Het Witte Huis, het Capitool en andere openbare gebouwen van de Mall symboliseren de suprematie van het Europese idee. Precies de gebouwen waarin president Trump alles door het slijk haalt waar zijn land lang voor stond.
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/10/30/laatste-kans-voor-het-westen-a4018093
De vraag is alleen: waar ‘stond,’ volgens haar, de VS al zo ‘lang voor’? Uit haar columns valt op te maken dat dit de niet nader omschreven ‘waarden’ van ‘de westerse democratie’ zijn. In een poging haar beweringen enige geloofwaardigheid te geven verzwijgt De Gruyter het feit dat de VS in 1953 de democratisch gekozen regering van de Iraanse premier Mossadeq ten val bracht tijdens een staatsgreep, georganiseerd en uitgevoerd door de Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst CIA, op verzoek van de Britse MI6. De reden was simpelweg dat Mossadeq de Iraanse oliebronnen had genationaliseerd, olie die tot dan toe in handen was geweest van de Britse ‘Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.’ Wikipedia:
Door de olie-industrie te nationaliseren, maakte hij Iran economisch gezien minder afhankelijk van buitenlandse investeerders… Hij probeerde te investeren in andere productiemogelijkheden en zich niet alleen te concentreren op de olie-export. Zo zou Iran in theorie zelfvoorzienend kunnen worden. Volgens Mossadeq zou het land minder risico lopen wanneer niet alles af zou hangen van de olie-inkomsten. Balans en spreiding waren kernwoorden in het beleid van Mossadeq.
Daarnaast was zijn voornaamste thema om de macht van de sjah te verschuiven naar het parlement, zodat het volk meer inspraak kon krijgen over beslissingen die genomen werden. Mossadeq stond, zoals hij het zelf graag noemde, voor een ‘schone regering’. Hiermee bedoelde hij een regering vrij van corruptie met een transparante beleidsvoering, een regering waar het volk bij betrokken was, een onafhankelijk rechtssysteem, vrijheid van religie, en uiteraard vrije verkiezingen. Daarnaast zette hij zich in voor meer rechten voor vrouwen, arbeiders, en boeren. Hij was zelfs bezig met een fonds om rurale ontwikkelingsprojecten te stimuleren, om zo de ongelijkheid binnen de bevolking te verkleinen.
Zijn ideeën werden vaak veroordeeld door het westen, de door het westen gesteunde sjah, of oppositiepartijen, maar desalniettemin bleef hij over het algemeen de steun van de meerderheid van het volk houden. Zijn vernieuwende ideeën kregen groot draagvlak bij de inwoners van Iran.
Het verspreiden van de democratie is tot nu toe een in het Westen effectieve propagandistische claim gebleken om in de zogeheten 'vrije wereld' de ideologie van het neoliberale kapitalisme een zekere geloofwaardigheid te verlenen in het bewustzijn van de massa. Daarentegen weet de rest van de wereldbevolking uit eigen ervaring wat ‘westerse waarden’ als ‘democratie’ en ‘mensenrechten’ in de praktijk betekenen. Een centrale rol in de naoorlogse politiek van Washington en Wall Street speelden de Dulles-broers, John Foster Dulles, de Amerikaanse minister van Buitenlandse Zaken onder president Eisenhower, en Allen Dulles, directeur van de CIA. Maar ook deze feitelijke informatie zult u niet aantreffen in Caroline de Gruyter’s 2 minuten durende propagandastukjes, waarin zij opkomt voor de elite in Washington en op Wall Street. Wat zij tevens verzwijgt is dat na het vernietigen van de Perzische democratie, in 1954 de democratie in Guatemala aan de beurt was. De Amerikaanse econoom Paul Craig Roberts, die in 1981 ‘was appointed by President of the United States Ronald Reagan as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy,’ schreef daarover dat de VS:
overthrew Guatemala’s popular president Arbenz, because his land reform threatened the interest of the Dulles brothers’ Sullivan & Cromwell law firm’s United Fruit Company client. The brothers launched an amazing disinformation campaign depicting Arbenz as a dangerous communist who was a threat to Western civilization. The brothers enlisted dictators such as Somoza in Nicaragua and Batista in Cuba against Arbenz. The CIA organized air strikes and an invasion force. But nothing could happen until Arbenz’s strong support among the people in Guatemala could be shattered. The brothers arranged this through Cardinal Spellman, who enlisted Archbishop Rossell y Arellano. ‘A pastoral letter was read on April 9, 1954 in all Guatemalan churches.’
