The gist of Hannah Arendt’s insight is that we no longer seek the truth, we only want certainties. This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong.
Post-truth is that slippery slope in which objective facts influence public opinion less than emotions and personal beliefs. An area in which reality gives way to sensations, intuitions, emotions and, of course, to media, political and social manipulation. In this field, relativism triumphs while the limits between truth and lies are dangerously blurred.
However, it is not a new phenomenon. Long before we spoke of post-truth or even conceived that concept, Hannah Arendt had already referred to ‘defactualization,’ which would be the inability to discern fact from fiction. In 1971 she published an essay called ‘Lies in Politics,’ which she wrote — somewhat outraged and disappointed — just after came to light the Pentagon Papers on the Nixon administration and its handling of the Vietnam War.
— The Pentagon Papers, officially titled Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, is a United States Department of Defense history of the United States' political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1968. Released by Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on the study, they were first brought to the attention of the public on the front page of The New York Times in 1971. A 1996 article in The New York Times said that the Pentagon Papers had demonstrated, among other things, that Lyndon B. Johnson's administration had ‘systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress.’
The Pentagon Papers revealed that the U.S. had secretly enlarged the scope of its actions in the Vietnam War with coastal raids on North Vietnam and Marine Corps attacks — none of which were reported in the mainstream media. For his disclosure of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg was initially charged with conspiracy, espionage, and theft of government property; charges were later dismissed, after prosecutors investigating the Watergate scandal discovered that the staff members in the Nixon White House had ordered the so-called White House Plumbers to engage in unlawful efforts to discredit Ellsberg.
In June 2011, the documents forming the Pentagon Papers were declassified and publicly released.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers#/media/File:TIME_Magazine_-_Pentagon_Papers_cover.jpg
Arendt stated: ‘Our daily life is always in danger of being punctured by individual lies or torn apart by the organized lying of groups, nations or classes, as well as by negations or distortions, often carefully covered up by mounds of untruths or simply dropped into oblivion.’
Defactualization, the risk of turning facts into opinions.
‘The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the devout communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist,’ Arendt explained. Of course, ‘That distinction does not erode overnight, but rather emerges through, among other things, continuous lying: ‘The result of a constant and total replacement of the lie by the factual truth is not that lies are now accepted as truth and the truth is maligned as a lie, but the sense by which we orient ourselves in the real world, and the category of truth versus falsehood, is destroyed.’
Arendt is saying that defactualization occurs when we lose the ability to distinguish reality from construction, true from false. In fact, the philosopher establishes an important differentiation between truth, which corresponds to and reflects reality, and meaning, which is relative and shaped by our subjective interpretations, which in turn depend on beliefs and can be manipulated.
She explains that ‘The need for reason is not inspired by the search for truth but by the search for meaning. Truth and meaning are not the same. It is a basic fallacy to interpret meaning in the context of truth.’
Certainties live in the realm of meaning, not truth. The very notion of ‘alternative fact’ is a concept that generates certainty at the expense of truth. Political propaganda and social manipulation are often based on this manipulation of certainties.
Arendt believed that this is why it is so easy to fool the masses. Actually, ‘Falsity never conflicts with reason, because things could have been as the liar says they were. Lies are usually much more plausible, more attractive to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing in advance what the audience wants or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption with an eye toward making it believable, while reality has a disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared.’
That is, many times the desire to have certainties and handles to cling to in situations of uncertainty becomes the ideal breeding ground for the growth of ‘’’ that give way to lies. These falsehoods serve a function: they make us feel comfortable. They give us security. They remove dissonance and allow us to get on with our lives without overthinking. Without questioning things. Without feeling bad.
‘Under normal circumstances, the liar is overcome by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how big the fabric of falsehood that an experienced liar builds, it will never be big enough to cover the immensity of reality,’ Arendt pointed out.
However, when a war breaks out, we experience a pandemic or we go through an economic crisis, the ‘normal circumstances’ that Arendt referred to vanish to make way for a high level of uncertainty. In this condition we are more vulnerable to manipulation because we tend to prioritize the search for certainty over the truth.
We are more likely to believe those ‘alternative facts’ that someone tells us because it saves us from the hard work of seeking the truth, taking responsibility and facing consequences. Therefore, for Arendt, defactualization does not occur in one direction, it is not a lie imposed from power but a consensual falsehood between those who are unwilling to engage in the critical thinking work necessary to get to the truth, who are unwilling to change their personal agendas, step out of their comfort zone, or abandon pre-existing beliefs.
