His High
Imperial Holiness Obama Does Berlin
by Paul Street
"Obama's
oration was a monument to deception and denial in the service of empire and
inequality."
Reflecting
the increasing Americanization of their continent's politics [1], "progressive"
European commentators and politicos have been gushing over U.S. Senator Obama's
(D-IL) speech before 200,000 people in Berlin.
Never mind that the speech called for increased European commitment to
the criminal U.S. attack on Afghanistan - a colonial war most Europeans do not
support - and was otherwise loaded with reactionary content.
"How the world might be
remade"
Speaking
of Europe in the aftermath of World War Two (WWII), Obama recalled how "the
Soviet shadow had swept across Europe, while in the West, America, Britain, and
France took stock of their losses and pondered how the world might be
remade."
This
comment suggested that the U.S. had wartime losses that could be remotely
compared with those of Europe (it didn't) and that America's Allied partners
had remotely equal influence with the U.S on the postwar world system (they
didn't). It deleted the fact that U.S. imperial architects consciously
exploited WWII as a great opportunity for an "American Century." They made the
sure that "the world" was "remade" in such a way as to guarantee U.S. hegemony
and built up the supposed Soviet menace to further that agenda. (For what it's
worth, those nasty Soviets did more than any other nation to defeat the Nazis,
losing 25 million lives in the struggle with the Third Reich).
Obama
made reference in his Berlin speech to "the generosity of the Marshall
Plan." This omitted the fact that the
United States' post-WWII European reconstruction program was designed to serve
U.S. corporate and imperial self-interests in numerous ways.
"The doors of democracy" and "prosperity"
After
the collapse of the Berlin Wall (of "communism"), Obama told Berlin, "the
doors of democracy were opened. Markets opened too, and the spread of
information and technology reduced barriers to opportunity and
prosperity."
Not
exactly. U.S.-imposed capitalist "shock therapy" devastated Eastern
populations, leading to shocking levels of poverty, inequality and corruption
in the former Soviet Union and much of the former Eastern bloc. The spread of
"markets" meant the expanded reach and power of multinational corporations and
capital, forces that are deeply subversive of democracy. Inequality
sharpened around the world and at home too, consistent with the
anti-egalitarian character of the profits system. Basic social supports and
protections were blown away in the formerly socialist world. South Africa got rid of apartheid but fell
under the savage yoke of neoliberal capitalism along with much of the rest of
the world (see Mike Davis,
Planet of Slums [London: Verso, 2006])
The unacceptable notion that "America is part of what has gone wrong in
the world"
"In
Europe," Obama claimed, "the view that America is part of what has gone wrong
in the world....has become all too common."
This
supposedly terrible view happens to be accurate on numerous levels. The
hyper-consumerist automobile-addicted U.S. is home to 5 percent of world's
populations but generates a quarter of the planet's climate-baking carbon
emissions. Add in 720-plus U.S. military bases stationed in nearly every
country on Earth, the threat and recurrent reality of U.S. military assault,
the U.S.-spread mass culture of commodified nothingness and the dedicated U.S.
advance of a negative (corporate) globalization model that consigns billions to
extreme poverty while the ever richer planetary few enjoy spectacular opulence
(and related political hyper-power) and you begin to get a sense of why many
world citizens might think "America is part of what has gone wrong in the
world."
Obama
did not merely defend the U.S. against the widespread (and highly
understandable) charge that it is the leading source of difficulty in the
world. No, he had the nationally narcissistic chutzpah to oppose even the
modest notion that America is merely "part of what has gone wrong in the
world."
How
could the most powerful and wealthy nation in the world - the one with the
greatest power to shape history - not be at least "part of what has gone wrong
in the world"?
America's "sacrifice for freedom around the world"
In
praising Europeans for "taking more responsibility in critical parts of the
world," Obama said that "our country still sacrifice[s] greatly for freedom
around the globe."
Here
is a useful translation for his phrase "taking more responsibility": "doing
more to help the U.S. illegally attack and occupy defenseless sovereign states
to otherwise support our self-interested definition of world order."
Obama
is free to pretend that the U.S. is trying to spread "freedom" to Afghanistan
and Iraq, but he knows very well that you cannot export freedom through the
barrel of a gun. To make matters worse,
the U.S. has undertaken an illegal and significantly oil-driven occupation of
Iraq against the wishes of that formerly sovereign state's populace. It has imposed a bloody Holocaust on that
nation, killing as many as 1.2 million civilians ("sacrifice" is relative: the
U.S. has lost 4,000 soldiers in Iraq) and displacing many millions more.
