aldus NRC-columniste Caroline de Gruyter, die in navolging van de Pruisische generaal Carl von Clausewitz eenvoudigweg ervan uitgaat dat oorlog ‘een waarachtig politiek instrument’ is, ‘een voortzetting van het politieke verkeer, een doorvoering daarvan met andere middelen.’
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2021/08/27/europa-moet-zijn-eigen-boontjes-gaan-doppen-a4056289
Oorlog als middel om een politiek doel te bereiken, was ruim twee eeuwen geleden nog een acceptabele doctrine, maar is in het huidige tijdperk van massavernietigingswapens een genocidale misdaad. Dit roept dan ook onvermijdelijk bij welgemanierde burgers de vraag op waarom in De Gruyter’s middenklasse milieu deze patjepeeër’s mentaliteit doorgaat voor beschaafd gedrag. Ik bedoel, mevrouw De Gruyter en haar entourage zouden natuurlijk verontwaardigd opkijken wanneer iemand haar een taart in het gezicht zou werpen, omdat zij opinies verkondigt die weerzinwekkend zijn. Ik vrees dat haar schizofrenie berust op een combinatie van onverschilligheid voor het lot van anderen, en het narcisme waaraan mainstream opiniemakers doorgaans lijden. Het opmerkelijke is dat nooit, maar dan ook nooit een journalist deze vraag durft te stellen aan politici en opiniemakers van wie de grove mentaliteit steeds gevaarlijker is. Ook dit gebrek toont aan dat geen van mijn collega’s zich betrokken voelt, of in elk geval zich niet verantwoordelijk acht, voor het verspreiden van uiterst dubieuze opvattingen. Stel uzelf de vraag waarom in de ogen van Caroline de Gruyter ‘de Amerikanen de handen vrij’ moeten ‘hebben voor China’? Gezien het feit dat de VS op dit moment ruim 60 procent van zijn marinevloot ‘in de Zuidoost-Aziatische wateren’ heeft ‘gestationeerd,’ en dat ‘The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps,’ zoals Thomas Friedman, de bekendste woordvoerder van het Amerikaans establishment, in The New York Times van 28 maart 1999 stelde, is de conclusie gerechtvaardigd dat de politieke macht in Washington en de financiële macht op Wall Street een oorlog plannen tegen de nucleaire grootmacht China. De vooraanstaande, veelvuldig onderscheiden, Australische onderzoeksjournalist John Pilger onthult in zijn filmdocumentaire The Coming War on China (2016), hoe en waarom een oorlog dreigt tussen twee met massavernietigingswapens uitgeruste grootmachten:
Nuclear war is not only imaginable, but planned. The greatest build-up of NATO military forces since the Second World War is under way on the western borders of Russia. On the other side of the world, the rise of China is viewed in Washington as a threat to American dominance.
To counter this, President Obama announced a ‘pivot to Asia,’ which meant that almost two-thirds of all US naval forces would be transferred to Asia and the Pacific, their weapons aimed at China. A policy which has been taken up by his successor Donald Trump, who during his election campaign said ‘We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country and that’s what they’re doing.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAfeYMONj9E
Pilger politely reminds us that Nobel peace laureate Barack Obama presided over a massive increase in nuclear spending and a new strategic objective, the super-modern ‘pivot to Asia,’ which for the arms business is like the exploitation of a lucrative new market. It means a colossal but unacknowledged buildup of military bases under China’s nose, specifically intended to smack down any thoughts China might be having about translating its commercial prosperity into power in the region and answer with an overwhelming show of strength China’s own disputed claim to the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. Their semi-secret bases are tracked by academic David Vine in his observation project Base Nation. Pilger fills in the historical context: from turning the Marshall Islands and their peoples into vivisectional nuclear-test guinea pigs after the war, the US government has turned many places into missile bases whose weapons are trained on China. (Pilger could — but doesn’t — point out how close America came to a nuclear strike on China during the Korean war.)
It’s a bizarre, dysfunctional situation, a buildup which shows no sign of abating… This is a gripping film… A strong corrective to our bland and complacent indifference to the new war-game scenario in the Pacific.
