Vluchtelingenstroom 113

In the Middle Ages priests spoke only of the afterlife, hardly bothering to prove that a sincere Christian might prove happy here. But American preachers return constantly to this world and have some difficulty in detaching their gaze from it. So as to touch their listeners more profoundly, they show them every day how religious belief is beneficial to freedom and public order. It is often hard to know from listening to them whether the main intention of religion is to obtain everlasting joy in the next world or prosperity in this.

Alexis de Tocqueville. Democracy in America. 1840

Op 17 augustus 1858 verklaarde de latere Amerikaanse president Abraham Lincoln over de grondleggers van de republiek dat zij

grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity (nageslacht. svh). They erected a beacon to guide their children and their children's children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity (welvaart. svh) to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began — so that truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being built.

Tegenover de Zeeuwse literair periodiek Ballustrada zei de dichter Hans Verhagen, die in 2009 de P.C. Hooft-prijs ontving, dat ‘één van de aardige dingen’ in de jaren zestig was ‘dat er een eerste poging werd gedaan tot verzet tegen de ziekte van de normalisering.’ Doe maar normaal dan doe je al gek genoeg is de houding die de mens zijn individualiteit ontneemt. ‘In een klein dichtbevolkt land is de neiging tot overzichtelijk indelen… sterk aanwezig,’ zei Verhagen en hij vervolgde met de opmerking dat ‘als je protesteert’ je dan onherroepelijk ‘de kans’ loopt ‘een querulant te worden genoemd of een zijkertje, die graag wil opvallen. Dan pas je niet meer in de groep, iets waar we vroeger trots op waren, maar dat nu gezien wordt als iets dat je welzijn kan schaden.’

In zijn roman De Conformist (1951) beschreef de Italiaanse auteur Alberto Moravia zijn hoofdpersoon als een man die ‘tot elke prijs’ streefde ‘naar normaliteit; een wil tot aanpassing aan een algemeen aanvaarde norm, een verlangen om gelijk te zijn aan alle anderen, omdat anders-zijn hetzelfde was als schuldig zijn.’ Dit vurige verlangen veroorzaakte ‘een zucht tot behagen die aan slaafsheid of aan koketterie grensde,’ en resulteerde in collaboratie met het fascisme, een ideologie waarin de conformist weliswaar niet geloofde, maar die hem wel een normale baan gaf, een functie en daarmee een valse identiteit. In dit verband is het weliswaar niet vreemd dat het poldermodel-denken eindigt in collaboratie dat in crisistijd op bloedbaden uitloopt. De identiteitsloze dient daarom altijd gewantrouwd te worden. 

Vladimir Golstein, hoogleraar Slavische Studies aan de Brown Universiteit op Rhode Island, schreef op de website Russian Insider van zaterdag 25 juni 2016 met betrekking tot de bewering van de Amerikaanse neoconservatieve ideoloog Fukuyama dat na de val van de Sovjet Unie het neoliberalisme had gewonnen en de hele mensheid ‘het einde van de geschiedenis’ meemaakte:

it is clear that Francis Fukuyama triumphant pronouncement was a bit premature, to say the least. The stubborn world balked immediately, yet, those who resisted it were located at the outskirts of the new empire. Their concerns were dismissed, while they themselves were demonized and destined to be conquered. Looked objectively, the amount of demons popping up all over the world was pushed beyond any credibility: Milosevic, Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Assad, Hugo Chavez, Putin. The presence of these demons did not challenge the narrative of the end of history in a meaningful way. Demons are viewed as historical aberration; their fate is to be exorcised.

The Brexit, on the other hand, announced the renewal of history loud and clear. The message was delivered from within. Not from the backward barbarians trying to resist the enlightened and beneficial rule, but from very heart of the new empire. This time, it is the populace of the empire that have resisted, and decided that the imposition of the will of some faceless bureaucrats in Brussels serving the interests of Washington and its misguided rulers was too getting too heavy and burdensome.

British citizens recognized that, which was long clear to the conquered barbarians. They saw that despite the rhetoric, the empire does not really serve them, that it serves the notorious 1% instead. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with the onslaught of the shock capitalism and globalism, all hell broke lose. It became fashionable to promote greed, unscrupulous careerism, and blatant disregard for others. Who cares? And if the workers complained, the ideological apparatus was ready to point to the sad example of the Soviets: do you want this drab, bleak socialism, without toilet paper and consumer goods? Is that what you want?