A masterpiece of propaganda, the pastoral letter misrepresented Arbenz as a dangerous communist who was the enemy of all Guatemalans. False radio broadcasts produced a fake reality of freedom fighter victories and army defections. Arbenz asked the UN to send fact finders, but Washington prevented that from happening. American journalists, with the exception of James Reston, supported the lies. Washington threatened and bought off Guatemala’s senior military commanders, who forced Arbenz to resign. The CIA’s chosen and well paid ‘liberator,’ Col. Castillo Armas, was installed as Arbenz’s successor.
We recently witnessed a similar operation in Ukraine.
President Eisenhower thanked the CIA for averting ‘a Communist beachhead in our hemisphere,’ and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles gave a national TV and radio address in which he declared that the events in Guatemala ‘expose the evil purpose of the Kremlin.’ This despite the uncontested fact that the only outside power operating in Guatemala was the Dulles brothers.
What had really happened is that a democratic and reformist government was overthrown because it compensated United Fruit Company for the nationalization of the company’s fallow (braak liggend. svh) land at a value listed by the company on its tax returns. America’s leading law firm or perhaps more accurately, America’s foreign policy-maker, Sullivan & Cromwell, had no intention of permitting a democratic government to prevail over the interests of the law firm’s client, especially when senior partners of the firm controlled both overt and covert US foreign policy. The two brothers, whose family members were invested in the United Fruit Company, simply applied the resources of the CIA, State Department, and US media to the protection of their private interests. The extraordinary gullibility (goedgelovigheid. svh) of the American people, the corrupt American media, and the indoctrinated and impotent Congress allowed the Dulles brothers to succeed in overthrowing a democracy.
Keep in mind that this use of the US government in behalf of private interests occurred 60 years ago long before the corrupt Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes. And no doubt in earlier times as well.
Paul Kattenburg, the State Department desk officer for Vietnam suggested that instead of war, the US should give Ho $500 million in reconstruction aid to rebuild the country from war and French misrule, which would free Ho from dependence on Russian and Chinese support, and, thereby, influence. Ho appealed to Washington several times, but the demonic inflexibility of the Dulles brothers prevented any sensible response. Instead, the hysteria whipped-up over the ‘communist threat’ by the Dulles brothers landed the United States in the long, costly, fiasco known as the Vietnam War. Kattenburg later wrote that it was suicidal for the US ‘to cut out its eyes and ears, to castrate its analytic capacity, to shut itself off from the truth because of blind prejudice.’ Unfortunately for Americans and the world, castrated analytic capacity is Washington’s strongest suit.
The Dulles brothers’ next targets were President Sukarno of Indonesia, Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of Congo, and Fidel Castro. The plot against Castro was such a disastrous failure that it cost Allen Dulles his job. President Kennedy lost confidence in the agency and told his brother Bobby that after his reelection he was going to break the CIA into a thousand pieces. When President Kennedy removed Allen Dulles, the CIA understood the threat and struck first.
Warren Nutter, my Ph.D. dissertation chairman, later Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, taught his students that for the US government to maintain the people’s trust, which democracy requires, the government’s policies must be affirmations of our principles and be openly communicated to the people. Hidden agendas, such as those of the Dulles brothers and the Clinton, Bush and Obama regimes, must rely on secrecy and manipulation and, thereby, arouse the distrust of the people. If Americans are too brainwashed to notice, many foreign nationals are not.
