Climate Refugee Crisis

THE COMING CLIMATE REFUGEE CRISIS

The European Migrant Crisis Is A Nightmare. The Climate Crisis Will Make It Worse.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants are seeking refuge in Europe, but millions more will be displaced as the climate warms.

Peter Mellgard Associate Editor, The WorldPost

Posted: 09/05/2015 12:34 PM EDT | Edited: 3 hours ago

Credit: Rebecca Blackwell/Associated Press 2-year-old Aliou Seyni Diallo eats dry couscous given to him by a neighbor, after he collapsed in tears of hunger in the village of Goudoude Diobe, in the Matam region of northeastern Senegal, Tuesday, May 1, 2012.

The hundreds of thousands of migrants arriving in Europe or dying on the way to its shores could be a harbinger of things to come, researchers and policymakers warn, because a potentially greater driver of displacement looms on the horizon: climate change.

As U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry warned at a recent State Department-led conference on climate change in the Arctic, the scenes of chaos and heartbreak in Europe will be repeated globally unless the world acts to mitigate climate change.

"Wait until you see what happens when there's an absence of water, an absence of food, or one tribe fighting against another for mere survival," Kerry said.

World leaders have long warned that natural disasters and degraded environments linked to climate change could -- indeed, have already started to -- drive people from their homes. UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres declared in 2009 that climate change will create millions of refugees and internally displaced populations. "Not only states, but cultures and identities will be drowned," Guterres said.

Displacement is already happening in some parts of the world. Almost 28 million people on average were displaced by environmental disasters every year between 2008 and 2013, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center -- roughly three times as many as were forced from their homes by conflict and violence.

It's difficult to predict exactly how many more may be displaced as climate change progresses. "When global warming takes hold there could be as many as 200 million people overtaken" by the consequences, professor Norman Myers of Oxford University argued in a 2005 paper. For comparison’s sake, 350,000 migrants sought entry into the  European Union in 2014, the International Organization for Migration estimated.

Few countries or international organizations are prepared to deal with environmentally displaced people. As a 2011 report from the European Parliament's Directorate-General for Internal Policies detailed, there is no specific legal protection for "environmentally displaced individuals" beyond temporary measures that would prove insufficient if the environmental damage to their homeland endured.

The UN has a non-binding agreement on internal displacement from 1998 that includes provisions for people fleeing natural disasters, but it is not obligatory and includes no penalties for countries that ignore it, as Roger Zetter, a professor emeritus in refugee studies at Oxford, told The Huffington Post. The portions addressing natural disasters focus on storms, not the more complex and slow-onset effects of climate change.

Myers’ sensational prediction of hundreds of millions of climate change refugees has come under fire in the years since its 2005 publication. "It’s a very contentious overestimate," Zetter said. "It’s a back-of-the-envelope figure."

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to get data on the number of current migrants who left their homes primarily because of climate change. For most, environmental degradation is one factor among many, Zetter and other experts cautioned. Nevertheless, climate change-related environmental impacts will present "very significant challenges," Zetter said.

“What climate change and displacement do is present developmental problems for countries that are already struggling," he explained. "If you’ve got to start spending more and more money on flood relief channels or earthquake-proof buildings or increasing huge water transfer programs to cope with depleting aquifers, there’s no question that it will add a huge additional financial burden and make planning and development strategies more difficult.” 

And for some countries, climate change poses an immediate and very real threat -- countries like the small island states threatened by rising seas. "If there's no land, they’ll have to leave," Zetter said.

Credit: Richard Vogel/Associated Press In this March 30, 2004 file photo, a man fishes on a bridge on Tarawa atoll, Kiribati. Fearing that climate change could wipe out their entire Pacific archipelago, the leaders of Kiribati are considering an unusual backup plan: moving the populace to Fiji.

That includes places like Kiribati, a country made up of 33 islands in the remote South Pacific. Kiribati will be among the first countries to vanish beneath the rising ocean, possibly as soon as the end of this century. But long before then, its atolls and reef islands will be uninhabitable for their 103,000 residents if a violent storm comes crashing through, or if the ocean seeps into their already inadequate supply of fresh groundwater. Half of the country's citizens live on the Tarawa Atoll, a crescent of white sand two-thirds of a mile across whose highest point is just 10 feet above the ocean.
Operating on the unfortunate assumption that the sea will swallow the country, the government of Kiribati purchased 6,000 acres of land in Fiji last year, in case they need to uproot an entire people and put them somewhere else.

