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Behind the Headlines
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com
August 25, 2000
BLOWBACK: READ THIS BOOK!
[Editor's Note: This article first appeared in the September 2000 issue of
Chronicles, and is reprinted with permission. Chronicles, by the way, is my
very favorite magazine: it a journal of cutting edge conservatism that is both
literate and timely, far better than the neo-conservative pap pumped out by the
likes of National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the American Spectator. If
you like my writing, you'll love Chronicles � which features my work pretty
regularly. You can subscribe at the special introductory rate of $19 per year
using your credit card by calling 1-800-877-5459, or by sending a check to:
Chronicles, P.O. Box 800, Mount Morris IL 61054. Take my word for it � you'll
be glad you did.]
In his classic study of noninterventionist or "isolationist" thought, Not to
the Swift, historian Justus Doenecke takes note of a phenomenon that might be
called "Asialationism" � conservative politicians and publicists of the postwar
era who were opposed to meddling in the intrigues of Europe but saw Asia as the
equivalent of the long-vanished American frontier, and the East as the natural
arena of American expansionism. In the postwar world, the old America Firsters
"became concentrated less and less upon withdrawal from the world's passions
and battles, and more and more upon the most hazardous commitments on the Asian
continent." The Asialationists of today don't much like the US military
occupation of the Balkans, but the military occupation of Japan, South Korea,
and Okinawa are "vital" American interests. Putin is a pussycat, but the
"Chicoms," in these circles, are a looming presence, a rising challenge to
American hegemony that must be "contained."
THE ANTIDOTE
In the 1950s, as the cold war delivered the conservative movement to the tender
mercies of various ex-communist and pseudo-Trotskyist charlatans, still a
minority within a minority retained the old faith. Doenecke recounts that, even
at the height of the cold war hysteria, the "genuine outsiders" like Lawrence
Dennis, the seditiously acerbic mulatto intellectual, historian Harry Elmer
Barnes, essayist Garet Garrett and precious few others "called in vain for a
return to a more consistent and cautious ideology." Garrett, the most lyrical
and bitter of this Old Right band, wondered aloud: "How could we lose China or
Europe, since they never belonged to us?" The question was drowned out by the
strident voices of the Cold War chorus, on the liberal "anti-Communist" left as
well as the right, and not asked again for half a century. Now that the cold
war is over, Chalmers Johnson has raised this question with renewed urgency in
Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (Metropolitan Books,
268 pp., $26.00), a "must-read" book that is the perfect antidote for present-
day Asialationism
PRISONERS OF HISTORY
In 1952, Garrett opined that by the time we discover our Republic has become an
Empire "it may be already too late to do anything about it. That is to say, a
time comes when Empire finds itself a prisoner of history." There is the same
sense of irony and self-inflicted tragedy in Johnson's indictment of American
globalism. "Many may, as a start, find it hard to believe that our place in the
world even adds up to an empire," he writes. "But only when we come to see our
country as both profiting from and trapped within the structures of an empire
of its own making will it be possible for us to explain a great many elements
of the world that otherwise perplex us."
"AS YE SOW . . ."
Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, presents his general
theme by illustrating it with examples in his area of expertise, the nations of
the Pacific Rim. The book opens by examining the ugly spectacle of Imperial
America in the miniature model of Okinawa. Johnson paints a vivid portrait of
the island's fate as an exploited and thoroughly trashed outpost of empire,
where rape, robbery, and traffic accidents involving US military personnel
surpass the crime rates of our own inner cities. Chapters on Indonesia, the two
Koreas, China, and Japan illustrate the overarching theme of "blowback,"
succinctly summed up in the old biblical injunction that "as ye sow, so shall
ye reap." "Blowback" means not just terrorist attacks on the multitude of US
military bases and other targets abroad, but the not-so-long-range economic and
political consequences of imperial overstretch. In this ambitious book, Johnson
presents the outlines of an alternative, non-Marxist theory of American
imperialism: "Marx and Lenin were mistaken about the nature of imperialism," he
avers. "It is not the contradictions of capitalism that lead to imperialism but
imperialism that breeds some of the more important contradictions of
capitalism. When these contradictions ripen, as they must, they create
devastating economic crises."
