Everybody with an IQ above room temperature is onto the con act of our media. They are obeying bigger, richer interests than informing the public — which is the last thing that corporate America has ever been interested in doing.
You know, I have been around the ruling class all my life, and I have been quite aware of their total contempt for people of the country.
Gore Vidal. History of the National Security State. 2014
In haar fascinerende en tegelijkertijd deprimerende studie The March of Folly. From Troy to Vietnam (1984) benadrukt de Amerikaanse historica Barbara Tuchman:
Rulers will justify a bad or wrong decision on the ground, as a historian and partisan wrote of John F. Kennedy, that ‘He had no choice,’ but no matter how equal two alternatives may appear, there is always freedom of choice to change or desist from a counter-productive course if the policy-maker has the moral courage to exercise it. He is not a fated feature blown by the whims of Homeric gods. Yet to recognize error, to cut losses, to alter course, is the most repugnant option in government.
For a chief of state, admitting error is almost out of the question. The American misfortune during the Vietnam period was to have had Presidents who lacked the self-confidence for the grand withdrawal. We come back again to Burke (Ierse filosoof, grondlegger van het moderne conservatisme. svh): 'Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom, and a great Empire and little minds go ill together.' The test comes in recognizing when persistence in error has become self-damaging. A prince, says Machiavelli, ought always to be a great asker and a patient hearer of truth about those things of which he has inquired, and he should be angry if he finds that anyone has scruples about telling him the truth. What government needs is great askers.
Maandag 6 juli 2009 stierf op 93-jarige leeftijd de Amerikaanse oorlogsmisdadiger Robert McNamara in alle rust tijdens zijn slaap in zijn bed te Washington. Tegen het einde van zijn leven biechtte hij als oud-minister van Defensie onder de presidenten Kennedy en Johnson, en, niet te vergeten, als vrome katholiek, een lange reeks oorlogsmisdaden op, waarvoor hij politiek verantwoordelijk was geweest. In zijn boek In Retrospect. The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (1995) kwam McNamara tot de conclusie dat als gevolg van het Vietnam-beleid ‘de regeringen Kennedy, Johnson en Nixon’ vele miljoenen burgers ‘verschrikkelijk leed’ hadden toegebracht, omdat:
wij de macht onderschatten van het nationalisme teneinde een volk te motiveren… om te vechten en te sterven voor hun overtuigingen en waarden, en we blijven dat vandaag de dag nog steeds doen in vele delen van de wereld,
terwijl:
wij niet het God gegeven recht hebben om elke natie naar ons eigen beeld te scheppen.
Volgens McNamara zijn tijdens de Vietnam-oorlog 3,4 miljoen Zuidoost Aziaten gedood, onder wie talloze burgers van Laos, het zwaarst gebombardeerde land in de geschiedenis van de mensheid, als we uitgaan van het aantal inwoners. Eenkwart van de bevolking vluchtte grotten in om aan het alles verzengende geweld te ontkomen. De Amerikaanse luchtmacht wierp twee keer zoveel bommen op Laos dan op Nazi-Duitsland, hetgeen voor de boerenbevolking neerkwam op tien jaar lang elke 9 minuten een clusterbom. Omdat — volgens USA TODAY — tien tot dertig procent van deze in kleine fragmenten uiteenspattende bommen, niet explodeerde, komen tot op de dag van vandaag nog steeds Laotianen om het leven, de meerderheid van hen spelende kinderen. Ook Cambodja leed onder de Amerikaans terreur. Meer dan 600.000 Cambodjanen werden gedood tijdens de Amerikaanse bombardementen, en door de totale verwoesting van landbouwgronden werden de overlevenden geconfronteerd met een massale hongersnood.
In de filmdocumentaire The Fog of War (2003) vertelt Robert McNamara dat als de VS de Tweede Wereldoorlog had verloren hij een grote kans had gelopen om wegens oorlogsmisdaden te worden veroordeeld. Want McNamara organiseerde de vernietiging van tientallen Japanse steden door middel van Amerikaanse napalm- en clusterbommen, waarbij op één avond alleen al in Tokio meer dan 100.000 burgers gedood werden. De bemanning van de vliegtuigen, die tijdens de tweede aanval op 9 kilometer hoogte inzette, vertelde naderhand dat zij de brandende lijken beneden hadden kunnen ruiken. Dit was het concrete resultaat van ondermeer het besluit van Britse autoriteiten in 1918 om Duitse oorlogsmisdaden juridisch niet te vervolgen omdat dit 'would be placing a noose round the necks of our airmen in future wars,’ waarvan het doel is
to weaken the morale of civilian inhabitants (and thereby their 'will to win') by persistent bomb attacks which would both destroy life (civilian and otherwise) and if possible originate a conflagration which should reduce to ashes the whole town.’
