Chalmers Johnson

Chalmers Johnson, an Asian studies scholar who stirred controversy with books contending that the United States was trying to create a global empire and was paying a stiff price for it, died Saturday at his home in Cardiff-by-the Sea, Calif. He was 79.

Trying to? Who doubts it? Well, other than Karl Rove, Fox-nuts and the extreme rightwingers?

Dr. Johnson, who considered himself a longtime cold warrior, was a consultant to the Central Intelligence Agency for many years. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union he became concerned that the United States was increasingly using its military presence to gain power over the global economy.

That would make it George HW Bush's and Bill Clinton's presidencies.

Summarizing the series in “Dismantling the Empire,” Dr. Johnson said that “blowback” means more than a negative, sometimes violent reaction to United States policy. “It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public,” he wrote. “This means that when the retaliation comes, as it did so spectacularly on Sept. 11, 2001, the American public is unable to put the events in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback.”

Not because they hate our way of life.


His 1982 book, “MITI and the Japanese Miracle” (MITI stands for the Ministry of International Trade and Industry), challenged conventional wisdom with its premise that Japan was a “capitalist developmental state” that combined government industrial strategy with free-market forces. His ideas contradicted those of economists who insisted that Japan’s economic rise was almost entirely based on the free market. The heavily state-influenced economic model that Dr. Johnson elucidated can now be seen in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and China. “This,” Dr. Keehn said, “is how you can have a contradiction that the world’s last remaining powerful Communist country is also the world’s greatest rising capitalist success.”