Major storms and flooding already cause tremendous displacement -- almost 28 million per year on average, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center. Many more are affected, but not necessarily displaced -- an average of 140 million people yearly, the International Panel on Climate Change reports. Scientists expect climate change to make violent storms like Typhoon Haiyan, which forced a million people to flee their homes in the Philippines in 2013, stronger and more frequent.
Typhoons and monsoon floods hit people hard and fast, forcing them to literally flee for their lives. Scientists call those rapid-onset climate events. But there are also slow-onset climate events like drought, desertification and sea level rise.

These slow-moving changes are "much more difficult to relate to mobility patterns," Albert Kraler, a program manager for research at the International Center for Migration Policy Development in Vienna, told HuffPost. Often, environmental changes are just "one of the factors informing people’s migration choices."

Despite the difficulty in determining exact numbers, the United Nations Environment Program concluded in a 2011 study on the Sahel, a semi-arid belt across northern Africa, that "migration occurs when livelihoods cannot be maintained, especially when agriculture or herding is severely affected by environmental degradation or extreme events."

The changes in the Sahel are perhaps the most obvious example of slow-onset events. The UN dubbed the region "ground zero" for climate change "due to its extreme climatic conditions and highly vulnerable population." Its arid climate and infrequent rain are getting worse, and scientists blame climate change. The rain is less predictable than it used to be -- sometimes there is too much and sometimes nowhere near enough. For almost everyone in the Sahel, food has become more expensive and scarcer. As a result, 30 percent of households in Burkina Faso, in the heart of the Sahel, have relocated in the last 20 years because they could no longer survive, The Guardian reported in 2013.

People have always migrated across this region. But these days, "the traditional temporary and seasonal migration patterns of many farmers, herders and fishermen in the region are increasingly being replaced by a more permanent shift southward and to urban areas," UNEP reports. "Nearly half of the West African population now lives in largely overcrowded coastal cities, including 12 townships of over one million inhabitants along the coastline from Senegal to Nigeria."

The population of the Sahel region is expected to skyrocket over the next few decades. Competition between tribes and ethnic groups, pastoralists, farmers and fishermen over ever-scarcer natural resources, which has existed for as long as people have lived there, is becoming intense. And then there's Boko Haram. Its fighters have set up camps on islands emerging out of Lake Chad, a once-majestic expanse of fresh water that in the past supported millions of people in the heart of the Sahel. But the lake has lost 90 percent of its area since the 1960s. Now, there’s a militant Muslim fundamentalist insurgency taking hold amid an ongoing environmental disaster.

Credit: Ben Curtis/Associated Press A dead donkey lies partially covered by the wind-swept sand near the village of Dala in the Sahel belt of Chad, Friday, April 20, 2012. UNICEF estimates that 127,000 children under five in Chad's Sahel belt will require lifesaving treatment for severe acute malnutrition this year, with an estimated 1 million expected throughout the wider Sahel region. The organization says the current food and nutrition crisis stems from scarce rainfalls in 2011, which caused poor harvests and livestock production.

Climate change is also a factor in the worsening storms and environmental degradation of coastal South Asia -- factors that, when combined with mismanagement and political dysfunction, are putting millions of people at risk. Some have already started to migrate because their ways of living are becoming impossible. In the Indus delta in Pakistan, entire villages have been wiped off the map. Bangladeshis and Indians in the Sundarbans, a vast mangrove forest where the Ganges meets the sea, are heading inland, away from the rising ocean and the increasingly saline farmland.

Bangladesh is expected to be the largest single source of climate refugees, with up to 30 million people at risk. Many end up in slums in cities like Dhaka, Bangladesh's capital and the world’s fastest-growing megacity. Some 70 percent of Dhaka’s slum dwellers moved there because of environmental degradation, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Migrants and refugees across the world, driven by rapid-onset natural disasters or by a complex combination of the more slow-moving effects of a changing climate, are already putting immense strain on the countries and cities they end up in. A lot of the time locals aren’t happy to see them, and many governments have been caught unprepared and unwilling to take them in.

Already, migrants and refugees across the world are already putting immense strain on the countries and cities where they end up.

