The Dutch Forum voor Democratie party is interested in the origins of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's fortune, estimated at $850 million, according to a Twitter post published on Monday.
‘Zelensky has a huge fortune: according to various estimates, it is about 850 million [dollars],’ the report says. ‘And he did not receive most of it until he became president.’ ‘So how did he get this money? And more importantly, where does it go?’ the party asks.
Earlier, the Forum voor Democratie refused to listen to Zelensky's speech before the Dutch parliament, saying that this was a violation of democratic traditions.
Het verzwijgen van dit bericht is één van de tientallen voorbeelden van hoe de westerse censuur in de praktijk van alledag functioneert, en dat in de Angel-Saksische wereld ‘a conspiracy of silence’ wordt genoemd. Maar omdat Zelensky een pion is in de westerse poging in Rusland een regime change te forceren, moet de werkelijkheid geweld worden aangedaan. Zonder gemor houdt de westerse ‘corporate press’ zich aan de directieven vanuit Washington en Brussel, met hetzelfde voorbeeldige enthousiasme als zij in 2003 haar steun betuigde aan de illegale Amerikaanse inval in Irak. Niet dat mijn mainstream-collega’s gedwongen worden om deel te nemen aan deze ‘stilte-samenzwering,’ maar ze weten wel degelijk wat al dan niet bekend mag worden gemaakt; zelfcensuur is de garantie om een carrière te kunnen maken in de journalistiek. Vandaar dat er geen verder onderzoek wordt gedaan naar de duistere financiële praktijken van Volodymyr Zelensky en zijn kornuiten. Opmerkelijk, aangezien nog op 3 oktober 2021 bekend werd dat de:
Pandora Papers Reveal Offshore Holdings of Ukrainian President and his Inner Circle.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky rode to power on pledges to clean up the Eastern European country, but the Pandora Papers reveal he and his close circle were the beneficiaries of a network of offshore companies, including some that owned expensive London property.
Key Findings
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his partners in comedy production owned a network of offshore companies related to their business based in the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus, and Belize.
Zelensky’s current chief aide, Serhiy Shefir, as well as the head of the country’s Security Service, were part of the offshore network.
Offshore companies were used by Shefir and another business partner to buy pricey London real estate.
Around the time of his 2019 election, Zelensky handed his shares in a key offshore company over to Shefir, but the two appear to have made an arrangement for Zelensky’s family to continue receiving money from the offshore.
Actor Volodymyr Zelensky stormed to the Ukrainian presidency in 2019 on a wave of public anger against the country’s political class, including previous leaders who used secret companies to stash their wealth overseas.
Now, leaked documents prove that Zelensky and his inner circle have had their own network of offshore companies. Two belonging to the president’s partners were used to buy expensive property in London.
The revelations come from documents in the Pandora Papers, millions of files from 14 offshore service providers leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and shared with partners around the world including OCCRP.
The documents show that Zelensky and his partners in a television production company, Kvartal 95, set up a network of offshore firms dating back to at least 2012, the year the company began making regular content for TV stations owned by Ihor Kolomoisky, an oligarch dogged by allegations of multi-billion-dollar fraud. The offshores were also used by Zelensky associates to purchase and own three prime properties in the center of London.
The documents also show that just before he was elected, he gifted his stake in a key offshore company, the British Virgin Islands-registered Maltex Multicapital Corp., to his business partner — soon to be his top presidential aide. And in spite of giving up his shares, the documents show that an arrangement was soon made that would allow the offshore to keep paying dividends to a company that now belongs to his wife.
Dit alles demonstreert hoe noodzakelijk een gedegen, democratisch onderzoek is naar het vermogen van een president van een uiterst corrupt land, wiens nauwe samenwerking met westerse inlichtingendiensten en de NAVO-landen een Derde Wereldoorlog kan veroorzaken. Wat is erop tegen om het vermogen van een joods-Oekraïense voormalige komiek en dat van zijn zakenvrienden serieus te bestuderen? Dat hij niet te goeder trouw is blijkt onomstotelijk uit de onthullingen van de Pandora Papers.