This dismissal of common men’s concerns, this peddling of naïve hope that the new rulers would somehow take care of the weak and the poor, rather than the rich and the powerful, has finally began to sink in the minds of the British voters, at least in the minds of ‘the weak and poor’ part of it, which, thanks to the efforts of the elites has been multiplying exponentially.

People in England understood that the consumer driving economy needs consumers rather than the dole recipients, the slaves who are silenced by bread and circus. It is becoming clearer by the day that the taxes and profits should go for the development of science, technology, new jobs, rather than acquiring private islands, beating the drums of war and demonizing foreign countries. People sensed it. They might be not always sophisticated enough to understand the academic arguments about foreign policy or bond yields, but they know well enough that with the lack of competition, it is the incompetent, greedy and well-connected people who get on top, that this situation generates incompetence, that the new elite is becoming way too cozy with the equally incompetent bankers and equally incompetent military industrial complex.

http://russia-insider.com/en/brexit-signals-end-neocons-end-history/ri15213?utm_source=Russia+Insider+Daily+Headlines&utm_campaign=36c0d95478-Russia_Insider_Daily_Headlines11_21_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c626db089c-36c0d95478-227211645&ct=t(Russia_Insider_Daily_Headlines11_21_2014)&mc_cid=36c0d95478&mc_eid=c046c6b41c 

Op haar beurt stelde de Amerikaanse hoogleraar Wendy Brown in haar boek Undoing the Demos. Neoliberalism’s Stealth revolution (2015) met betrekking tot het aloude verschijnsel van ‘scapegoating,’ het bombarderen van een onschuldige tot ‘zondebok’:

the victim is a substitute for all the members of the community, offered up by the members themselves. The sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence; it prompts the entire community to choose victims outside itself. The elements of dissension  (onenigheid. svh) scattered through the community are drawn to the person of the sacrificial victim and eliminated, at least temporarily, by its sacrifice. 

So, who or what might be the object of substitution in neoliberal citizen sacrifice? What ‘internal tensions, feuds, and rivalries’ is sacrifice absorbing from the community? What are the ‘elements of dissension scattered throughout the community’ temporarily eliminated or displaced by the call to sacrifice? Might interpellation by the call to sacrifice repress political dissension or uprising? Alternatively, perhaps ‘shared sacrifice’ inverts while sustaining the general logic… instead of preserving the community through sacrifice of a victim outside of it, the whole community is called to sacrifice in order not save particular elements within it. Thus for example, rage appropriately directed at investment banks is redirected into a call tor shared sacrifice undertaken by their victims. This would seem to be exactly the logic that Occupy was seeking to expose and reverse in its attempt to hold the banks, rather than the people, responsible for creating an unsustainable debt-based economy. 

Maar de schatrijke westerse elite en haar woordvoerders in de ‘corporate media’ accepteren deze logica absoluut niet, en wel omdat het winstprincipe heilig is verklaard. Ook al levert dit grondbeginsel geen werk op en dupeert het steeds grotere groepen burgers, dan nog rust een taboe op het schenden van het axioma, net zoals in de middeleeuwen er een heilig verbod stond op twijfel aan het bestaan van god. Wat dit betreft verkeert de postmoderne burger in dezelfde positie als een veertiende-eeuwse boer. Nog steeds zal de macht tot het uiterste gaan om haar belangen te verdedigen, inclusief het demonieren van dissidenten en het sanctioneren van grootscheepse moordpartijen. De Amerikaanse politiek wetenschapper, C. Douglas Lummis, een voormalige marinier en hoogleraar, over wie Susan Sontag heeft opgemerkt dat hij ‘one of the most thoughtful, honorable, and relevant intellectuals writing about democratic practice anywhere in the world,’ terwijl Karel van Wolferen hem betitelde als een ‘eminent observer of the American-Japanese vassalage relationship,’ merkte het volgende op:

It is a scandal in contemporary international law, don’t forget, that while ‘wanton (moedwillige. svh) destruction of towns, cities and villages’ is a war crime of long standing, the bombing of cities from airplanes goes not only unpunished but virtually unaccused. Air bombardment is state terrorism, the terrorism of the rich. It has burned up and blasted apart more innocents in the past six decades than have all the antistate terrorists who ever lived. Something has benumbed (verlamd. svh) our consciousness against this reality. In the United States we would not consider for the presidency a man who had once thrown a bomb into a crowded restaurant, but we are happy to elect a man who once dropped bombs from airplanes that destroyed not only restaurants but the buildings that contained them and the neighborhoods that surrounded them. I went to Iraq after the Gulf war and saw for myself what the bombs did; ‘wanton destruction’ is just the term for it. 

