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Best-selling Author Foretells Ruin for the American Republic
(San Diego Union, February 10, 2004)
There was a time not that long ago when Chalmers Johnson might have fit in nicely with Bill O'Reilly out on the right flank of political discourse. . . . A retired UCSD professor, Johnson once served as a consultant to the CIA. He supported the Vietnam War and thought the student protesters were annoyingly naive. He voted for Ronald Reagan for president – twice. . . . He was, in his words, "a spear carrier for the empire." . . . So how did he wind up sounding like Al Franken? . . . His book "Blowback," released in the spring of 2000, harshly criticized American foreign policy and warned that the country was ripe for retaliation. When terrorists flew airplanes into buildings on a blue September day a year later, he looked like a prophet. "Blowback" became a best seller. . . . Now he's out with a new book, "The Sorrows of Empire." It's a scathing and scary indictment of America's military expansion to all corners of the globe. He sees a future of perpetual war and constitutional ruin and financial bankruptcy. . . . "It is nowhere written that the United States, in its guise as an empire dominating the world, must go on forever," he writes. . . . At public appearances, he's even more direct. Inevitably someone raises a hand and says, "OK, I buy your analysis, and I think the situation is serious, so what should I do about it?" . . . And Johnson, speaking in a resonant, almost musical voice cultivated over more than 30 years of lecturing in college halls, will sometimes answer: "If you have a little money, I'd prepare your escape route. You might want to go up to Vancouver and buy yourself a condo." . . . In 1996, Johnson was invited to Okinawa in the wake of a horrific incident: the rape of a 12-year-old girl by three American servicemen. The case had sparked large anti-U.S. demonstrations on the island and international outrage. . . . Johnson said he was "appalled" at the size of the American military presence there, some 50 years after the end of World War II: 38 bases on the "choicest" 20 percent of the island. He could see no strategic reason for it. . . . He figured that Okinawa was unique, that the deployment there had just kind of sprung up through complacency and neglect. He didn't see it as part of a larger picture. . . . Then, after he wrote "Blowback," he did some research, and then some more. By the time he was done he had another book, "The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic." It came out last month. . . . In it, Johnson argues that Okinawa is not unique – that the United States, with more than 700 bases spread around the world, is "a military juggernaut intent on world domination." . . . That's not the way Americans like to see themselves, of course. We often equate "empire" with the Romans, the Nazis, and imperial Japan. Our leaders prefer to call their military forays "humanitarian intervention" and say our troops stationed in other parts of the world are a necessary counterbalance to threats like "the axis of evil." . . . Using a mountain of facts – the footnotes alone run more than 50 pages – Johnson traces the growth of the military from one George (Washington) to another (Bush), and explains how secrecy has enabled the Pentagon to undermine the public scrutiny and financial accountability the founding fathers built into the Constitution. . . . "I fear that we will lose our country," he writes in the opening chapter, and in the last one details the "four sorrows" he sees as inevitable: a state of perpetual war; the destruction of democracy; a system of propaganda and disinformation; and bankruptcy.

posted by LoZo 4:47 PM