All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.
Captain Ahab. Moby Dick. 1851
What is most depressing, however, is how little time is spent trying to understand America's role in the world, and its direct involvement in the complex reality beyond the two coasts that have for so long kept the rest of the world extremely distant and virtually out of the average American's mind. You'd think that 'America' was a sleeping giant rather than a superpower almost constantly at war, or in some sort of conflict, all over the Islamic domains. Osama bin Laden's name and face have become so numbingly familiar to Americans as in effect to obliterate any history he and his shadowy followers might have had before they became stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination. Inevitably, then, collective passions are being funnelled into a drive for war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick, rather than what is going on, an imperial power injured at home for the first time, pursuing its interests systematically in what has become a suddenly reconfigured geography of conflict, without clear borders, or visible actors. Manichaean symbols and apocalyptic scenarios are bandied about with future consequences and rhetorical restraint thrown to the winds.
Edward Said. The Observer. Zondag 16 september 2001
Met Edward Said's beschouwing in het achterhoofd, moeten we, in navolging van de Duitse historicus, Joachim Fest, vaststellen dat elke 'staat als spiegelbeeld' fungeert 'van haar onderdanen.' Dit verklaart waarom de houding van de Nederlandse staat gekenmerkt wordt door een opportunistische tweeslachtigheid, enerzijds het gidsland, anderzijds de handelsnatie, die wisselend de rol van dominee en koopman aanneemt. Als algemene regel geldt hier in de polder: 'doe maar normaal dan doe je al gek genoeg.' In de woorden van Johan Huizinga, de grootste Nederlandse historicus ooit: 'De eenheid van het Nederlandse volk is bovenal gelegen in zijn burgerlijk karakter,' met als gevolg dat 'uit een burgerlijke sfeer onze weinig militaire geest, de overwegende handelsgeest [sproten],' waardoor 'hypocrisie en farizeïsme hier individu en gemeenschap [belagen]! Huizinga stelde dat 'het [niet] valt te ontkennen, dat de Nederlander, alweer in zekere burgerlijke gemoedelijkheid, een lichte graad van knoeierij of bevoorrechting van vriendjes zonder protest verdraagt.' Waarbij men dient te beseffen dat wat in 1934, toen Huizinga dit vaststelde, nog 'een lichte graad van knoeierij en bevoorrechting' was, anno 2014, in de huidige neoliberale consumptiemaatschappij, is uitgegroeid tot een wijd verspreide corrupte mentaliteit, die verhullend het 'poldermodel' wordt genoemd. En aangezien de overheid een weerspiegeling is van 'haar onderdanen' en vice versa kan men zonder overdrijven ervan uit gaan dat tevens de zelfbenoemde 'politieke-literaire elite' gecorrumpeerd is. Zij zou anders niet kunnen overleven. Wat doorgaat voor intellectuelen, is immers direct afhankelijk van de koopman annex dominee. Net als de rest van de Nederlandse bevolking staat de polder 'intelligentsia,' onverschillig dan wel enthousiast, te wachten hoe de huidige desastreuze ontwikkelingen zullen eindigen. Tegelijkertijd berichtte op vrijdag 14 maart 2014 The Guardian:
A new study partly-sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilization could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.
Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that 'the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history.' Cases of severe civilizational disruption due to 'precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common.'
In verband met dit feit is het interessant te lezen wat de Amerikaanse auteur en journalist Chris Hedges op de website Truthdig van 7 juli 2013 schreef :
The most prescient portrait of the American character and our ultimate fate as a species is found in Herman Melville’s 'Moby Dick.' Melville makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness and inevitable self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. He is our foremost oracle. He is to us what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England or Fyodor Dostoyevsky to czarist Russia.
Our country is given shape in the form of the ship, the Pequod, named after the Indian tribe exterminated in 1638 by the Puritans and their Native American allies. The ship’s 30-man crew—there were 30 states in the Union when Melville wrote the novel—is a mixture of races and creeds. The object of the hunt is a massive white whale, Moby Dick, which, in a previous encounter, maimed the ship’s captain, Ahab, by biting off one of his legs. The
self-destructive fury of the quest, much like that of the one we are on, assures the Pequod’s destruction. And those on the ship, on some level, know they are doomed—just as many of us know that a consumer culture based on corporate profit, limitless exploitation and the continued extraction of fossil fuels is doomed.
'If I had been downright honest with myself,' Ishmael admits, 'I would have seen very plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea. But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing, and tried to think nothing.'
