David Vine is Professor of political anthropology at American University in Washington, DC. David's newest book, The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State, was published by the University of California Press. The book was a finalist for the 2020 L.A. Times Book Prize in History.
In een commentaar na het verschijnen van The United States of War (2020), verklaarde kolonel Lawrence Wilkerson, de ‘former chief of staff, U.S. Department of State, and Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary,’ en de voormalige naaste medewerker van minister Colin Powell schreef Wilkerson:
Like David Vine’s previous book, Base Nation, his new book provides a clear look at rampant U.S. imperialism as exhibited by U.S. overseas basing at 800 locations across the globe. The United States of War is an agonizing read even if the myth of U.S. exceptionalism is already badly tattered. In short, ‘exceptionalism' only applies if one means unique brutality, violence, ruthlessness, unparalleled pursuit of self-interest, and imperialism of the most blatant and degrading sort — an exceptionalism that has meant the deaths of millions, the maiming of millions more, and the wandering from state to state of even more millions displaced by war. It is not a book to read curled up by a warm winter fire; rather, it’s a book that will stir your soul, if you have one left, to action.
In verband met de uitzichtloze ‘War on Terror,’ dat de chaos alleen maar had vergroot, constateerde de antropoloog Vine dat:
Elliott’s retort was intended as an ironic joke. Others in the room laughed because the major and others knew the truth: peace would be bad for business, bad for them. Contractors would lose contracts; profits would shrink; stock prices would likely fall; some employees might face layoffs. For military officers, too, peace might see their careers stall, without opportunities to deploy and lead troops in combat. Lower levels of military spending would also mean fewer lucrative jobs after retirement from the military, in the military-contracting and weapons-manufacturing industries.
Eight years later it’s clear the conference attendees needn’t have worried. Troop reductions continued and some budget cuts occurred, but the U.S. war in Afghanistan continued and the Pentagon and its allies in Congress found ways to circumvent the cuts. Presidents Obama and Donald Trump responded to the rise of that product of the U.S. war in Iraq, the Islamic State, by sending new U.S. troops to Iraq and Syria. The military began occupying territory in both countries and building new bases, which were soon hosting thousands of troops. The Pentagon used bases around the region to launch what remains an ongoing bombing campaign against ISIS and other militants. The military also used these installations to provide refueling, logistical, and other support for the government of Saudi Arabia’s war against the Houthi movement in Yemen, which seized power there in 2015. The military and the CIA have continued drone missile attacks on suspected militants in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and Somalia, as well as in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. By the end of his presidency, Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama supported spending $1 trillion over thirty years to upgrade the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. By the last full year of his presidency, Obama’s military was dropping an average of seventy-one bombs every day across at least seven countries.
In the United States, some in Congress, the military, the media, and the think tank world began talking openly about cold and hot wars with Russia and China. This talk has helped fuel greater spending on expensive weapons systems. In President Donald Trump’s first years in office, his administration pushed for and secured major increases to the military budget, including billions in additional funding for nuclear weapons and a new Space Command.
In 2024 the Army is scheduled to open a new military hospital in Germany, at a cost of what will likely be more than $1 billion. The new facility, located near Ramstein Air Base (tevens NAVO-basis. svh), is a replacement for the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, which was built in the 1950s and has received thousands of casualties from Afghanistan, Iraq, and other war zones. When I visited the existing hospital in 2012, Landstuhl had a level-one trauma center rating — the highest possible grade… I asked Washington Post Pulitzer Prize–winning military reporter Walter Pincus what we should make of spending more than $1 billion to replace a world-class medical facility in Germany. Without missing a beat, he said, ‘It implies we’re going to keep fighting.’
Numerous signs suggest that unless there are significant changes in the United States, the wars that began in October 2001 won’t be coming to an end soon. Why? is the question I asked at the start of this book. In many ways, that the United States has existed in a state of near-permanent war since its revolution (1765. svh) is unsurprising. This book has shown that the newly independent country’s embrace of a long string of wars and invasions followed nearly three hundred years of deadly colonizing warfare by European empires and European settlers in the Americas. After independence (1776. svh), the aim for many U.S. civilian and military leaders was expansion and conquest. The aim was empire. And the construction of bases on and beyond the borders of U.S.-claimed territory helped make wars for imperial expansion possible.
