DE ANTI-RUSLAND PROPAGANDA VAN DE MAINSTREAM MEDIA 6

In zijn uit 1958 daterende essay Structure Of Power In American Society zette de Amerikaanse socioloog C. Wright Mills uiteen dat:

We cannot today merely assume that in the last resort men must always be governed by their own consent. For among the means of power which now prevail is the power to manage and to manipulate the consent of men. That we do not know the limits of such power, and that we hope it does have limits, does not remove the fact that much power today is successfully employed without the sanction of the reason or the conscience of the obedient.

Surely nowadays we need not argue that, in the last resort, coercion is the ‘final’ form of power.

Hij voegde hieraan toe:

Intellectual ‘conviction’ and moral ‘belief’ are not necessary, in either the rulers or the ruled, for a ruling power to persist and even to flourish. So far as the role of ideologies is concerned, their frequent absences and the prevalence of mass indifference are surely two of the major political facts about the western societies today… if men do not make history, they tend increasingly to become the utensils of history-makers as well as the mere objects of history.

 The history of modern society may readily be understood as the story of the enlargement and the centralization of the means of power — in economic, in political, and in military institutions. The rise of industrial society has involved these developments in the means of economic production. The rise of the nation-state has involved similar developments in the means of violence and in those of political administration… The top of modern American society is increasingly unified, and often seems willfully coordinated: at the top there has emerged an elite whose power probably exceeds that of any small group of men in world history. The middle levels are often a drifting set stalemated forces: the middle does not link the bottom with the top. The bottom of this society is politically fragmented, and even as a passive fact, increasing powerless: at the bottom there is emerging a mass society,

voortgedreven door geconditioneerde reflexen van zowel de cynische elite, de angstige middenklasse als de onverschillige onderkaste. Het begrip vrijheid speelt hierbij in zowel het Westen als in Rusland en China geen rol van betekenis. Desondanks blijven de opiniemakers van de polderpers staande houden dat ‘wij’ in het Westen ‘de democratie’ moeten blijven exporteren, dat onze neoliberale ‘vrijheid’ het hoogste goed is op aarde, en dat de Russen en Chinezen niet deugen.

In verband met de destijds heersende eerste Koude Oorlog benadrukte Mills dat de ‘directe oorzaak van de Derde Wereldoorlog haar voorbereiding’ is. Dat was vier jaar voordat de Amerikaanse historicus Arthur Schlesinger, adviseur van president John Kennedy, naar aanleiding van de Cuba Crisis in oktober 1962, had opgemerkt dat dit ‘the most dangerous moment in human history’ was geweest. Op zijn beurt verklaarde de toenmalige Amerikaanse minister van Defensie Robert McNamara in de bekroonde documentaire The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003) dat:

at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today.

De meeste westerse autoriteiten staan in de dagelijkse praktijk onverschillig tegenover dit immense gevaar, omdat zij te druk bezig zijn met de manicheïsche waan van de dag, waarbij vanzelfsprekend zij de goedheid zelve zijn en de anderen het kwaad vertegenwoordigen.  Tot hoever het cynisme van de macht gaat blijkt ondermeer uit het feit dat de Amerikaanse oud-minister van Buitenlandse Zaken, Mike Pompeo, en plein public  lachend verklaarde:

I was the CIA director, we lied, we cheated, we stole… we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.

Het aanwezige academisch geschoolde publiek waardeerde zijn misdadigheid zeer door te lachen en te applaudisseren. En de slachtoffers van deze terreur? Wel, zoals gebruikelijk bleven die onzichtbaar. ‘Such is life,’ in de ogen van ‘the powers that be.’ Net als in de voormalige Sovjet Unie heerst vandaag de dag overal in de neoliberale ‘democratieën’ de zogeheten ‘conspiracy of silence,’ als gevolg van de zelfcensuur van de mainstream-pers en het buiten sluiten van dissidenten. Veel meer belangstelling wordt getoond voor de capriolen van bekende Nederlanders die zich aan teenagers vergrepen. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPt-zXn05ac 

Onder aanvoering van politieke en journalistieke opruiers gaat de mensheid de toekomst in, tenminste, voor zolang die duurt. Met betrekking tot dit laatste wees medio januari 2022 de kritische, goed geïnformeerde Britse journalist Jonathan Cook op het volgende:

Washington’s ‘credibility’ was also seemingly in peril when US and Russian officials met in Geneva this week for negotiations in the midst of a diplomatic, and potential military, standoff over Ukraine. 

