I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.
De bekende Amerikaanse historicus Howard Zinn benadrukte in A Young People's History of the United States (2007) met betrekking tot Theodore Roosevelt's obsessieve verlangen:
Maybe a war would take up some of the rebellious energy that people were pouring into strikes and protests. Maybe it would unite the people with the armed forces against a foreign enemy. And there was another reason — an economic one.
Before he was elected president, William McKinley had said, 'We want a foreign market for our surplus goods.' Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana spelled it out in 1897. He said:
'American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours.'
These politicians and others believed that the United States had to open up other countries to American goods — even if those markets were not eager to buy. If factories and farms could sell their surplus production overseas, American companies would keep earning money, and the economy might avoid the crises that had sparked class war in the 1890s.
War was probably not a thought-out plan among most of the elite ruling classes. Instead, it grew naturally from two sources, capitalism and nationalism. Capitalism demanded more markets. Nationalism, the spirit of strong national pride, made people think that the United States had a right, or even a duty, to expand itself and to shape the affairs of other countries.
Stretching the United States' arm overseas was not a new idea. The war against Mexico had already carried the United States to the Pacific Ocean. Before that, in 1823, President James Monroe had produced the Monroe Doctrine. This statement made it clear that the United States claimed an interest in the politics of the entire Western Hemisphere — North, Central, and South America. It warned the nations of Europe not to meddle with countries in the America's.
The United States, however, didn't feel that it had to stay out of other countries' affairs. Between 1798 and 1895, the United States sent troops to other countries, or took an active role in their affairs, 103 times. In the 1850s, for example, the U.S. Navy used warships to force Japan to open its ports to American shipping.
At the end of the nineteenth century, many military men, politicians, and business men supported the idea of still more foreign involvement. A writer for the Washington Post said:
'A new consciousness seems to have come upon us — the consciousness of strength — and with it a new appetite, the yearning to show our strength… The taste of Empire is in the mouth of the people.'
With hindsight we know that Wilson's (president Woodrow Wilson die claimde de wereld ‘veilig te maken voor democratie.’ svh) interventions in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua set the stage for the dictators Batista, Trujillo, the Duvaliers, and Somozas, whose legacies still reverberate.
Wilson zond bovendien troepen naar Mexico om daar Amerikaanse investeringen veilig te stellen. Piero Gleijesus, hoogleraar aan de prestigieuze Johns Hopkins University en deskundige op het gebied van Amerikaanse interventies in Latijns Amerika, schreef:
It is not that Wilson failed in his earnest efforts to bring democracy to these little countries. He never tried. He intervened to impose hegemony, not democracy.
Loewen:
The United States also attacked Haiti's proud tradition of individual ownership of small tracts of land, which dated back to the Haitian Revolution, in favor of the establishment of large plantations. American troops forced peasants in shackles to work on road construction crews. In 1919 Haitian citizens rose up and resisted U.S. occupation troops in a guerrilla war that cost more than 3,000 lives, most of them Haitian [...] George Barnett, a U.S. marine general, complained to his commander in Haiti: ‘practically indiscriminate killing of natives has gone on for some time,'
hetgeen deze historicus tot de conclusie voerde dat Wilson's politiek in de praktijk gebaseerd was op drie keiharde feiten: 'colonialism, racism, and anticommunism.' En het was dezelfde door Geert Mak zo geprezen Woodrow Wilson die:
personally vetoed a clause on racial equality in the Covenant of the League of Nations... Wilson's legacy was extensive: he effectively closed the Democratic Party to African Americans for another two decades, and parts of the federal government remained segregated into the 1950s and beyond... Wilson was an outspoken white supremacist who believed that black people were inferior. During his campaign for the presidency, Wilson promised to press for civil rights. But once in office he forgot his promises. Instead, Wilson ordered that white and black workers in federal government jobs be segregated from one another... When black federal employees in Southern cities protested the order, Wilson had the protesters fired.