These dynamics, which developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, intensified and became more powerfully embedded in the economic, political, and social life of the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. During the earlier period, forts and the U.S. Army made land available and relatively safe for settlement and Euro-Americans’ individual and familial enrichment. The Army protected major trading posts, trade routes, railroads, and eventually growing towns and cities to support Euro-American profit making and to ensure the smooth operation of capitalism in North America. After 1898 and especially after World War II, bases abroad continued to support individual and corporate profit making, but at a much larger, global scale.
In the post–World War II era, overseas bases have played an important role in the creation of a permanent war system in the United States. When the global base infrastructure remained in place after World War II, it became entrenched in tandem with the expansion of the Military Industrial Congressional Complex. The global base network became a microcosm of the Complex as it became embedded in local, national, and international political-economic and social systems, making it increasingly difficult to uproot.
The growth in the size and power of the Military Industrial Congressional Complex reflected the central role that military spending came to play in the U.S. economy after World War II. Weapons production and other military spending became the “largest public works project” in the postwar era, Catherine Lutz notes. While other wealthy industrialized nations created welfare states after World War II with investments in universal health care, education, child care, housing, and other social bebenefits, U.S. leaders and elites created a warfare state built around the construction and maintenance of military bases, the world’s largest arms industry, a large standing military, and the wars that followed in their wake. U.S. leaders directed tax spending to create ‘the largest budget for the production of violence of any government, anywhere, ever.’ It’s no coincidence that the other major postwar public works project was created by former Army general President Dwight Eisenhower with military functions firmly in mind: the nationwide Interstate Highway System offered a way to move military forces quickly and reliably around the country. A global infrastructure of bases abroad was likewise helpful in advancing elite economic interests and the personal and professional interests of high-ranking military officers. A large collection of bases abroad provided justification for a large standing military and for high levels of spending to maintain the bases, all to the benefit of the Military Industrial Congressional Complex.
UN report: Widespread torture of detainees in Afghan prisons:
A U.N. report says that nearly a third of all detainees held in Afghan detention centers say they have suffered some form of torture or ill-treatment... The United Nations expressed serious concerns about the claims, including allegations of 'enforced disappearances.' https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/high-torture-detainees-afghanistan-continues-75655151
Following the start of the U.S. war in Afghanistan in 2001, this Complex and the system of permanent war have reached new levels of entrenched power and insidiousness. The intensification of power is the result of Congress’s willingness to appropriate extraordinary levels of taxpayer funding for the military and war after October 2001 and the ability of the U.S. government to run up trillions in dollar-denominated debts (now around $23 trillion). Since 2006 military budgets have exceeded the highest spending levels of the ‘Cold War,’ when the United States confronted another empire in the form of the Soviet Union. This more profound economic, political, and sociocultural power in turn has helped normalize permanent war. Indeed, military leaders, analysts, journalists, and others now can talk with a straight face about the United States existing in a state of ‘infinite war.’ Air Force General Mike Holmes explained ‘infinite war’ in a 2018 speech. Infinite war, he said, is ‘not losing. It’s staying in the game and getting a new plan and keeping pursuing your objectives.’ In other words, the Military Industrial Congressional Complex has become a Dr. Strangelove–like caricature of itself: a system transparently and perhaps exclusively dedicated to its own perpetuation and expansion, lacking any threat warranting these levels of profligate spending but producing catastrophic warfare that has created more militants, thus ensuring higher levels of funding and more war in a cycle that indeed appears infinite.
Journalist Andrew Cockburn compares the Complex to a ‘giant, malignant virus’ with a ‘built-in self-defense reflex that reacts forcefully whenever a threat to its food supply — taxpayers’ money — hits a particular trigger point.’ In another world, where the consequences weren’t so wasteful and deadly, it might be humorous. Except it’s not, because the waste and destruction have been so profound and because daily U.S. military operations risk triggering a new, even more catastrophic, potentially nuclear war, whether with Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea. The irony deepens given that the astronomically high military budgets have yielded a ‘very poor fighting force for our money.’ People in the United States should pray the military never actually has to defend the United States.
