We're being bashed in the face with western propaganda about the Ukraine situation with increasing forcefulness. Every day now we're seeing things like ‘analysts' claiming Putin definitely wants a large-scale war, very familiar-looking puff pieces about Ukrainian guerrilla freedom fighters based on claims by anonymous intelligence sources, think pieces on why Americans should all care about Ukrainian freedom from Kremlin tyranny, and, of course, a lot of entirely unsubstantiated assertions about what Russia is doing.
Despite the British government's evidence-free claim that Russia was planning to install a puppet regime in Ukraine being debunked within hours and then shown to be a US intelligence claim dishonestly packaged as a British one days later, mass media outlets still to this day repeat the allegation like it's a real thing. Despite the entirely un-evidenced US government claim that Russia was plotting to stage a false flag attack in eastern Ukraine failing to prove true in subsequent weeks, US Senator Bob Menendez went on CNN over the weekend and declared that this false flag which never actually, physically happened was grounds to sanction Russia effective immediately.
The US political/media class is just saying whatever it wants about what Russia is doing and planning to do with no regard for facts or evidence. Nothing is too cartoonishly hysterical; in fact the more clickbaity and attention-grabbing the better. They feel free to scattergun these outlandish claims willy nilly all over our information ecosystem because five years of Russia hysteria have taught them that they will suffer exactly zero professional consequences when they are proven wrong, and that they will in fact see their stars rise as a reward for advancing the interests of the US empire.
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/what-has-been-asserted-without-evidence
Inderdaad, westerse burgers zijn opnieuw de dupe van het nepnieuws dat de commerciële media dagelijks verspreiden. De belangrijkste drijfveer achter de oorlogshetze is niet moeilijk te traceren: ‘follow the money,’ en de lezer zal snel beseffen dat wanneer het Witte Huis, gesanctioneerd door het Congres, ruim 50 procent van het federale budget waarover politici kunnen beschikken aan het militair-industrieel complex toewijst, de beleidsbepalers op z’n minst een bedreiging moeten verzinnen om dit astronomisch hoog bedrag te rechtvaardigen. Nog beter is natuurlijk een dreigende oorlog, terwijl een langdurig gewapend conflict een apotheose is. Iemand hoeft niet hoog begaafd te zijn om dit te beseffen, maar omdat de ‘corporate press’ even corrupt is geworden als de politieke macht, verzwijgt zij bewust de werkelijkheid. Vandaar dat u nooit een kritische analyse als die van Caitlin Johnstone zult vernemen via mijn mainstream-collega’s. Wel zult u de propaganda horen en lezen van een uitgesproken onbetrouwbare opiniemaker als NRC’s Hubert Smeets die meer dan 290.000 euro kreeg toegezegd door de Nederlandse staat om een anti-Russische website op te zetten, volgens hemzelf omdat er in politiek Den Haag 'een grijs gebied,' bestaat, te weten: ‘ik ken natuurlijk ook wel wat mensen en tijdens bepaalde gelegenheden komt dit wel eens ter sprake.' Zo werkt nu eenmaal het poldermodel. De ‘intriganten’ die Smeets in achterkamertjes spreekt, deinzen er niet voor terug om een oorlogshetze tegen Rusland en China te financieren, die kan uitlopen in een nucleair armageddon. Dit ondemocratisch gekonkel verklaart tevens waarom Hubert Smeets een graag geziene gast is bij de Atlantische Commissie, de propaganda-arm van de door de VS gedomineerde NAVO.
tijdens de regering Bush (jr.) diende als een van de belangrijkste adviseurs met betrekking tot de buitenlandse politiek van vicepresident Dick Cheney en als Amerikaanse ambassadeur bij de NAVO.
Tijdens de regering-Obama werd zij eerst benoemd tot speciale gezant voor de conventionele strijdkrachten in Europa. In de zomer van 2011 werd zij woordvoerder van het Amerikaanse ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken.
In mei 2013 werd zij genomineerd als staatssecretaris voor Europese en Euraziatische Zaken. In september 2013 werd zij ingezworen.
In 2014 speelde zij op de achtergrond een prominente rol in de gebeurtenissen in Oekraïne. Daar maakte zij in een telefoongesprek met de toenmalige Amerikaanse ambassadeur in Oekraïne de opmerking fuck the EU.’
