Chalmers Johnson and the Anti-War Movement
Chalmers Johnson, the acclaimed author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, will be joining us next week to discuss his new book. In Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, he argues that "America is saddled with an empire that is fatally undermining its republican government." We're excited to have him to joining us and hope you'll do the same.
His visit to the Coffee House is especially interesting in light of where last week's conversation ended about the New Left and the Netroots.
Todd Gitlin, responding to a movie he saw at Sundance over the weekend about demonstrations at the '68 Democratic Convention, argued that for all of our romanticizing of the late sixties anti-war demonstrations, they provoked a disastrous political backlash. The Netroots, he notes:
have been much savvier, if less colorful, than the '68ers. They are not inviting a backlash. Those who go to the streets now ought to tread just that carefully, too.
All hail the human capacity to learn.
The nature of the differences in their anti-war thinking, though, goes beyond tactics and tone. Whether you agree or not, the New Left "68ers" were explicitly anti-imperialist in their orientation in a way that seems to gel with Chalmers Johnson's diagnosis of the problem: their goal was to roll back American empire. The Netroots, maybe for the better, is not so clearly oriented.
Is the Netroots, then, and the broader non-internet anti-war sentiment, an anti-imperialist movement? Is it responding to the picture Johnson paints? Or the individual mistake of Iraq? Or something different altogether?
In other words, in preparation for discussion Johnson's argument about the nature of America's problem, I'm wondering what people think about the nature of the anti-war movement that will try to solve it.
Interesting, because I started volunteering for campaigns in 2000 - before the war. In a sense I was reacting to the Clinton impeachment nonsense and worried about the creation of a Bush dynasty (and yet now Billary could be dynasty II). I guess I just thought Kosovo was a police action and not really a war.
Also, there aren't too many people who got worked up about the Afghanistan attack - barely a month ofter 9-11. I remember wondering at the time why we thought we could do better than the Soviets, but then there was the horse calvary charge, Rumsfeld said we won and we mostly forgot about it.
I just heard former NPR reporter Sarah Chaise saying that Afghanistan's a mess and all we've really done is remind the Afghanis why they wanted the order of Taliban to replace war-lords - the war lords whom we have mostly re-instated.
Pacifism is basically verbotten in the US. The center left has to counter bizarre propositions from the far right that the left is against all war - even where the Canadians despoil our fields and rape our women, so you have to respond, "Well, sure you've got to defend the nation." Even Ghandi wouldn't stand for Canadian raping and pillaging.
But then the obvious gets folded and spindled and mangled to the point where invasion of a sovereign state, one that promises on a stack a' bibles it can't and won't hurt us, gets invaded because our offense is actually just defense in advance.
Yes, its Orwellian as hell - NewSpeak to beat the band, but that's clearly what happened to us in 2003.
My only counter was that much of their argument was simply that war is always good (unspoken assumption? We 'win' it.) - it seems like that's just as unreasonable as saying war is always bad.
January 22, 2007 11:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
Don't forget his book The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, which I'm reading right now. It's also quite good. Johnson is one of the few people I know who was for the Vietnam War and has had the grace to concede that the protestors (including me) were right and he was wrong. He's a class act.
Tom
January 22, 2007 12:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Great news.
I'm sure long threads loom.
January 22, 2007 1:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
"No . . . more . . . imperialist war!"
The Left in the '60s seems in retorspect to have been more analytical, although such things as the critique of imperialism may have been just regurgitated pseudo-Marxism.
Those who see Iraq and the neocon (or Rummy-Cheney) project as a way to secure access to oil are more in line with the '60s anti-war analysis. But asome people who one might expect to be on the anti-imperialist side are compelled by other factors to support war in the Middle East where they would not in East Asia, for example.
The Netroots seems to me to mostly look at it pragmatically--the foregone opportunity costs of the war, for example, and the adding to the debt burden; the loss of our prestige vis a vis the rest of the world; the increasing loss of liberty at home in the name of protecting us from vague terrors. They see the War as a tool for centralizing authority in the Executive and backtracking on civil liberties.
Because of 9/11 and the receding image of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I don't see the Netroots as being anti all war, just against the misuse of war to consolidate power and manipulate the populace. The continuing conundrum is whether people would have supported the Iraq War had it been prosecuted competently and mostly finished by now.
January 22, 2007 1:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm looking forward to this discussion.
Back in 2002 I argued at length in email correspondence about the poisonous effects on democracy of military establishments and the constant fighting of wars and preparations for war. Military ventures and militarism always carry secrecy and restrictions on liberty in their wake. They produce a massive bureaucracy and a standing military establishment which becomes a powerful, vested economic concern in itself and which corrupts the legislature and drain away resources from domestic public investments. They depend to some degree on black budgets. And they foster attitudes of paranoia, fear, love and admiration for aggression and authoritarian impulses that threaten the body politic, and transform it from a body of equal citizens into a hierarchical military cult with a society-wide command structure.
I don't know to what precise extent anti-imperialism characterizes the anti-Iraq War movement as such, but I believe it has been a very significant component.
We had some tangential discussion of this issue in response Ernest Wilson's last post.
