Ian Buruma's Civilisatie 9

For those who stubbornly seek freedom there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms & practices of indoctrination.

 

The freer the society, the more well-honed and sophisticated its system of thought control and indoctrination. The ruling elite, clever, class-conscious, ever sure of domination, make sure of that. These are easy to perceive in totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of brainwashing under freedom to which we are subjected.

Beide uitspraken zijn van de Amerikaanse hoogleraar Noam Chomsky, die al decennialang de werkwijze van de westerse ‘corporate media’ volgt. Ik citeer deze geleerde omdat Ian Buruma mij liet weten dat mijn ‘ideeën eerder [komen] uit een wat ouderwetse Amerikaanse hoek, Chomsky, Zinn et al. die door een oudere generatie serieus werden genomen,’ maar inmiddels als nonsens naar de prullenbak moeten worden verwezen. De fundamentele kritiek van ‘Chomsky, Zinn et.al’ op de illegaliteit van het Amerikaans en Israelisch grootschalig geweld is, in zijn ogen, gedateerd, zonder duidelijk te maken waarom hij deze mening is toegedaan. Wel is evident dat ook in dit geval mijn oude vriend actief deelneemt aan de ‘hersenspoeling’ van een ideologie die ‘vrijheid’ predikt. Waarom zou anders het internationaal recht, volgens deze ‘Fackelträger des Liberalismus,’ vandaag de dag ‘ouderwets’ zijn? Steeds minder betwistbaarder is het feit dat de neoliberale ‘democratie’ geweld moet inzetten om de belangen van de economische, financiële en bureaucratische elite te beschermen tegen de opstandigheid van de massa der gemarginaliseerden in de wereld. De gezaghebbende Amerikaanse politiek theoreticus Sheldon Wolin, beschreef in het laatste boek vóór zijn dood Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (2008) hoe de liberale democratie is uitgelopen op een systeem van ‘corporate totalitarianism.’ Hij wees erop dat:

[o]ne cannot point to any national institution that can accurately be described as democratic, surely not in the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-biased judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media.

In een interview met oud New York Times-correspondent Chris Hedges verklaarde Wolin: 

The ruling groups can now operate on the assumption that they don’t need the traditional notion of something called a public in the broad sense of a coherent whole. They now have the tools to deal with the very disparities (ongelijkheden. svh) and differences they themselves helped to create. It’s a game in which you manage to undermine the cohesiveness that the public requires if they [the public] are to be politically effective.

And at the same time, you create these different, distinct groups that inevitably find themselves in tension or at odds or in competition with other groups, so that it becomes more of a melee than it does become a way of fashioning majorities.

Hedges benadrukt dat Wolin’s:

[i]nverted totalitarianism is different from classical forms of totalitarianism. It does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader but in the faceless anonymity of the corporate state. Inverted totalitarianism pays outward fealty (trouw. svh) to the facade of electoral politics, the Constitution, civil liberties, freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary, and the iconography, traditions and language of American patriotism, but it has effectively seized all of the mechanisms of power to render the citizen impotent. 

Wolin wijst op nog een ander aspect:

Employment in a high-tech, volatile, and globalized economy is normally as precarious as during an old-fashioned depression. The result is that citizenship, or what remains of it, is practiced amidst a continuing state of worry. Hobbes had it right: when citizens are insecure and at the same time driven by competitive aspiration, they yearn for political stability rather than civic engagement, protection rather than political involvement.  

Er bestaat een fundamenteel en gevaarlijk verschil tussen enerzijds een geleerde als Sheldon Wolin, die wetenschappelijk aantoont dat de democratie is uitgehold, en anderzijds een mainstream-opiniemaker als Ian Buruma, die met grote stelligheid beweert dat 'westerse samenlevingen nu democratischer [zijn] dan ooit.’ Buruma bewijst het grote gevaar van de mainstream propaganda die dagelijks over de massa wordt uitgestort. I Buruma’s pedanterie is slechts bühnewerk voor de eigen angstige middenklasse. Daarentegen geeft Wolin’s academische werk de intelligentsia de mogelijkheid te begrijpen hoe de maatschappelijke en politieke processen in de VS een imperialistische civilisatie hebben gecreëerd, waardoor tegelijkertijd een functionerende parlementaire democratie onmogelijk werd. Terecht merkt Chris Hedges op dat:

Great writers and intellectuals give us a vocabulary that allows us to make sense of reality. They excavate depths that we, without their help, are unable to fathom. We are captive to systems of power until we can name the dominant myths and the intricate systems of coercion and control that extinguish our freedom.

We are a society awash in skillfully manufactured lies. Reality is whatever hallucination flickers on a screen. Solitude that makes thought possible — a removal from the electronic cacophony that besieges us — is harder and harder to find. We have severed ourselves from a print-based culture. We are unable to grapple with the nuances and complexity of ideas. We have traded ideas for fabricated clichés. We speak in the hollow language we are given by our corporate masters. Reality, presented to us as image, is unexamined and therefore false. We are culturally illiterate. And because of our illiteracy we are easily manipulated and controlled.