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Nuland
In December 2013, Nuland, assistant secretary of state for European affairs and a long-time regime change advocate, said that the U.S. government had spent $5 billion promoting ‘democracy’ in Ukraine since 1991. The money went toward supporting ‘senior officials in the Ukraine government…[members of] the business community as well as opposition civil society’ who agree with U.S. goals.
The NED is a key organization in the network of American soft power that pours $170 million a year into organizations dedicated to defending or installing U.S.-friendly regimes. The Washington Post‘s David Ignatius (9/22/91) once wrote that the organization functions by ‘doing in public what the CIA used to do in private.' The NED targets governments who oppose U.S. military or economic policy, stirring up anti-government opposition.
The NED board of directors includes Elliott Abrams, whose sordid record runs from the Iran/Contra affair in the ’80s to the Trump administration’s effort to overthrow the Venezuelan government. In 2013, NED president Carl Gershman wrote a piece in the Washington Post (9/26/13) that described Ukraine as the ‘biggest prize' in the East/West rivalry. After the Obama administration, Nuland joined the NED board of directors before returning to the State Department in the Biden administration as undersecretary of state for political affairs.
One of the many recipients of NED money for projects in Ukraine was the International Republican Institute. The IRI, once chaired by Sen. John McCain, has long had a hand in U.S. regime change operations. During the protests that eventually brought down the government, McCain and other U.S. officials personally flew into Ukraine to encourage protesters.
https://www.nationofchange.org/2022/01/31/what-you-should-really-know-about-ukraine/
https://thebaffler.com/latest/i-still-know-what-you-did-last-summer
Voordat ik doorga met de bellicose Victoria Nuland, eerst de sociale en politieke context waarin zij en haar soortgenoten opereren. Centraal in haar bestaan staat het gebrek aan waardigheid en zelfrespect, het overal opduikende narcisme en autisme, de permanente staat van oorlog tegen mens en natuur, de verveling en ontevredenheid. Dit alles is voorspeld door de meest schrandere geesten onder ons, geleerden als, wijlen, de joods-Amerikaanse historicus Daniel J. Boorstin, die zijn magistrale studie The Image. A Guide To Pseudo-Events In America (1961), begint met het citaat van de Zwitserse auteur Max Frisch dat ‘technologie’ de ‘kunstgreep’ is ‘om de wereld zo in te richten dat wij hem niet hoeven te ervaren.’ Op die manier zijn wij in een virtuele werkelijkheid verloren geraakt, in een van zichzelf vervreemde realiteit. Onder de kop ‘Extravagant Expectation’ maakt Boorstin al onmiddellijk in de introductie duidelijk dat:
Of course, America has provided the landscape and has given us the resources and the opportunity for this feat of national self-hypnosis. But each of us individually provides the market and the demand for the illusions which flood our experience.
We want and we believe these illusions because we suffer extravagant expectations. We expect too much of the world. Our expectations are extravagant in the precise dictionary sense of the word — ‘going beyond the limits of or moderation?’ They are excessive,
met andere woorden: de moderne mateloosheid van het onverzadigbare kapitalisme, de permanente ontevredenheid, noodzakelijk om de consumptiemaatschappij overeind te houden, staat hier lijnrecht tegenover. Boorstin: ‘We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible,’ en daarom verwachten we:
to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for ‘excellence,’ to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy. We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly,’
en bovenal ‘to revere God and to be God.
Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer…
By harboring, nourishing, and ever enlarging our extravagant expectation we create the demand for the millions with which we deceive ourselves. And which we pay others to make to deceive us…
We tyrannize and frustrate ourselves by expecting more than the world can give or than we can make of the world… We have become so accustomed to our illusions that we mistake them for reality. We demand them. And we demand that there be always more of them, bigger and better and more vivid. They are the world of our making: the world of the image... We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in place of reality.
To discover our illusions will not solve the problems of our world. But if we do not discover them, we will never discover our real problems. To dispel the ghosts which populate the world of our making will not give us the power to conquer the real enemies of the real world or to remake the real world. But it may help us discover that we cannot make the world in our image. It will liberate us and sharpen our vision. It will clear away the fog so we can face the world we share with all mankind.
