De Amerikaanse hoogleraar American Studies, David E. Stannard, schreef in zijn opzienbarende en geprezen boek American Holocaust. The Conquest Of The New World (1992) dat:
the notion of the deserved and fated extermination of America’s native peoples had become a commonplace and secularized ideology. In 1784 a British visitor to America observed that ‘white Americans have the most rancorous antipathy to the whole race of Indians; nothing is more common than to hear them talk of extirpating (uitroeien. svh) them totally from the face of the earth, men, women, and children.’ And this visitor was not speaking only of the opinion of those whites who lived on the frontier. Wrote the distinguished early nineteenth century scientist, Samuel G. Mortin: ‘The benevolent mind may regret the inaptitude of the Indian for civilization,’ but the fact of the matter was that the ‘structure of [the Indian’s] mind appears to be different from that of the white man, nor can the two harmonize in the social relation except on the most limited scale.’ ‘Thenceforth,’ added Francis Parkman, the most honored American historian of his time, the natives — whom he described as ‘man, wolf, and devil all in one’ — ‘were destined to melt and vanish before the advancing waves of Anglo-American power, which now rolled westward unchecked and unopposed.’ The Indian, he wrote, was in fact responsible for his own destruction, for he ‘will not learn the arts of civilization, and he and his forest inevitable and proper together.’
But by this time it was not just the native peoples of America of America who were being identified as the inevitable and proper victims of genocidal providence and progress. In Australia, whose aboriginal population had been in steep decline (from mass murder and disease) ever since the arrival of the white man, it commonly was being said in scientific and scholarly publications, that ‘to the Aryan… apparently belong the destinies of the future. The races whose institutions and inventions are despotism, fetishism, and cannibalism — the races who rest content in… placid sensuality and unprogressive decrepitude, can hardly hope too contend permanently in the great struggle for existence with the noblest division of the human species.... The survival of the fittest means that might — wisely used — is right. And thus we invoke and remorselessly fulfill the inexorable law of natural selection when exterminating the inferior Australian.’
Meanwhile, by the 1860s, with only a remnant of America's indigenous people still alive, in Hawaii the Reverend Rufus Anderson surveyed the carnage that by then had reduced those islands' native population by 90 percent or more, and he declined to see it as a tragedy; the expected total die-off of the Hawaiian people was only natural, this missionary said, somewhat equivalent to ‘the amputation of diseased members of the body.’ Two decades later, in New Zealand, whose native Maori people also had suffered a huge population collapse from introduced disease and warfare with invading British armies, one A.K. Newman spoke for many whites in that country when he observed that ‘taking all things into consideration, the disappearance of the race is scarcely subject for much regret. They are dying out in a quick, easy way, and are being supplanted by a superior race.’
Vanuit deze feiten bezien getuigt het van een verregaand cynisme dat in het begin van de 21ste eeuw de gelauwerde mainstream-opiniemaker Ian Buruma, in The Guardian eerst vermeldt dat het ‘internationaal recht,' net als de 'mensenrechten,' het 'product was van de Europese Verlichting,' om vervolgens te stellen dat het ICC (Het Internationaal Strafhof voor oorlogsmisdaden. svh) ‘a fine ideal [is], and if the whole world were like western Europe it would work very well. Alas, our peaceful EU is not well equipped to deal with gangsters.’ Daarom adviseert hij dat Europa ‘too must do the dirty work, and take the risk of being held accountable.’ Ook hier speelt het racisme van ‘a superior race’ een belangrijke rol. Als woordvoerder van de witte westerse elite meent Buruma, jarenlang hoogleraar mensenrechten en democratie in New York, dat ‘het smerige werk’ gerechtvaardigd is om de ‘kwaadaardigsten’ uit de weg te ruimen.
Buruma's opvatting loopt als een rode draad door de afgelopen vijf eeuwen kolonialisme. In zijn boek American Holocaust, wees professor Stannard erop dat:
Not to be outdone by the most eminent historians, scientists, and cultural critics of the previous generation, several decades later still, America’s leading psychologist and educator, G. Stanley Hall, imperiously surveyed the human wreckage that Western exploration and colonization had created across the globe, and wrote:
‘Never, perhaps, were lower races being extirpated as weeds in the human garden, both by conscious and organic processes, so rapidly as today. In many minds this is inevitable and not without justification. Pity and sympathy, says Nietzsche, are now a disease, and we are summoned to rise above morals and clear the world’s stage for the survival of those who are fittest because strongest… The world will soon be overcrowded, and we must begin to take selective agencies into our own hands. Primitive races are either hopelessly decadent and moribund (zieltogend. svh), or at best have demonstrated their inability to domesticate or civilize themselves.’