JAPAN'S 'THIRD WAY'
Particularly fascinating is Johnson's analysis of how the cold war distorted
the global economy, and hollowed out America's industrial base, leading to
malinvestment and subsequent overcapacity in our East Asian satellites. Japan
is a prime case in point. During the cold war era, Japan's strategic value
outweighed � in the eyes of US political leaders and economic planners � its
growing role as an economic competitor. Americans provided open access to their
markets without expecting or demanding reciprocity, while the Japanese supinely
accepted their role as a eunuch state, disarmed but kept fat and happy by their
American overlords. As what Johnson calls a "developmental state," along with
the other Asian "tigers," Japan developed its own variety of mercantilist
capitalism, a "third way" between the socialism of the Soviet bloc and what
Johnson deems American-style "laissez-faire."
IMPERIALIST ECONOMICS
This Nipponese "third way," however, was not an ideological alternative, but
the survival mechanism of a defeated people. Japanese industrial policy, set by
a permanent and unelected bureaucracy, was geared to serve the interests of
producers, not consumers. Giant cartels, or zaibatsu, stood at the apex of an
export-driven economy, churning out inexpensive manufactured goods for the US
market and making their own people pay ten times the world market price for
their number one food staple, rice. Other Asian nations, huddled under the US
defense umbrella, followed the Japanese example, South Korea and Taiwan being
the exemplars. Imperialism distorted the normal evolution of these developing
nations, and made them economically dependent on their political and especially
their military relationship with the US. This peculiar form of imperial
symbiosis had a debilitating effect on both the Americans and the Japanese: it
led to the deindustrialization of America and a great deal of Japanese
malinvestment. In America, the deterioration of the steel, auto, and other
heavy industries created a "Rust Belt" and decimated the ranks of working class
families: in Japan, MITI economic planners manipulated the controls of their
industrial policy machine, reducing interest rates to zero percent, and
creating a world-historic "bubble" that burst around 1998, when the Japanese
economy plunged into recession.
BURDEN OF EMPIRE
MITI's economic planners, rather than undertake needed reforms � which would
have meant the wholesale restructuring of the Japanese economy � fell back on
what they knew: they would export their way out of their predicament. Resisting
pressures to open their markets to American goods, the Japanese continued to
develop the fine art of economic warfare behind a wall of protective tariffs,
taxes, and other barriers to free trade. In trade negotiations with the US
government, the Japanese held the trump card: would the Americans prefer that
suddenly impoverished Japanese holders of US government securities converted
their assets to cash? This would be the ultimate � and, perhaps, the most
destabilizing � form of "blowback" possible: the bursting of the American
bubble and the beginning of a worldwide economic meltdown. This is the true
meaning of "globalization," the internationalist buzzword of the moment: the US
is being held hostage by its own satellites, a prisoner of history and the
hubris of its leaders. Johnson's powerful thesis is that we are bound to buckle
under the burden of empire, it is only a matter of time before the American
Imperium goes the way of its Roman, British, and Soviet predecessors.
THE SOVIET PARADIGM
Johnson's critique of America's global empire as comparable, in form and
function, to its Soviet counterpart is sure to enrage those old cold warriors
who rank the sin of "moral equivalence" as a kind of blasphemy. Johnson is glad
to cede to them the moral high ground while making the vital point that this
make no difference whatsoever in analyzing how our system of client states has
actually functioned. The case of South Korea is especially illuminating � and
newsworthy, as we witness the rise of a new Korean nationalism and the momentum
of reunification erasing borders, political structures, and inter-state
alliances born at the height of the cold war. In his chapter on South Korea,
Johnson likens the Kwangju uprising of 1980 to the suppression of the Hungarian
revolution of 1956, with the only difference being that the Soviets used their
own troops while we depended on our South Korean surrogates. When a South Korea
general headed off democratic elections with a coup, in 1980, and imposed
martial law; student protesters in Kwangju were bayoneted by elite South Korean
military forces who had been withdrawn from the DMZ with much more than tacit
US consent: as Johnson shows, quoting recently-released cables to and from then-
US ambassador William J. Gleysteen, the US coordinated the bloody crushing of
the Kwangju rebellion just as surely as the Kremlin planted its jackboot on the
neck of Imre Nagy and the Hungarian revolutionaries. During the cold war, South
Korea had no more choice to opt out of its military alliance with the US than
the nations of the Warsaw Pact were free to leave the Warsaw Pact.
