Ter herinnering: in zijn eveneens in het Nederlands vertaalde boek The Clash of Civilizations (1996) vatte de neoconservatieve Amerikaanse politicoloog Samuel Huntington het nog eens kort samen:
The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.
Om de rijkdom van de kleine westerse elite te bevorderen, benadrukte de Nederlandse mainstream-opiniemaker Ian Buruma dat ‘we cannot expect the Americans to be keen on our European civilizing mission,’ en dat ‘we too must do the dirty work, and take the risk of being held accountable.’ Mede vanwege deze kijk op de wereld kreeg mijn oude vriend in 2008 de Erasmusprijs dat dat jaar als thema had 'De Nieuwe Kosmopoliet.’ Inderdaad, het establishment vergeet maar al te graag dat het Westen ‘de wereld niet overwon door de superioriteit van zijn ideeën of waarden of religie, maar allereerst door zijn overmacht in het toepassen van georganiseerd geweld.’ Vandaar ook dat de VS jaarlijks ruim 50 procent van zijn federale budget -- dat het Congres kan toewijzen -- aan het militair-industrieel complex besteedt, en de ‘corporate press’ het agressief expansionisme altijd steunt. Zo gaf NRC Handelsblad in een redactioneel commentaar op de dag dat de Amerikaanse illegale inval in Irak begon, het volgende klemmende advies:
Nu de oorlog is begonnen, moeten president Bush en premier Blair worden gesteund. Die steun kan niet blijven steken in verbale vrijblijvendheid. Dat betekent dus politieke steun — en als het moet ook militaire.
Onthullend hieraan is dat de redactie en de hoofdredactie tegelijkertijd stelden dat zij aan ‘de casus belli tegen Irak twijfelen.’ Met andere woorden: hoewel er volgens het internationaal recht geen rechtvaardiging bestond voor Washington om ‘oorlogshandelingen’ tegen Irak te beginnen, moest Den Haag deze agressieoorlog toch ‘politieke steun’ verlenen ‘en als het moet ook militaire.’ Ik gebruik met nadruk het begrip ‘agressieoorlog,’ zoals die werd geformuleerd door het Internationale Militaire Tribunaal in Neurenberg:
To initiate a war of aggression… is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
Eerder al, op 23 juli 1945, had Robert Jackson, die naderhand de Amerikaanse hoofdaanklager werd tijdens de Processen van Neurenberg erop gewezen dat
If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.
Ondanks Vietnam, Afghanistan, Irak, Libië, Syrië, en al het andere Amerikaanse geweld overal ter wereld, meende Ian Buruma nog in 2017 dat, met het oog op het naderende einde van wat hij ‘Pax Americana’ betitelde, ‘we ons [zullen] moeten voorbereiden op een tijd waarin we met weemoed terugkijken op het betrekkelijk goedaardige imperialisme uit Washington.’ Het zal duidelijk zijn dat in een ware democratische rechtsorde niet alleen de verantwoordelijke politici zouden zijn veroordeeld voor de ernstige schendingen van het recht, maar ook hun woordvoerders in de 'vrije pers.' Hoewel steun aan terreur strafbaar is, weigert de gevestigde orde het eigen terrorisme juridisch te vervolgen. Geen enkele journalist is ooit in Nederland aangeklaagd wegens steun aan een ‘war of aggression,’ terwijl het wel degelijk ‘the supreme international crime’ is ‘differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.’ De steun van mijn mainstream-collega’s aan het demoniseren van alle mogelijke vijanden, van Irak to Rusland, van Iran tot China, is een uiterst gevaarlijke ontwikkeling nu geen enkele oorlog tussen grootmachten zelfs maar de schijn van een oplossing kan bieden. Maar ondanks alle reële bedreigingen van de mensheid blijven de commerciële media hun oorlogspropaganda verspreiden. Vrijdag 4 januari 2019 werd bekend dat ‘Reporter Quits NBC Citing Network’s Support For Endless War.’ Hij, William M. Arkin, kon niet meer tegen de alom heersende waanzin:
the immense resistance that ostensibly liberal mass media outlets have to antiwar narratives, skepticism of US military agendas, and any movement in the opposite direction of endless military expansionism.