‘the chance to reason of most men is destroyed, as rationality increases and its locus, its control, is moved from the individual to the big-scale organization. There is then rationality without reason. Such rationality is not commensurate with freedom but the destroyer of it,’
zoals de Amerikaanse socioloog C. Wright Mills in The Sociological Imagination (1959) zo helder beschreef, en hem deed concluderen dat ‘the alienated man is the antithesis of the Western image of the free man.’ De gemeenschap waarin hij en zij gedijen ‘is the antithesis of the free society — or in the literal and plain meaning of the word, of a democratic society.’ Mills zet in zijn studie uiteen dat:
Freedom is not merely the chance to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them — an then, the opportunity to choose. That is why freedom cannot exist without an enlarged role of human reason in human affairs. Within an individual’s biography and within a society’s history, the social task of reason is to formulate choices, to enlarge the scope of human decisions in the making of history.
Vrijdag 1 juli 2016 lekte onder de kop ‘Breedlove’s war: Emails show ex-NATO general plotting US conflict with Russia,’ het volgende uit:
Hacked private emails of the US general formerly in charge of NATO reveal a campaign to pressure the White House into escalating the conflict with Russia over Ukraine, involving several influential players in Washington.
The emails, posted by the site DCLeaks, show correspondence between General Philip M. Breedlove, former head of the US European Command and supreme commander of NATO forces, with several establishment insiders concerning the situation in Ukraine following the February 2014 coup that ousted the elected government in favor of a US-backed regime…
The hacked emails reveal his frequent and intense communications with retired General Wesley Clark, as well as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and involving a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, State Department official Victoria Nuland (de neoconservatieve staatssecretaris van Buitenlandse Zaken voor Europe and Eurasia onder Obama, die de gewelddadige Oekraïense staatsgreep met 5 miljard dollar steunde. svh) and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt…
Breedlove continued to push for more aggressive US involvement, claiming a heavy Russian troop presence in Ukraine — which was later denied even by the government in Kiev. In March this year, the general was telling US lawmakers that Russia and Syria were ‘deliberately weaponizing migration in an attempt to overwhelm European structures and break European resolve.’
Breedlove was replaced at the helm of EUCOM and NATO in May, and officially retired from the military on July 1 (2016. svh). He was replaced by US Army General Curtis Scaparrotti, whose public statements suggest a similar level of hostility for Russia.
https://www.rt.com/usa/349213-hacked-emails-breedlove-ukraine/
Eerder al, 6 maart 2015, waarschuwde Der Spiegel voor Breedlove’s ‘Oorlogszuchtigheid’ met de woorden:
BREEDLOVE'S BELLICOSITY: BERLIN ALARMED BY AGGRESSIVE NATO STANCE ON UKRAINE
It was quiet in eastern Ukraine last Wednesday. Indeed, it was another quiet day in an extended stretch of relative calm. The battles between the Ukrainian army and the pro-Russian separatists had largely stopped and heavy weaponry was being withdrawn. The Minsk cease-fire wasn't holding perfectly, but it was holding.
On that same day, General Philip Breedlove, the top NATO commander in Europe, stepped before the press in Washington. Putin, the 59-year-old said, had once again ‘upped the ante’ in eastern Ukraine — with ‘well over a thousand combat vehicles, Russian combat forces, some of their most sophisticated air defense, battalions of artillery’ having been sent to the Donbass. ‘What is clear,’ Breedlove said, ‘is that right now, it is not getting better. It is getting worse every day.’
German leaders in Berlin were stunned. They didn't understand what Breedlove was talking about. And it wasn't the first time. Once again, the German government, supported by intelligence gathered by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency, did not share the view of NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR).
The pattern has become a familiar one. For months, Breedlove has been commenting on Russian activities in eastern Ukraine, speaking of troop advances on the border, the amassing of munitions and alleged columns of Russian tanks. Over and over again, Breedlove's numbers have been significantly higher than those in the possession of America's NATO allies in Europe. As such, he is playing directly into the hands of the hardliners in the US Congress and in NATO.
The German government is alarmed. Are the Americans trying to thwart European efforts at mediation led by Chancellor Angela Merkel? Sources in the Chancellery have referred to Breedlove's comments as ‘dangerous propaganda.’ Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier even found it necessary recently to bring up Breedlove's comments with NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg.
