Onder de kop ‘Henry Kissinger: Ukraine Should Give Up Territory to Russia to Reach Peace’ berichtte het Amerikaanse tijdschrift Newsweek op 24 mei 2022:
Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger has said Ukraine should accept giving up part of its territory to reach a peace deal with Russia, and end the now three-month-long war immediately.
Talking at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, on Monday, 98-year-old Kissinger said that failing to restart negotiations with Russia and continuing to antagonize Moscow could have disastrous consequences for Europe's stability in the long term.
https://www.newsweek.com/henry-kissinger-ukraine-should-give-territory-russia-reach-peace-1709488
Volgens Kissinger, de meest gezaghebbende westerse geopoliticus, moet de ‘outcome of the war be outlined’ binnen ‘the next two months or so,’ dus ‘before it creates upheavals and tensions that cannot be overcome. Particularly between the eventual relationship of Russia towards Europe and Ukraine. Ideally, the dividing line should return to the status quo ante (terugbrengen in de staat zoals die vroeger was. svh). Kissinger dringt erop aan dat Oekraïne territorium moet opgeven om vrede te kunnen bereiken die absoluut noodzakelijk is om te voorkomen dat de oorlog ‘would turn into a war not about the freedom of Ukraine, which had been undertaken with great cohesion by NATO, but a new war against Russia itself.’ Deze woorden kunnen maar op één manier worden opgevat: er moet zo snel mogelijk vrede met de nucleaire grootmacht Rusland worden gesloten, om een genocidale Derde Wereldoorlog onmogelijk te maken. Kissingfer's waarschuwing maakte tevens duidelijk dat de anti-Russische propaganda van de bellicose westerse politici en de opgewonden ‘corporate press’ geen bijdrage leveren aan de noodzakelijke ontspanning, laat staan aan een vreedzame coëxistentie die uiteindelijk in de eerste Koude Oorlog werd ontwikkeld om een nucleair Armageddon te voorkomen. Letwel, dr. Kissinger is als politicoloog, voormalig diplomaat en oud-politicus van de Republikeinse Partij een insider, die, in tegenstelling tot de meeste opiniemakend politici en journalisten door ervaring weet welke immense gevaren dreigen. ‘Hij diende als nationaal veiligheidsadviseur van 1969 tot 1975 en vanaf 1973 in een dubbele functie als minister van Buitenlandse Zaken tot 1977 onder presidenten Richard Nixon en Gerald Ford.’ Bovendien is hij een ‘practitioner of Realpolitik,’ en:
played a prominent role in United States foreign policy between 1969 and 1977. During this period, he pioneered the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, orchestrated the opening of relations with the People's Republic of China, engaged in what became known as shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East to end the Yom Kippur War, and negotiated the Paris Peace Accords, ending American involvement in the Vietnam War. Kissinger has also been associated with such controversial policies as U.S. involvement in the 1973 Chilean military coup, a ‘green light' to Argentina's military junta for their Dirty War, and U.S. support for Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War despite a genocide being perpetrated by Pakistan. After leaving government, he formed Kissinger Associates, an international geopolitical consulting firm. Kissinger has written over a dozen books on diplomatic history and international relations.
Ik ga wat uitgebreider in op Kissinger’s expertise omdat de huidige generatie Amerikaanse- en Europese politici qua kennis en ervaring lichtgewichten zijn, die door onwetendheid en kortzichtigheid menen dat Rusland — voor het merendeel een Aziatisch land met elf tijdszones en daarmee het omvangrijkste land ter wereld — geïsoleerd kan worden. Het zal duidelijk zijn dat bijvoorbeeld de D’66 coryfee Kajsa Ollongren die na een ‘Leergang Buitenlandse Betrekkingen aan Instituut Clingendael’ en een wethouderschap intellectueel een onbeduidend iemand is vergeleken met de professionele oude rot Henry Kissinger. Zij mag dan wel de ‘meest invloedrijke vrouw van Nederland’ zijn ‘in de categorie openbaar bestuur in de Opzij Top 100 van het feministische maandblad Opzij,' maar ja, dat legt vanzelfsprekend geen enkele gewicht in de schaal zodra het op geopolitiek aankomt. Zo ontving:
Henry Kissinger his BA degree summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa in political science from Harvard College in 1950, where he lived in Adams House and studied under William Yandell Elliott. His senior undergraduate thesis, titled The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant, was over 400 pages long, and was the origin of the current limit on length (35,000 words). He received his MA and PhD degrees at Harvard University in 1951 and 1954, respectively. In 1952, while still a graduate student at Harvard, he served as a consultant to the director of the Psychological Strategy Board,[33] and founded a magazine, Confluence. At that time, he sought to work as a spy for the FBI.
