The Iran Deal is dying. Does Biden care?

Joe Biden repeatedly said he wanted to rejoin the Iran Deal if he became president. But now that he's president, things aren't so clear.

BY MICHAEL ARRIA  MARCH 12, 2021

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PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA TALKS WITH NATIONAL SECURITY STAFF IN THE OVAL OFFICE AFTER BEING NOTIFIED OF THE NUCLEAR AGREEMENT WITH IRAN. FROM LEFT, CHIEF OF STAFF DENIS MCDONOUGH; JEFFREY PRESCOTT, NSC SENIOR DIRECTOR FOR IRAN, IRAQ, SYRIA, AND THE GULF STATES; NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR SUSAN E. RICE; AVRIL HAINES, DEPUTY NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR FOR COUNTERTERRORISM AND BEN RHODES, DEPUTY NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR FOR STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS, JULY 13, 2015. (OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY PETE SOUZA)

Whatever happened to the Iran Deal? You know, the historic agreement that the Obama administration negotiated back in 2015, despite Republicans, some fellow Democrats, and Israel trying to torpedo it? The Trump administration violated it, but Biden repeatedly said he wanted to rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) if he ended up becoming president.

Well, now he’s president and suddenly things aren’t so clear. David Klion has a great piece at Jewish Currents on growing progressive anxiety over this issue. “Biden’s team has dawdled, insisting that Tehran take the first steps toward complying with the agreement even though the US withdrew when Iran was cooperating,” writes Klion. “In the meantime, the administration has created new obstacles to diplomacy.”

Klion cites the February 26th Syria strike as one of those obstacles. “The Syria strikes were disheartening, to say the least,” Win Without War’s Erica Fein told him. “Syria is not a place that should be used to send messages back and forth between Iranian-backed proxies and the United States. You can’t bomb your way to peace.”

During a four-hour hearing with the House Foreign Affairs Committee this week, Secretary of State Tony Blinken assured its members that Biden wouldn’t be making any concessions, or lifting sanctions, until Iran reverts back to the rules of the original deal. “Iranians have, unfortunately, moved further and further away from their own compliance,” said Blinken at one point.

Let’s step back for a moment. Here’s Iran, which has been the target of U.S. aggression for decades. I don’t have to run through the public record for you. The C.I.A. overthrew their government via a coup in 1953, gave Iraq chemical weapons that were used against them, shot down a civilian Iranian airliner with 66 children on it, among a variety of additional horrors. U.S politicians regularly threaten to pulverize the country with a military strike. The former president did so over Twitter and a former presidential candidate (and late hero of the “Never Trump Republican” clique) even sang a song about doing so. This isn’t even to mention anything that Israel has done to the country through the years, with full assistance from the United States. You know the history.

In 2015, Iran agreed to cut its low-enriched uranium stockpile by 98% in exchange for sanction relief. The United States violated the deal, ramped up sanctions amid a global pandemic, and now Biden is bombing countries in an effort to send the country a message.

“On Iran, negotiation is always best from a position of strength,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) told Blinken during the hearing. “I don’t trust the Ayatollah, I don’t know how you can possibly negotiate with the Ayatollah.”

I don’t know how, indeed.

Dems also try to sink the deal

Once again, a number of Democrats are seemingly working to impede the deal. Back in December, 150 House Democrats sent a letter to Biden calling on him to rejoin the deal without conditions. A new letter comes in direct response to that suggestion.

The new letter (which was signed by 70 Republican and 70 Democratic House members) outlines a number of conditions that Iran should abide by before Biden negotiates. “Despite everything you see, there is bipartisanship going on in DC, even over something as contentious as the Iran deal,” said Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL). “We’re thrilled to have been able to come together on a number of these points… encouraging the administration to encompass all of Iran’s malign behavior.”

Waltz also praised Democrats for taking a more hawkish stand. “The important thing from this letter is that we’re seeing 70 Democrats on the record to the administration saying that we need to have all of these pieces on the table for a future deal,” he explained. “We did not want to leave the only thing out there from Congress — and many Democrats did not want to leave as the only thing out there from the House — the letter in December that just said blindly get back into the JCPOA.”

