Nu de 29 NAVO-landen onder aanvoering van Washington en Wall Street aan de vooravond staan van een serie onvermijdelijk lijkende gewapende conflicten met Rusland en China, is het voor serieuze journalisten van belang om The March of Folly. From Troy to Vietnam (1985) te lezen, waarin de Amerikaanse historica Barbara W. Tuchman met betrekking tot de Amerikaanse nederlaag in Vietnam concludeerde:
In the aftermath, as everyone knows, Hanoi overcame Saigon within two years. When Nixon had been destroyed by Watergate and Congress had finally gathered the votes to preclude, by cutting off funds, American re-intervention, North Vietnam launched a final offensive and the disheartened South failed to withstand the onslaught. For all that some units fought hard, ARVN (Zuid-Vietnamese Strijdkrachten. svh) as a national army, in the words of an American soldier, 'was like a house without any foundation — the collapse came naturally.' The Communists established their rule over the whole of Vietnam, and similar results were accomplished in Cambodia…
Congressional refusal to allow the United States to re-intervene represented the functioning, not, as Kissinger lamented, 'the breakdown of our democratic political process.' Rather than weakness of American will to see the task through, it was belated (te late. svh) recognition of a process clearly contrary and damaging to self-interest, and the summoning of political responsibility to terminate it. It came too late, however, for the country to escape punishment. Human casualties are bearable when they are believed to have served a purpose; they are bitter when, as in this case, 45,000 killed and 300.000 wounded were sacrificed for nothing. Expenditures of about $20 billion annually for nearly a decade, amounting to a total of about $150 billion over and above what would have been the normal military budget, contorted (verminkte. svh) the economy to a condition that has not since been righted.
De Vietnam Oorlog was een ramp voor de Amerikaanse economie en dwong de VS in 1971 om de dollar te ontkoppelen van het goud, oftewel: ‘the suspension in 1971 of convertibility of paper U.S. currency into any precious metal,' waardoor de 'the U.S. dollar, de facto, fiat money,’ is, dat wil zeggen: ‘a currency without intrinsic value.' De VS was door de oorlogsuitgaven bankroet, maar omdat de Golflanden en Saoedi Arabië in dollars betaald moeten worden voor hun olie, blijft de waarde van de dollar kunstmatig hoog. Een absurde situatie omdat het ook nog eens meer dan ‘twenty trillion dollar’ schuld aan het buitenland heeft, een astronomisch hoog bedrag dat de VS nooit in zijn geheel zal kunnen terugbetalen. Daar komt bij dat meer dan de helft van de Federale Begroting, dat het Congres jaarlijks kan toewijzen, door het militair-industrieel complex wordt opgeslokt, om het in staat te stellen met grootscheeps geweld andere landen te dwingen zich aan de dollar-orde te onderwerpen. Barbara Tuchman:
More important than the physical effects was the lowered trust in and authority of government. Legislation by Congress in the post-Vietnam years was repeatedly directed to restricting the Executive in various kinds of conduct on the assumption that without such restrictions, it would act irregularly or illegitimately. The public too learned suspicion, and many would have felt their attitude expressed in two words by one of the White House staff, Gordon Strachan, who on being asked by the Ervin committee what advice he would give to other young people wishing to serve in government, answered, 'Stay away.’ For many, confidence in the righteousness of their country gave way to cynicism. Who since Vietnam would venture to say of America in simple belief that she was the 'last best hope of earth?’ (Opmerking van president Abraham Lincoln tegenover het Congres in 1862, tijdens de burgeroorlog. svh) What America lost in Vietnam was, to put it in one word, virtue.
Hoe ver de democratische westerling inmiddels in de praktijk verwijderd is van doorleefde normen en waarden, hoe diep het cynisme is geïnternaliseerd, blijkt wel uit het feit dat nagenoeg geen enkele politicus vandaag de dag nog het begrip ‘virtue,’ oftewel ‘deugdzaamheid,’ in de mond zal nemen.
The follies that produced this result begin with continuous over-reacting: in the invention of endangered 'national security,' the invention of 'vital interest,' the invention of a 'commitment' which rapidly assumed a life of its own, casting a spell over the inventor.
