regimes such as those in China. That’s a pretty strong statement. Well, I think the conclusions are unavoidable. Our diplomacy today is more or less in tatters. We pioneered foreign aid, but we no longer do that. We don’t even bother to pay our United Nations dues. We are not much interested in trying to lead by example. Our first resort, and too often our last resort, is cruise missiles and the carrier task force. In your book, you draw extraordinary parallels between the Soviet Union and the United States and their satellites.
Will you describe this?
I argue that the Soviet Union established its satellites—meaning the so-called people’s democracies from Poland to Bulgaria—for exactly the same reason that the United States established its own system of satellites, particularly Japan and South Korea, and at one time including Taiwan, South Vietnam, Thailand, and the Phillipines.
Stalin discovered in East Europe that he could not bring his supporters to power in the territories he had conquered through the ballot box. Therefore he did it through military means. We discovered in East Asia that we could not bring our supporters to power through the ballot box, and therefore we did it through military means.
We abandoned our attempts to democratize Japan and instead set out to turn it into a satellite. We brought back the neo-Fascist right and the criminal underworld, because they were genuinely anti-communist. For example, we installed an unindicted war criminal, Nobusuke Kishi, as prime minister between 1957 and 1960; he was Tojo’s minister of munitions during World War II. I assure you that if Albert Speer had become chancellor of Germany, the New York Times would have noticed. But Speer’s equivalent did become the prime minister of Japan and was playing golf with Eisenhower at the Burning Tree golf course.
The history of Korea between 1945 and 1950, in which we were totally in charge of South Korea, is only now slowly coming into the open, with the revelations of the atrocities at No Gun Ri, the massacre at Dokchon, the 30,000 people killed on Cheju Island in 1948. It will be revealed that we almost surely killed more people in creating our satellites than Stalin did in East Europe. And this is hidden history that very definitely needs to be brought forward.
My point is that both the Soviet Union and the United States created empires in their respective areas: Russia’s in Europe, ours in East Asia. And for essentially the same reason: that neither empire could do what it wanted through popular means, so they did it through coercive means.
But the Soviet empire collapsed.
Yes. And it’s important for us to bear in mind that we are not immune to such a collapse, and that our society has been distorted and contorted by the Cold War, including our universities. I don’t think we have sufficiently reflected upon the kinds of commitments and institutions that we forged during the Cold War and their influence on our society as they try to justify their existence when the Cold War no longer exists.
The parallel with the USSR is not exact by any means, but we have witnessed in the past year examples of politically unprecedented things in our country that suggest our vulnerability. We after all attempted to impeach a President over what seemed to be the most trivial grounds. But, simultaneously, this President, in order to distract attention from his embarrassment in Congress, was quite prepared to use cruise missiles against Afghanistan and the Sudan and Iraq.
This strongly suggests a loss of prudence, a loss of balance and good sense that certainly is more typical of an empire than of a democratic nation, and could prove to be fatal.
Most Americans believe that the Cold War was justified. There was not just one Cold War. There were at least three. The one in Europe was concerned with democracy versus totalitarianism, and we were on the right side there. That one’s over.
There was a second Cold War, in East Asia, where we established the satellites I just mentioned. Here we found ourselves on the wrong side of history. The main issue in East Asia was not democracy versus totalitarianism but liberation from dependency on foreign imperialist powers—the European powers, Japan, and, in the Philippines, the United States. We fought two wars in East Asia over these issues, in Korea and Vietnam, and we lost both of them.
We lost the Korean War?
As a veteran of it, I think we did. We like to kid ourselves by calling it a stalemate. But we actually lost it, much to the great disadvantage of the Koreans, because Korea remains divided. Then a third Cold War is the one that went on in an area of our traditional imperialist influence, Latin America. Using the excuse of an anti-American revolt in Cuba against Batista, we engaged in all sorts of activities, leading to genocide, as it’s now been identified, in the 1980s, in Guatemala and Nicaragua. This imperialism is still going on at the present time, as we see with the huge new expenditures of funds to buy weapons to carry on an allegedly anti-drug war in Colombia. It’s considerably more than just an anti-drug war. My argument is that the Cold War in Europe has been over for a decade. The Cold War in Latin America continues unabated. And the Cold War in East Asia is just starting to come undone—as a result of the actions of the Koreans themselves.