Now there’s a House resolution (being led primarily by Democrats) to condemn Iranian’s nuclear program. The resolution was introduced by Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA). “Iran is a state-sponsor of terrorism and poses an existential threat to our national security and Israel, America’s strongest ally in the region,” she said in a statement. “Iran cannot be allowed to continue to progress towards a nuclear weapon and the United States must unequivocally condemn their provocations.”

Does the Biden administration agree with this stuff or do they actually hope to reenter the Iran Deal? This remains an open question.

https://mondoweiss.net/2021/03/the-iran-deal-is-dying-does-biden-care/?utm_source=mailpoet&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-email-mailpoet

AMERICAN EMPIRE, BIDEN ADMINISTRATION, COMMENTARY, COVID-19, U.S.

Chris Hedges: Bandaging the Corpse

March 12, 2021

Biden’s bailout will not alter the structural inequities and other fundamental underpinnings of America’s death spiral.

President Joe Biden during presidential inauguration motorcade, Jan. 20. (White House, Ana Isabel Martinez Chamorro)

By Chris Hedges 
ScheerPost.com

The established ruling elites know there is a crisis. They agreed, at least temporarily, to throw money at it with the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 bill known as American Rescue Plan (ARP).

But the ARP will not alter the structural inequities, either by raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour or imposing taxes and regulations on corporations or the billionaire class that saw its wealth increase by a staggering $1.1 trillion since the start of the pandemic.

The health system will remain privatized, meaning the insurance and pharmaceutical corporations will reap a windfall of tens of billions of dollars with the ARP, and this when they are already making record profits. The endless wars in the Middle East, and the bloated military budget that funds them, will remain sacrosanct. Wall Street and the predatory global speculators that profit from the massive levels of debt peonage imposed on an underpaid working class and loot the U.S. Treasury in our casino capitalism will continue to funnel money upwards into the hands of a tiny, oligarchic cabal.

There will be no campaign finance reform to end our system of legalized bribery. The giant tech monopolies will remain intact. The fossil fuel companies will continue to ravage the ecosystem. The militarized police, censorship imposed by digital media platforms, vast prison system, harsher and harsher laws aimed at curbing domestic terrorism and dissent and wholesale government surveillance will be, as they were before, the primary instruments of state control.

This act will, at best, provide a momentary respite from the country’s death spiral, sending out one-time checks of $1,400 to 280 million Americans, extending $300 weekly unemployment benefits until the end of August and distributing $3,600 through a tax credit for children under the age of 6 and $3,000 per child ages 6 to 17 starting on July 1.

Much of this money will be instantly gobbled up by landlords, lenders, medical providers and credit card companies. The act does, to its credit, bail out some 1 million unionized workers poised to lose their pensions and hands $31.2 billion in aid to Native communities, some of the poorest in the nation. 

But what happens to the majority of Americans who get government support for only a few months? What are they supposed to do when the checks stop arriving at the end of the year? Will the federal government orchestrate another massive relief package? I doubt it. We will be back where we started. 

(Original illustration by Mr. Fish)

By refusing to address the root causes of America’s rot, by failing to pump life back into the democratic institutions that once gave the citizen a voice, however limited, and make incremental and piecemeal reform possible, by not addressing the severe economic and social inequality and dislocation that afflicts at least half the country, the anomie and ruptured social bonds that gave rise to a demagogue like Donald Trump will expand. The American empire will not staunch its disintegration. The political deformities will metastasize. 

When the next demagogue appears, and the Republican Party has banked its future on Trump or his doppelgänger, he or she will probably be competent. The Republican Party in 43 states has proposed 250 laws to limit mail, early in-person and Election Day voting and mandate stricter ID requirements, as well as reduce the hours at voting sites and the numbers of voting locations potentially disenfranchising tens of millions of voters. The party has no intention of playing by the rules. Once back in power, cloaked in the ideological garb of Christian fascism, the new or the old Trump will abolish what little is left of democratic space. 