Hierbij verwijst Tuchman naar Richard Nixon, die tijdens zijn inaugurale rede in 1969 bezwoer dat hij als president met een ‘sacred commitment’ naar vrede zou streven, maar in werkelijkheid oorlog bleef voeren. Als historica laat zij zien dat de basis voor al dit geweld in Vietnam al eerder was gelegd door de Amerikaanse minister van Buitenland Zaken, John Foster Dulles, die samen met zijn broer Allen Dulles, hoofd van de CIA, een op angst berustende haat tegen elke sociale hervormingsbeweging had ontwikkeld, hoe gematigd de hervormingen dan ook waren. Als oud bedrijfsadvocaten, werkzaam voor Wall Street, vreesden zij dat de imperialistische macht van de Verenigde Staten gehinderd zou worden door een verlichte, sociale politiek. Tuchman:
In this process the major mover was Dulles, who, by setting out to wreck the compromise of Geneva and install America as the keeper of one zone and relentless opponent of the other (Noord Vietnam. svh) was the begetter of all that followed. His zeal as a Savonarola of foreign policy (fanatieke dominicaanse monnik die van 1494 tot 1498 over Florence heerste. svh) mesmerized associates and successors into parroting ‘national security’ and ‘vital interest,’ not so much in belief as in lip service to the cold war, or as scare tactics to extract appropriations from Congress. As late as 1975, President Ford told Congress that unwillingness to vote aid for South Vietnam would undermine 'credibility' as an ally, which is 'essential to our national security.' Kissinger repeated the theme two months later, telling a press conference that if South Vietnam were allowed to go under it would represent 'a fundamental threat over a period of time to the security of the United States.'
Eveneens toen al was voor iedere serieuze waarnemer het begrip ‘national security’ een eufemisme voor het beschermen en uitbreiden van de Amerikaanse belangen van de elite in Washington en op Wall Street. Dit politiek beleid heeft niet alleen vele miljoenen wereldbewoners het leven gekost, maar ook democratieën vernietigd, democratische politici vermoord, omdat de Amerikaanse elite die als een bedreiging zagen van hun economische belangen. Desondanks beweerde Ian Buruma nog medio 2017, met het oog op het naderende ‘einde’ van de ‘Pax Americana,’ dat ‘we ons [zullen] moeten voorbereiden op een tijd waarin we met weemoed terugkijken op het betrekkelijk goedaardige imperialisme uit Washington.’ Desgevraagd liet mijn oude vriend Ian mij weten dat hij met ‘we’ doelde op de redelijk hoog opgeleide witte 'stedelijke elites' die NRC Handelsblad raadplegen. Op dit moment richt zijn propaganda-strijd zich op Rusland en China, in zijn ogen pure ‘mafia societies.’ Op die manier baant hij de weg voor wat John Pilger ‘The Coming War on China,’ noemt, en die al in een ver gevorderd stadium van voorbereiding is, aangezien vóór het einde van dit jaar ruim 60 procent van de Amerikaanse marinevloot voor de kust van China zal zijn gestationeerd, en al tot de eerste confrontaties heeft geleid. Mede daarom is Barbara Tuchman’s boek The March of Folly zo belangrijk om te lezen.
Over-reacting was present in the conjuring of specters, of falling dominoes, of visions of 'ruin,' of yielding the Pacific ad pulling back to San Francisco, of minor dragons like the invisible COSVN (de communistische Central Office for South Vietnam. svh), and finally the paranoia of the Watergate White House. More serious, over-reacting led to the squandering of American power and resources in a grand folly of disproportion to the national interest involved. The absence of intelligent thought on this issue was astonishing for, as General Ridgway wrote in 1971, ‘it should not have taken great vision to perceive... that no truly vital United States interest was present... and that the commitment to a major effort was a monumental blunder.'
Hier doet zich nog een aspect voor, namelijk datgene wat de Britse historicus Paul Kennedy ‘imperial overstretch’ heeft betiteld. Al in 1987 waarschuwde deze hoogleraar in zijn opzienbarende studie The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Economic Change and Military Conflict dat de Verenigde Staten aan 'imperial overstretch' lijdt. Kort samengevat betekent dit begrip dat het Amerikaanse Rijk meer kost dan het opbrengt, en dat dit het begin van het eind betekent van het Amerikaans imperialisme. Kennedy:
argues that economic strength and military power have been highly correlated in the rise and fall of major nations since 1500. He shows that expanding strategic commitments lead to increases in military expenditures that eventually overburden a country's economic base, and cause its long-term decline. His book reached a wide audience of policy makers when it suggested that the United States and the Soviet Union were presently experiencing the same historical dynamics that previously affected Spain, the Netherlands, France, Great Britain, and Germany, and that the United States must come to grips with its own ‘imperial overstretch.’
