In De Groene Amsterdammer van 11 maart 2015 schreef columnist Henk Hofland over 'De Iraanse bom.' Precies twee weken later, op 25 maart 2015, staat boven Hoflands column in De Groene Amsterdammer 'De bom van Iran.' Heeft Iran een kernbom? Nee. Israel wel, naar schatting bezit de zionistische staat rond de 200 nucleaire bommen. Schrijft de mainstream-opiniemaker hier regelmatig over? Nee, hij is niet gek, hij weet precies wat van hem verwacht wordt, waarover hij mag spreken en vooral ook wat hij dient te verzwijgen. Die houding heeft hem de 'beste journalist van de twintigste eeuw' gemaakt, in de ogen van zijn mainstream-collega's in de polder. Ik vermeld dit, omdat H.J.A. Hofland in de tussenliggende week, in De Groene van 18 maart 2015, het volgende beweerde:
Op 21 november 1981 namen op het Museumplein in Amsterdam vierhonderdduizend mensen deel aan een demonstratie… Twee jaar later demonstreerden 550.000 mensen in Den Haag.
Dergelijke massale betogingen worden al jaren nergens meer gehouden. Dat is geen wonder. Na het einde van de Koude Oorlog is de buitenlandse politiek gefragmentariseerd. Ook de publieke opinie had geen groot politiek doel meer.
De vorige keer stelde ik ondermeer de volgende vragen:
Hoe kwam het dat 'de publieke opinie geen groot politiek doel meer [had]'?
Bestond er van de ene op de andere dag 'geen groot politiek doel meer'? Zo ja,
waarom niet? En indien het antwoord negatief is, is de vraag: was elk 'groot politiek
doel' inmiddels succesvol bereikt?
Omdat Hofland hierover zwijgt, zal ikzelf proberen een antwoord te geven. Dat is minder moeilijk dan mag lijken. Immers, 'de publieke opinie,' wordt in een massamaatschappij voor het merendeel gestuurd door de mainstream-pers in het algemeen, en de mainstream-opiniemakers in het bijzonder. Hun taak is 'the engineering of consent' dat 'the very essence [is] of the democratic proces,' oftewel 'the freedom to persuade and suggest,' aldus de grondlegger van de public relations industrie, de Amerikaan Edward Bernays in de jaren twintig van de vorige eeuw. Het spreekt voor zich dat 'freedom' alleen in handen kan zijn van de machtigen en rijken, die de financiële middelen hebben om de 'vrijheid' op grote schaal vorm en inhoud te geven. Daarom is het 'impossible to overestimate the importance of engineering consent; it affects almost every aspect of our daily lives.' Na de Tweede Wereldoorlog constateerde de redactie van het gezaghebbende Amerikaanse zakentijdschrift Fortune dan ook dat
it is as impossible to imagine a genuine democracy without the science of persuasion [ i.e. propaganda] as it is to think of a totalitarian state without coercion. The daily tonnage output of propaganda and publicity... has become an important force in American life. Nearly half of the contents of the best newspapers is derived from publicity releases; nearly all the the contents of the lesser papers... are directly or indirectly the work of PR departments.
Wanneer de nestor van de polderjournalistiek signaleert dat 'Ook de publieke opinie geen groot politiek doel meer,' heeft, dan kan het niet anders dan dat de westerse mainstream-pers, met voorop opiniemakers als Hofland zelf, in deze ontwikkeling een belangrijke, zo niet doorslaggevende rol hebben gespeeld. Waarom zouden de mainstream-media anders een goed betaalde opiniemaker inhuren, nietwaar? In zijn standaardwerk Propaganda (1928) wees Bernays erop dat:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
De opiniemaker in de westerse mainstream media is, net als de rooms katholieke geestelijke in de middeleeuwen dit was, een onmisbare schakel bij het disciplineren van wat Hofland 'het volk' noemt. Vanuit dit oogpunt is de onverhulde 'wrok' van de commerciële pers over internet verklaarbaar. Nadat zij het monopolie op de waarheidsvinding had verloren schreef de stem van het Nederlands establishment in De Groene Amsterdammer van 10 maart 2010 onder de kop Helemaal gek maken:
internet heeft het machtsgevoel van de ontevredenen vergroot. Nu kunnen ze de wereld in hun wrok laten delen. Deze bloggers zijn de permanent wrokkenden in digitale gedaante.