But Breedlove hasn't been the only source of friction. Europeans have also begun to see others as hindrances in their search for a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine conflict. First and foremost among them is Victoria Nuland, head of European affairs at the US State Department. She and others would like to see Washington deliver arms to Ukraine and are supported by Congressional Republicans as well as many powerful Democrats.
Zomer 2015 zette Kissinger uiteen dat een:
number of things need to be recognized. One, the relationship between Ukraine and Russia will always have a special character in the Russian mind. It can never be limited to a relationship of two traditional sovereign states, not from the Russian point of view, maybe not even from Ukraine’s. So, what happens in Ukraine cannot be put into a simple formula of applying principles that worked in Western Europe, not that close to Stalingrad and Moscow. In that context, one has to analyze how the Ukraine crisis occurred. It is not conceivable that Putin spends sixty billion euros on turning a summer resort into a winter Olympic village in order to start a military crisis the week after a concluding ceremony that depicted Russia as a part of Western civilization.
Dergelijke informatie wordt door de Nederlandse mainstream-pers stelselmatig genegeerd. Gedwee volgt zij de propaganda van het Atlantisch bondgenootschap, en weigert zij het feit te analyseren dat de elite in Washington en op Wall Street zich tevens voorbereidt op een gewapend conflict met China. In 2020 was 60 procent van de Amerikaanse marinevloot in de Zuid Chinese Zee gestationeerd, waardoor nu ‘U.S. Navy destroyers stalk China's claims in South China Sea.’ De reden is dat de Amerikaanse politiek ten aanzien van de Pacific Rim erop gericht is:
to ‘contain’ China, to limit China’s ability to project power in the waters off its southern coast, to bolster U.S. ‘hegemony’ or primacy in the East Asia maritime space.
Gezien de nieuwe Amerikaanse nucleaire strategie is van belang te weten dat vrijdag 5 augustus 2016 uitlekte dat het Amerikaanse leger de Rand Corporation opdracht had gegeven tot het ‘Thinking Through' van 'the Unthinkable.' Onder de kop ‘RAND CORPORATION LAYS OUT SCENARIOS FOR U.S. WAR WITH CHINA’ vernam de lezer:
A new study by the RAND Corporation titled ‘War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable’ is just the latest think tank paper devoted to assessing a US war against China. The study, commissioned by the US Army, provides further evidence that a war with China is being planned and prepared in the upper echelons of the American military-intelligence apparatus.
That the paper emerges from the RAND Corporation has a particular and sinister significance. Throughout the Cold War, RAND was the premier think tank for ‘thinking the unthinkable’ — a phrase made notorious by RAND’s chief strategist in the 1950s, Herman Kahn. Kahn devoted his macabre book ‘On Thermonuclear War’ to elaborating a strategy for a ‘winnable’ nuclear war against the Soviet Union.
According to the preface of the new study, released last week, ‘This research was sponsored by the Office of the Undersecretary of the Army and conducted within the RAND Arroyo Center’s Strategy, Doctrine, and Resources Program. RAND Arroyo Center, part of the RAND Corporation, is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the United States Army.’
The paper is a war-gaming exercise in the Kahn tradition: weighing the possible outcomes of a war between two nuclear powers with utter indifference to the catastrophic consequences for people in the United States, China and the rest of the world.
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/08/05/pers-a05.html
http://thediplomat.com/2016/08/the-us-china-perception-gap-in-the-south-china-sea/
Eind januari 2018 waarschuwde de Amerikaanse huisarts Robert F. Dodge, bestuurslid van ondermeer ‘Nuclear Age Peace Foundation,’ voor het almaar dichterbij komen van ‘the Apocalypse,’ nu:
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has just moved their Doomsday Clock forward to two minutes till midnight. Midnight represents nuclear apocalypse. The Clock is recognized around the world as an indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and emerging technologies. Each year the decision to move the Clock forward, backward, or not at all, is determined by the Bulletins Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors which includes 15 Nobel Laureates.
In making this year’s move to two minutes till midnight, the Bulletin stated that ‘in 2017, world leaders failed to respond effectively to the looming threat of nuclear war and climate change, making the world’s security situation more dangerous than it was a year ago-and as dangerous as it has been since World War II.’