‘Alternative facts are not simply lies or falsehoods, but speak of a significant change in the shared factual reality that we take for granted […] Their corrosive force consists in turning the fact into a mere opinion, that is, an opinion in the merely subjective sense: an ‘it seems to me’ that persists indifferent to what it seems to others.’ Reality is stripped of the facts to enter the field of what is debatable and manipulable.
As a final point, Arendt warns that there is a point at which this defactualization turns against us: ‘The point always arrives beyond which the lie becomes counterproductive. This point is reached when the target audience of the lies is forced to completely ignore the line between truth and falsehood in order to survive.
‘True or false ceases to matter if your life depends on you acting as if it were true. Then the truth that can be trusted completely disappears from public life, and with it the main stabilizing factor in the ever-changing affairs of men.’
‘Under normal circumstances, the liar is overcome by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how big the fabric of falsehood that an experienced liar builds, it will never be big enough to cover the immensity of reality,’ Arendt pointed out. However, when a war breaks out, we experience a pandemic or we go through an economic crisis, the ‘normal circumstances’ that Arendt referred to vanish to make way for a high level of uncertainty. In this condition we are more vulnerable to manipulation because we tend to prioritize the search for certainty over the truth.
As a final point, Arendt warns that there is a point at which this defactualization turns against us: ‘The point always arrives beyond which the lie becomes counterproductive. This point is reached when the target audience of the lies is forced to completely ignore the line between truth and falsehood in order to survive. True or false ceases to matter if your life depends on you acting as if it were true. Then the truth that can be trusted completely disappears from public life, and with it the main stabilizing factor in the ever-changing affairs of men.”
Source: Arendt, H. (1971) Lying in Politics: Reflections on The Pentagon Papers. In: The New York Review.
Source:
Arendt, H. (1971) Lying in Politics: Reflections on The Pentagon Papers. In: The New York Review.
JENNIFER DELGADO
‘NOW WE CAN BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND HOW IT HAPPENED THAT the Modernists, Braque & Bros., completed almost all their stylistic innovations before the First World War, and yet Modern Art seems to belong to the postwar period. It is simply because the Boho Dance took place before the war and the Consummation took place afterward. This is not what is so often described as the lag between ‘the artist’s discoveries’ and ‘public acceptance.’ Public? The public plays no part in the process whatsoever. The public is not invited (it gets a printed announcement later). Le monde, the culturati, are no more a part of ‘the public,’ the mob, the middle classes, than the artists are. If it were possible to make one of those marvellous sociometric diagrams that sociologists tried to perfect in the 1950s, in which they tried to trace on a map the daily routes of key people in a community — a blue line for Community Leader A here and a red one for Leader B and a green one for Leader C and a broken sienna one for Bureaucrat Y, and so on — and the lines started moving around and intersecting here and there like a hallucinated Sony solid-state panel — if it were possible to make such a diagram of the art world, we would see that it is made up of (in addition to the artists) about 750 culturati in Rome, 500 in Milan, 1,750 in Paris, 1,250 in London, 2,000 in Berlin, Munich, and Düsseldorf, 3,000 in New York, and perhaps 1,000 scattered about the rest of the known world. That is the art world, approximately 10,000 souls — a mere hamlet! — restricted to les beaux mondes of eight cities. The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in Modern Art, the notion that the public scorns, ignores, fails to comprehend, allows to wither, crushes the spirit of, or commits any other crime against Art or any individual artist is merely a romantic fiction, a bittersweet Trilby sentiment. The game is completed and the trophies are distributed long before the public knows what has happened. The public that buys books in hardcover and paperback by the millions, the public that buys records by the billions and fills stadiums for concerts, the public that spends $100 million on a single movie — this public affects taste, theory, and artistic outlook in literature, music, and drama, even though courtly elites hang on somewhat desperately in each field. The same has never been true in art. The public whose glorious numbers are recorded in the annual reports of the museums, all those students and bus tours and moms and dads and random intellectuals… are merely tourists, autograph seekers, gawkers, parade watchers, so far as the game of Success in Art is concerned. The public is presented with a fait accompli and the aforementioned printed announcement, usually in the form of a story or a spread of color pictures in the back pages of Time. An announcement, as I say. Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his worth and make it stick. They can only bring you the news, tell you which artists the beau Hamlet, Cultureburg, has discovered and certified. They can only bring you the scores. We can now also begin to see that Modern Art enjoyed all the glories of the Consummation stage after the First World War not because it was ‘finally understood’ or ‘finally appreciated’ but rather because a few fashionable people discovered their own uses for it. It was after the First World War that modern and modernistic came into the language as exciting adjectives (somewhat like now, as in the Now Generation, during the 1960s). By 1920, in le monde, to be fashionable was to be modern, and Modern Art and the new spirit of the avant-garde were perfectly suited for that vogue. Picasso is a case in point. Picasso did not begin to become Picasso, in the art world or in the press, until he was pushing forty and painted the scenery for Diaghilev’s Russian ballet in London in 1918. Diaghilev & Co. were a tremendous succès de scandale in fashionable London. The wild dervishing of Nijinsky, the lurid costumes — it was all too deliciously modern for words. The Modernistic settings by Picasso, André Derain, and (later on) Matisse, were all part of the excitement, and le monde loved it. ‘Art,’ in Osbert Lancaster’s phrase, ‘came once more to roost among the duchesses.’ Picasso, who had once lived in the legendary unlit attic and painted at night with a brush in one hand and a candlestick in the other — Picasso now stayed at the Savoy, had lots of clothes made on Bond Street and nearby, including a set of tails, went to all the best parties (and parties were never better), was set up with highly publicized shows of his paintings, and became a social lion — which he remained, Tales of the Aging Recluse notwithstanding, until he was in his seventies.
Wolfe, Tom. The Painted Word (pp. 25-27). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.’
Sunday, July 21, 2019, exactly 5 years ago, I wrote the following:
Ian Buruma's 'Liberal Democracy' 5: 'Less than a month after the US had started a war of aggression against sovereign Afghanistan, opinion maker Ian Buruma stated with utmost certainty in The Guardian of Tuesday, November 6, 2001, under the headline 'Afghanistan versus Vietnam' that: 'If the US retreats with a bloody nose, the consequences for the world would be too dreadful to contemplate.' That is, if Washington were to stop terrorizing a poor and underdeveloped country like Afghanistan. According to the imperialist view of my old friend Ian, 'we cannot pull out without having achieved a decisive victory over Bin Laden and the Taliban,' because if the US suffered a 'nosebleed' then 'the victory would go to the Islamist revolution.’ And the outcome of that would be too “horrific” for the rogue state “Israel” in the first place. Moreover, as Ian Buruma, the mouthpiece of the neoliberal establishment, added:
'It would be unfortunate if fear of another Vietnam, which appears to be haunting Colin Powell, hampered the Americans from doing what they have to do to stop the Islamist revolution from spreading and thus leading to even greater wars. The endless bombing is part of this fear, for it is often a substitute for other forms of combat. US policy has been warped for more than 20 years by the Vietnam syndrome. The last thing the world needs now is an Afghan syndrome to shape the next 20.'
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/nov/06/afghanistan.terrorism4
23 years after my old friend Ian made his prophecy, he started to doubt the validity of his prediction, because of his claim that 'If the US retreats with a bloody nose, the consequences for the world would be too dreadful to contemplate,' is nothing more but a ridiculous representation of matters that only shows how intensely this opinionmaker had come to believe in the official NATO-propaganda. The same applies to his firm belief that 'It would be unfortunate if fear of another Vietnam, which appears to be haunting Colin Powell, hampered the Americans from doing what they have to do to stop the Islamist revolution from spreading, and thus leading to even greater wars.'
Apparently Ian Buruma, in the role of strategist, knew exactly what American leaders had to do, which was to crush resistance to American rule, not realizing that endless American warfare is necessary to keep the military-industrial complex running, a fact that former five-star general and President of the United States for eight years, Dwight Eisenhower, once again emphasized in his farewell speech in early 1961, a warning that was subsequently repeated by leading Western politicians and intellectuals. The highlight of Ian's rhetoric was the statement that the 'endless bombing' is an element of the 'fear' that non-Western violence would spread, because according to him,‘hopefully the end of Pax Americana will not involve intense military conflicts (which cannot be ruled out). But we will still have to prepare for a time when we will look back with nostalgia on Washington's relatively benign imperialism.’
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2017/06/09/pax-americana-nadert-haar-einde-11006828-a1562395
This so called ‘relatively benign imperialism,’ the Western liberals believe in, was since the seventies being pulled apart ‘by the Vietnam syndrome,’ and so ‘The last thing the world needs now is an Afghan syndrome to shape the next 20’ years, according to Buruma cum suis. The world-famous neoconservative American Political Scientist Samuel Huntington formulated in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) this kind of ‘benign imperialism’ as follows ‘The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.’
