Laat ik beginnen met het citeren van twee kritische Amerikaanse intellectuelen, beiden vrouw, en alle twee stemmen die men nooit in de Nederlandse mainstream-media aantreft:
1. Danielle Brian is the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan independent watchdog group that works to ensure a more effective, accountable and transparent government. Brian frequently testifies before Congress, and meets regularly with legislators, White House officials and federal agencies to encourage a more open and ethical government.
Op 26 februari 2014 publiceerde zij in het kader van een serie over de Amerikaanse samenleving het volgende essay over ‘Legalized Corruption’:
Washington is the most important node (knooppunt. svh) of the Deep State that has taken over America, but it is not the only one. Invisible threads of money and ambition connect the town to other nodes. One is Wall Street, which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and operating as a diversionary marionette theater. Should the politicians forget their lines and threaten the status quo, Wall Street floods the town with cash and lawyers to help the hired hands remember their own best interests. The executives of the financial giants even have de facto criminal immunity. On March 6, 2013, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder stated the following: ‘I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.’ This, from the chief law enforcement officer of a justice system that has practically abolished the constitutional right to trial for poorer defendants charged with certain crimes. It is not too much to say that Wall Street may be the ultimate owner of the Deep State and its strategies, if for no other reason than that it has the money to reward government operatives with a second career that is lucrative beyond the dreams of avarice (schraapzucht. svh) — certainly beyond the dreams of a salaried government employee.
The corridor between Manhattan and Washington is a well trodden highway for the personalities we have all gotten to know in the period since the massive deregulation of Wall Street: Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner and many others. Not all the traffic involves persons connected with the purely financial operations of the government: In 2013, General David Petraeus joined KKR (formerly Kohlberg Kravis Roberts) of 9 West 57th Street, New York, a private equity firm with $62.3 billion in assets. KKR specializes in management buyouts and leveraged finance. General Petraeus’ expertise in these areas is unclear. His ability to peddle influence, however, is a known and valued commodity. Unlike Cincinnatus (een Romeins veldheer die in 458 v.Chr. na zestien dagen zegevierend terugkeerde uit een oorlog, om meteen weer zijn velden te gaan ploegen. svh) the military commanders of the Deep State do not take up the plow once they lay down the sword. Petraeus also obtained a sinecure as a non-resident senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. The Ivy League is, of course, the preferred bleaching tub and charm school of the American oligarchy.
Petraeus and most of the avatars of the Deep State — the White House advisers who urged Obama not to impose compensation limits on Wall Street CEOs, the contractor-connected think tank experts who besought us to ‘stay the course’ in Iraq, the economic gurus who perpetually demonstrate that globalization and deregulation are a blessing that makes us all better off in the long run — are careful to pretend that they have no ideology. Their preferred pose is that of the politically neutral technocrat offering well considered advice based on profound expertise. That is nonsense. They are deeply dyed in the hue of the official ideology of the governing class, an ideology that is neither specifically Democrat nor Republican. Domestically, whatever they might privately believe about essentially diversionary social issues such as abortion or gay marriage, they almost invariably believe in the ‘Washington Consensus’: financialization, outsourcing, privatization, deregulation and the commodifying of labor. Internationally, they espouse 21st-century ‘American Exceptionalism’: the right and duty of the United States to meddle in every region of the world with coercive diplomacy and boots on the ground and to ignore painfully won international norms of civilized behavior. To paraphrase what Sir John Harrington said more than 400 years ago about treason, now that the ideology of the Deep State has prospered, none dare call it ideology. That is why describing torture with the word ‘torture’ on broadcast television is treated less as political heresy than as an inexcusable lapse of Washington etiquette: Like smoking a cigarette on camera, these days it is simply ‘not done.’
2. Heidi Boghosian ‘the former executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, a progressive bar association established in 1937. She co-hosts the weekly civil liberties radio program, ‘Law and Disorder,’ which airs on Pacifica’s WBAI in New York and on 60 national affiliate stations around the country. She has published numerous articles and reports on policing, protest and the First Amendment, including The Policing of Political Speech (National Lawyers Guild 2010), Applying Restraints to Private Police (Missouri Law Review 2005) and The Assault on Free Speech, Public Assembly, and Dissent (North River Press 2004). Her book reviews have been published in The Federal Lawyer and the New York Law Journal. She received her JD from Temple Law School where she was editor-in-chief of the Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review. She also holds an MS from Boston University College of Communication and a BA from Brown University. She is admitted to practice law in Connecticut, New York, the Southern District of New York and the US Supreme Court. She lives in the East Village of New York.’