We, like Ahab and his crew, rationalize madness. All calls for prudence, for halting the march toward environmental catastrophe, for sane limits on carbon emissions, are ignored or ridiculed. Even with the flashing red lights before us, the increased droughts, rapid melting of glaciers and Arctic ice, monster tornadoes, vast hurricanes, crop failures, floods, raging wildfires and soaring temperatures, we bow slavishly before hedonism and greed and the enticing illusion of limitless power, intelligence and prowess. We believe in the eternal wellspring of material progress. We are our own idols. Nothing will halt our voyage; it seems to us to have been decreed by natural law. 'The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run,' Ahab declares. We have surrendered our lives to corporate forces that ultimately serve systems of death. Microbes will inherit the earth.
In our decline, hatred becomes our primary lust, our highest form of patriotism and a form of eroticism. We are made supine by hatred and fear. We deploy vast resources to hunt down jihadists and terrorists, real and phantom. We destroy our civil society in the name of a war on terror. We persecute those, from Julian Assange to Bradley Manning to Edward Snowden, who expose the dark machinations of power. We believe, because we have externalized evil, that we can purify the earth. We are blind to the evil within us. Melville’s description of Ahab is a description of the bankers, corporate boards, politicians, television personalities and generals who through the power of propaganda fill our heads with seductive images of glory and lust for wealth and power. We are consumed with self-induced obsessions that spur us toward self-annihilation.
Een dergelijke genadeloos eerlijke analyse van het eigen systeem is ondenkbaar in de Nederlandse mainstream journalistiek. Hier verkondigt de bestsellerauteur Geert Mak algemeenheden als dat 'de Amerikanen hele optimistische mensen [zijn] vergeleken met ons fatalistische Europeanen.' In zijn, volgens de Volkskrant, 'monumentaal boek,' getiteld Reizen zonder John, presenteert Mak zijn lezerspubliek met de Reader's Digest-versie van de Amerikaanse geschiedenis door bijvoorbeeld te schrijven dat
Thomas Jefferson was nog maar drieëndertig jaar oud toen hij in 1776 de Onafhankelijkheidsverklaring optekende, een van de mooiste staatsdocumenten die ooit zijn geschreven. 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness…' Zijn uitgangspunt was een staat waarin de burgers niet alleen rechten hadden om zich tegen machthebbers te verdedigen -- zoals hier en daar in Europa al het geval was --, maar waarin alle soevereiniteit bij het volk werd gelegd.
In werkelijkheid was het 'uitgangspunt' van deze representant van de rijke Amerikaanse elite geenszins dat 'alle soevereiniteit bij het volk werd gelegd,' al was het maar omdat hij, net als talloze andere 'Founding Fathers,' een slaveneigenaar was, en
Although many of the Founding Fathers acknowledged that slavery violated the core American Revolutionary ideal of liberty, their simultaneous commitment to private property rights, principles of limited government, and intersectional harmony prevented them from making a bold move against slavery. The considerable investment of Southern Founders in slave-based staple agriculture, combined with their deep-seated racial prejudice, posed additional obstacles to emancipation.
In Jefferson's tijd mochten dan ook alleen blanke mannen die over land of een financieel vermogen beschikten stemmen; arme blanken, vrouwen, Indianen en slaven bezaten geen stemrecht. Maar omdat de polderpers bewust de overleefde mythen over de VS in stand probeert te houden, kan zij de werkelijkheid niet beschrijven. Daarentegen trekken Amerikaanse intellectuelen zich niets aan van de 'received conventional truths,' zoals de neoliberale dogma's in de VS genoemd worden. Zo schreef de Amerikaanse auteur Eric Reece in 2006 in zijn boek Lost Mountain. A Year In The Wilderness. Radical Strip Mining And The Devastation Of Appalachia dat het woud in Kentucky en West Virginia
certainly demonstrates an intelligence, one it had been honing (aanscherpt. svh) for 290 million years. It’s economy is a closed loop that transforms waste into food. In that alone, it is superior to our human economy, where the end of the line is not nutrients but toxic industrial waste. Is there design behind this natural intelligence? I have no idea. But I will venture this: The forest knows what it’s doing.
Op zijn beurt waarschuwde in 2005 de Amerikaanse auteur Wendell Berry dat
every one of our economic landscapes, have been put at the mercy of a class of economic agressors whose aim is to convert the natural world into money as quickly as is technologically possible and at the least possible cost. If that least cost is the total destruction of the land and the land’s communities, that is understood as an acceptable cost of doing business.