The US government’s secret agendas have cost Americans and many peoples in the world tremendously. Essentially, the Foster brothers created the Cold War with their secret agendas and anti-communist hysteria. Secret agendas committed Americans to long, costly, and unnecessary wars in Vietnam and the Middle East. Secret CIA and military agendas intending regime change in Cuba were blocked by President John F. Kennedy and resulted in the assassination of a president, who, for all his faults, was likely to have ended the Cold War twenty years before Ronald Reagan seized the opportunity.
Secret agendas have prevailed for so long that the American people themselves are now corrupted. As the saying goes, ‘a fish rots from the head.’ The rot in Washington now permeates the country.
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/09/28/washingtons-secret-agendas-paul-craig-roberts/
https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/29/washingtons-secret-agendas/
Al deze feiten tonen aan hoe propagandistisch de mainstream-journaliste Caroline de Gruyter te werk gaat wanneer zij Rusland tot het grote Kwaad in de wereld bestempelt en tegelijkertijd de Verenigde Staten uitroept tot het ultieme voorbeeld van de gehele mensheid. Dat anderen de oorlogen moeten voeren, waarvoor zij de geest rijp maakt, interesseert haar niet. Evenmin demonstreert zij enige belangstelling voor het volgende:
Suicides among post-9/11 veterans are four times as high as combat deaths, a new study finds.
As the last remaining American troops prepare to depart from Afghanistan and Congress debates removing presidential war-making powers for the first time in a generation, there is a growing understanding that the veterans of America’s longest wars have a far greater risk of suicide and other mental health concerns than those who came before.
A new report from the Costs of War Project at Brown University found an estimated 30,177 active duty military personnel and veterans who have served since the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks have died by suicide, compared with the 7,057 killed in military operations during the two-decade global war on terror. Among those who died by suicide, not all served in combat roles, suggesting that the problems that led to their suicides went beyond many of the often-cited causes, such as the high number of traumatic brain injuries and other severe combat-related wounds.
The study pointed to service members’ exposure to mental, moral, and sexual traumas; the influence of the military’s hegemonic masculine culture; access to guns; and the difficulty of reintegrating into civilian life. The study also questioned ‘the impact of the military’s reliance on guiding principles which overburden individual service members with moral responsibility or blameworthiness’ for actions or consequences over which they may have little control.
The overall suicide rate for veterans is 1.5 times as much as the rate for civilians. Among post-Sept. 11 veterans between 18-years-old and 35-years-old, the rate is 2.5 times that of all civilians, the report found, and double that of civilians the same age.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/us/911-suicide-rate-veterans.html
Fallujah, The Hidden Massacre is a documentary film by Sigfrido Ranucci and Maurizio Torrealta which first aired on Italy's RAI state television network on November 8, 2005. The film documents the use of weapons that the documentary asserts are chemical weapons, particularly the use of incendiary bombs, and alleges indiscriminate use of violence against civilians and children by military forces of the United States of America in the city of Fallujah in Iraq during the Fallujah Offensive of November 2004.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallujah,_The_Hidden_Massacre
Eerder al was er sprake van:
The Fallujah killings of April 2003 variously characterized as a war crime, crime against humanity, crime against rules of war and genocide, that began when United States Army soldiers from the American 1st Battalion, 325th Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division fired into a crowd of Iraqi civilians who were protesting their presence at a school within the city of Fallujah. The soldiers claimed they were receiving fire from the crowd, whereas the civilians said they were shot at first. Human Rights Watch, which inspected the area after the incident, found no physical evidence of shots fired at the building where U.S. forces were based… The incident is frequently cited and compared to other similar incidents. Foreign Policy compared Fallujah to the 2010 Israeli Gaza flotilla raid during which Israeli naval commandos used lethal force to kill nine activists, some shot when they had their backs turned to the Israeli soldiers… Rules of Engagement, a 2000 film displaying a similar incident, albeit of U.S. Marines under perceived attack from a supposedly hostile crowd.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallujah_killings_of_April_2003
