Chalmers Johnson Died Saturday
by Tom Englehardt
 I’m sad to report that Chalmers Johnson died on Saturday. He was a stalwart of this site, writing for it regularly from its early moments. Without the slightest doubt, he was one of the most remarkable authors I’ve had the pleasure to edit,
no less be friends with.
He saw our devolving American world with
striking clarity and prescience. He wrote about it with precision,
passion, and courage. He never softened a thought or cut a corner.
I
dedicated my new book to him, writing that he was “the most astute
observer of the American way of war I know. He broke the ground and
made the difference.”
I wouldn’t change a word. He was a man on a journey from
Depression-era Arizona through the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet
Union, and deep into a world in which the foundations of the American
empire, too, began to shudder. A scholar of Japan, one-time Cold Warrior, and CIA consultant, in the
twenty-first century, he became the most trenchant critic of American
militarism around.
I first read a book of his -- on Communist peasants
in North China facing the Japanese “kill-all, burn-all, loot-all”
campaigns of the late 1930s -- when I was 20. I last read him this week
at age 66. I benefited from every word he wrote.
To my mind, his final question was this: What would the “sole
superpower” look like as a bankrupt country? He asked that question.
Nobody, I suspect, has the answer. We may find out.
“Adios,” he
invariably said as he signed off on the phone. Adios, Chal.
The Congress from Hell
These last years of blissful peace have left Republican Congressman
Howard P. "Buck" McKeon, soon to be the new chair of the House Armed
Services Committee, in a true panic. How, he wonders, will a starved
military ever get the necessary money for the weapons it needs to keep
us safe, and where exactly is that military heading, anyway? “My
concern is we end up back with a ‘bow and arrow’ -- I’m hoping not,”
McKeon said about
Obama-era austerity measures at the Pentagon. Get ready America: the
dovish days of the Obama presidency are over. With the midterm
elections successfully behind them, the hawks are taking flight and
they’re bound for Washington.
Don’t you remember those halcyon days under Obama when we traded guns
for butter, the military shrank, and peace was at hand? Me neither.
These last years, of course, have seen the largest military budget in history, the repeated doubling down on one war, a pretend conclusion to another, the building up of the structure of U.S. military bases across the Greater Middle East and a massive build-up of such bases in Afghanistan, as well as the violent escalation of conflicts in nations not at war with the U.S., and record numbers of
Special Forces troops -- the military’s expanding secret military --
sent into 75 countries (15 more than at the end of the Bush era).
With doves like these, who needs hawks? And yet, you’re going to see
a new batch of Republican hawks landing anyway. There may be so many
competitors, when it comes to war funding, that -- as David Swanson
makes clear -- you won’t know whether our conflicts are Obama’s wars,
McKeon’s wars, or... well, you’ll have plenty of choices when it comes
to continuing to boost military budgets well beyond Bush-era levels.
TomDispatch regular Swanson, an antiwar organizer and all-around dynamo,
who now runs the website War Is a Crime, among other things, is just publishing his latest book, War Is A Lie,
as this post appears. In his usual vigorous fashion, he takes on every
argument used to justify war and all the lies we’ve unfortunately grown
so painfully familiar with these last years. Tom
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