Jonathan
Cook heeft een flink artikel geschreven op Information Clearing House,
waarin hij betoogt dat we de planeet moeten redden (voor zover dat
nog mogelijk is*) en dat de weg daartoe bestaat uit het stoppen van
de westerse oorlogsmachine, die vooral draait om de inhumane neoliberale
kapitalistische status quo te handhaven.
Het
kapitalisme houdt geen rekening met de gevolgen van het plunderen
van de planeet plus het vervuilen van lucht, water, bodem en
ondergrond door productieprocessen en om deze processen draaiende
te houden. De kosten die nu al worden gemaakt door de
klimaatverandering, zijn niet meer in een getal te vatten, je moet denken aan
‘duizenden miljarden’, terwijl de mensenlevens die door dit proces
verloren zijn gegaan al helemaal niet in geld zijn uit te
drukken…… (het kapitalisme heeft daar totaal geen moeite mee….) Zoals Cook terecht opmerkt, die kosten worden op ons
afgewenteld, terwijl de grote bedrijven doorgaan met het naar de
gallemiezen helpen van de planeet……**
Om
e.e.a. vol te kunnen houden zijn de media nodig, die weliswaar niet
langer kunnen schrijven dat er geen sprake is van een
klimaatverandering en dat deze een normaal verschijnsel is (de
klimaatverandering gaat sneller dan ooit eerder gezien sinds de
‘moderne’ mens op aarde rondloopt, alleen met een meteoor als die van 65
miljoen jaar geleden kan het sneller). De media kunnen niet langer
ontkennen dat er enorme kosten zijn verbonden aan de
klimaatverandering, vandaar dat men zwijgt over deze kosten, logisch
daar de plutocratische eigenaars van die media er alle belang bij
hebben dat de winsten van de grote bedrijven blijven bestaan, immers
daarvan zijn zij de grootaandeelhouders……. Ja toen Greta Thunberg van zich liet horen gaf het grootste deel van die media complimenten aan haar en de jeugd die haar volgde, echter niet voor lange duur….. Nu wordt ze in veel mediaorganen afgeschilderd als een psychiatrisch patiënt………
Cook
stelt verder dat het voorheen de religieuzen waren die werden beloond
door de vorsten, daar ze deze figuren hebben gepromoot bij het volk
met het dogma dat ze door god werden gezonden, zodat het plebs
gehoorzaam hun taak vervulde zonder vragen te stellen. Nu doen de
media in feite hetzelfde: men hersenspoelt het volk dat het
kapitalisme de enige ware weg is naar een beter leven, echter degenen
die het meest profiteren is maar een beperkte groep aangeduid als de
1% (al is dat wat mij betreft al te simpel, het is minstens 10% van
de mensheid die ongelofelijk profiteert van vernietiging en
onderdrukking), terwijl daarvoor de wereld zoals wij die kennen wordt
vernietigd…..
De westerse oorlogsmachine, het leger van de VS en andere NAVO-lidstaten (de NAVO altijd onder militair opperbevel van de VS!!), zorgt ervoor dat de grondstoffen en productiecentra ten behoeve van het westen veilig blijven voor exploratie en productie, dan wel daarvoor veilig worden gesteld…… Uiteraard met grote steun van de grote bedrijven als oliemaatschappijen en de geheime diensten, waar die diensten van de VS de hand niet omdraaien voor het organiseren van een opstand en een coup tegen een onwillig land……..
Cook
heeft een uitgebreid artikel geschreven op Information Clearing House dat de moeite van het lezen meer dan de moeite waard
is!! (onder het artikel kan je klikken voor een ‘Dutch vertaling’)
The Planet Cannot
Heal until We Rip the Mask off the West’s War Machine
By
Jonathan Cook
December 01, 2020
“Information
Clearing House”
– Making political sense of the world can be tricky unless one
understands the role of the state in capitalist societies. The state
is not primarily there to represent voters or uphold democratic
rights and values; it is a vehicle for facilitating and legitimating
the concentration of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands.