Haast instinctmatig constateren de Hoflanden geschrokken dat hun macht fundamenteel is aangetast door de komst van een nieuwe technologie. Dat is overigens een normale reactie. De Canadese filosoof Marshall McLuhan toonde in de tweede helft van de twintigste eeuw uitgebreid aan dat 'When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.' Met als gevolg dat de 'beste journalist van de twintigste eeuw' die een werkzaam leven lang er vanuit was gegaan dat 'De Volkskrant en NRC Handelsblad elitaire kranten' waren, om hieraan de bewering te verbinden: 'Dat is geen nadeel. Een natie kan niet zonder een politiek-literaire elite,' zoals Hofland in 'De toekomst van bedrukt papier' verkondigde in De Groene Amsterdammer van 20 maart 2009. Zijn verlies aan macht in ogenschouw nemende concludeerde hij met afschuw dat
De afgelopen tien jaar is het politieke landschap ten koste van het oude bestel gefragmentariseerd en tegelijkertijd heeft zich in de journalistiek, ook door de invloed van internet, een culturele polarisatie voltrokken. De ‘nieuwe media’ met de mening van de bloggers zijn voor een groot deel van de publieke opinie toonaangevend geworden. Dit is de gedigitaliseerde stem des volks.
Zonder dit te beseffen demonstreerde hij impliciet hoe gecorrumpeerd hij en zijn 'politiek-literaire elite,' c.q. 'de vrije westerse pers' al die jaren hadden gefunctioneerd. Door de democratisering van de berichtgeving via internet 'voelen' volgens hem
[b]estuurders zich in het nauw gedreven, aan de ene kant doordat het onvermijdelijke internet ook een middel tot voorbarige openbaarheid kan zijn, aan de andere kant doordat ze daarmee worden uitgeleverd aan het onmiddellijke oordeel van de dan plotseling goedgelovige massa. De verborgen zwakte van internet is dat het oorzaak kan zijn van een laaiende volkswoede.
De 'plotseling goedgelovige massa,' die niet langer meer afhankelijk was van de zorgvuldig begeleide propaganda van opiniemakers als Hofland, kan nu in 'een laaiende volkswoede' ontsteken, en voordat de kennelijk altruïstische 'bestuurders' het weten, trekt het rapaille met hooivorken en dorsvlegels op naar de dichtstbijzijnde Bastille. Dan zal duidelijk worden hoe belangrijk Bernays les was dat
If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits.
Deze 'scientific technique of opinion-molding' oftewel de 'engineering of consent' is onmisbaar om het falderappes en de middenklasse in het gareel te houden, zodat zij dienstbaar blijven aan de politieke en economische elite, die, zoals bekend, de koers van de hele mensheid uitstippelt, richting de afgrond. De klemmende vraag is hoe zonder 'regimenting the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers' de rijke elite aan de macht kan blijven wanneer de 'corporate media' hun alleenheerschappij kwijt zijn, en bloggers 'de gedigitaliseerde stem des volks' zijn geworden? Walter Lippmann, die als adviseur van ondermeer president Woodrow Wilson meewerkte het Amerikaanse volk te overtuigen van de noodzaak aan de Eerste Wereldoorlog deel te nemen, terwijl Wilson juist was gekozen vanwege zijn belofte dat dit niet zou gebeuren, maakte in de jaren twintig van de vorige eeuw tegenover de elite duidelijk dat
the members of the public, who are the spectators of action, cannot successfully intervene in controversy on the merits of the case. They must judge externally, and they can act only by supporting one of the interests directly involved.
In The Phantom Public (1927) werkte Lippmann dit verder uit toen hij stelde dat:
THE PRIVATE CITIZEN today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back row, who ought to keep his mind on the mystery off there, but cannot quite manage to keep awake. He knows he is somehow affected by what is going on. Rules and regulations continually, taxes annually and wars occasionally remind him that he is being swept along by great drifts of circumstance.
Yet these public affairs are in no convincing way his affairs. They are for the most part invisible. They are managed, if they are managed at all, at distant centers, from behind the scenes, by unnamed powers. As a private person he does not know for certain what is going on, or who is doing it, or where he is being carried. No newspaper reports his environment so that he can grasp it; no school has taught him how to imagine it; his ideals, often, do not fit with it; listening to speeches, uttering opinions and voting do not, he finds, enable him to govern it. He lives in a world which he cannot see, does not understand and is unable to direct.
