Amerika kan minder, en omdat het zich bedreigd voelt bestaat de kans dat het meer aan het eigen belang gaat denken,
aldus Ruud van Dijk, docent geschiedenis aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam, in de Volkskrant van 19 december 2015, onder de kop 'Amerika is nog steeds de onmisbare natie,' en wel omdat 'Amerika in het dna van het internationale systeem [zit].' Daarom 'moet een van de belangrijkste doelstellingen van het Europese en Nederlandse beleid zijn te voorkomen dat Amerika niet langer verantwoordelijk wil zijn voor het functioneren van het internationale systeem.'
Tot op zekere hoogte heeft Van Dijk gelijk, maar ik vrees op een andere manier dan hij bedoelt. 'Amerika,' zoals deze academicus de VS blijft noemen, is de hedendaagse variant van de Europese genocidale verovering van de wereld, die eind vijftiende eeuw begon toen Columbus na zijn eerste ontmoeting met 'Indianen' in een brief aan zijn financiers schreef:
They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. They would make fine servants... With fifty men we would subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.
De oorzaak van het massale Europese geweld werd twee decennia later kort maar krachtig uiteen gezet door de Spaanse veroveraar Hernán Cortés. Tegenover de verslagen Azteken legde hij uit dat hij en zijn metgezellen 'know a sickness of the heart that only gold can cure.' Vijf eeuwen later waren de motieven van het witte geweld nog steeds onveranderd, zoals bleek uit de memoires van het voormalige hoofd van de Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. Over de illegale Amerikaanse inval in Irak schreef hij in zijn boek met de veelzeggende titel: The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (2007):
I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.
Greenspan adviseerde Bush dat 'taking Saddam Hussein out' van wezenlijk belang was om de olievoorraden te beschermen. Als er al iets in het 'dna' van Van Dijk's 'Amerika' zit, en daarmee in het 'dna' van 'het internationale systeem,' dan is het grootscheeps geweld. In 2012 vatte dr. Maung Zarni van de London School of Economics dit feit als volgt samen onder de kop: 'Violence in the Institutional and Cultural DNA of the United States of America':
As a parent of 2 including an American teenager, a former teacher, and a son, nephew and brother of teachers, my heart goes out to bereaved and grieving families of all American children and teachers in CT slaughtered in a senseless and insane act by a mad gunman.
That said, the two of the three pillars of the United States were the ethno- and genocide of the native people and the enslavement of African people — yes, the other is honorably the Enlightenment ideals of equality (of property-owning while males).
Both as an economic system and as an ideological edifice, USA is one of the most violent places on earth.
USA ranks number one in:
1) being the world’ largest merchant of death (arms export);
2) having the largest Armed Forces with over 1,000 bases around the world;
3) fighting, with absolutely no interval, the largest number wars, both covert and overt, in the history of wars and conflict since its founding as a republic in 1776;
4) endowed with the greatest annual ‘defense’ budget;
5) building and running the largest espionage edifice that engages in assassination and incarceration, and torture of anyone SUSPECTED – not proven — of being an enemy of the USA (throwing away the foundation of American jurisprudence – that one is innocent until proven guilty);
6) having a nominal civilian control of the Pentagon (hardly any civilian presidents most of whom don’t have any military experience would feel confident to resist the pressure from the Pentagon – for more toys and more wars because toys and wars profit certain segments of American society and American economy);
7) allowing the President to decide who among the ‘enemies of the USA’ to KILL routinely;
8) having the greatest number of civilian deaths from gun crimes in the industrialized world;
9) incorporating the violent and militaristic language of war — war on poverty, war on diseases, war on terror (the Americans are conditioned to love wars and guns by the culture industry called Hollywood, and celebrate everything national and local with the display of military prowess — not dissimilar to former USSR or China or India, in this respect);
10). having foreign policy complex that does NOT have 'peace' as a pillar or value (I have heard this repeatedly with my own ears from various US officials that 'peace' is not a value for State Department), despite rhetoric to the contrary – always unilateralism that decides what Washington does;
11) fiercely defending Death Penalty – many death row inmates are black males, Hispanic men and working class whites many of whom are wrongly convicted – Rumsfeld’s 'the Old Europe' has moved away from such Dark Age practices and policies;
12) locking up the largest number of people – again disproportionately minorities and working class individuals – behind bars which are popular with the provincialistic, American exceptionalist voters; and finally
13) having the institutionalized habit of never counting the people the US Armed Forces have killed around the world – dismissing them as nameless statistics otherwise known as 'collateral damage' — while glorifying the death of their own members of the Armed Forces, again many are from working class and minority backgrounds.