G. Stanley Hall, die als hoogleraar een pioniersrol vervulde in de Amerikaanse psychologie, en een bewonderaar was van Sigmund Freud, schreef het bovenstaande in 1904, het jaar dat Adolf Hitler vijftien jaar werd. De mainstream van de westerse intelligentsia verzwijgt maar al te graag het feit dat de westerse overheersing gebaseerd is op een superioriteitsgedachte die, ook door sociale wetenschappers wordt gedeeld. Ik blijf wat langer hierbij stilstaan omdat:
Darwin's theory of evolution and Ernst Haeckel's recapitulation theory were large influences on (G. Stanley) Hall’s career… His work also delved into controversial portrayals of the differences between women and men, as well as the concept of racial eugenics… Hall believed in giving ‘lower races’ a chance to accept and adapt to the ‘superior white civilization.’ Hall even commended high ranking African Americans in society as being ‘exception to the Negro’s diminished evolutionary inheritance.’ Hall viewed civilization in a similar fashion he viewed biological development. Humans must allow civilization to ‘run its natural evolution.’ Hall saw those that did not accept the superior civilization as being primitive and consisting of savages. Hall viewed these civilizations in a similar fashion that he viewed children stating that ‘their faults and their virtues are those of childhood and youth.’ Hall believed that men and women should be separated into their own schools during puberty because it allowed them to be able to grow within their own gender. Women could be educated with motherhood in mind and the men could be educated in more hands-on projects, helping them to become leaders of their homes. Hall believed that schools with both sexes limited the way they could learn and softened the boys earlier than they should be…
Hall was deeply wedded to the German concept of Volk, an anti-individualist and authoritarian romanticism in which the individual is dissolved into a transcendental collective. Hall believed that humans are by nature non-reasoning and instinct driven, requiring a charismatic leader to manipulate their herd instincts for the well-being of society. He predicted that the American emphasis on individual human right and dignity would lead to a fall that he analogized to the sinking of Atlantis.
Hall was one of the founders of the child-study movement in the 1880s. A national network of study groups called Hall Clubs existed to spread his teaching. He is popularly known today for supervising the 1896 study Of Peculiar and Exceptional Children, which described a series of only child eccentrics as permanent misfits. For decades, academics and advice columnists alike disseminated his conclusion that an only child could not be expected to go through life with the same capacity for adjustment that siblings possessed. ‘Being an only child is a disease in itself,’ he claimed.
Hall argued that child development recapitulates his highly racialized conception of the history of human evolutionary development. He characterized pre-adolescent children as savages and therefore rationalized that reasoning was a waste of time with children. He believed that children must simply be led to fear God, love country, and develop a strong body. As the child burns out the vestiges of evil in his nature, he needs a good dose of authoritarian discipline, including corporal punishment. He believed that adolescents are characterized by more altruistic natures than pre-adolescents and that high schools should indoctrinate students into selfless ideals of service, patriotism, body culture, military discipline, love of authority, awe of nature, and devotion to the state and the well being of others. Hall consistently argued against intellectual attainment at all levels of public education. Open discussion and critical opinions were not to be tolerated. Students needed indoctrination to save them from the individualism that was so damaging to the progress of American culture…
Hall had no sympathy for the poor, the sick, or those with developmental differences or disabilities. A firm believer in selective breeding and forced sterilization, he believed that any respect or charity toward those he viewed as physically, emotionally, or intellectually weak or ‘defective’ simply interfered with the movement of natural selection toward the development of a super-race…
Much of the mark that Hall left behind was from his expansion of psychology as a field in the United States. He did a lot of work to bring psychology to the United States as a legitimate form of study and science. He began the first journal dedicated only to psychology in the United States of America, called the American Journal of Psychology. He was also the first president of the American Psychological Association. All of the work that Hall did in the field of psychology and for psychology in the United States of America allowed for all the other psychologists to follow in his foot steps and to become psychologists in the United States. Without the effort from Hall it could have taken many more years for psychology to become a field in the United States.