Hoewel het bewust terroriseren van de bevolking door het massaal plegen van oorlogsmisdaden in 1918 nog ‘top secret’ moest blijven, weet de mensheid zeker sinds Hiroshima en Nagasaki wat de hedendaagse militaire strategie precies inhoudt. Tijdens de eerste Koude Oorlog gingen Amerikaanse militairen ervan uit dat in geval van een nucleaire oorlog:
an all-out U.S. attack on the Soviet Union, China and satellite countries in 1962 would have killed 335 million people within the first seventy-two hours… In an all-out nuclear attack, most of the industrialized world would have been bombed back to the Stone Age, with hundreds of millions killed outright and perhaps as many as a billion or more dying of radiation, disease and famine in the postwar period.
Dit is de werkelijkheid waarin wij, de machtelozen, vandaag de dag leven. Zo mogelijk nog misdadiger is dat een dergelijke genocidale politiek tolerabel blijft voor onze autoriteiten, en dat deze dreigende terreur door de massamedia wordt gepresenteerd als acceptabel. De staat die, zoals bekend, het geweldsmonopolie bezit om zodoende de eigen onderdanen te kunnen beschermen, is zelf de grootste bedreiging geworden voor het voortbestaan van diezelfde burgers. Dit geldt voor zowel democratieën als dictaturen. De groteske criminaliteit wordt door mainstream-opiniemakers als Ian Buruma geprezen door bijvoorbeeld te stellen dat ‘wij’ — met het oog op het naderende einde van wat hij, zonder ironie, de ‘Pax Americana’ noemt — ‘ons [zullen] moeten voorbereiden op een tijd waarin we met weemoed terugkijken op het betrekkelijk goedaardige imperialisme uit Washington.’ Dat wil zeggen: met ‘weemoed terugkijken’ op wat Harry Mulisch betitelde als een mogelijke ‘vernietiging, waarnaast de jodenmoord een bagatel zal worden, een herinnering uit de goede oude tijd.’ Hoe diep gestoord kan een cultuur en haar pleitbezorgers zijn, voordat het ondenkbare denkbare daadwerkelijk plaatsvindt? Desalniettemin worden de Buruma’s van deze tijd alom geprezen door de gevestigde orde. De elite prijst op die manier haar eigen waanzin. En mijn oude vriend Ian? Welnu, hij is een broodschrijver die gedwongen is zijn imago van kosmopolitische redelijkheid in stand te houden. Niet voor niets wees in 1946 George Orwell in het essay Politics and the English Language met nadruk op het volgende:
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible… The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.
Wanneer Ian Buruma spreekt van een ‘betrekkelijk goedaardige imperialisme uit Washington,’ terwijl zelfs hij weet hoe genocidaal de Amerikaanse politiek is, dan is er bij hem inderdaad sprake van een ‘massa leugens, uitvluchten, dwaasheden, haat en schizofrenie,’ en is zijn taal ‘grotendeels het verdedigen van het onverdedigbare.’ En aangezien het establishment deze pathologie prijst is het niet overdreven te stellen dat wij in een ernstig zieke maatschappij leven, zonder hoop op genezing. Stap voor stap wordt de gemeenschap richting slachthuis gedreven. De slaafse houding roept de vraag op waarom de overgrote meerderheid zich gedwee neerlegt bij dit lot, en net als ten tijde van de nazi’s en fascisten niet in opstand komt tegen de doodsdrift van de huidige cultuur en haar corrupte propagandisten als Ian Buruma.
Hoe intens misdadig de westerse macht onder aanvoering van de elite in Washington en op Wall Street is, toont onder andere de Amerikaanse auteur Douglas Valentine in zijn boek The Phoenix Program: America's Use of Terror in Vietnam (2014), waarbij de Verenigde Staten probeerde ‘to destroy the Viet Cong through torture and summary execution.’ Hij schreef:
The first objective of a covert action program is to create plausible denial — specifically, in South Vietnam, to cloak the CIA’s role in organizing GVN repression (Government of Viet Nam. svh). The CIA did this by composing and planting distorted articles in foreign and domestic newspapers and by composing ‘official’ communiques which appeared to have originated within the GVN itself. This disinformation campaign led predisposed Americans to believe that the GVN was a legitimately elected representative government, a condition which was a necessary prerequisite for the massive aid programs that supported the CIA’s covert action programs.
Insofar as language — information management — perpetuated the myth that Americans were the GVN’s advisers, not its manufacturer, public support was rallied for continued intervention. Next, the CIA judges a covert action program on its intelligence potential — its ability to produce information on the enemy’s political, military, and economic infrastructure. That is why the CIA’s covert action branch operates as an intelligence arm under cover of civic action. What makes these intelligence operations covert is not any mistaken impression on the part of the enemy, but rather the CIA’s ability to deny plausibly involvement in them to the American public. Here again, language is the key. For example, during Senate hearings into CIA assassination plots against Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders, ‘plausible denial’ was defined by the CIA’s deputy director of operations Richard Bissell as the use of circumlocution and euphemism in discussions where precise definitions would expose covert actions and bring them to an end.
