Dinsdag 28 oktober 2014 berichtte de International New York Times op de voorpagina:
In the decades after World War II, the C.I.A. and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informers and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed the governments's ties to some still living in America, newly disclosed records and interviews show.
At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet 'assets,' declassified records show. They believed the Nazis' intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called 'moral lapses' in their service to the Third Reich.
De vraag is wat 'moral lapses' precies zijn. Volgens de gangbare definitie is het in dit geval:
A euphemism for an act performed while knowing or believing it to be contrary to prevailing moral standards.
Oftewel:
A moral lapse is a term people use when they did something they knew was wrong, but wanted to anyway.
Hier is sprake van een immorele handeling in strijd met de democratische rechtsregels, begaan door de Amerikaanse gevestigde orde tijdens en zelfs na de Koude Oorlog. Zolang deze immoraliteit in het geheim kan worden uitgevoerd is er geen vuiltje aan de lucht. In dit opzicht verschilde de VS in niets van de Sovjet Unie. De strijd ging in werkelijkheid ook niet om democratie versus totalitarisme, maar om de hegemonie in de wereld, waarbij beide ideologieën zo totalitair waren dat de elite van zowel de Verenigde Staten als die van de Sovjet Unie bereid was de eigen bevolking te laten uitroeien middels een nucleaire oorlog. 'Mutual Assured Destruction,' heette dit in het NAVO-jargon, MAD, wat zonder enige twijfel de grootst denkbare immoraliteit is.
Wat door de mainstream-journalistiek voortdurend wordt verzwegen is dat de grootmachten gerund worden door sociopaten en psychopaten die er niet voor terugdeinzen om tot het uiterste te gaan: de vernietiging van de beschaving van de hele mensheid. In het kader daarvan gaat Washington door met zijn desastreuze wapenwedloop, die nu al direct of indirect vele miljoenen mensenlevens kost. September 2014 werd bekend dat
Under Nobel Peace Prize-winning President Barack Obama, America's nuclear weapons spending will eclipse $1 trillion over the next 30 years as the United States spent more in 2014 on its arsenal than at any time in its history – including during the Cold War and World War II. The stunning news from The New York Times comes just five years after a newly minted Obama won the Prize for, in part, using international diplomacy to further a 'vision of a world free from nuclear arms.'
Ondertussen wordt Rusland steeds meer omringd door NAVO-bases. Desondanks slaagde de westerse mainstream-pers erin juist Rusland af te schilderen als de grote bedreiging van de vrede in de wereld. De houding van de 'vrije pers' is misdadig, zo simpel is het. Zij steunt een moreel volstrekt verwerpelijk orde, de wanorde van het neoliberalisme. En zodra een kritische stem de werkelijkheid toont, kan de de corrupte journalistiek niets anders doen dan die stem marginaliseren, stigmatiseren, criminaliseren en desnoods demoniseren. Zondag 26 oktober 2014 gaf de kritische Amerikaanse journalist Chris Hedges het volgende voorbeeld:
When Webb, writing in a 1996 series in the San Jose Mercury News, exposed the Central Intelligence Agency’s complicity in smuggling tons of cocaine for sale into the United States to fund the CIA-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua, the press turned him into a journalistic leper. And over the generations there is a long list of journalistic lepers, from Ida B. Wells to I.F. Stone to Julian Assange.
The attacks against Webb have been renewed in publications such as The Washington Post since the release of the film earlier this month. These attacks are an act of self-justification. They are an attempt by the mass media to mask the collaboration between themselves and the power elite. The mass media, like the rest of the liberal establishment, seek to wrap themselves in the moral veneer of the fearless pursuit of truth and justice. But to maintain this myth they have to destroy the credibility of journalists such as Webb and Assange who shine a light on the sinister and murderous inner workings of empire, who care more about truth than news.
The country’s major news outlets—including my old employer The New York Times, which wrote that there was “scant proof” of Webb’s contention—functioned as guard dogs for the CIA. Soon after the 1996 exposé appeared, The Washington Post devoted nearly two full pages to attacking Webb’s assertions. The Los Angeles Times ran three separate articles that slammed Webb and his story. It was a seedy, disgusting and shameful chapter in American journalism. But it was hardly unique. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, in the 2004 article 'How the Press and the CIA Killed Gary Webb’s Career,' detailed the dynamics of the nationwide smear campaign.
