In het essay ‘We Are All Aboard the Pequod’ schreef in 2013 de vooraanstaande voormalige New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges
After the attacks of 9/11, Edward Said saw the parallel with ‘Moby Dick’ and wrote in the London newspaper The Observer:
‘Osama bin Laden’s name and face have become so numbingly familiar to Americans as in effect to obliterate any history he and his shadowy followers might have had before they became stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination. Inevitably, then, collective passions are being funneled into a drive for war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick, rather than what is going on, an imperial power injured for the first time, pursuing its interests systematically in what has become a suddenly reconfigured geography of conflict.’
Ahab, as the historian Richard Slotkin points out in his book ‘Regeneration Through Violence,’ is ‘the true American hero, worthy to be captain of a ship whose “wood could only be American.”’ Melville offers us a vision, one that D.H. Lawrence later understood, of the inevitable fatality of white civilization brought about by our ceaseless lust for material progress, imperial expansion, white supremacy and exploitation of nature.
Melville, who had been a sailor on clipper ships and whalers, was keenly aware that the wealth of industrialized societies came from the exploited of the earth. ‘Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans,’ Ishmael says of New England’s prosperity. ‘One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.’ All the authority figures on the ship are white men — Ahab, Starbuck, Flask and Stubb. The hard, dirty work, from harpooning to gutting the carcasses of the whales, is the task of the poor, mostly men of color. […]
Ahab’s thirst for dominance, vengeance and destruction… overpowers… Hatred wins. ‘What is it,’ Ahab finally asks, ‘what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time…’
Melville knew that physical courage and moral courage are distinct. One can be brave on a whaling ship or a battlefield, yet a coward when called on to stand up to human evil. Starbuck elucidates this peculiar division. The first mate is tormented by his complicity in what he foresees as Ahab’s ‘impious end.’ Starbuck, ‘while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific, because spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man.’
And so we plunge forward in our doomed quest to master the forces that will finally smite us. Those who see where we are going lack the fortitude to rebel. Mutiny was the only salvation for the Pequod’s crew. It is our only salvation. But moral cowardice turns us into hostages.
Moby Dick rams and sinks the Pequod. The waves swallow up Ahab and all who followed him, except one. A vortex formed by the ship’s descent collapses, ‘and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.’
Melville's verwijzing naar ‘vijfduizend jaar geleden’ is niet toevallig. In die tijd ontstonden de eerste imperia die met geweld naar hegemonie streefden, om uiteindelijk betrekkelijk snel ten onder te gaan. In dit opzicht is er niets in de continuïteit van de geschiedenis veranderd. Vandaag de dag manifesteert zich onder de elite dezelfde agressieve, zelfvernietigende drift naar alleenheerschappij. Die irrationele drang werd door Melville beschreven aan de hand van kapitein Achab, wiens obsessief gedrag de bemanning van zijn schip en hemzelf naar de ondergang sleepte. Het is niet verwonderlijk dat een andere prominente oud New York Times-correspondent Stephen Kinzer in 2008 met betrekking tot Moby-Dick erop wees dat
No book more deeply and revealingly explains the spasm of madness through which the United States has passed in recent years than Moby Dick. For generations, it has been considered a masterpiece of world literature, but now can it be seen as an eerily prophetic allegory about 21st-century America. It is now truly the nation's epic…
Consider the novel's plot, and how closely it parallels recent American history. A shocking and disfiguring crime is committed. The victim is unable to understand that the enterprise in which he is engaged helped provoke that crime. Instead of reflecting on his own responsibility, he flails out wildly at the diffuse force he believes must be held responsible.
What was the basis of that enterprise, the reason why Americans like Captain Ahab traveled to the ends of the earth? It was the search for whale oil, and the profits oil would bring.
When Ahab's first mate warns him that the world is full of forces that man cannot control, and that he should not assume he can master them, he replies that he cares nothing for this or any other reality. ‘All visible objects,’ he insists dismissively, ‘are but as pasteboard masks.’ […]
Ahab was a tyrant who combined his business – finding oil – with the blind pursuit of personal vindication. Never was he able to see his plight from any perspective other than his own.
By believing in his own ability to decide what is good and what is evil, Ahab arrogated to himself the role of God. He saw no nuance and appreciated nothing of the world's ambiguity. The biblical injunction ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged’ means nothing to him. He believed absolutely in his own ability to shape the world.