Paul Kennedy heeft zowel in het geval van de Sovjet Unie als in dat van de VS volledig gelijk gekregen. Een rijk:
overextends itself geographically and strategically if, even at a less imperial level, it chooses to devote a large proportion of its total income to ‘protection,’ leaving less for ‘productive investment,’ it is likely to find its economic output slowing down, with dire implications for its long-term capacity to maintain both its citizens' consumption demands and its international position.
Hoewel de ‘corporate press’ niet meer kan negeren dat de macht van de Amerikaanse elite zowel in het binnenland als buitenland tanende is, zijn mijn mainstream-collega’s niet bij machte deze ontwikkeling in een bredere context te plaatsen. Met een infantiel simplisme doen zij het nu voorkomen alsof president Trump het ware probleem is, terwijl in werkelijkheid deze zakenman/politicus slechts het symptoom is van een veel fundamentelere malaise van de neoliberale kapitalistische consumptiecultuur met haar intense vervreemding van de mens en de natuur. Hierover is al sinds de jaren vijftig door de belangrijkste Amerikaanse denkers uitgebreid en diepgravend gepubliceerd, zonder dat dit enige invloed heeft gehad op het werk van de polderpers. Eén van de scherpzinnigste intellectuelen in Noord Amerika, professor Henry A. Giroux, een cultuurcriticus die gerekend wordt tot ‘one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period,’ stelt in zijn boek America at War With Itself (2017):
Trump is representative of a publicity-branding machine that funds and promotes conservative institutes that produce anti-public intellectuals whose role is to snarl at the victims of social injustice, to disdain public institutions in the service of the public good, and to do everything possible to promote a culture marked by a depoliticizing moral and political vacancy. Trump is simply the manifestation of a new type of authoritarianism, one that revels in thoughtlessness and the survival-of-the-fittest ethic marketed in his former TV game show, ‘The Apprentice.’
Deze ‘show’ is ‘een Amerikaanse reality-serie en spelprogramma van NBC, op de Vlaamse en Nederlandse televisie uitgebracht onder de titel Trumps troonopvolger.
Giroux:
Corporate media love Donald Trump. He is the perfect embodiment of the spectacle that drives up their ratings. That Trump is a white nationalist, a racist, and a spewer of hate against Muslims, Mexicans, and the Pope all adds to the shock that feeds the spectacle. Karl Grossman argues that the media is intimidated by Trump. He misses the point. In the age of celebrity culture, the media love Trump and he loves them. They chase audiences and he delivers them. Trump is not a media clown, he is an expert at getting the media to promote and fund his self-marketing strategy. His campaign is unique in that it is modeled after the commercial superficiality of game-show TV. Sean Illing (Amerikaanse auteur en veteraan. svh) is right in stating:
‘Trump is a TV man; he understands the landscape. He knows interesting is preferable to informed or reasonable or lucid. Which is why he eschews talking points or scripts and instead riffs on stage like a stand-up. Trump's free-wheeling approach means he could say literally anything at any moment, and that's the kind of thing people want to watch.’
Zonder een dergelijke oppervlakkige cultuur zou het neoliberalisme überhaupt niet kunnen bestaan. Trump is geen afwijking of een ontsporing van dit systeem, maar een voorlopig onvermijdelijk hoogtepunt ervan. Hij is slechts één van de duivelskinderen die door de virtuele werkelijkheid van de massamedia is voortgebracht, en wijkt als zodanig niet af van president Barack Obama en diens voorgangers, George W. Bush en Bill Clinton. Zij allen zijn het product van de omvangrijke culturele deprivatie die de westerse ‘democratie’ nodig heeft om te kunnen overleven. Hier staart de vervreemde massamens gebiologeerd naar zichzelf. Trump, Obama, Bush junior en Bill Clinton zijn een ‘selfie’ van de postmoderne massamens die even uit de anonimiteit is getild, en in Andy Warhol’s woorden ‘will be world-famous for 15 minutes.’ Zelfs een beroemd mens is tegenwoordig na een decennium vergeten, hetgeen ik opnieuw merkte toen ik onlangs in gezelschap van studenten de naam van Henry Kissinger liet vallen, en de meesten van hen niet wisten over wie ik het precies had. Bovendien leeft iedere westerling in een tijd waarin niemand meer met zekerheid kan vaststellen wat waar is en wat niet, wat de werkelijkheid is en wat niet. De computertechniek zorgt voor een virtuele werkelijkheid die werkelijker lijkt dan de werkelijkheid zelf. Sterker nog, dankzij de gefabriceerde virtuele werkelijkheid was bijvoorbeeld al in 2011 Geert Mak's bestseller In Europa (2004), zo achterhaald dat de Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur zich gedwongen zag een pamflet hierover te schrijven, en nu zelfs druk doende is zijn boek volledig te herschrijven. Het probleem met mijn door het establishment zo gelauwerde generatiegenoten niet beseften dat hun profetisch lijkende beweringen in luttle jaren al volstrekt achterhaald waren. Dat wat mijn oude vriend Geert Mak aanzag voor de realiteit was in werkelijkheid een lachwekkende façade waarachter zich elke dag weer een meedogenloos machtsspel voltrok, want, zoals Giroux stelt:
Celebrity culture points to a powerful fusion of power, culture, and politics, but the ideological form it takes and the politics it now serves have to be named, however difficult the task. Trump is the logical result of decades of assaults on democracy by both the Republican and Democratic Parties, which have been skewed (verwrongen. svh) by the enormous economic influence of financial and corporate elites. Trump's popularity in the political arena is about more than the power of politics as entertainment or his ability to direct the narrative; it is also ‘the distilled essence of a much larger disturbing reality,’ the rise of authoritarianism in the United States and the death of democracy. Trump may know how to manipulate the media, but the interests that benefit from the commercial media are the product of the darker elements of elitism, racism, bigotry (hypocrisie. svh), demagoguery, and authoritarianism… The current crisis is not simply about the power of the corporate-entertainment complex, it is about a divide between those who believe in democracy as a protected home for diversity, equality, and social justice, and those who don’t.
Dit voert me terug naar Barbara Tuchman’s analyse van Washington’s buitenlandse politiek, zoals die zich eveneens in Vietnam manifesteerde:
A second folly was illusion of omnipotence, cousin to the Popes’ illusion of invulnerability (waardoor zij niet doorhadden dat zij het Protestantisme veroorzaakten. svh); a third was wooden-headedness (hardleersheid. svh) and ‘cognitive dissonance’; a fourth was 'working the levers' as a substitute for thinking.
In the illusion of omnipotence, American policy-makers took it for granted that on a given aim, especially in Asia, American will could be made to prevail. This assumption came from the can-do character of a self-created nation and from the sense of competence and superpower derived from Work War II. If this was ‘arrogance of power,’ in Senator Fulbright's phrase, it was not so much the fatal hubris and over-extension that defeated Athens and Napoleon, and in the 20th century Germany and Japan, as it was failure to understand that problems and conflicts exist among other peoples that are not soluble by the application of American force or American techniques or even American goodwill. 'Nation-building' was the most presumptuous of the illusions. Settlers of the North American continent had built a nation from Plymouth Rock to Valley Forge to the fulfilled frontier, yet failed to learn from their success that elsewhere, too, only the inhabitants can make the process work.
Ik denk dat de Amerikaanse elite wel degelijk had geleerd ‘van hun succes,’ op het ‘Noord Amerikaanse continent.’ Zij hadden namelijk gemerkt dat via genocidaal geweld, waarbij de Indiaanse volkeren, bijna geheel werden uitgeroeid en de overlevenden in reservaten werden opgesloten, volstrekt straffeloos was gebleven, zoals ook Hitler maar al te goed besefte. Dat is niet zo verwonderlijk aangezien de ‘Führer’ in 1889 werd geboren, een jaar voordat in Wounded Knee vluchtende Indiaanse vrouwen, kinderen en mannen, door de Amerikaanse cavalerie werden afgeslacht. Van de naar schatting 7 miljoen Indianen die op het grondgebied van de huidige VS hadden geleefd, waren rond 1900 volgens de officiële cijfers nog maar 237.000 over. Dankzij het drie eeuwen durende genocidale beleid hadden de witte christelijke kolonisten uit Europa ruim 9.800.000 km² land in handen gekregen, en wist de elite er dankzij de slavernij van Afrikaanse zwarten schatrijk te worden. Elk imperium in de geschiedenis werd gebouwd op slavernij. Rijk wordt men niet door eigen bloed, zweet en tranen, maar door die van vele anderen, de rechtelozen. Daarbij dient men niet te vergeten dat ook de Amerikaanse volkerenmoord ‘is not a mere academic exercise,’ zoals de Amerikaanse historicus Benjamin Madley stelt in de inleiding van zijn boek An American Genocide. The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe (2017). Professor Madley die geschiedenis doceert aan de Universiteit van Californië, Los Angeles, herinnert de lezer aan het volgende:
As anyone who has ever lost a loved one knows, the death of a single person is a profound loss. Recording how many California Indians were killed between 1846 and 1873 is, in part, an attempt to understand the magnitude of the rupture and profound pain caused by their loss: each murder severed personal, familial, and tribal links. Each was a tragedy. When multiplied by thousands during a short period, the impact was nothing less than devastating. In the context of genocide, recording deaths also dignifies the slain and gives a voice to the departed.