These transformations provoked a stormy debate over the degree to which national security needs might endanger the basic values and institutions associated with American democracy. Those who defended traditional political culture, notably conservatives in Congress and their allies in the press, were convinced that a powerful national security state would waste precious resources, regiment the nation's youth, and concentrate too much authority in the state, particularly in its military arm. Still worse, at least by their calculations, it would weaken the home, the church, and the school as counterweights to federal authority and would undermine the constitutional balance, first by creating an executive branch strong enough to overwhelm Congress and then by creating a military caste strong enough to overwhelm the president…
Running through all of these initiatives was a fear of the garrison state, which was just as great in Truman and Eisenhower as it was in conservatives like Taft and Hoover. But where conservatives saw the garrison state arising from an expansive foreign policy, and the costly military establishment needed to support it, Truman and Eisenhower saw the same specter emerging if the United States retreated to a hemispheric system of defense. In their view, such a policy would isolate the country in a totalitarian world, at which point its very survival would demand even larger defense budgets and the kind of government controls and oppressive taxes associated with the garrison state. Whereas conservatives seemed to believe that democracy could only survive behind an iron curtain of hemispheric defense, Truman and Eisenhower tried to devise a military strategy that would allow the country to meet its obligations around the world without leading to economic and political regimentation at home. president. Nor were these idle concerns in a period marked by dramatic challenges to constitutional authority, as in the admirals' revolt of 1949, Truman's decision to wage war in Korea and send troops to Europe in 1950, and MacArthur's bold defiance of presidential leadership in 1951. Added to these challenges, moreover, was the persistent military opposition to a balanced budget and effective unification of the services, not to mention the largely successful efforts by military leaders to establish for themselves a degree of political authority and independence unmatched in American history.
Concerns of this sort ran through the whole process of American state-making in the first decade of the Cold War. They provoked a strong defense of the balanced budget, not only as a hedge against waste and as a symbol of public virtue but also as a barrier against big government and military rule. They inspired a strong critique of Truman's plans to unify the armed forces and create the modern-day Department of Defense. They informed alternative plans whereby authority would be more widely dispersed and a system of checks and balances would be preserved through a decentralized system of decision making. They guided the attack on universal military training, and they influenced plans to give the White House a source of scientific advice independent of the Pentagon. In each case, those involved worried that national security needs would harness the nation's resources to an institutional complex run by military leaders and dedicated to military purposes. Their fear, in other words, was of a garrison state that would undermine alternative centers of authority, destroy democracy, and militarize American life.
On the other side of this discourse were those whose thinking had been influenced by the national security ideology that began to crystalize during World War II. According to this ideology, the United States had entered an era of total war in which the line between citizen and soldier, civilian and military, war and peace, had disappeared forever. The threat of total war required a new degree of military vigilance and a permanent program of preparedness in which all of the nation's resources, civilian and military alike, were mobilized against a ruthless and implacable enemy. According to the new ideology, moreover, it was no longer possible to separate the defense of American liberties from the defense of liberty everywhere. Peace and freedom were indivisible, so that American leaders had no choice but to safeguard the country's security by safeguarding the security of the free world in general. Indeed, this was a mission that God and history had thrust upon the United States, at least according to the national security ideology. The American people had to muster the resolve and make the sacrifices that such a mission required, which is why some officials saw the Cold War as an exercise in national rejuvenation. It was a great opportunity, in Kennan's view, to recapture the moral discipline and the civic virtue that had supposedly characterized earlier periods of American history.