When the whaling ship's crewmen agreed to accompany Ahab across a distant ocean, they knew nothing of the deep malice that festered within him. Having accepted his leadership, however, they followed his orders. Theirs, to paraphrase one of Melville's contemporaries, was not to question why; it was but to do and die.
In the end, Ahab succeeded in destroying his tormenter. His success, however, was overwhelmed by the deaths not only of almost all his crewmen, but of Ahab himself. The captain's blasphemous ambition led him to a fatal embrace with his enemy that killed them both, along with a ship full of innocents. The grandest success of Ahab's life was also his grandest failure because it destroyed both him and those who were foolish enough to trust his judgment. In Moby Dick there are no victors, only victims.
As if all of that were not enough to make this story frighteningly relevant, consider the fantasy that seizes the narrator, Ishmael, as his doomed voyage begins. He imagines the voyage as ‘part of the grand programme of Providence.’ Three aspects of that programme, he suspects, will unfold simultaneously: ‘Grand contested election for the presidency of the United States; whaling voyage by one Ishmael; bloody battle in Afghanistan.’
Moby-Dick gaat over het diep verankerde Amerikaanse geloof in ‘manifest destiny’ en ‘exceptionalisme,’ de gedachte dat de VS door God dan wel de Natuur is voorbestemd de toekomst van de mensheid te bepalen. Deze veronderstelling leeft onder zowel Republikeinen als Democraten, zoals weer eens duidelijk werd toen president Obama in 2015 tegenover afgestuurde cadetten van de militaire academie Westpoint trots verklaarde: ‘I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.’ De elite in de VS wordt gedreven door de mythe dat de VS uniek is en superieur aan de rest van de wereld.
Champions of American exceptionalism hold that because of its national credo, historical evolution, and unique origens, America is a special nation with a special role — possibly ordained by God — to play in human history. The belief in American exceptionalism is a fundamental aspect of U.S. cultural capital and national identity. It is an essential part of America’s political, cultural, and social DNA,
aldus de Amerikaanse academici David Weiss en Jason A. Edwards in de introductie van de bundel kritische essays The Rhetoric of American Exceptionalism (2011). Maar dit dogma is niet uniek voor de VS, elk imperium was de geschiedenis door ervan overtuigd superieur te zijn aan alle anderen op aarde. Het enige wezenlijke verschil met vroeger is dat de VS beschikt over een uitgebreid arsenaal van chemische, biologische en nucleaire wapens om hun hegemonie af te dwingen. Wanneer het erop aankomt zijn hoge Amerikaanse militairen bereid nucleaire wapens in te zetten. Zo benadrukte luchtmacht-generaal Curtis LeMay, tijdens het hoogtepunt van de Koude Oorlog vier jaar lang ‘Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force’ dat ‘there may be times when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons.’ Om een nucleair armageddon mogelijk te maken reorganiseerde LeMay ‘the Strategic Air Command (SAC) into an effective instrument of nuclear war.’ Daarmee was de toon gezet, zoals twee decennia later bleek toen het gezaghebbende Britse tijdschrift de New Statesman van 4 december 1987 onthulde:
There have been two recent subtle changes to [NATO’s] approach. Until last year, it was assumed that NATO would hold back until facing defeat in a conventional war before escalating to nuclear weapons. Now, however, early use is the policy. Nuclear planners at NATO Head Quarters talk openly of demonstrations shots with nuclear weapons at the beginning of the hostilities. General Bernard Rogers, who recently retired as NATO commander, admitted this shift to early use to nuclear weapons in an interview with ‘International Defence Review' last year. He told IDR that he is instructed by his political masters: ‘before you lose the cohesiveness of the alliance — that is before you are subject to [conventional Soviet military] penetration on a fairly broad scale — you will request, not you may, but you will request the use of nuclear weapons.
Oliver Ramsbotham. Modernizing Nato’s Nuclear Weapons. 1989
The US wants to modernize nuclear bombs stationed in Europe in a way many experts call the equivalent of creating a new weapon. Critics believe the move violates pledges by President Obama he would not develop new nukes.