Bekend is tevens dat de CIA over miljarden beschikt om regime changes over de hele wereld te financieren. ‘Since the 19th century, the United States government has participated and interfered, both overtly and covertly, in the replacement of several foreign governments. In the latter half of the 19th century, the U.S. government initiated actions for regime change mainly in Latin America and the southwest Pacific, including the Spanish–American and Philippine–American wars. At the onset of the 20th century, the United States shaped or installed governments in many countries around the world, including neighbors Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.’ Wikipedia:
Under the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. government feared that national security would be compromised by governments propped by the Soviet Union's own involvement in regime change and promoted the domino theory, with later presidents following Eisenhower's precedent. Subsequently, the United States expanded the geographic scope of its actions beyond traditional area of operations, Central America and the Caribbean. Significant operations included the United States and United Kingdom-orchestrated 1953 Iranian coup d'état, the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion targeting Cuba, and support for the overthrow of Sukarno by General Suharto in Indonesia. In addition, the U.S. has interfered in the national elections of countries, including Italy in 1948, the Philippines in 1953, and Japan in the 1950s and 1960s as well as Lebanon in 1957. According to one study, the U.S. performed at least 81 overt and covert known interventions in foreign elections during the period 1946–2000. Another study found that the U.S. engaged in 64 covert and six overt attempts at regime change during the Cold War.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change
Het is geenszins een voorbeeld van het door de mainstream zo verfoeide complotdenken om ervan uit te gaan dat de CIA allereerst de politieke kongsi rond Zelensky heeft omgekocht om de belangen van de Amerikaanse ‘deep state’ te steunen. Dit is namelijk de werkwijze van Central Intelligence Agency. Een voorbeeld:
Operation Cyclone was the code name for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program to arm and finance the Afghan mujahideen in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1992, prior to and during the military intervention by the USSR in support of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The mujahideen were also supported by Britain's MI6, who conducted separate covert actions. The program leaned heavily towards supporting militant Islamic groups, including groups with jihadist ties, that were favored by the regime of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in neighboring Pakistan, rather than other, less ideological Afghan resistance groups that had also been fighting the Soviet-oriented Democratic Republic of Afghanistan administration since before the Soviet intervention.
Operation Cyclone was one of the longest and most expensive covert CIA operations ever undertaken. Funding officially began with $695,000 in mid-1979, was increased dramatically to $20–$30 million per year in 1980, and rose to $630 million per year in 1987, described as the ‘biggest bequest to any Third World insurgency.’ The first CIA-supplied weapons were antique British Lee–Enfield rifles shipped out in December 1979, but by September 1986 the program included U.S.-origin state of the art weaponry, such as FIM-92 Stinger surface-to-air missiles, some 2,300 of which were ultimately shipped into Afghanistan. Funding continued (albeit reduced) after the 1989 Soviet withdrawal as the mujahideen continued to battle the forces of President Mohammad Najibullah's army during the Afghan Civil War (1989–1992).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone
Met andere woorden: hoe langduriger Zelensky de oorlog in Oekraïne weet voort te zetten des te rijker hij wordt, en des te problematischer de situatie voor de Russische beleidsbepalers is. Vandaar dat Washington en zijn NAVO-satellieten bereid blijven voor vele miljarden aan oorlogstuig te leveren. Gezien het feit dat zelfs de meest fervente aanhangers van het Amerikaans Imperium beseffen dat het rijk in verval is, en zij niet meer geloven in het in stand houden van wat voorheen de ‘Pax Americana’ werd genoemd, is de voornaamste reden waarom de NAVO-staten, onder aanvoering van Washington, de Russische inval hebben uitgelokt. Een oorlog tussen enerzijds het Westen en anderzijds Azië werd voor de VS en Europa ‘onvermijdelijk’ op het moment dat zij zich realiseerden dat de opkomst van China als wereldmacht niet gestopt kon worden. In wezen is de proxy-oorlog met Rusland een afgeleide daarvan. Na vijf eeuwen wereldwijde hegemonie van Europa, en na 1945 van de VS, is het voor het Westen erop of eronder. Vanuit historisch perspectief gezien bestaat er geen tussenweg. De macht geeft nooit vrijwillig de macht op. In vakkringen heet dit:
Thucydides's Trap, a term popularized by American political scientist Graham T. Allison to describe an apparent tendency towards war when an emerging power threatens to displace an existing great power as a regional or international hegemon. It was coined and is primarily used to describe a potential conflict between the United States and the People's Republic of China.