Genocide is a form of violence in which intention and repetition are defining features. This book shows that, although the pressures of demographics (the migration of hundreds of thousands of immigrants), economics (the largest gold rush in US history) and profound racial hatred all made the genocide possible, it took sustained political will — at both the state and federal levels — to create the laws, policies, and well-funded killing machine that carried it out and ensured its continuation over several decades.
Het kapitalistische systeem kan niet anders dan vernietigen, het is immers gebaseerd op onverzadigbare begeerte. De moderne tijd met zijn globalisering, die eind vijftiende eeuw goed op gang kwam, is het natuurlijke product van het christelijke egoïsme dat vier eeuwen later, in 1880, de New York Tribune deed constateren:
The original owner of the soil, the man from whom we have taken the country, in order that we may make of it the refuge of the world, where all men should be free if not equal, is the only man in it who is not recognized as entitled to the rights of a human being.
De moderne geschiedenis is 'rationality without reason,' de wetenschappelijke, desastreuze uitbuiting van de mens en de natuur. De Amerikaanse dichter William Carlos Williams beschreef het in 1925 in zijn boek In the American Grain aldus:
History, history! We fools, what do we know or care? History begins for us with murder and enslavement, not with discovery. No, we are not Indians but we are men of their world. The blood means nothing; the spirit, the ghost of the land moves in the blood. It is we who ran naked, we who cried ‘Heavenly Man!’ These are the inhabitants of our souls that lie…agh…
Fierce and implacable we kill them but their souls dominate us. Our men, our blood, but their spirit is master. It enters us, it defeats us, it imposes itself. We are moderns — madmen at Paris — all lacking in a ground sense of cleanliness…
If men inherit souls this is the color of mine. We are, too, the others. Think of them! The main islands were thickly populated with a peaceful folk when Christ-over found them. But the orgy of blood which followed, no man has written. We are the slaughterers. It is the tortured soul of our world. Indians have no souls; that was it. That was what they said. But they knew they lied — the blood-smell proof.
Dat is ware geschiedschrijving en niet de barokke Reader's Digest-versie van de geschiedenis, zoals polder-opiniemakers als Ian Buruma, Bas Heijne en Geert Mak die geven. Het is alsof de hervormingen van de jaren zestig van de vorige eeuw volledig aan hen zijn voorbij gegaan. In de VS en andere belangrijke cultuurlanden werd toen de basis gelegd voor een fundamentele herziening van de de eigen geschiedschrijving. Zo concludeerde in 1993 een historicus als David E. Stannard in zijn boek American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World na uitgebreid onderzoek:
The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.
Terwijl de Amerikaanse historici, professor Robert V. Hine en John Mack Faragher van Yale University in hun studie The American West. A new interpretive history in 2000 tot de slotsom kwamen dat:
The empire ran on the suffering of millions of peons and slaves, Indians and Africans,
constateerde op zijn beurt de Amerikaanse historicus Peter Montague dat
By then [1891] the native population had been reduced to 2.5% of its original numbers and 97.5% of the aboriginal land base had been expropriated… Hundreds upon hundreds of native tribes with unique languages, learning, customs, and cultures had simply been erased from the face of the earth, most often without even the pretense of justice or law.
