Schrijvend over China stelde Ian Buruma begin augustus 2020 het volgende:
How to defend what is left of the free world against the predatory strategies of a very rich and powerful dictatorship? Pompeo is right to stress the importance of solidarity. The way to organize the protection of common interests is to establish international organizations to safeguard and enforce common rules and laws.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-hypocritical-china-policy-by-ian-buruma-2020-08
Omdat mijn oude vriend Ian nagenoeg alle sociale ontwikkelingen reduceert tot politieke fenomenen als westerse ‘democratie’ en ‘de vrije wereld’ versus ‘mafia societies’ en ‘machtige dictaturen’ als Rusland en China, is het verhelderend om zijn verpolitiekt mens- en wereldbeeld tegen het licht te houden. Neem bijvoorbeeld het begrip ‘the free world.’ Volgens Buruma moet ‘de vrije wereld’ in Europa het Amerikaans ‘militair-industrieel complex’ ontlasten door een deel van zijn ‘dirty work’ op zich te nemen, waarbij ‘we’ zelfs bereid moeten zijn om ‘het risico te accepteren dat we verantwoordelijk worden gesteld’ voor de daaruit onvermijdelijk voortvloeiende oorlogsmisdaden. Kortom, het plegen van oorlogsmisdaden en misdaden tegen de menselijkheid, en zelfs genocide, is voor hem geenszins in strijd met de‘democratie’ en ‘de vrije wereld.’ Dit is een veelzeggende overtuiging van een Nederlandse opiniemaker die door de Duitstalige pers wordt geprezen als ‘ein Fackelträger des Liberalismus,’ en die na decennialang de VS te hebben bewierookt zich sinds kort toch gedwongen ziet te erkennen dat de ‘Pax Americana im Sterben [liegt].’ Dat is opmerkelijk, want toen ik hem in 2017 erop attent maakte dat zijn lof voor ‘Amerika’ nogal overdreven klonk, antwoordde hij snel: ‘Ik heb af en toe een blik geslagen op je blog, en begrijp je standpunten denk ik goed,’ om vervolgens te concluderen dat mijn ‘ideeën eerder [komen] uit een wat ouderwetse Amerikaanse hoek, Chomsky, Zinn et al. die door een oudere generatie serieus werden genomen,’ maar die drie jaar geleden nog door Buruma als obsoleet naar de prullenbak werden verwezen. Soit.
Het is kenmerkend dat mainstream-opiniemakers bijna altijd achter de feiten aanhobbelen. Zij verkeren immers in een intellectuele spagaat, omdat hun voornaamste taak het behagen is van een zo groot mogelijk publiek, zonder hun schatrijke opdrachtgevers voor het hoofd te stoten. Dit is geen geringe opgave, nu ook nog eens de Europese cultuur niet meer voorstelt dan een voetnoot bij de geschiedenis, en tegelijkertijd de Amerikaanse civilisatie op sterven na dood is. Desondanks beweert Buruma met grote stelligheid dat de ‘zelfgenoegzaamheid bij links over het eigen morele gelijk een populistische proteststem uit[lokt],’ en dat er ‘geen enkele reden [is] voor een crisisstemming, laat staan dat “onze beschaving” in gevaar is.’ Nog afgezien van het gegoochel met de inhoudsloze begrippen links en recht, is het gemak waarmee de ‘fakkeldrager van het liberalisme’ van alles beweert typerend voor zijn onvermogen te beseffen dat er een subtiel maar wezenlijk verschil bestaat tussen ‘beschaving' en‘cultuur.’ Een ‘beschaving’ verkeert per definitie altijd in gevaar omdat de ‘sociale orde’ van een civilisatie ‘rests on the final rise to supremacy not of an oligarchy or proletariat but an immensely broad, town dwelling middle class. Society is no longer a hierarchical pyramid but a vast middle-class plateau. Civilization is a predominantly urban phenomenon, and the gradual decline of rural America emphasizes this trend toward town-dwelling. In 1954 the farm population of America had declined to less that 22 million, hardly more than 13 percent of the total population, down from 30 million or more than the 23 percent in 1940. The decline is continuous and by no means terminated. The time may soon come when the farm population will represent less than five percent of the total population,
aldus de Franse historicus Amaury de Riencourt in zijn baanbrekende boek The Coming Ceasars. An Interpretation of America’s Direction In Light Of World History, dat in 1957 verscheen. Inmiddels, ruim zes decennia later, is de boerenbevolking in de VS afgenomen tot 1,3 procent van de werkende bevolking, zijnde 2,6 miljoen burgers. Riencourt wees er bovendien op dat:
Civilization implies also the rise to supremacy of economic thinking and the decline of truly creative culture, whose conflicting ideas and theories, stimulating when formulated, end up causing the breakdown of a culture’s political and social structure because they are taken too seriously. All the way from the post-Renaissance Wars of Religion to Robespierre and Hitler; there were tragic attempts to materialize theoretical schemes, to impose philosophies of life on one’s neighbors by all means, fair or foul, and fight to the bitter end without thought of compromise. It takes many generations for men to grow tired of philosophies and abstractions but this fatigue eventually overcomes intellectual curiosity and doctrinal proselytism.
