Het grote probleem voor mainstream-journalisten als Hubert Smeets is dat de werkelijkheid nooit volledig correspondeert met hun ideologische kijk op de werkelijkheid, en zelfs daar regelmatig fundamenteel van afwijkt. En dan krijgt men beschrijvingen als deze:
Nieuw Maidan-protest broeit in Kiev
OEKRAÏNE
Gewapende agenten beschermen het parlement. Uit welke hoek komt deze keer het oproer?
Door HUBERT SMEETS 21 OKTOBER 2014
Het Oekraïense parlement vergadert weer onder politiebescherming. Maar liefst drie linies oproerpolitie met helmen en schilden staan er voor het gebouw van de Verchovna Rada. Binnen lopen mannen in gevechtstenue met automatische wapens rond, in scherp contrast tot de scherp geklede en gehakte volksvertegenwoordigers en hun assistentes. Ook het presidentiële paleis aan de Bankova-straat is door geüniformeerde agenten en burgerpot afgegrendeld van de stad.
De politiemannen die de regering van president Petro Porosjenko en premier Arsen Jatsenjoek bewaken, lijken als twee druppels water op de agenten van de Berkoet (steenarend) die hun voorgangers begin dit jaar beschermden tegen de pro-Europese betogers op het centrale plein Maidan. Ook die aanvankelijk geweldloze en later geradicaliseerde burgerbeweging tegen het bewind rond president Viktor Janoekovitsj, diens premier Nikolaj Azarov en een hele batterij andere corrupte staatsfunctionarissen – de eerste zogeheten Maidan – moest desnoods hardhandig worden weggehouden bij de ‘macht’, zoals de overheid in Oekraïne heet.
Wederom zeg Ik u, het is gemakkelijker dat een kameel door het oog van een naald gaat dan dat NRC-correspondent Hubert Smeets erin slaagt de werkelijkheid te zien voor wat die is. Om het laatste aan te tonen, zal ik proberen zijn tekst te analyseren. Smeets vraagt zich verbaasd af: 'Uit welke hoek komt deze keer het oproer?' Voor hem en zijn mainstream-collega's was het een uitgemaakte zaak dat het geweld op de zogeheten 'Euromaidan' dat november 2013 in Kiev begon de democraten aan de macht had geholpen en het door en door corrupte land voortaan democratisch zou worden bestuurd onder het presidentschap de neoliberale Petro Porosjenko, een miljardair die als de grootste zoetwaren-fabrikant van Oekraïne, de bijnaam Willy Wonka kreeg. Daarnaast bezit Porosjenko een aantal auto- en busfabrieken, een scheepswerf en een televisiekanaal, kortom een 'democraat' van formaat die geheel belangeloos enerzijds de verregaande Oekraïense corruptie binnen afzienbare tijd de kop in zou drukken, en anderzijds zijn land de NAVO moeiteloos zal binnenloodsen, waardoor de Russische omsingeling voltooid zou zijn. Tenminste, dit suggereert de westerse mainstream-pers. In hun ideologisch enthousiasme verzwegen mijn collega's evenwel de werkelijkheid zoals die al zeven maanden geleden werd beschreven door Michel Chossudovsky 'an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal and Editor of the globalresearch.ca website.' Op 24 februari 2014 wees Chossudovsky op het feit dat:
Svoboda is a Neo-Nazi Party, Ukraine’s fourth biggest party holding 36 seats out of 450 in parliament… Svoboda is supported directly by Washington.
This is Svoboda, the Neo-Nazi group that is doing the fighting in Ukraine.
Update February 24. The BBC headlines read: 'We are putting our hopes in a new generation of politicians' amidst unconfirmed reports that an arrest warrant has been issued for the democratically elected president.
Speaker of the Parliament Oleksandr Turchynov who allegedly issued the arrest warrant directed against President Viktor Yanukovych stated 'We must move towards a national government by Tuesday.' That government, were it to be formed, would be integrated by Svoboda.
Scroll down to meet the 'new generation of politicians' supported and financed by the Obama administration.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/there-are-no-neo-nazis-in-the-ukraine-and-the-obama-administration-does-not-support-fascists/5370269
Svoboda’s Oleh Tyahnybok doing their party salute when re-elected their leader.
http://www.mmo-champion.com/
http://www.businessinsider.