Voor een onafhankelijke waarnemer is het duidelijk dat de huidige gewelddadige interventies van de VS naadloos passen in de continuïteit van de Amerikaanse buitenlandse politiek. Desondanks wordt deze context door de Nederlandse ‘vrije pers' voortdurend verzwegen. In Caroline de Gruyter’s voorstelling van de werkelijkheid wordt het Westen doorgaans gedreven door nobele motieven, terwijl juist 'onze' tegenstanders vervaarlijke expansionisten zijn. Met betrekking tot dit onvermogen het eigen kwaad onder ogen te zien, wees de Brits-Indiase neurobioloog en historicus Kenan Malik in The International New York Times van vrijdag 24 oktober 2014, op het volgende:
A century ago, most educated Britons would have had a deep appreciation of German history, music, philosophy and literature. Today, the role of Germans from the Enlightenment to Modernism in constructing our very conception of the world is barely acknowledged and little understood.
It is not just German history about which Britain lacks insight. While the enormity of the Holocaust has forced Germany to address the darkest aspects of its past, Britain has never had to think about its history in that fashion. From the Opium Wars to the Bengal famine, the shameful episodes of Britain’s imperial past are rarely discussed.
Perhaps nowhere is this blind spot more obvious than in the current debate about World War I. There has been much discussion in Britain about the role of German militarism and imperial ambitions in fomenting war. Rarely acknowledged is that all the great powers of the time had expansionist aims; that in the decades leading to the war, they had carved up the globe among them; that at the center of the global imperialist network stood not Germany but Britain.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/24/opinion/kenan-malik-germanys-history-lesson-for-britain.html
Aan diezelfde blindheid lijdt de huidige mainstream-media zodra het de VS betreft. In navolging van de Amerikaanse toonaangevende media geldt voor de polderpers dat Poetin niet deugt, terwijl Biden wel deugt. Daarentegen zijn opvallend veel vooraanstaande Amerikaanse intellectuelen kritisch over de eigen geschiedenis en de geclaimde nobele motieven van hun politieke en economische elite. Zo schreef de Amerikaanse publicist Jeff Nall begin 2010:
Standing on the world’s stage, receiving a prize for peace, Obama stared straight into the eyes of Reverend King’s legacy and declared not hostility but rather his loyalty to militarism. Rev. King called for America to 'get on the right side of the world revolution' by undergoing a 'radical revolution of values.' Obama defended the American exceptionalism which has and continues to color U.S. militaristic violence in a divine shade of ineffability (onbespreekbaarheid. svh). Dismissing the hundreds of thousands left dead from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama described the U.S. as the world’s great savior which never does wrong. 'Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.' As if tearing out pages from reality and replacing them with the most egregious doublespeak Obama stated plainly: 'America has never fought a war against a democracy, and our closest friends are governments that protect the rights of their citizens.’
I have been discussing certain of these themes for several years. I point you in particular to an article from May 2009: 'Obama and the Triumph of the American Myth.' The second, major part of that essay, 'Torture and the American Project,' sets forth many of the facts of American history that Obama steadfastly refuses to acknowledge and, as Nall observes, blatantly lies about. Obama announced his dedication to the propaganda of American Exceptionalism on a comprehensive scale in his widely praised speech on race; see 'Obama's Whitewash' for the details.
Silber wees met betrekking tot het — door De Gruyter zo bewonderde — ‘liberaal multilateralisme’ van Barack Obama, er tevens op dat:
there is an earlier passage in 'Obama and the Triumph of the American Myth' that I offer again here, since it speaks to Nall's argument:
‘Given the fundamentalist fervor with which the U.S. ruling class maintains and burnishes the national mythology, an exercise in which the majority of “ordinary” Americans join with equal enthusiasm (for such dedication to onanistic joys will forever find many followers), Barack Obama was inevitable. It was dangerous enough when truth was the enemy; truth was to be destroyed, but there remained a barely discernible acknowledgment that the truth still existed. With the ascension of Obama the Marketer, Obama the Fulfiller of Dreams, Obama the Commander of Illusion, the lie occupies the most prominent national space. Once installed, the lie grows daily and hourly. The smallest remaining tatters of truth are pushed always farther to the edges, until they vanish into the growing swamp of pain, suffering and death. To search for the truth in these circumstances is to sentence oneself to ridicule and hatred. To speak the truth is to render oneself irrelevant and invisible.’