The established elites pretend that Trump was a freakish anomaly. They naively believe they can make Trump and his most vociferous supporters disappear by banishing them from social media. The ancien régime, will, they assert, return with the decorum of its imperial presidency, respect for procedural norms, elaborately choreographed elections and fealty to neoliberal and imperial policies. 

The Ongoing Trump Era 

But what the established ruling elites have yet to grasp, despite the narrow electoral victory Joe Biden had over Trump and the storming of the capital on Jan. 6 by an enraged mob, is that the credibility of the old order is dead. The Trump era, if not Trump himself, is the future. The ruling elites, embodied by Biden and the Democratic Party and the polite wing of the Republican Party represented by Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney, is headed for the dustbin of history. 

The elites collectively sold out the American public to corporate power. They did this by lying to the public about the consequences of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), trade deals, dismantling welfare, revoking Glass-Stegall, imposing austerity measures, deregulating Wall Street, passing draconian crime bills, launching endless wars in the Middle East and bailing out the big banks and financial firms rather than the victims of their fraud. These lies were far, far more damaging to the public than any of the lies told by Trump. These elites have been found out. They are hated. They deserve to be hated. 

“The Rise of Medusa” by Théodore Géricault, 1818-1819, the Louvre. The work is set at a moment when “the ruin of the raft may be said to be complete.” (Wikimedia Commons)

The Biden administration — and Biden was one of the principal architects of the policies that fleeced the working class and made war on the poor — is nothing more than a brief coda in the decline and fall, set against which is China’s rising global economic and military clout. 

The loss of credibility has left the media, which serves as courtiers to the elites, largely powerless to manipulate public perceptions and public opinion. Rather, the media has divided the public into competing demographics. Media platforms target one demographic, feeding its opinions and proclivities back to it, while shrilly demonizing the demographic on the other side of the political divide. This has proved commercially successful. But it has also split the country into irreconcilable warring factions that can no longer communicate. Truth and verifiable fact have been sacrificed. Russiagate is as absurd as the belief that the presidential election was stolen from Trump. Pick your fantasy. 

Transfer of Political Influence

The loss of credibility among the ruling elites has transferred political influence to those outside established centers of power such as Alex Jones, celebrities and those, such as Joe Rogan, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi who were never groomed by the media conglomerates.

The Democratic Party, in an effort to curb the influence of the new centers of power, has allied itself with social media industry giants such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Patreon, Substack and Spotify to curtail or censor its critics. The goal is to herd the public back to Democratic Party allied news organizations such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN. But these media outlets, which in the service to corporate advertisers have rendered the lives of the working class and the poor invisible, are as reviled as the ruling elites themselves. 

The loss of credibility has also given rise to new, often spontaneous groups, as well as the lunatic fringe that embraces conspiracy theories such as QAnon. None of these groups or individuals, whether they are on the left or the right, however, has the organizational structure, coherence and ideological cohesiveness of radical movements of the past, including the old Communist Party or militant labor unions.

Emotional Outrage 

Building burning in Minneapolis on May 29, 2020, during George Floyd protests. (Hungryogrephotos, CC0, Wikimedia Commons)

They traffic in emotional outrage, often replacing one outrage with another. They provide new forms of identity to replace the identities lost by tens of millions of Americans who have been cast aside. This energy can be harnessed for laudable causes, such as ending police abuse, but it is too often ephemeral. It has a tendency to transform political debate into grievance protests, at best, and more often televised spectacle.

These flash mobs pose no threat to the elites unless they build disciplined organization structures, which takes years, and articulate a vision of what can come next. (This is why I support Extinction Rebellion, which has a large grassroots network, especially in Europe, carries out effective sustained acts of civil disobedience and has a clearly stated goal of overthrowing the ruling elites and building a new governing system through people’s committees and sortition.)