With little public awareness or debate, war and military spending have become even more deeply rooted in the structure of U.S. politics and government as de facto U.S. economic policy and the major form of national economic investment. Today’s collection of U.S. bases abroad has given military and other government leaders the ability to deploy and use military force almost anywhere in the world, whether it be with aerial bombing campaigns, ground troops, drone strikes, or proxy armies guided by special forces operators. This hyperinterventionist vision of deploying U.S. military power to strike in any and every ‘dark corner’ of the world has shaped U.S. foreign policy and further entrenched the United States in a state of permanent, endless war. That many and perhaps most U.S. Americans think and feel little about these wars — if they’re aware of them at all — is due to the absence of a national draft and the government’s ability to put the costs of infinite war effectively on a credit card by running up trillions in debt.
This book has shown some of the powerful forces that have shaped the permanent system of imperial war in which the United States is trapped today. As ‘God forbid [peace might break out]!’ reveals, there are corporations, elements of the military and other government agencies, politicians, lobbyists, journalists, think tank analysts, academics, and many others who are literally invested in war — while also being professionally, psychologically, and socially invested. U.S. bases abroad and the near-continuous wars they have helped enable indeed have benefited some. I have been one of the beneficiaries as a Euro-American man growing up in a privileged upper-class home in and around Washington, DC, a city whose economy revolves to a significant degree around the Military Industrial Congressional Complex. (That much of my professional career has revolved around studying and writing about U.S. bases abroad is another ironic way I have benefited.) The people securing most of the benefits of this system have tended to be elites with direct economic interests tied to bases and to the markets and industries directly supported by bases and wars abroad. Some will respond that the system creates jobs. It does. But the U.S. military should not be a jobs program. If the country needs a jobs program, Congress should invest in other sectors of the economy that create far more jobs per dollar spent than investments in the military: infrastructure and clean energy create 40 percent more jobs for every $1 million invested, health care creates 100 percent more jobs, and education creates 120 percent more. Even if military investments created just as many jobs as other sectors, or even more, the military should be focused on defending the country. And it should defend the country’s people at the lowest possible cost and not a cent more. As Eisenhower said, ‘Every arms dollar we spend above adequacy has a long-term weakening effect upon the nation and its security.’
Beyond the nation, we must of course face the full breadth of harm inflicted by the war system. As we’ve seen, the total dead from U.S. wars number in the tens of millions. The wars have left millions more injured and traumatized physically and mentally in the countries where the wars have been waged and in the homes of people who went to fight. The wars have displaced millions. They have torn apart neighborhoods, communities, and societies. They have impoverished people economically, politically, and even spiritually, as President Eisenhower suggested in his Military Industrial Complex speech. Others have suffered ‘peacetime crimes’ as a result of U.S. bases abroad and other regular preparations for war. The victims include people displaced by bases, such as the Chagossians. They include the people of the U.S. colonies, who still are colonized and live as third-and fourth-class U.S. Americans because of the freedom the military gets from having bases in their homes, while their freedoms are denied.
'Urinating on dead' video: US soldiers identified as fallout continues
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_of_U.S._Marines_urinating_on_Taliban_fighters
De kern van hetgeen professor Vine in zijn wetenschappelijk werk aantoont is dat:
Na de onafhankelijkheid van de Verenigde Staten was het doel van veel Amerikaanse civiele- en militaire leiders expansie en verovering. Het doel was een imperium opbouwen. En de aanleg van bases in en buiten de grenzen van het door de VS geclaimde gebied maakte oorlogen mogelijk voor de expansie van het rijk.
