In tien jaar tijd veranderde een jonge staat als
Ohio van een wildernis in een gebied met een grotere bevolkingsdichtheid dan de
meeste oorspronkelijke kolonies.
Geert Mak. Pagina 161 van Reizen zonder John.
We
did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, the
winding streams with tangled growth, as 'wild'. Only to
the white man was nature a 'wilderness'
and only to him was it ‘infested'
with 'wild' animals and 'savage' people. To us it was tame. Earth was
bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery.
Luther
Standing Bear. Chief of the Ojanjan Sioux (1905-1939)
Twee wereldbeelden. De
christelijke gedicteerd door angst en het gevoel verdoemd te zijn, het paradijs
is elders. De indiaanse visie is die van organisch opgaan in de natuur die als een moeder de basis is van het overleven van de mens. De christelijke kwalificatie
van de ongerepte natuur als, in de woorden van Mak, ‘een wildernis’ overtuigde
de Amerikanen ervan gerechtvaardigd te zijn de natuur en de mens te onderwerpen
aan hun wil. De ‘wildernis’ en de ‘de wilde’ vertegenwoordigen het
kwaad dat door de ‘uitverkorenen’ beheerst moet worden, dan wel vernietigd, zowel
toen als nu. The Chosen Peoples:
For Wilson, too, religious fervor with a
nationalist bent generated the moral imperative to actively take the part of
good against evil. Early and late, he cited Ephesians 6:12 to defend the
Manichaean proposition that ‘we wrestle, not against flesh and blood, but
against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of
this world, against wickedness in high places.’ As president, he marked the
fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg on July 4, 1913, by calling America ‘the nation that God has builded by our hands’ and declaring that ‘war fitted us for
action, and action never ceases.’ He
felt this way when he launched armed interventions in Mexico, Cuba, the
Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras, and Nicaragua, proclaiming, on July 4, 1914, ‘I am going to teach the South American
republics to elect good men.’
Het spreekt voor zich dat ‘good men,’ in de
praktijk betekent dat een elite aan de macht geholpen werd en nog steeds wordt,
die de Amerikaanse economische en geopolitieke belangen zo goed mogelijk
behartigt, terwijl dit publiekelijk verkocht wordt als ‘a unique global mission’
die de VS zou hebben en die gedefinieerd wordt als een nobele zaak waarbij de
wereld ‘safe for democracy’ wordt gemaakt. In totaal dertien maal liet
Wilson de Amerikaanse strijdkrachten in het buitenland intervenieren. Van
Latijns Amerika tot Rusland, waar hij Amerikaanse troepen tegen het Rode Leger
inzette, overigens tegen het advies van zijn eigen ministerie van Oorlog.
Hoewel het expansionisme als een rode draad door de Amerikaanse geschiedenis
loopt kan men stellen dat de buitenlandse interventies rond 1900 goed op gang
kwamen en Woodrow Wilson's politiek als een katalysator functioneerde. De Amerikaanse
journalist/programmamaker Scott Horton poneert zelfs het volgende:
If Russia's Provisional Government
had quit the war and negotiated peace with Germany in early 1917, we might
never had heard of Lenin. He would have returned home to find Russians
celebrating the end of the war. Soldiers would have been returning home and the
process of reviving the economy would have begun ... Finally of course, the
Czar was gone, and the Russian army would have been there to defend the
Provisional Government, virtually ruling out prospects for a Bolshevik coup.
Alexander Kerensky and some others in
the Provisional Government wanted Russia to stay in the war, and maybe they
would have prevailed if they had decided on their own. But relentless
diplomatic pressure from Britain and France, and diplomatic pressure and bribes
from Woodrow Wilson, helped assure that the virtually bankrupt Provisional Government
would stay in the war. http://scotthorton.org/all-interviews/
Horton concludeert tenslotte
dat
Woodrow Wilson's presidential
legacy consists of central banking, national income taxes, the destruction of the separation of powers,
the Palmer raids, massive expansion of the national government's
power and the worst slaughter of Americans since 1865. No wonder he's George W. Bush's hero. Let's
hope the consequences of the foreign adventures of our current
megalomaniac-in-chief are not as harmful as those of his predecessor.
