Waarom de VS een Nucleaire Basis in Oekraïne Wil 2

Het streven van de Amerikaanse elite naar de hegemonie in de hele wereld is ideologisch gebaseerd op het Amerikaans exceptionalisme, het geloof in de superioriteit van de VS. Dit narcisme is het product van allereerst de overtuiging dat het volk inherent anders is dan alle andere naties, en daardoor uniek is in de wereldgeschiedenis, waardoor Washington voorbestemd blijft om de alleenheerser op aarde te zijn. Net als elke religie en elke ideologie is dit geloof uiteindelijk niets anders dan een gevaarlijke mythe, die telkens weer in grootscheeps bloedvergieten uitloopt. Over dit exceptionalisme verklaarde de voormalige National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski in 2010 tegenover Der Spiegel: ‘I am very worried that most Americans are close to total ignorant about the world,’ en dat dit ‘an unhealthy condition’ was ‘in a country in which foreign policy has to be endorsed by the people if it is to be pursued. And it makes it much more difficult for any president to pursue an intelligent policy that does justice to the complexity of the world.’ Op de opmerking van de interviewer ‘Yet the American right is still convinced of American exceptionalism’ reageerde Brzezinski dat dit ‘a reaction’ was ‘to the inability of people to understand global complexity or important issues like American energy dependency. Therefore, they search for simplistic sources of comfort and clarity. And the people that they are now selecting to be, so to speak, the spokespersons of their anxieties are, in most cases, stunningly ignorant.’ Brzezinski’s oordeel mag dan wel juist zijn, toch handelt ook de Amerikaanse elite, onder wie beleidsbepalende politici, generaals, CEO’s en bankiers, vanuit de diepe overtuiging exceptionalistisch te zijn, en bezit daardoor de macht over leven en dood van miljarden medemmensen.

In het voorwoord van de heruitgave van het opzienbarende boek The Irony of American History (2010), geschreven door de Amerikaanse protestantse theoloog Reinhold Niebuhr, schrijft de Amerikaanse oud kolonel en emeritus hoogleraar geschiedenis Andrew J. Bacevich dat deze studie ‘het belangrijkste boek’ is dat ‘ooit is geschreven over de buitenlandse politiek van de VS,’ omdat het ‘provides the master key to understanding the myths and delusions that underpin American statecraft.’ Bacevich wijst erop dat:

In Niebuhr’s view, America’s rise to power derived less from divine favor than from good fortune combined with a fierce determination to convert that good fortune into wealth and power. The good fortune came in the form of a vast landscape, rich in resources, ripe for exploitation, and apparently insulated from the bloody cockpit of power politics. The determination found expression in a strategy of commercial and territorial expansionism that proved staggeringly successful, evidence not of superior virtue but of shrewdness punctuated with a considerable capacity for ruthlessness.

In describing America’s rise to power Niebuhr does not shrink from using words like ‘hegemony’ and ‘imperialism.’ His point is not to tag the United States with responsibility for all the world’s evils. Rather, it is to suggest that it does not differ from other great powers as much as Americans may imagine.

Niebuhr has little patience for those who portray the United States as acting on God’s behalf. ‘All men are naturally inclined to obscure the morally ambiguous element in their political cause by investing it with religious sanctity,’ he once observed. ‘This is why religion is more frequently a source of confusion than of light in the political realm.’ In the United States, he continued, ‘The tendency to equate our political with our Christian convictions causes politics to generate idolatry.’ Evangelical conservatism and its growing influence on American politics, which Niebuhr did not live to see, have only reinforced this tendency.

Niebuhr anticipated that the American veneration of liberty could itself degenerate into a form of idolatry. In the midst of World War II, he went so far as to describe the worship of democracy as ‘a less vicious version of the Nazi creed.’ He cautioned that 'no society, not even a democratic one, is great enough or good enough to make itself the final end of human existence.’ Our prophet’s skepticism on this point does not imply that he was antidemocratic. However, Niebuhr evinced an instinctive aversion to anything that smacked of utopianism, and he saw in the American Creed a susceptibility to the utopian temptation, and he suggested provocatively that ‘the evils against which we contend are frequently the fruits of illusions which are similar to our own.’ Although Niebuhr was referring to the evils of communism, his comment applies equally to the present, when the United States contends against the evils of Islamic radicalism. The illusions of Osama bin Laden find their parallel in the illusions of George W. Bush. Each of these two protagonists is intent on radically changing the Middle East. Neither will succeed, but in their efforts they engage in a de facto collaboration that causes enormous mischief and suffering.