Desondanks sprak wijlen Henk Hofland in dit soort gevallen van ‘het vredestichtende Westen’ dat kennelijk vanuit altruïstische motieven miljoenen mensen heeft vermoord of verminkt, daarbij gesteund en soms zelfs toegejuicht door de mainstream-pers die zich maar al te graag voor het karretje van macht laat spannen. Hofland,  in de polder uitgegroeid tot een journalistiek ijkpunt van de hoogste orde, pleitte nog in 2012 voor NAVO-bombardementen op Syrië om het Assad-regime te verdrijven, waardoor, zoals nu alom bekend is, islamitische terroristen aan de macht zouden komen. Dat zowel Afghanistan, Irak, en Libië door de westerse terreur in totale chaos waren gedompeld was ‘de beste journalist van de twintigste eeuw’ natuurlijk niet ontgaan, maar iemand moest geofferd worden voor het failliete neoliberalisme. Dat het Amerikaanse militair-industrieel complex overeind moet blijven, is één van de belangrijkste geloofsartikelen van de westerse ‘vrije pers.’  Er moet geofferd worden, de god van het geweld en het geld is onverzadigbaar, en zijn positie is onaantastbaar. Wendy Brown:

Religious sacrifice often aims not only to nourish or propitiate (gunstig stemmen. svh) the gods, but to rebalance the forces of life and common existence. Girard (prominente Franse antropoloog. svh) insists that ‘the purpose of sacrifice is to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric.’ What is the disharmony or torn social fabric at stake in the call to sacrifice in contemporary neoliberal regimes? Is it only fiscal and economic? Does it concern only debt, spending, or even improperly regulated financial institutions? Perhaps there is also at stake a crisis in values, a crisis in the identity or promise of the polity (staat. svh), even a crisis of democracy. Refusal of the encomium (lofrede. svh) to sacrifice might productively reveal these other crises and in so doing, challenge their neoliberalized form. 

Waar geofferd wordt, dienen er zondebokken te worden aangewezen. Het spreekt voor zich dat de machtigen zelf nooit kunnen worden geofferd. Ze zouden anders nooit de macht hebben geambieerd. Op mijn collega’s van de mainstream-pers na en ideologische malloten in het universitaire wereldje weet iedereen dit. Professor Brown wijst er dan ook op dat het kenmerk bij uitstek van patriottisme is

the willingness to risk life, which is why soldiers in battle remain its enduring icon and why Socrates rendered acceptance of his death sentence as ultimate proof of his loyalty to Athens and compared himself to a soldier when doing so. Today, as economic metrics have saturated the state and the national purpose, the neoliberal citizen need not stoically risk death on the battlefield, only bear up uncomplainingly in the face of unemployment, underemployment, or employment unto death. The properly interpellated neoliberal citizen makes no claims for protection against capitalism's suddenly burst bubbles, job-shedding recessions, credit crunches, and housing market collapses, its appetites for outsourcing or the discovery of pleasure and profit in betting against itself or betting on catastrophe. This citizen also accepts neoliberalism's intensification of inequalities as basic to capitalism's health — comprising the subpoverty wages of the many and the bloated compensation of bankers, CEOs, and even managers of public institutions and comprising as well reduced access of the poor and middle class to formerly public goods, now privatized. This citizen releases state, law, and economy from responsibility for and responsiveness to its own condition and predicaments (netelige posities. svh) and is ready when called to sacrifice to the cause of economic growth, competitive positioning and fiscal constraints. 