Op grond hiervan beweert Geert Mak nu dat Wilson
‘een begin van orde’ bracht ‘in de mondiale politiek en
economie' en voegt daar op pagina 466 van zijn reisboek aan toe
dat ‘De Amerikaanse politiek sterk antikolonialistisch [bleef]’
tot na de Tweede Wereldoorlog toen ‘het anticommunisme de overhand kreeg.’
Daarentegen is de Amerikaanse hoogleraar Politieke Wetenschappen van de
University of California, Adam Gómez, wantrouwig over de orde die Wilson’s
wilde scheppen, omdat zijn boodschap ‘messianic and millenial’
was, met ‘a strong element of the apocalyps.’ Immers, wat moet een
intelligent mens denken over een machtige politicus die rotsvast ervan
overtuigd is dat ‘Americans set up a new nation in the high and honorable
hope… [to] show mankind the way to liberty’ en dat ‘We shall give
all that we love and all that we have to redeem the world and make it fit for
free men like ourselves to live in.’ In elk geval moest men wel
stekeblind zijn om de werkelijkheid van de slachtpartij die de Eerste
Wereldoorlog was geweest en het economische ineenstorting na 1929 niet te zien,
vandaar dat
Public rhetoric after Wilson was more reticent –
embarrassed, perhaps, or simply more businesslike – about referring to
Americans as a chosen people. The theme of divine favoritism slid into the
shadows to manifest itself in a more secular vernacular,
hoewel
de stem van de gevestigde orde, de theoloog van het establishment bleef
volhouden dat in de Tweede Wereldoorlog god de kant had gekozen van de Amerikanen
‘in this fateful period of world.’ En ook presicent Franklin Roosevelt deed een beroep op de
Almachtige toen hij tijdens zijn State of the Union-toespraak op 6
januari 1942 verklaarde:
We are inspired by a faith that
goes back through all the years to the first chapter of the Book of Genesis: ‘God created man in His own image…’ We in our side are striving to be
true to that divine heritage.
Na 1945 onstond in de VS religieuze opleving, en
in 1951, aan het begin van de Koude Oorlog tegen de atheistische Sovjet Unie,
verklaarde president Truman, een doopsgezinde, weer volmondig dat:
Divine Providence has played a great part in our
history. I have the feeling that God has created us and brought us to our
present position and strength for some purpose.
Wat het exacte doel van de christelijke luchtgod
zou zijn bleef onduidelijk, nu de VS een kernmacht was geworden die twee
nucleaire bommen op de Japan had gegooid ten koste van honderdduizenden burger
slachtoffers, terwijl sinds 1949 het ‘rijk van het kwaad’ inmiddels ook
kernwapens bezat. In hoeverre het woord van de judeo-christelijke god de
Amerikaanse buitenlandse politiek domineered blijkt ook uit zijn erkenning van
de staat Israel ‘against fierce State Department opposition,’ en de Amerikaanse
minister van Buitenlandse Zaken, generaal George Marshall, bekend van het Marshall-Plan aan West-Europa, waarvoor
hij in 1953 de Nobel Peace Prize
kreeg. Truman liet zich niet leiden door politieke inzichten, maar door god’s bevel,
zo schreef vele jaren later zijn persoonlijke adviseur, Clark Gifford:
From his reading of the Old Testament he felt
that the Jews derived a legitimate historical right to Palestine, and he
sometimes cited such biblical lines as Deuteronomy 1:8: ‘Behold, I have given up the land before you; go in
and take possession of the land which the Lord hath sworn unto your fathers, to
Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob.’
Land dat volgens hetzelfde Deuteronomium in beslag moest worden genomen nadat eerst de
oorspronkelijke bewoners en hun vee collectief waren afgeslacht. Het toont aan
hoe gevaarlijk het is om een religieus geschrift als draaiboek te nemen. Maar
daar hadden de mewerderheid van de Amerikanen geen oog voor, zoals ook bleek
uit het presidentschap van Eisenhower toen in 1953 de zogeheten ‘national
prayer breakfast’ werd ingevoerd, waarbij ieder jaar op de eerste dinsdag van
februari het Amerikaanse Congres 3500 gasten uitnodigt uit meer dan 100 landen ‘on
their behalf by The Fellowship Foundation, a conservative
Christian organization more widely known as "The Family".’
