[R-G] Pilger: After Bobby Kennedy

[Anthony Fenton]

After Bobby Kennedy
John Pilger
Published 29 May 2008
http://www.newstatesman.com/north-america/2008/05/obama-pilger-mccain-kennedy

Bobby Kennedy's campaign is the model for Barack Obama's current bid  
to be the Democratic nominee for the White House. Both offer a false  
hope that they can bring peace and racial harmony to all Americans,  
writes John Pilger

In this season of 1968 nostalgia, one anniversary illuminates today.  
It is the rise and fall of Robert Kennedy, who would have been elected  
president of the United States had he not been assassinated in June  
1968. Having travelled with Kennedy up to the moment of his shooting  
at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on 5 June, I heard The Speech  
many times. He would "return government to the people" and bestow  
"dignity and justice" on the oppressed. "As Bernard Shaw once said,"  
he would say, "'Most men look at things as they are and wonder why. I  
dream of things that never were and ask: Why not?'" That was the  
signal to run back to the bus. It was fun until a hail of bullets  
passed over our shoulders.

Kennedy's campaign is a model for Barack Obama. Like Obama, he was a  
senator with no achievements to his name. Like Obama, he raised the  
expectations of young people and minorities. Like Obama, he promised  
to end an unpopular war, not because he opposed the war's conquest of  
other people's land and resources, but because it was "unwinnable".

Should Obama beat John McCain to the White House in November, it will  
be liberalism's last fling. In the United States and Britain,  
liberalism as a war-making, divisive ideology is once again being used  
to destroy liberalism as a reality. A great many people understand  
this, as the hatred of Blair and new Labour attest, but many are  
disoriented and eager for "leadership" and basic social democracy. In  
the US, where unrelenting propaganda about American democratic  
uniqueness disguises a corporate system based on extremes of wealth  
and privilege, liberalism as expressed through the Democratic Party  
has played a crucial, compliant role.

In 1968, Robert Kennedy sought to rescue the party and his own  
ambitions from the threat of real change that came from an alliance of  
the civil rights campaign and the anti-war movement then commanding  
the streets of the main cities, and which Martin Luther King had drawn  
together until he was assassinated in April that year. Kennedy had  
supported the war in Vietnam and continued to support it in private,  
but this was skilfully suppressed as he competed against the maverick  
Eugene McCarthy, whose surprise win in the New Hampshire primary on an  
anti-war ticket had forced President Lyndon Johnson to abandon the  
idea of another term. Using the memory of his martyred brother,  
Kennedy assiduously exploited the electoral power of delusion among  
people hungry for politics that represented them, not the rich.

"These people love you," I said to him as we left Calexico,  
California, where the immigrant population lived in abject poverty and  
people came like a great wave and swept him out of his car, his hands  
fastened to their lips.

"Yes, yes, sure they love me," he replied. "I love them!" I asked him  
how exactly he would lift them out of poverty: just what was his  
political philosophy? "Philosophy? Well, it's based on a faith in this  
country and I believe that many Americans have lost this faith and I  
want to give it back to them, because we are the last and the best  
hope of the world, as Thomas Jefferson said."

"That's what you say in your speech. Surely the question is: How?"

"How . . . by charting a new direction for America."

The vacuities are familiar. Obama is his echo. Like Kennedy, Obama may  
well "chart a new direction for America" in specious, media-honed  
language, but in reality he will secure, like every president, the  
best damned democracy money can buy.

Embarrassing truth

As their contest for the White House draws closer, watch how,  
regardless of the inevitable personal smears, Obama and McCain draw  
nearer to each other. They already concur on America's divine right to  
control all before it. "We lead the world in battling immediate evils  
and promoting the ultimate good," said Obama. "We must lead by  
building a 21st-century military . . . to advance the security of all  
people [emphasis added]." McCain agrees. Obama says in pursuing  
"terrorists" he would attack Pakistan. McCain wouldn't quarrel.

Both candidates have paid ritual obeisance to the regime in Tel Aviv,  
unquestioning support for which defines all presidential ambition. In  
opposing a UN Security Council resolution implying criticism of  
Israel's starvation of the people of Gaza, Obama was ahead of both  
McCain and Hillary Clinton. In January, pressured by the Israel lobby,  
he massaged a statement that "nobody has suffered more than the  
Palestinian people" to now read: "Nobody has suffered more than the  
Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to  
recognise Israel [emphasis added]." Such is his concern for the  
victims of the longest, illegal military occupation of modern times.  
Like all the candidates, Obama has furthered Israeli/Bush fictions  
about Iran, whose regime, he says absurdly, "is a threat to all of us".

