Chalmers Johnson died yesterday. He was, like Orwell a generation before, the loyal officer of an empire who would become one of its sharpest and most credible critics.
James Fallows and others who knew Johnson have offered brief eulogies. I never met him, but it’s fair to say that without Chalmers Johnson and his writing, this website would not exist. On a recent overseas move, I made room in my luggage for only two books. One of them was Blowback.
If you haven’t read that prescient volume, first published in 2000, make the time for it. I will excerpt a few passages relevant to this website and its mission of exposing the profit motive for armed conflict.
The first concerns one rationale behind military privatization, already evident during the 1990s:
The Pentagon’s most recent route around accountability is: “privatization” of its training activities… The companies involved are generally associated with the Department of Defense’s Special Operations Command, which has replaced the ClA’s Directorate of Operations as the main American sponsor of covert action in other countries. Nonetheless, these are privately contracted mercenaries who, by their nature, are not directly responsible to the military chain of command. In many cases, these private companies have been formed by retired special forces personnel seeking to market their military training to foreign governments, regardless of the policies of the Defense Department.
One reason privatization appeals to the Pentagon is that whatever these companies do becomes “proprietary information.” The Pentagon does not even have to classify it; and as private property, information on the activities of such companies is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. … Such firms also purchase weaponry from former Soviet states for distribution to groups that the U.S. government may want to arm without being accused of doing so, such as guerrillas fighting for Bosnia and in Kosovo.
The second passage concerns the perverse effects of America’s economic reliance on weapons exports:
[Defense Department] arms sales are a vital component of stealth imperialism. By several orders of magnitude the United States maintains the world’s largest military establishment and is the world’s biggest arms exporter. …
One of the things this huge military establishment also does is sell arms to other countries, making the Pentagon a critical economic agency of the United States government. Militarily oriented products account for about a quarter of the total U.S. gross domestic product. The government employs some 6,500 people just to coordinate and administer its arms sales program in conjunction with senior officials at American embassies around the world, who spend most of their “diplomatic” careers working as arms salesmen.
The paralyzing consequences of this militarization are described in the third passage:
Ten years after the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon monopolizes the formulation and conduct of American foreign policy. Increasingly, the United States has only one, commonly inappropriate means of achieving its external objectives—military force. …
Military might does not equate with “leadership of the free world.” It is also no substitute for an informed public that understands and has approved the policies being carried out in its name.
In his final book, published this year, Johnson carried that argument further, calling for the closure US military bases overseas and the abolition of his former employer, the CIA. Dismantling the Empire, he believed, was the only way to save the republic.