Deze angstaanjagende werkelijkheid wordt nog eens verergerd door de ontwikkeling waarover CNN op 20 september 2021 berichtte:
The US and UK will be sharing technology and expertise with Australia to help it build nuclear-powered submarines as part of a newly-announced defense pact between the three countries.
Een dag eerder al had The Financial Times melding gemaakt van de voordelen van nucleaire onderzeeboten:
The biggest advantage of nuclear submarines is that they can remain submerged and remain stealth for much longer. Traditionally powered vessels do not have the same range without being exposed to detection on the surface of the water. Nuclear submarines can carry enough fuel for up to 30 years of operation and only need to return to the port for maintenance and supply.
According to one defense expert, nuclear submarines are ‘the most complex human-made machines, even more complex than the Space Shuttle.’ ‘You have a nuclear reactor in the back, high explosives in the front and in the middle, a hotel where people live, and everything is submerged for months at a time.’
Bovendien werd bekend dat:
The decision to acquire Tomahawk missiles — which can be fired from either ships or submarines — also marks a major addition to Australia’s capabilities.
‘Tomahawks transform a surface navy ship into a strategic asset that can target military facilities ashore from a thousand miles away. This new payload will significantly upgrade the conventional strike power of the Australian navy,’ said Eric Sayers, a defense expert at the American Enterprise Institute…
The Tomahawks would give Australia more capability to hit targets in China in any conflict, which is important because the US and its allies would have fewer military assets off the coast of China than the Chinese military. ‘The Tomahawk opens the door to long-range strikes against land targets like taking down integrated air and missile-defense systems or aircraft hangars,’ Sayers said.
https://www.ft.com/content/aa5c9fd5-891b-4680-b3c7-5a55d03f673c
Onder de kop ‘Arms deal increases tensions across Asia’ berichtte The New York Times van 21 september 2021:
China is swelling into a military superpower. India, Vietnam and Singapore are spending more on defense. Japan is leaning to do the same. Now Australia, backed by the United States and Britain, has catapulted the military contest with Beijing in Asia into a tense new phase.
Their deal last week to equip Australia with stealthy, long-range nuclear-powered submarines better able to take on the Chinese navy could accelerate an Asian arms buildup long before the submarines enter service.
In response, China may step up its military modernization, especially in technology able to stymie the submarines. And by confirming the Biden administration’s determination to take on Chinese power in Asia, the new weapons deal may tilt other big military spenders like India and Vietnam into accelerating their own weapons plans.
Countries trying to stay in the middle, like Indonesia, Malaysia and others, face a potentially more volatile region and growing pressure, as Australia did, to choose sides between Washington and Beijing.
The picture is one of three Anglo-Saxon countries drumming up militarily in the Indo-Pacific region. It plays to the narrative offered by China that ‘outsiders’ are not acting in line with the aspiration of regional countries,’ said Dino Patti Djalal, a former Indonesian ambassador to the United States. 'The worry is that this will spark an untimely arms race, which the region does not need now, nor in the future.’
The submarines won’t hit the water for at least a decade. But the geopolitical waves from their announcement have been instant, while giving Beijing time to marshal opposition among Asian neighbors and plot military countermoves.
Japan and Taiwan, both strong United States allies, quickly endorsed the security agreement.
