The Fifth Estate Propaganda

'The Fifth Estate' & WikiLeaks: Film About Julian Assange Leaked To Wikileaks

By RAPHAEL SATTER 01/25/13 06:03 PM ET EST

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"The Fifth Estate" has reportedly been leaked to WikiLeaks.

LONDON -- If you're making a movie about WikiLeaks, this is the kind of thing you probably see coming.

Julian Assange says he has obtained a leaked copy of the script for "The Fifth Estate," a DreamWorks film about the maverick computer expert and his famed secret-busting site. In a speech before the Oxford Union debating society earlier this week, Assange said his unauthorized sneak peek has left him convinced the film is a hit piece.

"It is a mass propaganda attack against WikiLeaks, the organization (and) the character of my staff," he said, adding that the movie – the opening scenes of which Assange described as taking place in Tehran and Cairo – also hyped Western fears over the Islamic Republic's disputed atomic energy program.

"It is not just an attack against us, it is an attack against Iran. It fans the flames of an attack against Iran," he said.

A DreamWorks spokeswoman declined to comment on Assange's claims.

In a telephone interview late Friday, Assange said that the film's plot revolves around a fictional mole in Iran's nuclear program who discovers that the country has nearly finished building an atom bomb and will soon be in a position to load it onto ballistic missiles. The film has the informant fleeing to Iraq when WikiLeaks publishes his name among its massive trove of classified material.

Assange says the whole story is "a lie built on a lie," claiming that the U.S. intelligence community generally believes that Iran stopped comprehensive secret work on developing nuclear arms in 2003, and that, in any case, the world had yet to see evidence of a case in which WikiLeaks had exposed a CIA informant.

"They tried to frame Iran as having an active nuclear weapons program. Then they try to frame WikiLeaks as the reason why that's not known to the public now," Assange said, comparing the movie to Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty," another film whose artistic liberties with recent history have drawn allegations of political bias.

Assange declined to say where he got the script, although he hinted that he had been supplied with several copies of it over time. He also declined to say whether the script would be posted to the WikiLeaks website, saying only that "we are examining options closely."

"The Fifth Estate" stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Assange and Daniel Bruhl as Daniel Domscheit-Berg, an early Assange ally who eventually fell out with WikiLeaks.

The film is due for release in November, and in a statement earlier this week director Bill Condon was quoted as saying that those behind the movie want "to explore the complexities and challenges of transparency in the information age" and "enliven and enrich the conversations WikiLeaks has already provoked."

Assange made his comments to the Oxford Union on Wednesday via videolink from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has been holed up for more than six months in a bid to avoid extradition to Sweden as part of a long-running sex crimes case.

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Online:

Assange's speech before the Oxford Union: http://bit.ly/Vcokdo

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/26/the-fifth-estate-wikileaks-julian-assange-wikileaks_n_2557393.html

The Empire 893

John V. Whitbeck, laywer, living in Paris, 23rd  January 2013:

Transmitted below is the latest wisdom from Ambassador Chas Freeman, who, as usual, is penetratingly perceptive and plain-speaking. These remarks were delivered on January 16 at a conference of the Washington-based Middle East Policy Council, of which Chas is president emeritus.

It is noteworthy that these remarks were circulated yesterday by the American Academy of Diplomacy, an élite organization of retired and serving American ambassadors.

Grand Waffle in the Middle East
Chas W. Freeman Jr.
MEPC 2013/01/16


Over the past half century or so the United States has pursued two main but disconnected objectives in West Asia and North Africa: on the one hand, Americans have sought strategic and economic advantage in the Arabian Peninsula, Persian Gulf, and Egypt; on the other, support for the consolidation of the Jewish settler state in Palestine.  These two objectives of U.S. policy in the Middle East have consistently taken precedence over the frequently professed American preference for democracy. 

These objectives are politically contradictory.  They also draw their rationales from distinct moral universes.  U.S. relations with the Arab countries and Iran have been grounded almost entirely in unsentimental calculations of interest.  The American relationship with Israel, by contrast, has rested almost entirely on religious and emotional bonds.  This disconnect has precluded any grand strategy.

Rather than seek an integrated policy framework, America has balanced the contradictions between the imperatives of its domestic politics and its interests.  For many years, Washington succeeded in having its waffle in the Middle East and eating it too – avoiding having to choose between competing objectives.  With wiser U.S. policies and more judicious responses to them by Arabs and Israelis, Arab-Israeli reconciliation might by now have obviated the ultimate necessity for America to prioritize its purposes in the region.  But the situation has evolved to the point that choice is becoming almost impossible to avoid.