John McCain with leader of the Neo-Nazi Svoboda Party (right)
Svoboda’s Oleh Tyahnybok doing their party salute when re-elected their leader.
http://www.mmo-champion.com/
http://www.businessinsider.
John McCain with leader of the Neo-Nazi Svoboda Party (right)
Nog geen drie weken later, op 11 maart 2014 berichtte de Amerikaanse website Huffington Post:
Foreign Policy Analyst
The Neo-Nazi Question in Ukraine
The Obama administration has vehemently denied charges that Ukraine's nascent regime is stock full of neo-fascists despite clear evidence suggesting otherwise. Such categorical repudiations lend credence to the notion the U.S. facilitated the anti-Russian cabal's rise to power as part of a broader strategy to draw Ukraine into the West's sphere of influence. Even more disturbing are apologists, from the American left and right, who seem willing accomplices in this obfuscation of reality, when just a cursory glance at the profiles of Ukraine's new leaders should give pause to the most zealous of Russophobes.
In a State Department 'fact sheet' released last week the U.S. accused Putin of lying about the Ukrainian government being under the sway of extremist elements. The report stated that right wing ultranationalist groups 'are not represented in the Rada (Ukraine's parliament),' and that 'there is no indication the government would pursue discriminatory policies.'
It isn't too surprising that conservative outlets like FOX News would downplay Russian allegations but the so-called 'liberal' press has also contributed to the American disinformation campaign. Celestine Bohlen from The New York Times considers harsh epithets, like the word 'neo-Nazi,' which Putin has hurled at the demonstrators in Kiev as part of a Russian propaganda effort to tarnish Ukraine's revolutionary struggle against authoritarianism.
Yet after simply Googling the terms 'Ukraine' and 'Neo-Nazi,' the official position of the United States government along with the stance taken by many in the American media both now seem quite dubious, if not downright ridiculous, especially considering that one would be hard-pressed to machinate the lineup that now dominates Ukraine's ministry posts.
For starters, Andriy Parubiy, the new secretary of Ukraine's security council, was a co-founder of the Neo-Nazi Social-National Party of Ukraine (SNPU), otherwise known as Svoboda. And his deputy, Dmytro Yarosh, is the leader of a party called the Right Sector which, according to historian Timothy Stanley, 'flies the old flag of the Ukrainian Nazi collaborators at its rallies.'
The highest-ranking right-wing extremist is Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Sych, also a member of Svoboda, who believes that women should 'lead the kind of lifestyle to avoid the risk of rape, including refraining from drinking alcohol and being in controversial company.' This is the philosophy underlying one of his 'legal initiatives,' according to the Kyiv Post, 'to ban all abortions, even for pregnancies that occurred during rape.'
The Svoboda party has tapped into Nazi symbolism including the 'wolf's angel' rune, which resembles a swastika and was worn by members of the Waffen-SS, a panzer division that was declared a criminal organization at Nuremberg. A report from Tel-Aviv University describes the Svoboda party as 'an extremist, right-wing, nationalist organization which emphasizes its identification with the ideology of German National Socialism.'
According to this BBC news clip two Svoboda parliamentarians in recent weeks posed for photos while 'brandishing well-known far right numerology,' including the numbers 88 -- the eighth letter of the alphabet -- signifying 'HH,' as in 'Heil Hitler.' This all makes Hillary Clinton's recent comments comparing Putin to Hitler appear patently absurd, as Stanley adeptly points out: 'After all, in the eyes of many ethnic Russians, it is the Ukrainian nationalists -- not Putin -- who are the Nazis.'
Last week Per Anders Rudling from Lund University in Sweden, an expert on Ukrainian extremists, told Britain's Channel 4 News: 'A neo-fascist party like Svoboda getting the deputy prime minister position is news in its own right.' Well, except in the U.S.
Even more disconcerting has been the emergence of phone intercepts between high-ranking U.S. and Ukrainian officials which make it look as if the U.S. was basically, in the words of Princeton's Stephen Cohen, 'plotting a coup d'état against the elected president of Ukraine.' In other words, the U.S., in addition to providing moral support, may have paved the way for extremists to seize power in Kiev. Such a development would counter the American right's condemnation of Obama for not 'engaging' in the world. The real problem is actually the administration's over-engagement in this case -- as in meddling in the affairs of another state and trying to rearrange its domestic political machinery to suit Washington's agenda.
