A socialist by conviction, Ambedkar had plenty of reason to be worried in 1949 about some dangerous ‘contradictions’ in his project of emancipation…
Ambedkar’s warning about the vicious consequences of rampant inequality can be verified even in the older and more established liberal democracies of the West. Such a global breakdown calls for a more substantive definition of democracy and an acknowledgment that, as Prakash writes, ‘democracy is not just a matter of electing governments and holding elections’ and that it is, as Ambedkar believed, ‘not just procedures but a value, a daily exercise of equality of human beings.’ Much mainstream analysis, however, strives to change the subject, describing figures like Modi and Donald Trump as demonic arsonists of a long-standing ‘liberal order’ and indulging in a nostalgia for ruling elites that never were.
A more rigorous reckoning with the old establishment’s iniquities and failures would reveal the deeper roots of the crisis today.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/07/18/indira-gandhi-long-undeclared-emergency/
In verband hiermee stelde de prominente Indiase historicus Gyan Prakash, auteur van het boek Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point (maart 2019), de vraag op:
In verband hiermee stelde de prominente Indiase historicus Gyan Prakash, auteur van het boek Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point (maart 2019), de vraag op:
How is it that at present we have across the world the rise of this kind of rightwing populism? It cannot be a coincidence that suddenly you have this kind of populist figures emerge in all these different countries at the same time. So there has to be some deeper reason. In short, I think that what we are witnessing today is a crisis of democracy. Now that can be a cliché, but if we step back we can see the making of, at least since the late seventies and early eighties, a kind of global crisis of ruling regimes. There had been the ‘cultural revolution’ in China, the Prague Spring, the Emergency in India, the antiwar movement in the US, and in general, a counterculture across the world. There had been some yearning from below which said that democracy had not delivered.
One kind of a solution was imposed through the democratization of the sixties and seventies, out of which, broadly speaking, we had a neoliberalization of the world, and by ‘neoliberalization’ I do not mean just the economy, because you can say that Adam Smith was mainly about trade and production, while neoliberalization means the neoliberalization of absolutely everything, the economization of everything, an ideology that is not based on the idea of common good, but on ‘winner takes all.’ And the marshaling of the power of the state in favor of a neoliberal economy, whereby not only the economy should be capitalist, but also our universities should be run on corporate principles, our newspapers should be run on corporate principals, everything should be economized, and everything became a commodity.
By the time the economic crisis hit, the neoliberalization of the world had of course destroyed communities, it destroyed all kinds of organizations that were in support of people, like trade unions, various kinds of corporate agencies and so on, because now everything was supposed to be run on market principles. In the wake of it, after 2007/2008, although communities around the world know that democracy has not delivered, the ruling elites disconnect the existing discontent against them from any kind of social and economic analysis.
So, the political elites can now say that ‘God made India a Hindu nation,’ and the whites in the U.S. can now say: ‘Make America Great Again.’ Indeed, the whole thing is to turn the anger against minorities rather than against the one’s who led the country into a crisis, and against global capitalism. Neoliberalism has played in this process a crucial ideological role, which is to defang (tandeloos maken. svh) the opposition, and direct it in favor of opposition against minorities and scapegoat minorities for the existing problems by saying: ‘Well, the reason why you are in this condition is because of appeasement here in India, or because of affirmative action and African-Americans are given positions they do not deserve.’ So now we are in the position that some demagogues can appear, and mobilize these sentiments and say: ‘It’s not about the corruption that is inherent in neoliberalism with all the give-away to big corporations, but it’s because the minorities are being appeased. But if we run the government on a sort of corporate model all problems will be solved and America will be great again or India will be great again, and so on.
and the state becomes primarily a coercive instrument. If there is opposition against the neoliberal politics you can call it anti-national and crush it. So you have at the same time this combination of populism and authoritarianism, whereby the authority, the leader, claims to be the representative of will of the people.