Omdat ‘grote schrijvers en intellectuelen ons een vocabulaire geven die ons in staat stelt de realiteit te begrijpen’ en zij bovendien ‘diepten onthullen die wij, zonder hun hulp, niet in staat zijn te doorgronden,’ citeer ik op mijn oude dag deze bronnen. Sinds mijn vijftiende jaar zijn zij voor mij van onschatbaar belang geweest, door me een richtlijn te geven in deze absurde wereld. Mijn respect voor de scherpzinnigheid en authenticiteit van hun gedachten was tevens de voornaamste reden waarom ik de producten van broodschrijvers bekritiseer. Als puber en adolescent was ik via de Amerikaanse kritische media getuige van het verzet tegen de Vietnam-Oorlog, én natuurlijk van de massale Amerikaanse terreur, die, zo begreep ik al snel, niets met democratie en mensenrechten te maken had, hoe fanatiek de elite dit bloedbad probeerde te rechtvaardigen. Ik besefte dat, in de woorden van Sheldon Wolin:   

Capitalism is destructive because it has to eliminate the kind of custom, political values, even institutions that present any kind of credible threat to the autonomy of the economy. And it’s that — that’s where the battle lies. Capitalism wants an autonomous economy. They want a political order subservient to the needs of the economy. 

Het kapitalisme is in feite net zo ‘elitist as any aristocratic system ever was.’ Wolin maakt bovendien aannemelijk dat in ‘the system that was consciously and deliberately constructed by the founders who framed the Constitution’ de 

democracy was the enemy. And that was rooted in historical realities. Many of the colonial governments had a very strong popular element that became increasingly prominent as the colonies moved towards rebellion. And rebellion meant not only resisting British rule, but also involved the growth of popular institutions and their hegemony in the colonies, as well as in the nation as a whole, so that the original impulses to the Constitution came in large measure from this democratizing movement. But the framers of the Constitution understood very well that this would… jeopardize the ruling groups that they thought were absolutely necessary to any kind of a civilized order. And by ‘ruling groups,’ they meant not only those who were better educated, but those who were propertied, because they regarded property as a sign of talent and of ability, so that it wasn’t just wealth as such, but rather a constellation of virtues as well as wealth that entitled capitalists to rule. And they felt that this was in the best interests of the country.

Zolang in dit systeem ‘dissent remains ineffectual,’ aldus Wolin, ‘the government does not need to stamp out dissent. The uniformity of imposed public opinion through the corporate media does a very effective job.’ Vandaar het belang van ‘especially the intellectual class,’ die afgekocht wordt 

[t]hrough a combination of governmental contracts, corporate and foundation funds, joint projects involving university and corporate researchers, and wealthy individual donors, universities (especially so-called research universities), intellectuals, scholars, and researchers have been seamlessly integrated into the system,

aldus Sheldon Wolin. Maar zodra een groeiend aantal burgers de geloofwaardigheid van de mainstream-opiniemakers ter discussie stelt, waardoor de legitimiteit van de macht wordt bedreigd, ontstaat een geheel nieuwe situatie. Dit verklaart Buruma’s onderhuidse woede toen ik hem vroeg hoe betrekkelijk het ‘betrekkelijk goedaardige imperialisme uit Washington’ in zijn ogen was. Dit soort dogma’s mag absoluut niet betwijfeld worden, aangezien dan het hele bouwwerk van de ‘neoliberale democratie’ begint te wankelen. Het is juist de taak van de Buruma’s van de 'corporate press' om de kapitalistische geloofsbeginselen koste wat kost overeind te houden. Zodra die niet langer meer kritiekloos geslikt worden, is het einde van het bestel nabij, en treedt een nieuwe fase in. Dan is de maskerade voorbij, en tracht de elite met grof geweld haar privileges te handhaven. Of zoals Chris Hedges schreef:   

should the population — steadily stripped of its most basic rights, including the right to privacy, and increasingly impoverished and bereft of hope — become restive, inverted totalitarianism will become as brutal and violent as past totalitarian states. ‘The war on terrorism, with its accompanying emphasis upon “homeland security,” presumes that state power, now inflated by doctrines of preemptive war and released from treaty obligations and the potential constraints of international judicial bodies, can turn inwards,” he (Wolin. svh) writes, “confident that in its domestic pursuit of terrorists the powers it claimed, like the powers projected abroad, would be measured, not by ordinary constitutional standards, but by the shadowy and ubiquitous character of terrorism as officially defined.”