The Middle East matters.  It is where Africa, Asia, and Europe converge.  In addition to harboring the greater part of the world’s conventionally recoverable energy supplies, it is a key passageway between Asia and Europe.  No nation can hope to project its power throughout the globe without access to and through the Middle East.  Nor can any ignore the role of the Persian Gulf countries in fueling the world’s armed forces, powering its economies, and setting its energy prices.  This is why the United States has acted consistently to maintain a position of preeminent influence in the Middle East and to deny to any strategically hostile nation or coalition of nations the opportunity to contest its politico-military dominance of the region. 

The American pursuit of access, transit, and strategic denial has made the building of strategic partnerships with Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt a major focus of U.S.  policy.  The partnership with Iran broke down over three decades ago.  It has been succeeded by antagonism, low-intensity conflict, and the near constant threat of war.  The U.S. relationships with Egypt and Saudi Arabia are now evolving in uncertain directions.  Arab governments have learned the hard way that they must defer to public opinion.  This opinion is increasingly Islamist.  Meanwhile, popular antipathies to the widening American war on Islamism are deepening.  These factors alone make it unlikely that relations with the United States can retain their centrality for Cairo and Riyadh much longer.

The definitive failure of the decades-long American-sponsored “peace process” between Israelis, Palestinians, and other Arabs adds greatly to the uncertainty.  Whether it yielded peace or not, the “peace process” made the United States the apparently indispensable partner for both Israel and the Arabs.  It served dual political purposes.  It enabled Arab governments to persuade their publics that maintaining good relations with the United States did not imply selling out Arab or Islamic  interests in Palestine, and it supported the U.S. strategic objective of achieving acceptance for a Jewish state by the other states and peoples of the Middle East.  Washington’s abandonment of this diplomacy was a boon to Israeli territorial expansion but a disaster for American influence in the region, including in Israel.

Over the years, America protected Israel from international rebuke and punishment.  Its stated purpose was the preservation of prospects for a negotiated “two-state solution” that could bring security and peace to Israelis and Palestinians alike.  A decade ago, every member of both the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation endorsed this objective and pledged normalization with Israel if Israeli-Palestinian negotiations succeeded.  In response, Israel spun out its talks with the Palestinians while working hard to preclude their self-determination.  It has now succeeded in doing so. 

There has been no American-led peace process worthy of the name for nearly two decades.  There is no prospect of such a process resuming.  No one in the international community now accepts the pretense of a "peace process" as an excuse for American protection of Israel.  Eleven years on, the Arab and Islamic peace offer has exceeded its shelf life.  On the Israel-Palestine issue, American diplomacy has been running on fumes for some time.  It is now totally out of gas and universally perceived to be going nowhere.

Sadly, barring fundamental changes in Israeli politics, policies, and behavior, the longstanding American strategic objective of achieving acceptance for the state of Israel to stabilize the region where British colonialism and Jewish nationalism implanted it is now infeasible.  In practice, the United States has abandoned the effort.  U.S. policy currently consists of ad hoc actions to fortify Israel against Palestinian resistance and military threats from its neighbors, while shielding it from increasingly adverse international reaction to its worsening deportment.  In essence, the United States now has no objective with respect to Israel beyond sheltering it from the need to deal with the unpalatable realities its own choices have created.

The key to regional acknowledgment of Israel as a legitimate part of the Middle East was the “two-state solution.”  The Camp David accords laid out a program for Palestinian self-determination and Israeli withdrawal from the territories it had seized and occupied in 1967.  Israel has had more than forty-five years to trade land for peace, implementing its Camp David commitments and complying with international law.  It has consistently demonstrated that it craves land more than peace, international reputation, good will, or legitimacy.  As a result, Israel remains isolated from its neighbors, with no prospect of reversing this.  It is now rapidly forfeiting international acceptability.  There is nothing the United States can do to cure either situation despite the adverse consequences of both for American standing in the region and the world.

In the seventeenth century, English settlers in America found inspiration  for a theology of ethnic cleansing and racism in the Old Testament.  In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Jewish settlers in Palestine have invoked the same scripture to craft a parallel theology.  The increasingly blatant racism and Islamophobia of Israeli politics, the kafkaesque tyranny of Israel’s checkpoint army in the occupied territories, and Israel’s cruel and unusual collective punishment of Gaza have bred hateful resentment of the Jewish state in its region and throughout the Muslim world.  One has to look to north Korea to find another polity so detested and distrusted by its neighbors and with so few supporters among the world’s great powers. 

