Hoewel je situaties nooit een-op-een op elkaar kunt leggen, is de analyse van de Nederlandse militaire geschiedenis van grote waarde voor het heden. Er kunnen allerlei bruikbare lessen uit worden getrokken. Daarom ben ik blij met dit onderzoek. Met dit boek.
Zo sprak de Commandant der Strijdkrachten, generaal Tom Middendorp, nadat hij op 29 juni 2015 'het eerste exemplaar' had ontvangen van de 499 pagina's tellende studie Oorlogen Overzee. Militair optreden door compagnie en staat buiten Europa 1595-1814, met als wetenschappelijke conclusie ondermeer dat het 'begin van de Nederlandse expansie overzee zowel een commercieel als een militair karakter [kende].' Ook uit dit historisch werk wordt de continuïteit duidelijk van de ware drijfveren achter het eeuwenoude westerse geweld, waarbij de staat en de financiële/economische elite elkaar ondersteunen. In dit opzicht geldt daadwerkelijk voor het kapitalisme: 'Geen Jorwert zonder Brussel,' het bureaucratisch bolwerk waar niet voor niets het hoofdkwartier van de EU en van de NAVO zijn gevestigd. Generaal Middendorp heeft volkomen gelijk: 'de analyse van de Nederlandse militaire geschiedenis [is] van grote waarde voor het heden,' en daarom 'kunnen er allerlei bruikbare lessen uit worden getrokken,' met betrekking tot de wijze waarop de geglobaliseerde neoliberale kapitalistische belangen het best kunnen worden behartigd, dat wil zeggen: met zoveel mogelijk dreiging met agressie en als dat niet helpt met maximaal militair geweld. Vandaar dat de generaal 'blij' is 'met dit onderzoek. Met dit boek.' Een beter draaiboek voor toekomstig NAVO-geweld om de belangen van de Europese en Amerikaanse elite te beschermen is nauwelijks denkbaar. De Staat en de Beurs bepalen meer dan ooit in onderling overleg welke koers er gevaren moet worden. Navigare Necesse Est. Varen Omdat Het Noodzakelijk Is, kan worden gezien als de belangrijkste Nederlandse lijfspreuk.
Nederland had zich uit noodzaak ontwikkeld tot een zeevarende natie. Enerzijds om noodzakelijke grondstoffen als graan, wol, hout, metalen, zout te importeren; anderzijds om zuivel, vis en textiel te exporteren naar landen waar zeevaart gebruikt werd als middel om de ontwikkelde stapelplaats-functie gericht op handel en winstbejag te handhaven. Dit laatste met de geweldige stimulans, eind 16e - begin 17e eeuw, van emigranten uit zuidelijker streken, die hun handelservaringen en relaties uit de gehele toen bekende wereld meebrachten.
Winst en rijkdom
De noodzaak van de vaart ter zee verandert in een noodzaak om aan de zucht naar winst en rijkdom te voldoen…
aldus de website van de Vereniging Oud Leerlingen van de Hogere Zeevaartschool Amsterdam.
http://www.volhzsa.nl/Ver_Oudleerlingen/KW_artikelen/Artikelen/2006/6/6_NAVIGARE_NECESSE_EST_._._..html
Jawel, uit deze geschiedenis 'kunnen allerlei bruikbare lessen worden getrokken,' zeker door de hoogste militair van de Nederlandse Strijdkrachten die geen kans ongebruikt laat om er met klem op te wijzen dat
Of we het nu leuk vinden of niet, in veiligheid en vrijheid moeten we blijven investeren. Of zoals Geert Mak in de uitzending ‘Eén op Eén’ concludeerde:
'Vrijheid komt niet vanzelf. Voor vrijheid moet je knokken. Moet je concessies doen. Moet je ruzie over maken. Rode koppen krijgen en uiteindelijk weer naar de stembussen sjokken. Dat is allemaal vrijheid. Vrijheid moet je verrekt alert op zijn, want anders glipt het zo door je vingers.'
