In zijn 353 pagina's tellende studie How Propaganda Works (2015) recapituleert de Amerikaanse hoogleraar filosofie aan Yale University, Jason Stanley, zijn betoog als volgt:
In the previous chapters, I laid out the concept of ideology I favor. Using Max Weber, I argued that elites in civil society invariably acquire a flawed ideology to explain their possession of an unjust amount of the goods of society. The purpose of the flawed ideology is to provide an apparently factual (in the best case, apparently scientific) justification for the otherwise manifestly unjust distribution of society's goods. I then argued that, as a mechanism of social control, the elite seek to instill the ideology in the negatively privileged groups. By this route, the negatively privileged groups acquire the beliefs that justify the very structural features of their society that cause heir oppression. I then laid out some very general psychological and epistemological facts that make it plausible that such such efforts will be successful.
The ideology of the elites is the flawed ideology that those those who possess more than they deserve tell themselves to justify their excessive control over the goods of the society into which hey are born…
In contemporary societies, one basis of the ideology of elites is the belief that the society into which they are born is meritocratic; this is a belief held particularly strongly by those born into wealth and privilege. But since it is quite obvious that in most societies the goods are divided unequally and not according to merit, a much more detailed structure of flawed ideological belief is required to explain how manifest injustices in the pattern of distribution of the goods of society can be present in the environment of someone who firmly believes in the meritocratic nature of the very system that quite obviously leads to the existence of those very injustices.
Stanley verwijst naar het boek The Power Elite (1956) van de Amerikaanse socioloog C. Wright Mills, die opmerkte:
People with advantages are loath (verafschuwen. svh) to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves. In this sense, the idea of the elite as composed of men and women having a finer moral character is an ideology of the elite as a privileged ruling stratum, and this is true whether the ideology is elite-made or made up for it by others.
Professor Stanley herinnert de lezer eraan dat:
As in Ancient Greece, in twentieth-century Western democracies such as the United States, the system of education has been informed by the flawed ideological belief of the ideology of elites that education should fit each person to the task for which they are suited, along a continuum determined by he flawed distinction between intellectual and nonintellectual activity. In his paper 'Labor and Leisure,' John Dewey (bekende Amerikaanse filosoof, psycholoog en educational reformer. stierf in 1952. svh) bemoans that '[p]robably the most deep-seated antithesis which has shown itself in educational history is that between education in preparation for useful labor and education for a life of leisure.' Dewey continues:
'The separation of liberal education from professional and industrial education goes back to the time of the Greeks, and was formulated expressly on the basis of a division of classes into those who had to labor for a living and those who were relieved of this necessity. The conception that liberal education, adapted to men in the latter class, is intrinsically higher than the servile training given to the former class reflected the fact that one class was free and the other servile in its social status.'
Dewey argues that the division is based upon a confusion, but nevertheless '[t]he idea still prevails that a truly cultural or liberal education cannot have anything in common, directly at least, with industrial affairs, and that the education which is fit for the masses must be a useful or practical education in a sense which opposes useful and practical sense which opposes useful and practical to nurture of appreciation and liberation of thought.' Dewey was writing at the time of a complete restructuring of the US secondary school system. He was not making an abstract point, but rather commenting on how the concurrently occurring restructuring of the secondary school system was guided by a flawed ideological belief of the ideology of elites, namely, the view that one class, the labor class, was fit only for menial labor and destined for servility.
The Stanford sociology professor Edward Alsworth Ross's book 'Social Control' published in 1901, is an extended argument for the use of the educational system as the ideal mechanism of elite social control. Ross argues that 'the Elite, or those distinguished by ideas and talent, are the natural leaders of society.' and when 'populations thicken, interests clash, and the difficult problems of mutual adjustment become pressing, it is foolish and dangerous not to follow the lead of superior men.' Ross stresses throughout the importance of an elite to spread its desires, tastes, and moral opinions.'
Ross's book contains a series of chapters on different mechanisms by which the elite can attain social control over the masses in a democracy. In chapter 14, Ross settles on education, noting 'the time-honored policy of founding social order on a system of education.' Ross writes of fixing 'in the plastic child mind principles upon which, later, may be built a huge structure of practical consequence. Education, for Ross, is a means of "'breaking in'' the colt to the harness' (het breken van de wil van een veulen. svh). Ross argues that the most effective method of social control is a 'school education that is provided gratuitously (kosteloos. svh) for all children by some great social organ.