The term is based on a quote by ancient Athenian historian and military general Thucydides, in which he posited that the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta had been inevitable because of Spartan fears of the growth of Athenian power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thucydides_Trap
In Allison’s opzienbarende boek Destined For War. Can America And China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (2017) wijst deze Amerikaanse hoogleraar op het feit dat:
China’s economic development is transforming it into a formidable political and military competitor. During the Cold War, as the US mounted clumsy responses to Soviet provocations, a sign in the Pentagon said: ‘If we ever faced a real enemy, we would be in deep trouble.’ China is a serious potential enemy.
Kort samengevat: terwijl het aandeel van de VS in de wereldeconomie sinds 1945 meer dan halveerde, verviervoudigde de afgelopen 6 decennia het Chinese aandeel. Als voormalig staatssecretaris van Defensie stelt de uitstekend ingevoerde Allison daarom dat ‘As far as the eyes see, the defining question about global order is whether China and the US can escape Thucydides’s Trap,’ waarbij tussen een ineenstortend imperium en een opkomende wereldmacht doorgaans oorlog uitbreekt.
Dat de ‘Real Politiker’ Henry Kissinger al in 2015 publiekelijk ervoor waarschuwde dat onder de regering Obama/Biden ‘breaking Russia has become an objective; the long-range purpose should be to integrate it,’ werd door de westerse beleidsbepalers genegeerd, en in hun voetspoor de gezagsgetrouwe mainstream-pers. Maar deze waarschuwing van één van ’s werelds meest prominente geopolitieke experts werd vanzelfsprekend in Rusland ogenblikkelijk uiterst serieus genomen. Daar neemt de vrees voor het expansionisme van de NAVO almaar toe, zeker nu het westers militair-industrieel complex 17 keer meer spendeert aan oorlogsvoorbereidingen dan de Russische Federatie. Kissinger probeerde de Amerikaanse elite ervan te overtuigen dat ‘If we treat Russia seriously as a great people, we need at an early stage to determine whether their concerns can be reconciled with our necessities.’ Maar aangezien het Amerikaans ‘exceptionalisme’ het ware elite-geloof is, zoals ondermeer blijkt uit het feit dat de VS 93 procent van zijn bestaan in oorlog is geweest, kan Washington niet anders dan doormarcheren. De VS bestaat alleen bij groei en moet om te kunnen overleven mentaal en fysiek gemobiliseerd blijven. Zoiets kan alleen wanneer Washington en Wall Street zich superieur achten aan de rest van de mensheid, net zoals slavernij alleen mogelijk is zolang de slaveneigenaar zich superieur blijft voelen, en de slaaf zich inferieur.
Het feit dat China en Rusland weigeren zich te schikken naar de eisen van Washington en Wall Street bewijst dat het Amerikaans imperialisme op zijn grenzen is gestoten. Als geen ander beseft Kissinger dat deze historische omslag een groot gevaar voor de wereldvrede betekent, omdat -- simpelweg gesteld -- de VS de loop van de geschiedenis weigert te accepteren. Daardoor zag Kissinger zich in 2019 genoodzaakt te benadrukken dat ‘those countries that used to be exceptional and used to be unique, have to get used to the fact that they have a rival.’ Met andere woorden: de huidige westerse oorlogszuchtige propaganda van westerse politici en pers vormt een ernstig gevaar voor de toekomst van de gehele mensheid. Typerend voor de verregaande corruptie van de westerse ‘corporate press’ is dat deze waarschuwingen van een insider als Kissinger collectief werden verzwegen. De veronderstelling dat alleen het werk van dissidenten wordt gecensureerd is dan ook onjuist. Een ieder die waarschuwt voor de desastreuze en misdadige politiek van de NAVO, onder aanvoering van het Pentagon en de CIA, wordt rücksichtlos monddood gemaakt.