Het zijn de meest scherpzinnige intellectuelen die het failliet analyseren van het westerse modernisme, gebaseerd op achterhaalde Verlichtingsmythen. De Amerikaanse auteur Chris Hedges, 15 jaar lang buitenland-correspondent van The New York Times, schreef over het simplisme van het Vooruitgangsgeloof:
It is this naïve belief in our goodness and decency — this inability to face the dark reality of human nature, our capacity for evil and the morally neutral universe we inhabit — that is the most disturbing aspect of all of these belief systems. There is nothing in human nature or human history to support the idea that we are morally advancing as a species or that we will overcome the flaws of human nature. We progress technologically and scientifically, but not morally. We use the newest instruments of technological and scientific progress to create more efficient forms of killing, repression, economic exploitation and to accelerate environmental degradation. There is a good and a bad side to human progress. We are not watching toward a glorious utopia.
Maar tegen de feiten in blijft Buruma de superioriteit van de Verlichtingsideologie prediken. Desnoods met onwaarheden, zoals toen hij op 23 juni 2017 in de Centrale Bibliotheek van Den Haag op de fundamentele kritiek van Pankaj Mishra reageerde met de bewering:
I think that Napoleon is an interesting thing to talk about because, yes, a lot of people were killed as a consequence of his military campaigns, but his brand of universalism is actually something we — in this country as well as other countries — still benefit from, the idea of equality for the law and so on, did come from them (Napoleon en de Verlichtingsideologen. svh), the emancipation of minorities came from them, precisely because he had the idea of the universality of rights, and that not just one particular elite or one particular people deserved rights, but that it were universal rights.
De werkelijkheid staat hier lijnrecht tegenover. Nadat in 1801 Toussaint Louverture, de leider van de Haïtiaanse Revolutie, een grondwet had ingesteld en er een eind kwam aan de slavernij in de voormalige Franse slavenkolonie, zond Napoleon Bonaparte:
a large expeditionary force of French soldiers and warships to the island, led by Bonaparte's brother-in-law Charles Leclerc, to restore French rule. They were under secret instructions to restore slavery… Toussaint was to summoned to Le Cap and be arrested; if he failed to show, Leclerc was to wage ‘a war to the death’ with no mercy and all of Toussaint's followers to be shot when captured. Once that was completed, slavery would be ultimately restored.
Nadat de rebellerende Haïtianen zich hadden overgegeven aan het Franse bezettingsleger, bleek binnen een paar maanden
that the French intended to re-establish slavery (because they had nearly done so on Guadeloupe), black cultivators revolted in the summer of 1802. Yellow fever had decimated the French as by the middle of July 1802, the French lost about 10, 000 dead to yellow fever. By September, Leclerc wrote in his diary that he had only 8,000 fit men left as yellow fever had killed the others.
In totaal kwamen meer dan 300.000 mensen om het leven — onder wie ruim 200.000 Haïtianen, een ‘quantité négligeable’ voor de keizer die, volgens Buruma, toch zo diep doordrongen was geweest van de Verlichtingsidealen, en van de democratie, vrijheid en ‘de universaliteit van het recht.' Dat was niet het recht waarbij iedere burger gelijk was, maar Buruma’s recht van de sterkste, zoals de Verlichte neo-Darwinisten dit zagen, en eveneens 85 procent van de Amerikaanse mainstream-journalisten, die zichzelf zien als 'liberal.'
Het is één van de talloze voorbeelden van de mythes waarmee westerse mainstream-opiniemakers als Ian Buruma hun publiek hopen te overtuigen van de voortreffelijkheid van 'de westerse beschaving.’ Ook toen moest het Westen ‘de lasten’ van wat de Haagse opiniemaker het ‘smerige werk’ noemde op zich nemen. Als een hedendaagse dr. Pangloss gelooft Ian nog steeds in Kipling’s White Man’s Burden, geschreven als aanmoediging van de bloedige Amerikaanse verovering van de Filippijnen rond 1900:
TAKE up the White Man's burden —
Send forth the best ye breed —
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild —
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
Filipijnse gevangene wordt door Amerikaanse militairen gemarteld, 1900.
Vietnam, 6 decennia later. Een ander bewijs van de westerse Verlichtingsideologie.
Ook Buruma en zijn opdrachtgevers geloven dat zij de waarheid dienen. Met hun utopische droombeelden menen zij dat het doel elk middel, hoe barbaars ook, heiligt. Terecht brengt Hedges in herinnering dat:
Utopian ideologues, armed with the technology and mechanism of industrial slaughter, have killed tens of millions of people over the last century. They ask us to inflict suffering and death in the name of virtue en truth…
The danger arises when the myths we tell about ourselves endow us with divine power, when we believe the it is our role to shape and direct human destiny, for then we seek to become gods. We can do this in the name of Jesus Christ, Muhammad or Western civilization. The result, for those who defy us, is the same — repression and often death. The refusal to acknowledge human limitations and our irrevocable flaws can thus cross religious and secular lines to feed both religious fundamentalism and the idolization of technology, reason and science.