Like all the other large-scale violent operations the US has initiated in the struggle for world hegemony, Washington has not won any of the wars since 1945. In short, the well-paid opinion makers of the Buruma variety can be missed like a toothache by the Western public. Too much excitement quickly ends in vulgar propaganda, especially when time goes by and the claims have taken on ridiculous proportions. Almost a quarter of a century later, the U.S. forces returned home with ‘a bloody nose’ because ‘America’ lost the highly expensive war against the Taliban.
FEB 20, 2018 the progressive American website Truthdig published the following:
The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of U.S. Hegemony
Uncle Sam’s weakening is just fine with most Earth residents who pay attention to global events: by far and away world history’s most extensive empire, the U.S. has at least 800 military bases spread across more than 80 foreign countries and “troops or other military personnel in about 160 foreign countries and territories.” The U.S. accounts for more than 40 per cent of the planet’s military spending and has more than 5,500 strategic nuclear weapons, enough to blow the world up 5 to 50 times over. Last year it increased its “defense” (military empire) spending, which was already three times higher than China’s, and nine times higher than Russia’s.
Think it’s all in place to ensure peace and democracy the world over, in accord with the standard boilerplate rhetoric of U.S. presidents, diplomats and senators?
Do you know any other good jokes?
A Pentagon study released last summer laments the emergence of a planet on which the U.S. no longer controls events. Titled “At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primary World,” the study warns that competing powers “seek a new distribution of power and authority commensurate with their emergence as legitimate rivals to U.S. dominance” in an increasingly multipolar world. China, Russia and smaller players like Iran and North Korea have dared to “engage,” the Pentagon study reports, “in a deliberate program to demonstrate the limits of U.S. authority, reach influence and impact.” What chutzpah! This is a problem, the report argues, because the endangered U.S.-managed world order was “favourable” to the interests of U.S. and allied U.S. states and U.S.-based transnational corporations.
Any serious efforts to redesign the international status quo so that it favours any other states or people is portrayed in the report as a threat to U.S. interests. To prevent any terrible drifts of the world system away from U.S. control, the report argues, the U.S. and its imperial partners (chiefly its European NATO partners) must maintain and expand “unimpeded access to the air, sea, space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum in order to underwrite their security and prosperity.” The report recommends a significant expansion of U.S. military power. The U.S. must maintain “military advantage” over all other states and actors to “preserve maximum freedom of action” and thereby “allow U.S. decision-makers the opportunity to dictate or hold significant sway over outcomes in international disputes,” with the “implied promise of unacceptable consequences” for those who defy U.S. wishes.
“America First” is an understatement here. The underlying premise is that Uncle Sam owns the world and reserves the right to bomb the hell out of anyone who doesn’t agree with that (to quote President George H.W. Bush after the first Gulf War in 1991: “What we say goes.”
It’s nothing new. From the start, the “American Century” had nothing to do with advancing democracy. As numerous key U.S. planning documents reveal over and over, the goal of that policy was to maintain and, if necessary, install governments that “favor[ed] private investment of domestic and foreign capital, production for export, and the right to bring profits out of the country,” according to Noam Chomsky. Given the United States’ remarkable possession of half the world’s capital after World War II, Washington elites had no doubt that U.S. investors and corporations would profit the most. Internally, the basic selfish national and imperial objectives were openly and candidly discussed. As the “liberal” and “dovish” imperialist, top State Department planner and key Cold War architect George F. Kennan explained in “Policy Planning Study 23,” a critical 1948 document:
We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population… In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity… To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming, and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives… We should cease to talk about vague and… unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.
The harsh necessity of abandoning “human rights” and other “sentimental” and “unreal objectives” was especially pressing in the global South, what used to be known as the Third World. Washington assigned the vast “undeveloped” periphery of the world capitalist system — Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia and the energy-rich and thus strategically hyper-significant Middle East—a less than flattering role. It was to “fulfil its major function as a source of raw materials and a market” (actual State Department language) for the great industrial (capitalist) nations (excluding socialist Russia and its satellites, and notwithstanding the recent epic racist-fascist rampages of industrial Germany and Japan). It was to be exploited both for the benefit of U.S. corporations/investors and for the reconstruction of Europe and Japan as prosperous U.S. trading and investment partners organized on capitalist principles and hostile to the Soviet bloc.
