[Peace-discuss] [sf-core] Obama's cynical task

Tue May 29 23:17:35 UTC 2012

Mort is right.

Obamney offers no hope at all.

"Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins".

--

Say it ain't true, say it ain't true, Linda Lou.  Say it ain't true, 
Linda Lou.

On 5/30/2012 3:52 AM, Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> As horrible as Obama and his administration is, Romney et al. will 
> certainly be no better, probably worse (yes it is possible), certainly 
> in domestic policy. This means that the world of the non 1% is in for 
> very tough times. The country needs a shock treatment to release it 
> from its lethargy, but the leaning left is far too disorganized to 
> manage it.
>
> A new system of government is needed to replace what is evident by 
> now; the present system is corrupt and doesn't work in any democratic, 
> rational representative sense.
>
> --mkb
>
> On May 29, 2012, at 11:26 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>
>>
>> OBAMA'S CYNICAL TASK.
>>
>> /     "Obama announces new Vietnam War memorial project. Speaking 
>> from the Vietnam War Memorial, President Barack Obama criticizes 
>> treatment of Vietnam veterans and announces a 13-year memorial 
>> program to commemorate the 50-year anniversary of the start of the 
>> war..."/
>>
>> Ten years after the US invaded Afghanistan, the anti-war movement in 
>> America looks remarkably similar to what it was in 1972 – ten years 
>> after the US invaded South Vietnam. In each case, more than 
>> two-thirds of the American public oppose the war, but the press and 
>> ‘educated opinion’ – hence the ideological institutions, notably the 
>> universities – support it. Our rulers’ task, in cases 40 years apart, 
>> is therefore to make sure that democracy is ineffective.
>>
>> The American ascendency is in fact more effective at doing that now 
>> than they were then: they learnt something from the earlier 
>> experience. (See, e.g., Michael Crozier et al., The Crisis of 
>> Democracy [1975] – the crisis being that allowing democracy in the US 
>> would interfere with elite plans.) But they also learnt that the US 
>> public will not allow things like the carpet-bombing in Vietnam: note 
>> the secrecy (from the US public of course – they’re not secret from 
>> Afghans, Pakistanis, Somalis, Yemenis et al.) of Obama’s drone attacks.
>>
>> There are other differences. The wars are very different: Vietnam was 
>> not important to the US except as a demonstration war – an 
>> illustration that countries are not to be allowed to develop 
>> independently, without coordinating their economies with US control. 
>> (And the US established the point by killing four million Asians, 
>> despite those who claim the US lost in Vietnam: its complete war aims 
>> were not achieved, but the important point was made clear to all – 
>> look at the SE Asian economies today.)
>>
>> Afghanistan (“Pipelinistan,” as Pepe Escobar says) is much more 
>> important to the US elite than Vietnam ever was. It’s the keystone of 
>> the region that the US State Department in 1945 said contained “the 
>> world’s greatest material prize” – Mideast oil. Today the US 
>> government is threatening, invading, and occupying countries from 
>> North Africa to the Indian subcontinent, and from Central Asia to the 
>> Horn of Africa – a vast circle with a 2,000-mile radius – the Greater 
>> Middle East. (The US military calls it “Central Command.”) Control 
>> and not just access to those energy resources is what the US 
>> government demands: the US in fact imports very little oil from the 
>> Mideast, but control gives the US government an unparalleled 
>> advantage over its oil-hungry rivals in Europe and Asia. We’re 
>> killing people in the Mideast and North Africa because China needs 
>> oil, and our government wants to control where they get it. Our 
>> government says that we’re conducting these vastly expensive wars to 
>> stop terrorism and protect civilians; but it’s obvious that, instead, 
>> we’re killing civilians and creating terrorists.
>>
>> Finally, the US is a very different country today. In 1972 it was a 
>> wealthy and prosperous society, with a self-confident middle class. 
>> Forty years of Neoliberal counter-attack to “the Sixties” have seen 
>> wages and standards of living stagnate or decline, even before the 
>> crisis of 2007/8 – out of which the rich 1% prospered and the 99% 
>> declined even further.
>>
>> And in these circumstances, the US population is subject to the 
>> greatest propaganda manipulation in history, because of the failure 
>> of US propaganda in the 1970s, when 70% of Americans saw the Vietnam 
>> war as “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” not “a mistake.” In his My 
>> Struggle (1925/6), “Adolph Hitler suggested that the Germans lost the 
>> First World War because they could not match Anglo-American 
>> propaganda achievements, and he vowed that next time Germany would be 
>> ready. It had a big impact on future developments” [Noam Chomsky].
>>
>> Barack Obama wrote in 'The Audacity of Hope' that “the greatest 
>> casualty of that [Vietnam] war was the bond of trust between the 
>> American people and their government.” (Paul Street, who quotes the 
>> remark, comments, “as if the deaths of millions of Indochinese and 
>> 58,000 U.S. GIs were secondary and as if popular American skepticism 
>> towards the designs of the U.S. foreign policy establishment isn’t a 
>> sign of democratic health.”) Obama sees his job accurately as to 
>> restore that “trust between the American people and their government” 
>> in regard to his war-making as well as his exploitative economic 
>> policy – although his account of the war is a lie.
>>
>> The first task of the anti-war movement today is to overcome its 
>> co-option by the Democrats in the elections of 2006 and 2008, and 
>> dispel the propaganda fog of the Obama administration. Obama’s 
>> killing in the Mideast and Africa is more widespread, efficient, and 
>> brutal than Bush’s ever was, but the policy remains what it has been 
>> for more than a generation.  The anti-war movement must make that 
>> clear to the American people – and that it’s being done in our name.
>>
>> --CGE
>>
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