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.nl/2010/01/peace-is-means-and-end.html http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.nl/2008/03/obamas-whitewash.html
De onophoudelijke oorlogen die de VS 93 procent van zijn bestaan sinds 1776 voert worden door mevrouw De Gruyter verzwegen wanneer zij Rusland weer eens beschuldigt van wat officieel ‘hybride oorlogsvoering’ wordt genoemd. Tegelijkertijd blijft zij, in strijd met de werkelijkheid, de VS prijzen vanwege zijn — in haar ogen — ‘beschavingsmissie,’ zijnde het verspreiden van, ik citeer haar opnieuw, ‘westerse waarden’ zodat ‘de rest van de wereld’ echt ‘democratisch’ kan worden. In De Gruyter’s belevenis heeft het ‘Westen gezegevierd,’ door de val van de Sovjet Unie, Daarmee zou een einde zijn gekomen aan de geschiedenis, zoals een andere neoconservatieve fantast, de Amerikaanse hoogleraar politieke wetenschappen Francis Fukuyama, meende op grond van het feit dat 'with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy and the dissolution of the Soviet Union—humanity’ het ‘einde van de geschiedenis als zodanig had bereikt.’ Ironisch daarbij is dat ‘Fukuyama draws upon the philosophies and ideologies of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, who define human history as a linear progression, from one socioeconomic epoch to another.’ Hoewel talloze vooraanstaande Amerikaanse intellectuelen onmiddellijk beseften dat Fukuyama’s beweringen absurd waren, suggereren Caroline de Gruyter, en het merendeel van de polder-opiniemakers, dat de VS de leidende grootmacht zal blijven, ondanks het feit dat tot nu toe Washington’s militaire ‘mondiale “beschavingsmissie” stuk [liep] op China, Rusland, islamitische staat en oorlogen als in Syrië,’ aldus NRC’s opiniemaakster Caroline de Gruyter.
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/10/30/laatste-kans-voor-het-westen-a4018093
De aanleiding dat zij niet bij machte is de werkelijkheid te beschrijven is het feit dat zij door een ideologische bril naar de wereld kijkt. Als gevolg van haar manicheïsme kent zij als outsider slechts twee partijen: de goeden, de VS en zijn NAVO-satellietlanden, en de slechten, zijnde Rusland en China. De Gruyter beseft niet dat de werkelijkheid complexer is dan haar simplistisch voorstelling ervan. Om dit in te zien dient men te beschikken over zowel een zekere mate van scherpzinnigheid, als over een authentieke persoonlijkheid, en de juiste contacten. Een voorbeeld daarvan is de Amerikaan Lawrence Wilkerson, ‘Army Colonel and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Since the end of his military career, Wilkerson has criticized many aspects of the Iraq War, including his own preparation of Powell's presentation to the UN, as well as other aspects of American policy in the Middle East.’ Op 21 oktober 2009 verklaarde de gezaghebbende insider Wilkerson tijdens een toespraak aan de American University in Washington, D.C. met betrekking tot ‘The Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex’ het volgende:
I spoke at East Tennessee State University not too long ago, and we had twelve hundred people in the auditorium. We were talking about the cabal. This was a couple of years ago. And I was really impressed with the students' interest in what did I mean by a cabal, what did I mean by a national security decision-making process that had been captured by not the president of the United States, as was statutorily intended by the 1947 National Security Act, and by extension, the Constitution of the United States of America as it was originally conceived, but by people who were in some cases unelected, not subject to the advice and consent of the Senate.