This gambit has backfired in a number of ways. Not only has a neo-fascist-laden regime secured power in Kiev but it may have played the U.S. and its allies for fools by insinuating it would become part of the Western sphere when it really had no such designs. As Svoboda political council member Yury Noyevy baldly admitted: 'The participation of Ukrainian nationalism and Svoboda in the process of EU [European Union] integration is a means to break our ties with Russia.'
Be they radical mujahideen or neo-fascists, Washington certainly has a penchant for bolstering shadowy forces, usually labeling them with risible euphemisms like 'freedom fighters,' in order to satiate short-term geopolitical needs, despite said factions being inimical to America's true long-term interests.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-hughes/the-neo-nazi-question-in_b_4938747.html
John McCain with leader of the Neo-Nazi Svoboda Party (right) Business Insider, Business Trip to Kiev
John McCain with leader of the Neo-Nazi Svoboda Party (right) Business Insider, Business Trip to Kiev
Omdat 'a State Department 'fact sheet' released last week the U.S. accused Putin of lying about the Ukrainian government being under the sway of extremist elements,' zwegen Smeets en zijn mainstream-collega's over het feit dat de stoottroepen van de Oekraïense 'vrijheidsstrijders' op het 'Euromaidan' overtuigde neo-nazi's waren die door de neoconservatieve vleugel in president Obama's regering werden gefinancierd en aangestuurd. Alleen de ideologische blindheid van corrupte journalisten als Hubert Smeets verhinderde datgene te zien dat zowel in woord als beeld uitgebreid werd aangetoond, waardoor ook deze opiniemaker zich nu over het recente 'oproer' in Kiev moet afvragen:
Waar kwam de fascistoïde ‘sabbat’ vandaan?
Als Smeets zich in het onderwerp had verdiept en niet meteen de anti-Poetin propaganda van het Witte Huis had geslikt, dan had hij bijvoorbeeld geweten wat de gerespecteerde Amerikaanse onderzoeksjournalist Robert Parry had geschreven op 22 september 2014:
HIGH COST OF BAD JOURNALISM ON UKRAINE
The costs of the mainstream U.S. media’s wildly anti-Moscow bias in the Ukraine crisis are adding up, as the Obama administration has decided to react to alleged 'Russian aggression' by investing as much as $1 trillion in modernizing the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal.
On Monday, a typically slanted New York Times article justified these modernization plans by describing 'Russia on the warpath' and adding: 'Congress has expressed less interest in atomic reductions than looking tough in Washington’s escalating confrontation with Moscow.'
But the Ukraine crisis has been a textbook case of the U.S. mainstream media misreporting the facts of a foreign confrontation and then misinterpreting the meaning of the events, a classic case of 'garbage in, garbage out.' The core of the false mainstream narrative is that Russian President Vladimir Putin instigated the crisis as an excuse to reclaim territory for the Russian Empire.
While that interpretation of events has been the cornerstone of Official Washington’s 'group think,' the reality always was that Putin favored maintaining the status quo in Ukraine. He had no plans to 'invade' Ukraine and was satisfied with the elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych. Indeed, when the crisis heated up last February, Putin was distracted by the Sochi Winter Olympics.
Rather than Putin’s 'warmongering' – as the Times said in the lead-in to another Monday article – the evidence is clear that it was the United States and the European Union that initiated this confrontation in a bid to pull Ukraine out of Russia’s sphere of influence and into the West’s orbit.
This was a scheme long in the making, but the immediate framework for the crisis took shape a year ago when influential U.S. neocons set their sights on Ukraine and Putin after Putin helped defuse a crisis in Syria by persuading President Barack Obama to set aside plans to bomb Syrian government targets over a disputed Sarin gas attack and instead accept Syria’s willingness to surrender its entire chemical weapons arsenal.
But the neocons and their 'liberal interventionist' allies had their hearts set on another 'shock and awe' campaign with the goal of precipitating another 'regime change' against a Middle East government disfavored by Israel. Putin also worked with Obama to resolve the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program, averting another neocon dream to 'bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.'
The situation on the ground is not as simple as pro-EU and trade versus pro-Putin and Russian hegemony in the region.'
The Despised Putin
So, Putin suddenly rose to the top of the neocons’ 'enemies list' and some prominent neocons quickly detected his vulnerability in Ukraine, a historical route for western invasions of Russia and the scene of extraordinarily bloody fighting during World War II.
