Adembenemende confrontatie Rusland en VS – wie durft wat?
In een leestijd drie minuten wordt uit de doeken gedaan hoe adembenemend, spectaculair, opzienbarend, sensationeel een gewapende confrontatie tussen twee grootmachten, beschikkend over massavernietigingswapens, kan zijn, tenminste in de ogen van een Limburger die tussen 1982 en 1988 politieke wetenschappen en internationale betrekkingen studeerde aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam, waarvan de nauwe banden met het Atlantisch bolwerk, en zijn NAVO, een opmerkelijk feit is. Volgens Kerres wil ‘het Westen,’ dus de NAVO-leden, de ‘aanvallen met gifgas niet straffeloos voorbij laten gaan.’ Bij een onafhankelijke journalist roept deze bewering twee voor de hand liggende vragen op:
- Wie is precies ‘het Westen’? De NAVO? Het Pentagon? Het Amerikaanse Congres? De politiek verantwoordelijken rond dat pleintje in Den Haag? Het militair-industrieel complex? Kerres zwijgt erover. ‘Het Westen’ is kennelijk voldoende voor de ‘kwaliteitslezers’ van de NRC, en aldus wordt een in oorsprong geografisch gegeven het eufemisme van een politieke- en militaire kongsi, die in strijd met het internationaal recht zelf bepaalt wanneer het geweld gaat inzetten en tegen wie, en waarom.
- Nog tendentieuzer is Kerres’ impliciete bewering dat de Syrische strijdkrachten onder president Assad de boosdoeners waren, die gestraft moesten worden. Het opvallende is dat de NRC-redacteur meteen wist wie de schurken waren, terwijl toch anderhalve maand eerder, op 2 februari 2018 het Amerikaanse persbureau Associated Press had bericht dat:
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. has no evidence to confirm reports from aid groups and others that the Syrian government has used the deadly chemical sarin on its citizens, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Friday.
‘We have other reports from the battlefield from people who claim it’s been used,’ Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon. ‘We do not have evidence of it.’ […]
Last April (2017. svh), the U.S. launched several dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles at a Syrian air base in response to what it called illegal Syrian use of chemical weapons. President Donald Trump said the attack was meant to deter further Syrian use of illegal weapons.
In his remarks Friday, Mattis alluded to the April attack, saying, ‘So they’d be ill-advised to go back to violating’ the international prohibition on the use of chemical weapons.
https://apnews.com/article/bd533182b7f244a4b771c73a0b601ec5
Veelzeggend is tevens dat de Canadese ‘foreign policy analyst’ Stephen Gowans, auteur van Washington’s Long War on Syria (2017), onder de kop ‘Eight reasons why the latest Syria chemical weapons attack allegations are almost certainly complete nonsense,’ al op 8 april 2018 had gewaarschuwd dat:
First, the reports are ‘unverified,’ according to The Wall Street Journal [1] and British Foreign Office [2] and are unconfirmed, according to the US State Department [3]. What’s more, The New York Times noted that it ‘was not possible to independently verify the reports,’ [4] while The Associated Press added that ‘the reports could not be independently verified.’ [5]
Second, according to The Wall Street Journal, it isn’t ‘clear who carried out the attack’ [6] assuming even that one was carried out.
Third, the ‘unverified photos and videos’ [7] which form the body of (unverified) evidence, were produced by two groups which have an interest in fabricating atrocities to draw the United States more deeply into the Syrian conflict. Both groups, the White Helmets and Syrian American Medical Society, are funded by Western governments [8], which openly seek regime change in Syria and therefore have an interest in producing a humanitarian pretext to justify stepping up their intervention in the country. The Western government-funded White Helmets and Syrian American Medical Society are allied with anti-government jihadists and are active only ‘in opposition-controlled areas.’ [9] They, too, are clearly interested parties.