Het is juist dit onloochenbare feit dat door de mainstream-pers voortdurend wordt verzwegen. Daarmee demonstreert de ‘corporate press’ in het ‘democratische Westen’ dat zij niet vrij is om de werkelijkheid te beschrijven en zij derhalve de rol van propagandist speelt. Dit is de voornaamste reden dat de zelfcensuur waaraan de massamedia collectief lijdt, zoveel mogelijk en zo langdurig mogelijk onbespreekbaar moet blijven, en dissidenten gemarginaliseerd dienen te blijven. In een ware democratie is er evenwel sprake van een vrije uitwisseling van feiten en opvattingen. Maar vanwege de afgedwongen zelfcensuur — uitstoting uit de groep — bestaat ook in het Westen geen ‘democratie.’ Het is typerend dat De Groene Amsterdammer, een weekblad waarvan de doelgroep uit hoger opgeleide lezers bestaat uit de hoogste sociale welstandsklasse, pas op het moment dat de Taliban naar Kaboel oprukte de onthullende realiteit van de afgelopen twintig jaar onder Amerikaanse bezetting publiceerde, zoals die werd opgetekend door de Nederlandse journaliste Bette Dam, die van 2009 tot 2014 in de hoofdstad Kaboel werkte. Onder de kop ‘Afghanistan en het eenzijdige verhaal’ schreef zij ondermeer:
Afghanistan was na 9/11 in de internationale media steeds meer beschreven als het land van de terroristen, die staan voor alles waar wij niet voor staan, zoals de Amerikaanse president George Bush dat verwoordde. Afghanistan was in dat beeld het land waar 9/11 was bedacht en voorbereid. Ook de internationale fotojournalistiek toonde vooral een onheilspellend Afghanistan. Zelden zag je iets anders dan slachtoffers van geweld, bij voorkeur gefotografeerd in zwart-wit. Net als veel internationale collega’s had ik mij dat angstige beeld eigen gemaakt. Het was vooral het beeld van de militairen. Ik herinner me nog hoe een Nederlandse kolonel die mij op Kamp Holland in Uruzgan rondleidde ineens tegen me schreeuwde dat ik niet te dicht bij het toilet moest komen, omdat ik er rekening mee moest houden dat de Afghaanse schoonmaker zich elk moment zou kunnen opblazen.
Het contrast tussen het angstaanjagende beeld van Afghanistan en wat ik gaandeweg zelf over het land ontdekte door met Afghanen te praten deed me sterk denken aan een TED Talk uit die tijd. Daarin vertelde de Nigeriaans-Amerikaanse auteur Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie over ‘the danger of a single story.’
Het is het verhaal over hoe zij, jaren nadat Nigeria onafhankelijk was geworden, op school de geschiedenis van haar land nog steeds vanuit het perspectief van de voormalige Britse kolonisator leerde. Teksten over een land vol spectaculaire natuur en exotische wilde dieren en vreemd uitgedoste mensen die onderling onbegrijpelijke oorlogen voerden en eigenlijk zaten te wachten op redding van buiten. Pas jaren later ervaart ze een ‘mental shift’ als zij zelf kennis maakt met Nigeriaanse schrijvers die een heel ander verhaal vertellen over haar geschiedenis en cultuur.
Zo werd mij duidelijk dat veel internationale media wat betreft de interventie in Afghanistan ook gevangen zaten in een single story. Langzaam maar zeker maakte mijn angst over Afghanen plaats voor vertrouwen in ook hun verhaal. Dat zorgde ervoor dat mijn beeld over Afghanistan en de interventie steeds verder weg dreef van wat er door mijn internationale collega’s werd beweerd.
Zo was er het verhaal over dat de Taliban weliswaar verrassend snel waren verdreven, maar zich hadden verschanst in grensgebieden als Tora Bora, samen met het al-Qaeda van Osama bin Laden, en dus klaar om onmiddellijk weer terug te slaan zodra de internationale militaire steun voor de nieuwe Afghaanse president Hamid Karzai zou verslappen.
De strijd werd met volle kracht voortgezet in de vorm van een ware klopjacht op iedereen die verdacht werd van betrokkenheid bij 9/11. In een paar maanden tijd werden duizenden vermeende al-Qaeda-strijders en Taliban-sympathisanten achter slot en grendel gezet. Vaak in geheime gevangenissen waar marteling was toegestaan, zoals in Polen, Egypte en de meest beruchte: Guantánamo Bay op Cuba.