National Endowment for Democracy president Carl Gershman, one of the top neocon paymasters spreading around $100 million a year in U.S. taxpayers’ money, declared in late September 2013 that Ukraine represented 'the biggest prize' but beyond that was an opportunity to put Putin 'on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.'
The context for Gershman’s excitement was a European Union offer of an association agreement to Ukraine’s elected President Viktor Yanukovych, but it came with some nasty strings attached, an austerity plan demanded by the International Monetary Fund that would have made the hard lives of the average Ukrainian even harder.
That prompted Yanukovych to seek a better deal from Putin who offered $15 billion in aid without the IMF’s harsh terms. Yet, once Yanukovych rebuffed the EU plan, his government was targeted by a destabilization campaign that involved scores of political and media projects funded by Gershman’s NED and other U.S. agencies.
Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, a neocon holdover who had been an adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, reminded a group of Ukrainian business leaders that the United States had invested $5 billion in their 'European aspirations.' Nuland, wife of prominent neocon Robert Kagan, also showed up at the Maidan square in Kiev passing out cookies to protesters.
The Maidan protests, reflecting western Ukraine’s desire for closer ties to Europe, also were cheered on by neocon Sen. John McCain, who appeared on a podium with leaders of the far-right Svoboda party under a banner honoring Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. A year earlier, the European Parliament had identified Svoboda as professing 'racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views [that] go against the EU’s fundamental values and principles.'
Yet, militants from Svoboda and the even more extreme Right Sektor were emerging as the muscle of the Maidan protests, seizing government buildings and hurling firebombs at police. A well-known Ukrainian neo-Nazi leader, Andriy Parubiy, became the commandant of the Maidan’s “self-defense” forces.
Behind the scenes, Assistant Secretary Nuland was deciding who would take over the Ukrainian government once Yanukovych was ousted. In an intercepted phone call with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, Nuland crossed off some potential leaders and announced that 'Yats' – or Arseniy Yatsenyuk – was her guy.
The Coup
On Feb. 20, as the neo-Nazi militias stepped up their attacks on police, a mysterious sniper opened fire on both protesters and police killing scores and bringing the political crisis to a boil. The U.S. news media blamed Yanukovych for the killings though he denied giving such an order and some evidence pointed toward a provocation from the far-right extremists.
As Estonia’s Foreign Minister Urmas Paet said in another intercepted phone call with EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Asthon, 'there is a stronger and stronger understanding that behind snipers it was not Yanukovych, it was somebody from the new coalition.'
But the sniper shootings led Yanukovych to agree on Feb. 21 to a deal guaranteed by three European countries – France, Germany and Poland – that he would surrender much of his power and move up elections so he could be voted out of office. He also assented to U.S. demands that he pull back his police.
That last move, however, prompted the neo-Nazi militias to overrun the presidential buildings on Feb. 22 and force Yanukovych’s officials to flee for their lives. Then, rather than seeking to enforce the Feb. 21 agreement, the U.S. State Department promptly declared the coup regime 'legitimate' and blamed everything on Yanukovych and Putin.
Nuland’s choice, Yatsenyuk, was made prime minister and the neo-Nazis were rewarded for their crucial role by receiving several ministries, including national security headed by Parubiy. The parliament also voted to ban Russian as an official language (though that was later rescinded), and the IMF austerity demands were pushed through by Yatsenyuk. Not surprisingly, ethnic Russians in the south and east, the base of Yanukovych’s support, began resisting what they regarded as the illegitimate coup regime.
To blame this crisis on Putin simply ignores the facts and defies logic. To presume that Putin instigated the ouster of Yanukovych in some convoluted scheme to seize territory requires you to believe that Putin got the EU to make its reckless association offer, organized the mass protests at the Maidan, convinced neo-Nazis from western Ukraine to throw firebombs at police, and manipulated Gershman, Nuland and McCain to coordinate with the coup-makers – all while appearing to support Yanukovych’s idea for new elections within Ukraine’s constitutional structure.
Though such a crazy conspiracy theory would make people in tinfoil hats blush, this certainty is at the heart of what every 'smart' person in Official Washington believes. If you dared to suggest that Putin was actually distracted by the Sochi Olympics last February, was caught off guard by the events in Ukraine, and reacted to a Western-inspired crisis on his border (including his acceptance of Crimea’s request to be readmitted to Russia), you would be immediately dismissed as 'a stooge of Moscow.'
