Conversations with History: Chalmers Johnson

[Music] [Music] welcome to a conversation with history I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies our guest today is Chalmers Johnson who is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute a nonprofit research and public affairs organization devoted to public education concerning Japan and international relations in the Pacific he taught for 30 years 1962 to 90 1992 at the Berkeley and San Diego campuses of the University of California and held endowed chairs in Asian politics at both of them his most recent books a trilogy focus on the American Empire they are blowback The Sorrows of Empire and now his new book nemesis the last days of the American Republic Chalmers welcome back to Berkeley thank you very much Harry it's always a pleasure to be here tell us how you chose that title nemesis is the ancient Greek goddess of revenge of retribution The Punisher of hubris and arrogance she's a very important figure in iconography usually shown as a fierce young woman usually with the scales in one hand and a whip and the other but she's uh a very legitimate goddess she was the sister of urato the goddess of love poetry she for the readers of youth Edith Hamilton and and other Greek mythology books you will recall she's the one who led who found narcissus in the woods led him to the pond showed him his reflection he fell in love with it no VIN and drowned but I'm suggesting that nemesis is present in our country now waiting for her divine mission mm-hmm and in your book is really an analysis of the consequences of Empire which you've traced in the previous two books on the American Republic and in summary the chickens have come home to roost yes I mean the the essential the it's not the certainly the only argument but the essential argument in nemesis is that there is no more unstable critical configuration history tells us than the one of the United States today that is a domestic democracy combined with a foreign Empire the two don't mix you could be one you can be the other but you don't get to do both if you try it you're it's going to work out one way or the other you're going to lose your domestic democracy as for example did the Roman Republic which is significant because so much of our principles in the Constitution were derived from the Roman Republic or I suggested a book there is an alternative you could like the British I'm not a great admirer of the British Empire by a matter of means but the British Empire after World War Two having just defeated Nazism it became apparent I think to the English that it was not possible to retain the jewel in the crown India except short of administrative massacres the British had used of them often enough in the past but it was now no longer acceptable in light of Nazi behavior during World War two therefore I argue they gave up their Empire in order to retain their democracy and it is something I believe we in this country ought to be talking about very seriously mm-hmm and in fact if we look at your intellectual Odyssey which we talked about in the last interview it's quite interesting as an agent as a distinguished Asian scholar you actually were involved as a consultant to the CIA commenting on National Intelligence Estimates yeah and now in this book and in a recent article in Harper's you're I guess I would say you're you're trying to write an ni a for the people and and the American democracy it is illegal to write a National Intelligence Estimate on states.the see it CIA is not supposed to do intelligence on the United States of course it has on numerous occasions gone ahead and actually done that that's what I tried to do in the in the Harper's piece but it is an nie is relevant it seems to be in that it it deals with what the best the intelligence community can do in putting together that has of the future as I say at the end of the of the Harper's piece my wife used to ask me why is this stuff so highly classified and I think brother's probably highly classified because it's the best we can do and it would be embarrassing to actually display to the world the best we can do our intelligence functions are not very good despite the original purposes of the Central Intelligence Agency and the way of and the legislation that created it let's talk a little about the history that one finds throughout the the one finds throughout the book you've talked already about the comparison with with Rome and Great Britain in Hope in with the hope of understanding this challenge and and I have a quote here you say the problem was that the Roman Constitution made administration of so large and diverse an area increasingly difficult and subtly altered the norms and interests that underlay the need for compromise and consensus precisely that is to say it's I mean to look at the United States today the president goes around saying I am the decider it's hard to think labore absurd remark more hostile to our Constitution he's anything but the decider it's to be done by consensus through the separation of powers things of this this is of course what is breaking down it goes back to probably the most important piece of advice ever given to us by a former president I would certainly include Eisenhower but it's the original one it's George Washington's farewell address that it's read to the opening session of Congress each each due term in which he said the great enemy Liberty is standing armies and the particular enemy of republican liberty what he meant by it is that of course standing armies as distinct from raising an army to defend the country in a time of national emergency that standing armies draw power to Washington destroy federalism increase the power of the presidency increased secrecy and government draw funds from throughout the country into the military in a certain sense Eisenhower's warning in 1961 which he used the phrase and invented it military industrial complex was a further manifestation of this warning that the great that is say the intervening variable but do sound social science II the intervening variable between domestic democracy and foreign imperialism is militarism that to