Paul Brill van de Volkskrant 2

Aan het eind van zijn boek Who Owns America? schreef in 1971 de Amerikaanse voormalige minister van Binnenlandse Zaken, Walter Joseph Hickel, in het hoofstuk An Iron Curtain of Fear: 'We are in the midst of a dangerous variation of the nationalism game in this country. A great isolation of spirit has collided with the feeling that we are chosen people, a people who triumphed because of the justice of our cause and the virtue with which we "prosecuted" it. The youth of our generation have dared to strip aside the curtain of national virtue and look at the consequences of our actions. They see the desecration of the environment for strictly monetairy reasons. They see that our national priorities are selected for short-term gain. And they feel frustrated because they see the uselessness of dying in a useless war. The credibility of a nation is at stake when it tries to justify at the same time both war and peace, setting a priority on neither and losing both...

Now it is time for us to lead the world in showing that instead of being guided by artificial fears, created for artificial reasons, we can plunge ahead to create an environment of hope. The great fallacy in our national priorities after the end of World War II lay in the fact that we poured our wealth into "protection" and neglected the heart of the global issue - communication. As we built a great wall of defense around us, we unrealistically hoped that somehow the international threat, the misunderstanding, the hate and the rivalry would magically disappear...

How much of our budget has gone into researching the root causes of our international differences? Are we truly a peaceful nation?... An individual, a society or a nation as a whole cannot be respected unless it in turn respects. This is where we must start... The challenge of freedom still ahead of us is to break out into the freedom of the heart, the mind and the soul... If we pause nown to bathe in the glory of our rhetoric, then we are on the road to failure.'

Bijna vier decennia na het verschijnen van Who Owns America? geschreven door een vooraanstaande Amerikaanse politicus is de analyse van het morele en financiele failliet van de Verenigde Staten nog steeds even actueel. Weer spreekt nu een politicus over hoop, en nog steeds is de macht in handen van een onverantwoordelijke elite. Sterker nog die macht is in de loop der jaren alleen maar gegroeid. Hoe kan dat? In die ontwikkeling spelen de commerciele massamedia een doorslaggevende rol. Meer daarover later. Dan ook meer over de rol van opiniemakers als Paul Brill, die van mijn generatie is.