Ian Buruma en The Unthinkable

Het begin van de twintigste eeuw gaf een exponentiële groei te zien van informatie, die via woorden en beelden beschikbaar kwam. Dankzij het baanbrekende werk dat de telegraaf en de fotografie hadden verricht, ontstond er een nieuwe definitie van informatie. Voortaan was er sprake van informatie die de noodzaak tot samenhang verwierp, die zonder context voortschreed, die de nadruk legde op het hier en nu in plaats van op historische continuïteit en die fascinatie bood in plaats van complexiteit en samenhang. En terwijl de Westerse beschaving nog naar adem hapte begon alweer de vierde informatierevolutie: die van de radio en de tv. En daarna de vijfde, de computertechnologie. Elke revolutie bracht nieuwe vormen van informatie voort, zorgde voor ongekende hoeveelheden ervan en verhoogde de snelheid waarmee de informatie-overdracht plaatsvond,

zo schreef de Amerikaanse media- en cultuur-criticus Neil Postman in zijn ook in Nederlands vertaalde boek Technopoly (1992). Over de vloedgolf aan informatie die de mens over zich heen krijgt, waarschuwde hij:

Wereldwijd stroomt vanuit miljoenen bronnen en via elk mogelijk kanaal of medium — lichtgolven, luchtgolven, ponsbanden, computerdatabanken, telefoondraden, televisiekabels, satellieten, drukpersen — informatie binnen. Daarachter ligt een nog grotere hoeveelheid informatie in elke denkbeeldige opslagvorm — op papier, op video- en geluidsband, op platen, film en computerchips — te wachten om binnengehaald te worden. Net als de tovenaarsleerling worden we overspoeld door informatie. En alles wat de tovenaar ons heeft nagelaten is een bezem. Informatie is een soort afval geworden, die niet alleen ongeschikt is om een antwoord te geven op de fundamentele menselijke vragen, maar ook nauwelijks in staat is op een enigszins coherente manier bij te dragen aan het oplossen van meer alledaagse problemen. Anders gezegd: de omgeving waarin de technopolie zich thuisvoelt is er één waarin de band tussen informatie en het menselijk streven verbroken is. Nog anders gezegd: informatie wordt ongericht verstuurd, naar niemand in het bijzonder, en is losgekoppeld van enigerlei theorie, betekenis of doel. 

Deze voortdurende informatiestroom is in handen van monopolies geraakt; en aldus ‘ontstaat een kennismonopolie bij mensen die hier helemaal niet competent voor zijn. Het geeft hen dus onverdiende autoriteit en prestige. De mensen buiten deze kennismonopolie moeten geloven in de bedrieglijke wijsheid van deze nieuwe technologieën.’ De onaantastbare macht van de anonieme technocratie roept steeds meer argwaan en woedde op bij miljarden machtelozen, die merken dat zij geen greep meer hebben op hun eigen bestaan, laat staan op dat van de maatschappij als geheel. Wat deze vervreemding van het individu en de fragmentering van het collectief hebben opgeleverd, is overal merkbaar: eenzaamheid. Die eenzaamheid van het individu is misschien wel het belangrijkste maatschappelijke, culturele en politieke probleem waarmee de mensheid nu wordt geconfronteerd. Zodra er namelijk geen samenhang meer is, houdt een gemeenschap op te functioneren. Dan is het ieder voor zich, precies datgene wat wij nu rondom ons zien gebeuren. In haar boek The Lonely Century. Coming Together in a World that’s Pulling Apart (2020), zet de Britse econome en hoogleraar Noreena Hertz het volgende uiteen:

The way we now live, the changing nature of work, the changing of relationships, the way our cities are now built and our offices designed, the way we treat each other and the way our government treats us, our smartphone addiction and even the way now love are all contributing to how lonely we have become. But we must go back further to fully understand how we became disconnected, siloed (afgezonderd. svh) and isolated. For the ideological underpinnings of the twenty-first century’s loneliness crisis pre-date technology, the most recent wave of urbanization, this century’s profound changes to the workplace and the 2008 financial crisis, well as, of course, the coronavirus pandemic. 