George Kennan was na de Tweede Wereldoorlog de grondlegger van de Amerikaanse buitenland politiek ten aanzien van de Sovjet Unie — en een scherpzinnige waarnemer van de desastreuze machiavellistische machtspolitiek van zijn land. Wikipedia:
In zijn in 1989 verschenen boek Sketches From A Life (1989) geeft de insider Kennan een gedesillusioneerde terugblik op zijn tijdperk. Aan het slot van zijn boek stelt hij somber vast:
Ik beschouw de Verenigde Staten van deze laatste jaren van de twintigste eeuw als een in wezen tragisch land, begiftigd met uitstekende natuurlijke hulpbronnen die het snel aan het verkwisten en uitputten is, en met een intellectuele en artistieke intelligentsia van groot talent en originaliteit. Voor deze intelligentsia hebben de dominante politieke machten in het land weinig begrip of respect. Haar stem wordt doorgaans tot zwijgen gebracht of overschreeuwd door de commerciële media. Het is waarschijnlijk veroordeeld om, net als de Russische intelligentsia in de negentiende eeuw, voorgoed een hulpeloze toeschouwer te blijven van de verontrustende koers in het leven van de natie.
Op zijn beurt merkte de Amerikaanse historicus, professor Mark Atwood, op dat voor de architect van de ‘containment-politiek,’ die doctrine bij hem meermaals tot grote ontgoocheling leidde:
that haunted him until his death in 2005. Kennan believed that the Soviet Union, however repugnant, posed little military threat to the West and urged that the United States rely mostly on economic and political means to resist Communist expansion… Kennan watched with regret as the United States subsequently poured enormous resources into weaponry and military bases,
waardoor de VS al geruime tijd niet zozeer een oppermachtig militair-industrieel complex heeft, maar in feite een militair-industrieel complex is, een macht die medeverantwoordelijk blijft voor een buitenlandse schuld van 28,6 biljoen dollar, volgens de officiële cijfers van begin augustus 2021. Inmiddels is dit complex, waarvoor president Eisenhower in 1961 waarschuwde, uitgegroeid tot een staat in de staat, terwijl:
almost every president, almost every Congress, and almost every director of central intelligence since the 1960s has proved incapable of grasping the mechanics of the CIA. Most have left the agency in worse shape than they found it.
De voormalige New York Times onderzoeksjournalist Tim Weiner, die in 1988 de Pulitzer Prize won voor zijn reportages over nationale veiligheid, en over geheime operaties in Afghanistan, Soedan en Guyana beschreef in zijn, ook in het Nederlands vertaalde boek Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2008), 720 pagina’s lang het bloedspoor dat de CIA door de hele wereld heeft getrokken en nog steeds trekt. De recensent van The Washington Times kwalificeerde dit boek als:
De titel is afkomstig van president Eisenhower, die na acht jaar presidentschap ‘called into his office, the former legendary OSS officer and director of the CIA Allen Dulles, and said to him point-blank. ‘After eight years you have left me, a legacy of ashes.’
Desondanks blijft Caroline de Gruyter de gewelddadige Amerikaanse buitenlandse politiek steunen wanneer zij haar hetze tegen Rusland onbekommerd voortzet. En dit, terwijl:
A nation that wants to project its power beyond its borders needs to see over the horizon, to know what is coming, to prevent attacks against its people. It must anticipate surprise. Without a strong, smart, sharp intelligence service, presidents and generals alike can become blind and crippled. But throughout its history as a superpower, the United States has not had such a service.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16435085&t=1628423711940
Maar ook dit feit beschouwt De Gruyter als een te verwaarlozen detail, wanneer zij in de NRC beweert dat ‘Het moeilijkste is om te erkennen dat het gewoon oorlog is met Rusland.’ Maar op grond van welke CIA-informatie stelt zij dit? Welnu, op twee juridisch onbewezen incidenten, en een ideologisch rapport van de nauw aan de militair-industrieel complex verwante RAND-corporation. Daarentegen schrijft de Amerikaanse mensenrechtenadvocaat Dan Kovalik in zijn boek The Plot To Scapegoat Russia. How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia (2017):
THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING… again. It seems that al-Qaeda, ISIS, North Koreans, Mexican ‘bad
hombres,’ and various other bogeyman were insufficient to the task of terrifying Americans. So now the US war machine — that vast complex of weapons manufacturers, Wall Street speculators, saber-rattling Washington politicians, armchair generals, and the media industry that thrives on boom and bang (or the ‘beatiful pictures of our fearsome armaments’ in the unforgettable words of MSNBC’s Brian Williams) — has revived the tried and true Red Scare. Day after day, night after night, the US citizenry is bombarded with scare stories about the evil machinations of Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin henchmen (handlangers. svh). How they stole our democracy and are scheming to conquer the entire NATO alliance. How they are building a military machine and nuclear arsenal that threaten to eclipse our own. How they are subverting the global free press with its low-ratings Russia Today network and army of hackers and trolls. How they are blocking peace in the Middle East with their machinations in Syria.
