“It
never happened.”
Under
the rules of "mainstream" political discourse in the United
States, crimes are committed by evil others, never by noble
"America." Bad things are done by "them,"
but not by "us." "They" often have
malevolent intent but "we" are fundamentally good, driven
by the highest and most noble objectives: peace, democracy, and
liberty.
From
the end of World War Two through the present, the U.S. Empire has
caused "the extinction and suffering of countless human beings.
The United States," John Pilger notes, "attempted to
overthrow fifty governments, many of them democracies, and to crush
thirty popular movements fighting tyrannical regimes. In the
process, twenty-five countries were bombed, causing the loss of
several million lives and the despair of millions more" (John
Pilger, Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire [New York:
Nation Books, 2007], pp. 4-5].
The
leading imperial crimes include a massive U.S. assault on the peasant
nation of Vietnam - an epic attack that killed 3 million Indochinese
- and a continuing illegal invasion of oil-rich Mesopotamia.
The latter attack has led to the premature death of 1.2 million
Iraqis. .
But
in the U.S, and indeed across much of the West, the record of this
ongoing criminality is airbrushed out from official history and the
mass culture. It is tossed down George Orwell's "memory
hole," consistent with Big Brother's dictum in Nineteen
Eighty Four: "Who controls the past controls the future.
Who controls the present controls the past." As Harold
Pinter noted in his biting acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize in
Literature, dominant Western cultural authorities behave as if "it
never happened." When it comes to America's saga of monumental
transgression against civilized norms and international law, "nothing
ever happened. Even while it was happening," Pinter added,
"it never happened. It didn't matter. It was of no
interest" (quoted in Pilger, Freedom Next Time, p. 4).
“The
record of this ongoing criminality is airbrushed out from official
history and the mass culture.”
Dominant
U.S.-led Western cultural codes mandate that the only victims worthy
of acknowledgement and compassion are those assaulted by officially
designated enemies. The larger number victimized by us and our
clients and allies (e.g., the Palestinians suffering under Israeli
occupation and apartheid) do not merit consideration, sympathy, or
even acknowledgement. They didn't happen. They don't exist.
Beyond
the question of historical accuracy, the problem here is that
powerful nations who deny the occurrence of past transgressions are
likely to commit new ones.
Denouncing
Wright, Praising George I’s War on Iraq
Which
brings us to the avowed "American exceptionalist" [1]
Barack Obama, who enjoys support from a large number of so-called
left-liberal voters who want very badly to believe that he is a
"progressive" opponent of American war, imperialism and
militarism. As he has shown in his comments denouncing Reverend
Jeremiah Wright and praising the military "service" of John
McCain, Obama is more than ready to wipe "magical"
America's historical slate clean when it comes to imperial crimes.
Obama denounces Wright because the good Reverend dares to acknowledge
and denounce the bloody and dangerous - for states that practice
terrorism abroad must expect to face terrorism there and at home -
and living American history of imperial atrocity, illegality,
and arrogance. McCain is lauded as "American war hero"
despite the fact that he was an eager participant in a massive
imperial assault on the men, women, and children of a poor peasant
nation who posed no danger to the people of America.
Speaking
in a high school gymnasium in Greensburg, Pa. last April, Obama said
he wanted to return America to the more "traditional"
foreign policy of such past presidents as "George Bush's father,
or John F. Kennedy," and "in some respects, Ronald Reagan."
He spoke in flattering and favorable terms of the way George H.W.
Bush handled the supposedly virtuous first Persian Gulf War. The
Associated Press article reporting this comment was titled "Obama
Align Foreign Policy With GOP" - a rebuke to left-liberal
writers who argue that the centrist Obama stands to the recognizably
progressive side of Hillary Clinton at least on foreign policy.
Nobody
in the mainstream commentariat acted on (or likely even remotely felt
) the urge to point out that Bush I's assault on Iraq involved
heinous Superpower butchery, including the bombing and
bulldozing to death of thousands of surrendered Iraqi soldiers and
the decision to let Saddam Hussein slaughter Kurds and Shiites the
U.S. had initially encouraged to rebel. Iraq is still dealing with
epidemic cancers caused by American deployment of depleted uranium in
the first one-sided Iraq "war," described by many
participants as a one-sided "turkey shoot."
As
Obama knows, such crimes never happened. They are of no
interest.
