Wij leven op een breukvlak. De komende tijd is het erop of eronder. Het oude heeft afgedaan, het nieuwe is er nog niet. Het volk wil andere politici, terwijl de politici een ander volk willen. Maar dat is slechts de politieke buitenkant van een alomvattende systeemcrisis, die diep onder het oppervlak ligt van de westerse consumptiecultuur.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity,
zo schreef de Ier W.B. Yeats in 1919 in zijn gedicht The Second Coming. Wij leven volgens hem aan de vooravond van een omwenteling die apocalyptische vormen dreigt aan te nemen, want, aldus Yeats:
what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Terwijl de elite en haar woordvoerders van de commerciële media nieuwe oorlogen voorbereiden die de rijken nog rijker zullen maken, waarschuwen dissidenten voor de consequenties van het beest dat naar zijn geboorteplaats kruipt. In feite weten we allang wat er aankomt: het is er in feite al, het ultieme fascisme. Wij leven in een totalitaire staat, met een onderworpen massa die via elektronische apparatuur dag en nacht in de gaten wordt gehouden. Vanzelfsprekend allemaal voor onze eigen ‘veiligheid.’ Door voortdurend in te spelen op de existentiële angsten is ‘veiligheid’ het begrip bij uitstek waarmee het fascisme blinde gehoorzaamheid probeert af te dwingen. Enkele dissidente stemmen:
Capitalism’s gratuitous wars and sanctioned greed have jeopardized the planet and filled it with refugees. Much of the blame for this rests squarely on the shoulders of the government of the United States. Seventeen years after invading Afghanistan, after bombing it into the ‘stone age’ with the sole aim of toppling the Taliban, the US government is back in talks with the very same Taliban. In the interim it has destroyed Iraq, Libya and Syria. Hundreds of thousands have lost their lives to war and sanctions, a whole region has descended into chaos, ancient cities — pounded into dust.
– Arundhati Roy
As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities.
― Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments
I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
― Smedley Butler, War is a Racket
It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. And the alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear tests, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world, may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation, and our earthly habitat would be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine.
— Martin Luther King, Jr., Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution, 31 March 1968
De Amerikaanse kunstenaar en socioloog Kenn Orphan schreef op 23 mei 2019 op de kritische website CounterPunch, onder de kop ‘The Belligerence of Empire’:
Empire understands nothing except ruthless expansion. It has no other raison d’être. In the past this meant the violent acquisition of lands and territories by a militarized system where caste was very apparent and visible. But today the dealings of empire are far more duplicitous. The ruling order of this age expands empire via the acquisition of capital while using the military industrial complex to police its exploits. But there is an insidious social conditioning at work which has led the general public to where it is today, a state of ‘inverted totalitarianism’ as political philosopher Sheldon Wolin explained. Indeed, capitalism has morphed into the unassailable religion of the age even among the working class. Its tenets are still viewed as sacrosanct.
Violence is the sole language of empire. It is this only currency it uses to enforce its precepts and edicts, both at home and abroad. Eventually this language becomes internalized within the psyche of the subjects. Social and cultural conditioning maintained through constant subtle messaging via mass media begins to mold the public will toward that of authoritarian conformity. The American Empire is emblematic of this process. There is mass compliance to the dictates of the ruling class and this occurs most often without any prompting or debate whatsoever. In this dictatorship of money the poor are looked at with ridicule and contempt, and are often punished legally for their imposed poverty.
But the social conditioning of the American public has led toward a bizarre allegiance to its ruling class oppressors. Propaganda still works here and most are still besotted with the notion of America being a bastion of ‘freedom and democracy.’ The growing gap between the ultra-wealthy and the poor and the gutting of civil liberties are ignored. And blind devotion is especially so when it comes to US foreign policy.
Most Americans still believe they live in the greatest country on the planet. They believe the American military to be noble and that they always reluctantly go into or are forced into war. Indeed, both the Democrats and Republicans possess an uncanny ability to bridge their ideological distances when it comes to defending US militarism, the Pentagon and the war machine of imperialism. But this is tied to the defense of capitalism, the ruling class, and the ultimate reason for war: the protection of that class’s global capital investments.
The persecution of Chelsea Manning, much like the case of Julian Assange, is demonstrative of this. It is a crusade against truth tellers that has been applauded from both sides of the American establishment, liberal and conservative alike. It does not matter that she helped to expose American war crimes. On the contrary, this is seen as heresy to the Empire itself. Manning’s crime was exposing the underbelly of the beast. A war machine which targeted and killed civilians and journalists by soldiers behind a glowing screen thousands of miles away, as if they were playing a video game.
