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.
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
Public appraisal
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.
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.