Webb’s newspaper, after printing a mea culpa about the series, cast him out. He was unable to work again as an investigative journalist and, fearful of losing his house, he committed suicide in 2004. We know, in part because of a Senate investigation led by then-Sen. John Kerry, that Webb was right. But truth was never the issue for those who opposed the journalist. Webb exposed the CIA as a bunch of gunrunning, drug-smuggling thugs. He exposed the mass media, which depend on official sources for most of their news and are therefore hostage to those sources, as craven handmaidens of power. He had crossed the line. And he paid for it.
If the CIA was funneling hundreds of millions of dollars in drugs into inner-city neighborhoods to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua, what did that say about the legitimacy of the vast covert organization? What did it tell us about the so-called war on drugs? What did it tell us about the government’s callousness and indifference to the poor, especially poor people of color at the height of the crack epidemic? What did it say about rogue military operations carried out beyond public scrutiny?
These were questions the power elites, and their courtiers in the press, were determined to silence.
The mass media are plagued by the same mediocrity, corporatism and careerism as the academy, labor unions, the arts, the Democratic Party and religious institutions. They cling to the self-serving mantra of impartiality and objectivity to justify their subservience to power. The press writes and speaks—unlike academics that chatter among themselves in arcane jargon like medieval theologians—to be heard and understood by the public. And for this reason the press is more powerful and more closely controlled by the state. It plays an essential role in the dissemination of official propaganda. But to effectively disseminate state propaganda the press must maintain the fiction of independence and integrity. It must hide its true intentions.
The mass media, as C. Wright Mills pointed out, are essential tools for conformity. They impart to readers and viewers their sense of themselves. They tell them who they are. They tell them what their aspirations should be. They promise to help them achieve these aspirations. They offer a variety of techniques, advice and schemes that promise personal and professional success. The mass media, as Wright wrote, exist primarily to help citizens feel they are successful and that they have met their aspirations even if they have not. They use language and images to manipulate and form opinions, not to foster genuine democratic debate and conversation or to open up public space for free political action and public deliberation. We are transformed into passive spectators of power by the mass media, which decide for us what is true and what is untrue, what is legitimate and what is not. Truth is not something we discover. It is decreed by the organs of mass communication.
'The divorce of truth from discourse and action—the instrumentalization of communication—has not merely increased the incidence of propaganda; it has disrupted the very notion of truth, and therefore the sense by which we take our bearings in the world is destroyed,” James W. Carey wrote in “Communication as Culture.'
Bridging the vast gap between the idealized identities—ones that in a commodity culture revolve around the acquisition of status, money, fame and power, or at least the illusion of it—and actual identities is the primary function of the mass media. And catering to these idealized identities, largely implanted by advertisers and the corporate culture, can be very profitable. We are given not what we need but what we want. The mass media allow us to escape into the enticing world of entertainment and spectacle. News is filtered into the mix, but it is not the primary concern of the mass media. No more than 15 percent of the space in any newspaper is devoted to news; the rest is devoted to a futile quest for self-actualization. The ratio is even more lopsided on the airwaves.
'This,' Mills wrote, 'is probably the basic psychological formula of the mass media today. But, as a formula, it is not attuned to the development of the human being. It is a formula of a pseudo-world which the media invent and sustain.'
At the core of this pseudo-world is the myth that our national institutions, including those of government, the military and finance, are efficient and virtuous, that we can trust them and that their intentions are good. These institutions can be criticized for excesses and abuses, but they cannot be assailed as being hostile to democracy and the common good. They cannot be exposed as criminal enterprises, at least if one hopes to retain a voice in the mass media.
Chris Hedges is niet de eerste de beste, maar een vooraanstaand Amerikaans journalist en auteur, onderscheiden met de Pulitzer Prijs. Hij werkte lange tijd als correspondent in verschillende delen van de wereld, 15 jaar lang voor de New York Times, waarvan hij bureauchef was voor het Midden-Oosten. Hedges berichtte uit meer dan 50 landen, doceerde aan Princeton en is verbonden aan het onafhankelijke Nation Institute dat het oudste weekblad in de Verenigde Staten publiceert. 26 december 2010 beschreef hij de huidige situatie in het 'democratische' Westen aan de hand van de visie van Sheldon Wolin, emeritus hoogleraar Politieke Wetenschappen aan onder andere de prestigieuze Princeton University:
The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin uses the term ‘inverted totalitarianism’ in his book ‘Democracy Incorporated’ to describe our political system. It is a term that would make sense to Huxley. In inverted totalitarianism, the sophisticated technologies of corporate control, intimidation and mass manipulation, which far surpass those employed by previous totalitarian states, are effectively masked by the glitter, noise and abundance of a consumer society. Political participation and civil liberties are gradually surrendered. The corporation state, hiding behind the smokescreen of the public relations industry, the entertainment industry and the tawdry materialism of a consumer society, devours us from the inside out. It owes no allegiance to us or the nation. It feasts upon our carcass.