SOUTH KOREA � AN AMERICAN PROVINCE
This inability to get out from under the "protection" of the US hegemon is even
more pronounced in the post-cold war era, when there is nothing to protect
South Korea against except the accelerating implosion of North Korean
communism. As President Kim Dae Jung, a former dissident who served time in
jail for proposing direct talks with North Korea, holds up the promise of
reunification as an achievable goal, in the imperial city of Washington the
lords of the New World Order are getting nervous. In April of 1997, Johnson
reminds us, defense secretary William Cohen declared in a visit to Seoul that
American troops would stay stationed on the peninsula even if North and South
Korea were reunified � a statement that was met with widespread shock, at the
time, not only by the Chinese but by the South Koreans, who increasingly view
the GIs in their midst as more of a threat than North Korea's million-man army.
SEOUL'S SEARCH FOR NUKES
Johnson's account of the origins and development of South Korea as a US client
state emphasizes the underlying current of Korean nationalism that is just now
breaking through to the surface. General Park Chung-hee's coup d'etat of 1961
ushered in a decade of what appeared, on the surface, to be an era of seamless
coordination between Washington and Seoul, with the dominance of the former and
the latter's dependence completely beyond question. But Johnson reveals another
side to the history of this relationship which is little-known in the West yet
instrumental in understanding what is happening in Korea today. Johnson tells
the story of how Gen. Park, seeing the fate of America's South Vietnamese
clients, was determined that South Korea could go it alone � by acquiring
nuclear weapons. South Korea launched a nuclear weapons program that was
supposed to bear radioactive fruit in 1985 � but Park was assassinated before
the project really got off the ground.
ANOTHER "LONE GUNMAN"?
It was, of course, just a coincidence that his assassin was South Korea's chief
of intelligence, Kim Jae-kyu, who just happened to be Park's main liasion with
Washington. The two were having dinner, and sometime between the appetizers and
the drinks the KCIA chief pulled out a pistol shot Park in the head, and
wounded a bodyguard. The official story is that he did it to protest the
"repression against the people" � a repression implemented by none other than
the assassin himself, the commander of Park's political police. While Americans
have long since explained away virtually all political assassinations by means
of the "lone gunmen" story, Koreans are understandably more skeptical.
THE GERMAN ROAD
The "isolationism" and "xenophobia" said to permeate the North is in reality a
national characteristic, a stubborn willfulness that resents foreign intrusion
and is the legacy of a whole series of Japanese invasions beginning in the
1500s. Park was an anti-Communist, but he was a Korean first. The same
nationalism underlies the ostensibly Marxist ideology of the North: Kim Jong Il
may be the hereditary "communist" monarch of the North Korean workers paradise,
but it turns out he is also a Korean patriot. Starvation is said to induce
clarity of mind, at least in the first stages, and perhaps the effects of the
famine are being personally felt by North Korea's "Great Leader." In such
circumstances, a square meal comes before ideology. Although widely
characterized as being not ready for prime time, he is proving his mettle as a
world leader by outflanking the US and China � neither of which are all that
eager to see a united Korea. The wily Kim Jong Il, by endorsing reunification
and entering into serious negotiations, is betting on making as "soft" a
landing as his German counterparts. When the Berlin Wall fell, the ruling
Socialist Unity Party (SED), once a bastion of orthodox Stalinism, quickly
mutated into the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), which in practice serves
as the far left wing of the German Social Democracy. As the artificial wall
separating the two Koreas begins to crack, the Korean Communists could easily
take the same road.