En zo sluiten de rijen zich weer hermetisch, de generaal citeert een voormalige pacifist van de collaborerende 'politiek-literaire elite,' wiens narcisme en geldlust zijn belangrijkste drijfveren vormen, terwijl de al even intellectueel gecorrumpeerde premier net als zijn voorganger de 'sfeer van de Gouden Eeuw terug' wil, en zijn kabinet ervoor zorgt dat zwendelende bankiers, gefinancierd met gemeenschapsgeld, kunnen blijven speculeren met lucht. Op hetzelfde moment zien de autoriteiten erop toe dat de nieuwe oftewel de oude vijand zoveel mogelijk gedemoniseerd wordt, zodat de angstmakerij de aandacht kan afleiden van de werkelijke bedreigingen en de eigen corruptie. Om deze neoliberale politiek zo vlekkeloos mogelijk te verwezenlijken riep generaal Middendorp op 8 april 2014 in Trouw op: 'Investeer in Defensie want vrijheid is niet gratis,' omdat volgens de generaal
[d]e explosieve situatie in Oekraïne duidelijk [maakt] dat aan de tijd van bezuinigen op Defensie een einde gaat komen. Dat stelt generaal Tom Middendorp, de hoogste militair in Nederland in een interview met Trouw…
Voor een procent van ons bruto binnenlands product (bbp) hebben we een verzekeringspolis, een goedkope polis waarvoor we NAVO-dekking in huis halen,
en niet te vergeten: de hegemonie van de VS wordt veilig gesteld, een feit dat door Middendorp angstvallig wordt verzwegen. Hij zou anders serieus moeten ingaan op de vraag welk belang Europa heeft bij een conflict met de Russische Federatie, zeker als dat uitloopt op geweld. De politiek van Washington en Wall Street is gericht op het creëren van wat de invloedrijke neoconservatieve denktank Project for the New American Century al in september 2000 een 'global Pax America' noemde. In het beleidsstuk 'Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century' wordt een 'blueprint' gegeven
for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests,
waarbij tevens de zorg wordt uitgesproken dat Europa zou kunnen rivaliseren met de Verenigde Staten. De 'American grand strategy' moet daarom 'as far into the future as possible,' worden gecontinueerd. De 'core mission' van de VS is 'fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars.' Het invloedrijke rapport beschrijft de Amerikaanse strijdkrachten als 'the cavalry on the new American frontier.' Het 'blauwdruk' van PNAC ondersteunt een eerder beleidsrapport, geschreven door ondermeer de vooraanstaande neoconservatief Paul Wolfowitz, oud-staatssecretaris van Defensie en oud-president van de Wereldbank, waarin gesteld wordt dat de VS 'must…discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.' In het kader daarvan is, volgens de goed geïnformeerde Henry Kissinger 'Breaking Russia has become an objective [for US officials].' Welk voordeel Europa heeft bij totale chaos aan zijn Oostgrens is een raadsel. Om de Amerikaanse hegemonie veilig te stellen benadrukt het PNAC dat de op gang gebrachte 'Revolution in Military Affairs' optimaal moet worden gebruikt. Daarnaast wordt gepleit voor een 'regime change' in China, met als gevolg dat 'it is time to increase the presence of American forces in southeast Asia.' Op die manier zou de Amerikaanse elite China als opkomende wereldmacht eronder kunnen houden, en 'American and allied power providing the spur to the process of democratization in China.' Om een politiek van 'democratisering' en 'vredesmissies' mogelijk te maken, vereist 'American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations,' aldus de invloedrijke Amerikaanse neoconservatieven die erin zijn geslaagd ook op de buitenlandse politiek van de regering Obama hun stempel te drukken.
De New York Times van 14 februari 2012:
One thing Barack Obama and Mitt Romney seem to have in common these days is an appreciation for the neoconservative historian Robert Kagan.
One thing Barack Obama and Mitt Romney seem to have in common these days is an appreciation for the neoconservative historian Robert Kagan.
THE WORLD AMERICA MADE
By Robert Kagan
149 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $21.
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.'
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…
De door Obama bewonderde neoconservatief Robert Kagan, één van de grote voorstanders van de illegale en desastreuze Amerikaanse inval in Irak. Hieronder zijn echtgenote Victoria 'Fuck the European Union' Nuland, door Obama benoemd tot staatssecretaris voor Europa en Eurazië, die persoonlijk intervenieerde in Oekraïne en zo een uitzichtloze chaos creëerde.
Ondanks het feit dat de neoconservatieve Robert Kagan incoherente opvattingen erop nahoudt, en desastreuze overtuigingen koestert met betrekking tot de Amerikaanse geopolitiek is president Obama een groot bewonderaar van zijn gedachtenwereld en heeft hij de echtgenote van deze ideoloog, Victoria Nuland, staatssecretaris van Buitenlandse Zaken gemaakt die Europa en Eurazië in haar pakket heeft. Gezien het milieu waaruit zij voortkomt, zal het niemand verbazen dat Victoria Kagan Nuland tijdens haar bemoeienis met de chaos in de Oekraïne internationaal naam maakte vanwege de opmerking 'Fuck the European Union.' Volgens de New York Times-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 de schrijfstijl van haar echtgenoot, Robert Kagan, 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 minachtende toon 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.
De 'neerbuigende' houding beperkt 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 een einde aan de geschiedenis had gemaakt en dat 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 echte oorlog (Korea was gelijkspel, Vietnam, Afghanistan en Irak verloor de VS wanneer men uitgaat van de oorspronkelijke Amerikaanse doeleinden) blijft de macht in Washington en op Wall Street 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.
Voorafgaand aan de herverkiezing van president Obama in 2012 beweerde in strijd met de eenvoudig te controleren werkelijkheid opiniemaker Geert Mak, die inmiddels door de mainstream-media ook nog als 'Amerika-deskundige' wordt gezien, via de EO Radio dat
het beter [is] voor Nederland en de internationale gemeenschap dat Obama de verkiezingen wint.
In zijn hetzelfde jaar verschenen bestseller Reizen zonder John. Op zoek naar Amerika sprak Mak tevens lovend over de 'Amerikaanse diplomaten' die in zijn ogen 'tot de beste ter wereld [behoren],' en dat
het land beschikt over voortreffelijke informatiesystemen, het leger geen grenzen [kent], de universiteiten en het State Department over briljante strategen en politieke analisten [beschikken].