“Democracy” was fine as a slogan and benevolent, idealistic-sounding mission statement when it came to marketing this imperialist U.S. policy at home and abroad. Since most people in the “third” or “developing” world had no interest in neocolonial subordination to the rich nations and subscribed to what U.S. intelligence officials considered the heretical “idea that government has direct responsibility for the welfare of its people” (what U.S. planners called “communism”), Washington’s real-life commitment to popular governance abroad was strictly qualified, to say the least. “Democracy” was suitable to the U.S. as long as its outcomes comported with the interests of U.S. investors/corporations and related U.S. geopolitical objectives. It had to be abandoned, undermined and/or crushed when it threatened those investors/corporations and the broader imperatives of business rule to any significant degree. As President Richard Nixon’s coldblooded national security adviser Henry Kissinger explained in June 1970, three years before the U.S. sponsored a bloody fascist coup that overthrew Chile’s democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.”
The U.S.-sponsored coup government that murdered Allende would kill tens of thousands of real and alleged leftists with Washington’s approval. The Yankee superpower sent some of its leading neoliberal economists and policy advisers to help the blood-soaked Pinochet regime turn Chile into a “free market” model and to help Chile write capitalist oligarchy into its national constitution.
“Since 1945, by deed and by example,” the great Australian author, commentator and filmmaker John Pilger wrote nearly nine years ago: “The U.S. has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, crushed some 30 liberation movements and supported tyrannies from Egypt to Guatemala (see William Blum’s histories). Bombing is apple pie.” Along the way, Washington has crassly interfered in elections in dozens of “sovereign” nations, something curious to note in light of current liberal U.S. outrage over real or alleged Russian interference in “our” supposedly democratic electoral process in 2016. Uncle Sam also has bombed civilians in 30 countries, attempted to assassinate foreign leaders and deployed chemical and biological weapons.
If we “consider only Latin America since the 1950s,” writes the sociologist Howard Waitzkin:
[T]he United States has used direct military invasion or has supported military coups to overthrow elected governments in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Haiti, Grenada, and Panama. In addition, the United States has intervened with military action to suppress revolutionary movements in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Bolivia. More recently… the United States has spent tax dollars to finance and help organize opposition groups and media in Honduras, Paraguay, and Brazil, leading to congressional impeachments of democratically elected presidents. Hillary Clinton presided over these efforts as Secretary of State in the Obama administration, which pursued the same pattern of destabilization in Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia.
The death count resulting from “American Era” U.S. foreign policy runs well into the many millions, including possibly as many as 5 million Indochinese killed by Uncle Sam and his agents and allies between 1962 and 1975. The flat-out barbarism of the American war on Vietnam is widely documented on record. The infamous My Lai massacre of March 16, 1968, when U.S. Army soldiers slaughtered more than 350 unarmed civilians — including terrified women holding babies in their arms — in South Vietnam was no isolated incident in the U.S. “crucifixion of Southeast Asia” (Noam Chomsky’s phrase at the time). U.S. Army Col. Oran Henderson, who was charged with covering up the massacre, candidly told reporters that “every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden somewhere.”
It is difficult, sometimes, to wrap one’s mind around the extent of the savagery Uncle Sam has unleashed on the world to advance and maintain its global supremacy. In the early 1950s, the Harry Truman administration responded to an early challenge to U.S. power in Northern Korea with a practically genocidal three-year bombing campaign that was described in soul-numbing terms by the Washington Post years ago:
The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment of America’s own leaders. ‘Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — 20 per cent of the population,’ Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later Secretary of State, said the United States bombed ‘everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.’ After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops… [T]he U.S. dropped 635,000 tons of explosives on North Korea, including 32,557 tons of napalm, an incendiary liquid that can clear forested areas and cause devastating burns to human skin.
Gee, why does North Korea fear and hate Uncle Sam?
This ferocious bombardment, which killed 2 million or more civilians, began five years after Truman arch-criminally and unnecessarily ordered the atom bombing of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to warn the Soviet Union to stay out of Japan and Western Europe.
Some benevolent “world policeman.”
The ferocity of U.S. foreign policy in the “America Era” did not always require direct U.S. military intervention. Take Indonesia and Chile, for two examples from the “Golden Age” height of the “American Century.” In Indonesia, the U.S.-backed dictator Suharto killed millions of his subjects, targeting communist sympathizers, ethnic Chinese and alleged leftists. A senior CIA operations officer in the 1960s later described Suharto’s 1965-66 U.S.-assisted coup as “the model operation” for the U.S.-backed coup that eliminated the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, seven years later. “The CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders,” the officer wrote, “[just like] what happened in Indonesia in 1965.”
