OBAMA, THE POSTMODERN COUP
-- MAKING OF A MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
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Introduction: Obama: a CIA
People Power Coup, U.S.A, 2008
The need for this book became
evident to me between Sunday January 6 and Monday January 7, 2008, that is to
say, during the interval between this year's January 3 Iowa caucus and the
January 8 New Hampshire primary. From my vantage point in Washington, I was in
communication with a group of friends who were making a programmatic
intervention into the New Hampshire political and media circus around the idea
of a five-year compulsory freeze on foreclosures of primary residences, farms,
hospitals, public utilities, transportation companies, and factories. These
friends were holding a press conference in Manchester, while actively
buttonholing and lobbying the staffs of the various presidential campaigns then
active in New Hampshire, urging them to adopt and support the five-year ban on
foreclosures as the centerpiece of their own approach for dealing with the
current George Bush economic depression. At the same time, I was in frequent
contact with my old friend Franco Macchi, who has for many decades maintained an
unparalleled overview of the world strategic situation, supplemented by
extensive on-the-ground experience in Central Europe, in the Balkans, and in
regard to Russia.
My friends in New Hampshire
told me of the stunned disorientation, demoralization, and drift among members
of the Hillary Clinton campaign as it straggled in from New Hampshire on Friday,
January 4 and attempted to pivot into the urgent tasks of the New Hampshire
primary. My friends learned that the internal polling of the Clinton campaign
in Iowa had indicated that Hillary was on her way to winning the caucuses, and
that this erroneous finding had been aggressively asserted by the marplot Mark
Penn down to the moment when it was overwhelmed by caucus returns showing that
Senator Clinton had in fact been defeated not just by Obama, but by Senator
Edwards as well. As the weekend progressed, I supplemented these reports by
monitoring CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News Channel. It quickly became evident that all
the networks were in the grip of the most intense outburst of media hysteria
observed since the aftermath of September 11, 2001. The target of their
vituperation was Mrs. Clinton, whom they demanded must immediately cease her
campaign and drop out of contention for the presidency. Hour by hour, Mrs.
Clinton was submerged by a rising tide of the vilest verbal abuse. The
object of their adulation was the leptic figure of a certain Barack Obama, a
little-known Senator from Illinois with no known accomplishments or loyalties
who was beginning to make a reputation for himself as a mob orator. For
Obama, the television commentators were forecasting immediate transfiguration,
ascension, and apotheosis. For Senator Edwards, the strongest economic
populist in the Democratic field, the media had only indifference and oblivion.
I had tried to get Congressman
Kucinich to address issues of 9/11 truth, as well as the colossal scandal of the
rogue B-52, which had flown from North Dakota to Louisiana at the end of August
with six nuclear cruise missiles on board, outside of the normal legal channels
of the U.S. Air Force. Congressman Kucinich and Senator Gravel had been
unable or unwilling to address the issue of the rogue B-52 in a series of
Democratic candidates' debates carried on nationwide cable television, with the
national press present and paying attention. I had gone from attempting to push
Kucinich into some kind of meaningful action related to emerging events on the
Iran war front, to attempting to push Edwards, at least on paper the best
economic populist left in the race, into a more aggressive stance on stopping
foreclosures as a prelude to other New Deal measures to address the economic
crisis, which was becoming acute towards the end of 2007.
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI AND
OBAMA
At the same time, I was
talking to Franco Macchi about what appeared to us to be the most dangerous
foreign policy tendency common to the Democratic candidates, namely their
tendency to adopt a line of militant confrontation with Russia and with Russian
President Vladimir Putin in particular. In this context, my friend drew my
attention to the fact that Zbigniew Brzezinski, the notorious Dr. Strangelove hawk and warmonger of the Cold
War and an inveterate Russia hater, had a few months before openly assumed
a position of dominance inside the Obama campaign by accepting the role of
Obama's chief foreign policy adviser. Brzezinski, of course, had long been
infamous for his demonic role in the tragic foreign policy betrayals of the
Carter administration between 1977 and 1981. A quick check revealed that
Zbigniew Brzezinski and his son Mark Brzezinski were shaping Obama's entire
public profile along the lines suggested by Zbigniew's most recent books. Zbig's
daughter, Mika Brzezinski, was churning out the Obama line every morning on
MSNBC. A pattern was emerging. However, I still believed that Sen. Clinton
was the flagship candidate of the Wall Street finance establishment. That notion
was about to be violently swept aside by emerging events.
By midday of Monday, January
7, the media pressure for Mrs. Clinton to terminate her campaign and abort the
entire multi-month primary process of the Democratic Party had reached grotesque
dimensions. The television networks were reporting public opinion polls that
indicated that Obama was on his way to crushing Senator Clinton and Senator
Edwards in an epic landslide in the New Hampshire primary scheduled for the
following day, thus rendering their continuance in the campaign a futile
gesture. At the same time, the networks were also filling their screens with the
images of the large crowds waiting outside Obama's campaign rallies all over New
Hampshire. The corporate media were hyping Obama's slogans of "hope" and of
"change we can believe in." The most obscene media swoon of recent decades was
reaching the point of paroxysm. Given the realities of the U.S. oligarchical
system as I had studied them in connection with the events of September 11,
2001, it was clear that one of the great intelligence community mobilizations of
the decade was in progress. What was being shown on television was no longer
the standard coverage of a normal political campaign, but rather a propaganda
exercise within the framework of a CIA covert operation.
The controlled corporate
media wanted Obama nominated by accolade, by acclamation, by the mob of swarming
adolescents. He was being offered not a public office but a crown -- better
yet, an apotheosis. For the media whores, the reign of the new Messiah was
beginning.
POSTMODERN COUP D'ETAT A LA
KIEV 2004
A coup d'etat, in short, was
in progress. But it was not the coup d'etat of the Greek colonels, nor of
Pinochet in Chile. It was not a right-wing coup at all, and it was not violent
-- at least, not initially. This was a coup d'etat with leftist and
progressive overtones, carried out not by a junta of elderly reactionary
generals, but rather by a slick young demagogue of the center-left who advanced
surrounded by swarms of youthful and enthusiastic devotees. It resembled
nothing so much as the so-called Orange Revolution which had taken place in
Kiev, in the Ukraine, in the late fall and early winter of 2004. That Orange
Revolution, as informed observers knew very well, had been the result of a
cynical destabilization of Ukraine by U.S. and British intelligence --
especially by the National Endowment for Democracy, the various Soros
foundations, Gene Sharp's Albert
Einstein Institution, and other entities that we may refer to for the sake
of brevity and clarity as the privatized or quasi-governmental left wing of the
U.S. intelligence community or left CIA in the post-1982 era of President
Reagan's Executive Order 12333.
The 2004 Orange Revolution was
not a unique event, but had been preceded by similar exercises in
destabilization and subversion, especially in the former Warsaw Pact and Soviet
spaces. These have included the successful so-called Bulldozer Revolution in
Belgrade, Serbia in 2000, and the Roses revolution in Tiflis, Georgia in 2003.
There had been an attempt at a Cedars Revolution in Lebanon in 2006, but it had
been blocked by the organized mass mobilization capacity of Hezbollah. Another
attempted coup in Belarus in 2001 had also been defeated by that nation's
government.
All of these coups had several
features in common. They were always built around a telegenic demagogue. They
always featured fake public opinion polling, often combined with outright vote
fraud. They required huge sums of money and abundant supplies of narcotics to
fuel them. They featured large mobs, composed especially of politically naive
and suggestible young people, who would demonstrate and camp out in public
squares to support the demands of the coup. They presupposed a significant
control over television, radio, key Internet sites, and other media, which were
used to project and portray the youthful mob of swarming adolescents as the
authentic expression of the will of the whole people. They all arrived after
a period of suffocating repression, which they opportunistically exploited to
introduce a new order which was not much better, and which generally became
radically worse, than the pre-coup status quo. They had trademarks, logos,
slogans, and jingles straight from Madison Avenue: "It's enough!" chanted one.
"He's finished!" screamed another. One was called Resistance. One was Orange.
One was a red, red rose. Obama's color was blue, no doubt to reflect his cool
detachment from the partisan fray. Another had the green of the cedar tree.
All of them somehow ended up by installing into power NATO agents and greedy
kleptocrats in the service of banks located in Wall Street and the City of
London.
POSTMODERN FASCISM: THE
SHOCK OF RECOGNITION, JANUARY 7, 2008
All of these thoughts came
together in my mind as I viewed the images of an Obama rally on MSNBC. It was
the early afternoon of Monday, January 7, 2008.
"My God!" I exclaimed. "It's a
color revolution in the U.S.!"
It was indeed an attempted
color revolution, organized in the form of a surprise attack. At this point, my
entire political orientation began to change rapidly. As 2007 had come to an
end, I had repeatedly told my weekly radio audiences on the Genesis
Communications Network that the two most important goals in the upcoming primary
season were first of all to defeat Mayor Giuliani as the most dangerous
Republican candidate, surrounded as he was by the entire gaggle of discredited
and demented neocon warmongers. My second goal had been to deny Mrs. Clinton the
Democratic presidential nomination, based on her stubborn support for the
lunatic military adventure in Iraq, and her hostile attitude towards Iran. She
further appeared to be the consensus candidate of the Wall Street banking
establishment.
The evidence available just
after midday on January 7, 2008 clearly showed that this second point, however
plausible it might have seemed during the course of 2007, was no longer
applicable. It was now evident that Mrs. Clinton had become the object of the
universal execration and obloquy of the controlled corporate media. The press
whores were attempting to tear her to pieces. A massive mobilization of
intelligence community assets against Mrs. Clinton was in progress. At the
same time, it was now clear that the candidate of Wall Street and of the
intelligence community was none other than the unknown outsider Obama, who was
suddenly revealed as a typical photogenic demagogue from Brzezinski's central
casting department. The mass hysteria generated by Obama's joint appearances
with the New Age billionairess celebrity Oprah Winfrey now revealed its sinister
purpose: it was in every way a coup d'etat.
All of this required me to
reverse my political field immediately. My priorities had to be reordered, and
radically. I needed to shift target at once. I needed to focus on the most
dangerous oligarchical and imperialist threat. In a naval battle, it makes no
sense to scatter one's fire haphazardly among the ships of the opposing fleet.
It is far better to concentrate one's attacks on the enemy's flagship. There was
now no doubt who this was.
OBAMA'S HANDLERS: THE
BRZEZINSKI CLIQUE
I had been studying Obama's
advisers, handlers, and controllers. In about 20 minutes I was able to assemble
a rogue's gallery of these figures with a brief note about their main strategic
obsession. First on the list was of course the unreconstructed cold warrior
Zbigniew Brzezinski, with his fanatical commitment to promote confrontation with
Russia, the greatest of all possible lunacies, worse than the neocon plans for
mucking around in the Middle East. Then came Mark Brzezinski, in pursuit of the
same goal. Then came Susan Rice, infamous for wanting to bomb Sudan. Then came
Richard Clarke, the originator of the absurd myth of 9/11. Then came Dennis
Ross, more effective in undermining the Arab world because of the vague left
cover he enjoyed. People had seen George W. Bush burst onto the scene in 2000
with his mantra of being a uniter and not a divider, a compassionate
conservative, and a supporter of a foreign policy based on humility. The horrors
of Bush had been on display for almost 8 years. The lesson of 2000 had been
that the reassuring promises of a candidate with no track record and no
accomplishments were far less important than the careful study of the handlers,
advisors, controllers, and backers, since these were destined to become the
White House palace guard of the new regime. Surely the people who had been so
cruelly deceived by Bush would have the sense to look beyond Obama's messianic
and utopian verbiage to see the reality of the revanchist Brzezinski clique
pulling the candidate's strings.
The resulting instant leaflet
was distributed to the entire Edwards campaign bus, to some of Senator Clinton's
most important advisors, and to a number of journalists and television
commentators. That was the beginning of a campaign of mass political education
about the urgent danger posed by the Obama campaign -- an educational campaign
which this book hopes to continue.
FASCISM MUCH WORSE THAN
MERE DICTATORSHIP
In order to understand the
nature of the problem posed by Operation Obama, it is unavoidable to introduce a
discussion of certain features of fascism. It is no coincidence that massive
efforts are being undertaken in the current time to obfuscate and confuse
popular understanding of what fascism was. One of the most absurd of these
attempts is the book Liberal Fascism by the reactionary Republican and neocon
Jonah Goldberg, the son of the old reactionary battle axe Lucianne Goldberg, the
sponsor of military intelligence figure Linda Tripp during the impeachment
campaign against Bill Clinton. Goldberg's doltish thesis is that whenever
government intervenes in the economy, fascism results. This idiotic
viewpoint would make both Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln into dyed in
the wool goose-steppers. For Goldberg, the essence of fascism in our own time
is naturally to be sought in the Franklin D. Roosevelt New Deal -- this despite
the fact that the New Deal was a vital factor in the defeat of fascism back here
in the real world. Goldberg's book is so grotesque a tissue of distortions
that one is forced to conclude that such a hack job must have been ordered up by
the intelligence community for the express purpose of disorienting public
opinion on this very important question, precisely at the moment when Obama's
ascendancy would begin to force many serious and intelligent people to begin
rethinking the question of fascism.
For our purposes here, we need
to look at fascism most of all as a political phenomenon, and this means fascism
as a mass movement. The average American thinks of fascism as a
bureaucratic-authoritarian form of police-state dictatorship which becomes more
and more oppressive and stifling until it reaches the point where it can be
called fascist. The resulting notion of fascism as the extreme form of
oppressive top-down dictatorship is a complete and total misconception of how
fascism comes about, and one of the most dangerous delusions possible in the
current situation. If fascism meant nothing more than tyranny, oppression,
dictatorship, and police state, it would never have been necessary to introduce
a special new term "fascism" in the years following World War I. Terms like
police-state dictatorship would have been more than enough. But fascism
was something very different.
FASCISM AS A GRASS-ROOTS
MASS MOVEMENT RUN BY BANKERS
Fascism was not what most
readers think. In its origins, fascism takes the form of a mass movement.
Fascism started as a political protest movement at the grass-roots level, an
anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian, and anti-parliamentary movement with
radical cover and indeed with left cover. It started in the streets, or better
yet, in the gutter. It did not start with bureaucrats issuing arrest warrants
from government offices. It started with fervently idealistic young students,
and then brutal thugs carrying truncheons, clubs, and firearms on their way to
do battle with their political enemies, and quite often with the police. Fascism
was an affair of hooligans, goons, gangsters, and fanatics. It was the specialty
of ragtag storm troopers. It was the political theater of Mussolini's march on
Rome in 1922. The bulk of fascism's forces came from parts of the middle class
who had been driven insane by economic crisis and by military defeat, and many
were disgruntled war veterans. The rebellious despair of these social groups was
the soil from which fascism grew. Of course, after fascism took power it became
more and more evident that this radical, grassroots, anti-establishment,
anti-politician protest movement had not been spontaneous at all, but had been
carefully and artificially orchestrated by the most prominent bankers and their
political operatives. Fascism established itself by attacking, harassing, and
crushing the main political institutions of society which opposed it, most
especially the left wing political parties, trade unions, independent
newspapers, and independent organizations of all types.
After it had seized power,
fascism tended to eliminate its own radical and mass movement dimensions,
sometimes with direct murderous violence, and then to solidify and consolidate
itself into a top-down police state dictatorship. But it must not be
forgotten that such a relatively stable police state dictatorship could never
have been created without the ability of a fascist mass movement first to
systematically destroy all forms of organized political resistance inside the
society in a way that the police and the secret police simply could not do, in
which the army could never have been trusted to undertake. While many
scholars focus their attention on the ossified end product of fascism as an
accomplished police state dictatorship, for us today it is imperative to
understand it in statu nascenti, the beginnings of fascism, as a bottom-up mass
movement fomented by bankers in order to mobilize society for economic
sacrifice, for fanaticism, and for war.