According to the respected journalist Nir Rosen last December, "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) [2].
Meanwhile,
the bipartisan U.S. foreign policy elite has no intention of leaving and
granting Iraq real sovereignty anytime soon, thanks to the country's
strategically hyper-significant oil riches.
This holds for an Obama White House as well as a McCain administration).
U.S.-"liberated"
Afghanistan is under the control of religious extremists and warlords and the
deadly U.S. Empire and its European allies (see John Pilger, Freedom Next Time:
Resisting the Empire [New York: Nation Books, 2007]],pp. 264-313).
Obama's
supposedly "freedom"-spreading government homeland's power elite has tried to
overthrow the democratically elected government of oil-rich, Left-led
Venezuela. It is the protector of
Israel's racist occupation of Palestine and of the oil-rich neo-feudal
arch-sexist Saudi kingdom, possibly the most reactionary state on Earth.
"Our common humanity"
Obama
said that cooperation across the Atlantic is the only way for the U.S. and
Europe "to advance our common humanity." Does Obama think America models
"humanity" by murdering, maiming, and uprooting millions in Southwest Asia in
the name of "freedom"? A U.S. Senator who has repeatedly voted funds paying for
the mass killing of Iraqi and Afghani children and who reflexively defends
Israel's right to bomb civilians and who vows readiness to level any Pakistani
village thought to contain top al Qaeda operatives and who refuses to take a
first nuclear strike on Iran "off the table" has no business lecturing anyone
on "common humanity." Ask the parents of "liberated" Afghani children who have
lost limbs to U.S cluster bombs about American "humanity."
Earlier
this month, the U.S. killed 64 civilians when it bombed a wedding party in the
eastern Afghanistan. It's the fourth wedding party that the U.S.-led
"coalition" has blown up in Afghanistan since the beginning of its invasion of that
country - a war that Obama badly wants to expand [3]. Obama, who recently told
CNN that the U.S. has done nothing in the world that merits apology over the
last seven and a half years [4], should ask the survivors of these wedding
attacks what they think of U.S. and British
"humanity."
"The walls...cannot stand"
Obama
waxed eloquent in Berlin about how "the walls between races and tribes; natives
and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand."
I
wonder how many Germans listening to these noble sentiments grasped that
"progressive" Obama is a close friend of the Israeli apartheid regime, which
has constructed a separation wall to supplement its already oppressive system
in occupied Palestine. How many know
that Obama supports the ongoing construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexican
border?
Obama
joined his fellow militarist John McCain in immediately supporting Israel's
bombing of Lebanon in the summer of 2006 and in reflexively defending Israel's
vicious blockade of Gaza earlier this year. The bombing killed more than 1,200
people, most of whom were Muslims. According to Obama, this butchery and the
siege of Gaza were legitimate acts of "self-defense."
Listen
to the American Palestinian activist and author Ali Abunimah on the trip that
Obama took to Israel right before coming to Germany:
"He
visited the Israelis Holocaust memorial and the Western Wall. He met the full spectrum of Israeli Jewish
(though not Israeli Arab) political leaders.
He traveled to the Israeli Jewish town of Sdreot, which until last
month's ceasefire, frequently experienced rockets from the Gaza Strip. At every step, Obama warmly professed his
support for Israel and condemned Palestinian violence."
"Other
than a cursory 45-minute visit to occupied Ramallah to meet with Palestinian
Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinians got little...Obama remained
silent on the issue of Jerusalem, after boldly promising the ‘undivided' city
to Israel as its capital in a speech to AIPAC last month... But Obama missed the
opportunity to visit Palestinian refugee camps, schools and even shopping malls
to witness first-hand the devastation caused by the Israeli army and settlers,
or to see how Palestinians cope under what many call ‘apartheid.' This year
alone, almost 500 Palestinians, including over 70 children, have been killed by
the Israeli army - exceeding the total for 2007 and dwarfing the two-dozen
Israelis killed in conflict-related violence. Obama said nothing about Israel's
relentless expansion of colonies on occupied land. Nor did he follow the
courageous lead of former President Jimmy Carter and meet with the
democratically elected Hamas leaders, even though Israel negotiated a ceasefire
with them" (A. Abunimah, ‘What Obama Missed in the Middle East," ZNet, July 24,
2008).