The indiscriminate police violence in poor communities of color is an example of the ability of the corporate state to ‘legally’ harass and kill citizens with impunity. The cruder forms of control — from militarized police to wholesale surveillance, as well as police serving as judge, jury and executioner, now a reality for the underclass — will become a reality for all of us should we begin to resist the continued funneling of power and wealth upward. We are tolerated as citizens, Wolin warns, only as long as we participate in the illusion of a participatory democracy. The moment we rebel and refuse to take part in the illusion, the face of inverted totalitarianism will look like the face of past systems of totalitarianism.

Alle tekenen wijzen er nu op dat het westerse ‘inverted totalitarianism’ aan de vooravond staat van een gewelddadige confrontatie tussen geprivilegieerden en gemarginaliseerden. Intussen houdt Ian Buruma vol dat — ondanks alle Amerikaanse bloedbaden — tot het aantreden van president Trump de Verenigde Staten ‘a force for good,’ was en ‘a model of freedom and openness.’ Tegelijkertijd kan ook hij niet langer meer de mogelijkheid ontkennen dat ‘die Welt aus einander fällt, in feindliche Blöcke gespalten wird,’ terwijl het ‘Nationalismus zunimmt und Angst verbreitet wird und all das noch überschattet (overschaduwd. svh) wird von einer sehr ernsten und langanhaltenden Wirtschaftskrise,’ met anderer woorden:  ‘dann haben wir alle Bestandteile für Chaos und vielleicht sogar Gewalt.’ Hieruit valt op te maken dat voor hem de omvangrijke armoede en de voortdurende oorlogen geen ‘chaos en wellicht geweld’ betekenen. Wat buiten het Westen gebeurt telt voor de mainstream-opiniemaker immers niet mee. Het Amerikaanse oorlogsgeweld in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Irak, Libië  en Syrië, om slechts enkele in het oog lopende conflicthaarden te noemen, spelen hier bij Ian Buruma geen rol, omdat de ‘civilisatie’ van de witte man er geen last van heeft gehad. Sterker nog, het westers militair-industrieel complex, met die van de VS voorop, heeft er biljoenen aan verdiend. En als we afgaan op de opmerking van de toonaangevende Amerikaanse socioloog C. Wright Mills dat ‘de directe oorzaak van de Derde Wereldoorlog zijn voorbereiding’ is, dan moeten we er vanuit gaan dat de situatie in de wereld almaar verslechterd is. In feite geldt nog steeds datgene wat oud-premier Joop den Uyl al in 1983 tegenover de Volkskrant verklaarde, namelijk dat de ‘enige stimulans van de wereldeconomie bestaat uit de enorme Amerikaanse oorlogsuitgaven. Die worden in hoge mate inflatoir gefinancierd.’ Hij vond het verbijsterend dat ‘de Amerikaanse overheid die voor een groot deel laat betalen door landen die kapitaal naar Amerika exporteren. Zo gaat het met de vijf, zes miljard die jaarlijks vanuit Nederland naar Amerika stroomt,’ aldus de toenmalige PVDA-bewindsman. Een ander gevaar dat Buruma’s ‘force for good,’ en ‘model of freedom and openness’ voor de wereld vormt is ‘jobless growth.’   

Vooral ook omdat in het Westen zelf de negatieve gevolgen van het neoliberalisme steeds meer slachtoffers veroorzaakten onder het ‘precariat,’ de uitdijende groep burgers die door het fenomeen ‘jobless growth’ geen vaste banen krijgen, maar zich tevreden moeten stellen met tijdelijke contracten, zodat de rijke elite geen sociale lasten meer  hoeft te betalen. Ondertussen gaan rigoreuze bezuinigingen op de minder draagkrachtigen gewoon door, verdwijnt staatsteun naar het militair-industrieel complex om elders in de wereld de neoliberale ideologie met geweld af te dwingen, blijven overheidssubsidies naar ‘artificial intelligence’ vloeien, en de massale milieuvernietiging niet stopt omdat de totalitaire technocratie almaar machtiger wordt. Zo ontstond in enkele decennia, volgens de Britse hoogleraar Development Studies, Guy Standing, ‘The Precariat,’ dat in zijn ogen ‘The New Dangerous Class’ is, zoals de titel luidt van zijn in 2011 gepubliceerde studie. Standing wijst erop dat de neoliberale kapitalisten: 

disliked the state, which they equated with centralized government, with its planning and regulatory apparatus. They saw the world as an increasingly open place, where investment, employment and income would flow to where conditions were most welcoming. They argued that unless European countries, in particular, rolled back the securities that had been built up since the Second World War for the industrial working class and the bureaucratic public sector, and unless the trade unions were ‘tamed,' de-industrialization (a new concept at the time) would accelerate, unemployment would rise, economic growth would slow down, investment would flow out and poverty would escalate. It was a sobering assessment. They wanted drastic measures, and in politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Donald Reagan they had the sort of leaders willing to go along with their analysis.

