Wanneer een vooraanstaande mainstream-opiniemaker als Henk Hofland ineens stelt dat '[n]iet de rest van de wereld maar het Westen zich [zal] moeten aanpassen' aan de ingrijpend veranderende machtsverhoudingen op aarde, dan betekent dit dat deze woordvoerder van de macht is losgeslagen van zijn ideologische anker, en nu met de stroming meedeint, niet wetend waarheen die leidt. In verwarring probeert Hofland te redden wat er te redden valt, wat ondermeer blijkt uit het feit dat hij meent dat de aanpassing 'nog altijd bij voorkeur onder Amerikaanse leiding' moet verlopen, tenminste 'als het een Democraat is,' in dit geval de oorlogszuchtige Hillary Clinton die volgens hem 'de ideale kandidaat,' is. Hoewel hij zich begint te realiseren dat de zekerheid van de Koude Oorlog-doctrine onhoudbaar is geworden, kan hij nog steeds niet zonder de eenvoud dat het manicheïsme hem en zijn 'politiek-literaire elite' in de polder tenminste een halve eeuw heeft verschaft. Hij weet dat 'het Westen zich' moet 'aanpassen,' maar dan wel onder 'leiding' van de VS die zich in zijn hele hegemonistische geschiedenis nooit heeft aangepast aan de rechten van de rest van de wereld. De 'beste journalist van de twintigste eeuw' realiseert zich niet dat na vijf eeuwen westerse overheersing een politieke aanpassing pas mogelijk is nadat daaraan eerst een diepe culturele omslag is vooraf gegaan. Bij gebrek aan historische kennis weet Hofland ook niet dat de elite van imperia nooit van haar fouten leert, kan leren, omdat juist die 'fouten' hen de macht verschaffen waarnaar ze voortdurend streven. En dus verklaarde op 28 mei 2014 president Obama, die 'change we can believe in' had beloofd, tegenover een nieuwe lichting officieren van de U.S. Military Academy-West Point:
I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.
Ten overstaan van de Algemene Vergadering van de Verenigde Naties herhaalde Obama in 2013 zijn diepe overtuiging in niets andere bewoordingen:
Some may disagree, but I believe that America is exceptional.
Daarentegen hebben
Critics on the left such as Marilyn Young and Howard Zinn argued that American history is so morally flawed, citing slavery, civil rights and social welfare issues, that it cannot be an exemplar of virtue. Zinn argues that American exceptionalism cannot be of divine origin because it was not benign, especially when dealing with Native Americans.
Niet lang voor zijn dood benadrukte de historicus Zinn in een interview met mij hoe diep dit exceptionalisme is geïnternaliseerd in de psyche van zijn landgenoten door te stellen dat toen de eerste Europese kolonisten op de Oostkust van de huidige VS aan wal gingen 'their eyes were set on the West Coast.' Daar komt nog bij dat dit 'exceptionalisme' niet heeft verhinderd dat de VS de afgelopen zes decennia al zijn grote oorlogen heeft verloren, terwijl ook op binnenlands gebied het geloof in 'manifest destiny' in de praktijk weinig voorstelt. De Amerikaanse hoogleraar
Donald E. Pease mocks American exceptionalism as a 'state fantasy' and a 'myth' in his 2009 book The New American Exceptionalism. Pease notes that 'state fantasies cannot altogether conceal the inconsistencies they mask,' showing how such events as the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and the exposure of government incompetence after Hurricane Katrina 'opened fissures in the myth of exceptionalism.'
Op zijn beurt wees Stephen Martin Walt, hoogleraar aan de prestigieuze Kennedy School of Government van de Harvard-universiteit, waar hij internationale betrekkingen doceert, in 2011 erop dat
THE IDEA THAT THE UNITED STATES IS UNIQUELY VIRTUOUS MAY BE COMFORTING TO AMERICANS. TOO BAD IT'S NOT TRUE.
A crucial component of American exceptionalism is the belief that the United States has a divinely ordained mission to lead the rest of the world. Ronald Reagan told audiences that there was 'some divine plan' that had placed America here, and once quoted Pope Pius XII saying, 'Into the hands of America God has placed the destinies of an afflicted mankind.' Bush offered a similar view in 2004, saying, 'We have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom.' The same idea was expressed, albeit less nobly, in Otto von Bismarck's alleged quip that 'God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States.'
