[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] From Kennedy to Obama

[Bill Totten]

Liberalism's last fling

by John Pilger

www.johnpilger.com (May 29 2008)

Writing in the New Statesman, John Pilger refers back to his travels
with Robert Kennedy to describe the false hopes offered by those, like
Barack Obama, who exploit the appeal of liberalism then present a very
different reality.


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.

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. Like McCain, he would extend the crippling embargo on Cuba.

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
fourteen-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 fourteen 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 $164 billion and $213 billion: 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.

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/page.asp?partid=489


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