Het is bovendien belangrijk te weten dat:
Hall, like Hitler somewhat later, saw the bulk of humanity as eager and willing to escape from freedom. Both men sensed the underlying yearning for security which had overcome western man. Both were highly sensitive to the alienating effects of industrial progress and the renting of western consciousness from an agrarian to an urban life. Finally, both seemed intuitively aware of the kinds of symbolic uses of the past which seemed to heal that wound. While Vilfredo Pareto (Italiaanse liberale econoom, die stierf als fascist. svh) analyzed this need for ‘security’ by the ‘western mind’ in what was becoming a fractured culture, others would write about the conditions of man as alienated from nature, God, and even man himself. Running throughout Hall's work from his ‘The Education of the Will’ (1882) essay to his last work, Life and Confessions of a Psychologist (1923), there is a constant reference and reaction to the loss of the agrarian virtues and the growth of artificial urban life. Indeed, the work which catapulted him to educational fame was the ‘Content of Children’s Minds (1893),’ which was based on an examination of urban youngsters' knowledge of rural life.
Ik citeer dit alles omdat onder de westerse mainstream-opiniemakers nog steeds de meestal onuitgesproken opvatting heerst dat het westen ‘superieur’ is aan alle andere culturen. Dit blijkt ondermeer wanneer Bas Heijne in NRC Handelsblad schrijft over ‘het in alle opzichten superieure Amerika,’ of wanneer Geert Mak met grote stelligheid beweert:
De Amerikaanse diplomaten horen tot de beste ter wereld, het land beschikt over voortreffelijke informatiesystemen, het leger kent geen grenzen, de universiteiten en het State Department beschikken over briljante strategen en politieke analisten, het Amerikaanse bedrijfsleven over de hele wereld opereert. De Verenigde Staten hebben de hand gehad in talloze vredesonderhandelingen, niet zelden met succes,
daarbij volledig voorbijgaand aan het feit dat het ‘superieure Amerika’ één van de meest agressieve staten in de geschreven geschiedenis is, die net als Edward Gibbon's beschrijving van de Pax Romana 'weinig meer was dan een opsomming van de misdaden, dwaasheden en tragedies van de mensheid,' en die een ‘Legacy of Ashes,' in de wereld heeft achtergelaten, zoals Dwight Eisenhower aan het eind van zijn presidentschap de CIA verweet. In zijn boek Legacy of Ashes. The History of the CIA (2007) concludeerde de vooraanstaande joods-Amerikaanse journalist en Pulitzerprijs-winnaar Tim Weiner:
We zijn terug waar we zestig jaar geleden begonnen, in een toestand van wanorde.
Deze voormalige New York Times-correspondent, die de prestigieuze National Book Award in Nonfiction ontving voor zijn bijna 800 pagina’s tellende geschiedschrijving van de CIA zal het ook niet in zijn hoofd halen om, zoals Ian Buruma, te adviseren 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.’ Ook de joods-Amerikaanse historicus William Blum zou nooit, als Buruma, zo intellectueel corrupt zijn geweest om te beweren dat de VS ‘a force for good’ is. In zijn 470 pagina’s tellende boek Killing Hope. US Military & CIA Interventions since World War II (2004) schreef hij:
From 1945 to 2003, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements fighting against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US bombed some 25 countries, caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair. ‘The idea is to build an antiterrorism global environment,’ a senior Defense Department official told the New York Times in 2003, ‘so that in 20 to 30 years, terrorism will be like slave-trading, completely discredited.’ The world can only wonder this: When will American wars of aggression, firing missiles into the heart of a city, and using depleted uranium and cluster bombs against the population become completely discredited? They already have become such, but the United States, which wages war on the same scale other nations apply to mere survival, does not yet know it. Instead, it practices perpetual war for perpetual peace...
Nogmaals, de reden van Buruma's 'heimwee' naar de 'legacy of ashes' van Washington's buitenlandse politiek, vloeit voort uit het diepgewortelde westerse superioriteitsgeloof, dat ten grondslag ligt aan G. Stanley Hall’s overtuiging dat ‘[p]rimitive races are either hopelessly decadent and moribund, or at best have demonstrated their inability to domesticate or civilize themselves.’ Aangezien Hall's formulering vandaag de dag politiek incorrect is, wordt deze opvatting nu keurig verpakt in eufemismen als ‘humanitair ingrijpen’ en zelfs ‘responsibility to protect,’ maar in de praktijk is de uitkomst telkens weer hetzelfde: geweld tegen de burgerbevolking elders om de westerse elite-belangen veilig te stellen, te weten: grondstoffen en markten. och blijft de vraag: hoe kan de academisch geschoolde Buruma zijn eigen leugenachtige voorstelling van zaken tegenover zichzelf rechtvaardigen? Zomer 2018 liet hij zich in een interview met een Volkskrant-journaliste ontvallen:
Ik denk niet dat er binnen je geest een soort essentieel zelf is; je verandert de hele tijd... Al die rollen die je speelt; dat doe je gedachteloos en ze zijn allemaal een deel van jezelf. Die maskers, die ben je óók.