As John Pilger noted 10 years ago, “the U.S. embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto with a ‘zap list’ of Indonesian Communist party members and crossed off the names when they were killed or captured… The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what Richard Nixon had called ‘the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in Southeast Asia.’ ”
“No single American action in the period after 1945,” wrote the historian Gabriel Kolko, “was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia, for it tried to initiate [Suharto’s] massacre.”
Two years and three months after the Chilean coup, Suharto received a green light from Kissinger and the Gerald Ford White House to invade the small island nation of East Timor. With Washington’s approval and backing, Indonesia carried out genocidal massacres and mass rapes and killed at least 100,000 of the island’s residents.
Among the countless episodes of mass-murderous U.S. savagery in the oil-rich Middle East over the last generation, few can match the barbarous ferocity of the “Highway of Death,” where the “global policeman’s” forces massacred tens of thousands of surrendered Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait on Feb. 26 and 27, 1991. Journalist Joyce Chediac testified that:
U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. ‘It was like shooting fish in a barrel,’ said one U.S. pilot. On the sixty miles of coastal highway, Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the sun… for 60 miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments. No survivors are known or likely… ‘Even in Vietnam, I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic,’ said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer… U.S. pilots took whatever bombs happened to be close to the flight deck, from cluster bombs to 500-pound bombs… U.S. forces continued to drop bombs on the convoys until all humans were killed. So many jets swarmed over the inland road that it created an aerial traffic jam, and combat air controllers feared midair collisions… The victims were not offering resistance… [I]t was simply a one-sided massacre of tens of thousands of people who had no ability to fight back or defend.
The victims’ crime was having been conscripted into an army controlled by a dictator perceived as a threat to U.S. control of Middle Eastern oil. President George H.W. Bush welcomed the so-called Persian Gulf War as an opportunity to demonstrate America’s unrivalled power and new freedom of action in the post-Cold War world, where the Soviet Union could no longer deter Washington. Bush also heralded the “war” (really a one-sided imperial assault) as marking the end of the “Vietnam Syndrome,” the reigning political culture’s curious term for U.S. citizens’ reluctance to commit U.S. troops to murderous imperial mayhem.
As Noam Chomsky observed in 1992, reflecting on U.S. efforts to maximize suffering in Vietnam by blocking economic and humanitarian assistance to the nation it had devastated: “No degree of cruelty is too great for Washington sadists.”
But Uncle Sam was only getting warmed up by building his Iraqi body count in early 1991. Five years later, Bill Clinton’s U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright told CBS News’ Leslie Stahl that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children due to U.S.-led economic sanctions imposed after the first “Persian Gulf War” (a curious term for a one-sided U.S. assault) was a “price … worth paying” for the advancement of inherently noble U.S. goals.
“The United States,” Secretary Albright explained three years later, “is good. We try to do our best everywhere.”
In the years following the collapse of the counter-hegemonic Soviet empire, however, American neoliberal intellectuals like Thomas Friedman — an advocate of the criminal U.S. bombing of Serbia — felt free to openly state that the real purpose of U.S. foreign policy was to underwrite the profits of U.S.-centered global capitalism. “The hidden hand of the market,” Friedman famously wrote in The New York Times Magazine in March 1999, as U.S. bombs and missiles exploded in Serbia, “will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”
In a foreign policy speech Sen. Barack Obama gave to the Chicago Council of Global Affairs on the eve of announcing his candidacy for the U.S. presidency in the fall of 2006, Obama had the audacity to say the following in support of his claim that U.S. citizens supported “victory” in Iraq: “The American people have been extraordinarily resolved. They have seen their sons and daughters killed or wounded in the streets of Fallujah.”
It was a spine-chilling selection of locales. In 2004, the ill-fated city was the site of colossal U.S. war atrocities, crimes including the indiscriminate murder of thousands of civilians, the targeting even of ambulances and hospitals, and the practical levelling of an entire city by the U.S. military in April and November. By one account, “Incoherent Empire,” Michael Mann wrote:
The U.S. launched two bursts of ferocious assault on the city, in April and November of 2004 … [using] devastating firepower from a distance which minimizes U.S. casualties. In April… military commanders claimed to have precisely targeted… insurgent forces, yet the local hospitals reported that many or most of the casualties were civilians, often women, children, and the elderly… [reflecting an] intention to kill civilians generally… In November… [U.S.] aerial assault destroyed the only hospital in insurgent territory to ensure that this time no one would be able to document civilian casualties. U.S. forces then went through the city, virtually destroying it. Afterwards, Fallujah looked like the city of Grozny in Chechnya after Putin’s Russian troops had razed it to the ground.