In a recent
post, I wrote about “externalities” – the ability of
companies to offset the true costs inherent in the production
process. The burden of these costs are covertly shifted on to wider
society: that is, on to you and me. Or on to those far from view, in
foreign lands. Or on to future generations. Externalising costs means
that profits can be maximised for the wealth elite in the here and
now.
Jonathan Cook
@Jonathan_K_Cook
My latest: The increasingly desperate task of capitalism’s perception managers is to dissociate our economic system from the emerging environmental crisis – to break our understanding of the causal link between the two
Capitalism is double-billing us: we pay from our wallets only for our future to be stolen from us
jonathan-cook.net
Our own societies must
deal with the externalised costs of industries ranging from tobacco
and alcohol to chemicals and vehicles. Societies abroad must deal
with the costs of the bombs dropped by our “defence” industries.
And future generations will have to deal with the lethal costs
incurred by corporations that for decades have been allowed to pump
out their waste products into every corner of the globe.
Divine Right
to Rule
In the past, the job
of the corporate media was to shield those externalities from public
view. More recently, as the costs have become impossible to ignore,
especially with the climate crisis looming, the media’s role has
changed. Its central task now is to obscure corporate responsibility
for these externalities. That is hardly surprising. After all, the
corporate media’s profits depend on externalising costs too, as
well as hiding the externalised costs of their parent companies,
their billionaire owners and their advertisers.
Once, monarchs
rewarded the clerical class for persuading, through the doctrine of
divine right, their subjects to passively submit to exploitation.
Today, “mainstream” media are there to persuade us that
capitalism, the profit motive, the accumulation of ever greater
wealth by elites, and externalities destroying the planet are the
natural order of things, that this is the best economic model
imaginable.
Most of us are now so
propagandised by the media that we can barely imagine a functioning
world without capitalism. Our minds are primed to imagine, in the
absence of capitalism, an immediate lurch back to Soviet-style bread
queues or an evolutionary reversal to cave-dwelling. Those thoughts
paralyse us, making us unable to contemplate what might be wrong or
inherently unsustainable about how we live right now, or to imagine
the suicidal future we are hurtling towards.
Lifeblood of
Empire
There is a reason
that, as we rush lemming-like towards the cliff-edge, urged on by a
capitalism that cannot operate at the level of sustainability or even
of sanity, the push towards intensified war grows. Wars are the
lifeblood of the corporate empire headquartered in the United States.
Jonathan Cook
@Jonathan_K_Cook
My latest: The new documentary on Greta Thunberg – I Am Greta – isn’t about climate change. It’s about something even more important: the elusiveness of sanity in an insane world
I Am Greta isn’t about climate change. It’s about the elusiveness of sanity in an insane world
jonathan-cook.net
US imperialism is no
different from earlier imperialisms in its aims or methods. But in
late-stage capitalism, wealth and power are hugely concentrated.
Technologies have reached a pinnacle of advancement. Disinformation
and propaganda are sophisticated to an unprecedented degree.
Surveillance is intrusive and aggressive, if well concealed.
Capitalism’s destructive potential is unlimited. But even so, war’s
appeal is not diminished.
As ever, wars allow
for the capture and control of resources. Fossil fuels promise future
growth, even if of the short-term, unsustainable kind.
Wars require the state
to invest its money in the horrendously expensive and destructive
products of the “defence” industries, from fighter planes to
bombs, justifying the transfer of yet more public resources into
private hands.
The lobbies associated
with these “defence” industries have every incentive to push for
aggressive foreign (and domestic) policies to justify more
investment, greater expansion of “defensive” capabilities, and
the use of weapons on the battlefield so that they need replenishing.
Whether public or
covert, wars provide an opportunity to remake poorly defended,
resistant societies – such as Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria – in
ways that allow for resources to be seized, markets to be expanded
and the reach of the corporate elite to be extended.