De Amerikaanse auteur, Barry Lopez, wiens werk talloze onderscheidingen heeft gekregen, schreef in The Rediscovery of North America (1991) over de 'violent corruption,' van de VS:
We can say, yes, this happened, and we are ashamed. We repudiate the greed. We recognize and condemn the evil. And we see how the harm has been perpetuated. But, five hundred years later, we intend to mean something else in the world,
namelijk de voortdurende herhaling van het gewelddadige expansionisme dat zo typerend is voor de geschiedenis van de VS. Niet voor niets wordt vanaf de verovering van de Filippijnen rond 1900, toen het Amerikaans overzees imperium begon, tot aan de Amerikaanse aanval op Fallujah in 2004, het grondgebied van anderen omschreven als 'Indian Country.' De noodzaak van een nieuw 'grensgebied' dat moet worden veroverd, ligt diep verankerd in de cultuur van de VS, zo vertelde mij de Amerikaanse emeritus hoogleraar Richard Slotkin toen ik deze Amerikaanse historicus in 2010 interviewde. In zijn Gunfighter Nation. The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992) zet hij uiteen dat:
Kennedy’s use of ‘New Frontier’ tapped a vein of latent ideological power. While he and his advisers could not have predicted just how effective the symbolism would be, they certainly understood that they were invoking what was a venerable tradition in American political rhetoric. They knew from their own experience of American culture that figures of speech referring to this tradition would be intelligible to the widest possible audience — to Brooklyn and Cambridge as well as Abilene and Los Angeles. They had grounds for knowing — or at least intuiting — that this set of symbols was also an appropriate language for explaining and justifying the use of political power.
The exchange of an old, domestic, agrarian frontier for a new frontier of world power and industrial development had been a central trope in American political and historiographical debates since the 1890s. Sixty-seven years (almost to the day) before Kennedy’s address, Frederick Jackson Turner had delivered his epoch-making address on ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History,’ in which he asserted that the contemporary crisis of American development had arisen from the closing of the ‘old frontier’ and the delay in finding a new one. His ‘Frontier Thesis’ would become the basis of the dominant school of American historical interpretation and would provide the historiographic rationale for the ideologies of both Republican progressives and Democratic liberals for much of the ensuing century.
For Kennedy and his advisers, the choice of the Frontier as symbol was not simply a device for trade-marking the candidate. It was an authentic metaphor, descriptive of the way in which they wished to use political power and the kinds of struggle in which they wished to engage. The ‘Frontier’ was for them a complex resonant symbol, a vivid and memorable set of hero-tales — each a model of successful and morally justifying action on the stage of historical conflict… it shaped the language through which the resultant wars would be understood by those who commanded and fought them. Seven years after Kennedy’s nomination, American troops would be be describing Vietnam as ‘Indian Country’ and search-and-destroy missions as a game of ‘Cowboys and Indians’; and Kennedy’s ambassador to Vietnam would justify a massive military escalation by citing the necessity of moving the ‘Indians’ away from the ‘fort’ so that the ‘settlers’ could plant ‘corn.’ But the provenance and utility of the Frontier symbol did not end with the Kennedy/Johnson administrations: twenty years after Kennedy’s acceptance speech the same symbolism — expressed in talismanic invocations of the images of movie-cowboys John Wayne and Clint Eastwood — would serve the successful campaigns of a Republican arch-conservative and former Hollywood actor identified (perhaps unfairly) with Western roles.
Ook na filmster/president Ronald Reagan bleef de mythe van het Wilde Westen onaangetast en fungeerde als rechtvaardiging voor het Amerikaanse expansionisme. David J. Morris, voormalige officier van het Amerikaanse Korps Mariniers, schreef in 2004:
Only later, as I reflected on the profusion of American Indian call signs being used by several Marine units in Iraq and the repeated references to Iraq as the 'Wild West,' did it strike me that, however facile the idea may seem, the American mind-set is still stuck in Western frontier mode.
Thus our shortcomings in Iraq are a failure of the American imagination as much as anything else. We’re the cowboys, trying to get the Iraqis to make like Indians. I only hope that we’re wise enough to play sheriff for a while after our moment at the OK Corral has come and gone.
Anno 2019 weten we dat dit laatste niet is gebeurd, met als gevolg dat de Amerikaanse strijdkrachten ook de ‘gunfight’ in Irak en Syrië verloren, zeker als we de illegale Amerikaanse interventies beoordelen naar de eigen Amerikaanse maatstaven. Hoe diep de Cowboys-Indianen metafoor het Amerikaanse bewustzijn bepalen toont tevens het volgende voorbeeld aan, beschreven in:
Stephen W. Silliman’s sample of public media sources employing 'Indian Country' metaphor in Iraq and Afghanistan:
‘From across the river, we hear a boom in the distance. And then another. “This is like Cowboys and Indians,” relays a Marine. Indeed it is.’
De Amerikaanse hoogleraar Antropologie Stephen Silliman ontdekte dat het begrip ‘Indian Country’ zelfs nu nog in de 21ste eeuw een karakteristiek symbool is voor Amerikaanse gewapende conflicten. Dit getuigt van:
its staying power in national narratives of colonialism at home and abroad. Summoning the ‘Indian wars’ of the 19th century in the U.S. West as malleable symbolic parallels to the current war in Iraq serves to offer combat lessons in guerrilla warfare while re-inscribing epic stories of U.S. military imperialism and re-narrating uncritically the struggles and conflicts of Native Americans, past and present, through the lens of contemporary perspectives on terrorism.