"No one welcomes war"
"No
one," Obama intoned in Berlin, "welcomes war."
Wouldn't
that be nice? Sadly, it's not true: Boeing and Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and
Blackwater Worldwide and many other military (so-called "defense") contractors
welcome U.S colonial "war." Obama's longstanding campaign finance patron Henry
Crown Investments is a leading war profiteer. The oil majors have done
very nicely with recent "wars" (the one-sided imperial assaults on Iraq and
Afghanistan) and are looking to cash in nicely with Iraqi oil profits gained
through "war." There are a large number of evangelical Christian U.S.
fascists who crave "war" in the Middle East. There was a whole cabal of
strategically placed elites within the George W. Bush administration who
welcomed 9/11 as an opportunity to wage a long-sought war of petro-colonial
conquest on Iraq and there are still plenty of powerful U.S. neoconservatives
(many have collected around the John McCain candidacy) who like "war" a great
deal.
Obama
appears to have great affection for the U.S. war on Afghanistan, an action that
he has repeatedly praised. He also retrospectively welcomes the first U.S. war
on Iraq (1991), an especially noxious exercise in one-sided imperial butchery
for which Obama has repeatedly stated his admiration.
"We should support the millions of Iraqis who seek to rebuild their
lives"
"We
should support the millions of Iraqis," Obama told Berlin, "who seek to
rebuild their lives even as we pass on responsibility to the Iraqi
government."
"Rebuild
their lives" from exactly what, pray tell?
Senator Obama did not elaborate on the two U.S. military attacks, the
decade plus of murderous "economic sanctions" (which killed more than half a
million children - a cost that the current Obama advisor and supporter Madeline
Albright called a "price worth paying"), and the ongoing invasion of Iraq.
Obama will continue the occupation as president, as is known by those who care
to read between the lines of his populace-pleasing campaign rhetoric.
Here
is a word that imperial Obama will never utter for what the U.S. owes Iraq:
REPARATIONS. America cannot pass on to devastated Iraq's government America's
responsibility to do what it can to repair the monumental damage it has
arch-criminally inflicted during a falsely "preventive" attack that would have
made onetime Berlin resident Adolph Hitler proud.
How
many of Obama's 200,000 German listeners knew that an Obama administration will
maintain control over Iraq even if it actually does remove "combat troops"
(just half the full U.S. force structure in Iraq) from that country "in sixteen
months"? Whether McCain or Obama wins next fall, Superpower will retain
permanent military bases in Iraq along with the biggest "embassy" in
human history - itself a permanent colonial military installation of no small
significance. The Occupier will require favorable oil contracts for the leading
U.S. and Western petroleum firms and continue to enforce U.S. suzerainty over
Iraqi air space (the nuclear power Israel must be free to fly over on the way
to bomb Iran in the name of "self defense").
Obama
reserves the right to change his squishy "withdrawal" plans in accord with the
advice of imperial commanders "on the ground."
He refuses to support legislation that would ban Blackwater and other
private security contractors from Iraq, something that suggests he would
increase the already massive U.S. mercenary presence in Mesopotamia while he
shifts some of the Empire's soldiers from Iraqi to Afghan killing fields.
"Will we welcome immigrants?"
"Will
we welcome immigrants from different lands?" Obama asked Berlin.
He
should ask himself the same question, keeping in mind the stupid and offensive
wall he supports on the southern border of his "magical" United States.
The doctrine of "Good Intentions"; Imperial violence as a "mistake"
"We
have made our share of mistakes," Obama told Berlin, "and there are times when
our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions."
Here
Obama was referring to the Vietnam and Iraq (2003 - ?) "wars" (one-sided
imperial assaults). He was talking the imperial language of the official
"doves" that Noam Chomsky has decoded for us in regard to both illegal
"wars." Obama claims to believe
that both were "mistakes," not CRIMES. These terrible "blunders" were the over-zealous outcomes of our
GOOD INTENTIONS and not the outcome of our commitment to criminal EMPIRE.
Wrong
on both counts! And some "mistakes" indeed: 3 million Indochinese
obliterated and Vietnam turned into a "basket case" and 1.3 million Iraqis
killed and counting. How many Afghanis civilians have needlessly died in
Obama's "good" and "proper" war on their country? Estimates run well into the
tens of thousands.