Daarom kan de gemaskerde Buruma, die ‘gedachteloos’ zoveel ‘rollen’ speelt, en geen eigen identiteit bezit, geen ‘essentieel zelf,’ het ene moment een ‘oprechte nostalgie’ voelen voor de hoogtijdagen van ‘the American Empire,’ en het volgende moment met evenveel stelligheid beweren dat er ‘goede redenen [zijn] om nostalgie te wantrouwen’ omdat zij ‘gevaarlijk’ is, gezien het feit dat 'nostalgie' regelmatig 'niet het historische leed zelf [betreft], maar de saamhorigheid van de collectieve herinnering.’ Maar hoewel nostalgie ‘kan leiden tot sentimentaliteit, tot kitsch,’ en de ‘letterlijke betekenis van nostalgie ‘pathologische heimwee’ [is]’ en ‘Heimwee vaak kitscherig,’ is, acht hij zijn eigen ‘nostalgie’ naar wat hij noemt ‘Pax Americana’ nu juist ‘oprecht.’ Waarom precies maakt hij, verstandig genoeg, niet duidelijk, want ook hier is inderdaad sprake van ‘kitsch.’ Politieke ‘kitsch,’ van iemand die als opiniemaker opereert. Waarom bedriegt hij zichzelf en zijn publiek? Waarom beseft hij niet dat, zoals Joan Didion schreef,
[a]t the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us’?
Juist met zijn politieke ‘kitsch’ steunt Buruma de huidige neoliberale werkelijkheid die er ertoe geleid heeft dat sinds de kredietcrisis 'the richest white Americans since 2008' tenminste '$30 trillion' rijker zijn geworden. Niet door iets te produceren of door het verlenen van diensten, maar alleen door te speculeren met niet bestaand geld. De Amerikaanse intellectueel Paul Buchheit constateerde begin september 2018 dat:
[a]t the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us’?
Juist met zijn politieke ‘kitsch’ steunt Buruma de huidige neoliberale werkelijkheid die er ertoe geleid heeft dat sinds de kredietcrisis 'the richest white Americans since 2008' tenminste '$30 trillion' rijker zijn geworden. Niet door iets te produceren of door het verlenen van diensten, maar alleen door te speculeren met niet bestaand geld. De Amerikaanse intellectueel Paul Buchheit constateerde begin september 2018 dat:
These fortunate takers profited mainly from the stock market, which has more than tripled in value since the end of 2008.
That’s nearly a third of ALL our current wealth, newly created and distributed to the richest 10%, who are mostly white millionaires...
Wealth statistics since the recession are provided in the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook. A summary of relevant data can be found here.
Post-recession data shows that about $33 trillion went to the richest 10%, who are overwhelmingly millionaires (13 million millionaires, 12.6 million U.S. households!). That nearly doubled the wealth of each member of the richest 10%. Average net worth is now $14 million for each 1% household, and the greater part of a million for even the ‘poorest’ household in the top 10%.
In comparison, average net worth for the poorest half of America decreased from $11,000 to $8,000 since the recession.
https://www.nationofchange.org/2018/09/03/what-just-happened-30-trillion-to-the-richest-white-americans-since-2008/
Buruma verzwijgt tevens het feit dat de VS een nucleaire grootmacht is die meer dan de helft van haar federale budget dat het Congres kan toewijzen, aan het militair-industrieel complex spendeert, en die daarom ter rechtvaardiging van deze verkwisting onophoudelijk 'military invasions' moet ondernemen, onder het mom van ‘responsibility to protect.’ De macht van de 'U.S. deep state' meent het recht te hebben om voortdurend en overal nieuw massaal geweld te ontketenen. Ondertussen blijft de zogeheten 'vrije pers' voortdurend propaganda maken voor de heersende elite en haar neoliberale ideologie. Waarom blijft mijn oude vriend een onmisbaar schakeltje in de alomtegenwoordige psychologische oorlogsvoering? Over de conditionering van het publiek schreef de Amerikaanse psycholoog Craig Chalquist, ‘member of Psychologists for Social Responsibility’ in 2013 onder de kop ‘Why I Am Not a Member of the American Psychological Association’:
The American Psychological Association (APA. svh) was founded in 1892 at Clark University. The primary purpose of this new organization was to advance psychology as a science. One of the founders, G. Stanley Hall, was keenly interested in psychodynamic therapy and invited Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung to Clark to visit and lecture.