In the cold light of experience he knows that his sovereignty is a fiction. He reigns in theory but in fact he does not govern…
There is then nothing particularly new in the disenchantment which the private citizen expresses by not voting at all, by voting only for the head of the ticket, by staying away from the primaries, by not reading speeches and documents, by the whole list of sins of omission for which he is denounced. I shall not denounce him further. My sympathies are with him, for I believe that he has been saddled with an impossible task and that he is asked to practice an unattainable ideal. I find it so myself for, although public business is my main interest and I give most of my time to watching it, I cannot find time to do what is expected of me in the theory of democracy; that is, to know what is going on and to have an opinion worth expressing on every question which confronts a self-governing community. And I have not happened to meet anybody, from a President of the United States to a professor of political science, who came anywhere near to embodying the accepted ideal of the sovereign and omni-competent citizen…
Today’s theories assume that either the voters are inherently competent to direct the course of affairs or that they are making progress toward such an ideal. I think it is a false ideal. I do not mean an undesirable ideal. I mean an unattainable ideal, bad only in the sense that it is bad for a fat man to try to be a ballet dancer. An ideal should express the true possibilities of its subject. When it does not it perverts the true possibilities. The ideal of the omni-competent, sovereign citizen is, in my opinion, such a false ideal. It is unattainable. The pursuit of it is misleading. The failure to achieve it has produced the current disenchantment.
The individual man does not have opinions on all public affairs. He does not know how to direct public affairs. He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen. I cannot imagine how he could know, and there is not the least reason for thinking, as mystical democrats have thought, that the compounding of individual ignorance in masses of people can produce a continuous directing force in public affairs…
The need in the Great Society not only for publicity but for uninterrupted publicity is indisputable. But we shall misunderstand the need seriously if we imagine that the purpose of the publication can possibly be the informing of every voter. We live at the mere beginnings of public accounting. Yet the facts far exceed our curiosity… A few executives here and there read them. The rest of us ignore them for the good and sufficient reason that we have other things to do….
Specific opinions give rise to immediate executive acts; to take a job, to do a particular piece of work, to hire or fire, to buy or sell, to stay here or go there, to accept or refuse, to command or obey. General opinions give rise to delegated, indirect, symbolic, intangible results: to a vote, to a resolution, to applause, to criticizing, to praise or dispraise, to audiences, circulations, followings, contentment or discontent. The specific opinion may lead to a decision to act within the area where a he has personal jurisdiction, that is, within the limits set by law and custom, his personal power and his personal desire. But general opinions lead only to some sort of expression, such as voting, and do not result in executive acts except in cooperation with the general opinions of large numbers of other persons.
Since the general opinions of large numbers of persons are almost certain to be a vague and confusing medley, action cannot be taken until these opinions have been factored down, canalized, compressed and made uniform… the making of one general will out of a multitude of general wishes... consists essentially in the use of symbols which assemble emotions after they have been detached from their ideas. Because feelings are much less specific than ideas, and yet more poignant, the leader is able to make a homogeneous will out of a heterogeneous mass of desires. The process, therefore, by which general opinions are brought to cooperation consists of an intensification of feeling and a degradation of significance. Before a mass of general opinions can eventuate in executive action, the choice is narrowed down to a few alternatives. The victorious alternative is executed not by the mass but by individuals in control of its energy…
We must assume, then, that the members of a public will not possess an insider's knowledge of events or share his point of view. They cannot, therefore, construe intent, or appraise the exact circumstances, enter intimately into the minds of the actors or into the details of the argument. They can watch only for coarse signs indicating where their sympathies ought to turn.
Binnen dit scherp begrensde raamwerk opereren de westerse massamedia, die allen in mindere of meerdere mate de belangen van de elite dienen. Elke opiniemaker weet dit, elke journalist weet dit, elke politicus weet dit. Ook als hij/zij zich hiervan niet expliciet bewust is, dan nog weten de direct betrokkenen het onbewust, als het ware instinctmatig, zoals valt op te maken uit hun gelijk geschakelde werk. Zij weten hun plaats en alleen de grootste conformisten kunnen in dit bestel carrière maken en in de polder uitgeroepen worden tot de 'beste journalist van de twintigste eeuw.'
Hoflands beroep is het maken van opinies die sporen met de belangen van de neoliberaal kapitalistische elite. Hij is tot op het bot doordrongen van het besef dat publieke aangelegenheden 'are managed, if they are managed at all, at distant centers, from behind the scenes, by unnamed powers,' en dat hij daarom de schijn van democratie dient hoog te houden, omdat het systeem toch op de een of andere manier gelegitimeerd moet worden, en om op die manier te voorkomen dat 'de gedigitaliseerde stem des volks' de elite 'in het nauw' drijft door 'voorbarige openbaarheid' op 'het onvermijdelijke internet,' waardoor de macht, die achter de schermen actief is, wordt 'uitgeleverd aan het onmiddellijke oordeel van de dan plotseling goedgelovige massa,' en de machtigen overgeleverd worden aan 'een laaiende volkswoede.'
