De onderzoekers van Rand (RAND Corporation, een nauw aan het Amerikaans militair-industrieel complex gelieerde denktank. svh) stellen allereerst vast dat Rusland geen belang heeft bij oorlog aan zijn westflank. De NAVO is sterk. Rusland heeft de middelen niet. Het beseft ook dat ineenstorting van de NAVO of EU zijn stabiliteit kan bedreigen: als daar een gat ontstaat, kan het er zelf invallen. Daarom focust Rusland op subversieve acties, meestal undercover, die vaak worden ontkend: cybercrime, vergiftigingen enz. Dit ondermijnt de NAVO en EU: het creëert chaos, verdeelt lidstaten, zaait angst bij burgers. Zo hoopt Rusland tegen minimale kosten zijn buitenlands-politieke doelen te bereiken: territorium, regime en invloedssfeer beschermen; erkenning krijgen als grootmacht; economisch gewin najagen; NAVO- en EU-uitbreiding verhinderen…
Europa kan allereerst preventief reageren: betere grensbewaking, serieuze samenwerking van geheime diensten, robuuste bescherming van data en infrastructuur. Ten tweede kunnen we straffen, terugslaan. Europa is daar niet goed in: lidstaten hebben verschillende belangen. Economische sancties zijn één ding. Stilzwijgend Russische schepen vastleggen die toevallig in Europese havens worden gerepareerd, is een ander. Dit kan onder de radar, en heeft als voordeel dat Rusland gepakt wordt zonder publiekelijk te worden vernederd. Ten derde: we moeten ook wortels bieden. Eisen dat de Wit-Russische journalist en activist Roman Protasevich vrijkomt, werkt niet. Wat wél kan werken: de grenzen sluiten om vage, fytosanitaire redenen, als drukmiddel — en dan achter de schermen onderhandelen over vrijlating.
Dit alles staat haaks op wie wij zijn. Of dénken dat we zijn. Het moeilijkste is om te erkennen dat het gewoon oorlog is. En dat we, wat ons antwoord ook is, bereid moeten zijn daarvoor een prijs te betalen. Onze veiligheid staat op het spel.
Aldus beweert een moeder van drie kinderen uit een klein land dat braaf de neoliberale politiek uitvoert van de almaar rijker wordende elite. Het roept de vraag op wat nu precies De Gruyter's eigen belang is om deze oorlogszuchtige NAVO-propaganda te verspreiden? Die vraag is zeker gerechtvaardigd nadat de Franse president Emmanuel Macron zich op 27 augustus 2019 genoodzaakt voelde om tijdens een Conferentie van Ambassadeurs op te merken: ‘We were accustomed to an international order which, since the 18th century, rested on a Western hegemony,’ maar ‘Things change. And they are now deeply shaken by the mistakes of Westerners in certain crises, by the choices that have been made by Americans for several years which did not start with this administration (onder president Trump. svh), but have led us to re-examine certain involvements in conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere, and to rethink fundamental diplomatic and military strategy and on occasion elements of solidarity which we thought were forever inalienable even though we had developed them together during periods of geopolitical significance, which have however now changed. And it is also the emergence of new powers whose impact we have probably underestimated for far too long.
Maar omdat Nederland een klein land is, met een kleine, merendeels provinciaals georiënteerde intelligentsia, klampt het zich vast aan de inmiddels achterhaalde Koude Oorlogsdoctrine, waarin tot het einde der dagen de Europese landen als satellieten om de VS blijven cirkelen. Veelzeggend is dat binnen deze nauw omlijnde context Caroline de Gruyter voorstelt Moskou te dwingen een ‘journalist en activist’ uit een ander land vrij te laten door ‘de grenzen’ te ‘sluiten’ met het qua oppervlakte grootste land ter wereld. Even absurd is het door haar verzonnen ‘drukmiddel,’ te weten ‘vage fytosanitaire redenen’ om Rusland onder druk te zetten. Met andere woorden, om één ‘Wit-Russische journalist en activist’ vrij te krijgen moeten naar schatting 150 miljoen Russische burgers worden gestraft, door allereerst de Russische overheid — niet die van Wit-Rusland — te chanteren.