The language of science and reason is now used by many atheists to express the ancient longings for human perfectibility. According to them, reason and science, rather than religion, will regulate human conflicts and bring about a paradise.
Het Verlichtingsgeloof verschilt niet wezenlijk van het Christelijk geloof in de verlossing van het Kwaad, maar de Verlichtingsideologie is ondertussen wel de oorzaak geweest van het feit dat:
Nearly twothirds of the life-support services provided to us by nature are already in precipitous decline worldwide. The old wars conquest, expansion ands exploitation will be replaced by wars fought for the necessities of air, food, sustainable living conditions and war. And as we race toward this catastrophe, scientists continue to make discoveries, set the discoveries upon us and walk away from the impact.
Hert the blief persists that science and reason will save us; it persists because it makes it possible to ignore or minimize these catastrophes. We drift toward disaster with the comforting thought that the god of science will intervene on our behalf…
The Enlightenment empowered those who argued that superstition, blind instinct and ignorance had to be eradicated. Kant, in ‘Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View,’ published in 1798, asserted that Africans were inherently predisposed to slavery. Thus the Enlightenment gave the world the ‘scientific racism’ adopted as an ideological veneer for murder…
Belief in the moral superiority of Western civilization allowed the British to wipe out the Tasmanian Aborigines. British hunting parties were given licenses to exterminate this ‘inferior race,’ whom the colonial authorities said should be ‘hunted down like wild beasts and destroyed.’ The British captured many in traps and burned or tortured them to death. The same outlook led to the slaughter of the Caribs of the Caribbean, the Guanches of the Canary Islands, as well as Native Americans. It justified the slave trade that abducted 15 million Africans and killed even more. And it was this long tradition of colonial genocide in the name of progress in places like King Leopold’s Congo that set the stage for the industrial-scale killing of the Holocaust and man-made famines of the Soviet Union.
Het westers, in wezen racistisch, superioriteitsgeloof is de reden van Buruma’s oproep aan de NAVO-partners om een deel van het — in zijn ogen noodzakelijke — ‘dirty work’ uit handen te nemen van de VS. Dit alle om natuurlijk onze grondstoffen en markten, en daarmee de stijgende winsten, veilig te stellen. Feit is dat het blinde Verlichtingsgeloof tot wereldwijde chaos heeft geleid. Dat blijkt ook nu weer. Op 7 oktober 2018 bekend is geworden dat:
The world is rapidly running out of time to scale back greenhouse gas emissions, dimming hopes of keeping global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, beyond which catastrophic planetary changes are forecast.
That assessment comes from a sobering new report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, the leading United Nations consortium of researchers studying the speed and scope of human-caused temperature rise…
The report ― authored by 91 researchers and editors from 40 countries citing more than 6,000 scientific references and released Sunday night following a summit in Incheon, South Korea ― details how difficult it will be to keep the planet from warming beyond the 1.5-degree target, considered the aspirational goal of the 2015 Paris climate accord.
Maar ook dit kan Buruma’s Verlichtingsgeloof op geen enkele manier aan het wankelen brengen, zoals bleek uit zijn geïrriteerde reactie op Pankaj Mishra’s kritiek dat:
we live in a world of forced Enlightenment, where all notions have fallen by the wayside, like the idea of a well-educated citizenry, when in reality you have mass-media spreading false news, fake news, propaganda all the time.
https://maryloudriedger2.wordpress.com/tag/hiroshima-victims/
Ik blijf langer stilstaan bij dit onderwerp omdat de superioriteitsgedachte zo diep verankerd blijft in het westerse liberale en neoliberale gedachtengoed. In dit verband hiermee is het van belang het volgende te weten:
Onder de kop ‘The French Führer: Genocidal Napoleon was as barbaric as Hitler, historian claims,’ stelde de Britse journalist Christopher Hudson op 24 juli 2008, in een recensie van het boek Le Crime de Napoleon (2005), geschreven door de gerespecteerde Franse historicus en filosoof Claude Ribbe, dat:
Three days after the fall of France in 1940, Napoleon, lying in his marble tomb in Paris, received a visit from his greatest admirer.