This spirit of free scientific inquiry was about to change drastically beyond any hope of restoration.
Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays set the tone by transplanting psychology into modern advertising, a field he referred to as ‘the engineering of consent’; his techniques were admired and imitated by Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. It was Bernays’s campaigns that convinced women to start smoking, previously an activity restricted to men.
In the U.S., John Watson, a president of the APA, taught behavioral techniques to mass marketers after losing his professorship at Cornell University. Hugo Munsterberg, an early APA member, started industrial psychology by writing Psychology and Industrial Efficiency in 1912. ‘The psychological experiment,’ he wrote, ‘is systematically to be placed at the service of commerce and industry.’ Walter Dill Scott directed psychology into personnel screening and wrote The Theory and Practice of Advertising. Scott, who had arrived at the idea of workplace efficiency while plowing a field, also advocated appeals to emotion to override reason and heighten consumer suggestibility.
By 1915, a clothing manufacturer in Cleveland used psychological tests to select workers, in effect corporatizing a now-common invasion of privacy; as a result, by 1917 companies sponsoring psychological research on salesmanship included Ford, Goodrich, Westinghouse, Heinz, Prudential, and Carnegie Steel. In most cases prospective and current employees had to submit to being tested, nor could they learn the test results afterward. Psychologist Lillian Gilbreth extended employee selection schemas and workplace efficiency methods to management training. Reacting to all this, journalist Grace Adams, a thoroughly disenchanted former student of psychology, wrote ‘The Decline of Psychology in America’ to criticize the field for so shamelessly selling itself out. At a meeting of the American Psychological Association, William Montague protested the overemphasis on behavior and efficiency with a paper titled ‘Has Psychology Lost Its Mind?’
During WW I, the APA secured funding by mentally testing soldiers and, eventually, by helping the U.S. Army develop psychologically friendly battlefield equipment. Watson served as a military psychologist. Scott won a medal from the Army for helping them select soldiers. B.F. Skinner designed a guided missile system directed by pigeons but failed to secure enough funding to build it because of the invention of radar. That since Descartes ‘machines have become more lifelike,’ as he put it, ‘and living organisms have been found to be more like machines’ he took as a sign of progress rather than as a vast colonization of the social imaginary.
By 1924, John Watson worked as vice president of J. Walter Thompson, one of the largest advertising agencies in the U.S. There he pioneered celebrity endorsements, brand loyalty (with Yuban first, then Camel Cigarettes, Johnson’s Baby Powder, and Ponds), impulse buying, timed obscolescence (veroudering. svh), and methods for conditioning consumers to want ever-newer products. In her book Breaking the Silence, actor Mariette Hartley described the emotionally devastating impact of Grandpa Watson’s obsessive behavioral regimentation of her family. This included putting everyone, including infants, on a rigid schedule and limiting the amount of time spent in physical contact.
Meanwhile, fed by military and government contracts, the APA continued to expand. In 1951, the U.S. military established HumRRO, the Human Resource Research Organization, to develop methods of psychological warfare under the direction of psychologist Meredith Crawford, the former APA treasurer. In 1952, psychologists and other social scientsts were funded by the CIA — in some cases covertly — for conducting research on psychological warfare. According to Patricia Greenfield, Carl Rogers sat on the board of the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, a front for CIA interrogation research. An internal CIA memo he never saw circulated in 1960 to note his research as useful for evaluating techniques that influence human behavior. The Society gave a grant to professor Martin Orne to explore research on hypnosis. From the Korean War onward, in fact, the CIA paid for decades of social science research on mind control. The results landed in the agency’s interrogation manual and, from there, spread to repressive Latin America regimes who made effectively murderous use of it during the 1970s and 1980s.