”The
hope of a young lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta”
Obama's
eagerness to whitewash the dark record of U.S. foreign policy is
hardly just a 2008 thing. Take a look at the following passage
from his instantly famous Keynote Address to the 2004 Democratic
Convention (the one that catapulted him to overnight celebrity),
where he said the following about his repeatedly invoked concept of
"hope:"
"I'm
not talking about blind optimism here - the almost willful ignorance
that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don't talk about it,
or the health care crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it. I'm
talking about something more substantial. It's the hope of slaves
sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants
setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant
bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a mill worker's son
who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny
name who believes that America has a place for him, too... In the
end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation; a
belief in things not seen; a belief that there are better days
ahead."
The
"young naval lieutenant line" was a reference to John F.
Kerry's participation in the invasion of South Vietnam. It took
no small chutzpah for Obama to lump African-American slaves'
struggles and spirituality with the racist U.S. "crucifixion of
Southeast Asia" (Noam Chomsky) under the image of noble
Americans wishing together for a better future. Perhaps "God"
gave Nazi executioners and Nazi victims the shared gift of hoping for
"better days ahead."
It
was not clear who or what told Obama that the Mekong Delta was Kerry
and his superiors' territory to "patrol." Perhaps it was
the same arrogant, nationalist and racist sensibilities that gave
19th century white Americans permission to own slaves and murder and
steal land from Mexico and the indigenous first "American"
nations and which allowed the Bush administration to attempt to seize
Iraq as a colonial possession.
The
Wonderful Work of Those Wise White Wilsonians
Obama's
eager willingness to whitewash U.S. foreign policy history in accord
with the Orwellian requirements of dominant imperial canon was
demonstrated in the foreign relations chapter of his bestselling 2006
campaign book The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the
American Dream (New York: Crown, 2006). Bearing the grandiose
title "The World Beyond Our Borders," this chapter
displayed rigid acceptance of the doctrinal notion that the United
States' foreign policies have long and consistently advanced "shared
ideas of freedom" and the "rule of law" and
"international institutions." It praised the
wonderful (for Obama) "post-[World War Two] leadership of
president Truman, Dean Acheson, George Marshall and George Kennan"
for "craft[ing]...a new...order that married [Woodrow] Wilsonian
idealism to hardheaded realism, an acceptance of American power with
a humility regarding America's ability to control events around the
world" (Obama, Audacity of Hope, p. 284). The benevolent,
wise "Wilsonian" architects of the postwar Pax Americana,
Obama claimed in Audacity, sought a "democratic"
world order in which the U.S. countered the limitless "totalitarian"
Soviet threat and "signaled a willingness to show restraint in
the exercise of its power" (Obama, Audacity of Hope, p.
285).
This
was remarkably sterile and reactionary commentary on such memorable
moments in American "humility" as the arch-criminal
atom-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (mass-murderous shots
across the bow of the emerging Cold War), the enormous imperial
assaults on Korea and Indochina (millions of "enemy"
civilians dead), the U.S. restoration of fascist power in "liberated"
Italy, the intervention against popular social revolution in Greece
(smeared as a Soviet export by U.S. policymakers in order to "Scare
the Hell out of the American people" to garner support for
massive new imperial "defense" expenditures) and the
U.S. subversion of democracy and national independence across the
planet. Iran (1953), Dominican Republic (1965), Guatemala (1954),
Chile (1970-1973), Indonesia (1965) are just some of the more
spectacular examples in a list that goes on and on.
“Obama's
‘hardheaded’ ‘Wilsonians’ ordered the murder of untold ‘Third
World’ millions.”
Washington
consistently justified its remarkable record of global criminality
after World War II with a great enabling myth that Obama eagerly
embraces: the existence of a Soviet Union willing and able "to
spread [in Obama's words] its totalitarian brand of communism"
(Obama, Audacity of Hope, p. 204). Under the guise of
protecting the world from that imperially useful but non-existent
threat - honest U.S. assessments acknowledged that the real Soviet
danger was that USSR modeled the possibility of independent national
development outside the parameters of U.S.-led world-capitalist
supervision and indicating an impermissible refusal "to
complement the industrial economies of the West" (William
Yandell Elliot, ed., The Political Economy of American Foreign
Policy [New York: Holt, Reinhart & Winston, 1955], p. 42;
Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy [New York: Hill and Wang,
1991], p.26) - Obama's "hardheaded" "Wilsonians"
ordered the murder (preferably via proxy agents like the
Indonesian Suharto regime and the Shah of Iran) of untold "Third
World" millions.
Humble
"restraint" in the "exercise of [U.S.] power" is
not the first description that comes into the mind of one who takes
an honest and comprehensive look at that troubling record.