Boghosian stelde op 26 februari 2014 met betrekking tot ‘Mass Surveillance’ van de Amerikaanse oligarchie:
After Edward Snowden’s revelations about the extent and depth of surveillance by the National Security Agency, it has become publicly evident that Silicon Valley is a vital node of the Deep State as well. Unlike military and intelligence contractors, Silicon Valley overwhelmingly sells to the private market, but its business is so important to the government that a strange relationship has emerged. While the government could simply dragoon the high technology companies to do the NSA’s bidding, it would prefer cooperation with so important an engine of the nation’s economy, perhaps with an implied quid pro quo. Perhaps this explains the extraordinary indulgence the government shows the Valley in intellectual property matters. If an American ‘jailbreaks’ his smartphone (that is, modifies it so that it can use a service provider other than the one dictated by the manufacturer), he could receive a fine of up to $500,000 and several years in prison; so much for a citizen’s vaunted property rights to what he purchases. The libertarian pose of the Silicon Valley moguls, so carefully cultivated in their public relations, has always been a sham. Silicon Valley has long been tracking for commercial purposes the activities of every person who uses an electronic device, so it is hardly surprising that the Deep State should emulate the Valley and do the same for its own purposes. Nor is it surprising that it should conscript the Valley’s assistance…
The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure and political dysfunction. Washington is the headquarters of the Deep State, and its time in the sun as a rival to Rome, Constantinople or London may be term-limited by its overweening sense of self-importance and its habit, as Winwood Reade said of Rome, to ‘live upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face.’ ‘Living upon its principal,’ in this case, means that the Deep State has been extracting value from the American people in vampire-like fashion.
We are faced with two disagreeable implications. First, that the Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by surveillance, firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that it is almost impervious to change. Second, that just as in so many previous empires, the Deep State is populated with those whose instinctive reaction to the failure of their policies is to double down on those very policies in the future. Iraq was a failure briefly camouflaged by the wholly propagandistic success of the so-called surge; this legerdemain allowed for the surge in Afghanistan, which equally came to naught. Undeterred by that failure, the functionaries of the Deep State plunged into Libya; the smoking rubble of the Benghazi consulate, rather than discouraging further misadventure, seemed merely to incite the itch to bomb Syria. Will the Deep State ride on the back of the American people from failure to failure until the country itself, despite its huge reserves of human and material capital, is slowly exhausted? The dusty road of empire is strewn with the bones of former great powers that exhausted themselves in like manner.
De ‘Deep State’ werd Robert Koehler, ‘an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer’ tijdens het presidentschap van Barack Obama, ‘the invisible government’ genoemd, de macht achter de schermen, waaraan zowel Democraten als Republikeinen gehoorzamen. In The Huffington Post van 2 december 2010 schreef Koehler:
The machinations of empire turn out to be banal and ordinary. In a time of endless war, when democracy is an orchestrated charade and citizen engagement is less welcome in the corridors of power than it has ever been, when the traditional checks and balances of government are in unchallenged collusion with one another, when the media act not as watchdogs of democracy but guard dogs of the interests and clichés of the status quo… we have WikiLeaks, disrupting the game of national security, ringing its bell, changing the rules.
‘Never before in history,’ writes Der Spiegel, one of five international publications to get advance copies of more than 250,000 State Department cables dating back to 1966, ‘has a superpower lost control of such vast amounts of such sensitive information — data that can help paint a picture of the foundation upon which US foreign policy is built.’ […]
We get to have real-time looks at how geopolitics actually works.
While temporary secrecy, or at least privacy, is sometimes necessary in any endeavor, permanent secrecy — secrecy as entitlement — is nothing but dangerous. Over the last several decades, with an enormous push from the Bush administration, we have devolved toward a secrecy state, with more and more information hidden from American citizens in the spurious name of national security. Meanwhile, the government and the corporotocracy have pursued war and global dominance with impunity.
So Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s claim that WikiLeaks has put lives in danger — the lives of ‘human rights activists, religious leaders, the critics of governments who speak to members of our embassy about abuses in their own country’ — is not only a red herring, in that there is no evidence that anyone has been harmed by any of the hundreds of thousands of classified items about the war on terror that WikiLeaks has liberated so far this year, but sanctimonious damage control, implying that under normal circumstances the U.S. government cares about such lives.
‘If it’s loss of life the U.S. government is concerned about, it should begin with paying more attention to the soldiers and civilians it’s putting in harm’s way every hour in Iraq and Afghanistan,’ Pierre Tristam writes at FlaglerLive.com. […]
An obsession with secrecy is always anti-democratic; it’s an obsession with domination, control and the maintenance of power — and it’s a perfectly natural temptation for those in positions of great power. They want to cut their deals in private and present a face of Olympian righteousness in public.
According to the New York Times Lede Blog, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange began a manifesto he wrote four years ago, explaining the purpose of the organization, with a 1912 quote from Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party platform:
‘Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.’
The invisible government has always been in power. The continuously revolutionary premise of democracy is that power itself — the power to dominate and exert one’s will — must not be allowed to coalesce in a single individual or institution, but must be constantly challenged, broken down and redistributed. I fear that most Americans, or at least the media they stay glued to, are content with a charade democracy. That’s why WikiLeaks is controversial.
Het spreekt voor zich dat ook de Nederlandse mainstream-media zwijgen als het graf over het feit dat de westerse democratieën een ‘georchestreerde charade’ zijn. Een treffend voorbeeld daarvan gaf de onder Nederlandse intellectuelen zo populaire New York Times-columnist Thomas Friedman, de ‘imperial messenger’ van de ‘Deep State’ gezien zijn uitspraken als
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.
Als pleitbezorger van het massale Amerikaanse geweld liet Frieman tevens weten dat
The historical debate is over. The answer is free-market capitalism.
Hoewel de gewelddadige inval in Irak een grove schending van het internationaal recht betekende, was Friedman een fervent voorstander van deze oorlogsmisdaad die hij een maand na het begin van de Shock and Awe terreur als volgt 'rechtvaardigde':
We needed to go over there, basically, and take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble.… What they [moslims. svh] needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad and basically saying ‘Which part of this sentence don't you understand? You don't think we care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy, we're just going to let it grow? Well, suck on this!’ That, Charlie [de interviewer Charlie Rose. svh], is what this war was about.
Veelzeggend is dat deze woordvoerder van de ‘Deep State’ een dag voor Kerstmis 2018 onder de kop:
Time for G.O.P. to Threaten to Fire Trump
Republican leaders need to mount an intervention,
in The New York Times een schot voor de boeg gaf:
Up to now I have not favored removing President Trump from office. I felt strongly that it would be best for the country that he leave the way he came in, through the ballot box. But last week was a watershed moment for me, and I think for many Americans, including some Republicans.
It was the moment when you had to ask whether we really can survive two more years of Trump as president, whether this man and his demented behavior — which will get only worse as the Mueller investigation concludes — are going to destabilize our country, our markets, our key institutions and, by extension, the world. And therefore his removal from office now has to be on the table.