The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of the corporation. Corporations, who hire attractive spokespeople like Barack Obama, control the uses of science, technology, education and mass communication. They control the messages in movies and television. And, as in ‘Brave New World,’ they use these tools of communication to bolster tyranny. Our systems of mass communication, as Wolin writes, ‘block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification, ambiguity, or dialogue, anything that might weaken or complicate the holistic force of their creation, to its total impression.’
The result is a monochromatic system of information. Celebrity courtiers, masquerading as journalists, experts and specialists, identify our problems and patiently explain the parameters. All those who argue outside the imposed parameters are dismissed as irrelevant cranks, extremists or members of a radical left. Prescient social critics, from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky, are banished. Acceptable opinions have a range of A to B. The culture, under the tutelage of these corporate courtiers, becomes, as Huxley noted, a world of cheerful conformity, as well as an endless and finally fatal optimism. We busy ourselves buying products that promise to change our lives, make us more beautiful, confident or successful as we are steadily stripped of rights, money and influence. All messages we receive through these systems of communication, whether on the nightly news or talk shows like ‘Oprah,’ promise a brighter, happier tomorrow. And this, as Wolin points out, is ‘the same ideology that invites corporate executives to exaggerate profits and conceal losses, but always with a sunny face.’ We have been entranced, as Wolin writes, by ‘continuous technological advances’ that ‘encourage elaborate fantasies of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, actions measured in nanoseconds: a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose denizens are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge.’
Wikipedia meldt over Sheldon Wolin het volgende:
Wolin believes that the United States (which he refers to using the proper noun ‘Superpower,’ to emphasize the current position of the United States as the only superpower) has been increasingly taking on totalitarian tendencies as a result of the transformations that it underwent during the military mobilization required to fight the Axis powers, and during the subsequent campaign to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War:
While the versions of totalitarianism represented by Nazism and Fascism consolidated power by suppressing liberal political practices that had sunk only shallow cultural roots, Superpower represents a drive towards totality that draws from the setting where liberalism and democracy have been established for more than two centuries. It is Nazism turned upside-down, ‘inverted totalitarianism.’ While it is a system that aspires to totality, it is driven by an ideology of the cost-effective rather than of a ‘master race’ (Herrenvolk), by the material rather than the ‘ideal.’
According to Wolin, there are three main ways in which inverted totalitarianism is the inverted form of classical totalitarianism.
Whereas in Nazi Germany the state dominated economic actors, in inverted totalitarianism, corporations through political contributions and lobbying, dominate the United States, with the government acting as the servant of large corporations. This is considered ‘normal’ rather than corrupt.
While the Nazi regime aimed at the constant political mobilization of the population, with its Nuremberg rallies, Hitler Youth, and so on, inverted totalitarianism aims for the mass of the population to be in a persistent state of political apathy. The only type of political activity expected or desired from the citizenry is voting. Low electoral turnouts are favorably received as an indication that the bulk of the population has given up hope that the government will ever help them.
While the Nazis openly mocked democracy, the United States maintains the conceit that it is the model of democracy for the whole world. Wolin writes: Inverted totalitarianism reverses things. It is all politics all of the time but a politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash.
Managed democracy
Wolin believes that the democracy of the United States is sanitized of political participation and refers to it as managed democracy. He defines managed democracy as ‘a political form in which governments are legitimated by elections that they have learned to control.’ Under managed democracy, the electorate is prevented from having a significant impact on policies adopted by the state through the continuous employment of public relations techniques.
Wolin believes that the United States resembles Nazi Germany in one major way without an inversion: the essential role that propaganda plays in the system. According to Wolin, whereas the production of propaganda was crudely centralized in Nazi Germany, in the United States it is left to highly concentrated media corporations, thus maintaining the illusion of a ‘free press.’ Dissent is allowed, although the corporate media serves as a filter, allowing most people, with limited time available to keep themselves apprised of current events, only to hear points of view which the corporate media deems to be ‘serious.’
According to Wolin, the United States has two main totalizing dynamics:
The first, directed outward, finds its expression in the Global War on Terror and in the Bush Doctrine that the United States has the right to launch preemptive wars. This amounts to the United States seeing as illegitimate the attempt by any state to resist its domination.
The second dynamic, directed inward, involves the subjection of the mass of the population to economic ‘rationalization’, with continual ‘downsizing’ and ‘outsourcing’ of jobs abroad and dismantling of what remains of the welfare state created by U.S. Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. Thus, neoliberalism is an integral component of inverted totalitarianism. The state of insecurity in which this places the public serves the useful function of making people feel helpless, thus making it less likely that they will become politically active, and thus helping to maintain the first dynamic.