have an empire and let's always remember an empire is a pure form of tyranny it never rules through consent it rules through military force even though the British and the Americans love to say to themselves they have a industry of writing books about how foreigners love us but you you don't rule through consent in any way shape or form in order to create the Empire to protect it to expand it you need armed forces and that you then get the most common picture in our minds of American troops in Iraq a burly fellow with the half a dozen other well-fed Americans standing there kicking down the door of a private home rushing in with an assault rifle pointing it at cowering women and hollering democracy in a language that nobody in the room understands it's I think this is the the it's whether the issue comes up that you can't as militarism is an inescapable accompaniment of imperialism and the north tourism will force changes domestically this was what the British I think did realize in 1945 to keep India they would have to become I domestic tyranny they'd have to change their own government and the public would not stand for administrative massacres and it therefore the the choice was stark they also were fortunate one sense they know that they could piggyback called the backs of American power at the time so that it was somewhat easy but their leaders had the courage to make this decision right now not done perfectly there were many fall backs many atavistic responses including the god-awful war against the Kikuyu in in kenya in the 1950s the agro French Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956 you could certainly mention today speaking of atavisms Tony Blair and of all the places you would have thought any halfway intelligent English Prime Minister would not get involved in was Iraq which they had already bungled in creating after the first world war and were the first people to really use poison gas in Mesopotamia but there they are back at a bad mistake yeah as one looks at your analysis of the empire and we're going to get back to this harper's article in a few minutes you you give us a compelling analysis of where America is today and and and just reading some of the chapter titles militarism and the breakdown of constitutional government the CIA the president's private army US military bases and other people's country how Empire works the status of force agreement in Japan and so on what is striking I think is your accounts of these aspects of American Empire really trace a history of the United States so at the one you wrong level you're saying things have really gotten bad recently but this is an evolution so history becomes important in a second sense anyway saying that this is all bush administration there's no doubt that they have done disastrously stupid things and it made it worse it in other sense I would argue if you were a serious committed American imperialist you'd have liked a Bill Clinton better than George Bush he was more subtle he tried to disguise what he was doing called it globalization in electable forces technological change that the market made me do it sort of things whereas in the case of George Bush he along with the neoconservatives simply dropped the mask said we are the new Rome we have full spectrum dominance we could enforce our will through military power that immediately sets up the realization that they're coming what it might take to resist the Americans it might take nuclear weapons that certainly cross the minds of some people in Tehran and jungyeon so so looking at this leap that has made our foreign policy are we looking at a Schumpeterian atavism basically a group that at whose leadership at one time made sense at the end of the Second World War but over time fail to adapt which is I know as I recall what led you to write your first book blowback well I think that yes it's a very complex history one of the things I would I'm not sure that I'm the best word on it at all I'm one of the things I'm trying to do here as a retired professor is open up this territory to make it a little bit safer for young scholars critical sciences almost failed hopelessly it did it if it's no interesting signal in the in the world today and that these things should be being studied my argument would be we are mistakes and the invitation to dhimmis began with the collapse of the Soviet Union we miss analyzed it we said that we won the Cold War the truth of matter is we both lost it lost it they lost it first because they were always much bored but we're both now suffering from the same kinds of pressures of ideological rigidity Imperial overstretch inability to reform even though give Gorbachev credit he did try it's then it seems to me that we make the historic errors in the 1990s and particularly carried on by the so called neoconservatives but generally speaking the American establishment concluded that we were a new realm we were the lone superpower these are hubristic terms if you ever assaulted that we can't rule through military force that back at the end of the first Bush administration when Wolfowitz was in the in the department of defense he already wrote the strategy that said our policy should be to prevent any nation or combination of nations friend or foe posing any kind of a military challenge to us this leads that into defense budgets that are larger than all other defense budgets combined that's the current state in the United States playing with bankruptcy to producing the worst debts in recorded history and things of this mm-hmm your analysis really gives us a closed system that showing us how all the parts work well there's something further on there what people have often asked me you weren't a cold warrior I said it said how did you change your mind what was the ad if one of the things that I think is very important here is that when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 the thing that struck me most vividly is how our government went to work instantly to find a replacement enemy the military-industrial complex had to be kept it being it could be China it could be drug lords it could be terrorism even instability anything to