It
was all very consistent with the "idealistic" history of
the actual (Woodrow) Wilson administration, whose "extreme
racism" (Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old and New [New
York: Columbia University Press, 1996], p. 44) found grisly
expression in the brutal U.S. invasions of Haiti and the Dominican
Republic. As Noam Chomsky observes, "Wilson's troops murdered,
destroyed, reinstituted virtual slavery and demolished the
constitutional system in Haiti." These actions followed in
accord with Wilson Secretary of State Robert Lansing's belief that
"the African race are devoid of any capacity for political
organization" and possessed "an inherent tendency to revert
to savagery and to cast aside the shackles of civilization which are
irksome to their physical nature." As Chomsky notes, "while
supervising the takeover of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Wilson
built his reputation as a lofty idealist defending self-determination
and the rights of small nations with impressive oratory. [But]
there is no contradiction [because] Wilsonian doctrine was restricted
to people of the right sort: those ‘at a low stage of civilization'
need not apply" for the rights of democracy and
self-determination (Noam Chomsky, Year 501: The Conquest Continues
[Boston, MA: South End, 1993], pp. 202-203).
Racism
aside, Lansing said that the effective meaning of the Monroe Doctrine
was simply that "the United States considers its own interests.
The integrity of other American nations is an incident, not an end"
(Lansing is quoted in Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants
[Berkeley, CA: 1992], p. 11). Wilson agreed, but found it politically
unwise to say so publicly.
Such
high "idealistic" sentiments certainly informed a noble
Wilsonian intervention against the Russian Revolution in 1918 and
1919.
Of
course, none of this non-existent history prevents Obama from
praising Wilson for seeing that "it was in America's interest to
encourage the self-determination of all peoples and provide the
world a legal framework that could help avoid future conflicts"
(Obama, Audacity, p. 283).
“Our
Struggle Against Fascism”
Historical
deletion was a major problem with an essay Obama published in the
establishment journal Foreign Affairs in the summer of 2007. Titled
"Renewing America's Leadership," this 5000-word article
began by praising Franklin Delano Roosevelt for "buil[ding] the
most formidable military the world had ever known" and for
giving "purpose to our struggle against fascism" with his
"Four Freedoms."
Much
of Obama's treatise was dedicated to the erasure of Washington's past
imperial criminality. "At moments of great peril in the
last century," Obama wrote, "American leaders such as
Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy managed both to
protect the American people and to expand opportunity for the next
generation. What is more, they ensured that America, by deed and
example, led and lifted the world - that we stood for and fought for
the freedoms sought by billions of people beyond our borders."
It
was interesting that Obama's essay never named the "Four
Freedoms": freedom of speech and expression, freedom from want,
freedom from fear and freedom of worship. One likely
explanation for that deletion was that U.S policymakers from
Roosevelt II through Kennedy (and beyond) regularly violated most of
them in the enforcement of their particular imperial concept of the
"national interest." During the middle and late 1930s, US
policymakers helped enable the rise of European fascism that
culminated in Hitler's march of terror. The US watched with approval
as Fascist darkness set over Europe during the inter-war years.
American policymakers saw Italian, Spanish, German and other strains
of the European fascist disease as a welcome counters to "the
Soviet threat" - essentially the demonstration Russia made of
the possibilities for national outside the capitalist world system -
and to Left movements, parties and related social-democratic policy
drifts within Western Europe.
“American
policymakers saw Italian, Spanish, German and other strains of the
European fascist disease as a welcome counters to ‘the Soviet
threat.’”
In
1937, Roosevelt's U.S. State Department's European Division argued
that European fascism was compatible with America's economic
interests. This key diplomatic agency reported that fascism's rise
was a natural response of "the rich and middle classes" to
the threat posed by "dissatisfied masses," who, with the
"the example of the Russian Revolution before them," might
"swing to the left." Fascism, the State Department argued,
"must succeed or the masses, this time reinforced by the
disillusioned middle class, will again turn to the left." The
French Popular Front government of the middle 1930s was an example of
the democratic socialist threat that made German fascism acceptable
to American officials before Hitler launched his drive for a New
World Order (Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy [New York: Hill
and Wang, 1991], p. 41).
It
is true that Nazi Germany became an avowed U.S. enemy during WWII.
This did not occur, however, until fascism, holding power in two
leading rival industrial states, directly attacked U.S. interests.
American policymakers intervened against fascism on the basis of
perceived national self-interest, not out of any particular concern
for the human rights of the French or, for that matter, European Jews
or anyone else (Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United
States [New York: HarperPerennial, 2003], pp. 407-410;
Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, pp. 37-42).
“Our
Real Task”
But
back to noble America's compassionate "restraint in the exercise
of its power" in the post-WWII era that was so beautifully
guided by the likes of George Kennan and Dean Acheson. After the
"good war," America's accommodation of European and Asian
fascism in the inter-war period became something of a model for U.S.
