Terwijl mainstream-opiniemaker Geert Mak de absurde mantra herhaalt dat 'De kracht van onze westerse samenleving onze democratie [is], onze variatie in ideeën, onze tolerantie, onze openheid tegenover andere culturen,' beschrijven vooraanstaande Amerikaanse intellectuelen als Tom Engelhardt hoe 'with its widening economic inequalities, the United States is increasingly a society of the rulers and the ruled, the surveillers and the surveilled.' In zijn boek Shadow Government (2014) over de 'Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in an Single-Superpower World' voegde hij hieraan toe:
Those surveillers have hundreds of thousands of spies to keep track of us and others on this planet, and no matter what they do, no matter what lines they cross, no matter how egregious their acts may be, they are never punished for them, not even losing their jobs. We, on the other hand, have a tiny number of volunteer surveillers on our side. The minute they make themselves known or are tracked down by the national security state, they automatically lose their jobs and that’s only the beginning of the punishments levied on them.
Those who run our new surveillance state have not the slightest hesitation about sacrificing us on the altar of their plans -- all for the greater good, as they define it.
This, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with any imaginable definition of democracy or the long-gone republic. This is part of the new way of life of imperial America in which a government of the surveillers, by the surveillers, for the surveillers shall not perish from the Earth.
Terwijl Mak, op zoek naar 'hoop,' blijft wegdromen over 'onze variatie in ideeën, onze tolerantie, onze openheid,' beschrijven overal elders kritische westerlingen de werkelijkheid van alledag. Zo berichtte de Amerikaanse journalist Chris Floyd, wiens werk 'appeared in print and online in venues all over the world, including The Nation, Counterpunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Il Manifesto, etcetera,' op 13 januari 2015 onder de kop 'The Unmourned: Another Mass Killing by the Peace Prize Prez':
In keeping with the concept of 'unmournable bodies' […] news arrives today of yet another clutch of unimportant, unmournable deaths at the hands of extremist violence. From McClatchy:
A U.S.-led coalition airstrike killed at least 50 Syrian civilians late last month when it targeted a headquarters of Islamic State extremists in northern Syria [the town of Al Bab, near the Turkish border], according to an eyewitness and a Syrian opposition human rights organization. […]
The Syrian Network for Human Rights, an independent opposition group that tracks casualties in Syria, said it has documented the deaths of at least 40 civilians in airstrikes in the months between the start of U.S. bombing in Syria Sept. 23 through the Dec. 28 strike on Al Bab. The deaths include 13 people killed in Idlib province on the first day of the strikes. Other deaths include 23 civilians killed in the eastern province of Deir el Zour, two in Raqqa province and two more in Idlib province.
The issue of civilian deaths in U.S. strikes is a critical one as the United States hopes to win support from average Syrians for its campaign against the Islamic State. The deaths are seen by U.S.-allied moderate rebel commanders as one reason support for their movement has eroded in northern Syria while support for radical forces such as al Qaida’s Nusra Front and the Islamic State has gained. Rebel commanders say they have intelligence that could avoid civilian casualties, but that U.S. officials refuse to coordinate with them. […]
Daniel Wickham provides an excellent rogues' gallery of the free speech repressors -- including, most emphatically, the chief mourner at the rally, French President Francois Hollande -- who paraded their moral virtue at the Charlie Hebdo march.
Op zijn beurt wees de Nigeriaans-Amerikaanse auteur, fotograaf en kunsthistoricus Tejo Cole onder de kop 'Onbetreurde Lijken' in het prestigieuze tijdschrift The New Yorker van 9 januari 2015 erop dat
Western societies are not, even now, the paradise of skepticism and rationalism that they believe themselves to be. The West is a variegated space, in which both freedom of thought and tightly regulated speech exist, and in which disavowals of deadly violence happen at the same time as clandestine torture. But, at moments when Western societies consider themselves under attack, the discourse is quickly dominated by an ahistorical fantasy of long-suffering serenity and fortitude in the face of provocation. Yet European and American history are so strongly marked by efforts to control speech that the persecution of rebellious thought must be considered among the foundational buttresses of these societies. Witch burnings, heresy trials, and the untiring work of the Inquisition shaped Europe, and these ideas extended into American history as well and took on American modes, from the breaking of slaves to the censuring of critics of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Rather than posit that the Paris attacks are the moment of crisis in free speech—as so many commentators have done—it is necessary to understand that free speech and other expressions of liberté are already in crisis in Western societies; the crisis was not precipitated by three deranged gunmen. The U.S., for example, has consolidated its traditional monopoly on extreme violence, and, in the era of big data, has also hoarded information about its deployment of that violence. There are harsh consequences for those who interrogate this monopoly. The only person in prison for the C.I.A.’s abominable torture regime is John Kiriakou, the whistle-blower. Edward Snowden is a hunted man for divulging information about mass surveillance. Chelsea Manning is serving a thirty-five-year sentence for her role in WikiLeaks. They, too, are blasphemers, but they have not been universally valorized, as have the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo.
