'Deskundigen' 105

All governments need enemies. How else to justify their existence?
Edward Abbey. A Voice Crying in the Wilderness. 1989

America has become ‘the most lawless country in the civilized world,’ a panorama of murders, perversions, a terrific ungoverned strength, excusable only because of the horrid beauty of its machines. To-day it is a generation of gross know-nothingism, of blackened churches were hymns groan like chants from stupefied jungles, a generation universally eager to barter permanent values (the hope of an aristorcracy) in return for opportunist material advantages, a generation hating those whom it obeys.
William Carlos Williams. In The American Grain. 1933

The history of the United States shows that in spite of the varying trend of the foreign policy of succeeding administrations, this Government has interposed or intervened in the affairs of other states with remarkable regularity, and it may be anticipated that the same general procedure will be followed in the future. It is well that the United States may be prepared for any emergency which may occur…
U.S. Marine Corps. Small Wars Manual. 1940

These conflicts might as well be called ‘imperial wars’ – a term that, American sensitivities notwithstanding, seems apt to describe many U.S. adventures abroad. Indeed, having set out to write a purely military history, I found myself of necessity also chronicling the political course of American empire.
Max Boot. The Savage Wars of Pelace. Small Wars and the Rise of American Power. 2002

The second in command, now left in charge of the camp, was a man of gigantic size called ‘Judge’ Holden of Texas. Who or what he was no one knew but a colder blooded villain never went unhung: he stood six foot six in his mocassins, had a large fleshy frame, a dull tallow colored face destitute of hair and all expression. His desires was blood and women, and terrible stories were circulated in camp of horrid crimes committed by him when bearing another name, in the Cherokee nation and Texas; and before we left Frontreras a little girl of ten years was found in the chapperal, foully violated and murdered. The mark of a huge hand on her little throat pointed him out as the ravisher as no other man had such a hand, but though all suspected, no one charged him with the crime.
Samuel E. Chamberlain. My Confession. 1956

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The My Lai Massacre was the Vietnam War mass murder of between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians in South Vietnam on March 16, 1968, by United States Army soldiers of ‘Charlie’ Company of 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade of the Americal Division. Most of the victims were women, children, infants, and elderly people. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies were later found to be mutilated and many women were allegedly raped prior to the killings. While 26 U.S. soldiers were initially charged with criminal offenses for their actions at Mỹ Lai, only Second Lieutenant William Calley, a platoon leader in Charlie Company, was convicted. Found guilty of killing 22 villagers, he was originally given a life sentence, but only served three and a half years under house arrest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre

At the Winter Soldier Investigation in Detroit organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War January 31-February 2, 1971, veterans including First Lieutenant William Crandell of the 199th Light Infantry Brigade, Americal Division expressed their outrage:

We intend to tell who it was that gave us those orders; that created that policy; that set that standard of war bordering on full and final genocide. We intend to demonstrate that My Lai was no unusual occurrence, other than, perhaps, the number of victims killed all in one place, all at one time, all by one platoon of us. We intend to show that the policies of Americal Division which inevitably resulted in My Lai were the policies of other Army and Marine Divisions as well. We intend to show that war crimes in Vietnam did not start in March 1968, or in the village of Son My or with one Lieutenant William Calley. We intend to indict those really responsible for My Lai, for Vietnam, for attempted genocide… On August 19, 2009, while speaking to the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus, Calley apologized for his role in the My Lai massacre. Calley said:

There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai. I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry... If you are asking why I did not stand up to them when I was given the orders, I will have to say that I was a 2nd Lieutenant getting orders from my commander and I followed them—foolishly, I guess.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Calley

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. Het is nog altijd de ‘standaardmacht’
Geert Mak. Reizen zonder John. Op zoek naar Amerika. 2012

Gen. William C. Westmoreland’s characterization of civilian casualties: ‘It does deprive the enemy of the population, doesn’t it?’ We evaluated our progress by bodycounts and drew free-fire zones in which the entire civilian population was created as the enemy. Such a strategy inevitably led to war crimes. Thus My Lai was not a minor event, unworthy of inclusion in a nation’s history, but was important precisely because it was emblematic of much  of what went wrong with the entire war in Vietnam. My Lai was the most famous instance of what John Kerry, formerly of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, now a U.S. senator (en de huidige Amerikaanse minister van Buitenlandse Zaken. svh), called ‘not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.’ Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971, Kerry said, ‘Over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia.’ He went on to retell how American troops ‘had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Kahn, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisend food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of Vietnam.’ All this was ‘in addition to the normal ravage of war.’
James W. Loewen. Lies My Teacher Told Me. Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. 1995

In reading the Abu Ghraib articles Seymour Hersh wrote for the New Yorker in May (here, here, and here), what struck me about the revelations of abuse and torture was the similarity in detail to what I experienced in Vietnam 35 years ago. The one major difference has been the media’s willingness to embrace in 2004 a story that they shunned in 1970, when returning veterans attempted to inform the American public of widespread atrocities, including the routine killing and torture of prisoners, committed by American forces in Southeast Asia.

