Author Q&A

Q&A with Chalmers Johnson
Author of The Well-Fed Writer

Chalmers Johnson is a worried patriot. America is an empire backed by a strong and financially draining military whose presence is all over the globe, he persuasively argues in the concluding volume of a trilogy. Echoing writers such as Mark Twain and Gore Vidal, Johnson takes the view that the United States cannot simultaneously maintain a republic at home and an empire abroad.

He wrote three books on this topic. The first two are Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (Metropolitan Books, 2000) and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (Metropolitan, 2004). Blowback won the 2001 American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation, and The Sorrows of Empire won the 2005 gold medal for nonfiction conferred by The Commonwealth Club of California. His latest and newest book, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (Metropolitan, 2007), completes the trilogy.

He has the background, training and evidence to make his chilling charges worth considering.

Johnson taught for 30 years, from 1962 to 1992, at the Berkeley and San Diego campuses of the University of California and held endowed chairs in Asian politics at both campuses. At Berkeley he was chairman of the Center for Chinese Studies and of the Department of Political Science. He received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in economics and political science from the University of California, Berkeley. From 1968 until 1972 he served as a consultant to the Office of National Estimates of the Central Intelligence Agency.

He was chairman of the academic advisory committee for the PBS television series “The Pacific Century,” and played a prominent role in the PBS “Frontline” documentary, “Losing the War with Japan” — both Emmy award-winning series. In 2006, he appeared in the prize-winning documentary film, “Why We Fight.”

He lives in Cardiff, Calif., with his wife and cat and devotes himself to his hobby of opera. We spoke and emailed over the course of several days in March and April 2007.

You’ve often remarked that you didn’t intend to or even want to write this tough trilogy. What drove you to write the first one, Blowback, and then continue on to the next two books? They couldn’t have been fun to write.

Professionally, I am a specialist in the politics of East Asia — i.e., China, Japan, and the two Koreas. But until 1996, I had never been in Okinawa, Japan’s poorest prefecture. The governor of Okinawa had invited me in the wake of a very serious incident that set off the worst anti-American demonstrations since the Japanese-American Security Treaty had been signed. On September 4, 1995, two American Marines and a sailor abducted, beat and raped a 12-year-old Okinawan girl. I was shocked by my visit to Okinawa — home of 37 American military bases and over 17,000 U.S. Marines — and I began to investigate this gross manifestation of American imperialism. One result was the book I contributed to and edited in 1999, Okinawa: Cold War Island, published by the Japan Policy Research Institute. My book Blowback was a study of the things we had done throughout the Cold War in East Asia that were about to come back to haunt us. It was published in early 2000, well before 9/11.

Only after 9/11, and in light of the disastrous Bush administration’s response to it, did I go on to study our global military empire —737 military bases maintained in over 130 countries. Our empire is more or less like that of the former Soviet Union in Eastern Europe — established by military might, composed of docile puppet governments and integrated into the American economic system.
 
My most recent book, Nemesis, is a study of the likely consequences of our imperialism and militarism. I truly mean the subtitle, “The Last Days of the American Republic.” Nemesis discusses in detail the catastrophe of the illegal Iraq war, the evolution of the CIA into the president’s private army with no form of effective oversight, wasteful military expenditures on weapons in outer space and how our system of separation of powers has broken down and has been replaced by an imperial presidency.

You say that these books could not have been fun to write. That’s true, but the research and organizing of the presentation were extremely stimulating since the topics of American imperialism and militarism, although recognized by virtually all other peoples on earth, are taboo in the minds of most Americans.

Define “blowback” for us. Why is that concept so important to understand, and why don’t more American’s acknowledge it?

The concept “blowback,” a CIA term, 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. These operations include the clandestine overthrowing of governments we do not like, training foreign militaries in the techniques of state terrorism, rigging elections in foreign countries, interfering with the economic viability of countries that seem to threaten the interests of American companies and the torture and assassination of selected foreigners. The fact that these actions are secret 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 alleged perpetrators, thereby commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback.

The term blowback was used in the after-action report on the CIA’s first overthrow of a legal foreign government, Iran in 1953, an operation it undertook on behalf of the British Petroleum Company. The United States used the standard excuse that the elected Iranian government was “communist,” which could not have been further from the truth. This report was declassified only in the late 1990s. Not until after 9/11 did “blowback” become a household word and my book a best seller. Americans have trouble acknowledging the term, both because the secret operations American presidents have ordered overseas are unknown to them but also because they have been inured against critical thinking by generations of Cold War propaganda. It is time that all people in America talk about our overthrow of the elected government of Chile on another 9/11 — September 11, 1973 — in order to bring to power, probably the most odious dictator installed by either side in the Cold War, General Augusto Pinochet; the reign of the CIA-installed Greek colonels from 1967 to 1973; American butchery of Guatemala in 1974; and numerous other examples.

Are Americans ready to hear what you say? It might be difficult for some to acknowledge or understand how the military dominates federal spending or that the American economy and empire is tottering so precariously. What is the best way to get through to people who might not see this yet?