December 2015 werd bekend dat de ‘total cost’ van de geplande vernieuwing van het Amerikaanse nucleaire arsenaal ‘the next 30 years’ volgens drie ‘independent estimates’ rond de één ‘trillion’ dollar zal bedragen, oftewel een miljoen maal een miljoen dollar. Gezien ook het feit dat de VS sinds de val van de Sovjet Unie de Russische Federatie geheel heeft omsingeld met militaire bases, sommigen ervan uitgerust met nucleaire wapens, en ‘The U.S. military in the process [is] of modernizing all of its existing strategic delivery systems and refurbishing the warheads they carry to last for the next 30-50 years,’ zal Moskou zich in geval van een oorlog gedwongen zien sneller kernwapens in te zetten. Zeker zodra hun conventionele strijdkrachten verliezen van de NAVO, waarvan het budget 13 keer hoger is dan dat van het Russische militaire apparaat. De hegemonie zal op den duur onvermijdelijk worden uitgevochten ten koste van miljoenen, zo niet miljarden burgers, en van de beschaving.
‘Der Wille zur Macht,’ die Nietzsche beschouwde als de belangrijkste drijfveer in het hele universum, zal -- als het niet ingetoomd wordt door rationaliteit -- het einde van de mensheid betekenen. Vandaar dat Melville’s Moby-Dick zo’n belangrijk visionair boek is. Kritische Amerikaanse intellectuelen zijn hier diep van doordrongen, hoewel het pas na de dood van Melville was dat het lezerspubliek in de VS doorkreeg hoe geniaal Herman Melville de ‘gloomy’toekomst van zijn land had voorspeld. Naar aanleiding van de ontploffing op het BP-booreiland Deepwater Horizonin april 2010, waarbij 11 doden vielen ‘and leading to the largest oil spill in United States history,’ schreef de New York Times-journalist Randy Kennedy dat
Andrew Delbanco, the director of Columbia University’s American studies program and the author of “Melville: His World and Work,” said, ‘It’s irresistible to make the analogy between the relentless hunt for whale oil in Melville’s day and for petroleum in ours.’ Melville’s story ‘is certainly, among many other things, a cautionary tale about the terrible cost of exploiting nature for human wants,’ he said. ‘It’s a story about self-destruction visited upon the destroyer — and the apocalyptic vision at the end seems eerily pertinent to today.’ […]
much like the modern petroleum industry — which began in the late 1850s, making it only slightly younger than Melville’s novel — whaling quickly came up against the limits of its resources. Hunting grounds near North America were wiped out by the early 19th century. And the lengths to which ships had to go to continue to find them led to the event that inspired ‘Moby-Dick,’ the sinking in 1820 of the whaling ship Essex, which was rammed by a sperm whale in the South Pacific, more than 10,000 miles from home. One of the great underlying themes of ‘Moby-Dick,’ Mr. Delbanco observed, ‘is that people ashore don’t want to know about the ugly things that go on at sea.’ […]
in the same way whalers had to sail farther and farther for their prey, oil companies are drilling deeper and deeper to tap the gulf’s oil, to levels made possible only by the most advanced technology, operating near its limits. The Coast Guard has warned that this technology has outpaced not only government oversight but — as events have shown — the means of correcting catastrophic failures. An admonition from Nietzsche that Mr. Hoare (auteur van ‘The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea.’ svh) cites in reference to ‘Moby-Dick’ seems just as pertinent to the spill: ‘And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.’
‘We want our comforts but we don’t want to know too much about where they come from or what makes them possible.’ He added: ‘The oil spill in the gulf is a horror, but how many Americans are ready to pay more for oil or for making the public investment required to develop alternative energy? I suspect it’s a question that Melville would be asking of us now.’
In reactie op Kennedy’s artikel merkte een lezer op:
By drawing the parallels between the Deepwater Horizon and the Pequod, as well as the industries and economic imperatives that caused them to be, your article reminds us that a mid-19th-century genius like Herman Melville has something to say about the events and disasters of the early 21st century because the elements of nature and the qualities of human nature that govern such activities have not changed in the intervening 150 years.
Readers might be interested to know, however, that Melville’s affinity with current times was not limited to monumental sea disasters. In ‘Loomings,’ the famous first chapter of ‘Moby-Dick,’ Ishmael explains that he is compelled by fate to go to sea. Conceiving his whaling trip as a small interlude between major acts played out on the stage of human history, he lists “Whaling voyage by one Ishmael” between ‘Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States’ and ‘Bloody Battle in Afghanistan.’
While Melville could not have known the particulars of Bush versus Gore and the current campaign in Afghanistan, he knew well the forces that shape our history.