Typerend in dit verband is dat De Gruyter, net als de rest van de polderpers, zwijgt over de opsluiting van de journalist Julian Assange, die een onschatbare journalistieke bijdrage heeft geleverd aan het onthullen van ondermeer Amerikaanse oorlogsmisdaden en misdaden tegen de menselijkheid. In 2006 richtte hij WikiLeaks op, een internationale non-profitorganisatie die misdaden en schendingen van het nationaal- en internationaal recht openbaar maakte, informatie die de Verenigde Staten in het bijzonder en het Westen in het algemeen juist geheim willen houden. Zo wist WikiLeaks in 2010 internationaal aandacht te krijgen nadat ‘it published a series of leaks provided by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. These leaks included the Baghdad airstrike Collateral Murder video (April 2010), the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), and Cablegate (November 2010).’
As we have pointed out since Media Lens began in 2001, a fundamental feature of corporate media is propaganda by omission. Over the past week, a stunning example has highlighted this core property once again.
A major witness in the US case against Julian Assange has just admitted fabricating key accusations in the indictment against the Wikileaks founder. These dramatic revelations emerged in an extensive article published on 26 June in Stundin, an Icelandic newspaper. The paper interviewed the witness, Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, a former WikiLeaks volunteer, who admitted that he had made false allegations against Assange after being recruited by US authorities. Thordarson, who has several convictions for sexual abuse of minors and financial fraud, began working with the US Department of Justice and the FBI after receiving a promise of immunity from prosecution. He even admitted to continuing his crime spree while working with the US authorities.
Last summer, US officials had presented an updated version of their indictment against Assange to Magistrate Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser at the Old Bailey in London. Key to this update was the assertion that Assange had instructed Thordarson to commit computer intrusions or hacking in Iceland.
As the Stundin article reported:
‘The aim of this addition to the indictment was apparently to shore up and support the conspiracy charge against Assange in relation to his interactions with Chelsea Manning. Those occurred around the same time he resided in Iceland and the authors of the indictment felt they could strengthen their case by alleging he was involved in illegal activity there as well. This activity was said to include attempts to hack into the computers of members of [the Icelandic] parliament and record their conversations.
In fact, Thordarson now admits to Stundin that Assange never asked him to hack or access phone recordings of MPs.
Judge Baraitser’s ruling on 4 January, 2021 was against extradition to the US. But she did so purely on humanitarian grounds concerning Assange’s health, suicide risk and the extreme conditions he would face in confinement in US prisons.’
‘With regards to the actual accusations made in the indictment Baraitser sided with the arguments of the American legal team, including citing the specific samples from Iceland which are now seriously called into question.
Other misleading elements can be found in the indictment, and later reflected in the Magistrate’s judgement, based on Thordarson’s now admitted lies.’
The Stundin article further details Thordarson’s lies and deceptions, including mispresenting himself as an official representative of WikiLeaks while a volunteer in 2010-2011, even impersonating Assange, and embezzling more than $50,000 from the organization.
By August 2011, Thordarson was being pursued by WikiLeaks staff trying to locate the missing funds. In fact, Thordarson had arranged for the money to be sent to his private bank account by forging an email in Assange’s name. That month, Thordarson sought a way out by contacting the US Embassy in Iceland, offering to be an informant in the case against Assange.
‘within 48 hrs a private jet landed in Reykjavik with around eight [US] agents who quickly set up meetings with Thordarson and with people from the Icelandic State Prosecutors office and the State Police Commissioner.’
But it turned out that the US officers did not have permission from the Icelandic government to operate in the country and Ögmundur Jónasson, then Iceland’s minister of interior, ordered them to leave. Meanwhile, the FBI were allegedly complicit in DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks on the websites of several Iceland government institutions. The FBI had then approached Icelandic authorities, promising to assist them in preventing any future such attacks. In reality, the approach was a ruse to fool Iceland into cooperation in an attempt to entrap Assange.
