American scholar Chalmers Johnson, 1931

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6/20/2011
Juan Gonzalez on America's role in Latin America

5/13/2011
Adam Hochschild on how World War I began

4/29/2011
Manning Marable, 1950 - 2011, dies days before publication of his biography of Malcolm X

2/2/2011
Edward Herman and David Peterson on Julian Assange and Luis Posada Carriles

1/28/2011
Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune

12/1/2010
American scholar Chalmers Johnson, 1931 - 2010

11/8/2010
Susan Reverby has won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for Examining Tuskegee

10/25/2010
Fractal Mathmematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot, 1924 – 2010

10/21/2010
Mohammed Arkoun, Islamic scholar who explored Enlightenment ideals, 1928-2010

10/10/2010
Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa wins Nobel Prize

9/20/2010
Tariq Ali on "The Obama Syndrome"

9/10/2010
Historian and public intellectual Tony Judt, 1948 - 2010

8/31/2010
Former U.S. Senator James Abourezk on Leaders in Hiding

8/23/2010
David Kirby on something else we feed chickens

8/5/2010
Andrew J. Bacevich on How to Dismantle the American Empire

8/1/2010
Stacy Malkan on Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry

7/10/2010
Joy Gordon on the Invisble War, the United States and Iraq Sanctions

6/26/2010
Tom Engelhardt on the American Way of War

6/25/2010
Writer, critic and activist Carlos Monsiváis, 1938 - 2010

6/8/2010
He is totally unreproducible — he was sui generis — Martin Gardner, 1914 - 2010

6/7/2010
Joe Meadors: I seem to have all the bad luck in the world when it comes to the Israelis.

5/30/2010
Historian Bruce Cumings on the rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula

5/12/2010
How the hell did it happen? - Daniel Okrent on how Prohibition democratized drinking and made the income tax possible

5/6/2010
"We have more than an oil slick out of control, we also have these big corporations out of control." - Marine toxicologist Rikki Ott on the BP and Exxon Valdez oil spills.

4/24/2010
"This is too important. We cannot leave this to governments": Cormac Cullinan on the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights

4/6/2010
Anarchist, poet, publisher and chess-player, John Rety, 1930 - 2010

4/4/2010
"Literature was another victim of the war": Miguel Delibes, 1920 - 2010

3/24/2010
The beautiful brain of Sherman Alexie: War Dances wins 2010 Pen/Faulkner Award

3/13/2010
It's terrible to be possessed by brittle things: Elena Fanailova's The Russian Version wins the Best Translated Book Award for Poetry

3/7/2010
Translator, critic and BBC script editor, Barbara Bray, 1924 - 2010

2/28/2010
Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award to D. A. Powell

2/24/2010
The banks have had nine months to creatively increase the real cost of borrowing: Robert Manning on Credit Card Nation

2/9/2010
Robert McChesney and John Nichols the history and necessity of government subsides for US journalism

2/5/2010
Of course, I’d forgotten she’d died: An extract from A Scattering by Christopher Reid, the 2009 Costa Book of the Year

1/30/2010
Tributes to People's Historian Howard Zinn, 1922 - 2010

1/24/2010
Johann Hari on P. W. Singer's Wired For War

1/23/2010
Jamin Raskin on the Supreme Court campaign finance ruling which removes limits on corporate campaign spending

1/16/2010
"Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their freedom", Tracy Kidder and Peter Hallward on Haiti

1/2/2010
At 42, she was one of the best poets of her generation, Rachel Wetzsteon, 1967 - 2009

12/27/2009
You have to decide which side you are on: there is always a side. Commitment does not exist in an abstraction; it exists in action: Dennis Brutus, 1924 - 2009

12/19/2009
The wedding guests look upon the cracked, pink lips of Rosie's bridegroom - an extract from Petina Gappah's An Elegy for Easterly, the 2009 Guardian First Book Award winning book

12/12/2009
David Cortright on Obama's shallow understanding of the priciples of Just War Theory

11/26/2009
Obama's rejection of Landmine Treaty lacks vision, compassion, and basic common sense

11/22/2009
Those who saw him hushed: Let the Great World Spin, the National Book Award winner by Colum McCann

11/15/2009
Robert Jensen: Of Turkeys and Holocausts

11/8/2009
Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1908 - 2009, his works as a practical anti-racist manifesto

11/7/2009
Power exercised by man over his fellow man is always a usurpation, Francisco Ayala, 1906 - 2009

11/1/2009
If you think you'll to be rich someday, why resent million-dollar bonuses: Barbara Ehrenreich on Positive Thinking

10/21/2009
Four Canadians tortured in the name of fighting Terror, Kerry Pither wins Ottawa Book Award for Dark Days

10/14/2009
The Potato that Became a Tomato, Playgiarist Raymond Federman, 1928 - 2009

12/1/2010 American scholar Chalmers Johnson, 1931 - 2010

There are people whose memory fades with time. There are others whose importance only grows. Such a man was Chalmers Johnson , who died last week. As a CIA analyst, and an influential scholar of east Asia's political economy, he forced a revision both of the Chinese revolution and the Japanese "economic miracle". Johnson went from being a spear-carrier for US global power to an unflinching chronicler of its impending demise. It started with a visit to Okinawa, where a 12-year-old Japanese girl was abducted and raped by two US marines and a sailor in 1995. He found that local hostility to the US military was not the exception, a response to three "bad apples", but the rule. Only late in his career did his impact reach beyond academia, with a trilogy that pathologised America's current role in the world. Blowback, the CIA word for the unintended consequences of actions that are kept secret from the US public, was the first: it was ignored at home when it came out in 2000. Its prime example was the recruiting, arming and putting into combat of mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s. 11 September made this book a bestseller, while "blowback" entered the political vocabulary. With 700 declared military bases, and probably 300 secret ones, around the world, Johnson likened his country to the Roman republic as it turned into an empire, which would find itself overstretched, bankrupted and then overrun. The uncomfortable parallel may have some life in it yet. - from In praise of … Chalmers Johnson.

Chalmers Johnson on his "Blowback" trilogy:

In Blowback, I set out to explain why we are hated around the world. 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."

The Sorrows of Empire was written during the American preparations for and launching of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. I began to study our continuous military buildup since World War II and the 737 military bases we currently maintain in other people's countries. This empire of bases is the concrete manifestation of our global hegemony, and many of the blowback-inducing wars we have conducted had as their true purpose the sustaining and expanding of this network. We do not think of these overseas deployments as a form of empire; in fact, most Americans do not give them any thought at all until something truly shocking, such as the treatment of prisoners as Guantanamo Bay, brings them to our attention. But the people living next door to these bases and dealing with the swaggering soldiers who brawl and sometimes rape their women certainly think of them as imperial enclaves, just as the people of ancient Iberia or nineteenth-century India knew that they were victims of foreign colonization."

In Nemesis, I have tried to present historical, political, economic, and philosophical evidence of where our current behavior is likely to lead. Specifically, I believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and in the end produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent. The founders of our nation understood this well and tried to create a form of government – a republic – that would prevent this from occurring. But the combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, military Keynesianism, and ruinous military expenses have destroyed our republican structure in favor of an imperial presidency. We are on the cusp of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation is started down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play – isolation, overstretch, the uniting of forces opposed to imperialism, and bankruptcy. Nemesis stalks our life as a free nation.”

- three excerpts from Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic by Chalmers Johnson.

Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
Chalmers Johnson
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The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic
Chalmers Johnson
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Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic
Chalmers Johnson
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Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope
Chalmers Johnson
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