Wat was er nu een week eerder voor schokkends gebeurd waarom ‘u zich had moeten afvragen of we werkelijk nog twee jaar Trump als president kunnen overleven’? Welnu, het antwoord is simpelweg dat president Trump had verklaard ‘to withdraw all American troops from Syria and half from Afghanistan,’ een besluit dat in de ‘National Security State,’ waar het militair-industrieel complex de helft van de ‘discretionary’ federale begroting opslokt, een absolute halsmisdaad is. Een Amerikaanse president mag, al dan niet met steun van het Congres, oorlogen beginnen die in flagrante strijd zijn met het internationaal recht, hij mag de rijken nog rijker maken waardoor de VS nu, in de terminologie van oud-president Jimmy Carter, een ‘oligarchie’ is, hij mag de Amerikaanse Constitutie verkrachten, hij mag, net als president Obama, de buitenlandse schuld met 9 biljoen dollar laten oplopen tot meer dan 20 biljoen, maar hij mag absoluut niet uitzichtloos geweld beëindigen. Militaire interventies belemmeren geldt als taboe, en wel omdat sinds de oprichting van de staat grootschalig geweld juist het fundament is waarop de VS rust. Het paradoxale nu is dat ditzelfde geweld de ineenstorting van wat Ian Buruma de ‘Pax Americana’ noemt, versnelt. Maar zonder geweld is de VS de VS niet meer. De staat is gebaseerd op het geloof ‘exceptionalistisch’ te zijn, het is zelfs haar raison d’être. In de introductie van de essaybundel The Rhetoric of American Exceptionalism (2011), stellen de Amerikaanse academicus David Weiss en professor Jason A. Edwards dat:
American exceptionalism is the distinct belief that the United States is unique, if not superior, when compared to other nations. Champions of American exceptionalism hold that because of its national credo, historical evolution, and unique origins, 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. Deborah Madsen has argued that American exceptionalism has always ‘offered a mythological refuge from the chaos of history and the uncertainty of life.’ To believers in American exceptionalism, the United States continues to move in constant upward pattern, remaining the beacon of light in the darkness and the defender of the rights of man as long as the nation exists. Moreover, America and Americans are exceptional because they are charged with saving the world from itself; at the same time, America and Americans must maintain a high level of devotion to this destiny. Ultimately, champions of American exceptionalism argue that American exceptionalism functions to order Americans’ universe and define their place in it.
The rhetoric of American exceptionalism permeates every period of American history,
zo concluderen beide auteurs, daarbij benadrukkend dat
American exceptionalism has been fundamental to political rhetoric, serving as the foundation for the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, which was used to justify the Mexican, Spanish–American, and Vietnam wars as well as the westward expansion of U.S. sovereignty across the American continent.
Deze diepgewortelde ideologie met al haar kenmerken van een rotsvast geloof, waaraan zowel het volk als de intelligentsia zich vastklampen, functioneert als de rechtvaardiging bij uitstek van de Amerikaanse militaire interventies in het buitenland. Het moest dan ook voor president Trump als een serieuze waarschuwing van de ‘Deep State’ worden opgevat toen Thomas Friedman namens de elite en haar militair-industrieel complex liet weten dat de maat vol was omdat zij van mening is:
that the only responsible choice for the Republican Party today is an intervention with the president that makes clear that if there is not a radical change in how he conducts himself — and I think that is unlikely — the party’s leadership will have no choice but to press for his resignation or join calls for his impeachment.
It has to start with Republicans, given both the numbers needed in the Senate and political reality. Removing this president has to be an act of national unity as much as possible — otherwise it will tear the country apart even more. I know that such an action is very difficult for today’s G.O.P. (Grand Old Party, de Republikeinse Partij. svh), but the time is long past for it to rise to confront this crisis of American leadership.
Volgens de ‘Deep State’ die via Friedman de Republikeinse Partij de wacht aanzegt, is Trumps houding ‘onberekenbaar’ zoals ondermeer zou blijken uit ‘his readiness to accommodate Russia and spurn allies,’ daarmee bedoelend het NAVO-bongenootschap onder aanvoering van Washington en Wall Street. Trump’s beleid zou ‘so erratic’ zijn dat:
two more years of him in office could pose a real threat to our nation. Vice President Mike Pence could not possibly be worse.
Na zijn besluit troepen terug the trekken uit Syrië en Afghanistan moet president Trump worden afgezet, want, aldus de ’boodschapper van het imperium’:
The damage an out-of-control Trump can do goes well beyond our borders. America is the keystone of global stability. Our world is the way it is today — a place that, despite all its problems, still enjoys more peace and prosperity than at any time in history — because America is the way it is (or at least was). And that is a nation that at its best has always stood up for the universal values of freedom and human rights, has always paid extra to stabilize the global system from which we were the biggest beneficiary and has always nurtured and protected alliances with like-minded nations.
Donald Trump has proved time and again that he knows nothing of the history or importance of this America. That was made starkly clear in Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis’s resignation letter.