‘were trying to use things here [in Iceland] and use people in our country to spin a web, a cobweb that would catch Julian Assange.’
The US officials left Iceland, flying to Denmark, but taking with them their new informant and ‘star witness’, Thordarson.
Stundin reported:
‘The meeting in Denmark was the first of a few where the FBI enthusiastically embraced the idea of co-operation with Thordarson. He says they wanted to know everything about WikiLeaks, including physical security of staff. They took material he had gathered, including data he had stolen from WikiLeaks employees and even planned to send him to England with a wire. Thordarson claimed in interviews he had refused that particular request. It was probably because he was not welcomed anymore as he knew WikiLeaks people had found out, or were about to firmly establish, that he had embezzled funds from the organization.’
However:
After months of collaboration the FBI seem to have lost interest. At about the same time charges were piling up against Thordarson with the Icelandic authorities for massive fraud, forgeries and theft on the one hand and for sexual violations against underage boys he had tricked or forced into sexual acts on the other.
After long investigations Thordarson was sentenced in 2013 and 2014 and received relatively lenient sentences as the judge took into account that he changed his plea at court and pleaded guilty to all counts.’
The article continued:
‘Incarceration did not seem to have an intended effect of stopping Thordarson from continuing his life of crime. It actually took off and expanded in extent and scope in 2019 when the Trump-era DoJ [Department of Justice] decided to revisit him, giving him a formal status as witness in the prosecution against Julian Assange and granting him immunity in return from any prosecution.’
Under President Obama, the US Department of Justice had decided against indicting Assange, despite devoting huge resources to building a case against him. The stumbling block was ‘The New York Times Problem’: the difficulty in distinguishing between WikiLeaks publications and NYT publications of the same material. In other words, prosecuting WikiLeaks would pose grave First Amendment risks for even ‘respectable’ media such as the NYT.
But this changed after Trump took office. Stundin explained:
‘President Donald Trump’s appointed Attorney general William Barr did not share these concerns, and neither did his Trump-appointed deputy Kellen S. Dwyer. Barr, who faced severe criticism for politicizing the DoJ on behalf of the president, got the ball rolling on the Assange case once again. Their argument was that if they could prove he was a criminal rather than a journalist the charges would stick, and that was where Thordarson’s testimony would be key.
‘In May 2019 Thordarson was offered an immunity deal, signed by Dwyer, that granted him immunity from prosecution based on any information on wrong doing they had on him. The deal, seen in writing by Stundin, also guarantees that the DoJ would not share any such information to other prosecutorial or law enforcement agencies. That would include Icelandic ones, meaning that the Americans will not share information on crimes he might have committed threatening Icelandic security interests – and the Americans apparently had plenty of those but had over the years failed to share them with their Icelandic counterparts.’
Thordarson’s offer of an immunity deal came the month following Assange’s forced removal from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, most likely with US connivance, and subsequent incarceration in the high-security Belmarsh prison.
It is not clear from the Stundin article why Thordarson has now decided to come clean. But the Stundin journalists noted that a psychiatric assessment that had been submitted to an Icelandic court before he was sentenced diagnosed him as a sociopath:
‘incapable of remorse but still criminally culpable for his actions. He was assessed to be able to understand the basic difference between right and wrong. He just did not seem to care.’
In a new blog piece discussing these revelations, Craig Murray, who had reported from the Old Bailey during the Assange extradition hearing, referred back to the final day of proceedings. Magistrate Baraitser had refused to accept an affidavit from Assange’s solicitor Gareth Peirce addressing the updated indictment on the grounds it was out of time:
‘The affidavit explained that the defense had been unable to respond to the new accusations in the United States government’s second superseding indictment, because these wholly new matters had been sprung on them just six weeks before the hearing resumed on 8 September 2020.
