'Deskundigen' 110

Truth is always the enemy of power. And power the enemy of truth.
Edward Abbey. A Voice Crying In The Wilderness. 1989

I cannot prove that I am stateless, because I am stateless.
Ad van Delderen. Go No Go. 2003

The End of History and the Last Man is a 1992 book by Francis Fukuyama… In the book, Fukuyama argues that the advent of Western liberal democracy may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government.

‘What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man

Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds. It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of humanity… All these passions of today… have discovered a ‘historical law,’ according to which their movement is merrely carrying out the spirit of history and must therefore necessarily triumph, while the opposing party is running counter to this spirit and can enjoy only a transitory triumph. That is merely the old desire to have Fate on one’s side, but it is put forth in a scientific shape. And this brings us to the second novelty: Today all political ideologies claim to be founded on science, to be the result of a ‘precise observation of facts.’ We all know what self-assurance, what rigidity, what inhumanity … are given to these passions today by this claim.

To summarize: Today political passions show a degree of universality, of coherence, of homogeneousness, of precision, of continuity, of preponderance, in relation to other passions, unknown until our times. They have become conscious of themselves to an extent never seen before. Some of them, hitherto scarcely avowed, have awakened to consciousness and have joined the old passions. Others have become more purely passionate than ever, possess men’s hearts in moral regions they never before reached, and have acquired a mystic character which had disappeared for centuries. All are furnished with an apparatus of ideology whereby, in the name of science, they proclaim the supreme value of their action and its historical necessity. On the surface and in the depths, in spatial values and in inner strength, political passions have today reached a point of perfection never before known in history. The present age is essentially the age of politics.
Julien Benda. The Treason of the Intellectuals. 1927

 Orde, evenwicht tussen de verschillende machten, binnen Amerika en ook in de rest van de wereld, dat was zijn doel… Teddy Roosevelt was een fenomeen.
Geert Mak. Reizen zonder John. 2012

Als je invloed en macht wilt hebben, moet je groots zijn. Dat is iets wat we in Europa van ze kunnen leren.

Geert Mak. Nu.NL. 22 augustus 2012

'Het is beter voor Nederland en de internationale gemeenschap dat Obama de verkiezingen wint.'

Geert Mak. EO Radio. 6 november 2012

Afgaande op de uitspraken van westerse mainstream-intellectuelen als Mak is er inderdaad sprake van ‘la trahison des clercs,’ zoals Benda het in zijn eigen taal noemde. Hun begrippen als ‘het einde van de geschiedenis,’ ‘groots zijn,’ ‘orde’ en ‘evenwicht’  verraden een totalitair wereldbeeld van opiniemakers die met een handvol illusies de macht en het grote publiek willen behagen. Daar tegenover staat de visie van kunstenaars en denkers. In zijn essay The Great Gatsby: Fitzgerald’s Meditation on American History schreef de Amerikaanse emeritus hoogleraar Literatuur Kermit W. Moyer:

The foul dust that floats in the wake of America’s dreams: the waste of material resources exploited in a desperate effort to sustain that impossible and disastrously circular thrust into the future and the waste of spiritual resources exploited in the ‘service of a vast, vulgar, and metricious beauty’ (p.99). The foul dust is the corruptive materialism, like a worm in an apple, at the center of the transcendental dream.

 De Amerikaanse Droom, waarnaar al degenen die de werkelijkheid niet kunnen verdragen op zoek zijn, is in werkelijkheid de hersenschim van zowel de winners als de losers, een illusie die de democratie heeft vernietigd omdat het alle interne tegenstrijdigheden van het kapitalisme ontkend, de realiteit dus ontkend en daarmee mensen buitensluit. De Amerikaanse socioloog en toneelschrijver Phlip Slater schrijft daarover in A Dream Deferred. America’s Discontent And The Search For A New Democratic Ideal:

Democracy is by definition inclusive. Not just in the sense of including people, but in the sense of including ideas. Authoritarianism is exclusive, seeking to limit – to shut out disruptive ideas and feelings. Hence it is appealing to those with dictatorial egos – egos that are continually struggling to suppress uncomfortable messages from the interior… It is not merely a matter of including… individuals within the framework of rights which our Declaration of Independence claims to be inalienable but which have so often been alienated, it is also a matter of reviving our feelings for the rights themselves.

This claim toward inclusiveness is an international one. Despite the many local wars and ethnic battles around the world, global interdependence has become a reality. The tiresome military posturing that still fascinates our media and our presidency is obscuring one of the most profoundly integrative phenomena in history – the accelerating global cross-fertilization as widely different cultures make increased contact. The recent fusions that have occured in art, music, dance, theater, film, literature, and so on are only the beginning of a rich and diverse gobal renaissance.