Zodra het om Amerikaans geweld gaat is er geen verschil tussen de ‘liberals’ en de ‘neoconservatives,’ zoals ondermeer bleek uit de kop op de voorpagina van The New York Times van 27 december 2018:
Trump Unites Left and Right Against Troop Plans,
De betrokken nieuwcommentator Mark Landler, stelde vast dat:
President Trump managed to do something remarkable with his abrupt order to withdraw all American troops from Syria and half from Afghanistan: unite the left and right against a plan to extract the United States from two long, costly and increasingly futile conflicts.
Landler is een toonaangevende journalist, lid van de machtige ‘Council on Foreign Relations,’ de ‘most influential foreign-policy think tank in the United States, claiming among its members a high percentage of government officials, media figures, and establishment elite.’ De Amerikaanse historicus Laurence H. Shoup concludeerde terecht dat de CFR functioneert als ‘Wall Street’s Think Tank.’ Het is tevens de titel van zijn boek over ‘The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014.’ De van origine Canadese diplomaat en emeritus hoogleraar Peter Dale Scott, auteur van het boek The American Deep State (2014) oordeelde in een recensie:
‘Wall Street’s Think Tank’ is an invaluable supplement to Laurence Shoup’s earlier book, ‘Imperial Brain Trust,’ as it chronicles the subsequent history and composition of the Council on Foreign Relations over the last five decades. It thus records how the CFR’s early advocacy of the Vietnam War led to a reversal in 1968 of both Council and U.S. policy, followed by a restructuring of the CFR itself. Did this mean that the CFR avoided the widespread campaign before 2003 to press America into another disastrous war in Iraq? Not at all: The CFR, as Shoup documents, played a leading role in this largely dishonest effort. Underlying both campaigns Shoup shows the on-going presence in the CFR of the international oil majors, as well as of related financial interests, such as the Rockefellers and their spokesmen. Shoup persuasively demonstrates how U.S. foreign policies are still (as in the 1950s) formulated at the CFR before they are adopted in Washington. While it may be more challenged than before by other think tanks, none can begin to match its international outreach. This is a must read for those wishing to understand the dynamics of U.S. hegemony.
Op zijn beurt schreef de Amerikaanse geleerde Noam Chomsky:
Forty years ago, Laurence Shoup and William Minter published their book ‘Imperial Brain Trust,’ a careful and highly informative analysis of World War II planning for the postwar world by the Council of Foreign Relations and the State Department, plans that were then implemented, establishing much of the framework of postwar history. In this new study, Shoup carries their inquiry forward with a very revealing account of how a small group of planners drawn from sectors of concentrated private and state power, closely linked, along with ‘experts’ whose commitments are congenial to their ends, have set the contours for much of recent history, not least the neoliberal assault that has had a generally destructive impact on populations while serving as an effective instrument of class war. A welcome and very valuable contribution.
Kortom, duidelijk is dat zelfs een Amerikaanse president niet in staat is ongestraft de eisen van de ‘Deep State’ te trotseren. Ondanks het feit dat de Amerikaanse interventies zijn uitgelopen op ‘twee langdurige, kostbare en in toenemende mate nutteloze conflicten,’ die ten koste gaan van de Amerikaanse begrotingen voor onderwijs, gezondheidszorg, volkshuisvesting, sociale uitkeringen, etc. mag de president wel bepalen dat er nieuwe oorlogen worden gevoerd, maar niet dat oorlogen worden gestaakt, zonder voorafgaande goedkeuring van de ‘Deep State,’ waarvan de joodse pro-Israel lobby een onlosmakelijk onderdeel is geworden. Al snel werd dan ook bekend dat Trump’s plannen niet in vier maanden zouden worden verwezenlijkt. In de tweede week van januari 2019 werd bekend dat:
The state of Israel seems to share at least some of the responsibility for the latest shift of U.S. Syria policy — as National Security Adviser John Bolton announced on Sunday that President Donald Trump’s call to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria would now be ‘coordinated’ with Israel, after meeting with top Israeli officials including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Israel’s main motivation in preventing a swift U.S. exit from Syria was also made explicit by Netanyahu, who openly stated on Twitter that Israel’s push to obtain sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights — which is internationally recognized as part of Syria — was the driving factor behind Israel’s recent efforts to dramatically slow down Trump’s plan for an ‘immediate’ withdrawal of U.S. troops currently occupying Syrian territory illegally.