The Church Committee (Speciale Senaatscommissie die in 1975 de misdaden van de CIA, NSA, die FBI en de Internal Revenue Service (IRS) onderzocht. svh) report says, ‘In November 1962 the proposal for a new covert action program to overthrow Castro was developed. The President’s Assistant, Richard Goodwin, and General Edward Lansdale, who was experienced in counter-insurgency operations, played major staff roles in creating this program, which was named Operation MONGOOSE.’ A special group was created to oversee Mongoose, and Lansdale was made its chief of operations. Those operations included ‘executive actions.’ A memo written by Lansdale and introduced during the hearings in part states that the ‘Attack on the cadre of the regime including key leaders… should be a ‘Special Target’ operation. CIA defector operations are vital here. Gangster elements might prove the best recruitment potential for actions against police G-2 (functionarissen van de politie-inlichtingendienst. svh) officials.’ When questioned about his language, Lansdale testified that the words ‘actions’ and ‘attack’ actually meant killing. He also testified that ‘criminal elements’ were contracted for use in the attack against Castro. He euphemistically called these gangsters the Caribbean Survey Group.
Further to ensure plausible denial, the CIA conducts covert action under cover of proprietary companies like Air America and the Freedom Company, through veterans and business organizations, and various other fronts. As in the case of fake newspaper articles and official communiqués, the idea is to use disinformation to suggest initiatives fostering positive values — freedom, patriotism, brotherhood, democracy — while doing dirty deeds behind the scenes. In CIA jargon this is called black propaganda and is the job of political and psychological (PP) officers in the covert action branch. PP officers played a major role in packaging Phoenix for sale to the American public as a program designed ‘to protect the people from terrorism.’
Ook hier speelde de Orwelliaanse propaganda lange tijd een doorslaggevende rol. De Amerikaanse historica Barbara Tuchman had gelijk toen zij waarschuwde dat ’What government needs is great askers.’ Zij zette in haar studie The March of Folly uiteen dat:
Refusal to draw inference from negative signs, which under the rubric 'wooden-headedness' has played so large a part in these pages, was recognized in the most pessimistic work of modern times, George Orwell's 1984, as what the author called 'Crimestop.' ‘Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments... and of being bored and repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.’
Het is precies dit fenomeen, waaraan politici en pers in het Westen lijden, waardoor wij niet in een vrije democratie leven, maar juist in een totalitaire technocratie, waarop niemand meer greep heeft, en waarbij ook de onzichtbare macht door primitieve driften wordt gedreven. Tuchman wierp dan ook de vraag op:
whether or how a country can protect itself from protective stupidity in policy-making, which in turn raises the question whether it is possible to educate for government. Plato's scheme, which included breeding as well as educating, was never tried. A conspicuous attempt by another culture, the training of the mandarins of China for administrative function, produced no very superior result. The mandarins had to pass through years of study and apprenticeship and weeding out by a series of stiff examinations, but the successful ones did not prove immune to corruption and incompetence. In the end they petered out in decadence and ineffectiveness.
Tegenwoordig wordt het probleem verergerd door een complex van factoren, waaronder de algehele corrumpering van het maatschappelijk en politiek bestel, de vervreemding en het cynisme onder een aanzienlijk deel van de westerse bevolking, en, daarmee verbonden, de sterke vermindering van de geloofwaardigheid van politici en massamedia. Barbara Tuchman:
In America, where the electoral process is drowning in commercial techniques of fund-raising and image-making, we may have completed a circle back to a selection process as unconcerned with qualifications as that which made Darius King of Persia.
En die ‘bekwaamheid’ van Darius was het vermogen om zijn mededingers te bedriegen. Bovendien, zo waarschuwde Tuchman:
For the chief of state under modern conditions, a limiting factor is too many subjects and problems in too many areas of government to allow solid understanding of any of them, and too little time to think between fifteen-minute appointments and thirty-page briefs (samenvattingen. svh). This leaves the field open to protective stupidity. Meanwhile bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably (onontkoombaar. svh) as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.
Above all, lure of office, known in our country as Potomac fever, stultifies (onmogelijk maken. svh) a better performance of government. The bureaucrat dreams of promotion, higher officials want to extend their reach, legislators and the chief of state want re-election; and the guiding principle in these pursuits is to please as many and offend as few as possible. Intelligent government would require that the persons entrusted with high office should formulate and execute policy according to their best judgment, the best knowledge available and a judicious estimate of the lesser evil. But re-election is on their minds, and that becomes the criterion.