Desondanks steekt vandaag de dag het verzet tegen het neoliberale mens- en wereldbeeld voorzichtig de kop op. De meest opvallende reactie van de elite en haar ‘vrije pers’ hierop is de aan hysterie grenzende woede en zelfs haat tegen de eigen burgers zodra die zich niet langer meer neerleggen bij de dictaten van een totalitaire kongsi, bestaande uit hoge bureaucraten, politieke voormannen, en de financiële/economische macht, die zonder enige democratische controle de koers van de technocratie bepaalt. ‘Geen Jorwert zonder Brussel’ wordt door de gedupeerden, de werklozen, de armen, de overtolligen, niet gezien als een wervende slogan, maar als datgene wat zij is: een heldere samenvatting van de werkelijke machtsverhoudingen, waarbij zowel ‘Jorwert' zonder 'Brussel’ als ‘Jorwert’ met ‘Brussel’ ten dode zijn opgeschreven. Terecht werpt Wendy Brown de vraag op:

does a political rationality originally born in opposition to fascism turn out to mirror certain aspects of it, albeit through powers that are faceless… They appear as well in the growing devaluation of politics, publics, intellectuals, educated citizenship, and all collective purposes apart from economy and security. 

This is the order of things challenged by the protests of recent years against austerity measures and privatization. In place of the image of the nation (or of Europe) on the model of the firm, these protests often struggle to revive the image of the nation as res publica,       ala public thing, and of the people as a living political body. Ironically, these protests emerge in part from the broken solidarities of neoliberalism. The ’99 percent’ that Occupy claimed to represent, for example, was not founded on associations of workers, students, consumers, welfare clients, or debtors. Rather, Occupy in fall 2011 was a public coalescing and uprising of solidarities dismantled and citizenries fragmented and dispersed by neoliberal rationality. This eruption, like those in Southern Europe in 2012 or Turkey, Brazil, and Bulgaria in spring 2013, repossessed private space as public space, occupied what is owned, and above all, rejected the figure of citizenship reduced to sacrificial human capital and neoliberal capitalism as a life-sustaining sacred power. It sought to reclaim the political voice hushed by those figures. But a voice on behalf of what future? 

Die vraag is daarom zo belangrijk omdat degenen die eind jaren zestig begin jaren zeventig voor politiek-links doorgingen, en daar hun aanzien aan ontleenden, geen alternatief hebben voor de huidige fase van het kapitalisme. Zelfs hun verbeeldingskracht is gekoloniseerd. Professor Brown beschrijft onder de tussenkop ‘DESPAIR: IS ANOTHER WORLD POSSIBLE?’ het volgende:

The Euro-Atlantic Left today is often depicted, from within and without, as beset by a predicament without precedent: we know what is wrong with this world, but cannot articulate a road out or a viable global alternative. Lacking a vision to replace those that foundered (vergingen. svh) on the shoals (klippen. svh) of repression and corruption in the twentieth century, we are reduced to reform and resistance — the latter being a favored term today in part because it permits action as reaction, rather than as crafting an alternative. While the Left opposes an order animated by profit instead of the thriving of the earth and its inhabitants, it is not clear today how such thriving could be obtained and organized. Capitalist globalization, which Marx imagined would yield a class that would universalize itself by inverting its denigration into shared power and freedom, has yielded instead paralyzing conundrums (verwarrende en moeilijke vraagstukken. svh): What alternative planetary economic and political order(s) could foster freedom, equality, community, and earthly sustainability and also avoid domination by massive administrative apparatuses, complex markets, and the historically powerful peoples and parts of the globe? What alternative global economic system and political arrangements would honor regional historical, cultural, and religious differences? Within such arrangements, what or who would make and enforce decisions about production, distribution, consumption, and resource utilization, about population thresholds, species coexistence, and earthly finitude (eindigheid. svh)? How to use the local knowledges and achieve the local control essential to human thriving and ecological stewardship in the context of any worldwide economic system? How to prevent rogue subversions without military repression or prevent corruption and graft (omkoperij. svh) without surveillance and policing? Whither (waarheen met. svh) the nation-state or international law? 

Ondermeer de auteur en New York Times-columnist Roger Cohen gaf op 24 juni 2016 in zijn krant het volgende voorbeeld van de impasse waarin zowel de elite als de bevolking is geraakt:

The British have given the world’s political, financial and business establishment a massive kick in the teeth by voting to leave the European Union, a historic decision that will plunge Britain into uncertainty for years to come and reverses the integration on which the Continent’s stability has been based.

Warnings about the dire consequences of a British exit from President Barack Obama, Britain’s political leaders, major corporations based in Britain and the International Monetary Fund proved useless. If anything, they goaded a mood of defiant anger against those very elites.