Third World policy. In the name of resisting supposedly expansionist
Soviet influence and "communism," the U.S. sponsored,
funded, equipped, and provided political cover for numerous "Third
World fascist" regimes. In doing so, it enlisted and protected
numerous Nazi War criminals (e.g. Klaus Barbie) deemed to possess
useful anti-Left "counter-insurgency" skills (Chomsky, What
Uncle Sam Really Wants, pp. 14-25).
To
grasp some of the "hardheaded realism" behind such U.S.
Cold War policies as the sponsorship of vicious military
dictatorships in Indonesia, Iran, Greece and Brazil (to name just a
few "Free World" partners), we can consult an interesting
formulation from Obama's wise "Wilsonian" hero George
Kennan. As Kennan explained in Policy Planning Study 23,
crafted for the State Department in 1948:
"We
have about 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of
its population...In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object
of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is
to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain
this position of disparity...to do so we will have to dispense with
all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to
be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives...We
should cease to talk about vague and ...unreal objectives such as
human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization.
The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight
power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans,
the better."
Later
Kennan would explain the need to crush those who refused to serve
U.S. interests in the Third World (defined as "communists")
by any means necessary: "The final answer might be an unpleasant
one, but...we should not hesitate before police repression by the
local government. This is not shameful since the Communists are
traitors...It is better to have a strong regime in power than a
liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by
Communists" (quoted in Noam Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really
Wants, p. 11).
“In
Obama's world view, as in that of his Harvard friend and former
foreign policy adviser Samantha Power, American crimes generally
don't exist.”
The
directly and indirectly U.S.-slaughtered millions of Hiroshima,
Nagasaki, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia (the last were victims of what
Obama's Audacity of Hope charitably called a "morally
rudderless" U.S. bombing campaign ) and Central America stand as
grisly but - inside the "inverted totalitarian" United
States (see Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed
Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism [Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008) and much of the West -
officially invisible testimony to Uncle Sam's marvelous "restraint."
And so do the countless other Asians, Africans and Latin Americans
who suffered under oppressive dictatorships and ruling classes
routinely funded and equipped by "the watchtower on the walls of
freedom" (as Obama's hero John Fitzgerald Kennedy once described
the United States) in the name of the mythic battle against messianic
Soviet expansionism - victims of what Obama's Audacity of
Hope called the United States' "occasional
encouragement of tyranny...when it served our interests (Obama,
Audacity of Hope, p. 279).
Such
"unworthy victims" of U.S. foreign policy stand as tragic
historical testimony to the dark secret behind the United States'
passionately declared commitment to "democracy" during the
Cold War: the United States supported popular governance and national
self determination abroad only in the rare incidents when and where
(never and nowhere or close to it) these principles were deemed
consistent with "American" global aims determined by the
U.S. power elite.
The
officially nonexistent historical casualty roster includes murdered
East-Timorese masses butchered by a nearly genocidal Indonesian
invasion that the Gerald Ford White House approved and could have
prevented with one phone call. It was a call that Ford and his
secretary of State Henry Kissinger restrained themselves from making.
Obama deleted the Timor atrocities from his reflections in The
Audacity of Hope on what he learned about "Indonesia's
subsequent history" after he lived in that country as a young
boy during the 1960s. In Obama's world view, as in that of his
Harvard friend and former foreign policy adviser Samantha Power,
American crimes generally don't exist. They didn't happen [3].
The
Biggest Casualty of that War”
Obama's
nationalistic and whitewashed take on the history of U.S. foreign
relations was starkly evident in The Audacity of Hope's
reflections on the Vietnam War, an illegal U.S. invasion that killed
at least 3 million Indochinese. By Obama's disturbing account:
"The
disastrous consequences of that conflict - for our credibility and
prestige abroad, for our armed forces (which would take a generation
to recover), and most of all for those who fought - have been amply
documented. But perhaps the biggest casualty of that war was
the bond of trust between the American people and their government -
and between Americans themselves. As a consequence of a more
aggressive press corps and the images of body bags flooding into the
living rooms, Americans began to realize that the best and the
brightest in Washington didn't always know what they were doing - and
didn't always tell the truth. Increasingly, many on the left
voiced opposition not only to the Vietnam War but also to the broader
aims of American foreign policy. In their view, President
Johnson, General Westmoreland, the CIA, the ‘military industrial
complex,' and international institutions like the World Bank were all
manifestations of American arrogance, jingoism, racism, capitalism
and imperialism. Those on the right responded in kind, laying
responsibility for the loss of Vietnam but also for the decline of
America's standing in the world squarely on the ‘blame America'
first crowd - the protestors, the hippies, Jane Fonda, the Ivy League
intellectuals and liberal media" (Obama, Audacity of Hope,
pp. 287-288)
The
Audacity of Hope [2] left it to alienated carpers of the "moral
absolutist" (Obama's description of both the New Left and the
New Right) Left to point out that Vietnam wasn't America's to "lose"
and that the massive U.S assault on Indochina reflected U.S. foreign
policy aims of subordinating Third World development to the perceived
needs of U.S-supervised world capitalist order. It was left to
deranged radicals to point out that the one-sided "war" was
ordered by elites who were criminal - not just stupid or ignorant -
and that many of the policy makers did "know [very well] what
they were doing": murdering Vietnam
As
for the supposed tragic fraying of the "bond of trust between
the American people and their government," many "unrealistic"
leftists (this author included) have sound reasons to think that the
so-called "Vietnam Syndrome" - the often skeptical attitude
of many Americans towards the militaristic pronouncements and war
plans of their foreign policy "leaders" - is a very healthy
thing. It's a welcome development, many progressives believe,
whenever US citizens subject "their" foreign policy
establishment to skeptical, even "distrustful" scrutiny.