Fourth, The New York Times indirectly revealed a possible motivation for the two groups to bring forward fabricated atrocity stories. ‘A new confirmed chemical attack in Syria,’ the newspaper noted, ‘would pose a dilemma for President Trump, who… recently said he wants to get the United States out of Syria.’ [10]
Trump’s recent musings about ending the US military occupation of nearly one-third of Syrian territory, including the country’s richest oil fields, was swiftly met by Pentagon opposition, led by US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. The US president reluctantly accepted a continued occupation, so long as it ends in a matter of months rather than years.
Fabricating an atrocity would pressure Trump to maintain the US occupation indefinitely and possibly escalate US military intervention in Syria, much to the pleasure of Islamist insurgents, their White Helmet and Syrian American Medical Society allies, and US war planners.
If that is the intention, the maneuver appears to have met with success. Trump reacted on Twitter to the unverified (and unverifiable) reports, by dehumanizing Syrian president Bashar al-Assad as an ‘animal,’ who the US president said was responsible for a ‘humanitarian disaster for no reason whatsoever.’ That the US State Department acknowledged that the reports were unconfirmed failed to restrain the ‘shoot-from-the-hip’ Trump.
Fifth, a chemical attack by the Syrian government would be manifestly self-defeating, and therefore would seem to be highly unlikely. The Syrian Arab Army is on the cusp of an all but inevitable victory in Eastern Ghouta. Why would it cancel its gains by handing the United States a pretext to continue its military intervention in Syria, in the aftermath of Trump signaling his intention to withdraw US troops?
Sixth, it is difficult to conceive of any military benefit to the Syrian Arab Army of deploying chemical weapons. The Syrian military has more lethal conventional ways of killing than using chemical agents, whose effects are unpredictable and typically small scale. In all the alleged chemical attack incidents in Syria, the claimed number of victims is always smaller than that which could easily be produced by air strikes and artillery. Why, then, would the Syrian government use relatively ineffective chemical weapons, creating a pretext for continued US intervention, when it could use more deadly conventional weapons, without a crossing a red line?
Seventh, much of the discourse about chemical weapons in Syria implicitly assumes the Syrian government has them, despite the country cooperating with the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons to eliminate them years ago.
Finally, allegations of chemical weapons use are routinely made against the Syrian government, and while, through repetition, have been transfigured into received truths, have all proved to be unverified. Jim Mattis acknowledged this at a February 2 news conference.
Q: Just make sure I heard you correctly, you’re saying you think it’s likely they have used it and you’re looking for the evidence? Is that what you said?
SEC. MATTIS: We do not have evidence of it… we’re looking for evidence of it…
Q: So the likelihood was not what your — you’re not characterizing it as a likelihood? I thought I used — you used that word; I guess I misunderstood you.
SEC. MATTIS: Well, there’s certainly groups that say they’ve used it. And so they think there’s a likelihood, so we’re looking for the evidence.
Q: So there’s credible evidence out there that both sarin and chlorine —
SEC. MATTIS: No, I have not got the evidence, not specifically. I don’t have the evidence.
What I’m saying is that other — that groups on the ground, NGOs, fighters on the ground have said that sarin has been used. So we are looking for evidence. I don’t have evidence, credible or uncredible. [11]
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but neither is it evidence of guilt. The complete lack of evidence, along with a political context that favors the production of spurious allegations, suggests that the latest chemical weapons claims are — like all that have preceded them — dubious at best.
1. Raja Abdulrahim, ‘Dozens killed in alleged chemical-weapons attack in Syria,’ The Wall Street Journal, April 8, 2018.
2. Ben Hubbard, ‘Dozens suffocate in Syria as government is accused of chemical attack,’ The New York Times, April 8, 2018.
3. Hubbard.
4. Hubbard.
5. Zeina Karam and Philip Issa, ‘Syrian rescuers say at least 40 people killed in eastern Ghouta has attack,’ The Associated Press, April 8, 2018.
