zaterdag 15 december 2012

'Deskundigen' 58




For globalism to work, America can’t be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is.…The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist—McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.



— Thomas Friedman, What the World Needs Now, New York Times, March 28, 1999. Quoted from Backing Up Globalization with Military Might

'EVIL VISITED THIS COMMUNITY' 


        
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Vorige week donderdag 6 december 2012 wees de Amerikaanse auteur William Rivers Pitt erop dat

The United States has been in a state of permanent, global war since Pearl Harbor. Involved in conflicts large and small, known and unknown, a moment has not passed in the last 71 years that has not involved American military personnel killing and dying somewhere in the world. That is fact. This is not a story about America's insanely bloated 'defense' budget. It is not a story about the bent priorities this nation has come to accept; to wit: more than half of every dollar collected in taxes goes to warfare and spying, a multi-trillion dollar industry, while we reel through national 'debates' about cutting health care benefits for old people and closing schools because 'we can't afford it.'

Het is onvermijdelijk dat een cultuur waarin geweld altijd een centrale rol speelt uiteindelijk zelf geconfronteerd wordt met 'shock and awe.' Dit is in feite ook een van de thema's die ik in de serie 'deskundigen' behandel.


De Amerikaanse soft power is… hoewel aangetast, nog altijd sterk aanwezig… Soft power is, in de kern, de overtuigingskracht van een staat, de kracht om het debat naar zich toe te trekken, om de agenda van de wereldpolitiek te bepalen.
Geert Mak, pagina 522 van Reizen zonder John.

de Verlichting is bedacht in Europa, maar Amerika heeft het uitgevoerd, als real life experiment.
Geert Mak in Vrij Nederland. 3 november 2012.
 
Nu de werkelijkheid zoals die wordt gezien door Amerikaanse intellectuelen als Garry Wills,
an American prolific Pulitzer Prize-winning author, journalist, and historian, specializing in American history, politics, and religion, as well as the history of the Roman Catholic Church.
Wills has written nearly forty books and since 1973 has been a frequent reviewer for the New York Review of Books.[3] He joined the faculty of the history department at Northwestern University in 1980, where he is currently an Emeritus Professor of History.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Wills

In 1976 schreef Wills in zijn essay Total war:

American in the early 1940’s fell in love with total war; and no wonder. The war was the best thing that had happened to this country in a long time. It did what the New Deal never really accomplished – carried us fully out of the Great Depression, and restored us to the boom-expansiveness of our Gilded Age. It did this by renegotiating het close relationship between business and the federal government – and in the process it expanded the federal government much farther and faster than the New Deal ever did.

Kortom, niet de ‘soft power,’ maar de hard power van het militair industrieel complex was doorslaggevend ‘om de agenda van de wereldpolitiek te bepalen.’ Wills:

Even the secret of the universe’s own structure – the atom – served our national goals, which were mankind’s and the world’s goals. Americans need to find morality at work at work behind morality success. Money is justified on Horatio Alger grounds, as the reward of virtue and effort. We never doubted our right to use absolute instruments of destruction in World War II – artificially created fire storms, saturation bombing, napalm flame-throwers, both our atom bombs – to enforce our demand for unconditional surrender. Our victory must be total, because we were fighting total evil.

Overal loert het kwaad dat vernietigtd moet worden. Vandaar dat president Ronald Reagan over de Sovjet Unie sprak als de ‘evil empire’ en president Bush junior over de ‘axis of evil.’ Een tegenstander is altijd de duivel van wie de mensheid verlost moet worden. Wills:

We achieved that most refined of pleasures, a virtuous hate. Killing fora n idea isd the worst kind of killing, ideological killing. Better to hate a person, the assailant of one’s family or home, than to hate an idea. What if the idea hides behind an otherwise law-abiding and unmenacing exterior? The none must steel oneself against all normal amenities and personal attraction. Then one launches a crusade – to be followed by an inquisition.
It is hard to climb back down from a self-righteous ‘high’ of hatred. The arrogance of victory has been a commonplace at least since Aeschylus’s time.

Op een overtuigende manier koppelt Garry Wills de economische noodzaak van oorlog aan de psychologische noodzaak een vijand te hebben. Deze noodzaak creërt op haar beurt weer de noodzaak dit alles ideologisch te legitimeren. De meeste mensen zijn namelijk niet onmiddellijk bereid te moorden en te plunderen. Wills:

If power corrupts, we came closer to absolute power, over the world and over our own people’s outlook, than any other nation had ever come. Why did we expect to pay no price for this?

Het antwoord was in wezen simpel, de Amerikaanse beleidsbepalers propageerden dat zij de ‘good guys’ waren, en de overgrote meerderheid van de bevolking accepteerde dit blind. Logischerwijs moesten de tegenstanders dus de ‘bad guys’ zijn.