Such is how mindless “group think” works in Washington. All the people who matter jump on the bandwagon and smirk at anyone who questions how wise it is to be rolling downhill in some disastrous direction.
But the pols and pundits who appear on U.S. television spouting the conventional wisdom are always the winners in this scenario. They get to look tough, standing up to villains like Yanukovych and Putin and siding with the saintly Maidan protesters. The neo-Nazi brown shirts are whited out of the picture and any Ukrainian who objected to the U.S.-backed coup regime finds a black hat firmly glued on his or her head.
For the neocons, there are both financial and ideological benefits. By shattering the fragile alliance that had evolved between Putin and Obama over Syria and Iran, the neocons seized greater control over U.S. policies in the Middle East and revived the prospects for violent 'regime change.'
On a more mundane level – by stirring up a new Cold War – the neocons generate more U.S. government money for military contractors who bestow a portion on Washington think tanks that provide cushy jobs for neocons when they are out of government.
December 2013
Russia Today. Ukrainian Neo-Nazi skinheads
Civilisation Ukrainian-Style: Vandalising the Memorials to the Soldiers of the Anti-Hitler Coalition
Reunion of SS and UPA Nazi collaborators and their supporters in 2006 in the Ukraine.
http://02varvara.wordpress.
The Losers
The worst losers are the people of Ukraine, most tragically the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, thousands of whom have died from a combination of heavy artillery fire by the Ukrainian army on residential areas followed by street fighting led by brutal neo-Nazi militias who were incorporated into Kiev’s battle plans. [See Consortiumnews.com’s Ukraine’s ‘Romantic’ Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers.]
The devastation of eastern Ukraine, which has driven an estimated one million Ukrainians out of their homes, has left parts of this industrial region in ruins. Of course, in the U.S. media version, it’s all Putin’s fault for deceiving these ethnic Russians with 'propaganda' about neo-Nazis and then inducing these deluded individuals to resist the 'legitimate' authorities in Kiev.
Notably, America’s righteous 'responsibility to protect' crowd, which demanded that Obama begin airstrikes in Syria a year ago, swallowed its moral whistles when it came to the U.S.-backed Kiev regime butchering ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine (or for that matter, when Israeli forces slaughtered Palestinians in Gaza).
However, beyond the death and destruction in eastern Ukraine, the meddling by Nuland, Gershman and others has pushed all of Ukraine toward financial catastrophe. As “The Business Insider” reported on Sept. 21, 'Ukraine Is on the Brink of Total Economic Collapse.'
Author Walter Kurtz wrote: 'Those who have spent any time in Ukraine during the winter know how harsh the weather can get. And at these [current] valuations, hryvnia [Ukraine’s currency] isn’t going to buy much heating fuel from abroad…
Inflation rate is running above 14% and will spike sharply from here in the next few months if the currency weakness persists. Real wages are collapsing. … Finally, Ukraine’s fiscal situation is unraveling.'
In other words, the already suffering Ukrainians from the west, east and center of the country can expect to suffer a great deal more. They have been made expendable pawns in a geopolitical chess game played by neocon masters and serving interests far from Lviv, Donetsk and Kiev.
But other victims from these latest machinations by the U.S. political/media elite will include the American taxpayers who will be expected to foot the bill for the new Cold War launched in reaction to Putin’s imaginary scheme to instigate the Ukraine crisis so he could reclaim territory of the Russian Empire.
As nutty as that conspiracy theory is, it is now one of the key reasons why the American people have to spend $1 trillion to modernize the nation’s nuclear arsenal, rather than scaling back the thousands of U.S. atomic weapons to around 900, as had been planned.
Or as one supposed expert, Gary Samore at Harvard, explained to the New York Times: 'The most fundamental game changer is Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. That has made any measure to reduce the stockpile unilaterally politically impossible.'
Thus, you can see how hyperbolic journalism and self-interested punditry can end up costing the American taxpayers vast sums of money and contributing to a more dangerous world.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.
Numerous reports have exposed the links between the U.S. government and Svoboda, and several pictures show U.S. and European authorities with the controversial Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnybok.