They go back instead to the 1980s when a particularly harsh form capitalism took hold: neoliberalism, an ideology with an overriding emphasis on freedom — ‘free’ choice, ‘free’ markets, ‘freedom’ from governments or trade union interference. One that prized an idealized of self-reliance, small government and a brutally competitive mindset that placed self-interest above community and the collective good. Championed in initially by both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and later embraced by 'Third Way’ politicians such as Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Gerard Schröder, this political project has dominated commercial and government practices over the past few decades. 

Why it has played a fundamental role in today's loneliness crisis is, first, because it has precipitated a significant rise in income and gaps within countries across many parts of the world. In US, in 1989 CEOs earned on average fifty-eight times the average worker’s salary, but by 2018 they made 278 times as much. In the UK, the share of income going to the top 1% of households has tripled in the last forty years with the wealthiest 10% now owning five times as much wealth as the bottom 50%. As a result, significant swathes of the population have, for a considerable time, felt behind, branded as losers in a society that has time only for winners, left to fend for themselves in a world in which their traditional moorings of work and community are disintegrating, social nets eroding and their status in society diminishing. Whilst those in higher income brackets can also be lonely, those who have less in economic terms are disproportionately so. Given contemporary levels of unemployment and economic hardship we need to be especially mindful of this.

Second, because neoliberalism has given ever more power and freer rein to big business and big finance, allowing shareholders and financial markets to shape the rules of the game and conditions of employment, even when this comes at an excessively high cost to workers and society at large. At the turn of the decade, record numbers of people globally believed that capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good. In Germany, the UK, the United States and Canada around half the population believed this to be the case, with many feeling that the state was so in thrall to the market that it wasn’t watching their backs or looking out for their needs. It’s lonely to feel uncared for, invisible and powerless in this way. The huge interventions governments made to support their citizens during 2020 were completely at odds with the economic ethos of the previous forty years, embodied by comments made by Ronald Reagan in 1986: ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”’ Even if the various coronavirus stimuli do signal the dawning of a new approach, the long-term social and economic impact of neoliberalism will inevitably take a long time to unwind. 

Third, because it profoundly reshaped not only economic relationships, but also our relationships with each other. For neoliberal capitalism was never just an economic policy, as Margaret Thatcher made clear in 1981 when she told the Sunday Times, ‘Economics is the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.’ And in many ways, neoliberalism succeeded in this aim. For it fundamentally changed how we saw each other and the obligations to each other that we felt, with its valorizing of qualities such as hyper-competitiveness and the pursuit of self-interest, regardless of the wider consequences. 

It is not that humans are essentially selfish — research in evolutionary biology makes clear that we are not. But with politicians actively championing a self-seeking, dog-eat-dog mindset, and ‘greed is good’ (the maxim Gordon Gekko famously uttered in the 1987 movie Wall Street) serving as neoliberalism’s bumper sticker, qualities such as solidarity, kindness and caring for each other were not only undervalued, but deemed irrelevant human traits. Under neoliberalism we were reduced to homo economicus, rational humans consumed only by our own self-interest.

We have even seen this play out in how our language has evolved. Collectivist words like ‘belong,’ ‘duty,’ ’share’ and ‘together’ have since the 1960s been increasingly supplanted by individualistic words and phrases such as ‘achieve’, ‘own,’ ‘personal’ and ‘special.’ Even pop song lyrics have become ever more individualistic over the past forty years, as pronouns such as ‘we’ and ‘us’ have been replaced by ‘I’ and ‘me’ in this generation’s lyrical imagination. In 1977, Queen told us that ‘we are the champions’ and Bowie that ‘we could be heroes.’ In 2013, Kanye West told us ‘I am a God,’ whilst Ariana Grande’s 2018 record-breaking ‘thank u, next’ was written as a love song to herself. 

It is not just in the West that we see this. When researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Singapore’s Nanyang Business School analyzed China’s ten most popular songs every year from 1970 to 2010, they discovered that first-person pronouns such as ‘I,’ ‘me’ and ‘mine’ were increasingly used in songs over the decades, while uses of ‘we,’ ‘us’ and ‘ours’ diminished. Even in a country traditionally defined by mass solidarity and collectivism, in which the state remains firmly in control, what we may think of as a super-individualistic neoliberal mindset has firmly taken hold. 