Tegelijkertijd gaven de Amerikanen vorm aan de nieuwe regering van Hamid Karzai. Gouverneurs en politiecommandanten werden vooral geselecteerd op hun militaire kwaliteiten. Het waren vooral oude bestuurders die slechte reputaties hadden opgelopen in de verwoestende burgeroorlog van begin jaren negentig en die in 1994 door de Taliban werden verdreven. Zij maakten in het nieuwe Afghanistan nu de dienst uit, gesteund door de internationale interventiemacht die zich overal in het land in grote militaire bases verschansten tegen de aanhoudende dreiging van de terroristen.
Nadat Karzai over deze overgave van de Taliban persoonlijk de grote internationale persbureaus had geïnformeerd, werd hij vanuit Washington D.C. gecorrigeerd. Met name minister Donald Rumsfeld van Defensie wilde van geen overgave weten. Hij maakte bekend dat hij Karzai had gebeld en hem had gezegd de overgave niet te accepteren. ‘Al-Qaeda en de Taliban blijven onze vijanden. We blijven troepen sturen.’ Karzai liet zich door dit machtsvertoon het zwijgen opleggen en de overgave verdween binnen 24 uur volledig uit beeld.
Hiermee kreeg de militaire interventie al snel steeds meer het karakter van een oorlog zonder vijand. Vooral gedreven door het gevoel dat 9/11 moest worden gewroken, werden Afghanen bij ook maar de geringste verdenking van connecties met de Taliban en al-Qaeda opgepakt. Meestal was voor zo’n verdenking een tip uit de kringen van de nieuwe Afghaanse machthebbers genoeg. Zulke tips werden voor die bestuurders de manier om voor andere, voor hen belangrijkere zaken gehoor te vinden bij de Amerikanen. Ze probeerden voordeel te behalen, of een oude vete met rivalen te beslechten. Ze zeiden tegen de westerlingen wat zij wilden horen: het is Taliban/al-Qaeda.
Mevrouw Dam’s journalistieke verslag van de werkelijkheid geeft een volstrekt ander beeld van Afghanistan dan die waarmee het publiek in Nederland twee decennia lang werd gevoed. Het manicheïsch simplisme van een NRC-columniste als Caroline de Gruyter is slechts één voorbeeld van de permanente propaganda die over de NRC-lezer werd — en nog steeds wordt — uitgestort.
Precies aan de andere kant van het journalistieke spectrum is NRC's columniste Caroline de Gruyter met haar NAVO-propaganda actief. In haar krant van op 30 juli 2021 stelde zij:
Klemens von Metternich, tussen 1809 en 1848 minister van Buitenlandse Zaken van het Habsburgse Rijk, hield van spinnen. ‘Ik heb vaak het idee,’ zei hij eens, ‘dat ik middenin een groot, zelf-geweven web zit, net als mijn vrienden de spinnen die ik zo bewonder. Zo’n web is mooi om naar te kijken, ambachtelijk gemaakt en sterk genoeg om een lichte aanval te weerstaan, al gaat het bij een flinke windvlaag kapot.’
Europese leiders moeten deze woorden ter harte nemen, nu het vertrek van westerse troepen uit Afghanistan een machts- en veiligheidsvacuüm in Centraal-Azië veroorzaakt. Het westerse ‘web’ in die regio is grotendeels kapot. China en Rusland maken er dankbaar gebruik van en zoeken toenadering tot de Taliban, die nu grote delen van Afghanistan heroveren.