Now power purified – and the saints are free of many restrictions imposed on those without proper doctrine.
An essential ingredient of our wartime euphoria had been the concentration of our energies upon a total enemy. In 1946there was a reluctance to surrender that focusing device. Return to peacetime was looked at warily – wartime had become ‘normal’, preferable to the prewar drift and sluggishness. So we maintained the draft, while Truman fought hard to impose universal military training onm all young males. The OSS (voorloper CIA svh) was loath to go out of existence. The FBI, expanded to new kinds of power against espionage at home and throughout South America, did not want to give up its new powers. Atomic research continued at full speed and in secret, keeping the issue of security checks alive into peacetime. Crusaders slow to take their armor off get itchy under it, and start to look ridiculous. What could put the moral shine back on that armor but the discovery, off on the horizon, of another Total Enemy? The reluctance of our demobilization in late 1945 explains the rush of glee at our remobilization in early 1947. The liberal second lieutenants and intelligence officiers were back in business, and business looked liberal again. We had a world to save, with just those plans – from NATO to the Korean War – that professor Commager called ‘so wise and so enlightened’. A thousand wartime ties, relexed slightly in 1946 to moans of economic and psychic discontent, twanged back tight again and gave America its tonic,

aldus Garry Wills, wiens visie gedeeld door talloze Amerikaanse wetenschappers die de afgelopen halve eeuw uitgebreid gedocumenteerde studies hierover hebben gepubliceerd. Ook de controversiele aspecten van de Amerikaanse politiek in de VS serieus geanalyseerd. Hier in de polder is dit niet het geval wat betreft de Nederlandse geschiedenis, zoals op 19 juni 2012 nog eens duidelijk werd toen de Volkskrant op de voorpagina opende met het bericht dat

Nieuw, volledig onderzoek nodig naar geweld in Indie 1945-1949.
Morele vragen over de politionele acties in Indonesië zijn belangrijk, maar daarmee zijn we er niet, schrijven Piet Kamphuis, Gert Oostindie en Marjan Schwegman. We moeten ook willen begrijpen wat voor soort oorlog daar werd gevoerd, en waarom en hoe deze oorlog mensen ertoe bracht wreedheden te begaan die tot dusver als 'excessen' werden betiteld. http://stanvanhoucke.blogspot.nl/search?q=marjan+schwegman

En waarom pas nu, na 6 decennia, ineens die oproep om de eigen oorlogsmisdaden te bestuderen? Wel, omdat de Tweede Wereldoorlog waarbij het kwaad in de ander kon worden geprojecteerd, inmiddels uit-en-te-na bestudeerd is en onder andere het NIOD op zoek is naar opdrachten om zijn historici werk te verschaffen, overigens zonder dat dit gelukt is. De politici willen er geen geld voor vrijmaken. De eigen misdaden worden te triviaal beschouwd.

Dit geldt niet voor de Amerikaanse intelligentsia die uiterst kritisch kan zijn, zoals de lezers van mijn weblog weten. Garry Wills bijvoorbeeld zou in het poldermodel al gauw doorgaan voor een ‘radicaal,’ en al snel gemarginaliseerd worden. Maar niet in de VS, getuige zijn:

Awards and Honours
1978: Inventing America - National Book Critics Circle Award for General Non-Fiction (co-winner, with Facts of Life by Maureen Howard)[18]
1979: Inventing America - Merle Curti Award
1982: Honorary degree of L.H.D. by the College of the Holy Cross
1995: Honorary degree from Bates College
2004: St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates[20]

Public appraisal
The New York Times literary critic John Leonard said in 1970 that Wills "reads like a combination of H. L. Mencken, John Locke and Albert Camus."[21] The Roman Catholic journalist, John L. Allen, Jr. considers Wills to be "perhaps the most distinguished Catholic intellectual in America over the last 50 years" (as of 2008).[8] Martin Gardner in "The Strange Case of Garry Wills" states there is a "mystery and strangeness that hovers like a gray fog over everything Wills has written about his faith".[22]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Wills

Daarom nogmaals Garry Wills:

Our postwar world began, instead of ending, with a bang, and we did not intend to whimper. Instead, we bullied.
Bullied, for a start, our own citizenry. But that is part of any crusade. Eleventh-century crusaders ‘cleaned out’ European ghettos, before getting to the Holy Land. […] In 1947, by proclamation of the President, we were back at war, and even liberals had long been telling Americans that war obliges them to hate the alien doctrine. We obliged. Communism became exactly what Fascism had been. Our propaganda effort had to be turned against the second enemy just as it had been against the first – Congressman Nixon must ‘encourage’ Hollywood to make anti-Russia movies. […] An element in America’s sense of mission has always been the belief that close foreign ties might sully the purity of republican doctrine, a fear expressed by Jefferson himself. It was not enough to be American in citizenship or residence – one must be American in one’s thoughts. There was such a thing as an Americanism. And lack of right thinking could make an American citizen un-American. The test was ideological. That is why we had such a thing as an Un-American Activities Committee in the first place. Other countries do not think in terms of, say, Un-British Activities as a political category. But ours was the first of the modern ideological countries, born of revolutionary doctrine, and it has maintained a belief that return to doctrinal purity is the secret of national strength for us. […]  If it is not enough to possess citizenship and obey the laws, if one must also subscribe to the propositions of Americanism, then we create two classes of citizens – those loyal and pure in doctrine, and those who, without actually breaking any law, are considered un-American, insufficient in their Americanism. These latter can be harassed, spied on, forces to register, deprived of governmental jobs and other kinds of work. […] We are not merely a country. We are an Ism. And thruth must spread without limit; it cannot countenance error. So John F. Kennedy orated: ‘In the election of 1860 Abraham Lincoln said the question was whether this nation could exist half-slave or half-free. In the election of 1960, and with the world around us, the question is whether the world will exist half-slave or half-free.’ In the war of minds, anyone not fully committed to the propositions of freedom is an enemy.
Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11 cover 
Tot welke absurde gevolgen dit leidt toont de Amerikaanse schrijfster Joan Didion in Fixed Ideas. America since 9.11:

events have history, political life has consequences, and the people who led this country and the people who wrote and spoke about the way this country was led were guilty of trying to infantilize its citizens if they continued to pretend otherwise.
Inquiry into the nature of the enemy we faced… was to be interpreted as sympathy for that enemy. The final allowable word on those who attacked us was to be that they were ‘evildoers,’ or ‘wrongdoers,’ peculiar constructions which served to suggest that those who used them were transmitting messages from some ultimate authority. […] We had suddenly been asked to accept – and were accepting – a kind of reasoning so extremely fragile that it might have been based on the promised return of the cargo gods… A year later, we were still looking for omens, portents, the supernatural manifestations of good or evil. Pathetic fallacy was everywhere. The presence of rain at a memorial for fallen firefighters was gravely reported as evidence that ‘even the sky’ cried. The presence of wind during a memorial at the site was interpreted as another such sign, the spirit of the dead rising up from the dust.

This was the year when Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem, deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would say at a Pentagon briefing that he had been ‘a bit surprised’ by the disinclination of the Taliban to accept the ‘inevitability’ of their own defeat. It semed that Admiral Stufflebeem, along with many other people in Washington, had expected the Taliban to just give up. ‘The more that I look into it,’ he said at this briefing, ‘and study it from the Taliban perspective, they don’t see the world the same way we do.’

Hoe auteistisch deze houding is blijft wel uit het feit dat elf jaar nadat de strijdkrachten Afghanistan aanvielen de Amerikanen nog niet erin zijn geslaagd de Taliban te verslaan en in dat opzicht de VS zijn langst durende oorlog heeft verloren. Afgezien van de gevaarlijk naieve militaire ambities, heeft de kapitalistische noodzaak van expansie de ideologie van het Amerikanisme een uiterst agressief karakter gegeven. Ook daarover zijn ontelbare studies van Amerikaanse intellectuelen verschenen. Ik zal ditmaal Noam Chomsky citeren, per slot van rekening is hij niet voor niets ‘s werelds meest geciteeerde en gerespecteerde wetenschapper op het gebied van de Amerikaanse buitenlandse politiek. 17 maart 2009 gaf hij een lezing aan de Boston University, getiteld Modern-Day American Imperialism: The Middle East and Beyond, waarin hij ondermeer het volgende uiteenzette:
 
I’ve been asked to talk about modern-day American imperialism. That’s a rather challenging task.  In fact, talking about American imperialism is rather like talking about triangular triangles.  The United States is the one country that exists, as far as I know, and ever has, that was founded as an empire explicitly.  According to the founding fathers, when the country was founded it was an ‘infant empire.’  That’s George Washington.  Modern-day American imperialism is just a later phase of a process that has continued from the very first moment without a break, going in a very steady line.  So, we are looking at one phase in a process that was initiated when the country was founded and has never changed. 

