Ontheemd. We zijn allemaal ontheemd. Dat schreef ik drie jaar geleden in mijn column op BNR. We zijn als land op weg naar waar we nog niet waren. Terwijl onze natuur is om terug te willen naar hoe we denken dat het vroeger was. Het vroeger uit onze herinnering, toen alles beter was.
Marianne Zwagerman. 2018
Opiniemaker Ian Buruma schreef in The New York Review of Books van 11 april 2002 onder de kop ‘The Blood Lust of Identity’ in een bespreking van het boek In the Name of Identity. Violence and the Need to Belong (1996) van de Libanees/Franse auteur Amin Maalouf:
He mentions various reasons why people fear for their sense of belonging: globalization, the erosion of national sovereignty, Western domination over the last three hundred years, the collapse of failed secular regimes.
All these reasons deserve consideration, but none explains the extraordinary bloodlust of identity warriors. Sadism must play a part. Once their basest instincts are given the official nod, some people feel a sense of pleasure, even liberation. The degradation of one’s victims, stripped of their identity, is a way to sooth one’s conscience. This results in a ghastly paradox: the more brutal the method of slaughter, the easier it is on the killers, for the victims are no longer regarded as fully human.
But sadism cannot explain everything. Maalouf observes that mass murder can seem entirely legitimate to people who feel that their community is under threat. He writes: ‘Even when they commit massacres they are convinced they are merely doing what is necessary to save the lives of their nearest and dearest.’ It is difficult to imagine an SS man thinking this while feeding Zyklon-B into the gas chambers of Treblinka, but it was indeed an essential part of Nazi propaganda, and some Germans may have actually believed it, including possibly Hitler himself — but then, from what we know, he didn’t really have any nearest and dearest.
Voordat ik Maalouf uitgebreider citeer, zodat de lezer weet wat de schrijver werkelijk bedoelt, is het onthullend de beweringen van mijn oude vriend te analyseren. Buruma stelt dat Maalouf’s ‘oorzaken’ weliswaar ‘aandacht verdienen,’ maar dat die — zelfs allen tezamen — onvoldoende zijn, aangezien ‘geen van allen de buitengewone bloeddorstigheid verklaart van de identiteitskrijgers.’ Dit oordeel blijft kenmerkend voor de wijze waarop de witte westerse elite de wereld en de geschiedenis beschouwt, want Ian bedoelt de ‘extraordinary bloodlust of identity warriors’ en ‘sadism’ van ‘onze’ vijanden, nooit de 'bloeddorstigheid' en het 'sadisme' van het Westen, en wel omdat ‘wij’ de goeien zijn en zij de slechten. Het feit bijvoorbeeld dat tijdens het Phoenix Program (1965-1972) in Vietnam Washington op grote schaal tegenstanders lieten martelen, speelt bij hem en de andere mainstream-propagandisten geen rol:
Methods of reported torture detailed by author Douglas Valentine that were used at the interrogation centers included:
Rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electric shock ('the Bell Telephone Hour') rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; the 'water treatment'; the 'airplane' in which the prisoner's arms were tied behind the back, and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair, after which he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; the use of police dogs to maul prisoners.
Military intelligence officer K. Barton Osborne reports that he witnessed the following use of torture:
The use of the insertion of the 6-inch dowel into the canal of one of my detainee's ears, and the tapping through the brain until dead. The starvation to death (in a cage), of a Vietnamese woman who was suspected of being part of the local political education cadre in one of the local villages...The use of electronic gear such as sealed telephones attached to… both the women's vaginas and men's testicles [to] shock them into submission…
Phoenix operations often aimed to assassinate targets, or resulted in their deaths through other means… Lieutenant Vincent Okamoto, an intelligence-liaison officer for the Phoenix Program for two months in 1968 and a recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross said the following:
‘The problem was, how do you find the people on the blacklist? It's not like you had their address and telephone number. The normal procedure would be to go into a village and just grab someone and say, "Where's Nguyen so-and-so?" Half the time the people were so afraid they would not say anything. Then a Phoenix team would take the informant, put a sandbag over his head, poke out two holes so he could see, put wire around his neck like a long leash, and walk him through the village and say, "When we go by Nguyen's house scratch your head." Then that night Phoenix would come back, knock on the door, and say, "April Fool, motherfucker." Whoever answered the door would get wasted. As far as they were concerned whoever answered was a Communist, including family members. Sometimes they'd come back to camp with ears to prove that they killed people.’
Deze Amerikaanse terreur betreft geen toevallige uitwas, maar is structureel sinds in het begin van de negentiende eeuw Filippijnse opstandelingen werden doodgemarteld. Dat blijkt opnieuw uit het volgende:
During the war in Iraq that began in March 2003, personnel of the United States Army and the Central Intelligence Agency committed a series of human rights violations against detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. These violations included physical and sexual abuse, torture, rape, sodomy, and murder.
Buruma verzuimt tevens te vermelden dat CIA-functionarissen een deel van de opium/heroïnehandel in handen hadden en nog steeds hebben. De onderzoeksjournalisten Jeffrey St. Clair en Alexander Cockburn schreven in september 2017 naar aanleiding van Vang Pao, ‘who commanded the CIA’s secret air base in Laos, where it was processed into high-grade Number 4 heroin in labs just down the block from CIA quarters’ ondermeer het volgende:
in 1967, the CIA and USAID purchased two C-47s for Vang Pao, who opened up his own air transport company, which he called Xieng Khouang Air, known by one and all as Air Opium.