FASCISM HAD LEFT RADICAL
ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT COVER
The radical,
anti-establishment, and leftist overtones of fascism may be the hardest for the
present day American to grasp. Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and their ilk appear
in retrospect as right wing extremists of the most exasperated type. But it
should be recalled that Mussolini in his early career was a socialist, and that
even Hitler insisted on calling his movement National Socialism. There was a
reason for this, and it was to recruit any and all disaffected
anti-establishment and anti-politician forces into the new movement, including
those coming from leftist backgrounds, no matter how antithetical and
contradictory they might be among themselves. Mussolini and Hitler both
claimed to be the real revolution, not the fake revolution that had been
manifested as betrayal of the workers by corrupt socialist party and union
bosses.
The question of the fascist
mass movement is the essential one. Anybody can become an individual fascist
anytime they decide to do so. It is fair to say that Bush and Cheney have the
mentality of fascists and are fascists, but this should not obscure the fact
that they do not have a fascist mass movement and could almost never be capable
of creating one. Fascist leaders have to be charismatic, energetic, feral,
cunning, brutal, and eloquent. Bush is a class A war criminal, but he could
hardly make it as the leader of a fascist mass movement. His shortcomings as an
orator are alone sufficient to rule him out. So when Keith Olberman chose to
denounce Bush as a fascist just as a number of commentators were beginning to
notice the parallels between an Obama rally and a Mussolini balcony speech, we
must suspect that this star of the Brzezinski network MSNBC was acting in bad
faith, seeking not to educate his viewers about the essence of fascism, but
rather seeking to confuse them on this score. The point is that Obama brings
together more of the characteristic features of fascism than any other political
figure on the U.S. scene, either now or in living memory. This need not mean
that Obama represents the culmination or endpoint of fascist development in this
country today. Obama may well be the John the Baptist of postmodern fascism,
destined to fall by the wayside and be supplanted by a larger figure who may
well build on the rage and bitterness of Obama's disappointed followers. It does
mean that the Obama candidacy already represents a significant step in the
direction of postmodern fascism.
Consider this series of
names: Nitti, Giolitti, Bonomi, and Facta. If you do not know who they are, then
you should admit to yourself that you know almost nothing about the genesis of
Italian fascism in the years following World War I. These are the names of
the Italian prime ministers who were in power in the years of economic
crisis and national convulsion preceding Mussolini's march on Rome in October
1922. Some of them, most notably Facta, were parliamentary cretins and
nonentities. Giolitti, by contrast, was a politician of real substance and merit
who had helped Italy develop modern railroads, modern industries, and a modern
merchant marine, and who had fought to save his country from the incalculable
folly of intervening in World War I on the side of the British and French.
Whatever his faults, Giolitti can be considered at the very least as the lesser
evil of the Old Order in Italy at that time, in something of the same way that
the Clintons would have to be considered as a lesser evil in comparison with
Bush the elder, Bob Dole, and Bush the younger. Several years went by after 1922
before most Italians realized that all the governments up to and including Facta
had represented one thing, but that the country had gone off a cliff
with Mussolini as far as political life and the rule of law were concerned. It
was the fascist seizure of power of October 1922 which marked the great point of
no return, the great watershed, even though this had not been obvious to many in
real time.
BRUNING, VON PAPEN, VON
SCHLEICHER...
Here is another series of
names: Bruning, von Papen, von Schleicher. If you do not know who these people
are, then you know absolutely nothing about the origins of the more extreme
German form of fascism which built on the experience of the Italian
original, and which is called Nazism. These are the names of the
German chancellors in the period of acute economic depression in Germany leading
up to Hitler's seizure of power in January 1933. Bruning ruled the longest,
holding on to power for about two years, ruling by emergency decree with the
help of President Hindenburg, and imposing a series of brutal austerity measures
against the wages, the unemployment benefits, and the standard of living of
Germany's working people. By now, people had been watching events in Italy long
enough to know that there was such a thing as fascism, and many of Bruning's
enemies claimed that his government was already fascist. It quickly became clear
that this had been a very foolish exaggeration indeed.
After Bruning came von Papen,
a reactionary scoundrel who helped open the door to Hitler. The best of the lot
was von Schleicher, a maverick general with progressive ideas who wanted to
start an ambitious program of public works and infrastructure building to fight
the depression and put people back to work. But von Schleicher was ousted before
his programs could take hold, and was later murdered by Hitler. It was only
after Hitler's seizure of power that the German political world recognized that
he represented a dramatic, acute, and qualitative deterioration of the political
life of the country. A reign of terror began immediately. All opposition and
worker's parties were outlawed, and members of the parliament belonging to them
were expelled. Trade unions were also outlawed, and their offices and property
seized or destroyed. The offices and printing plants of opposition newspapers
were attacked and burned down, often by mobs of storm troopers acting outside of
the law. Many of those who had been preaching that Bruning already
represented fascism were now looking back fondly on Bruning's time in office
as the good old days. Bruning appeared in retrospect as an authoritarian who
had been overthrown by a fascist. These were not the same thing, and there
was no doubt which was worse.
Some observers realized after
the fact that there was indeed an immense qualitative difference between just
another bourgeois regime, no matter how bellicose, no matter how reactionary, no
matter how oppressive, no matter how corrupt, and a fascist regime that could
act outside the law and use its mass movement to mobilize active enthusiastic
public support, and which could deploy its brown-shirted goons and fanatics, to
crush opposition without worrying about arrest warrants and death sentences.
The point of this brief
overview is to show that for many of its victims, the real nature of fascism
revealed itself as a very unpleasant surprise, and that this revelation occurred
only after fascism had taken power. In its beginning phases, fascism often
appeared to naive observers as a movement promising idealism, national unity, an
end to political squabbling, parliamentary haggling, and class struggle, plus
reform, moral renewal, and a decisive break with the corrupt and discredited
practices of the existing political order. To some, it even appeared as a
liberating force which appealed to young people and the best and most active
parts of the nation.
In a somewhat later phase,
when the fascist dictators had fully consolidated their power and they decided
to take the path of military aggression, it was found that the institutions
which might have served as focal points for resistance simply did not exist any
more, because those old institutions had been demolished by the fascists, who
had not allowed any forms of independent organization to survive in society. If
a President Obama calls the American people to war with Pakistan, with China,
with Russia, we may see his hysterical lemming legions mobilize to beat up
congressmen and crush antiwar demonstrators who dare to oppose the decrees of
the Perfect Master.
Those who have followed this
far can perhaps see that distinct analogies are emerging between post-World War
I Italy and the United States of today. These go beyond real or imagined
military defeat and severe economic crisis and also include political phenomena,
most notably Obamism.
For the more than two thirds
of the American people who have spent a considerable part of the past eight
years hating, disliking, or resenting Bush and Cheney, it may sound heretical
and hard to digest that there could be anything worse than this bankrupt regime.
But we can assure you that there are alternatives that are much
worse, infinitely worse.
THE BUSH NEOCONS: BEYOND
THE POINT OF DIMINISHING RETURNS
The current setup featuring
Bush, Cheney, and their gaggle of neocons has pretty much come to the end of the
road, as far as functioning as an effective organizing center for Anglo-American
imperialism is concerned. The neocon method has long since passed the point of
diminishing returns. Their arguments and tricks are stale and predictable. The
U.S. and British economies are collapsing. Their armies are defeated and
demoralized. They are increasingly isolated in international affairs. They are
objects of widespread hatred and suspicion in the world, and such allies as they
have are thoroughly disaffected. Their vassals and satraps are in various stages
of rebellion. Their adversaries are becoming more organized every day, most
notably in such world alliances as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
The most immediate issue for
the City of London and for Wall Street is to maintain Anglo-American world
domination in the face of numerous challenges. They must maintain their monetary
and financial hegemony, restore their diplomatic credibility, regroup and
rebuild their military forces, refurbish their alliances, intimidate their
satraps and vassals back into obedience, and prepare for a showdown with such
recalcitrant superpowers as Russia and China. With Bush-Cheney or McCain, they
have only a very limited chance of accomplishing any of this.
OBAMA AS A FACELIFT FOR A
COLLAPSING EMPIRE
An Obama presidency, by
contrast, would give Anglo-American imperialism a breathing spell, a second
wind, a facelift, and a new lease on life. If Obama were not available, the
elitist bankers would have had to invent him. And in fact, they did invent him,
probably starting as much as a quarter of a century ago, when Obama and Zbigniew
Brzezinski were both on the campus of Columbia University in New York City in
1981-1983.
Consider for a moment what
might happen if a reinvigorated labor movement were to stage a series of
militant strikes designed to win real increases in wages, benefits, and working
conditions in a high profile confrontation with management, where success would
soon prompt all kinds of working people to demand similar improvements in their
situations as well. How effective could George Bush be as a strike breaker,
given the fact that he is actively despised by a large minority and disliked by
about two thirds of the U.S. population? It is quite possible that any
strikebreaking efforts on the part of Bush would lead to an explosive general
strike that would be totally beyond the control of the current hegemonic U.S.
institutions. The moribund U.S. labor movement might well rise up and reassert
itself after more than three decades of defeat and retreat. Contrast this
with the ability of a possible Obama presidency to turn the majority of the
population against the strikers by appealing to the higher need to bring all
Americans together. It is clear that Obama would have a far greater chance
of functioning as an effective strike breaker.
Or, take the case of the new
false flag terror attack which the Anglo-American ruling elite wishes to blame
on Russia, China, or some other formidable foreign power against whom they wish
to inflame and incite the English-speaking world. Imagine a solemn television
address to the nation delivered by Bush. It is likely that more than half of the
U.S. population would not believe Bush's arguments and might reject his calls
for mobilization and sacrifice, while a sizable minority would immediately and
openly accuse Bush of being involved in the preparation and execution of the
false flag attack. Since the fall of the neofascist Aznar regime in Spain in
March of 2004, the Anglo-American ruling class has lived in fear of a potent
Spanish-style reaction to their next false flag stunt, in which the target
population, instead of blaming the scapegoats and bogeymen identified by the
regime, prefer to concentrate their wrath on the incompetent politicians who
have allowed the terrorism to take place, and who may even have artificially
created it. Consider then, by contrast a similar televised address to the nation
carried out by Obama in the wake of the same false flag attack. It is clear that
Obama would succeed in duping a far higher percentage of the U.S. population
than the despised, discredited Bush. These are the sorts of considerations which
have impelled the Anglo-American ruling class to consider turning over a new
leaf, in the form of a new demagogic profile for their entire worldwide
political operations -- a policy shift aimed not at peace or real cooperation,
but rather at the more effective waging of war, including economic and cultural
warfare.
When an imperialist system
faces an array of crises like the one which is presently enveloping the
Anglo-American world system, even the short-term survival of that imperialism
will tend to require forms of totalitarian mobilization which are exceedingly
difficult to implement by means of top-down coercion alone, and which are much
more efficient if they can be based on the voluntary assent and willing or even
enthusiastic mobilization of the masses. This is the area where fascist
methods provide a very obvious and substantial advantage in comparison with the
crude dragooning which a mere top-down dictatorial police state can provide.
Under fascism, an ideologized and self-mobilized population can be made to
police itself, at least for a time. This begins perhaps to explain why a
figure such as Obama can exercise such an appeal to a ruling elite in crisis
like the Anglo-American bankers of today.
No ruling class begins to
consider a fascist transformation except in moments of grave crisis. The
ruling class must be desperate enough so as to be willing to jettison many of
the traditional forms of their political domination and create something that
will at least look like a mass movement, which always implies some risk that the
movement will get out of hand. In addition, the ruling class will have to
grant a measure of apparent political power to persons whom they consider gutter
elements and whose presence they would tend not to tolerate, except for
counterinsurgency purposes in extremis.
The level of understanding
concerning the real nature of fascism on the part of the American public today
is abysmally low, tending toward zero. Accordingly, it will be useful at this
point to sample some recent scholarly writings which point out some of the
features of historical fascist mass movements, especially during their initial,
radical, anti-establishment mass movement phase.
FASCISM: THE LEADER AS THE
GENERAL WILL
In his essay entitled "Towards
a General Theory of Fascism," George L. Mosse noted that both communism and
fascism "were based on the ideal, however distorted, of popular sovereignty.
This meant rejection of parliamentary government and representative institutions
on behalf of the democracy of the masses in which the people directly governed
themselves. The leader symbolized the people, he expressed the 'general will' --
but such a democracy meant that, instead of representative assemblies, a new
secular religion mediated between people and leaders, providing, at the same
time, an instrument of social control over the masses. It was expressed on the
public level through official ceremonies, festivals, and not least, imagery, and
other private level control over all aspects of life by the dictates of the
single political party." [Mosse in Roger Griffin, ed., International
Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus (London: Arnold, 1998), 138]
Fascism exalted the spirit
of wartime camaraderie which had reigned among the troops in the trenches of
World War I, where class divisions and class conflicts were supposedly submerged
in dedication to the survival of the nation and its defense. Whatever their
material circumstances, the brutalized victims of the war desperately sought for
comradeship and leadership, "also to counteract their sense of isolation within
a nation which had not lived up to their expectations." (Mosse in Griffin 142)
Mosse's writings on Nazism focus on fascism's attempt to prolong the wartime
idea of communitarianism based on affinity rather than external coercion.
This is the kind of togetherness which we hear so much of today on the part
of a candidate whose central pledge is to bring the people together.
THE DIALECTIC OF HOPE AND
DESPAIR IN FASCISM
If Obama talks of hope, we
must assume that the Trilateral-Ford Foundation focus groups have shown the
prevalence of despair among the American people, a despair that must be related
to feelings of loneliness and isolation on the part of many Americans.
Fascism may be thought of as an expression of pervasive cultural-historical
as well as personal despair, with the individual deciding to seek a way out of
the despair by a flight forward into fanatical and mindless activism.
Fascism also placed much
stress on "the national past and the mystical community of the nation, emphasis
upon that middle-class respectability which proved essential for political
success. The 'cult element' ... gave direction by channeling attention towards
the eternal verities which must never be forgotten. Activism there must be,
activism was essential, but it had to focus upon the leader who would direct it
into the proper 'eternal' channels. The liturgical element must be mentioned
... for the 'eternal verities' were purveyed and reinforced through the endless
repetition of slogans, choruses, symbols and participation in mass ceremony.
These are the techniques which went into the taming of the revolution and
which made Fascism a new religion with rites long familiar through centuries of
religious observance. Fascist mass meetings seemed something new, but in reality
contained predominantly traditional elements in technique as well as in
ideology."
Fascism boasted that by
using these means, it was waging a "war on alienation." (Mosse in Griffin 142)
Alienation can be thought of as the widespread sense that one's life is so
dominated, controlled, and manipulated by outside forces that it is no longer
one's own. The irony of fascism's claims to assuage this sense of alienation is
that when a person joins a political movement for the purpose of attaining
immediate emotional relief and satisfaction, the level of subjective alienation
experienced may indeed become less painful but at the same time, the objective
alienation of the person is maximized, since he or she is now a dupe and pawn,
mere cannon fodder, for the fascist demagogue, and above all for the cynical
financiers who have concocted the fascist movement in the first place. As
Mosse wrote in his book on Nazism, all fascism promised an end to alienation,
and indeed "Hitler had a very startling passage in Mein Kampf where he says that
when a man comes out of his factory and into a mass movement he becomes a part
of a community and ends his alienation." (Tarchi in Griffin 267-68) Members of
fascist mass movements are seeking emotional satisfactions in the midst of a
bleak, desperate, and collapsing world. Can 2008 be compared with 1931 in this
regard?
"Fascism was everywhere an
'attitude towards life,' based upon the national mystique which might vary from
nation to nation. It [sought] to escape concrete economic and social change by a
retreat into ideology: the 'revolution of the spirit' of which Mussolini spoke.
... it encouraged activism, the fight against the existing order of things."
(Mosse in Griffin 145)
FASCISM AND THE YEARNING
FOR COMMUNITY AND TOGETHERNESS
Over all of its constituent
elements fascism threw "the mantle of a community conceived as sharing a
national past, present, and future -- a community which was not enforced but
'natural,' 'genuine,' and with its own organic strength and life, analogous to
nature. The tree became the favorite symbol, but the native landscape or the
ruins of the past were also singled out as exemplifying on one level the
national community, a human collectivity represented by the Fascist party."