Als klap op de vuurpijl beweerde mijn oude vriend dat het 'Amerikaanse presidenten' zijn geweest
die de aanzet gaven tot een hele reeks internationale instituten die, ondanks alle problemen, een begin van orde brachten in de mondiale politiek en economie,
met als gevolg dat de VS 'decennialang als ordebewaker en politieagent' van de wereld kon fungeren. Dat de vele miljoenen slachtoffers van de Amerikaanse buitenlandse politiek, van Vietnam tot Irak en overal elders waar de VS intervenieerde, daar niets van gemerkt hebben, is voor domineeszoon Geert Mak een te verwaarlozen detail in zijn narcistisch streven naar aanzien en zoveel mogelijk geld. Mak is vol lof over 'het vitale karakter van de Amerikaanse democratie,' en niet te vergeten over 'The Imperial Messenger,' New York Times-columnist Thomas Friedman, die Geert Mak 'altijd wel leuk om te lezen' vindt, 'lekker upbeat, hij is zo’n man die altijd wel een gat ziet om een probleem op te lossen.' Beslist geen 'doemdenker' als de door Mak zo verachte Nobelprijswinnaar Literatuur John Steinbeck, die Amerikaanse 'amfetamine' gebruikende 'oudere man die zichzelf overschreeuwde, die zijn leeftijd niet kon accepteren,' en die 'zijn jeugd niet kon loslaten.' De oorzaak van de psychologische diskwalificatie is dat Steinbeck al in een vroegtijdig stadium had ontdekt dat in zijn land, waarvoor het orakel van Bartlehiem, volgens eigen zeggen, 'altijd al' een 'geheime liefde' koesterde, een 'creeping, all pervading, nerve-gas of immorality' hing 'which starts in the nursery and does not stop before it reaches the highest offices, both corporate and governmental.' In een uit 1959 daterende brief aan zijn vriend, de Democratische presidentskandidaat Adlai Stevenson, schreef Steinbeck over de 'nervous restlessness,' in de VS
a hunger, a thirst, a yearning for something unknown – perhaps morality. Then there's the violence, cruelty and hypocrisy symptomatic of a people which has too much, and last, the surly ill-temper which only shows up in human when they are frightened…
Mainly, Adlai, I am troubled by the cynical immorality of my country. I do not think it can survive on this basis and unless some kind of catastrophe strikes us, we are lost. But by our very attitudes we are drawing catastrophe to ourselves. What we have beaten in nature, we cannot conquer in ourselves.
Someone has to reinspect our system and that soon. We can't expect to raise our children to be good and honorable men when the city, the state, the government, the corporations all offer higher rewards for chicanery and deceit than probity and truth. On all levels it is rigged, Adlai.
In tegenstelling tot de auteur John Steinbeck die met zijn hond Charley de VS doorkruiste, reisde de journalist Geert Mak met zijn vrouw Mietsie. Het heeft niet mogen baten, Mak's reisverslag is een aanfluiting.
Er machten aan de gang [zijn] boven Europa, ik zeg echt bóven Europa, het klassieke woord grootkapitaal doet hier zijn intrede. Ik heb er nooit zo in geloofd, maar nu wel, die ons totaal ontglipt en waar je niks tegen kunt doen! En dat vind ik buitengewoon beklemmend.
Deze opvallende tegenstrijdigheden onderstrepen nog eens hoe ver een poseur het in Nederland kan schoppen. Bij gebrek aan een maatschappelijk betrokken intelligentsia blijven Mak's gevaarlijke beweringen onweersproken, waardoor zijn schaamteloosheid tot grote hoogte is gestegen. Vandaar dat Mak zonder enige weerwoord kan beweren dat hij een fan van Thomas Friedman is, die in de New York Times van 28 maart 1999 in A Manifesto for the Fast World het volgende vaststelde:
The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.
Enerzijds beweert Mak dat het 'grootkapitaal… ons totaal ontglipt' en 'dat vind ik buitengewoon beklemmend,' anderzijds verklaart hij Thomas Friedman 'lekker upbeat,' te vinden, aangezien 'hij zo’n man [is] die altijd wel een gat ziet om een probleem op te lossen,' en die het daarom doodnormaal vindt dat het neoliberale kapitalisme met geweld wordt verspreid. Welk belang Mak's Europa van 'Geen Jorwert zonder Brussel' heeft bij de agressieve en genadeloze politiek van Washington en Wall Street, wordt niet door de bestseller-auteur uit de doeken gedaan. En toch zal 'in 2020 zeker 60 procent van' de Amerikaanse 'vloot in de Zuidoost-Aziatische wateren gestationeerd' zijn, met het oog op een gewelddadig conflict met de opkomende wereldmacht China. Maar dat vindt Mak een onvermijdbaar probleem, gezien de opvatting dat 'The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.' Een dergelijke opiniemaker zou door kritische Angelsaksische intellectuelen onmiddellijk terzijde worden geschoven als een chaotische dwaas. In het eerste essay van zijn bundel Citizenship Papers (2014) citeert de Amerikaanse auteur Wendell Berry uit de 'National Security Strategy' van september 2002, waarin het Witte Huis het volgende verklaarde:
While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists…
Berry reageert als volgt op de politieke uitgangspunten van de Amerikaanse elite:
A democratic citizen, properly uneasy, must deal here first of all with the question, Who is this 'we'? It is not the 'we' of the Declaration of Independence, which referred to a small group of signatories bound by the conviction that 'governments [derive] their just powers from the consent of the governed.' And it is not the 'we' of the Constitution, which refers to 'the people' of the United States.'