The United States has affirmed that, regardless of how Israel behaves, it will allow no political distance between itself and the Jewish state.  In the eyes of the world there is none.  Israel’s ill repute corrodes U.S. prestige and credibility not just in the Middle East but in the world at large.

Israel does not seem to care what its neighbors or the world think of it.  Despite its geographical location, it prefers to see itself as its neighbors do: as a Hebrew-speaking politico-economic extension of Europe rather than part of the Middle East.  Nor does Israel appear concerned about the extent to which its policies have undermined America’s ability to protect it from concerted international punishment for its actions. The  United States and Israel’s handful of other international supporters continue to have strong domestic political reasons to stand by it.  Yet they are far less likely to be able to hold back the global movement to ostracize Israel than in the case of apartheid South Africa.  America may “have Israel’s back,” but – on this –  no one now has America’s back.

For a considerable time to come, Israel can rely on its US-provided “qualitative edge” to sustain its military hegemony over others in its region.  But, as the “crusader states” established and sustained by previous Western interventions in the region illustrate, such supremacy – especially when dependent on external support – is inevitably ephemeral – and those who live exclusively by the sword are more likely than others to perish by it.   Meanwhile, as the struggle for Palestinian Arab rights becomes a struggle for human and civil rights within the single sovereignty that Israel has de facto imposed on Palestine, Israel’s internal evolution is rapidly alienating Jews of conscience both there and abroad.  Israelis do not have to live in Palestine; they can and do increasingly withdraw from it to live in diaspora.  Jews outside contemporary Israel are coming to see it less as a sanctuary or guarantor of Jewish security and well-being than as a menace to both.

The United States has made an enormous commitment to the success of the Jewish state.  Yet it has no strategy to cope with the tragic existential challenges Zionist hubris and overweening territorial ambition have now forged for Israel.  The hammerlock the Israeli right has on American discourse about the Middle East assures that, despite the huge U.S. political and economic  investment in Israel, Washington will not discuss or develop effective policy options for sustaining the Jewish state over the long term.  The outlook is therefore for continuing deterioration in Israel’s international moral standing and the concomitant isolation of the United States in the region and around the globe.

This brings me back to the other main objective of U.S. policy in the Middle East: the nurturing of strategic partnerships with the largest and most influential Muslim states in the region.  Iran and Syria have proven to be lost causes in this regard.  Iraq is now more aligned with them than with America.  Turkey is still an important U.S. ally on many matters but, with the exception of some aspects of relations with Syria, Ankara is following policies toward the Middle East that are almost entirely uncoordinated with those of the United States.  The two pillars of the U.S. position in the Middle East beyond Israel are Egypt and Saudi Arabia.  Neither can now be taken for granted.

Egypt is in the midst of a transition from American-aligned autocracy to self-determination under Islamist populism.  It is not clear what sort of domestic political order this populism will shape but it seems certain that future Egyptian governments will listen less to the United States and demand more of Israel.  The diversion to Egypt of a portion of the U.S. government’s generous annual subsidies to Israel long sufficed to secure Cairo’s acquiescence in the Camp David framework.  This enabled Israel to pretend that it had achieved a measure of acceptance among its Arab neighbors despite its default on its obligations to the Palestinians and its escalating mistreatment of them.  More importantly, it gave Israel the strategic security from Egyptian attack it had been unable to obtain by force of arms. 

Populist Egypt’s passivity is very unlikely to be procurable on similar terms.  Enough has changed to put the Camp David framework at severe risk.  (This is true for Jordan as well.  Jordan made peace with Israel in response to the Oslo accords, which the ruling right-wing in Israel systematically undermined and finally undid.)

Since 1979, the U.S. relationship with Israel has been both a raison d’être and essential underpinning for U.S.-Egyptian cooperation.  It is now reemerging as a point of division, irritation, and contention between Americans and Egyptians.  Egypt is once again an independent Arab actor in the affairs of its region, including Israel and Iran.  It is no longer a reliable agent of American influence.  It reacts to Israeli actions and policies calculatedly, with much less deference to U.S. views than in the past.

Islamist parties now dominate Egyptian politics as they do politics in Tunisia and among Palestinians.  It is very unlikely that post-Assad Syria will be democratic but it is virtually certain that it will be Salafist.  The so-called Arab awakening has turned out really to be a Salafist awakening.  There is a struggle for the soul of Islam underway between Takfiri Salafists and conservative modernizers.  In the traditionally Islamist states of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, this struggle is being won by the forces of tolerance, reform, and opening up.  Elsewhere, as in Egypt, the outcome remains in doubt, but nowhere are Muslim conservatives, still less Salafists, at ease with expansionist Zionism or the sort of aggressive anti-Islamism that the United States has institutionalized in its “drone wars.”

