Chalmers Johnson, influential scholar of East Asia and a leading anti-imperialist scholar recently passed away at the age of 79 due to complications of long-term rheumatoid arthritis. While most of the mainstream media and a majority of Americans don't know who Mr. Johnson was, for genuine American patriots and intellectual members of the anti-imperial school of thought, the passing of Mr. Johnson is a great loss.
From the LA Times:
Born in Phoenix on Aug. 6, 1931, Johnson moved to Alameda, Calif., with his family in 1945. He earned a bachelor's degree in economics from UC Berkeley in 1953. He then served as a naval officer for two years and began studying Japanese on his own while stationed in Japan.
Returning to UC Berkeley, he earned a master's degree in political science in 1957 and a doctorate in political science in 1961.
While a faculty member at UC Berkeley from 1962 to 1988, he served as chairman of the political science department and chairman of the Center for Chinese Studies. He also was an unpaid consultant to the CIA's Office of National Estimates from 1968 to '77.
In 1988, he joined the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at UC San Diego. He retired from the university in 1992.
Johnson also was chairman of the academic advisory committee for the PBS series "The Pacific Century" and played a prominent on-camera role in the PBS "Frontline" documentary "Losing the War with Japan."
As Mr. Johnson first gained academic distinction with his 1962 dissertation, "Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power, The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937-1945," Johnson also wrote an even more influential book about Japan in 1982 entitled: "MITI and the Japanese Miracle”. In this book, Chalmers Johnson argued that the Japanese government and MITI, (Ministry of International Trade and Industry) was the most influential player in the Japanese economy, in contrast to the more widely held view that the private sector was the driving force behind the Japanese economy. "MITI and the Japanese Miracle", led Mr. Johnson to become known as the ‘godfather’ of the revisionist school of Japanese political economy.
According to a Washington Post obituary of Mr. Johnson:
It was in the research for that book that Dr. Johnson said he initially became disenfranchised with what he would later term "American imperialism" abroad and led him "to see clearly for the first time the shape of the empire that I had so long uncritically supported."
His weakening opinion of the expansion of unchecked military influence on U.S. foreign policy was solidified in 1995 after three American servicemen in Okinawa were convicted of raping a 12-year-old-Japanese girl.
In Dr. Johnson's mind, the troops should not have been stationed in Okinawa - the location of one of the Marine Corps' largest installations overseas - in the first place.
The military leadership, Dr. Johnson argued, suffered from an impulsive need to build and maintain bases in foreign countries that was formed during height of anxiety in the Cold War.
Constructing and keeping U.S. military property and manpower overseas was little more than colonization, Dr. Johnson said. The policy, he added, would ultimately poison America's long-term interests and bankrupt the country not only money but also political clout. Dr. Johnson dissected his theories on American imperialism with a series of books, beginning in 2000 with "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire."
Writing in the New York Times, reviewer Richard Bernstein called Dr. Johnson's book a "take-no-prisoners tirade against what he portrays as classic imperial overextension worthy of Rome or the Ottoman Empire" and could be subjecting itself to retribution in which the 1993 "World Trade Center bombings and other anti-American terrorist acts may be just the beginning."
The review continued that Dr. Johnson had effectively issued "a useful and timely alert," but ultimately concluded the book was "marred by an overriding, sweeping and cranky one-sidedness."
In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, however, Dr. Johnson's theories gained significant traction and "Blowback," became a bestseller.
As a graduate student studying international relations, I first became familiar with the trilogy of books exploring the imperial overreach of America and the declining status of America as a Democratic Republic. The three books, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire" (2000), "The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic" (2004) and "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic" (2006), hold even more significance as the United States faces trillion dollar deficits, and still unable to liquidate its imperial garrisons around the world.
Too unconventional for the infotainment news outlets, the prolific work done by Mr. Johnson on the transition of America from a republic to an empire will be a valuable primary source document for future historians in their study of the demise of the American Empire.
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