Geert Mak. Nu.NL 22 augustus 2012
aldus de Canadese oud-diplomaat en emeritus hoogleraar van de University of California, Berkeley, Peter Dale Scott, in zijn meest recente boek The American Deep State. Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy (2015). In het laatste hoofdstuk, getiteld Why Americans Must End America's Self-generating Wars, zet de politieke wetenschapper Scott uiteen dat
what is needed is not some radical and untested new policy, but a much-needed realistic reassessment and progressive scaling back of wo discredited policies that are themselves new, and demonstrably counterproductive.
I am referring above all to America's so-called 'war on terror.' American politics, both foreign and domestic, are being increasingly deformed by a war on terrorism that is counter-productive, radically increasing the number of perpetrators and victims of terrorist attacks. It is also profoundly dishonest, in that Washington's policies actually contribute to the funding and arming of the al-Qaedists that it nominally (in naam. svh) opposes.
Above all the War on Terror is a self-generating war, because, as many experts have warned, it produces more terrorists than it eliminates. And it has become inextricably combined with America’s earlier self-generating and hopelessly unwinnable war, the so-called War on Drugs.
The two self-generating wars have in effect become one. By launching a War on Drugs in Colombia and Mexico, America has contributed to a parastate of organized terror in Colombia (the so-called AUC, United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) and an even bloodier reign of terror in Mexico (with 50,000 killed in the last six years). By launching a War on Terror in Afghanistan in 2001, America has contributed to a doubling of opium production there, making Afghanistan now the source of 90 percent of the world’s heroin and most of the world’s hashish.
Americans should be aware of the overall pattern that drug production repeatedly rises where America intervenes militarily – Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 60s, Colombia and Afghanistan since then. (Opium cultivation also increased in Iraq after the 2003 US invasion.) And the opposite is also true: where America ceases to intervene militarily, notably in Southeast Asia since the 1970s, drug production declines.
Both of America’s self-generating wars are lucrative to the private interests that lobby for their continuance.5 At the same time, both of these self-generating wars contribute to increasing insecurity and destabilization in America and in the world.
Thus, by a paradoxical dialectic, America’s New World Order degenerates progressively into a New World Disorder. And at home the seemingly indomitable national security state, beset by the problems of poverty, income disparity, and drugs, becomes, progressively, a national insecurity state.
The purpose of this paper is to argue, using the analogy of British errors in the late nineteenth century, for a progressive return to a more stable and just international order, by a series of concrete steps, some of them incremental. Using the decline of Britain as an example, I hope to demonstrate that the solution cannot be expected from the current party political system, but must come from people outside that system.
De waarschuwing van de oud-diplomaat Peter Dale Scott, die de macht van binnenuit kent, staat diametraal tegenover het advies van de outsider Geert Mak dat '[a]ls je invloed en macht wilt hebben, je groots zijn [moet]. Dat is iets wat we in Europa van ze kunnen leren.' Het gewelddadig streven naar 'grootsheid' heeft Europa twee wereldoorlogen gekost, massale verwoestingen en tientallen miljoenen doden en verminkten. Niet het Avondland kan iets van Washington en Wall Street leren, maar zij zouden van de geschiedenis kunnen leren. Maar omdat Mak een gebrekkige kennis van de geschiedenis bezit, zoals ik uit talloze gesprekken met hem weet, beseft hij niet echt dat hij gevaarlijke leugens verspreidt. Daarom, speciaal voor Mak en de Makkianen van de mainstream-pers in de polder citeer ik de deskundige Peter Dale Scott over 'The Follies of the Late Nineteenth Century Pax Britannica':
The final errors of British imperial leaders are particularly instructive for our predicament today. In both cases power in excess of defense needs led to more and more unjust, and frequently counter-productive, expansions of influence. My account in the following paragraphs is one-sidedly negative, ignoring positive achievements abroad in the areas of health and education. But the consolidation of British power led to the impoverishment abroad of previously wealthy countries like India, and also of British workers at home.
A main reason for the latter was, as Kevin Phillips has demonstrated, the increasing outward flight of British investment capital and productive capacity:
'Thus did Britain slip into circumstances akin to those of the United States in the 1980s and most of the 1990s – slumping nonsupervisory wage levels and declining basic industries on one hand, and at the other end of the scale a heyday for banks, financial services, and securities, a sharp rise in the portion of income coming from investment, and a stunning percentage of income and assets going to the top 1 percent.'