Helaas staat de huidige generatie Europese politici en mainstream-journalisten weerloos tegenover het immense gevaar van de Amerikaanse illusies. Dit is opmerkelijk aangezien er voldoende vooral Angelsaksische intellectuelen zijn die gedocumenteerde kritiek op het exceptionalisme hebben geuit. Zo signaleert de Canadese auteur Michael Ignatieff in de introductie van American Exceptionalism and Human Rights (2009)  dat er  drie typen van exceptionalisme zijn:

• exemptionalism (supporting treaties as long as Americans are exempt from them); 
• double standards (criticizing ‘others for not heeding the findings of international human rights bodies, but ignoring what these bodies say of the United States’); 
• legal isolationism (the tendency of American judges to ignore other jurisdictions). 

Daaraan kan worden toegevoegd:

• Absolutization of democracy as a dangerous (and totalitarian) form of idolatry. Niebuhr correctly described the ‘worship of democracy’ as neo-fascist in its spirit, ‘a less vicious version of the Nazi creed.’ He cautioned that ‘no society, not even a democratic one, is great enough or good enough to male itself the final end of human existence.’

Vooruitlopend op de Amerikaanse overwinning in 1945 waarschuwde Niebuhr: 

• The victors would also face the ‘imperial' problem of using power in global terms but from one particular center of authority, so preponderant and unchallenged that its world rule would almost certainly violate basic standards of justice. Such a tragic dilemma is an impressive aspect of our contemporary situation.

• The idea of diffusion of power between different branches of government enshrined in US constitution (which actually disappeared in 1947 with the emergence of national Security State) is applicable to international arena. Otherwise the dangers associated with hegemonic power can't be averted in the international context. Niebuhr, as a realist once noted that ‘no world government could possibly possess, for generations to come, the moral and political authority to redistribute power between nations in the degree in which highly cohesive national communities have accomplished this end in recent centuries.’ However he expressed optimism that the UN can serve as forum in which national policies are subjected to some level of scrutiny of world opinion. Serving as a check on exercising hegemonic power in the international relations. Now we know that Niebuhr is wrong in this respect and subverting UN is a trivial game for a hegemonic power. Still, the great peril for the USA is excessive hubris witch comes with exceptionalism.

The second important contribution to to the studies of American exceptionalism is Anatol Lieven. He correctly linked American exceptionalism with far right nationalism which Wikipedia defined as:

‘Far-right politics or extreme-right politics are right-wing politics to the right of the mainstream centre right on the traditional left-right spectrum. They often involve a focus on tradition as opposed to policies and customs that are regarded as reflective of modernism. They tend to include disregard or disdain for egalitarianism, if not overt support for social inequality and social hierarchy, elements of social conservatism and opposition to most forms of liberalism and socialism.'  

 ‘America keeps a fine house,’ Anatol Lieven writes in his probably best book on the American Exceptionalism (America Right or Wrong An Anatomy of American Nationalism ) ‘but in its cellar there lives a demon, whose name is nationalism.’  In a way US neocons, who commanded key positions in Bush II and Barack Obama administrations  are not that different from Israeli Likud Party.

 

While neocons definitely played an important role in shaping the US policy immediately after 9/11, the origins of aggressive U.S. foreign policy since 9/11 also reflect controversial character of the US national identity, which according to Anatol Lieven embraces two contradictory features.

• ‘The American Creed,’ — a civic nationalism which absolutizes and espouses liberty, democracy, and the rule of law. While it has positive aspects, conversion of  the ‘Creed’ into religious belief creates a strong tendency toward a dangerous ‘messianic’ element in American foreign policy, the desire to extend American values and American democracy to the whole world, irrespective of the needs and desires of others in a manner that closely resembles Bolshevism and especially Trotskyism with its idea of permanent war. 

• Populist (or what is sometimes called ‘Jacksonian’) nationalism, has its roots in an aggrieved (gekrenkt. svh), embittered, and defensive White America, centered largely in the American South. Where the ‘Creed’ is optimistic and triumphalist, Jacksonian nationalism is fed by a profound pessimism and a sense of deep threat to white population personal, social, and religious values. 

Both of those tendencies are much older then 9/11. The first aggressive, expansionist war by the US was the war of 1812. See:American Loyalists, The Most Important War You Probably Know Nothing About - By James Traub Foreign Policy

The War of 1812 matters because it was America’s first war of choice. The United States did not have to declare war on Great Britain on June 18, 1812, to survive as a nation and indeed President James Madison did not want to. The newly founded United States was growing westward but the ‘war hawks’ in Congress pressed for a conflict with America’s former colonial masters in the hope of gaining even more territory to the north. The term ‘hawk’ was coined in the run-up to the War of 1812 and the hawks of U.S. foreign policy have been with us ever since.The War of 1812 was America’s first neocon war. With an audacity that would become familiar, the war hawks appealed to a combination of personal pride — the British navy was forcibly conscripting Americans — and the prospect of material gain — the absorption of British Canada — wrapped up in love of country. No one said the conquest of Canada would be a ‘cakewalk,’ but the hawks were confident the Americans would be greeted as liberators.