The tragedy was that, while their diagnosis made partial sense, their prognosis was callous (hardvochtig. svh). Over the next 30 years, the tragedy was compounded by the fact that the social democratic political parties that had built up the system the neo-liberals wished to dismantle, after briefly contesting the neo-liberals' diagnosis, subsequently lamely accepted both the diagnosis and the prognosis. 

One neoliberal claim that crystallized in the 1980s was that countries needed to pursue 'labor market flexibility.’ Unless labor markets were made more flexible, labor costs would rise and corporations would transfer production and investment to places where costs were lower; financial capital would be invested in those countries, rather than 'at home.’ Flexibility had many dimensions: wage flexibility meant speeding up adjustments to changes in demand, particularly downwards; employment flexibility meant easy and costless ability of firms to change employment levels, particularly downwards, implying a reduction in employment security and protection; job flexibility meant being able to move employees around inside the firm and to change job structures with minimal opposition or cost; skill flexibility meant being able to adjust workers' skills easily. 

In essence, the flexibility advocated by the brash (onbehouwen. svh) neoclassical economists meant systematically making employees more insecure, claimed to be a necessary price for retaining investment and jobs. Each economic setback was attributed in part, fairly or not, to a lack of flexibility and to the lack of 'structural reform' of labor markets. 

As globalization proceeded, and as governments and corporations chased each other in making their labor relations more flexible, the number of people in insecure forms of labor multiplied. This was not technologically determined. As flexible labor spread, inequalities grew, and the class structure that underpinned industrial society gave way to something more complex but certainly not less class based… But the policy changes and the responses of corporations to the dictates of the globalizing market economy generated a trend around the world that was never predicted by the neo-liberals or the political leaders who were putting their policies into effect. 

Millions of people, in affluent and emerging market economies, entered the precariat, a new phenomenon even if it had shades of the past. The precariat was not part of the 'working class' or the ‘proletariat.' The latter terms suggest a society consisting mostly of workers in longterm, stable, fixed-hour jobs with established routes of advancement, subject to unionization and collective agreements, with job titles their fathers and mothers would have understood, facing local employers whose names and features they were familiar with. 

Many entering the precariat would not know their employer or how many fellow employees they had or were likely to have in the future. They were also not 'middle class,’ as they did not have a stable or predictable salary or the status and benefits that middle-class people were supposed to possess. 

As the 1990s proceeded, more and more people, not just in developing countries, found themselves in a status that development economists and anthropologists called ‘informal.' Probably they would not have found this a helpful way of describing themselves, let alone one that would make them see in others a common way of living and working. So they were not working class, not middle class, not ‘informal.' What were they? A flicker of recognition would have occurred in being defined as having a precarious existence. Friends, relatives and colleagues would also be in a temporary status of some kind, without assurance that this was what they would be doing in a few years' time, or even months or weeks hence. Often they were not even wishing or trying to make it so.   

Intussen zijn de opeenvolgende crises — uitgemond in een diepe systeem-crisis — ‘a means of governing. In a world that seems to hold together only through the infinite management of its own collapse,’ aldus de Franse intellectuelen die het boek The Coming Insurrection (2009) schreven. Volgens hen is het: 

useless to wait — for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides.

De westerse elite weet dit als geen ander. Ook zij ziet de militarisering van de politie, de uitbreiding van staatsinterventies in het privéleven van gewone burgers, het schaduwen van ‘verdachte elementen,’ en de corrumpering van de mainstream-media met de zich overal manifesterende opiniemakers. Een saillant voorbeeld van deze anti-democratische ontwikkelingen is de nauwe samenwerking tussen het Westen en de schurkenstaat Israel, waar Britse en Amerikaanse politieagenten en Nederlandse mariniers worden opgeleid in ondermeer het onderdrukken van sociaal verzet. Bovendien laat het Amerikaanse en Europese establishment, zonder democratische goedkeuring vooraf, Israel deelnemen aan NAVO-oefeningen met als ‘argument’ zodoende ‘het terrorisme’ te bestrijden. Dat wil zeggen: niet de terreur van de zelfbenoemde ‘Joodse staat,’ maar van degenen die zich tegen de Israelische terreur verzetten, of van degenen van wie het land door de NAVO is plat gebombardeerd, met achterlating van vele honderduizenden burgerslachtoffers, onder wie kinderen, vrouwen en bejaarden. Eén van de vele deskundigen die door de ‘corporate press’ worden geboycot, is de Amerikaanse auteur en hoogleraar Alan Nasser, die in zijn werk erop wijst wat er de afgelopen vier decennia gebeurd is:

Out with the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society and forward with what is essentially a resurrection of 1920s capitalism. Because capitalism is a globally integrated system, if neoliberalism exists on a significant scale anywhere, it must exist everywhere. It is thus a ‘New World Order,’ a phrase deployed by G. H. W. Bush and Adolf Hitler.