En zodoende kan het ‘grove beest’ ongestoord verder kruipen, op weg naar ‘Bethlehem.’ De Verlichting en het Liberalisme hebben zijn weg niet versperd. Integendeel zelfs, beide hebben met hun technologie de weg vrij gemaakt. Het is dan ook logisch dat de Italiaanse filosoof Domenico Losurdo zijn uitgebreide studie Liberalism. A Counter-History (2014) met de volgende beschrijving eindigt:
it is precisely from such historical reconstruction, remote from any apologetic, edifying tones, that the genuine merits and real strong points of liberalism emerge. Demonstrating an extraordinary flexibility, it constantly ought to react and rise to the challenges of the time. It is true that, far from being spontaneous and painless, such transformation was largely imposed from without, by political and social movements with which liberalism has repeatedly and fiercely clashed. But precisely in this resides its flexibility. Liberalism has proved capable of learning from its antagonist… to a far greater extent than its antagonist as proved capable of learning from it. Above all, the antagonist has proved incapable of learning what constitutes the second major strong point of liberalism. Certainly, liberalism's learning process was quite the reverse of smooth, at least for those who wanted to overcome the exclusion clauses that run deep in this intellectual tradition. None has been as committed as it to thinking through the decisive problem of the limitation of power. However, historically, this limitation of power went hand in hand with the delimitation of a restricted sacred space: nurturing a proud, exclusivist self-consciousness, the community of the freemen inhabiting it was led to regard enslavement, or more or less explicit subjection, imposed on the great mass dispersed throughout the profane space, as legitimate. Sometimes they even arrived at decimation or annihilation. Has this dialectic on the basis of which liberalism was transformed into an ideology of domination, and even an ideology of war, wholly disappeared?
Iets anders gesteld: hier voltrekt zich het pathologische element van het liberalisme. Hoewel deze ideologie een beroep doet op het universalisme, de idee dat ‘all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,’ acht ditzelfde liberalisme zich tegelijkertijd gerechtigd om met massaal geweld een repressief systeem in stand te houden dat alleen een zeer kleine elite bevoordeelt. Het huidige feodale neoliberalisme is een logisch resultaat van het schizofrene liberalisme, waarbij emancipatie afgewisseld wordt door wat Lusordo ‘dis-emancipation’ noemt ‘that is, deprivation of the rights whose recognition and enjoyment the excluded had won.’ De met veel strijd verworven sociale rechten van de werkende massa zijn sinds de opkomst van het neoliberalisme met zijn deregulering en privatisering in snel tempo afgebroken, omdat er — in de woorden van bijvoorbeeld de sociaal-democratische voorman Wim Kok — ‘geen alternatief’ meer zou bestaan ‘voor de maatschappelijke constellatie die we nu hebben,’ en het 'dus geen enkele zin’ had ‘daar naar te streven.’ Centraal in de neoliberale ideologie staat het behoud van de westerse hegemonie in de wereld, met als gevolg dat het tevens een ideologie is van permanente oorlogsvoering tegen mens en natuur. Losurdo wijst in dit verband op het marktdenken:
In economics, clearly distancing itself from an insipid ideology of social harmony miraculously lacking any element of contradiction, conflict and tension, liberal thought has vigorously insisted on the need for competition between individuals in the market, in order to develop social wealth and the productive forces. This is a further, major historical merit to be acknowledged.
However, at this level, too, there emerged the awful exclusion clauses we are already familiar with. Far from being a site where all individuals freely meet as sellers and buyers of commodities, for centuries the liberal market was a site of exclusion, de-humanization and even terror. In the past the ancestors of today's black citizens were commodities, not autonomous buyers and sellers. And for centuries the market functioned as an instrument of terror: even more than the lash (zweepslag. svh), what imposed total obedience on the slave was the threat of being sold, like a commodity exchanged on the market, separately from other family members. For a long time indentured white servants were also bought and sold on the market, and thus condemned to a fate not very different from that of black slaves. And in the name of the market, workers' coalitions were repressed and economic and social rights ignored and denied, with a consequent commodification of essential aspects of the human personality and human dignity (health, education, and so on). In extreme cases the superstitious cult of the Market sealed (bekrachtigden. svh) huge tragedies, like the one which in 1847 saw Britain condemn an enormous mass of actual (Irish) individuals to death from starvation. Is all his a definitively concluded chapter of history? Moreover, has liberalism definitively left behind it the dialectic of emancipation and dis-emancipation, with the dangers of regression and restoration implicit in it? Or is this dialectic still alive and well, thanks to the malleability peculiar to this current of thought?