It's much to be applauded, many of us think, that during the late
1960s and early 1970s much of the American populace turned against
a bloody colonial war in which "Fortunate Son" children of
the "elite" were deemed too privileged to "serve."
It's fantastic, many Americans rightly believe, that part of the
population came to grasp the class and related racial domestic bases
of the imperialism that Obama's campaign book portrayed as the
mythological creation of left "caricature" (The Audacity
of Hope, p. 288).
The
Audacity of Hope neglected to note that the previous supposed
"bond of trust" (whose dissolution Obama mourned) between
the people and "their" government was based largely on
establishment lies calculated to "scare the Hell of the American
people" (US Senator Vandenburg in 1947) with crassly exaggerated
global Soviet and "Communist" threats. The deceptions
were meant to induce the U.S. populace to cower under the umbrella of
the National Security State and to accept on faith the global and
domestic proclamations of the American system's wise and benevolent
managers.
Obama
left it to irrelevant radicals and hopeless arch-iconoclasts to note
that his frequently invoked icon Dr. Martin Luther King was among
those "on the left" who saw the Vietnam War as an
expression of the United States' broader imperialism and racism and
of its related captivity to what former U.S. president and World
War II Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower identified as the military
industrial complex - a very real and easily identifiable
political-economic entity that deserves to be mentioned without
sarcastic quotations marks around it.
“Dr.
Martin Luther King was among those ‘on the left’ who saw the
Vietnam War as an expression of the United States' broader
imperialism and racism.”
Also
left for "unreasonable" "zealots" of the
"unrealistic" radical fringe to note was the inconvenient
truth that the "biggest casualt[ies]" of the remarkably
one-sided Vietnam "war" - an exercise in imperial
aggression that was fought entirely on illegally invaded Vietnamese
(and Cambodian and Laotian) soil - was suffered by the people of
Vietnam. The terrible U.S. GI body count (58,000 during the war
and more through suicide since) pales before the millions of
Vietnamese killed and the related astonishing damage done to
Indochinese villages, cities, infrastructure, ecology, and
agriculture. The number of South Vietnamese civilians killed just in
the CIA's "Operation Phoenix" torture and assassination
program was equivalent to 45 percent of the U.S. death total in
Vietnam.
With
perhaps as many 700,000 Iraqis killed by "Operation Iraqi
Freedom" by the time The Audacity of Hope became a
U.S. bestseller, moreover, the people of Iraq could be forgiven
if they didn't share Obama's sense that it was a good thing for the
U.S. Armed Forces to have "recover[ed]" after Vietnam.
As
for Obama's daring observation that Vietnam indicated that U.S.
foreign policy makers "didn't always tell the truth" (p.
287), it must be one of the most understated observations of
elementary reality in the recorded history of campaign literature.
“Oura
Own Defense Department: v. That Crazy Radical Jesus
The
same perverse Orwellian historical deletion and distortion that
characterized The Audacity of Hope's foreign policy chapter
has been repeated again and again in Obama's various foreign policy
speeches and in his Foreign Affairs essay. In all of these and other
venues, Obama has been willing to function as what Pilger calls "the
voice of the Council on Foreign Relations."
Here
is a typical proclamation from Obama's voluminous record of imperial
pronouncements beyond just his book: "At moments of great peril
in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by
example, led and lifted the world, that we stood and fought for the
freedom sought by billions of people beyond their borders."