The defense had not only to gather evidence from Iceland, but had virtually no access to Assange to take his evidence and instructions, as he was effectively in solitary confinement in Belmarsh. The defense had requested an adjournment to give them time to address the new accusations, but this adjournment had been refused by Baraitser.
She now refused to accept Gareth Peirce’s affidavit setting out these facts.’
Even before the Stundin article was published five days ago, Thordarson’s testimony should have already been recognized as suspect, to say the least. As WikiLeaks noted last year:
‘The “Star Witness” of the new superseding indictment is a diagnosed sociopath/ convicted conman/ child abuser/ FBI informant who was found guilty in Iceland of impersonating #Assange’
The recent Stundin revelations that the updated US indictment against Assange rests on now-admitted lies means that the FBI case is demonstrably a travesty.
‘It’s now clearer than ever before that the U.S. indictment of #Assange is based on fraud. A key accuser admits he lied to the help set up Assange. How much evidence does the Justice Department need stop this criminal abuse of power?’
As the famous US whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted:
‘This is the end of the case against Julian Assange.’
Or, as journalist Glenn Greenwald followed up, more realistically:
‘It should be.’
Jennifer Robinson, a human rights attorney who has been advising Assange and WikiLeaks since 2010, told Democracy Now:
‘The factual basis for this case has completely fallen apart.’
Robinson pointed out:
‘the evidence from Thordarson that was given to the United States and formed the basis of the second, superseding indictment, including allegations of hacking, has now been, on his own admission, demonstrated to have been fabricated [our emphasis]. Not only did he misrepresent his access to Julian Assange and to WikiLeaks and his association with Julian Assange, he has now admitted that he made up and falsely misrepresented to the United States that there was any association with WikiLeaks and any association with hacking.
‘So, this is just the latest revelation to demonstrate why the U.S. case should be dropped.’
Robinson expanded:
‘it’s significant that the initial indictment for Julian Assange related only to the publications back in 2010, 2011, the Chelsea Manning publications. It was a second, superseding indictment, introduced by the Trump administration, which was based upon Thordarson’s evidence [our emphasis]. Now, any lawyer and even any layperson would be looking at evidence from a convicted felon, who had been convicted of forgery, fraud and sexual abuse allegations associated with minors. That is a problematic source. Now we have him admitting that he lied to the FBI about that evidence. This raises serious concerns about the integrity of this investigation and the integrity of this criminal prosecution, and serious questions ought to be being asked within the Department of Justice about this prosecution and the fact that it is continuing at all.’
The headline of the article accompanying Robinson’s interview put it succinctly:
‘U.S. Case Against Julian Assange Falls Apart, as Key Witness Says He Lied to Get Immunity’
‘I don’t think one US or UK newspaper has reported this. The free press is incredible.’
Several days on, the ‘mainstream’ media silence is truly remarkable. As we remarked via Twitter:
‘The discipline, or blindness, to ignore awkward facts is a reliable feature of corporate “journalism”’
Of course, it is possible that we have missed something, somewhere in the ‘MSM’; perhaps a brief item at 3am on the BBC World Service. But in a sane world, Stundin’s revelations about a key Assange witness — that Thordarson lied in exchange for immunity from prosecution — would have been headline news everywhere, with extensive media coverage on BBC News at Six and Ten, ITV News, Channel 4 News, front-page stories in the Times, Telegraph, the Guardian and more. The silence is quite extraordinary; and disturbing. Caitlin Johnstone described it as a ‘weird, creepy media blackout’:
‘not one major western media outlet outside of Iceland has reported on this massive and entirely legitimate news story. A search brings up coverage by Icelandic media, by Russian media, and by smaller western outlets like Democracy Now, World Socialist Website, Consortium News, Zero Hedge and some others, but as of this writing this story has been completely ignored by all major outlets who are ostensibly responsible for informing the public in the western world.’