‘January 4 is my last day at NBC News and I’d like to say goodbye to my friends, hopefully not for good,’ begins an email titled ‘My goodbye letter to NBC’ sent to various contacts by William M Arkin, an award-winning journalist who has been associated with the network for 30 years.
‘This isn’t the first time I’ve left NBC, but this time the parting is more bittersweet, the world and the state of journalism in tandem crisis,’ the email continues. ‘My expertise, though seeming to be all the more central to the challenges and dangers we face, also seems to be less valued at the moment. And I find myself completely out of synch with the network, being neither a day-to-day reporter nor interested in the Trump circus.’
The lengthy email covers details about Arkin’s relationship with NBC and its staff, his opinions about the mainstream media’s refusal to adequately scrutinize and criticize the US war machine’s spectacular failures in the Middle East, how he ‘argued endlessly with MSNBC about all things national security for years,’ the fact that his position as a civilian military analyst was unusual and ‘peculiar’ in a media environment where that role is normally dominated by ‘THE GENERALS and former government officials,’ and how he was ‘one of the few to report that there weren’t any WMD in Iraq’ and remembers ‘fondly presenting that conclusion to an incredulous NBC editorial board.’ […]
Arkin makes clear that NBC is in no way the sole mass media offender in its refusal to question or criticize the normalization of endless warfare, but that he feels increasingly ‘out of sync’ and ‘out of step’ with the network’s unhesitating advancement of military interventionist narratives. He writes about how Robert Windrem, NBC News’ chief investigative producer, convinced him to join a new investigative unit in the early days of the 2016 presidential race. Arkin writes the following about his experience with the unit:
‘I thought that the mission was to break through the machine of perpetual war acceptance and conventional wisdom to challenge Hillary Clinton’s hawkishness. It was also an interesting moment at NBC because everyone was looking over their shoulder at Vice (mediakanaal. svh) and other upstarts creeping up on the mainstream. But then Trump got elected and Investigations got sucked into the tweeting vortex, increasingly lost in a directionless adrenaline rush, the national security and political version of leading the broadcast with every snow storm. And I would assert that in many ways NBC just began emulating the national security state itself — busy and profitable. No wars won but the ball is kept in play.
‘I’d argue that under Trump, the national security establishment not only hasn’t missed a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength. Now it is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism. I’d also argue, ever so gingerly, that NBC has become somewhat lost in its own verve, proxies of boring moderation and conventional wisdom, defender of the government against Trump, cheerleader for open and subtle threat mongering, in love with procedure and protocol over all else (including results). I accept that there’s a lot to report here, but I’m more worried about how much we are missing. Hence my desire to take a step back and think why so little changes with regard to America’s wars.’
Arkin is no fan of Trump, calling him ‘an ignorant and incompetent impostor,’ but describes his shock at NBC’s reflexive opposition to the president’s ‘bumbling intuitions’ to get along with Russia, to denuclearize North Korea, to get out of the Middle East, and his questioning of the US military’s involvement in Africa.
‘I’m alarmed at how quick NBC is to mechanically argue the contrary, to be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war. Really? We shouldn’t get out Syria? We shouldn’t go for the bold move of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula? Even on Russia, though we should be concerned about the brittleness of our democracy that it is so vulnerable to manipulation, do we really yearn for the Cold War? And don’t even get me started with the FBI: What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?’
‘There’s a saying about consultants, that organizations hire them to hear exactly what they want to hear,’ Arkin writes in the conclusion of his statement. ‘I’m proud to say that NBC didn’t do that when it came to me. Similarly I can say that I’m proud that I’m not guilty of giving my employers what they wanted. Still, the things this and most organizations fear most — variability, disturbance, difference — those things that are also the primary drivers of creativity — are not really the things that I see valued in the reporting ranks.’