The theme of Ross's book is elite domination by control of societal norms, with education as the main mechanism of social control. These have been persisting themes in liberal democratic states throughout the twentieth century. Whatever skepticism is brought to the claim that elites can instill their ideology in negatively privileged groups, it is clearly not a skepticism shared by those who self-identify as elites in liberal democracies. Ross was not a crank (dwaas. svh) working on the fringes of educational theory at the time. His views had a deep and lasting influence on American educational policy.
Met andere woorden: Ruud van Dijk bedrijft propaganda voor de 'elites in liberal democracies,' wanneer de universitair docent geschiedenis in de Volkskrant van 19 december 2015 beweert dat de Amerikaanse elite in Washington en op Wall Street 'nog steeds de onmisbare natie' vormen, en dan stelt:
Waarom toch Amerika? In de eerste plaats omdat de liberaal-democratische orde van onze tijd grotendeels op Amerikaanse initiatieven teruggaat. Amerika zit in het dna van het internationale systeem.
Zonder omwegen maakt Van Dijk letterlijk en figuurlijk duidelijk dat 'education' de 'main mechanism of social control' is. Nogmaals, How Propaganda Works:
In 1909, in an address titled 'The Meaning of Liberal Education,' delivered to the High School Teachers Association, Woodrow Wilson, later to become the twenty-eighth president of the United States (en rector magnificus van Princeton University. svh), articulated a view of the purpose of education that reflected the influence of Ross's work and those of his cohort:
'Let us go back and distinguish between the two things that we want to do; for we want to do two things in modern society. We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego (afzien. svh) the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.'
Volgens Van Dijk streeft het huidige neoliberale systeem van 'sociale controle' naar 'individuele vrijheden' en 'open samenlevingen.' Dat die 'vrijheden' beperkt blijven tot de 'elites,' zoals de latere, racistische, president Woodrow Wilson al meer dan een eeuw geleden bepleitte, is een feit dat de Amsterdamse wetenschapper verzwijgt. Professor Jason Stanley:
Wilson's views of a 'liberal education' are part of the education as social control movement explicitly stated and defended by Ross in 'Social Control.' At its base is an ideology of elite superiority, including white male elite superiority. And as we have seen, the self-justification of American anti-liberal ideology is a presumed natural distention between the exercise of intelligence and the exercise of mere practical skill. There are a select few capable of intelligent decision making. All others must be trained in manual skills, together with a uniform story of American history.
In zijn boek toont Stanley gedocumenteerd aan dat het huidige systeem is gebaseerd op een 'division into a small group of elites and a large group of followers.' De achterliggende ideologie wordt in verschillende bewoordingen gesteund door de Nederlandse 'politiek-literaire elite.' Zo beweert Geert Mak dat Amerikaanse presidenten, onder wie Wilson, 'een begin van orde brachten in de mondiale politiek en economie.' Maar welke 'orde'? In zijn boek Woodrow Wilson and World Politics (1968) omschreef de Amerikaanse historicus Norman Gordon Levin de doelstellingen van de 'orde' van de 28ste president van de VS als de
attainment of a liberal capitalist world order under international law safe both from traditional imperialism and revolutionary socialism, within whose stable liberal confines a missionary America could find moral and economic pre-eminence.
Omdat Mak en de meeste andere Nederlandse opiniemakers het werk van Amerikaanse historici nauwelijks of niet kennen, weten zij niet dat de Amerikaanse historicus James W. Loewen in zijn 'National Bestseller,' getiteld Lies My Teacher Told Me. Everything Your American History Book Got Wrong (1995) het volgende onder de aandacht had gebracht:
My students seldom know or speak about two antidemocratic policies that Wilson carried out: his racial segregation of the federal government and his military interventions in foreign countries. Under Wilson, the United States intervened in Latin America more often than at any other time in our history... In the summer of 1918 he authorized a naval blockade of the Soviet Union and sent expeditionary forces to Murmansk, Archangel, and Vladivostok to help overthrow the Russian Revolution.