By
the way, in a recent interview with CNN's Candy Crowley, Obama was asked if
"there's anything that's happened in the past 7 1/2 years that the U.S. needs
to apologize for in terms of foreign policy." Obama immediately said "No, I
don't believe in the U.S. apologizing. As I said I think the war in Iraq was a
mistake. We didn't keep our eye on the ball in Afghanistan. But,
you know, hindsight is 20/20, and I'm much more interested in looking forward
rather than looking backwards" (for a full transcript: http://thepage.time.com/transcript-of-obama-interview-on-cnn)
Take
that, "Progressives for Obama" at home and abroad.
"Our public square"
"Our
allegiance," Obama told Berlin, "has never been to any particular tribe or
kingdom."
He
was speaking of the U.S. Was he right? "Our" public policy at home and
abroad has long been dominated by a relatively small corporate elite (the
"tribe" of leading capitalists?).
"We" have a long at least semi-tribal history of a sort of white
Anglo-Protestant rule.
"Every
point of view is expressed in our public squares," Obama told Germany and the
world. He was bragging about "freedom
of expression" in the U.S.
How
true is his boast? "We" don't have very many public squares
anymore. Even though its positions on various issues are widely
supported in one American public opinion poll after another, the American Left
is essentially inaudible and invisible on National "Public"
radio and the "Public" Broadcasting System along with the more explicitly
corporate media and pretty much everywhere else in U.S. civil society. In
America's corporate-supervised "managed democracy," the spectrum of acceptable
"mainstream" debate and political contestation is so narrowly business-friendly
and imperial as to amount to a kind of "totalitarianism" (Sheldon Wolin's
"Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted
Totalitarianism" [2008]). Majority public opinion is next to irrelevant in the
formation of U.S. policy and party platforms, which stand well to the right of
the actual populace.
The
U.S. citizenry's much-ballyhooed freedom of expression amounts to little more
than the right to whisper to your neighbor in the front row of a loud movie
theater. At the same time, historical free speech traditions and protections in
the U.S. have long been a great incentive for corporate and state authorities
to invest heavily in the routine practice of thought control, mass
disinformation, and propaganda (see Alex Carey, Taking the Risk Out of
Democracy: Corporate Propaganda Versus Freedom and Liberty [Urbana, IL: 1997],
pp. 11-17).
"The promise of liberty and equality"
"I
know my country has not perfected itself," Obama said in Berlin. "At times," he added, "we've struggled to keep
the promise of liberty and equality for all of our people."
That
was a remarkable bit of understatement. The U.S. has the most unequal
distribution of wealth in the industrialized world. It is the only modern
industrial (formal) "democracy" that does not guarantee health care to all of
its citizens. The top 1 percent of
Americans owns 40 percent of the nation's wealth and a larger portion of its
politicians and officeholders, including the explicitly corporate-neoliberal
Barack (Goldman Sachs-Exelon-UBS-Sidley-Austin-Morgan Stanely) Obama. Median
black American household wealth is equivalent to 7 cents on the median white
American household dollar.
As
for not always keeping liberty and equality alive for "all our people," yes,
there have been some difficulties. The
shortcomings include two-and-a half centuries of black chattel slavery (Obama
opposed reparations for that supposedly ancient crime), followed by many
decades of Jim Crow and black disenfranchisement and a continuing deep and
unacknowledged legacy and practice of harsh institutional racism. The supposedly "freedom"-exporting U.S. is
the world's leading mass incarceration state and nearly half of its more than 2
million prisoners are African-American. In Obama's own Chicago metropolitan area
at the peak of the Clinton boom, more than a third of black children lived in
poverty, compared to just 5 percent of the white kids. Of Chicago's 15 poorest neighborhoods, with
poverty measures ranging from 32 to 56 percent, all but one was disproportionately
black and eleven were at least 94 percent black. Sixteen percent of his home
city's blacks lived in what researchers call "deep poverty" - at less than half
of the federal government's notoriously low and inadequate poverty level. Only a tiny percentage of whites lived at
that terrible level of extreme poverty.
Another
thing that Obama's nationally narcissistic formulation left out is that "the
promise of liberty and equality" is not unitary or without internal
contradiction. The long dominant definition of "liberty" in the U.S. has
stressed freedom of private profit and capital accumulation for the possessors
of wealth - freedoms that are antithetical to social equality.