In the wake of Washington’s abandonment of the effort to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians, the impact of 9//11, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the transformation of a punitive raid in Afghanistan into a long-term attempt to preclude an Islamist regime there, the U.S. - Saudi relationship, once an example of broad-based strategic partnership, has markedly weakened.  American Islamophobia has erased much of the previous mutual regard between the two countries.  The United States continues to be the ultimate guarantor of the Saudi state against intervention from foreign enemies other than Israel.  There is no alternative to America in this role.  Nor, even when it regains energy self-sufficiency, will the United States be able to ignore Saudi Arabia’s decisive influence on global energy supplies and prices.  But U.S. - Saudi cooperation is no longer instinctual and automatic.  It has become cynically transactional, with cooperation taking place on a case-by-case basis as specific interests dictate. 

Policy convergence between Washington and Riyadh continues but sometimes conceals major differences.  This is clearly the case with Iran, where Washington’s interest in non-proliferation and desire to preserve Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the Middle East overlap but do not coincide with Riyadh’s concerns.  If Tehran does go nuclear, Saudi-American disharmony will be glaringly apparent in very short order .  Similarly, in Syria, the common desire of Americans and Saudis to see Syrians overthrow the Assad government masks very different visions about what sort of regime should succeed it and what the stance of that regime should be toward Israel, Lebanon, or Iraq. 
               
The bottom line is this.  U.S. policies of unconditional support for Israel, opposition to Islamism, and the use of drones to slaughter suspected Islamist militants and their families and friends have created an atmosphere that precludes broad strategic partnerships with major Arab and Muslim countries, though it does not yet preclude limited cooperation for limited purposes.   The acceptance of Israel as a legitimate presence in the Middle East cannot now be achieved without basic changes in Israeli attitudes and behavior that are not in the offing. 

U.S. policies designed, respectively, to pursue strategic partnerships with Arab and Muslim powers and to secure the state of Israel have each separately failed.  The Middle East itself is in flux.  America’s interests in the region now demand fundamental rethinking, not just of U.S. policies, but of the strategic objectives those policies should be designed to achieve.

'Deskundigen' 92

Amerika [zal] in de loop van deze eeuw weer het ‘gewone’ land moeten worden dat het tot 1940 was.

Geert Mak in Vrij Nederland van 3 november 2012.

Waarom 1940? Waarom niet 1539 toen de Spaanse conquistador Hernando de Soto aan het hoofd van 550 soldaten als eerste Europeaan diep het grondgebied van de huidige VS binnendrong op zoek naar goud en slaven, en in het kader daarvan een begin maakte aan de eeuwenlange genocide en roof door blanke christenen? Hele dorpen en steden werden daarbij met de grond gelijk gemaakt, ten koste van vele duizenden inwoners, terwijl ‘the cries of the women and children were such as to deafen those who pursued them,’ aldus een Spaans getuigeverslag. Sommige zwaar gewonden werden terug gestuurd zodat ‘they might strike terror into those who were absent.’ In The Mammoth Book of Native Americans. The story of America’s original inhabitants in all its beauty, magic, truth and tragedy schrijft de historicus Jon E. Lewis dat toen de Spaanse expeditie voorbij was ‘Its impression on the tribes of the southeast was deadly and indelible. Disorientated by the failure of their religions and their chiefs to protect them, hopelessness spread through the people. But not so as quickly as the microbes the Spaniards left behind.

When another Spaniard, Tristan de Luna, visited the southeast less then twenty years after de Soto, he found it a ghost land.’

En dit nog geen halve eeuw nadat Columbus aan zijn financiers, de Spaanse koning en koningin, over inwoners van Amerika had geschreven:

So tractable, so peacable, are these people that I swear to your Majesties there is not in the world a better nation. They love their neighbors as themselves, and their discourse is ever sweet and gentle, and accompanied with a smile… their manners are decorous and praiseworthy.

Maar zoals de Amerikaanse historicus Dee Brown in Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee in 1970 schreef: ‘All this, of coursed, was taken as a sign of weakness, if not heathenism, and Columbus being a righteous European was convinced the people should be ‘made to work, sow and do all that is necessary and to adopt our ways.’ Over the next four centuries (1492-1890) several million Europeans and their descendants undertook to enforce their ways upon the people of the New World.