Neoliberalism is an eminently rational arrangement for the capitalists and their political cronies who instituted it. The system is called capitalism, not laborism, because it was forged for centuries and is presided over by those whose overarching objective is to maintain a settlement that serves the interests of owners of capital. Adam Smith’s tome is called The Wealth of Nations, not The Income of Nations or The Wages of Nations. The bottom-line priority of those who own society’s most valuable asset, its means of production, is that society be organized around the continuous increase of wealth, especially the wealth and income of its wealthiest. The welfare state foils that project. The evidence is unambiguous: after the Depression and during the great expansion of the Golden Age, we witnessed the unprecedented: the share of national income flowing to the one percent continued to fall by an increasing percentage each decade during the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s and early ‘70s. These were the only years in American history when an essential feature of State policy was to increase social services benefitting the working class and redistribute income from the wealthiest to those who do society’s work. And these were also the only years in the history of the republic that featured ongoing and increasing downward redistribution. This was the result of New Deal and Great Society social legislation, and the power of labor unions. Hence, from the perspective of the enlightened capitalist, the legacy of these policies must be reversed.

Naar aanleiding van gedocumenteerde feiten, verzameld door The World Inequality Lab over het jaar 2018, schreef professor Nasser:

The undoing of social democracy must be effected on a global scale. Because one of the principal effects of neoliberalism is the remarkable growth of inequality, Thomas Piketty and associates have produced the World Inequality Report 2018, assessing the growth of worldwide inequality. They conclude that ‘income inequality has increased in nearly all countries,’ and that ‘rising inequality… can lead to various sorts of political, economic, and social catastrophes.’ Inequality is lowest in Europe, where social-democratic economic policy is strongest, and has increased rapidly in North America, where the top 10 percent cop (zich toe-eigenen. svh) 47 percent of national income… The share of national income of the top 1 percent in both regions in 1980 (VS en Europa. svh) was about the same, close to 10 percent. By 2016 it had risen slightly, to 12 percent in Western Europe, while in the United States it soared to 20 percent, while the share of the bottom 50 percent decreased from more than 20 percent in 1980 to 13 percent in 2016. Between 1980 and 2016 the global 1 percent captured twice as much of the growth in income as the bottom 50 percent. What’s more, Credit Suisse reports that as of 2015 the richest global 1 percent had accumulated more wealth than the rest of the world put together. In the same year, a mere 62 individuals had accumulated as much wealth as is held by the bottom 50 percent of humanity…

While national wealth has substantially increased, public wealth is now negative or close to zero in rich countries. Arguably this limits the ability of governments to tackle inequality; certainly it has important implications for wealth inequality among individuals.’ The situation is graver still if we acknowledge, as the authors of this study apparently do not, that governments in the capitalist countries have no intention to ‘tackle inequality.’ Quite the contrary. What we are witnessing is the bipartisan effort to ‘starve the beast.’ As the study puts it, ‘Over the past decades, countries have become richer but governments have become poor.’ The net public wealth (public assets minus public debts) of the most aggressively neoliberal advanced countries, the United States and the UK, ‘has even become negative in recent years.’ ‘The balance between private and public wealth is a crucial determinant of the level of inequality.’ In their summation, the authors conclude that ‘In a future in which “business as usual” continues, global inequality will further increase.’

The whole picture draws out the implications of Thomas Piketty’s demonstration that it belongs to the nature of capitalism that more and more private wealth tends to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands. The plutocrats pass their booty on to their progeny, so that an increasing portion of total wealth is inherited. Indeed, as of today between 50 and 70 percent of U.S. household wealth is inherited. If this continues, it is a matter of arithmetic that the U.S. is headed for rule by dynasty.

Op 7 augustus 2020 gaf The New York Times onder de kop: ‘Inequity boils over’ de volgende stand van zaken: 

The poor and marginalized are vulnerable as the earth reaches new heat extremes. For the past 60 years, every decade has been hotter than the last, and 2020 is poised to be among the hottest years ever. The agony of extreme heat, though, is profoundly unequal… For 150 years of industrialization, the combustion of coal, oil and gas has steadily released heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, driving up average global temperatures and setting heat records. Nearly everywhere around the world, heat waves are more frequent and longer lasting than they were 70 years ago.

But a hotter planet does not hurt equally. If you’re poor and marginalized, you’re likely to be much more vulnerable to extreme heat. You might be unable to afford an air-conditioner, and you might not even have electricity when you need it. You may have no choice but to work outdoors under a sun so blistering that first your knees feel weak and then delirium sets in. Or the heat might bring a drought so punishing that, no matter how hard you work under the sun, your corn withers and your children turn to you in hunger.

