'Deskundigen' 113

The empire ran on the suffering of millions of peons and slaves, Indians and Africans.
Robert V. Hine & John Mack Faragher. The American West. A new interpretive history. 2000

Kennedy’s use of ‘New Frontier’ tapped a vein of latent ideological power. While he and his advisers could not have predicted just how effective the symbolism would be, they certainly understood that they were invoking what was a venerable tradition in American political rhetoric. They knew from their own experience of American culture that figures of speech referring to this tradition would be intelligible to the widest possible audience – to Brooklyn and Cambridge as well as Abilene and Los Angeles. They had grounds for knowing – or at least intuiting – that this set of symbols was also an appropriate language for explaining and justifying the use of political power.

The exchange of an old, domestic, agrarian frontier for a new frontier of world power and industrial development had been a central trope in American political and historiographical debates since the 1890s. Sixty-seven years (almost to the day) before Kennedy’s address, Frederick Jackson Turner had delivered his epoch-making address on ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History,’ in which he asserted that the contemporary crisis of American development had arisen from the closing of the ‘old frontier’ and the delay in finding a new one. His ‘Frontier Thesis’ would become the basis of the dominant school of American historical interpretation and would provide the historiographic rationale for the ideologies of both Republican progressives and Democratic liberals for much of the ensuing century.

For Kennedy and his advisers, the choice of the Fronier as symbol was not simply a device for trade-marking the candidate. It was an authentic metaphor, descriptive of the way in which they wished to use political power and the kinds of struggle in which they wished to engage. The ‘Frontier’ was for them a complex resonant symbol, a vivid and memorable set of hero-tales – each a model of successful and morally justifying action on the stage of historical conflict… it shaped the language through which the resultant wars would be understood by those who commanded and fought them. Seven years after Kennedy’s nomination, American troops would be be describing Vietnam as ‘Indian country’ and search-and-destroy missions as a game of ‘Cowboys and Indians’; and Kennedy’s ambassador to Vietnam would justify a massive military escalation by citing the necessity of moving the ‘Indians’ away from the ‘fort’ so that the ‘settlers’ could plant ‘corn.’ But the provenance and utility of the Frontier symbol did not end with the Kennedy/Johnson administrations: twenty years after Kennedy’s acceptance speech the same symbolism – expressed in talismanic invocations of the images of movie-cowboys John Wayne and Clint Eastwood – would serve the sucecsful campaigns of a Republican arch-conservative and former Hollywood actor…

Richard Slotkin. Gunfighter Nation. The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. 1992

Ook na filmster Ronald Reagan bleef de mythe van het Wide Westen onaangetast en fungeerde  als rechtvaardiging voor het Amerikaanse expansionisme. Zo schreef David J. Morris, voormalige  officier van het Amerikaanse Korps Mariniers in 2004:

Only later, as I reflected on the profusion of American Indian call signs being used by several Marine units in Iraq and the repeated references to Iraq as the “Wild West,” did it strike me that, however facile the idea may seem, the American mind-set is still stuck in Western frontier mode.

Thus our shortcomings in Iraq are a failure of the American imagination as much as anything else. We’re the cowboys, trying to get the Iraqis to make like Indians. I only hope that we’re wise enough to play sheriff for a while after our moment at the OK Corral has come and gone.

http://www.salon.com/2004/11/12/fallujah_8/

Anno 2013 weten we dat dit laatste niet is gebeurd met als gevolg dat de Amerikaanse strijdkrachten de ‘gunfight’ en de strijd in Irak verloren, zeker als we de illegale Amerikaanse inval  beoordelen naar de eigen Amerikaanse maatstaven. Hoe diep de cowboys-idianen metafoor het Amerikaanse bewustzijn bepalen blijkt ook uit de volgende voorbeelden:

'Indian Country'

by zunguzungu

From Stephen W. Silliman’s 'The “Old West” in the Middle East: U.S. Military Metaphors in Real and Imagined Indian Country,' American Anthropologist, Vol. 110, No. 2 (Jun., 2008), a sample of public media sources employing “Indian Country” metaphor in Iraq and Afghanistan (via lexus search in 2006):

“From across the river, we hear a boom in the distance. And then another. ‘This is like cowboys and Indians,’ relays a Marine. Indeed it is.” (Hemmer, Bill, 2006 Reporter’s Notebook: Cowboys and Indians. Foxnews.com, March 30. Electronic document, http://ww.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,189147,00.html.)

“Anbar has the savagery, lawlessness and violence of America’s Wild West in the 1870s. The two most lethal cities in Iraq are Fallujah and Ramadi, and . . . between them is Indian Country.”(West, Bing, and Owen West 2007 Iraq’s Real “Civil War.”

 Wall Street Journal, April 5:A13.)

“I guess if this were the Old West I’d say there are Injuns ahead of us, Injuns behind us, and Injuns on both sides too . . . ”

(Editors’ Report 2003 Indian Country of America. Indian Country Today, April 9. Electronic document, http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1049898023.)

“Even the base the Americans have set up on the edge of town, in an abandoned Iraqi police station, is called Forward Operating Base Comanche, with echoes of a fort in Indian country during the 19th-century expansion across the Great Plains.”