Waarom het willekeurig gekozen jaartal ‘1940’  en niet 1890, het jaar van Wounded Knee, waarin de laatste massaslachting van Indianen door de blanke binnendringers plaatsvond, op bijna soortgelijke wijze als in 1539 gebeurde, inclusief ‘the cries of the women and children’ die zo hartverscheurend waren ‘as to deafen those who pursued them.’ Dee Brown over de in de ijzige kou vluchtende Indiaanse mannen, vrouwen en kinderen:

‘then the big Hotchkiss guns on the hill opened up on them, firings almost a shell a second, raking the Indian camp, shredding the tepees with flying shrapnel, killing men, women, and children.

‘We tried to run,’ Louise Weasel Bear said, ‘but they shot us like we were a buffalo.’ […] 'I was running away from the place and followed those who were running away,’ said Hakiktawin, another of the young women. ‘My grandfather and grandmother and brother were killed as we crossed the ravine, and then I was shot on the right hip clear through and on my right wrist  I did not go any further as I was not able to walk…’

Toen het bloedbad geeindigd was bleken 153 indianen te zijn gedood, ‘but many of the wounded crawled away to die afterward. One estimate placed the final total of dead at very nearly three hundred of the original 350 men, women, and children… the dead Indians were left lying where they had fallen. (After the blizzard, when a burial party retunred to Wounded Knee, they found the bodies… frozen into grotesque shapes), aldus Brown.  Let wel, dit gebeurde allemaal op het moment dat de VS nog een ‘normaal’ land was, een kwalificatie die tekenend is voor de blindheid van de mainstream. Ook na de meer dan 3 miljoen dode Zuidoost Aziaten tijdens de Vietnam oorlog en de illegale inval in Irak geldt voor Mak nog steeds dat de VS na 1945 ‘decennialang als ordebewaker en politieagent’ fungeerde en bovendien ‘het anker’ is ‘van het hele Atlantische deel van de wereld in de ruimste zin van het woord,’ een zaak die hij toejuicht. Gezien vanuit het oogpunt van de blanke, Europese, christelijke cultuur heeft Mak ook gelijk. Maar zodra men deze beperkte visie laat vallen en een kosmopolitische humanistisch standpunt inneemt blijkt hoe absurd een dergelijke houding is. Dus opnieuw: waarom ‘1940’ als uitgangspunt? Waarom bijvoorbeeld niet 1637 toen de protestants-christelijke kolonisten begonnen met hun genocidale expansionisme in New England door de bevolking uit te roeien van een indiaans dorp, voor het merendeel bestaande uit vrouwen en kinderen? 1637 lijkt me een goed uitgangspunt voor de continuiteit van het geweld in de Amerikaanse geschiedenis. Mak daarentegen doet alsof ineens rond 1940 de VS van een ‘gewoon land’ een gewelddadige expansionistische grootmacht werd, daarbij voorbijgaand aan het meedogenloze Amerikaanse kolonialisme vóór 1940 in zowel Azie als Latijns Amerika. Zijn suggestie is bedrieglijk, berust niet op feiten zoals iedereen weet die de geschiedenis van de VS heeft bestudeerd. Wounded Knee behandelt hij als een te verwaarlozen incident. Daarentegen toont de Zweedse hoogleraar en auteur Sven Lindqvist in Exterminate all the Brutes aan dat ‘Auschwitz de moderne industriële toepassing [was] van een uitroeiingspolitiek waarop de Europese overheersing van de wereld […] lang heeft gesteund.’ Lindqvist concludeert dat de

Europese vernietiging van de ‘inferieure rassen’ van vier continenten de grond voorbereidde voor Hitlers vernietiging van zes miljoen joden in Europa… Het Europese expansionisme, vergezeld als het was door een schaamteloze verdediging van het uitroeien, schiep manieren van denken en politieke precedenten die de weg baanden voor nieuwe wandaden, die uiteindelijk culmineerden in de gruwelijkste van alle: de Holocaust… En toen hetgeen was gebeurd in het hart der duisternis werd herhaald in het hart van Europa, herkende niemand het. Niemand wilde toegeven wat iedereen wist.