6. April 8.
7. Abdulrahim, April 8.
8. Raja Abdulrahim, ‘Syria airstrikes hit hospitals in rebel territory,’ The Wall Street Journal, February 5, 2018; Louisa Loveluck and Erin Cunningham, ‘Dozens killed in apparent chemical weapons attack on civilians in Syria, rescue workers say,’ The Washington Post, April 8, 2018.
9. Abdulrahim, April 8; Abdulrahim, February 5.
10. Hubbard.
11. Media Availability by Secretary Mattis at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis, Feb. 2, 2018, https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript-View/Article/1431844/media-availability-by-secretary-mattis-at-the-pentagon/
Deze informatie was dus bekend drie dagen voordat Kerres de Syrische strijdkrachten de schukld gaf. Ter verduidelijking: ondanks het feit dat de Amerikaanse minister van Defensie Mattis begin februari 2018 toegaf dat met betrekking tot de chemische aanval op de Syrische stad Khan Shaykhun op 4 april 2017, ‘We do not have evidence of it,’ en dat ‘we’re looking for evidence of it’:
The governments of the United States, United Kingdom, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, France, and Israel as well as Human Rights Watch attributed the attack to the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian government said the attack was a ‘fabrication.’ The Russian government claimed that the incident was staged.
On 7 April (2017. svh), the United States launched 59 cruise missiles at Shayrat Air Base, which U.S. intelligence claimed was the source of the attack.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Shaykhun_chemical_attack
Maar al deze feiten waren voor diplomatiek redacteur Michel Kerres lang niet ‘adembenemend’ genoeg om te melden, terwijl toch, volgens hem, een ‘confrontatie’ dreigde tussen Rusland en VS, waarbij de vraag was: ‘wie durft wat?’ Dit was voor de NRC niet interessant genoeg om de lezers uitgebreid te informeren, ondanks de verregaande consequenties als die ‘confrontatie’ zou uitlopen op een Derde Wereldoorlog met nucleaire wapens. Het NRC-artikel is één van de vele voorbeelden van het levensgevaarlijke ‘nepnieuws’ dat door de polderpers wordt verspreid. Wat Kerres eveneens verzwijgt is datgene wat de Amerikaanse journalist Aaron Maté uitgebreid heeft onderzocht. Onder de kop ‘Ex-UK ambassador: War on Syria continues with US occupation, sanctions, propaganda’ interviewde hij 20 december 2020 voor The Grayzone, een volledig onafhankelijke ‘news website dedicated to original investigative journalism and analysis on politics and empire,’ Peter Ford, een ‘veteran British diplomat who served as the UK ambassador to Syria from 2003-2006.’ Hij legde hem het volgende voor:
I wanted to get your thoughts on the OPCW scandal. It’s something I’ve been covering extensively: inspectors from the OPCW (Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. svh) who investigated an alleged chemical weapons attack in the town of Douma in April 2018. This was the rationale for US-led strikes on Syria that same month. These inspectors had their evidence suppressed, and they were sidelined from their investigation. And these allegations of chemical weapons attacks in Syria have been very key to the overall narrative that is used to sustain the proxy war and now justify sanctions on Syria, that we have to sanction this regime that uses chemical weapons against its own people. I’m wondering if you followed this controversy about Douma and the suppression of the OPCW’s own findings and their own investigators, and what your thoughts are?
PETER FORD: Yeah, chemical weapons in Syria, the issue has been played much with the issue played with Iraq. And the world has amnesia over Iraq, the non-existent weapons of mass destruction, the Colin Powell dossier proof presented to the UN. It’s like Groundhog Day when you hear the claims made about Assad, the use of chemical weapons.
In the first place, it would make no practical sense for Assad to use chemical weapons; it could only ever have been an own goal. If he wanted to invite heavy Western intervention, he would not have gone about it any other way. You’d have to be incredibly either twisted or delusional to believe that Assad could have been so stupid as to do the one thing — use chemical weapons — which would bring about, or possibly bring about, his obliteration.