Maar ook in de zogeheten rijke wereld lijdt een snel groeiend aantal armen onder de gevolgen van het opwarmen van de aarde. Zo meldt The New York Times dat:

Heat is the deadliest form of extreme weather for older Americans. In New York City, isolation is its sly accomplice…. In the United States, heat kills older people more than any other extreme weather event, including hurricanes, and the problem is part of an ignominious national pattern: Black people and Latinos like Mr. Velasquez are far more likely to live in the hottest parts of American cities.

His neighborhood is exceptionally vulnerable to heat extremes. According to the most recent available data, from 2018, Brownsville was among New York City’s hottest, with average daytime highs around two degrees Fahrenheit higher than the city as a whole.

Those neighborhoods are often the same areas that have faced some of the highest rates of coronavirus deaths. This spring, around 10 residents of Mr. Velasquez’s senior housing complex died from the virus.

‘Inequality exacerbates climate and environmental risks,’ said Kizzy Charles-Guzman, a deputy director for resilience efforts in the New York City Mayor’s office.

Isolation makes it worse. With no one to check in on you, even a mild case of dehydration can take a quick turn for the worse if you’re frail or suffer from other ailments, like heart disease. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 600 Americans die each year from extreme heat. A recent academic study, though, estimated that as many as 12,000 people may be dying of heat-related ailments; 80 percent of them, the researchers said, are over the age of 60.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/06/climate/climate-change-inequality-heat.html 

Daar komt ook nog bij de economische recessie als gevolg van de 2008 kredietcrisis die door de huidige ‘jobless growth’ de elite nog rijker maakt, en de midden-klasse en armen in grote moeilijkheden heeft gestort. Bovendien zijn er de problemen van de Covid 19 Pandemie die de positie van gewone burgers almaar verslechterd. Het resultaat van het fanatieke neoliberale regeringsbeleid in de afgelopen vier decennia is dat bijvoorbeeld Nederland wat betreft het gemiddelde netto inkomen van huishoudens op de vijftiende plaats staat, en zodoende samen met onder andere Hongarije, Polen en Griekenland de achterhoede vormt in Europa. ‘How Neoliberal Austerity Kills’ in de VS beschrijft Alan Nasser ondermeer in zijn boek Overripe Economy: American Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy Paperback (2018):

There is decisive evidence that neoliberalism’s widening inequality tends to generate uncommon rates of physical and mental health disorders. A Princeton study found that middle-aged non-Hispanic white Americans suffered a great increase in mortality between 1998 and 2013. This was the first such case in American history. The increase is entirely concentrated among persons with a high school degree or less, a reliable criterion of poverty. Among whites with any college experience, mortality rates have declined during this period. And disease is not the issue. The predominant causes of death are suicide, chronic alcohol abuse and drug overdoses. Paul Krugman has noted that these statistics mirror ‘the collapse in Russian life expectancy after the fall of communism.’ The Princeton study labels these mortalities ‘deaths of despair.’ It is noteworthy that among the population in question, wages have fallen by over 30 percent since 1969. In a detailed study of the health effects of austerity, based on data from the Great Depression, Asian countries during the 1990s Asian Financial Crisis, and European countries suffering austerity policies after the 2008 crisis, researchers found that the more austerity was practiced in a country, the more people became ill and the more people died.

Homicide and murder are also strongly related to inequality. The World Bank reports that inequality predicts about half of the variance in murder rates between the U.S. and other countries and the FBI notes that of U.S. murders for which the precipitating reason is known over half stem from the agent’s sense that he had been ‘dissed’ (vernederd. svh) Persons shoot someone who has cut them off in traffic or beat them to a parking spot.

In connection with the high number of homicides associated with dissing, challenging a person’s sense of self-respect or personal worth, the psychologist and neuroscientist Martin Daly documents the intimate connection between inequality and loss of personal and social status. He shows that inequality predicts homicide rates ‘better than any other variable.’ In America, status is determined by how much a person has, and having is a matter of the standard of material living one enjoys, competitively conceived in terms of how one compares with others. And the admired standard is one’s level of material comfort, determined for the non-wealthy by a good job and the ability to support a family or the ability to enjoy a comfortable and independent standard of living as a single person. These makers of social status and self-respect are unavailable to those at the lower ends of the income hierarchy and the unemployed. Self-respect is one of men’s (and most homicides are male-on-male) most prized goods, and self-respect, as much as income and wealth, is unequally distributed. In a society where there are structurally determined winners and losers, if one is a loser one’s social reputation is all one has, all one can brandish, in order to maintain a sense of self-respect and personal worth. A diss is a blow to both social reputation and self-respect, and if one has nothing else, the threat looms disproportionately large.

While gang murders are not the majority of murders by the poor, they display in stripped-down form the way in which dissing translates to a social put-down and social denigration makes for personal humiliation and devaluation. The disser becomes a deadly rival. The research I cite in this essay shows that this syndrome is by no means limited to gang culture.