(Mosse in Griffin 145) The supporters of fascist movements wanted someone who
could bring them together, and that turned out to be Mussolini and his
imitators.
Other commentators have seen
in fascism an attempted answer to a crisis in the mechanisms by which society
imbues and endows life and its components with meaning. Gerald Platt writes:
"... the most significant analytic point presented here is that through an
empirical investigation of ideology we may develop a set of language rules that
act as orienting principles for ideological adherents in constructing a viable
world in the face of a sense-making crisis." (Platt in Griffin 212) In other
words, fascism is an abortive attempt to provide sense and meaning to a
meaningless world through an arbitrary and usually irrational act of the will.
Klaus Theweleit discusses "the
basis on which the typically fascist relation between desire and politics
arises: politics is made subject to direct libidinal investment, with no
detours, no imprints of mama papa, no encodings through conventions,
institutions, or the historical situation. Under fascism the most common form
of the 'I' is as a component within a larger totality-ego -- the 'I' as 'we,'
pitted in opposition to the rest of the world, the whole starry galaxy This,
then, is 'megalomania' -- the desire of men to shake off what they consider to
be meaningless parental origins -- 'history will absolve me.' These men desire
to execute a hidden design of history from a position of dominance within the
largest of all imaginable symbiotic unities: 'I/We' and History. 'Freedom."'
(Theweleit in Griffin 223 224) Dr. Justin Fran correctly diagnosed Bush as a
megalomaniac, but Bush has no monopoly on this disorder. What are the
implications of a mass movement infected with collective megalomania which
succeeds in taking power?
Gene Sharp, Soros, and Brzezinski
have organized people power coups tinted in orange, red, and many other colors,
but the original fascists were way ahead of them. After World War I, there
existed Mussolini's blackshirts, the German brownshirts, the Romanian green
shirts, and the Irish blue shirts, not to mention the Silver shirts here in the
U.S. In an essay entitled "Between Festival and Revolution," the Italian Marco
Tarchi, a writer initially sympathetic to fascism, writes: "The profound
sense of spiritual, human community fostered by the experiences of camaraderie
pervades the anti-Marxist and anti-democratic movements of the immediate postwar
[i.e., post-1918] period to the point of forming a distinctive feature of the
ideology, one expressed in a whole series of external signs which bring the
militants together, unify their style, and try to win the attention, and then
the active support, of sympathizers. The whole symbology which typifies
Fascism conforms to this logic. The shirts of various colors which movements,
akin but originating in different national and cultural contexts, adopt as an
external uniform epitomize this discourse ... the problem of alienation caused
by the uprooting of individuals and families from their natural, traditional
environment, the consequence of a progressive process of urbanization,
commercialization, and industrialization, is resolved in the new community, no
longer taken for granted as something hereditary, but achieved through an act of
the will." (Tarchi in Griffin 268)
"The fascination of the ideal
community envisaged by the nascent fascist movements is twofold: on the one
hand, it presents itself as the agent of dissolution for social bonds judged to
be anachronistic, such as those of profession or 'class;' on the other, it is to
act as a binding force in the name of reality which is no longer and not only
material. The result of this mixture the shattering ... the fascist parties,
typical movement-parties, thus came into being as ... 'community parties,'
in other words parties whose membership was not motivated by material interests,
but by spiritual motives, by instinctive impulses, by demands of idealism."
The community which the fascists sought was "generated by the irrational,
non-utilitarian, organic will, the motor of every act and source of every
creation ... The modern world, by stressing its own technical and utilitarian
character, tends to reduce the sphere of the organic, qualitative, spontaneous,
pluralist, 'natural' will " (Tarchi in Griffin 269-270)
Obama supporters constantly
cite their desire to restore admiration and respect for the United States in the
eyes of the world community. Such concern for restoring the fullest possible
great power status for one's own country is a typical, primordial theme of
Italian and German fascism. These older fascisms were responding to military
defeat, the denied fruits of victory, and generally to the poor treatment they
felt their countries had received at the great world summit conference of the
age, the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919. Today's Obama supporters seem to
regard restoring the U.S. position in the world as a purely cosmetic exercise in
foreign relations; they do not for example propose to abandon the practice of
constant meddling and interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states
which has characterized Bush-Cheney-neocon practice. If anything, the Obamakins
want to increase such meddling. Obama's base enthusiastically supports U.S.
aggression against Sudan, under the pretext of protecting the southern Sudanese
from alleged Chinese "ethnocide." In reality, such an attack would aim at
cutting off Chinese access to Sudanese oil in the framework of Brzezinski's
strategy of isolating and encircling the Middle Kingdom.
Obama's base strongly
supports the Tibetan insurrection of the feudal monster and CIA/MI-6/NATO
provocateur calling himself the Dalai Lama. Once again, the issue is alleged
ethnocide by tampering with traditional Tibetan feudalism, which kept 90% of the
population as serfs, 5% as slaves, and 4% as parasitical monks who did not teach
or maintain hospitals but who demanded economic and sexual feudal dues from the
serfs. We should also take into account Obama's successful demand for U.S. state
sponsored terrorism in the form of unilateral killing of Pakistanis in the
northwest frontier area, where CIA Predator drones have now declared open season
on the local population, killing dozens in January, February, and March 2008
without permission from the government in Islamabad. Obama's striking ability to
transform anti-war left liberals into ferocious backers of war with Sudan, with
Pakistan, and with China gives some idea of why Obama has been chosen by the
Trilaterals to mobilize the United States for total war.
FROM SCHOPENHAUER TO
NIETZSCHE
It may also be useful to
illustrate the difference between authoritarian dictatorship on the one hand and
Fascism on the other using examples from philosophy, specifically the transition
from Schopenhauer (1788-1860) to Nietzsche (1844-1900). These are two German
philosophers of the 19th century. One of the best discussions of this transition
is the one offered more than half a century ago by the Hungarian Marxist Georg
Lukacs. Lukacs sees both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as right-wing extremists,
reactionaries, and enemies of human progress in general. But there is a
difference in the way that these two philosophers act out their right wing
extremist sentiments. Schopenhauer is a pessimist and a cynic who expresses
reactionary opinions and supports reactionary causes, but does this most of the
time from the comfort of his easy chair. His support for right-wing extremist
thinking is expressed in his writings and speeches, but he tended not to espouse
specific causes and stayed aloof from party politics. Lukacs views this as a
passive acceptance of reactionary rule. Nietzsche, by contrast, is much more
interested in motivating his readers to actively support the cause of reaction.
He wants to mobilize them for militant action, for energetic participation, and
finally for the wars which he felt were looming on the horizon of his time.
Today, Schopenhauer is relatively obscure, but Nietzsche remains popular and
influential, at least among intellectuals. It is also important to note that
the Nazi regime in Germany claimed Nietzsche as one of its ideological
precursors, and this claim is solidly justified. Concerning Schopenhauer,
Lukacs writes:
We have thus reached the philosophical heart of
Schopenhauer's philosophy -- pessimism. It is through pessimism that
Schopenhauer became the leading philosopher of the second half of the 19th
century. Through pessimism, Schopenhauer was able to found a new type of
apologetics. He was the founder, but nothing more. We will see later, especially
in our treatment of Nietzsche, that Schopenhauer's form of indirect apologetics
represents only the initial stage of this philosophical genre. The reason for
this is that Schopenhauer's approach, which involves the renunciation of all
social action since social action is viewed as futile, and which implies even
more the abandonment of any attempt to change society, is only sufficient for
the needs of the bourgeoisie of the pre-imperialist period. This was a time
of general economic expansion, in which the rejection of political action
corresponded to the level of class struggle and to the needs of the ruling
class.
In the imperialist epoch, although this tendency by no
means completely disappears, the social task of reactionary philosophy goes much
further: now philosophy must mobilize people for the active support of
imperialism. It is in this sense that Nietzsche surpasses Schopenhauer, even
though Nietzsche, in his role as indirect apologist of a more developed stage,
never stops being Schopenhauer's student and disciple. Thus, pessimism means in
the first place the philosophical assertion of the meaninglessness of all
political action; that is indeed the social function of this level of indirect
apologetics. (Lukacs, The Destruction of Reason [Neuwied am Rhein: Luchterhand,
1962], p. 182)
With Nietzsche, we come to
forms of pessimism and despair so profound that they kick over from passive
cynicism into frenetic nihilistic activism:
Schopenhauer's struggle against the progressive thought
of his time could be summed up in the idea that all action is to be slandered as
intellectually and morally valueless. In contrast to this comment, Nietzsche
calls for active support for reactionary imperialism. From this follows that
Nietzsche must set aside Schopenhauer's entire dualism of imagination and
will, and must replace the Buddhist myth of the will with the myth of the will
to power. It also follows that Nietzsche can have no use for Schopenhauer's
abstract and general rejection of history. Naturally, neither Nietzsche nor
Schopenhauer has any idea of what real history is. However, Nietzsche's
apologetics for a more aggressive stage of imperialism take the form of a
mythologizing of history.
Finally, since we can only briefly mention the most
essential elements here, Schopenhauer's apologetics are indirect in form, but he
openly expresses his socially reactionary sympathies. In the case of Nietzsche,
the principle of the indirect apologetic penetrates the method of presentation
itself: his aggressively reactionary stance in favor of imperialism is expressed
in the form of a hyper-revolutionary posturing. The struggle against democracy
and socialism, the myth of imperialism, the call to a barbaric activism have to
be presented as an unprecedented upheaval, as a revaluation of all values, as a
twilight of the idols: it is the indirect apologetic of imperialism expressed as
a demagogically effective pseudo-revolution. (Lukacs, 280)
Lukacs formulated the
following warning to future generations which is highly relevant to ourselves at
this juncture:
Every individual person and every people ought to try to
learn something for their own survival out of the lesson which Hitler gave the
world. And this responsibility is especially incumbent upon the philosophers,
who are supposed to be committed to act as sentinels in regard to the existence
and development of reason according to its real role in social development ...
The philosophers have failed to fulfill this role both inside and outside of
Germany. It may be true that up until now the words of [Goethe's] Mephistopheles
about the despairing Faust have not yet
become true everywhere:
Just hold reason and science in contempt,
Those highest powers of humanity, And I will have you wholly in my power.
But this still means that, if no transformation should
intervene, that there is not the slightest guarantee for any other country in
the imperialist economy, for any bourgeois intellectual culture under the
dominance of irrationalism, that they will not be subjected tomorrow to some
fascist devil, in comparison to whom even Hitler will look like a mere bungling
beginner." (Lukacs 83)
Today universities are reputed
to be centers of Obama's support in the same way that universities were in fact
centers of fascist agitation in the 1920s and 1930s. To remove some illusions in
this regard, it is enough to recall Heidegger's 1933 pro-nazi inaugural
address as Rector of the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, where he asserted
that the die had been cast in favor of fascism in Germany since "the decision
has already been made by the youngest part of the German nation." Fascism is
always likely to take the form of a youth movement, and so it is especially
important that university intellectuals take an uncompromising antifascist stand
today.
SAMANTHA POWER: AMERICANS
WANT TOTAL WAR
To transport the
Schopenhauer-Nietzsche comparison into our own time, we could say without too
much distortion that the imperialist strategy of Bush and the neocons has much
in common with the method of Schopenhauer, whereas Obama leans much more in the
direction of Nietzsche and activism. From this point of view, we can see that
the reactionary politics and bureaucratic-authoritarian repression of the Bush
era demands little more from the vast majority of the subject population than a
passive and resigned acceptance of the regime's policies of foreign war and
domestic police-state surveillance. From Bush and Cheney came no impassioned
call for blood, sweat, and tears. They did not demand war time austerity,
rationing, scrap metal drives, or strikebreaking specifically in the name of the
war effort. They rejected proposals for a reinstitution of the military draft.
Their notion of national mobilization for war was to appeal to the population to
maintain high levels of consumer spending to keep the economy vibrant. They even
offered tax cuts to the most opulent and parasitical elements of society.
Bush and Cheney have always
been criticized for their failure to exploit the events of September 11, 2001 to
impose an economic regime of austerity, economic sacrifice, wage cuts, and the
dramatic curtailment of the standard of living. This mentality is strongly
represented in the Obama campaign. As part of her "monster" tirade to a British
journalist, Obama's foreign policy governess Samantha Power delivered the
following rant: "'The Bush years have left the American people looking for
visible change. There was this post-September 11th yearning, people were waiting
for a call to do good -- instead of getting the call we were told to go
shopping. What the Obama movement has shown is that that yearning still exists
in people.' Despite wins in Ohio and Texas, she thinks Hillary Clinton lacks the
idealism to inspire." (Daily Telegraph, March 8, 2008) Obama and Power evidently
feel that the American people want total war, not just half-hearted little
adventures.
Implicit here is the notion
that the Obama campaign holds Bush in contempt because of his failure to exploit
the September 11 crisis and insist on a community of shared sacrifice and
rigorous austerity, quite possibly including forms of compulsory national
service, meaning in plain English forced labor, or even military conscription.
Bush was like Schopenhauer; he was content to leave his supporters in this state
of cynical passivity and consumerism, as long as they assented to his policies.
Obama by contrast arrives on the scene with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
already irrevocably lost, with the United States in a position of strategic
weakness and isolation, and above all with the economic and financial crisis of
banking panic, hyperinflation, and the death agony of the United States dollar
as a world reserve currency already the dominant realities of an imperialism
which is incomparably worse off than it was in 2001. Obama therefore must demand
something that goes far beyond the cynical and passive assent that was enough
for Bush.
OBAMA: ACTIVE MASS
MOBILIZATION FOR IMPERIALISM
The Obama campaign demands an
active mobilization for international aggression, imperialist domination, and
the drastic reduction of standards of living, including in the "homeland"
itself. It is no longer enough to support the economy by going to the shopping
mall in making purchases. It is now required that the U.S. population actively
embrace a stunning reduction of their standard of living and the further
immiseration of whole sectors of U.S. society. Carbon taxes will be imposed and
cap and trade systems will be financed at public expense, all allegedly to save
the planet from the horrors of global warming, even though any warming is
overwhelmingly due to changes in solar activity. Compulsory national service
and related forced labor schemes like the Green Corps will be set up to give
concrete expression to the delirious youthful enthusiasm for Obama. Other taxes
will be increased, even as hyperinflation devours more and more of the average
worker's paycheck. Sacrifices will also be explained as necessary to tackle the
problems of economic underdevelopment in the Third World. Naturally, all of the
resources thus extracted and extorted from the U.S. population will flow into
the coffers of David Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan Chase, and the other Wall Street
banking interests.
In foreign affairs, it will no
longer be enough for the U.S. population to watch the bombing of Iraq or
Afghanistan on television as if it were a video game. Larger and larger numbers
of Americans will have to be mobilized for direct and active participation in
the barbaric new campaigns now being planned on a scale surpassing the
imagination of the neocons of 2001 to 2003. Bush offered shopping malls. Obama
will demand a levee en masse, and mass mobilization for aggression, naturally
under the cover of the loftiest ideals. Bush offered war profiteering and
videogames. Obama will demand total war in the fullest sense of the term.
FASCIST IDEOLOGUE MICHELLE
OBAMA: "OUR SOULS ARE BROKEN"
It is frequently Michelle
Obama who hints in a cryptic and sinister undertone at the real goals of the
Obama campaign. Since her own mind is a rage-filled postmodern multicultural
ragbag of inchoate thoughts, she sometimes blurts out the program of the
exercise of which she is a part. "Our souls are broken," she said on one
occasion. "And right now we need some inspiration. Inspiration and hope are not
words. Everything begins and ends with hope. And the only person in this race
who has a chance of getting us where we need to be is Barack Obama." Where is it
then that we need to be? On another occasion, she revealed that her husband was
demanding that Americans not merely vote for him, but that they also reformed
their lives according to his dictates: "We need a leader who's going to touch
our souls because you see, our souls are broken," Michelle Obama said. "The
change Barack is talking about is hard, so don't get too excited because Barack
is going to demand that you too be different." How then should we be
different? In yet another speech, Mrs. Obama specified that we would all have to
give up something: "We need a different leadership because our souls are broken.