In Europe, Hungary is putting up a fence to keep migrants and refugees out. "We don't want to [live together with Muslims],” Hungary’s prime minister Victor Orban said on Thursday, "and I think we have a right to decide that we do not want a large number of Muslim people in our country."

Credit: Mark Baker/Associated Press Detainees sit in a detention center on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, July 23, 2009. Australia came under fire from the U.N. children's aid agency and human rights advocates June 3, 2011, over its plan to send unaccompanied child asylum seekers to Malaysia under a refugee swap deal.

For the past two years, Australia has deployed its navy to force migrants and asylum-seekers away. The government allegedly bribed one captain more than $30,000 to take his boatload of migrants to Indonesia. Other migrants are being held in detention centers on tiny islands like Nauru, where, according to an Australian Senate committee report, children are sexually abused and guards offer weed in exchange for sex.

As for America, when residents of Kivalina, a Native village in northwestern Alaska that is rapidly disappearing into the ocean, tried to get the government to lend a hand, the response they received was that "there's no agency set up to address those questions."

Europe's handling of the current refugee situation doesn’t bode well for a future in which vulnerable populations fleeing the effects of climate change are again knocking at their doors. Nor does it seem likely that Western countries will embark on the expensive and challenging task of helping at-risk countries prepare, as John Kerry warned we must do. The Western world is facing a lot of tough questions, Zetter said.

"We've not faced up to the challenge that we obviously are the emitters, that we are creating climate change, that we are creating this additional pressure on the developmental trajectories that many countries face," he said.

MORE: Climate Change, Europe, european migrants, climate impacts, sea level rise, drought, Refugees, United Nations, migrants, displacement, climate refugees, environmental displacement

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/migrant-crisis-climate-change_55e9ed2de4b03784e275d514

Neoliberal Democracy 37

Whatever happened to critical intellectuals?

Neoliberalism combined with the disappearance of critical intellectuals spell a bleak future for Western democracy.

04 Sep 2015 08:09 GMT | Politics, Humanitarian crises, War & Conflict, Human Rights, Middle East

People hold posters with drawings depicting a drowned Syrian toddler during a demonstration for refugee rights in Istanbul [REUTERS]

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

C J Polychroniou

C J Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in Europe and the US.

A time not so long ago, public intellectuals in Western democracies loudly denounced war and imperialism, oppression and the violation of universal values (truth, justice, etc) whenever and wherever they occurred.

True, critical/oppositional intellectuals were always few and far between in the modern Western era, but there were always giants in our midst whose voice and status were not only revered by a fair chunk of the citizenry, but, in some cases, produced fear and even awe among the members of the ruling class.    

In this context, well known 20th-century names like John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus easily pop to mind. They were thinkers of immense intellectual prowess, independent of those in power, who spoke out against social evils and abuses of power. 

Equally important, the stance they took on public issues mattered because it mobilised thousands of ordinary citizens to participate in political advocacy.

Inside Story: Migrants or refugees?

'The right side of history'

Scientists and artists like Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso, respectively, can easily be included in the above list as they were also public figures who were interested in issues of common concern and did not hesitate to stand on what they believed to be "the right side of history": Einstein consistently supported anti-war movements and highlighted the dangers of nuclear war while Picasso was a committed anti-fascist.

Much closer to our own time, the list of names of world-renowned critical/oppositional intellectuals that stand out has been getting worriedly smaller and smaller, especially since most of them have passed away (Harold Pinter, Howard Zinn, Edward Said, Pierre Bourdieu). 

---

Also read: Why Al Jazeera will not say Mediterranean 'migrants'

---

Indeed, the world's greatest critical/oppositional intellectual who is still alive is undoubtedly MIT Professor Emeritus of Linguistics Noam Chomsky, and he clearly represents a dying breed. When he passes away, there is no one able to fill his shoes.

Notions such as democracy, social justice, equality, and the common good have taken a back seat to a crude individualism which is driven by consumerism, social apathy and self-aggrandisement...

The reality is that, with small exceptions, today's Western world is dominated by functional/conformist intellectuals, ie, thinkers whose mission is not to inform the public about social evils, abuses of power and the threat they pose to freedom, democracy, and dignity, but to enhance their own careers and material wealth by preserving and reproducing the existing order and the dominant power relations. 

Functional/conformist intellectuals focus on narrow, highly specialised and technical areas, and do not dare to challenge the status quo or speak out against social evils out of fear of losing their job, being denied tenure and promotion, or not having access to grants.