keep the thing going which is also relates to what happened in the Soviet Union Gorbachev did certainly conclude he'd rather have friendly relations with with Germany and France than these crummy satellites that were left over from Stalin's imperialism in the in Eastern Europe he tried it he read into vested interests that he could not surmount I believe the same is true today I cannot think of any president in any party who could truly stand up to the military-industrial complex he's down so deeply embedded in our own society as a way of providing jobs for Americans or to the Central Intelligence Agency one of the points that you emphasize in this book and in the Harper's article is is the the importance of what you're talking about now and you call it military Keynesianism and and what we've done my phrase actually goes back to a a Polish economist during World War two who invented the phrase to explain the first German economic miracle that is Hitler's elimination of depressed conditions in Germany through armaments expenditures it does obviously mean pump priming but not in truly in the Keynesian sense there's still counter cyclical aspect to it there is in fact once you start using the military budget to provide jobs you'd be develop a vicious cycle that leads to wars that Wars lead to war our misspending and the thing you never and you can't turn off the spigot you'd never cut back yeah so so that so that and this this because the the Empire basis which you talked about in the second book is the is the the muscles of the Empire which go out in the world and behave in the way you discover they behave in Okinawa when you help write that report but but what what you're you're the new element here I mean it's not an idea that's necessarily original with you but you are applying it to this context which is to say hey there's a bigger issue here and when we add two military Keynesianism privatization then you've got a whole new set of problems that you can't change the thing begins to get badly out of control let me stress here that there are still many Americans who have trouble with the idea that we are it the we that it's an empire that we are imperialist and I think it's worth emphasizing that of course we recognize British French Dutch Portuguese empires as places that through colonies around the world and often involved a good deal of immigration from the home country I'm contending that yes those were certainly empires but that's not the only kind then there was another good example of an empire and that was what the Soviet Union did create in Eastern Europe at the end of World War two satellites with foreign troops based either in the country or on the territory integrated into the economy of the Soviet bloc and with leaders that were puppets of the Soviet regime we do that our unit of empire is the military base of which according to the most recent official count the base structure report which is an unclassified Pentagon report there's seven hundred thirty seven of them around the world apologists for the Pentagon like to go around saying oh well these are marine guards in embassies that simply isn't true we don't have there aren't that many countries we certainly do not have 700 embassies around the world these are genuine military bases with all of the problems of the local population having to live with healthy young Marines most of whom have good deal of racism built into them as Americans believe that they are divinely appointed to hunt down evildoers but that lead to endless bar brawls sexually violent crimes hit-and-run accidents environmental pollution noise pollution Okinawa is a million example thirty-seven American military bases on an island smaller than Hawaii in the Hawaiian Islands a million 300,000 Okinawan is living there the reason for it of course is that the Japanese government itself the Japanese people probably like the Japanese American security treaty but they assuredly do not like the thought of having any American troops living anywhere near them so they dump them you know in a Japanese equivalent of Puerto Rico an island that was acquired late in the 19th century by the Japanese Empire has always been discriminated against they couldn't care less in Tokyo the people of Okinawa feel about having 17,000 Marines of the third Marine Division and the largest American military facility in East Asia Kadena Air Force Base plug down in the middle of there in their midst and there's a quite an irony here because you earlier you talked about comparing the Clinton administration with the Bush administration and on the on the in the liberal side of the debate in our country the notion of humanitarian intervention the notion that we will spread democracy and our ideals but what you're suggesting is that the the underside of these military the status of force agreements all over the world create a situation where rules are in place that make our soldiers able to act outside of the law absolutely and create really a kind of deal Ajith amaizing of American power so even at the same time that the Japanese may want our security umbrella right the people and the mayor's are really up in arms about the their young women being raped or American soldiers being outside of the law when they commit a murder and they're expensive these bases are is it an entirely separate budget from the defense appropriation is called the defense facilities appropriation it's the two mother hens of this Subcommittee on the Senate Armed Services Committee or kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas and Dianne Feinstein of California in the states with the largest number of military bases in which they're extremely protective and pay attention to also what is said spread around the world on on military bases but of course these our troops have privileges that are very similar to those of the former Soviet troops located at East Germany before the wall came down they were living better in Germany certainly that they would lived back in Russia our Marines are living better in Okinawa than they would live in a rather crummy stateside town like Oceanside California next door to Camp Pendleton I