‘The rulers of the world’

People who “did not experience a surge of rage where it was due”, wrote the great Greek philosopher Aristotle in his ‘Nicomachean Ethics’ 2500 years ago, were living ‘wrongly’. The behaviour of someone untouched by injustice is, he said, “as if he had no feeling and as if it caused him no pain, and, as he experienced no anger, as if he were also incapable of defending himself, since after all, it betrays a sense of slavery to remain silent when being insulted, or to abandon loved ones.”
  I can still remember that ‘surge of rage’ I felt when, at the age of 17, I questioned the firmly established world view of my German nationalist father for the first time in my life, at the Christmas of 1968, when in our churches there was once again preaching about ‘peace on earth and goodwill towards men’. At that time the words sounded stale to me and I was seized by a strong emotion, because the images of the Vietnam War were in my mind’s eye: the streams of bombers, the carpets of bombs and the terrible, glaring napalm fireballs by means of which ‘our American friends’ were slaughtering the Vietnamese population in the name of the same God I believed in. But I had never thought about these matters before. A year earlier, the Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Spellman, military vicar of the US armed forces, had praised the Vietnam GIs as ‘soldiers of Christ’ and incited them ‘to fight to total victory’.¹
  When I read Armin Wertz’s book ‘Die Weltbeherrscher’ (The rulers of the world), published by Westend Verlag in 2015, I was reminded of that Christmas in 1968. The book is highly recommended for anyone lacking a ‘surge of rage’. It is nothing less than the “first complete chronicle of all US operations in independent states” – from 1794 (18 years after the founding of the USA in 1776) to 2014. Armin Wertz used the Congressional Research Service Report RL 3017 of the Foreign Affairs Department of the US Congressional Research Service from 2004 as his basic source, and he completed the gaps with his own research.²
  Born in Friedrichshafen in 1945, Armin Wertz studied economics in Berlin and worked for over thirty years as a foreign correspondent: for ‘Der Spiegel’ in Central America, for the ‘Frankfurter Rundschau’ and the ‘Tages-Anzeiger’ in Israel and for the ‘Freitag’ and the ‘Berliner Zeitung’ in Southeast Asia. He also published as a freelance journalist in ‘taz’, Zeit, ARD, ‘Tagesspiegel’, ‘Standard’ (Vienna), for mare, Lettre International, El Mundo (Medellin), TEMPO (Jakarta) and other media. He has published four books: ‘Tränen im Heiligen Land’(Tears in the Holy Land), ‘Die verdammte Presse’ (The damned press), ‘Sie sind viele, sie sind eins. Eine Einführung in die Geschichte Indonesiens’ (They are many, they are one. An Introduction to the History of Indonesia.) and ‘Der Sieg der freien Welt. Militärische und geheimdienstliche Operationen der USA im Ausland’ (The Victory of the Free World. US military and intelligence operations abroad). Armin Wertz also wrote for the internet newspaper ‘Journal21’, a project of the former head of ‘Tagesschau’, Heiner Hug, who

“with passion and financial commitment, has gathered around him a group of mostly veteran journalists who cannot stop writing and investigating, but who are increasingly finding no place in the media, which are saving themselves to death”.

On 320 of the 400 pages, Armin Wertz outlines the almost countless imperialist US aggressions between 1794 and today – wars, military interventions, murders on state orders, gross but also subtle US interference in the affairs of other sovereign states. The descriptions of the US drone murders between 2004 and 2011 alone fill fifteen densely printed pages, just a few lines per murderous activity!
  The overall picture provided by Armin Wertz’s chronicle, the complete collection of all the misdeeds of this state that calls itself a democracy, is an absolute catastrophe: Only a very few of the 220 years of US history passed without wars, military interventions, without state murders and without overt or covert interference in the affairs of other sovereign states ... excepting in five of its countless wars of aggression the USA did not find it necessary to even declare war! Everything happened in the abused and desecrated name of democracy.
  The 400 pages of the book are prefaced by a quote from George F. Kennan, who was head of the planning staff at the US State Department in 1948:

“We own 50 per cent of the world’s wealth, but we make up only 6.3 per cent of the world’s population. [...] Faced with such a situation, we cannot avoid attracting envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to find a form of relationship that will allow us to maintain these differences in prosperity without seriously compromising our national security. To achieve this, we will have to abandon all sentimentality and daydreaming; [...]. We must not delude ourselves that today we can afford the luxury of altruism and world happiness [...]. We should stop talking about vague and unrealistic goals such as human rights, raising living standards and democratisation. The day is not far off when our actions must be guided by sober power calculations. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”

Kennan said these three years after America dropped the first two atomic bombs in world history, the most terrible of all weapons. He said it in 1948, the same year that the American First Lady Eleonore Roosevelt with great pomp proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and as head of the planning staff at the US State Department he spat on human rights and democracy. Mocked them as ‘vague’ and ‘unrealistic’ ‘sentimentalities and daydreams’. We have not forgotten who, just a few years before, mocked human rights as a humanitarian fantasy! As clever as a snake, the wolf slipped into the sheep’s clothing of human rights in 1948. As if the USA were the guardians of human rights!
  What kind of state is this, whose command centre spits on human rights and calls them ‘sentimentalities’ and ‘daydreams’ while the president’s wife proclaims the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? But Kennan named what the US has always done: “renounce all sentimentality and daydreaming”, “stop talking about vague and unrealistic goals like human rights, raising living standards and democratisation”, “be guided by sober power calculation”.
  Wertz documents the history of the USA’s bloody policy of aggression, conquest and power, which has had nothing to do with democracy from the outset: “The founding of the United States and its subsequent expansion across the North American continent”, Wertz writes,

“were only achieved with the destruction of numerous Indian nations. [...] In order to appropriate their land, the USA concluded 800 treaties with the various Indian nations. Around 430 of these were not ratified by Congress. Nevertheless, the Indians were expected to abide by the terms of these treaties. ‘Even more tragic, however, was that of the 370 treaties that were ratified, the United States did not honour a single one’, [...]. When the first Europeans arrived on the East Coast, between twenty and fifty million Indians lived in the land that is now the United States. By the end of the 19th century, there were just 250,000 left.”