The background are demands from Moscow that Washington stops encircling Russia with military bases and that NATO end its relentless advancement towards Russia’s borders. NATO should be a relic of a Cold War-era that officially ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991. Moscow dissolved its own version of NATO, the Warsaw Pact, more than three decades ago.

Russia had been given verbal assurances in 1990 by George HW Bush’s administration that Nato would not expand militarilybeyond the borders of what was then West Germany. Seven years later, President Bill Clinton signed the Nato-Russia Founding Act on Mutual Relations, which committed Russia and NATO not to treat each other ‘as adversaries,’ while NATO reiterated that there would be no ‘additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces’ in former Eastern bloc states.

Every subsequent US administration has flagrantly broken both of these pledges, with Nato troops now stationed across eastern Europe. Perhaps not surprisingly, Moscow feels as menaced by NATO’s aggressive posturing, which serves to revive its Cold War fears, as Washington would if Russia placed military bases in Cuba and Mexico.

No one should forget that the US was prepared to bring the world to the brink of armageddon in a nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union in 1962 to prevent Moscow from stationing nuclear missiles in Cuba.

Historic alliance

Despite the current clamor about the need for the US to maintain its ‘credibility,’ Washington was in fact only being asked at the Geneva talks to start honoring, 30 years late, commitments it made long ago and has repeatedly violated. 

The latest flashpoint is Ukraine, Russia’s neighbor, which has been roiling since a coup in 2014 overthrew the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, an ally of Moscow. The deeply divided country is split between those who want to prioritize their historic ties with Russia and those who want to be embraced by the European Union.

Moscow — and a proportion of Ukrainians — believe Washington and Europe are exploiting the push for an economic pact to engineer Ukraine’s subordination to NATO security policies, directed against Russia. Such fears are not misplaced. Each of what were formerly Soviet-states that became an EU member has also been recruited to NATO. In fact, since 2009 it has been an official requirement, through the Treaty of Lisbon, that EU member states align their security policies with NATO. 

Now US ‘credibility’ apparently depends on its determination to bring NATO to Russia’s front door, via Ukraine. 

https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2022-01-13/why-washingtons-focus-on-credibility-is-a-recipe-for-war/?fbclid=IwAR3eVQFfBjAmltOOEQwIBWjqYHDE0IHgORpVZnb2teyPNh42wv9wy1eT8GU 

Gelukkig zijn de Franse- en Duitse leiders apert tegen de dreiging van een Derde Wereldoorlog, maar in Nederland waren zowel de minister van Defensie, de D’66 brokkenpiloot Ollongren, en de voltallige ‘corporate press’ voor het bestraffen van de Grote Beer, wanneer de Russische leiders alles op alles zetten om te voorkomen dat Oekraïne lid van de NAVO wordt, waardoor Moskou in vijf minuten tijd met raketten, voorzien van massavernietigingswapens, kan worden platgegooid. Dat willen de Russen begrijpelijkerwijs niet, net zomin als de Amerikaanse leiders begin jaren zestig dit wilden en zelfs bereid waren een oorlog te beginnen tegen de Sovjet Unie als de Sovjet leiding hun raketten op Cuba zouden stationeren. Maar ook hier wordt opnieuw door de gecorrumpeerde polderpers met twee maten gemeten, na domweg eerst hierover te hebben gezwegen. Onder druk van de sociale media zagen mijn mainstream-collega’s zich alsnog gedwongen om hieraan aandacht te besteden, overigens zonder te wijzen op het gebrek aan eigen logica. Hoe is dit te verklaren? Allereerst vooral vanwege het feit dat journalisten voor de overgrote meerderheid geen intellectuelen zijn, en gebukt gaan onder een gebrek aan wat de Duitsers ‘Bildung’ noemen. Dat wil zeggen: de meesten zijn afkomstig uit de lagere middenklasse die geen cultuur bezit. Opnieuw C. Wright Mills:

As a type of social man, the intellectual does not have any one political direction, but the work of any man of knowledge, if he is the genuine article, does have a distinct kind of political relevance: his politics, in the first instance, are the politics of truth, for his job is the maintenance of an adequate definition of reality. In so far as he is politically adroit, the main tenet of this politics is to find out as much of the truth as he can, and to tell it to the right people, at the right time, and in the right way. Or, stated negatively: to deny publicly what he knows to be false, whenever it appears in the assertions of no matter whom. 

Wat de werkelijkheid ook mag zijn, als die niet past binnen hun ideologisch mens- en wereldbeeld wordt de realiteit door politici en pers domweg ontkend, genegeerd, of verzwegen. En dit, terwijl de enige functie van een intellectueel is dat hij of zij ‘ought to be the moral conscience of his society at least with reference to the value of truth, for in the defining instance, that is his politics. And he ought also to be a man absorbed in the attempt to know what is real and unreal,’ aldus Mills in zijn essaybundel Power, Politics and People: the Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills (1967).

De afgelopen weken is opnieuw duidelijk aangetoond hoe rampzalig het gebrek aan logica kan uitwerken. Wekenlang bereidde westerse politici en de mainstream-pers het publiek voor op een conflict met Moskou. Zo opende de toonaangevende New York Times van 19 januari 2022 met de kop: ‘Biden Predicts Putin Will Order Ukraine Invasion, but ‘Will Regret Having Done It.’ Volgens de Times verklaarde:

President Biden on Wednesday that he now expected President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would order an invasion of Ukraine, delivering a grim assessment that the diplomacy and threat of sanctions issued by the United States and its European allies were unlikely to stop the Russian leader from sending troops across the border.

‘Do I think he’ll test the West, test the United States and NATO, as significantly as he can? Yes, I think he will,’ Mr. Biden told reporters during a nearly two-hour news conference in the East Room of the White House. He added, almost with an air of fatalism: ‘But I think he will pay a serious and dear price for it that he doesn’t think now will cost him what it’s going to cost him. And I think he will regret having done it.’

Asked to clarify whether he was accepting that an invasion was coming, Mr. Biden said: ‘My guess is he will move in. He has to do something.’

Bovendien verklaarde hij als opperbevelhebber van de Amerikaanse strijdkrachten:

‘It’s very important that we keep everyone in NATO on the same page,’ Mr. Biden said. ‘That’s what I’m spending a lot of time doing. There are differences. There are differences in NATO as to what countries are willing to do, depending on what happened, the degree to which they’re able to go.’

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/us/politics/biden-putin-russia-ukraine.html 

Maar als volleerde pokerspelers liet de Russische politieke- en militaire top, inclusief president Poetin, zich niet in de kaart kijken, zeer tot de woede van vooral de Amerikaanse liberal pers, die elke oorlog na 1945 in eerste instantie heeft toegejuicht om, zoals in het geval van Irak, naderhand te bekennen dat zij zich op de realiteit had verkeken. De gerespecteerde Amerikaanse historicus Daniel J. Boorstin schreef da ook een halve eeuw geleden al dat ‘the inauthentic and the theatrical has now displaced the natural, the genuine and the spontaneous. Reality has become stagecraft,’ waardoor wij in een wereld leven ‘where fantasy is more real than reality.’ In deze virtual reality is de ‘corporate press’ geenszins in staat de werkelijkheid weer te geven, terwijl toch steeds grotere groepen in het Westen de kwalijke gevolgen van het neoliberalisme aan den lijve ondervinden. In plaats van dat de commerciële journalist ‘het morele geweten van zijn samenleving’ is, blijkt hij keer op keer de handlanger te zijn van bellicose elites die zich aan oorlogen verrijken. Zo bekende de voltallige redactie van The New York Times op 26 mei 2004, toen het Iraakse bloedbad een voldongen feit was, dat hoewel haar:

problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, many shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on ‘regime change’ in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks. (The most prominent of the anti-Saddam campaigners, Ahmad Chalabi, has been named as an occasional source in Times articles since at least 1991, and has introduced reporters to other exiles. He became a favorite of hard-liners within the Bush administration and a paid broker of information from Iraqi exiles, until his payments were cut off last week.) Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations — in particular, this one. 