"That,"
John Pilger noted in Chicago last year, "is the nub of the
propaganda, the brainwashing if you like, that seeps into the lives
of every American, and many of us who are not Americans."
One
of my (least) favorite Obama comments on U.S. foreign policy came in
a speech that wasn't dedicated to that topic per se. At one
point in his 2006 "Call to Renewal" conference keynote
address on religious values, Obama inserted an interesting remark
into a section of his address that criticized literalist
interpretations of Christian scripture by noting that the Bible
contains some truly wacky judgments and pronouncements:
"And
even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled
every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose
Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with
James Dobson's, or Al Sharpton's? Which passages of Scripture should
guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests
slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is an abomination? How
about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays
from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the
Mount - a passage so radical that is doubtful our own Defense
Department would survive its application? So before we get
carried away, let's read our bibles." (Barack Obama, "Call
to Renewal Keynote Address," Washington D.C., June 28, 2006,
read at
http://obama.senate.gov/speech/060628-call_to_renewal/index.php).
The
"Sermon on the Mount" appears in the book of Matthew in the
New Testament. It includes the following aphorisms from Jesus:
"Blessed
are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."
"Blessed
are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."
"Blessed
are the merciful, for they shall attain mercy."
"Blessed
are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God."
"For
if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly father will also
forgive you."
"You
have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘you shall not murder,
and whoever murders will be in danger of judgment. But I say to
you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be
in danger of the judgment."
"But
whoever slaps you on your right check, turn the other to him also..."
"Give
to him who asks you, and from him who wants to borrow from you do not
turn away."
"Love
your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate
you."
"Take
heed you do not do your charitable deeds before men, to be seen by
them."
"Do
not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth...for where your
treasure is, there your heart will be also"
"Whatever
you want men to do, do also to them."
The
problem with Obama's comment wasn't that he sensed contradiction
between these sayings and the actions of the U.S. Pentagon. It
is an understatement to say that the history of U.S. military
behavior does not look terribly good in light of these statements.
With millions of overseas civilians corpses as a result, "Christian"
America's military and foreign policy over the last century and more
- firmly dedicated to the expansion and preservation of the Few's
"treasures on earth” - the last half century and more stands
as a gruesome and monumental rejection of these and other maxims in
Jesus' mountain-top speech to "the multitudes."
The
real difficulty with Obama's aside is that he found that long-haired
Sixties "radical" Jesus' pacifism and egalitarianism so
over the top that they actually - imagine - lead one to question the
benevolence and wisdom of "our own defense department” - as
if the U.S. Pentagon was and is some sort of generally understood
paragon of global peace and justice.
The
majority of morally and politically cognizant humanity disagrees,
pointing to the millions of victims of U.S. Empire - the countless
faceless masses of killed and suffering humans who "didn't
happen," who don't exist, and who are "of no interest"
within the tragically narrow moral parameters of U.S. and Western
political culture. By the nationally narcissistic American
exceptionalist perspective of Obama's "Call to Renewal"
address, this disagreement is on moral and intellectual part with
supporting slavery or calling for the stoning of insufficiently
religious 10-year-olds.
Let’s
“Stop Trying to Put Iraq Back Together”
Building
on his denial of past U.S. criminality, candidate Obama's foreign
policy pronouncements have been loaded with promises of future
criminality under an Obama administration. Obama's Foreign Affairs
essay gave explicit reasons for people and states beyond U.S. borders
to fear the prospect of an Obama White House. "The American
moment is not over, but it must be seized anew," Obama
proclaimed, adding that "we must lead the world by deed and by
example" and "must not rule out using military force"
in pursuit of "our vital interests."
The
last three words harkened back to another Democratic imperialist's
"Carter Doctrine," which updated the Monroe Doctrine for
the global petro-capitalist era to include the Persian Gulf region in
the United States' inviolable sphere of special interest and
unilateral action). They constitute a code phrase with a useful
imperial translation: "other nations' oil," located
primarily in the Middle East.
“Candidate
Obama's foreign policy pronouncements have been loaded with promises
of future criminality under an Obama administration.”
"A
strong military," Obama wrote in Foreign Affairs last year, "is,
more than anything, necessary to sustain peace." We must
"revitalize our military" (to foster "peace"),
Obama declared, partly by adding 65,000 soldiers to the Army and
27,000 to the Marines. Here the junior Senator from Illinois echoed
George Orwell's fictional totalitarian state of Oceana, which
proclaimed that "War is Peace" and "Love is Hate."