At the time the CIA decided to give Vang Pao his own airline, the CIA station chief in Vientiane was Ted Shackley, a man who had gotten his start in the CIA’s Paperclip project, recruiting Nazi scientists. Before he came to Laos Shackley had headed the Agency’s Miami station, where he orchestrated the repeated terror raids and assassination bids against Cuba and consorted with the local Cuban émigrés, themselves deeply involved in the drug trade. Shackley was an ardent exponent of the idea of purchasing the loyalty of CIA clients by a policy of economic assistance, calling this ‘the third option.’ Tolerance – indeed active support – of the opium trade was therefore a proper military and diplomatic strategy. He also had a reputation for preferring to work with a team of long-term associates whom he would deploy in appropriate posts.
Thus one can follow, through the decades, the Shackley team from Miami, to Laos, to Vietnam (where he later became CIA station chief in Saigon) to his private business operations in Central America. When Shackley was in Vientiane, his associate, Thomas Clines, was handling business at Long Tieng. Another CIA man, Edwin Wilson, was delivering espionage equipment to Shackley in Laos. Richard Secord was supervising CIA operations, thus participating in a bombing program depositing more high explosive on peasants and guerrillas in the Plain of Jars than did the US on Germany and Japan during the whole of World War II. Shackley, Clines, Secord and Air America cargo kicker Eugene Hasenfus show up later in our story, in Central America, once again amid the CIA’s active complicity in the drug trade…
This CIA-transported opium engendered an addiction rate among US servicemen in Vietnam of up to 30 percent, with the soldiers spending some $80 million a year in Vietnam on heroin. In the early 1970s some of this same heroin was being smuggled back to the US in the body bags of dead servicemen, and when DEA agent Michael Levine attempted to bust the operation, he was warned off by his superiors because it might have led to exposure of the supply line from Long Tieng (plaats in Laos. svh).
Amerikaanse soldaten in Afghaanse opium poppy fields. Meer dan 90 procent van de illegale heroine komt nu uit Afghanistan.
Wat Buruma ook nog verzwijgt is dat:
After 16 years and 1 trillion dollar spent, there is no end to the fighting — but western intervention has resulted in Afghanistan becoming the world’s first true narco-state.
After fighting the longest war in its history, the US stands at the brink of defeat in Afghanistan. How could this be possible? How could the world’s sole superpower have battled continuously for more than 16 years – deploying more than 100,000 troops at the conflict’s peak, sacrificing the lives of nearly 2,300 soldiers, spending more than 1 trillion dollar on its military operations, lavishing a record $100 billion more on ‘nation-building,’ helping fund and train an army of 350,000 Afghan allies — and still not be able to pacify one of the world’s most impoverished nations? So dismal is the prospect of stability in Afghanistan that, in 2016, the Obama White House cancelled a planned withdrawal of its forces, ordering more than 8,000 troops to remain in the country indefinitely.
In the American failure lies a paradox: Washington’s massive military juggernaut has been stopped in its steel tracks by a small pink flower – the opium poppy. Throughout its three decades in Afghanistan, Washington’s military operations have succeeded only when they fit reasonably comfortably into central Asia’s illicit traffic in opium — and suffered when they failed to complement it.
It was during the cold war that the US first intervened in Afghanistan, backing Muslim militants who were fighting to expel the Soviet Red Army. In December 1979, the Soviets occupied Kabul in order to shore up their failing client regime; Washington, still wounded by the fall of Saigon four years earlier, decided to give Moscow its ‘own Vietnam’ by backing the Islamic resistance. For the next 10 years, the CIA would provide the mujahideen guerrillas with an estimated 3 billion dollar in arms. These funds, along with an expanding opium harvest, would sustain the Afghan resistance for the decade it would take to force a Soviet withdrawal. One reason the US strategy succeeded was that the surrogate war launched by the CIA did not disrupt the way its Afghan allies used the country’s swelling drug traffic to sustain their decade-long struggle.
Abu Ghraib.
American Special Forces.
American Special Forces.
Wat ik hiermee probeert aan te tonen is dat wanneer Ian Buruma met grote stelligheid beweert dat ‘sadism must play a part’ in de ‘extraordinary bloodlust of identity warriors,’ hij de werkelijkheid naar zijn hand zet. De centrale vragen zijn namelijk: vanwaar de ‘buitengewone bloeddorstigheid’ van de VS, die sinds het einde van de Tweede Wereldoorlog meer dan 20 miljoen mensen in 37 landen heeft vermoord. En vanwaar het ‘sadisme’ waarmee deze politiek gepaard ging? Mijn oude vriend oordeelde over Maalouf’s stelling dat ‘Even when they commit massacres they are convinced they are merely doing what is necessary to save the lives of their nearest and dearest’ het volgende:
It is difficult to imagine an SS man thinking this while feeding Zyklon-B into the gas chambers of Treblinka, but it was indeed an essential part of Nazi propaganda, and some Germans may have actually believed it, including possibly Hitler himself — but then, from what we know, he didn’t really have any nearest and dearest.
Hier worden weer de 6 miljoen vermoorde joodse Europeanen misbruikt om Buruma’s fixatie op de holocaust als unieke gebeurtenis, te benadrukken. Natuurlijk meende de SS-er in Treblinka dat hij het Duitse volk beschermde tegen de joden, net zoals Ian Buruma meent dat de Amerikanen de wereld beschermen tegen het Kwaad in de wereld, wanneer hij zonder enige ironie schrijft dat:
even if the end of Pax Americana does not result in military invasions, or world wars, we should ready ourselves for a time when we might recall the American Empire with fond nostalgia.
Het enige verschil is dat de Duitsers boetedoening hebben gedaan voor hun genocidale politiek, maar Ian Buruma en de ‘vrije pers’ niet voor de Amerikaanse genocidale politiek.
Ian Buruma: 'the extraordinary bloodlust of identity warriors.'
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