THE "SOFT" OPTION
The same military and political establishment that insists on indefinitely
maintaining our cold war "forward" stance on the Korea peninsula, as a
permanent obstacle to Korean reunification, also sees China as an emerging
threat to American hegemony that must be either "engaged" or "contained" � but
never adjusted to. The irony, Johnson points out, is that a united Korea could
well provide a regional counter-balance to this alleged Chinese threat. The
author's view of China reflects his view of Asia's capitalist developmental
states � Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and even Japan � that they are "soft"
authoritarian states. These states, while nominally democratic, are really
ruled over by unelected bureaucrats, with varying degrees of popular
participation and consent. China is an example of "soft totalitarianism," where
the media is openly controlled by the state; Johnson contrasts this with the
Japanese model of speech control, where "such freedoms exist on paper but are
attenuated in part by cartelization of the news media � press clubs in Japan
can impose collective or individual penalties on journalists who report news
that irritates the state." Elections are formally held under both systems, with
China's soft totalitarians using police methods to ensure the outcome and
Japan's soft authoritarian regime employing more subtle but no less effective
means to guarantee a similar result, achieving its ends "through peer pressure,
bullying, fear of ostracism, giving priority to group norms, and eliciting
conformity through social sanctions of various kinds."
CULTURE TRUMPS IDEOLOGY
Under both types of regimes, elections are mere formalities, and the economic
reforms in China have further blurred the differences between the "socialist"
and "capitalist" wings of developing Asia. Beneath the thin veneer of ideology,
the underlying character of the various national cultures shapes the social and
political evolution of the Asian tigers, including that giant mastadon, China.
Johnson points out that "the real economic model for mainland China, although
never mentioned for all the obvious reasons, is undoubtedly neither Japan nor
South Korea but Taiwan" under the Nationalists, where thriving state-party
enterprises comprise half the nation's wealth. Left to themselves, Johnson
suggests, China and Taiwan could come to some peaceful conclusion to their long-
drawn out family feud � a possibility that once seemed more likely than the
prospect of Korean reunification.
THE WALL STREET � TREASURY COMPLEX
The cold war ended, but Americans did not go home: instead they stayed to guard
the frontiers of empire against an enemy that has long since vanished. More
than that: they launched a new holy war, this time a whole series of
"humanitarian" interventions in tandem with an ideological campaign to impose
"free market democracy" on the rest of the world. Johnson dismisses the
overrated Francis Fukuyama, the "right"-Hegelian Deep Thinker of "The End of
History" fame, as "the apologist for America." Fukuyama's thesis that history
ended with the invention of McDonald's and the advent of MTV � and that this,
along with the apparent death of communism, would have to mean that there was
no alternative to Western democratic capitalism � or, at least, no legitimate
one that deserved to be let alone to develop in its own way. But the
universalism of Western elites would never permit such a strategy of benign
neglect. Johnson, citing Jagdish Bhagwati, a fervent free trader and former
GATT official, points to the existence of the "Wall Street-Treasury Complex"
(WTC) that is "comparable to the military-industrial complex, which contributes
little to the global economy but profits enormously from pretending that it
does."
THE NEW UTOPIANS
With US hegemony in the military realm assured, and the public largely unaware
of its government's machinations, "government officials, economic theorists,
and members of the Wall Street-Treasury Complex launched an astonishingly
ambitious, even megalomaniacal attempt to make the rest of the world adopt
American economic institutions and norms. One could argue that the project
reflected the last great expression of eighteenth-century Enlightenment
rationalism, as idealistic and utopian as the paradise of pure communism that
Marx envisioned." This megalomania is reflected not just in Fukuyama's
hubristic thesis, but in the Clinton Doctrine that commits the US to the
forcible eradication of "racism" and "ethnic intolerance" even if we have to
invade the every country on earth to do it � invading not only militarily, as
in Kosovo, but also launching economic attacks on the currency of targeted
nations, such as Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia, with oddly coordinated
strikes at the value of local currencies. "Although there is no evidence that
Washington hatched a conspiracy to extend the scope of its global hegemony,"
writes Johnson, "a sense of moral superiority on the part of some and of
opportunism on the part of others more than sufficed to create a similar
effect." It wouldn't be the first time government worked in tandem with finance
capital to achieve common political and financial objectives.
