On November 20, 2010, he passed away at age 79. Johnson went on to teach international relations at the University of California in Berkeley and San Diego for 30 years, and was the President of the Japan Policy Research Institute, which he co-founded in 1994. He was a CIA consultant for the LBJ and Nixon administrations during the Vietnam war which he supported, and worked for none other than Allen Dulles, a major player in the 1953 coup which Johnson would later describe as “blatantly illegal”. Johnson began warning that “imperialism is a form of tyranny”, he helped feed the beast. He explained the coup in more detail in his second book in the Blowback trilogy, Nemesis, brief mentions in The Sorrows of Empire and the new foreword for Blowback in 2004, and the 2005 documentary Why We Fight.īefore Chalmers A. After September 11th, Johnson brought up the coup frequently. So it’s peculiar that his 2000 book on the subject, Blowback, contained not even a single mention of the 1953 coup in Iran which spawned the term (the book deals mostly with China, Korea and Japan, his areas of expertise). His emphasis helped popularize the term in political discourse. He often noted that the first official use of the word “blowback” occurred in the CIA’s internal report on Operation Ajax, the plot that eradicated Premier Mossadegh’s democratic government in 1953. Author, professor and political scientist Chalmers Johnson (1931-2010) accentuated the perils of empire and “blowback” in foreign policy in his work.
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