In Nemesis, I introduce some relatively new concepts to help readers understand the impact of American military spending. One of these concepts is military Keynesianism, referring to the degree to which our economy has become increasingly dependent on munitions and weapons manufacturing. This dependency has set up a vicious cycle of producing weapons, which encourages our bloated military establishment to go to war, thus creating the demand for more weapons. I try to explain why the Department of Defense’s propaganda about the defense budget being a declining percentage of our gross domestic product is an outrageous subterfuge. It ignores the fact that the Department of Defense’s so-called budget is only a small part of our expenditures on the military establishment. True defense of the United States is in the hands of the Department of Homeland Security, nuclear weapons are controlled by the Department of Energy, pensions and the treatment of our badly wounded veterans is the responsibility of the Department of Veterans Affairs, foreign military aid is largely administered by the State Department, service of the national debt run up by our wars dating back to 1916 is paid for by the Treasury, and there are many other examples. We spend more on our military than all the rest of the world combined spend on theirs. Eisenhower’s great 1961 warning about the vested interests and secret power of the military-industrial complex was ignored. We are now starting to pay the price. If Americans refuse to pay attention and do not reclaim the citizens’ role as envisaged by the authors of our Constitution, they deserve what will happen to them. Our great orators have been telling us for 200 years that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. The American people have been anything but careful observers of their government.

The analysis in your excellent work is bleak, and the hope for recovery you express is faint. How do you keep going without letting it bring you down?

I am inspired by the need to reconstitute our Constitutional system and reinvigorate our separation of powers. That is the only way we shall survive as a republic. The need is to mobilize inattentive citizens to the danger that they may soon lose their republic and, once they do so, will never get it back. It is late and the chances of our fellow citizens retaking control of their government, ending the influence of the military-industrial complex, stopping the blatant secrecy of the executive branch, abolishing the Central Intelligence Agency, is small. But there is no more necessary and worthwhile project. We have done it in the past — in the progressive movement to end the corrupt governments of the robber barons at the beginning of the 20th century and in the civil rights breakthroughs of the 1960s. History tells us that one of the most unstable political combinations is a country that tries to be both a domestic democracy and a foreign imperialist, like the United States is today. If we try to hold onto our empire, we will lose our democracy, just as the Roman Republic did after the assassination of Julius Caesar. But we could, like the British empire after World War II, give up our empire in order to retain our democracy. That is what we should be discussing in this country today. I am simply trying to make a small contribution to that awakening.

What can the average citizen or average writer-citizen do if they agree with your book and take it as a call to action?

That depends on one’s age and outlook. Some might demonstrate in public, decide not to have children (after all, they’re not an endangered species), boycott corporations that bring us such travesties as the network news, write Ph.D. dissertations about American imperialism and militarism rather than about such useless and arcane ideologies as rational choice theory, run for public office, or prepare for the likely bankruptcy that our military expenditures invite. Some writer-citizens may become revolutionaries or some may turn to inner or actual migration. I am 75 years old. My approach is what cancer specialists call “watchful waiting.”

Turning to the writing, how do you work? Does research take more of your time than the actual writing? Do you have to do a lot of redrafting or heavy editing? What’s your process?

I have written some seventeen nonfiction books on topics ranging from the Chinese revolution, Japanese economic development, Japan’s most famous World War II spy, and the theory of violent protest movements. In all of my work, I have relied on an empirical, inductive method, being guided by the results of my research rather than the formal, deductive style of much contemporary American social science. The deductive approach usually produces only ideology. The failure of our university scholars to inform the country of the dangers we face is one of the reasons why our intellectual dialogue has been dominated to such a high degree by Washington think tanks devoted to radical ideologies. Most of my time is spent doing research. I write very fast and do not begin writing until I have a firm outline of where I’m going and what I want to say. I rewrite and edit extensively, and I appreciate the hard work of real editors, ego-bruising thought it may be. I have been blessed by working with some excellent and famous editors — Norris Pope, the former director of Stanford University Press; and Tom Engelhardt, founder of TomDispatch and editor for Metroplitan Books. These editors, including my wife, are purveyors of that rarest of commodities — honest criticism, providing real advice about what one has done and not done.

You’ve been published widely in magazines. How does your approach differ when you write in that media compared to a book?

It’s not my approach that differs. . . . Magazine editors are just a lot more intrusive than book editors. Some magazines and newspapers have demanded such extensive changes that they’ve all but changed my meaning and I’ve vowed never to work with them again. I’ve found it increasingly effective to write essays for the Internet, for blogs, to do Internet interviews, and to avoid the establishment press. My book Nemesis was well launched and is doing quite well, but that is almost entirely due to Internet media. So far I have received only three books reviews, all from the state in which I live — the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and the San Francisco Chronicle. The New York Times went out of its way to tell my publisher that it would not review Nemesis. I am reminded of Gore Vidal’s crack that the function of the New York Times is to enter the battle only after it is over and then devote itself to shooting the wounded. It seems that the battle is not yet over and the Times is in denial until it is clear which wounded it is supposed to shoot.

What is your next writing project?

I actually don’t plan to write another book. Writing a nonfiction work is an exhausting, obsessive endeavor, each book literally consuming at least two years of one’s life. I’m now reading some other people’s books — particularly those on the horrors of the British empire as seen by people on the receiving end. I am also writing the occasional review and essay and listening to music.

Special thanks to Patricia Raynor for her editorial contributions to this interview.