That’s about as charitably as it could possibly be said by a skeptical tongue. Another way to say it would be that plutocrat-controlled and government-enmeshed media networks hire reporters to protect the warmongering oligarchic status quo upon which media-controlling plutocrats have built their respective kingdoms, and foster an environment which elevates those who promote establishment-friendly narratives while marginalizing and pressuring anyone who doesn’t. It’s absolutely bizarre that it should be unusual for there to be a civilian analyst of the US war machine’s behaviors in the mainstream media who is skeptical of its failed policies and nonstop bloodshed, and it’s a crime that such voices are barely holding on to the fringes of the media stage. Such analysts should be extremely normal and commonplace, not rare and made to feel as though they don’t belong.
Inmiddels is bekend dat het Pentagon in zijn Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) van 2018:
calls for ‘low-yield’ nuclear weapons on submarine-launched ballistic missiles — weapons that could cause as much damage as the bombs the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
aldus de Amerikaanse auteur Marjorie Cohen, emerita hoogleraar ‘at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers.’ Op de website Truthout van 6 februari 2018 schreef zij onder de kop ‘Pentagon to Allow Nuclear Responses to Non-Nuclear Attacks,’ het volgende:
For the first time, the new NPR states that the United States could use nuclear weapons in response to non-nuclear attacks, including cyberattacks, in ‘extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States, its allies and partners.’ This new strategy opens the door to first-use of nuclear weapons, which is prohibited under international law.
In its 1996 advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) concluded that while the use of nuclear weapons might be lawful when used in self-defense if the survival of the nation were at stake, a first-strike use would not be.
The ICJ held in its ‘Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons’ case that ‘the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the principles and rules of humanitarian law.’ […]
Russia, China and North Korea are singled out as potential nuclear threats in the NPR. The document erroneously states that the United States needs new nuclear weapons because ‘China is expanding and modernizing its considerable nuclear forces’ and is pursuing ‘entirely new nuclear capabilities,’
zo berichtte op dinsdag 6 februari 2018 Marjorie Cohn, ‘professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and an advisory board member of Veterans for Peace.’
In zijn boek The Doomsday Machine. Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (December 2017) waarschuwde de befaamde Daniel Ellsberg voor een andere rampzalige ontwikkeling:
There is every likelihood that, for comparable reasons, similar secret delegation or Dead Hand systems or arrangements exist in every other nuclear weapons state — China, Britain, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea — meaning that a Hiroshima-size explosion on any one of their capitals and/or central military headquarters is likely to lead to full-scale launching of their ready forces. The only difference is that none of these states could, at present, cause a full-scale nuclear winter, though an exchange between any two of them (except North Korea) could trigger enough global reduction in sunlight and loss of harvests for a decade to cause nuclear famine and the starvation of one to two billion people or more.
The Strangelove paradox afflicts not only the United States and Russia. Every new state that acquires nuclear weapons and comes face-to-face with the vulnerability both of the weapons systems and of the command and control apparatus confronts the same incentives, the same pressures from its military to delegate and sub-delegate authority to use them, and the same motives to keep that delegation secret from the est of the world.
Deployment of nuclear weapons by a new state doesn't add just one new finger to a trigger on nuclear war. The world worries about the finger of an irresponsible or reckless third world leader, when the finger can just as easily be that of one of many functionaries working in a far-flung outpost for one of these leaders, new or old.
The bottom line, once again: This is not a species to be trusted with nuclear weapons. Above all, not to be trusted with a full or partial Doomsday Machine. And that doesn't just apply to ‘crazy’ third world leaders.
Elsberg is niet de eerste de beste, maar een voormalige defensieanalist die in dienst van de denktank RAND Corporation voor het Amerikaanse leger werkte. ‘Begin jaren 70 ontdekte hij dat de Amerikaanse bevolking was voorgelogen over de Vietnamoorlog en speelde geheime documenten door naar The New York Times, de zogenaamde Pentagon Papers.’ In de Amerikaanse Western ‘Hostiles' uit 2017 merkt iemand op: ‘You know I have killed everything that has walked or crawled. If you do it enough, you get used to it,’ en juist deze mentaliteit was ook al in 1961 herkenbaar toen de Amerikaanse militaire en politieke leiders akkoord gingen met de nucleaire ‘extermination of over half a billion people,’ zo ontdekte Daniel Ellsberg destijds als ‘nuclear war planner.’ Opnieuw wordt hiermee bewezen hoe juist Huntington’s constatering was dat ‘the West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.’ De beleidsbepalers van de technologische beschaving zijn sinds begin jaren zestig zelfs bereid de gehele mensheid uit te roeien zodra zij een oorlog tussen kernmachten dreigen te verliezen. Die waanzin noemden zij ‘MAD,’ een acroniem van ‘Mutual Assured Destruction’ een ‘doctrine of military strategy and national security policy in which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two or more opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender.’ Veelbetekenend is dat de toenmalige Amerikaanse minister van Defensie Robert McNamara, de eerste was die de MAD-doctrine openbaar maakte, dezelfde man dus die in de bekroonde documentaire The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003) naar aanleiding van de Cuba Crisis met betrekking tot een nucleair armageddon opmerkte:
I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today.