And with exhaustion comes a desire for the harmony of compromise, for a constructive peace devoted to economic welfare rather than cultural pursuits that always spill out into the political world become monstrously distorted, and end in bloody disaster. The age of Nazism’s monstrous Wagnerian drama comes to a close in a cataclysmic Twilight of the Gods. From now on, culture will no longer be taken in dead earnest but rather as a marginal activity that will not be allowed to interfere civilization’s serious pursuit — the establishment of security and economic well-being for as many human beings as possible. It will be a secondary civilization of Ciceros and Senecas growing in the shade of the greatness of the original culture.
In de Scheerpost van 10 augustus 2020 constateerde de prominente oud New York Times-correspondent Chris Hedges over de ineenstorting van de Amerikaanse ‘beschaving’ dat ‘Regardless of the outcome, the U.S. election will not stop the rise of hyper-nationalism, crisis cults and other signs of an empire’s terminal decline,’ om vervolgens uiteen te zetten:
The political rot and depravity will continue to eat away at the soul of the nation, spawning what anthropologists call crisis cults — movements led by demagogues that prey on an unbearable psychological and financial distress. These crisis cults, already well established among followers of the Christian Right and Donald Trump, peddle magical thinking and an infantilism that promises — in exchange for all autonomy — prosperity, a return to a mythical past, order and security. The dark yearnings among the white working class for vengeance and moral renewal through violence, the unchecked greed and corruption of the corporate oligarchs and billionaires who manage our failed democracy, which has already instituted wholesale government surveillance and revoked most civil liberties, are part of the twisted pathologies that infect all civilizations sputtering towards oblivion. I witnessed the deaths of other nations during the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and later in the former Yugoslavia. I have smelled this stench before.
The removal of Trump from office will only exacerbate the lust for racist violence he incites and the intoxicating elixir of white nationalism. The ruling elites, who first built a mafia economy and then built a mafia state, will continue under Biden, as they did under Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, to wantonly pillage and loot. The militarized police will not stop their lethal rampages in poor neighborhoods. The endless wars will not end. The bloated military budget will not be reduced. The world’s largest prison population will remain a stain upon the country. The manufacturing jobs shipped overseas will not return and the social inequality will grow. The for-profit health care system will gouge the public and price millions more out of the health care system. The language of hate and bigotry will be normalized as the primary form of communication. Internal enemies, including Muslims, immigrants and dissidents, will be defamed and attacked. The hypermasculinity that compensates for feelings of impotence will intensify. It will direct its venom towards women and all who fail to conform to rigid male stereotypes, especially artists, LGBTQ people and intellectuals. Lies, conspiracy theories, trivia and fake news — what Hannah Arendt called ‘nihilistic relativism’ — will still dominate the airwaves and social media, mocking verifiable fact and truth. The ecocide, which presages the extinction of the human species and most other life forms, will barrel unabated towards its apocalyptic conclusion.