U.S. Assistant secretary of State Victoria Nuland with Oleh Tyahnybok (left)
Deze context verzwijgen Smeets en de polderpers omdat het niet past in hun neoliberale anti-Poetin, pro-NAVO propaganda waarvoor ze worden betaald. En dus verzwijgen ze ook dat de Amerikaanse staatssecretaris van Buitenlandse Zaken voor Europa en Eurazië, Victoria Nuland, die internationale bekendheid kreeg door haar opmerking 'Fuck the European Union,' een neoconservatief is. Ze is de echtgenoot van Robert Kagan, een vooraanstaande neoconservatieve ideoloog, over wie de New York Times in 2012 het volgende schreef:High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy for the European Union Catherine Ashton and Oleh Tyahnybok (left).European Union Enlargement Commissioner Stefan Fuele (center) and Oleh Tyahnybok (right).
One thing Barack Obama and Mitt Romney seem to have in common these days is an appreciation for the neoconservative historian Robert Kagan.
The Romney campaign has retained Mr. Kagan as a foreign-policy adviser, and according to news reports, President Obama has read and been influenced by a recent Kagan essay in The New Republic, which addresses 'the myth of American decline' and underscores the importance of the United States’ maintaining its 'global responsibilities.'
Mr. Kagan’s sometimes shaky reasoning is combined with a failure to grapple convincingly with crucial problems facing America today, the very problems that observers who worry about American decline have cited as clear and present dangers, including political gridlock at home, falling education scores, lowered social mobility and most important, a ballooning deficit…
Mr. Kagan hops and skips around such issues, placing way more emphasis on the military aspects of power as a measure of a country’s health and global sway. For instance, of the burgeoning financial clout of China — which already holds more than $1 trillion in United States debt — Mr. Kagan asserts that it has implications for American power in the future 'only insofar as the Chinese translate enough of their growing economic strength into military strength.' […]
This volume is peppered with vague lines like 'many believe that wars among the great powers are no longer possible,' or 'it is a common perception today that the international free market system is simply a natural stage in the evolution of the global economy.'
Nog wat achtergrond-informatie waardoor duidelijk zal worden met wie we te maken hebben, Robert Kagan
was a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century. More recently, his book The World America Made has been publicly endorsed by US President Barack Obama, and its theme was referenced in his 2012 State of the Union Address…
Ondanks Robert Kagan's 'gammele wijze van argumenteren,' en ondanks zijn agressieve overtuigingen met betrekking tot de Amerikaanse geopolitiek is president Obama een groot bewonderaar van zijn gedachtenwereld en heeft hij de echtgenote van de ideoloog, Victoria Nuland, een belangrijke post in zijn regering gegeven, waardoor zij onbekommerd kan verklaren:'Fuck the European Union.' Volgens de recensente Michiko Kakutani 'an American Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for The New York Times' en 'considered a leading literary critic in the United States' wordt ook de schrijfstijl van haar echtgenoot gekenmerkt door een 'condescending tone, along with sometimes less than coherent reasoning,' die 'make readers ponder the curious development that it happens to be this historian who’s recently found public favor in both the Obama and Romney camps.'
Die minachting voor andersdenkenden, of dit nu individuen dan wel hele continenten zijn, blijkt ook uit Kagan's in 2003 verschenen boek Of Paradise And Power. America And Europe In The New World Order, dat eindigt met ondermeer de volgende conclusie:
The Bush administration viewed NATO's historic decision to aid the United States under Article 5 less as a boon than as a booby trap. An opportunity to draw Europe into common battle out in the Hobbesian world, even in a minor role, was thereby unnecessarily squandered.
But Americans are powerful enough that they need not fear Europeans, even when bearing gifts. Rather than viewing the United States as a Gulliver tied down by Lilliputian threads, American leader should realize that they are hardly constrained at all, that Europe is not really capable of constraining the United States.
