Interview with "The Sorrows of Empire" author Chalmers Johnson

[JohnyCanuck]

Kreisler: Once upon a time you called yourself a “spear-carrier for the empire.”

Johnson: “—for the empire,” yes, yes.

That’s the prologue to Blowback; I was a consultant to the Office of National Estimates of the CIA during the time of the Vietnam War. But what caused me to change my mind and to rethink these issues? Two things: one analytical, one concrete. The first was the demise of the Soviet Union. I expected much more from the United States in the way of a peace dividend. I believe that Russia today is not the former Soviet Union by any means. It’s a much smaller place. I would have expected that as a tradition in the United States, we would have demobilized much more radically. We would have rethought more seriously our role in the world, brought home troops in places like Okinawa. Instead, we did every thing in our power to shore up the Cold War structures in East Asia, in Latin America. The search for new enemies began. That’s the neoconservatives. I was shocked, actually, by this. Did this mean that the Cold War was a cover for something deeper, for an American imperial project that had been in the works since World War II? I began to believe that this is the case.


snip

Standing behind it is the military-industrial complex. We must, once again, bear in mind the powerful warnings of probably the two most prominent generals in our history. George Washington, in his farewell address, warns about the threat of standing armies to liberty, and particularly republican liberty. He was not an isolationist; he was talking about what moves power toward the imperial presidency, toward the state. It requires more taxes. Everything else which he said has come true. The other, perhaps more famous one was Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell address, where he invented the phrase “military-industrial complex.” We now know that he intended to say “military-industrial-congressional complex,” but he was advised not to go that far.

snip

One of my four “sorrows of empire” at the end of the book is bankruptcy. The military is not productive. They do provide certain kinds of jobs, as you discover in the United States whenever you try and close a military base—no matter how con servative or liberal your congressional representatives are, they will go mad to try and keep it open, keep it functioning. And the military-industrial complex is very clever in making sure that the building of a B-2 bomber is spread around the country; it is not all located at Northrop in El Segundo, California.

I have grave difficulty believing that that any president can bring under control the Pentagon, the secret intelligence agencies, the military-industrial complex. The Department of Defense is not, today, a department of defense. It’s an alternative seat of government on the south bank of the Potomac River. And, typical of militarism, it’s expanding into many, many other areas in our life that we have, in our traditional political philosophy, reserved for civilians. domestic policing: they’re slowly expanding into that.

http://www.counterpunch.org/kreisler05062010.html

[State the Obvious]

1. Time to re-read "The Sorrows of Empire".

It's definitely about today's America.

[JohnyCanuck]

2. kick n/t