This resentment has its roots in many things but may be summed up as a revolt against global capitalism. To heck with the experts and political correctness was the predominant mood in the end. A majority of Britons had no time for the politicians that brought the world a disastrous war in Iraq, the 2008 financial meltdown, European austerity, stagnant working-class wages, high immigration and tax havens for the super-rich.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/25/opinion/britains-brexit-leap-in-the-dark.html?_r=0 

Hoewel de woordvoerders van de elite in de mainstream-media doorgaans hierover zwijgen speelt het volgende een doorslaggevende rol op de achtergrond en achter gesloten deuren:

Leaving the European Union, the UK ends its ‘special relationship’ with the United States. But London is also a member of the agreement of the ‘Five Eyes’ from the Atlantic Charter and co-founder of NATO (the British share all information concerning the Stay Behind network). Releasing the UK therefore means the collapse of the entire Anglo-Saxon system of world domination.

The National Security Council of the United States has developed a plan to secure the UK to Atlantic structures. It was decided to do everything to prevent the Downing Street appointment of the Conservative Brexit leader, Boris Johnson, and to promote a ‘consensus’ personality able to ‘reconcile’ the British. This personality would negotiate the terms of the exit from the European Union. For its part, the Union would propose to replace the current agreements with almost identical provisions. Following this process, the United Kingdom would have lost his seat on the European Council, but would remain de facto in the Common Market.

President Obama has appointed the German Chancellor Angela Merkel to conduct operations within the EU and George Osborne, the current number two of the Government to organize the ’consensus’ in the UK. Already, Prime Minister David Cameron has refused to resign before the US presidential election, while the Scottish Executive and the European press highlight the risk of secession to justify the call for a ‘consensus personality. ‘

The European Council was convened by the President of the Union, Donald Tusk, June 29, in the presence of the Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg.

http://www.voltairenet.org/article192532.html 

Nu jaarlijks meer dan 50 procent van het zogeheten ‘discretionary’ federale budget van de VS naar het militair-industrieel complex gaat kan het niemand verbazen dat dit complex, waarvoor president Eisenhower al in 1961 waarschuwde, een alles bepalende macht bezit. Zo mogelijk nog gevaarlijker, is het feit dat het militair-industrieel complex vijanden en oorlogen moet creëren om zijn bestaan te rechtvaardigen. Het gevolg is dat de elite en hun 'poortwachters' de bevolking tracht te mobiliseren voor een gewapend conflict met allereerst de Russische Federatie en daarna China, de inmiddels grootste economische macht in de wereld. Dat een dergelijke confrontatie niet anders kan aflopen dan in een nucleair conflict is onder deskundigen algemeen bekend, maar wordt door mijn collega’s van de ‘corporate media’ angstvallig verzwegen. Juni 2016 benadrukte de Amerikaanse auteur en journalist Eric Margolis dat

War with Russia appears increasingly likely as the US and its NATO satraps continue their military provocations of Moscow.

As dangers mount,  our foolish politicians should all be forced to read, and then re-read, Prof. Christopher Clark’s magisterial book, ‘The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914.’ What is past increasingly appears prologue.

Prof. Clark carefully details how small cabals of anti-German senior officials in France, Britain and Russia  engineered World War I, a dire conflict that was unnecessary, idiotic, and illogical. Germany and Austria-Hungary, of course, share some the blame, but to a much lesser degree than the bellicose French, Serbs, Russians and British.

We are seeing the same process at work today. The war party in Washington, backed by the military-industrial complex, the tame media, and the neocons, are agitating hard for war. 

US and NATO combat forces are being sent to Russia’s western borders in Ukraine, the Baltic, and the Black Sea. NATO is arming, financing ($40 billion so far) and supplying Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. Prominent Americans are calling for the US to attack Russian forces in Syria. US warships are off Russia’s coasts in the Black Sea, Baltic, and Pacific. NATO air forces are probing Russia’s western air borders.