Adolf Hitler, on his one and only visit to the French capital, made an unannounced trip to the tomb in Les Invalides.
In his white raincoat, surrounded by his generals, Hitler stood for a long time gazing down at his hero, his cap removed in deference.
He was said later to have described this moment as 'one of the proudest of my life.’
The next day, during his official sightseeing tour of Paris, Hitler again visited Napoleon's tomb to salute him.
Conscious that his hero was known to the world simply as Napoleon, Hitler boasted that he would not need a rank or title on his gravestone. 'The German people would know who it was if the only word was Adolf.'
Throughout the war, Hitler had sandbags placed around Napoleon's tomb to guard against bomb damage.
Wooden floorboards were laid across the marble floor of Les Invalides so that they would not be scarred by German jackboots.
Until recently, the French would have been incensed by any comparison between Napoleon and Hitler.
But to their rage and shame, new research has shown that France's greatest hero presided over mass atrocities which bear comparison with some of Hitler's worst crimes against humanity.
These reassessments of Napoleon have caused anguish in France. Top politicians backed out of official ceremonies to mark what was possibly Napoleon's greatest victory, the battle of Austerlitz, when Napoleon's Grande Armee defeated the combined armies of Austria and Russia in just six hours, killing 19,000 of their adversaries.
A street in Paris named Rue Richepanse (after Antoine Richepanse, a general responsible for atrocities in the Caribbean) has recently had its name changed to Rue Solitude.
During his reign as Emperor, concentration camps were set up and gas was used to massacre large groups of people.
There were hit squads and mass deportations. And all this happened 140 years before Hitler and the Holocaust.
Claude Ribbe, a respected historian and philosopher and member of the French government's human rights commission, has been researching Napoleon's bloodcurdling record for some years.
He accuses him of being a racist and an anti-Semite who persecuted Jews and reintroduced widespread slavery just a few years after it had been abolished by the French government.
The most startling of these findings, the attempted massacre of an entire population over the age of 12 by methods which included gassing them in the holds of ships, relate to the French Caribbean colony of Haiti at the turn of the 19th century.
In Ribbe's words, Napoleon, then First Consul, was the man who, for the first time in history, 'asked himself rationally the question how to eliminate, in as short a time as possible, and with a minimum of cost and personnel, a maximum of people described as scientifically inferior.’
Haiti around 1800 was the world's richest colony, a slave-powered export factory which produced almost two-thirds of the world's coffee and almost half its sugar.
The black slaves were lashed and beaten to work and forced to wear tin muzzles to prevent them from eating the sugar cane.
If the slaves were fractious, they were roasted over slow fires, or filled with gunpowder and blown to pieces.
When the slaves began to fight for their freedom, under the leadership of a charismatic African military genius called Toussaint L'Ouverture, Napoleon sent 10,000 crack troops under the command of his brother-in-law, General Leclerc, to crush Toussaint and restore slavery.
In 1802, a vast program of ethnic cleansing was put in place. Napoleon banned inter-racial marriages and ordered that all white women who'd had any sort of relationship with a black or mulatto (person of mixed race) be shipped to France.
He further commanded the killing of as many blacks in Haiti as possible, to be replaced by new, more docile slaves from Africa.
The French troops were under orders to kill all blacks over the age of 12. However, younger children were also killed — stabbed to death, put in sandbags and dropped into the sea.
The Haitians fought to the death for independence, which they finally declared in 1804.
Prisoners on both sides were regularly tortured and killed, and their heads were mounted on the walls of stockades or on spikes beside the roads.
Non-combatants, too, were raped and slaughtered. According to contemporary accounts, the French used dogs to rip black prisoners to pieces before a crowd at an amphitheatre.
Allegedly on Napoleon's orders, sulphur was extracted from Haitian volcanoes and burned to produce poisonous sulphur dioxide, which was then used to gas black Haitians in the holds of ships - more than 100,000 of them, according to records.
The use of these primitive gas chambers was confirmed by contemporaries. Antoine Metral, who in 1825 published his history of the French expedition to Haiti, writes of piles of dead bodies everywhere, stacked in charnel-houses.