Aldus de inmiddels overleden Domenico Losurdo in 2005 toen zijn boek in het Italiaans verscheen. In zijn omvangrijke studie betoogde hij dat vanaf het allereerste begin in de achttiende eeuw de liberale ideologie verbonden was met de meest onliberale politiek: slavernij, kolonialisme, genocide, racisme en snobisme. Het liberalisme, ook in zijn neoliberale vorm, verraadt onophoudelijk talloze tegenstellingen, die voor de elite noodzakelijke zijn om hun dominante macht op het politieke beleid te behouden.
Vijftien jaar nadat Losurdo zijn boek schreef kunnen we nu zonder overdrijven stellen dat de dialectiek van het liberalisme nog steeds dezelfde is, een periode van afgedwongen emancipatie is de afgelopen dertig jaar afgewisseld door de neoliberale politiek van ‘dis-emancipation.’ Ondanks alle overdreven lof van de ‘vrije pers’ voor de zogeheten ‘liberale democratie’ is deze ‘gebruikelijke hagiografie een belediging van de herinnering aan de slachtoffers,’ aldus Losurdo die dan ook in de laatste zin van zijn boek constateert dat ‘bidding farewell to hagiography is the precondition for landing on the firm ground of history.’
De noodzaak om de werkelijkheid te beschrijven is vandaag de dag groter dan ooit, aangezien de consequenties van het neoliberalisme veel omvangrijker en gevaarlijker zijn dan ooit eerder in de geschiedenis. Daardoor is het zo weerzinwekkend dat de meningen van westerse mainstream-opiniemakers onweersproken door de ‘corporate media’ worden verspreid, terwijl dissidente stemmen worden genegeerd. Het gaat hierbij niet eens meer om de democratie, maar om het voortbestaan van de mensheid, die door het liberalisme in een cul-de-sac is terecht gekomen. Het is inderdaad een ‘voorwaarde om vaarwel te zeggen tegen’ de voortdurende lof voor de zogeheten liberale democratie, willen we tenminste kunnen ‘landen op de vaste grond van de geschiedenis,’ zeker nu in de commerciële media alle taboes lijken te zijn verdwenen, behalve dan kritiek op het neoliberale kapitalisme.
In september 2014 verscheen het onderzoek ‘Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,’ samengesteld door de Amerikaanse hoogleraar Martin Gilens van de Princeton University en de Amerikaanse hoogleraar Benjamin Page van de Northwestern University. Beide wetenschappers tonen gedocumenteerd aan dat ‘The US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite.’ Onder de kop ‘Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy’ berichtte de alles behalve radicale BBC:
the two professors have conducted exhaustive research to try to present data-driven support for this conclusion. Here's how they explain it:
‘Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.’
In English: the wealthy few move policy, while the average American has little power.
The two professors came to this conclusion after reviewing answers to 1,779 survey questions asked between 1981 and 2002 on public policy issues. They broke the responses down by income level, and then determined how often certain income levels and organized interest groups saw their policy preferences enacted.