Because of what is implied by the commitment to act alone and preemptively, this 'we' of the new strategy can refer only to the president. It is a royal 'we.' A head of state, preparing to act alone in starting a preemptive war, will need to justify his intention by secret information, and will need to plan in secret and execute his plan without forewarning. A preemptive attack widely known and discussed, as in a democratic policy, would risk being preempted by a preemptive attack by the other side. The idea of a government acting alone in preemptive war is inherently undemocratic, for it does not require or even permit the president to obtain the consent of the governed. As a policy, this new strategy depends on the acquiescence of a public kept fearful and ignorant, subject to manipulation by the executive power, and on the compliance of an intimidated and office-dependent legislature. Even within the narrow logic of warfare, there is a substantial difference between a defensive action, for which the reason would be publicly known, and a preemptive or aggressive action, for which the reason would be known only by a few at the center of power…. By this new doctrine, the president alone may start a war against any nation at any time, and with no more forewarning than preceded the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Meer over de 'creeping, all pervading, nerve-gas of immorality' van Mak en de Makkianen in de polder de volgende keer.
The Rise Of The Inhumanes
By Paul Craig Roberts September 02, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - America’s descent into totalitarian violence is accelerating. Like the Bush regime, the Obama regime has a penchant for rewarding Justice (sic) Department officials who trample all over the US Constitution. Last year America’s First Black President nominated David Barron to be a judge on the First US Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston. Barron is responsible for the Justice (sic) Department memo that gave the legal OK for Obama to murder a US citizen with a missile fired from a drone. The execution took place without charges presented to a court, trial, and conviction. The target was a religious man whose sermons were believed by the paranoid Obama regime to encourage jihadism. Apparently, it never occurred to Obama or the Justice (sic) Department that Washington’s mass murder and displacement of millions of Muslims in seven countries was all that was needed to encourage jihadism. Sermons would be redundant and would comprise little else but moral outrage after years of mass murder by Washington in pursuit of hegemony in the Middle East. Barron’s confirmation ran into opposition from some Republicans, some Democrats, and the American Civil Liberties Union, but the US Senate confirmed Barron by a vote of 53-45 in May 2014. Just think, you could be judged in “freedom and democracy America” by a fiend who legalized extra-judicial murder. While awaiting his reward, Barron had a post on the faculty of the Harvard Law School, which tells you all you need to know about law schools. His wife ran for governor of Massachusetts. Elites are busy at work replacing law with power. America now has as an appeals court judge, no doubt being groomed for the Supreme Court, who established the precedent in US law that, the Constitution not withstanding, American citizens can be executed without a trial. Did law school faculties object? Not Georgetown law professor David Cole, who enthusiastically endorsed the new legal principle of execution without trial. Professor Cole put himself on the DOJ’s list of possible federal judicial appointees by declaring his support for Barron, whom he described as “thoughtful, considerate, open-minded, and brilliant.” Once a country descends into evil, it doesn’t emerge. The precedent for Obama’s appointment of Barron was George W. Bush’s appointment of Jay Scott Bybee to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Bybee was John Yoo’s Justice (sic) Department colleague who co-authored the “legal” memos justifying torture despite US federal statutory law and international law prohibiting torture. Everyone knew that torture was illegal, including those practicing it, but these two fiends provided a legal pass for the practitioners of torture. Not even Pinochet in Chile went this far. Bybee and Yoo got rid of torture by calling it “enhanced interrogation techniques.” As Wikipedia reports, these techniques are considered to be torture by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, medical experts who treat torture victims, intelligence officials, America’s allies, and even by the Justice (sic) Department. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bybee Others who objected to the pass given to torture by Bybee and Yoo were Secretary of State Colin Powell, US Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora, and even Philip Zelikow, who orchestrated the 9/11 Commission coverup for the Bush regime. After five years of foot-dragging, the Justice (sic) Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that Bybee and his deputy John Yoo committed “professional misconduct” by providing legal advice that was in violation of international and federal laws. The DOJ’s office of Professional Responsibility recommended that Bybee and Yoo be referred to the bar associations of the states where they were licensed for further disciplinary action and possible disbarment. But Bybee and Yoo were saved by a regime-compliant Justice (sic) Department official, David Margolis, who concluded that Bybee and Yoo had used “poor judgement” but had not provided wrong legal advice. So, today, instead of being disbarred, Bybee sits on a federal court just below the Supreme Court. John Yoo teaches constitutional law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, Boalt Hall. Try to imagine what has happened to America when Harvard and Berkeley law professors create legal justifications for torture and extra-judicial murder, and when US presidents engage in these heinous crimes. Clearly America is exceptional in its immorality, lack of human compassion, and disrespect for law and its founding document. Hitler and Stalin would be astonished at the ease with which totalitarianism has marched through American institutions. Now we have a West Point professor of law teaching the US military justifications for murdering American critics of war and the police state. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/29/west-point-professor-target-legal-critics-war-on-terror Also here: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42758.htm The professor’s article is here: http://warisacrime.org/sites/afterdowningstreet.org/files/westpointfascism.pdf William C. Bradford, the professor teaching our future military officers to regard moral Americans as threats to national security, blames Walter Cronkite for loosing the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War by reporting the offensive as an American defeat. Tet was an American defeat in the sense that the offensive proved that the “defeated” enemy was capable of a massive offensive against US forces. The offensive succeeded in the sense that it demonstrated to Americans that the war was far from over. The implication of Bradford’s argument is that Cronkite should have been killed for his broadcasts that added to the doubts about American success. The professor claims to have a list of 40 people who tell the truth who must be exterminated, or our country is lost. Here we have the full confession that Washington’s agenda cannot survive truth. I am unaware of any report that the professor has been censored or fired for his disrespect for the constitutionally protected right of freedom of expression. However, I have seen reports of professors destroyed because they criticized Israel’s war crimes, or used a word or term prohibited by political correctness, or were insufficiently appreciative of the privileges of “preferred minorities.” What this tells us is that morality is sidetracked into self-serving agendas while evil overwhelms the morality of society. Welcome to America today. It is a land in which facts have been redefined as enemy propaganda, a land in which legally protected whistleblowers are redefined as “fifth columns” or foreign agents subject to extermination, a land in which America is immune from criticism and all crimes are blamed on those whom Washington intends to rule. Barron, Bybee, Yoo, and Bradford are members of a new species—the Inhumanes—that has risen from the poisonous American environment of arrogance, hubris, and paranoia. Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42778.htm |
The Howling Wilderness of the Mind
The Bizarre Suicide of the American Empire
By Adam
By Adam
September 01, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - "ExtraSensory.News" - I grew up in a tiny town of less than 1500 people in western Montana. It is a land of breathtaking natural beauty, and for 18 years I lived in the same house in a form of bucolic perfection. We prided ourselves on living 100 miles from the nearest stoplight. I smile to imagine that many young villagers from all over the planet share a form of kinship enforced by the laws of small communities and big mountains.