De postmoderne mens handelt even onwetend als bijvoorbeeld de Maya’s van wie de eeuwenoude hoge cultuur rond 900 bijna van de ene op de andere dag ineen stortte, omdat ze niet in staat waren zich aan te passen aan de veranderende omstandigheden. De Amerikaanse geleerde, professor Jared Diamond, schreef hierover in zijn essay The Last Americans:
Why did the kings and nobles not recognize and solve these problems? A major reason was that their attention was evidently focused on the short-terms concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with one another, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all those activities.
‘s Wereld’s grootste autoriteit op het gebied van myrmecology (studie van mieren), de Amerikaan E.O. Wilson, waarschuwde in 2006 in The Creation. An Appeal To Save Life On Earth dat ‘through the loss of sites where evolution can occur, the number of species is plummeting,’ als gevolg van 'the unintended consequences of human greed,’ terwijl
often obscure life forms run Earth completely free for us. Each is a masterpiece of evolution, exquisitely well adapted to the niches of the natural environment in which it occurs. The surviving species around us are thousands to millions of years old. Their genes, having been tested each generation in the crucible of natural selection, are codes written by countless episodes of birth and death. Their careless erasure is a tragedy that will haunt human memory forever.
Daarom pleit deze 83-jarige emeritus hoogleraar van Harvard University voor ‘het redden van de schepping,’ vooral ook omdat allereerst de mens in het neoliberalisme de gevolgen van zijn daden niet kan overzien:
All that human beings can imagine, all the fantasies we can conjure, all our games, simulations, epics, myths, and histories, and, yes, all our science dwindle to little beside the full productions of the biosphere. We have not even discovered more than a small fraction of Earth’s life forms. We understand fully no one species among the millions that have survived our onslaught… Humanity must take a decision, and make it right now: conserve Earth’s natural heritage, or let future generations adjust to a biologically impoverished world. There is no way to weasel out of this choice.
Desondanks gaat het geglobaliseerde kapitalistische consumptie-systeem door met zijn alles bedreigende roofbouw en milieuvernietiging. En de reden ‘scientists believe,' is dat er 'insufficient time' bestaat 'for the evolving species to hardwire reactions in the brain to these new threats.’ Vanuit evolutionair standpunt gezien kan de Homo sapiens die ‘originated in Africa, where they reached anatomical modernity about 200,000 years ago and began to exhibit full behavioral modernity around 50,000 years ago,’ qua overlevingsintelligentie zich meten met veel oudere levensvormen. Eric Reece wees er derhalve terecht op dat:
There is a certain insanity (I choose the word carefully) about perpetuating a global economy based on limitless growth when that growth is powered by finite resources – in the case of the energy bill, fossil fuels.
Het resultaat van deze waanzin is dat
We are, unfortunately, a naton that values technology and wealth much more than we value community, and the result is the wasted land that lies all around me. The twentieth century was a Faustian gamble that combined industrialism and greed to make us cash-rich and resource-poor. If our species is to make it through this century, the forces of science and technology must be tempered by two other forces: ethics and aesthetics.
Maar ondertussen kent het vooruitgangsgeloof geen weg terug, en blijft de doctrine van de mateloosheid het leidende motief in een wereld waar alles wel degelijk een maat heeft. In het oude Griekenland stond boven de tempel van Apollo in Delfi de inscriptie 'Meden Agan – alles met mate.' Ook het christendom, boeddhisme, taoïsme, islam, judaïsme en alle natuurgodsdiensten kennen het principe van de matiging. Alleen het kapitalisme verwerpt dit beginsel en propageert wat de Verlichtingsfilosoof Adam Smith, het ‘vrije spel der maatschappelijke krachten’ noemde, gebaseerd op een door de wetenschap geschapen technologisch regime. De Amerikaanse historicus Henry Adams schreef al in 1904 in A Law of Acceleration over de onbelichte kant van het mens- en wereldbeeld van de Verlichtingsideologen:
They had reduced their universe to a series of relations to themselves. They had reduced themselves to motion in a universe of motions, with an acceleration, in their own case of vertiginous violence. With the correctness of their science, history had no right to meddle, since their science now lay in a plane where scarcely one or two hundred minds in the world could follow its mathematical processes; but bombs educate vigorously, and even wireless telegraphy or airships might require the reconstruction of society. If any analogy whatever existed between the human mind, on one side, and the laws of motion, on the other, the mind had already entered a field of attraction so violent that it must immediately pass beyond, into new equilibrium, like the Comet of Newton, to suffer dissipation altogether, like meteoroids in the earth’s atmosphere. If it behaved like an explosive, it must rapidly recover equilibrium; if it behaved like a vegetable, it must reach its limits of growth; and even if it acted like the earlier creations of energy — the saurians and sharks — it must have nearly reached the limits of its expansion. If science were to go on doubling or quadrupling its complexities every ten years, even mathematics would soon succumb. An average mind had succumbed already in 1850; it could no longer understand the problem in 1900.