Desondanks besloot een halve eeuw later de regering Obama tot de algehele vernieuwing van het Amerikaanse kernwapenarsenaal, die naar schatting één biljoen dollar (een miljoen keer een miljoen) gaat kosten. Een deel van die massavernietigingswapens wordt in Europa gestationeerd, zodat Het Avondland de eerste desastreuze klap kan opvangen. Hier zien we opnieuw het westerse rationalisme zonder rede, de banaliteit van het kwaad, de criminele gedachteloosheid, de weigering om na te denken. In verband daarmee wees de Amerikaanse hoogleraar Roger Berkowitz, directeur van het Hannah Arendt Center for Ethical and Political Thinking op het volgende:
The political implications of thinking are brought front and center in Arendt's discussion of the argument from the lesser evil as it arose in response to the actions of German citizens and even Jews during the Nazi era. In her coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann for ‘The New Yorker,’ and later in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt reported on a disturbing fact that struck her, and many others, at the trial. Eichmann, she noted, was decidedly average. The evil of his deeds was indisputable; yet, notwithstanding what he had done, Eichmann's motivations seemed grounded in typical bourgeois drives. Eichmann was ambitious. He sought the recognition that came from success. And he wanted to excel at his profession. These banal motivations could, under the Nazi system of rule, lead him to participate in some of the most wrongful deeds in the history of man. How could such a simple man do such extraordinary evil?
Een nog steeds uiterst actuele vraag, zoals duidelijk werd toen dr. Madeleine Albright, de eerste vrouwelijke Amerikaanse minister van Buitenlandse Zaken, die als ambassadeur bij de VN, op 12 mei 1996:
defended sanctions against Iraq on a 60 Minutes segment in which Lesley Stahl asked her ‘We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?’ and Albright replied ‘we think the price is worth it.’
Auschwitz en Hiroshima zijn een kinderspel vergeleken met de nucleaire zelfmoord van de gehele mensheid, ‘een bagatel,’ schreef Harry Mulisch, niet meer dan ‘een herinnering uit de goede oude tijd,’ want:
Hier vervloekt de mens zichzelf, zijn eigen kindskinderen, hieruit spreekt een haat zo fundamenteel, dat wij wel moeten vrezen, de mens nog altijd overschat te hebben.
Alle woorden ten spijt over westerse beschaving, white man’s burden, responsibility to protect, humanitair ingrijpen, de werkelijkheid is dat het Westen bereid is genocide te plegen zodra grondstoffen en markten in het gedrang komen. De Shock and Awe-strategie, onder leiding van NAVO-bondgenoot de VS was een eufemisme voor grootschalige oorlogsmisdaden, en wel omdat in de praktijk bij massaal geweld er geen onderscheid kan worden gemaakt tussen burgers en militairen. Een moderne oorlog is per definitie een permanente massale schending van het volkenrecht en het oorlogsrecht, zoals elke burger weet die slachtoffer is geworden van het grootscheeps terrorisme dat oorlog heet. Generaal Curtis LeMay, vatte als stafchef van de Amerikaanse luchtmacht, de heersende militaire en politieke mores als volgt samen:
There is no such thing as an innocent civilian.
De militaire inzet tijdens de Vietnam-Oorlog was al even simpel:
We will bomb them back to the Stone Age.
In de met een Oscar bekroonde documentaire The Fog of War wierp Robert McNamara de vraag op:
Why was it necessary to drop the nuclear bomb if LeMay was burning up Japan?