This amorphous, emotionally driven anti-politics is fertile ground for demagogues, who have no political consistency but cater exclusively to the zeitgeist of the moment. Many of those who support demagogues know, on some level, they are con artists and liars. But demagogues are revered because, like all cult leaders, they flout conventions, are outrageous and crude, claim omnipotence and disdain traditional decorum. Demagogues are weaponized against bankrupt well-heeled elites who have stripped the public of opportunities and identities, extinguishing hopes for the future. A cornered population has little left but hate and the emotional catharsis expressing it brings. 

The engine of our emerging dystopia is income inequality, which is growing.  This bill does nothing to address this cancer. The bottom 50 percent of households in 2019 accounted for only 1 percent of the nation’s total wealth.  The top 10 percent accounted for 76 percent.  And this was before the pandemic accelerated income disparity. 

More than 18 million American depend on unemployment benefits, as businesses contract and close.  Nearly 81 million Americans struggle to meet basic household expenses, 22 million lack enough food and 11 million say they can’t make their next house payment. 

Only deep structural reforms accompanied by New Deal-type legislation can save us, but such changes are an anathema to the corporate state and the Biden administration.  History has amply demonstrated what happens when income disparities of this magnitude afflict a country.  We will be no exception.  Lacking a strong left, the United States will in desperation embrace authoritarianism, if not proto-fascism.  This will, I fear, be Biden and the Democratic Party’s real legacy.  

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show “On Contact.” 

This column is from Scheerpost, for which Chris Hedges writes a regular column twice a month. Click here to sign up for email alerts.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/03/12/chris-hedges-bandaging-the-corpse/

Sigrid Kaag als Kille Narcist

 

Minister Kaag en haar gezin bij Yasser Arafat.

Het opportunisme en conformisme van de D’66 politica Sigrid Kaag is zeker niet minder dan dat van de overgrote meerderheid van de mannelijke Tweede Kamerleden. Wat dat betreft kan opiniemaker Ian Buruma met een gerust hart op haar stemmen, zeker nadat hij al in 2013 zich erover had beklaagd dat hij ‘te weinig idealisme’ ziet ‘om de wereld te verbeteren,’ en er toen ‘geen reden’ was ‘tot groot optimisme.’ Maar ziedaar, acht jaar later treedt de 59-jarige Sigrid in de schijnwerpers om voor het oog van de wereld de blijde boodschap te verkondigen dat ‘Wie idealen heeft, moet er staan op het moment dat het ertoe doet. Dat moment voor mij is nu.’ Het zal mij dan ook geenszins verbazen dat Ian dit keer op mevrouw Kaag zal stemmen. Soort zoekt immers soort. Desondanks wil ik mijn oude vriend toch voor haar waarschuwen, want in een interview dat ik vanmiddag op internet zag, hoorde ik hoe zij de vraag omzeilde over de vrouwvriendelijkheid van demissionair premier Mark Rutte. Zij deed dit door op te merken:

Vrouwen moeten elkaar ook steunen, dat is ook een belangrijke. Madeleine Albright zei altijd terecht: ‘De hel heeft een speciale plekje gereserveerd voor vrouwen die andere vrouwen niet steunen.’ 

https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/video/video/5219193/kaag-d66-plekje-hel-voor-vrouwen-die-elkaar-niet-steunen 

Afgezien van het feit dat zij Albright niet letterlijk citeerde -- Albright zei namelijk ‘There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women’ -- blijft de strekking van deze groteske infantiliteit evenwel overeind. Dat de zich progressief voordoende Kaag nu juist Madeleine Albright citeerde, is een gotspe en demonstreert wat de D’66 lijsttrekker voorstelt. Hier zien we namelijk opnieuw het westerse rationalisme zonder rede, de banaliteit van het kwaad, de criminele gedachteloosheid, de weigering om na te denken. In verband daarmee wees de joods-Amerikaanse hoogleraar Roger Berkowitz, directeur van het Hannah Arendt Center for Ethical and Political Thinking op het volgende:  

The political implications of thinking are brought front and center in Arendt's discussion of the argument from the lesser evil as it arose in response to the actions of German citizens and even Jews during the Nazi era. In her coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann for ‘The New Yorker,’ and later in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt reported on a disturbing fact that struck her, and many others, at the trial. Eichmann, she noted, was decidedly average. The evil of his deeds was indisputable; yet, notwithstanding what he had done, Eichmann's motivations seemed grounded in typical bourgeois drives. Eichmann was ambitious. He sought the recognition that came from success. And he wanted to excel at his profession. These banal motivations could, under the Nazi system of rule, lead him to participate in some of the most wrongful deeds in the history of man. How could such a simple man do such extraordinary evil? 