His doctoral dissertation was titled Peace, Legitimacy, and the Equilibrium (A Study of the Statesmanship of Castlereagh and Metternich). In his PhD dissertation, Kissinger first introduced the concept of ‘legitimacy,’ which he defined as: ‘Legitimacy as used here should not be confused with justice. It means no more than an international agreement about the nature of workable arrangements and about the permissible aims and methods of foreign policy.’ An international order accepted by all of the major powers is ‘legitimate’ whereas an international order not accepted by one or more of the great powers is ‘revolutionary’ and hence dangerous. Thus, when after the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the leaders of Britain, France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia agreed to co-operate in the Concert of Europe to preserve the peace after Austria, Prussia, and Russia participated in a series of three Partitions of Poland, in Kissinger's viewpoint this international system was ‘legitimate’ because it was accepted by the leaders of all five of the Great Powers of Europe. Notably, Kissinger's ‘Primat der Aussenpolitik’ approach to diplomacy took it for granted that as long as the decision-makers in the major states were willing to accept the international order, then it is ‘legitimate’ with questions of public opinion and morality dismissed as irrelevant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Kissinger
De pretentie van Nederlandse politici dat zij veel meer waarde hechten aan moraliteit en het internationaal recht is absurd, gezien het feit dat Nederland de Amerikaanse agressieoorlog tegen Irak steunde, zonder dat Washington en Den Haag het mandaat bezaten om een soevereine staat aan te vallen, en daarnaast de Nederlandse regering islamitische terroristen financierde die mede verantwoordelijk waren voor het veranderen van Syrië in één groot bloedbad, waarbij ‘350,209 people had been killed in the conflict’ tussen ‘March 2011 and March 2021, including 26,727 women and 27,126 children.’ De Haagse politiek verantwoordelijken werden voor het financieren van de terroristen niet juridisch vervolgd; sterker nog zij konden als minister en zelfs premier doorgaan, want zo immoreel is het poldermodel wel. Ook vanuit de EU werden geen stappen ondernomen omdat het steunen van terroristen in ondermeer Syrië een onlosmakelijk onderdeel is van de westerse politiek, en allereerst en bovenal dat van Washington om de belangen van Wall Street veilig te stellen. Een uitstekend geïnformeerde bron wat betreft de machinaties van Wall Street is de Amerikaanse auteur en journalist Nomi Prins. Wikipedia:
Prins worked as a managing director at Goldman Sachs for 2 years and as a senior managing director at Bear Stearns for seven years, and was a senior strategist at Lehman Brothers and an analyst at the Chase Manhattan Bank. She was Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos think tank from 2002 to 2016. Prins is known for her book All the Presidents' Bankers, in which she explores over a century of close relationships between the 19 presidents from Teddy Roosevelt through Barack Obama and the key bankers of their day, based on archival documents. Prins also received recognition for her whistleblower book, ‘It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bonuses, Bailouts, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street,’ (2009. svh) for her views on the U.S. economy, for her published spending figures on federal programs and initiatives related to the 2008 bailout, and for her advocacy for the reinstatement of the Glass–Steagall Act and regulatory reform of the financial industry. She was also a member of Senator Bernie Sanders' panel of top economic experts to advise on Federal Reserve reform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomi_Prins
Op de Amerikaanse website AlterNet van 7 maart 2012 schreef zij:
Several years after the Wall Street-ignited crisis began, the nation’s top bank CEOs (who far out-accumulated their European and other international counterparts) continue to hobnob with the president at campaign dinners where each plate costs more than one out of four US households make in a year. Financial bigwigs lead their affluent lives, unaffected, unremorseful, and unindicted for wreaking havoc on the nation. Why? Because they won. They hustled better. They are living the American Dream.
This is not the American Dream that says if you work hard you can be more comfortable than your parents; but rather, if you connive well, game the rules, and rule the game, your take from others is unlimited. In this paradigm, human empathy, caring, compassion, and connection have been devalued from the get-go. This is the flaw in the entire premise of the American Dream: if we can have it all, it must by definition be at someone else’s expense.
