The Blowback World of Chalmers Johnson

[mgc1961]

In going through my husband’s files, books, and papers after his death, I’ve been forcibly struck by two things. First, contrary to what many of his obituaries said, his writings and thoughts were remarkably consistent throughout his life. In other words, he was not a right-winger who became more liberal and outspoken as he got older. More than most people suspected, he was a radical all along, whose intellectual impulses were tempered only by his birth in the Depression year of 1931 and his determination to make a decent living without “joining the establishment.” Second -- and it was an unavoidable recollection -- he worked with manic energy and maniacally hard all his life.

When we met in the fall of 1956, I was a 19-year-old junior at the University of California, Berkeley, “shacked up” with a boyfriend. Chal, by contrast, was six years older, and just returned from two years with the Navy in Korea, where the ship on which he was the communications officer, LST 883, had been tasked with ferrying Chinese prisoners of war from South Korea back to North Korean ports. He was living at home with his parents in Alameda to save money, and had only recently finished his master's thesis on “thought reform” in Communist China in the period just before and after Mao Zedong took over in 1949.

When his LST was docked in Yokosuka, he started to study Japanese. As an undergraduate at Berkeley he’d majored in economics, but he was now a graduate student in political science and teaching assistant for Robert Scalapino, whose course on “America’s Role in the Far East” I took. I had invited Chal to a Christmas party at my apartment (and even fixed him up with a date). In return, in January 1957 he decided to deliver my final grade in Scalapino’s course in person. I wasn’t home, but my boyfriend was and informed Chal that I was leaving him. (Even in those early days of “free love,” I’d concluded that for women the price was too high.)

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175377/tomgram%3A_sheila_johnson%2C_%22chal%22/

[RaleighNCDUer]

1. Great article - I particularly noted this quote from "Anatomy Of The

People's War":

“It is useful to be reminded,” he wrote, “that revolutions in the modern sense are also, in fact, civil wars. If other nations want to make a successful adjustment to them, they cannot ignore the fact that a domestic fight is going on between people who are agitated by issues other than the general course of human history. For this reason direct intervention in one is generally the worst thing that a prudent nation can do -- not because the revolution is unimportant either ideologically or to the world balance of power but because foreign intervention, if it fails, is bound to antagonize in the most direct manner the victorious revolutionary state.”

Written in the 70s, it could apply to all our wars today.

[swilton]

2. Think of Chalmers more than once and his

predictions in Nemesis...how he felt the US had just past too many Rubicons to redeem itself and would eventually meet with its fate.

[JohnyCanuck]

3. Lots of interesting interviews and speeches on Youtube with Chalmers Johnson

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=chalmers+johnson&aq=0