Interessant is dat de behoudende BBC überhaupt aandacht besteedde aan het feit dat NAVO-leider, de VS, ‘geen democratie’ is, maar ‘een oligarchie,’ een systeem waarbij ‘de macht in handen van een kleine groep van mensen die behoren tot een bevoorrechte klasse of stand.’ Als volgens wetenschappelijk onderzoek de VS ‘een oligarchie’ is, dan is vanzelfsprekend de NAVO de sterke arm van de ‘bevoorrechte klasse,’ die niet ‘de democratie’ beschermt maar de belangen van de ‘oligarchie.’ Natuurlijk weten westerse dissidenten dit allang, maar het is niet de bedoeling dat juist ‘de vrije pers’ deze informatie doorspeelt aan de massa. Dit is een treffend voorbeeld van hoe het liberalisme in de praktijk functioneert. Zo nu en dan permitteert een mainstream-journalist zich te berichten dat de wereld er anders uitziet dan de officiële versie ervan, die in Nederland doorgaans wordt verspreid door opiniemakers als Anet Bleich, Hubert Smeets, Bas Heijne, Geert Mak en al die andere praatjesmakers die ik al decennialang van nabij volg. Hier en daar zal bij de BBC gefronst zijn over zoveel eigenzinnigheid, maar zolang de betrokken journalist geen follow-up geeft, of de dissidente feiten in een bredere, al dan niet historische, context plaatst, zullen zijn meerderen niet reageren, om zodoende te voorkomen dat er een rel ontstaat die alleen maar meer licht werpt op de werkelijkheid. De Amerikaanse hoogleraren Herman en Chomsky wijzen in hun studie Manufacturing Consent (1988) op het feit dat:
[t]he technical structure of the media virtually compels adherence to conventional thoughts; nothing else can be expressed between two commercials, or in seven hundred words, without the appearance of absurdity that is difficult to avoid when one is challenging familiar doctrine with no opportunity to develop facts or argument... The critic must also be prepared to face a defamation apparatus against which there is little recourse, an inhibiting factor that is not insubstantial... The result is a powerful system of induced conformity to the needs of privilege and power. In sum, the mass media of the United States are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without significant overt coercion. This propaganda system has become even more efficient in recent decades with the rise of the national television networks, greater mass-media concentration, right-wing pressures on public radio and television, and the growth in scope and sophistication of public relations and news management.
Door de ‘zelfcensuur’ van de betrokken BBC-journalist werd dit belangwekkende onderzoek niet nader uitgewerkt in een serie artikelen. Het ontstaan en bestaan van de Amerikaanse oligarchie werd zodoende genegeerd. Maar zelfs wanneer de BBC-journalist wel zijn werk had gedaan, dan nog zou zijn aandacht voor dit onderwerp niet hebben opgewogen tegen de permanente media-propaganda over het neoliberale bestel. Het gevolg is ‘a powerful system of induced conformity to the needs of privilege and power,’ aldus Herman en Chomsky. Zij concludeerden dat:
[i]n sum, the mass media of the United States are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda-function by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without significant overt coercion.
Typerend voor de gecorrumpeerde ‘corporate press’ is dat zij weigert de structurele problemen van het liberalisme zelf te onderzoeken. Ook niet nadat onder andere Gilens en Page hadden aangetoond dat de VS geen ‘democratie’ is gezien het feit dat wanneer
a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it… we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.
De BBC berichtte wel in hetzelfde artikel dat naar aanleiding van dit wetenschappelijk onderzoek dat de Amerikaanse historicus:
Eric Zuesse, writing in Counterpunch, isn't surprised by the survey's results.
‘American democracy is a sham, no matter how much it's pumped by the oligarchs who run the country (and who control the nation's "news" media),’ he writes. ‘The US, in other words, is basically similar to Russia or most other dubious “electoral” “democratic” countries. We weren't formerly, but we clearly are now.’
This is the ‘Duh Report,’ says Death and Taxes magazine's Robyn Pennacchia. Maybe, she writes, Americans should just accept their fate.
‘Perhaps we ought to suck it up, admit we have a classist society and do like England where we have a House of Lords and a House of Commoners,’ she writes, ‘instead of pretending as though we all have some kind of equal opportunity here.’
In de Huffington Post van 3 augustus 2016 schreef Zuesse over hetzelfde onderzoek:
The scientific study closed by saying: ‘In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.’ A few other tolerably clear sentences managed to make their ways into this well-researched, but, sadly, atrociously written, paper, such as: ‘The preferences of economic elites (as measured by our proxy, the preferences of “affluent” citizens) have far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do.’ In other words, they found: The rich rule the U.S…
The New York Times front page on Sunday 2 August 2015 bannered, ‘Small Pool of Rich Donors Dominates Election Giving,’ and reported that:
A New York Times analysis of Federal Election Commission reports and Internal Revenue Service records shows that the fund-raising arms race has made most of the presidential hopefuls deeply dependent on a small pool of the richest Americans… All of the evidence suggests that though different aristocrats compete against each other for the biggest chunks of whatever the given nation has to offer, they all compete on the same side against the public, in order to lower the wages of their workers, and to lower the standards for consumers’ safety and welfare so as to increase their own profits (transfer their costs and investment-losses onto others); and, so, now, the U.S. is soaring again toward Gilded Age economic inequality, perhaps to surpass the earlier era of unrestrained robber barons. And, the Times study shows: even in the Democratic Party, the mega-donations are going to only the most conservative (pro-corporate, anti-public) Democrats. Grass-roots politics could be vestigial, or even dead, in the new America.