These two mutually-exclusive impulses caused wild oscillations of the US foreign policy, especially in the Middle East and influenced the nature of U.S. support for Israel. Due to those oscillations those two contradictory impulses are undermining the U.S. foreign policy credibility in the eyes of the worlds and complicates reaching important national objectives.

Some attribute the term 'American Exceptionalism' to Alexis de Tocqueville — though he never penned the phrase. In reality this term originated by German Marxists who were trying to explain weakness of worker movement in the USA. The idiom was popularized by neo-conservative pundits (aka former Trotskyites) soon after WWII.

In reality the term American Exceptionalism is nothing but a disguised, more ‘politically correct’ reference to America's Janus-faced nationalism. It has some mystical components like long vanished under the hill of financial oligarchy the ‘American dream’ and its German-style refrain 'God bless America.’ What is interesting about ‘God bless America’ is that most founding fathers were Deists, profoundly critical of organized religions and they sought to separate personal — what many of them described as mythologies — from government. They were profoundly respectful of personal religious belief, but saw government as necessarily secular if freedom was to prevail. Not until the religious revivals of the 1820s through the 1860s can you find many identifying religion as a component of American exceptionalism. 

As Martin Woollacott (in 2021 overleden buitenlandredacteur van The Guardian. svh) aptly noted in his review of Anatol Lieven’s book America, Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism ( Guardian):

He cuts through the conformist political rhetoric of America, the obfuscating special language of the ‘American dream,’ or the 'American exception,’ which infects even foreign accounts. Even to use the word ‘nationalism' to describe an American phenomenon is, as he notes, not normal. Americans are not ‘nationalist,' they are ‘patriotic.’ It is a patriotism which too often leaves no room for the patriotism of others, combining a theoretical care for all humanity with, in practice, an ‘indifference verging on contempt’ for the interests and hopes of non-Americans. Nothing could be more distant from 'the decent respect to the opinions of mankind’ recommended to Americans in the early years of their independent existence.

Lieven first paints a picture of an in some ways admirable American ‘civic nationalism,’ based on respect for the rule of law, constitutionality, democracy, and social (but not economic) equality, and a desire to spread these values in the world. But because this nationalism unrealistically holds that such ‘American’ values can be exported at will, it blinds Americans to the different nature of other societies, sustaining the mistaken idea that if only particular rulers or classes can be displaced, ‘democracy’ will prevail — a ‘decapitation' theory which contributed to the decision to attack Saddam. The American campaign to democratize other societies, Lieven says, harshly but fairly, 'combines sloppiness of intellect and meanness of spirit.’ […]

The result, Lieven argues, is that instead of the mature nationalism of a satisfied and dominant state, American nationalism is more akin to that of late developing and insecure states such as Wilhelmine Germany and Tsarist Russia. 

'While America keeps a splendid and welcoming house,’ Lieven writes in his preface, ‘it also keeps a family of demons in its cellar.’

His book supports Mark Twain to the effect that ‘we are blessed with three things in this country, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and, thirdly, the common sense to practice neither one!’

He also points at the very important side effect of Exceptionalism: ‘America's hypocrisy,’ (see for example Inside "democracy promotion" hypocrisy fair). An outstanding level of hypocrisy in the US foreign policy also is corroborated by other scholars, among them James Hillman in his recent book ‘A Terrible Love of War’ in which he characterizes hypocrisy as quintessentially American (although British are strong competitors). Now after Snowden, Libya, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, etc we might appear to be entering a new stage on which ‘The era of easy hypocrisy is over.’

The regime of easy hypocrisy means that America positions itself as a blessed nation created by God and (here’s the rub) therefore privileged in what actions it can take around the world and the nation that can safely ignore international norms, which are created only for suckers. It is above the international law.

http://www.softpanorama.org/Skeptics/Political_skeptic/Nationalism/american_exceptionalism.shtml#Niebuhrs_contribution_to_understanding_of_American_exeptionalism

Al deze levensbedreigende kwalen spelen ook nu weer in de Oekraïne-crisis een doorslaggevende rol. Een imperium waarvan, volgens vriend en vijand, het einde nadert, en dat ‘intellectuele nalatigheid en geestelijke doortraptheid combineert,’ handelt als een ongeleid projectiel in een wereld die toch al ernstig uit balans is, en tot aan zijn nek bewapend. De huidige westerse militaire steun aan het regime in Kiev, dat na een staatsgreep aan de macht kwam in een uiterst corrupt land met neo-nazi’s in zowel de strijdkrachten als de politiek en de bureaucratie, kan in korte tijd leiden tot een nucleair armageddon. Volgende keer meer. 

Oekraiense neo-nazi's.