The “global policeman’s” deployment of radioactive ordnance (depleted uranium) in Fallujah created an epidemic of infant mortality, birth defects, leukemia and cancer there.
Fallujah was just one especially graphic episode in a broader arch-criminal invasion that led to the premature deaths of at least 1 million Iraqi civilians and left Iraq as what Tom Engelhardt called “a disaster zone on a catastrophic scale hard to match in recent memory.” It reflected the same callous mindset behind the Pentagon’s early computer program name for ordinary Iraqis certain to be killed in the 2003 invasion: “bug-splat.” Uncle Sam’s petro-imperial occupation led to the death of at least 1 million Iraqi “bugs” (human beings). According to the respected journalist Nir Rosen in December 2007, “Iraq has been killed… [T]he American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century.”
Along with death came the ruthless and racist torture. In an essay titled “I Helped Create ISIS,” Vincent Emanuele, a former U.S. Marine, recalled his enlistment in an operation that gave him nightmares more than a decade later:
‘I think about the hundreds of prisoners we took captive and tortured in makeshift detention facilities… I vividly remember the Marines telling me about punching, slapping, kicking, elbowing, kneeing and head-butting Iraqis. I remember the tales of sexual torture: forcing Iraqi men to perform sexual acts on each other while marines held knives against their testicles, sometimes sodomizing them with batons… [T]hose of us in infantry units… round[ed] up Iraqis during night raids, zip-tying their hands, black-bagging their heads and throwing them in the back of HUMVEEs and trucks while their wives and kids collapsed to their knees and wailed… Some of them would hold hands while marines would butt-stroke the prisoners in the face… [W]hen they were released, we would drive them from the FOB (Forward Operating Base) to the middle of the desert and release them several miles from their homes… After we cut their zip-ties and took the black bags off their heads, several of our more deranged marines would fire rounds from their AR-15s into their air or ground, scaring the recently released captives. Always for laughs. Most Iraqis would run, still crying from their long ordeal.’
The award-winning journalist Seymour Hersh told the ACLU about the existence of classified Pentagon evidence files containing films of U.S-“global policeman” soldiers sodomizing Iraqi boys in front of their mothers behind the walls of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. “You haven’t begun to see [all the]… evil, horrible things done [by U.S. soldiers] to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run,” Hersh told an audience in Chicago in the summer of 2014.’
It isn’t just Iraq where Washington has wreaked sheer mass murderous havoc in the Middle East, always a region of prime strategic significance to the U.S. thanks to its massive petroleum resources. In a recent Truthdig reflection on Syria, historian Dan Lazare reminds us that:
‘[Syrian President Assad’s] Baathist crimes pale in comparison to those of the U.S., which since the 1970s has invested trillions in militarizing the Persian Gulf and arming the ultra-reactionary petro-monarchies that are now tearing the region apart. The U.S. has provided Saudi Arabia with crucial assistance in its war on Yemen, it has cheered on the Saudi blockade of Qatar, and it has stood by while the Saudis and United Arab Emirates send in troops to crush democratic protests in neighbouring Bahrain. In Syria, Washington has worked hand in glove with Riyadh to organize and finance a Wahhabist holy war that has reduced a once thriving country to ruin.’
Chomsky has called Barack Obama’s targeted drone assassination program “the most extensive global terrorism campaign the world has yet seen.” The program “officially is aimed at killing people who the administration believes might someday intend to harm the U.S. and killing anyone else who happens to be nearby.” As Chomsky adds, “It is also a terrorism-generating campaign — that is well understood by people in high places. When you murder somebody in a Yemen village, and maybe a couple of other people who are standing there, the chances are pretty high that others will want to take revenge.”
“We lead the world,” presidential candidate Obama explained, “in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good… America is the last, best hope of earth.”
Obama elaborated in his first inaugural address. “Our security,” the president said, “emanates from the justness of our cause; the force of our example; the tempering qualities of humility and restraint” — a fascinating commentary on Fallujah, Hiroshima, the U.S. crucifixion of Southeast Asia, the “Highway of Death” and more.