As… noted at the time of Trump’s withdrawal announcement, Israel’s influence on Trump’s Middle East policy and Israel’s push towards containing ‘Iranian influence’ in Syria would mean that Trump’s plan to withdraw troops over the alleged defeat of ISIS would likely never materialize if it was opposed by Tel Aviv.
This was apparently and not surprisingly the case as, soon after Trump’s announcement that he planned to bring U.S. troops home from Syria last month, Israel’s government announced that it would dramatically rev up its direct involvement in the Syrian conflict in the U.S.’ absence. That involvement had so far been limited to hundreds of unilateral airstrikes on Syrian government and military targets over the course of the nearly eight-year-long war. Israel’s threat of escalation revealed Israel’s unwillingness to see foreign pressure on Damascus reduced.
Israel’s military — currently headed by Netanyahu, who is also serving as Israel’s defense minister — made good on this promise to increase its military involvement in Syria soon after, using civilian airplanes as cover to launch airstrikes on Syria on Christmas Day.
However, Israel’s reaction to Trump’s announcement appears to have been much more extensive than its decision to increase its airstrikes targeting Syrian territory. After meeting with Netanyahu and the director of Israeli intelligence, Bolton noted on Twitter that the ‘U.S. drawdown in Syria’ would now be ‘coordinated’ with Israel. Also on Sunday, Bolton announced that the U.S. had no timetable for troop withdrawal from Syria and that the troop withdrawal was also conditional.
John R. Bolton found himself last weekend in a familiar but dangerous spot for any White House aide: cleaning up after his boss, President Trump announced the withdrawal of 2,000 troops from Syria -- a decision that rattled allies and threw America's Middle East policy into turmoil.
Een zucht van opluchting steeg in Washington en op Wall Street op nadat eerder president Trump's besluit, in de woorden van Landler, 'howls of protests from Congress' had veroorzaakt en 'concerned phone calls from allies like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.'
Typerend aan het propagandistische gehalte van deze vooraanstaande representant van de 'vrije pers' is de formulering dat 'America's Middle East policy into turmoil,' was gebracht door Trump's besluit om Amerikaanse troepen uit deze regio terug te trekken. Niet alleen is het Midden Oosten juist door de Amerikaanse oorlogen in Irak en Afghanistan, de interventies in Syrië, en de steun aan de Israelische terreur, in totale chaos beland, maar dezelfde Landler had twee weken eerder nog in The New York Times met grote stelligheid vastgesteld dat de oorlogen in Irak en Afghanistan 'two long, costly and increasingly futile conflicts' waren. Misscvhien wel het meest krankzinnige is dat de neoconservatieve Bolton een grote voorstander was van de desastreuze, illegale inval in Irak. Het gebrek aan elementaire logica van de commerciële westerse journalistiek neemt steeds absurdere vormen aan.
De neoconservatief Bolton en premier Netanyahu, beiden fel voorstander van de illegale inval in Irak, floten namens de Deep State de Commander in Chief Trump terug. Geen beëindiging van het uitzichtloos geweld.
De zelfbenoemde ‘Joodse staat’ maakte opnieuw duidelijk dat niet de Amerikaanse president de macht heeft om oorlogen in het Midden-Oosten te eindigen, maar dat alleen de schatrijke joods-Amerikaanse lobby en Israel die macht bezitten. The New York Times had eerder al, op 6 januari 2019, namens de ‘Deep State’ bericht:
President Trump’s national security adviser, John R. Bolton, rolled back on Sunday Mr. Trump’s decision to rapidly withdraw from Syria, laying out conditions for a pullout that could leave American forces there for months or even years… Mr. Bolton’s comments inserted into Mr. Trump’s strategy something the president had omitted when he announced on Dec. 19 that the United States would depart within 30 days: any conditions that must be met before the pullout.