And it simply beggars belief for what we’ve seen, I’m quite convinced, is an elaborate hoax (bedrog. svh). A series of hoaxes. It’s very revealing that not one of the alleged instances of use of chemical weapons was investigated on the ground by any UN or other international investigations, with the sole exception of Douma. And why Douma? Because that was a piece of territory that the government forces managed to recover immediately after the alleged incident, so that the US and its allies were unable to keep away the international investigators. That didn’t stop them bombing Syria; they went ahead without waiting for the international investigators to arrive on the site. And ever since we’ve seen an elaborate attempt to provide a post hoc justification and to provide the justification for the sanctions, the cruel policy that we were discussing earlier. That ultimately is the purpose of the chemical weapon hoaxes — to justify the occupation of northeast Syria and the continuing cruel economic pressure.
AARON MATÉ: And what do you make of the relative media silence on this issue? We’ve done a lot of reporting on this at The Grayzone. The late Robert Fisk covered this issue for The Independent a little bit; he actually got on the ground in Douma, shortly after the alleged attack, and found evidence of the scenes being staged in the hospital. But even though now, since then, these inspectors have had their evidence leaked. And so, it’s been made clear to the public there that the inspectors who went to Douma reached a far different conclusion than what was put out publicly, had key evidence and data being censored, and false, unsupported conclusions being inserted to falsely tell the public that essentially there was a chemical attack by Syria. But, yet, media, for the most part, especially in the West, has been pretty much silent on the story. What do you make of that?
PETER FORD: Well, besides being a former British diplomat, I’m also a former UN official. I worked for eight years with a UN refugee agency in the Middle East, and it doesn’t surprise me in the least. Because I’ve seen from the inside of the UN machinery how arms get twisted by the Western powers, and particularly by the US. You can’t have a very successful career in the UN if you make an enemy of the US by doing the honest thing, sometimes. And therefore, an organization like the WHO is always going to be extremely easy to manipulate for the US and its allies, including my own country. They stack it with their own people, very often.
But occasionally somebody gets through the net, an honest person with some integrity, and that is what happened on this occasion. And these gentlemen drafted a report stating that they found evidence that was consistent with staging of an incident, rather than an authentic incident. And ever since, they have been vilified, condemned, undermined. And the campaign against the truth goes on and on and on.
Vanzelfsprekend toonde Michel Kerres geen enkele belangstelling voor de informatie van deze Britse diplomaat; Assad moet de boef zijn en blijven; alles dat dit weerspreekt dient verzwegen te worden. En dus schreef hij in zijn krant van 13 april 2018, zonder zelf enig onderzoek ter plaatse te hebben gedaan:
Vermoedelijk ging het ongeveer zo. Zaterdag 7 april, begin avond, stegen vanaf luchtmachtbasis Dumayr in Syrië twee helikopters van Russische makelij op. Eén gooide rond 19.30 gele gasflessen met chloorgas af boven een appartementencomplex aan het Shuhada-plein in Douma, een van de laatste nog resterende verzetshaarden tegen het regime van Bashar al-Assad. Resultaat: tussen dertig en vijftig doden, mogelijk een veelvoud aan gewonden…
De foto’s van slachtoffers — levenloze lichamen en verschrikte kinderogen boven een zuurstofmasker — waren schrijnend, maar ook tragisch-herkenbaar. Hoe vaak heeft de wereld dit al niet gezien? De oorlog heeft aan naar schatting 500.000 mensen het leven gekost; de VS denken dat Assad 50 keer gifgas heeft gebruikt.