know since I live in northern San Diego County the add the costs are very very high and Americans have no appreciation of it whatsoever because we have no foreign military bases in the United States mm-hmm you can also be absolutely certain Americans would not tolerate it what one hour are the sort of things that are simply routine in Oh Aviano air base in northern Italy where have you seen in just this past month we've had major demonstrations against the enlargement of a base it means enca Vincenza is the old Palladian city for the most famous architecture on earth you could well imagine that people don't like the idea of enlarging the base more that's one of the places they store cluster bombs and things like that none of its attractive as I was taking notes on your book and was thinking about in preparation for the interview it sort of struck me that that the way Americans deceive themselves about what they're doing is the extent to which the these these actions especially abroad are encapsulated that we said we tend to see if we think of the bases we think protection of the peoples of the world we think the McDonald's and the Burger Kings that we've put there and this is spreading economic incentive right well what you're suggesting is that in many ways the the the the encapsulation the walls burst basically among the local populations and now under President Bush in examples like the renditions which ought to come more intense so that but what what you're basically saying is you can't keep these walls up that what what you have is a malignancy it appears to be but not it appears to be benign but what you're saying when you add these up and you're doing more and more of it that it really turns malignant and then it meant metastasize it turns into deceit I mean we uh we have huge numbers of bases in Great Britain they're mostly disguised as Royal Air Force bases in something that went back to the to the early Cold War it all done through administrative agreements between our ambassador and British authorities there are no Englishmen on these bases Englishmen know this the and they're all over the world the as well as then the history of our interventions probably in my opinion the most anti-american democracy on earth is probably Greece they will never forgive us for five years of the Greek Colonels late late 60s early 70s installed by the CIA produced onerous regime until finally the Colonel's simply went too far themselves this it's a sort of thing that happened on 9/11 I was my book blowback had been published a year earlier on the morning of 9/11 I was chatting with my publisher in New York over what had happened we were now aware that it was a terrorist incident but it we hadn't yet tumbled to the idea that these were Islamic terrorists these were Saudi Arabians and our first thought was well look at the date September 11 September 11th 1973 is the best known date in Latin America it's the day the CIA overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile and installed probably the most odious dictator on either side in the Cold War General Augusto Pinochet so I thought maybe there Chileans they might be any number of other countries in the Southern Cone of South America maybe there Okinawans maybe there Greeks they could be any number of people of which we start adding them could be Indonesians we've got rid of close Sukarno and then put in General Suharto but finally got rid of him when he got on our nerves so so we have this a good point to show your book again nemesis by Chalmers Johnson and to point out that in your chapter on militarism no I actually think it's the chapter on this the are the president's army the CIA you actually help us understand where the Osama bin Laden came from and it's essentially the funding of the Mujahideen through Pakistan with Saudi money that that that helps us understand that day and the largest single clandestine operation we ever carried out was recruiting arming training sending in a battle of the Mujahideen against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s Osama bin Laden was without question an asset and Ally just a sort of man you would have expected to meet if you were a houseguest at Kennebunkport under the first George Bush a well at least the father the father wealthy pious young Saudi from a very wealthy family and and who was outraged by just being dumped after the Soviet Union withdrew in 1988 that allowed we had no interest at all in the fact that Afghanistan would descend into one of the most pitifulness civil wars in modern times in which it got so bad that you would welcome the Taliban finding to bring it to an end and that then when the retaliation finally did genuinely come on 9/11 it's certainly not the first I mean bin Laden attacked us in 1973 attacked our barracks in Riyadh Saudi Arabia he'd attacked two embassies in East Africa the USS Cole in the port of eight and then fighting 9/11 but then we come up with his nonsense about this is a clash of civilizations that he dislikes our way of life our democracy the president is posing these these folk questions about why do they hate us their truths the matter is a week after 9/11 bin Laden published in all the press the world his stated reasons for why we did it I mean why why we carried out what the Defense Department called an act of asymmetric warfare one was you people placed American troops in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War that wasn't necessary we do not believe that the House of Saud needed to be defended by infidel troops particularly since they are charged with defending the two most sacred sites in Islam Mecca and Medina secondly he said you Americans will never know peace so long as you continue to support one-sidedly the Israelis in their aggression against the Palestinian people and their land and third he accused us or something that we now all acknowledge that during the vigorous sanctions ever enforced in the 1990s by Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright that we killed 1/2 million Iraqi children in the process we starved them they died of disease we prohibited the importation of things that would produce