En zo ontstond een wereld waar de mens geen greep meer op heeft, en die buiten hem om aangestuurd wordt door krachten die een democratische greep erop al langere tijd zijn ontstegen De mens is volledig afhankelijk van grondstoffen, van energiebronnen om de machine draaiende te houden, en de natuur omzet in vaak overbodige producten en steeds meer afval. Dit parasitaire systeem is onhoudbaar geworden, niet alleen doordat het de kloof tussen arm en rijk wereldwijd laat toenemen, maar ook omdat de grondstoffen, waaraan het westerse systeem zijn macht ontleent, uitgeput raken, en zijn materialistische systeem het milieu ernstig verstoort. Maar voor deze werkelijkheid is geen ruimte in de van reclamegelden afhankelijke mainstream-media. En tevens daarom concludeert de mainstream-journalist Geert Mak zelf dat hij en zijn Nederlandse collega's, als 'chroniqueurs van het heden en verleden,' hun 'taak,' het ‘uitbannen van onwaarheid,’ niet 'serieus genoeg' nemen. Zij slagen er niet in om de waan van de dag te relativeren door feiten in een bredere context te plaatsen. Bij gebrek aan verbeeldingskracht kennen ze geen prioriteiten, komt alles op hetzelfde niveau binnen, is 'meneer Poetin' een grotere bedreiging voor de mensheid dan de zich versnellende klimaatverandering of de wereldwijde wapenwedloop onder aanvoering van Washington en Wall Street. Daarom is het belangrijk om het hele essay van Chris Hedges over Melville's Moby Dick te citeren. Het demonstreert het grote gevaar voor Europa om het gewelddadige Amerikaanse expansionisme te blijven volgen:
After the attacks of 9/11, Edward Said saw the parallel with 'Moby Dick' and wrote in the London newspaper The Observer:
'Osama bin Laden’s name and face have become so numbingly familiar to Americans as in effect to obliterate any history he and his shadowy followers might have had before they became stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination. Inevitably, then, collective passions are being funneled into a drive for war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick, rather than what is going on, an imperial power injured for the first time, pursuing its interests systematically in what has become a suddenly reconfigured geography of conflict.'
Ahab, as the historian Richard Slotkin points out in his book 'Regeneration Through Violence,' is 'the true American hero, worthy to be captain of a ship whose "wood could only be American."' Melville offers us a vision, one that D.H. Lawrence later understood, of the inevitable fatality of white civilization brought about by our ceaseless lust for material progress, imperial expansion, white supremacy and exploitation of nature.
Melville, who had been a sailor on clipper ships and whalers, was keenly aware that the wealth of industrialized societies came from the exploited of the earth. 'Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans,' Ishmael says of New England’s prosperity. 'One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.' All the authority figures on the ship are white men—Ahab, Starbuck, Flask and Stubb. The hard, dirty work, from harpooning to gutting the carcasses of the whales, is the task of the poor, mostly men of color.
Ahab, when he first appears on the quarterdeck after being in his cabin for the first few days of the voyage, holds up a doubloon, an extravagant gold coin, and promises it to the crew member who first spots the white whale. He knows that 'the permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man… is sordidness.' And he plays to this sordidness (egoïsme. svh). The whale becomes a commodity, a source of personal profit. A murderous greed, one that Starbuck denounces as 'blasphemous,' grips the crew. Ahab’s obsession infects the ship.
'I see in him [Moby Dick] outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it,' Ahab tells Starbuck. 'That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.'
Ahab conducts a dark Mass, a Eucharist of violence and blood, on the deck with the crew. He orders the men to circle around him. He makes them drink from a flagon that is passed from man to man, filled with draughts 'hot as Satan’s hoof.' Ahab tells the harpooners to cross their lances before him. The captain grasps the harpoons and anoints the ships’ harpooners—Queequeg, Tashtego and Daggoo—his 'three pagan kinsmen.' He orders them to detach the iron sections of their harpoons and fills the sockets 'with the fiery waters from the pewter.' 'Drink, ye harpooneers! Drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat’s bow—Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!' And with the crew bonded to him in his infernal quest he knows that Starbuck is helpless 'amid the general hurricane.' 'Starbuck now is mine,' Ahab says, 'cannot oppose me now, without rebellion.' 'The honest eye of Starbuck,' Melville writes, 'fell downright.'
