Tot het aantreden van president Trump was de VS ‘a force for good,’ en was het ‘ideal of American openness and democracy still worthy of admiration,’ aldus Ian Buruma in januari 2019. Toen ik deze mainstream-propaganda las, moest ik onmiddellijk aan de Britse auteur John Berger denken die schreef dat:
[c]onsumptie en communicatie tegenwoordig verenigd [zijn] in een diabolische vennootschap, en uit deze vennootschap bestaat datgene wat wij kennen als de media. Eerst en vooral vertegenwoordigen de media een economisch contract waardoor alles wat er in de wereld gebeurt wordt gekoppeld aan het mechanisme van de verkoop.
Zoals de clerus in de middeleeuwen bepaalde wat de waarheid was, zo verordineren nu de commerciële massamedia wat de werkelijkheid is, en vooral ook, hoe de realiteit door het publiek ervaren moet worden. In zijn in 1992 verschenen essaybundel Stemverheffing schreef Berger:
De veronderstellingen waarvan het mediabedrijf, namens het publiek, uitgaat zijn behalve blind ook verblindend… Misschien is het precies op dit punt dat onze vorm van democratie een langzame dood sterft. Als dat zo is, dan als gevolg van een weigering. De weigering van het mediabedrijf om het feit te erkennen en te laten doorwerken dat het publiek in zijn hart weet hoe de wereld in elkaar zit… De reden van deze weigering die een bedreiging is voor onze vorm van democratie, de reden waarom het mediabedrijf stelselmatig onderschat wat we gemeen hebben, die reden is steeds dezelfde: de normloze drang tot verkopen… Wat ik wil is dat mensen zich ervan bewust worden hoe smerig het mediabedrijf ze bedient als publiek. Smerig, omdat met de waardigheid van kijker en bekekene de vloer wordt aangeveegd.
En omdat voor het neoliberalisme winst maken het heiligste geloofsartikel is, spreekt Berger van 'the dealers of the Free Market and their corollary, the Mafia,' die weten dat:
they now have the world in their pocket. They have. But to maintain their confidence they have to change the meaning of all the words used in languages to explain or praise or give value to life: every word, according to them now, is the servant of profit. And so they have become dumb. Or, rather, they can no longer speak any truth. Their language is too withered for that. As a consequence they have also lost the faculty of memory. A loss which one day will be fatal.
Wat de Buruma’s van de zogeheten ‘vrije pers’ chronisch ‘vergeten’ is de geschiedenis, die, zoals bekend, gehoorzaamd aan de wet van oorzaak en gevolg. Zij verzwijgen bewust het feit dat het Westen al ruim vijf eeuwen lang op grote schaal terreur laat uitoefenen zodra de elite meent er zelf beter van te kunnen worden. De in de polder zo bejubelde ‘kosmopoliet’ Buruma schrijft vanuit een leugen die het Westen heeft gecreëerd om zijn eigen terreur te rechtvaardigen. Daarentegen stelde de zwarte intellectueel en dichter Aimé Césaire uit de Franse kolonie Martinique in zijn Discours sur le colonialisme (1950) dat de:
colonial enterprise is to the modern world what Roman imperialism was to the ancient world: the prelude to Disaster and the forerunner of Catastrophe. Come, now! The Indians massacred, the Moslem world drained of itself, the Chinese world defiled and perverted for a good century; the Negro world disqualified; mighty voices stilled forever; homes scattered to the wind; all this wreckage, all this waste, humanity reduced to a monologue, and you think that all that does not have its price? The truth is that this policy cannot but bring about the ruin of Europe itself, and that Europe, if it is not careful, will perish from the void it has created around itself.
They thought they were only slaughtering Indians, or Hindus, or South Sea islanders, or Africans. They have in fact overthrown, one after another, the ramparts behind which European civilization could have developed freely.
I know how fallacious historical parallels are, particularly the one I am about to draw. Nevertheless, permit me to quote a page from Edgar Quinet (Franse negentiende eeuwse historicus. svh) for the not inconsiderable element of truth which it contains and which is worth pondering. Here it is:
‘People ask why barbarism emerged all at once in ancient civilization. I believe I know the answer. It is surprising that so simple a cause is not obvious to everyone. The system of ancient civilization was composed of a certain number of nationalities, of countries which, although they seemed to be enemies, or were even ignorant of each other, protected, supported, and guarded one another. When the expanding Roman Empire undertook to conquer and destroy these groups of nations, the dazzled sophists thought they saw at the end of this road humanity triumphant in Rome. They talked about the unity of the human spirit; it was only a dream. It happened that these nationalities were so many bulwarks protecting Rome itself... Thus when Rome, in its alleged triumphal march toward a single civilization, had destroyed, one after the other, Carthage, Egypt, Greece, Judea, Persia, Dacia, and Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul, it came to pass that it had itself swallowed up the dikes that protected it against the human ocean under which it was to perish.
