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Black President And American Imperialism

By Jay Janson

04 March, 2010
Countercurrents.org

There is a new wave of pro-Obama, "excuse Obama' and "stick with Obama' articles on the Internet and in alternative print media. Followers of Howard Zinn and Buddha will refuse to be media cajoled into having consummate interest in the personality of a sitting president of the American capitalist empire.

It is a president's executive orders, especially any deadly orders given as Commander-in-Chief, that deserve our attention. It is even more painfully appropriate to be interested in how the imperialist media masks and clothes a president's intentions, how these intentions are made to misrepresent all of us to the rest of the people on Earth, and how domestic issues are artificially heated up into seemingly irresolvable public confrontations in order to confound, distract and relegate war to secondary consideration.

The system has thrown up a likable, well spoken, nonwhite president of the American capitalist empire successfully dampening criticism from the hundreds of millions abroad and millions at home who are aware of U.S. imperialist programs.

As uncomfortable as it is, especially for Black Americans, to condemn homicide ordered by a Black President without seeming to be going against the aspirations of majority Mankind long dominated by less than fair administrators, managers, and CEO overloads largely of white Anglo-Saxon descent, a way must be found to confront and block the spread of legalized mass murder.

Progressives and Blacks were far less deceived into remaining mum and uncritical when the Imperial token was two back to back Black Secretaries of State , fourth in line for emergency presidential power: former Chief of Staff Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice who had also had held the power wielding office of National Security Advisor.

Beginning in 2007, commercial media, with a enormous assist from the entire progressive community, eventually convinced most Americans and a billion souls overseas, that having a half-Black American president could brake U.S. imperialism and unrestrained and unethical corporatism. One disastrous year later, pro-Obama progressives are still assisting the empire's establishment to play out a life-costing foolishness for their limited constituency of Liberal capitalists that unfortunately make up most of what is called the Left in America. In excusing and backing Liberal imperialists, they inadvertently override war worries, and are unintentionally misleading trusting audiences into focusing in greater detail and fear on right wing activity thrown up by capitalist establishment itself and featured in its conglomerate media.

Tea-baggers are not commanding the U.S. military to bring the death and destruction that is provoking anti-American outrage, enlistment of ever more extremists to fight U.S. occupations and polarizing the world again into capitalist and socialist camps. No, a Liberal imperialist president is in command. Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn warned us beforehand not to expect much from Obama. Few progressives listened to what turned out to be vastly understated, and socialists see progressives as countenancing war.

Most progressives are proposing cures for the symptoms, but not the disease of capitalism, and even worse, consort to prevent this mortal disease from being identified by making it appear difficult to diagnose.

Millions of immigrants from the impoverished nations of neocolonialism in Latin America and other continents have no such difficulty. They come from cultures where common sense and kind social education has not been totally compromised by the all engulfing media blessed desperate consumerism and commodification of life pressed upon society in industrialized nations. For these millions of newly arrived, the word "capitalist' has never had any rehabilitation from being an insidious pejorative describing opprobrious antisocial behavior. Once in America, usually suffering as cheap labor and unprotected non-citizens or citizens discriminated against for their nonwhite complexion, they have little difficulty in seeing the way things are regardless of conglomerate media hype.

On the other hand, the greater amount of intellectuals who call themselves progressive are, perhaps almost unnoticed by themselves, progressive capitalists and associate themselves with Liberal capitalists who propose legislation to mitigate the worst abuses of capitalism. They dissimulate by avoiding referring to anyone or anything as capitalist while going along with the use of the pointing out label "communist' for socialist revolutionary governments and their officers.

Progressive capitalists lay the cause of America's wars in and on the Third World, as well as corporate mega-crime to mistakes and bad judgments of [capitalist] public officials in an an otherwise viable capitalist system that is practical to accept and live with, not realizing that they sabotage and splinter organized antiwar effort even while the disgusting profiteers, promoters and defenders of war are arousing some good amount of public anger and willingness to join in opposition to war and capitalism.

Progressives, though they are part of the antiwar movement, tend to be stridently careful to disassociate themselves from those of in the peace movement that see capitalism as the root cause of war throughout modern history.

The floundering insane power elite of the world governing capitalist superpower and its allied NATO nation societies is reassured of its rectitude, uprightness and normalcy by having a loyal educated well behaved dissenting minority serving as an example of it allowing freedom of expression. An unorganized powerless but culturally prestigious grouping of non-trouble making independent thinking progressives acts as a buffer between between those in command and the millions of citizens that might otherwise be motivated to unite in class awareness.

There is an affable and easy going cohabitation and warm social intercourse between a good many progressives and many of their rich and famous Liberal compatriots who co-rule media and the military that is torturing and executing humankind. This pleasant fraternizing is understood as civilized behavior.

Activists like of Howard Zinn, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Eugene Debs, Thorstein Veblen etc., representatives of the common man, were not "progressives.' They would not be or have been at ease palling around with obvious to them war criminals, and they were not, or will ever be, invited to.