Aware of the controlling power of ambition, corruption and emotion, it may be that in the search for wiser government we should look for the test of character first. And the test should be moral courage…
The problem may be not so much a matter of educating officials for government as educating the electorate to recognize and reward integrity of character and to reject the ersatz (surrogaat. svh). Perhaps better men flourish in better times, and wiser government requires the nourishment of a dynamic rather than a troubled and bewildered society. If John Adams was right, and government is 'little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago,’ we cannot reasonably expect much improvement. We can only muddle on as we have done in those same three or four thousand years, through patches of brilliance and decline, great endeavor and shadow.
Ik vrees dat ondanks haar intelligente inzichten, de historica Barbara Tuchman hier een gevaarlijke denkfout maakt. Het tijdperk van massavernietigingswapens wijkt fundamenteel af van het verleden, met andere woorden: de veronderstelling dat ‘wij alleen maar kunnen doormodderen zoals we in diezelfde drie of vier duizend jaar hebben gedaan,’ is gebaseerd op het verleden, maar niet op het heden en zeker niet op de toekomst. Als het waar is dat ‘wij redelijkerwijs niet veel verbetering kunnen verwachten,’ dan staan wij aan de vooravond van een nucleair armageddon.
Have you ever felt like the government doesn’t really care what you think?
Professors Martin Gilens (Princeton University) and Benjamin I. Page (Northwestern University) looked at more than 20 years worth of data to answer a pretty simple question: Does the government represent the people?
Their study took data from nearly 2000 public opinion surveys and compared it to the policies that ended up becoming law. In other words, they compared what the public wanted to what the government actually did. What they found was extremely unsettling: The opinions of the bottom 90% of income earners in America has essentially no impact at all.
This video gives a quick rundown of their findings — it all boils down to one simple graph:
Note: All sources linked at the bottom of this page
Princeton University study: Public opinion has “near-zero” impact on U.S. law.
Gilens & Page found that the number of americans for or against any idea has no impact on the likelihood that congress will make it law.
“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
One thing that does have an influence? Money. While the opinions of the bottom 90% of income earners in America have a “statistically non-significant impact,” Economic elites, business interests, and people who can afford lobbyists still carry major influence.
Nearly every issue we face as a nation is caught in the grip of corruption.
From taxation to national debt, education to the economy, America is struggling to address our most serious issues. Moneyed interests get what they want, and the rest of us pay the price.
They spend billions influencing America’s government. We give them trillions in return.
In the last 5 years alone, the 200 most politically active companies in the US spent $5.8 billion influencing our government with lobbying and campaign contributions.
Those same companies got $4.4 trillion in taxpayer support — earning a return of 750 times their investment.
It’s a vicious cycle of legalized corruption.
As the cost of winning elections explodes, politicians of both political parties become ever more dependent on the tiny slice of the population who can bankroll their campaigns.
To win a Senate seat in 2014, candidates had to raise $14,351 every single day. Just .05% of Americans donate more than $10,000 in any election, so it’s perfectly clear who candidates will turn to first, and who they’re indebted to when they win.
In return for campaign donations, elected officials pass laws that are good for their mega-donors, and bad for the rest of us.
Our elected officials spend 30-70% of their time in office fundraising for the next election. When they’re not fundraising, they have no choice but to make sure the laws they pass keep their major donors happy — or they won’t be able to run in the next election.Until it’s addressed, Corruption will continue to block progress on every issue.
RepresentUs has a plan to tackle corruption, and it’s already winning:
SOURCES
- Gilens and Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspective on Politics, 2014.
- Washington Post, “Rich People Rule!” 2014.
- Washington Post, “Once again, U.S. has most expensive, least effective health care system in survey,” 2014.
- Forbes Opinion, “The tax code is a hopeless complex, economy-suffocating mess,” 2013.
- CNN, “Americans pay more for slower Internet,” 2014.
- The Hill, “Sanders requests DOD meeting over wasteful spending,” 2015.
- CBS News, “Wastebook 2014: Government’s questionable spending,” 2014.
- The Heritage Foundation, Budget Book, 2015.
- The Atlantic, “American schools vs. the world: expensive, unequal, bad at math,” 2013.
- CNN Opinion, “War on drugs a trillion-dollar failure,” 2012.
- Feeding America, Child Hunger Fact Sheet, 2014.
- New York Times, “Banks’ lobbyists help in drafting financial bills,” 2014.
- New York Times, “Wall Street seeks to tuck Dodd-Frank changes in budget bill,” 2014
- Sunlight Foundation, “Fixed Fortunes: Biggest corporate political interests spend billions, get trillions,” 2014.
- Sunlight Foundation, Fixed Fortunes database, 2015.
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