The magnanimous Caesar, by crushing the two Gauls, only paved the way for the Teutons. So many societies, so many languages extinguished, so many cities, rights, homes annihilated, created a void around Rome, and in those places which were not invaded by the barbarians, barbarism was born spontaneously. The vanquished Gauls changed into Bagaudes (berooiden die in opstand kwamen. svh). Thus the violent downfall, the progressive extirpation (vernietiging. svh) of individual cities, caused the crumbling of ancient civilization. That social edifice was supported by the various nationalities as by so many different columns of marble or porphyry. When, to the applause of the wise men of the time, each of these living columns had been demolished, the edifice came crashing down; and the wise men of our day are still trying to understand how such mighty ruins could have been made in a moment's time.’
And now I ask: what else has bourgeois Europe done? It has undermined civilizations, destroyed countries, ruined nationalities, extirpated ‘the root of diversity.’ No more dikes, no more bulwarks. The hour of the barbarian is at hand. The modern barbarian. The American hour. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, gregariousness, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.
Ter verduidelijking:
De oorsprong van Bagaudae moet worden gezocht in boeren en stedelingen die vanwege de plundertochten door Germaanse stammen alles kwijt waren geraakt. Zij vormden gewapende groepen om zich te beschermen en voorzagen zichzelf van levensonderhoud door te roven en plunderen.
De parallellen tussen toen en nu zijn fascinerend. De binnenlandse onderkaste die door het neoliberalisme de afgelopen vier decennia opnieuw is gekweekt en die door het systeem van de ‘jobless growth’ almaar uitdijt, zijn de ‘Bangaudae’ van nu. De macht weet dit, en heeft zich hierop voorbereid door wetgeving, de militarisering van de politie, het op grote schaal bespioneren van de eigen bevolking, en het creëren van gewapende conflicten elders om de aandacht af te leiden, in een vergeefse poging de interne cohesie te handhaven. De oorlog tegen de buitenlandse ‘Bangaudae’ is al in volle gang en ziedaar de scherpzinnige constatering van ‘Aimé Césaire’ uit 1950:
Geen dijken meer, geen verschansingen meer. Het uur van de barbaar is aangebroken. Het Amerikaanse uur. Geweld, overdaad, verspilling, handel, bluf, kuddegeest, domheid, vulgariteit, wanorde.
Niet voor niets waarschuwde Amnesty International in de tijd dat, volgens Buruma, de VS ‘a force for good’ was dat de:
Obama administration claims its use of lethal force, including with drones, is ‘legal,' ‘ethical,’ and ‘wise.’ But Amnesty International is gravely concerned that the administration is killing people outside the bounds of human rights and the law.
Buruma zal ook nooit opkomen voor bijvoorbeeld de journalist Julian Assange die, als woordvoerder van Wikileaks, door de VS wordt gezocht vanwege het openbaar maken van onder andere Amerikaanse oorlogsmisdaden en de publicatie van Hillary Clinton’s emails, handelend over het doortrapte machtspel van de Democratische Partij-bonzen. En dit alles terwijl bekend is dat op:
12 July 2018, The Inter-American Court of Human Rights published its opinion on Assange's asylum in a press statement that had been requested by Rafael Correa's government. According to Doughty Street, the ruling was made shortly after US Vice President Mike Pence raised the issue of Assange while on a visit to Ecuador.
The ruling upheld the principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits signatories of the American Convention on Human Rights from deporting foreign individuals when such a deportation would likely lead to their persecution ‘on account of race, nationality, religion, social status or political opinions.’ It concluded that the principle applies equally to diplomatic and territorial asylum.
The decision, according to multiple reporting outlets, in respect to Assange's status, outlines the necessity for ‘third countries’ to allow for ‘safe passage’ out of an embassy. Commentators have noted the near absence of this ruling from the American media… On 5 February 2016, the UN's Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that Assange had been subject to arbitrary detention by the UK and Swedish Governments since 7 December 2010, including his time in prison, on conditional bail and in the Ecuadorian embassy. According to the group, Assange should be allowed to walk free and be given compensation.