It was my home and they were my people, but after traveling, education and 13 years of living elsewhere, I can see what a strange accident of history small town America actually is, a residue left by a frontier that has moved on and twisted inward. This is a report from a correspondent embedded for 18 years and a hundred miles behind the front lines of the American frontier.
I was enabled to see it clearly by the fact that almost half of the buildings on the one main street are the originals from when the town was slapped together in the 1890s. One century later the layout and social structure were unchanged. I remember vividly the moment it struck: my parents and I were crossing the main street to dine at a Chinese restaurant. (Of course!) A glance to the right revealed where the street lamps petered out, a look over the left shoulder saw the other end of town. The mountains brooded over us, dark except for the scattered isolated houses here and there like embers from a dying fire. I stopped in the middle of the empty road and gasped: “This is still a frontier town!” That epiphany shattered the insular perfection of my home, and I have been struggling with it ever since.
It is painful to see the frontier scrawled across the personalities and culture of individuals and a town I love dearly, but now that I am an outsider it is obvious. Their little fenced estates in the woods are their half of the quid pro quo their ancestors fulfilled: tame the wilderness and your private claims will be protected. Their desires are clear and simple: they want taxes to be low, infrastructure to be mediocre (certainly not good enough to help the poorest) and fuel to be cheap. They love their trucks and jet skis and four-wheelers and cars and dirt bikes and speedboats and snowmobiles and motorcycles and SUVs and brush cutters and chainsaws and log splitters and lawn mowers and backhoes and shotguns and semitrailers and rifles and pistols and guns. They hate the government and complain that it doesn’t do enough for them.
They are profoundly ignorant of the vast human diversity and history around them and serenely contemptuous of the few snippets of knowledge they have collected. Put 500 of them in a room together and there probably won’t be a single classic poem or plotline of a work of world literature memorized between them, and if there is it will be in the head of a lone weirdo. There are only about three dates anybody appears to be aware of: 1492, 1776, 1945, and, by the time I was a senior in high school, 9/11, 2001. Most of them at some point complete the pilgrimage to the great holy city in the south, the place in the desert that god itself has touched, made sacred, made itself physically manifest in the world. They return from Las Vegas renewed, uplifted, their faith in financial manipulation restored, and full of hope that if they are pure enough, the god Mammon just might bless their own lives, someday.
So even though they are poor, in debt, and only able to move in a tiny world, mentally they are all little aristocrats. Therein lays the genius and opportunity of a frontier. If in the early 1800s you were a plantation owner in Virginia or a financial tycoon in New York, how do you simultaneously gain access to all those resources west of Appalachia, reduce pressure for social reform and of course not do any of the work yourself? The social architecture of the frontier answers all three questions elegantly, but it concomitantly makes a hollow society, a government without a nation underneath.
I took my epiphany and outsider status with me when I attended university on the outskirts of Tacoma, Washington. There was no physical relic of the frontier to observe, but after wandering around the local suburbs at night and especially after visiting the homelands of ancient nations in Peru and Guatemala on study-abroad trips it gradually dawned on me that the frontier was everywhere in the United States. Its peculiar dynamics have been so deeply ingrained that they define Americans better than any other interpretive framework, long after the physical circumstances of the frontier have ceased to exist.
What took me years to see in the suburbs of Tacoma is that the frontier has been turned on its side. Not inverted; an inverted frontier would resemble Brazilian farmers retreating hundreds of kilometers back from the edge of the Amazon rainforest and coming together to build beautiful sustainable cities. No, what I see is an internalization of that terrible frontier interface.
Fast food makes the most vivid case: how does one create money from otherwise worthless agricultural products, reduce social pressure for reform by fattening and stupefying the commoners, and of course not do any of the work oneself? Economically fast food joints are not restaurants at all—they are commodity dumps. They are a means to inflate massive profits out of otherwise inaccessible resources. If the dreck they served in place of food were sustainably farmed, if the workers were paid living wages and if the American people would defend their health, fast food chains would vanish. The exact same dynamic applies to the suburbs: overpriced cardboard boxes filled with cheesy appliances that would not be worth constructing if the Earth were taken into account. Whatever field of endeavor you care to examine, be it medicine or education, science or art, the frontier interface prevents it from serving human needs and demands that it serve one purpose only: that of converting resources into profits.