Neoliberalism has made us see ourselves as competitors not collaborators, consumers not citizens, hoarders not sharers, takers not givers, hustlers not helpers; people who are not only too busy to be there for our neighbors, but don’t even know our neighbors’ names. And we collectively let this happen. In many ways this was a rational response. For under neoliberal capitalism if I am not for ‘I’, then who will be? The market? The state? Our employer? Our neighbor? Unlikely. The trouble is that an ‘all about me’ selfish society in which people feel that they have to look after themselves because no one else will, is inevitably a lonely one. 

It also fast becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. This is because in order not to feel lonely we need to give as well as take, care as well as be cared for, be kind to each other and respectful of those around us, as well as be treated as such ourselves. 

If we are to come together in a world that’s pulling apart, we will need to reconnect capitalism to the pursuit of the common good and put care, compassion and cooperation at its very heart, with these behaviors extending to people who are different to us. That’s the real challenge: to reconnect not only with those similar to us, but also with the much wider community to which we ultimately belong. Post-Covid-19 this is both more urgent than ever and also more possible. 

The purpose of this book isn’t solely to articulate the scale of the loneliness crisis in the twenty-first century, how we got here, and the ways that it will get worse if we do nothing to respond. It is also a call for action. To governments and business for sure — loneliness has clear structural drivers that they must address. But also to each of us as individuals. 

Because society isn’t only done to us, we ‘do’ society too, we participate in it and shape it. So if we want to stop the destructive path of loneliness and restore the sense of community and cohesion we have lost, we will need to acknowledge that there are steps we must take, as well as trade-offs we will have to make — between individualism and collectivism, between self-interest and societal good, between anonymity and familiarity, between convenience and caring, between what is right for the self and what is best for the community, between liberty and fraternity. Choices that are not necessarily mutually exclusive, yet will demand the relinquishing of at least some of the freedoms that neoliberalism promised, falsely, that we could have at no cost. 

Het gebrek aan waardigheid en aan zelfrespect, het overal opduikende narcisme, demonstrerend hoe diep de mens in zichzelf zit opgesloten, de permanente staat van oorlog tegen mens en natuur, de verveling en ontevredenheid, het is allemaal voorspelt door de meest scherpzinnige geesten onder ons, geleerden als de joods-Amerikaanse historicus Daniel J. Boorstin, die zijn magistrale studie The Image. A Guide To Pseudo-Events In America (1961), begint met het citaat van de Zwitserse auteur Max Frisch dat ‘technologie’ de ‘kunstgreep’ is ‘om de wereld zo in te richten dat wij hem niet hoeven te ervaren.’ Op die manier zijn wij in een virtuele werkelijkheid verloren geraakt, in een vervreemdende realiteit. Onder de kop ‘Extravagant Expectation’ maakt Boorstin onmiddellijk in de introductie duidelijk dat:

In this book I describe the world of our making, how we have used our wealth, our literacy, our technology, and progress, to create the thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life. I recount historical forces which have given us this unprecedented opportunity to deceive ourselves and to befog our experience.  

Of course, America has provided the landscape and has given us the resources and the opportunity for this feat of national self-hypnosis. But each of us individually provides the market and the demand for the illusions which flood our experience. 

We want and we believe these illusions because we suffer extravagant expectations. We expect too much of the world. Our expectations are extravagant in the precise dictionary sense of the word — ‘going beyond the limits of or moderation?’ They are excessive,

en daarmee in strijd met de gouden regel van de Griekse oudheid: ‘Meden Agan,’ zoals de inscriptie luidde in de fronton van Apollo’s tempel in Delphi. ‘Alles met Mate,’ zo hield de ‘rationele God’ van ‘licht en eendracht, van rede en orde’ de burgers voor. De moderne mateloosheid van het onverzadigbare kapitalisme, de permanente ontevredenheid noodzakelijk om de consumptiemaatschappij overeind te houden, staat hier lijnrecht tegenover.  Boorstin: ‘We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible,’ en daarom verwachten we:  

to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for ‘excellence,’ to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy. We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly’ en bovenal ‘to revere God and to be God. 

Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer…

By harboring, nourishing, and ever enlarging our extravagant expectation we create the demand for the millions with which we deceive ourselves. And which we pay others to make to deceive us…

We tyrannize and frustrate ourselves by expecting more than the world can give or than we can make of the world… We have become so accustomed to our illusions that we mistake them for reality. We demand them. And we demand that there be always more of them, bigger and better and more vivid. They are the world of our making: the world of the image... We  are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in place of reality. 

To discover our illusions will not solve the problems of our world. But if we do not discover them, we will never discover our real problems. To dispel the ghosts which populate the world of our making will not give us the power to conquer the real enemies of the real world or to remake the real world. But it may help us discover that we cannot make the world in our image. It will liberate us and sharpen our vision. It will clear away the fog so we can face the world we share with all mankind. 

Inmiddels, zes decennia nadat Daniel Boorstin zijn waarschuwing de wereld in stuurde, zien we hoe ziek de Amerikaanse massa-maatschappij is geworden, en in zijn voetspoor de rest van de westerse wereld,  door zich te blijven vastklampen aan de materialistische illusies van het kapitalisme. Dit is de context waarin de mainstream-opiniemaker bij gebrek aan gewicht als vanzelf naar boven drijft, en meent de profeet van de hele mensheid te kunnen spelen, terwijl:

‘the chance to reason of most men is destroyed, as rationality increases and its locus, its control, is moved from the individual to the big-scale organization. There is then rationality without reason. Such rationality is not commensurate with freedom but the destroyer of it,’ zoals de Amerikaanse socioloog C. Wright Mills in The Sociological Imagination (1959) zo helder beschreef, en hem deed concluderen dat ‘the alienated man is the antithesis of the Western image of the free man.’ De gemeenschap waarin hij en zij gedijen ‘is the antithesis of the free society — or in the literal and plain meaning of the word, of a democratic society.’ Mills zet in zijn baanbrekende studie uiteen dat:

Freedom is not merely the chance to o as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them — an then, the opportunity to choose. That is why freedom cannot exist without an enlarged role of human reason in human affairs.  Within an individual’s biography and within a society’s history, the social task of reason is to formulate choices, to enlarge the scope of human decisions in the making of history. 

Vrijdag 1 juli 2016 lekte onder de kop ‘Breedlove’s war: Emails show ex-NATO general plotting US conflict with Russia,’ het volgende uit:

Hacked private emails of the US general formerly in charge of NATO reveal a campaign to pressure the White House into escalating the conflict with Russia over Ukraine, involving several influential players in Washington. 

The emails, posted by the site DCLeaks, show correspondence between General Philip M. Breedlove, former head of the US European Command and supreme commander of NATO forces, with several establishment insiders concerning the situation in Ukraine following the February 2014 coup that ousted the elected government in favor of a US-backed regime…

The hacked emails reveal his frequent and intense communications with retired General Wesley Clark, as well as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and involving a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, State Department official Victoria Nuland (de neoconservatieve staatssecretaris van Buitenlandse Zaken voor Europe and Eurasia onder Obama, die de gewelddadige Oekraïense machtsovername met 5 miljard dollar steunde. svh) and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt…

Breedlove continued to push for more aggressive US involvement, claiming a heavy Russian troop presence in Ukraine — which was later denied even by the government in Kiev. In March this year, the general was telling US lawmakers that Russia and Syria were ‘deliberately weaponizing migration in an attempt to overwhelm European structures and break European resolve.’

Breedlove was replaced at the helm of EUCOM and NATO in May, and officially retired from the military on July 1 (2016. svh). He was replaced by US Army General Curtis Scaparrotti, whose public statements suggest a similar level of hostility for Russia.

https://www.rt.com/usa/349213-hacked-emails-breedlove-ukraine/   

Eerder al, 6 maart 2015, waarschuwde Der Spiegel voor Breedlove’s ‘Oorlogszuchtigheid’ met de woorden:

BREEDLOVE'S BELLICOSITY: BERLIN ALARMED BY AGGRESSIVE NATO STANCE ON UKRAINE

It was quiet in eastern Ukraine last Wednesday. Indeed, it was another quiet day in an extended stretch of relative calm. The battles between the Ukrainian army and the pro-Russian separatists had largely stopped and heavy weaponry was being withdrawn. The Minsk cease-fire wasn't holding perfectly, but it was holding.