Are we still expected to be shocked that this society, this economy and this political system has produced a trend in massacres in schoolyards, shopping malls, university campuses, churches, mosques, and cinema halls?
It is hightime that the American people wake up from their hegemonic American dream – which has been the world’s nightmare — and reclaim their wonderful Republic from the delusional maniacs who run Pax Americana.
The following brutally truthful observation made by the well known British playright the late Harold Pinter in his Noble Lecture for Literature in 2005 should serve as a good wake-up call:
'It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.'
__________________________
Dr. Maung Zarni… was educated in the US where he lived and worked for 17 years. Visit his website www.maungzarni.com.
Zarni's betoog kan nog korter worden gerecapituleerd met de volgende feiten:
America Has Been At War 93% of the Time — 222 Out of 239 Years — Since 1776. No U.S. president truly qualifies as a peacetime president. Instead, all U.S. presidents can technically be considered 'war presidents.'
- The U.S. has never gone a decade without war.
- The only time the U.S. went five years without war (1935-40) was during the isolationist period of the Great Depression.
Onthullend is tevens het volgende bericht:
Clinton Email Hints that Oil an Gold Were Behind Regime Change In Libya
On New Year’s Eve, 3,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server were released.
One of them confirms – an email dated April 2, 2011 to Clinton from her close confidante Sidney Blumenthal – that:
Qaddafi’s government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver.***This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French. franc (CFA).(Source Comment [This is in the original declassified email, and is not a comment added by us]: According to knowledgeable individuals this quantity of gold and silver is valued at more than $7 billion. French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya. According to these individuals Sarkozy’s plans are driven by the following issues:
- A desire to gain a greater share of Libya oil production,
- Increase French influence in North Africa,
- Improve his internal political situation in France,
- Provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert its position in the world,
- Address the concern of his advisors over Qaddafi’s long term plans to supplant France as the dominant power in Francophone Africa)
H/T: Brad Hoff.
Wanneer de UVA-docent geschiedenis van de internationale betrekkingen Ruud van Dijk verkondigt dat 'Washington nog altijd [streeft] naar een wereld waarin individuele vrijheden - fundamentele rechten van de mens - de norm zijn,' dan wordt deze bewering zelfs door de binnenlandse situatie in de VS weersproken. Een van de Amerikaanse intellectuelen die dit keer op keer duidelijk maakt is Chris Hedges, 15 jaar lang buitenland-correspondent voor de New York Times, die 'an early critic of the Iraq War' was.
In May 2003, Hedges delivered a commencement address at Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois, saying: 'We are embarking on an occupation that, if history is any guide, will be as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige and power and security.' His speech was received with boos and his microphone was shut off three minutes after he began speaking. His newspaper, The New York Times, criticized his statements and issued him a formal reprimand for 'public remarks that could undermine public trust in the paper's impartiality.' Shortly after the incident, Hedges left The New York Times to become a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, and a columnist at Truthdig, in addition to writing books and teaching inmates at a New Jersey correctional institution. Hedges has spent a decade teaching in prisons in New Jersey and has become a fierce critic of mass incarceration in the United States.
