Most essential piece of writing!
Bobby Kunhu wrote:
> http://www.newstatesman.com/north-america/2008/11/barack-obama-pilger-texas
> Don't
> believe the hype
>
> John Pilger <http://www.newstatesman.com/writers/john_pilger>
>
> Published 13 November 2008
>
> - 1
> comment<http://www.newstatesman.com/north-america/2008/11/barack-obama-pilger-texas#reader-comments>
> - Print version <http://www.newstatesman.com/print/200811130021>
> -
> Listen<http://asp.readspeaker.net/cgi-bin/newstatesmanrsone?customerid=1003373〈=en&url=http://www.newstatesman.com/200811130021>
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>
> Barack Obama is being lauded by liberals but the truth about him is that he
> represents the worst of American power. John Pilger reports from Texas
>
> My first visit to Texas was in 1968, on the fifth anniversary of the
> assassination of President John F Kennedy in Dallas. I drove south,
> following the line of telegraph poles to the small town of Midlothian, where
> I met Penn Jones Jr, editor of the *Midlothian Mirror*. Save for his drawl
> and fine boots, everything about Penn was the antithesis of the Texas
> stereotype. Having exposed the racists of the John Birch Society, his
> printing press had been repeatedly firebombed. Week after week, he
> painstakingly assembled evidence that all but demolished the official
> version of Kennedy's murder.
>
> This was journalism as it had been before corporate journalism was invented,
> before the first schools of journalism were set up and a mythology of
> liberal neutrality was spun around those whose "professionalism" and
> "objectivity" carried an unspoken obligation to ensure that news and opinion
> were in tune with an establishment consensus, regardless of the truth.
> Journalists such as Penn Jones, independent of vested power, indefatigable
> and principled, often reflect ordinary American attitudes, which have seldom
> conformed to the stereotypes promoted by the corporate media on both sides
> of the Atlantic.
>
> Read *American Dreams: Lost and Found* by the masterly Studs Terkel, who
> died on 31 October, or scan the surveys that unerringly attribute
> enlightened views to a majority who believe that "government should care for
> those who cannot care for themselves" and are prepared to pay higher taxes
> for universal health care, who support nuclear disarmament and want their
> troops out of other people's countries.
>
> Returning to Texas, I am struck again by those so unlike the redneck
> stereotype, in spite of the burden of a form of brainwashing placed on most
> Americans from a tender age: that theirs is the most superior society in the
> world, and all means are justified, including the spilling of copious blood,
> in maintaining that superiority.
>
> That is the subtext of Barack Obama's "oratory". He says he wants to build
> up US military power; and he threatens to ignite a new war in Pakistan,
> killing yet more brown-skinned people. That will bring tears, too. Unlike
> those on election night, these other tears will be unseen in Chicago and
> London. This is not to doubt the sincerity of much of the response to
> Obama's election, which happened not because of the unction that has passed
> for news reporting since 4 November (eg, "liberal Americans smiled and the
> world smiled with them"), but for the same reasons that millions of angry
> emails were sent to the White House and Congress when the "bailout" of Wall
> Street was revealed, and because most Americans are fed up with war.
>
> Two years ago, this anti-war vote installed a Democratic majority in
> Congress, only to watch the Democrats hand over more money to George W Bush
> to continue his blood-fest. For his part, the "anti-war" Obama voted to give
> Bush what he wanted. Yes, Obama's election *is* historic, a symbol of great
> change to many. But it is equally true that the American elite has grown
> adept at using the black middle and management class. The courageous Martin
> Luther King recognised this when he linked the human rights of black
> Americans with the human rights of the Vietnamese, then being slaughtered by
> a "liberal" Democratic administration. And he was shot. In striking
> contrast, a young black major serving in Vietnam, Colin Powell, was used to
> "investigate" and whitewash the infamous My Lai massacre. As Bush's
> secretary of state, Powell was often described as a "liberal" and was
> considered ideal to lie to the United Nations about Iraq's non-existent
> weapons of mass destruction. Condaleezza Rice, lauded as a successful black
> woman, has worked assiduously to deny the Palestinians justice.
>
> Obama's first two crucial appointments represent a denial of the wishes of
> his supporters on the principal issues on which they voted. The
> vice-president-elect, Joe Biden, is a proud warmaker and Zionist. Rahm
> Emanuel, who is to be the all-important White House chief of staff, is a
> fervent "neoliberal" devoted to the doctrine that led to the present
> economic collapse and impoverishment of millions. He is also an
> "Israel-first" Zionist who served in the Israeli army and opposes meaningful
> justice for the Palestinians - an injustice that is at the root of Muslim
> people's loathing of the US and the spawning of jihadism.
>
> No serious scrutiny of this is permitted within the histrionics of Obama
> mania, just as no serious scrutiny of the betrayal of the majority of black
> South Africans was permitted within the "Mandela moment". This is especially
> marked in Britain, where America's divine right to "lead" is important to
> elite British interests. The *Observer*, which supported Bush's war in Iraq,
> echoing his fabricated evidence, now announces, without evidence, that
> "America has restored the world's faith in its ideals". These "ideals",
> which Obama will swear to uphold, have overseen, since 1945, the destruction
> of 50 governments, including democracies, and 30 popular liberation
> movements, causing the deaths of countless men, women and children.
>
> None of this was uttered during the election campaign. Had that been
> allowed, there might even have been recognition that liberalism as a narrow,
> supremely arrogant, war-making ideology is destroying liberalism as a
> reality. Prior to Blair's criminal warmaking, ideology was denied by him and
> his media mystics. "Blair can be a beacon to the world," declared the *
> Guardian* in 1997. "[He is] turning leadership into an art form."
>
> Today, merely insert "Obama". As for historic moments, there is another that
> has gone unreported but is well under way - liberal democracy's shift
> towards a corporate dictatorship, managed by people regardless of ethnicity,
> with the media as its clichéd façade. "True democracy," wrote Penn Jones Jr,
> the Texas truth-teller, "is constant vigilance: not thinking the way you're
> meant to think, and keeping your eyes wide open at all times."
>
>
> --
> Bobby Kunhu http://community.eldis.org/myshkin/Blog/
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