We need to be inspired ... to make the sacrifices that are needed to push us to
a different place," she said.
To learn more about the
sacrifices, we need only read the policy papers of the Warren Rudman's Concord
Coalition, Felix Rohatyn's infrastructure program, and the calls for the drastic
curtailment of entitlements coming from the Heritage Foundation, the Cato
Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Lehrman Institute, and the
Manhattan Institute.
Obama, with his 2004 call
for the bombing of Iran and Pakistan, his refusal to vote for the Kerry
amendment calling for an immediate departure of U.S. forces from Iraq, and his
July 2007 call for the bombing of Pakistan, has represented by far the most
aggressive, bellicose, and adventurous voice in the entire Democratic field,
although his deluded followers appear ironically incapable of grasping this
plain fact. Indeed, Obama has shown himself to be more aggressive and
adventurous than Bush himself. In military affairs, Obama in no way criticizes
Bush from a pacifist or antiwar point of view. Quite the contrary: Obama
attacks Bush from the right, from a more militant and activist standpoint of
imperialist barbarity. Obama attacks Bush as Nietzsche might criticize
Schopenhauer as a fanatical fascist idealist might attack a cynical right wing
reactionary war profiteer.
The social world of today's
decadent and moribund Anglo-American imperialism is full of individuals who are
increasingly being propelled by the Obama hysteria out of their previous state
of cynical passivity and into an active mobilization in the service of militant
imperialist barbarism -- in the direction of what we can call postmodern
fascism. It would of course be absurd to expect that the fascist-demagogic
synthesis engineered behind the scenes by the financiers and their think tanks
and institutes to best manipulate the intellectual and moral vulnerabilities of
Americans at the beginning of the 21st century would represent merely a slavish
copy of the fascist movements in Central Europe between the two world wars.
As we have seen, the similarities and direct parallels are striking enough. But
there are also important differences. A postmodern Fascism adequate for the
United States in the 21st century must diverge from the array of European
fascist prototypes on any number of points.
OBAMA, THE UNITER WHO
DIVIDES AND SPLITS
The prevalence of
multiculturalism means for example that the race theories and racial and
national animosities that loomed so large in earlier fascisms must now be
recast. Modern multiculturalism agrees with the race science of the early
20th century in viewing the races and their cultures, and not the creative
individual, as the main actors of human history. To that degree multiculturalism
is a collectivist theory of history -- the individual plays only a very minor
role. For modern multiculturalism, races and their cultures remain the
primary building blocks, but they are now subjected to a radical relativism
which makes them all a priori equal, in sharpest contrast to the racial
hierarchies and master race theories which obsessed the earlier fascists.
Obama's own attitude towards
race represents a chaotic mass of contradictory attitudes. First he is obsessed
with race, attempting to find his own ethnocultural roots in Kenya. His
underlying view is thus strongly Afrocentric. But as a candidate, he portrays
himself as resolutely transracial, not at all as a candidate representing the
needs of the black community, but as the spokesman for the mystical unity of all
Americans. In this regard, he appears as a more exalted political version of the
golf player Tiger Woods, whose indifference to the problems of the black
inner-city poor has been widely remarked. But, even though Obama claims to
have transcended all racial divides, his campaign remains intensely preoccupied
with identifying and denouncing alleged racial slurs on the part of his
opponents, who are systematically and routinely accused of being racist. It is
thus Obama who plays the race card, and not his opponents, as the controlled
corporate media would have the public believe. (Professor Sean Wilentz of
Princeton University has contributed a very perceptive essay on this phenomenon
which is discussed elsewhere in this book.) The logic seems to be that, given
Obama's demagogic claim to being trans-racial, post-racial, a-racial, and
anti-racist, anyone who opposes him must automatically be considered a racist on
the level of Bull Connor.
Despite Obama's claims about
bringing the American people together, there can be no doubt that the net effect
of his presidential campaign has been to inflame racial prejudices and
animosities among whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asians far more than any other
candidate in recent memory. In this regard, Obama can be seen as a highly
sophisticated application of the foundational counterinsurgency principle of
divide and conquer. Bush claimed to be a uniter but turned out to be a divider.
Obama does the same thing at an even grander scale, but does it in a way that
liberals and leftists are unable to fathom, because of their ideological
blinders.
POSTMODERN FASCISM
Underneath the entire
discussion of race there is one decisive governing principle: Fascism was
invented as a last-ditch strategy to preserve the power of the financier
oligarchy, and whatever Fascism says about race one way or another is
dictated by the prevailing idea of how best to perpetuate the rule of the
financiers over society. For the financier sponsors of Fascism, race is a matter
of relative indifference. After World War I, fascists proclaimed theories of
racial supremacy and racial inferiority as a means of defending the financier
class. Postmodern Fascism would necessarily start with a multicultural
veneer, since that is currently judged to be the best way to perpetuate the rule
of the finance oligarchs. Race itself is never primary; but the fascist
demagogue knows very well that his sponsors are bankers and financiers -- the
Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Rand Corporation,
the Chicago School, Skull and Bones -- who sponsor Fascism not as a means for
acting out their racial prejudices or lack thereof, but for the purpose of
maintaining power.
Postmodern Fascism builds on
the Malthusian-Luddite historical pessimism and cultural pessimism which pervade
the late Anglo-American Empire. Earlier fascists, by contrast, proclaimed the
need for industrial modernization and technological discovery, especially in the
area of secret weapons and the like. But the pro-industrialism of earlier
fascists concerned with increasing output for war purposes always coexisted with
the glorification of traditional peasant life as the backbone of the nation, and
with labor-intensive methods in public works which finally reached their extreme
form in the concentration camps.
OBAMA ADDICTION: MILITANT
RADICAL SUBJECTIVISTS ON THE MARCH
An Internet essay by columnist
Michael Bader provides us with an important document for illustrating one
person's psychic transition from passive cynicism and pessimism into more
militant forums of activism under the impact of the Obama agitation. Here we are
moving from historical, philosophical, and sociological questions to
psychological ones: what is it about the Obama political pseudo-movement which
is so attractive to large numbers of liberals and left liberals? What of the
psychological needs which they are seeking to satisfy by associating themselves
with Obama? Bader starts off by telling his readers that he is in love with
Obama. Not only is he smitten -- for the first time in many, many years, he is
considering taking part in a militant protest action. He wants to go to the
Democratic National Convention to force the party to accept Obama as its
nominee. At the same time, he is well aware that Obama is a hollow candidate
when it comes to his concrete program of campaign promises. He evidently feels
attracted to Obama by psychological forces which have little to do with the
kinds of reforms Obama might actually introduce if he ever took office. Bader,
in other words, is a radical subjectivist who has started to be politically
active to obtain certain emotional satisfactions which he cannot find any longer
in his alienated (or petty bourgeois) everyday life. The movement, the
experience and the process are everything; how Obama might govern is a matter of
indifference. Bader tells us:
I love Barack Obama. I love to listen to him talk. His
victory speeches after Iowa and South Carolina gave me chills. I haven't felt
that way about a politician since I worked for Bobby Kennedy in 1968. I haven't
felt that way about someone's oratory since hearing Martin Luther King and
Malcolm X. I found myself thinking: "If they try to steal his nomination at the
convention, I'm flying to Denver to demonstrate." I haven't felt that way in
decades either. I should have felt that way when they stole the election from
Gore in 2000, but I didn't. And I don't even think Obama's positions are that
great. He's weak on health care, panders on Israel, and usually sounds like the
type of mainstream liberal that I hate. I don't care, though. He speaks to my
heart and I feel inspired and moved by his emphasis on community, meaning, and
responsibility.
Here we can clearly see the
longing for community and camaraderie which so many contemporary observers
detected among the disgruntled veterans of World War I in Central Europe, albeit
decked out with modern jargon and in a modern frame of reference. Bader also
looks to Obama to fill the void of meaning in his life; this recalls Nietzsche's
approach of arbitrarily choosing any myth to believe in rather than facing the
void of a universe without absolute values.
At the same time, Bader is
aware of journalistic accounts which have criticized and ridiculed Obama's
supporters as lemmings, zombies, Hare Krishna, cultists, Charles Manson freaks,
groupies, and the like. Exhibiting the well-known weakness of the American
character, Bader is other-directed (in Riesman's terminology) and thus intensely
concerned with the shifting opinions of his shifting peer group of friends:
But I'm aware of something else, too. I'm a bit
embarrassed by loving Obama -- unless, of course, I couch my support in
hard-nosed political calculations, e.g. he's better equipped to beat McCain, he
can bring people into the political process and energize our movement, or he can
create a political space where progressives can organize. But these are
objective calculations and analyses about others and don't reflect my emotional
identification with and response to Obama. These latter feelings make me
uncomfortable. I feel like one of the herd. I think I'll be viewed as naive. I
worry that my progressive friends will see me as hero-worshiping and, for some
reason, that seems immature and slightly neurotic. And all of this is in
addition to being bombarded with media coverage frequently raising critiques of
Obama as superficial and his followers so smitten they swoon like girls getting
their first look at the Beatles.
Bader would like to commit
himself to open and militant activism in favor of Obama, but he is still held
back by his own inner fears and reticence.
FROM CYNICISM TO
MOBILIZATION FOR THE SAKE OF OBAMA
Bader traces his problems back
to his distant and alcoholic father, who mocked togetherness and family
closeness. Bader writes:
What's the source of my discomfort adoring Barack Obama?
When I was young, ... [and] uncomfortable with open-hearted expressions of love,
I became clever and sarcastic and felt a private disdain for those who were too
open about it. I became cynical. It's easy to see here that my cynicism was a
defense, one with which psychotherapists are very familiar. As a child, when
one's desire or need for something is rejected, one develops the unconscious
belief that he or she is not supposed to desire or need it.
It has been widely noted that
the closing decades of the 20th century in the United States were characterized
by a culture of overwhelming passivity, as people sat watching shadows
flickering across the screens of television sets, movie theaters, and computers.
For those born between 1963 and 1982, it was also a time of unstable families,
drug use, child abandonment, and divorce by the parents. There were acrimonious
arguments at the dinner table that Generation X wants to forget -- thus the
appeal of Obama's anti-partisan rhetoric. Out of this cultural world there
emerged a psychological type that saw aloofness, detachment, and a lack of
concern as some of the greatest of virtues all summed up in the ubiquitous
positive signifier "cool." Bader documents the pain of breaking with his persona
of coolness on his way to the rendezvous with destiny promised by Obama to his
activists:
Safety -- psychic safety -- was to be found in cynicism.
The same dynamics were true when it came to hero-worship. One shouldn't be taken
with fame, right? It's a bit demeaning. Ultimately, I became cynical about that,
too. If I was with a famous person I'd try to either ignore him or her or
interact in a way that didn't reflect a shred of awe or admiration. It was
important to seem cool. Except cool in the present political context really
means cynical. Cool means that we're not in love with Obama; we just think he's
a strong candidate. Cool means that we're not like my childhood neighbors who
love to connect with one another; we're just excited by the fact that Obama is
bringing disenchanted voters back into the system on election day. Cool means
that we don't ourselves relate to him as a rock star; we're just impressed that
he can generate that type of enthusiasm in others.
Bader now feels that it is his
moral duty to sacrifice his coolness, his cynicism, and his other mental
defenses in order to better serve his new leader and object of psychological
cathexis, Obama. Bader continues his self-criticism by talking about the painful
reaction formations that he has created in his own mind to prevent himself from
giving his heart away to a political candidate:
That we're cynical about Obama because we're afraid of
being disappointed is certainly no news flash. But cynicism of this sort is
deeper than that. We have come to identify our own longings as dangerous, our
own longings for someone to inspire us, to bring us together, our own longings
to be part of a community of meaning again in politics, our own wish to be
connected to something bigger than ourselves, a "something" that Barack Obama
embodies, the "something" that gives us a chill when we hear him speak. We have
been disappointed in our lives in both personal and public spheres. We dread
being embarrassed again by loving someone or wanting something that we can't and
aren't supposed to have. We feel a tremendous pressure, internally and
externally, to be "realistic" and to accept what is as what is supposed to be.
To not be realistic is to risk humiliation and rejection. And this danger lies
in wait behind our relationship to Obama.
OBAMA AS EXISTENTIALIST
MYTH
Reaching the conclusion of his
monologue, Bader commits himself to active efforts as an organizer on behalf
of the new leader. He does this even though he is well aware that the concrete
politician Obama is in all likelihood a charlatan using people like him as
useful dupes on his path to power. Even so, he gets the emotional reward of
joining the pseudo-movement for Obama. Bader's choice of pro-Obama activism is
an act of pure irrational existentialist caprice, justified only by the
radically subjective satisfaction that he derives from his new life as an Obama
activist:
Obama may yet disappoint us. In fact, he likely will. And
yet, somehow he has put the issues of hope, possibility, meaning and community
back into public life. He has reminded many of us of who we are and who we want
to be. We should celebrate this. We should celebrate it and take it seriously as
evidence of what is possible. We should acknowledge and embrace our own feelings
and, through such self-awareness, recognize that the feelings that Obama
triggers lie at the heart of every person that we're trying to organize, and
it's our challenge to figure out how to elicit these feelings. The Right does it
through appeals to patriotism, family, and community, although for them it's a
jingoistic patriotism, a conventional heterosexual family, and a predominantly
white community. The new mega-churches do it through addressing the needs of
their parishioners at all levels and dimensions of their lives, including their
needs for meaning, recognition, connectedness, and agency. (Michael Bader, "I'm
Tired of Being Cool -- Understanding My Love Affair With Barack Obama,"
AlterNet, March 6, 2008)
MEIN KAMPFCHEN: THE PATHOS
OF THE OBAMAKINS
The world, Bader seems to
imply, is inherently meaningless and can only be endowed with meaning by an arbitrary choice, no matter how
irrational and self-destructive a choice might be. This outlook has much in
common with Nietzsche. It should be obvious that mass movements made up of irrationalists who believe these things can
rapidly become incompatible with the future of representative government in the
United States. How, for example, can such an individual be shown that his
devotion to Obama represents a threat to himself and to society in general?
As long as the immediate satisfaction of one's own interior and psychological
needs is the be-all and end-all of political life, we might as well be dealing
with drug addicts. If a majority of individuals in any given society reach the
mental state exemplified by Bader in his article, a point of no return may well
be passed beyond which democratic institutions give way to mob rule (ochlocracy)
by swarms of militant radical subjectivists intent on the satisfaction of their
own irrational psychological needs, and thus become completely unworkable.
All this takes us back to what happened in Central Europe between the two world
wars of the last century.
SATISFACTIONS OF THE MOB OR
FUSED GROUP
The most obvious form of
psychological satisfaction sought by the devotees of Obama is the indescribable
elation of being part of a mob. Apart from the fading memories of an
occasional spring riot when they were in college, the Obamaphiles have often
never tasted this feeling before in their lives. The inebriation of the mob
has been described by sociologists as the process of losing one's own individual
existence in a fused group. The mob or fused group offers immediate forums
of community, belonging, and togetherness. The mob holds out the promise of
washing away the painful sense of alienation as discrete individuals which many
Obama supporters have felt all their lives. Obama speaks of hope, of bringing
people together, and of overcoming the bitter divisions of partisan politics,
but the immediate emotional satisfaction which he offers comes in the form of a
personal victory over alienation by submerging oneself in the fused group. This
is the real magic of the Messiah.