Een nog steeds uiterst actuele vraag, zoals duidelijk werd toen dr. Madeleine Albright, eveneens van joodse afkomst, en de eerste vrouwelijke Amerikaanse minister van Buitenlandse Zaken, op 12 mei 1996 in het bekende Amerikaanse nieuwsprogramma 60 minutes verklaarde dat de dood van meer dan een half miljoen Iraakse kinderen onder de vijf jaar, die bewust om het leven waren gekomen als gevolg van de door de VS afgedwongen sancties tegen het land, ‘de prijs waard’ waren geweest om de Amerikaanse politieke doelen te verwezenlijken. En dat, terwijl dit aantal meer is dan in Hiroshima waren vermoord, zoals de interviewster opmerkte. Albright, zelf moeder en grootmoeder, bleek niet onder de indruk te zijn van het argument dat het uitroeien van babies en peuters een oorlogsmisdaad is, waarvoor SS-ers na 1945 werden vervolgd, en zo nodig ter dood gebracht. 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbIX1CP9qr4   

College protests revive accusations against 'war criminal' Madeleine Albright, who defended deaths of 500,000 Iraqi kids. 

https://www.salon.com/2016/05/11/college_protests_revive_accusations_against_war_criminal_madeleine_albright_who_defended_deaths_of_500000_iraqi_kids/

Deze genocidale politiek verzwijgt Sigrid Kaag, die met een Arabische man is gehuwd. Zij maakt er geen woord aan vuil, alleen dat Madeleine een vrouw was, speelt voor haar een rol. Het is één van de ontelbare voorbeelden van morele corruptie. Een ander voorbeeld: woensdag 12 december 2012, opende de International Herald Tribune, The Global Edition of the New York Times, op de voorpagina met een 4 kolommen brede kop ‘Back in Kosovo, for business’ daaronder een foto van een straat in de Kosovaarse hoofdstad Pristina met alleen maar Amerikaanse vlaggen. 

De lezer wordt medegedeeld dat:

Admired for roles in war, ex-U.S. officials return to seek lucrative contracts. The prime minister is in a bind. His country’s largest and most lucrative enterprise, the state telecom, is up for sale… One bid is from a fund founded by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright. Lobbying for another was James W, Pardew, the U.S. special envoy to the Balkans in Bill Clinton’s presidency. Both are among the Americans who hold the status of heroes for their roles in the 1999 war that separated one of the world’s newest states… so many former U.S. officials have returned to Kosovo for business — in coal and telecommunications, or for lobbying and other lucrative government contracts — it is hard to keep them from colliding. The list reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of recent American diplomatic history in the region. It also includes Wesley K. Clark, the former supreme allied commander of NATO forces in Europe who ran the 78-day bombing campaign against the Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic… Kosovo is not the only nation where former officials have returned to conduct business — Iraq is another prominent example — but it presents an extreme case, and perhaps a special ethical quandary, given the outsize American influence here. Pristina, the capital, may be the only city in the world where a Bob Dole Street intersects Bill Clinton Boulevard. Experts in foreign policy say the practice of former officials returning for business is more common than acknowledged publicly. Privately, former officials concede the possibility for conflicts of interest and even the potential to influence American foreign policy, as diplomats who traditionally spent careers in public service are rotating more frequently to lucrative jobs in the private sector.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/world/europe/americans-who-helped-free-kosovo-return-as-entrepreneurs.html?pagewanted=all 