Desondanks meent H.J.A. Hofland in De Groene dat 'Hillary' het morele gezag bezit om 'leiding' te geven aan de noodzakelijke aanpassing van het Westen aan de realiteit in de wereld, en illustreert daarmee dat in elk geval hijzelf nog steeds rotsvast vertrouwt in het Amerikaans 'exceptionalisme.' Vanwaar zijn absurde geloof? Ik denk dat nu zijn hegemonistische ideologie schipbreuk lijdt, de verwarring bij de hoogbejaarde Hofland inmiddels zo groot is, dat hij zich wanhopig vastklampt aan wat ronddobberend wrakhout van het eens zo machtige Westen. Hetzelfde proces zag ik in Rusland toen ik tijdens de ineenstorting van de Sovjet-Unie in Moskou, schrijvers, kunstenaars en wetenschappers interviewde over hun verleden, heden en verwachtte toekomst. De schok was zo groot dat niemand meer precies wist waarin hij of zij was beland. Men moest als het ware vanuit het niets van het ene op het andere moment een totaal nieuw mens- en wereldbeeld creëren. Dat kan natuurlijk niet, zeker niet bij intellectuelen die het langst gehersenspoeld zijn door een failliete ideologie. Vandaar de chaos in het denken van de Nederlandse 'politiek-literaire elite,' en vandaar ook haar almaar toenemend provincialisme en haar banale opinies, die alleen maar demonstreren hoe beschamend weinig deze autistische 'elite' weet en begrijpt. De Koude Oorlog heeft mijn generatiegenoten en hoogbejaarden als Henk Hofland decennialang een houvast geboden, die bepaalde wie 'de vijand' was of op zijn minst behoorde te zijn, en dus wie Het Kwaad in de wereld vertegenwoordigde. Totdat het ondenkbare gebeurde en 'the West was without enemy' en 'Evil lost its face,' zoals mijn vrouw, de juriste Heikelien Verrijn Stuart, in maart 2015 uiteenzette voorafgaand aan een vertoning van een documentaire tijdens Movies That Matter. Zij wees erop dat in de jaren negentig van de vorige eeuw zowel intellectuelen als politici in het Westen al snel op zoek gingen naar een nieuwe vijand, het nieuwe Kwaad, dat hen weer een geloofwaardige postuur kon verschaffen. Op die manier werd
genocide the ‘magic word,’ Antonio Cassese, former president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, told me in 2009. ‘One reason is, that people think that if massive crime is called genocide, the international community has to intervene. But there is no such legal obligation.' According to Cassese, arguing that a massacre amounts to genocide serves only a psychological and media purpose. Why? Because of its link to the Holocaust. And that gives an almost unlimited carte blanche to use any means to intervene. And, as we have seen, intervention leads to new violence, to the disintegration of states, the destruction of infrastructure, to new divisions and hatreds.
Niet gehinderd door juridische of historische kennis pleitte Henk Hofland als opiniemaker regelmatig in De Groene Amsterdammer voor zogenaamd 'humanitair ingrijpen,' vanwege een geclaimde 'responsibility to protect,' die in Afghanistan, Irak, Libië, Syrië en Oekraïne in burgeroorlogen zijn ontaard. De enigen die hiervan hebben geprofiteerd zijn vanzelfsprekend niet de vele honderdduizenden slachtoffers van het NAVO-geweld, maar het westers militair-industrieel complex, én niet te vergeten de westerse commerciële massamedia en hun opiniemakers, die zo hun onmisbaarheid bij het mobiliseren van de massa konden aantonen. Maar nu de gewelddadige interventies in chaos zijn beland, verneemt men van hen niets meer over de westerse 'verantwoordelijkheid om te beschermen,' maar zijn ze op zoek naar nieuwe 'NAVO-avonturen.' Rusland en China staan op hun lijstje; het is voor hen slechts afwachten tot de macht het startsein geeft, ondertussen zijn ze al druk doende de 'vijand' te stigmatiseren en te dehumaniseren door hem onder andere te criminaliseren. Het is een oude en beproefde techniek waarvan Hofland en de zijnen alle fijne kneepjes kennen. In Fighting Against Western Imperialism (2014) beschrijft de onderzoeksjournalist en documentairemaker Andre Vltchek het als volgt:
As many nations, including those in Europe and North America, increasingly succumb to indoctrination and intellectual homogeneity, courage is vanishing. It is demonstrated very infrequently, and it clearly fails to inspire the majority…
While people used to be influenced and inspired by great thinkers, novelists and filmmakers, they are now being shaped by 160-character messages of social media, and by all those opinion-formers who try to make them shallow, unemotional, compliant and cowardly…
'I rebel, therefore I exist!' wrote Albert Camus, proudly. It appeared to be one of the main mottos of that era.