clean water things of this sort I cite these not because I agree with it but these are genuine causes no I these are not abstract statements of this is a clash of medieval Islam versus modern America these are genuine grievances and it's a way of of catching our attention well he certainly did that we then made a bad mistake of making the situation worse by declaring a war on terrorism refusing to follow our procedures for people who commit crimes against innocent bystanders it would not have been to every difficult for us to have gone after the whole al-qaeda budge arrested them but the extradited that brought them back to the United States tried them in American courts found them guilty and executed them that's what we should have done and we should never have called it a war an emergency would have been a better truth I just wanna underline a point that you've made in passing which is the the the consequences of the militarization the militarism at home and the the acts of our private of our armies our secret armies abroad and in two particular things that you discuss in the book is the the way we dealt with the cultural artifacts of Iraq oh yeah after the invasion and then you just mentioned the sanctions in the 90s under Bill Clinton and the consequences for children they're actually so so in other words that that as a result of the the of this dependence on military behavior and on the Empire basis as an instrument if the primary instrument of our power we wind up taking actions that if you did a vote among the American people they would say well this is incompatible with what we stand for clear I mean if you think that we're I mean the president now spends a lot of time talking about our promotion of democracy to turn that over to the military is in saying you're not going to promote democracy through people kicking down doors and behaving the way our military does they're not trying to do that they're not any good at it they're counterproductive that there seems to be no question that the Iraqi people will hate us till the end of time that they didn't ask for this and that moreover to have had such stupid militarists that is then it turns out the war is two years old before the president is actually informed about the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam and that the regime that he just overthrew was a minority Sunni government that had dominated the mass of the Shia population in Iraq and that once you overthrew him guess what these people are going to come to power and therefore you to ally themselves with their Shia neighbors they see a superpower Iran and that this is not going to be to your advantage to Israel's advantage or any of the other pipe dreams come up with by amateurs sitting in an extremely conservative and right-wing think tanks paid for by American billionaires in Washington DC mm-hmm you actually you know talk about you call it something and it's not stupidity but the the extent well it is stupidity but there is a a when we're told that the army had went the type of the invasion we had four people of the army who spoke Arabic yeah you know that's that's stupid what do you think back to the days of the attack on the war with Japan we trained a huge cadre of extremely distinguished Japanese linguist at Boulder at University of Michigan things of this sort we don't seem capable of doing that at all anymore so but but you were you're citing the arguments of Hannah Arendt and then the whole question of just thinking you know that part of morality is just being able to look at problems and think rationally about them and and draw on the kinds of training and expertise that must exist in the government uh yes maybe I ought to say a word about that simply because I I do use one of our ents arguments and it it is always dangerous I believe in our society to ever compare anything to the Nazis but in her famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem the trial of I don't like that she covered she ended the book with this dental famous line that so I can read exactly how it goes but so is illustrated the banality of evil mm-hmm she's dead went over way later to say that she didn't really mean anything by that except that he was a desk murderer mm-hmm he he was remote from the crime itself that he was indifferent to it he was a technician supplying transportation to the death camps that rather famously in the book Eichmann has revealed himself to be well educated and claims to be a devout man judge Landau presiding over the court said in that case explained to us the meaning of Kant's categorical imperative and Iran argues I never heard it better expressed I mean there was no doubt that he knew exactly what Immanuel Kant was was getting at here the but she said he had forgotten how to think mm-hmm he no longer now that this was relevant to me I mean he had no conscience he was unable to put things in context Abu Ghraib we we come now to Americans who are torturing prisoners in extremely grotesque manner and photographing they're laughing about it these are it the the e-ring the Pentagon had signs posters putting up the of the enlisted men that have substant Livan who have been convicted that these are the six morons who who lost the war I had in my first chapter expand this to seven morons and started with the president he got out and drew general Myers and a few others that attorney Donald figures there but it is to say one of the people I had in mind was Sergeant Darby who was also in these cell blocks in in Abu Ghraib who got one of the computer disks with photographs of people in grotesque positions and being tortured and he looked at it and said this is contrary to everything I believe in contrary to everything the US Army stands for and he delivered it to army criminal and criminal investigation and that's the way it started that on to general takuya's report and things of this sort I said well even though he has been pilloried by many professional militaries in this country you know Darby was an American who had not forgotten how to think mm-hmm and and it's interesting because in the end you're somewhat pessimistic about the sideline media yeah