Albert Einstein stressed non participation in war, Malcolm, self-reliance on one's own integrity and distance from capitalism, MLKjr, Gandhi, and Howard Zinn, civil disobedience, Eugene Debs, an organized solidarity so strongly achieved that he received a million votes for President while in prison. None of these, nor Noam Chomsky and Rev. Jeremiah Wright were or are progressives, and of course, not capitalists. None see or would have seen Obama as someone apart from the capitalism he professes and extols.

Why is the war weary and capitalist depression suffering public unable to bring its millionsfold weight to meaningfully to bear? (With the last two elections its voice has proved to be of no consequence.)

Imperial capitalist governance aims to preserve an America politic divided into Liberal and Progressive capitalists on one side and and conservative and reactionary capitalists on the other, counterbalancing each other, thus frustrating new legislation while the body counts overseas and the exploitation at home and abroad go on unimpeded. This is the perennial "Divide and Rule' of all empires.

Managed media constantly dramatize personalities in spectacular conflict, purposefully disorienting perception of a mechanically functioning political economy of desperate private capital accumulation and diverting attention from feelings of solidarity with fellow human beings slaughtered right in front of electronically enhanced eyes. Are progressives helping big media make it easy for those who profit from war to continue them by backing the Liberal president who has rehired war hawks and corrupt bankers?

Howard Zinn would often say that we must make it too difficult for those who are subjugating us to continue that subjugation. Are progressive apologists for capitalism standing in the way of public awareness of who and what is making America and the world suffer wars, massive injustice and hunger? Why is such a key but faceless leader over decades as David Rockefeller never even mentioned?

Progressive journalists write against war policies and even lead opposition to specific wars, while hardly addressing the root cause of constant war. Secondly, progressives push domestic issues of injustice as equally important, diluting the effectiveness of the peace movement and distracting public attention away from the more horrific mass homicide with effect of inadvertently assisting what the criminal corporate media goes about opening with its pro-war programing. Those who are not serious about stopping the killing as a first priority above all others, help those who are running the wars to be able to continue them.

It behooves all within the peace movement to distinguish progressives who do not put halting the carnage above other concerns, from progressives who do. Distinguish between those who oppose and would shut down the private capital dictatorship in order to stop the wars once and for all, from those that limit criticism of a capitalist system that requires wars. Distinguish between those who would usher in a national government that would allow communities to develop in freedom from mega corporations and conglomerates, from those who call for modest reform of a national government of masters at arranging personal fortunes to trickle down to the confined majorities at home and abroad.

In our present tragic situation-comedy, these bloody and inhumane resource wars will end when the business community overreaches itself as it did vis-à-vis the burgeoning Japanese economy during the Vietnam war and not for any antiwar demonstrations. But fighting war is an immediate human obligation but should be seen as an initial step toward ending all wars and the capitalist system that requires them.

Howard Zinn patiently explained progress (the root word of "progressive') as people organizing against injustice, which can only be removed from the bottom up, when enough people become activists for justice and make life too troublesome for the perpetrators of injustice. We can choose between saving lives in six (and counting) Muslim countries on our way to ending capitalist imperialism, and accepting white Anglo-Saxon led world military dominance as presently fronted up by its first black Commander-in-Chief. In all due respect to progressive colleagues in alternate media journalism, that choice is also between progressive capitalism and peaceful nonviolent opposition to the wars of capitalism and its wars, and civil disobedience as it becomes necessary.

Confirmed non-capitalists and uncompromising anti-imperialists seem destined to expend greater time and effort arguing with their progressive peers who by and large wish or feel the need to work from within the pseudo democratic framework of a capitalist political economy that marginalizes them as a token, non-interfering, opposition.

Instead of accepting their marginalization as an exceptional avant guard learned group singularly known for a preponderance of university professors from the arts and sciences criticizing the status quo from the wings, progressives could be taking a leadership role commensurate to their academic background as educators.

If progressives should come to merge with a smaller group of American scholars and historians who as socialist revolutionaries study, among other alternatives to capitalism, the successes of a Cuban society that the elected presidents or more than a half dozen, going on to a dozen, Latin American presidents look to as a role model for uplifting their own nations from misery under imperialism, a real Left with national influence could arise in an America on the skids.

Such a strong Left would, as Noam Chomsky does, recognize the real widespread suffering that is the fertile ground in which an even more frightening proto-fascism is being planted, and provide an alternative understanding of events for the hard put upon people out there across the nation.

A united Left might act to diminish the power of a national media than keeps the general population in dangerous ignorance.

Post Script:

Let's inject some specifics into the general confusion about political designation:

What kind of a Progressive? Anti-capitalist and anti empire progressive or progressive capitalist?

What kind of Liberal? Pro social reform Liberal or banks and empire supporting Liberal?

What kind of Conservative? Old fashioned agrarian Conservative or corporate Conservative.

Root words like common, social, progress, liberate, conserve, react are used by everyone to express everyday reality. Later suffix is added to concoct an abstract concept that seems invented in order to confuse. Let's sort it out. Break down meaningless and misleading generalities into components and distinctions.

For instance, and clarity, Progressives are not Revolutionary Socialists or even Socialists.

 

Jay Janson is peoples historian activist, musician and writer, who has lived and worked on all the continents and whose articles on media have been published in China, Italy, England and the US, and now resides in New York City.