Geïnterviewd door professor Cornel West van Harvard University op 14 oktober 2015 verklaarde Chris Hedges met betrekking tot de huidige situatie in de VS:
The political paralysis builds deep and understandable frustration… As the state is in essence deconstructed by these corporate capitalist forces, quite physically, they bring back — this always happens — from the outer reaches of empire the forms of control that are intimately familiar to those the empire subjugates: drones, militarized police. So, you take a night raid in East New York were they are kicking down the door in kevlar vests, dressed in black with long-barreled weapons for a non-violent drug offense, terrorizing an entire family, it is no different from a night raid in Fallujah. That is what happens when empires die. The harsh, brutal violent forms of control that an empire has perfected on what Frantz Fanon called 'The Wretched of the Earth,' soon becomes intimately familiar in the hart of empire itself. And this gets into the whole issue of what we have done in marginalized communities where we have allowed omnipotent policing.
Hannah Arendt writes about that as well, omnipotent policing, and she writes about this vis-a-vis the stateless, but she says as soon as you create a legal and a physical mechanism for omnipotent policing, that means: unarmed civilians can be shot dead or strangled to death on city sidewalks for having never committed a crime and the police go free. Once you create a mechanism whereby your police 'serve' as judge, jury, and executioner, than the moment the society unravels everything is in place to put both that legal and physical mechanism as a way of maintaining control. Thucydides writes about it, with Athens' expanding empire. Thucydides writes that the tyranny Athens imposed on others it finally imposed on itself and that is what killed the Athenian democracy. And that is what killed American Democracy!
They thought they were only slaughtering Indians, or Hindus, or South Sea Islanders, or Africans. They have in fact overthrown, one after another, the ramparts behind which European civilization could have developed freely.
In dit verband constateert de Zweedse journalist en auteur Sven Lindqvist in zijn boek Exterminate all the Brutes (1997), dat
Auschwitz de moderne industriële toepassing [was] van een uitroeiingspolitiek waarop de Europese overheersing van de wereld […] lang heeft gesteund.
Lindqvist ontdekte gaandeweg dat de
Europese vernietiging van de 'inferieure rassen' van vier continenten de grond voorbereidde voor Hitlers vernietiging van zes miljoen joden in Europa […] Het Europese expansionisme, vergezeld als het was door een schaamteloze verdediging van het uitroeien, schiep manieren van denken en politieke precedenten die de weg baanden voor nieuwe wandaden, die uiteindelijk culmineerden in de gruwelijkste van alle: de Holocaust […] En toen hetgeen was gebeurd in het hart der duisternis werd herhaald in het hart van Europa, herkende niemand het. Niemand wilde toegeven wat iedereen wist. Overal in de wereld waar kennis wordt onderdrukt, kennis die als ze bekend zou worden gemaakt ons beeld van de wereld aan gruzelementen zou slaan en ons zou dwingen om onszelf ter discussie te stellen – daar wordt overal het Hart der Duisternis opgevoerd. U weet dat al. Net als ik. Het is geen kennis die ons ontbreekt. Wat gemist wordt is de moed om te begrijpen wat we weten en daaruit conclusies te trekken.
Die morele en intellectuele 'moed' ontbreekt Ruud van Dijk wanneer hij adviseert dat
[e]en van de belangrijkste doelstellingen van het Europese en Nederlandse beleid moet zijn te voorkomen dat Amerika niet langer verantwoordelijk wil zijn voor het functioneren van het internationale systeem.