Hoewel Buruma volhoudt dat de VS tot de komst van Trump ‘[a]n ideal of American openness and democracy was still worthy of admiration,’ zal hij net als de de rest van de liberal ‘vrije pers’ in de VS blijven zwijgen over Assange, om te voorkomen dat zijn inkomen, en zijn imago als betrouwbare woordvoerder van het establishment, in gevaar komt. Buruma rept ook met geen woord over het volgende:
Questions still surround the case of the deceased former Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich and whether he was the source who gave thousands of classified emails to WikiLeaks. Those questions were answered this week, when leaked audio featuring Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh claimed that Rich had indeed contacted WikiLeaks.
Just over one year ago, Rich, 27, was working as the DNC’s voter expansion data director in Washington D.C. when he was murdered while walking home around 4 a.m. It’s been confirmed that earlier that evening Rich was with Imran Awan — the IT specialist who had top secret clearance to Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s data as well as other members of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Awan was recently taken in custody while trying to flee the country.
The official story on Rich’s death was he was a victim of a botched robbery. The timing of his death, in relation to the release of the infamous DNC Emails from WikiLeaks less than two weeks later, caused many to question the missing links surrounding his unsolved murder. After his death, the DC police secured his laptop, but could not crack it and turned to the FBI for help. Hersh claims he is referencing the report created by the FBI after agents searched Rich’s laptop.
‘All I know is that he offered a sample, an extensive sample, I’m sure dozens of emails, and said “I want money.” Later, WikiLeaks did get the password, he had a DropBox, a protected DropBox. They got access to the DropBox,’ Hersh said. ‘The word was passed. According to the NSA report, he also shared this DropBox with a couple of friends, so that “if anything happens to me it’s not going to solve your problems. WikiLeaks got access before he was killed,”’
aldus de wereldberoemde Amerikaanse onderzoeksjournalist Seymour Hersh zomer 2017. Ook dit toont aan dat Buruma’s geloof in ‘Amerikaanse openheid en democratie’ die ‘nog steeds waard waren om te worden bewonderd,’ niet meer is dan simplistische propaganda, waarmee hij furore maakt bij het establishment, maar zeker niet bij goed geïnformeerde Amerikaanse intellectuelen die uit ervaring van nabij weten hoe de politieke machinaties van een ineenstortend imperium verlopen.
De geopolitiek van een ineenstortend imperium als de VS wordt natuurlijk niet democratisch bepaald door het volk, maar door een kleine, rijke elite die haar belangen bedreigd weet. Zo is het de hele geschiedenis door geweest. Dat Buruma’s ‘liberals’ het doen voorkomen, of misschien wel echt geloven, dat Washington en Wall Street hierop een historische uitzondering vormen, getuigt van ofwel een verpletterende naïviteit of een verregaande doortraptheid. Kortom, of zij zijn onvoorstelbaar dom dan wel uitermate slecht. Hoe dan ook, van precies dezelfde mentaliteit is al sprake sinds het begin van het liberalisme. Wie hier meer van wil weten, raad ik aan de 375 pagina’s tellende studie te lezen van Domenico Losurdo, de in 2018 overleden Italiaanse marxistische filosoof en historicus. In zijn Liberalism. A Counter-History (2014), dat door de Financial Times werd gekwalificeerd als ‘a brilliant exercise in unmasking liberal pretensions,’ laat hij omstandig zien hoe Amerikaanse zowel als Britse ‘liberal’ theoretici en politici uit de zeventiende, achttiende en zelfs nog de negentiende eeuw ‘were firmly committed to the defense of colonial slavery.’ Over ‘one of the major authors and great minds in the liberal tradition and pantheon,’ de zeventiende eeuwse Engelse Verlichtingsfilosoof John Locke, merkt Losurdo op dat dit boegbeeld van ‘liberalism’:
regarded slavery in the colonies as self-evident and indisputable, and personally contributed to the legal formalization of the institution in Carolina. He took a hand at drafting the constitutional provision according to which ‘[e]very freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his Negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever… However, this did not prevent him from inveighing against the political 'slavery' that absolute monarchy sought to impose. Similarly, in Calhoun (vooraanstaande Amerikaanse politicus. svh) the theorization of black slavery as a 'positive good' went hand in hand with warnings against a concentration of power that risked transforming 'the governed' into 'the slaves of the rulers.’ Of course, the American statesman was a slave-owner, but the English philosopher als had sound investments in the slave trade.