In Why America Failed, noted historian and cultural critic Morris Berman’s brilliant, raw and unflinchingly accurate postmortem of America, he concludes that this hustling model, literally woven into the American DNA, doomed the country from the start, and led us inevitably to this dysfunctional point. It is not just the American Dream that has failed, but America itself, because the dream was a mistake in the first place. We are at our core a nation of hustlers; not recently, not sometimes, but always. Conventional wisdom has it that America was predicated on the republican desire to break free from monarchical tyranny, and that was certainly a factor in the War of Independence; but in practical terms, it came down to a drive for ‘more’ — for individual accumulation of wealth.
So where does that leave us as a country? I caught up with Berman to find out.
Op haar vraag waarom Berman’s trilogie over het verval van het Amerikaans Imperium tot stand kwam, antwoordde deze Amerikaanse historicus en cultuurcriticus:
The first book in the series, The Twilight of American Culture (2000), is a structural analysis, or internal comparison, of the contemporary US and the late Roman Empire. In it, I identified factors that were central to the fall of Rome and showed that they were present in the US today. I said that if we didn’t address these, we were doomed. I didn’t believe for a moment we would, of course, and now the results are obvious.
After 9/11, I realized that my comparison with Rome lacked one crucial component: like Rome, we were attacked from the outside. Dark Ages America (2006), the sequel to Twilight, is an analysis of US foreign policy and its relationship to domestic policy, once again arguing that there had to be a serious reevaluation of both if we were to arrest the disintegration of the nation. Of course, no such reevaluation took place, and we are now in huge economic trouble with no hope of recovery, and stuck in two wars in the Middle East that we cannot seem to win.
By the time I sat down to write the third volume, ‘Why America Failed’ (2011. svh), I was past the point of issuing warnings. The book is basically a postmortem for a dying nation. The argument is that we failed for reasons that go back more than 400 years. As a result, the historical momentum to not undertake a reassessment, and just continue on with business as usual, is very powerful. At this point we can no more reverse our downward trajectory than we can turn around an aircraft carrier in a bathtub.
Prins: So you’ve been analyzing America’s decline for over a decade. Was there a particular, specific inspiration for Why America Failed?
Berman: I was originally inspired by the historian Walter McDougall (Freedom Just Around the Corner) and his argument about America being a nation of hustlers. The original working title was Capitalism and Its Discontents, the point being that those who dissented from the dominant ideology never had a chance. The crux of the problem remains the American Dream: even ‘progressives’ see it as the solution — including, I have the impression, the Wall Street protesters — when it’s actually the problem.
In my essay collection, A Question of Values (2010. svh), I talk about how we are driven by a number of unconscious assumptions, including the notions of our being the ‘chosen people’ and the availability of an endless frontier (once geographical, now economic and technological). For a while I had The Roots of American Failure as the title, but more to the point would be The Failure of American Roots — for even our success was a failure, because it was purely material. This is really what the American Dream is about, in its essence
Prins: What do you say to people who don’t believe America has failed; who may just see the country as going through a bad patch, so to speak? What evidence have you compiled for the argument that the United States has failed?
Berman: The major evidence is, of course, economic, and there is by now a slew of books showing that this time around recovery is not really possible and that we are going to be eclipsed by China or even Europe. These are books by very respected economists, I might add; and even a US Intelligence report of two yrs ago, ‘Global Trends 2025,’ says pretty much the same thing, although it adds cultural and political decline into the mix. The statistics here are massive, but just consider a single one: in terms of collective wealth, the top 1 percent of the nation owns more than the bottom 90 percent. If we have a future, it’s that of a banana republic. And there will be no New Deal this time around to save us; just the opposite, in fact, as we are busy shredding any social safety net we once had.
Prins: How does this relate to the rise of the Tea Party, or the Occupy Wall Street movement?
Berman: Americans may be very vocal in claiming we’ll eventually recover, or that the US is still number-one, but I believe that on some level they know that this is whistling in the dark. They suspect their lives will get worse as time goes on, and that the lives of their children will be even worse than that. They feel the American Dream betrayed them, and this has left them bitter and resentful. The Wall Street protests are, as during the Depression, a demand for restoring the American Dream; for letting more people into it. The Tea Party seeks a solution in returning to original American principles of hustling, i.e. of a laissez-faire economy and society, in which the government plays an extremely small role. Thus they see Obama as a socialist, which is absurd; even FDR doesn’t fit that description. There are great differences between the two movements, of course, but both are grounded in a deep malaise, a fear that someone or something has absconded with America.
Prins: Most political analysts place the blame for our current situation on major institutions, whether it is Wall Street, Congress, the Bush or Obama administrations, and so on. You agree with them to a great extent, but you also seem to place a lot of emphasis on the American people themselves — on individual values and behavior. Why is that? How do you see that as a factor?