This is D. O. Hebb, whose sensory deprivation research was funded by the CIA, justifying his torture of research subjects:
‘The work that we have done at McGill University began, actually, with the problem of brainwashing. We were not permitted to say so in the first publishing… The chief impetus, of course, was the dismay at the kind of “confessions” being produced at the Russian Communist trials. “Brainwashing” was a term that came a little later, applied to Chinese procedures. We did not know what the Russian procedures were, but it seemed that they were producing some peculiar changes of attitude. How? One possible factor was perceptual isolation and we concentrated on that.’
Hebb was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1960, and he won the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award in 1961.
In The Dark Side, Jane Mayer describes how former APA president Martin Seligman, the father of Positive Psychology, was invited by the CIA to speak in 2002 at the Navy’s SERE (Survival, Resistance, Evasion, Escape) school in San Diego. In the 1960s, Seligman had found that by shocking a dog unpredictably, he could brutalize it into total, helpless passivity. His theories were adapted for use in CIA prisons. In 2010, Seligman won a $31 million contract to provide combat resilience training to U.S. soldiers. Reporter Mark Benjamin argues that Seligman’s work also laid the basis for the Bush Administration’s torture program.
Seligman was not the only accomplice. Former APA president Joseph Matarazzo worked with psychologists Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen to design a new CIA interrogation regimen, much of it based on techniques employed by Chinese Communist torturers. According to the New York Times, these two psychologists were part of what Defense Department officials nicknamed the ‘Resistance Mafia’ of experts on how to survive enemy interrogation. The two directed the torture of Abu Zubaydah at a secret CIA detention site in Thailand. Zubaydah was stripped, subjected to sleep deprivation, and waterboarded thirty-eight times before the interrogators decided he didn’t know anything of value. These methods were then used on dozens of other prisoners in various locations around the world: on underage prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, for example, the brutality of which has been publicly minimized by psychologist and former APA president Patrick DeLeon. After visiting Guantanamo, APA president Ronald Levant claimed that psychologists were present during interrogations to ‘add value and safeguards.’ Subsequent documentation shows plainly that the psychologists — members of so-called Behavioral Science Consultaton Teams (BSCT. svh) — were actually full participants. By 2007, the Pentagon was relying on psychologists for interrogation work rather than on psychiatrists because so many of the latter refused to be involved.
Today, more than three thousand detainees remain at Bagram, a facility about to be expanded to twice its current capacity. At Bagram psychologists like Morgan Banks, Bryce Lefever, and Larry James have overseen prisoner treatment programs operating in flagrant violation of international law and of the Geneva Conventions inspired by the ghastly revelations of the Nuremberg Trials. In 2011, however, James, former interrogation overseer at Abu Ghraib as well, was picked to serve on the White House Task Force for ‘Enhancing the Psychological Well-Being of The Military Family.’ According to ethics complaints filed against him by the International Human Rights Clinic of Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program, during his tenure at the prison boys and men were threatened with rape and death for themselves and their family members, sexually, culturally, and religiously humiliated, forced to remain naked and cold, deprived of sleep, subjected to sensory deprivation, over-stimulation, and extreme isolation, short-shackled into stress positions, and physically assaulted. The evidence indicates that abuse of this kind was systemic, and that BSCT health professionals played an integral role in its planning and practice.
Of course, the great majority of psychologists and other practitioners of social science do a world of good every day, psychologically, scientifically, and ethically. Hundreds have protested the shadow of their own profession: psychologist Beth Shinn, for example, who after watching president Gerald Koocher denigrate dissenters from APA policy as ‘opportunistic commentators masquerading as scholars’ resigned from the APA in 2007 because ‘the American Psychological Association continues to condone psychologists’ work in detention centers that violate international law and because of actions by APA’s leadership to discourage dissent from its policies in this matter.’ That year psychologist Mary Pipher protested by returning her APA Presidential Citation award. In 2008, psychologist Jeffrey Kaye wrote an article on ‘Why Torture Made Me Leave the APA.’ Because of such push-back the APA finally issued an unconditional condemnation of psychologists’ involvement in torture.
The APA has also been busy on the home front. As of today, 25% of clinical psychology doctoral students cannot find internships because the APA now owns them through further legislatory acts of predatory self-promotion. Having ignored ecological destruction, extinction, and climate change for decades despite the urgent warnings of ecologists and eco-psychologists, the APA finally studied the problem in 2009 and came up with a comprehensive solution: condition people to recycle and to buy more green products.