What do you think of U.S. foreign policy in East Asia?
It’s anachronistic, outdated, and does not come to grips with what is actually going on in the area—and it misinforms the American public to do so.
Why does this happen?
I think there are two fundamental causes. One is vested interests within the Pentagon, with an overblown military establishment, in which there is today very little credibility that the military is contributing to peace and stability in East Asia at all. Secondly, it’s domestic politics in America. We are quite prepared to damage the interests of some very defenseless people in Okinawa, to take one example, for purposes of dealing with our domestic political strife—the fact that the President and the Vice President both seem vulnerable to charges of being “weak” on military security. And the Republicans are exploiting this.
You don’t believe that the United States is in danger from so-called “rogue states” or, to use the more recent term, “states of concern”?
No, I don’t. It’s lunaticly overstated to suggest that such impoverished territories as Iran, Iraq, Cuba, and North Korea could actually pose a threat to a country that deploys 7,000 nuclear weapons, that has by orders of magnitude a defense budget that’s larger than virtually all of the rest of the defense budgets on earth, to a country that no combination of forces could possibly stand up to. Moreover, these people are rational, they have a good history of rationality, and know full well that should they ever launch a missile against the United States, their countries would be incinerated the next day. Every single person would be destroyed by the force the United States could throw at them. But these states are said to be unstable. But we have no evidence of this instability. This is something alleged by people in this country who are often reflecting merely the military-industrial-university complex, which has a huge vested interest in continuing to do experiments on unimaginably complex things like a bullet hitting a bullet, the National Missile Defense system.
You use the term “military-industrial-university complex.” Why?
To give one concrete, obvious example: the weapons laboratories are still run by the University of California. It’s interesting how much my University does not want to give up management of the weapons labs at Los Alamos and Livermore, because they’re enormously lucrative. That is, defense contracts fuel many of our basic sciences, as well, certainly, as our engineering schools. Therefore, it always seemed to me that there was something wrong with the term “military-industrial complex” because it didn’t include the organization that does the R and D for the military-industrial complex. As an Old Blue, I have to say that the greatest contribution of the University of California to the world has been the atom bomb. It’s arguable that this was an important role to play during the Cold War in Europe, when the menace of the Soviet Union—and I stipulate that it was a genuine menace—did exist and did need a national effort to confront it. But the Soviet Union’s been gone for a decade, and there’s not even the slightest ripple of change within the University. The University, if anything, seems more driven today—there’s more prestige associated with raising money, particularly money from official sources like the Department of Defense, than there ever was in the past. And I find this ominous and discouraging. And it certainly raises questions about whether the University can even pretend to offer moral leadership in a period of much greater complexity than the Cold War ever was.
What has been the role of the press in the United States in covering our foreign policy?
An interesting pattern has been revealed. Regional newspapers sometimes report on the doings of our empire. The Baltimore Sun, for example, revealed the details of our murderous operation in Honduras during the 1980s. Similarly, the San Jose Mercury News detailed the sale of crack cocaine in this country by the contra revolutionaries in Nicaragua in order to finance their efforts. What then happens is that the establishment press—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal—denounces the journalism of these regional newspapers. The regional publisher usually agrees, apologizes, and fires the journalist.
The CIA asks its inspector general to do a thorough investigation; he looks into the files and says, “There is no evidence for any of this.” However, simultaneously, a secret investigation is undertaken by the inspector general, and some years later it is revealed that, in so many words, the original story was largely true.