Overigens beperkt die 'neerbuigende' houding zich niet tot ideologen als Kagan. Over diens boek schreef dr. Henry Kissinger: 'I consider this essay one of those seminal treatises without which any discussion of European American relations would be incomplete and which will shape that discussion for years to come.' En de vooraanstaande Amerikaanse neoconservatieve ideoloog Francis Fukuyama, die na de val van de muur meende dat het neoliberale systeem het einde van de geschiedenis had ingeluid en de VS de eindoverwinning had behaald, betitelde op zijn beurt Kagan's analyse als 'Brilliant.' Hoewel de Amerikaanse grootheidswaan na de invallen in Irak en Afghanistan op niets concreets gebaseerd bleken, en hoewel het Amerikaanse militaire overwicht sinds 1945 niet heeft geleid tot het winnen van ook maar één oorlog (Korea was gelijkspel, Vietnam, Afghanistan en Irak verloor de VS wanneer men uitgaat van de oorspronkelijke Amerikaanse doeleinden) blijft de politieke macht in Washington geloven dat de VS de taak heeft de wereld met geweld te hervormen. 24 september 2013 berichtte The Daily Beast:
'I believe that America is exceptional,' said Obama. Its ability to 'stand up for the interests of all' is special… Obama said that right now he would focus American efforts on resolving the stand-off with Iran over its nuclear program… And he reserved the right to intervene militarily wherever America’s core security interests were challenged, including Syria, but not only in Syria. He called for the international community to support all this, but looked determined to go ahead with or without consensus.
Dit alles weet Hubert Smeets niet, of wil hij niet weten, hetgeen voor zijn publiek niet zoveel uitmaakt, aangezien de meesten onder hen de feiten niet kennen. Hoe dan ook, vanuit die onwetendheid kan Smeets zich voordoen als een deskundige in de polder. Maar van de werkelijkheid geopolitiek weet hij nagenoeg niets. En dat wat hij weet, begrijpt hij niet echt, met als gevolg dat hij zich publiekelijk moet afvragen wat er nu precies gebeurt in Oekraïne. Dat de VS ment 5 miljard dollar de Oekraïense oppositie heeft gemanipuleerd mag niet bekend worden gemaakt. Wie wel weet wat er achter de schermen gebeurt is de invloedrijke Robert Kagan, waar zowel Democraten als Republikeinen naar luisteren. Hij maakt het volgende duidelijk:
On the all-important question of power – the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power – American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Immanuel Kant’s ‘perpetual peace.’ Meanwhile, the United States remains mired in history, exercising power in an anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable, and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might. That is why on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little and understand one another less and less. And this state of affairs is not transitory — the product of one American election or one catastrophic event. The reasons for the transatlantic divide are deep, long in development, and likely to endure. When it comes to setting national priorities, determining threats, defining challenges, and fashioning and implementing foreign and defense policies, the United States and Europe have parted ways,
En dit laatste verklaart de opmerking van zijn echtgenote tijdens de Amerikaanse bemoeienis met de binnenlandse ongeregeldheden in Oekraïne: 'Fuck the European Union,' immers, 'Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus… the United States and Europe have parted ways.' De hegemonistische macht in Washington en op Wall Street wil met geweld wereldwijd de neoliberale ideologie afdwingen, terwijl de neoliberale macht van 'Geen Jorwert zonder Brussel' subtieler te werk wil gaan. Het 'cultuurconflict' tussen de Oude en Nieuwe Wereld is historisch verklaarbaar. Europa heeft na twee verwoestende wereldoorlogen zijn hegemonie verloren, terwijl de VS juist mede dankzij die oorlogen de hegemonie in handen kreeg. Maar dit is slechts de politieke kant van het verhaal. Veel belangrijker is de culturele component, oftewel datgene wat de Amerikaanse auteur Wendell Berry in The Unsettling of America heeft geanalyseerd. Hij schreef:
Generation after generation, those who intended to remain and prosper where they were have been dispossessed and driven out, or subverted and exploited where they were, by those who were carrying out some version of the search for El Dorado. Time after time, inlace after place, these conquerors have fragmented and demolished traditional communities, the beginnings of domestic cultures. They have always said that what they destroyed was outdated, provincial, and contemptible. And with alarming frequency they have been believed and trusted by their victims, especially when their victims were other white people.
If there is any law that has been consistently operative in American history, it is that the members of any established people or group or community sooner or later become 'redskins' — that is, they become the designated victims of an utterly ruthless, officially sanctioned and subsidized exploitation. The colonists who drove off the Indians came to be intolerably exploited by their imperial governments. And that alien imperialism was thrown off only to be succeed by a domestic version of the same thing; the class of independent small farmers who fought the war of independence has been exploited by, and recruited into, the industrial society until by now it is almost extinct.
Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his expectation, that the Senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.