OBAMA AND GENERATION X: THE
FASCIST POTENTIAL
Obama's demagogic attack in
his notorious and megalomaniacal Joshua speech on the so-called baby boom age
cohort born in the two decades after the end of World War II reflects what
appears to be the generational composition of his own support. Obama's birthday
of August 4, 1961 places him at the tail end of the postwar baby boom, which can
be thought of as coming to an end with the assassination of President Kennedy in
Dallas in November 1963. But naturally such an indication can only be
approximate. Obama's background of abandonment by his father, followed by a
time spent separated from his mother when he lived with his grandparents, all
complicated by extensive teenage drug use including marijuana, cocaine, and
possibly more all this gives Obama strong affinities with the so-called
generation X, an age cohort composed to a considerable extent of the hapless
victims of the breakdown and chaos of American society during the two decades
after the Kennedy assassination. The Xers were born into homes ravaged by
drug use, promiscuity, alcoholism, crime, cultural degradation, and divorce, as
living standards collapsed, and opportunities for productive employment and
upward social mobility became harder and harder to find. For the Xers, there
seemed to be no social safety net, and an alarming proportion of the children
born during these years were simply abandoned by one or both of their own
parents. For the Xers, there have been few of the scholarships, fellowships,
low-interest loans, or other forms of assistance which were available in the
late New Deal. Because of the terrible cruelty of the social conditions which
they have known, many Xers have concluded that society is indeed a jungle where
charity and human solidarity do not exist, and where brutality and heartlessness
rule. Many Xers feel that if there was no social safety net for them when
they needed it, no one else should be treated any differently, and it is from
this group that Ron Paul was able to draw such support as he garnered for a
Herbert Hoover style presidential campaign based on a platform which implied the
abolition of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment
insurance, Head Start, and WIC, submitting the American people to the full fury
of the cartel-dominated "market" in the midst of a world economic depression.
The Xers were the age cohort which has most consistently supported the bombing
of Iraq during the first Gulf War, the bombing of Serbia in 1999, and the
current war in Iraq.
THE LOST GENERATION:
MUSSOLINI AND HITLER
The recent generation which
exhibits the greatest similarity with Generation X is the so-called Lost
Generation, born between about 1885 and 1905, which is associated in the popular
mind with the American expatriate circles of the hapless alcoholic F. Scott
Fitzgerald, and the worshipper of brutality and cruelty Ernest Hemingway in
Paris in the 1920s. But the Lost Generation was also the age cohort which
included the greatest proportion of front-line troops who saw action in the
trenches of World War I, and which produced such political leaders as Mussolini,
Hitler, and Stalin. The Lost Generation was the generation of fascism, and it
has long been evident that generation X might pose a problem of similar nature.
It is this fascist potential of Generation X which Obama is attempting to
realize. His Joshua speech, discussed in detail elsewhere in this book, is an
attempt to appeal to the resentments of the Xers over the deprivations and
humiliations which they have suffered, in their view at the hands of more
affluent and older yuppies from the postwar age cohort. This appeal by Obama is,
as always, purely demagogical. One of the greatest negative impacts on the life
of generation X came with the collapse of the U.S. industrial economy during the
Carter administration, a regime dominated by David Rockefeller, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, Paul Volcker, and other members and friends of the Trilateral
Commission who are today supporting Obama.
MILLENNIALS BETWEEN FASCISM
AND ANTI-FASCISM
The other generation which
Obama is seeking to recruit is the so-called Millennials, those born between
about 1982 and 2001. This generation is on the whole far more optimistic than
the Xers. In contrast to the angry and tormented loners who are heavily
represented in the ranks of Generation X, the Millennials exhibit a pattern of
happy collectivism and positive thinking. The propaganda of the controlled
corporate media is making a tremendous effort to convince the Millennials that
Obama is indeed their man, but this argument is based on tainted polls which
are extremely unreliable and highly suspect. Anecdotal evidence suggests
that there is far more indifference for Obama on college campuses than there is
enthusiasm. Since all high school and college students today belong to the
Millennials, it would be urgent to offer a guaranteed free college education for
all those graduating from high school. It would also be urgent to propose an
ambitious national and international program for the exploration and permanent
colonization of the moon, Mars, and other nearby celestial objects. Far more
than the Xers, the Millennials have an immense innate capacity for scientific
optimism and technological rationality, and it is imperative to tap these
resources for the future progress of humanity. Otherwise, the danger is that the
Millennials could be recruited more or less en bloc, given their collectivist
tendencies, for the Obama crusade.
Although it is sometimes
possible to make meaningful generalizations about the political and social
characteristics of generational groups, it is above all important to remember
this: human affairs are ruled by free will, not by determinism of any kind.
Great leaders and great minds are the ones who have fought against the majority
views of their contemporaries, no matter what generation they belonged to.
Generational origins may impel, but they can never compel, and everybody is
always free to reject the consensus opinions of their peers. Nobody should ever
believe that the accident of being born in a certain year forces them to believe
or to do anything.
2008: A PARTY RE-ALIGNMENT
FOR THE NEXT FORTY YEARS
This book is offered in the
hopes of prodding the American public and Democratic primary voters and
activists in particular to pause and reflect on the huge stakes involved in the
2008 presidential contest. This year's election marks a party realignment, an
event which has occurred before in American history after the 1788 adoption of
the Federal Constitution, only five times so far in 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932, and
1968. The events of 2008 are likely destined to found a new party system
which will endure for the next three to four decades, decisively impacting the
lives of everyone living on Earth today. Decisions of such vast implications
are obviously far too important to undertake under the influence of media
manipulation, or in some burst of enthusiasm about a seemingly attractive new
candidate about whom we know virtually nothing. The great test today is to
found a national progressive coalition capable of replicating the achievement of
the common front which supported Franklin A. Roosevelt's New Deal, starting in
1932. In that year, Roosevelt was able to unite the big city Democratic
machines, resurgent organized labor, the solid South, and progressive
intellectuals. A decisive addition came in the form of black voters, who had
previously been loyal to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, but who now
made a permanent choice in favor of the Democrats. The resulting coalition
dominated American politics until it was destroyed by the folly of Lyndon B.
Johnson, who insisted on pursuing the senseless and criminal war in Vietnam.
In 2008, it is still
possible that a new progressive coalition could be built around the existing
Democratic Party, although this is by no means guaranteed. The great issue of
our time is to incorporate new groups of voters into the progressive front.
Chief among these are the Hispanics or Latinos, who are now the largest single
minority in this country. Another indispensable group is the Asian-Americans,
who are of decisive importance in a number of states. If the Hispanics and
the Asian-Americans could be permanently incorporated into the existing (flawed)
progressive coalition, the resulting force could be enough to dominate the
Electoral College, and lead this country out of the current total crisis. If
Hispanics and Latinos permanently join the Democratic Party, California will
remain locked up for the Democrats for the foreseeable historical future.
Florida would no longer be a swing state or battleground state, but would be
solidly incorporated into the Democratic column. The vital state of Texas,
instead of being an automatic win for the Republicans, would become a
battleground state, forcing the expenditure of large amounts of money and energy
by the national Republican party. States like Arizona, New Mexico, and others in
the intermountain West and high plains, would also gravitate towards the
Democratic column.
THE REAGAN DEMOCRATS
The other requirement is to
re-incorporate the Reagan Democrats into the Democratic Party. These are middle
aged and older blue-collar, ethnic, and Catholic voters heavily concentrated in
states like Ohio, Pennsylvania. They were driven out of the Democratic Party by
the ultra-left excesses of the McGovernites, and then by the
Carter-Rockefeller-Brzezinski Volcker catastrophe, which destroyed the economic
viability of their communities and cost many of them their jobs. A Democratic
Party characterized by elitist, ultra-left, and Malthusian social and
educational policies and right-wing economic policies of the type represented by
Obama will never recapture the Reagan Democrats. By contrast, this is a
demographic which has no difficulty in supporting Sen. Clinton. All this would
mean that, with Sen. Clinton as the Democratic nominee in 2008, the Southern
strategy or Reagan coalition which has dominated between 1968 and 2006, would be
supplanted by something new and much more promising. It would not be the
messianic-utopian promise of singing tomorrows. It would merely represent a new
playing field, slightly skewed in favor of New Deal solutions.
None of this would be much
comfort for anyone if we were proposing merely to assign a more or less
permanent absolute majority in the Electoral College to the politically
correct liberal totalitarian oligarchs of the Nancy Pelosi-Jane Harmon
school, who are now so visible in the ranks of the Democratic leadership.
This, of course, is not what we intend. The liberal totalitarians are largely
the residue of decades of defeat, demoralization, disillusionment,
disorientation, and corruption that go all the way back to the Nixon era. As of
the time that this is being written in late March 2008, it would appear that a
Democratic landslide may be in the offing for the November 2008 congressional
elections. If we can use the 1976 post-Watergate elections as a rule of thumb,
it is likely that the Democratic Party will enjoy a two to one majority in the
next House of Representatives, and a substantial supermajority in the Senate.
This would mean the largest infusion of new members of Congress in many decades,
helping to bring the real day-to-day concerns of working families into halls so
long dominated by corporate lobbyists and Malthusian ideologues. The main
excuse offered by corrupt and incompetent Democratic Party leaders has been
their anemic majorities in both houses of Congress; the November 2008 elections
may well destroy that alibi and open the door to decisive action. This, at
least, is the potential inherent in the ongoing party realignment which is
unfolding around us.
In the middle of all these
developments, there has emerged that candidacy for president of a certain Barack
Obama. Obama appears as a naturally talented orator for an upscale mob,
mellifluously purveying an edifying rhetoric of national healing, bringing
people together, reaching across the aisle, quelling partisan passions,
and fostering national reconciliation.
Although some concrete policy
proposals are actually offered, the overwhelming impression is one of vagueness,
recalling the lack of specificity or "fuzziness" issue which was mentioned
during the Jimmy Carter campaign of 1976. For many of his enthusiastic
followers, Obama plays the role of a blank slate upon which all their fondest
hopes, dreams, and aspirations may be projected in hopes of fulfillment. He
is a kind of political Rorschach test, where each person tends to see whatever
he or she finds most congenial. Obama has unquestionably been the beneficiary of
the biggest sustained effort of mass media manipulation since the events of
September 11, 2001. Notably, while Obama promises unity, his campaign has in
practice shattered the U.S. electorate along every possible line -- white vs.
black vs. Latino, old vs. young, men vs. women, and even among the main
religious groups.
LOOK AT THE HANDLERS,
ADVISERS, CONTROLLERS, BACKERS
Politicians generally lie, so
we need to develop a methodology that will permit the average voter, the
ordinary American, to detect such lies in aspiring political leaders. One
obvious way to do this is to carefully examine the public statements of the
candidate. Even the cleverest demagogue is seldom so well disciplined as to
hide the real agenda in 100% of all public appearances. Sooner or later,
something of substance will be blurted out. In the case of Obama, many might
be surprised to find that he is the most extreme warmonger of the entire
Democratic Party field, based on his own statements during the televised
presidential debates. In the Chicago debate of July 2007, Obama announced his
intention to bomb Pakistan without consulting the government of that nation, in
order to eliminate what he called terrorist targets. This was a highly
provocative and adventurous statement, and Mrs. Clinton criticized it as
irresponsible. Senator McCain found that it underlined how inexperienced Obama
actually was. Even the tenant of the White House, long considered nec plus ultra
in militaristic adventurism, stressed that he would never intervene in Pakistan
without securing the cooperation of President Musharraf.
This exchange firmly
established Obama as the most trigger-happy of all the Democratic
contenders. Then there was the matter of economics. Here Obama rejected
Senator Clinton's call for a freeze on home foreclosures, and instead offered
counselors to provide emotional support for desperate homeowners as they were
thrown out onto the streets. Obama was opposed to including money for winter
fuel assistance to poor families (LIHEAP) as part of the so-called stimulus
package passed by Congress in February 2008. In other words, Obama was running
clearly to the right of Senator Clinton on economic issues of critical
importance to working families -- to say nothing of the fact that he had been
running far to the right of Senator Edwards until the latter dropped out of the
race. So here we already find evidence that Obama's messianic and utopian
rhetoric does not appear to be backed up by policies that would actually benefit
hard-pressed working families in this country.
BUSH AND THE NEOCON VULCANS
Even more important than the
close textual analysis of the candidate's speeches is an examination of the
candidate's advisors, handlers, backers, contributors, and controllers. Here
voters should ask themselves what, if anything, they have actually learned from
the widespread buyers' remorse suffered in regard to George Bush and his 2000
campaign. During that campaign, the current tenant of the White House argued
that he was a uniter, and not a divider. He famously described himself as a
compassionate conservative. He promised the foreign policy based on humility. He
promised to reach across the aisle in quest of compromise. How could the
average voter have determined at that time that Bush was lying? The most obvious
method would have been to look at Bush's handlers, backers, and controllers.
A cursory examination would have revealed the presence of a group calling
itself the Vulcans, composed of figures like Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas
Feith, Condoleezza Rice, and other aggressive neocon ideologues with strongly
militaristic tendencies.
It was from this pool of
neocon warmongers, all bitterly nostalgic for the confrontational atmosphere of
the Cold War, that Bush's White House staff, cabinet and subcabinet would
obviously be drawn. The Bush campaign even tacitly acknowledged that their
candidate knew nothing of foreign policy, but intended to surround himself with
the best available foreign policy talent, who would prepare his options and
guide him towards the correct decision in case of crisis. Any president
without a visible track record in foreign policy must automatically be evaluated
in these terms, since it is the advisors and handlers who will take over the
National Security Council, the State Department, and the intelligence agencies,
and impose the policies with which they are publicly identified. That is
simply a truism of the weakened post Truman, post-Watergate presidency. In the
case of Obama, this level of analysis leads us directly to the extended family
of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Trilateral Commission co-founder and infamous
warmonger who did so much to destroy the Carter presidency thirty years ago, and
who is now eager for a last hurrah, using the vehicle provided by Obama.
THE PUPPET PRESIDENCY: THE
CARTER TRILATERAL PARADIGM
Another relevant case is that
of Jimmy Carter, the little-known governor of Georgia who came out of nowhere in
1975 and 1976 to prevail in the Democratic primaries and go on to defeat
President Ford. Carter was also prodigal in his utopian promises: a classic
was his famous pledge, "I'll never lie to you." He promised the American people
a government as good and as decent as they were. "Why not the best?" was another
of his favorite refrains. How would it have been possible for American voters in
1976 to foresee the catastrophic nature of the coming Carter administration? The
most obvious fact was that Carter's principal foreign policy adviser was none
other than Zbigniew Brzezinski, cofounder with David Rockefeller of the
Trilateral Commission, a cabal of international bankers from Europe, the United
States, and Japan, all assembled under the leadership of David Rockefeller of
the Chase Manhattan Bank. Brzezinski had been known as an extreme anti-Soviet
and anti-Russian hawk from the 1950s on. Brzezinski then became the director of
Carter's National Security Council, where he oversaw the overthrow of the Shah
of Iran, and the installation of the Khomeini dictatorship. Brzezinski may be
justly regarded as the father of modern Islamic fundamentalism. His role was not
a blunder but the result of studied geopolitical calculation: Brzezinski argued
that Islamic fundamentalism was the main bulwark against Soviet communism;
Brzezinski thus qualifies as the progenitor of al Qaeda. He provoked the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan, supported Pol Pot in Cambodia, and wrecked U.S.
relations with the French and German governments of the time. More than once
during these years, the world teetered on the edge of a superpower thermonuclear
confrontation provoked by Brzezinski. His ruling passion was and is a burning
hatred of Russia, and it was immaterial to him how much damage his tactics did
to the United States or to his nominal boss, Jimmy Carter.
Russian leaders are well aware
of Brzezinski's role and intentions. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov commented
in the summer of 2008:
Ideology, when confused with practical policies, obscures
one's vision and reason. This may be illustrated by the words of Zbigniew
Brzezinski, who claimed that it had been the U.S. that provoked the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan. This suggests that the U.S. played a greater role than
usually thought in giving birth to al-Qaeda. The law of "unintended
consequences" more often than not works in situations where ideology-inspired
enthusiasm comes into play. ("Containing Russia: back to the future?" August 15,
2007)
Americans should ponder the
wisdom of putting the White House under the control of Brzezinski, whose very
presence is already a major irritant in relations with Russia, a country that
owns the largest nuclear stockpile on earth.