Carl Valvo
Concord, Mass., June 13, 2010
Een andere lezer merkte op:
‘The Ahab Parallax’ could have mentioned a haunting line from ‘Moby-Dick’ that fits the present even better than it did the world of whalers:
‘For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s blood was spilled for it.’
David Singerman
Cambridge, Mass., June 13, 2010
De pathologische wil tot heersen is evenwel niet alleen desastreus voor de natuur geweest, zoals de klimaatverandering aantoont, maar tevens voor de mens die langere tijd dacht zich boven de natuur te hebben verheven door domweg de logische natuurwetten te negeren. ‘Moby-Dick’ is het boek over de moderne westerling, de Amerikaan voorop, wiens hoogmoed zijn eigen ondergang bewerkstelligt. Dit proces versnelt zich in de totalitaire technocratie die over de postmoderne westerling heerst.
Omdat het militair-industrieel complex de huidige politiek dicteert dient de westerse elite en haar woordvoerders de burger permanent te mobiliseren. Dit gebeurt het meest succesvol door voortdurend op angsten in te spelen, dus door berichten in de mainstream media als deze:
NATO Commander: Russia uses Syrian refugees as 'weapon' against West.
NATO's top commander in Europe, Philip Breedlove, made the claim about the migration crisis during US Senate testimony. He also warned lawmakers that Russia posed a renewed existential threat to the US and its allies… ‘Together, Russia and the Assad regime are deliberately weaponizing migration in an attempt to overwhelm European structures and break European resolve,’ Breedlove told the Senate Armed Services Committee…
‘Russia has chosen to be an adversary and poses a long-term existential threat to the United States and to our European allies and partners,’ Breedlove said.
Terwijl het expansionisme van de VS sinds de val van de Sovjet-Unie almaar bleef doorgaan, zodat de VS nu over meer dan 800 militaire bases, verspreid over de hele wereld, wordt de massa verteld dat Rusland ‘expansionistisch’is, een leugen die in Nederland klakkeloos verspreid wordt door opiniemakers als Geert Mak en Henk Hofland, die nooit publiekelijk in debat zullen gaan met geïnformeerde waarnemers, omdat ze maar al te goed weten dat hun argumenten inhoudsloos zijn en dan hun aanzien verliezen en daarmee hun inkomen. Geen van mijn collega’s zullen een dergelijke confrontatie durven te organiseren. Ze kijken wel uit, de mainstream journalistiek is tot op het bot gecorrumpeerd. De gevolgen van de domheid en misdadigheid is sinds de twintigste eeuw letterlijk en figuurlijk grenzeloos. Geen mens op aarde kan de consequenties van schurken als 'NATO-commander' Breedlove, en in zijn voetspoor Mak en Hofland, ontvluchten. Voor het eerst in de geschiedenis is ieder mens op aarde volkomen overgeleverd aan de terreur van de macht. In het kader van De Vooruitgang moet elke wereldburger voortdurend fysiek en psychisch gemobiliseerd blijven tegen de zelfgekozen vermeende vijand, en de commerciële massamedia zien erop toe dat de status-quo van de angst intact blijft. Dat is hun belangrijkste taak geworden. Het was dan ook ‘the imperial messenger’ Thomas Friedman, de meest bekende opiniemaker van de New York Times die in zijn krant de lezers uitlegde dat
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.
Wat ‘onze’ opiniemakers werkelijk waard zijn bleek opnieuw toen bestseller-auteur Geert Mak zonder enige gêne in 2012 publiekelijk liet weten:
Ik vind Friedman altijd wel leuk om te lezen, lekker upbeat, hij is zo’n man die altijd wel een gat ziet om een probleem op te lossen.
Mak's 'optimisme' is dat van de beulsknecht en de folteraar die na een dag te hebben gemoord en gemarteld tevreden naar huis gaan om daar opgeruimd, zonder een greintje gewetensnood, hun buik vol te proppen. De Makkianen en Hoflanden kennen hun marktwaarde tot op de cent. Net als een prostituee weet hoeveel ze voor haar lichaam kan vragen, zo weet de opiniemaker wat de marktwaarde van zijn geest is.
Geert Mak: Ik vind Friedman altijd wel leuk om te lezen, lekker upbeat, hij is zo’n man die altijd wel een gat ziet om een probleem op te lossen.
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