Net als Irak is Kossovo inderdaad ‘een speciaal ethisch dilemma,’ maar niet voor Albright, en in haar voetspoor, minister Kaag, die het militair-industrieel complex en de gewelddadige Amerikaanse buitenlandse politiek hier volstrekt buiten beschouwing laat. Zodra een vrouw oorlogsmisdaden pleegt, is dit kennelijk een te verwaarlozen detail voor haar. Waar het bij Kaag om draait is dat ‘de hel een speciale plekje heeft gereserveerd voor vrouwen die andere vrouwen niet steunen,’ aldus de vrouw die samen met een Arabische man vier kinderen heeft. En zo vernietigt haar ambitie haar laatste restje humaniteit. Naar de hel met deze narcist.

 

Sigrid Kaag en Ian Buruma Spreading Freedom

Journalisten en opiniemakers van de 'corporate press' die regelmatig uitspraken van presidenten gebruiken om hun eigen reactionaire gelijk te bewijzen, of propagandistische cliché’s blijven herhalen, dienen met een forse dosis argwaan te worden benaderd. Ik geef een voorbeeld. Op 4 maart 2021 beweerde opiniemaker Ian Buruma op The World’s Opinion Page:

America’s self-appointed mission to spread freedom around the world has a long history. Many foolish wars were fought as a result. But US democratic idealism has been an inspiration to many as well. America long saw itself, in John F. Kennedy’s words, as a country ‘engaged in a world-wide struggle in which we bear a heavy burden to preserve and promote the ideals that we share with all mankind.’

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/asian-protesters-misplaced-hopes-in-america-by-ian-buruma-2021-03 

De eerste zin bevat de aloude platitude dat ‘America’ als ‘missie’ heeft om ‘freedom around the world’ te verspreiden. Is deze bewering juist? Wanneer Buruma over ‘America’ spreekt dan heeft hij het niet over het continent Amerika, en ook niet over de Amerikaanse bevolking, maar over de politieke elite in Washington en de financiële macht op Wall Street, die vanaf het begin in 1776 de koers van het imperium uitstippelen. Ik vermeld dit nog eens aangezien de mystificaties van Buruma’s propaganda bedoeld zijn om zijn publiek zand in de ogen te strooien. Hoewel mijn oude vriend zich gedwongen ziet toe te geven dat de ‘zichzelf opgelegde missie’ heeft geleid tot ‘vele dwaze oorlogen,’ er toch van uitgaat dat dit massale geweld een te verwaarlozen futiliteit is, vergeleken met de ‘inspiratie van velen’ om ‘het democratisch idealisme’ in de praktijk te brengen. Om deze leugen nog eens de schijn van geloofwaardigheid te geven bij zijn half-geïnformeerd hoger opgeleid publiek voegt hij eraan toe dat: 

Amerika zichzelf lange tijd zag, in de woorden van John F. Kennedy, als een land ‘betrokken in een wereldwijde strijd waarin wij een zware last dragen de idealen, die wij delen met de gehele mensheid, te behoeden en te bevorderen.’ 

Dit is de bewering van een outsider als Buruma, die in tegenstelling tot een insider als de latere president Woodrow Wilson al in 1907 tegenover zijn studenten het Amerikaanse buitenlandse beleid nog eens kort maar krachtig samenvatte met de woorden:

Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed must be battered down… Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.

Geen woord sprak Wilson achter de schermen over de door Buruma geclaimde democratische ‘missie’ van ‘Amerika.’ Bovendien schreef in 1935 op zijn beurt de Amerikaanse generaal buiten dienst Smedley Darlington Butler, die van 1898 tot 1931 bij het Korps Mariniers diende, in het tijdschrift Common Sense een uiterst opzienbarend artikel, waaruit ik het volgende fragment citeer: 

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Hetzelfde 1935 publiceerde generaal Butler, tot dan toe de meest gedecoreerde Amerikaanse marinier, een boek onder de titel War Is a Racket, dat met de volgende woorden begint:

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives,

om vervolgens op te merken: 

For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.