"BRZEZINSKI IS TRYING TO
CONCEAL HIS INVOLVEMENT WITH BARACK OBAMA'S TEAM"
Brzezinski has successfully
duped large numbers of left liberals about his own role by the simple expedient
of coming out against Bush's conduct of the Iraq war. Russians are much smarter
and have not been fooled, since they know that the war Brzezinski wants is
directed against them. Moscow News noted that "Zbigniew Brzezinski ... is
trying to conceal his involvement with Barack Obama's team." (Moscow News,
April 3, 2008)
When the Moscow business daily
Kommersant wanted to know about Obama's intentions, they went to Brzezinski,
since they knew he would be running the show. The acrimony and clarity of the
interview makes it well worth citing at some length:
Brzezinski, in spite of his age, continues to travel
extensively ... In addition, he sometimes accompanies presidential candidate
Barack Obama in his travels around the country. Brzezinski has supported Obama
since last summer. He stated that the senator from Illinois was the only
candidate who stood for a radical change in U.S. foreign policy, the military
campaign in Iraq first and foremost. The Illinois senator and the author of
The Grand Chessboard first appeared together in September 2007 in Iowa.
Brzezinski introduced Obama to the audience, and then Obama spoke about his
foreign policy program. His main position is the complete withdrawal of American
forces from Iraq by the end of 2009. His main long-range policy is a
rejection of military force in favor of "soft power," the economic and cultural
influence of the U.S. on the rest of the world.
Although Brzezinski is considered in Russia practically
the main Russophobe among the American political elite, in the U.S., he is not
considered a specialist on Russia ... the last article Brzezinski wrote was
called "Putin and Beyond," published in The Washington Quarterly. "The West's
strategy should not be built upon making things pleasant or convenient for
Russia. Making Russia a partner at any cost is not what the West needs today,"
he states, summing up his article. Brzezinski said he does not believe that
there will be liberalization soon in Russia under President Dmitry Medvedev. He
compares that power structure in Russia as it has taken shape since the March 2
election with that of Fascist Italy. "The head of state was nominally the king,
but Mussolini set policy. Putin is also considered the national leader. He chose
Medvedev himself. The logical conclusion is that Putin will be on top in the
near future, and Medvedev will do what he tells him to do." [...]
Hearing that he is called a Russophobe in Russia and
thought to be the developer of a plan to divide the country into parts,
Brzezinski's eyes flash with annoyance. "Show me the place in any of my books
where I wrote about that," he snaps. Brzezinski calls himself an optimist in
Russian-American relations and says the younger generation of Russian and
Americans will find much in common as soon as "the dinosaurs of the Cold War"
die out. The chief specialist on Russian-American relations in the Brzezinski
family, and also on the Obama staff, is Brzezinski's oldest son Mark. In 1999
and 2000, Mark Brzezinski was director for Russia and Eurasia of the National
Security Council under president Bill Clinton. "It's possible that Putinism
may be the last gasp of the old regime, and it may well be the case that within
the next decade, the Putin-Medvedev government might be replaced by a new
generation of Russians, many of them who are trained in the west ... who are not
products of the KGB and more open to the West," Mark Brzezinski said recently.
He will most likely occupy a high-profile post in the administration, if Obama
is elected president.
Engaged in our conversation, Brzezinski completely
forgets about our 15-minute time limit. "Don't you think the younger generation
of Russians has a much warmer attitude toward America?" he asked toward the end
of the conversation. "No, it seems to us that the young have an even worse
attitude toward America than those over 30." "That can't be. I hope you are
wrong. Write me, please, later and tell me what the reaction to this interview
is, okay?" (Mikhail Zygar and Nargiz Asadova, "Real Live Redbaiters," Moscow
Kommersant, March 27, 2008)
The dark and realistic view of
Brzezinski is hegemonic among Russian leaders. President Vladimir Putin told a
group of foreign reporters on June 4, 2007: "You talk about public opinion.
Public opinion in Russia is in favor of increasing our security. Where did you
get a public opinion that we should fully disarm and then, according to some
theoreticians, such as Brzezinski, divide our territory into three or four
states? If there is such a public opinion, I would disagree with it." (Ibid.)
It is worth pointing out
that Carter did not choose Brzezinski; it was in actual fact Brzezinski who had
chosen Carter to be the Trilateral candidate for president in 1976. As
Brzezinski writes in his book Power and Principal: Memoirs of the National
Security Adviser 1977-1981 (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1985): "I
first met Jimmy Carter at one of the early meetings of the Trilateral
Commission, which I directed in the early 1970s. I remember discussing his
membership with my two principal Trilateral Commission colleagues, Gerard Smith
and George Franklin. We wanted a forward-looking Democratic Governor who
would be congenial to the Trilateral perspective. Reubin Askew of Florida
was mentioned as a logical candidate, but then one of them noted that Jimmy
Carter, the newly elected Governor of Georgia, courageous on civil rights and
reportedly a bright and upcoming Democrat, was interested in developing trade
relations between his State of Georgia and the Common Market and Japan. I then
said, 'Well, he's obviously our man,' and George Franklin went down to Atlanta
to explore his background further and came back enthusiastic. Jimmy Carter was
invited to join and he accepted."
HOW ZBIGGY CHOSE JIMMY
Brzezinski continues his
narrative: "In the course of 1974 I was told that Jimmy Carter had declared his
candidacy for the Presidency and that he needed advice. I decided, therefore,
to approach him, largely because I felt that he would spread the Trilateral
Commission's concept of closer and more cooperative relations between the United
States on the one hand and Europe and Japan on the other. I did not then
think of him as a candidate with whom I would become closely identified. I wrote
him a note making an offer of help, and received in return a handwritten note,
dated December 31, 1974: 'To Zbigniew Brzezinski -- Thank you for your offer to
help me with analyses of foreign affairs issues. I look forward to meeting with
you for a personal discussion, and hope that in the meantime you would let me
have any memos or articles which would be instructive to me. The Trilateral Com
experience has been a wonderful opportunity for me, and I have used it perhaps
even more than you could know. Your friend, Jimmy."'
Brzezinski goes on: "Through
the spring of 1975 I sent Jimmy Carter various materials, including some of my
speeches. I would receive from time to time handwritten notes expressing
appreciation, occasionally praising me for the ideas that I had expressed, and
reserving 'the right to plagiarize freely.' I became increasingly impressed by
him, but the turning point came in the summer of 1975 when Carter and I, as well
as other Commission members, attended a Trilateral meeting in Kyoto, Japan. At
the Commission meeting itself, Carter spoke forcefully and clearly on behalf of
a fair Middle East settlement as very much in the U.S. national interest.
Accordingly, I complimented him publicly at one of the plenary sessions.
Afterwards, and quite unexpectedly, he asked me if I would be willing to attend
a press conference, dealing with his candidacy, that he was giving to a group of
American newspapers. I was a little surprised at the time, but concluded that
he probably wanted to show the newspapermen that his candidacy was being
taken seriously and that he could count on expert advice in his campaign.
His press conference made a believer of me." According to contemporary
accounts, Carter was introduced to the Kyoto Trilateral meeting by Gianni
Agnelli of the Italian FIAT automobile company, who acclaimed Carter as "the
next president of the United States."
Brzezinski says that he was
tempted to support the campaign of Senator Henry Jackson of Washington state,
the arch-neocon Cold Warrior who represented Boeing in the U.S. Senate, but
"Henry Jackson, who appealed to me the most on substantive grounds, was
vulnerable as a relatively colorless candidate ... By the end of 1975 I had
emerged as Carter's principal foreign policy adviser. In late December he
asked me 'to develop for me the outline of a basic speech/statement on foreign
affairs ... I agree with your order of priorities. I would also like to talk to
you re more definite analyses and your personal campaign help. Your friend,
Jimmy."' (Brzezinski 1985, 57) For those who can read between the lines and
disregard the little subterfuges which Zbig has inserted so that things will not
look too blatant, this is actually a description of how Jimmy Carter was
selected by a group of bankers to become the president of the United States with
their decisive financial support. Hitler had Schacht and Krupp, the
Herrenklub and the Thule Gesellschaft. Carter had David Rockefeller,
Brzezinski, the Trilaterals and the Council on Foreign Relations. Obama has all
of these, plus special assistance from the Ford Foundation, which is practically
his mothership.
Another member of the
Trilateral Commission who was to play an important role during the Carter years
was Paul Adolf Volker, who was appointed by Carter to be the boss of the Federal
Reserve System in 1979. In conformity with the "controlled disintegration"
program of the Trilateral Commission, Volcker hiked the prime lending rate of
U.S. banks to 22%, devastating the U.S. industrial base, and destroying the
export economy of this country. The Volcker interest rate policy precipitated a
severe recession, which helped to guarantee that Carter could not be
reelected. As a result of Carter's defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980, the
United States entered a period of a dozen years of extreme political reaction,
rout of the labor movement, declining standards of living, skyrocketing national
debt, and general political despair known as "Morning in America."
This method of examining
the candidates' handlers, advisors, and controllers has proven over the years to
be by far the most reliable one in predicting the future behavior of an American
presidential administration. Candidates are sometimes such good liars that they
manage to conceal almost everything that they really intend to do once they have
taken office. An analysis of financial supporters is useful and even
imperative, but the problem here is that many large financial interests hedge
their bets by giving large contributions to more than one candidate, leaving it
uncertain as to whom they really want to see installed in office. But, with very
few exceptions, a look at the advisors and handlers generally reveals who will
be who in the next administration, and therefore allows us to extrapolate what
the new regime will actually do.
OBAMA'S CONTROLLERS FROM
BRZEZINSKI TO GOOLSBEE
If we look at Obama in this
way, we are confronted with findings that are nothing short of appalling. It
turns out that none other than Zbigniew Brzezinski is the principal guru of the
entire Obama campaign. His influence goes beyond the critical area of
foreign policy and embraces the entire public profile of post-partisan, trans
racial, and global elements assumed by this candidate. This time around, we see
the mobilization, not just of Zbigniew Brzezinski himself, but of the entire
Russia-hating Brzezinski clan, with son Mark Brzezinski, a veteran of the
Clinton era NSC, also on board for foreign policy, and media groupie Mika
Brzezinski leading the cheering section for Obama at the cable television
network MSNBC. Another wing of the Brzezinski operation is represented by son
Ian Brzezinski, currently Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Eastern
Europe and NATO Affairs. Ian, it should be noted, is technically supporting
Senator McCain. A kind of utility infielder in this entire effort is Matthew
Brzezinski, a supposed investigative journalist who has written an extensive
profile of Ilyas Achmadov, the U.S. resident ambassador for the Chechen
terrorist organization, which appeared in 2005 in the Washington Post.
The real dimensions of the
Brzezinski machine are much larger than this: as used in this book, the term
Brzezinski machine indicates that entire part of the U.S. intelligence community
which assumes a left of center coloration in its public dealings. The Brzezinski
machine by this definition therefore includes the strategically decisive left
wing of the Central Intelligence Agency, which often does business as the
National Endowment for Democracy, frequently lining up with the Soros
foundations and other foundations which operate in the orbit of the intelligence
community. These are more or less the same forces which dominated the
Baker-Hamilton Iraq study group of December 2006, and which criticized and
rebelled against the policy orientation of the George Shultz-Rupert Murdoch
neocon faction that had been dominant inside the U.S.-UK banking establishment
since about the time of the impeachment of Clinton in 1999.
It is therefore necessary to
ignore for a moment the edifying rhetoric and utopian platitudes spouting from
the mouth of the candidate, and instead turn our attention to the handlers and
advisers who represent the potential future White House palace guard, since it
is these figures who will actually repair the policy options for the next tenant
of the White House, and will thus actually make policy. Don't listen to the
mouth; watch the motions of the hands and feet, who are in this case the
advisors who will later fill the Cabinet and other key posts.
FROM HUMAN DIGNITY TO
POLITICAL BALKANIZATION AND PARTITION
Brzezinski's influence is not
limited merely to issues of war and peace in the foreign policy sphere, critical
though that obviously is. The entire public persona or political profile
exhibited by Obama during his campaign would appear to derive from the
theoretical elaborations of Brzezinski. The key piece of evidence in this
regard is Brzezinski's latest book, Second Chance. Here Brzezinski
repeats his thesis that a worldwide political awakening is now taking place, and
that the goal of this movement is "dignity." Brzezinski's notion of dignity,
once all the obfuscation is peeled away, boils down to the quest for cultural
and political self-determination and extreme identity politics on the smallest
possible scale, with everything shaped by the cultural, ethnic, religious, and
social peculiarities and parochialisms of the smallest possible groups.
Brzezinski wants mini-states and micro-states with the dimensions of the local
control and community control projects which have so long been in vogue for
counter-insurgency purposes. There is no doubt that Brzezinski's "dignity"
thesis represents a declaration of war, not against this or that modern
nation-state, but against the institution of the nation-state itself as we have
known it for the last 500 to 650 years, going back to the Visconti of Milan c.
1380 in the Italian Renaissance. If respecting the tiniest peculiarities of
every conceivable group is the order of the day, then a massive wave of
secession, Balkanization, subdivision, and partition of the existing nation
states will be the unavoidable result. And this is exactly what Brzezinski
wants. The most obvious example is the secession of Kosovo province from Serbia
(under KLA terrorist auspices), opening a superpower crisis between Washington
and Moscow. For Africa, Brzezinski recommends the so-called
"micro-nationalities" concept, which means that the national boundaries
established in the 19th century should be swept aside in favor of a crazy quilt
of petty tribal entities, each one so small that it could not hope to resist
even a medium-sized oil multinational.
In the Middle East,
knowledgeable observers have long been familiar with the Bernard Lewis plan,
which contemplates the breakup of the existing nation states into impotent,
squabbling, principalities, each one an easy prey for J.P. Morgan Chase,
Halliburton, Blackwater, Exxon-Mobil, and other neo-feudal corporate
predators. The case of Iraq is already before the eyes of the world: instead
of one Iraq, we now have three -- the Kurdish entity in the north, the central
Sunni region, and the Shiastan in the south. Still according to the Bernard
Lewis plan, Iran is one day to be divided into six or seven subdivisions, Sudan
into at least two parts, and Lebanon into a checkerboard of petty enclaves,
while Turkey, Syria, and other Middle East states are destined to be carved and
mutilated to create an independent greater Kurdistan and other will-o'-the-wisps
that have populated the diseased imagination of Anglo-American geo-politicians
going back to Versailles in 1918.
Policymakers in Moscow, for
their part, are well aware of the Brzezinski Plan, which calls for the partition
and subdivision not only of the Russian Federation, but of the age-old European
Russian heartland itself. Under the Brzezinski Plan, the world map would come
to look more and more like the map of the Holy Roman Empire in about 1600, which
had some 500 theoretically independent political entities, some of them no
bigger than a small sized family farm, speckled across central Europe.
Knowing Brzezinski, we must suspect that the one country destined to remain
intact is Poland, perhaps in the form of a greater Poland stretching from the
Baltic to the Black Sea, as it once did, under the control of an oligarchy of
imbecilic petty noblemen (or "gentry") rather like Brzezinski himself.
Brzezinski's notion of dignity is thus revealed as an extreme form of local
control over a Bantustan or ethnic-religious mini-homeland of the type used in
the past in such countries as South Africa. The greater the local control of
language, culture, and related parochial issues, the greater the subjugation of
the resulting entity to outside political, economic, and military interests.
OBAMA: SKULL AND BONES AND
THE CHICAGO BOYS
If the Russia-hating
Brzezinski clan dominates Obama's foreign policy apparatus, what of economics
and finance, areas which are obviously at the forefront of everyone's concern in
the present Bush world economic depression, marked by dollar hyperinflation,
universal banking panic, and the death agony of the U.S. dollar as the world
reserve currency? Here the results give rise to just as much consternation.
Obama's leading economics guru is Professor Austan Goolsbee, a 1991 graduate
of the ultra-elitist Yale University, where he was a member of the infamous
Skull and Bones secret society, which brought us Bush the Elder and the current
tenant of the White House, to say nothing of the effete patrician, John Forbes
Kerry.