The ship, described by Melville as a hearse, was painted black. It was adorned with gruesome trophies of the hunt, festooned with the huge teeth and bones of sperm whales. It was, Melville writes, a 'cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies.' The fires used to melt the whale blubber at night turned the Pequod into a 'red hell.' Our own raging fires, leaping up from our oil refineries and the explosions of our ordinance across the Middle East, bespeak our Stygian heart. And in our mad pursuit we ignore the suffering of others, just as Ahab does when he refuses to help the captain of a passing ship who is frantically searching for his son who has fallen overboard.
Ahab is described by Melville’s biographer Andrew Delbanco as 'a suicidal charismatic who denounced as a blasphemer anyone who would deflect him from his purpose—an invention that shows no sign of becoming obsolete anytime soon.' Ahab has not only the heated rhetoric of persuasion; he is master of a terrifying internal security force on the ship, the five 'dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air.' Ahab’s secret, private whale boat crew, which has a feral lust for blood, keeps the rest of the ship in abject submission. The art of propaganda and the use of brutal coercion, the mark of tyranny, define our lives just as they mark those on Melville’s ship. C.L.R. James, for this reason, describes 'Moby Dick' as 'the biography of the last days of Adolf Hitler.'
And yet Ahab is no simple tyrant. Melville toward the end of the novel gives us two glimpses into the internal battle between Ahab’s maniacal hubris and his humanity. Ahab, too, has a yearning for love. He harbors regrets over his deformed life. The black cabin boy Pip is the only crew member who evokes any tenderness in the captain. Ahab is aware of this tenderness. He fears its power. Pip functions as the Fool did in Shakespeare’s 'King Lear.' Ahab warns Pip of Ahab. 'Lad, lad,' says Ahab, 'I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health. … If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s purpose keels up in him. I tell thee no; it cannot be.' A few pages later, 'untottering (vast ter been. svh) Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl’s forehead of heaven… From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.' Starbuck approaches him. Ahab, for the only time in the book, is vulnerable. He speaks to Starbuck of his 'forty years on the pitiless sea! […] the desolation of solitude it has been… Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? How the richer or better is Ahab now?' He thinks of his young wife—'I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck'—and of his little boy: 'About this time—yes, it is his noon nap now—the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to dance him again.'
Ahab’s thirst for dominance, vengeance and destruction, however, overpowers these faint regrets of lost love and thwarted compassion. Hatred wins. 'What is it,' Ahab finally asks, 'what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time…'
Melville knew that physical courage and moral courage are distinct. One can be brave on a whaling ship or a battlefield, yet a coward when called on to stand up to human evil. Starbuck elucidates this peculiar division. The first mate is tormented by his complicity in what he foresees as Ahab’s 'impious end.' Starbuck, 'while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific, because spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man.'
And so we plunge forward in our doomed quest to master the forces that will finally smite us. Those who see where we are going lack the fortitude to rebel. Mutiny was the only salvation for the Pequod’s crew. It is our only salvation. But moral cowardice turns us into hostages.
Moby Dick rams and sinks the Pequod. The waves swallow up Ahab and all who followed him, except one. A vortex formed by the ship’s descent collapses, 'and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.'
Met zijn visionaire blik wist Herman Melville tot de kern door te dringen van het obsessieve expansionisme van zijn land, de pathologische bezetenheid van een geseculariseerd messianisme, de diepe overtuiging het aangeboren recht te hebben om de rest van de mensheid te hervormen naar het beeld van de Amerikaanse ideologie. Die drijfveer vertoont hetzelfde 'suïcidale' symptoom als waaraan 'Captain Ahab' leed, 'who denounced as a blasphemer anyone who would deflect him from his purpose,' en die diep in zijn hart wist dat 'All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.' De hele mensheid en de natuur onderwerpen aan de wil van een kleine groep is waanzin. Om die absurditeit na te streven confronteert iedere ideoloog de mens met een vals dilemma waarbij de werkelijkheid kunstmatig wordt verdeeld in het absolute goed versus het al even absolute Kwaad. Zo verklaarde Vladimir Ilijich Lenin: 'Ieder mens moet kiezen, of onze kant of de andere,' een middenweg bestond niet, nuance was onmogelijk. Benito Mussolini zei hetzelfde met iets andere woorden: 'Of u bent voor ons of tegen ons,' en George W. Bush liet op 20 september 2001 in dezelfde totalitaire traditie weten: 'Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.'