None of these shadows — of ecologically destructive industry and mass marketing, of political propaganda, of covert imprisonment and torture, of restriction of psychology graduates’ rights to call themselves psychologists and practice as they see fit–should be dismissed as anomalies. Long-standing and of a systematic pattern, they are inevitable expressions of the ideology of seeing everything from the outside, as separable parts rather than as living relations. It’s breathtaking to imagine psychologist Clark Hull spending his entire professional life trying to mathematize human nature, only to admit shortly before his death that his theories probably applied only to hungry rats. The work of cognitive ethologists (de studie van het gedragspatroon van dieren in hun natuurlijke omgeving. svh) like Marc Bekoff throws even this claim into doubt: unlike the research psychologists who manipulate them, rats and other primates show clear signs of empathy when their fellow creatures are being tortured in laboratories.
As Viktor Frankl (joods-Oostenrijkse neuroloog en psychiater, die de holocaust overleefde. svh) pointed out, the foundations of satanic mills like Auschwitz are laid at the drawing boards and lecterns of nihilistic reductionists who see living beings as automata. ‘Expectations that are only statistical,’ wrote analyst James Hillman, ‘are no longer human.’
Sometimes it’s not a matter of differing paradigms, but of refusing to sanction the colonialism, ambition, and inhumanity of institutions unable to redeem themselves.
See also ‘American Psychological Association Bolstered CIA Torture Program, Report Says’ (New York Times, April 30, 2015), ‘Guantanamo Bay Psychologists to Remain Despite APA Torture Fallout’ (The Guardian, July 15, 2015), and ‘Outside Psychologists Shielded US Torture Program, Report Finds’ (New York Times, July 10, 2015).
Zonder overdrijven kan worden gesteld dat Ian Buruma en de meeste westerse mainstream-opiniemakers, op jacht naar erkenning, gedreven door een brandende ambitie, het neo-kolonialisme ‘sanctioneren,’ en daarmee de ‘onmenselijkheid van instituten, die niet bij machte zijn zichzelf te bevrijden’ blijven steunen. Gezien het bovenstaande kan een serieuze intellectueel onmogelijk volhouden dat de VS tot de komst van president Trump ‘a model of freedom and openness’ was, en 'a force for good.' Zijn propaganda is pervers en levensgevaarlijk, zeker voor de toekomst van de komende generaties. Ik bedoel daar ondermeer het volgende mee: november 2007 beschreef de redacteur en literair criticus van Vrij Nederland, Jeroen Vullings, in een portret van de joods-Nederlandse auteur Arnon Grunberg:
Auschwitz. In het vorig jaar uitgezonden televisie-interview van Paul Rosenmöller met Arnon Grunberg werd de schrijver verzocht naar Auschwitz te gaan, het kamp waar zijn moeder gezeten heeft. Hij heeft een exemplaar van het manuscript dat ze voor haar kinderen heeft gemaakt bij zich. Dat levensverhaal heeft hij nog nooit gelezen. Door het in straf tempo doorvragen over gevoelige en pijnlijke onderwerpen van Rosenmöller, die steeds vlak bij Grunberg staat, raakt de schrijver merkbaar onder druk. Hij ratelt:
‘Ik hoop steeds minder jood te worden, ik ben meer dan dat — ik ben méér dan mijn ouders — ik schaam mij voor dat joodse — dat is ongemak.’ Nadat hij heeft moeten voorlezen uit zijn moeders boek — hij doet het snel en toonloos — typeert hij het drama van zijn ouders zo: ‘Dat je iets overleefd hebt en dat je niet meer kan leven. Niet meer echt leven.’
Op het terrein van Auschwitz, oog in oog met het onmetelijke en onmenselijke van de eerdere vernietiging, krijgt hij het zichtbaar te kwaad, zoals dat eenieder gebeurt die een concentratiekamp bezoekt, zelfs zonder een vergelijkbaar familieverleden. Hij draait met zijn hoofd, maar de interviewer laat zijn slachtoffer niet gaan. Waar Arnon Grunberg wanhopig over is, wil hij weten. Grunberg, terwijl hij wegkijkt:
‘Ja, dat het idee wat hij had toen hij zestien was, van: ik ga het anders doen dan mijn ouders, ik ga echt leven, dat dat niet gelukt is. Dus dat hij ook niet echt leeft.’
Verschrikkelijk om te zien, maar memorabele televisie. Het was duidelijk dat hij door gevoel bevangen werd, terwijl hij vastzat in de pose van degene die ongevoelig is voor het leed dezer wereld. Die scène vernietigde op dat moment zijn imago.