Other Asian governments have, through their remarks or silence, signified misgivings or apprehension about riling China.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/world/asia/australia-submarines-china.html
Om de toenemende dreiging van een oorlog met China te rechtvaardigen beweren tegenwoordig westerse mainstream-opiniemakers als Caroline de Gruyter dat ‘de les van Afghanistan’ is ‘dat er een nieuw transatlantisch evenwicht komt, waarbij de Amerikanen de handen vrij hebben voor China, en Europa eindelijk meer voor zijn eigen veiligheid gaat zorgen.’ Aangezien Washington en Wall Street ervan doordrongen zijn dat China de grootste bedreiging vormt voor de hegemonie van het Amerikaans imperium heeft het na de val van de Sovjet Unie zijn troepen in Europa vermindert, en na het verlies van de oorlogen in Afghanistan, Irak en Syrië zijn troepen uit het Midden-Oosten heeft teruggetrokken, ziet het Amerikaans militair-industrieel complex zich genoodzaakt nieuwe oorlogen voor te bereiden, ditmaal tegen China en Rusland die, in tegenstelling tot Europa, weigeren de Amerikaanse politieke- en militaire overheersing als vanzelfsprekend te accepteren. De weg die de NAVO momenteel inslaat is doodlopend, aangezien wereldwijd ‘military expenditure increased 75% over the past 20 years, but stands at around $1.7 trillion annually since 2009. In 2018, it was $1.774 trillion,’ en ‘By 2030, the countries with top defense spending are expected to be: USA with over 1 trillion, China with $736 billion, and India with $213 billion (from respectively 633.6 billion, $240 billion and 66.6 billion in 2018.)’ en ‘World's military arsenals are expected to double in size by 2030, compared to 2016,’ en ‘NATO 29-members' spending was $900 billion (out of which, $610 billion was USA), accounting for 52% of world's spending in 2017,’ terwijl ‘The five biggest weapons exporters together accounted for 74% of the total volume of arms exports — the United States (33%), Russia (23%), China (6.2%), France (6%), and Germany (5.6%).’
Nu de economische en daarmee geopolitieke macht naar het Verre Oosten verschuift geldt opnieuw datgene waarvoor de prominente Amerikaanse socioloog C. Wright Mills al in 1958 waarschuwde, namelijk dat ‘The drift and thrust toward World War III is now part of the contemporary sensibility — and the defining characteristic of our time,’ waardoor met recht gesteld kan worden dat ‘The immediate cause of World War III is the military preparation of it.’ Van belang is te weten dat ‘Military necessity,’ aldus Mills ‘has become a cover term by which those who proclaim and who decide in the name of the nation hide their incompetence and their irresponsibility. The only realistic military view is the view that war, and not Russia is the enemy.’
Het is zeker geen teken van zwakte om C. Wright Mills stelling te onderschrijven dat in een tijdperk van massavernietigingswapens ‘war and peace are now the most important issues men anywhere can reason about.’ De neoliberale NRC-propagandiste De Gruyter mocht dan wel in haar krant van 30 oktober 2020 beweren dat ‘Na de val van de Muur’ in 1989 het ‘Westen had gezegevierd,’ kennelijk in de overtuiging dat ‘het einde van de geschiedenis’ was aangebroken, zoals de Amerikaanse neoconservatieve ideoloog Fukuyama had beweerd, maar desondanks rapporteerde het persbureau Reuters op 8 november 2009 over Oost-Europa: ‘Capitalism’s failure to lift living standards, impose the rule of law and tame flourishing corruption and nepotisme have given way to fond memories of the times when the jobless rate was zero, food was cheap and social safety was high,’ dezelfde factoren die tegelijkertijd in het Westen een diepe kloof tussen politici en kiezers veroorzaakte. Bovendien wees de Amerikaanse onafhankelijke politieke analist en auteur van ‘two acclaimed books Washington's Long War on Syria (2017) and Patriots Traitors and Empires, The Story of Korea's Struggle for Freedom (2018),’ Stephen Gowans, op het volgende:
While at the times the demise of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was proclaimed as a great victory for humanity, not least by leftist intellectuals in the United States, two decades later there’s little to celebrate. The dismantling of socialism has, in a word, been a catastrophe, a great swindle that has not only delivered none of what it promised, but has wreaked irreparable harm, not only in the former socialist countries, but throughout the Western world, as well. Countless millions have been plunged deep into poverty, imperialism has been given a free hand, and wages and benefits in the West have bowed under the pressure of intensified competition for jobs and industry unleashed by a flood of jobless from the former socialist countries, where joblessness once, rightly, was considered an obscenity. Numberless voices in Russia, Romania, East Germany and elsewhere lament what has been stolen from them — and from humanity as a whole: ‘We lived better under communism. We had jobs. We had security.’ And with the threat of jobs migrating to low-wage, high unemployment countries of Eastern Europe, workers in Western Europe have been forced to accept a longer working day, lower pay, and degraded benefits. Today, they fight a desperate rearguard action, where the victories are few, the defeats many. They too lived better — once.