The American people are not building society. They are still doing the work of conversion for those same financial interests that opened the frontier in the first place. The same impulse that carried their ancestors across the Atlantic and maintained them through the crushing labor of deforestation and sod busting is now directed into mowing lawns, cleaning gutters, washing the car and, of course, shopping. Stand on any busy street and watch the frontier at work. Single out the delivery truck drivers, the look on their faces. They will hunt down and liquidate (financialize) every last pocket of natural resources left on the planet if they can.
I believe the lens of the frontier clarifies the otherwise bizarre suicide of the American empire. We must remember that settling the American west was swift and easy. Technological superiority, diseases and overwhelming numbers allowed civilians to do most of the ethnic cleansing while there was an actual boundary between the natives and European colonists.
The United States never had to demand sacrifices of its citizens or seriously negotiate with the natives. After all the territory in North America was settled, a series of historical accidents bumped the U.S. into a brief period of hegemony. Industrialization exploded just as the frontier ended. The same settlers who walked from St. Louis to Oregon Territory took trains back east a few decades later. Then the old imperial powers of Eurasia destroyed themselves in two world wars and voilà, the U.S. found itself the one intact industrial power! This is not the stuff of long-lasting empires. The upper classes have never stared defeat in the eye or had to restrain themselves and ask the common people for massive collective effort.
This explains why the government cannot repair national infrastructure or implement sound industrial policy. The internalized frontier is why the military cannot administer conquered territory and the ethnic minorities in the homeland cannot receive equal treatment under the law. The regime in Washington D.C. is not there to create a vast polyglot imperial structure (like the Achaemenid empire) nor to represent the collective will of a single nation (like Switzerland, or many others.) It exists to divvy up resources and then defend those aristocratic interests at all costs. It was set up in that form from the very beginning.
This explains why September 11 was used as another date that granted legitimacy to aristocratic claims, right in line with 1776 and 1945. Instead of leading a worldwide effort to bring criminals to justice and rooting out actual causes, the regime set about trying to create new frontier zones in places like Iraq and many others, hunting grounds for certain corporations and government agencies. Those efforts roused the ire of two of the oldest, most puissant imperial systems in the world, and were subsequently checked.
Nobody in D.C. seems to have read the memo that they are no longer allowed to set up frontiers for their cronies (or masters, depending on what side of the revolving door between corporations and government they are on.) They do not realize that China and Russia will never ever grant favorable terms to Western interests, and that the absurd commitment to “free markets” is actually a back door into the heart of what is left of the American economy.
Of course, such knowledge cannot exist inside such a regime, and anyway, it would make no difference. The U.S. government cannot ask the common people to make the kind of colossal sacrifice necessary to take on China and Russia at the same time. It cannot even shut down or control the mechanism of the frontier. It must keep talking about “free markets” because that is the main linguistic shield for aristocratic freedom of action from democratic controls. It certainly cannot tax the rich at progressive levels or shut down offshore havens.
So if its mercenary armies keep getting defeated overseas and efforts to control resources and markets in places like the Middle East keep getting thwarted, those same incompetent people still have to make ridiculous sums of money from nothing without doing the work, and the frontier takes another turn in upon itself. The government begins shedding excess population and militarizing civilian governance and privatizing the national patrimony and binding the poor with debt and austerity and meaninglessly spying on everything and on and on. After all, if they can’t run roughshod all over Central Asia and the Middle East, there’s no place like home!
There will be no coherent national uprising against this final suicide. There cannot be, because there is no American nation. Real nations have wrenching, defining events like the Dreyfus Affair, the Tupac Amaru rebellion, Tahrir Square, the taking of the Winter Palace, the storming of the Bastille, the trial of the Gang of Four, the Polish Deluge. The agony and ecstasy of being a nation, of being a people, evolving through time regardless of the specifics of where the capital city is or what dynasty sits on the throne has not yet happened to the mess of immigrants and descendants of immigrants in North America.
The process is beginning. Alaskan or Southern Californian or Cascadian or Texan are embryonic nationalities. If Washington D.C. actually tried to win the fight against Russia (let alone China) and keep its tottering financial empire intact, the effort itself would exacerbate the nascent breakup along those already visible lines. Why would an Alaskan fisherman obey a bureaucrat in D.C. when his livelihood depends on selling seafood to China? What possible situation or political figure could align the interests of a Texan and a Cascadian? The inevitable breakup of North American economic and political unity is clear to anyone with a sense of how and why nations evolve on this planet. It will be messy, lubricated by rivers of blood, and in most areas accompanied by a long dark age, but the rest of the world will breathe a sigh of relief.
For individuals like myself, born inside the frontier and soaked in its propaganda, the U.S. seems like A Very Important Thing. For minds still trapped, the breakup of the U.S. feels like The End Of The World, which is a way of simplifying events to the point of not thinking about them at all. I would like to end this report by exploring a perspective about the next few decades not often seen, which does not involve Nuclear War or Utter Collapse or The End of the US Dollar.
North America was almost inevitably going to be treated as a single huge frontier the moment any old world explorer, with all his weapons, diseases, domesticated animals and crops stepped ashore. Present-day old world nations and empires understand this and no longer envy or fear what amounts to a historical blip. They also observe that the deep social foundations necessary for a government to play with the big boys in the arena of culture are missing. But a vast, distant frontier is just as useful at converting worthless commodities into money for them as it has proven for our own aristocrats.