In recent years the Bulletin has added climate change to nuclear weapons as a major risk of global conflict. This year the greatest threat remained that of nuclear conflict with the ongoing North Korea crisis featuring dangerous rhetoric and actions coming from both sides. World experts have made their assessments; leadership in the US and North Korea have now radically elevated the risk of nuclear war either by accident or miscalculation.
Coupled with deteriorating relationships between the world’s nuclear powers, with US and Russian relations at the lowest point in decades and rising tensions between the US and China, all while the United States plans to rebuild its nuclear arsenal — prompting all of the other nations to follow suit. The situation is further undermined from a diplomatic standpoint by an understaffed and demoralized US State Department and thus the Clock ticks forward.
The Board stated, ‘To call the world nuclear situation dire is to understate the danger — and its immediacy.’ […]
We have the ability and now the legal framework with the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons to abolish nuclear weapons…
It’s time, possibly our final chance, to abolish nuclear weapons. It’s two minutes till midnight.
http://www.peacevoice.info/2018/01/26/11527/
Op de Amerikaanse website CounterPunch van 7 februari 2018 wees Dodge bovendien op het volgende:
Scientific studies have demonstrated the potential catastrophic global environmental effects following a limited regional nuclear war, using just 100 12-kiloton Hiroshima-size weapons (of the 16,300 in the arsenals of the nine nuclear nations, which is approximately one-half of just one percent) that would potentially kill two billion people.
This new Doctrine proposes the development of two new generations of nuclear weapons including ‘low-yield nukes,’ Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBM) and the long-term development of Submarine Launched Cruise Missiles (SLCM). These ‘low-yield nuke’ are 20 kiloton — same as the larger Nagasaki size bombs that killed more than 70,000 people. Seemingly ignoring the fact that nuclear weapons are nuclear weapons regardless of size with the same horrific initial devastation and radioactive fallout, these weapons are proposed to demonstrate America’s resolve in deterring nuclear attack.
In fact this circular argument of smaller nuclear weapons being a greater deterrence actually increases the likelihood of their use. This further promotes the mythology of deterrence which actually drives all nine nuclear states to follow suit.
Gekoppeld aan de de nieuwe nucleaire strategie van het Amerikaanse ministerie van Defensie, waarbij ook ‘non-nuclear circumstances’ aanleiding kunnen zijn voor een Amerikaanse nucleaire aanval:
such as certain cyberattacks, the risk of nuclear war is dramatically increased, bringing the imminent threat of nuclear war to the center of US military policy and foreign policy. This fact was also acknowledged in the recent Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ movement of their nuclear Doomsday clock to two minutes till midnight, the closest since World War II.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/07/trumps-nuclear-doctrine-resumes-cold-war/
Zijn deze levensbedreigende feiten aanleiding voor de ‘vrije pers’ om de alarmbel te luiden? Het antwoord is: Nee! De commerciële media moeten het hebben van de waan van de dag, én van een vijandsbeeld. Bovendien kan alleen nog een permanente oorlogsdreiging de bedreigde interne cohesie kunstmatig in stand houden. En nu de advertentie-inkomsten van de kranten en tijdschriften almaar blijven teruglopen, ziet de ‘corporate press’ zich genoodzaakt politieke en militaire spanningen zo veel mogelijk en zo lang mogelijk te exploiteren. Op die wijze verenigen zich de belangen van de elites en die van hun media. De voormalige buitenland-correspondent van The New York Times Chris Hedges gaf in dit verband als voorbeeld de demonisering van Rusland, de absurde gedachte dat Rusland verantwoordelijk was voor de verkiezing van Donald Trump, in plaats van de maatschappelijke ongelijkheid, waarvan The New York Times en vooral zijn columnisten jarenlang ‘cheerleaders’ zijn geweest. De mainstream-media weigeren te verklaren hoe het mogelijk is geweest dat Hillary Clinton met een verkiezingsfonds van ruim een miljard dollar niet in staat is geweest de vermeende Russische propaganda onderuit te halen. In reactie op de waanzin gaf in april 2018 de Amerikaanse hoogleraar Media Studies, Mark Crispin Miller, een ander voorbeeld van 'fake news':
When one reads the ‘news’ about Syria, one might as well have been reading the ‘news’ about the Hun (de Duitsers. svh) in 1915. It is exactly the same. It is really staggering (onthutsend. svh) how little moral and intellectual progress the mass-mind seems to have made, especially in a country where we don’t study propaganda-history in school, as we should. The ‘Times’ and the rest of them are filled with propaganda and ton’s of fluff, celebrity ‘news’ and so on. To bring this back to our initial point: the ground of this shift is clearly economic, there is no blood-flow there, they don’t have enough advertising anymore, so they have to align increasingly on clickbait revenues (content that is aimed at generating online advertising revenue, especially at the expense of quality or accuracy, relying on sensationalist headlines to attract click-throughs and to encourage forwarding of the material over online social networks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x39yKWWP10). And there is another danger: as the press has vanished into the media cartel — six transnational corporations that control some ninety percent of the content that we digest daily — as the media cartel become more concentrated, it is simultaneously also becoming closer and closer to the state.