Geen wonder dat zijn advies onmiddellijk door de Atlantische Commissie, die als propaganda-arm van de NAVO functioneert, via internet werd verspreid. Op die manier laat de Universiteit van Amsterdam zich misbruiken voor nog meer geweld van het steeds verder oostwaarts oprukkende militaire bondgenootschap, dat mede-verantwoordelijk is voor de chaos in de Arabisch sprekende wereld. Onder de mom van wetenschap wordt Van Dijk's propaganda in de Volkskrant en tijdens zijn college's door de UVAgeaccepteerd. Opmerkelijk is tevens dat de wetenschappelijke publicaties van deze docent absoluut minimaal zijn. Hij heeft ook nooit een wetenschappelijk boek geschreven, zoals hij mij in een email liet weten:
Dijk, Ruud van
2 jan. (8 dagen geleden)
aan mij
Geachte heer van Houcke, Beste Stan,
Ik ben de senior editor van de Encyclopedia of the Cold War (2008, Routledge). Mijn proefschrift, niet gepubliceerd, ging over de Duitse kwestie in de vroege Koude Oorlog. Verder heb ik voornamelijk artikelen en hoofdstukken gepubliceerd als wetenschapper. Toen ik in de VS woonde en werkte (1988-2008) schreef ik geregeld opiniestukken voor Nederlandse kranten (Parool, GPD bladen). Natuurlijk geef ik ook steeds college over dit en aanverwante thema's. Ben benieuwd naar uw stuk — zal het blog in de gaten houden.
Hartelijke groeten,
Ruud van Dijk
University of Amsterdam
Faculty of Humanities
Contemporary History
Coordinator, History of International Relations
Zijn weblog bestaat uit opvallend veel gedateerde verslagen van fietstochten. Er tussen door meldt Ruud van Dijk ineens het volgende:
THURSDAY, MARCH 24, 2011
Today. Not that it has never happened before. I'm in the paper somewhere in the Netherlands just about every month. Have been for years. But late last year the syndicate of regional papers I've been contributing to for the past ten years had to cut cost, and so the occasional op-ed writers were let go. Since that time I've made contact with several of the individual papers, and in January (on the Arizona shooting and the political debate in the U.S.) and earlier this month (Wisconsin union battle) this led to articles in the Leeuwarder Courant (of Frysland) (Friesland dan wel Fryslân. svh), and today I have commentary on President Obama as 'imperial president' in the Nederlands Dagblad. They told me yesterday that it would come out today, so I went to buy the paper this afternoon. It had been a while since I had done that. The article is a commentary on the way the president took the country into the Lybian (Libyan bedoelt Van Dijk. svh) intervention, and how members of Congres (Congress. svh) have criticized it. The argument is that Obama is much like his predecessors in the office, including George W. Bush: he's an imperial president at the head of a powerful national security state. I don't dig too deeply into the reasons why there seems to be such a big difference between Obama the candidate and Obama the president on this, but the suggestion is that the structure, the machine, the complex that is the national security/surveillance state has a way of severely limiting the room for maneuver individual politicians may seek for themselves. This very much includes the president, on whose desk the national security buck stops. Of course, given that in the Lybia (Libya. svh) case no vital U.S. national interests seemed to be at stake, has worked a little differently here as far as the motive is concerned. (Secretary Gates's apparent reluctance for the U.S. to get involved suggests that the Pentagon certainly was not chomping at the bit (ongeduldig of gefrustreerd zijn wanneer iets wordt uitgesteld. svh). It's a war of choice, and maybe it will turn out to have been the right choice. Let's hope so. But I think the way Congres (Congress. svh) feels taken for granted (it's probably right about this) is revealing of how much leeway (speelruimte. svh) presidents have in these matters nowadays. The unhappiness has not developed into a firestorm, and if things work out in Lybia (Libya. svh) it probably won't. But I'm wondering if we're not gradually reaching a turning point in executive-Congressional relations similar to what we saw at the end of the Vietnam era. Such a Congressional push-back would fit nicely with the insurgency type of politics we're seeing right now. Might not be a bad thing, if it was done right.
Deze redenering uit 2011 lijkt in tegenspraak met wat hij in 2015 beweerde. In 2011 stelde Van Dijk dat
the structure, the machine, the complex that is the national security/surveillance state has a way of severely limiting the room for maneuver individual politicians may seek for themselves. This very much includes the president, on whose desk the national security buck stops.