Professor Silliman wijst er tevens op dat:
[a]lthough I focus my argument here on the ‘Indian Country’ metaphor in 21st-century Iraq and Afghanistan, this context does not mark its first usage in U.S. military parlance. A detailed history of the use of the term Indian Country has not yet been traced (other than its likely origins during the infamous 19th-century Indian Wars as the United States expanded across the North American continent), but several observations can be made about its role in 20th century military discourse. The public first became aware of the ‘Indian Country' military metaphor in the Vietnam War. Instances of this particularly in newspaper coverage, popular books, and films of the 1970s and afterward — have been noted elsewhere. Vietnam, the soldiers said, was ‘Indian Country' (General Maxwell Taylor himself referred to the Vietnamese opposition as ‘Indians’ in his Congressional testimony on the war), and the people who lived in Indian country ‘infested’ it, according to official government language (Stannard 1992:251). Transcripts of the congressional war crime hearings following the 1971 My Lai Massacre capture a revealing exchange between Captain Robert B. Johnson and Congressman John Seiberling:
Johnson: ‘Where I was operating I didn’t hear anyone personally use that term [“turkey shoots”]. We used the term “Indian Country.”’
Seiberling: What did ‘Indian Country’ refer to?
Johnson: ‘I guess it means different things to different people. It is like there are savages out there, there are gooks out there. In the same way we slaughtered the Indian’s buffalo, we would slaughter the water buffalo in Vietnam.’
In 1995, Colin Powell, who would later serve as U.S. Secretary of State at the beginning of the Iraq War, recounted his experiences in My Lai in a similar way when he described the massacre as the tragic but understandable act of troops stuck in ‘Indian country.'
‘I don’t mean to be ethnically or politically unconscious,’ Powell said, ‘but it was awful. There was nothing but V.C. [Viet Cong] in there. When you went in there, you were fighting everybody.’
Frances Fitzgerald (Amerikaanse journalist en historicus. svh) made the powerful point as the Vietnam War drew to a close that highlights the nature of the ‘Indian Country’ metaphor for U.S. citizens: ‘It put the Vietnam War into a definite mythological and historical perspective: the Americans were once again embarked upon a heroic and (for themselves) almost painless conquest of an inferior race.’
Despite the high numbers of Native Americans serving in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War and the rising activism surrounding Native American rights during that decade, the term did not disappear in the 1970s. The First Gulf War in 1991 revealed that such a term continued within military circles. Brigadier General Richard Neal stated in a nationally televised broadcast that they had rescued a pilot ’40 miles into Indian Country,’ a portion of Kuwait under Iraqi control. Not unexpectedly, Native American communities across the United States took notice and demanded an apology. As Paul DeMain (Indiaan. journalist. svh) (1991) reported, many Native American veterans recalled hearing this terminology during their service in Vietnam and resented the insults implied: accusations of non-patriotism and outright linkages with the enemy. However, instead of receiving an apology, they were told that although the term had been used commonly in the Vietnam War, it was not part of any official manual or training. However, what went unnoticed was the pervasiveness of this metaphor. Several prominent news sources contained quotations of U.S. soldiers in Kuwait who used the same terminology of ‘Indian Country.’ For example, consider this statement: ‘Beyond the berm, the immense sand wall running the length of the Kuwait border, lies what the grunts call Indian Country, a shell-pocked no man’s land.’ The early-21st-century conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan involving U.S. participation have not backed away from the ‘Indian Country’ metaphor and, in fact, may propagate it more than ever. The frequency with which this metaphor appears in military discourse indicates the comfort that its proliferators (verspreiders. svh) have with it as an efficacious (effectief. svh), transparent, and acceptable 'figure of speech.’
As Atlantic Monthly writer Robert Kaplan notes in a book that valorizes soldier experiences: ‘Welcome to “Injun Country” was the refrain I heard from troops from Colombia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq.’
Silliman zelf geeft als commentaar:
Contrary to statements made by U.S. military officials, the traffic in these metaphors may be part of the sanctioned but, perhaps, not 'official' lexicon of the U.S. government. In October 2006, the Baghdad Overseas Security Advisory Council website had the following statement (which one year later no longer existed): 'We will post other things… so that your teams can have the best information available if they run into trouble out in Indian Country.’ The Los Angeles Times quotes with reference to the U.S. Embassy: ‘If the government of Iraq collapses and becomes transparently just one party in a civil war, you’ve got Ft. Apache in the middle of Indian country, but the Indians have mortars now.’