Daarentegen besteedde The Strategic Culture Foundation, een Russische denktank ‘for exclusive analysis, research and policy comment on Eurasian and global affairs’ — die net als ik door Facebook wordt gecensureerd — wel aandacht aan de woorden van Henry Kissinger, de voormalige Amerikaanse minister van Buitenlandse Zaken en oud National Security Adviser. November 2019 berichtte deze 'Foundation':
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made prudent remarks recently when he said the United States is no longer a uni-power and that it must recognize the reality of China as an equal rival…
If the US cannot find some modus vivendi with China, then the outcome could be a catastrophic conflict worst than any previous world war, he admonished.
Speaking publicly in New York on November 14, the veteran diplomat urged the US and China to resolve their ongoing economic tensions cooperatively and mutually, adding: ‘It is no longer possible to think that one side can dominate the other.’
In other words, he is negating (ontkent. svh) the erroneous consensus held in Washington which asserts that the US is somehow ‘exceptional,’ a ‘uni-power’ and the ‘indispensable nation.’ This consensus has grown since the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the US viewed itself as the sole super-power. That morphed into a more virulent ideology of ‘full-spectrum dominance.’ Thence, the past three decades of unrelenting US criminal wars and regime-change operations across the planet, throwing the whole world into chaos.
Kissinger’s frank assessment is a breath of fresh air amid the stale and impossibly arrogant self-regard held by too many American politicians who view their nation as an unparalleled power which brooks no other…
Aptly, Kissinger’s caution about danger of conflict was reiterated separately by veteran journalist John Pilger, who warned in an exclusive interview for Strategic Culture Foundation this week that, presumed ‘American exceptionalism is driving the world to war.’
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/11/29/henry-kissinger-gets-it-us-exceptionalism-is-over/
Nogmaals, deze feiten worden bewust niet door de westerse mainstream-pers gemeld en al helemaal niet geanalyseerd of in een bredere context geplaatst. Slaapwandelend dreigt het Westen een Derde Wereldoorlog te ontketenen. De geschiedenis kent even krankzinnige gevallen van hoogmoed. Zo dachten Napoleon en Hitler dat zij Rusland op de knieën konden krijgen, en zo meent de mallotige regering van het Verenigd Koninkrijk op dit moment dat zij de hegemonie van de witte man ongestoord kan voortzetten.
Donderdag 28 april 2022 berichtte de Amerikaanse historicus Eric Zuesse onder de kop ‘UK calls for a global NATO’:
British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss says a ‘Global NATO’ needs to arm Taiwan, like Ukraine.
The world order created after the Second World War and the Cold War isn’t working anymore, so the West needs ‘a global NATO’ to pursue geopolitics anew, UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss argued, in a major foreign policy speech on Wednesday. Truss also urged the US-led bloc to send more ‘heavy weapons, tanks’ and airplanes to Ukraine, and said China would face the same treatment as Russia if it doesn’t ‘play by the rules.’
‘My vision is a world where free nations are assertive and in the ascendant. Where freedom and democracy are strengthened through a network of economic and security partnerships,’ Truss said in a speech at a Mansion House banquet in London.
Dubbing this arrangement ‘the Network of Liberty,’ Truss argued it was necessary because the economic and security structures developed after 1945 — such as the UN Security Council — ‘have been bent out of shape so far, they have enabled rather than contained aggression.’
‘Geopolitics is back,' she announced.
The collective West and its allies need to supply Kiev with ‘heavy weapons, tanks, aeroplanes — digging deep into our inventories, ramping up production,’ Truss said, because the objective is to ‘push Russia out of the whole of Ukraine’ and rebuild the country along the lines of a new Marshall Plan.
‘The war in Ukraine is our war — it is everyone’s war because Ukraine’s victory is a strategic imperative for all of us.’
Beyond that, NATO must ensure that ‘the Western Balkans and countries like Moldova and Georgia have the resilience and the capabilities to maintain their sovereignty and freedom,’ and uphold the ‘sacrosanct’ open-door policy [of NATO], Truss said.