Johnstone continued:
‘It’s not that those outlets have been ignoring Assange altogether these last few days either. Reuters recently published an interview with Assange’s fiance Stella Moris. Evening Standard has a recent article out on Assange’s plans to marry Moris in Belmarsh, as does Deutsche Welle. It’s just this one story in particular that they’ve been blacking out completely.’
She offered an explanation for the silence across the media:
‘they’re all generally following the lead of just a handful of top-tier publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian. If just those few outlets decide to ignore a major news story that’s inconvenient for the powerful (either by persuasion, infiltration or by their own initiative), then no one else will either. As far as the media-consuming public is concerned, it’s like the major news story never happened at all.’
More fundamentally:
‘Western mass media outlets are propaganda. They are owned and controlled by wealthy people in coordination with the secretive government agencies tasked with preserving the world order upon which the media-owning plutocrats have built their kingdoms, and their purpose is to manipulate the way the mainstream public thinks, acts and votes into alignment with the agendas of the ruling class.
You see this propaganda in the way things are reported, but you also see it in the way things are not reported. Entire news stories can be completely redacted from mainstream attention if they are sufficiently inconvenient for the mechanisms of empire, or only allowed in via platforms like Tucker Carlson Tonight and thereby tainted and spun as ridiculous right-wing conspiracy theories.’
Our polite challenges to Paul Royall, editor of BBC News at Six and Ten, and Katharine Viner, editor of the Guardian, went unanswered, despite multiple retweets and follow-up queries by other Twitter users. Of course, this is the standard non-response of even the ‘best’ state-corporate media to uncomfortable questions.
As we have often observed, the establishment media relentlessly warn of the insidious nature of ‘fake news’: a claim that does have a seed of validity. But it is the state-corporate media themselves who are the primary purveyors of fake news. As Tim Coles, author of ‘Real Fake News’, commented:
‘Whenever people in power tell you that fake news is undermining democracy, they really mean that alternative sources of information are challenging their grip on power.’
In fact, the most dangerous component of ‘MSM’ (mainstream-media. svh) fake news is arguably propaganda by omission. In ostensible ‘democracies,’ the public cannot make informed decisions, and take appropriate action, when the crimes of ruling elites are kept hidden by a complicit media.
https://www.medialens.org/2021/a-remarkable-silence-media-blackout-after-key-witness-against-assange-admits-lying/#more-6751
Het feit dat Caroline de Gruyter deelneemt aan deze ‘conspiracy of silence,’ die zo kenmerkend is voor de westerse ‘corporate press,’ plus het feit dat zij wel opkomt voor een ‘Wit-Russische journalist en activist,’ om haar stellige mening te onderbouwen ‘dat het gewoon oorlog is met Rusland,’ demonstreert haar journalistieke corruptheid. Zij is hier niet meer dan een propagandiste van ‘fake news,’ die de journalistiek misbruikt om de belangen van het westers militair-industrieel complex te behartigen. Een dergelijke opiniemaker probeert de geest rijp te maken voor, in het uiterste geval, een nucleair armageddon, al was het maar omdat de ‘directe oorzaak van de Derde Wereldoorlog haar voorbereiding’ is, zoals de prominente Amerikaanse socioloog C. Wright Mills in 1958 schreef, vier jaar voordat de Amerikaanse historicus Arthur Schlesinger, adviseur van president John Kennedy, naar aanleiding van de Cuba Crisis in oktober 1962, had opgemerkt dat dit ‘the most dangerous moment in human history’ was geweest. Op zijn beurt verklaarde de toenmalige Amerikaanse minister van Defensie Robert McNamara in de bekroonde documentaire The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003) dat:
at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today.