(Burns, John F. 2004 In the General’s Black Hawk, Flying over a Divided Iraq. The New York Times, January 12:2.)

“‘You have so much freedom and authority over there,’ one member of ODA 2021 said. ‘It kind of makes you feel like God when you’re out there in cowboy and Indian country.’”

(Sack, Kevin, and Craig Pyes 2006 Firebase Gardez: A Times Investigation. Los Angeles Times, September 24:A1.)

“LT. COL. RALPH PETERS, US ARMY (RET): ‘[T]he convoys, it’s harder to run them, you need more protection. Basically, the wagon trains now have to go through Indian country.’”

(Gibson, John, Mike Tobin, and Mike Emmanuel 2004 US Soldier Kidnapped by Terrorists in Iraq. “The Big Story with John Gibson,” Fox News Network, April 16.)

“Ramadi is Indian Country—‘the wild, wild West,’ as the region is called.” (McDonnell, Patrick J. 2004 The Conflict in Iraq: No Shortage of Fighters in Iraq’s Wild West. Los Angeles Times, July 25:A1)

“We refer to our base as ‘Fort Apache’ because it’s right in the middle of Indian country.”

(Peirce, Michael 2003 A View from the Frontline in Iraq. LewRockwell.com, April 13. Electronic document, http://www.lewrockwell.com/peirce/peirce73.html.

“Christ be careful out there. This is Indian country in the Hollywood sense of the word.”

(Adams, Jeff 2004 Comment on “Greetings from Baghdad,” May 27. Electronic document, http://www.back-toiraq.com/archives/2004/05/greetings_from_baghdad.php.)

“Had he even lifted a finger towards it, there could have been a ‘situation’. Now you know why we call this place either the ‘Old West’ or ‘Indian Country.’”

 (Reese, Christopher 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom through the Eyes of an Adventurer, May 2. Electronic document, http://www.scuttlebuttsmallchow.com/reese.html.)

And as Silliman comments:

Contrary to statements made by U.S. military officials, the traffic in these metaphors may be part of the sanctioned but, perhaps, not “official” lexicon of the U.S. government (see Bolger 1995). In October 2006, the Baghdad Overseas Security Advisory Council website had the following statement (which one year later no longer existed): “We will post other things . . . so that your teams can have the best information available if they run into trouble out in ‘Indian Country’ “ (Baghdad Country Council n.d.). Recent newspaper quotations from Stephen Biddle, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former professor at the U.S. Army War College, further emphasize the currency of this metaphor among military leaders and strategists. The Los Angeles Times quotes him with reference the U.S. Embassy: “If the government of Iraq collapses and becomes transparently just one party in a civil war, you’ve got Ft. Apache in the middle of Indian country, but the Indians have mortars now” (Zavis 2007: A1). The International Herald Tribune quotes Biddle saying “those convoys are going to roll through Indian country with no cavalry” (Knowlton 2006). Even U.S. country music superstar Toby Keith commented on traveling to Iraq to entertain soldiers “in Indian country, in the Wild Wild West” (Masley 2005: W16).

http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2011/07/15/indian-country/

De frontier mythe wordt bekrachtigd door politici, opiniemakers, journalisten, filmmakers als de legendarische John Ford die meer dan vijftig Westerns maakte en algemeen beschouwd wordt als één van de belangrijkste en invloedrijkste film directors van zijn generatie wiens werk het beeld van vele miljoenen Amerikanen heeft bepaald. In John Ford and the American West schreef de filmhistoricus Peter Cowie dat

Ford’s Westerns flowed from a vibrant tradition in the visual arts – a tradition rooted in the aspirations of Manifest Destiny, the belief that propelled American society westward during the nineteenth century…

Ford’s films rarely err on the side of realism; rather they present us with a mythic vision of the plains and deserts of the American West, embodied most memorably in Monument Valley, with its buttes and mesas that tower above the men on horseback, whether they be settlers, soldiers, or Native Americans… Many of these have entered movie history as imperishable examples of the Western spirit… His best work unfolds at the interface between old and new, between the traditional Indian way of life and the inexorable tide of civilization… Ford’s greatest works in the genre show settlers and cattlemen at the mercy of elements and Indians alike…

Native American, lurking in forest and canyon alike, were regarded as dangerous vermin. Frederick Jackson Turner, writing in 1893, noted: ‘One of the most striking phases of frontier adjustment, was the proposal of the Reverend Solomon Stoddard of Northampton in the fall of 1703, urging  the use of dogs 'to hunt Indians as they do Bears.’ The argument was that the dogs would catch many an Indian who would be too light of foot for the townsmen, nor was it thought of as inhuman; for the Indians 'act like wolves and are to be dealt with as wolves.' Almost a full century of what Turner called ‘Indian fighting and forest felling’ was needed to advance the colonial settlements a mere hundred miles westward from the eastern seaboard…

By 1901, Vice President Theodore could assert: ‘The conquest and settlement of the West… has been the stupendous feat of our race for the century that has just closed… It is a record of men who greatly dared and greatly did; a record of wanderings wider and more dangerous than those of the Vikings; a record of endless feats-of-arms, of victory after victory in the ceaseless strife waged against wild man and wild nature. The winning of the West was the great epic feat in the history of our race.’