READ MORE: UK support for attacks on Russian soil triggers response
Her ambitions went beyond Europe, though, as Truss denounced the ‘false choice between Euro-Atlantic security and Indo-Pacific security.'
‘In the modern world we need both. We need a global NATO,’ she said. ‘And we must ensure that democracies like Taiwan are able to defend themselves.'
Pointing to London’s unprecedented effort to embargo Russia, Truss insisted that ‘economic access is no longer a given. It has to be earned,’ and that countries who wish to earn it ‘must play by the rules. And that includes China.’
The UK has sent a large quantity of weapons systems to Ukraine over the past several months, including NLAW anti-tank missiles and Stormer armored vehicles. British Armed Forces Minister James Heappey told Thames Radio on Wednesday it would be ‘completely legitimate’ for Ukraine to use UK-supplied weapons to strike into Russian territory, to which the Russian military warned that any such attack would be met with a proper response.
READ MORE: Australia doesn’t rule out arming Taiwan against China
Truss traveled to Russia in early February to threaten Moscow not to invade Ukraine, but ended up being widely mocked after multiple gaffes concerning geography. She first mistook the Baltic for the Black Sea in a BBC interview, then reportedly fell for a trick question from her Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov and insisted London would ‘never recognize Russia’s sovereignty’ over Rostov and Voronezh — Russian regions she mistook for the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.
Wanneer mevrouw Truss beweert dat de mensheid nu ineens door de Russische aanval op Oekraïne wordt ‘[g]econfronteerd met verschrikkelijk barbarisme en oorlogsmisdaden, waarvan wij hoopten dat ze tot het verleden behoorden,’ dan is dit voor een onafhankelijke journalist een voorbeeld van oorlogspropaganda van een Britse conservatief, minister van een land dat zich nooit verontschuldigd heeft voor de lange reeks oorlogsmisdaden van het Britse Rijk ‘on which the sun never set.’ Integendeel zelfs. Nog in 2016 berichtte de Independent onder de kop ‘British people are proud of colonialism and the British Empire, poll finds’ dat een gedegen opinieonderzoek had uitgewezen dat ’43 per cent of Brits thought the British Empire was a good thing, while 44 per cent were proud of Britain's history of colonialism.’ Slechts '19 per cent said it was bad and 25 per cent said it was neither.' Om het geheugen van de Britse chauvinisten enigszins op te frissen besprak de Independent in het kort ‘5 of the worst atrocities carried out by the British Empire,’ die een beeld gaven hoe barbaars en misdadig het Britse kolonialisme was geweest.
The prisoner is generally tied to a gun with the upper part of the small of his back resting against the muzzle. When the gun is fired, his head is seen to go straight up into the air some forty or fifty feet; the arms fly off right and left, high up in the air, and fall at, perhaps, a hundred yards distance; the legs drop to the ground beneath the muzzle of the gun; and the body is literally blown away altogether, not a vestige being seen.
Een aanzienlijk deel van de Britten mag dan wel ‘trots’ blijven op zijn barbaarse koloniale rijk, ook nu nog weigert de Britse regering haar verantwoordelijkheid te nemen voor de oorlogsmisdaden die in naam van het Koninkrijk nog steeds worden gepleegd. Zo meldt Wikipedia dat:
Human Rights Watch reported that the UK government sought the overseas operations bill to stop the prosecution of British soldiers for torture and other war crimes committed overseas. Under this bill the power of the attorney general, a member of the government, had more power to protect soldiers from prosecution whether with a genuine case or not.
In November 2019, BBC News reported that the British government and military were accused of covering up the killing and torture of civilians and children during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Leaked documents allegedly contain evidence implicating British troops in killing children and the torture of civilians in these regions. The Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT), which investigated British war crimes in Iraq, and Operation Northmoor, which investigated the same in Afghanistan, were dismantled by the British government in 2017 after Phil Shiner, a solicitor who took more than 1,000 cases to IHAT, was struck off from practising law amid allegations he had paid people in Iraq to find clients.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_war_crimes
Desondanks blijft mijn oude vriend, de opiniemaker Ian Buruma, van mening dat de VS ‘a force for good’ is. Deze onverschilligheid is overigens kenmerkend voor het merendeel van de ‘liberals.’ Met betrekking tot het 'betrekkelijk goedaardige imperialisme uit Washington,' zoals Buruma dit formuleert, is uit wetenschappelijk onderzoek gebleken dat:
U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths during the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the two Iraq Wars. The Korean War also includes Chinese deaths while the Vietnam War also includes fatalities in Cambodia and Laos.