Het grote probleem is nu dat de 'unnamed powers' een fascistische technocratie mogelijk hebben gemaakt, die het voortbestaan van de hele mensheid bedreigt, en dat daardoor opiniemakers als Hofland, die de status quo proberen te verdedigen, levensgevaarlijk zijn geworden, gevaarlijker nog dan de fascisten en nationaal socialisten in de jaren dertig, omdat de consequenties van de huidige agressieve propaganda nu voor ieder individu op aarde desastreus zullen zijn. Al was het maar door de 'bom.' Niemand kan zich nog verschuilen. Volgende keer meer daarover.
Henk Hofland toont in zijn werk aan een brave leerling te zijn van Edward Bernays' stelling dat 'The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.'
Yemen Beware as it Threatens US-backed Order
Finian CUNNINGHAM | 25.03.2015 | 14:41
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The crisis in Yemen is the latest manifestation of the old order desperately trying to cling on to a dwindling power base. That old order has been backed by the United States and its allies among the Persian Gulf Arab dictatorships as a bulwark against a popular uprising that could lead to democratisation in the poorest Middle Eastern country. If such an outcome were to succeed, the repercussions for the autocratic Gulf monarchies would be deeply destabilising. Saudi Arabia, which shares a southern border with Yemen, is the primary concern for this spreading «instability».
That is why the House of Saud is now issuing all sorts of grave warnings of «foreign interference» and blaming Iran for «aggression». Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al Faisal this week said that the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is ready to send in a military force to «protect Yemen’s sovereignty». The GCC comprises the six monarchial states of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. All are stalwart American client regimes.
Meanwhile, Washington is urging Yemeni rival factions to «return to the United Nations-mediated peace talks». Samantha Power, the US representative on the UN Security Council, said: «To preserve Yemen's security, stability and unity, all parties must refrain from any further unilateral and offensive military actions.»
UN envoy to Yemen, Jamal Benomar, amid warnings of all-out civil war, said this week that imminent talks were scheduled to take place in the Qatari capital, Doha. Al Jazeera reported that «any agreement reached would be signed in [Saudi capital] Riyadh».
The venues of Doha and Riyadh are hardly neutral places to conduct peace talks. The rebels in Yemen, led by the northern Houthi movement, have accused Saudi Arabia and Qatar, along with the US, of repeatedly interfering in the country’s strife to support the old order and to offset any democratic change. Seen from this point of view, the UN-mediated talks are thus being capped with a veto wielded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. That would explain why Washington is so keen to push the talks, knowing that they will not produce anything substantive in terms of democratic progress in Yemen.
Indeed, Samantha Power has taken to discredit the Houthi movement by alleging that it is responsible for all the recent violence in the country. Power told the UN Security Council this week that the Houthi rebels have «consistently undermined Yemen’s transition». Amazingly, or perhaps not, she did not make mention of Saudi-backed extremists who last week killed more than 130 people in two mosque bombings in the capital, Sanaa. Ironically, it is the US and Saudi Arabia and their unswerving support in sustaining the old regime that is undermining «transition» to a more democratic and peaceful polity in Yemen.
The old regime in Yemen is headed up by Mansour Hadi, who is openly backed by the US and Saudi Arabia. For nearly 30 years he served as the vice president under the strong-arm dictatorship of Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was also backed to the hilt by Washington and Riyadh.
Saleh was notorious for his kleptocracy, siphoning of huge wealth for his family and entourage from Yemen’s modest oil industry. His son was made commander of the Republican Guard and was being groomed for succession until the Arab region’s popular protests in 2011 threatened to upset the family-run apple cart. Despite a brutal crackdown against largely peaceful protests, in which hundreds were gunned down on the streets of the capital, the American and Saudi sponsors of Saleh managed to stave off his overthrow by spinning out «talks» and eventually coming up with a «deal» that afforded the dictator and his ruling clique lifetime immunity from prosecution. As part of that US-Saudi-brokered «compromise», Saleh’s long-time deputy, Mansour Hadi, was made president in February 2012 after a non-contested «election». His presidency was only supposed to be a transitional position until the advent of full elections and the reconstitution of a representative parliament.
For the past three years, the US-Saudi process of transition has been nothing but a cynical rearguard action to retrench the old order, in which the majority of Yemen’s 24 million population are shut out from democratic control of the country’s politics and economics. The old kleptocratic order would thereby persist in its disenfranchisement of the Yemeni population while serving the geopolitical interests of Washington and its client Arab monarchies. Prime among those interests is the deterrence of democratic change in the region, as American political analyst Noam Chomsky has consistently argued.