En dit als uitsmijter:

The Times never followed up on the veracity of this source or the attempts to verify his claims.

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-the-times-and-iraq.html 

Ondanks het gegeven dat de polderpers veel van de beweringen van de Times klakkeloos overnam, heeft zij zich nooit tegenover haar publiek verontschuldigd voor het verspreiden van ‘nepnieuws.’ Hetzelfde gaat op voor de recente oorlogshetze tegen ‘Poetin,’ en de wijze waarop er over de VS wordt bericht. De journalist en jurist Geert Mak die liet weten altijd al ‘in het geheim verliefd’ te zijn geweest op Amerika kwalificeert dit agressieve imperium als ‘politieagent en ordebewaker’ van de wereld. Tegelijkertijd ergert hij zich aan Rusland omdat het: 

on the move [is] again. After the collapse of the Soviet Empire it wants to start history once more, and how! Old myths about Russian greatness and the Russian soul are being dusted off. Borders are being redrawn, spheres of influence determined by force — it's as if we're back in the nineteenth century, complete with rigid and short-sighted tsarism. Russians have a sense that the Western world, including Western values and Western ways of thinking, are no longer paramount.

Mak is zich, net als zijn mainstream-collega’s, er niet van bewust dat na vijf eeuwen gewelddadig kolonialisme, uitlopend op Auschwitz en Hiroshima, men tegenover de rest van de wereld niet kan pochen over ‘western values,’ tenminste als men zich niet voor eeuwig belachelijk wil maken. En wat betreft de ‘geheime liefde’ van mijn oude vriend voor het Amerikaanse geweld dat heeft geleid tot het feit dat de VS 93 procent van zijn bestaan in oorlog is geweest, wil ik hier de Indiase/Britse intellectueel Pankaj Mishra citeren, die in The New York Review of Books van 4 november 2021 uiteenzette:

According to the only recently challenged American ideology of hyper-individualism and pseudo-egalitarian meritocracy, anyone, regardless of where they were born, can make it if they work hard enough, and are entirely to blame if they fail to seize the widely available opportunities of self-advancement.

Recent disasters have revealed that this ideology of the American dream did its job too well: it obscured the real conditions — wage stagnation, steady downward mobility — of their lives from the dreamers, enabling them to be controlled by the real beneficiaries of an iniquitous system. And even as the unlived American dreams gathered menacing mass and density, public attention was monopolized by the concerns of the elites — the well-educated and the well-off in the urban centers of an increasingly financialized economy. The thwarted members of the lower and middle classes were rendered mostly invisible, even to themselves, until a demagogue claiming to ‘love the poorly educated’ and loathe the liberal elites began sowing chaos in American society and politics.

Donald Trump’s apotheosis traumatized the metropolitan intelligentsia into acknowledging the deprivations and resentments of the ‘left-behinds,’ and the scholarly and journalistic archive devoted to them has burgeoned over the past five years. However, these subjects of a repentant reckoning were long thought of, if at all, with fear and condescension, even by their putative political representatives in the Democratic Party. This is what Barack Obama said in 2008 about voters in the kind of deindustrialized towns Strout (Amerikaanse auteur. svh) writes about: ‘They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.’ ‘Kind of arrogant’ is how a character in Olive (Strout’s boek waarvoor zij de Pulitzerprijs in 2009 kreeg. svh), Again describes the first Black yuppie president.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/11/04/elizabeth-strout-oh-william-writing-america/ 

Het ineenstortend Amerikaans imperium dat voortdurend ten oorlog trekt, tracht nu Europa in een desnoods Derde Wereldoorlog mee te slepen, om koste wat kost zijn aangetaste hegemonie te herstellen. Ziedaar de gemilitariseerde samenleving waar de armoede blijft toenemen, terwijl het militair-industrieel complex er de dienst uitmaakt. Daarover de volgende keer.