Deze opmerkingen uit de praktijk van alledag en uit de mond van twee vooraanstaande Amerikaanse insiders staan haaks op Buruma’s lachwekkende cliché’s over een langdurige ‘Amerikaanse’ democratisch ‘missie.’ Toch doceert Ian in de VS als hoogleraar in de vakken ‘Democracy, Human Rights & Journalism.’ Met andere woorden: de man die Europa opriep om een deel van ‘Amerika’s’ gebruikelijke ‘dirty work’ op zich te nemen en te accepteren daarvoor te worden veroordeeld door het Internationaal Strafhof, vanwege oorlogsmisdaden en misdaden tegen de menselijkheid, is door het establishment benoemd tot hoogleraar ‘Democratie, Mensenrechten & Journalistiek,’ hetgeen onmiddellijk het verregaande cynisme van het neoliberale elite aantoont. Zolang nagenoeg iedereen van zijn liberale vriendenkring hierover zwijgt, en de gevestigde orde hem keer op keer huldigt voor zijn ‘kosmopolitische’ kijk op de wereld, is er voor hem, net als voor minister Sigrid Kaag, niets aan de hand. Beiden kunnen zich blijven voordoen als progressief en humanistisch, om ondertussen in werkelijkheid een meedogenloze ideologie te legitimeren. Zonder onmiddellijk te worden bekritiseerd kan minister Kaag publiekelijk stellen dat ‘Het tijd [is] voor nieuw leiderschap,’ om zich vervolgens als redelijk alternatief aan te bieden, want ‘Wie idealen heeft, moet er staan op het moment dat het ertoe doet. Dat moment voor mij is nu. Deze verkiezingen moeten we het anders doen,’ terwijl NRC Handelsblad, het avondblad van de Atlantici en hun NAVO  op 11 maart 2021 het verkiezingsvolk meedeelde dat: ‘Na veel oefenen Sigrid Kaag haar plek [heeft] gevonden,’ want hoewel ‘Sigrid Kaag twijfelde,’ zagen ‘adviseurs in haar al langer een droomkandidaat.’ De virtuele wereld van de spindoctors. Aan de zenuw-trekken in haar gelaat, zodra zij onder druk staat, kan de geoefende waarnemer zien hoe zij met al dit theater zichzelf en haar publiek bedriegt. Dezelfde pathologie is merkbaar bij Buruma omdat hij op dit moment, eveneens onder de druk van de werkelijkheid, zoveel van zijn vroegere dogma’s radicaal moet herzien. Een mens die zichzelf blijft bedriegen is tevens een gevaar voor de samenleving, zoals we uit de recente geschiedenis door schade en schande hebben kunnen leren. 

Opnieuw wordt de westerse beschaving met een diepe, werkelijk allesomvattende, crisis geconfronteerd. De door ambitie gedreven Kaag en Buruma voelen dit op zijn minst aan, maar kunnen er verder niet zoveel mee. Daarom proberen zij koste wat kost hier juist profijt uit te trekken. Het begint pas voor hen pijnlijk te worden wanneer meer mensen zoals ik vanuit de marge kritiek op hun dwaasheden beginnen te leveren, want niets is zo onuitstaanbaar voor ijdele en onzekere individuen, die door ambitie worden opgezweept, om kritiek te krijgen. Vandaar dat Buruma, meteen zo fel reageerde toen ik hem op 21 juni 2017 vroeg waarom, zoals hij beweerde, ‘wij’ allen op aarde, ‘ons moeten voorbereiden op een tijd waarin we met weemoed terugkijken op het betrekkelijk goedaardige imperialisme uit Washington.’ Immers: hoe ‘betrekkelijk goedaardig’ is het ‘imperialisme’ van de Amerikaanse elite?

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2017/06/09/pax-americana-nadert-haar-einde-11006828-a1562395   

Al meteen de dag erna reageerde Buruma na eerst te zijn begonnen met ‘Beste Stan — Leuk van je te horen. Ik hoop dat je het goed maakt,’ al vrij snel met de tegenaanval door te stellen dat ‘Jouw ideeën komen eerder uit een wat ouderwetse Amerikaanse hoek, Chomsky, Zinn et al. die door een oudere generatie serieus werden genomen,’ en allervriendelijkst te eindigen met ‘Ik verheug me erop je weer eens te zien. Doe mijn hartelijke groeten aan Heikelien.