On the war in Iraq, Obama the dove and McCain the hawk are almost  
united. McCain now says he wants US troops to leave in five years  
(instead of "100 years", his earlier option). Obama has now "reserved  
the right" to change his pledge to get troops out next year. "I will  
listen to our commanders on the ground," he now says, echoing Bush.  
His adviser on Iraq, Colin Kahl, says the US should maintain up to  
80,000 troops in Iraq until 2010. Like McCain, Obama has voted  
repeatedly in the Senate to support Bush's demands for funding of the  
occupation of Iraq; and he has called for more troops to be sent to  
Afghanistan. His senior advisers embrace McCain's proposal for an  
aggressive "league of democracies", led by the United States, to  
circumvent the United Nations.

Amusingly, both have denounced their "preachers" for speaking out.  
Whereas McCain's man of God praised Hitler, in the fashion of lunatic  
white holy-rollers, Obama's man, Jeremiah Wright, spoke an  
embarrassing truth. He said that the attacks of 11 September 2001 had  
taken place as a consequence of the violence of US power across the  
world. The media demanded that Obama disown Wright and swear an oath  
of loyalty to the Bush lie that "terrorists attacked America because  
they hate our freedoms". So he did. The conflict in the Middle East,  
said Obama, was rooted not "primarily in the actions of stalwart  
allies like Israel", but in "the perverse and hateful ideologies of  
radical Islam". Journalists applauded. Islamophobia is a liberal  
speciality.

The American media love both Obama and McCain. Reminiscent of mating  
calls by Guardian writers to Blair more than a decade ago, Jann  
Wenner, founder of the liberal Rolling Stone, wrote: "There is a sense  
of dignity, even majesty, about him, and underneath that ease lies a  
resolute discipline . . . Like Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama  
challenges America to rise up, to do what so many of us long to do: to  
summon 'the better angels of our nature'." At the liberal New  
Republic, Charles Lane confessed: "I know it shouldn't be happening,  
but it is. I'm falling for John McCain." His colleague Michael Lewis  
had gone further. His feelings for McCain, he wrote, were like "the  
war that must occur inside a 14-year-old boy who discovers he is more  
sexually attracted to boys than to girls".

The objects of these uncontrollable passions are as one in their  
support for America's true deity, its corporate oligarchs. Despite  
claiming that his campaign wealth comes from small individual donors,  
Obama is backed by the biggest Wall Street firms: Goldman Sachs, UBS  
AG, Lehman Brothers, J P Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and  
Credit Suisse, as well as the huge hedge fund Citadel Investment  
Group. "Seven of the Obama campaign's top 14 donors," wrote the  
investigator Pam Martens, "consisted of officers and employees of the  
same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public  
and newly implicated in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made  
mortgages." A report by United for a Fair Economy, a non-profit group,  
estimates the total loss to poor Americans of colour who took out sub- 
prime loans as being between $164bn and $213bn: the greatest loss of  
wealth ever recorded for people of colour in the United States.  
"Washington lobbyists haven't funded my campaign," said Obama in  
January, "they won't run my White House and they will not drown out  
the voices of working Americans when I am president." According to  
files held by the Centre for Responsive Politics, the top five  
contributors to the Obama campaign are registered corporate lobbyists.

What is Obama's attraction to big business? Precisely the same as  
Robert Kennedy's. By offering a "new", young and apparently  
progressive face of the Democratic Party - with the bonus of being a  
member of the black elite - he can blunt and divert real opposition.  
That was Colin Powell's role as Bush's secretary of state. An Obama  
victory will bring intense pressure on the US anti-war and social  
justice movements to accept a Democratic administration for all its  
faults. If that happens, domestic resistance to rapacious America will  
fall silent.

Piracies and dangers

America's war on Iran has already begun. In December, Bush secretly  
authorised support for two guerrilla armies inside Iran, one of which,  
the military arm of Mujahedin-e Khalq, is described by the state  
department as terrorist. The US is also engaged in attacks or  
subversion against Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, India,  
Pakistan, Bolivia and Venezuela. A new military command, Africom, is  
being set up to fight proxy wars for control of Africa's oil and other  
riches. With US missiles soon to be stationed provocatively on  
Russia's borders, the Cold War is back. None of these piracies and  
dangers has raised a whisper in the presidential campaign, not least  
from its great liberal hope.

Moreover, none of the candidates represents so-called mainstream  
America. In poll after poll, voters make clear that they want the  
normal decencies of jobs, proper housing and health care. They want  
their troops out of Iraq and the Israelis to live in peace with their  
Palestinian neighbours. This is a remarkable testimony, given the  
daily brainwashing of ordinary Americans in almost everything they  
watch and read.

On this side of the Atlantic, a deeply cynical electorate watches  
British liberalism's equivalent last fling. Most of the "philosophy"  
of new Labour was borrowed wholesale from the US. Bill Clinton and  
Tony Blair were interchangeable. Both were hostile to traditionalists  
in their parties who might question the corporate-speak of their class- 
based economic policies and their relish for colonial conquests. Now  
the British find themselves spectators to the rise of new Tory,  
distinguishable from Blair’s new Labour only in the personality of its  
leader, a former corporate public relations man who presents himself  
as Tonier than thou. We all deserve better.

http://www.johnpilger.com