Tijdens een college aan Columbia University in 1907 verklaarde Woodrow Wilson:
Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed must be battered down… Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.'
Loewen:
With hindsight we know that Wilson's interventions in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua set the stage for the dictators Batista, Trujillo, the Duvaliers, and Somozas, whose legacies still reverberate.
President Woodrow Wilson zond bovendien troepen naar Mexico om daar de Amerikaanse investeringen 'veilig te stellen,' zoals gewelddadige interventies in soevereine staten officieel heten, tenminste, zodra westerse landen dit doen. Piero Gleijesus, hoogleraar aan de Johns Hopkins University en expert op het gebied van US intervention in Latin America, stelde vast:
It is not that Wilson failed in his earnest efforts to bring democracy to these little countries. He never tried. He intervened to impose hegemony, not democracy.
Loewen:
The United States also attacked Haiti's proud tradition of individual ownership of small tracts of land, which dated back to the Haitian Revolution, in favor of the establishment of large plantations. American troops forced peasants in shackles to work on road construction crews. In 1919 Haitian citzens rose up and resisted U.S. occupation troops in a guerilla war that cost more than 3,000 lives, most of them Haitian [...] George Barnett, a U.S. marine general, complained to his commander in Haiti: ‘practically indiscriminate killing of natives has gone on for some time,'
hetgeen Loewen tot de conclusie voert dat Wilson's politiek in de praktijk gebaseerd was op drie uitgangspunten: 'colonialism, racism, and anticommunism.' En het was deze door Mak zo geprezen racistische Woodrow Wilson die
personally vetoed a clause on racial equality in the Covenant of the League of Nations... Wilson's legacy was extensive: he effectively closed the Democratic Party to African Americans for another two decades, and parts of the federal government remained segregated into the 1950s and beyond... Wilson was an outspoken white supremacist who believed that black people were inferior. During his campaign for the presidency, Wilson promised to press for civil rights. But once in office he forgot his promises. Instead, Wilson ordered that white and black workers in federal government jobs be segregated from one another... When black federal employees in Southern cities protested the order, Wilson had the protesters fired.
Ondanks of beter gesteld, juist door het geweld van de VS om overal ter wereld de Amerikaanse elite-belangen te beschermen, van Vietnam, Latijns Amerika, tot Afrika, Afghanistan en Irak, om enkele dieptepunten dan wel hoogtepunten, zo u wilt, te noemen, weet Ruud van Dijk tegenover zijn studenten en in de Volkskrant vol te houden dat:
Washington nog altijd [streeft] naar een wereld waarin individuele vrijheden — fundamentele rechten van de mens — de norm zijn. Voor ons in de EU is het niet anders.
Bovendien,
[zit] Amerika zit in het dna van het internationale systeem,
dus
[blijven] de Verenigde Staten de onmisbare ordeningsmogendheid in het internationale systeem,
aldus Van Dijk's redenering, die kennelijk zo wetenschappelijk verantwoord is dat géén enkele academicus van de Universiteit van Amsterdam zijn of haar stem verhief. Ik zal daarom opnieuw een stem van binnenuit citeren, in dit geval, Paul Craig Roberts, een in 1939 geboren Amerikaanse econoom die onder president Reagan staatssecretaris van Financiën was, verantwoordelijk voor de Economische Politiek, en een voormalig redacteur en columnist voor de Wall Street Journal, Business Week, en de omroeporganisatie Scripps Howard News Service. Een fragment uit het voorwoord van zijn boek The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism(2013):
Paul Craig Roberts sold supply-side economics to the U.S. Congress and to President Reagan as the way to overcome stagflation (simultaneously rising inflation and unemployment) and renew economic growth. Why does he now write that growth might be the problem instead of the solution? 'I dealt with the problems of my time. Supply-side economics worked, and the worsening trade-offs between inflation and unemployment disappeared for two decades. Today's problems are different, and they are dealt with in this book.'
On the one hand there are theoretical problems in the growth model. On the other hand the growth model is not being applied in Europe to what is euphemistically called 'the sovereign debt problem,' but in reality is the problem of reckless lending by private banks. Austerity is being imposed in order to to free resources with which to pay the banks, and the austerity is driving growth into the ground. In other words, the West itself does not believe that its growth model is the solution to the problem.