The question has become whether the unrestrained power of the aristocracy is locked in this time even more permanently than it was in that earlier era. Or will there be yet another FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) to restore a democracy that once was? Or is a president like that any longer even possible in America?
As for today’s political incumbents: they now have their careers for as long as they want and are willing to do the biddings of their masters. And, then, they retire to become, themselves, new members of the aristocracy, such as the Clintons have done, and such as the Obamas will do. (Of course, the Bushes have been aristocrats since early in the last century.)
Furthermore, the new age of aristocratic control is not merely national but international in scope; so, the global aristocracy have probably found the formula that will keep them in control until they destroy the entire world. What’s especially interesting is that, with all of the many tax-exempt, ‘non-profit’ ‘charities,’ which aristocrats have established, none of them is warring to defeat the aristocracy itself — to defeat the aristocrats’ system of exploitation of the public. It’s the one thing they won’t create a ‘charity’ for; none of them will go to war against the exploitative interests of themselves and of their own exploitative peers. They’re all in this together, even though they do compete amongst themselves for dominance, as to which ones of them will lead against the public. And the public seem to accept this modern form of debt-bondage, perhaps because of the ‘news’ they see, and because of the news they don’t see (such as this).
Deze feiten zult u zelden of nooit in de Nederlandse mainstream-media aantreffen; er rust een taboe op. Ongenoegen en ressentiment moeten op ‘de Russen’ geprojecteerd blijven, hetgeen onder andere blijkt uit het feit dat de Nederlandse staat de 'journalist' Hubert Smeets’ anti-Poetin website subsidieert met belastinggeld. En zo wordt de angst gevoed om de aandacht af te leiden van de huidige systeemcrisis waarmee zowel de bevolking als de elite worden geconfronteerd. Zoals de zaken er vandaag de dag voorstaan is een Derde Wereldoorlog slechts een kwestie van tijd, nu er voorlopig geen andere uitweg voor handen is. In het nawoord van zijn boek The Management of Savagery. How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS And Donald Trump (2019) schrijft de prominente Joods-Amerikaanse journalist Max Blumenthal:
In July 2018, following the defeat of Islamist insurgents in southern Syria, including ISIS factions, 422 self-identified White Helmet members were evacuated by the Israeli military through the occupied Golan Heights to Jordan, a US client state that had served as a base for covert operations against Syria's government. The war may not have been entirely over, but this event signaled more than any other that the campaign to shatter Syria as an independent nation-state was close to its end. Not only had the White Helmets been treated to a special evacuation not afforded to any other Syrians in distress, it had arrived courtesy of Israel, a malicious adversary whose very existence was opposed across the Arab world. Nothing could have better reinforced the critique of this group as a collection of cynical mercenaries — and of the Syrian armed opposition as a whole — than this scene of retreat.
Consumed in bitterness over its failure in Syria, America’s national security state lashed out with vengeful fury. Biting sanctions were crafted to target Russia for its rol in preventing regime change in Syria. Meanwhile, the Trump administration reoriented its national security doctrine toward what Defense Secretary Mattis called ‘great power conflict’ with Russia and China. The new doctrine did not even mention ISIS or any ‘war on terror.’
Inmiddels is James Mattis op 20 februari 2019 teruggetreden als minister van Defensie. In zijn ontslagbrief gaf hij als reden op zijn vruchteloze pleidooi bij president Trump voor heroverweging van diens besluit om het Amerikaanse contingent van circa 2000 actieve militairen uit Syrië terug te roepen. Het Amerikaanse militair-industrieel complex heeft juist meer oorlog nodig om te kunnen overleven en zeker niet minder oorlog, zoals president Trump beaamde. Hoe dan ook, de oorlogsstrategie gaat gewoon door onder zijn opvolger, de voormalige zakenman, Patrick M. Shanahan. Opnieuw Max Blumenthal:
A budget-busting defense authorization bill appropriately named for Senator John McCain (Inmiddels overleden Republikeinse Havik. svh) ratified the drive toward confrontation with Russia and China, removing congressional oversight from the production of new nuclear weapons and demanding a ‘whole of government’ strategy against China. The bill also widened the military’s latitude (speelruimte. svh) for action against Iran, which the Trump administration had just placed back on the regime change target board after unilaterally reneging on the nuclear deal the United States had signed with Tehran. Under heavy influence from pro-Israel oligarchs like Sheldon Adelson (joods-Amerikaanse multimiljardair, en fanatieke pro-Israel lobbyist. svh) and the think tanks he's funded, the Trump administration established a special ‘Iran Action Group’ to spearhead the State Department’s campaign of pressure and sabotage. The new anti-Iran unit distinctly resembled the George W. Bush Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, the propaganda operation set up by neoconservative operative Douglas Feith (joods Amerikaan die tot de agressieve pro-Israel lobby behoort. svh) to cook up intelligence linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda. Below the radar of the Washington press corps, Feith's son, David, had been hired to work directly under the Iran Action Group's director, Brian Hook (Special Representative for Iran and Senior Policy Advisor to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. svh).