And
then Obama gave reasons to expect future unilateral and "preemptive"
wars and occupations carried out in the name of the "war on
terror" by an Obama White House. "We must retain the
capacity to swiftly defeat any conventional threat to our country and
our vital interests," Obama pronounced. "But we must
also become better prepared to put boots on the ground in order to
take on foes that fight asymmetrical and highly adaptive campaigns on
a global scale." Reassuring the bipartisan imperialist
establishment that he will not be hamstrung by international law and
civilized norms when "our vital interests" (other peoples'
petroleum, primarily) are "at stake," Obama added that "I
will not hesitate to use force unilaterally, if necessary, to protect
the American people or our vital interests wherever we are attacked
or imminently threatened."
"We
must also consider using military force in circumstances beyond
self-defense," Obama added, "in order to provide for the
common security that underpins global stability -- to support
friends, participate in stability and reconstruction operations, or
confront mass atrocities" (Barack Obama, "Renewing American
Leadership," Foreign Affairs (July/August 2007), read online at
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20070701faessay86401/barack-obama/renewing-american-leadership.html).
As
Glen Ford has observed, Obama has gone "out of his way to prove"
that he is "no peace candidate" (Glen Ford, "Barack
Obama the Warmonger," Black Agenda Report, August 8, 2007, read
at
www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=305&Itemid=34).
To be more precise, Obama has gone to elaborate lengths to prove his
imperial credentials to the foreign policy establishment while posing
as a peace candidate to the more gullible and less informed but
predominantly antiwar voting majority. As part of that project, Obama
studiously avoids any explicit reference to the blatant criminality
and illegality of Bush's War on Iraq - a war that he promises
(between the lines of his shifting, cunning, calibrated and deceptive
rhetoric on "withdrawal") to continue.
He
even claims, absurdly, that Bush II's transparently petro-imperialist
and colonial invasion was motivated by a desire to "export
democracy through the barrel of a gun" and even "to create
a Jeffersonian democracy." Last February, Obama told autoworkers
in Janesville, Wisconsin that "It's time to stop spending
billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together and start
spending the money putting America back together" (WIFR
Television, CBS 23, Rockford, Illinois, "Obama Speaks at
General Motors in Janesville," February 13, 2008, read at
http://www.wifr.com/morningshow/headlines/15618592.html).
Yes,
"trying to put Iraq back together."
As
Iraq was being pushed to the margins of the Democratic presidential
debate (and of mainstream news) last January, the people of that
occupied state suffered under the weight of what amounted to a
U.S.-imposed Holocaust. While the media obsessed about a slightly
racialized soap opera conflict between Hillary and Obama, Tom
Engelhardt noted the following:
"Whether
civilian dead between the invasion of 2003 and mid-2006 (before the
worst year of civil-war level violence even hit) was in the range of
600,000 as a study in the British medical journal, The Lancet
reported, or 150,000 as a recent World Health Organization study
suggests, whether two million or 2.5 million Iraqis have fled the
country, whether 1.1 million or more than two million have been
displaced internally, whether electricity blackouts and water
shortages have marginally increased or decreased, whether the
country's health-care system is beyond resuscitation or could still
be revived, whether Iraqi oil production has nearly crept back to the
low point of the Saddam Hussein-era or not, whether fields of opium
poppies are, for the first time, spreading across the country's
agricultural lands or still relatively localized, Iraq is a
continuing disaster zone on a catastrophic scale hard to match in
recent memory" (Tom Engelhardt, "The Corpse on the Gurney:
the Success Mantra in Iraq," Antiwar.com, January 18, 2008, read
at www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=12229).
According
to the respected journalist Nir Rosen in the December 2007 edition of
the mainstream journal Current History, "Iraq has been killed,
never to rise again. The American occupation has been more
disastrous than that of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the
thirteenth century. Only fools talk of solutions now.
There is no solution. The only hope is that perhaps the damage
can be contained" (Nir Rosen, "The Death of Iraq,"
Current History, December 2007, p. 31).
Airbrushing
and Cherry-Picking
As
Obama's comments on Iraq suggest, it matters a great deal when top
U.S. elected officials and candidates delete and deny past U.S
crimes. Those in global power who fail to acknowledge the imperial
crimes of the past are likely to repeat them in the present and
future.
After
reviewing Obama's biblical reflections and The Audacity of Hope's
musings on the supposedly noble and benevolent, democratic record of
past U.S. foreign policy - scarred only by occasional "strategic
blunders" (but not moral crimes) like the Vietnam and Iraq Wars
- I was reminded of an argument advanced by Chris Hedges in his book
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America
(2006). It will not do, Hedges argued, for "mainstream
Christians" who are appalled by the Christian Right's
militaristic use of scripture to "cherry pick the Bible to
create a Jesus and God who are always loving and compassionate.