Dezelfde onverschilligheid met betrekking tot degenen die als inferieur worden beschouwd, zien we nu bij de westerse ‘corporate press.’ Wanneer Ian Buruma op de World’s Opinion Page hoog opgeeft van de VS als ‘a model of freedom and openness’ en ‘a force for good’ dan verzwijgt hij bewust de Amerikaanse oorlogsmisdaden in onder andere Vietnam en Irak. Eeveneens geen woord van Buruma over bijvoorbeeld Madeleine Albright, die als Amerikaanse ambassadeur bij de VN op de vraag van Lesley Stahl, journaliste van het bekende CBS-programma 60 Minutes: ‘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?’ antwoordde: ‘we think the price is worth it.’
Het betrof hier een VN-rapport waarin gemeld werd dat als gevolg van het door de VS afgedwongen sanctiebeleid een half miljoen Iraakse kinderen onder de vijf jaar was gestorven. Maar was dit gebeurd met Joodse kinderen in Israel dan was Ian Buruma hier jarenlang op teruggekomen, getuige het feit dat hij te pas en te onpas joodse slachtoffers van terreur in zijn betogen betrekt. Het leven van een Joods kind in Israel is voor hem en de westerse mainstream-pers belangrijker dan een Arabisch kind in Irak. Het meten met twee maten is nog steeds kenmerkend voor de woordvoerders van de westerse elite. Over de negentiende eeuwse Engelse filosoof en econoom John Stuart Mill, vooral bekend door zijn werk On Liberty (1859), schreef Losurdo:
we shall see that, when he turned his attention to the colonies, the English liberal justified the West’s ‘despotism’ over ‘races’ that were still ‘under age,’ and who were obliged to observe an ‘absolute obedience’ in order to be set on the path of progress. This is a formulation that would not have displeased Calhoun, who likewise legitimized slavery by reference to the backwardness and nonage (onrijp. svh) of populations of African origin…
The self styled champions of liberty branded taxation imposed without their explicit consent as synonymous with despotism and slavery. But they had no scruples about exercising the most absolute and arbitrary power over their slaves. This was a paradox: ‘How is it,’ Samuel Johnson asked, ‘that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?’ Across the Atlantic, those who sought to contest the secession ironized in similar fashion. Thomas Hutchinson, royal governor of Massachusetts, rebuked the rebels for their inconsistency or hypocrisy: they denied Africans those rights that they claimed to be ‘absolutely inalienable’ in the most radical way imaginable…
It was not only the people most directly involved in the polemical and political struggle who expressed themselves so harshly. The intervention of John Millar, prominent exponent of the Scottish Enlightenment, was especially stinging:
‘It affords a curious spectacle to observe, that the same people who talk in a high strain of political liberty, and who consider the privilege of imposing their own taxes as one of the inalienable rights of mankind, should make no scruple of reducing a great proportion of their fellow creatures into circumstances by which they are not only deprived of property, but almost of every species of right. Fortune perhaps never produced a situation more calculated to ridicule a liberal hypothesis, or to show how little the conduct of men is at the bottom directed by any philosophical principles.’ […]
There is no doubt that the accusations against the rebels struck a weak point. Virginia played a central role in the American Revolution. Forty per cent of the country’s slaves were to be found there, but a majority of the authors of the rebellion unleashed in the name of liberty also came from there. For thirty-two of the United States’ first thirty-six years of existence, slave owners from Virginia occupied the post of president. This colony or state, founded on slavery, sup plied the country with its most illustrious statesmen. It is enough to think of George Washington (great military and political protagonist of the anti British revolt) and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (authors, respectively, of the Declaration of Independence and the federal Constitution of 1787), all three of them slave owners. Regardless of this or that state, the influence slavery exercised on the country as a whole is clear. Sixty years after its foundation, we see that ‘of the first sixteen presidential elections, between 1788 and 1848, all but four placed a southern slaveholder in the White House.’
Het al dan niet met geweld exporteren van het neoliberalisme naar de lage lonen landen, waar bij gebrek aan vakbonden en milieuwetten, arbeiders vandaag de dag vaak onder erbarmelijke omstandigheden werken en politiek monddood zijn gemaakt, is een ander voorbeeld van de volstrekte onverschilligheid van het alles behalve westerse 'liberal model.' Desondanks waarschuwt Buruma de wereldbevolking dat met het oog op ‘Life after Pax Americana,’ wij allen ‘should ready ourselves for a time when we might recall the American empire with fond nostalgia.’ Hier verzwijgt Buruma opnieuw bewust de ‘dark side’ van de ‘American Dream,’ die de kloof tussen rijk en arm de afgelopen vier decennia zodanig heeft verdiept dat nu zelfs de middenklasse in de VS voor een aanzienlijk deel is verdwenen.
