OBAMA, THE POSTMODERN COUP -- MAKING OF A MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE | |||
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
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