De meeste westerse autoriteiten staan onverschillig tegenover dit immens gevaar, en zijn te druk bezig met de waan van de dag. Tot hoever het cynisme van de macht gaat blijkt ondermeer uit het feit dat de Amerikaanse oud-minister van Buitenlandse Zaken, Mike Pompeo, lachend verklaarde ‘I was the CIA director, we lied, we cheated, we stole… we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.’ Het academisch geschoolde publiek waardeerde zijn relaas door te lachen en te applaudisseren. En de slachtoffers van dit misdadig beleid? Wel, zoals gebruikelijk bleven die onzichtbaar. Such is nu eenmaal life, in de ogen van the higher powers. Vanzelfsprekend wordt ook dit door Caroline de Gruyter en de voltallige polderpers verzwegen. Net als in de voormalige Sovjet Unie werkt vandaag de dag in het Westen de conspiracy of silence optimaal dankzij de mainstream-pers en het censureren van dissidenten.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPt-zXn05ac
De meeste Nederlanders die ik hiernaar vroeg waren niet op de hoogte van het feit dat tijdens de Cuba Crisis op 27 oktober 1962 de hele mensheid gered werd door het beheerste optreden van één Sovjet-officier aan boord van een B-59 duikboot, uitgerust met nucleaire wapens, die voor de kust van het zuiden van de VS voer. Aangezien de Sovjet-onderzeeër door de Amerikaanse marine werd bestookt met dieptebommen, waarvan enkele niet ver van de romp van de onderzeeboot tot ontploffing kwamen, werd de onderzeeboot gedwongen lang onder water te blijven. Volgens getuigen aan boord steeg de temperatuur:
sharply, especially inside the submarine's engine room. The ship went dark, with only emergency lights continuing to function. Carbon dioxide in the air reached near-lethal levels. People could barely breathe. 'One of the duty officers fainted and fell down. Then another one followed, then the third one… They were falling like dominoes. But we were still holding on, trying to escape. We were suffering like this for about four hours.' Then 'the Americans hit us with something stronger… We thought — that's it — the end.'
Panic ensued. Commander Valentin Savitsky tried unsuccessfully to reach the general staff. He then ordered the officer in charge of the nuclear torpedo to prepare it for battle and shouted. 'Maybe the war has already started up there, while we are doing somersaults here. We're going to blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all — we will not disgrace our Navy.' Savitsky turned to the other two officers aboard for their approval. One agreed, but political officer Vasili Arkhipov refused to launch, single-handedly preventing nuclear war,
aldus het relaas in The Untold History of the United States (2012) van de Amerikaanse filmmaker Oliver Stone en de historicus professor Peter Kuznick, directeur van de Nuclear Studies Institute at American University.
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/05/vasili-arkhipov-the-man-who-saved-the-world/
The man who saved the world: The Soviet submariner who single-handedly averted WWIII at height of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
De toenmalige Amerikaanse minister van Defensie Robert McNamara vroeg zich tijdens de crisis af of hij 'would live to see another Saturday night' en Dino Brugioni, lid van het CIA-team dat de wapenopbouw bespioneerde, zag geen andere uitweg dan 'war and complete destruction.' De broer van president John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy die in het geheim met de Russische autoriteiten onderhandelde, schreef: 'Stond de wereld aan de rand van de totale vernietiging? Was het een dwaling? Een fout? Was er nog iets anders dat ondernomen had moeten worden? Of niet ondernomen was? President Kennedy had de loop der gebeurtenissen op gang gezet, maar kon deze niet langer meer beheersen.' Zowel de Amerikaanse als Sovjet elite beseften dat er een proces op gang was gekomen dat zijn eigen dynamiek kende en derhalve door niemand kon worden beheerst. In zijn memoires, die in 1970 uitkwamen:
Khrushchev claimed that Robert Kennedy's message was even more desperate. 'Even though the President himself is very much against starting the war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will,' he warned. 'If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American army could get out of control.’
U.S. Military leaders were furious when the crisis ended without an attack on Cuba. On several occasions, they had as much as accused Kennedy of cowardice for resisting their recommendations. McNamara recalled their bitterness at a meeting with Kennedy the day after the Soviets agreed to remove their missiles: 'The President invited the chiefs to thank them for their support during the crisis, and there was one hell of a scene. Curtis LeMay came out saying, 'We lost. We ought to just go in there today and knock 'em off.'