Then, suddenly, rebellion ended,' it was 'contained.'
But the wars continued. Imperialism and colonialism regrouped. Media outlets were purchased, bought. Capitalism won, once again, despite all dialectic logic against such a victory. Progress was stopped, even reversed. Corporatism produced Thatcherism and Reaganism, and the world got its shackles and muzzles back. Then, the gangrenous 'War on Terror' was launched and fear began creeping back, even from where it had been expelled several decades earlier…
We are forced; we are being conditioned to believe in capitalism, in a Western style of 'multi-party democracy,' in the superiority of Western concepts.
But it is clear — more thoughts are there, more alternatives, options, more checks and balances, the safer our planet becomes. Needless to say, tin is brave to fight for its safety.
Die moed kan de conformistische 'vrije pers' in Nederland niet opbrengen. Hofland en zijn elitair gezelschap vormen kleine, onmisbaar schakeltjes in het bolwerk rondom de economische macht, speciaal aangesteld om haar belangen te beschermen. Het logische resultaat van deze ontwikkeling is dat
[i]n the 1980s the United States became a different country. Social inequality which had narrowed for decades began to widen. The American Dream became a memory. From a progressive country, or at least a country with major and growing progressive forces, the United States became a right-wing country -- in an economic sense with policies that privilege corporations, and in a political and cultural sense with an authoritarian turn,
aldus de van origine Nederlandse cultureel antropoloog Jan Nederveen Pieterse, hoogleraar Global Studies and Sociology at the University of California, in Is There Hope For Uncle Sam? Beyond the American Bubble (2008), waarin hij op een scherpzinnige manier ingaat op de vraag:
What accounts for this profound shift in American politics and culture?
In het derde hoofdstuk, getiteld 'Dixie Politics,' plaatst professor Nederveen Pieterse de radicale verandering in het Westen in een bredere context dan de simplistische voorstelling van zaken die opiniemaker Hofland geeft. In nagenoeg al diens betogen in De Groene Amsterdammer verdwijnt de ware macht in de wereld achter een mist van woorden, eufemismen, leugens en het veelvuldig gebruik van het persoonlijk voornaamwoord 'we,' alsof 'we' de koers van de samenleving daadwerkelijk bepalen, en alsof 'we' spontaan telkens weer een nieuwe oorlog eisen. Hofland gaat niet in op de fundamentele vraag: hoe is 'de diepgaande omslag' in de westerse 'politiek en cultuur' te verklaren? Bij hem en zijn mainstream-collega's is het net alsof de ontwikkelingen telkens weer spontaan tot stand komen, als een onwrikbare natuurwet, en niet het resultaat zijn van de machtsverhoudingen in de zogeheten 'democratische' landen, onder leiding van Washington en Wall Street. Daarentegen schrijft Jan Nederveen Pieters het volgende:
Zowel politiek rechts als links in het Westen was opvallend snel van oordeel dat 'er geen alternatief is' voor het neoliberalisme, een opvatting die de voormalige vakbondsleider Wim Kok als PVDA-voorman een decennium na Thatcher's uitspraak letterlijk herhaalde, om daar zelfs aan toe te voegen: 'en dus heeft het geen enkele zin daar naar te streven.' De ideologisch succesvol gehersenspoelde westerse politici en journalisten werden in hun geloof nog eens gesterkt door academici als de Amerikaanse politieke wetenschapper Francis Fukuyama die er rotsvast van overtuigd was dat 'The End of History' was aangebroken, de titel van zijn in 1992 verschenen bestseller, waarin hij zonder enige terughoudendheid beweerde 'that liberal democracy had triumphed over communism and that the historic struggle between political systems was over.' Het probleem met Fukuyama en zijn aanhang is dat zij niet beseffen dat een uniform systeem het kenmerk bij uitstek is van totalitarisme. Of zoals dit in de speelfilm Network uit 1976 als volgt werd uitgewerkt:
You have meddled with the primary forces of nature, Mr Beale, and I won't have it! Is that clear?
You think you merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tide and gravity. It is ecological balance.
You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no Third Worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems. One vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-varied, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rands, rubles, pounds and shekels.
It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic, and sub-atomic and galactic structure of things today.
And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature. And you will atone.
Am I getting through to you, Mr Beale?
You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.
What do you think the Russians talk about in their Councils of State? Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, mini-max solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bye-laws of of business. The world is a business, Mr Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime.
And our children will live, Mr Beale, to see that... perfect... world in which there is no war nor famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company for whom all men will work to serve a common profit. In which all men will hold a share of stock.