Gezien het feit dat Hillary Clinton nog eerder dan Bush junior hetzelfde had opgemerkt door te stellen: 'Every nation has to either be with us, or against us,' is te vrezen dat als zij president zal worden, er geen eind komt aan de agressieve Amerikaanse buitenlandse politiek, en de voortdurende oorlogen, waarbij het Europa van de NAVO en de EU van 'Geen Jorwert zonder Brussel' wordt betrokken. Sterker nog: mevrouw Clinton stelt zich veel radicaler op dan de huidige Amerikaanse president, en omdat zij mede door de joodse pro-Israel lobby in de VS wordt gefinancierd ziet de toekomst er bedreigend uit. Het is de hierboven geschetste bredere context die duidelijk maakt hoe gevaarlijk de Amerikaanse hegemonie voor Europa is. Maar aangezien de commerciële massamedia in Nederland deze informatie niet kennen dan wel verzwijgen zal de werkelijkheid niet snel onderwerp worden van een breed maatschappelijk debat, zelfs niet eens van een politiek onderonsje rond dat pleintje in Den Haag. Bovendien, wie van de 'politiek-literaire elite' in de polder heeft zich ooit afgevraagd waar Moby Dick precies over gaat, zij leest Melville's werk niet, terwijl Melville door Amerikaanse intellectuelen algemeen beschouwd wordt als één van hun grootste auteurs.?
De Nederlandse opiniemakers met hun gedram over 'humanitair ingrijpen' zijn nu muisstil over Egypte waar de democratisch gekozen regering ten val is gebracht door een militair regime dat door zowel de EU als de VS is erkend?
Link: Leaked Audio Shows Egypt’s Coup Leaders as a Criminal Syndicate
COUNTERPUNCH
Weekend Edition December 5-7, 2014
Conspiracy in Action
Leaked Audio Shows Egypt’s Coup Leaders as a Criminal Syndicate
by ESAM AL-AMIN
The Watergate scandal in the early 1970s exposed Richard Nixon and his inner circle as conspirators who were trying to cover up their criminal involvement in spying against their political opponents. Once it was uncovered, Nixon had to resign the presidency in disgrace, as many of his assistants and senior government officials were convicted and served many years in prison. A majority in Congress at the time, including Republican members, condemned the former president and voted to impeach him. The American public was shocked to witness the level of corruption reaching the highest echelons of their government. Had it not been for the audiotapes that were released by order of the Supreme Court, the extent of Nixon’s lawlessness and lies would never have been revealed or believed.
Now a series of audiotapes involving Egypt’s top military brass, which ousted former President Mohammad Morsi in a military coup in July 2013, were publicly leaked this week. The pro-Muslim Brotherhood satellite channel Mukameleen(Arabic for “We’ll Continue”) released the six audio recordings (see links 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) in a special nightly program on December 4. Shortly thereafter, the recordings went viral on Arabic-language websites, though most foreign language media outlets have yet to cover them.
The contents of the audio recordings (31 minutes in total) are shocking, as they involve the highest-ranking military rulers in Egypt, including coup leader Gen. Abdelfattah Sisi, conspiring together, falsifying evidence, forging documents, and admitting to criminal behavior on tape, while acknowledging that the legal case concocted against Morsi was in danger of collapsing. The question of who released the recordings is still a mystery but rumors abound. The program presenter at the satellite channel Mukameleen insinuated that the leak came from a source within Sisi’s inner circle that is sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood and the January 25 revolution. Haitham Abu Khalil, a prominent human rights advocate, tweeted that since the recordings came from within the Defense Ministry, the leaker must be a rival to Gen. Sisi, such as former Chief of Staff Sami Anan who declared his presidential candidacy last spring only to be sidelined by Sisi and ridiculed by his propaganda machine. Meanwhile, opposition leader Ayman Noor told Al Jazeera from his home in exile in Lebanon that the tapes are authentic because he has known the players and could easily identify their voices.