yeah the last days of the of the American Republic but this example and and one less believe that there's a broader group of people in the military who essentially are concerned about the violation of international law and so on in the book strangely enough it's an entirely different thing but there you do an aside there on the plane spotters which and you were president of a plane spotting Association in the United States are you this is something you know and do and these were people who basically watch planes and they became key to our understanding of the renditions and all these secret planes well rendition is kept totally secret I mean that is this world of abducting people off the streets of Milan or Stockholm or whoever it might be flying them off to a detention center that we know about or one of our own in a foreign country or they will unfortunately be tortured one of our main CIA officials in the Middle East had said if you want just a good hard torture interrogation you send them to Jordan if you wanted to just disappear you send it into Egypt and and that's what we do it well nobody you do anything about this it was just under wraps as could be and you should understand these are not for captures of American fugitives to be returned to American justice this is instead a clandestine activity carried out by the department of operations within the the CIA the the CIA made some monumental blunders in the things they were doing one of which they did these flights around the world via civil aviation apparently not understanding that there is no place with more eyes awake 24 hours a day than any International Airport just hundreds of people that are watching things among the people watching which is the way the case began to be broken or something called airplane spotters they go back to World War two to the Blitz in Britain it was a very famous magazine published with official sanction by the tempo press called the aeroplane spotter that is still regarded as one of the great sources of all time on on the Luftwaffe on the 8th Air Force on the Royal Air Force what we're looking at here is its airplane types obviously but then you begin to look at registrations at squadron markings at serial numbers you start putting this stuff together but you get a database you could infer the number of a particular type of things of this sort so that it's now getting harder and harder to do but because runways are not quite as accessible as they once were so the new Japanese Olympus camera as a lens it goes perfectly through way up through a chain-link fence so but you said at the end of runways with binoculars and cameras and photographing airplanes landing watching them going around and a group of spotters at Shannon Airport in in Ireland called the the shed and peace campers outed one of the first planes flying people to Guantanamo Bay and then you started tracing that down it's easy once you've got the registration numbers - it's all of the internet to start fighting out who allegedly owns this discovered that it's owned by a company that has no employees that the address are all post office boxes in Northern Virginia near Langley that the officers of the company are clearly fake is that they are men who who have social security cards that were issued when they were in their 50s this is at all of a certain sign of a new identity being created and at the moment one gets outed the registration changes overnight that's the way it started is that some other smart journalists picked it up and we're finally and ended up you know this huge scandal that the spies who came in from the hot tub they discovered that there that 2025 CIA agents are down under indictment in Italy for pinching this this Imam off the streets of Milan flying him to Ramstein Air Base then off to Cairo where he was unquestionably tortured and these were felonies committed in in a Italian territory but it was then revealed that r-25 spies that would carrying out this operation we're staying in the prepaid Savoia hotel and bail on at $500 a night as they ran up bills of $150,000 for just hotel rooms then they went for vacations on the tuscan coast and to venice afterwards and the this CIA station chief in in milan had already bought a house to retire it in asti lovely so the corruption it's part of the but but there is in both the case of the Sargent and Abu Ghraib and these plane spotters there there is a an inkling of hope here you know in the sense that civil society or the way civil society has impacted soldiers who go into the minute they have a different set of values that that because because it's it's it's it's a very pessimistic view you know which isn't an argument against what you're saying but but one ways left with without much hope because like as you point out the other elements of this domestic configuration that helps us break out of this encapsulation is this movement toward implementation of a unitary president yes by presidency by Bush much greater secrecy than in any previous regime and then a failure of the checks and balance system on it that's breaking down I mean we have an imperial presidency that he's just out of control today I still think that it's a much bigger issue not Bush and Cheney and there for the crazy ambitions presidents often have done things like this it's what happened to Congress why did they fail so badly why did they not even attempt oversight they just gave up on it the and this then made it easy for the president to classify so much stuff that the idea of oversight by a citizen turns out to be absurd remember 40% of the defense budget is black nobody gets to see it all of the CIA's budget is black always has been its subject well until the church committee in the 1970s it had no form of oversight whatsoever it was the president's private army and even though it was created as an Intelligence Agency he's in fact evolved irreversibly into an agency of dirty tricks of overthrowing foreign governments assassinations renditions teaching Latin American military officers state terrorism under devices to undercut economies that irritate us no president the day after he's inaugurated and the director of