Goolsbee is a leading
exponent of the monetarist Chicago school of economics, founded by the
unlamented Milton Friedman, whose doctrines have inflicted untold genocide on
the developing countries. Milton Friedman worked closely with such
reactionary Republicans as Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan,
all of whom used his approach to chip away and undermine the economic rights won
by the American people through the epoch labor struggles of the New Deal era.
The most sustained application of Milton Friedman's economic views came during
the fascist dictatorship of Pinochet in Chile. Goolsbee says that he is an
inveterate fan of "free markets," and any treaty with free trade on the cover
will automatically get his support. When asked to differentiate the Obama
campaign from others, Goolsbee has replied that the Obama campaign is more
respectful of "the market." Goolsbee is hostile to winter fuel assistance
for low-income families because he thinks the program in question is
"bureaucratic." He also does not like any government interference with the
process of foreclosing on working families and throwing them and their
belongings out into the street.
PRIVATIZING SOCIAL SECURITY
UNDER OBAMA
Another of Obama's
economics advisers is Harvard professor Jeffrey Liebman. Liebman is devoted to
the "partial privatization" of Social Security, which is exactly the strategy
supported by the current Bush. Partial privatization smacks of the Newt Gingrich
"let it wither on the vine" approach used by Republicans in the 1990s. Then
there is David Cutler, another Harvard professor on board with Obama, who thinks
that increased monetary incentives for health insurance companies and
pharmaceutical firms are the way to go. In other words, Cutler wants to increase
cash transfers into the insatiable paws of these corporate predators. All of
this speaks volumes about what Obama would actually do if he ever got to the
White House.
And no one should be fooled
into thinking that the Brzezinski-left CIA-NED faction represents a peace loving
alternative to the warmongering excesses of the bellicose and truculent neocons.
Quite the contrary. For all their bluster, the neocons have always had one
saving grace: as the cowardly bullies they are, they have always chosen to pick
on relatively defenseless states, meaning countries with little or no ability to
retaliate against the United States for the unprovoked aggression meted out to
them. The neocons in short pick on the little guys, the ones with little or no
intercontinental strategic weaponry.
The really alarming aspect of
Brzezinski is that he lacks even the bully's instinct for survival. Brzezinski
is determined to use the next U.S. administration as a vehicle for his final
settling of accounts with Russia, his own personal twilight of the gods.
Brzezinski's self-conception is that he is the statesman who successfully
destroyed the Soviet Union by goading Moscow to invade Afghanistan in 1979,
leading to Moscow's defeat in a decade-long protracted guerrilla war from which
the Soviet Union never recovered. Brzezinski also takes credit for having
masterminded the dismemberment of the Warsaw Pact, starting in his native Poland
in 1988-1989. Brzezinski now intends to crown the edifice of his geopolitical
career with the destruction of the Russian Federation, including the
Balkanization and partition of European Russia itself. This is an enterprise
of incalculable folly, since the Russian Federation is the one state on earth
which retains the ability to incinerate the United States, as well as Japan and
Western Europe, inflicting tens of millions of casualties in the first hour of a
thermonuclear exchange. Brzezinski is therefore attempting to drag the world
back into the worst nightmare of the Cold War.
Brzezinski himself would most
likely argue that a direct U.S.-Russian confrontation is not what he is working
towards. He would assert that his goal is to play other states off against
Russia, so that the United States will be able to observe the resulting
conflicts from the sidelines. China is unquestionably the number one nation
on Brzezinski's list of potential U.S. adversaries who should be turned into
kamikaze stooges and pawns of Anglo-American imperialism and embroiled in
conflict with Moscow. The Brzezinski plan also cannot work unless the
European Union is willing to subordinate its own survival to the fulfillment of
Brzezinski's aggressive plans. Countries like Turkey, Syria, and Iran are all
regarded by Brzezinski as potential pawns in his apocalyptic struggle with
Moscow; this is why Brzezinski is not interested in a direct U.S. attack on
these countries, in the way that the neocons have been.
BRZEZINSKI: GLOBAL SHOWDOWN
WITH RUSSIA AND CHINA
As this book will demonstrate,
the epicenter of world confrontation is rapidly shifting out of the Middle East
and towards Eastern Europe and everywhere else along the borders of the Russian
Federation, as well as towards Africa and Pakistan. Brzezinski is in favor of
winding down the Iraq war, but certainly not because he intends to usher in an
era of golden peace. Rather, he wants those resources freed up so they can be
better deployed on some anti-Russian or anti-Chinese front. An important
secondary theater of operations for Brzezinski is increasingly Africa. The goal
here is to disrupt Chinese economic cooperation with the African countries, and
hopefully to eject the Chinese from Africa entirely. Brzezinski calculates
that if China cannot procure the necessary oil, energy and strategic raw
materials from partners in Africa, the Chinese will have no choice but to turn
their attention to the oil and mineral resources of eastern Siberia and the
Russian Far East.
Brzezinski intends to drive
the Chinese in on eastern Siberia by using their overwhelming vulnerability to
cutoffs of overseas energy, of the type that the U.S. and the British can
engineer. Eastern Siberia notoriously contains much oil, many important mines,
and relatively few Russians. This is the apple of discord that Brzezinski
would like to parlay into a titanic Russo-Chinese war, which he imagines would
eliminate both of the main competitors to continued Anglo-American world
domination. This is the reality which lurks behind the edifying
messianic-utopian rhetoric of the candidate Barack Obama. This is beyond
question the most important single issue with which American voters have a right
to become acquainted before the November 2008 election, and this is the major
task of this book.
OBAMA: A QUARTER CENTURY OF
INDOCTRINATION?
It might be said that
Brzezinski and his Trilateral Commission circles, including the aging but still
active David Rockefeller, are attempting to repeat their Carter administration
caper of 1976 -- in other words, they are attempting to install their own wholly
owned puppet president into the White House. That is a good first approximation,
but it falls somewhat short of the enormity of what is going on today. At the
time that he was elected president in 1976, Carter had been under the influence
of the Trilateral Commission, David Rockefeller, and Zbigniew Brzezinski for at
most a few years. Carter was famous as a quick study, and this seems to have
applied to his indoctrination in the belief structure of Trilateralism. In
the case of Obama, the exposure of the prospective future candidate to
systematic training, indoctrination, and ideological formation, up to and
including what the average person might regard as out-and-out brainwashing,
appears to have been going on for many, many years.
As we will show in this book,
there is good reason to believe that Obama was identified and recruited by
Brzezinski at Columbia University between 1981 and 1983, at a time when Obama
was studying politics with a specialty in international relations and a thesis
topic involving Soviet nuclear disarmament -- a topic which has Brzezinski
written all over it. During these same years, Zbigniew Brzezinski was presiding
as the director of the Communist Affairs Institute at Columbia. (It is worth
pointing out that Columbia University was not only a bastion of Cold War
anti-Sovietism of the Brzezinski school, but had also been the American
university most friendly to the Mussolini brand of fascism during the 1920s and
1930s.)
Obama, who has freely
admitted using the illegal narcotics marijuana and cocaine, has proven to be
extraordinarily secretive about his years at Columbia, refusing to help a New
York Times reporter with any information about his courses, professors,
activities, or friends. What is Obama hiding? Why the obsessive secrecy
about this point, and so much openness about other things that might at first
glance appear much more damaging? The answer may well be that it was at Columbia
University between 1981 and 1983 that Obama was recruited by the Brzezinski
machine, be it through direct personal contact with Zbigniew Brzezinski, or
through his relations with professors in Brzezinski's orbit. As always, the
candidate is cordially invited to come forward with detailed information and
documentation if he wishes to refute this obvious conclusion. But if the
hypothesis ventured here should prove to be true, it would mean that Obama has
been undergoing indoctrination from the Brzezinski intelligence faction and its
allies for approximately a quarter century, making him a Manchurian candidate in
the fullest sense of the word.
Concerning the role of the
Ford Foundation in the creation of Obama, there is no doubt. Obama's mother
worked for the Ford Foundation. Obama himself worked as a community
counterinsurgent for the Gamaliel Foundation, a satellite of the Ford
Foundation.
He sat on the board of the
Woods Fund, another Ford Foundation satellite; it was here that he rubbed elbows
with Bill Ayers, the Weatherman terrorist bomber. Obama's now infamous Trinity
United Church of Christ boasts a pastor who was a Ford Foundation scholar, and a
key teacher and spokesman who is a Ford Foundation operative. And the Ford
Foundation is the oligarchy's principal watchdog in preventing the emergence of
any challenge to financier rule in this country.
OBAMA HAS NEVER WON OFFICE
IN A CONTESTED ELECTION
The sponsorship of Obama's
entire career starting no later than 1983 would be coherent with certain glaring
problems suggested by his biography, in so far as it is known. The most dramatic
is that Obama has never been elected to public office by way of a contested
election. When he ran for Illinois State Senate, pricey election lawyers helped
him to eliminate all his opponents by throwing them off the ballot. Once he was
the incumbent, his later re-election to the same seat was a mere formality.
The prime example is Obama's successful campaign for election to the United
States Senate from Illinois in 2004. In order for Obama to go to Washington, not
one but two opposing candidates had to be destroyed by scandals so that they
would no longer encumber his path. The first of these was the hapless Marson
Blair Hull, a millionaire stockbroker who spent at least $12 million, and
perhaps as much as $28 million, on television advertising in his quest for the
U.S. Senate seat that is now occupied by Obama. Just before the March 2004
senatorial primary in Illinois, Hull was hit by a series of scandals in which he
was accused of battery and other abuse against his former wife, including
threatening her life. Needless to say, these explosive revelations swiftly
knocked Hull out of the race.
But now Obama had to face a
Republican opponent in the person of Jack Ryan, by all accounts a capable and
formidable politician. At this point, a court in Los Angeles took the
exceptional step of unsealing the court papers relative to Ryan's very ugly
divorce of a few years earlier. In these papers, Ryan's former wife alleged that
he had taken her to sex clubs in several cities and had tried to coerce her into
sexual relations in the presence of third parties. Thanks to these
revelations, the Ryan campaign promptly collapsed. In both cases, the
arch-reactionary and neocon Chicago Tribune has led the effort to unearth and
publicize the material which destroyed Obama's opponents. At this point the
Illinois Republican Party, possibly sensing that they were in the presence of
the anointed one, did not put up another serious candidate to run against Obama,
but brought in the well-known windbag and self promoter Alan Keyes of Maryland.
Keyes' chances were not helped
by his status as an obvious out-of-state carpetbagger and interloper, so Obama
won the Senate by the most lopsided outcome in the recent history of Illinois.
Since Keyes was black, he was unable to attract even the anti-black backlash
vote from downstate Illinois that any white Republican could have counted on.
But what invisible hand had so mysteriously brushed aside Obama's formidable
opponents, always at precisely the right moment? If we set aside the notion of
divine intervention which might appeal to Obama's more enthusiastic followers,
we must conclude that the pervasive intelligence networks of the left CIA and
the Trilateral Commission had been at work. As for the many troubles that
seemed to rain down on the head of poor old John McCain, notably from muckraking
by the New York Times, as soon as it was clear that he represented a key
obstacle in the path of Obama to the White House -- one might conclude that they
also had their source in that same invisible, Trilateral hand.
The question of Obama's puppet
status has far-reaching implications, and must accordingly be studied with great
care. If we look only at the 20th century, we find that the vast majority of
presidents were indeed puppets of a supra-constitutional banking establishment
that may be associated with the names of Morgan, Mellon, and Rockefeller, with
the City of London looming in the background. This is of course the invisible
government or parallel government founded in its current form around 1895, when
President Grover Cleveland capitulated to the Morgan and London financier
interests during a run on the gold backing of the United States dollar. Since
1895, Morgan and London have controlled the public debt of the United States.
This arrangement was consolidated under color of law with the passage of the
Federal Reserve act under Woodrow Wilson.
This Morgan-led financier
faction has generally -- but not always -- been able to have its way over the
intervening decades, especially in matters of foreign policy and finance policy.
William McKinley is an example of a president who was not sufficiently
puppet-like to satisfy the Morgan interests; McKinley was not enthusiastic about
founding an American empire during and after the Spanish-American war, and was
accordingly liquidated. This process was facilitated by the vice presidency
of Theodore Roosevelt, a mental deficient who manifestly lacked the intellectual
or moral capabilities to take any form of effective independent action.
The banking elite has
always favored presidential candidates whose pedigree includes at least one
nervous breakdown, and extreme neurosis, or a borderline psychosis so powerful
as to cripple them as autonomous political actors. The banking oligarchy was
appalled by the ability of Franklin D. Roosevelt to actually exercise the
constitutional powers of the president as prescribed by the U.S.
Constitution. After Roosevelt's death, the oligarchy swore to itself that it
would never again permit a real president who might threaten the sacred
principle of oligarchical rule itself. One result of this collective resolve by
the banking oligarchs was the imposition of term limits on the presidency,
which has tended to make incumbent presidents into impotent lame ducks,
sometimes as early as the midpoint of their first term. When John F. Kennedy
attempted to reassert the New Deal concept of the presidency, he was liquidated
by the secret team or rogue network which is the operational arm of the bankers'
invisible government.
CIVIL WAR UNDER OBAMA?
Obama must be regarded as a
Manchurian candidate who is wholly owned by the Ford Trilateral-Council on
Foreign Relations bankers' consortium. He is the most thoroughgoing puppet
candidate yet observed in the postwar era, even more so than Carter because of
his more lengthy indoctrination. It is very unlikely that Obama could ever
assert an independent political identity or an independent political judgment.
Obama owes everything to his Trilateral sponsors, and they control him lock,
stock, and barrel. Because of the acute need of his backers for the most extreme
imperialist aggression and economic austerity policies, Obama could well preside
over the descent of the United States into a Second Civil War, even as he sought
armed intervention in Africa and confrontation with Pakistan, China, Russia, and
the members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Obama could in any case
deploy his lemming legions in the form of a postmodern fascist mass movement,
making political resistance to his regime inside the United States a very
difficult enterprise.
Sen. McCain would be our
bridge to the fourteenth century, the century that brought the Black Plague and
the Hundred Years' War, which together destroyed the civilization of medieval
Europe. McCain's well-known and uncontrollable rage fits suggest that he is
indeed a borderline but controlled psychotic, perhaps partly because of issues
related to his time as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. Even so, McCain would
have a good opportunity of beating Obama by capturing the votes of the Reagan
Democrats, Latinos, Asians, Roman Catholics, Jews, retirees, women, and other
groups who regard Obama with insuperable suspicion. Against Obama, McCain would
probably win Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Florida, would quickly lock up
Texas, and would be competitive even in states like California and, incredibly,
Massachusetts and Rhode Island, where voters have seen more than enough of Gov.
Deval Patrick, Obama's Siamese twin demagogue from the Trilateral stable. The
only way Obama could defeat McCain is through Gestapo attacks such as those used
in this cycle to destroy New York Governor Elliott Spitzer, a Clinton
superdelegate and scourge of the Wall Street financier elite. With McCain,
we would probably be in war with Iran and Syria, in addition to Iraq and
Afghanistan, within six months. But since McCain hardly represents a face lift
for U.S. imperialism, and has no fascist mass movement to support him, it might
be possible to parlay McCain's likely catastrophic defeat in foreign wars,
combined with the total immiseration of the U.S. population, into a successful
political challenge to his labile and brittle governing coalition.
THE CLINTONS AS LESSER EVIL
This leaves Sen. Clinton. Much
criticism of her is totally justified. But much of it is not, especially the
lunatic toxic residue of the raving reactionary 1998-1999 impeachment campaign
by such scoundrels as Gingrich, DeLay, and their clique. Other elements of
resentment against Sen. Clinton clearly derive from the male impotence of the
critics. What do we actually know about Sen. Clinton?
First, she is a politician who
responds to public opinion as she perceives it through triangulation. Compared
to the imperviousness of the quasi-psychotic McCain to public opinion, and
Obama's status as a puppet Manchurian candidate, this may well represent the
lesser evil, or at least the best we can hope for in what is admittedly a
terrible situation. Sen. Clinton is not the leader of a fascist mass movement,
and this may prove the most important qualification of all.