Within less than half a year of his inauguration, Obama’s rapidly accumulating record of atrocities in the Muslim world would include the bombing of the Afghan village of Bola Boluk. Ninety-three of the dead villagers torn apart by U.S. explosives in Bola Boluk were children. “In a phone call played on a loudspeaker on Wednesday to outraged members of the Afghan Parliament,” the New York Times reported, “the governor of Farah Province… said that as many as 130 civilians had been killed.” According to one Afghan legislator and eyewitness, “the villagers bought two tractor trailers full of pieces of human bodies to his office to prove the casualties that had occurred. Everyone at the governor’s cried, watching that shocking scene.” The administration refused to issue an apology or to acknowledge the “global policeman’s” responsibility.
By telling and sickening contrast, Obama had just offered a full apology and fired a White House official because that official had scared New Yorkers with an ill-advised Air Force One photo-shoot flyover of Manhattan that reminded people of 9/11. The disparity was extraordinary: Frightening New Yorkers led to a full presidential apology and the discharge of a White House staffer. Killing more than 100 Afghan civilians did not require any apology.
Reflecting on such atrocities the following December, an Afghan villager was moved to comment as follows: “Peace prize? He’s a killer… Obama has only brought war to our country.” The man spoke from the village of Armal, where a crowd of 100 gathered around the bodies of 12 people, one family from a single home. The 12 were killed, witnesses reported, by U.S. Special Forces during a late-night raid.
Obama was only warming up his “killer” powers. He would join with France and other NATO powers in the imperial decimation of Libya, which killed more than 25,000 civilians and unleashed mass carnage in North Africa. The U.S.-led assault on Libya was a disaster for black Africans and sparked the biggest refugee crisis since World War II.
Two years before the war on Libya, the Obama administration helped install a murderous right-wing coup regime in Honduras. Thousands of civilians and activists have been murdered by that regime.
The clumsy and stupid Trump has taken the imperial baton from the elegant and silver-tongued “imperial grandmaster” Obama, keeping the superpower’s vast global military machine set on kill. As Newsweek reported last fall, in a news item that went far below the national news radar screen in the age of the endless insane Trump clown show:
According to research from the nonprofit monitoring group Airwars… through the first seven months of the Trump administration, coalition air strikes have killed between 2,800 and 4,500 civilians… Researchers also point to another stunning trend — the ‘frequent killing of entire families in likely coalition airstrikes.’ In May, for example, such actions led to the deaths of at least 57 women and 52 children in Iraq and Syria… In Afghanistan, the U.N. reports a 67 per cent increase in civilian deaths from U.S. airstrikes in the first six months of 2017 compared to the first half of 2016.
That Trump murders with less sophistication, outward moral restraint and credible claim to embody enlightened Western values and multilateral commitment than Obama did is perhaps preferable to some degree. It is better for empire to be exposed in its full and ugly nakedness, to speed its overdue demise.
The U.S. is not just the top menace only to peace on Earth. It is also the leading threat to personal privacy (as was made clearer than ever by the Edward Snowden revelations), to democracy (the U.S. funds and equips repressive regimes around the world) and to a livable global natural environment (thanks in no small part to its role as headquarters of global greenhouse gassing and petro-capitalist climate denial).
The world can be forgiven, perhaps, if it does not join Eliot Cohen and Karl Vick in bemoaning the end of the “American Era,” whatever Trump’s contribution to that decline, which was well underway before he entered the Oval Office.
Ordinary Americans, too, can find reasons to welcome the decline of the American empire. As Chomsky noted in the late 1960s: “The costs of empire are in general distributed over the society as a whole, while its profits revert to a few within.”
The Pentagon system functions as a great form of domestic corporate welfare for high-tech “defence” (empire) firms like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon—this while it steals trillions of dollars that might otherwise meet social and environmental needs at home and abroad. It is a significant mode of upward wealth distribution within “the homeland.”
The biggest costs have fallen on the many millions killed and maimed by the U.S. military and allied and proxy forces in the last seven decades and before. The victims include the many U.S. military veterans who have killed themselves, many of them haunted by their own participation in sadistic attacks and torture on defenceless people at the distant command of sociopathic imperial masters determined to enforce U.S. hegemony by any and all means deemed necessary.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/world-will-not-mourn-decline-u-s-hegemony/
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Ha, dubbel zo verwarrend.
Als AI foto's zo perfect hun plek vinden, is het dan geen toegepaste kunst...?
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je hebt het meteen door. wie spreekt tot u? een virtuele werkelijkheid.
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