War is the ultimate
growth industry, limited only by our ability to be persuaded of new
enemies and new threats.
Fog of War
For the political
class, the benefits of war are not simply economic. In a time of
environmental collapse, war offers a temporary “Get out of jail”
card. During wars, the public is encouraged to assent to new, ever
greater sacrifices that allow public wealth to be transferred to the
elite. War is the corporate world’s ultimate Ponzi scheme.
The “fog of war”
does not just describe the difficulty of knowing what is happening in
the immediate heat of battle. It is also the fear, generated by
claims of an existential threat, that sets aside normal thinking,
normal caution, normal scepticism. It is the invoking of a
phantasmagorical enemy towards which public resentments can be
directed, shielding from view the real culprits – the corporations
and their political cronies at home.
The “fog of war”
engineers the disruption of established systems of control and
protocol to cope with the national emergency, shrouding and
rationalising the accumulation by corporations of more wealth and
power and the further capture of organs of the state. It is the
license provided for “exceptional” changes to the rules that
quickly become normalized. It is the disinformation that passes for
national responsibility and patriotism.
Permanent
Austerity
All of which explains
why Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, has just pledged
an extra £16.5 billion in “defense” spending at a time when the
UK is struggling to control a pandemic and when, faced by disease,
Brexit and a new round of winter floods, the British economy is
facing “systemic crisis”, according to a new Cabinet Office
report. Figures released last week show
the biggest economic contraction in the UK in three centuries.
If the British public
is to stomach yet more cuts, to surrender to permanent austerity as
the economy tanks, Johnson, ever the populist, knows he needs a good
cover story. And that will involve further embellishment of existing,
fearmongering narratives about Russia, Iran and China.
To make those
narratives plausible, Johnson has to act as if the threats are real,
which means massive spending on “defence”. Such expenditure,
wholly counter-productive when the current challenge is
sustainability, will line the pockets of the very corporations that
help Johnson and his pals stay in power, not least by cheerleading
him via their media arms.
New Salesman
Needed
The cynical way this
works was underscored in a classified 2010 CIA memorandum, known as
“Red Cell”, leaked to Wikileaks, as the journalist Glenn
Greenwald reminded us last week. The CIA memo addressed
the fear in Washington that European publics were demonstrating
little appetite for the US-led “war on terror” that followed
9/11. That, in turn, risked limiting the ability of European allies
to support the US as it exercised its divine right to wage war.
The memo notes that
European support for US wars after 9/11 had chiefly relied on “public
apathy” – the fact that Europeans were kept largely ignorant by
their own media of what those wars entailed. But with a rising tide
of anti-war sentiment, the concern was that this might change. There
was an urgent need to further manipulate public opinion more
decisively in favour of war.
The US intelligence
agency decided its wars needed a facelift. George W Bush, with his
Texan, cowboy swagger, had proved a poor salesman. So the CIA turned
to identity politics and faux “humanitarianism”, which they
believed would play better with European publics.
Part of the solution
was to accentuate the suffering of Afghan women to justify war. But
the other part was to use President Barack Obama as the face of a
new, “caring” approach to war. He had recently been awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize – even though he had done nothing for peace, and
would go on to expand US wars – very possibly as part of this same
effort to reinvent the “war on terror”. Polls showed support for
existing wars increased markedly among Europeans when they were
reminded that Obama backed these wars.
As Greenwald observes:
“Obama’s
most important value was in prettifying, marketing and prolonging
wars, not ending them. They saw him for what U.S. Presidents really
are: instruments to create a brand and image about the U.S. role in
the world that can be effectively peddled to both the domestic
population in the U.S. and then on the global stage, and specifically
to pretend that endless barbaric U.S. wars are really humanitarian
projects benevolently designed to help people — the pretext used to
justify every war by every country in history.”