Met betrekking tot wat Buruma kwalificeert als de ‘Amerikaanse openheid en democratie’ die ‘nog steeds waard’ zijn ‘om te worden bewonderd’ schreef Domenico Lusordo in zijn Liberalism. A Counter-History -- dat door de bekende Indiase intellectueel Pankaj Mishra wordt beoordeeld als een boek dat ‘stimulatingly uncovers the contradictions of an ideology that is much too self-righteously invoked’:
It was not only the race issue and the dark cloud it suspended over the civil rights of the white community itself. We can take a key state in the history of the North American revolution and republic: ‘Pennsylvania was... renowned in the nineteenth century for its stringent laws against blasphemy, profanity, and desecrating the sabbath’ Independently of the prohibition of miscegenation (rassenvermenging. svh), which remained in force beyond the mid-twentieth century, sexual freedom in the United States was restricted in ways that were largely foreign to the despised, 'statist' continental Europe. Here is the picture drawn in 2003 by a distinguished US newspaper:
‘All 50 states had laws banning sodomy until 1961... The number had dwindled to 24 states by 1968 and stands at 13 today... Most of the remaining states with anti-sodomy laws forbid anal or oral sex among consenting adults no matter their sex or relationship.’
To this we must add the constitutional amendment of 1919 that sought to prevent the production and consumption of 'intoxicating liquors’ — a further intervention in the private life of citizens with few parallels in other Western countries.
Buruma’s ‘land of the free, home of the brave,’ waar ‘wij,’ volgens hem, in de toekomst ‘met weemoed’ op zullen ‘terugkijken’ vanwege zijn ‘betrekkelijk goedaardige imperialisme,’ is complexer en veel minder rooskleurig dan mijn oude vriend het doet voorkomen met beweringen als dat het ‘a force for good’ was. Losurdo:
Overall, the history of the English colonies in America and then of the United States — both classical countries of the liberal tradition are thus involved to differing degrees — is better explained by the complexity of the process of constructing and protecting the sacred space (van beschaving en vrijheid. svh), than by the categories of anti-statism and individualism.
Once the field of hagiography has been evacuated, in reconstructing the history of liberalism it is better to start with the slogan advanced by the rebel American colonists: ‘We won’t be their Negroes!’ On the one hand, the rebellion began by demanding equality, while on the other it reasserted inequality and further deepened it. The two demands were indissolubly linked: precisely because they established a marked superiority over blacks and Indians, the colonists lelt themselves completely equal to gentlemen and property-owners residing in London, and demanded that such equality be recognized and consecrated at every level… The equality property-owners demanded with the the sovereign, who could now be nothing but primus inter pares, went hand in hand with the reification of servants, who tended to be likened to other objects of property. That is why liberalism and racial chattel slavery emerged together in a twin birth.
De vrijheid van de één betekent in het liberalisme, tot op de dag van vandaag, de onvrijheid van de ander. Volgens het in januari 2019 verschenen Oxfam is de huidige situatie als volgt:
Billionaires' fortunes grew by billions daily as poorest saw wealth decline by 11 percent last year, Oxfam report says. The world's 26 richest people own the same wealth as the poorest half of humanity, according to Oxfam International, as it urged governments to rise taxes on the wealthy to fight soaring inequality.
Billionaires around the world, who have almost doubled in number since the 2008 global financial crisis, saw their combined fortunes grow by $2.5 billion a day, while the 3.8 billion people at the bottom of the scale saw their wealth decline by 11 percent in 2018, said the UK-based charity's annual inequality report on Monday.
The findings were released in the face of the World Economic Forum, which kicks off in the Swiss city of Davos on Tuesday.
The world's richest man, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, saw his fortune increase to $112 billion last year, Oxfam said, pointing out that just one percent of his wealth was the equivalent to the entire health budget of Ethiopia, a country of 105 million people.
Analysts found that 3.4 billion people have barely escaped extreme poverty and are living on less than $5.50 a day while stressing the growing gap between rich and poor was undermining the fight against poverty, damaging economies, and increasing public anger.
‘Our economy is broken with hundreds of millions of people living in extreme poverty while huge rewards go to those at the very top,’ Oxfam said.