Some of this is great power shadow boxing, trying to cow insubordinate Russia into accepting Washington’s orders. But much appears to be the work of the hard right and neocons in the US and Europe in spite of the desire of most Americans and Europeans to avoid armed conflict with Russia.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/eric-margolis/war-russia-coming/ 

Wat de inzet van die oorlog is, formuleerde de Amerikaanse voormalige minister van Buitenlandse Zaken en één van ’s werelds meest gezaghebbende geopolitieke deskundigen, dr. Henry Kissinger, toen hij in juni 2015 waarschuwde dat ‘breaking Russia has become an objective’ van de beleidsbepalers van de Amerikaanse buitenlandse politiek. Zaterdag 18 juni 2016 maakte de BBC het volgende bekend: 

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has warned Nato against ‘warmongering,’ after it conducted military exercises in Eastern Europe.

Mr Steinmeier said that extensive Nato manoeuvres launched this month were counterproductive to regional security and could inflame tensions with Russia.

He urged the Nato military alliance to replace the exercises with more dialogue and co-operation with Russia.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36566422 

Tegelijkertijd wordt de hele mensheid bedreigd door de desastreuze gevolgen van de klimaatverandering, nemen wereldwijd de militairen uitgaven toe, groeit overal de kloof tussen rijk en arm, en dijt de macht almaar uit van de fascistoïde neoliberale technocratie, bereid om in het uiterste geval miljarden mensen te offeren. Wendy Brown concludeert dan ook dat

answers have been thin. However, the Left is not alone in faltering before the task of crafting, in ideas or institutions, a realizable alternative future trajectory. Rather, the Left's predicament refracts a ubiquitous(alom verbreid. svh), if unavowed (niet algemeen erkend. svh) , exhaustion and despair in Western civilization. At the triumphal ‘end of history’ in the West, most have ceased to believe in the human capacity to craft and sustain a world that is humane, free, sustainable, and, above all, modestly under human control. This loss of conviction about the human capacity to craft and steer its existence or even to secure its future is the most profound and devastating sense in which modernity is ‘over.’ Neoliberalism's perverse theology of markets rests on this land of scorched belief in the modern. Ceding all power to craft the future to markets, it insists that markets ‘know best,’ even if, in the age of financialization, markets do not and must not know at all, and the hidden hand has gone permanently missing.

Neoliberal rationality did not germinate (doen ontspruiten. svh) this civilizational despair. However, its figuration of the human, its reality principle, and its worldview — ‘there is no alternative’ — consecrates, deepens, and naturalizes without acknowledging this despair. In letting markets decide our present and future, neoliberalism wholly abandons the prospect of individual or collective mastery of existence. The neoliberal solution to problems is always more markets, more complete markets, more perfect markets, more financialization, new technologies, new ways to monetize. Anything but collaborative and contestatory (betwistbare. svh) human decision making, control over the conditions of existence, planning for the future; anything but deliberate constructions of existence through democratic discussion, law, policy. Anything but the human knowledge, deliberation, judgment, and action classically associated with homo politicus. 

De gewone mens zelf is een overtollige voetnoot geworden. Het wachten is op de onvermijdelijke nucleaire holocaust. Het Westen heeft zichzelf, na vijf eeuwen wereldwijd genocidaal geweld dat eindigde in Auschwitz en Hiroshima, volledig uitgeput. Het is moe en verveeld. De tijdgeest is die van het nihilisme. Knocking on heaven’s door. That long black cloud is coming down. Yes it is. Wat we dreigen mee te maken is The End of History, maar dan heel anders dan Fukuyama het zich heeft voorgesteld. 

George Orwell zette uiteen dat de moderne oorlog bedoeld is om

de speciale geestelijke atmosfeer in stand te houden, die een hierarchische maatschappij nodig heeft. De oorlog, zo zal men zien, is nu een zuiver binnenlandse aangelegenheid. In het verleden bestreden de heersende groepen van alle landen elkaar ook echt, al mochten zij inzien, dat zij een gemeenschappelijk belang hadden en daarom de vernietigende werking van de oorlog zouden moeten beperken, en de overwinnaar altijd de overwonnene plunderde. In onze eigen tijd vechten zij helemaal niet tegen elkaar. De oorlog wordt door iedere heersende groep gevoerd tegen de eigen onderdanen en het doel van de oorlog is niet om gebiedsoverwinningen te maken of te voorkomen, maar om de structuur der samenleving is stand te houden... 

Oorlog is een methode tot het verbrijzelen, of tot het in de lucht laten vliegen, of tot het laten zinken in de diepte der zee van materialen, die anders gebruikt zouden kunnen worden om de massa's te veel gemak te verschaffen en daardoor op de lange duur te intelligent te maken.