But that’s only part of the story. For others, for investors and corporations, who’ve found new markets and opportunities for profitable investment, and can reap the benefits of the lower labor costs that attend intensified competition for jobs, the overthrow of socialism has, indeed, been something to celebrate. Equally, it has been welcomed by the landowning and industrial elite of the pre-socialist regimes whose estates and industrial concerns have been recovered and privatized. But they’re a minority. Why should the rest of us celebrate our own mugging?
Growing competition for jobs and industry has forced workers in Western Europe to accept less. They work longer hours, and in some cases, for less pay and without increases in benefits, to keep jobs from moving to the Czech Republic, Slovakia and other former socialist countries — which, under the rule of the Reds, once provided jobs for all. More work for less money is a pleasing outcome for the corporate class, and turns out to be exactly the outcome fascists engineered for their countries’ capitalists in the 1930s. The methods, to be sure, were different, but the anti-Communism of Mussolini and Hitler, in other hands, has proved just as useful in securing the same retrograde (verslechterende svh) ends. Nobody who is subject to the vagaries (grilligheden. svh) of the labor market — almost all of us — should be glad Communism was abolished.
https://gowans.blog/2011/12/20/we-lived-better-then/
As for the losses that the working class of the West suffered due to loss of the USSR and the East Bloc, former Assistant Secretary of Treasury under President Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts, has this to say, and he has said it often:
‘The collapse of the Soviet Union was the worst thing that ever happened to the United States. The two main consequences of the Soviet collapse have been devastating. One consequence was the rise of the neoconservative hubris of US world hegemony, which resulted in 14 years of wars that have cost $6 trillion. The other consequence was a change of mind in socialist India and communist China, large countries that responded to ‘the end of history’ by opening their vast under-utilized labor forces to Western capital, which resulted in the American economic decline that this article describes, leaving a struggling economy to bear the enormous war debt.’
Lijnrecht tegenover de zienswijze van een insider als de voormalige Amerikaanse staatssecretaris van Financiën Paul Craig Roberts is de anti-Russische propaganda van de oud NRC-adjunct hoofdredacteur Hubert Smeets, die zijn boek met de Kuifje-achtige titel De wraak van Poetin. Rusland contra Europa (2016) eindigt met het volgende citaat van de Russische oud-premier Victor Tsjernomyrdin: ‘We zullen nog eens zo leven dat onze kleinkinderen en achterkleinkinderen jaloers op ons zullen zijn,’ daarmee verzwijgend dat ruim 40 procent Russen als gevolg van Tsjernomyrdin’s economische shocktherapie onder de armoedegrens zakte, de gemiddelde leeftijd van Russische mannen naar 58 jaar daalde, het niveau van de Derde Wereld, terwijl zeven oligarchen, via malversaties en sommigen zelfs door het vermoorden van concurrenten erin slaagden zeker 50 procent van de Russische economie in handen te krijgen, terwijl onder president Poetin dit percentage is teruggebracht tot rond de 13 procent. Kennelijk allemaal 'jaloers' makende feiten. Maar deze feitelijke informatie verzwijgt Smeets in dit geval.
In tegenstelling tot de opgewonden ‘Europa-deskundige’ Caroline de Gruyter die erop hamert dat Rusland en China een bedreiging vormen van het Westen, zo niet de gehele mensheid, eindigt de academicus Dan Kovalik zijn boek over ‘How the CIA and the Deep State Have conspired to Vilify Russia’ met de nuchtere constatering dat:
We now face some of the greatest crises that humanity and the earth have ever seen — global warming, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, mass poverty and constant wars. To ally with a country like Russia to confront such challenges makes all the sense in the world.
Kovalik toont aan dat ‘we have been lied and misled into every war we have been involved in — by both the government and by the press which seems to be captured by it — and the results of these wars, if not the aims, have been opposite of what we were told they were.’