Maar dat inzicht weigert de Nederlandse mainstream te accepteren. Feiten worden ondergeschikt gemaakt aan een ideologisch beeld. Men zou tientallen andere voorbeelden kunnen geven die, in tegenstelling tot ‘1940,’ veel logischer gekozen zouden zijn, van het verdrijven van de koningin van Hawaii in 1893, de gewelddadige onderdrukking van de Filippijnen in 1898 totaan de gevolgen in Latijns Amerika van de Amerikaanse Monroeleer in de negentiende en twintigste eeuw. Inmiddels zal duidelijk zijn hoe arbitrair Mak’s jaartal is.

Vrijdag 2 november 2012 betoogde Geert Mak het volgende:

Wat is het doel van onze eindeloze verteldrift? Wat en wie dienen we met onze verhalen? En, wat meer toegespitst, welke rol speelt het verhaal in de geschiedschrijving? Waarom wordt die ene gebeurtenis, die ene kwestie of die ene persoon uit de stroom van de tijd gelicht, en waarom vergeten we al het andere? […] Is het omdat de eerste categorie verhalen, ondanks alle drama, een bepaalde ordening schept of versterkt - ‘Het recht zal zegevieren’, ‘Hoogmoed komt ten val’, ‘Vrouwen en kinderen eerst’ - terwijl de tweede categorie ons alleen maar de bittere nasmaak laat van een wellicht rommelig immigrantenbestaan, de wreedheid van een nutteloze oorlogshandeling van ‘de onzen’, de chaos en doelloosheid van zoveel mensenlevens. […] Waar blijft, in deze chaos van telkens botsende en elkaar tegensprekende verhalen, de rol van de historicus? Zijn werk is – en ik volg nu de definitie van de Amerikaans/Hongaarse historicus John Lukacs – in de eerste plaats ‘het streven naar waarheid door het uitbannen van onwaarheid.’ […] Woorden zijn voor de historicus dan ook meer dan de verpakking van feiten: het gaat minstens zozeer om de formulering, om de associaties die ze opwekken, ja, om het verhaal. […] Doen we dat genoeg? Nemen wij, chroniqueurs van het heden en verleden, onze taak, het ‘uitbannen van onwaarheid’, serieus genoeg?  Zeker in deze tijd? Ik vraag het me af.   Op dit moment vindt op Europees en mondiaal niveau een misvorming van de werkelijkheid plaats die grote consequenties heeft. […] waar ik het meest naar verlang zijn de ontregelende romans die zullen komen, en die de geest van dit tijdvak genadeloos op de korrel zullen nemen. ‘Maar ik, die in mijn bundel woon, snak naar het riool der revolutie,’ dichtte Lucebert een halve eeuw geleden, maar het lijkt vandaag. Fictie die verontrust in plaats van orde schept – en wat is daaraan een schreeuwende behoefte. 

http://www.geertmak.nl/nl/Leven/Kijken%20en%20luisteren/De%20woede%20van%20mijn%20oom%20Petrus/

Dit zijn de woorden van dezelfde Geert Mak die in dezelfde maand het volgende had verklaard: ‘Amerika [zal] in de loop van deze eeuw weer het ‘gewone’ land moeten worden dat het tot 1940 was,’ en wiens Reizen zonder John geen serieuze poging is om te ‘streven naar waarheid door het uitbannen van onwaarheid.’ Hoewel hij geen historicus is, blijft het een raadsel waarom deze opiniemaker zich niet als een van de ‘chroniqueurs van het heden en verleden,’ zijn ‘taak, het ‘uitbannen van onwaarheid’ niet ‘serieus genoeg’ neemt, zoals hij zelf toegeeft.  Waarom bedriegt de journalist/auteur  zijn publiek? Ik denk dat de oorzaak zijn verlangen naar ‘hoop’ is, naar ‘verlossing,’ niet langer meer door de christelijke god, maar nog wel door de materie, de god van de consumptie. En ook zijn publiek verlangt hiernaar, dat verklaart waarom zijn boeken als het verlossende woord worden gelezen. Het opmerkelijke is evenwel dat zowel hij als zijn publiek niet echt meer overtuigd zijn van hun geloof. Ze geloven dat ze het geloven, en dat is weer iets anders. Vandaar dat Mak’s beweringen elkaar voortdurend tegenspreken. Het ene moment beweert hij dat hij niet ‘serieus genoeg’ streeft naar het ‘uitbannen van onwaarheid,’ en het volgende moment presenteert hij zich met evenveel stelligheid als ‘Europa-‘ en nu ook ‘Amerika deskundige,’ die zich allerlei beweringen permitteert. Deze schizofrenie typeert ook zijn publiek, vandaar zijn populariteit. Een dergelijke houding maakt de mens blind voor de werkelijkheid en leidt hem via talloze zijpaden uiteindelijk weer naar dezelfde doodlopende weg. Het eindigt niet in bewustwording maar in chaos.