Obama-style
Facelift
Once the state is
understood as a vehicle for entrenching elite power – and war its
most trusted tool for concentrating power – the world becomes far
more intelligible. Western economies never stopped being colonial
economies, but they were given an Obama-style facelift. War and
plunder – even when they masquerade as “defence”, or peace –
are still the core western mission.
That is why Britons,
believing days of empire are long behind them, might have been
shocked to learn last week that the UK still operates 145 military
bases in 42 countries around the globe, meaning it runs the second
largest network of such bases after the US.
Such information is
not made available in the UK “mainstream” media, of course. It
has to be provided by an “alternative” investigative site,
Declassified UK. In that way the vast majority of the British public
are left clueless about how their taxes are being used at a time when
they are told further belt-tightening is essential.
Declassified UK
@declassifiedUK
REVEALED — The UK military’s overseas base network involves 145 sites in 42 countries.
The results of a months-long investigation by @pmillerinfo
Declassified UK: REVEALED: The UK military’s overseas base network involves 145 sites in 42…
REVEALED: The UK military’s overseas base network involves 145 sites in 42 countries by Phil Miller Britain’s armed forces have a far more extensive base network than ever presented by the Ministry…dailymaverick.co.za 9:40 AM · Nov 24, 2020
561 454 people are Tweeting about this
The UK’s network of
bases, many of them in the Middle East, close to the world’s
largest oil reserves, are what the much-vaunted “special
relationship” with the US amounts to. Those bases are the reason
the UK – whoever is prime minister – is never going to say “no”
to a demand that Britain join Washington in waging war, as it did in
attacking Iraq in 2003, or in aiding attacks on Libya, Syria and
Yemen. The UK is not only a satellite of the US empire, it is a
lynchpin of the western imperial war economy.
Ideological
Alchemy
Once that point is
appreciated, the need for external enemies – for our own Eurasias
and Eastasias – becomes clearer.
Some of those enemies,
the minor ones, come and go, as demand dictates. Iraq dominated
western attention for two decades. Now it has served its purpose, its
killing fields and “terrorist” recruiting grounds have reverted
to a mere footnote in the daily news. Likewise, the Libyan bogeyman
Muammar Gaddafi was constantly paraded across news pages until he was
bayonetted to death. Now the horror story that is today’s chaotic
Libya, a corridor for arms-running and people-trafficking, can be
safely ignored. For a decade, the entirely unexceptional Arab
dictator Bashar Assad, of Syria, has been elevated to the status of a
new Hitler, and he will continue to serve in that role for as long as
it suits the needs of the western war economy.
Notably, Israel,
another lynchpin of the US empire and one that serves as a kind of
offshored weapons testing laboratory for the military-industrial
complex, has played a vital role in rationalising these wars. Just as
saving Afghan women from Middle Eastern patriarchy makes killing
Afghans – men, women and children – more palatable to Europeans,
so destroying Arab states can be presented as a humanitarian gesture
if at the same time it crushes Israel’s enemies, and by extension,
through a strange, implied ideological alchemy, the enemies of all
Jews.
Quite how
opportunistic – and divorced from reality – the western discourse
about Israel and the Middle East has become is obvious the moment the
relentless concerns about Syria’s Assad are weighed against the
casual indifference towards the head-chopping rulers of Saudi Arabia,
who for decades have been financing terror groups across the Middle
East, including the jihadists in Syria.
During that time,
Israel has covertly allied with oil-rich Saudi Arabia and other Gulf
states, because all of them are safely ensconced within the US war
machine. Now, with the Palestinians completely sidelined
diplomatically, and with all international solidarity with
Palestinians browbeaten into silence by antisemitism smears, Israel
and the Saudis are gradually going public with their alliance, like a
pair of shy lovers. That included the convenient leak this week of a
secret meeting between
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi ruler Mohammed
bin Salman in Saudi Arabia.