The model for the founding fathers that they borrowed from Britain was the Roman Empire.  They wanted to emulate it.  I’ll talk about that a little.  Even before the Revolution, these notions were very much alive.  Benjamin Franklin, 25 years before the Revolution, complained that the British were imposing limits on the expansion of the colonies.  He objected to this, borrowing from Machiavelli.  He admonished the British (I’m quoting him), ‘A prince that acquires new territories and removes the natives to give his people room will be remembered as the father of the nation.’  And George Washington agreed.  He wanted to be the father of the nation.  His view was that ‘the gradual extension of our settlement will as certainly cause the savage as the wolf to retire, both being beasts of prey, though they differ in shape.’ I’ll skip some contemporary analogs that you can think of.  Thomas Jefferson, the most forthcoming of the founding fathers, said, ‘We shall drive them [the savages] -- We shall drive them with the beasts of the forests into the stony mountains.’ and the country will ultimately be ‘free of blot or mixture’— meaning red or black.  It wasn’t quite achieved, but that was the goal.  Furthermore, Jefferson went on, ‘Our new nation will be the nest from which America, north and south, is to be peopled,’ displacing not only the red men here but the Latin-speaking population to the south and anyone else who happened to be around. […]

Well, it’s commonly argued that American imperialism began in 1898.  That’s when the US did finally succeed in conquering Cuba, what’s called in the history books ‘liberating’ Cuba—namely intervening in order to prevent Cuba from liberating itself from Spain, and turning it into a virtual colony as it remained until 1959, setting off hysteria in the United States which hasn’t ended yet.  Also, conquering and taking over Hawaii, which was stolen by force and guile from its population.  Puerto Rico, another colony.  Soon moving to the Philippines and liberating the Philippines.  Also liberating a couple of hundred thousand souls to heaven in the process.  And again, the reverberations of that extend right to the present: ample state terror, and the one corner of Asia that hasn’t undergone high development—something we’re not supposed to notice. 

But the belief that the imperial thrust started in 1898 is an example of what historians of empire call ‘the salt water fallacy,’ the belief that you have an empire if you cross salt water.  In fact, if the Mississippi River were as wide as the Irish Sea, the imperial thrust would have started much earlier.  But that’s an irrelevance.  Expanding over settled territory is no different from expanding over the waters.  So, what happened in 1898 was just an extension of the process that began when the infant empire, as it saw itself, was first formed, in its first moments.  The extension to beyond was… Again, a lot of this starts in New England, with New England merchants who were very eager to take over the Pacific trade, the fabulous markets of China, which were always in their minds, which meant conquering the northwest so you can control the ports and so on, meant kicking the British out and others out, and so on.  It went on from right here.  The goal, as William Seward, who was Secretary of State in the 1860s, pointed out (a central figure in American imperialism) was that we have to gain command of the empire of the seas.  We conquer the continent.  We’re going to take it over.  The Monroe Doctrine was a declaration that we’ll take it over—everybody else keep out.  And the process of doing so continued through the nineteenth century and beyond until today.  But now we have to have command of the seas.  And that meant when the time was ripe, 70 years later, when the apple started to fall from the tree, given relative power, proceeding overseas to the overseas empire.  But it’s basically no different than the earlier steps.  The leading philosophical imperialist, Brooks Adams, pointed out (this is 1885; we were just on the verge of moving overseas extensively) that ‘all Asia must be reduced to our economic system, the Pacific must be turned into an inland sea’ (just like the Caribbean had been).  And ‘there’s no reason,” he said, “why the United States should not become a greater seat of wealth and power than ever was England, Rome, or Constantinople.’ 

Well, again there was a deterrent.  The European powers wanted a piece of the action in East Asia, and Japan by then was becoming a formidable force.  So it was necessary to explore more complex modes of gaining command of turning the Pacific into an inland sea and going on.  And that was lucidly explained by Woodrow Wilson, who is one of the most brutal and vicious interventionists in American history.  The probable permanent destruction of Haiti is one of his many accomplishments.  Those of you who study international relations theory or read about it know that there is a notion of Wilsonian idealism.  The fact that that notion can exist is a very interesting commentary on our intellectual culture and scholarly culture if you look at his actual actions.  Fine words are easy enough.  But these are some of his fine words which he was smart enough not to put into print.  He just wrote them for himself.  He said, ‘Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed must be battered down … Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.’

 That’s 1907.  There’s a current version of that, a crude version by Thomas Friedman, who says that ‘McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas’ (meaning the US Air Force).  Well, that’s a crude version of Wilson’s point.  You’ve got to batter down the doors by force and threat, and no corner of the world must be left unused—no useful corner.  http://current.com/1ne8a4c

Het land fungeerde… decennialang als ordebewaker en politieagent – om maar te zwijgen van alle hulp die het uitdeelde. En nog steeds zijn de Verenigde Staten het anker van het hele Atlantische deel van de wereld in de ruimste zin van het woord.
Geert Mak. Pagina 523 van Reizen zonder John.

President James Madison, opsteller van de Amerikaanse grondwet, zat veel dichter bij de waarheid toen hij waarschuwde:

War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement… In war the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions, and the most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, averice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire an duty of peace.

Meer hierover maandag.

Mises Academy: David Gordon teaches The Real Causes of America's Wars: A Revisionist View



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