De gecorrumpeerde Buruma’s van de westerse commerciële media mogen dan nu al terugverlangen naar de hoogtijdagen van wat zij lovend de ‘Pax Americana’ noemen, maar de overgrote meerderheid van de Amerikaanse burgers gelooft al lang niet meer in deze propaganda. Laat ik voor de verandering eens een doorsnee Amerikaan aan het woord laten, te weten Kevin Roberts. Hij liet in januari 2015 het volgende weten:
It is common knowledge that the wealth distribution in the US is so incredibly uneven, with so few having almost everything. This would be easier to take for the many Americans living in abject poverty if it were not that war had given the American economy a boost in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The super-rich profited exponentially as defense contracts soared but at what cost? The awful irony is that it was mainly the American citizens at the bottom of the pile that actually fought, and in return they saw the sons and daughters of defense contractors living the 'Ivy League' life — a million miles away from harm — see George W. Bush for an example of a privileged kids 'service career.’
On one hand America salutes into military heroes for 'protecting America' whilst the other hand is busy taking money out the back door.
The now infamous PNAC document is well read by people that understand politics yet many people in America do not even know that the likes of Wolfowitz and Cheney actually set out to create conflict, they prepared a document crying out for conflict to boost America's standing in the world and to boost the defense industry — and how many of G.W. Bush's administration are now ‘working’ in the very industry they helped to regenerate?
Americans wake up every day to be reminded what the top people have. Poor people in America are told 'in America you can make it' but in reality the gap between them and the top tier grows ever bigger and chances ever less.
America didn't even deal with its own disaster in New Orleans. It's poorest people were left homeless and the government still seems to look other way. Americans are unfortunately not really privy to what goes on in the rest of the world because their news is sanitized — just like the rest of the world.
The only way to really get a feel for the world is to get out and see it, yet most Americans will live and die never ever having left it's shores — spending their time struggling to make ends meet whilst at the same time extolling the virtues of the American Way to the rest of the world…
America became a superpower because of the second world war not in spite of it. Pearl Harbour forced its hand but Germany might have won that war, they might have won the Battle of Britain. At the time the U.S. was happy to bankroll allied efforts at huge rates of interest.
America became reinforcements, but charged a hell of a lot of money for the privilege.
America a force for good?
Democracy the American way leaves its people dying in schools at the hands of gunmen. It's cities rife with gangs and drug abuse and homeless veterans.
It is the land of the 'have more' and the 'have nothing.’
It is unsustainable, and one day the American people will simply say no more. It's unsustainable to give all the wealth to a mighty few.
I feel sorry for American people because they live in a relatively new country that might not even last 500 years and things are looking very rocky for the future.
Tijdens een ‘system crisis,’ zoals nu zijn het opportunisme en conformisme van de massamedia letterlijk en figuurlijk dodelijk. In plaats van het ineenstortende systeem te redden, versnellen ze alleen maar de afbraak. Buruma's gezwets over de Amerikaanse ‘openheid en democratie’ is levensgevaarlijk geworden. Terecht stelt Losurdo aan het einde van zijn studie over het liberalisme en de mythe van de vrijheid en gelijkheid voor de wet:
At this point we should analyse as a whole the three revolutions from which we started out. Of the first, which occurred in Holland, Huizinga observed that ‘the revolt against the Spanish government was a conservative revolution and could not have been otherwise.’ The same conclusion has been reached by other eminent historians. Philip II was concerned to ‘require that bishops be technically skilled (that is, theologians rather than sons of great lords)’ and was opposed to the nobility’s attempt to transform the Council of State into ‘an exclusively aristocratic executive body.’ We can then understand that ‘large parts of the “Netherlands” nobility were suddenly afraid that the prince was not their agent, that his policies would in the short and medium run threaten their interests significantly.’ So, on the one hand, we have Philip II, who surrounded himself with ‘secretaries who were generally from modest origins, passive instruments of his will’; on the other, ‘an oligarchic princely republic of communal cities and feudal lordships,’ a ‘grand aristocracy,’ a ‘feudal oligarchy’ engaged in defending ‘privileges and customs’ that consecrated its power and prestige. It is as if the nobles of the Netherlands, like large English property owners and the English colonists in America subsequently, declared: ‘We don’t want to be treated as your servants!’ In its initial stages, the revolt against Philip II was not very different from the contemporaneous agitation of the Fronde (opstand in koninkrijk Frankrijk die zich afspeelde tussen 1648 en 1653, waarbij de elite ageerde tegen de fiscale lasten die hen waren opgelegd en tegen de beknotting van hun bevoegdheden. svh) in France. In both cases, what ignited the powder was the clash between the high nobility’s autonomist and in some sense liberal aspirations and the Crown’s centralizing tendencies except that, in the second case, the influence of the struggle for national independence and the intervention of the popular masses in it profoundly altered the initial picture.