Maar ook die context verzwijgt de kleinburgerlijke Hubert Smeets. Hij is zo diep geschoold in het Koude Oorlogsdenken dat hij vandaag de dag volkomen gedesoriënteerd is geraakt in de grote mensenwereld. De NRC-opiniemaker is zijn ideologische houvast kwijt en realiseert zich niet welke krachten op de achtergrond meespelen in het geopolitieke machtspel buiten de polder. Hij denkt zwart-wit, in termen van goed versus kwaad. En dus geldt in zijn simplistisch wereldbeeld dat degenen die claimen vóór de democratie te zijn, onmiddellijk de goeden vertegenwoordigen. Als historicus heeft Smeets weinig van de geschiedenis geleerd. Hij gelooft in vrome woorden en grootse gebaren, en zou niet weten wat Edward Gibbon bedoelt toen de grote Britse historicus meer dan twee eeuwen geleden in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire het volgende beschreef:
Toen in het voorjaar 2014 bekend werd dat 'Ukraine fires defense minister who lost Crimea to Russia,' zijnde de 'radicaal rechtse,' nationalistische Igor Tenyukh, had Smeets onmiddellijk kunnen beseffen dat Tenyukh's neo-nazi-partijgenoten van Svoboda weer de straat op zouden gaan en als ze hun zin niet kregen een gewelddadige confrontatie zouden aangaan met het huidige regime, dat onder leiding van een miljardair even weinig voor de belangen van de burgers opkomt als de westerse oligarchen. De NRC-opiniemaker mag het dan wel doen voorkomen alsof de westerse 'democratie' inderdaad de heerschappij van de bevolking betekent, maar dit illustreert alleen zijn grote verwarring óf zijn doortraptheid, zo u wilt. Hoe dan ook, in beide gevallen is de conclusie hetzelfde: Hubert Smeets en zijn collega's hebben hun langste tijd gehad. Ze zijn hun geloofwaardigheid definitief kwijt.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/ukraine-fires-defense-minister-who-lost-crimea-to-russia/2014/03/25/81409484-31c6-41db-9e24-7b6193240aef_story.html
Zijn ideologische kijk blijkt ondermeer uit het feit dat hij nu pas ontdekt dat er iets niet klopt aan zijn propagandistische voorstelling van zaken. Op 21 oktober 2014 merkt hij ineens verbijsterd:
Dinsdag 14 oktober – een feestdag voor zowel de drie Orthodoxe kerken als de Grieks-Katholieken in Oekraïne – was het raak voor de Verchovna Rada. Een kleine duizend radicaal rechtse nationalisten demonstreerden vóór erkenning van het Oekraïense Opstandelingenleger (OePA) dat in en na de Tweede Wereldoorlog vocht tégen het Russische Sovjetleger dat het westen van Oekraïne op Polen en later op nazi- Duitsland had veroverd en vervolgens stalinistisch collectiviseerde. De betoging liep uit de hand. Molotovcocktails gingen door de lucht. Ruiten van het parlementsgebouw gingen aan diggelen. Voorzitter Oleksandr Toertsjinov ontruimde de plenaire vergaderzaal.
Meer over de corrupte media later.
Hubert Smeets tijdens een anti-Poetin lezing voor het Roosevelt Study Center, dat 'explores the Roosevelt Legacy in Transatlantic Relations. The diverse and dynamic character of this legacy offers an inspiring way to understand the history and culture of the United States and its meaning for Europe... The RSC is located in the twelfth-century Abbey of Middelburg, the Netherlands.'
Daar kunt u ook professor Barbara Oomen aantreffen en zo is de cirkel weer rond. Ons kent ons. Het is het onvermijdelijke product van het mafiose poldermodel.
http://stanvanhoucke.blogspot.nl/search?q=barbara+oomen
De Amerikaanse staatssecretaris van Buitenlandse Zaken, Victoria 'Fuck the EU' Nuland tijdens een ontmoeting met de leider van de Oekraïense neo-nazi party Oleh Tyhanybok. 'The diverse and dynamic character of this legacy offers an inspiring way to understand the history and culture of the United States and its meaning for Europe.'
Daar kunt u ook professor Barbara Oomen aantreffen en zo is de cirkel weer rond. Ons kent ons. Het is het onvermijdelijke product van het mafiose poldermodel.
http://stanvanhoucke.blogspot.nl/search?q=barbara+oomen
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