[Peace-discuss] War is peace, ignorance is strength

[C. G. Estabrook]

["Obama, the man of peace, is planning another war to add to his impressive 
record."  Pilger, despised by American liberals for telling the truth about our 
regime, continues to do so. --CGE]

	New Statesman
	War is peace, ignorance is strength
	John Pilger
	Published 15 October 2009

Barack Obama, winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, is planning another war to 
add to his impressive record. In Afghanistan, his agents routinely extinguish 
wedding parties, farmers and construction workers with weapons such as the 
innovative Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of your lungs. According to 
the UN, 338,000 Afghan infants are dying under the Obama-led alliance, which 
permits only $29 per head annually to be spent on medical care.

Within weeks of his inauguration, Obama started a new war in Pakistan, causing 
more than a million people to flee their homes. In threatening Iran - which his 
secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said she was prepared to "obliterate" - 
Obama lied that the Iranians were covering up a "secret nuclear facility", 
knowing that it had already been reported to the International Atomic Energy 
Authority. In colluding with the only nuclear-armed power in the Middle East, he 
bribed the Palestinian Authority to suppress a UN judgment that Israel had 
committed crimes against humanity in its assault on Gaza - crimes made possible 
with US weapons whose shipment Obama secretly approved before his inauguration.

The old dog whistle test

At home, the man of peace has approved a military budget exceeding that of any 
year since the end of the Second World War while presiding over a new kind of 
domestic repression. During the recent G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, hosted by 
Obama, militarised police attacked peaceful protesters with something called the 
Long-Range Acoustic Device, not seen before on US streets. Mounted in the turret 
of a small tank, it blasted a piercing noise as tear gas and pepper gas were 
fired indiscriminately. It is part of a new arsenal of "crowd-control munitions" 
supplied by military contractors such as Raytheon. In Obama's 
Pentagon-controlled "national security state", the concentration camp at 
Guantanamo Bay, which he promised to close, remains open, and "rendition", 
secret assassinations and torture continue.

The Nobel Peace Prize-winner's latest war is largely secret. On 15 July, 
Washington finalised a deal with Colombia that gives the US seven giant military 
bases. "The idea," reported the Associated Press, "is to make Colombia a 
regional hub for Pentagon operations . . . nearly half the continent can be 
covered by a C-17 [military transport] without refuelling", which "helps achieve 
the regional engagement strategy".

Translated, this means Obama is planning a "rollback" of the independence and 
democracy that the people of Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Paraguay have 
achieved against the odds, along with a historic regional co-operation that 
rejects the notion of a US "sphere of influence". The Colombian regime, which 
backs death squads and has the continent's worst human rights record, has 
received US military support second in scale only to Israel. Britain provides 
military training. Guided by US military satellites, Colombian paramilitaries 
now infiltrate Venezuela with the goal of overthrowing the democratic government 
of Hugo Chavez, which George W Bush failed to do in 2002.

Obama's war on peace and democracy in Latin America follows a style he has 
demonstrated since the coup against the democratic president of Honduras, Manuel 
Zelaya, in June. Zelaya had increased the minimum wage, granted subsidies to 
small farmers, cut back interest rates and reduced poverty. He planned to break 
a US pharmaceutical monopoly and manufacture cheap generic drugs. Although Obama 
has called for Zelaya's reinstatement, he refuses to condemn the coup-makers and 
to recall the US ambassador or the US troops who train the Honduran forces 
determined to crush a popular resistance. Zelaya has been repeatedly refused a 
meeting with Obama, who has approved an IMF loan of $164m to the illegal regime. 
The message is clear and familiar: thugs can act with impunity on behalf of the US.

Obama, the smooth operator from Chicago via Harvard, was enlisted to restore 
what he calls "leadership" throughout the world. The Nobel Prize committee's 
decision is the kind of cloying reverse racism that has beatified the man for no 
reason other than he is a member of a minority and attractive to liberal 
sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he kills. This is the Call of 
Obama. It is not unlike a dog whistle: inaudible to most, irresistible to the 
besotted and boneheaded. "When Obama walks into a room," gushed George Clooney, 
"you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere."

Extreme and dangerous

The great voice of black liberation Frantz Fanon understood this. In The 
Wretched of the Earth, he described the "intermediary [whose] mission has 
nothing to do with transforming the nation: it consists, prosaically, of being 
the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though 
camouflaged". Because political debate has become so debased in our media 
monoculture - Blair or Brown; Brown or Cameron - race, gender and class can be 
used as seductive tools of propaganda and diversion. In Obama's case, what 
matters, as Fanon pointed out in an earlier era, is not the intermediary's 
"historic" elevation, but the class he serves. After all, Bush's inner circle 
was probably the most multiracial in presidential history. There was Condoleezza 
Rice, Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, all dutifully serving an extreme and 
dangerous power.

Britain has seen its own Obama-like mysticism. The day after Blair was elected 
in 1997, the Observer predicted that he would create "new worldwide rules on 
human rights" while the Guardian rejoiced at the "breathless pace [as] the 
floodgates of change burst open". When Obama was elected last November, Denis 
MacShane MP, a devotee of Blair's bloodbaths, unwittingly warned us: "I shut my 
eyes when I listen to this guy and it could be Tony. He is doing the same thing 
that we did in 1997."

http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2009/10/obama-pilger-war-peace