The northern-based Houthis are adherents to a Shia sect of Islam. They have received political support from Shia Iran, but Saudi claims of Iranian fifth columnists are wildly overblown. Also, in the Houthis’ recent push for democratic change in Yemen their political vision has been notably inclusive of all religions and tribes. The Houthis, also known as Ansarullah, have spearheaded the ouster of the old regime simply because they have felt the most grievances of exclusion under the old Western, Saudi-backed order.
Last September, Houthi frustration over continual delay in the promised political transition boiled over when they took over the capital Sanaa by force of arms. One of its leaders Mohammed Abdulsalam said then: «This is a strategic victory for all Yemenis. But it is only the beginning of a long campaign to defeat corruption endemic in Yemen’s governing system. Today is the beginning of an age different from the past as the voice of all of the nation is being heard».
The Houthi movement can therefore be rightly seen as much more than just a narrow Shia sect, and one that seems to be genuinely agitating for a more democratic, inclusive Yemen.
When the Western-Saudi puppet president Hadi was forced last September to speed up the overdue transition, it is notable that Saudi Arabia began issuing dire warnings of Yemen’s collapse and Iranian foreign aggression, as it has once again cited this week. Meantime, Riyadh began to step up its support for Al Qaeda-linked groups in Yemen, who embarked on a campaign of car bombings and shootings in the capital and other towns loyal to the pro-democracy movement. Warnings of chaos had a self-fulfilling quality because of covert Saudi sponsoring of chaos. One month after the Houthis took over Sanaa in September last year, a car bomb claimed by Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (which is linked to Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) killed more than 50. Last week, saw another atrocity when two Shia mosques were bombed by the same group, killing more than 130. In between those atrocities there have been numerous other massacres carried out by the Al Qaeda-linked extremists, mainly directed at the Houthi community.
The systemic link between Saudi rulers and Islamist terror groups is not a matter of contention. It has been well documented elsewhere, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon and Syria. So too are the links between US and NATO allies and the same terror groups who function as proxies for regime change or pretexts for foreign military intervention. There are contradictions, of course, such as Saudi Arabia (and Qatar) claiming to be allies in the US-led so-called war on terrorism against Al Qaeda. Washington and Riyadh claim to be waging a counterinsurgency campaign in Yemen against Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula, which the US has targeted with its aerial drones for the past decade.
Western powers, including the US, Britain, France and Germany, followed moves by the Persian Gulf monarchies to shut down embassies in Yemen earlier this year. This had the effect of heightening tensions and destabilising the country. The rush to evacuate Yemen had the unmistakable air of a forced abandonment to contrive a state of emergency, which would undermine the Houthi push for political transition. This puts Samantha Power’s recent accusations against the Houthis in a more enlightening context.
Now the deposed puppet-president Mansour Hadi has set up a base in the southern port city of Aden – the old British colonial «Protectorate». Hadi and his clique are calling for foreign military intervention from the Saudi-led GCC states to «restore order» – a phrase that reveals more than intended. It is patent that the Aden remnant is speaking according to a US-Saudi script aimed at giving a legal fig leaf for justifying foreign interference, whose real intent is to roll back a popular uprising.
In this Yemeni development there is an unerring analogy with the Bahrain pro-democracy movement. In mid-March 2011 when a Bahraini popular uprising was threatening to overthrow the kleptocratic regime of the Al Khalifa monarchy, the Saudis led a GCC military force into the Gulf island-state to crush that pro-democracy movement. Again, as with Yemen, the Saudis invented the pretext of Iranian aggression as a political cover for its actions. The Americans and the British, too, went fully along with the Saudi ruse in Bahrain to crush a democratic opening and to shore up the old order.
The old order of autocratic, despotic rule in the Arab region is sacrosanct, as far as Washington and its petrodollar allies are concerned. Democracy, or even the mere possibility of democracy, cannot be tolerated. For that would threaten the fascist order that underpins American global hegemony. Yemen is now entering dangerous political territory. It is threatening the Washington-ordained order, not just in the country, but in the entire oil-rich region. A US-backed Saudi-led military intervention to «restore order» is therefore on the way. That could take the form of an overt invasion, as in Bahrain, or a ramped-up covert terror campaign to drown the country in blood.
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Tags: Middle East Saudi Arabia US Yemen
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VVD wil meer samen optrekken met dictators
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