All necessities provided. All anxieties tranquilized. All boredom amused.
Forget the politicians, they're irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea you have freedom of choice - you don't! You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own, and control the corporations. They've long since bought, and payed for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets, and they own all the big media, so they control just about all the information you get. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying - lobbying, to get what they want.
Well we know what they want. They want more for themselves, and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don't want — they don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that — that doesn't help them. That's against their interests. That's right! They don't want people that are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table, and think about how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don't want that. You know what they want? Obedient workers — obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines, and do paper work. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and vanishing pension that disappear the minute you go to collect it, and now they're coming for your social security money. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They'll get it - they'll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You, and I are not in The Big Club.
By the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think, and what to buy.
The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good honest hard working people: white collar, blue collar it doesn't matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard working people continue (these are people of modest being) — continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don't give a fuck about you. They don't give a fuck about you — they don't give a fuck about you. They don't care about you at all — at all — at all, and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care.
That's what the owners counted on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white, and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth. It's called the American Dream, cause you have to be asleep to believe it, but say what you want about Americans folks.
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| April 28, 2015 Tomgram: Andrew Cockburn, How Assassination Sold Drugs and Promoted Terrorism No one can claim that plotting assassination is new to Washington or that, in the past, American leaders and the CIA didn’t aim high: the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo. The difference was that, in those days, the idea of assassinating a foreign leader, or anyone abroad, had a certain element of the taboo attached to it. Whatever they knew, presidents preferred not to be officially involved. The phrase of the era was “plausible deniability.” Top officials, including presidents, might approveassassination plots, but they didn’t brag about them. Even in the CIA, there was a certain reticence about embracing the act. As Tim Weiner writes in his classic history of the Agency, Legacy of Ashes, “On December 11, 1959, having reached [the conclusion that his movement was communist], Richard Bissell sent Allen Dulles a memo suggesting that ‘thorough consideration be given to the elimination of Fidel Castro.’” Bissell was the Agency’s deputy director of plans and Dulles its director. Although it was an internal memo and “elimination” was already a euphemism, writes Weiner, “Dulles penciled in a crucial correction to the proposal. He struck out elimination, a word tinged with more than a hint of murder. He substituted removal from Cuba -- and gave the go-ahead.” And yes, “removal from Cuba” turned out to mean an almost endless string of convoluted, failed plots to murder Castro -- via the Mafia, poison, even exploding cigars or sea shells. It was, in the end, a performance worthy not of James Bond, but of the Three Stooges. Jump four decades into a new century and assassination has come out of the closet. It’s something presidents are proud of. Barack Obama’s aides considered the news that the White House had a “kill list” a point of pride well worth leaking to the press. Think of it as plausible undeniability in twenty-first-century Washington. Key figures in the U.S. government now openly, publicly, discuss what the exact limits (and legal authority) might be for the assassination of American citizens and others abroad, and these arguments, even when they take place inside a government known for its fetishistic love of secrecy, soon becomefront-page news and no one even flinches. If you need a reason for all this, blame it at least in part on the sexiness of technology. The drone (or its equivalent) first arrived in American multiplexes as a baleful shadow of a horrific future, but when it finally made it into the light of day in our actual world, it turned out to have the glow and glamour of a new Apple product. Think: an iPhone armed with Hellfire missiles. Assassination was no longer a shameful act for the shadows, something from which presidents had to cringe. It was cool. And campaigns to assassinate-by-drone on a large scale, while covert, were not, in the old-fashioned sense, secret, not when the drone was a sentinel keeping Americans safe on a terror planet. While quite capable of knocking off enemy figures -- only recently, for instance, such a drone took out a key religious leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula -- the killer drone turned out not to work at all as promised when it came to staunching terrorism or terror organizations. In addition, thanks to the recent killing of two hostages, an American and an Italian, in an al-Qaeda compound in Pakistan, its unremitting "collateral damage" from so-called signature strikes, previously largely ignored here, has suddenly made the news in a big way. In these years, the drone has, in fact, proven a terror promoter. A new book, Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins, by Andrew Cockburn, the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine, lays out the rise of our latest technology of death in a way no one else has and in the process makes that point stunningly. Kill Chain is, to my mind, an instant classic if you want to understand the new American century (such as it is). Today, in an original essay based on his book, Cockburn takes us back to the drug wars of the 1990s, opening a window on just why the drone is the modern age's blowback weapon, par excellence. Tom The Kingpin Strategy |
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