Berman: The dominant thinking on the left, I suppose, is some variety of a ‘false consciousness’ argument, that the elite have pulled the wool over the eyes of the vast majority of the population, and once the latter realizes that they’ve been had, they’ll rebel, they’ll move the country in a populist or democratic socialist direction. The problem I have with this is the evident fact that most Americans want the American Dream, not a different way of life — a Mercedes-Benz, as Janis Joplin once put it. Endless material wealth based on individual striving is the American ideal, and the desire to change that paradigm is practically nonexistent. Even the poor buy into this, which is why John Steinbeck once remarked that they regard themselves as ‘temporarily embarrassed millionaires.’ Hence I would argue that nations get the governments they deserve; that the wool is the eyes.
Met andere woorden: het expansionisme is een aangeboren karaktertrek van allereerst en bovenal de Amerikaanse elite. Zij gelooft, meer is het niet, dat de VS de hegemonie op aarde en zelfs in het heelal toekomt. De kritische Canadese ‘journalist, lecturer and founder of the Canadian Patriot Review,’ Matthew Ehret, schreef op 23 januari 2022 in verband hiermee dat het christelijk concept van:
positive future-ideals teleologically driving society forward was a powerful notion that once governed much of western civilization. The idea that man was made in the living image of a Creator, capable of participating in the continuous process of creation itself was an empowering notion which animated some of the greatest upward leaps in scientific progress, liberty, sovereignty, increased quality of life and population growth ever seen.
Onder de witte Amerikanen die het uitgestrekte land met genocidaal geweld veroverden op de ‘Indiaanse’ volkeren werd dit christelijk vooruitgangsconcept ‘manifest destiny’ genoemd, gebaseerd op Gods opdracht in de Bijbel ‘Weest vruchtbaar, en vermenigvuldigt, en vervult de aarde, en onderwerpt haar,’ hetgeen in de praktijk bovendien neerkwam op het uitroeien van andere volkeren die land en daarmee begeerlijke grondstoffen bezaten, zoals duidelijk wordt uit het oudtestamentische Deuteronomium:
Vernietig alle volken die de Heer God in jullie macht zal geven. Heb geen medelijden met hen en laat hen niet in leven. Ga hun goden niet aanbidden. Want anders zal het slecht met jullie aflopen. 17 Jullie vragen je misschien af: 'Die volken zijn groter dan wij. Hoe kunnen we hen dan wegjagen?' 18 Maar jullie moeten niet bang voor hen zijn. Denk steeds aan wat jullie Heer God met de farao en heel Egypte heeft gedaan. 19 Denk aan de grote rampen die jullie zelf hebben gezien. Aan de wonderen en de macht van de Heer waarmee Hij jullie uit Egypte heeft bevrijd. Hetzelfde zal jullie Heer God doen met alle volken waar jullie bang voor zijn. 20 Verder zal jullie Heer God grote wespen op hen afsturen. De mensen die nog waren overgebleven en die zich voor jullie hadden verborgen, zullen door die wespen gedood worden. 21 Wees dus niet bang voor die volken. Want jullie Heer God is bij jullie. Hij is een machtige en ontzagwekkende God.
22 Jullie Heer God zal deze volken één voor één voor jullie wegjagen. Jullie mogen hen niet in korte tijd vernietigen, maar beetje bij beetje. Want anders zouden er te veel wilde dieren in het land komen. 23 Jullie Heer God zal ervoor zorgen dat jullie hen overwinnen. Hij zal hen in paniek brengen en vernietigen. 24 Hij zal hun koningen in jullie macht geven. Jullie zullen ervoor zorgen dat later niemand zich nog zal herinneren dat ze hebben geleefd. Geen enkele koning zal jullie kunnen verslaan. Ze zullen allemaal worden vernietigd. 25 Jullie moeten hun godenbeelden verbranden. Het zilver en het goud van die beelden mogen jullie niet houden. Het zou daardoor slecht met jullie aflopen. Want jullie Heer God vindt die beelden walgelijk. 26 En jullie mogen geen godenbeelden in jullie huis zetten. Want dan zal het slecht met jullie aflopen. Jullie moeten die beelden walgelijk vinden, want er rust een vloek op.