Conformist intellectuals

If asked, conformist intellectuals will probably say that it is not their duty and responsibility to speak out against, say, US militarism, imperial policies and the destruction of entire nations (Iraq, Libya, Syria), the abomination known as Guantanamo Bay prison, police and state violence, Israeli oppression of Palestinians, predatory capitalism and Wall Street crimes, authoritarianism and inequality.   

But the true explanation is that they are simply cowards.

Those members of society with the best access to knowledge do have a duty and responsibility to speak out and take action to support peace, freedom, democracy, and the common good. 

As Chomsky wrote in his famous essay: "The Responsibility of Intellectuals", published in The New York Review of Books on February 23, 1967: "Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyse actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. In the Western world, at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us."

A Turkish police officer carries Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi's dead body off the shores in Bodrum, southern Turkey [AFP]

The disappearance of critical intellectuals can be attributed to several interrelated developments. 

For starters, universities have abandoned their traditional role of preparing students to be caring, active citizens, and, instead, aim almost exclusively towards preparing them for the global marketplace. Accordingly, most universities produce professionals these days rather than graduates as critically engaged citizens who will play a leading role in their communities and in the struggle for a better world.

Decline of political advocacy

The absorption of writers and artists into the academic world has also enhanced the trend towards the disappearance of the critical/oppositional intellectual.

---

Also read: Refugee crisis exposes massive flaws in EU governance

---

With neoliberalism as the dominant ideology shaping our world today, notions such as democracy, social justice, equality, and the common good have taken a back seat to a crude individualism which is driven by consumerism, social apathy and self-aggrandisement, thus further reinforcing the decline of political advocacy and the divorce of the intellectual elite from the pursuit of universal values like truth, justice and peace.

To the list of factors contributing to the rapid disappearance of engaged political cultures in Western societies with critical/oppositional intellectuals at the helm, one must add the corporate takeover of mass media whose main mission is the manipulation of public opinion and the shaping of a politically apathetic culture.

The dominance of neoliberal ideology combined with the disappearance of critical/oppositional intellectuals spell a bleak future for Western democracy and its cherished values.   

In fact, silencing those voices that speak out against social evils and the abuses of power seems to have become the norm.   

Indeed, how far we seem to have come from the time when leading critical/oppositional intellectuals not only challenged the status quo, but actually had the capacity to inspire awe to the status quo itself, thus prompting someone like French President Charles de Gaulle to mock at the idea of arresting Jean Paul Sartre for inspiring rebellion by saying: "One does not arrest Voltaire."

C J Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked for many years in universities and research centres in Europe and the United States.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/08/happened-critical-intellectuals-refugees-150831065656343.html

Henk Hofland en de Massa 103

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.'

https://www.defensie.nl/actueel/weblog/cds/2014/veiligheidsdiscussie 

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.

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.' 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/books/the-world-america-made-by-robert-kagan.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 

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…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kagan 

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.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/24/obama-america-is-special.html

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.  

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/12/america-is-like-that-second-kind-of.html 

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.  

Steinbeck's profetische beschrijving werd door mainstream-opiniemaker Mak veroordeeld als gevaarlijke nonsens van zowel de Nobelprijswinnaar als 'zijn pessimistische geestverwanten,' die 'met hun sombere voorspellingen de plank mis[sloegen],' omdat 'Amerika na 1960 nog decennia van grote voorspoed beleven.' Mijn oude vriend Geert, die zoals ik uit talloze gesprekken met hem weet schrikbarend weinig gelezen heeft over de VS, en de boeken die hij wel gelezen heeft doorgaans alleen heeft doorgebladerd heeft op zoek naar simplistische quotes,  slaat zelf de plank mis, net zoals hij de plank missloeg in zijn bestseller In Europa, waarin hij in 2004 met een minimum aan inzicht maar met een maximum aan stelligheid beweerde dat 'Europa als vredesproces een eclatant succes' was en 'Europa als economische eenheid ook een eind op weg [is],' om zich zeven jaar jaar later ineens geschrokken af te vragen 'Hoe zijn we zo plotseling in deze nachtmerrie terechtgekomen?' om weer een jaar later op te merken dat 'Het Europese project als geheel is nu al zwaar beschadigd; met kunst- en vliegwerk blijft het misschien bestaan.' Te laat ontdekte hij dat 

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.