Vertaald in het simplisme van Ruud van Dijk: het Amerikaanse 'dna van het internationale systeem' heeft een monster geschapen, waardoor Van Dijk's advies 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' niets anders is dan een oproep is tot collectieve zelfmoord. Daar komt nog een feit bij:
Another problem is that the growth model no longer works for many people. For example, in the U.S. income growth is only experienced by a small percentage at the top. In much of the Third World the growth model imposes monocultures that deprive people of independence and self-sufficiency. Yet another problem is that the growth model is not sustainable as it is exhausting nature's capital and is polluting our planet. When one thinks about such things as the economists' assumption that man-made capital is a substitute for nature's capital, one realizes that this unrealistic assumption (known as the Solow-Stiglitz production function) is the basis of the belief that economic growth is infinitely sustainable. Growth cannot be infinite when earth's resources are finite. 'Therefore,' writes Roberts, 'we must think anew prior to the exhaustion of nature's capital. Longrun thinking must supplant short-term thinking.'
Many industrial, agricultural, and food-producing processes pollute air, water, and soil. Corporations avoid costs by imposing them on the environment. In some instances these external costs exceed the value of the corporations' output. The quality of food, its nutrition and safety are sacrificed for yield.
The exhaustion of nature's capital has begun to bite. Surface water and aquifers are threatened by fracking, mining, and chemical fertilizer run-off.
De journaliste Charlotte Mcdonald van de BBC-radio wierp de vraag op: 'How many Earths do we need?' om iedere wereldbewoner net zo welvarend te maken als een westerling. Zij schreef:
The world's seven billion people consume varying amounts of the planet's resources. Compare the lifestyle of a subsistence farmer with that of a wealthy city-dweller in a developed country. More land is required to grow the city dweller's food, more materials are used to build the city dweller's home and workplace, more energy is required for transport, heating and cooling… the claim that four Earths would be needed if everyone lived like Americans is still a striking one.
It has been recurring on social media at least since 2012, when science writer Tim De Chant produced this infographic illustrating how much land would be required if seven billion people lived like the populations of nine selected countries from Bangladesh to the United Arab Emirates.
Opmerkelijk is dat dit feit inderdaad telkens via internet terugkeert, terwijl de commerciële massamedia hier soms wel enige aandacht aan besteden maar vervolgens weer overgaan tot de neoliberale orde van de dag, alsof het uitgangspunt van de neoliberale ideologie van de groei blijft deugen. Ditzelfde absurdisme kenmerkt de mentaliteit op de Universiteit van Amsterdam, waar Ruud van Dijk vasthoudt aan het dogma dat 'voor ons in Europa een constructieve, activistische Amerikaanse rol intussen essentieel' is, aangezien het imperium 'de onmisbare ordeningsmogendheid in het internationale systeem' is, en hij het milieu, het massale NAVO-geweld onder aanvoering van de VS, de grootscheepse repressie, en de groeiende kloof tussen arm en rijk simpelweg verzwijgt. Hij weigert te beseffen dat
The notion that the entire world can live at a 20th century American consumption level seems farfetched and unattainable. Yet, it remains the goal of the word's policymakers. Drawing on the work of others, such as former World Bank economist Herman Daly, Roberts suggests that a 'steady state' economy that provides adequate material means for material life and preservation of nature's capital, not mass consumption societies, is the only sustainable economic model.
Waarom besteedde Van Dijk in zijn Volkskrant-betoog hier geen enkele aandacht aan? Het antwoord, zo moet gevreesd worden, is dat de docent geschiedenis van de Universiteit van Amsterdam en zijn 60 witte collega's bij de faculteit geesteswetenschappen, die zich muisstil houden, alleen aandacht hebben voor het rijke westen. De erbarmelijke situatie waarin de drieënhalf miljard armen in de wereld verkeren, spelen voor hen geen doorslaggevende rol. De polder is klein, en maar weinig academici zijn vandaag de dag in staat over de dijken heen te kijken. Vandaar dat een Ruud van Dijk zijn gang kan gaan. Zijn praatjes zijn, in tegenstelling tot de analyses van bijvoorbeeld Herman Daly, niet gebaseerd op empirische feiten en ook theoretisch kloppen ze niet, maar op overleefde cliché's die slechts propagandistische waarde hebben.