McNamara wees in verband hiermee op het feit dat
Killing 50-90% of the people in 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve.
'Necessary' of niet, 'Shock and Awe' is de strategie waarmee het Westen al eeuwenlang zijn hegemonie consolideert. Iedere militair, politicus, academicus, journalist weet dit. In zijn boek De Natuurlijke Historie van de Verwoesting (2004) onderstreepte de Duitse auteur en hoogleraar Europese Literatuur, wijlen W.G. Sebald, nog eens het gemak waarmee terreur wordt geaccepteerd, terwijl je toch ‘van de menselijke natuur een zekere mate van empathie [verwacht].’ Maar inlevingsvermogen bezitten militairen en politici domweg niet. McNamara stelde in The Fog of War daarom het volgende vraagstuk ter discussie:
What makes it immoral if you lose but not if you win?
Deze vraag is vanzelfsprekend retorisch. Het antwoord ligt in de vraag besloten: oorlog is per definitie een misdaad, omdat de meerderheid van de slachtoffers bestaat uit ongewapende burgers. Tegelijkertijd geldt dat alleen de overwinnaars beslissen wie een oorlogsmisdadiger is; zij schrijven de geschiedenis. En zo gaat ook de ‘democratie’ voorbij aan het ondubbelzinnige feit dat een moderne oorlog uit een lange serie oorlogsmisdaden bestaat. Al in februari 1943 was bekend dat de moderne oorlog niets onberoerd laat. Toen riep nazi-minister van Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, op tot ‘den totalen Krieg.’ Een jaar eerder had de Amerikaanse president, na de Japanse aanval op Pearl Harbor, tijdens zijn ‘total war’-speech laten weten dat de Duitsers en Japanners geenszins moesten verwachten dat zij een ‘negotiated peace,’ konden verwachten, maar dat zij zich 'onvoorwaardelijk' moesten overgeven. Wat dit in de praktijk betekende, liet ruim een halve eeuw later Robert McNamara weten door te vertellen dat hij en zijn meerdere, Curtis Lemay, wisten dat 'we were behaving as war criminals.’ In tegenstelling tot de massamoorden in opdracht van de nazileiding werd het op grote schaal vermoorden van de stedelijke bevolking in Duitsland en Japan door de Geallieerden nooit juridisch vervolgd. Integendeel zelfs, de Lemay's en McNamara's en hun piloten werden bij terugkeer als oorlogshelden verwelkomd. Vanzelfsprekend is het niet overdreven te stellen dat een dergelijke ontwikkeling in een tijdperk van massavernietigingswapens genocidale gevolgen zal hebben. De huidige drempelverlagende Amerikaanse nucleaire strategie kan alleen veranderen wanneer de wereldbevolking zich hiertegen massaal keert, Europeanen voorop. Vooral laatstgenoemden moeten weten dat achter de schermen het Amerikaans militair-industrieel complex nieuwe oorlogen blijft plannen. Vrijdag 1 juli 2016 lekte onder de kop ‘Breedlove’s war: Emails show ex-NATO general plotting US conflict with Russia,’ het volgende uit:
Hacked private emails of the US general formerly in charge of NATO reveal a campaign to pressure the White House into escalating the conflict with Russia over Ukraine, involving several influential players in Washington.
The emails, posted by the site DCLeaks, show correspondence between General Philip M. Breedlove, former head of the US European Command and supreme commander of NATO forces, with several establishment insiders concerning the situation in Ukraine following the February 2014 coup that ousted the elected government in favor of a US-backed regime…
The hacked emails reveal his frequent and intense communications with retired General Wesley Clark, as well as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and involving a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, State Department official Victoria Nuland (de neoconservatieve staatssecretaris van Buitenlandse Zaken voor Europe and Eurasia onder Obama, die de gewelddadige Oekraïense machtsovername met 5 miljard dollar steunde. svh) and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt…
Breedlove continued to push for more aggressive US involvement, claiming a heavy Russian troop presence in Ukraine — which was later denied even by the government in Kiev. In March this year, the general was telling US lawmakers that Russia and Syria were ‘deliberately weaponizing migration in an attempt to overwhelm European structures and break European resolve.’