The killings in Paris were an appalling offense to human life and dignity. The enormity of these crimes will shock us all for a long time. But the suggestion that violence by self-proclaimed Jihadists is the only threat to liberty in Western societies ignores other, often more immediate and intimate, dangers. The U.S., the U.K., and France approach statecraft in different ways, but they are allies in a certain vision of the world, and one important thing they share is an expectation of proper respect for Western secular religion. Heresies against state power are monitored and punished. People have been arrested for making anti-military or anti-police comments on social media in the U.K. Mass surveillance has had a chilling effect on journalism and on the practice of the law in the U.S. Meanwhile, the armed forces and intelligence agencies in these countries demand, and generally receive, unwavering support from their citizens. When they commit torture or war crimes, no matter how illegal or depraved, there is little expectation of a full accounting or of the prosecution of the parties responsible. […]
This focus [on the Hebdo victims] is part of the consensus about mournable bodies, and it often keeps us from paying proper attention to other, ongoing, instances of horrific carnage around the world: abductions and killings in Mexico, hundreds of children (and more than a dozen journalists) killed in Gaza by Israel last year, internecine massacres in the Central African Republic, and so on. And even when we rightly condemn criminals who claim to act in the name of Islam, little of our grief is extended to the numerous Muslim victims of their attacks, whether in Yemen or Nigeria—in both of which there were deadly massacres this week—or in Saudi Arabia, where, among many violations of human rights, the punishment for journalists who 'insult Islam' is flogging. We may not be able to attend to each outrage in every corner of the world, but we should at least pause to consider how it is that mainstream opinion so quickly decides that certain violent deaths are more meaningful, and more worthy of commemoration, than others.
We mourn with France. We ought to. But it is also true that violence from 'our' side continues unabated. By this time next month, in all likelihood, many more 'young men of military age' and many others, neither young nor male, will have been killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere. If past strikes are anything to go by, many of these people will be innocent of wrongdoing. … Those of us who are writers will not consider our pencils broken by such killings. But that incontestability, that unmournability, just as much as the massacre in Paris, is the clear and present danger to our collective liberté.
Het is waar dat Tejo Cole geen eurocentrische blanke christelijke bestseller-auteur is, die voor de mainstream schrijft, maar toch: hoe is Mak's geconditioneerde reflex te verklaren om onmiddellijk nadat mensen met een andere huidskleur verdacht worden van een misdaad te beweren dat 'De kracht van onze westerse samenleving is onze democratie, onze variatie in ideeën, onze tolerantie, onze openheid tegenover andere culturen. Maar dat is tegelijk onze kwetsbaarheid, blijkt nu ook weer'? Nog afgezien van de makkelijk aantoonbare leugen van deze opmerking, valt meteen het onderhuids racisme op. De blanke, westerse, uit het christendom ontsproten cultuur, die zeven decennia geleden uitmondde in Auschwitz en Hiroshima en momenteel door haar interventies tenminste vijf landen in een burgeroorlog heeft gestort, is precies het tegenovergestelde van wat Mak beweert. Het Westen is geen democratie, onze consumptiecultuur is er één waarbij het individualisme wordt verheerlijkt terwijl het conformisme wordt afgedwongen, variatie kent men niet omdat, aldus Joachim Fest, 'De moderne wereld onverbiddelijk [is]. Ze verdraagt het bijzondere niet.' De door Mak zo geprezen westerse 'tolerantie' en 'openheid,' is in werkelijkheid de 'National Security State,' oftewel, in de woorden van Engelhardt,
a world that is increasingly hard to capture accurately because the changes are outpacing the language we have to describe them and so our ability to grasp what is happening.
Hoe is Mak's krankzinnige vertekening van de werkelijkheid te verklaren? En veel belangrijker nog: hoe kan het dat in een redelijk ontwikkelde staat als Nederland deze charlatan doorgaat voor 'een van de scherpste analisten van ons continent' en daarvoor meermaals is gelauwerd door de 'politiek-literaire elite'? Vanwaar deze weerzinwekkende schaamteloosheid?
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