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2018/04/13/krachtig-antwoord-op-de-gifgasaanval-maar-wanneer-a1599418
Bij gebrek aan feiten en eigen onderzoek, werd het NRC-publiek met emoties en sentimenten bewerkt. Ruim twee maanden later, op 26 juni 2018 achtte Kerres het wel belangrijk om te vermelden dat de OPCW in Den Haag:
op het punt [staat] om een onderzoek naar de gifgasaanval op Douma, nabij Damascus, af te ronden. De aanval, waarbij tientallen doden vielen, was in april voor de VS, Frankrijk en Groot-Brittannië aanleiding om Syrië met raketten te bestoken. Rusland en Syrië ontkennen dat het gas door Syrische helikopters is afgegooid op een woonwijk. The New York Times concludeerde deze week op basis van indirect bewijs dat het Syrische regime verantwoordelijk was voor de aanslag.
Dat een insider als de voormalige Britse ambassadeur in Syrië, Peter Ford, van oordeel is dat ‘the US and its allies continue to wage war on Syria via sadistic sanctions,’ en hij de ‘illegal US military occupation,’ plus ‘the OPCW cover-up’ veroordeelt, evenals de ‘media propaganda that masks the brutality,’ is voor het allooi journalisten als Michel Kerres een te verwaarlozen feit. Alleen de pro-Amerika, oorlogszuchtige, stroming wordt door de NRC aan het woord gelaten. Waarom? Onder de kop ‘Onze beginselen’ zette de krant uiteen dat:
de veiligheid van de wereld niet bevorderd [zal] worden door een Nederlands neutralisme. Vandaar dat wij de grondslag van het Atlantisch bondgenootschap aanvaarden — niet om ideologische redenen, maar omdat vrede en veiligheid in Europa, bij gebreke van een betrouwbaar veiligheidsstelsel, niet gediend zijn met het ontstaan van machtsvacua.
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2010/12/21/onze-beginselen-a1503462
Hoewel de NRC als bedrijf beweert dat de redactie en hoofdredactie ‘niet om ideologische redenen’ voor het geweld van de NAVO kiest, maar vanwege de vrees voor ‘machtsvacua,’ die ‘vrede en veiligheid in Europa’ zullen vernietigen, is deze redenering op zich al ‘ideologisch,’ evenals de suggestie dat ‘een Nederlandse neutralisme’ de ‘veiligheid van de wereld’ schaadt. De stelling dat ‘het Atlantisch bondgenootschap’ de ‘vrede en veiligheid’ dient, is gebaseerd op ideologisch gekleurde veronderstellingen. Dit wordt opnieuw bewezen wanneer de NRC-ombudsman Sjoerd de Jong probeert te ontkennen dat de NRC ‘aan de leiband van de NAVO [loopt]’ en hij zich afvraagt:
zou het verwijt kloppen? Nou, nee. Een veteraan-commentator is stellig: ‘De krant heeft nooit aan de hand van de NAVO gelopen of de Atlantische lijn per definitie, right or wrong, verdedigd. In de grote oorlogskwesties Afghanistan en Irak is de lijn altijd geweest: eerst en vooral met het mandaat van de VN.’
om zich vervolgens gedwongen te voelen in één adem hieraan toe te voegen:
Hoewel, de praktijk is weerbarstig: zo steunde de krant de inval in Irak (2003) en de bombardementen op Kosovo (1999), zonder mandaat van de Veiligheidsraad,
en daarmee zelf de opvatting bevestigt dat de NRC wel degelijk de agressieve NAVO-politiek volgt. Zo gehoorzaam zelfs dat de krant op 20 maart 2003, de dag dat de illegale inval in Irak begon, opriep:
Nu de oorlog is begonnen, moeten president Bush en premier Blair worden gesteund. Die steun kan niet blijven steken in verbale vrijblijvendheid. Dat betekent dus politieke steun — en als het moet ook militaire,
terwijl de redactie en hoofdredactie van het avondblad tegelijkertijd lieten weten: ‘[a]an de casus belli tegen Irak twijfelen we.’ Hoewel het hier dus een grove schending van het internationaal recht betrof, bleef de redactie van NRC Handelsblad deze oorlogsmisdaad steunen, en wel vanwege het Atlantisch beginsel, gebaseerd op een neoliberale- en neoconservatieve ideologie die, ironisch genoeg, veelvuldig ‘de veiligheid van de wereld’ ernstig heeft verstoord. Met dit slag geïndoctrineerde journalisten moet Nederland de duistere toekomst in.