"We
will not be able to sustain [economic] growth," Obama told the 200,000, "if it
favors the few, and not the many."
Okay
but, as Obama has made abundantly clear on numerous occasions, Obama believes
strongly in capitalism [5] and thus in its own particular definition of growth
and development. Capitalism is quite explicitly about the concentration of
wealth (and power) - the advance of the Few over and against the lower-
and working-class Many.
"Our moment"
"People
of Berlin - people of the world - this," imperial Obama said, "is our
moment. This is our time...let us...remake the world once
again."
Nice,
but when Obama was writing for the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in
Foreign Affairs last year, he argued that "the American moment is not
over" but "must be seized anew," 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." "A strong
military," Obama wrote, "is, more than anything, necessary to sustain peace."
We must "revitalize our military" to foster "peace," Obama claimed, echoing
Orwell, by adding 65,000 soldiers to the Army and 27,000 to the Marines.
Obama's
Foreign Affairs article 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 more militarist segments of the U.S. power elite that he would not be
hamstrung by international law and civilized norms when the control of
strategic global energy resources is 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" [5].
In
Berlin last week, Obama talked about needing the help of Europe and the world
to get things done. But writing in
Foreign Affairs and speaking before various elite U.S. foreign policy bodies
over the last two years, Obama has emphasized the need for the U.S. to be
globally dominant and ready to act unilaterally when it "must."
Obama's
Berlin speech included some worthwhile comments on global warming and the
urgent need for the international community to control nuclear weapons. These
remarks merit positive attention in light of the messianic militarist
arch-plutocrat John McCain's dangerous advocacy of offshore oil drilling and a
new Cold War with Russia and China. Still, Obama's oration was a monument
to deception and denial in the service of empire and inequality and it was sad
(if not surprising) to see so many educated Europeans taken in.
The
Europeans are understandably behind the curve on seeing the deeply conservative
reality behind the "progressive" image of the Obama phenomenon. They are still at the stage that a growing
number of Americans have recently begun to transcend - the one where people
lacking appropriate institutional expressions for their progressive political
sentiments naively project their wishes onto a corporate and imperial candidate
who has been expertly marketed and transmitted as a man of the people.
While
we should recognize that John McCain is a dangerous extremist and dunderhead,
many have recently begun the overdue process of demystifying His High Imperial
Holiness The Dali Obama in the United States.
The sooner the Europeans do the same the better for all concerned.
Paul Street ([email protected])
has been demystifying Obama since July 29th, 2004 (see http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/8128). His next book is
Barack Obama and the Future of American
Politics: www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987
NOTES
1.
By which I mean a narrowing, business-friendly ideological spectrum (with
anti-capitalist working-class struggle and consciousness pushed further and
further to the margins of acceptable debate) and the growing elevation of
candidate image and marketing over substantive matters of policy and ideology.
2.
One wonders what Rosen and knowledgeable Germans would have had to say about
the following comment offered by Barack Obama to autoworkers assembled at the
General Motors plant in Janesville, Wisconsin on February 13, 2008, just before
that state's Democratic primary: "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, "putting Iraq back together."
Though "error" is not quite the word for Obama's remark, comments like
this led an exiled German (Karl Marx) to remark that "To leave error un-refuted
is to encourage intellectual immorality." For those who know the depth and
degree of the destruction inflicted on Iraq by two invasions, one ongoing, and
more than a decade of deadly economic sanctions (embargo), Obama's Wisconsin
statement was nothing short of obscene.
3. Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope (New
York, 2006), pp. 149-150; Barack Obama, "Our Common Stake in America's
Prosperity.," speech to NASDAQ New
York, New York (September 17, 2007); Paul Street, " ‘Angry John' Edwards v.
KumbayObama," SleptOn Magazine
(December 28, 2007); Paul Street, "Obama's Audacious Deference to Power," ZNet Magazine (January 24, 2007), read
at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=11936
4. John Pilger, "Obama, The Prince of Bait and
Switch," The New Statesman (July 26, 2008).
5.
"Full Transcript of July 25th 2008 Obama Interview on CNN," The Page
(July 28th, 2008), read at http://thepage.time.com/transcript-of-obama-interview-on-cnn
6. Barack Obama, "Renewing American Leadership,"
Foreign Affairs (July/August 2007).