The dangers of increasing income and wealth disparity in Britain were easily recognized at the time, including by the young politician Winston Churchill. But only a few noticed the penetrating analysis by John A. Hobson in his book Imperialism (1902), that an untrammeled search for profit that directed capital abroad created a demand for an oversized defense establishment to protect it, leading in turn to wider and wilder use abroad of Britain’s armies. Hobson defined the imperialism of his time, which he dated from about 1870, as 'a debasement … of genuine nationalism, by attempts to overflow its natural banks and absorb the near or distant territory of reluctant and unassimilable (niet te assimileren. svh) peoples.'
The earlier British empire could be said by a British historian in 1883 to have been 'acquired in a fit of absence of mind,' but this could not be said of Cecil Rhodes’s advances in Africa. Maldistribution of wealth was an initial cause of British expansion, and also an inevitable consequence of it. Much of Hobson’s book attacked western exploitation of the Third World, especially in Africa and Asia. He thus echoed Thucydides description of how Athens was undone by the overreaching greed (pleonexia) of its unnecessary Sicilian expedition.
Both the apogee of the British empire and the start of its decline can be dated to the 1850s. In that decade London instituted direct control over India, displacing the nakedly exploitative East India Company. But in the same decade Britain sided with France’s nakedly expansionist Napoleon III (and the decadent Ottoman empire) in his ambitions against Russia’s status in the Holy Land. Although Britain was victorious in that war, historians have since judged that victory to be a chief cause of the breakdown in the balance of power that had prevailed in Europe since the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Thus the legacy of the war for Britain was a more modernized and efficient army, together with a more insecure and unstable world. (Historians may in future come to judge that NATO’s Libyan venture of 2011 played a similar role in ending the era of U.S.-Russian détente.)
The Crimean War also saw the emergence of perhaps the world’s first significant antiwar movement in Britain, even though that movement is often remembered chiefly for its role in ending the active political roles of its main leaders, John Cobden and John Bright. In the short run, Britain’s governments and leaders moved to the right, leading (for example) to Gladstone’s bombardment of Alexandria in 1882 to recover the debts owed by the Egyptians to private British investors.
Reading Hobson’s economic analysis in the light of Thucydides, we can focus on the moral factor of emergent hubristic greed (pleonexia) fostered by unrestrained British power. In 1886 the discovery of colossal gold deposits in the nominally independent Boer Republic of the Transvaal attracted the attention of Cecil Rhodes, already wealthy from South African diamonds and mining concessions he had acquired by deceit in Matabeleland. Rhodes now saw an opportunity to acquire goldfields in the Transvaal as well, by overthrowing the Boer government with the support of the uitlanders or foreigners who had flocked to the Transvaal.
In 1895, after direct plotting with the uitlanders failed, Rhodes, in his capacity as Prime Minister of the British Cape Colony, sponsored an invasion of Transvaal with the so-called Jameson Raid, a mixed band of Mounted Police and mercenary volunteers. The raid was not only a failure, but a scandal: Rhodes was forced to resign as Prime Minister and his brother went to jail. The details of the Jameson raid and resulting Boer War are too complex to be recounted here; but the end result was that after the Boer War the goldfields fell largely into the hands of Rhodes.
The next step in Rhodes’ well-funded expansiveness was his vision of a Cape-to-Cairo railway through colonies all controlled by Britain. As we shall see in a moment, this vision provoked a competing French vision of an west-east railway, leading to the first of a series of crises from imperial competition that progressively escalated towards World War I.
According to Carroll Quigley, Rhodes also founded a secret society for the further expansion of the British empire, an offshoot of which was the Round Table which in turn generated the Royal Institute of International Affairs. In 1917 some members of the American Round Table also helped found the RIIA’s sister organization, the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
Carroll Quigley was een vooraanstaande Amerikaans historicus, en als hoogleraar de leermeester van Bill Clinton, die tijdens diens aanvaardingsspeech als presidentskandidaat voor de Democratische Partij het volgende over hem zei:
As a teenager, I heard John Kennedy’s summons to citizenship. And then, as a student at Georgetown, I head that call clarified by a professor named Caroll Quigley, who said to us that America was the greatest Nation in history because our people had always believed in two things - that tomorrow can be better than today and that every one of us has a personal moral responsibility to make it so.
Wat betreft dit laatste, Quigley benadrukte in zijn colleges en in zijn boeken dat
The powers of financial capitalism had (a) far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank… sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.