Het is inderdaad een mogelijkheid, maar een mogelijkheid die bedreigd wordt door het geweld van het neoliberale mens- en wereldbeeld dat uitgaat van het dogma dat ‘als je invloed en macht wilt hebben, je groots [moet] zijn,’ een meedogenloze leerstelling ‘wat we in Europa van ze kunnen leren.’ Daarbij gaat de mainstream ook nog eens voorbij aan de historische werkelijkheid zoals die vier eeuwen geleden in de latere VS begon met de aankomst van Europese christelijke fundamentalisten, over wie de Amerikaanse dichter William Carlos Williams in zijn essaybundel In the American  Grain het volgende schreef:

As particles stripped of wealth, mortifying as they were mortified, ‘predicateurs,’ greatly suffering, greatly prepared to suffer, they were the perfect sprout for the continent God had driven them to. But Puritans, as they were called, if they were pure it was more since they had nothing in them of fulfillment than because of positive virtues.

By their very emptiness they were the fiercest element in the battle to establish a European life on the New World… The emptiness about them was sufficient terror for them not to look further. The jargon of God, which they used, was their dialect by which they kept themselves surrounded as with a palisade…

The dreadful and curious thing is that men, despoiled and having nothing, must long most for that which they have not and so, out of the intensity of their emptiness imagining they are full, deceive themselves and all the despoiled of the world into their sorry beliefs…

Their misfortune has become a malfeasant ghost that dominates us all. It is they who must have invented the ‘soul,’ but the perversion is for this emptiness, this dream, this pale negative to usurp the place of that which really they were destined to continue.

This stress of spirit against the flesh has produced a race incapable of flower. Upon that part of the earth they occupied true spirit dies because of the Puritans, except through vigorous zeal, mistaken for a thrust up toward the sun, was a stroke in, in, in – not toward germination but the confinements of a tomb… And it is still today the Puritan who keeps his frightened grip upon the throat of the world lest it should prove him – empty.

Achter alle grootspraak, hubris, geweld, dreigementen, machtslust, drift, rancune, wraaklust, schuilt de leegte, de zinloosheid, de doodsangst. Een dichterlijke geest kan dat zien, voelt het ook, maar voor mensen die alles verpolitieken of in geld vertalen bestaat deze werkelijkheid niet. William Carlos Williams eindigt zijn essay Voyage of the Mayflower aldus:

Here souls perish miserably, or escaping, are bent into grotesque designs of violence and despair. It is an added strength thrown to a continent already too powerful for men. One had not expected that this seed of England would come to impersonate, and to marry, the very primitive itself; to creep into the very intestines of the settlers and turn them against themselves, to befoul the New World.

It has become ‘the most lawless country in the civilized world,’ a panorama of muders, perversions, a terrific ungoverned strength, excusable only because of the horrid beauty of its great machines. Today 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 aristocracy) in return for opportunist material advantages, a generation hating those whom it obeys.

What prevented the normal growth? Was it England, the northern strain, the soil they landed on? It was, of course, the whole weight of the wild continent that made their condition of mind advantageous, forcing it to reproduce its owen likeness, and no more.

Vandaar ook het aanhoudende expansionisme, overal moet deze cultuur zich weerspiegeld zien, zo niet dan zal het gedwongen zijn de eigen angstaanjagende leegte te aanschouwen. De consumptiemaatschappij is een vlak glazen façade waarin de mens zich miljoenvoudig weerkaatst ziet en naar zichzelf blijft kijken om te controleren of hij nog bestaat. De opmerking van ‘Amerikadeskundige’ Geert Mak dat de VS ‘weer het ‘gewone’ land moet worden dat het tot 1940 was,’ bewijst hoe weinig hij, net als de rest van de mainstream in de massamedia, van het land begrijpt. In plaats van beschaamd te zwijgen menen ze dat ‘Amerika behoefte’ heeft aan hun ‘blik van buitenaf.’  Het zou van intellectuele integriteit getuigen als ze eens naar Amerikaanse intellectuelen zouden luisteren en niet alleen naar ‘het volk’ en ‘de politici.’  Zo schreef al in 1999 Noam Chomsky dat uit Amerikaans opinieonderzoek blijkt dat ‘more than 80 percent of the population feel that the democratic system is a sham and that the economy is ‘inherently unfair,’ terwijl ‘The business press records “capital’s clear subjugation of labor for the past fifteen years,” which has allowed it to win many victories.’  De Nederlandse opiniemakers zouden ook eens over de volgende opmerking van Andy Warhol kunnen nadenken:

Your own life while it’s happening to you never has any atmosphere until it’s a memory. So the fantasy corners of America seem so atmospheric because you’ve pieced them together from scenes in movies and music and lines from books. And you live in your dream America that you’ve custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions just as much as you live in your real one.

Het citaat, uit 1985 dat in de catalogus Andy Warhol’s Dream America staat, vat treffend samen hoe de Amerikaanse Droom een individuele zelfverzonnen werkelijkheid is, bestaande uit flarden kitsch, sentimentaliteit en een wanhopig verlangen naar een motief dat de mens boven zichzelf verheft. Warhol’s visie plaats dan ook Mak’s bewering dat ‘het beter [is] voor Nederland en de internationale gemeenschap dat Obama de verkiezingen wint' in een wel heel wonderlijk licht.

Maandag meer.