From Democracy Now -- Chalmers Johnson, 1931-2010, on the Last Days of the American Republic:
The distinguished scholar and best-selling author Chalmers Johnson has died. He passed away in California on Saturday afternoon at the age of 79. During the Cold War, he served as a consultant to the Central Intelligence Agency and was a supporter of the Vietnam War, however, later became a leading critic of U.S. militarism and imperialism. He wrote the book, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire in 2000, which became a bestseller after the 9/11 attacks. He went on to complete what would become a trilogy about American empire. Today we re-air part of our last interview with Chalmers Johnson from 2007.
Full transcript at Democracy Now's site.
And here's more from Meteor Blades at Daily KOS -- Open thread for night owls: R.I.P. Chalmers Johnson:
Chalmers Johnson died Saturday. He was 79. If that name doesn't ring a bell, you've missed out on a tour de force in the realm of political science. What he wrote in the final 10 years of his life resonate even if his warnings are still being widely ignored.
Fortunately for us all, a decade ago Johnson moved away from his groundbreaking writing on the Japanese economy - a field in which he challenged and then overturned conventional wisdom - into another arena that the gatekeepers thought they had closed off discussion on: modern American imperialism. In a devastating set of four interwoven books, the first volume of which was published shortly before the September 11 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., Johnson laid bare the pernicious impacts of U.S. foreign policy.
Other writers had explored and excoriated that policy and done so with more detail and sharper barbs than Johnson in an era when writing the very word "imperialism" in the same sentence as the "United States" was enough to get both scholar and amateur a trip to obscurity and discredit. That, of course, was before the neoconservative denizens of the Project for a New American Century openly embraced both the term and its reality as a legitimate foundation for 21st Century American intervention abroad. But Johnson put it all together with a fresh eye in a fresh way.
One at a time, his four books written over a 10-year period wound up on the shelves of critics of the Iraq war and U.S. foreign policy in general. They are Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire; The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic; Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope. Having received my undergraduate degree in international relations a zillion years ago, I can only lament that no recognized authority who we studied had put it together the way Johnson did, operating outside his area of expertise with passion and clearheadedness.
Much more there so go read the rest. R.I.P. Chalmers Johnson.