Central Intelligence comes in and tells them about the power he's got as fail to use it it's a secret army at his orders it's the Victorian guards again now you say well the checks and balances broke down I want to read a quote that you have from Brandeis let me just say it was important to stress that we know what we should do it's to restore constitutional government right and but that's so difficult to do mm-hmm that what that is to say if you do believe so that the government in Washington today bears any resemblance to the one outlined in the Constitution in 1787 the burden of proof is on you and it just simply is not the case and the Constitution doesn't talk about those two big buildings on the south bank of the Potomac River the CIA and the Pentagon but this this actually is is to the point because you quote Brandeis which gives a very nice flavor of what what our system of government is about what you're talking about Brandeis in the 1926 dissent in Myers versus us said the doctrine of the separation of powers was adopted by the Convention of 1787 not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power the purpose was not to avoid friction but by means of the inevitable friction incident to the distribution of the governmental powers among three departments to save the people from autocracy so why has it failed many things and that's why you it probably probably the political system has failed us and it couldn't be fixed it's very hard to imagine any president either party that could stand up to the military-industrial complex or or the CIA or whatever that we have effective constitutional procedures for dealing with an unsatisfactory president we can impeach him I mean for one who lies to the country into war who violates the law on on secrecy and and the Fourth Amendment right to privacy and things of this right numerous other cases last november's the public again inchoate matter not well informed a press that is failing us daily universities that do nothing except promote each other the that we elect the opposition party on virtually the day they come to power the leader of the opposition party says impeachment is off the table well if impeachment is off the table then maybe democracy is off the table that's it's just a way of say you're acknowledging it doesn't work and but what led to this it was certainly standing armies it was militarism it was growing the military-industrial complex is very clever it that they got a big project like the b-2 bomber they put a piece of that get as many constituency's as you can possibly find to make sure that if a congress man or woman decided we don't need another weapon of mass destruction they can be voted out of office next time on simply loss of jobs the it's perfectly logical for the Secretary of Defense to try and close redundant and useless defense facilities some of them going back to the Civil War and even earlier just try it every time he does try it communities erupt preachers preach sermons newspapers write editorials people protest save our base save our job it that I I come the 50th district of California one of our most distinguished citizens farmer congressman Randy Duke Cunningham is spending eight and a half years in a federal penitentiary for for big the largest bribe taker in the history of Congress it is significant that he was taking bribes from military contractors to buy junk that nobody wanted the Defense Department didn't want it was worthless stuff while also parading himself around as a Vietnam War Navy Air ace and friend of the military blahblahblah the and of course we get the wisdom the 50th district has now gone ahead and elected to replace him a lobbyist well I'm working with I've been off it was just a little bit smarter than then Randy - but it's illustrative of of the world that we live in a well before Cunningham was identified and and brought to justice by the the US Attorney I had written an article in the LA Times pointing out that he was in bought and paid for by the military-industrial complex and I received letters from people in oh say the 34th district downtown Los Angeles saying god I wish he was my congressman I could use a good job I I wouldn't mind making cluster bombs for use on Lebanese civilians or whatever else that's we don't manufacture that much in this country anymore but we to manufacture more weapons than anybody else on earth as a student of Asian political economy you wrote there the classic on meaty what you're in a you know in the final analysis your judgment is that not only will we suffer political but also economic bankruptcy well my wife keeps saying to me come up with something optimistic what do you want me to be I mean it is possible the daughter II could take over that's the way the Roman Republic ended that find me vested interest in the military becomes so great that after the assassination of Julius Caesar Octavian becomes dictator for life and the god Augustus Caesar the that could happen in general Tommy Franks who is the leader of the assault on Baghdad has all reset imprint than another attack couple to 9/11 a we in the military probably had no choice but to take over we're the only ones who know how to run thing with blah blah blah you could imagine a renaissance from below I find that with the third book of this inadvertent trilogy I'm getting a much better public reaction suggesting that the public is much more worried than they were when even the first two books came out and that there is a real sense of what do we do or prepare your escape route got any good ideas in Vancouver malaga where should we go etc etc so it is conceivable but I think unlikely given a country this large how difficult it would be to mobilize it how little movement political movement I mean indeed it's possible we did in the civil rights movement things of this sort but at the same time the media are so awful so clearly owned by conglomerates who are making money off of advertising that Rupert Murdoch talks about buying a third of the Los Angeles Times things of this sort that it's almost impossible to imagine the citizen playing the citizens role as Benjamin Franklin imagined doing