Re: [Peace-discuss] James Petras fulminates…

[Morton K. Brussel]

I thought you'd be sympathetic :-)=

I believe the refusal to lambast Obama for his various choices of  
advisors at the UFPJ has to do somewhat with not offending those  
African-Americans (many on the steering committee), so proud and  
happy that Obama was elected. Only Ali Abunimah of those on the  
podium called a spade a spade, infuriated that Obama supported the  
strangling of the Palestinians, especially in Gaza. Also, I can  
surmise that the relief of so many that the Bush regime was  
repudiated with Obama's election has tended to attenuate their  
impulse to then immediately attack the beneficiary.
--mkb

On Dec 19, 2008, at 12:54 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

> 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...