How about the national security adviser, one of the most powerful people in the American panoply of governance now, not subject to the advice and consent of the Senate and not elected? Wow. Henry Kissinger is co-president, in Bob Dallek’s eloquent phrase in his new book, Nixon and Kissinger. And he was. Henry Kissinger was making presidential decisions, particularly toward the end, when Dick Nixon was drinking more than he wasn't and he was wrapped up in Watergate. If you have seen the movie about Frost and Nixon, or better, you have watched the thirteen hours of tape and listened to James Reston talk about it, who was the adviser to David Frost as he went after Nixon, you understand the depth of Nixon’s failure, both personal — that is, character-wise — and decision-making-wise. And so Kissinger began to make decisions, unelected, not subject to the advice and consent of the Senate. This is an extraordinary thing. Kissinger also took two jobs simultaneously: national security adviser and secretary of state. Extraordinary! The American people didn’t even blink. The founding fathers were rolling in their graves, I assure you.
Interestingly, intriguingly, the two men that will take Kissinger out are none other than Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Why? Because Henry Kissinger decided that the defeat in Vietnam, was so dramatic and had set our prestige back so much, our power was diminished, that we needed détente with the Soviet Union, we needed peaceful coexistence, we needed some room to recover, to recoup, and to recognize the fact that other nations were rising and our power, therefore, was changing the world. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld did not like that at all, and so they were the people who maneuvered Kissinger eventually out of a power position, certainly out of his two positions, and eventually out of the Ford administration. We later got them and their beliefs and their decision-making capabilities and so forth in the White House, and you see what it produced…
What has that got to do with Afghanistan or Pakistan or Irak or war in general? Well, it's got a hell of a lot to do with it. And I'm going to play academic here for a minute. I'm going to take you back to 1947, and I'm going to tell you, in 1947, a constellation of world leaders, and principally U.S. leaders, realized that there had been a massive change in power in the world. And let's just sum it up simplistically by saying that the United States looked at being not the rather democratic republic it had been for 150-pIus years prior, but the new Rome. Now, the founders had their feet in the Roman camp. The founders liked the Roman Senate. They liked the idea of Cincinnatus. They liked the idea of the citizen soldier. After all, Washington was a quintessential Cincinnatus. Had he not been, we wouldn't be here today, or at least we wouldn't be in the state we're in today. He refused power not once but twice, dramatically — actually three times, because he refused to run for a third term when everyone would've probably voted for him. So they liked that part of Rome.
But I think it is fair to say Imperial Rome they shied away from. But what we were looking at in 1947 was being Imperial Rome. And so Harry Truman (president. svh), James Forrestal (investment banker and Secretary of Defense. svh), George Marshall (Amerikaanse vijf-sterren-generaal, in Europa vooral bekend door zijn Marshallplan. svh) Dwight Eisenhower (vijf sterren generaal en vanaf 1953 president van de VS. svh), Ferdinand Eberstadt (American investment banker, and an important policy advisor, who was instrumental in the creation of the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency. svh), and a host of others tried to design a system, through the 1947 Act, essentially, and precedents set thereafter, principally by Truman and Eisenhower, that would manage this new power without sacrificing what had gotten us to that point in the first place — our civil liberties, our freedom, indeed our entire set of political and cultural values. Until 2000 I would maintain, most presidents had done a fair, or a good, or a not-so-good but average job of maintaining the tension between those two fundamental sides of us — the past, the present, and future (That’s three, but I'll throw the present and the future into one.)
Let me back up just for a moment and say that in 1961, probably the most capable man to assume the presidency in the twentieth century in his farewell address warned us about what was happening with regard to the tension between what we had had and what we had created. I'll call it the national security state, as Michael Hogan (auteur van A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945 1954. svh) has and others, and I'll call it a well-governed democratic republic on the other hand. Some have called it a welfare state. But that has a pejorative (ongunstige. svh) sense.