Most recently, David Ansell, a physician and social epidemiologist, has demonstrated in an exhaustive study that the acceleration of inequality between high and low socioeconomic groups over the past three decades has resulted in higher mortality rates for the poorest strata of the working class. He concludes that ‘inequality triggers so many causes of premature death that we need to treat inequality as a disease and eradicate it, just as we seek to halt any epidemic.’ Capitalism, in its post-welfare-state form, kills.

https://wir2018.wid.world

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/22/how-inequality-kills/ 

Tussen 1980 en 2016 wist 1 procent van de mensheid twee keer meer van de inkomensgroei in beslag te nemen dan de onderste 50 procent. Al in het begin van de jaren tachtig merkte ik rondom mij hoe de één na de andere collega van de zogeheten ‘vrije pers’ zich conformeerde aan de kadaverdiscipline van de verordonneerde elite-consensus. Het was een taboe om structureel kritiek te uiten op de heersende neoliberale doctrine. Het was zelfs ‘not done’ om het begrip kapitalisme te gebruiken, en degene die lak had aan de ongeschreven regels, werd met scheve ogen aangekeken en voor een gevaarlijke marxist of erger uitgemaakt. De militant rechtse Leidse hoogleraar Paul Cliteur stelde zelfs nog in 2018 in het 306 pagina’s tellende boek Cultuur Marxisme: 

Er waart een spook door het Westen, niet dat van het communisme, maar van het cultuurmarxisme. Het communisme is dood, het cultuurmarxisme springlevend. Cultuurmarxisme is een term waarmee critici bepaalde onderdelen van de linkse politieke agenda aanduiden en afwijzen. Volgens de critici zou het marxisme weliswaar zijn verslagen, maar is het als een Phoenix uit zijn as herrezen in een andere vorm. Marxisten hebben de preoccupatie met de materiële (sociaaleconomische) omstandigheden verlaten en zich gericht op de cultuur. De arbeider (het proletariaat) 'als troetelkind van linkse intellectuelen' heeft plaats gemaakt voor nieuwe verworpenen der aarde (Fanon.) Het heeft geleid tot een soms absurde zoektocht naar ‘nieuwe zieligheid.’

Bovenstaande lachwekkende uiteenzetting kreeg van de extreem-rechtse politicus Thierry Baudet de volgende beoordeling:

Zoals eerdere periodes uit de geschiedenis kunnen worden aangeduid als 'romantisch' of ‘fascistisch,' zo kunnen we de huidige tijd aanduiden als 'oikofoob' of ‘cultuurmarxistisch.' Deze manier van denken over de wereld, van voelen, van ervaren, bestrijkt alle domeinen van het leven en dient te worden ontmaskerd en verslagen als we de beschaving willen behouden. Deze bundel van Paul Cliteur biedt een strategisch handboek-soldaat.

https://www.bol.com/nl/p/cultuurmarxisme/9200000087308345/?suggestionType=browse&bltgh=sKzW3LDYK0gaj1ebtZlLQQ.1.2.ProductTitle 

In werkelijkheid zouden intellectuelen in het huidige tijdsgewricht niet het ‘cultuur marxisme’ moeten beschuldigen, maar de oppermachtige neoliberale ideologie. Tenminste als men rekening wil houden met de feiten. Zo publiceerde de prestigieuze National Academy of Sciences in the United States of America begin november 2015 een gedocumenteerd essay getiteld ‘Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century,’ waarin wordt aangetoond dat:  

Midlife increases in suicides and drug poisonings have been previously noted. However, that these upward trends were persistent and large enough to drive up all-cause midlife mortality has, to our knowledge, been overlooked. If the white mortality rate for ages 45−54 had held at their 1998 value, 96,000 deaths would have been avoided from 1999–2013, 7,000 in 2013 alone. If it had continued to decline at its previous (1979‒1998) rate, half a million deaths would have been avoided in the period 1999‒2013, comparable to lives lost in the US AIDS epidemic through mid-2015. Concurrent declines in self-reported health, mental health, and ability to work, increased reports of pain, and deteriorating measures of liver function all point to increasing midlife distress.

This paper documents a marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United States between 1999 and 2013. This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other rich country saw a similar turnaround. The midlife mortality reversal was confined to white non-Hispanics; black non-Hispanics and Hispanics at midlife, and those aged 65 and above in every racial and ethnic group, continued to see mortality rates fall. This increase for whites was largely accounted for by increasing death rates from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis. Although all education groups saw increases in mortality from suicide and poisonings, and an overall increase in external cause mortality, those with less education saw the most marked increases. Rising midlife mortality rates of white non-Hispanics were paralleled by increases in midlife morbidity. Self-reported declines in health, mental health, and ability to conduct activities of daily living, and increases in chronic pain and inability to work, as well as clinically measured deteriorations in liver function, all point to growing distress in this population. We comment on potential economic causes and consequences of this deterioration.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4679063/ 

Dit alles ontgaat de spraakmakende polder-intelligentsia, want in hetzelfde 2015 verklaarde Geert Mak, als ‘populairste geschiedenisleraar van het land,’ met grote stelligheid tegenover een journalist van het Vlaamse zakenkrant De Tijd: 

De kracht van onze westerse samenleving is onze democratie, onze variatie in ideeën, onze tolerantie, onze openheid tegenover andere culturen.