Dat de psychische schade die de genocide bij joodse overlevenden in Europa heeft aangericht nog generatieslang merkbaar zal zijn, wordt treffend verwoord door Arnon Grunberg wanneer hij opmerkt te hopen ‘steeds minder jood te worden, ik ben meer dan dat — ik ben méér dan mijn ouders — ik schaam mij voor dat joodse — dat is ongemak.’ Als intelligent en gevoelig mens weet Grunberg dat hij ‘ten koste van alles’ moet vermijden dat hij zichzelf ‘de status van slachtoffer toestaat,’ en dat hij moet proberen ‘te onthouden dat menselijke waardigheid een absoluut begrip is’ en dat hij dient te beseffen dat door zich ‘slachtoffer te beschouwen’ hij dan ‘alleen maar het vacuüm vergroot dat door gebrek aan persoonlijke verantwoordelijkheid ontstaat en dat demonen en demagogen zo graag opvullen,’ zoals de joods-Russische dichter Joseph Brodsky benadrukte in zijn essaybundel On Grief and Reason (1996), die een jaar na zijn dood verscheen. Iemand wiens persoonlijkheid gevormd wordt door het slachtofferschap is slechts een half mens. Desondanks cultiveert de zelfbenoemde ‘Joodse Staat’ vanwege doortrapte politieke redenen het slachtofferschap, waardoor de dwaasheid en het geweld alleen maar toeneemt. Maar de echte tragiek was die van ondermeer Grunberg’s ouders: ‘Dat je iets overleefd hebt en dat je niet meer kan leven. Niet meer echt leven.’ Precies hetzelfde geldt voor de genocides waarvan moslims, Afrikanen, Indianen, de Romavolkeren en zoveel andere religieuze, raciale en etnische groeperingen de dupe werden. Stannard schreef in verband hiermee dat net als ‘the Jewish Holocaust — the inhuman destruction of 6,000,000 people’ een ‘abominably unique event’ was:
So, too, for reasons of its own, was the mass murder of about 1,000,000 Armenians in Turkey a few decades prior to the Holocaust. So, too, was the deliberately caused ‘terror-famine’ in Stalin's Soviet Union in the 1930s, which killed more than 14,000,000 people. So, too, have been each of the genocidal slaughters of many millions more, decades after the Holocaust, in Burundi, Bangladesh, Kampuchea, East Timor, the Brazilian Amazon, and elsewhere. Additionally, within the framework of the Holocaust itself, there were aspects that were unique in the campaign of genocide conducted by the Nazis against Europe's Romani (Gypsy) people, which resulted in the mass murder of perhaps 1,500,000 men, women, and children. Of course, there also were the unique horrors of the African slave trade, during the course of which at least 30,000,000 — and possibly as many as 40,000,000 to 60,000,000 — Africans were killed, most of them in the prime of their lives, before they even had a chance to begin working as human chattel on plantations in the Indies and the Americas. And finally, there is the unique subject of this book, the total extermination of many American Indian peoples and the near-extermination of others, in numbers that eventually totaled close to 100,000,000.
Each of these genocides was distinct and unique, for one reason or another, as were (and are) others that go unmentioned here. In one case the sheer numbers of people killed may make it unique. In another case, the percentage of people killed may make it unique. In still a different case, the greatly compressed time period in which the genocide took place may make it unique. In a further case, the greatly extended time period in which the genocide took place may make it unique. No doubt the targeting of a specific group or groups for extermination by a particular nation's official policy may mark a given genocide as unique. So too might another group's being unofficially (but unmistakably) targeted for elimination by the actions of a multinational phalanx bent on total extirpation. Certainly the chilling utilization of technological instruments of destruction, such as gas chambers, and its assembly-line, bureaucratic, systematic methods of destruction makes the Holocaust unique. On the other hand, the savage employment of non-technological instruments of destruction, such as the unleashing of trained and hungry dogs to devour infants, and the burning and crude hacking to death of the inhabitants of entire cities, also makes the Spanish anti-Indian genocide unique.
Illustrerend voor de houding van zowel de liberals als de neoconservatieven in de VS is dat er in Washington wel een officiële United States Holocaust Memorial Museum bestaat, met meer dan 400 werknemers en een budget van ruim 100 miljoen dollar, maar geen United States Memorial Museum bestaat voor de genocide van naar schatting 7 miljoen Indianen in de Verenigde Staten. Daarover de volgende keer meer.
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