That tension Eisenhower described in his farewell address as having a real sneaking (sluipende. svh), insidious (bedrieglijk. svh), powerful problem. It was called the military-industrial- (and he wanted to say, but he was advised against it and accepted that advice) congressional complex. And if you go back and you watch the grainy black-and-white tape of that speech, it is striking, it is stunning, the seriousness with which Eisenhower delivers that message. The military-industrial complex, congressional-military industrial complex, is not an insidious force out there sneaking up on us and riding down Pennsylvania Avenue to take over Washington, but it is enormous power that is basically unchecked, not overseen adequately; and in particular, since the end of the Cold War, when contractors (grote ondernemingen. svh) have moved together and become primes and subs and colluded and monopolistic, it has become a real and constant danger to this country, certainly to the democratic republic that we like to think we are.
When war is as profitable as it was for Lockheed Martin, who leads this clan of defense contractors, that your share price goes from about $25 and three-quarters on March 19, 2003, to a year later about $126, $127 a share, when war is that profitable, you are going to have more of it; you’re going to have presidents who turn to the war instrument more and more often. Incidentally, since the end of the Cold War, that is exactly what we've done. Some people say it's because the restraints of the Cold War were released — we no longer have a rival superpower to keep us in check. That is part of it, but part of it is also the fact that the war instrument is the instrument of choice for presidents of the United States.
Kolonel Wilkerson’s logica is dermate voor de hand liggend dat niemand met een greintje verstand aan de vraag kan ontkomen waarom de polderpers zo fanatiek haar anti-Russische propaganda blijft voortzetten, zonder zichzelf niet diep te schamen. Hoe immoreel kunnen mensen als Caroline de Gruyter, Geert Mak, Hubert Smeets, Ian Buruma, Bas Heijne, en al die andere propagandisten worden voordat zij zichzelf walgend in de spiegel bekijken? Hoe kan het brandend verlangen hun opdrachtgevers te behagen een aangeboren moraliteit vernietigen? Kortom, aan welke psychische stoornis lijden deze burgers? ‘Narcisme’ is de diagnose van veel psychologen en psychiaters, de pathologische behoefte om gezien te worden. En die aandrift wordt op zijn beurt, net als agressie, weer gevoed door een existentiële onzekerheid, voortkomend uit een diep sluimerende minderwaardigheidsgevoel. Tijdens de vrede blijft de oorlog voor hen abstract, omdat zij in veiligheid en overvloed leven, tot de geschiedenis hun deur binnenmarcheert, en ook zij het slachtoffer worden van het inmiddels omvangrijke arsenaal aan massavernietigingswapens. Tot dan toe zien zij geen gevaren voor zichzelf en blijven zij doof voor zelfs de opmerkingen van insiders als Wilkerson, die zijn gehoor voorhield:
Let me tell you where that has got us right now, and then I will come in the back door to Afghanistan and Iraq. It has got us to bankruptcy. This country is the greatest debtor nation in human history now.
Ondertussen financiert Washington de oorlogen ‘with debt by printing money,’ om alleen al de rente te kunnen betalen over de Amerikaanse buitenlandse schuld van momenteel ruim 28 biljoen dollar, 28 keer een miljoen keer een miljoen. Wilkerson:
When I said to the Senate Finance Committee a year ago in testimony that I was worried about the Chinese at that point having about U.S. $1 trillion in their current accounts balance, one of the senators on the committee from Kentucky, a Republican, said, ‘I'm not worried about that There’s plenty more where that came from.’ Well, I give you three guesses where the ‘plenty more’ coming from is: the presses, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing (dat de dollarbiljetten drukt. svh). Basic economics tells you that is unsustainable.