Only certain episodes of the widespread Vietnam veteran war protests throughout 1970 and into 1971 are well-known, like the April 1971 veterans' encampment in Washington. Scores of former combatants – with John Kerry in a visible position of leadership – threw their service ribbons and medals of valor over a barrier in the direction of the Capitol steps. But one has to dig far deeper to recover and stitch into a coherent narrative an account of the precise issue – U.S. war crimes in Indochina – that motivated much of Vietnam veteran antiwar activism in those times. With the exception of the My Lai massacre – made public in the U.S. under Seymour Hersh’s byline more than a year and a half (November 1969) after it had occurred (March 1968) – Vietnam war crimes, which often included torture, never attained the level of media validation and public recognition afforded to the events at Abu Ghraib.
Michael Uhl. Vietnam's Shadow Over Abu Ghraib. 2004

The U.S. military first denied that it has used white phosphorus as an anti-personnel weapon in Fallujah, but later retracted that denial, and admitted to using the incendiary in the city as an offensive weapon. Reports following the events of November 2004 have alleged war crimes, human rights abuses, and a massacre by U.S. personnel. This point of view is presented in the 2005 documentary film, Fallujah, The Hidden Massacre…. The primary theme of the film is its assertion of a case for war crimes committed by the United States in its military offensive against Fallujah in Iraq. The film documents the use of weapons based on white phosphorus and other substances similar to napalm, such as Mark-77, by American forces.

Interviews with American ex-military personnel who claimed to have been involved in the Fallujah offensive back up the case for the use of weapons by the United States, while reporters who were stationed in Iraq discuss the American government's attempts to suppress the news by covert means… On 17 May 2011, AFP reported that 21 bodies, in black body-bags marked with letters and numbers in Latin script had been recovered from a mass grave in al-Maadhidi cemetery in the center of the city. Fallujah police chief Brigadier General Mahmud al-Essawi said that they had been blindfolded, their legs had been tied and they had suffered gunshot wounds. The Mayor, Adnan Husseini said that the manner of their killing, as well as the body bags, indicated that US forces had been responsible. Both al-Essawi and Husseini agreed that the dead had been killed in 2004. The US Military declined to comment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallujah,_The_Hidden_Massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallujah

Wanneer de westerse mainstream met grote stelligheid beweert dat de VS als ‘ordebewaker en politieagent’ in de wereld ‘fungeert,’ dan wordt bewust de Amerikaanse terreur met evenveel stellligheid verzwegen. De wreedheden, onderdrukking en uitbuiting passen niet in de Readers Digest-versie waarbij een ‘politieagent’ kennelijk geen ‘ordebewaker’ behoeft te zijn, gezien het onderscheid. Duidelijk is in elk geval dat die ‘orde’ de belangen van de rijken dient, of in de woorden van de opsteller van de Amerikaanse Grondwet en de vierde president van het land,  James Madison, ‘They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority’ van paupers. Op die wijze ontstond een racistische plutocratie waarbij, zo schreef de Amerikaanse hoogleraar  Engels, Mark Richardson, een werkelijk

integrated America will necessarily be a different America because what it means to be ‘American’ has until now involved a complementary blend of social opppression and psychic repression. This is what Baldwin has in mind when he writes, in No Name in the Street: ‘In the generality, as social and moral and political and sexual entities, white Americans are probably the sickest and most dangerous people, of any color, to be found in the world today.’ […] He writes in The Fire Next Time: ‘The white man’s unadmitted – and apparently, to him, unspeakable – private fears and longings are projected onto the Negro. The only way he can be released from the Negro’s tyrannical power over him is to consent, in effect, to become black himself, to become a part of that suffering and dancing country that he now watches wistfully from the heights of his lonely power and, armed with spiritual traveler’s checks.’

Het feit dat iets meer dan een kwart van de Amerikaanse kiesgerechtigden op een president heeft gestemd die een zwarte vader en een blanke moeder heeft, maakt aan dat racisme geen eind, gezien ook het feit dat de meerderheid van de blanke kiezers niet voor hem heeft gestemd en een aanzienlijk deel van de gekleurde bevolking in de VS nog steeds tot de onderkaste behoort. ‘The racial wealth gap has hit an all-time high while Barack Obama has been president. The median net worth of white households is now 20 times that of black households.’
http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2012/12/10/how-home-ownership-keeps-blacks-poorer-than-whites/

Paul McKinley, an outspoken Chicago resident and voice against liberal-Chicago-machine politics, Rahm Emanuel, and President Obama, spoke to me directly about the ongoing violence in the black community, explaining, “the real cause of violence in the community is caused by narco-terrorism facilitated by Chicago’s liberal-sanctuary-city status, in addition to the historically high unemployment rate among black men between of working age,” which he claims is never addressed by the President and comes last, if at all, in the liberal agenda.