Trump has performed an invaluable function in all this, because he enables the press to get up its high horse, count his countless, stupid, glaring, obvious lies, which are about nothing, and then pat themselves on the back as if the far fewer, far more dangerous lies that they routinely tell, are not lies. So Trump enables the corporate press to pose as honest, as truth-tellers, and he also enables the CIA and FBI to look like our champions, as if they are going to save us from Washington.
De hoerigheid van de massamedia bedreigt de toekomst, nu ook nog eens de verwachtingen van de Verlichting dat rationalisme, de rede en de vrijheid als drijvende krachten van de geschiedenis zouden worden, illusies zijn gebleken. Ruim zes decennia geleden wierp C. Wright Mills de volgende vragen op:
Where is the intelligentsia that is carrying on the big discourse of the Western world and whose work as intellectuals is influential among parties and publics and relevant to the great decisions of outs time? Where are the mass media open to such men? Who among this who are in charge of the the two-part state and its ferocious military machines are alert to what goes on in the world of knowledge and reason and sensibility? Why is the free intellect so divorced from decisions of power. Why does there now prevail among men of power such a higher and irresponsible ignorance?
En wanneer Mills tot de slotsom komt dat ‘The journalistic lie, becomes routine, is part of it too; and so is much of the pretentious triviality that passes for social science,’ dan kan ik niet anders dan constateren dat al decennia lang niets wezenlijks is veranderd. De gekte is alleen nog maar groter geworden.
In this book I describe the world of our making, how we have used our wealth, our literacy, our technology, and progress, to create the thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life. I recount historical forces which have given us this unprecedented opportunity to deceive ourselves and to befog our experience.
Of course, America has provided the landscape and has given us the resources and the opportunity for this feat of national self-hypnosis. But each of us individually provides the market and the demand for the illusions which flood our experience.
We want and we believe these illusions because we suffer extravagant expectations. We expect too much of the world. Our expectations are extravagant in the precise dictionary sense of the word — ‘going beyond the limits of or moderation?’ They are excessive,
en daarmee in strijd met de gouden regel van de Griekse oudheid: ‘Mèden Agan,’ zoals de inscriptie luidde in de fronton van Apollo’s tempel in Delphi. ‘Alles met Mate,’ zo hield de ‘rationele God’ van ‘licht en eendracht, van rede en orde’ de burgers voor. De moderne mateloosheid van het onverzadigbare kapitalisme, de permanente ontevredenheid noodzakelijk om de consumptiemaatschappij overeind te houden, staat hier lijnrecht tegenover. Boorstin: ‘We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible,’ en daarom verwachten we:
to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for ‘excellence,’ to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy. We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly’ en bovenal ‘to revere God and to be God.
Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer…
By harboring, nourishing, and ever enlarging our extravagant expectation we create the demand for the millions with which we deceive ourselves. And which we pay others to make to deceive us…
We tyrannize and frustrate ourselves by expecting more than the world can give or than we can make of the world… We have become so accustomed to our illusions that we mistake them for reality. We demand them. And we demand that there be always more of them, bigger and better and more vivid. They are the world of our making: the world of the image... We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in place of reality.
To discover our illusions will not solve the problems of our world. But if we do not discover them, we will never discover our real problems. To dispel the ghosts which populate the world of our making will not give us the power to conquer the real enemies of the real world or to remake the real world. But it may help us discover that we cannot make the world in our image. It will liberate us and sharpen our vision. It will clear away the fog so we can face the world we share with all mankind.