In hetzelfde jaar was de goed ingevoerde hoogleraar economie en internationale betrekkingen aan de ivy-league Universiteit van Princeton, Paul Krugman — Amerikaans neo-keynesiaans econoom en columnist van The New York Times, — buitengewoon sceptisch over het ‘de kracht van onze westerse samenleving.’ In zijn krant van 4 november 2015 schreef hij onder de kop ‘Heartland of Darkness’ het volgende over de:

new paper by Angus Deaton and Anne Case on mortality among middle-aged whites has been getting a lot of attention, and rightly so. As a number of people have pointed out, the closest parallel to America’s rising death rates — driven by poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases — is the collapse in Russian life expectancy after the fall of Communism. (No, we’re not doing as badly as that, but still.) What the data look like is a society gripped by despair, with a surge of unhealthy behaviors and an epidemic of drugs, very much including alcohol.

This picture goes along with declining labor force participation and other indicators of social unraveling. Something terrible is happening to white American society. And it’s a uniquely American phenomenon; you don’t see anything like it in Europe, which means that it’s not about a demoralizing welfare state or any of the other myths so popular in our political discourse.

There’s a lot to be said, or at any rate suggested, about the politics of this disaster. But I’ll come back to that some other time. For now, the thing to understand, to say it again, is that something terrible is happening to our country — and it’s not about Those People, it’s about the white majority.

https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/11/04/heartland-of-darkness/ 

Deze op feiten gebaseerde beschrijving kwam drie jaar nadat Geert Mak in 2012 tegenover het Algemeen Dagblad had verkondigd dat ‘Amerika er over een halve eeuw beter voor[staat] dan Europa,’ omdat ‘Amerikanen’ ondermeer ‘bereid [zijn] heel hard te werken,’ en 'Het land een miljoen immigranten per jaar binnen[laat]. Dat is gunstig voor de leeftijdsopbouw en het geeft dynamiek en flexibiliteit. Europa heeft de neiging immigratie enkel als een probleem te zien. Over 20 jaar hebben we spijt van ons stringente immigratiebeleid.’ 

https://www.ad.nl/binnenland/geert-mak-amerika-straks-sterker-dan-europa~a517e5c1/ 

Geheel in stijl met de Makkiaanse traditie beweert mijn oude vriend nu, zeven jaar later, precies het tegenovergestelde, in een poging ook van zijn nieuwe boek Grote verwachtingen (2019) een bestseller te maken. Verbaast constateert een Volkskrant-columnist in zijn krant van 8 november 2019 met betrekking tot Mak’s kunstmatig gevoede ‘optimisme’ over ‘de zegeningen van de immigratie,’ en ‘over de overwinning van de liberale democratie,’ dat die houding plotseling verdwenen is, overigens zonder dat de polderpers op zoek is gegaan naar de redenen van Mak’s radicale omslag. Was hij in 2012 nog overtuigd dat de ‘dynamiek en flexibiliteit’ van een miljoen immigranten per jaar de eerste vereisten waren om Europa op te stoten in de vaart der volkeren, vandaag de dag pleit dezelfde opiniemaker ervoor dat ‘[a]siel aanvragen moet gebeuren in het land van herkomst,’ om daar te ‘selecteren wie mag komen en wie niet. Anders wordt immigratie een golf die over je spoelt.’ 

Vrij Nederland plaatste boven een gelikt interview met hem de  — op het eerste gezicht — cryptisch lijkende kop: ‘De nostalgie voorbij.’ Misschien was beter geweest te stellen dat Mak ‘De Schaamte Voorbij’ is, want als een populaire mainstream-opiniemaker in korte tijds fundamenteel van mening veranderd door te suggereren dat op ‘Oudjaarsavond 1999’ in ‘bijna heel Europa de bubbels over de toonbank [vlogen] en de lege champagneflessen uit het raam,’ terwijl Europese en Amerikaanse intellectuelen en kunstenaars al geruime tijd waarschuwden voor de op handen zijnde financiële, economische, culturele en morele crisis, is dit kortweg de geschiedenis verdraaien. Het feit dat een nieuwe rijke als Mak zelf daadwerkelijk meent dat niet alleen in zijn milieu de ‘lege champagneflessen uit het raam [vlogen],’ maar dat dit in ‘bijna heel Europa’ het geval was, verraadt dat hoe laag het intellectuele niveau in Nederland is. Meer daarover de volgende keer.