Als Chef Staf van de Amerikaanse Luchtmacht had LeMay onmiddellijk gesteld:
The Russian bear has alway been eager to stick his paw in Latin American waters. Now we've got him in a trap, let's take his leg off right up to his testicles. On second thought, let's take off his testicles, too.'
President Kennedy 'was shaken by LeMay's cavalier attitude toward the possibility of nuclear was.' Het was dezelfde Curtis LeMay over wie minister van Defensie Robert McNamara verklaarde dat die na 1945 had gezegd:
'If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.' And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?
In de met een Oscar bekroonde documentaire The Fog of War (2003) stelde McNamara de vraag:
Why was it necessary to drop the nuclear bomb if LeMay was burning up Japan? And he went on from Tokyo to firebomb other cities. 58% of Yokohama. Yokohama is roughly the size of Cleveland. 58% of Cleveland destroyed. Tokyo is roughly the size of New York. 51% percent of New York destroyed. 99% of the equivalent of Chattanooga, which was Toyama. 40% of the equivalent of Los Angeles, which was Nagoya. This was all done before the dropping of the nuclear bomb, which by the way was dropped by LeMay's command. Proportionality should be a guideline in war. Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve.
Hoge militairen als Curtis LeMay handelden als gewetenloze psychopaten en daarvan was de oud-opperbevelhebber van de Geallieerde Strijdkrachten in Europa, Dwight Eisenhower, zich bewust. Tijdens zijn afscheidsspeech als Amerikaanse president in 1961 sprak Eisenhower dan ook uit ervaring toen hij waarschuwde voor de militarisering van de Amerikaanse samenleving als gevolg van:
the growing power of the military-industrial complex in American life. Most people know the term the president popularized, but few remember his argument.
In his farewell address, Eisenhower called for a better equilibrium between military and domestic affairs in our economy, politics and culture. He worried that the defense industry’s search for profits would warp foreign policy and, conversely, that too much state control of the private sector would cause economic stagnation. He warned that unending preparations for war were incongruous with the nation’s history. He cautioned that war and warmaking took up too large a proportion of national life, with grave ramifications for our spiritual health.
Maar daarvoor hebben ‘warmongers’ als Caroline de Gruyter, Geert Mak, Bas Heijne en Hubert Smeets — die allen voor de NRC schrijven, maar die zelf nooit een oorlog van nabij hebben meegemaakt — geen enkele belangstelling. Het feit dat een insider als 'President Kennedy de loop der gebeurtenissen op gang [had] gezet, maar deze niet langer meer [kon] beheersen' maakt op hen als outsiders geen enkele indruk. Meer over deze dwazen de volgende keer. Dan ook meer over de bewering van De Gruyter dat:
Het moeilijkste is om te erkennen dat het gewoon oorlog is. En dat we, wat ons antwoord ook is, bereid moeten zijn daarvoor een prijs te betalen. Onze veiligheid staat op het spel.
1 opmerking:
Caroline de Gruyter schrijft:
Zo hoopt Rusland tegen minimale kosten zijn buitenlands-politieke doelen te bereiken: territorium, regime en invloedssfeer beschermen; erkenning krijgen als grootmacht; economisch gewin najagen; NAVO- en EU-uitbreiding verhinderen…
Huh?! Nu breekt mijn klomp! Ik heb zelden zulke oorlogstaal gelezen. En dan vooral: NAVO- en EU-uitbreiding verhinderen… Van de emancipatie van Nederland naar een vrije en libertijnse samenleving in de jaren '60 en '70 is niets meer over. Vooral de laatste woorden in haar betoog: NAVO- en EU uitbreiding verhinderen...klinkt als: 'Meld u aan voor het oostfront en trekt ten strijde tegen het rode gevaar!' Een sociaal Europa?. Met dit slag informanten: Vergeet het maar.
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