Israel’s likely
reward is contained in a new
bill in Congress for even more military aid than the record $3.8
billion Israel currently receives annually from the US – at a time
when the US economy, like the UK one, is in dire straits.
Jonathan Cook
@Jonathan_K_Cook
My latest: Pompeo’s declaration that criticism of Israel and the peaceful movement urging a boycott of its settlements are ‘antisemitic’ marks the logical endpoint of a foreign policy consensus rapidly taking shape in the US and Europe
Pompeo spells out the new normal: All criticism of Israel is ‘antisemitic’
424 300 people are Tweeting about this
The west also needs
bigger, more menacing and more permanent enemies than Iraq or Syria.
Helpfully one kind – nebulous “terrorism” – is the inevitable
reaction to western war-making. The more brown people we kill, the
more brown people we can justify killing because they carry out, or
support, “terrorism” against us. Their hatred for our bombs is an
irrationality, a primitivism we must keep stamping out with more
bombs.
But concrete,
identifiable enemies are needed too. Russia, Iran and China give
superficial credence to the war machine’s presentation of itself as
a “defence” industry. The UK’s bases around the globe and Boris
Johnson’s £16.5 billion rise in spending on the UK’s war
industries only make sense if Britain is under a constant,
existential threat. Not just someone with a suspicious backpack on
the London Tube, but a sophisticated, fiendish enemy that threatens
to invade our lands, to steal resources to which we claim exclusive
rights, to destroy our way of life through its masterful manipulation
of the internet.
Voor de
rest van het artikel zie het origineel en lees verder bij
het ‘hoofdstuk’ getiteld: ‘Crushed
or Tamed‘
Click
for
Spanish,
German,
Dutch,
Danish,
French,
translation- Note- Translation
may take a moment to load.
============================
*
De klimaatverandering is niet meer te stoppen, hoe vaak de politiek
en de media je ook vertellen dat ‘we’ dat voor elkaar kunnen krijgen
en dat we de temperatuurstijging kunnen stoppen op 1,5 graad Celsius
tegen het eind van deze eeuw. Er zijn meerdere cumulatieve effecten
gaande, die de klimaatverandering steeds verder aanjagen. ‘We’ mogen
blij zijn als tegen het eind van de eeuw de temperatuur met niet meer
dan 5 graden C. zal zijn gestegen en dat betekent dat een fiks deel
van Nederland tegen die tijd onbewoonbaar zal zijn geworden, door een
enorme stijging van de zeespiegel…….
** Hetzelfde is in feite aan de hand met het Crononavirus: terwijl de wereld ‘vecht’ tegen het Coronavirus waarbij de economie wordt vernietiged en velen in diepe ellende werden en worden gestort, gaan de militaire laboratoria door met het ontwikkelen van dodelijk besmettelijke ziekten als wapen voor oorlogsvoering…… In Fort Detrick in de VS staat zo’n (groot) militair laboratorium, dat werd vorig jaar zomer in grote paniek gesloten daar een gevaarlijk virus was ontsnapt….. (het Coronavirus???) Nu draait dat laboratorium weer als ‘vanouds….’ (hoe is ‘t mogelijk??!!!) Overigens is het wel bijzonder vreemd dat men zoveel maatregelen treft voor het Coronavirus als je nagaat dat alleen in ons land ieder jaar rond de 18.000 mensen vroegtijdig overlijden ten gevolge van langdurige auto-uitstoot inademing…… (en dat na een akelig ziekbed) Waarom worden daarvoor niet ongelofelijk veel maatregelen getroffen om dit binnen1 of 2 jaar te stoppen?? (Hetzelfde geldt voor alcoholgebruik, ook door deze harddrug vallen jaarlijks vele duizenden doden……)
Zie ook: ‘Groot-Brittannië heeft 145 militaire bases in 42 landen‘ (de VS, het Vierde Rijk, heeft er meer dan 800 over de wereld……)