'We varied the methods of execution,' wrote Metral. 'At times, we pulled heads off; sometimes a ball and chain was put at the feet to allow drowning; sometimes they were gassed in the ships by sulphur.
'When the cover of night was used to hide these outrages, those walking along the river could hear the noisy monotone of dead bodies being dropped into the sea.’
A contemporary historian, who sailed with the punitive expedition, wrote that: 'We invented another type of ship where victims of both sexes were piled up, one against the other, suffocated by sulphur.’
These were prison ships with gas chambers called etouffiers, or ‘chokers,' which asphyxiated the blacks, causing them terrible suffering.
Even at the time, there were French naval officers who were appalled at this savagery, claiming they would rather have braved a court martial than have forgotten the laws of humanity.
But from the Emperor's point of view, gassing was a way of cutting costs. Ships continued to transport prisoners out to sea to drown them, but corpses kept being washed up on beaches or tangled in ships' hulls.
Toussaint, who called himself the Black Napoleon, was kidnapped after accepting an invitation to parlay with a French general and shipped back to France in chains, where he died of pneumonia after being imprisoned in a cold stone vault.
Guadeloupe, an island to the east, suffered a similar fate to Haiti's.
Once again choosing not to recognize France's abolition of slavery, Napoleon in 1802 promoted a comrade of his, Antoine Riche-panse, to the rank of General, and sent him with an expeditionary force of 3,000 men to put down a slave revolt on the island.
During his purge, General Richepanse slaughtered any men, women and children he encountered on his route to the capital. Then he worked through a plan of extermination apparently approved by the First Consul.
A military commission was set up to give what followed a veneer of legality. Some 250 'rebels' were shot in Guadeloupe's Victory Square. Another 500 were herded down to the beach and shot there.
Richepanse and Lacrosse, the former colonial governor now restored to power, thought of piling up the dead in vast mounds to intimidate the islanders, but gave up the plan for fear of starting a disease epidemic.
Instead, using a technique which the French were to copy during the Algerian War, they sent death squads into every part of Guadeloupe to track down farmers who were absent from their homes.
These men were treated as rebels. A bounty was promised for each black man captured, and the rebels were summarily shot or hanged. The ferocity of the repression sparked another uprising, which Lacrosse subdued with the most barbarous methods yet.
'Being hung is not enough for the crimes they have committed,' he said. 'It is necessary to cut them down alive and let them expire on the wheel [prisoners were bound to a cart wheel before having their arms and legs smashed with cudgels].
'The jails are already full: it is necessary to empty them as quickly as possible.' In this he was successful, hanging, garotting and burning the rebels and breaking their limbs on the wheel.
Lacrosse developed possibly the most fiendish instrument of slow execution ever created.
The prisoner was thrust into a tiny cage and had a razor-sharp blade suspended between his legs. In front of him was a bottle of water and bread, neither of which he could reach.
He was stood in stirrups, which kept him just above the blade, but if he fell asleep or his legs tired, he was sliced by the blade. Neither fast nor economical, it was pure sadism.
After four months in Guadeloupe, the French lost patience with the islanders, and the ferocity of their repression reached new heights.
Blacks with short hair were shot out of hand, since the expeditionary force considered short hair to be a sign of rebellion. Orders were given that 'the type of execution should set a terrifying example'.
The soldiers were encouraged 'to cut open insurgents, to strangle and to burn them'. French officers spoke proudly of creating 'torture islands’.
In a letter to Napoleon, his brother-in-law Leclerc wrote: 'It is necessary to destroy all the negroes of the mountain… do not leave children over the age of 12.’
Ribbe, in his work in progress, sees continual affinities between Napoleon and Hitler. He argues that many of Napoleon's actions were later echoed in Nazi Germany, right down to his enthusiasm for slavery reflecting the grim message 'Arbeit Macht Frei' ('Work Sets You Free'), which appeared over the gates of Auschwitz.
Napoleon, like Hitler, also used his own army like cannon fodder when the occasion demanded.
His retreat from Moscow in 1812 squandered the lives and courage of 450,000 soldiers of the Grande Armee; many of them were found frozen to death while embracing each other to harvest a last flicker of warmth, in what was one of the bitterest winters in living memory.
Nothing shows more clearly the contempt the Emperor showed for his minions than the bulletin announcing the destruction of his Army.