De frontier mythe wordt bekrachtigd door politici, opiniemakers, journalisten en filmmakers als de legendarische John Ford die meer dan vijftig Westerns maakte en algemeen gezien wordt als één van de belangrijkste en invloedrijkste filmmakers van zijn generatie, wiens speelfilms het beeld van vele miljoenen Amerikanen heeft bepaald. In John Ford and the American West schreef de filmhistoricus Peter Cowie dat
Ford’s Westerns flowed from a vibrant tradition in the visual arts — a tradition rooted in the aspirations of Manifest Destiny, the belief that propelled American society westward during the nineteenth century…
Ford’s films rarely err on the side of realism; rather they present us with a mythic vision of the plains and deserts of the American West, embodied most memorably in Monument Valley, with its buttes and mesas that tower above the men on horseback, whether they be settlers, soldiers, or Native Americans… Many of these have entered movie history as imperishable examples of the Western spirit… His best work unfolds at the interface between old and new, between the traditional Indian way of life and the inexorable tide of civilization… Ford’s greatest works in the genre show settlers and cattlemen at the mercy of elements and Indians alike…
Native American, lurking in forest and canyon alike, were regarded as dangerous vermin. Frederick Jackson Turner, writing in 1893, noted: ‘One of the most striking phases of frontier adjustment, was the proposal of the Reverend Solomon Stoddard of Northampton in the fall of 1703, urging the use of dogs “to hunt Indians as they do Bears.” The argument was that the dogs would catch many an Indian who would be too light of foot for the townsmen, nor was it thought of as inhuman; for the Indians “act like wolves and are to be dealt with as wolves.” Almost a full century of what Turner called “Indian fighting and forest felling” was needed to advance the colonial settlements a mere hundred miles westward from the eastern seaboard…
By 1901, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt could assert: “The conquest and settlement of the West… has been the stupendous feat of our race for the century that has just closed… It is a record of men who greatly dared and greatly did; a record of wanderings wider and more dangerous than those of the Vikings; a record of endless feats-of-arms, of victory after victory in the ceaseless strife waged against wild man and wild nature. The winning of the West was the great epic feat in the history of our race”,’
en werd tegelijkertijd het model en de rechtvaardiging van het almaar voortgaande Amerikaanse expansionisme, maar dan in overzeese territoria, zonder enige rekening te houden met de wensen van de slachtoffers van Washington's imperialistische politiek. Overal zijn er wel ‘wild man and wild nature’ die onderworpen moeten worden aan de Amerikaanse economische en geopolitieke belangen. Desondanks blijft voor de mainstream-journalistiek het een onaanvechtbaar dogma dat zelfs de grondlegger van het Amerikaanse overzees imperialisme, president Theodore Roosevelt, streefde naar:
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,
zoals de journalist Geert Mak met grote stelligheid verkondigt. Na de genocidale politiek tegenover Indiaanse volkeren heeft de Amerikaanse elite en haar pleitbezorgers in de 'vrije pers' zichzelf wijs gemaakt dat zij een beschavende taak in de wereld hebben, en de rest van de mensheid zich al dan niet met geweld daarbij zal moeten neerleggen. De witte liberal identificeert zich met de Cowboy en niet met de Indiaan, zoals ondermeer blijkt uit de uitspraak van de Schreibtischmörder Henry Kissinger dat:
I have always acted alone. Americans like that immensely. Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town, the village, with his horse and nothing else. Maybe even without a pistol, since he doesn't shoot. He acts, that's all, by being in the right place at the right time. In short, a Western. […] This amazing, romantic character suits me precisely because to be alone has always been part of my style or, if you like, my technique.
Deze romantisering van de genocide van Indiaanse volkeren, heeft de Amerikaanse machthebbers levensgevaarlijk en meedogenloos gemaakt. Hoe gevaarlijk dit Amerikaanse zelfbeeld is, bewees Kissinger nog eens nadat de Italiaanse journaliste Oriana Fallaci het interview in 1972 had gepubliceerd en de geïnterviewde verklaarde dat het vraaggesprek ‘without doubt the single most disastrous conversation’ was geweest ‘I ever had with any member of the press.’ Hij besefte zichzelf en zijn mede beleidsbepalers te hebben verraden. Meer daarover later.
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