On that same day, General Philip Breedlove, the top NATO commander in Europe, stepped before the press in Washington. Putin, the 59-year-old said, had once again ‘upped the ante’ in eastern Ukraine — with ‘well over a thousand combat vehicles, Russian combat forces, some of their most sophisticated air defense, battalions of artillery’ having been sent to the Donbass. ‘What is clear,’ Breedlove said, ‘is that right now, it is not getting better. It is getting worse every day.’

German leaders in Berlin were stunned. They didn't understand what Breedlove was talking about. And it wasn't the first time. Once again, the German government, supported by intelligence gathered by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency, did not share the view of NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR).

The pattern has become a familiar one. For months, Breedlove has been commenting on Russian activities in eastern Ukraine, speaking of troop advances on the border, the amassing of munitions and alleged columns of Russian tanks. Over and over again, Breedlove's numbers have been significantly higher than those in the possession of America's NATO allies in Europe. As such, he is playing directly into the hands of the hardliners in the US Congress and in NATO.

The German government is alarmed. Are the Americans trying to thwart European efforts at mediation led by Chancellor Angela Merkel? Sources in the Chancellery have referred to Breedlove's comments as ‘dangerous propaganda.’ Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier even found it necessary recently to bring up Breedlove's comments with NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg.

But Breedlove hasn't been the only source of friction. Europeans have also begun to see others as hindrances in their search for a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine conflict. First and foremost among them is Victoria Nuland, head of European affairs at the US State Department. She and others would like to see Washington deliver arms to Ukraine and are supported by Congressional Republicans as well as many powerful Democrats.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/germany-concerned-about-aggressive-nato-stance-on-ukraine-a-1022193.html   

Zomer 2015 zette Kissinger uiteen dat een:

number of things need to be recognized. One, the relationship between Ukraine and Russia will always have a special character in the Russian mind. It can never be limited to a relationship of two traditional sovereign states, not from the Russian point of view, maybe not even from Ukraine’s. So, what happens in Ukraine cannot be put into a simple formula of applying principles that worked in Western Europe, not that close to Stalingrad and Moscow. In that context, one has to analyze how the Ukraine crisis occurred. It is not conceivable that Putin spends sixty billion euros on turning a summer resort into a winter Olympic village in order to start a military crisis the week after a concluding ceremony that depicted Russia as a part of Western civilization.

Dergelijke informatie wordt door de Nederlandse mainstream-pers stelselmatig genegeerd. Gedwee volgt zij de propaganda van het Atlantisch bondgenootschap, en weigert zij het feit te analyseren dat de elite in Washington en op Wall Street zich tevens voorbereidt op een gewapend conflict met China. In 2020 was 60 procent van de Amerikaanse marinevloot in de Zuid Chinese Zee gestationeerd, waardoor nu ‘U.S. Navy destroyers stalk China's claims in South China Sea.’ De reden is dat de Amerikaanse  politiek ten aanzien van de Pacific Rim erop gericht is: 

to ‘contain’ China, to limit China’s ability to project power in the waters off its southern coast, to bolster U.S. ‘hegemony’ or primacy in the East Asia maritime space. 

Gezien de nieuwe Amerikaanse nucleaire strategie is van belang te weten dat vrijdag 5 augustus 2016 uitlekte dat het Amerikaanse leger de Rand Corporation opdracht had gegeven tot het ‘Thinking Through' van 'the Unthinkable.' Onder de kop ‘RAND CORPORATION LAYS OUT SCENARIOS FOR U.S. WAR WITH CHINA’ vernam de lezer: 

A new study by the RAND Corporation titled ‘War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable’ is just the latest think tank paper devoted to assessing a US war against China. The study, commissioned by the US Army, provides further evidence that a war with China is being planned and prepared in the upper echelons of the American military-intelligence apparatus.

That the paper emerges from the RAND Corporation has a particular and sinister significance. Throughout the Cold War, RAND was the premier think tank for ‘thinking the unthinkable’ — a phrase made notorious by RAND’s chief strategist in the 1950s, Herman Kahn. Kahn devoted his macabre book ‘On Thermonuclear War’ to elaborating a strategy for a ‘winnable’ nuclear war against the Soviet Union.