The American public probably is not aware of these numbers and knows even less about the proxy wars for which the United States is also responsible. In the latter wars there were between nine and 14 million deaths in Afghanistan, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, East Timor, Guatemala, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sudan.
But the victims are not just from big nations or one part of the world. The remaining deaths were in smaller ones which constitute over half the total number of nations. Virtually all parts of the world have been the target of U.S. intervention.
The overall conclusion reached is that the United States most likely has been responsible since WWII for the deaths of between 20 and 30 million people in wars and conflicts scattered over the world.
To the families and friends of these victims it makes little difference whether the causes were U.S. military action, proxy military forces, the provision of U.S. military supplies or advisors, or other ways, such as economic pressures applied by our nation. They had to make decisions about other things such as finding lost loved ones, whether to become refugees, and how to survive.
And the pain and anger is spread even further. Some authorities estimate that there are as many as 10 wounded for each person who dies in wars. Their visible, continued suffering is a continuing reminder to their fellow countrymen.
It is essential that Americans learn more about this topic so that they can begin to understand the pain that others feel. Someone once observed that the Germans during WWII ‘chose not to know.’ We cannot allow history to say this about our country.
between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history.
Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites.
Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants lives.
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2311-late-victorian-holocausts
Davis, ‘Winner of the World History Association Book Award,’ wijst erop dat de Britse journalist/auteur:
William Digby, principal chronicler of the 1876 Madras famine, prophesized on the eve of Queen Victoria’s death that when ‘the part played by the British Empire in the nineteenth century is regarded by the historian fifty years hence, the unnecessary deaths of millions of Indians would be its principal and most notorious monument.’ A most eminent Victorian, the famed naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer with Darwin of the theory of natural selection, passionately agreed. Like Digby, he viewed mass starvation as avoidable political tragedy, not ‘natural’ disaster. In a famous balance-sheet of the Victorian era, published in 1898, he characterized the famines in India and China, together with the slum poverty of the industrial cities, as ‘the most terrible failures of the century.’
Professor Davis kwam tot de ontdekking dat de:
great famines are the missing pages — the absent defining moments, if you prefer — in virtually every overview of the Victorian era. Yet there are compelling, even urgent, reasons for revisiting this secret history,
en wel omdat typerend is voor de westerse elite dat zij deze 'geheime geschiedenis' blijft verzwijgen of domweg is vergeten. Haar historisch bewustzijn vertoont grote gaten. Toch, hebben 'we,' volgens Davis, niet te maken:
with ‘lands of famine’ becalmed in stagnant backwaters of world history, but with the fate of tropical humanity at the precise moment (1870-1914) when its labor and products were being dynamically conscripted into a London-centered world economy. Millions died, not outside the ‘modern world system,’ but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed, many were murdered, as we shall see, by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill (Verlichtingsideologen, geestelijke grondleggers van het moderne kapitalisme. svh) Yet the only twentieth-century economic historian who seems to have clearly understood that the great Victorian famines (at least, in the Indian case) were integral chapters in the history of capitalist modernity was Karl Polanyi (beroemde Joods-Hongaarse econoom. svh) in his 1944 book The Great Transformation. ‘The actual source of famines in the last fifty years,’ he wrote, ‘was the free marketing of grain combined with local failure of incomes’:
‘Failure of crops, of course, was part of the picture, but despatch of grain by rail made it possible to send relief to the threatened areas; the trouble was that the people were unable to buy the corn at rocketing prices, which on a free but incompletely organized market were bound to be a reason to a shortage. In former times small local stores had been held against harvest failure, but these had been now discontinued or swept away into the big market… Under the monopolists the situation had been fairly kept in hand with the help of the archaic organization of the countryside, including free distribution of corn, while under free and equal exchange Indians perished by the millions.’