The individuals heard on the recordings comprise some of the major figures who were involved in the military coup and have ruled the country ever since. They include Gen. Mamdouh Shahin, legal advisor to Sisi, Gen. Abbas Kamel, Sisi’s chief aide and office manager, Gen. Mohammad Ibrahim, the interior minister, Gen. Osama El-Gindy, chief of naval forces, and Gen. Mahmoud Hegazi, head of military intelligence, who was later promoted to army chief of staff. The recording also featured Gen. Sisi himself, who was the defense minister at the time before being elected president last May in a vote that was considered by many neutral observers and monitors to be a sham election. In the tapes, Gen. Shahin also described the conspiratorial role of the chief General Prosecutor, Hisham Barakat (who was appointed to the post by the coup leaders) and several of his senior prosecutors including Mustafa Khater and Ibrahim Saleh who have been leading the prosecution teams against Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood leadership.
Conspiracy in Action
It’s not clear when the recordings were made but they probably occurred sometime last spring when Morsi’s defense team challenged the basis for his initial incarceration and petitioned the presiding judges to dismiss all charges against him under the pretext that he was kidnapped by the military with no criminal charges until months later. According to Egyptian law, if the defense team was able to prove that Morsi was illegally detained, he would have to be released, after which he would have most certainly declared that he was the legitimately-elected president by millions of Egyptians.
During the first minute of the recording, Gen. Shahin is heard telling Sisi’s office manager, Gen. Kamel, that General Prosecutor Barakat was in panic mode and had sent him his three leading prosecutors (including Khater and Saleh) and asked him to “fix” his problem. During an earlier court session, government prosecutors falsely told the judges that Morsi was never kidnapped and had always been in the custody of the interior ministry, even though he was actually being held in a military barracks at Abu Qir naval base near Alexandria. Shahin then told Kamel that they needed to provide the prosecutors with “an order of arrest of Morsi signed by interior minister Gen. Ibrahim that must be backdated to the day of the coup.” Shahin then called Ibrahim (min. 2-3) and asked for the forged legal document to be signed by the interior minister. He also asked Ibrahim to make sure that the order was “printed in the official government records” so the order would appear legitimate, adding “as we used to do so during the days of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces” – when SCAF issued backdated laws during the military rule in the aftermath of Mubarak’s ouster. On tape Ibrahim is heard readily agreeing, and requesting that Shahin provide him with details to be included in the order including, the address and description of the detention facility.
Shahin and Kamel then called Gen. El-Gindy, the chief of the naval forces, who commanded the naval base where Morsi was detained for several weeks before he was officially charged and transferred to an interior ministry prison. In the next few minutes (starting at min. 5) Shahin tried to convince Gen. El-Gindy to turn over one of his buildings in the base to the interior ministry to be used as a prison for a month until Morsi’s trial ended. When El-Gindy asked why they could not use an existing prison facility and claim that it was the facility used for Morsi’s initial incarceration, Shahin said that this would not work because there was an official report on record written by investigative judge Hasan Samir that gave a detailed description of Morsi’s detention facility that would not match any existing prison under the control of the interior ministry. In one instance Shahin warns (min. 9-11) that unless the prosecutors win this issue in court “the espionage charges and the Ittihadiyya (presidential palace) murder case (against Morsi) would collapse.” Shahin then stated that they would have to plan for the worst-case scenario, as he was certain that the defense team would request physical inspection of the detention facility that the judges may actually grant. In this case, the detention facility must be part of the prison system under the interior ministry and match what was already on the record. However, Gen. El-Gindy expressed skepticism, as he could not transform any existing building in the naval base to become a stand-alone prison and turned over to the interior ministry. Yet, he promised to look into the matter.
In the next audio recording Gens. Shahin and Kamel called military intelligence chief Gen. Hegazi (min. 13) to seek his support in getting Gen. El-Gindy to cooperate. In frustration, Hegazi complained that the military does not get adequate legal counsel and that’s why the military is now “collecting corpses” on the streets. Surprisingly, Shahin who is Sisi’s legal advisor, answered “there is no one here (i.e. in the military) whose specialty is the law in order to provide legal advice.” He further stated that interior minister Ibrahim has already agreed to sign the order and backdate it in order to “give the prosecutors the documents they need.” Hegazi then suggested that they build a “hanger” on the naval base “which the (army’s) engineering department could do in 72 hours”. He added “They could build a separate gate, fence it, put a sign on it and turn it over to the interior ministry as a prison facility.” Shahin was then delighted since the prosecutors told him that, “they had 15 days to finish the task.”
Military chief of staff Gen. Hegazi then called the chief of the naval forces Gen. El-Gindy in the presence of Gen. Shahin (min. 18) and asked if it was possible to build a hanger similar to the detention facility that housed Morsi during his initial incarceration. El-Gindy readily agreed to do it as Sisi’s office manager Gen. Kamel informed him (min. 20) that Sisi said that, “he should spare no cost because the important thing is to do it completely right.” He then added that Sisi instructed the interior ministry “to take over the new detention facility as if they had occupied it for 100 years.”