Keeping this in mind, I suspect that far from decisive military engagements or outright economic warfare, we might eventually observe China and Russia (among others) carefully managing the U.S. decline, expending small efforts to keep the regime in D.C. afloat as long as they keep getting a positive return on investment. After all, powerhouses like them will from time to time need to dump commodities like pork snouts or almost worthless forestry byproducts. As long as the frontier exists in the hearts and minds of Americans, they won’t lack for people willing to do the work of conversion for them.
Adam
It was my home and they were my people, but after traveling, education and 13 years of living elsewhere, I can see what a strange accident of history small town America actually is, a residue left by a frontier that has moved on and twisted inward. This is a report from a correspondent embedded for 18 years and a hundred miles behind the front lines of the American frontier.
I was enabled to see it clearly by the fact that almost half of the buildings on the one main street are the originals from when the town was slapped together in the 1890s. One century later the layout and social structure were unchanged. I remember vividly the moment it struck: my parents and I were crossing the main street to dine at a Chinese restaurant. (Of course!) A glance to the right revealed where the street lamps petered out, a look over the left shoulder saw the other end of town. The mountains brooded over us, dark except for the scattered isolated houses here and there like embers from a dying fire. I stopped in the middle of the empty road and gasped: “This is still a frontier town!” That epiphany shattered the insular perfection of my home, and I have been struggling with it ever since.
It is painful to see the frontier scrawled across the personalities and culture of individuals and a town I love dearly, but now that I am an outsider it is obvious. Their little fenced estates in the woods are their half of the quid pro quo their ancestors fulfilled: tame the wilderness and your private claims will be protected. Their desires are clear and simple: they want taxes to be low, infrastructure to be mediocre (certainly not good enough to help the poorest) and fuel to be cheap. They love their trucks and jet skis and four-wheelers and cars and dirt bikes and speedboats and snowmobiles and motorcycles and SUVs and brush cutters and chainsaws and log splitters and lawn mowers and backhoes and shotguns and semitrailers and rifles and pistols and guns. They hate the government and complain that it doesn’t do enough for them.
They are profoundly ignorant of the vast human diversity and history around them and serenely contemptuous of the few snippets of knowledge they have collected. Put 500 of them in a room together and there probably won’t be a single classic poem or plotline of a work of world literature memorized between them, and if there is it will be in the head of a lone weirdo. There are only about three dates anybody appears to be aware of: 1492, 1776, 1945, and, by the time I was a senior in high school, 9/11, 2001. Most of them at some point complete the pilgrimage to the great holy city in the south, the place in the desert that god itself has touched, made sacred, made itself physically manifest in the world. They return from Las Vegas renewed, uplifted, their faith in financial manipulation restored, and full of hope that if they are pure enough, the god Mammon just might bless their own lives, someday.
So even though they are poor, in debt, and only able to move in a tiny world, mentally they are all little aristocrats. Therein lays the genius and opportunity of a frontier. If in the early 1800s you were a plantation owner in Virginia or a financial tycoon in New York, how do you simultaneously gain access to all those resources west of Appalachia, reduce pressure for social reform and of course not do any of the work yourself? The social architecture of the frontier answers all three questions elegantly, but it concomitantly makes a hollow society, a government without a nation underneath.
I took my epiphany and outsider status with me when I attended university on the outskirts of Tacoma, Washington. There was no physical relic of the frontier to observe, but after wandering around the local suburbs at night and especially after visiting the homelands of ancient nations in Peru and Guatemala on study-abroad trips it gradually dawned on me that the frontier was everywhere in the United States. Its peculiar dynamics have been so deeply ingrained that they define Americans better than any other interpretive framework, long after the physical circumstances of the frontier have ceased to exist.
What took me years to see in the suburbs of Tacoma is that the frontier has been turned on its side. Not inverted; an inverted frontier would resemble Brazilian farmers retreating hundreds of kilometers back from the edge of the Amazon rainforest and coming together to build beautiful sustainable cities. No, what I see is an internalization of that terrible frontier interface.
Fast food makes the most vivid case: how does one create money from otherwise worthless agricultural products, reduce social pressure for reform by fattening and stupefying the commoners, and of course not do any of the work oneself? Economically fast food joints are not restaurants at all—they are commodity dumps. They are a means to inflate massive profits out of otherwise inaccessible resources. If the dreck they served in place of food were sustainably farmed, if the workers were paid living wages and if the American people would defend their health, fast food chains would vanish. The exact same dynamic applies to the suburbs: overpriced cardboard boxes filled with cheesy appliances that would not be worth constructing if the Earth were taken into account. Whatever field of endeavor you care to examine, be it medicine or education, science or art, the frontier interface prevents it from serving human needs and demands that it serve one purpose only: that of converting resources into profits.
The American people are not building society. They are still doing the work of conversion for those same financial interests that opened the frontier in the first place. The same impulse that carried their ancestors across the Atlantic and maintained them through the crushing labor of deforestation and sod busting is now directed into mowing lawns, cleaning gutters, washing the car and, of course, shopping. Stand on any busy street and watch the frontier at work. Single out the delivery truck drivers, the look on their faces. They will hunt down and liquidate (financialize) every last pocket of natural resources left on the planet if they can.