Such Christians," Hedges noted, "often fail to acknowledge
that there are hateful passages in the Bible that give sacred
authority to the rage, self-aggrandizement and intolerance of the
Christian Right."
The
Bible is loaded with such material, Hedges observed. Some of
the worst is found in the Book of Revelation, which portrays a final
and bloody battle between the forces of Good - led by a Warrior
Christ that would make the messianic militarist and Middle Eastern
Crusader George W. Bush proud - and the forces of evil.
Concluding with great birds of prey feasting on the flesh of
vanquished non-Christians, it is "a story of God's ruthless,
terrifying and violent power unleashed on nonbelievers."
In
Hedges' view, religious authorities should "denounce the
biblical passages that champion apocalyptic violence and hateful
political creeds...As long as scripture, blessed and accepted by the
church, teaches that at the end of the time there will be a day of
Wrath and Christians will control the shattered remnants of a world
cleansed through violence and war, as long as it teaches that all
non-believers will be tormented, destroyed and banished to Hell, it
will be hard to thwart the message of radical apocalyptic preachers
or assuage the fears of the Islamic world that Christians are calling
for its annihilation."
Christians
need to stop "airbrushing" the Bible, Hedges argued, if
they want to "to assuage the fears of the Islamic world
that Christians are calling for its annihilation." Christians
seeking to advance a morally respectable version of their faith must
acknowledge and repudiate scriptural passages that justify and
promise mass messianic-militarist devastation for supposed spiritual
enemies (Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and
the War on America (New York: Free Press, 2006), pp. 5, 6, and
7).
A
similar point could be made about the dominant civic religion of
American exceptionalism at home and abroad. A policy maker who denies
the existence and/or relevance of past racism is not a good candidate
to seriously address racial oppression in the present. A
candidate or office-holder who thinks the American historical story
is one of endless progress and opportunity, classlessness, democracy
and gentle cultural melding is not in a good position to meaningfully
represent, understand and serve disadvantaged people or advance
justice and democracy in the present and future. And U.S.
presidential hopefuls who trumpet whitewashed perspectives
on America's record of global transgression are
candidates to advance deadly imperial crimes in the future. Obama's
airbrushing out of past U.S. imperial arrogance and criminality is
problematic for reasons that are more than merely academic.
Veteran
radical historian Paul Street ([email protected]) is the author
of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder,
CO: Paradigm), Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the
Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Routledge, 2005); Racial Oppression
in the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).
His next book "Barack Obama and the Future of American
Politics" is forthcoming in August and can be advance-ordered at
www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987.
NOTES
1.
"American exceptionalism" is the nationally narcissistic
notion of the United States as a specially benevolent and far-seeing
super-state who uses its power only for good and democratic
purposes. The United States is seen as an inherently noble "city
on the hill" that is beyond significant moral reproach. It
is reflexively taken to be a special beacon of democracy and
liberty that the world can learn from and emulate. Under "American
exceptionalist" doctrine, there can be no serious moral,
ideological, or legal criticism of the basic underlying motives,
structures (class forces), and actors behind U.S. foreign policy.
Obama has proclaimed his belief in American exceptionalism on
numerous occasions. An early statement is Barack Obama,
"Remarks of Barack Obama at the Knox College Commencement,"
June 4, 2005, read at www.barackobama.com.
2.
The title of Obama's audaciously imperial book is lifted from an
anti-imperial sermon given by his frankly anti-imperialist and
"Afro-Centric" former pastor Jeremiah Wright. Wright's
statements about and against U.S. racism and imperialism (fairly
reflective of mainstream sentiment in the black community) have been
used by the powerful American right-wing republican noise machine and
U.S. corporate media to push the temperamentally and ideologically
conservative and centrist Obama further to the right. Last
spring, Obama denounced his insufficiently patriotic former
minister, who once brought the future presidential candidate to
Christianity and who presided over Obama's wedding and the baptism of
Obama's children.
3.
The main reason for Samantha Power's popularity in elite U.S.
cultural and policy circles is her reflexive blindness to U.S.
crimes. In her famous, award-winning book "A Problem From Hell:
America and the Problem of Genocide" (New York: Basic, 2002),
those monumental transgressions are nearly completely absent and the
small number of cases treated are selectively interpreted through the
lens of her paradigm asserting that our sole blemish is failing to
respond adequately to the sins of others. See Edward S. Herman, "The
Cruise Missile Left, Part 5: Samantha Power and the Genocide Gambit,"
ZNet Magazine (May 17, 2004), read at
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/8538;
Edward S. Herman, "Response to Zinn on Samantha Power,"
ZNet Magazine (August 27, 2007), read at
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/14622.