Inmiddels, zes decennia nadat Daniel Boorstin zijn waarschuwing de wereld in stuurde, zien we hoe ziek de Amerikaanse massa-maatschappij is geworden, en in zijn voetspoor de rest van de westerse wereld, door zich te blijven vastklampen aan de materialistische illusies van het kapitalisme. Dit is de context waarin de mainstream-opiniemaker bij gebrek aan gewicht als vanzelf naar boven drijft, en meent de profeet van de hele mensheid te kunnen spelen, terwijl:
the chance to reason of most men is destroyed, as rationality increases and its locus, its control, is moved from the individual to the big-scale organization. There is then rationality without reason. Such rationality is not commensurate with freedom but the destroyer of it,
zoals de Amerikaanse socioloog C. Wright Mills in The Sociological Imagination (1959) zo helder beschreef, en hem deed concluderen dat ‘the alienated man is the antithesis of the Western image of the free man.’ De gemeenschap waarin hij en zij gedijen ‘is the antithesis of the free society — or in the literal and plain meaning of the word, of a democratic society.’ Mills zet in zijn studie uiteen dat:
Freedom is not merely the chance to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them — an then, the opportunity to choose. That is why freedom cannot exist without an enlarged role of human reason in human affairs. Within an individual’s biography and within a society’s history, the social task of reason is to formulate choices, to enlarge the scope of human decisions in the making of history.
Dergelijke informatie wordt door de Nederlandse mainstream-pers stelselmatig genegeerd. Gedwee volgt zij de propaganda van het Atlantisch bondgenootschap, en weigert zij het feit te analyseren dat de elite in Washington en op Wall Street zich tevens voorbereidt op een gewapend conflict met China. In 2020 was 60 procent van de Amerikaanse marinevloot in de Zuid Chinese Zee gestationeerd, waardoor nu ‘U.S. Navy destroyers stalk China's claims in South China Sea.’ De reden is dat de Amerikaanse politiek ten aanzien van de Pacific Rim erop gericht is:
to ‘contain’ China, to limit China’s ability to project power in the waters off its southern coast, to bolster U.S. ‘hegemony’ or primacy in the East Asia maritime space.
Gezien de nieuwe Amerikaanse nucleaire strategie is van belang te weten dat vrijdag 5 augustus 2016 uitlekte dat het Amerikaanse leger de Rand Corporation opdracht had gegeven tot het ‘Thinking Through' van 'the Unthinkable.' Onder de kop ‘RAND CORPORATION LAYS OUT SCENARIOS FOR U.S. WAR WITH CHINA’ vernam de lezer:
A new study by the RAND Corporation titled ‘War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable’ is just the latest think tank paper devoted to assessing a US war against China. The study, commissioned by the US Army, provides further evidence that a war with China is being planned and prepared in the upper echelons of the American military-intelligence apparatus.
That the paper emerges from the RAND Corporation has a particular and sinister significance. Throughout the Cold War, RAND was the premier think tank for ‘thinking the unthinkable’ — a phrase made notorious by RAND’s chief strategist in the 1950s, Herman Kahn. Kahn devoted his macabre book ‘On Thermonuclear War’ to elaborating a strategy for a ‘winnable’ nuclear war against the Soviet Union.
According to the preface of the new study, released last week, ‘This research was sponsored by the Office of the Undersecretary of the Army and conducted within the RAND Arroyo Center’s Strategy, Doctrine, and Resources Program. RAND Arroyo Center, part of the RAND Corporation, is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the United States Army.’
The paper is a war-gaming exercise in the Kahn tradition: weighing the possible outcomes of a war between two nuclear powers with utter indifference to the catastrophic consequences for people in the United States, China and the rest of the world.
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/08/05/pers-a05.html
http://thediplomat.com/2016/08/the-us-china-perception-gap-in-the-south-china-sea/
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has just moved their Doomsday Clock forward to two minutes till midnight. Midnight represents nuclear apocalypse. The Clock is recognized around the world as an indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and emerging technologies. Each year the decision to move the Clock forward, backward, or not at all, is determined by the Bulletins Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors which includes 15 Nobel Laureates.
In making this year’s move to two minutes till midnight, the Bulletin stated that ‘in 2017, world leaders failed to respond effectively to the looming threat of nuclear war and climate change, making the world’s security situation more dangerous than it was a year ago-and as dangerous as it has been since World War II.’