Napoleon blamed his horses and ended by declaring that his health had never been better.
As theaters for Napoleon's callousness, Haiti and Guadeloupe were too far away to attract much public notice, let alone condemnation.
Syria was a different matter. In the war between France and the Ottoman Empire (most of it modern-day Turkey), Napoleon led the siege of the ancient walled city of Jaffa, whose harbor he needed as a vital shelter for his fleet.
The city fell on the fourth day, whereupon Napoleon's troops ran amok through the town, slaughtering Christians, Jews and Muslims indiscriminately.
To escape the slaughter, part of the garrison locked themselves into a large keep.
Napoleon sent his officers, who negotiated their surrender and marched them back to the French camp.
Rations were short, so Napoleon now decided that he had been too magnanimous.
For three days he kept the 4,000 mostly Turkish prisoners with their arms tied behind their back; then the massacre began.
Somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 men were slaughtered there and then, either by shooting them or by running them through with bayonets.
Shortly afterwards plague broke out, decimating the troops on both sides. With real courage, Napoleon led his general staff on a tour of the plague-infested hospitals.
It did not deter him from suggesting to the doctors that seriously ill French troops who could not be evacuated should be given a fatal dose of the opiate laudanum. The doctors forced him to back down.
From Jaffa, Napoleon marched to Acre, a city constructed on a peninsula and therefore impregnable, given that there was British control of the seas. Napoleon launched seven major assaults; each one failed. Marching back to Cairo, Napoleon left 2,200 of his troops dead, and 2,300 more seriously ill or wounded.
As far as Napoleon was concerned, these wounded were already dead men. Most of them he left behind, knowing that the Turks would cut off their heads as soon as his army left. They did their best to follow his retreat, crying out not to be abandoned.
They straggled along, their throats parched in the debilitating heat, which reduced their cries to a croak. Injured officers were thrown from their litters and left to die in the dunes.
Soldiers were abandoned in the cornfields, which were still smoldering in the devastation of crops and villages ordered by Napoleon. In all, some 5,000 Frenchmen lost their lives.
If Hitler learned any lessons from Napoleon, one must have been that victory required callousness, not just in the leader but in those around him.
'Like those working in the Nazi system, the French carrying out Napoleon's killing did so with little thought to morality,' Claude Ribbe says today. 'There was no sense of good or evil: it was just a matter of getting a difficult job done. In the end, the killing methods had to be efficient and cheap.’
So is Napoleon to be feted as a great leader or denounced as a dictator? A poll published in Le Figaro in 2005 found that nearly 40 per cent of Frenchmen regarded Napoleon as 'a dictator who had used all means to satisfy his thirst for power.’
However, considering what was done in Napoleon's name in Haiti and Guadeloupe, there is one memorial which deserves to be added.
Next to the unknown soldier at the Arc de Triomphe should be erected the Tomb of the Unknown Slave.
Aan de hand van deze, voor iedereen beschikbare, informatie kan niet anders dan geconcludeerd worden dat Ian Buruma's versie van de werkelijkheid op een leugen berust. Zijn stellige bewering dat ‘the idea of equality for the law and so on, did come from them,’ te weten ‘Napoleon’ en de westerse Verlichtingsideologen, is domweg propaganda. Voor de Franse keizer bestond er geen ‘universality of rights,’ net zo min als die voor de nazi's en Amerikanen bestond, getuige Auschwitz en Hiroshima. Voor iemand die bovendien zichzelf tot keizer kroonde bestond vanzelfsprekend de gedachte niet ‘that not just one particular elite or one particular people deserved rights, but that it were universal rights.’ En toch meent mijn oude vriend Ian dat hij publiekelijk deze leugen onweersproken kan verspreiden tegenover een Indiase intellectueel van naam. Dat kan allereerst omdat het intellectuele niveau van het Haagse publiek buitengewoon laag is, en anderzijds omdat de ‘urban elites’ van de NAVO-landen geen cultuurdragers meer zijn, aangezien zij te veel gespecialiseerde kennis bezitten en te weinig algemene kennis. Alleen in dit culturele vacuüm gedijen opiniemakende poseurs als Ian Buruma.
TAKE up the White Man's burden —
Send forth the best ye breed —
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild —
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
Send forth the best ye breed —
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild —
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
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