‘Zeker in deze tijd’ is het ‘uitbannen van onwaarheid’ van levensbelang. Daarom een poging zoveel mogelijk de ‘onwaarheid’ uit te bannen. Voor zover ik het kan overzien bestaan er voor de mens en voor culturen twee bestaansmogelijkheden, de parasitaire en de symbiotische. In 2010 werd ik hier nog eens aan herinnerd tijdens een reis door de VS en ik me in Californie onder andere via interviews met deskundigen verdiepte in de overlevingsstrategie van de Sequoia sempervirens, ‘the largest beings on earth,’ een boom die 2500 jaar oud kan worden en meer dan 100 meter hoog. Als soort bestaat deze eerbiedwaardige reus al vele miljoenen jaren:

The oldest sequoia fossil that is probably a direct ancestor of the present day giant sequoia is from the Miocene about 10-20 million years ago. The sequoia fossil found resembles the modern giant sequoia, and all the plants associated around that fossil are similar to those in present day sequoia communities. During the late Miocene, the giant sequoia's ancestors were in what is now western Nevada. As conditions became cooler and drier, along with the rise of the Sierra Nevada, the survivors managed to prosper at the southwestern edge of the mountain range.

Met andere woorden: de Sequoia sempervirens draagt tien tot twintig miljoen jaar evolutionaire kennis in zich. Vanuit evolutionair oogpunt gezien, weten bomen zich wonderwel aan te passen aan de almaar veranderende omstandigheden. De Amerikaanse auteur Eric Reece stelde in 2006 in zijn boek Lost Mountain. A Year In The Wilderness. Radical Strip Mining And The Devastation Of Appalachia dat het bos in Kentucky en West Virginia

certainly demonstrates an intelligence, one it had been honing for 290 million years. It’s economy is a closed loop that transforms waste into food. In that alone, it is superior to our human economy, where the end of the line is not nutrients but toxic industrial waste. Is there design behind this natural intelligence? I have no idea. But I will venure this: The forest knows what it’s doing.

De homo sapiens lijkt daarentegen niet te beseffen wat de vernietigende consequenties zijn van het feit dat hij in de twintigste eeuw wereldwijd de oppervlakte aan bossen bijna heeft gehalveerd van 5 miljard hectare tot 2.9 miljard. De Amerikaanse auteur Wendel Berry wees er in 2005 op dat

every one of our economic landscapes, have been put at the mercy of a class of economic agressors whose aim is to convert the natural world into money as quickly as is technologically possible and at the least possible cost. If that least cost is the total destruction of the land and the land’s communities, that is understood as an acceptable cost of doing business.

De postmoderne mens handelt even onwetend als bijvoorbeeld de Maya’s van wie de eeuwenoude hoge cultuur tamelijk plotseling ineen stortte omdat ze niet in staat waren zich aan te passen aan de veranderende wereld. De Amerikaanse geleerde, professor Jared Diamond, schreef hierover in zijn essay The Last Americans:

Why did the kings and nobles not recognize and solve these problems? A major reason was that their attention was evidently focused on the short-terms concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with one another, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all those activities.

‘s Wereld’s leidende autoriteit op het gebied van myrmecology, de Amerikaan E.O Wilson, waarschuwde in 2006 in The Creation. An Appeal To Save Life On Earth dat ‘through the loss of sites where evolution can occur, the number of species is plummeting,’ als gevolg van ‘the unintended consequences of human greed,’ terwijl 'often obscure life forms run Earth completely free for us. Each is a masterpiece of evolution, exquisitely well adapted to the niches of the natural environment in which it occurs. The surviving species around us are thousands to millions of years old. Their genes, having been tested each generation in the crucible of natural selection, are codes written by countless episodes of birth and death. Their careless erasure is a tragedy that will haunt human memory forever.

Daarom pleit deze 83-jarige emeritus hoogleraar aan Harvard University voor ‘het redden van de schepping,’ vooral ook omdat de mens de gevolgen van zijn daden niet kan overzien:

All that human beings can imagine, all the fantasies we can conjure, all our games, simulations, epics, myths, and histories, and, yes, all our science dwindle to little beside the full productions of the biosphere. We have not even discovered more than a small fraction of Earth’s life forms. We understand fully no one species among the millions that have survived our onslaught… Humanity must take a decision, and make it right now: conserve Earth’s natural heritage, or let future generations adjust to a biologically impoverished world. There is no way to weasel out of this choice.