Breedlove was replaced at the helm of EUCOM and NATO in May, and officially retired from the military on July 1 (2016. svh). He was replaced by US Army General Curtis Scaparrotti, whose public statements suggest a similar level of hostility for Russia.
Boven: De AZOV Brigade, uitgesproken fascistische troepen van Kiev.
Onder: President Petro Poroshenko emphasizes that NATO is a very important and reliable partner of Ukraine.
'We have discussed the opportunity to enhance our cooperation,' Petro Poroshenko told journalists following the meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
Eerder, 6 maart 2015, waarschuwde Der Spiegel voor Breedlove’s ‘Oorlogszuchtigheid’ met de woorden:
BREEDLOVE'S BELLICOSITY: BERLIN ALARMED BY AGGRESSIVE NATO STANCE ON UKRAINE
It was quiet in eastern Ukraine last Wednesday. Indeed, it was another quiet day in an extended stretch of relative calm. The battles between the Ukrainian army and the pro-Russian separatists had largely stopped and heavy weaponry was being withdrawn. The Minsk cease-fire wasn't holding perfectly, but it was holding.
On that same day, General Philip Breedlove, the top NATO commander in Europe, stepped before the press in Washington. Putin, the 59-year-old said, had once again ‘upped the ante’ in eastern Ukraine — with ‘well over a thousand combat vehicles, Russian combat forces, some of their most sophisticated air defense, battalions of artillery’ having been sent to the Donbass. ‘What is clear,’ Breedlove said, ‘is that right now, it is not getting better. It is getting worse every day.’
German leaders in Berlin were stunned. They didn't understand what Breedlove was talking about. And it wasn't the first time. Once again, the German government, supported by intelligence gathered by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency, did not share the view of NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR).
The pattern has become a familiar one. For months, Breedlove has been commenting on Russian activities in eastern Ukraine, speaking of troop advances on the border, the amassing of munitions and alleged columns of Russian tanks. Over and over again, Breedlove's numbers have been significantly higher than those in the possession of America's NATO allies in Europe. As such, he is playing directly into the hands of the hardliners in the US Congress and in NATO.
The German government is alarmed. Are the Americans trying to thwart European efforts at mediation led by Chancellor Angela Merkel? Sources in the Chancellery have referred to Breedlove's comments as ‘dangerous propaganda.’ Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier even found it necessary recently to bring up Breedlove's comments with NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg.
But Breedlove hasn't been the only source of friction. Europeans have also begun to see others as hindrances in their search for a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine conflict. First and foremost among them is Victoria Nuland, head of European affairs at the US State Department. She and others would like to see Washington deliver arms to Ukraine and are supported by Congressional Republicans as well as many powerful Democrats.
Zomer 2015 zette Kissinger uiteen dat een:
number of things need to be recognized. One, the relationship between Ukraine and Russia will always have a special character in the Russian mind. It can never be limited to a relationship of two traditional sovereign states, not from the Russian point of view, maybe not even from Ukraine’s. So, what happens in Ukraine cannot be put into a simple formula of applying principles that worked in Western Europe, not that close to Stalingrad and Moscow. In that context, one has to analyze how the Ukraine crisis occurred. It is not conceivable that Putin spends sixty billion euros on turning a summer resort into a winter Olympic village in order to start a military crisis the week after a concluding ceremony that depicted Russia as a part of Western civilization.
Dergelijke informatie wordt door de Nederlandse mainstream-pers doorgaans genegeerd. Gedwee volgt zij de propaganda van de Atlantische macht, en weigert zij het feit te analyseren dat de elite in Washington en op Wall Street zich tevens voorbereidt op een gewapend conflict met China. Vóór 2020 zal tenminste 60 procent van de Amerikaanse marinevloot in de Zuid Chinese Zee zijn gestationeerd, waar nu al ‘U.S. Navy destroyers stalk China's claims in South China Sea.’ De reden is dat de Amerikaanse politiek ten aanzien van de Pacific Rim erop gericht is:
to ‘contain’ China, to limit China’s ability to project power in the waters off its southern coast, to bolster U.S. ‘hegemony’ or primacy in the East Asia maritime space.