https://scheerpost.com/2020/08/10/chris-hedges-americas-death-march/
Maar in de polder blijft Ian Buruma’s betweterige naïviteit de boventoon voeren, en wordt zijn kolderieke voorstelling van zaken door de middenklasse als hoogste waarheid ervaren. Ziende blind, tot de geschiedenis de voordeur binnenmarcheert, en de pedante mainstream-intelligentsia verbijsterd met lege handen achterlaat. Zo is het ook de afgelopen eeuw telkens weer geweest. Het is altijd de begaafde enkeling die beseft dat er iets fundamenteels fout is. Dichters als de Ier William Butler Yeats die anno 1920, twee jaar na het einde van ‘The Great War’ in ‘The Second Coming’ schreef:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Bijna twee decennia later, op de dag dat de Tweede Wereldoorlog uitbrak, schreef de Britse dichter W.H. Auden:
September 1, 1939
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
https://poets.org/poem/september-1-1939
Het zijn vooral politici en broodschrijvers -- mensen op zoek naar een identiteit -- die naar bloedvergieten verlangen, zoveel heb ik in mijn werkzame leven geleerd. Zij willen hun machteloze publiek behagen met beschuldigingen als dat de ‘zelfgenoegzaamheid bij links over het eigen morele gelijk een populistische proteststem uit[lokt].’ Zo dirigeren zij de door angst gekweekte onverzadigbare haat. Van de geschiedenis en van de grote dichters leren zij niets. Het ontbreekt hen aan ervaring en inzicht. Het dringt nooit echt tot hen door dat alles vergankelijk is. Zij zijn niet in staat om aan de hand van de oude geschonden monumenten in te zien dat alle ‘beschavingen’ verwijzen naar de ondergang. Zij zijn niet als de Engelse dichter Shelley, die in 1818, nadat hij het gebroken beeld van Ramses II in het British Museum had gezien, schreef:
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
En aldus zijn we weer terug bij Buruma’s gevaarlijke retoriek: hoe het neoliberalisme als ‘overblijfsel van de vrije wereld’ moet worden ‘verdedigd tegen de roofzuchtige strategieën van een buitengewoon rijke en machtige dictatuur?’ zijnde China, om onmiddellijk als eerste het lid van de reactionaire Tea Party op te voeren, te weten de Republikein Mike Popeo, sinds 2018 de extremistische Amerikaanse minister van Buitenlandse Zaken en voormalig directeur van de Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), die lachend bekende 'We Lied, We Cheated, We Stole.' Pompeo is de havik die op 15 mei 2020 de functionarissen van het International Criminal Court in Den Haag waarschuwde dat het International Strafhof Joods-Israelische oorlogsmisdadigers niet mocht vervolgen. Joden uit Israel en Amerikanen in de Verenigde Staten staan volgens Washington zodoende boven het internationaal recht. In een commentaar van 31 juli 2020 wees de journalist Ramzy Baroud, hoofdredacteur van The Palestine Chronicle, erop dat:
The US slapped unprecedented sanctions against the ICC on June 11, with President Donald Trump issuing an ‘executive order’ that authorizes the freezing of assets and a travel ban against ICC officials and their families. The order also allows for the punishing of other individuals or entities that assist the ICC in its investigation.
Washington’s decision to carry out punitive measures against the very Court that was established for the sole purpose of holding war criminals accountable is both outrageous and abhorrent. It also exposes Washington’s hypocrisy – the country that claims to defend human rights is attempting to prevent legal accountability by those who have violated human rights.
Upon its failure to halt the ICC legal procedures regarding its investigation of war crimes, Israel began to prepare for the worst. On July 15, Israeli daily newspaper, Haaretz, reported about a ‘secret list’ that was drawn up by the Israeli government. The list includes “between 200 and 300 officials”, ranging from politicians to military and intelligence officials, who are subject to arrest abroad, should the ICC officially open the war crimes investigation.
Names begin at the top of the Israeli political pyramid, among them Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his current coalition partner, Benny Gantz.
The sheer number of Israeli officials on the list is indicative of the scope of the ICC’s investigation, and, somehow, is a self-indictment, as the names include former Israeli Defense Ministers – Moshe Ya’alon, Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett; current and former army chiefs of staffs – Aviv Kochavi, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot and current and former heads of internal intelligence, the Shin Bet – Nadav Argaman and Yoram Cohen.
Respected international human rights organizations have already, repeatedly, accused all these individuals of serious human rights abuses during Israel’s lethal wars on the besieged Gaza Strip, starting with the so-called ‘Operation Cast Lead’ in 2008-9.