This massive anti-Russian propaganda campaign is one of the biggest fake news operations in history. And we have had some colossal ones, dating back to the days of the Spanish American War, when newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst instructed artist Frederic Remington to help him fabricate a clash of forces that did not exist: ‘You furnish the pictures and I will furnish the war.’
Ever since World War I, war has been America’s lucrative ‘racket,’ in the mordant (scherpe. svh) observation of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, the most decorated marine of his day. The country’s economic engine runs on blood and oil. Without the constant specter of a foreign enemy there is no American prosperity.
Al in 1957 waarschuwde één van de meest gerespecteerde 5 sterren-generaals, Douglas MacArthur, die ‘een belangrijke rol in de Eerste, de Tweede Wereldoorlog en de Koreaanse Oorlog speelde’:
Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -- kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor -- with the cry of grave national emergency... Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.
Op zijn beurt concludeerde in 1991 de Amerikaanse voormalige minister van Justitie, Ramsey Clark in zijn boek The Fire This Time — US War Crimes in the Gulf dat ‘US Foreign Policy is the Greatest Crime Since WWII.’ Clark wijst op specifieke misdaden in tientallen landen die sinds de Tweede Wereldoorlog door de Amerikanen werden gebombardeerd en binnengevallen. Naar aanleiding van de illegale inval in Irak schreef Clark dat de Amerikaanse agressie een niet in te schatten niveau van ‘misery for the world’ had gecreëerd, en dat ‘the poor of the planet [are] made poorer, dominated and exploited by the foreign policies of the U.S. and its rich allies,’ en dat de Amerikaanse inval in Irak een ‘agressieoorlog’ was, ‘the supreme international crime’ volgens de rechters die in in 1946 in Neurenberg de overgrote meerderheid van de nazi-top ter dood veroordeelde. Als Nederland een ware intelligentsia zou bezitten, dan had die al lang NRC’s bellicose opiniemaakster de vraag gesteld waarom zij de feiten blijft negeren van bijvoorbeeld de hier geciteerde vooraanstaande Amerikaanse intellectuelen, en betrokken militairen en oud beleidsbepalers. Maar zolang de polderpers geen dissidenten aan het woord wil laten, zal de Nederlander geen ander geluid vernemen, en blijft een groot deel van de Nederlandse kiezers op corrupte politici stemmen.
1 opmerking:
Ruud van Dijk, hoogleraar geschiedenis aan de universiteit van Amsterdam beweert:
'‘Washington nog altijd [streeft] naar een wereld waarin individuele vrijheden — fundamentele rechten van de mens — de norm zijn.' Ik ben opnieuw verbijsterd. waarin een klein land groot kan zijn. Het uiten van de kolossaalste gemeenplaatsen. Mijn geschiedenis leraar, in de 4e klas atheneum-B, (Op het atheneum koos men pas bij overgang naar de 5e klas het eindexamen pakket R.W.) zou hem, als deze Ruud van Dijk het lef had bij een werkstuk zoiets op te schrijven, hem een 1 hebben gegeven voor deze volstrekte nonsens.
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