Gezien de nieuwe Amerikaanse nucleaire strategie is van belang te weten dat vrijdag 5 augustus 2016 uitlekte dat het Amerikaanse leger de Rand Corporation opdracht had gegeven tot het ‘Thinking Through' van 'the Unthinkable.’ Onder de kop ‘RAND CORPORATION LAYS OUT SCENARIOS FOR U.S. WAR WITH CHINA’ kon de lezer vernemen dat:
A new study by the RAND Corporation titled ‘War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable’ is just the latest think tank paper devoted to assessing a US war against China. The study, commissioned by the US Army, provides further evidence that a war with China is being planned and prepared in the upper echelons of the American military-intelligence apparatus.
That the paper emerges from the RAND Corporation has a particular and sinister significance. Throughout the Cold War, RAND was the premier think tank for ‘thinking the unthinkable’ — a phrase made notorious by RAND’s chief strategist in the 1950s, Herman Kahn. Kahn devoted his macabre book ‘On Thermonuclear War’ to elaborating a strategy for a ‘winnable’ nuclear war against the Soviet Union.
According to the preface of the new study, released last week, ‘This research was sponsored by the Office of the Undersecretary of the Army and conducted within the RAND Arroyo Center’s Strategy, Doctrine, and Resources Program. RAND Arroyo Center, part of the RAND Corporation, is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the United States Army.’
The paper is a war-gaming exercise in the Kahn tradition: weighing the possible outcomes of a war between two nuclear powers with utter indifference to the catastrophic consequences for people in the United States, China and the rest of the world.
Eind januari 2018 waarschuwde de Amerikaanse huisarts Robert F. Dodge, bestuurslid van ondermeer ‘Nuclear Age Peace Foundation,’ voor het almaar dichterbij komen van ‘the Apocalypse,’ nu:
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has just moved their Doomsday Clock forward to two minutes till midnight. Midnight represents nuclear apocalypse. The Clock is recognized around the world as an indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and emerging technologies. Each year the decision to move the Clock forward, backward, or not at all, is determined by the Bulletins Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors which includes 15 Nobel Laureates.
In making this year’s move to two minutes till midnight, the Bulletin stated that ‘in 2017, world leaders failed to respond effectively to the looming threat of nuclear war and climate change, making the world’s security situation more dangerous than it was a year ago-and as dangerous as it has been since World War II.’
In recent years the Bulletin has added climate change to nuclear weapons as a major risk of global conflict. This year the greatest threat remained that of nuclear conflict with the ongoing North Korea crisis featuring dangerous rhetoric and actions coming from both sides. World experts have made their assessments; leadership in the US and North Korea have now radically elevated the risk of nuclear war either by accident or miscalculation.
Coupled with deteriorating relationships between the world’s nuclear powers, with US and Russian relations at the lowest point in decades and rising tensions between the US and China, all while the United States plans to rebuild its nuclear arsenal — prompting all of the other nations to follow suit. The situation is further undermined from a diplomatic standpoint by an understaffed and demoralized US State Department and thus the Clock ticks forward.
The Board stated, ‘To call the world nuclear situation dire is to understate the danger — and its immediacy.’ […]
We have the ability and now the legal framework with the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons to abolish nuclear weapons…
It’s time, possibly our final chance, to abolish nuclear weapons. It’s two minutes till midnight.
Op de Amerikaanse website CounterPunch van 7 februari 2018 wees Dodge bovendien op het volgende:
Scientific studies have demonstrated the potential catastrophic global environmental effects following a limited regional nuclear war, using just 100 12-kiloton Hiroshima-size weapons (of the 16,300 in the arsenals of the nine nuclear nations, which is approximately one-half of just one percent) that would potentially kill two billion people.
This new Doctrine proposes the development of two new generations of nuclear weapons including ‘low-yield nukes,’ Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBM) and the long-term development of Submarine Launched Cruise Missiles (SLCM). These ‘low-yield nuke’ are 20 kiloton — same as the larger Nagasaki size bombs that killed more than 70,000 people. Seemingly ignoring the fact that nuclear weapons are nuclear weapons regardless of size with the same horrific initial devastation and radioactive fallout, these weapons are proposed to demonstrate America’s resolve in deterring nuclear attack.