Mike Pompeo’s sabotage van het recht, maakt Buruma’s woorden nog eens extra significant. Want gezien het bedreigen van het International Criminal Court (ICC), speciaal opgericht om oorlogsmisdaden, en misdaden tegen de menselijkheid en genocide te vervolgen, getuigt het van verregaande hypocrisie om te suggereren dat Pompeo de aangewezen politicus is om ‘het belang van solidariteit te benadrukken.’ Iemand die zelf het internationaal recht niet respecteert is wel de laatste figuur om andere bullebakken tot de orde te roepen, door hen te dwingen zich te houden aan wat Buruma ‘rules and laws’ betitelt. En Pompeo is evenmin de aangewezen man om ‘de gemeenschappelijke belangen’ te ‘organiseren’ met als doel het internationaal recht ‘te beschermen’ en zelfs met geweld ‘af te dwingen.’ Waarom zou Washington, de leider van wat Buruma‘the free world’ noemt, zo vaak zelf de ‘regels en wetten’ ernstig schenden, als die de basis vormen van wat de ‘Fackelträger des Liberalismus,’ kwalificeert als ‘onze beschaving’? De Amerikaanse 'civilisatie' is de erfenis van de versteende Europese cultuur, zoals de de Romeinse ‘beschaving,’ volgens Riencourt, de nalatenschap was van de versteende cultuur uit de Oudheid.
was made possible by men who, at first sight, did not seem to be blessed by great gifts. The worst features of Romans — heaviness, poor imagination, little sensitivity, indifference to form, instinctive distrust of individuality and originality — were, however, well-compensated for. It was their other qualities — a taste for action rather than thought, practicality, a concrete rather than abstract outlook on men and things, precision, taste for teamwork, discipline, tenacity, genius for organization and sound government, strong patriotism and indestructible belief in the superiority of the Roman way of life, a powerful faculty of absorption and assimilation — that made the Romanization of the classical world possible. More than anything else, it was what Pliny the Elder described as ‘omnium utilitatum et virtutum rapacissimi,’ the remarkable ability to borrow and adapt anything invented by others that could possibly be used in a practical way.
How do the Romans of the modern world compare with their classical predecessors? The duplication fits remarkably well. Americanism is to the modern world the equivalent of what Tertullian called ‘Romanitas’ was to the classical: the sum total of all the psychological traits, customs, habits of thought that their respective civilization men take for granted. Americans are civilization men, and not culture men. All their characteristics point to organization, productive efficiency, and earthly success. In a chaotic world where sensitive men are baffled (verbijsterd. svh) and often despair, they are not easily baffled and never despair. They can be nonplused, checked by what seems to them irrational reactions of other nations — but only temporarily.’ Their basic vitality is too great. The shape of things to come depends on many different factors. But one is of transcendent importance: the mind and soul of modern America, as shaped by several centuries of historical growth.
Met andere woorden, wanneer Ian Buruma zich afvraagt hoe datgene wat is overgebleven van de ‘vrije wereld’ — de ‘modern civilization,’ dievolgens hem ‘another term’ is ‘for Western civilization’ — zich moet verdedigen tegen ‘mafia societies’ en ‘machtige dictaturen’ als Rusland en China, en hij zich vervolgens allereerst beroept op een politieke extremist als Mike Pompeo, minister van Buitenlandse Zaken van de ‘Pax Americana,’ zoals Buruma het imperium van Washington en Wall Street betitelt, dan is duidelijk dat hij hij niet beseft dat de ‘Amerikaanse beschaving’ het sluitstuk is van vijf eeuwen hegemonie van de witte elite. Bovendien toont dit aan dat mijn oude vriend niet beseft dat ‘internationale organisaties’ als de Verenigde Naties nooit in staat zijn geweest om ‘de gemeenschappelijke regels en wetten’ al dan niet met grootschalig geweld te verdedigen, om de simpele reden dat de belangen van ’s werelds elite altijd voorrang hebben gekregen. De rest is propaganda geweest van goed betaalde opportunistische mainstream-opiniemakers als Ian Buruma zelf, die ondermeer voorstelt dat Europa, de ‘free world,’ een deel van het Amerikaanse ‘dirty work’ op zich neemt. Maar wat stelt de leider van wat Buruma ‘the free world’ noemt voor? Chris Hedges — geen Nederlandse broodschrijver, maar een gezaghebbende Amerikaanse journalist — geeft de volgende diagnose:
The French sociologist Emile Durkheim in his classic book ‘On Suicide’ found that when social bonds are shattered, when a population no longer feels it has a place or meaning in a society, personal and collective acts of self-destruction proliferate.
Societies are held together by a web of social bonds that give individuals a sense of being part of a collective and engaged in a project larger than the self. This collective expresses itself through rituals, such as elections and democratic participation or an appeal to patriotism, and shared national beliefs. The bonds provide meaning, a sense of purpose, status and dignity. They offer psychological protection from impending mortality and the meaninglessness that comes with being isolated and alone. The breaking of these bonds plunges individuals into deep psychological distress. Durkheim called this state of hopelessness and despair anomie, which he defined as ‘ruleless-ness.’