McKinley points to a Univiersity of Wisconsin Milwaukee ‘Race and Male Employment in the Wake of the Great Recession’ study, which found that for the 40-year time span between 1970 and 2010 the employment rate of black males between 16-64 years old has fallen by 28% to 55% in the country’s 25 largest metropolitan areas. Over these 40 years, he claims his community, the ‘poor-black community,’ has been controlled and devastated by black Democrats implementing a ‘white-liberal agenda.’ He specifically points to the President’s policy of putting issues such as same-sex marriage and amnesty for illegal aliens in front of the struggling black community and curbing violence.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/10/26/Exodus-Inter-City-Blacks-Fleeing-Obama-Democrats

Ondertussen beweert de mainstream bij monde van Geert Mak dat ‘Het beter [is] voor Nederland en de internationale gemeenschap dat Obama de verkiezingen wint,' en dat de huidige Amerikaanse president de armen gaat helpen, al was het maar omdat volgens hem ‘Bij Obama het erg over het verdedigen van verworven rechten [speelt].' Uit wetenschappelijk onderzoek blijkt evenwel dat de praktijk fundamenteel anders is. Professor Mark Richardson stelt ook vast dat ‘Only a possibility and a promise, America has existed nowhere within our geographical or chronological horizons.’ De Amerikaanse droom was en is een utopie, niets meer en ook niets minder dan een droombeeld voor de Amerikanen zelf. Een vooral materialistisch droombeeld dat universeel niet toepasbaar is, aangezien het zelfs niet in de VS een realiteit is geworden. De Amerikaanse academicus Mark Richardson eindigt zijn essay Peasant Dreams: Reading On the Road dan ook als volgt:

the wholesome American dream that the father-child Sal has (één van de hoofrolspelers in On the Road. svh), with its prairies, stars, sparklers, and nighttime Iowa blessings, is just the impossible dream of On the Road: its wild utopia, the joyous America that exists nowhere beyond the border of this fiction, but where... White and Black alike, at last find their happy, true-hearted, ecstatic place together in this world. On the Road sings its White readers to sleep dreaming of this world elsewhere: the place where America has the only reality it has in fact ever had. We have always dwelt merely in possibility, as migrant farm laborers in California, though not in On the Road, know full well. On the Road is therefore a novel steeped in forgetfulness, an Apollonian dream willfully set against a whole world of torment. It tells us a bedtime story about the power of our supreme national fiction to inspire belief, the better to bring into view its never-realized but always possible object, just over the western horizon. We simply have to keep telling ourselves that America can exist, as Baldwin knew when he wrote The Fire Next Time. ‘We the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation – if we are really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity, as men and women.’

Zolang de ‘Amerikaanse Droom’ een illusie blijft is het absurd te veronderstellen dat de VS die Droom wereldwijd wil of kan verspreiden. De mainstream mag dan wel, zoals Mak, een ‘geheime liefde’ koesteren voor het ‘droomland,’ verstandige mensen dienen daarentegen niet uit te gaan van een droom, maar van de werkelijkheid. En een ‘geheime liefde’ is het jargon van een puber die nog geen plaats heeft gevonden voor de harde realiteit. In The Anarchy of Empire schreef de Amerikaanse hoogleraar Engels, Amy Kaplan: 

American exceptionalism is in part an argument for boundless expansion, where national particularism and international universalism converge. The cultural expressions I analyze reveal an anxiety about the anarchic potential of imperial distension underlying this exceptionalist ideal. If the fantasy of American imperialism aspires to a borderless world where it finds its own reflection everywhere, then the fruition of this dream shatters the coherence of national identity, as the boudaries that distinguish it from the outside world promise to collapse.

Op de een of andere manier zullen de westerse mainstream-opiniemakers ooit eens moeten reageren op deze paradox. Als de claim van het Westen klopt dat de waarden van de Verlichting universeel zijn en wij dus gedwongen zijn de mensenrechten, de democratie, en het internationaal recht overal te respecteren dan hebben het nationalisme en patriottisme geen legitimering meer en zullen we onze grenzen dienen open te stellen voor de armen uit de derde wereld, ons streven naar hegemonie moeten stoppen, onze welvaart moeten afbouwen en delen met de rest van de wereld. Men kan niet eerst beweren de normen en waarden van mensenrechten en democratie te respecteren om vervolgens de schending van diezelfde normen te accepteren. En mocht de lezer zich afvragen waarover ik het heb dan wijs ik ondermeer op de Europese steun aan de illegale inval in Irak, de Europese steun bij het martelen van mensen die door de VS verdacht werden van terrorisme en op het feit dat de EU nog steeds Israel financieel, economisch, politiek, cultureel en zelfs via de NAVO militair steunt, ondanks het feit dat de ‘Joodse staat’ doorgaat met het schenden van het internationaal recht. ‘UN REPORT: ISRAEL MUST IMMEDIATELY DISMANTLE SETTLEMENTS OR FACE ICC’  http://stanvanhoucke.blogspot.nl/2013/02/zionist-terror-105.html

Morgen meer.