We have already seen the impetus given by the Glorious Revolution to the slave trade and the development of racial slavery in the colonies. The aspect of this emancipation also emerges with clarity in Ireland. Systematic expropriation of the natives intensified; in 1688 Catholics still owned 22 per cent of Irish land, but the figure fell to ‘14 per cent in 1703 and a mere 5 per cent in 1778.’ And that is not all: ‘Catholics the overwhelming majority of the Irish population were excluded from all public offices and from the legal profession.’ In England itself, the Glorious Revolution swept away the obstacles that still stood in the way of enclosures (het privatiseren van communale gronden. svh). As Marx put it, having attained full control of power, land owners and capitalists ‘inaugurated the new era by practising on a colossal scale the thefts of state lands which had hitherto been managed more modestly.’ To the extent that rural laborers had found an ear more or less attentive to their lamentations, it was from the Stuart monarchy. Up to 1688, by dint of the control over them exercised from above, Justices of the Peace had some autonomy from the landed aristocracy. They subsequently lost it, becoming ‘virtual dictators of local government’ and answering only to the members of their own class who sat in parliament. Finally, we must not lose sight of the incredible increase in the number of crimes against property that carried the death penalty, with the establishment of a regime of terror over the popular masses.
The dimension of dis emancipation is even more obvious in the American Revolution. The terms in which Theodore Roosevelt celebrated it at the start of the twentieth century are revealing:
‘The chief factor in producing the Revolution, and later in producing the War of 1812, was the inability of the motherland country to understand that the freemen who went forth to conquer a continent should be encouraged in that work... The spread of the hardy, venturesome backwoodsmen was to most of the statesmen of London a matter of anxiety rather than of pride, and the famous Quebec Act of 1774 was in part designed with the purpose of keeping the English speaking settlements permanently east of the Alleghenies, and preserving the mighty and beautiful valley of the Ohio as a hunting ground for savages…’
Roosevelt’s ‘wilden’ waren de oorspronkelijke bewoners van het continent Amerika, de Indianen, over wie hij in 1886 tijdens een toespraak in New York verklaarde:
I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are. And I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.
Desondanks beweerde de journalist en jurist Geert Mak in zijn boek Reizen zonder John. Op zoek naar Amerika (2012) met grote stelligheid het volgende over president Theodore Roosevelt:
Orde, evenwicht tussen de verschillende machten, binnen Amerika en ook in de rest van de wereld, dat was zijn doel. De Amerikaanse individuele vrijheid hoefde daarbij niet in het gedrang komen, integendeel, het ging hem juist om de bescherming van die vrijheid.
Hoewel Mak’s Amerika-boek inmiddels zeventien maal herdrukt, onthult zijn kijk op de VS een ernstig gebrek aan kennis. Wat dit betreft past zijn werk naadloos in de propagandistische versie van de werkelijkheid. Mijn oude vriend Geert voorspelde nog in 2012 dat ‘Amerika er over een halve eeuw beter voor[staat] dan Europa.’ Hoe iemand die zelfs het verleden van de VS nauwelijks kent, de toekomst van ‘Pax Americana’ kan voorspellen, is geen vraag voor de polderpers, aangezien de bekende Nederlander, Twan Huys, Mak had uitgeroepen tot ‘de populairste geschiedenisleraar van het land,’ en bij de ‘corporate press’ omdat overal in het Westen kwantiteit boven kwaliteit gaat. Dit leidt onvermijdelijk tot eenzelfde hypocrisie en racisme die Domenico Losurdo zo gedocumenteerd aan de kaak heeft gesteld. De ‘orde’ waarover de domineeszoon Geert Mak spreekt, is die van het grootschalig geweld, de uitbuiting en repressie in een groot deel van ‘de rest van de wereld.’ Zijn neoliberale ‘orde’ is gebaseerd op het aloude adagium: 'Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.' Met massaal militair geweld werden altijd al ongehoorzame gekleurde volkeren in het gareel gemept. Theodore Roosevelt was een overtuigt imperialist, zoals duidelijk wordt uit Honor in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines, and the Rise and Fall of America's Imperial Dream (2012), geschreven door de gezaghebbende Amerikaanse buitenland-correspondent en onderzoeksjournalist, Gregg Jones. Daarin wordt de rol geanalyseerd van de man die volgens Mak 'het grote voorbeeld [zou] worden van een reeks presidenten die na hem kwamen,’ en die ernaar streefde
Onlosmakelijk gekoppeld aan het Amerikaans imperialisme was het diep gewortelde racisme bij Theodore Roosevelt. De imperialist heeft immers een rechtvaardiging nodig om de gekleurde medemens te vermoorden dan wel als slaaf te misbruiken. In zijn boek Imperial Alibi’s: Rationalizing U.S. Intervention After the Cold War (1999) wees de Amerikaanse hoogleraar Stephen Shalom erop dat voor:
Theodore Roosevelt, the 'most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman,' but no matter, because it was 'idle to apply to savages the rules of international morality which obtain between stable and cultured communities… No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumph of war.