En dat voor
the first time in its history, Western Civilization is in danger of being destroyed internally by a corrupt, criminal ruling cabal which is centered around the Rockefeller interests, which include elements from the Morgan, Brown, Rothschild, Du Pont, Harriman, Kuhn-Loeb, and other groupings as well. This junta took control of the political, financial, and cultural life of America in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
En dat de
Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is the American Branch of a society which originated in England
en
believes national boundaries should be obliterated and one-world rule established. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years, and was permitted in the early 1960's to examine its papers and secret records.
Naar aanleiding van de op handen zijnde besloten Bilderberg Conferentie, waaraan ditmaal ook premier Rutte en Jeroen Dijsselbloem, minister van Financiën, deelnamen, op voorwaarde dat zij als democratische politici niet zouden vertellen waarover gesproken was, schreef de Amerikaanse auteur van de blog JaysAnalyses op 8 juni 2015:
Het zal duidelijk zijn dat deze machtsconcentratie in strijd is met de openheid en controleerbaarheid van een ware democratische samenleving. Desondanks blijven Mak en de Makkianen dat de 'kracht van onze westerse samenleving onze democratie [is], onze variatie in ideeën, onze tolerantie, onze openheid,' die als 'Western values and Western ways of thinking' een voorbeeld bij uitstek zijn voor de rest van de mensheid. Daarom wederom een fragment van Peter Dale Scott's historische visie van de gebeurtenissen:
Some have found Quigley’s argument overstated. But whether one agrees with him or not, one can see a continuity between the expansionist acquisitiveness of Rhodes in Africa in the 1890s and the post-war acquisitiveness of UK and American oil corporations in the CFR-backed coups in Iran (1953), Indonesia (1965), and Cambodia (1970). In all these cases private acquisitive greed (albeit of corporations rather than an individual) led to state violence and/or war as a matter of public policy. And the outcomes enriched and strengthened private corporations in what I have called the American war machine, thus undermining those institutions representing the public interest.
My main point is that the progressive build-up of the British navy and armies provoked, predictably, a responsive build-up from other powers, particularly France and Germany; and this ultimately made World War I (and its sequel, World War II) all but inevitable. In retrospect it is easy to see that the arms build-up contributed, disastrously, not to security but to more and more perilous insecurity, dangerous not just to the imperial powers themselves but to the world. Because American global dominance surpasses what Britain’s ever was, we have not hitherto seen a similar backlash in competitiveness from other states; but we are beginning to see a backlash build-up (or what the media call terrorism) from increasingly oppressed peoples.
In retrospect one can see also that the progressive impoverishment of India and other colonies guaranteed that the empire would become progressively more unstable, and doomed in its last days to be shut down. This was not obvious at the time; and comparatively few Britons in the nineteenth century, other than Hobson, challenged the political decisions that led from the Long Depression of the 1870s to the European 'Scramble for Africa,' and the related arms race. Yet when we look back today on these decisions, and the absurd but ominous crises they led to in distant corners of Africa like Fashoda (1898) and Agadir (1911), we have to marvel at the short-sighted and narrow stupidity of the so-called statesmen of that era.
We also note how international crises could be initially provoked by very small, uncontrolled, bureaucratic cabals. The Fashoda incident in South Sudan involved a small troupe of 132 French officers and soldiers who had trekked for 14 months, in vain hopes of establishing a west-to-east French presence across Africa (thus breaching Rhodes’ vision of a north-to-south British presence. The 1911 provocative arrival (in the so-called 'Panther leap' or Panzersprung) of the German gunboat Panzer at Agadir in Morocco was the foolish brainchild of a Deputy Secretary of Foreign Affairs; its chief result was the cementing of the Anglo-French Entente Cordiale, thus contributing to Germany’s defeat in World War I.
In verband met de lengte stop ik. De volgend keer meer over de overeenkomsten tussen de val van het Britse rijk en de ineenstorting van het Amerikaans imperium, waarvan wij nu getuige zijn, een ontwikkeling waarin het Europa van 'Geen Jorwert zonder Brussel' wordt mee gesleurd door dwaze politici en corrupte mainstream-journalisten als Geert Mak, Henk Hofland, Paul Brill en Hubert Smeets, op wie ik nu mijn kritiek nu richt.
Als je invloed en macht wilt hebben, moet je groots zijn. Dat is iets wat we in Europa van ze (Washington en Wall Street. svh) kunnen leren. Geert Mak. Nu.NL 22 augustus 2012 En als je als journalist geprezen wilt worden door de macht dan moet je corrupt zijn, voeg ik hieraan toe.
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