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2021/07/30/europa-wees-een-spin-a4053043
Uit haar voorstelling van zaken spreekt telkens weer het Eurocentrisme, het narcisme van de Europese middenklasse, waarbij de onderhuids racistische belevingswereld van de witte man en witte vrouw centraal staat. Terwijl de extreme armoede, het aantal vluchtelingen, doden en zwaar gewonden onder de Amerikaanse/NAVO-bezetting toenam, beweerde zij brutaalweg:
Twintig jaar later dondert alles in elkaar, en in plaats van grondig na te denken over de toekomst van het westerse bondgenootschap en artikel 5
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2021/08/20/de-europese-schande-a4055477
President Eisenhower’s warning about the Military Industrial Congressional Complex applies equally to this system of endless war and empire. It has militarized ‘the very structure of our society’ (and our world) with ‘economic, political, even spiritual’ effects ‘in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government’ (and far beyond). As a result of what Eisenhower rightly called the ‘disastrous rise of misplaced power,’ endless war, empire, and the Military Industrial Congressional Complex have shredded many of our ‘democratic processes.’ They have shredded ‘our liberties’ that grew in the United States and worldwide after World War II, thanks to decolonization struggles and other global social movements that demanded equality, justice, democracy, peace, and the extension of liberties to those denied them for far too long.
Returning to the visions of these movements offers a foundation for a fundamentally new vision for U.S. foreign policy and for U.S. engagement in the world. In keeping with the best traditions in U.S. history, this would be a democratic vision embracing the equality and equal rights of all human beings. It should be obvious, but needs saying, that imperialism and war are antidemocratic. As an antidemocratic ideology and form of rule based on the fraudulent idea that some humans are superior to others, imperialism — like war — must be rejected in favor of a renewed commitment to ensuring universal democratic rights for all. ‘A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death,’ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1967, a year to the day before his assassination.
Greed is Dead. Politics After Individualism (2020) is de titel van een 192 pagina’s tellend boek geschreven door Paul Collier, ‘professor of Economics and Public Policy’ in Oxford, en John Kay, ‘one of Britain’s lading economists and a fellow of St. John’s College’ in Oxford. Hun stelling is kort samengevat:
The extreme individualism embraced by many prominent and successful people in recent decades, and which sought justification in terms of merit or celebrity, is no longer intellectually tenable.
Daarbij is het uitgangspunt van Collier en Kay dat:
Humans are not selfish, maximizing individuals, pursuing their own conception of happiness; they seek fulfillment which arises largely from their interaction with others — in families, in streets and villages, at work.
Hier keren twee vooraanstaande leden van het Britse establishment zich tegen de neoliberale ideologie die nog steeds door de overgrote meerderheid van de westerse politici en de ‘corporate press’ wordt gepropageerd. Hoewel een toenemende aantal burgers zich tegen het a-sociale neoliberale bestel keert, geldt voor de politieke kaste van links zowel als rechts dat dit onderwerp buiten elke discussie moet staan. Zo verklaarde eind vorige eeuw de in Nederland bewonderde PvdA-voorman Wim Kok dat de oppositie tegen het neoliberale kapitalisme zinloos is, omdat er ‘geen alternatief’ zou bestaan ‘voor de maatschappelijke constellatie die we nu hebben,’ en ‘dus het geen enkele zin [heeft] daar naar te streven,’ aldus voegde hij hier in één adem aan toe. Naderhand beweerde dezelfde Kok, inmiddels premier, met evenveel stelligheid dat het hoogste tijd was om ‘afscheid van het socialisme’ te nemen. Deze zoon van een bouwvakker uit een streng gereformeerd dorp kwalificeerde het kritiekloos omarmen van de neoliberale ideologie als: 'de bevrijdende werking van het afschudden van de ideologische veren.’ Dankzij de ‘bevrijdende werking’ van, ironisch genoeg, de neoliberale ideologie zagen ‘U.S. billionaires their fortunes soar by $434 billion during the nation’s lockdown between mid-March and mid-May (2020. svh), according to a new report,’ zo berichtte de Amerikaanse omroep-organisatie CNBC op 21 mei 2020.
Op haar beurt liet eind januari 2021 NBC weten dat ‘World's richest become wealthier during Covid pandemic as inequality grows. Almost every country in the world is likely to see an increase in inequality because of the pandemic, according to a new report.’ Volgens het Amerikaanse netwerk contrasteerde de ervaringen van de superrijken:
sharply with those of the world’s less fortunate, who have hit on hard times and whose recovery from the pandemic could take over a decade, according to the report, titled ‘The Inequality Virus.’