De onverzadigbare begeerte, waarop het totalitaire neoliberalisme is gebaseerd, kan in een wereld waar zeker de helft van de mensheid in diepe armoede leeft, niet anders dan in totale vernietiging eindigen. Om dit te beseffen hoeft men geen filosoof te zijn. Zeker niet wanneer men slechts enkele simpele feiten weet, zoals:
1,426 people around the world made Forbes magazine's latest annual tally of billionaires, up 16 percent from last year. Their average net worth was $3.8 billion, rising 3 percent from 2012. The total net worth for the list's billionaires was $5.4 trillion compared with $4.6 trillion a year ago.
in 1960 kregen de rijken in de VS van elke tien dollar 1 dollar, vandaag de dag is dit 4 dollar, waardoor al in 2005 de 793 miljardairs op aarde 2,6 biljoen dollar bezaten (2,6 maal een miljoen maal een miljoen), een bedrag dat even hoog is als de 'entirity of developing countries' foreign debt,' aldus de Committee for the Cancellation of Third World Debt.
Tegelijkertijd bleef wereldwijd de kloof tussen arm en rijk toenemen, nu ook in het zogeheten democratische Westen. Eerder al schreef ik daarover:
De werkelijkheid wordt gemaskeerd door de spreekbuizen van de macht of wordt angstvallig verzwegen. Zo is er een situatie ontstaan waarin 2 procent van de rijksten meer geld heeft dan de helft van de wereldbevolking, de rijkste 1 procent 43 procent van alle rijkdom op aarde bezit, terwijl de onderste 80 procent van de wereldbevolking slechts 6 procent van alle rijkdom beschikt. Tot voor 200 jaar waren de rijke landen slechts 3 keer rijker dan de arme landen, tegen het einde van het kolonialisme, in de jaren zestig van de twintigste eeuw, waren ze 35 keer rijker, en vandaag de dag zijn de rijke landen ongeveer 80 keer rijker.
'The richest 300 people on earth have as much wealth as the poorest 3 billion. This is no accident; those in power write the rules.’
Elk jaar betalen de arme landen 600 miljard aan de rijke landen voor leningen die al vele malen zijn terug betaald. Jaarlijks verdwijnt in totaal 2 biljoen dollar (biljoen: een miljoen maal een miljoen) van de arme landen naar de rijke landen voor leningen die al vele malen zijn terug betaald.
Anno 2014 blijkt dat de situatie nog meer is verslechterd en dat nu 1 procent van de allerrijksten 48 procent van alle rijkdom in bezit heeft. In het uiterst aanbevelenswaardig boekje Hebben we er iets aan als de rijken steeds rijker worden? dat in 2014 is verschenen bij uitgeverij Leesmagazijn, schrijft de bekende socioloog Zygmunt Bauman:
Uit recent onderzoek van het World Institute for Development Economics Research van de United Nations University blijkt dat de rijkste 1 procent van alle volwassenen ter wereld in het jaar 2000 veertig procent van alle mondiale bezittingen in handen had, en dat de rijkste 10 procent van de volwassenen 85 procent van de totale rijkdom in de wereld voor zijn rekening nam. De onderste helft van de wereldwijde populatie volwassenen bezat 1 procent van de mondiale rijkdom. Dit is echter slechts een momentopname in een voortschrijdend proces. Het slechte nieuws voor de menselijke gelijkheid, en dus ook voor de kwaliteit van het leven van ons allemaal, stapelt zich dagelijks op — en het wordt nog steeds erger.
'De sociale ongelijkheid zou de uitvinders van het moderne project het schaamrood naar de kaken hebben doen stijgen,' concluderen Michel Rocard, Dominique Bourg en Floran Augagner in hun artikel 'De bedreigde menselijke soort' in Le Monde van 3 april 2011. In het tijdperk van de Verlichting, en tijdens de levens van Francis Bacon, Descartes of zelfs Hegel, was de levenstandaard waar ook ter wereld nooit meer dan tweemaal zo hoog als in de armste regio. Tegenwoordig beroemt het rijkste land, Qatar, zich op een inkomen per hoofd van de bevolking dat 428 maal hoger ligt dans dat van het armste land, Zimbabwe. En laten we niet vergeten dat dit vergelijkingen zijn tussen gemiddelden — en dat ze doen denken aan het grappig bedoelde recept voor hazen- en paardenpaté: neem één haas en één paard…
Het hardnekkige voortbestaan van de armoede op een planeet die op het gebied van de economische groei in de greep is van een soort fundamentalisme, volstaat om weldenkende mensen aan het twijfelen te brengen en te laten nadenken over de directe en indirecte slachtoffers van de welvaartsverdeling. De steeds dieper wordende kloof die de armen en uitzichtloze scheidt van hen die het goed hebben en vol optimisme, zelfvertrouwen en flair zijn — een kloof zo diep dat alleen de meest gespierde en minst scrupuleuze bergbeklimmer hem zou kunnen overbruggen — is een voor de hand liggende reden voor ernstige bezorgdheid.