Deze primitieve God der Wrake legde de basis van ook het gewelddadige Europese en Amerikaanse expansionisme dat tot op de dag van vandaag de werelde beheerst. Het is dan ook niet verwonderlijk dat Nomi Prins de volgende vraag opwierp:
Speaking of wars, having just undergone Iraq and Afghanistan, the Obama administration, and actually the Republican candidates as well, have begun to vilify China, and have amped up the volume regarding Iran. You talk about our need as a country to have an external enemy. In what way do you believe that need will manifest itself in any coming military actions?
Morris Berman: I deal with this issue in A Question of Values. America was founded within a conceptual framework of being in opposition to something—the British and the Native Americans, to begin with — and it never abandoned that framework. It doesn’t really have a clear idea of what it is in a positive sense, and that has generated a kind of national neurosis. I mean, we were in real trouble when the Soviet Union collapsed; in terms of identity, we were completely adrift until the attacks of 9/11 (just think of how frivolous and meaningless the Clinton years were, in retrospect). War is our drug of choice, and without an enemy we enter a kind of nervous breakdown mode.
Hence the saber rattling against Iran now, or the foolish decision to set up an army base in Australia to ‘watch’ China. What bothers me is that we are doing all of this unconsciously, and we always have. Mr. Obama, like most of his predecessors, is little more than a marionette on strings (Mr. Carter being the only postwar exception to this pattern, in a number of significant ways). Once again, true intelligence is ontological, and as a nation, we are sorely lacking in that department.
Prins: But haven’t we heard all this before? After all, there is a long history of the argument that the country is in permanent decline and has no future. Such books come and go; meanwhile, the country goes on. What makes your book, or books, different from previous assertions that ‘it’s all over’?
Berman: Decline takes time; an empire doesn’t come to an end on August 4, A.D. 476, at two in the afternoon. Similarly, declinist analysis (analyse van het verval. svh) also takes time: the books you are referring to form a continuous argument, from Andrew Hacker’s The End of the American Era in 1970 to George Modelski’s Long Cycles in World Politics in 1987 to Why America Failed in 2011. And there have been a good number of declinist works in between. These books are not wrong; rather, they are part of an ongoing recognition that the American experiment is finished. Even then, we can go back to before Professor Hacker to Richard Hofstadter, who called the US a ‘democracy of cupidity (hebzucht. svh)’; or to C. Vann Woodward, who wrote that we were probably doomed because we had put all of our eggs in one ideological basket, namely laissez-faire economics. During these years the country hasn’t just ‘gone on’; what it has done is progressively fallen apart, and these writers have made it their business to document the process.
https://www.carolynbaker.net/2012/03/09/why-the-american-empire-was-destined-to-collapse-nomi-prins-interviews-morris-berman/
Als achtergrond informatie het volgende:
Richard Hofstadter (August 6, 1916 – October 24, 1970) was an American historian and public intellectual of the mid-20th century.
Hofstadter was the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. Rejecting his earlier historical materialist approach to history, in the 1950s he came closer to the concept of ‘consensus history,’ and was epitomized by some of his admirers as the ‘iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus.’ Others see in his work an early critique of the one-dimensional society, as Hofstadter was equally critical of socialist and capitalist models of society, and bemoaned the ‘consensus’ within the society as ‘bounded by the horizons of property and entrepreneurship,’ criticizing the ‘hegemonic liberal capitalist culture running throughout the course of American history.’
His most widely read works are Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (1944); The American Political Tradition (1948); The Age of Reform (1955); Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963), and the essays collected in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964).
He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize, first in 1956 for The Age of Reform, an analysis of the populism movement in the 1890s and the progressive movement of the early 20th century; and then in 1964 for the cultural history Anti-intellectualism in American Life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hofstadter
Comer Vann Woodward (November 13, 1908 – December 17, 1999) was an American historian who focused primarily on the American South and race relations. He was long a supporter of the approach of Charles A. Beard, stressing the influence of unseen economic motivations in politics. Stylistically, he was a master of irony and counterpoint. Woodward was on the left end of the history profession in the 1930s. By the 1950s he was a leading liberal and supporter of civil rights. His book The Strange Career of Jim Crow, which demonstrated that racial segregation was an invention of the late 19th century rather than an inevitable post-Civil-War development, was endorsed by Martin Luther King Jr. as ‘the historical Bible of the civil rights movement.’ After attacks on him by the New Left in the late 1960s, he moved to the right politically. He won a Pulitzer Prize for History for his annotated edition of Mary Chestnut's Civil War diaries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._Vann_Woodward
In verband met de lengte stop ik hier. Volgende keer meer over de Verenigde Staten als grootste gevaar voor de wereldvrede.