In zijn boek Elites and Society (1977) wierp de Britse hoogleraar sociologie. wijlen T. B. Bottomore de onvermijdelijke vraag op:
Can we accept that democratic government, which requires of the individual independent judgement and active participation in deciding important social issues, will flourish when in one of the most important spheres of life — that of work and economic production — the great majority of individuals are denied the opportunity to take an effective part in reaching the decisions which vitally affect their lives. It does not seem to me that a man can live in a condition of complete and unalterable subordination during much of is life, and yet acquire the habits of responsible choice and self-government which political democracy calls for.
Van Dijk beschouwt kennelijk ook deze vraag als irrelevant. Zijn 'orde' is die van de neoliberale elite, en niet die van de wetenschappelijke twijfel. Maar, zoals Bottomore stelde:
Great inequalities of wealth and income plainly influence the extent to which individuals can participate in the activities of ruling the community. A rich man may have difficulty in entering the kingdom of heaven, but he will find it relatively easy to get into the higher councils of a political party, or into some branch of government. Het can also exert an influence on political life in other ways: by controlling media of communication, by making acquaintances in the higher circles of politics, by taking a prominent part in the activities of pressure groups and advisory bodies of one kind or another. A poor man has none of these advantages: he haas no relationships with influential people, he has little time or energy to devote to political activity, and little opportunity to acquire a thorough knowledge of political ideas or facts.The differences which originate in economic inequalities are enhanced by educational differences. In most of the Western democracies the kind of education provided for those classes which mainly provide the rulers of the community is sharply differentiated from that which is provided for the more numerous class of those who are ruled.
En zo is de cirkel weer rond. Het grote gevaar nu is dat juist op het moment dat de mensheid voor het eerst in de geschiedenis wereldwijd wordt geconfronteerd door wezenlijke bedreigingen, het academisch niveau in Nederland almaar blijft zakken, zoals ondermeer aan het optreden van een intellectueel lichtgewicht als Ruud van Dijk te merken is, en aan zijn faculteit geesteswetenschappen van de UVA, die deze propagandist ongestoord zijn gang laat gaan. Een serieuze wetenschapper prikt door de uiterlijke schijn heen, hij is op zoek naar de kern, het wezen der fenomenen, die worden bestudeerd. Dat lukt Van Dijk niet, hij is zelfs niet eens op zoek ernaar. Hij neemt genoegen met de rol van poseur, en zoals mij is opgevallen gaat de poseur er van nature vanuit dat iedereen een poseur is. Ruud van Dijk ontgaat datgene wat C. Wright Mills al meer dan zestig jaar geleden geleden haarscherp ontleedde:
American men of power tend, by convention, to deny that they are powerful. No American runs for office in order to rule or even govern, but only to serve; he does not become bureaucrat or even an official, but a public servant. And nowadays, as I have already pointed out, such postures have become standard features of the public-relations programs of all men of power. So firm a part of the style of power-wielding have they become that conservative writers readily interpret them as indicating a trend toward an 'amorphous power situation.'
But the 'power situation; of America today is less amorphous than is the perspective of those who see it as a romantic confusion. It is less a flat, momentary 'situation' than a grade, durable structure. And if those who occupy its top grades are not omnipotent, neither are they impotent. It is the form and the height of the gradation of power that we must examine if we would understand the degree of power held and exercised by the elite.
Gezien zijn publicaties is docent Ruud van Dijk nog steeds niet begonnen het functioneren van de macht in de neoliberale wanorde te onderzoeken. Waarom zou hij ook, zolang hij met zijn geborneerdheid wegkomt? Hetzelfde autisme treft men in de Nederlandse mainstream journalistiek aan.
De Forever Young-generatie.
If you're lookin' to get silly
You better go back to from where you came
Because the cops don't need you
And man they expect the same
If you're lookin' to get silly
You better go back to from where you came
Because the cops don't need you
And man they expect the same
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