[Peace-discuss] James Petras fulminates…

[C. G. Estabrook]

Why should Petras fulminate?  Obama is planning to kill a lot of people and 
immiserate more, just as he said he would.  And Petras seems so upset at the 
prospect that he can't even get straight why our rulers would do such things.

He seems to ascribe it to stupidity: "They blindly back a small, highly 
militarized and ideologically fanatical colonial state (Israel) against 1.5 
billion Muslims living in oil and mineral resource-rich nations with lucrative 
markets and investment potential and situated in the strategic center of the 
world. They promote total wars against whole populations, as is occurring in 
Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia and, which, by all historical experience, cannot 
be won."

That's wrong both as to cause and effect.  The Clinton-Bush-Obama regime has in 
fact done rather well in achieving its real goals and will probably continue to 
do so, despite the danger to humanity.  And they are generally quite rational in 
the Weberian sense of fitting means to ends (with occasional foul-ups, like the 
Coalition Provisional Authority, but they can be corrected, with more deaths). 
They're vicious, not stupid, as the rest of the (shoe-throwing) world 
recognizes.  But Americans who see that can be strangled in the bath of propaganda.

I find myself quoting Thomas Pynchon a lot these days: "If you can get them 
asking the wrong questions, you don't have to worry about answers."  --CGE

Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> Worth pondering. I would like to ask Petras whether would have preferred 
> McCain.Palin to the here reviled Obama.
> 
> I asked a panel at the UFPJ, which  included Tom Hayden, why there were 
> no real progressives nominated to Obama's team, and received no answer. 
> I thought this was a gross omission, because it must have implications 
> for the anti-war movement. 
> 
> James Petras gives his interpretation of those implications. The panel 
> at UFPJ were not willing to consider them.  (Maybe it was too late in a 
> long session.) --mkb
> 
> <http://petras.lahaine.org/articulo.php?p=1766&more=1&c=1>


Yes, indeed, “our greatest intellectual critics”, our ‘libertarian’ leftists and 
academic anarchists, used their 5-figure speaking engagements as platforms to 
promote the con man’s candidacy: They described the con man’s political pitch as 
“meeting the deeply felt needs of our people”. They praised the con man when he 
spoke of ‘change’ and ‘turning the country around’ 180 degrees. Indeed, Obama 
went one step further: he turned 360 degrees, bringing us back to the policies 
and policy makers who were the architects of our current political-economic 
disaster.

The contrast between Obama’s campaign rhetoric and his political activities was 
clear, public and evident to any but the mesmerized masses and the self-opiated 
‘progressives’ who concocted arguments in his favor. Indeed even after Obama’s 
election and after he appointed every Clintonite-Wall Street shill into all the 
top economic policy positions, and Clinton’s and Bush’s architects of prolonged 
imperial wars (Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense 
Robert Gates), the ‘progressive true believers’ found reasons to dog along with 
the charade. Many progressives argued that Obama’s appointments of war mongers 
and swindlers was a ‘ploy’ to gain time now in order to move ‘left’ later...

The electoral scam served several purposes above and beyond merely propelling a 
dozen strategic con artists into high office and the White House. First and 
foremost, the Obama con-gang deflected the rage and anger of tens of millions of 
economically skewered and war drained Americans from turning their hostility 
against a discredited presidency, congress and the grotesque one-party two 
factions political system and into direct action or at least toward a new 
political movement...