En werd tegelijkertijd het model en de rechtvaardiging van het almaar voortgaande Amerikaanse expansionisme, maar dan buiten de eigen grenzen zonder enige rekening te houden met de wensen van de slachtoffers van de imperialistische politiek. Overal zijn er wel ‘wild man and wild nature’ die onderworpen moeten worden aan de Amerikaanse economische en geopolitieke belangen en daarbij geldt allereerst ‘het gevoel dat ze uitzonderlijk zijn... Als je invloed en macht wilt hebben, moet je groots zijn,’ aldus de mainstream versie van Geert Mak die daaraan toevoegt: ‘dat is iets wat we in Europa van ze kunnen leren.’ Voor de mainstream is het een onaanvechtbaar dogma dat zelfs president Theodore Roosevelt streefde naar

Orde, evenwicht tussen de verschillende machten, binnen Amerika en ook in de rest van de wereld, dat was zijn doel. De Amerikaanse individuele vrijheid hoefde daarbij niet in het gedrang komen, integendeel, het ging hem juist om de bescherming van die vrijheid,’

zo stelt Mak, die zelf tegelijkertijd terecht constateert dat hij en andere Nederlandse ‘chroniqueurs van heden en verleden, onze taak, het “uitbannen van onwaarheid,”’  niet ‘serieus genoeg [nemen].’ Als hij de ‘waarheid’ wel had gerespecteerd dan had 'chroniqueur' Mak zijn lezers duidelijk moeten maken wat voor soort ‘orde’ Theodore Roosevelt voorstond, namelijk de ‘orde’ van het blanke, christelijke expanisonisme dat vijf eeuwen geleden begon met de zogeheten ‘ontdekking van de Nieuwe Wereld,’ die ook op het grondgebied van de VS de genocide van Indiaanse volkeren inluidde. De ‘Indian’ waar dan ook ter wereld is kennelijk een te verwaarlozen detail, zijn dood is niet meer dan ‘collateral damage.’  De blanke identificeert zich met de cowboy en niet met de indiaan, zoals tevens blijkt uit de uitspraak van zelfs een vooraanstaande politicus als Henry Kissinger:

I've always acted alone. Americans like that immensely.
Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town, the village, with his horse and nothing else. Maybe even without a pistol, since he doesn't shoot. He acts, that's all, by being in the right place at the right time. In short, a Western. […] This amazing, romantic character suits me precisely because to be alone has always been part of my style or, if you like, my technique.

Hoe waar dat zelfbeeld is, bewees Kissinger zelf nadat Oriana Fallaci haar interview in 1972 had gepubliceerd en Henry verklaarde dat het vraaggesprek ‘without doubt the single most disastrous conversation’ was geweest ‘I ever had with any member of the press’ om vervolgens te beweren dat hij waarschijnlijk verkeerd geciteerd was of dat zijn uitspraken uit zijn verband waren getrokken, een leugen die Fallaci snel kon weerleggen door de geluidsbanden te laten horen. De Italiaanse journaliste reageerde tenslotte met de volgende woorden:

Henry Kissinger may have wished I had presented him as a combination of Charles de Gaulle and Disraeli, but I didn’t… out of respect for De Gaulle and Disraeli. I described him as a cowboy because that’s how he described himself. If I were a cowboy I would be offended.

Het Amerikaanse zelfbeeld wordt nog altijd gevormd door de mythe van de eenzame cowboy die, net als Lucky Luke,  na het recht te hebben hersteld en gezeten op zijn paard westwaards trekt richting de ondergaande zon al zingend ‘I’m a poor lonesome cowboy and a long way from home…’ De cowboy is dus ook het archetype geweest voor één van de meest meedogenloze en doortrapte westerse politici van na de Tweede Wereldoorlog, die zelf als joods kind de nazi’s moest ontvluchten. Toen ik een paar jaar geleden over Henry Kissinger sprak met een joods Amerikaanse vriendin van ons, Sheila Geist, oud lerares geschiedenis in New York, vertelde ze me het volgende:

Met wie anders had Kissinger zich kunnen identificeren? Verplaats je in zijn positie: een klein, lelijk, joods mannetje, met een chip on his shoulder, wiens familie moest vluchten voor het Herrenvolk en in een land terecht kwam met een cultuur waar winners de dienst uitmaken en losers geminacht worden. Natuurlijk identificeerde hij zich met het archetype van de cowboy, de indianen waren de losers, die net als de joden massaal werden vermoord of in een kamp werden opgesloten. Dus koos hij voor de winners. Zo werkt nu eenmaal de menselijke psyche. En dit gaat op voor alle mensen, zeker voor degenen die niet van nature behoren tot de winners, de meerderheid dus. Dat verander je niet van de ene op de andere dag. Je zult eerst de oorzaken moeten wegnemen. We hebben hier te maken met een diep cultureel problemen.

Morgen meer.