In recent years the Bulletin has added climate change to nuclear weapons as a major risk of global conflict. This year the greatest threat remained that of nuclear conflict with the ongoing North Korea crisis featuring dangerous rhetoric and actions coming from both sides. World experts have made their assessments; leadership in the US and North Korea have now radically elevated the risk of nuclear war either by accident or miscalculation.
Coupled with deteriorating relationships between the world’s nuclear powers, with US and Russian relations at the lowest point in decades and rising tensions between the US and China, all while the United States plans to rebuild its nuclear arsenal — prompting all of the other nations to follow suit. The situation is further undermined from a diplomatic standpoint by an understaffed and demoralized US State Department and thus the Clock ticks forward.
The Board stated, ‘To call the world nuclear situation dire is to understate the danger — and its immediacy.’ […]
We have the ability and now the legal framework with the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons to abolish nuclear weapons…
It’s time, possibly our final chance, to abolish nuclear weapons. It’s two minutes till midnight.
http://www.peacevoice.info/2018/01/26/11527/
Op de Amerikaanse website CounterPunch van 7 februari 2018 wees Dodge bovendien op het volgende:
Scientific studies have demonstrated the potential catastrophic global environmental effects following a limited regional nuclear war, using just 100 12-kiloton Hiroshima-size weapons (of the 16,300 in the arsenals of the nine nuclear nations, which is approximately one-half of just one percent) that would potentially kill two billion people.
This new Doctrine proposes the development of two new generations of nuclear weapons including ‘low-yield nukes,’ Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBM) and the long-term development of Submarine Launched Cruise Missiles (SLCM). These ‘low-yield nuke’ are 20 kiloton — same as the larger Nagasaki size bombs that killed more than 70,000 people. Seemingly ignoring the fact that nuclear weapons are nuclear weapons regardless of size with the same horrific initial devastation and radioactive fallout, these weapons are proposed to demonstrate America’s resolve in deterring nuclear attack.
In fact this circular argument of smaller nuclear weapons being a greater deterrence actually increases the likelihood of their use. This further promotes the mythology of deterrence which actually drives all nine nuclear states to follow suit.
Gekoppeld aan de de nieuwe nucleaire strategie van het Amerikaanse ministerie van Defensie, waarbij ook ‘non-nuclear circumstances’ aanleiding kunnen zijn voor een Amerikaanse nucleaire aanval:
such as certain cyberattacks, the risk of nuclear war is dramatically increased, bringing the imminent threat of nuclear war to the center of US military policy and foreign policy. This fact was also acknowledged in the recent Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ movement of their nuclear Doomsday clock to two minutes till midnight, the closest since World War II.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/07/trumps-nuclear-doctrine-resumes-cold-war/
Trump has performed an invaluable function in all this, because he enables the press to get up its high horse, count his countless, stupid, glaring, obvious lies, which are about nothing, and then pat themselves on the back as if the far fewer, far more dangerous lies that they routinely tell, are not lies. So Trump enables the corporate press to pose as honest, as truth-tellers, and he also enables the CIA and FBI to look like our champions, as if they are going to save us from Washington.
De hoerigheid van de massamedia bedreigt de toekomst, nu ook nog eens de verwachtingen van de Verlichting dat rationalisme, de rede en de vrijheid als drijvende krachten van de geschiedenis zouden worden, illusies zijn gebleken. Ruim zes decennia geleden wierp C. Wright Mills de volgende vragen op:
Where is the intelligentsia that is carrying on the big discourse of the Western world and whose work as intellectuals is influential among parties and publics and relevant to the great decisions of outs time? Where are the mass media open to such men? Who among this who are in charge of the the two-part state and its ferocious military machines are alert to what goes on in the world of knowledge and reason and sensibility? Why is the free intellect so divorced from decisions of power. Why does there now prevail among men of power such a higher and irresponsible ignorance?
En wanneer Mills tot de slotsom komt dat ‘The journalistic lie, become routine, is part of it too; and so is much of the pretentious triviality that passes for social science,’ dan kan ik niet anders dan constateren dat al decennia lang niets wezenlijks is veranderd.
Volgende keer een analyse van de Nuland-kliek op zoek naar de permanente oorlogsvoering, niet om oorlogen te winnen, maar om de hiërarchie in stand te houden.
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