January 22, 2007 1:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
If anyone is curious, Johnson can be seen (and heard!) in the movie, "Why We Fight," which is about the American military-industrial complex and Iraq. It's pretty good, although TPM readers probably wouldn't learn much from it.
January 22, 2007 4:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
We need to not only compare the content of the two movement, we need to clearly keep in mind the very different context. The 60's and 70's movements were as we can now see -- middle age for the Cold War, and in essence those who seriously protested were a younger generation who were not able to unquestioningly accept the positions taken by the "Wise Men" who were 'present at the creation' as it is put -- but who scooped out the abstraction of containment in the wake of World War II. As we can see it now with the benefit of more recent histories, Vietnam became "Containment gone Wild" or "Containment gone nuts" -- for in the end it was many of the non-military aspects of Containment that led to the collapse of the Soviet System. (If I were to design a Cold War Museum, one thing I would feature would be an early Zerox Machine.)
I suspect one of the background movements to the present anti-war (or anti-Iraq War) movement is some of the serious economic analysis behind opposition to neo-liberal (or Neo-Con -- maybe they are twins?) led Globalization. You find it in some of the opposition to NAFTA, to the WTO, and I would suggest the votes last year in France and Holland against the proposed EU constitution have threads of this new movement. This whole movement is hardly mature at this point, it needs a serious culture, a canon of literature, the variety of leadership that could carry the ideas into many otherwise disconnected social and cultural groups. But I suspect much of our Netroots based anti-Iraq War movement is connected with this yet unjelled opposition to both Neo-Liberalism and Neo-Conservatism.
January 22, 2007 5:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
For those unaware of Chalmers Johnson, I highly recommend the reading of an opinion of his that ran in the Los Angeles Times May 4, 2000, and is currently republished at Common Dreams: "The Consequences Of Our Actions Abroad - Americans Feeling the Effects of 'Blowback'". When reading it, be sure to keep the original publish date of this article in your mind, as it is over a year prior to September 11, 2001.
For anyone looking for more, SourceWatch offers pointers to Chalmers Johnson analysis available online.
January 23, 2007 3:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
<p>There are many most would consider right-sided within the political bipolarity who are vehemently opposed to any war that cannot be clearly, and unequivocally an act of self-defense. A few examples:</p>
<ul><li><a xhref="http://antiwar.com/">Antiwar dot com</a></li><li><a xhref="http://www.independent.org/research/copal/">Independent Institute's Center on Peace and Liberty</a></li><li><a xhref="http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_08_28/taki.html">Taki Theodoracopulos in The American Conservative 8/8/06</a></li><li><a xhref="http://www.lewrockwell.com/">Lew Rockwell dot com</a></li><li>Original Libertarian Theorist, <a xhref="http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard84.html">Murray N. Rothbard, 'War and Foreign Policy'</a></li></ul>
<p>And BTW, Ghandi would not have stood for Canadian rape and pillage, but he would not have advocated violence either; he would have resisted peacefully with sit-ins.</p>
January 23, 2007 6:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
I buy that. I remember the Libertarians said they were against it before it started. I think maybe Pat Buchannon was pretty skeptical too.
I suppose, Peter Beinert notwithstanding, usually warmongers are nationalists and that almost always means right wing, even if not all right wingers are war mongers.
January 23, 2007 9:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
If Eisenhower can admit that, at least the part about the economic issues, can't 'netroots' at least acknowledge it too?
As I said though, you get yourself in the position of being accused of 'pacifism' if you are broadly anti-war, and that you'd just hide in the attic while the bandits raped your wife.
I remember being accused of lacking personal valor in several forum board discussions ("You'd just stand by as they raped your wife!") back in the 2002 runnup.
Ironically, I've been in my share of adult scuffles, but at least I'm not proud of them - not to mention I don't think punching someone or packing heat gives me a privileged postion to advocate invading a sovereign nation.
Does it then mean if you get in fistfights, you get to send others off to die for no and/or bad reasons?
January 23, 2007 10:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm looking foward to having Chalmers Johnson involved in a discussion here. Have been on the waiting list for Nemesis at the library and will pick the book up this afternoon.
January 23, 2007 10:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
Pacifism is basically verbotten in the US.
Something of an historical sidenote, but it wasn't until the mid-1970s that the Supreme Court recognized as legitimate a non-religious basis for conscientious objection. Before that, legally, only people adhering to religious beliefs opposed to war could be considered pacifists.
January 23, 2007 11:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
Even Bob Novak (excuse my language) was against the Iraq invasion before we went in.
Tom
January 23, 2007 7:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
I apologise for the visual html code. When I was editing the previous post, I was also engaged in configuring a private WiFi network for my broadband feed to enable laptop Internet access around the house, and lost the signal. It seems that I placed my externally edited html post into the rich text editor, and then saved it. By the time I returned, the post had been responded to, ending any opportunity to rectify it.
A possible plus though; if anyone is having difficulty figuring out how to configure an Embarq(aka Sprint) provided Zytel DSL modem with a third-party router, message me. The modem is set for different defaults than the Specs in the Embarq docs.
January 24, 2007 4:17 AM | Reply | Permalink