Bij elk fatsoenlijk en denkend mens levert de dagelijkse werkelijkheid 'ernstige bezorgdheid' op, behalve dan bij de Nederlandse opiniemakers die voortdurend de geesten rijp maken voor nieuwe gewelddadige NAVO-interventies waar dan ook ter wereld. Het grootscheepse geweld wordt verkocht door opiniemakers als Geert Mak met de bewering dat 'meneer Poetin' Europa 'dwingt om meer aan defensie uit te geven,' terwijl volgens hem de VS als ‘vitale… democratie’ zeker ‘decennialang als ordebewaker en politieagent ' heeft gefungeerd, terwijl zijn vriend Hubert Smeets bij de NRC zijn publiek voorbereidt op een confrontatie met Rusland, vanwege onder andere de chaos in Oekraïne.
Maandag 27 oktober 2014 berichtte de International New York Times op de voorpagina onder de kop
Ukraine vote amounts to referendum on uprising. Results will factor heavily in president's goal to free nation from Russia's grip…
The outcome will have far-reaching implications not just for this country's 45 million people, but also for the United States and its European allies, which have staked a huge political and financial bet on Ukraine's ability to emerge from the crisis as a stable state.
Gezien Zygmunt Bauman's beschrijving die door onafhankelijk onderzoek van de feiten wordt gestaafd, is de vraag: waarom hebben 'de Verenigde Staten' en zijn 'Europese bondgenoten' een 'huge political and financial bet' gedaan op het failliete en uiterst corrupte Oekraïne? Ik vraag dit mede omdat zelfs in de zogenaamde pro Europese Unie-deel van Oekraïne het opkomstcijfer slechts een schamele 52 procent was. Hebben Washington en Brussel zoveel miljarden aan belastinggeld aan de Oekraïense miljardair gegeven, die door het Westen als president naar voren werd geschoven, om ook daar op de bevolking te kunnen bezuinigen en de kloof tussen arm en rijk nog groter te maken? Zo nee, waarom doet de westerse elite dit dan wel in haar eigen landen? En van welke 'moral lapses' is er dit keer sprake, behalve de nauwe samenwerking tussen Brussel en Washington met de Oekraïense neo-nazi's, die de NAVO-bondgenoten in de regering in Kiev hebben gekregen? De misdadige voorstelling van zaken van de polderpers en de opkomst van internet leiden godzijdank tot een steeds verdere daling van de oplagen en een nog verdere daling van de geloofwaardigheid van de mainstream-pers op televisie. Meer over mijn corrupte collega's later.
http://euromaidanpress.com/2014/08/27/russian-neo-nazi-kornilovtsy-battalion-operating-in-ukraine/
Beneden: de neo-conservatieve Amerikaanse staatsecretaris staatssecretaris van Buitenlandse Zaken, Victoria Nuland, verantwoordelijk voor Europa en Eurazië. Nuland in het midden met de door haar aan de macht geholpen Oekraiense neo-nazi's.
Victoria Nuland, bekend door haar uitspraak: ‘fuck the EU’ met haar neo-nazi club.
Dezelfde Svoboda party-leider Oleh Tyahnybok en rechts de Oekraïense premier Arseniy Yatsenyuk, die de nazi-groet brengt. Allen gesteund door de Nederlandse mainstream-pers door er lange tijd over te zwijgen.
Het journalistieke 'theater' geeft 'colleges' aan een ieder die het maar horen wil.
De 'colleges' verlopen volgens de volgende lijn, van boven naar beneden: Hubert Smeets: 'Het is typisch Russisch, om altijd alles om te draaien.' Geert Mak: 'meneer Poetin dwingt' Europa 'om meer aan defensie uit te geven.' Michel Krielaars: 'Pas toen separatisten in Oost-Oekraïne vlucht MH17 neerhaalden, werd het Westen op brute wijze wakker geschud en leek het in te zien hoe Rusland zich had ontwikkeld en wie Poetin werkelijk is.'
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