Through covert operations and overt invasions, America's national security state had destabilized entire regions, from the Levant to North Africa, unleashed a migration crisis of unprecedented proportions onto Europe and spurred an inevitable right-wing backlash that was unraveling the neoliberal consensus they sought to protect. This process had crashed against the hard rocks of reality in Syria, and with it, the unipolar bliss that America had briefly enjoyed after the Cold War began to evaporate. As a new order emerged, Russiagate had become the ultimate expression of the national security state's anxieties.
Just one day before Trump's scheduled summit in Helsinki, special counsel Robert Mueller released the most dramatic document in his eighteen-month-long federal investigation into Trump's relationship with Russia. It was a detailed indictment of twelve Russian officers of the military intelligence unit GRU, accusing them of hacking into the DNC's (het hoogste bestuursorgaan van de Democratische Partij. svh) computers to disrupt the 2016 presidential campaign. The timing of the indictment ensured that Trump would be met with the furor of the Washington press corps tailing him to Helsinki, with one question another about ‘collusion’ with Putin and kompromat (compromitterend materiaal. svh) — and zero questions about substantive issues like antiballistic missile negotiations or de-escalation in Syria. Because the accused intelligence officers were likely to never appear in court, Mueller's charges couldn't be proven… However, the contents of the special counsel's indictment were enough to convict Trump in the eyes of the national security state. ‘He is wholly in the pocket of Putin,’ former CIA director Brennan declared following Brennan declared following the Helsinki summit with Putin. Brennan added that Trump's performance was ‘nothing short of treasonous.’
By painting Trump as Putin's puppet and branding anyone who favored détente with Russia as traitorous, the national security establishment rallied the public behind diplomatic degradation, all-out hostility and budget-busting defense expenditures. And by reviving the anticommunist paranoia of the Cold War, Russiagate enabled smear campaigns against socialist challengers like UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, an antiwar stalwart, and even Bernie Sanders, who presented only a faint challenge to the foreign policy consensus.
In the face of their own failure, America's national security elites had successfully engineered a new Cold War, wagering that the reignited conflict would preserve their management of savagery abroad and postpone the terrible reckoning they deserved at home…
The West's wars in the Middle East were drawing to an ignominious close by this point. From Washington to London, the so-called war on terror no longer generated the same level of public hysteria — or paychecks — it once had. But as the dust cleared from two decades of regime change campaigns, a new cast of evildoers was coming into focus,
ditmaal genaamd ISIS, of IS, of Daesh, of Al Qaida, en voortgekomen uit de decennialange financiële en militaire steun van de VS aan moslim-extremisten. In de woorden van Hillary Clinton op 23 april 2009, toen zij nog de Amerikaanse minister van Buitenlandse Zaken was:
Let’s remember here, the people we are fighting today, we funded twenty years ago, and we did it because we were locked in this struggle with the Soviet Union… There is a very strong argument, which is — it wasn’t a bad investment to end the Soviet Union, but let’s be careful what we sow because we will harvest.
Drie jaar later, op 12 februari 2012, schreef Hillary Clinton’s politiek adviseur Jake Sullivan, expert op het gebied van de buitenlandse politiek, in een e-mail aan haar: ‘AQ (Al Qaeda] is on our side in Syria.’
Opnieuw werd bewezen dat de VS niet zonder oorlog kan bestaan. En de Nederlandse politici blijven bereid dit te steunen. Meer daarover de volgende keer.
Tegen het einde van 2019 moet 60 procent van de Amerikaanse vloot voor de kust van China gestationeerd zijn.
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