Hartelijke groet, Ian’

Een serieus antwoord kreeg ik niet op mijn open vraag, waardoor ik ervan uitging dat hij geen rechtvaardiging had. Net zomin had minister Kaag antwoord op de vraag waarom zij zo lang had gewacht om de Nederlandse steun aan islamtische terroristen in Syrië te stoppen. Het antwoord is natuurlijk dat een substantieel deel van de Nederlandse Midden Oosten-politiek niet wordt bepaald rond dat pleintje in Den Haag, maar in Washington, in het Witte Huis en het Pentagon, en na overleg met de financiële macht op Wall Street. Maar dat kan mevrouw Kaag natuurlijk nooit zeggen, aangezien dit het einde van carrière zou betekenen. En dus verspreidt zij net zo enthousiast als mijn oude vriend Buruma talloze onwaarheden. Voor hen is het een overlevingsstrategie. Maar zij willen daar natuurlijk niet meer geconfronteerd worden, want dat zal hun zelfbeeld verwoesten. Met als gevolg dat ook de historische werkelijkheid moet worden ontkend dan wel vervormd om te kunnen voldoen aan de leugen waarin de neoliberale dwazen leven. Dit feit is nog absurder nu de mensheid in zijn geheel op een breukvlak leeft, het Westen zijn onbeperkte macht ziet afnemen, en de westerse beschaving geen antwoorden heeft op de bedreigingen die op ons afkomen. In zijn scherpzinnige analyse Europe And Its Shadows. Coloniality After Empire (2019) wijst in dit verband de Iraans Amerikaanse wetenschapper Hamid Dabashi, hoogleraar Iranian Studies and Corporative Literature aan de prestigieuze Columbia Universiteit in New York, erop dat: 

in his now classic book, Wretched of the Earth (1961) Frantz Fanon wrote one of his most iconic phrases: ‘Europe is literally the creation of the Third World.’ Why would he say that, and what could that phrase actually mean today? Here is the context in which Fanon wrote that famous phrase:

‘we are of the opinion that the imperialist states would be making a serious mistake and committing an unspeakable injustice if they were content to withdraw from our soil the military cohorts and the administrative and financial services whose job it was to prospect for, extract and ship our wealth to the metropolis. Moral reparation for national independence does not fool us and it doesn’t feed us. The wealth of the imperialist nations is also our wealth. At a universal level, such a statement in no way means we feel implicated in the technical feats or artistic creations of the West. In concrete terms Europe has been bloated out of all proportions by the gold and raw materials from such colonial countries as Latin America, China, and Africa. Today Europe’s tower of opulence faces these continents, for centuries the point of departure of their shipments of diamonds, oil, silk and cotton, timber, and exotic produce to this very same Europe. Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The riches which are choking it are those plundered from the underdeveloped peoples. The ports of Holland, the docks in Bordeaux and Liverpool owe their importance to the trade and deportation of millions of slaves. And when we hear the head of a European nation declare with hand on heart that he must come to the aid of the unfortunate peoples of the underdeveloped world, we do not tremble with gratitude. On the contrary, we say among ourselves, ‘it is a just reparation we are getting.’

In het kleine Nederland met zijn kleinburgerlijke en betweterige geestelijke klimaat lijdt ook de intelligentsia aan een ernstige vorm van autisme. Sinds het einde van de jaren zeventig is de poldermentaliteit steeds meer naar binnen gericht gericht; het werk van buitenlandse intellectuelen wordt nauwelijks of niet meer gelezen, laat staan bestudeerd. Achter de dijken worden lichtgewichten als Geert Mak, Hubert Smeets, Bas Heijne, etcetera als grote geesten bewonderd, waardoor, ondanks de  globalisering, het almaar zichtbaarder wordt hoe achterlijk dit land is geworden. Meer hierover later.