Ruleless-ness means the norms that govern a society and create a sense of organic solidarity no longer function. The belief, for example, that if we work hard, obey the law and get a good education we can achieve stable employment, social status and mobility along with financial security becomes a lie.
The old rules, imperfect and often untrue for poor people of color, nevertheless were not a complete fiction in the United States. They offered some Americans — especially those from the white working and middle class — modest social and economic advancement. The disintegration of these bonds has unleashed a widespread malaise Durkheim would have recognized.
The self-destructive pathologies that plague the United States — opioid addiction, gambling, suicide, sexual sadism, hate groups and mass shootings — are products of this anomie. So is our political dysfunction. My book, America: The Farewell Tour, is an examination of these pathologies and the widespread anomie that defines American society.
The economic structures, even before the pandemic, were reconfigured to mock faith in a meritocracy and the belief that hard work leads to a productive and valued role in society. American productivity, as The New York Times pointed out, has increased 77 percent since 1973 but hourly pay has grown only 12 percent. If the federal minimum wage was attached to productivity, the newspaper wrote, it would be more than $20 an hour now, not $7.25.
Some 41.7 million workers, a third of the workforce, earn less than $12 an hour, and most of them do not have access to employer-sponsored health insurance. A decade after the 2008 financial meltdown, the Times wrote, the average middle class family’s net worth is more than $40,000 below what it was in 2007. The net worth of black families is down 40 percent, and for Latino families the figure has dropped 46 percent.
Some four million evictions are filed each year. One in four tenant households spends about half its pretax income on rent. Each night some 200,000 people sleep in their cars, on streets or under bridges. And these stark figures represent the good times Biden and the Democratic Party leaders promise to restore.
Now, with real unemployment probably close to 20 percent — the official figure of 10 percent excludes those furloughed or those who have stopped looking for work — some 40 million people are at risk of being evicted by the end of the year. An estimated 27 million people are expected to lose their health insurance. Banks are stockpiling reserves of cash to cope with the expected wave of bankruptcies and defaults on mortgages, student loans, car loans, personal loans and credit card debt.
The ruleless-ness and anomie that defines the lives of tens of millions of Americans was orchestrated by the two ruling parties in the service of a corporate oligarchy. If we do not address this anomie, if we do not restore the social bonds shattered by predatory corporate capitalism, the decay will accelerate.
This dark human pathology is as old as civilization itself, repeated in varying forms in the twilight of ancient Greece and Rome, the finale of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, revolutionary France, the Weimar Republic and the former Yugoslavia.
The social inequality that characterizes all states and civilizations seized by a tiny and corrupt cabal — in our case corporate — leads to an inchoate desire by huge segments of the population to destroy.
The ethnic nationalists Slobodan Miloševic, Franjo Tudjman, Radovan Karadžic? and Alija Izetbegovic? in the former Yugoslavia assumed power in a similar period of economic chaos and political stagnation. Yugoslavs by 1991 were suffering from widespread unemployment and had seen their real incomes reduced by half from what they had been a generation before.
These nationalist demagogues sanctified their followers as righteous victims stalked by an array of elusive enemies. They spoke in the language of vengeance and violence, leading, as it always does, to actual violence. They trafficked in historical myth, deifying the past exploits of their race or ethnicity in a perverse kind of ancestor worship, a mechanism to give to those who suffered from anomie, who had lost their identity, dignity and self-worth, a new, glorious identity as part of a master race.
When I walked through Montgomery, Alabama, a city where half of the population is African-American, with the civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson a few years ago, he pointed out the numerous Confederate memorials, noting that most had been put up in the last decade. ‘This,’ I told him, ‘is exactly what happened in Yugoslavia.’
A hyper-nationalism always infects a dying civilization. It feeds the collective self-worship. This hyper-nationalism celebrates the supposedly unique virtues of the race or the national group. It strips all who are outside the closed circle of worth and humanity. The world instantly becomes understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us.
Terwijl broodschrijver Ian Buruma propaganda blijft maken voor de 'democratische' illusies, laat Chris Hedges zien dat ‘The Mask Is Off.’ Buruma evenwel, de 'fakkeldrager van het liberalisme,'begrijpt nog steeds niet dat de Amerikaanse Coca Cola-Civilisatie geen cultuur bezit. Daarover de volgende keer meer.
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