elementary oversight on his government so what do I suggest probably will happen I think we will stagger along under a facade of constitutional government as we are now until we're overcome by bankruptcy we are not paying our way we're financing it off of huge loans coming daily from our two leading creditors the Japan and China both of whom hold about eight hundred billion dollars exactly and that and have no reason to do that forever the it's it's a rigged system that reminds you of herb Stein when he was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in a Republican administration rather famously said things that can't go on forever don't and that's what we're talking about today is a we're massively indebted we're not manufacturing as much as we used to we maintain our lifestyle off of huge capital imports from countries that don't mind taking a short small beating on on the exchange rates so long as they can continue to develop their own economies and supply Americans in this means above all China which without question within 2025 years will be both the world's largest social system and the world's most productive social system it's on the barring truly unprecedented see would not mean the literal end of the United States any more than it did for Germany in 1923 or China in 1948 or Argentina just a few years ago in 2001 and - but it would certainly mean a catastrophic recession a the collapse of our stock exchange the end of our level of living and a vast series of new attitudes that would now be appropriate to a much poorer country Marshall Auerbach is a finance analysts of my admirer who refers the United States as a Blanche DuBois economy Blanche DuBois of course was the leading character in Tennessee Williams play a streetcar named desire and she said I've invented I've depended upon the kindness of strangers we are also increasingly dependent on the kindness of strangers and they are not many of them left that much care any more than they were for Blanche I figure if the United States did start to go down it would not elicit any more tears than the collapse of the Soviet Union did in the world at large today what do you do you see a configuration of power external Japan China the EU that that will be a balancer that might not just confront us but might help guide us to changes that would be good for us in them once you go down the path of empire you inevitably start a process of over stretch of you can't stop of tendencies toward bankruptcy and certainly in the rest of the world the tendency toward the unity of people who are opposed to your imperialism on simply on grounds that it's yours but it may also be on the grounds that you're incompetent at it there was one time when the world did trust the United States a good deal as a result of the Marshall Plan of foreign aid things of this sort they probably very likely trusted it more than they should have today that is almost entirely dissipated by the current government that's been in power since the Supreme Court have pointed it in in 2000 and it will at some point either we will stop it we will reduce our empire of basis from 737 to maybe thirty seven I just assumed get rid of all of them but you can make the case we could probably do it with 37 we don't certainly need 737 if we don't start doing that then we will go the way of the former Soviet Union one final question audience watching the program besides reading your three books which we convince them of do you how would you advise them if they are concerned citizens with a conscience you know what did you see something that just the public can get a handle on to assist the process of changing America back to the way it was the physical system isn't working very well but it does depend on an active engaged citizenry that would at least aspire to doing oversight of its government and discovering how deeply frustrated they're going to be if they try to use the Freedom of Information Act if they should actually try to account for what is called the defense budget it's so complex that it's intentionally designed to make sure that you can't really find out the huge amounts that are being spent on the name generally of the the military establishment they could try to become better at for them start using the Internet I begin the morning everyday with not the New York Times but with a war calm it's not a leftist generally they're they're libertarians but it's a good digest of all the news that isn't in the New York Times around the world and it's a it's a way to begin and then attempting to put pressure on our government I don't think this is going to work I don't think we have enough time I think we've waited too long and that we are probably talking about the short happy life of the American Republic in that case you would have to say to the well-informed citizen would start thinking of his or her escape route the condo in Vancouver as or whatever else it may be people keep pushing me on this I'm 75 years old and say I'm probably going to write it out but having having been pushed I said I happen to have a geriatric Russian blue cat that I admire a great deal and why you would bench it at the end of the book his name is yeah it's he he I did a little quick survey to find out if there's any country on earth that you get into without putting your cat into quarantine it turns out the Spaniards don't care so it looks like Malaga would be a place so that that would would serve Chalmers on that lighter note I want to thank you very much for writing this krill adji I want to show the book nemesis the last days of the American Republic and I want to thank you very much for coming back to Berkeley and and being on our program I'm indebted to you and I'm admirer of conversations with history it's you've done a terrific job with this program thank you very much Chalmers and thank you very much for joining us for this conversation with history [Music]

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 65,624

Rating: 4.8993378 out of 5

Keywords: Nemisis, American, empire, foreign, relation

Id: sQi4-97GXrI

Length: 59min 29sec (3569 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 16 2008