The compressed descriptions of this genocide in the ‘World Rulers’ awakened in me again that ‘surge of rage’ mentioned by the great Aristotle and at the same time the memory of how as a boy, I loved reading Karl May, from whose moving foreword in the first volume of the Winnetou trilogy I just have to quote here:

“It was not only a hospitable reception, but an almost divine veneration which the first ‘pale faces’ were greeted with among the Indsmen. What reward did the latter receive for this? There is no doubt that the land they inhabited belonged to them; it was taken from them. Anyone who has read the history of the ‘famous’ conquistadores knows what rivers of blood flowed and what atrocities were committed. The same model was followed later on. The white man came with sweet words on his lips, but at the same time with a sharpened knife in his belt and a loaded gun in his hand. He promised love and peace and gave hate and blood. The red man had to give way, step by step, further and further back. From time to time, he was guaranteed ‘eternal’ rights to ‘his’ territory, but after a short time he was chased out of this again, further and further. The land was ‘bought’ from him, but he was either not paid at all or paid in worthless barter goods that he had no use for. But he was taught all the more carefully all about the insidiously poisonous ‘firewater’, and had to learn as well about the smallpox and other, even worse and more disgusting diseases, which thinned out entire tribes and depopulated whole villages. If the red man tried to assert his rights, he was answered with gunpowder and lead and had to give way to the superior weapons of the whites. Enraged by this, he took revenge on every single paleface he encountered, and always the consequences were formal massacres among the Reds. As a result, he, originally a proud, bold, brave, truth-loving, sincere huntsman who was always loyal to his friends, became a secretly sneaking, suspicious, lying man, for no fault of his own, because it was not he but the white man who was to blame. [...] Yes, he has become a sick man, a dying man, and we stand pityingly by his miserable bed to cover his eyes. To stand by a death bed is a serious thing, but it is a hundred times more serious when that dying bed is the bed of an entire race. Many, many questions arise, above all the following: What could this race have achieved if it had been given the time and space to develop its inner and outer powers and talents? What peculiar cultural forms will be lost to humanity through the demise of this nation?”

The founding fathers of the USA, such as Benjamin Franklin, did not yet consider the Indians to be inferior ‘savages’: “The League of the Iroquois inspired Benjamin Franklin to copy them when he planned the state federation [of the later USA]”, wrote John F. Kennedy in the foreword to Willam Brandom’s ‘American Heritage Book of Indians’. But the generations after the Enlightenment philosopher Franklin “again followed the ideas of the bigoted Pilgrim Fathers”, who considered themselves a ‘chosen people’ and the North American continent their ‘promised land’: “1. the earth and everything in it is God’s. 2. God may give the earth or any part of it to his chosen people. 3. we are his chosen people.”
  Even the “most modest independence fighters around George Washington” yet wanted to advance conquests from the 13 East Coast states to the Mississippi. Thirty years later, Thomas Jefferson was already dreaming of the Rocky Mountains as the western frontier. Another forty years later, Congress was talking about conquering the entire continent “from the Isthmus of Darien (Panama) to the Behring Strait”. And in 1912, US President Taft remarked: “The whole hemisphere will be ours; in fact, because of our racial superiority, it already morally belongs to us.” He was referring to the American double continent from the North Pole to the South Pole as the promised land of the ‘racially superior’ Americans! In 1985, there were still over twenty Native American tribes living in the USA whose members did not have American citizenship. The USA’s military sphere of influence in the form of vassal states is expanding worldwide.
  Those who did not want to be slaughtered or colonised or who insisted on their state sovereignty were dehumanised by the aggressive US imperialists as early as in the 19^th century as ‘terrorists’, but more frequently as ‘savages’, ‘bandits’, ‘Islamic fanatics’ or ‘pirates’.
  Some say that nothing is done by simply recognising the evil. So why does power have to eliminate dissenters?
  To return to the beginning: 2500 years ago, Aristotle complained that we were living ‘wrongly’ if we did not experience a ‘surge of rage’ in the face of injustice. Since this reaction was a given in the face of injustice committed! And this remains true in view of the almost incomprehensible extent of injustice as it is summarised in the ‘Rulers of the world’! We would not use our reason, he said, unless we were shaken by strong feelings of astonishment or indignation. Reading ‘Rulers of the world’ is particularly suited to awakening this ‘surge of rage’, to being touched and feeling pain and anger and no longer behaving as if one were unable to defend oneself. This inner transformation is also an act. It makes you lose your ‘sense of slavery’ and clears the way for ‘outer action’, which you will now wade into out of your own free inner resolve.  •

¹ Francis Cardinal Spellman. In: Der Spiegel 51/1967 of 10 December 1967
² Grimmet, 5 October 2004. www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/crs/rl30172.htm (Wertz, p. 337, introduction, note 2)