Bovendien werden toen de woorden ‘In God We Trust’ opgenomen in de ‘Pledge
of Allegiance,’ een ‘expression of loyalty to the federal flag and
the republic of the United States of America,’
waarmee niet alleen Congres-bijeenkomsten worden geopend, maar eveneens vele
bestuursvergaderingen op locaal niveau en bijeenkomsten van particuliere
organisaties en doorgaans ook elke schooldag. De tekst is als volgt:
I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to
the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with
liberty and justice for all.
Terwijl hij in Het Witte Huis woonde ontving
Eisenhower regelmatig de evangelist Billy Graham die een groot publiek trok tijdens
zijn diensten in tenten overal in het land. De Amerikaanse historicus Gary
Scott Smith schreef in Faith and the
Presidency. From George Washington to George W. Bush dat Eisenhower ‘frequently
depicted’ de Koude Oorlog ‘as a struggle between God and Satan or good
and evil,’ en dat daarmee duidelijk werd dat de president in de morele
superioriteit van de VS geloofde. Eisenhower was van mening dat
America is the greatest force that God has ever allowed to exist on His footstool. As such it is up to us to
lead this world to a peaceful and secure existence. And I assure you we can do
it. Good-night, my friends.
Nuclear weapons, not unrealistically, fueled his
apocalyptic imagination. At the same time, he insisted that the United States
was ‘truly
trying to follow in the footsteps of the Prince of Peace, and to establish a
just peace for the world,’ as he told a religious assemblage in 1956, having
dispatched the CIA to overthrow democratically elected regimes in Iran and
Guatemala. Like other presidents before him, all the way back to George
Washinton, Eisenhower saw ‘the hand of Providence’ at work in American
life.
Hoe gevaarlijk dit morele superioriteitsgevoel
kan zijn blijkt uit het feit dat volgens de Amerikaanse voormalige minister van
Defensie, Robert McNamara, dat de wereld een paar keer langs de afgrond scheerde:
Conclusions
regarding the role of nuclear weapons in this world… the NATO policy, I
believe, has been founded on false premises for 35 years. And it's just
becoming apparent. There was a report published here in Washington about 6 or 8
weeks ago issued by the Stimpson Center, signed by four retired four-star
officers including a former SACEUR, General Goodpaster, along with Paul Nitze
and myself and some others which recommends - over a period of time, through
forth (sic) steps - elimination of nuclear weapons. And we recommend that
because we believe it's contrary to the interests of the world to continue to
have these weapons used and incorporated in strategic planning the way NATO has
planned to use them for the 35 years I've been familiar with it. […]
Again
in October 1962 over Cuba, when they introduced , missiles into Cuba.. and what
we have learned since, when they actually introduced tactical nuclear warheads
into Cuba, at a time when RCI was reporting there were no nuclear warheads....
we had photographs of launchers but the CIA said there were no nuclear warheads
on the island of Cuba. We now know there were roughly a hundred and sixty two
including tactical nuclear warheads and at that time had Khrushchev not, on
Sunday the 28th of October 1962, announced he was withdrawing those missiles,
on the following day or so, the majority of President Kennedy's military and
civilian advisers would have recommend (sic) attack including invasion of the island
of Cuba, not knowing that that invasion almost surely would have been
confronted with the use of nuclear weapons. We came very close. You came very
close to nuclear war at that time. Again, in June 1967, the Six-Day War in
which between Israel and Egypt. And as a part of that the hotline was used for
the first time and one of the messages from Kosygin to President Johnson was
'if you want war, you'll get war'. These were very tense times. So while I
think, in hindsight, we exaggerated the threat at times, and we certainly
misunderstood the objectives of the Soviets and I think the Chinese,
nonetheless we faced very real threats.
Het land fungeerde… decennialang als ordebewaker en politieagent… En nog
steeds zijn de Verenigde Staten het anker van het hele Atlanmtische deel van de
wereld in de ruimste nzin van het woord. Het is nog altijd de ‘standaardmacht’
Geert
Mak. Pagina 523 van Reizen zonder Charley.
Hoe bewaakte Mak’s ‘ordebewaker’
‘de ‘orde’
en welke ‘orde’? Omdat hij hierover zwijgt, citeer ik allereerst Amerikaanse autoriteiten
die direct betrokken waren als ‘ordebewakers.’ Na de val van de
Muur concludeerden zij in An Evolving US Nuclear Posture, Second Report of
the Steering committee Project on Eliminating Weapons of Mass Destruction,
Henry L. Stimson Center, December 1995:
The Cold War's end and the
dangers of nuclear proliferation demand a fundamental reappraisal of the role
of nuclear weapons in US policy and in global politics. In the changing
strategic environment, nuclear weapons are of declining value in securing US interests,
but pose growing risks to the security of the United States and other nations.