Met andere woorden: 'de machine' die de 'national security/surveillance state' is, functioneert als een autonoom 'complex,' dat 'in een ernstige mate' de keuzemogelijkheid 'beperkt' van zowel 'individuele politici' als 'de president.' Daarmee gaf Van Dijk aan dat de Amerikaanse democratie 'ernstig' werd bedreigd door het 'complex' waarvoor president Eisenhower al in 1961 waarschuwde, namelijk: het Amerikaans 'militair-industrieel complex,' waarvan 'The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government.' Gezien het feit dat Van Dijk nu deze 'structure,' deze 'machine,' dit 'complex' (zijn woorden) verzwijgt, is zijn bewering in de Volkskrant dat 'Amerika is nog steeds de onmisbare natie' een uiterst gevaarlijke stelling. De vraag is namelijk, waarom één 'van de belangrijkste doelstellingen van het Europese en Nederlandse beleid moet zijn te voorkomen dat Amerika niet langer verantwoordelijk wil zijn voor het functioneren van het internationale systeem,' terwijl de democratie van dit imperium 'ernstig' wordt beperkt door de 'structure' van de 'national security/surveillance state.' Dit lijkt raadselachtig, maar is het niet. Tenminste niet voor Ruud van Dijk zelf, aangezien het 'antwoord simpel [is]: de Verenigde Staten blijven de onmisbare ordeningsmogendheid in het internationale systeem.' Afgaand op het ontzagwekkende en vernietigende 'militair-industrieel complex' heeft de VS 'zelf, ondanks alles, er nog alle belang bij die rol te blijven spelen,' en is 'Voor ons in Europa een constructieve, activistische Amerikaanse rol intussen essentieel.' Het spreekt voor zich dat geen ander instituut dan de NAVO, onder aanvoering van'Amerika,' met geweld kan voorkomen dat de markten en de grondstoffen op aarde bedreigd worden door het groeiende arme deel van de wereldbevolking. De financiële en daarmee geopolitieke belangen van de 85 miljardairs die evenveel bezitten als de helft van de hele mensheid tezamen, moeten, volgens academici als Ven Dijk, natuurlijk 'beveiligd' blijven. Vandaar ook dat de Atlantische Commissie Van Dijk's pleidooi in de Volkskrant onmiddellijk op haar website als volgtverspreidde.
Amerika: de onmisbare natie
Ruud van Dijk, geschiedenisdocent aan de UvA, betoogt in de Volkskrant dat de Verenigde Staten nog steeds onmisbaar zijn voor de wereldpolitiek. Een van de belangrijkste doelstellingen van Europa moet dan ook zijn om te voorkomen dat Amerika niet langer verantwoordelijk wil zijn voor het functioneren van het internationale systeem.
Ruud van Dijk beschouwt het inmiddels eveneens vanzelfsprekend dat 'the way Congres (Congress. svh) feels taken for granted (it's probably right about this) is revealing' voor het feit dat in zaken van oorlog of vrede de Amerikaanse presidenten steeds meer macht hebben. Hoewel de Nederlandse universitair docent zich in 2011 nog afvroeg
if we're not gradually reaching a turning point in executive-Congressional relations similar to what we saw at the end of the Vietnam era. Such a Congressional push-back would fit nicely with the insurgency type of politics we're seeing right now,
en hij destijds van mening was dat het verzet van de Amerikaanse volksvertegenwoordiging tegen de verregaande presidentiële macht '[m]ight not be a bad thing, if it was done right,' nu speelt dit argument voor hem niet meer omdat de 'activistische Amerikaanse rol intussen essentieel' is geworden om het geglobaliseerde neoliberale systeem overeind te houden.