Midden september 2021 schreef de Amerikaanse politieke analist Danny Haiphong dat:
What the US and its Western allies work hard to conceal is that the basis for their policy of colonial revenge toward China rests upon a state of decline. It’s not that China is a threat to the wellbeing of humanity, but that China has rapidly progressed to the point where its economic and political model is taking center stage in global development. China’s economic and technological growth does not merely threaten to supplant the US and its Western allies from a purely competitive standpoint. Rather, China’s model of development represents a clear break from the dictates of white supremacy and colonialism that underwrite the imperialist order. More than forty years of predatory neoliberal capitalism and US-led imperialist hegemony have demonstrated that the centuries-old Western colonial system has nothing left to offer humanity but austerity, climate catastrophe, and endless war.
China, on the other hand, offers the world’s impoverished majority in the Global South hope for a better future. China is more than willing to share lessons from its defeat of extreme poverty and rapid infrastructure development in the areas of high-speed rail and 5G technology by way of the Belt and Road Initiative — a massive China-led infrastructure cooperation agreement that has the active participation of more than 130 countries. Developing countries in the Global South have counted on China to provide concrete assistance in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. China also offers loans to developing countries on terms which are more favorable than the conditionalities (voorwaarden. svh) of Western lending institutions. Furthermore, nations beleaguered by imperialism such as Syria, Cuba, the DPRK, and Iran have relied on China for political solidarity against barbaric US sanctions as well as much needed economic cooperation in the face of US aggression.
In the 20th century, the world was divided into two camps: a socialist camp led by the Soviet Union and a capitalist camp led by the United States. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the US and its Western partners enjoyed nearly free reign to dominate and exploit the planet in the interests of private shareholders and war profiteers. US and Western leaders hoped that China’s integration into the global economy would spell doom for its socialist system. AUKUS, and the New Cold War on China from which the alliance emerges, is rooted in a deepening desire among the historic white colonizers of the planet to exact revenge on China for refusing to relinquish its sovereignty and its world historic model of socialist development. The AUKUS alliance of white colonial states wishes for the evisceration of peaceful socialist development itself, especially when it is led by a nation of 1.4 billion non-white people who share core interests with the vast majority of humanity.
Dinsdag 21 september 2021 berichtte Het Parool op de voorpagina onder de kop ‘Joe Biden zet Amerika weer op de kaart, maar Europa voelt zich in zijn hemd gezet’ het volgende:
Bij aanvang van de VN-top in New York lijkt de relatie tussen Amerika en de Europese Unie kil. In Brussel begint het vertrouwen in betere banden met Washington onder Biden af te brokkelen…
‘Met de nieuwe regering van Joe Biden is Amerika terug,’ zei Charles Michel, voorzitter van de Europese Raad, gisteren in New York. “Maar wat betekent het dat Amerika terug is? Is Amerika terug in Amerika of ergens anders? We weten het niet.’
Eén ding maakt het bondgenootschap tussen Australië, de VS en het VK onder de naam Aukus duidelijk: Europa raakt in Washington, waar veel tegenwoordig draait om het beteugelen van China, steeds verder uit beeld. Niet alleen wordt de EU gepasseerd bij het bondgenootschap dat het hoofd moet bieden aan de toenemende macht van China in Azië; Brussel was niet eens van tevoren ingelicht.
Daarmee hield Biden zich volgens Michel niet aan de in juni gemaakte afspraak over eendracht bij de opstelling tegenover autoritaire regimes — met name China. ‘De elementaire principes voor een alliantie zijn loyaliteit en transparantie,’ zei Michel, die sprak van een patroon van minachting voor Europa door de VS: ‘We constateren een duidelijk gebrek daaraan.’
Thierry Breton, de EU-commissaris voor de Interne Markt, gaat zelfs nog verder. In een interview met de Britse krant Financial Times zei hij dat er iets ‘geknakt is’ in de trans-Atlantische banden. ‘Na wat de afgelopen twee maanden is gebeurd, is het een goed idee om ons partnerschap opnieuw te evalueren.’ […]
Europese Commissievoorzitter Ursula von der Leyen dreigde de eind september geplande top in Pittsburgh, over samenwerking tussen Brussel en Washington op het gebied van onder meer handel en klimaat, te schrappen. ‘Deze gang van zaken kan niet zo doorgaan.’
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