Desondanks gaat het geglobaliseerde neoliberale systeem door met zijn alles bedreigende roofbouw en milieuvernietiging.  En de reden ‘scientists believe, is insufficient time for the evolving species to hardwire reactions in the brain to these new threates.’ Vanuit evolutionair standpunt gezien kan de Homo sapiens die ‘originated in Africa, where they reached anatomical modernity about 200,000 years ago and began to exhibit full behavioral modernity around 50,000 years ago,’ qua overlevings intelligentie zich niet meten aan bijvoorbeeld de Sequoia sempervirens, waarvan de voorouders al tien tot twintig miljoen geleden op aarde leefden. Eric Reece denadrukt dan ook terecht:

There is a certain insanity (I choose the word carefully) about perpetuating a global economy based on limitless growth when that growth is powered by finite resources – in the case of the energy bill, fossil fuels.

Het resultaat van deze waanzin is dat

We are, unfortunately, a naton that values technology and wealth much more than we value community, and the result is the wasted land that lies all around me. The twentieth century was a Faustian gamble that combined industrialism and greed to make us cash-rich and resource-poor. If our species is to make it through this century, the forces of science and technology must be tempered by two other forces: ethics and aesthetics.

Maar ondertussen kent het vooruitgangsgeloof geen weg terug, en blijft de doctrine van de mateloosheid het leidende motief in een wereld waar alles wel degelijk een maat heeft. In het oude Griekenland stond boven de tempel van Apollo in Delfi de inscriptie Meden Agan – alles met mate. Ook het christendom, boeddhisme, taoïsme, islam, judaïsme en alle natuurgodsdiensten kennen het principe van de matiging. Alleen het kapitalisme verwerpt dit beginsel en propageert wat de Verlichtings filosoof Adam Smith,  het ‘vrije spel der maatschappelijke krachten’ noemde, gebaseerd op een door de wetenschap geschapen techologisch systeem. De Amerikaanse historicus Henry Adams wees al in 1904 in A Law of Acceleration op de onbelichte kant van het wereldbeeld:

They had reduced their universe to a series of relations to themselves. They had reduced themselves to motion in a universe of motions, with an acceleration, in their own case of vertiginous violence. With the correctness of their science, history had no right to meddle, since their science now lay in a plane where scarcely one or two hundred minds in the world could follow its mathematical processes; but bombs educate vigorously, and even wireless telegraphy or airships might require the reconstruction of society. If any analogy whatever existed between the human mind, on one side, and the laws of motion, on the other, the mind had already entered a field of attraction so violent that it must immediately pass beyond, into new equilibrium, like the Comet of Newton, to suffer dissipation altogether, like meteoroids in the earth’s atmosphere. If it behaved like an explosive, it must rapidly recover equilibrium; if it behaved like a vegetable, it must reach its limits of growth; and even if it acted like the earlier creations of energy — the saurians and sharks — it must have nearly reached the limits of its expansion. If science were to go on doubling or quadrupling its complexities every ten years, even mathematics would soon succumb. An average mind had succumbed already in 1850; it could no longer understand the problem in 1900.

En zo ontstond een wereld waar de mens geen greep meer op had, buiten hem om bestuurd werd, volledig afhankelijk was van grondstoffen, vooral energiebronnen om de machine draaiende te houden, en de natuur omzette in producten en steeds meer afval. En dit parasitaire systeem is onhoudbaar geworden, niet alleen doordat het de kloof tussen arm en rijk wereldwijd blijft toenemen, maar ook omdat de grondstoffen waarop het systeem berust uitgeput raken. Daarover morgen. Dan ook aandacht voor de tweede bestaansmogelijkheid: de symbiotische.

Woorden zijn voor de historicus dan ook meer dan de verpakking van feiten: het gaat minstens zozeer om de formulering, om de associaties die ze opwekken, ja, om het verhaal. […] Doen we dat genoeg? Nemen wij, chroniqueurs van het heden en verleden, onze taak, het ‘uitbannen van onwaarheid’, serieus genoeg?  Zeker in deze tijd? Ik vraag het me af.  

Geert Mak.

Ik vraag het me allang niet meer af, de mainstream spant zich absoluut niet in om ‘onze taak, het “uitbannen van onwaarheid” serieus’ te nemen. Daarvoor zijn de meesten van onze opiniemakers te lui en te corrupt, om het nu maar eens kort en krachtig samen te vatten. Meer daarover maandag.