Toch bestaat er nog een onafhankelijke journalistiek. Nederland kent helaas geen vrouwelijke journalisten met dezelfde integriteit als Rebacca Gordon. Zij is gepromoveerd in ‘Ethics and Social Theory,’ doceert aan de Faculteit der Filosofie van de Universiteit van San Francisco. Haar laatste boek is American Nuremberg: The Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post 9/11 War Crimes (2016). Zij schreef op de bekende website TomDispatch van de Amerikaanse intellectueel Tom Engelhardt van 17 december 2020 onder de titel: ‘All-War-All-the-Time?’:
We were certainly right that the United States had entered a period of all-war-all-the-time. It’s probably hard for people born since 9/11 to imagine how much — and how little — things changed after September 2001.
By the end of that month, this country had already launched a ‘war’ on an enemy that then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told us was ‘not just in Afghanistan,’ but in ‘50 or 60 countries, and it simply has to be liquidated.’
Five years and two never-ending wars later, he characterized what was then called the war on terror as ‘a generational conflict akin to the Cold War, the kind of struggle that might last decades as allies work to root out terrorists across the globe and battle extremists who want to rule the world.’ A generation later, it looks like Rumsfeld was right, if not about the desires of the global enemy, then about the duration of the struggle…
the wars dragged on at great expense, but with little apparent effect in this country. They even gained new names like ‘the long war’ (as Donald Trump’s Secretary of Defense James Mattis put it in 2017) or the ‘forever wars,’ a phrase now so common that it appears all over the place. But apart from devouring at least $6.4 trillion dollars through September 2020 that might otherwise have been invested domestically in healthcare, education, infrastructure, or addressing poverty and inequality, apart from creating increasingly militarized domestic police forces armed ever more lethally by the Pentagon, those forever wars had little obvious effect on the lives of most Americans…
according to the Costs of War Project, ‘At least 800,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan.’
Every one of the 2,977 lives lost on 9/11 was unique and invaluable. But the U.S. response has been grotesquely disproportionate… For 19 years, the military high command had hewed fairly closely to the strategy laid out by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld early in the Bush years: maintaining the capacity to fight ground wars against one or two regional powers (think of that ‘Axis of Evil’ of Iraq, North Korea, and Iran), while deploying agile, technologically advanced forces in low-intensity (and a couple of higher-intensity) counterterrorism conflicts. Nineteen years later, whatever its objectives may have been — a more-stable Middle East? Fewer and weaker terrorist organizations? — it’s clear that the Rumsfeld-Bush strategy has failed spectacularly.
Pentagon expert Michael Klare points out that, after almost two decades without a victory, the Pentagon has largely decided to demote international terrorism from rampaging monster to annoying mosquito cloud. Instead, the U.S. must now prepare to confront the rise of China and Russia, even if China has only one overseas military base and Russia, economically speaking, is a rickety petro-state with imperial aspirations. In other words, the U.S. must prepare to fight short but devastating wars in multiple domains (including space and cyberspace), perhaps even involving the use of tactical nuclear weapons on the Eurasian continent. To this end, the country has indeed begun a major renovation of its nuclear arsenal and announced a new 30-year plan to beef up its naval capacity. And President Trump rarely misses a chance to tout ‘his’ creation of a new Space Force…
In the meantime in these years of “ending” those wars, the Trump administration actually loosened the rules of engagement for air strikes in Afghanistan, leading to a ‘massive increase in civilian casualties,’ according to a new report from the Costs of War Project. ‘From the last year of the Obama administration to the last full year of recorded data during the Trump administration,’ writes its author, Neta Crawford, ‘the number of civilians killed by U.S.-led airstrikes in Afghanistan increased by 330 percent.’