Hoewel Van Dijk met grote stelligheid spreekt van 'de exceptionele Amerikaanse rol' in de wereld en in de geschiedenis, zijn Amerikaanse academici aanzienlijk minder overtuigd van het Amerikaans 'exceptionalisme.' Zo wees in het gezaghebbende Amerikaanse tijdschrift Foreign Policy van 11 oktober 2011 de Amerikaans hoogleraar in de internationale betrekkingen aan de prestigieuze Kennedy School of Government van de Harvard-universiteit, Stephen Walt, op het volgende:
Finally, any honest accounting of the past half-century must acknowledge the downside of American primacy. The United States has been the major producer of greenhouse gases for most of the last hundred years and thus a principal cause of the adverse changes that are altering the global environment. The United States stood on the wrong side of the long struggle against apartheid in South Africa and backed plenty of unsavory dictatorships -- including Saddam Hussein's -- when short-term strategic interests dictated. Americans may be justly proud of their role in creating and defending Israel and in combating global anti-Semitism, but its one-sided policies have also prolonged Palestinian statelessness and sustained Israel's brutal occupation.
Bottom line: Americans take too much credit for global progress and accept too little blame for areas where U.S. policy has in fact been counterproductive. Americans are blind to their weak spots, and in ways that have real-world consequences. Remember when Pentagon planners thought U.S. troops would be greeted in Baghdad with flowers and parades? They mostly got RPGs and IEDs instead.
In het al eerder genoemde boek The Myth of American Exceptionalism (2009) benadrukt Godfrey Hodgson, verbonden aan de University of Oxford:
The great Athenian historian Thucydides gives as an example the experience of his beloved Athenians. In 416 B.C. Athens, planning an ill fated expedition against Sicily, sent an expeditionary force against Melos, an island originally settled by Athens's archenemy, Sparta. It was seen as strategically vital to remove the danger that Melos could serve as a base for Spartan operations against the Athenians' lines of communication with Sicily.
In the part of his history that has come to be known as the Melian dialogue, Thucydides gives an account of the arguments the Athenians used to persuade to surrender. They are not pretty. The text has become a classic in the academic study of international relations. As result Thucydides has been hailed as the progenitor of the 'Realist' school in that discipline. Certainly his account of the arguments used by his countrymen makes them out to be hard-nosed and cynical. It is not so clear what the historian himself thought of them. 'The powerful,' he makes the Athenian envoys tell the men of Melos, 'exact what they can. The weak put up with what they must.' Again, when the Melians ask why they cannot be allowed to remain friends, and not allies of either side in the war. The Athenians answer: 'No. Your hostility does not hurt us as much as your friendship. For in the eyes of our subjects that would be a proof of our weakness, whereas your hatred is proof of our power.'
Hodgson eindigt zijn studie met de volgende opmerkingen:
Thucydides does not say explicitly what he feels about this episode. Posterity, however, has been clear about one thing. Melos marked the moment when Athens, the birthplace of democracy and its glorious champion against Persian imperialism in the days of Thucydides' grandparents, abandoned its principles and replaced them with the arrogant pursuit of power and self-interest. The disaster of the Sicilian expedition, which condemned thousands of Athenian prisoners to the salt mines, was not a direct consequence. Still, at Melos, Athens practiced the policy of 'shock and awe.' And Athenian democracy never did fully recover.
The point at which the principles of American democracy are reduced to mere boasting and bullying, justified by a cynical 'realism,' is the point at which the practice of American democracy, at home as well s abroad, is in mortal danger.
Om nu nog, zoals Ruud van Dijk doet, te beweren dat 'Washington nog altijd [streeft] naar een wereld waarin individuele vrijheden - fundamentele rechten van de mens - de norm zijn,' is weerzinwekkende politieke propaganda van een intellectueel corrupte academicus, die als 'universitair docent' pretendeert een wetenschappelijk verantwoorde visie te geven, en zo zijn studenten en het mainstream-publiek op het verkeerde been zet. Meer later.
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