[Peace-discuss] John Nichols writes about Chalmers Johnson

[E. Wayne Johnson]

'Chalmers Johnson, a true son of the wisest and best of the founding 
generation, spoke the language of James Madison, when he argued that a 
republic could not maintain more than 700 military bases on foreign soil 
and retain its own freedom.

It was a Madisonian impulse that caused Johnson to warn us that "as 
militarism, the arrogance of power, and the euphemisms required to 
justify imperialism inevitably conflict with America's democratic 
structure of government and distort its culture and basic values, I fear 
that we will lose our country."

It is a similarly Madisonian impulse, or what remains of it, that will 
cause genuine patriots to read Johnson as they do the founders for 
generations to come.'

***

[It is a sort of sorrow that we too frequently dismiss our friends and 
potential allies because they see fit to support ideas that we don't 
exactly agree with.  We shed too much of our own blood upon the ghastly 
altar of partisanism, on the one hand dissing a group because of their 
confused religiosity (not because of their faith) and on the other hand 
attacking another group as being immoral (rather than accepting their 
human condition).  I think we can all accept goodness as good and we can 
agree on some of the things in our world that are truly not only lacking 
in truth and value but also malicious and dangerously destructive to our 
being.

Chalmers Johnson passed away this week as I noted previously.  He was 
admired by anarchists, conservatives, libertarians and even progressives 
and liberals.

Lew Rockwell, the Daily Paul, and even The Nation noted his passing.

John Nichols at The Nation wrote a particularly good tribute to Chalmers 
Johnson. - ewj]

http://www.thenation.com/blog/156598/chalmers-johnson-and-patriotic-struggle-against-empire

Johnson, a frequent contributor to /The Nation/ 
<http://www.thenation.com/search/apachesolr_search/chalmers%20johnson> 
in his later years, argued in his most impressive book, /The Sorrows of 
Empire/ 
<http://www.amazon.com/Sorrows-Empire-Militarism-Republic-American/dp/0805077979/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_c>, 
that Americans needed to recognize something that their leaders denied: 
that the United States, a nation founded in opposition to empire, had 
become an empire.

"/The Sorrows of Empire/ was written during the American preparations 
for and launching of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and 
Iraq," he explained. "I began to study our continuous military buildup 
since World War II and the 737 military bases we currently maintain in 
other people's countries. This empire of bases is the concrete 
manifestation of our global hegemony, and many of the blowback-inducing 
wars we have conducted had as their true purpose the sustaining and 
expanding of this network. We do not think of these overseas deployments 
as a form of empire; in fact, most Americans do not give them any 
thought at all until something truly shocking, such as the treatment of 
prisoners a Guantánamo Bay, brings them to our attention. But the people 
living next door to these bases and dealing with the swaggering soldiers 
who brawl and sometimes rape their women certainly think of them as 
imperial enclaves, just as the people of ancient Iberia or 
nineteenth-century India knew that they were victims of foreign 
colonization."

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