In spite of his isolationist ‘America First’ rhetoric, in other words, President Trump has presided over an enormous buildup of an institution, the military-industrial complex, that was hardly in need of major new investment. And in spite of his anti-NATO rhetoric, his reduction by almost a third of U.S. troop strength Germany, and all the rest, he never really violated the post-World War II foreign policy pact between the Republican and Democratic parties. Regardless of how they might disagree about dividing the wealth domestically, they remain united in their commitment to using diplomacy when possible, but military force when necessary, to maintain and expand the imperial power that they believed to be the guarantor of that wealth.
On January 20, 2021, Joe Biden will become the president of a country that spends as much on its armed forces, by some counts, as the next 10 countries combined. He’ll inherit responsibility for a nation with a military presence in 150 countries and special-operations deployments in 22 African nations alone. He’ll be left to oversee the still-unfinished, deeply unsuccessful, never-ending war on terror in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia and, as publicly reported by the Department of Defense, 187,000 troops stationed outside the United States.
Nothing in Joe Biden’s history suggests that he or any of the people he’s already appointed to his national security team have the slightest inclination to destabilize that Democratic-Republican imperial pact. But empires are not sustained by inclination alone. They don’t last forever. They overextend themselves. They rot from within.
If you’re old enough, you may remember stories about the long lines for food in the crumbling Soviet Union, that other superpower of the Cold War. You can see the same thing in the United States today. Once a week, my partner delivers food boxes to hungry people in our city, those who have lost their jobs and homes, because the pandemic has only exacerbated this country’s already brutal version of economic inequality. Another friend routinely sees a food line stretching over a mile, as people wait hours for a single free bag of groceries.
Perhaps the horrors of 2020 — the fires and hurricanes, Trump’s vicious attacks on democracy, the death, sickness, and economic dislocation caused by Covid-19 — can force a real conversation about national security in 2021. Maybe this time we can finally ask whether trying to prop up a dying empire actually makes us — or indeed the world — any safer. This is the best chance in a generation to start that conversation. The alternative is to keep trudging mindlessly toward disaster.
https://tomdispatch.com/its-almost-twenty-years-since-9-11/
In deze werkelijkheid leeft het Westen nu. En in deze wereld stelt de voormalige Amerikaanse minister van Defensie Robert M. Gates op de voorpagina van toonaangevende New York Times van 19 december 2020 dat 'of course, unparalleled military power must remain the backdrop for America’s relations with the world,’ aangezien grootscheeps geweld het wapen blijft van wat mainstream-opiniemaker Ian Buruma de ‘Pax Americana’ betitelt, en waarvan Europa, in zijn ogen, een deel van het ‘dirty work’ op zich moet nemen om de status quo te handhaven. Hoe die status quo eruit ziet werd begin 2021 weer eens geopenbaard toen bekend werd dat:
Bloomberg's year-end report on the wealth of the world's billionaires shows that the richest 500 people on the planet added $1.8 trillion to their combined wealth in 2020, accumulating a total net worth of $7.6 trillion.
The Bloomberg Billionaires Index recorded its largest annual gain in the list's history last year, with a 31% increase in the wealth of the richest people.
The historic hoarding of wealth came as the world confronted the coronavirus pandemic and its corresponding economic crisis, which the United Nations last month warned is a ‘tipping point’ set to send more than 207 million additional people into extreme poverty in the next decade — bringing the number of people living in extreme poverty to one billion by 2030.
Even in the richest country in the world, the United States, the rapidly widening gap between the richest and poorest people grew especially stark in 2020.
As Dan Price, an entrepreneur and advocate for fair wages, tweeted, the 500 richest people in the world amassed as much wealth in 2020 as ‘the poorest 165 million Americans have earned in their entire lives.’
Meer over ineenstortende westerse beschaving de volgende keer.
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