The only military role of nuclear weapons -- the deterrence of other nuclear
threats -- could be met with far fewer nuclear weapons. US national security
would be best served by a policy of phased reductions in all states' nuclear
forces and gradual movement toward the objective of eliminating all weapons of
mass destruction from all countries.
Op 5
mei 2005, vier jaar voor zijn dood, schreef Robert McNamara onder de titel ‘Apocalypse Soon’
het volgende in Foreign Policy, het
tijdschrift van de establishment:
It is
time -- well past time, in my view -- for the United States to cease its Cold
War-style reliance on nuclear weapons as a foreign-policy tool. At the risk of
appearing simplistic and provocative, I would characterize current U.S. nuclear
weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully
dangerous. The risk of an accidental or inadvertent nuclear launch is
unacceptably high. Far from reducing these risks, the Bush administration has
signaled that it is committed to keeping the U.S. nuclear arsenal as a mainstay
of its military power -- a commitment that is simultaneously eroding the
international norms that have limited the spread of nuclear weapons and fissile
materials for 50 years. Much of the current U.S. nuclear policy has been in
place since before I was secretary of defense, and it has only grown more
dangerous and diplomatically destructive in the intervening years.
Today,
the United States has deployed approximately 4,500 strategic, offensive nuclear
warheads. Russia has roughly 3,800. The strategic forces of Britain, France,
and China are considerably smaller, with 200-400 nuclear weapons in each
state's arsenal. The new nuclear states of Pakistan and India have fewer than
100 weapons each. North Korea now claims to have developed nuclear weapons, and
U.S. intelligence agencies estimate that Pyongyang has enough fissile material
for 2-8 bombs.
How destructive are these
weapons? The average U.S. warhead has a destructive power 20 times that of the
Hiroshima bomb. Of the 8,000 active or operational U.S. warheads, 2,000 are on
hair-trigger alert, ready to be launched on 15 minutes' warning. How are these
weapons to be used? The United States has never endorsed the policy of ‘no first use,’ not during my seven years as secretary or since. We have been and
remain prepared to initiate the use of nuclear weapons -- by the decision of
one person, the president -- against either a nuclear or nonnuclear enemy
whenever we believe it is in our interest to do so. For decades, U.S. nuclear
forces have been sufficiently strong to absorb a first strike and then inflict ‘unacceptable’ damage on an opponent. This has been and
(so long as we face a nuclear-armed, potential adversary) must continue to be
the foundation of our nuclear deterrent.
The
destructive power of nuclear weapons is well known, but given the United
States' continued reliance on them, it's worth remembering the danger they
present. A 2000 report by the International Physicians for the Prevention of
Nuclear War describes the likely effects of a single 1 megaton weapon -- dozens
of which are contained in the Russian and U.S. inventories. At ground zero, the
explosion creates a crater 300 feet deep and 1,200 feet in diameter. Within one
second, the atmosphere itself ignites into a fireball more than a half-mile in
diameter. The surface of the fireball radiates nearly three times the light and
heat of a comparable area of the surface of the sun, extinguishing in seconds
all life below and radiating outward at the speed of light, causing
instantaneous severe burns to people within one to three miles. A blast wave of
compressed air reaches a distance of three miles in about 12 seconds,
flattening factories and commercial buildings. Debris carried by winds of 250
mph inflicts lethal injuries throughout the area. At least 50 percent of people
in the area die immediately, prior to any injuries from radiation or the
developing firestorm.
Of
course, our knowledge of these effects is not entirely hypothetical. Nuclear
weapons, with roughly one seventieth of the power of the 1 megaton bomb just
described, were twice used by the United States in August 1945. One atomic bomb
was dropped on Hiroshima. Around 80,000 people died immediately; approximately
200,000 died eventually. Later, a similar size bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. On
Nov. 7, 1995, the mayor of Nagasaki recalled his memory of the attack in
testimony to the International Court of Justice:
Nagasaki
became a city of death where not even the sound of insects could be heard.