Toen ik Shalom in 2003 interviewde benadrukte hij de continuïteit van het Amerikaanse racisme dat volgens hem niet meteen zou verdwijnen als gekleurde politici het buitenlandse beleid mede bepalen, zoals naderhand ook bleek uit de beleidsdaden van minister van Buitenlandse Zaken Condoleezza Rice, haar voorganger Colin Powell, en niet te vergeten president Barack Obama. Professor Stephen Shalom:
Racism was one of the key founding principles of the United States. The Puritans exterminated Pequot Indians, hoping, in the Puritans' words to 'cut off the Remembrance of them from the earth.' To George Washington, Indians and wolves were both 'beasts of prey, tho' they differ in shape.' In the Declaration of Independence, one of the indictments against King George was that he had inflicted on the colonists 'the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions' — a rather accurate characterization of the rules of warfare employed against the Native Americans. Repeatedly, in the Indian wars that raged across the continent, U.S. soldiers would proclaim as they massacred infants, 'Kill the nits, and you'll have no lice.' 'We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux,' wrote General Sherman in 1866, 'even to their extermination, men, women and children.' [...] How did this jibe with everyone being created equal? As Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell explained, Jefferson's doctrine applied 'only to our own race, and to those people whom we can assimilate rapidly.' Indians 'are not men, within the meaning of the theory' that ‘all men are created equal.’
Racism against Africans was another fundamental building block of American ideology. Deemed to be sub-human, they were subjected to a barbaric and brutal system of slavery. Lincoln was willing to accept slavery so long as the union could be preserved; and when the Civil War drove him to abolish slavery he did not change his belief in black inferiority. When the South introduced Jim Crow laws to maintain the descendants of slaves as second-class citizens, the northern elite went along. Even after World War II, President Harry Truman was referring to blacks as 'niggers.' Derogatory references to blacks were standard fare for President Nixon and the senior officials of his administration. 'I wonder what your dining room is going to smell like,' Kissinger chortled (schaterlachend. svh) to Senator Fulbright, regarding a dinner for African diplomats.
With racist views deeply embedded in the minds of U. S. policy-makers and rooted in domestic structures of domination and subordination, it is not surprising that these views have influenced the way in which Washington looked at and acted in the world outside.
The presence of a few non-whites in policymaking circles is not likely to change the nature of U.S. foreign policy very much; to attain positions of power, these individuals would have to have shown substantial conformity to the prevailing values of the elite. A substantial racial diversity among policy-makers, on the other hand, would likely make racism a less significant factor in the way Washington deals with the world. But such an occurrence is by no means imminent, and will not come to pass as long as racial inequality remains a fundamental characteristic of the U.S. domestic landscape. Until this time, racism will continue to be an important factor in U.S. foreign policy.
Desondanks prees Geert Mak de VS dat in zijn ogen 'decennialang als ordewaker en politieagent' van de hele wereld 'fungeerde' om Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘orde’ te handhaven en desnoods met grootscheeps geweld te verspreiden. Op zijn beurt blijft ook die andere door het polderestablishment zo geprezen mainstream-opiniemaker, Ian Buruma, de VS bejubelen als ‘a force for good.’ Deze propaganda is voor beide heren bijzonder lucratief geweest, en heeft hen vele onderscheidingen van de gevestigde orde opgeleverd. Meer hierover de volgende keer.
Schrijver en historicus Geert Mak ontving in 2017 uit handen van koningin Máxima de Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Prijs. Aan de prijs is een bedrag van 150.000 euro verbonden, en kan gezien worden als een schouderklopje van de gevestigde orde voor de vele jaren trouwe dienst aan de bestaande wanorde.
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