[politics]
EVIL EMPIRE
Chalmers Johnson at the San Diego Main Library
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Review by Kent Manthie
Chalmers Johnson was a professor with the University of California for 30 years: from 1962-1992, teaching mostly at the flagship UC Berkeley and also for a time down south at UC San Diego. His specialties were Asian, specifically Chinese and Japanese studies. Dr. Johnson has degrees in economics and political science as well as Chinese history, all graduate degrees, either MAs or PhDs. Also, for 4 years, between 1968 and 1972, he even worked for a compartment inside the CIA, the Office of National Estimates, where he must’ve done some fabulous work and, no doubt, some mind-numbing detailed analysis to which he’s sworn to secrecy. He is therefore, a bit of a smarty-pants, not some half-baked Cassandra, but an oasis of cool, calm and rational discourse. Johnson exudes a low-key, laconic charm and a disarming, grandfatherly (he’s 75 and officially a UC retiree) rectitude.
So it was a thrill, therefore, to spend a bit of my Saturday afternoon (5/19/07) at the Main Library, Downtown San Diego, listening to Chalmers Johnson give a lecture entitled “Evil Empire” – a talk that was related to his current best-seller, “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic”. There was also signing of books beforehand and again afterwards; Wahrenbrock’s Books were on hand, selling copies of “Nemesis” so people could have Johnson inscribe something witty inside the front cover. I left my wallet at home so I didn’t get a book.
Johnson’s style isn’t shrill, high-strung rhetorical blubbering. He has a calming way about him but at the same time he showed off his keen intellect and sense of history by weaving in many parallels between the hubris of the American empire builders and the fall of Ancient Rome and the perils of standing armies to a democracy.
He went right in for the kill, with a grave prognosis of the long-term fate of America, given the way things are presently skidding along: the rest of the world hates us, we’re in debt up to our eyeballs, there are elements of progressive and radical change out there in the world that are working very hard to counter the influence of the super-duper power that people think the U.S. is.
What Chalmers Johnson did was to sound some alarm bells; he’s an informed academic who has some sense of history and a sharp analytical mind. Johnson’s way is to be purposely over-the-top: maybe America needs to be shaken into consciousness; sometimes it takes a real shock to wake people up. Gentle nudging never really prods people into action, especially political action; that was the underlying message – ordinary Americans need to get out of their stupors and get pissed off and take action if anything good is to happen in the future.
The auditorium was a full house, which I expected at a free event like this. I thought there was going to be a bigger crowd, even when I got there, at 1:40pm, 20 minutes early. Instead, people trickled in little by little over the next half hour or so and just before 2:00 a throng of people magically appeared and filled out most of the empty seats. The show got going about 15 minutes late but eventually I got used to the bad sound quality, which would’ve been helped had he pulled the microphone closer to him; it wasn’t really a problem, though, as long as he spoke loudly enough, but one thing that kept making me cringe was the constant noise being perpetrated throughout the auditorium, not the least of which was the damn door that made a “BANG” every time someone walked through it because it was a free-swinging door that would slam when it swung shut unless you were careful enough and considerate enough to not let it slam shut, but I’m sure nobody realized that it was going to slam when they went through it; nonetheless it continued over and over again as people were continually coming in and going out throughout the entire lecture, as well as some little clicks and pops, which were all amplified by the hard, bare floor.
So, the talk went on for about an hour; Johnson gave a concise, not-overly-broad monologue about the dangers a country that has ambitions for empire faces if they go around creating their empire around the world at the expense of domestic issues: in the end they overspend and overextend themselves only to have it all fall apart.
The end of democracy comes, says Johnson, when the country teeters over the edge into bankruptcy and/or some kind of economic meltdown sending shockwaves through all parts of society and myriad chain reactions would shut down commerce and leave the country paralyzed, just for starters. Then a depression would settle over the world, after which the majority of the countries in the world would come out of it all right, but not the USA. We would, according to Johnson, never emerge from this depression and presumably that would give way to a radical restructuring, an adjustment that will forever alter American society.
That is the picture that Johnson paints – one possible route the future might take; something that could be set in motion in very short order, precipitated by a major economic catastrophe, something like “…Saudi Arabia suddenly demanding euros instead of dollars for their oil” – Johnson said that the system whereby Saudi Arabia takes dollars for its oil is the only thing that is keeping our American economy afloat and that if it switched over to euros instead of dollars the U.S. would “end tomorrow”; that is the triggering scenario that Johnson used to show how a major sudden shift like that could start the ball rolling that would lead to the aforementioned beginning of the end of the U.S. as we know it. It is something like this: you’d have a situation of chaos on your hands, where panic is setting in and the whole of civilized society is unraveling as money is running out and desperation runs rampant; a scenario where it’d become all too easy for the military to take over – sometimes, even with justifications – and impose martial law, something that Tommy Franks has already mentioned would likely be enacted in the event of another terrorist worse than the one on September 11, 2001 – when this happens, says Johnson, that’ll be the end of the American democratic experiment, a swift, painful death. These kinds of things can erupt quickly too, he said; while things seem stable enough now, that doesn’t mean that some catastrophe couldn’t trigger panic and chaos and disaster in a very short period of time. Johnson illustrated this point thusly: “Imagine if it were 1985 and I told you that in about six years the Soviet Union would cease to exist you’d think I had been inhaling too deeply on a certain substance”
I knew I was in for starkness at this talk, but the hopeful part of the show came during the Q & A period, always a highlight at book readings and lectures, where the scripted part ends and the audience gets to enter into dialogue with the speaker. There were a few interesting questions, some predictable diatribes and platitudes, et cetera, but it was heartening, at least, to see fellow citizens speaking their minds and displaying the age-old enabling power of the group dynamic. But really, it gave me a sense that there are a few people in America who don’t only care about prime time TV shows and what kind of car to buy this year, and I think that was an optimistic thing in itself for us to take away from the whole thing.
KM