Bovendien constateerden de onderzoekers van Oxfam:
how the pandemic has unequally affected people’s health outcomes. For example, in the U.S., close to 22,000 Black and Hispanic people would still be alive as of December 2020 if Covid-19 mortality rates were the same as for white people.
Covid-19 is not unique in the way it has affected different populations, said Melissa Leach, the director of the U.K.-based research organization, the Institute of Development Studies.
‘Epidemics are always mirrors to society, and what this has revealed is a highly unequal world,’ she said.
‘We are seeing rises in wealth amongst very few, rises in poverty, and gaps between the rich and poor. And what we’ve learned over many decades is that the gaps in themselves also matter because they have knock-on effects not just for the poor but for the way democracies function and the ways economic policies unfold,’ she added.
The report calls on governments to step in to remedy the growing gaps in inequality, and recommends taxes on the wealthy, increased public spending on health care, free universal access to quality health care, and permanent ‘social protection’ for the poorest in society.
‘Inequalities make it more difficult to deliver on things that any American would care about,’ said Leach. ‘It’s more difficult to have a stable society, a healthy society, a secure society, a peaceful society, and to have a functioning democracy.’
Hetzelfde proces, waarbij de kloof tussen een kleine uiterst vermogende elite en de rest van de mensheid almaar toenam, voltrok zich in alle neoliberale ‘democratieën,’ en dus ook in Nederland, nadat de volksvertegenwoordigers zich hadden ‘bevrijd’ van hun ‘ideologische veren,’ een stap die wereldwijd lucratief is geweest voor de zogeheten volksvertegenwoordigers. In de VS is ruim de helft van de Congresleden miljonair, terwijl in Nederland geen enkel parlementslid meer tot de arbeidersklasse behoort. De tot het ware kapitalistische geloof bekeerde Wim Kok, voormalig vicevoorzitter van de Socialistische Internationale, werd voor zijn collaboratie rijkelijk beloond met een commissariaat bij onder andere Shell, KLM, en ING. Wikipedia meldt dat:
Deze commissariaten tot discussie en kritiek [leidden], doordat Kok tijdens zijn bewind kritiek geleverd had op bestuurders van grote bedrijven en daarbij van ‘ordinaire zakkenvullers’ en van ‘exhibitionistische zelfverrijking’ had gesproken. Als commissaris genoot hij niet alleen zelf royale inkomsten, maar nam hij ook medeverantwoordelijkheid voor enkele verdere inkomensstijgingen. Zo stemde hij in met een stijging van 584 procent in de loop van drie jaar van de korte-termijnbonus voor ING-topman Michel Tilmant. Tegenover de commissie-de Wit verdedigde Kok dit door te zeggen dat de raad van bestuur van ING qua inkomen zwaar achteropgeraakt was bij de rest van de bankwereld, en dat het verschil met de concurrentie kleiner gemaakt moest worden om de talentvolle mensen te kunnen behouden. Kok verklaarde dat hij als minister-president een ‘maatschappelijke verantwoordelijkheid’ had, terwijl hij als commissaris ‘in het belang van de vennootschap’ en in het belang van 'BV Nederland' moest handelen. Naast zijn commissariaten vervulde Kok enkele Europese adviesfuncties.
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Kok
Zo zijn de kaarten geschud in het neoliberalisme van ‘ordinaire zakkenvullers’ en van het grondbeginsel dat ‘Greed is Good.’ In Oliver Stone’s speelfilm Wall Street zet de beursspeculant Gordon Gekko deze ‘exhibitionisme zelfverrijking’ als volgt uiteen:
The richest one percent of this country owns half our country's wealth, five trillion dollars. One-third of that comes from hard work, two-thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons — and what I do, stock and real estate speculation. It's bullshit. You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper clip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now, you're not naive enough to think we're living in a democracy, are you, Buddy? It's the free market. And you're a part of it. You've got that killer instinct. Stick around, pal, I've still got a lot to teach you.