After a while, countless men, women and children began to gather for a drink of
water at the banks of nearby Urakami River, their hair and clothing scorched
and their burnt skin hanging off in sheets like rags. Begging for help they
died one after another in the water or in heaps on the banks.… Four months
after the atomic bombing, 74,000 people were dead, and 75,000 had suffered
injuries, that is, two-thirds of the city population had fallen victim to this
calamity that came upon Nagasaki like a preview of the Apocalypse.
Why did so many civilians
have to die? Because the civilians, who made up nearly 100 percent of the
victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were unfortunately ‘co-located’ with Japanese military and industrial targets. Their annihilation,
though not the objective of those dropping the bombs, was an inevitable result
of the choice of those targets. It is worth noting that during the Cold War,
the United States reportedly had dozens of nuclear warheads targeted on Moscow
alone, because it contained so many military targets and so much ‘industrial
capacity.’
Dus ‘co-located,’ of in het
huidige jargon van terreur: ‘collateral damage.’ In de
filmdocumentaire Fog of War zei Mcamara
over de mogelijke ondergang van de mensheid ten tijde van de Cuba-Crisis:
In the end, it was luck. We
were *this* close to nuclear war, and luck prevented it…
Robert McNamara: [about Castro] I said, ‘I must have got the translation wrong.’ So I asked him 3 questions. One- did you know there were nuclear
warheads in Cuba? Two- would you have recommended to Khrushchev to use nuclear
missiles in the event of an American invasion of Cuba? And three- what would have
happened to Cuba? He said, ‘One- I knew the missiles were there. Two- I
would not *have* recommended it, I *did* recommend it! And three- we would have
been totally obliterated’. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara wondered
aloud whether he ‘would live to see another Saturday night’, and later recognized that ‘we lucked
out’ – barely.
Dit is de ‘orde’ waar
onze politieke leiders en opiniemakers het over hebben, zonder de consequenties
van deze ‘orde’ expliciet te maken.
Dat verdwijnt achter een façade van woorden en ‘a conspiracy of silence.’ In zijn boek over ‘Europa’ analyseert Mak nergens het
feit dat de NAVO van een verdedigingsorganisatie tegen de Sovjet Unie zonder
een democratische besluit in het parlement of een publieke discussie in de
zogeheten vrije media door de machthebbers is veranderd in een aanvallend
bondgenootschap dat nu overal onder aanvoering van de VS kan worden ingezet om
de westerse belangen met een maximum aan geweld te handhaven en uit te breiden.
Ook in zijn boek over ‘Amerika’
besteedt Mak geen structurele
aandacht aan de agressieve politiek van de NAVO. Daarentegen besteedde een
deskundige als McNamara hier wel degelijk uitgebreid aandacht aan. Hij schreef in
mei 2005 in Foreign Policy:
What is shocking is that today, more
than a decade after the end of the Cold War, the basic US nuclear policy is
unchanged. Of the 8,000 active or operational US warheads, 2,000 are on hair-trigger
alert, ready to be launched on 15 minutes' warning. On any given day, as we go
about our business, the president is prepared to make a decision within 20
minutes that could launch one of the most devastating weapons in the world. To
declare war requires an act of congress, but to launch a nuclear holocaust
requires 20 minutes' deliberation by the president and his advisors.
Twintig minuten is voldoende om
de nieuwe holocaust te veroorzaken. Binnen deze context krijgt de ‘orde’
van Geert Mak en zijn ‘ordebewaker’ een geheel andere
betekenis dan hij suggereert. Daarom verzwijgt hij -- en met hem de mainstream
-- de ware feiten. De ‘ordebewaker’ die volgens Mak de ‘Verlichting’ heeft ‘uitgevoerd, als real life experiment' heeft in werkelijkheid een
onvoorstelbare chaos veroorzaakt in de internationale en nationale
verhoudingen. Dat weet Mak natuurlijk ook wel, maar hij kan het als bestseller-auteur
natuurlijk niet opschrijven, immers, ‘als je invloed en macht wilt
hebben, moet je groots zijn. Dat is iets wat we in Europa van ze kunnen leren.’
Morgen meer. Hier kunt u alvast
aanvullende informatie krijgen over de nucleaire wapens en andere grootse
dingen die nodig zijn ‘als je invloed en macht wilt hebben.’
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