Last spring, the New York Times undertook its own investigation of the alleged “mistaken bombing” of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. It did this not because of regional newspapers in the United States but because of two prominent British newspapers that had put out strong details countering the official American view. But the Times dismissed this in a paragraph. The Times is looking suspiciously like our Pravda.
What do you mean?
It’s a defender of the faith. You don’t read the New York Times for news; you read it in order to figure out how you’re supposed to think about what is going on in the world. They explain it in such a way that you will not get disturbed about what our government is doing.
What’s your view of the bombing of the Chinese embassy?
Given that the intelligence community, the military-industrial-university complex, and the vast apparatus of strategic organizations in our society have an interest in a new Cold War—plus the demonizing of China—it is inconceivable that this target, which was the only target the CIA put in during the war, was accidental.
Let’s talk about your use of the term “blowback.”
This refers to the unintended consequences of American policies abroad, including polices that are kept secret from the American public. In the world today, any number of Americans can wander into an imperial scenario they know nothing about, but which could have truly lethal consequences for them. Like the blowing up of an airplane with American citizens on board. Or sitting in the World Trade Center when some former mujahideen from Afghanistan decided to bomb it; or the Americans killed in Karachi; or the whole Bin Laden affair. All of these had their origin in U.S. policies abroad.
Another point I’m trying to make is the use by the establishment press of abstract terms like “terrorism” or “rogue states” and “drug lords” and “ancient enmities.” These terms need to be contextualized. These words are used to avoid any suggestion that there might be an American hand involved. “Terrorism” is the tactic of the weak, in which the weak attack undefended targets of the state that has victimized them. The weak’s true victimizers are themselves impervious, sitting at 40,000 feet in a B-52 or sitting in a missile cruiser at sea. It therefore becomes logical to attack an undefended embassy in East Africa or innocent bystanders in Karachi.
Another aspect I’m trying to get at is the moral cost of empire. We maintain 65 major military installations abroad that have significant consequences. One of those places, which really got me into this whole analysis, is Okinawa. Okinawa, one of the 65, has 1.3 million people and 39 American military bases, which have been there since the last and bloodiest ground battle of World War II.
I went to Okinawa for the first time in 1996. It became apparent in half an hour in Okinawa that these bases were not there as an element of strategy. They were there because they’ve been there a long time, and the Americans there are extremely comfortable. Our Marines in Okinawa are there for the same reason that the Soviet troops did not want to leave East Germany after the Wall came down. They live better in Okinawa than they’re likely to live in the communities they come from in America.
Or take Italy, a nation that has no known enemies, and where there are no German troops or Iranian troops or Chinese troops. But there are American troops. Two years ago, U.S. Marine pilots doing acrobatics in their airplane sliced through a cable, killing 20 innocent skiers. They were supposed to maintain an altitude of 1,000 feet, by our regulations, 2,000 by Italian regulations. The cable was cut at 360 feet; the plane was going 150 miles an hour faster than it should have been going. The pilots were not tried in Italy; they were tried at a base in North Carolina, where they were exonerated; it was said to be a training accident. The President offered to pay compensation, but the House of Representatives refused to authorize it, on the advice of the Pentagon.
What I’ve tried to do in my book is to put together some of these incidents. They add up to a pattern, a pattern that I think the correct analytical word for is imperialism. You’ve written the book for what purpose?
To warn Americans to stop, look, and listen. To be aware that what you sow you reap, and a lot of what is being sown in your name you probably do not know about. For example, our 110 missions abroad to educate foreign armed forces, where this “education” often amounts to instructing them in state terrorism.
If Americans are simply to proceed, this trend of events portends conflict. The history of international relations suggests that it is only logical that when a country behaves as the United States has been, it elicits coalitions against it. Ultimately, it becomes caught up in imperial overreach and decline and collapse. Just as the Soviet Union did over a decade ago. It seems to me that I’m in a position to issue a warning, and to at least hold out the possibility that this trend of events could be altered.
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