Bush and Cheney appropriated all the money for Afghanistan and Iraq off-line — supplementals is the term of art. They did not put the money, the appropriation, through the process; they appropriated it off-line. The Japanese and the Chinese and others are paying for our wars. How much longer will they continue to do that? I'll submit they won’t continue very much longer at all. So we are coming to a fiscal crisis point that will not only stop these two wars, regardless of what we think about them; it will probably stop our ability to do just about anything overseas. You will probably see forces begin to come home from Germany, from Korea, and from other places where we have extended them to protect the peripheries of our empire.
What I'm talking about, ladies and gentlemen, is the end of the American Empire. Empires have idiosyncrasies, nuances, complexities. Go back to the Assyrian, move forward to the British, go back to the Roman, move forward to the Third Reich, which lasted not a thousand years but quite a few less. Everyone is a little bit different, but they all disappear. Ours could last another seventy-five years, indeed another hundred years, but it could be a very messy hundred years.
The real reason that Dick Cheney changed from the man who in 1991 (and in 1994 he repeated it) said, ‘Going to Baghdad is not worth a single soldier or marine,’ to some twelve years later, ‘Going to Baghdad,’ witlh some enthusiasm, is a three letter word called OIL. The reason that the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline is putting out four million barrels per day into the eastern Mediterranean has every bit as much to do with U.S. presence in Iraq and the stability that gave for private investment to put forward the $26 billion as it does with any genius having figured out the right path for the pipeline.
Oorlogen worden gevoerd met ondermeer als doel de beheersing van onmisbare grondstoffen en markten. De rest is propaganda. Intussen zou de werkelijkheid de Amerikanen uit hun ‘Droom’ moeten helpen, niet alleen in eigen land, maar zeker ook daarbuiten. Anders zal het geweld en de chaos nog omvangrijker worden. In een hoofdartikel op de website van de Strategic Culture Foundation schreef de redactie op 29 november 2019 onder de kop ‘Henry Kissinger Gets It… U.S. “Exceptionalism” Is Over’ dat:
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made prudent remarks recently when he said the United States is no longer a uni-power and that it must recognize the reality of China as an equal rival.
The furor over a new law passed by the US this week regarding Hong Kong and undermining Beijing’s authority underlines Kissinger’s warning.
If the US cannot find some modus vivendi with China, then the outcome could be a catastrophic conflict worst than any previous world war, he admonished.
Speaking publicly in New York on November 14, the veteran diplomat urged the US and China to resolve their ongoing economic tensions cooperatively and mutually, adding: ‘It is no longer possible to think that one side can dominate the other.’
A key remark made by Kissinger was the following: ‘So those countries that used to be exceptional and used to be unique, have to get used to the fact that they have a rival.’
In other words, he is negating the erroneous consensus held in Washington which asserts that the US is somehow ‘exceptional,’ a ‘uni-power’ and the ‘indispensable nation.’ This consensus has grown since the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the US viewed itself as the sole super-power. That morphed into a more virulent ideology of ‘full-spectrum dominance.’ Thence, the past three decades of unrelenting US criminal wars and regime-change operations across the planet, throwing the whole world into chaos.
Kissinger’s frank assessment is a breath of fresh air amid the stale and impossibly arrogant self-regard held by too many American politicians who view their nation as an unparalleled power which brooks no other…
Aptly, Kissinger’s caution about danger of conflict was reiterated separately by veteran journalist John Pilger, who warned in an exclusive interview for Strategic Culture Foundation this week that, presumed ‘American exceptionalism is driving the world to war.’
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/11/29/henry-kissinger-gets-it-us-exceptionalism-is-over/
De Strategic Culture Foundation behoort tot de goed geïnformeerde pers, die ‘provides a platform for exclusive analysis, research and policy comment on Eurasian and global affairs,’ en ‘covers political, economic, social and security issues worldwide.’ Door hun contacten met insiders, en analyserend vanuit een veel bredere context dan de polderpers kan, is de redactie van dit instituut wel in staat om de realiteit te beschrijven. Meer daarover de volgende keer.
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