I believe the lens of the frontier clarifies the otherwise bizarre suicide of the American empire. We must remember that settling the American west was swift and easy. Technological superiority, diseases and overwhelming numbers allowed civilians to do most of the ethnic cleansing while there was an actual boundary between the natives and European colonists.
The United States never had to demand sacrifices of its citizens or seriously negotiate with the natives. After all the territory in North America was settled, a series of historical accidents bumped the U.S. into a brief period of hegemony. Industrialization exploded just as the frontier ended. The same settlers who walked from St. Louis to Oregon Territory took trains back east a few decades later. Then the old imperial powers of Eurasia destroyed themselves in two world wars and voilà, the U.S. found itself the one intact industrial power! This is not the stuff of long-lasting empires. The upper classes have never stared defeat in the eye or had to restrain themselves and ask the common people for massive collective effort.
This explains why the government cannot repair national infrastructure or implement sound industrial policy. The internalized frontier is why the military cannot administer conquered territory and the ethnic minorities in the homeland cannot receive equal treatment under the law. The regime in Washington D.C. is not there to create a vast polyglot imperial structure (like the Achaemenid empire) nor to represent the collective will of a single nation (like Switzerland, or many others.) It exists to divvy up resources and then defend those aristocratic interests at all costs. It was set up in that form from the very beginning.
This explains why September 11 was used as another date that granted legitimacy to aristocratic claims, right in line with 1776 and 1945. Instead of leading a worldwide effort to bring criminals to justice and rooting out actual causes, the regime set about trying to create new frontier zones in places like Iraq and many others, hunting grounds for certain corporations and government agencies. Those efforts roused the ire of two of the oldest, most puissant imperial systems in the world, and were subsequently checked.
Nobody in D.C. seems to have read the memo that they are no longer allowed to set up frontiers for their cronies (or masters, depending on what side of the revolving door between corporations and government they are on.) They do not realize that China and Russia will never ever grant favorable terms to Western interests, and that the absurd commitment to “free markets” is actually a back door into the heart of what is left of the American economy.
Of course, such knowledge cannot exist inside such a regime, and anyway, it would make no difference. The U.S. government cannot ask the common people to make the kind of colossal sacrifice necessary to take on China and Russia at the same time. It cannot even shut down or control the mechanism of the frontier. It must keep talking about “free markets” because that is the main linguistic shield for aristocratic freedom of action from democratic controls. It certainly cannot tax the rich at progressive levels or shut down offshore havens.
So if its mercenary armies keep getting defeated overseas and efforts to control resources and markets in places like the Middle East keep getting thwarted, those same incompetent people still have to make ridiculous sums of money from nothing without doing the work, and the frontier takes another turn in upon itself. The government begins shedding excess population and militarizing civilian governance and privatizing the national patrimony and binding the poor with debt and austerity and meaninglessly spying on everything and on and on. After all, if they can’t run roughshod all over Central Asia and the Middle East, there’s no place like home!
There will be no coherent national uprising against this final suicide. There cannot be, because there is no American nation. Real nations have wrenching, defining events like the Dreyfus Affair, the Tupac Amaru rebellion, Tahrir Square, the taking of the Winter Palace, the storming of the Bastille, the trial of the Gang of Four, the Polish Deluge. The agony and ecstasy of being a nation, of being a people, evolving through time regardless of the specifics of where the capital city is or what dynasty sits on the throne has not yet happened to the mess of immigrants and descendants of immigrants in North America.
The process is beginning. Alaskan or Southern Californian or Cascadian or Texan are embryonic nationalities. If Washington D.C. actually tried to win the fight against Russia (let alone China) and keep its tottering financial empire intact, the effort itself would exacerbate the nascent breakup along those already visible lines. Why would an Alaskan fisherman obey a bureaucrat in D.C. when his livelihood depends on selling seafood to China? What possible situation or political figure could align the interests of a Texan and a Cascadian? The inevitable breakup of North American economic and political unity is clear to anyone with a sense of how and why nations evolve on this planet. It will be messy, lubricated by rivers of blood, and in most areas accompanied by a long dark age, but the rest of the world will breathe a sigh of relief.
For individuals like myself, born inside the frontier and soaked in its propaganda, the U.S. seems like A Very Important Thing. For minds still trapped, the breakup of the U.S. feels like The End Of The World, which is a way of simplifying events to the point of not thinking about them at all. I would like to end this report by exploring a perspective about the next few decades not often seen, which does not involve Nuclear War or Utter Collapse or The End of the US Dollar.
North America was almost inevitably going to be treated as a single huge frontier the moment any old world explorer, with all his weapons, diseases, domesticated animals and crops stepped ashore. Present-day old world nations and empires understand this and no longer envy or fear what amounts to a historical blip. They also observe that the deep social foundations necessary for a government to play with the big boys in the arena of culture are missing. But a vast, distant frontier is just as useful at converting worthless commodities into money for them as it has proven for our own aristocrats.
Keeping this in mind, I suspect that far from decisive military engagements or outright economic warfare, we might eventually observe China and Russia (among others) carefully managing the U.S. decline, expending small efforts to keep the regime in D.C. afloat as long as they keep getting a positive return on investment. After all, powerhouses like them will from time to time need to dump commodities like pork snouts or almost worthless forestry byproducts. As long as the frontier exists in the hearts and minds of Americans, they won’t lack for people willing to do the work of conversion for them.
Adam
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