In fact this circular argument of smaller nuclear weapons being a greater deterrence actually increases the likelihood of their use. This further promotes the mythology of deterrence which actually drives all nine nuclear states to follow suit.
Gekoppeld aan de de nieuwe nucleaire strategie van het ministerie van Defensie, waarbij ook ‘non-nuclear circumstances’ aanleiding zullen zijn voor een Amerikaanse nucleaire aanval,
such as certain cyberattacks, the risk of nuclear war is dramatically increased, bringing the imminent threat of nuclear war to the center of US military policy and foreign policy. This fact was also acknowledged in the recent Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ movement of their nuclear Doomsday clock to two minutes till midnight, the closest since World War II.
Zijn deze levensbedreigende feiten aanleiding voor de ‘vrije pers’ om de alarmbel te luiden? Het antwoord is: Nee! De commerciële media moeten het hebben van de waan van de dag, én van een vijandsbeeld. Alleen nog een permanente oorlogsdreiging kan de interne cohesie kunstmatig in stand houden. En nu de advertentie-inkomsten van de kranten en tijdschriften almaar blijven teruglopen, ziet de mainstream-pers zich genoodzaakt politieke en militaire spanningen zo veel mogelijk én zo lang mogelijk te exploiteren. Op die wijze verenigen zich de belangen van de elite en die van haar pers. De voormalige buitenland-correspondent van The New York Times, tot hem het werk onmogelijk werd gemaakt, Chris Hedges, gaf in dit verband als voorbeeld de demonisering van Rusland, de absurde gedachte dat Rusland verantwoordelijk was voor de verkiezing van Donald Trump, in plaats van de maatschappelijke ongelijkheid, waarvoor The New York Times en vooral zijn columnisten jarenlang ‘cheerleaders’ zijn geweest. De mainstream-media weigeren te verklaren hoe het mogelijk is geweest dat Hillary Clinton met een verkiezingsfonds van een miljard dollar niet in staat was de vermeende Russische propaganda onderuit te halen. In reactie op de waanzin gaf in april 2018 de Amerikaanse hoogleraar Media Studies, Mark Crispin Miller, een ander voorbeeld:
When one reads the ‘news’ about Syria, one might as well have been reading the ‘news’ about the Hun (de Duitsers. svh) in 1915. It is exactly the same. It is really staggering (onthutsend. svh) how littler moral and intellectual progress the mass-mind seems to have made, especially in a country where we don’t study propaganda-history in school, as we should. The ‘Times’ and the rest of them are filled with propaganda and ton’s of fluff, celebrity ‘news’ and so on. To bring this back to our initial point: the ground of this shift is clearly economic, there is no blood-flow there, they don’t have enough advertising anymore, so they have to align increasingly on clickbait revenues (content that is aimed at generating online advertising revenue, especially at the expense of quality or accuracy, relying on sensationalist headlines to attract click-throughs and to encourage forwarding of the material over online social networks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x39yKWWP10). And there is another danger: as the press has vanished into the media cartel — six transnational corporations that control some ninety percent of the content that we digest daily — as the media cartel become more concentrated, it is simultaneously also becoming closer and closer to the state.
Voorbeelden hiervan zijn de Amerikaanse generaals buiten dienst, doorgaans werkzaam voor de oorlogsindustrie, die door Amerikaanse netwerken opgevoerd worden als onpartijdige deskundigen, of John Owen Brennan, de voormalige CIA-directeur, die vandaag de dag als analyst via MSNBC zijn propaganda mag verspreiden. Zelfs de schijn van onpartijdigheid bestaat niet meer, in feite is het één en al propaganda geworden. Professor Crispin Miller benadrukt een ander gevaar:
Trump has performed an invaluable function in all this, because he enables the press to get up its high horse, count his countless, stupid, glaring, obvious lies, which are about nothing, and then pat themselves on the back as if the far fewer, far more dangerous lies that they routinely tell, are not lies. So Trump enables the corporate press to pose as honest, as truth-tellers, and he also enables the CIA and FBI to look like our champions, as if they are going to save us from Washington.
Meer hierover de volgende keer.
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