Polanyi, however, believed that the emphasis that Marxists put on the exploitative of late-nineteenth century imperialism tended ‘to hide from our view the even greater issue of cultural degeneration:
‘The catastrophe of the native community is a direct result of the rapid and violent disruption of the basic institutions of the victim (whether force is used in the process or not does not seem altogether relevant). These institutions are disrupted by the very fact that a market economy is foisted (opdringen. svh) upon an entirely different organized community; labour and land are made into commodities, which, again, is only a short formula for the liquidation of every and any cultural institution in an organic society… Indian masses in the second half of the nineteenth century did not die of hunger because they were exploited by Lancashire (waar de industriële revolutie plaatsvond. svh); they perished in large numbers because the Indian village community had been demolished.’
Polanyi’s famous essay has the estimable virtue of knocking down one Smithian fetish after another to show that the route to a Victorian ‘new world order’ was paved with bodies of the poor. But he simultaneously reified the ‘Market’ as automata in a way that has made it easier for some epigones to visualize famine as an inadvertent ‘birth pang’ (geboortepijn. svh) or no-fault ‘friction of transition’ in the evolution towards market-based world subsistence. Commodification of agriculture eliminates village-level reciprocities (wederdiensten. svh) that traditionally provided welfare to the poor during crises. (Almost as if to say: ‘Oops, systems error: fifty million corpses. Sorry. We'll invent a famine code next time.’)
But markets, to play with words, are always ‘made.’ Despite the pervasive ideology that markets function spontaneously (and, as a result, ‘in capitalism, there is nobody on whom one can pin guilt or responsibility, things just happened that way, through anonymous mechanisms), they in fact have inextricable political histories. And force — contra Polanyi — is ‘altogether relevant.’ As Rosa Luxemburg (joods-Duitse marxistische filosofe. svh) argued in her classic (1913) analysis of the incorporation of Asian and African peasantries into the late-nineteenth-century world market:
‘Each new colonial expansion is accompanied, as a matter of course, by a relentless battle of capital against the social and economic ties of the natives, who are also forcibly robbed of their means of production and labour power. Any hope to restrict the accumulation of capital exclusively to ‘peaceful competition,’ that is, to regular commodity exchange such as takes place between capitalist producer-countries rests on the pious belief that capital... can rely upon the slow internal process of a disintegrating natural economy. Accumulation, with its spasmodic (krampachtige. svh) expansion, can no more wait for, and be content with, a natural internal disintegration of non-capitalist formations and their transition to commodity economy, than it can than it can wait for, and be content with, the natural increase of the working population. Force is the only solution open to capital; the accumulation of capital, seen as a historical process, employs force as a permanent weapon, not only at its genesis, but further on down to the present day.’
Omdat ook de neoliberale fase van het kapitalisme alleen kan overleven door het dogma van de groei, met zijn almaar stijgende winsten, zien we momenteel dat het Amerikaanse imperialisme permanent oorlog moet voeren, wil het kunnen voortbestaan. Dat elk jaar weer rond de helft van de federale begroting, dat het Congres kan toewijzen, wordt gespendeerd aan het militair-industrieel complex toont aan welke miljardenwinsten er gemaakt worden. Eind 2017 werd geschat dat ‘U.S. spending on post-9/11 wars to reach $5.6 trillion by 2018.’ In 2019 heeft Washington meer uitgetrokken voor wat officieel ‘Defense’ heet dan voor alle andere begrotingsposten bij elkaar. Zonder overdrijven kan worden gesteld dat de VS geen militair-industrieel complex heeft, maar er één is, en daarom voortdurend oorlogen zal moeten blijven voeren om de astronomisch hoge militaire uitgaven te kunnen rechtvaardigen. Deze realiteit verklaart tegelijkertijd het doorslaggevende motief om de Koude Oorlog te hervatten. Zonder vijand, geen geld. Volgende keer over de rol van Zelensky en Victoria Nuland met betrekking tot hun poging om een Derde Wereldoorlog mogelijk te maken.
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