Second, Mrs. Clinton has no
single owner, in the way that Obama must perforce dance to Brzezinski's tune. If
she has many owners, this is a way of saying that in the last analysis she
really has none. If she can be rented, it means that she may not be for sale.
Bill Clinton was brought to Washington by Pamela Churchill Harriman, but Pam is
long dead. The Clintons may have outlived many of their former part owners.
By becoming the only Democrat since FDR to win re-election, Clinton has taken on
something of an independent life of his own, and this provides a certain
strength. No one should fear a Clinton dynasty; the dynasty we should fear is
the Brzezinski one, incomparably worse.
SHE FIGHTS
Mrs. Clinton demonstrates an
admirable human quality in that she fights. Senator Edwards talked a good game
of fighting all the way to the convention, and he would have performed an
important public service by doing so, but he folded. Mrs. Clinton soldiers
on. In the process, she has been betrayed and traduced by a whole series of
rotten elements -- Teddy Kennedy, Bill Richardson, Maria Shriver, and a whole
catalogue of decadents. In fact, much of the rotten part of the Democratic Party
has gravitated to Obama. If Obama goes down to defeat, the Democratic Party
will have been purged of some of its most repulsive elements.
In the meantime, Mrs. Clinton
will have built up considerable resentment against the media whores, against the
Soros and other Wall Street elements who have repeatedly stabbed her in the
back. These forces are unlikely to have the inside track in a future Clinton
regime.
This leaves the question --
underneath the triangulation and the relentless and disciplined self-censorship,
what does Mrs. Clinton really believe? What outlook has she been hiding for so
long, due to her fear of the vaunted Republican attack machine? The guess
here is that Mrs. Clinton, underneath all the reaction formations and layers of
cosmetic camouflage acquired in decades under fire, may actually harbor New Deal
sympathies. In 1993-2001, she often talked of her admiration of Eleanor
Roosevelt. This may be the actual bedrock of her personality, still latent after
all the years of political warfare, vilification, and distortion. If so, that is
something to build on. This is admittedly a slender reed, but what are the
choices? McCain, a borderline psychotic, thinks he is General von Falkenhayn at
Verdun, seeking to bleed his enemy white and bleeding his own country white in
the process. Obama, a deeply disturbed, race-obsessed, and unstable
megalomaniac personality larded over with years or even decades of
Ford-Trilateral indoctrination, thinks he is Frantz Fanon re-incarnated as an
exterminating angel, about to exact revenge on the American people for centuries
of racism and colonialism, in the form of a bankers' postmodern fascist
regime. With those two alternatives in view, Sen. Clinton is clearly the
lesser evil.
It is likely that, in a
Clinton administration, opposition political activity could take the form of
carrot and stick operations -- pushing for ending the wars, for the
implementation of New Deal anti-depression measures and related reforms, while
demanding the ouster of reactionary and imperialist figures like Gen. Wesley
Clark, Richard Holbrooke, and others who are still in the Clinton camp. The more
she triangulates, the better the chance of an aroused citizenry to push Clinton
in the desired direction. What other hope is there? In the meantime, the
successful completion of the party re-alignment, which at this point Sen.
Clinton alone can make possible, would begin to shift the entire political axis
of the United States back towards the New Deal, opening as many potentialities
as the American people have the intelligence, energy, and courage to fight for.
THE BANKERS REVERSE THEIR
FIELD
As I have described elsewhere,
after September 11, 2001, the terrorist attacks of that day, dressed up in
suitable mythical attire, provided an all-purpose racist, militarist, and
fascist myth and cover for every anti-human cause on this planet. It seemed
for a time as if the 9/11 myth might become the vehicle for the imposition of a
comprehensive top-down bureaucratic-authoritarian-totalitarian transformation in
the United States, the NATO countries, and Japan. But, by now, it is clear that
the attempt to carry out such a strategy under the auspices of Bush-Cheney would
call forth popular mass resistance on such a scale as to threaten the success of
the entire project. Part of this limitation had to do with the inherent
structural features of Bush-Cheney as political figureheads of the more
traditional top-down, oppressive, reactionary type, lacking the capacity for
mass mobilization of the mob.
Now the banking establishment
(Trilateral, Bilderberger, CFR, etc.) appears determined to play the card of
mass mobilization through the so-called Obama movement. This notable shift in
strategy and tactics will also require the synthesis of a new form of mass
demagogy, of a new ideology. It is not clear, but appears doubtful, that Obama's
current messianic-utopian platitudes about bipartisan cooperation represent the
last word in this department. It will also be necessary to add additional
features to permit the targeting of foreign enemies, and this will probably need
to be done in a form that does not appear to depend on the 9/11 myth.
The new Obama-era rhetoric of
imperialist aggression is not yet complete, but some aspects are already
evident. The initial stress will likely be anti-Chinese, with hostility to
Russia to some extent on the back burner. Joe Madison, a black talk show host
with a track record of synergy with various U.S. government operations, recently
made some broadcasts from Darfur, Sudan with Thom Hartmann of Air America Radio,
a drooling Obama acolyte. Madison's line was that the Chinese, through their
cooperation with General Bashir's Sudanese government in Khartoum, were guilty
of genocide and ethnocide against the southern Sudanese animists and Christians,
including the ethnic groups represented by the Sudanese People's Liberation
Front, a notorious creature of CIA, MI-6, and Mossad. The Chinese were
destroying villages and traditional lifestyles, raved Madison. Allegations of
Chinese genocide against black Africa as a cover story for Brzezinski's strategy
of blocking Chinese access to African oil and strategic raw materials give some
idea of the new, leftist-tinged U.S.-UK imperialist propaganda that would become
plausible for some under an Obama regime. Hysterical agitation against the
Serbs in Kosovo, the Chinese in Tibet and Sinkiang, the Russians in the
Caucasus, and other obvious variations would not be far behind. Most of these
would possess more appeal in Europe than the current Bush-Cheney neocon harping
on their single obsessive note of "Islamo-fascism."
SCENARIOS FOR OBAMA 'S
FUTURE: THE NEED FOR A GRIEVANCE
One vital ingredient of
earlier fascist movements which the Obama agitation so far has lacked is the
element of overwhelming grievance, the bitter anger at having been betrayed, the
sense of the stab in the back for which there must be retaliation. In the
fascism of the inter-war period, this element was provided by burning mass
discontent over the outcome of World War I, over the horrendous sacrifices which
had not been recompensed with the desired outcome. In the Italian frame of
reference, this took the form of raging resentment against the Versailles peace
conference and especially Woodrow Wilson personally, on the grounds that most of
the former Austrian territories [that] Italy had aspired to acquire at the end
of World War I had been used instead for the Anglo-American project of creating
Yugoslavia as a new synthetic state. This was the Italian slogan of the
mutilated victory. In the German case, the overwhelming national grievance was
the Armistice of November 11, 1918, which in the eyes of German fascism had
represented a stab in the back for the gallant soldiers at the fighting front,
who supposedly still had a good chance to win the war, on the part of the new
Social Democratic government ministers in Berlin. This was the Stab in the Back,
the main staple of all German fascist agitation during the 1920s and beyond.
So far the Obama movement has
no such obvious grievance which could serve as a fountain for endless
bitterness, rage, and resentment. But it is all too easy to see how such a
dimension could be acquired, since Obama has been hard-wired by his financier
masters to destroy himself. Three alternative scenarios come to mind:
In the first, Obama is
defeated in his quest for the Democratic presidential nomination. In this case,
his supporters are likely to riot at the Democratic National Convention in
Denver at the end of August. Such a riot would be a cynically orchestrated media
event in the way that similar staged protests in Belgrade, Tiflis, and Kiev have
been in recent years. In addition, provocateurs would do their best to generate
some action in poor black inner city neighborhoods.
In the second, Obama wins the
Democratic nomination but is defeated by McCain in November, most likely through
a failure by the intelligence community to deliver an adequate combination of
scandals against McCain and vote fraud in favor of Obama. In this case Obama's
backers might attempt to impose his presidency through color revolution riots on
some campuses, in certain black inner city neighborhoods, and perhaps through a
March on Washington. This scenario would be more likely if the election had been
thrown into the House of Representatives because of a lack of a clear winner in
a very plausible three-way race among Obama, Clinton, and McCain.
In the third, Obama wins the
presidency in November 2008, and then goes on to implement the policies demanded
by the Trilateral CFR bankers. Some combination of war, depression, mass
privation, economic breakdown, and a general fracturing and dislocation of
society result. In the course of this, Obama inevitably disappoints, then
betrays, and finally viciously attacks his own base, pitching the lemming
legions into acute psychological distress on top of all their other woes. In
this scenario, mob action is generated in protest against Obama's betrayal or
stab in the back, and a full-blown fascist mass movement, quite possibly of
right-wing and racist coloration, results.
Lurking beneath all these
scenarios is now the new pattern of domestic U.S. terrorism which has been
evident since the Virginia Tech shootings of mid-April 2007. The new pattern is
that of college student or campus-associated terrorism, which has taken center
stage as Columbine-style high school or other public school terrorism and
allegedly Islamic terrorism have moved to the sidelines. The new model is
Virginia Tech gunman Cho, a mentally disturbed or brainwashed mass killer.
Another case was that of Steven P. Kazmierczak, who in mid-February 2008 shot 21
people and killed five of them at Northern Illinois University in Dekalb.
Kazmierczak was described as being intensely concerned with "corrections,
political violence, and peace and social justice." With the media spinning out a
story of Obama's alleged popularity among college students, these cases may
represent dress rehearsals or pilot projects for multiple-shooter college
student terrorism being prepared for detonation in the wake of political events
like the ones just enumerated. Another possibly related ingredient is the death
of a man in Las Vegas in late February after he had stayed in a room tainted
with highly poisonous ricin gas. Ricin had also been sent to the Dirksen Senate
Office Building in Washington DC in February 2004. If we imagine college student
kamikazes with a ricin capability, the potentialities for massive disruptions
and dislocations clearly become enormous.
This analysis leaves open
the question of whether Obama represents the final and definitive demagogue. In
the case of Italian fascism, the definitive demagogue Mussolini was preceded in
terms of public impact by the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, who functioned as a kind
of pilot project until Mussolini took center stage. It may be that the
Trilateral bankers consider U.S. institutions as still too strong to topple by
means of a single attack wave. Obama may represent only their first assault
echelon, an expendable formation which is designed to be decimated as it does
its work of weakening existing government institutions. In the aftermath of
Obama, other fascist formations with different ideological colorations could
emerge. It is well to recall that Benazir Bhutto evidently returned to
Pakistan in October 2007 with the idea that she had been selected as the
successful protagonist of a CIA people power coup. She accordingly waded into
the throngs with reckless abandon, believing that Anglo-American intelligence
would protect her. But, when her popularity began to ebb, she was evidently
deemed by her masters to be more valuable as a martyr than as a candidate. The
same sort of danger clearly exists for Obama, if he should falter.
HUNTINGTON'S TASK: ABORT
THE MASS UPSURGE OF 2010-2030
A quarter century ago, as we
show elsewhere in this book, Zbigniew Brzezinski's subaltern Samuel Huntington described the
Trilateral Commission perspective for the American future, which amounted to a
totalitarian transformation. This was right after the close of the catastrophic
Carter administration, which Brzezinski, Volcker, and Huntington had done so
much to guide into the abyss. It was also about the time that young Barack Obama
may have been recruited by Brzezinski at Columbia University. In his book on
American Politics, Huntington looked ahead to a new period of political ferment
and mass upsurge (what he calls a "creedal passion period"). "If the periodicity
of the past prevails, a major sustained creedal passion period will occur in the
second and third decades of the twenty-first century." At this time, he argues,
The oscillations among the responses could intensify in
such a way as to threaten to destroy both ideals and institutions ... This
situation could lead to a two-phase dialectic involving intensified efforts to
reform government, followed by intensified frustration when those efforts
produce not progress in a liberal-democratic direction, but obstacles to meeting
perceived functional needs. The weakening of government in an effort to reform
it could lead eventually to strong demands for the replacement of the weakened
and ineffective institutions by more authoritarian structures more effectively
designed to meet historical needs. Given the perversity of reform, moralistic
extremism in the pursuit of liberal democracy could generate a strong tide
toward authoritarian efficiency. (p. 232)
I called attention to this
perspective a few years after Huntington published his analysis [See Webster G.
Tarpley, "Project
Democracy's Program: The Fascist Corporate State," in Project Democracy: The
Parallel Government Behind the Iran-Contra Affair (Washington DC: EIR), April
1987, excerpted elsewhere in this book.] If the Huntington formula remains in
effect in the secret councils of the Trilaterals, the precise course of future
development will depend to a great degree on exactly where the ruling financiers
decide to insert Obama in the oscillating "two-phase dialectic" mentioned above.
Obama might represent a transitional figure for the first phase.
A FASCIST MOB IN DENVER,
LATE AUGUST 2008?
As things now appear, all of
these questions are going to be hotly debated all the way to the Democratic
National Convention in Denver at the end of August 2008. The lemming legions are
already announcing their intention to make that event the focus of a people
power coup/color revolution, with a rent-a-mob/dupe-a-mob of swarming
adolescents descending on the city to stage a made-for-television spectacle of
ochlocracy and mob rule in order to impose an Obama candidacy. I know whereof I
speak: I have seen the greatness and the misery of the Democratic Party. On
the evening of November 5, 1960, I was part of an overflow crowd of high school
students who listened over outdoor loudspeakers to the speeches delivered by
John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson at the New York Coliseum in the closing
hours of the Nixon-Kennedy presidential contest. This Kennedy-Johnson rally was
billed as an answer to the joint appearance by Eisenhower and Nixon, also at the
Coliseum, a few days earlier. When the speeches were over, I joined the other
high school kids in what we thought was a spontaneous march down Broadway from
Columbus Circle to Times Square, where we were finally penned in and dispersed
by the police. This march, though hardly epic, merited a line in the next day's
New York Times.
Some years later, on August
28, 1968, I personally had to inhale a great deal of tear gas during the
decisive peaceful demonstration in the shadow of the Sheraton Blackstone and
Conrad Hilton Hotels at the corner of Michigan and Balbo in Chicago during the
anti-Vietnam War "Dump the Hump" (or anti-Hubert Humphrey) protest at the
Democratic National Convention. However dubious the leadership of the Chicago
1968 DNC protests, they represented an authentic and legitimate expression of
U.S. public opinion against the war, which the Democratic Party would have been
well advised to heed. Despite the unavoidable presence of anarchist provocateurs
and police agents among the protesters, the Chicago DNC protests ended in what
was officially described by the Walker Commission as a "police riot" -- meaning
that it had been Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, most likely in cooperation with
President Johnson, who had goaded the Chicago cops into their outrageous rampage
of violence against peaceful political protestors.
The protests being planned
for Denver at the end of August this year will not represent a protest against
war, nor against the financial and economic depression, nor against the growing
police state. They will represent a piece of top-down political theater,
cynically orchestrated by pro-financier think tanks and political operatives,
and designed to impose a candidate who by then will have demonstrated his narrow
appeal and inability to win the Democratic nomination in the normal way: Obama.
They may think that they are in Denver to fight for an end to war, but they will
be serving the interests of those who desire bigger and more catastrophic wars.
They may think that they are fighting for power to the people, but they will be
delivering more power to the financiers. They may think they are struggling for
civil liberties, but they will be shackling on an even heavier yoke of
oppression. They may imagine that they are seeking measures to mitigate the
economic depression, but they will be strengthening the domination of the Wall
Street circles who have created the depression, and who propose to make the
American people pay for it.
Let all persons of good
will be warned not to succumb to the dictates of such a rent-a-mob and
dupe-a-mob, such a swarm of deluded hysterical adolescents of all ages, for
Obama. If this scenario plays out, it will be indispensable to make clear
that a late August Denver mob for Obama will represent the essence of postmodern
fascism, and not of any leftist or progressive agitation. This book is offered
as a tool of anti-fascist political education, to allow this country to
recognize and rebuff postmodern fascist blackmail in all its forms.
by Webster Tarplay |
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
OBAMA, THE POSTMODERN COUP -- MAKING OF A MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