According to the preface of the new study, released last week, ‘This research was sponsored by the Office of the Undersecretary of the Army and conducted within the RAND Arroyo Center’s Strategy, Doctrine, and Resources Program. RAND Arroyo Center, part of the RAND Corporation, is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the United States Army.’

The paper is a war-gaming exercise in the Kahn tradition: weighing the possible outcomes of a war between two nuclear powers with utter indifference to the catastrophic consequences for people in the United States, China and the rest of the world.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/08/05/pers-a05.html   

http://thediplomat.com/2016/08/the-us-china-perception-gap-in-the-south-china-sea/   

Eind januari 2018 waarschuwde de Amerikaanse huisarts Robert F. Dodge, bestuurslid van ondermeer ‘Nuclear Age Peace Foundation,’ voor het almaar dichterbij komen van ‘the Apocalypse,’ nu:

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has just moved their Doomsday Clock forward to two minutes till midnight. Midnight represents nuclear apocalypse. The Clock is recognized around the world as an indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and emerging technologies. Each year the decision to move the Clock forward, backward, or not at all, is determined by the Bulletins Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors which includes 15 Nobel Laureates.

In making this year’s move to two minutes till midnight, the Bulletin stated that ‘in 2017, world leaders failed to respond effectively to the looming threat of nuclear war and climate change, making the world’s security situation more dangerous than it was a year ago-and as dangerous as it has been since World War II.’

In recent years the Bulletin has added climate change to nuclear weapons as a major risk of global conflict. This year the greatest threat remained that of nuclear conflict with the ongoing North Korea crisis featuring dangerous rhetoric and actions coming from both sides. World experts have made their assessments; leadership in the US and North Korea have now radically elevated the risk of nuclear war either by accident or miscalculation.

Coupled with deteriorating relationships between the world’s nuclear powers, with US and Russian relations at the lowest point in decades and rising tensions between the US and China, all while the United States plans to rebuild its nuclear arsenal — prompting all of the other nations to follow suit. The situation is further undermined from a diplomatic standpoint by an understaffed and demoralized US State Department and thus the Clock ticks forward.

The Board stated, ‘To call the world nuclear situation dire is to understate the danger — and its immediacy.’ […]

We have the ability and now the legal framework with the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons to abolish nuclear weapons…

It’s time, possibly our final chance, to abolish nuclear weapons. It’s two minutes till midnight.

http://www.peacevoice.info/2018/01/26/11527/ 

Op de Amerikaanse website CounterPunch van 7 februari 2018 wees Dodge bovendien op het volgende:

Scientific studies have demonstrated the potential catastrophic global environmental effects following a limited regional nuclear war, using just 100 12-kiloton Hiroshima-size weapons (of the 16,300 in the arsenals of the nine nuclear nations, which is approximately one-half of just one percent) that would potentially kill two billion people.

This new Doctrine proposes the development of two new generations of nuclear weapons including ‘low-yield nukes,’ Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBM) and the long-term development of Submarine Launched Cruise Missiles (SLCM). These ‘low-yield nuke’ are 20 kiloton — same as the larger Nagasaki size bombs that killed more than 70,000 people. Seemingly ignoring the fact that nuclear weapons are nuclear weapons regardless of size with the same horrific initial devastation and radioactive fallout, these weapons are proposed to demonstrate America’s resolve in deterring nuclear attack.

In fact this circular argument of smaller nuclear weapons being a greater deterrence actually increases the likelihood of their use. This further promotes the mythology of deterrence which actually drives all nine nuclear states to follow suit. 

Gekoppeld aan de de nieuwe nucleaire strategie van het Amerikaanse ministerie van Defensie, waarbij ook ‘non-nuclear circumstances’ aanleiding kunnen zijn voor een Amerikaanse nucleaire aanval:

such as certain cyberattacks, the risk of nuclear war is dramatically increased, bringing the imminent threat of nuclear war to the center of US military policy and foreign policy. This fact was also acknowledged in the recent Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ movement of their nuclear Doomsday clock to two minutes till midnight, the closest since World War II.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/07/trumps-nuclear-doctrine-resumes-cold-war/ 