Twee dagen later verzekerde mainstream-opiniemaker Ian Buruma zijn publiek dat de VS ondanks de ‘eigen gebreken’ en de ‘misdadige conflicten’ in het verleden toch ‘a force for good’ was. De naar schatting ruim 20 miljoen doden die deze ‘force for good’ met zijn ‘betrekkelijk goedaardig imperialisme’ na 1945 heeft veroorzaakt, moeten in Buruma’s wereldbeeld gezien worden als ‘bijkomende schade.’ Verbolgen constateerde mijn oude vriend dat ‘In the age of Trump, America is no longer so dependable,’ als ten tijde van bijvoorbeeld de Vietnam Oorlog, of de oorlog in Afghanistan, Irak, Libië, en al die andere landen waar de VS met geweld intervenieerde, democratische regeringen verjoeg, of terreur-regimes in stand hield. Zonder ook maar een vleugje ironie, beweerde broodschrijver Buruma dat ‘the US has also ceased to be a model of freedom and openness,’ alsof het McCarthyisme er nooit heeft bestaan, alsof de afgelopen halve eeuw de VS niet is veranderd in een oligarchie van kleptocraten, die ten koste van de arbeiders- en middenklasse zichzelf zo schaamteloos verrijkten dat in dezelfde periode bijna de helft van de Amerikanen niet meer stemt, en alsof de helft van de Amerikaanse Congresleden geen miljonair is, terwijl procentueel slechts 3,5 procent van de bevolking tot deze kaste behoort.
Het is deze intellectueel corrupte mentaliteit waartegen het fatsoenlijke deel van de Amerikaanse intelligentsia zich blijft verzetten. Zo toonde de vooraanstaande journalist en auteur, wijlen, David Halberstam, zijn werkzame leven lang aan hoe de macht van de propaganda niet beperkt blijft tot het slecht geschoolde deel van de bevolking, maar dat ook de goed geschoolde elites op jacht naar status bezwijken voor het magische denken, en dat de uitvoerende macht functioneert als één ‘omvangrijke leugen-machine.’ Halberstam werd meer dan twee decennialang door de FBI bespioneerd, een feit dat demonstreert hoe propagandistisch Buruma is wanneer hij de VS ‘a model of freedom and openness’ noemt. Het was tegenover de gerespecteerde Halberstam dat Martin Luther King begin 1968, enkele maanden voor hij werd vermoord, verklaarde:
For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.
Het lijkt allemaal vergeefs te zijn geweest nu propagandisten als Buruma gelauwerd worden omdat zij ongegeneerd deelnemen aan de huidige corruptie door hun publiek met illusies te verpletteren. Zij zijn mede-verantwoordelijk voor de opkomst van het fenomeen Donald Trump. Terecht wees de prominente Amerikaanse journalist en auteur Chris Hedges in mei 2018 op het feit dat:
The Trump administration did not rise, prima facie, like Venus on a half shell from the sea. Donald Trump is the result of a long process of political, cultural and social decay. He is a product of our failed democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live in a functioning democracy, that Trump and the political mutations around him are somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the next election, the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The problem is not Trump. It is a political system, dominated by corporate power and the mandarins of the two major political parties, in which we don’t count. We will wrest back political control by dismantling the corporate state, and this means massive and sustained civil disobedience, like that demonstrated by teachers around the country this year. If we do not stand up we will enter a new dark age.
The Democratic Party, which helped build our system of inverted totalitarianism, is once again held up by many on the left as the savior. Yet the party steadfastly refuses to address the social inequality that led to the election of Trump and the insurgency by Bernie Sanders. It is deaf, dumb and blind to the very real economic suffering that plagues over half the country. It will not fight to pay workers a living wage. It will not defy the pharmaceutical and insurance industries to provide Medicare for all. It will not curb the voracious appetite of the military that is disemboweling the country and promoting the prosecution of futile and costly foreign wars. It will not restore our lost civil liberties, including the right to privacy, freedom from government surveillance, and due process. It will not get corporate and dark money out of politics. It will not demilitarize our police and reform a prison system that has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners although the United States has only 5 percent of the world’s population. It plays to the margins, especially in election seasons, refusing to address substantive political and social problems and instead focusing on narrow cultural issues like gay rights, abortion and gun control in our peculiar species of anti-politics.
Meer hierover de volgende keer.
In de ogen van opiniemaker Ian Buruma was de VS tot voor kort ‘a force for good’ in de wereld, een 'model of freedom and openness.' Mede dankzij deze propaganda ontving hij in 2008 de Erasmus Prijs van het Nederlands establishment.
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