Remembering Chalmers Johnson

Chalmers Johnson, whose critiques of the American Empire and its unsustainability—Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire and Nemesis—grow more powerful and uncanny each year, has passed away. We have lost a giant, but his work will continue to reverberate for a long time to come.

John Nichols, author of the forthcoming The "S" Word, quotes Johnson's Nemesis in an obituary for the Nation:

The United States today is like a cruise ship on the Niagara River upstream of the most specacular falls in North America ... A few people on board have begun to pick up a slight hiss in the background, to observe a faint haze of mist in the air on their glasses, to note that the river current seems to be running slightly faster. But no one yet seems to have realized that it is almost too late to head for shore. Like the Chinese, Ottoman, Hapsburg, imperial German, Nazi, imperial Japanese, British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Soviet empires in the last century, we are approaching the edge of a huge waterfall and are about to plunge over it.

Visit the Nation to read the obituary in full.