De kern van het neoliberale geloof wordt door Gekko als volgt toegelicht:
Well, ladies and gentlemen, we are not here to indulge in fantasy, but in political and economic reality. America, America has become a second-rate power. Its trade deficit and its fiscal deficit are at nightmare proportions. Now, in the days of the free market, when our country was a top industrial power, there was accountability to the stockholder. The Carnegies, the Mellons, the men that built this great industrial empire, made sure of it because it was their money at stake. Today, management has no stake in the company!
Het zijn de speculerende bankiers, in dienst van de allerrijksten, die met fiduciair geld een handel in lucht op gang hebben gebracht, en gedreven worden door louter en alleen ‘begeerte,’ of zoals Gekko zegt:
The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
‘Greed,’ die zogeheten ‘evolutionaire drijfveer in een gedereguleerde en geprivatiseerde maatschappij heeft nu ook in het Westen, de almaar bredere kloof tussen arm en rijk gecreëerd, en het verlies veroorzaakt van de maatschappelijke samenhang. Of, zoals de hoogleraren Collier en Kay schrijven:
We live in societies saturated in selfishness. So how can we say that greed is dead’? What we mean is that the extreme individualism embraced by many prominent and successful people in recent decades, and which sought justification in terms of merit or celebrity is no longer intellectually tenable. Humans are naturally prosocial, and exhibitionist greed is both grating and contagious. The excessive financial demands of businesspeople and the claims of identity politics… and the rise of the reality-‘TV star and the ‘influencer’ share a central characteristic — it is all about me. Some are greedy for money, others greedy for attention. The libertarian fantasies of Silicon Valley rely on similar selfish motivation. And it has all gone much too far.
De ikke, ikke, ikke, en de rest kan stikke-mentaliteit heeft allereerst de Verenigde Staten uiteen laten vallen in twee elkaar hatende politieke partijen, die geen van beide een ‘alternatief’ hebben voor de sociale ineenstorting van ‘Gods Own Country’ en zijn ‘American Dream.’ Collier en Kay schrijven over het universitaire bestel met zijn ‘claims of moral superiority’ die:
derive from the resumption of intellectual entitlement intrinsic to meritocracy: ‘I’m clever so I know best.’ A presumption so strong that its beneficiaries not only do not wish to hear dissent but seek to suppress it. The un-enlightened are not to be dignified with reasoned argument but are the proper subject of personal abuse — they are fascists, homophobes, racists, transphobes, climate-change deniers. In the media and among public-sector professionals, an equivalent claim to moral superiority found a different origin. Exemplified by the passionate outrage expressed in a newspaper column or protest meetings, the intensity of feeling was for many the measure of moral worth. We are right because we are better people and we take every opportunity to tell you so.
This ugly stridency (recht voor zijn raap. svh) is the product of an extreme elite individualism — the rise of the self at the expense of community — which has taken much of modern political and cultural thought. Yet the more we learn about our evolution, our psychology, our anthropology, about history as a species — and modern research has greatly illuminated these subjects — the clearer it becomes that this individualism fails to recognize the fundamentals of humanity.
Our human nature has given us a unique capacity for mutuality. We are (mostly) not saints, but nor (mostly) are we sociopaths. In the complex modern world we could not thrive without an exceptional capacity for mutuality: more fundamentally, without that capacity we could never have created the complexity that has enabled modernity. A healthy society is a vast web of cooperative activity sustained by mutual kindnesses and obligations. Some of the interdependencies between individuals, but most involve people in groups — firms, local governments, colleges, communities and families. Most of these interrelationships are based on unwritten understandings, not legal documents.
Zij wijzen erop dat:
The modern, penchant for individualism treats markets and politics as disjoint mechanisms for reconciling individual interests. And so, understandably, both markets and politics are now held in contempt. Communities have been scarred, and those scars are manifest in our politics and our states. The new politics manifests itself across the developed world. It thrives on grievances, some well founded, others imagined or manufactured; its resentments and triumphalism have been tearing societies apart.
Maar ook hierover zwijgen de opiniemakers van de polderpers. Meer hierover de volgende keer.
2007. Zomaar een jonge Palestijnse slachtoffer van de door het Westen gesteunde zionistische terreur.
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