THE REAL 'THIRD WAY'
I can't say I agree with all of the author's policy prescriptions � he calls
for "managed trade," which is what we have now � but what is important is the
broad sweep of his analysis of militarized state capitalism as the inevitable
outcome of an imperial foreign policy. His critique of Western capitalism as no
less cartelized than the zaibatsu of Japan is sharp, at times: he notes
disdainfully the "crony capitalism" that enabled the government bailout of Long-
Term Capital Management, a huge hedge fund gone broke headed by former Federal
Reserve vice chairman David W. Mullins. As the International Monetary Fund goes
on the rampage in the Far East, decimating national economies and turning
crisis into catastrophe, Johnson acerbically notes that "globalization seems to
boil down to the spread of poverty to every country except the United States."
ROGUE SUPERPOWER
There is much talk of "rogue states" these days, and what to do about them: but
the real problem, as Johnson points out, is that the world is afflicted by a
"rogue superpower" � the US. Lecturing, threatening, and overtly seeking to
overthrow any and all regimes that fail to bow low enough before the American
hegemon, Madam secretary Albright travels the world braying about the virtues
of "democracy" and "free markets": in February 1998, explaining why it was
necessary to launch cruise missiles against Iraq, Mad Madeleine launched into
one of her trademark tirades: "If we have to use force, it is because we are
America," she bawled. "We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see
farther into the future."
PYRRHIC "VICTORY"
These people see no further than the next election, the next indictment, or the
next big campaign contribution from a weapons contractor. Like such Old Right
critics of the Warfare State as John T. Flynn, Johnson sees the role of the
arms lobby and an ever-growing military establishment as "the indispensable
instrument for maintaining the American empire." We have won a post-cold war
arms race, he avers, "that had no other participants," all to feed the
voracious appetite of an American military machine that has become autonomous,
an imperial Praetorian Guard armed with thermonuclear weapons � and ready for a
Caesar.
CRISIS OF EMPIRE
The unintended consequences of the cold war, predicts Johnson, will linger well
into the 21st century, the history of which will in large part be an account of
the blowback from the twentieth. Only an awareness of the crisis of empire
among American citizens can hope to avert or at least ameliorate it: Our
leaders believe that "if so much as one overseas American base is closed or one
small country is allowed to manage its own economy, the world will collapse,"
but "they might better ponder the creativity and growth that would be unleashed
in only the United States would relax its suffocating embrace." The publication
of Johnson's eloquent plea for a foreign policy more like the Founding Fathers'
and less like that of, say,Caligula, or Charlemagne, is really a case of good
timing, for the crisis of empire predicted in these pages seems almost upon us.
"Although it is impossible to say when this game will end," he writes, "there
is little doubt about how it will end." That it could end differently, that we
could pull back from the abyss of empire before it's too late, is a growing
possibility as more Americans wake up to the dangers of a rapacious American
globalism. Certainly our chances are improved by the addition of Johnson's
voice to the growing chorus calling for restraint.
A NOTE TO OUR READERS
>From time to time, we get letters of protest from angry readers who object to
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The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational
tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the
State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate
repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the
"democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist
by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse
of objective necessity. He strives to show that the existence of
taxation and the State necessarily sets up a class division between
the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that
the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State
has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to
accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a
share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded
subjects.
[[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard,
Fox & Wilkes, 1973, 1978, p. 25]]
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