Zijn deze levensbedreigende feiten aanleiding voor de ‘vrije pers’ om de alarmbel te luiden? Het antwoord is: Nee! De commerciële media moeten het hebben van de waan van de dag, én van een vijandsbeeld. Bovendien kan alleen nog een permanente oorlogsdreiging de bedreigde interne cohesie kunstmatig in stand houden. En nu de advertentie-inkomsten van de kranten en tijdschriften almaar blijven teruglopen, ziet de ‘corporate press’ zich genoodzaakt politieke en militaire spanningen zo veel mogelijk en zo lang mogelijk te exploiteren. Op die wijze verenigen zich de belangen van de elites en die van hun media. De voormalige buitenland-correspondent van The New York Times Chris Hedges gaf in dit verband als voorbeeld de demonisering van Rusland, de absurde gedachte dat Rusland verantwoordelijk was voor de verkiezing van Donald Trump, in plaats van de maatschappelijke ongelijkheid, waarvan The New York Times en vooral zijn columnisten jarenlang ‘cheerleaders’ zijn geweest. De mainstream-media weigeren te verklaren hoe het mogelijk is geweest dat Hillary Clinton met een verkiezingsfonds van ruim een miljard dollar niet in staat is geweest de vermeende Russische propaganda onderuit te halen. In reactie op de waanzin gaf in april 2018 de Amerikaanse hoogleraar Media Studies, Mark Crispin Miller, een ander voorbeeld van 'fake news':

When one reads the ‘news’ about Syria, one might as well have been reading the ‘news’ about the Hun (de Duitsers. svh) in 1915. It is exactly the same. It is really staggering (onthutsend. svh) how little moral and intellectual progress the mass-mind seems to have made, especially in a country where we don’t study propaganda-history in school, as we should. The ‘Times’ and the rest of them are filled with propaganda and ton’s of fluff, celebrity ‘news’ and so on. To bring this back to our initial point: the ground of this shift is clearly economic, there is no blood-flow there, they don’t have enough advertising anymore, so they have to align increasingly on clickbait revenues (content that is aimed at generating online advertising revenue, especially at the expense of quality or accuracy, relying on sensationalist headlines to attract click-throughs and to encourage forwarding of the material over online social networks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x39yKWWP10). And there is another danger: as the press has vanished into the media cartel — six transnational corporations that control some ninety percent of the content that we digest daily — as the media cartel become more concentrated, it is simultaneously also becoming closer and closer to the state. 

Voorbeelden hiervan zijn de Amerikaanse generaals buiten dienst, doorgaans werkzaam voor de oorlogsindustrie, die door Amerikaanse netwerken opgevoerd worden als onpartijdige deskundigen, of John Brennan, de voormalige CIA-directeur, die vandaag de dag als analyst via MSNBC propaganda mag verspreiden. Zelfs de schijn van onpartijdigheid bestaat niet meer, in feite is het één en al propaganda geworden. Daarnaast benadrukte professor Crispin Miller nog een ander gevaar: 

Trump has performed an invaluable function in all this, because he enables the press to get up its high horse, count his countless, stupid, glaring, obvious lies, which are about nothing, and then pat themselves on the back as if the far fewer, far more dangerous lies that they routinely tell, are not lies. So Trump enables the corporate press to pose as honest, as truth-tellers, and he also enables the CIA and FBI to look like our champions, as if they are going to save us from Washington.

De hoerigheid van de massamedia bedreigt de toekomst, nu ook nog eens de verwachtingen van de Verlichting dat rationalisme, de rede en de vrijheid als drijvende krachten van de geschiedenis zouden worden, illusies zijn gebleken. Ruim zes decennia geleden wierp C. Wright Mills de volgende vragen op: 

Where is the intelligentsia that is carrying on the big discourse of the Western world and whose work as intellectuals is influential among parties and publics and relevant to the great decisions of outs time? Where are the mass media open to such men? Who among this who are in charge of the the two-part state and its ferocious military machines are alert to what goes on in the world of knowledge and reason and sensibility? Why is the free intellect so divorced from decisions of power. Why does there now prevail among men of power such a higher and irresponsible ignorance? 

En wanneer Mills tot de slotsom komt dat ‘The journalistic lie, become routine, is part of it too; and so is much of the pretentious triviality that passes for social science,’ dan kan ik niet anders dan constateren dat al decennia lang niets wezenlijks is veranderd. De gekte is alleen nog maar groter geworden, en hiermee eindig ik deze serie artikelen.