In the next recording, Shahin tells Kamel that all the falsified documents were now ready and then commented that Kamel “should not worry about the forgery of the documents” since no one would be able to challenge them in court. Kamel then instructed him to make sure that “all the prison records are also doctored including the registration of Morsi as a criminal prisoner at the time.” Shahin then stated (min. 21) that General Prosecutor Barakat is now “very, very, very happy because he was under great duress because of this problem.”
Shahin and Kamel then joked that the new place would be ready for inspection by Morsi’s defense team. Kamel suggested (min. 22) that they make the detention facility so authentic as to also include a “torture room” and show how prisoners “are hanged from their feet.” Shahin then jokingly responded: “you can always command us. Forgery is the order of the day.” Kamel then commented on the Muslim Brotherhood by saying “the bastards would never win. We’d never allow them to gloat against us.”
The next recording is the only time Sisi is heard on the tapes (min. 22:20) in which he stated that he had just finished a meeting with interior minster Ibrahim. He then asked Shahin if he had completed the task at hand with the interior minister. Shahin responded that he had, and that it was the hardest obstacle in this predicament, in which case Sisi responded, “Indeed it was a very difficult problem.”
In the next recording, Gens. Kamel, Shahin, and El-Gindy are heard discussing the newly built hanger turned prison facility (min. 23-31) at the Abu Qir naval base. When El-Gindy stated that the facility was now ready to be turned over to the interior ministry, Shahin jokingly intimated, “It’s ready for us” (i.e. to be our prison when the military rule is ousted). El-Gindy responded by saying that it was unsuitable for them since it was only a 3-star rather than a 7-star facility (min. 23). El-Gindy then proceeded by saying that the new facility matched the one where Morsi was detained in all its details including “chairs, beds, appliances, refrigerators, washers, and the garage.” He then added, “It’s the same as the original from A to Z – even the sports equipment is the same. We even left the newspapers of that period in the cells.” Kamel then jokingly commented (min. 25) that such immaculate details “would drive the man (Morsi) crazy.” Shahin then stated (min. 26) that “he arranged with the head of the prison system to send 3 or 4 prisoners there to show that the facility had always been in use.” When the prisons chief asked why not house more prisoners Shahin responded by saying “Hell no. Do you want to expose us? This facility is supposed to be a special prison for only a limited number of prisoners.” Kamel then said that he would inform interior minister Ibrahim “to send his security people to take over the facility” and that there is “a tacit agreement (with the prosecutors) to receive early warning before an actual inspection takes place” in order to get the facility “ready.” He then assures them that the prison guards would have already been “briefed and trained” so as not to be uncovered. Finally, Shahin instructed that “all the record books must be cooked with proper dates and names of visitors including the visits by the African leaders (to Morsi in his early days of detention) as well as by a delegation from Egypt’s human rights organization, etc.” Kamel then assured them that “Lt. Gen. Tariq has been working on this with interior ministry officials.”
When wolves are guarding the sheep
These revelations clearly demonstrate that Egypt is currently being ruled by a criminal enterprise masquerading as patriotic military generals or statesmen. Since the July 2013 coup thousands of Egyptians have been killed in the streets while at least forty thousand have been arrested, jailed and tortured. In essence, the coup was a counterrevolutionary movement led by the military generals and elements of Mubarak’s deep state that eventually resulted not only in the acquittal of the former dictator and his cronies but also in thwarting Egypt’s path towards freedom and democracy.
More than forty years ago, Nixon told the American public that he was not a crook, only to be shamed nine months later and admit that indeed he had violated the law and had to resign. But the military generals in Cairo are not only crooks by their own admission, but also murderers, thugs, and psychopaths. There are no parliament, judiciary, or viable civil society institutions in Egypt to hold them accountable. Meanwhile, the international community is looking the other way while Egypt descends into turmoil and chaos, and most Egyptians face unprecedented repression and corruption on a massive scale. During the 18 momentous revolutionary days in the spring of 2011, many Egyptians believed that the military generals stood with them against the tyranny and decadence of the Mubarak regime, and declared in Tahrir Square and across Egypt that “the people and the army are one.” Four years later most Egyptians who yearn to be free openly declare “no to military rule” and understand now more than ever that freedom and democracy cannot be bestowed by any one group but must be taken by the people themselves.
