[Reader-list] Fw: On Obama

[debraj mookerjee]

I endorse what Sabitha has to say. the symbolism behind his election is
important. it shows what people want. and that they are really to vote in a
man of colour. maybe it will take many obamas to be voted in before the
world gets one who everybody likes. but like sabitha says, that is not the
point.
amartya sen makes a precient point about visceral anti-americanism. things
were not always like this. marx praised what the civil war was fought for.
some may believe it was fought to consolidate the north's financial
interests. big money centres like NY and Chicago Vs the pristine 'pre
lapsarian' agrarianism of the south. the southern new critics who invaded
yale wanted to recapture through literary studies what they had lost by way
of a 'culture' they hugely valued. these theorists were from nashville,
tenessee. some might argue these guys had more 'culture' and brains than the
big money norrth and the carpet baggers who trooped down south. but does
that take away from the symbolic significance of the civil war and what
lincoln managed to achieve.
to return to sen, who is not against the market but is against the primacy
given to capital, we must be willing to cats aside our natural anti-american
sentiments and replace them with genuine enquiry and engagement. after all,
just in case obama turns out to be at least half the guy that world believes
him to be, what harm would it do tot he world?
Debraj

2008/11/10 sabitha t p <sabitha_tp at yahoo.co.uk>

>   Dear all,
>
> I find Vinay Lal's cynicism almost as pointless as Nader's criticism,
> although of course one has to be really cautious in one's unqualified
> celebration of Obama. There can be cynicism and despair only where there's
> been a betrayal of stated positions. Nobody - except some gullible
>  Americans carried away by the "Yes, We Can" ad-campaign after the economic
> meltdown threatening their homes and jobs - thought Obama was ushering in
> any change.
>
> The point of this election probably wasn't "what after Obama?", but whether
> the Americans would vote in a black man with a Muslim middle name as
> president at all (so what if he's suave and well-educated and is miles ahead
> of McCain in every which way). So, now that that question has been answered
> and has redeemed the Americans somewhat, the post-election scenario should
> not be surprising to us, given that Obama's stated positions through his
> campaign have been pro-establishment and did not suggest any changes even
> close enough to any radical change in either America's foreign policy or its
> corporate capitalism. That Obama is elected to the White House IS the
> change, and a long-awaited one.
>
> The best,
> Sabitha.
>
>
>
> --- On *Mon, 10/11/08, V Ramaswamy <rama.sangye at gmail.com>* wrote:
>
> From: V Ramaswamy <rama.sangye at gmail.com>
> Subject: [Reader-list] On Obama
> To: reader-list at sarai.net
> Date: Monday, 10 November, 2008, 8:49 AM
>
> From Economic & Political Weekly, November 1, 2008
>
>
> The Technician in the Establishment: Obama's America and the World
>
> by Vinay Lal
>
> On November 4, Barack Obama will in all likelihood be elected the 44th
> president
> of the United States. As against the euphoria in the rest of the world about
> such a presidency, this article reads into his 2006 book (The Audacity of
> Hope)
> and his campaign speeches, a different kind of Obama. He emerges as a
> technician
> who is best equipped to fix broken policies and get America working once
> again.
>
> One can only hope that a US that is once again working does not mean a US
> that
> is more efficient in its exercise of military domination and even more
> successful in projecting its own vision of human affairs as the only road to
> the
> good life. To believe in Obama, one needs to hope against hope. Barack Obama
> is
> poised to become the 44th president of the United States. Many see in the
> ascendancy of a black man to the highest office of the world's hegemon a
> supremely historic moment in American if not world affairs.
>
> Such is the incalculable hold of the US, in times better or worse, on the
> imagination of people worldwide that many are more heavily invested in the
> politics and future of the US than they are in the politics of their own
> nation.
>
> There may yet be method to this maddening infatuation, for Iraqis, Afghanis,
> and Pakistanis, among many others, known and unknown, the target at some
> point
> of the military wrath and moral unctuousness of America, may want to reason
> if
> their chances of being bombed back into the stone age increase or decrease
> with
> the election of one or the other candidate. The French, perhaps best known
> for
> the haughty pride in their own culture, were so moved by the events of
> September
> 11, 2001, which the Americans have attempted to install as a new era in
> world
> history, rendering 9/11 as something akin to BC or AD, that Le Monde
> famously
> declared, "Nous sommes tous Americains" (We are all Americans ). One
> doubts
> that, had it been Beijing, Delhi, or Dakar that had been so bombed, the
> French
> would have declared, We are All Chinese, Indians, or Senegalese. That old
> imperialist habit of presuming the royal We, thinking that the French or
> American we is the universal We, has evidently not disappeared.
>
> Obama vs McCain
> There can be little question that Obama's presidency would be much
> preferable to
> that of McCain. If nothing else, his presidency is not calculated to be an
> insult to human intelligence or a complete affront to simple norms of human
> decency. After eight years of George W Bush, it seemed all but improbable
> that
> America could throw up another candidate who is, if not in absolutely
> identical
> ways, at least as much of an embarrassment to the US as the incumbent of the
> White House. But one should never underestimate the genius of America in
> throwing up crooks, clowns and charlatans into the cauldron of politics. It
> is
> likely that McCain has a slightly less convoluted" or should I say jejune
> "
> view
> of world history and geography than Bush, nor is his vocabulary wholly
> impoverished, but he will not strike anyone with a discerning mind as
> possessed
> of a robust intelligence. McCain has already committed so many gaffes,
> accusing
> (to take one example) Iran of training Al Qaida extremists, that one wonders
> whether his much touted "foreign policy experience" amounts to
> anything at
> all.
>
> In America, it is enough to have a candidate who understands that Iraq and
> Iran
> are not only spelled differently but constitute two separate nations. Obama
> seems so far ahead of the decorated Vietnam war veteran in these respects
> that
> it seems pointless to waste any more words on McCain. Obama writes
> reasonably
> well, and has even been lauded for his skills as an orator; he is suave,
> mentally alert, and a keen observer of world affairs.
>
> Far too many American elections have offered scenarios where a candidate has
> been voted into office not on the strength of his intelligence, sound
> policies,
> or moral judgment, but because the candidate has appeared to be "the
> lesser
> of
> two evils" . The iconoclast Paul Goodman, writing in the 1960s, gave it as
> his
> considered opinion that American elections were an exercise in helping
> Americans
> distinguish between undistinguishable Democrats and Republicans, and there
> are,
> notwithstanding Obama's appeal to liberals and apparently intelligent
> people,
> genuine questions to be asked about whether this election will be anything
> more
> than a choice between Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
>
> Candidates with wholly distinct views have always been described as
> "spoilers"
> in the American system, and anyone who do not subscribe to the rigidly
> corporatist outlook of the two major parties can only expect ridicule,
> opprobrium, and at best colossal neglect. To this extent, whatever
> America's
> pretensions at being a model democracy for the rest of the world, one can
> marvel
> at the ease and brilliance with which dissenters are marginalised in the US.
> The
> singularity of American democracy resides in the fact that it is, insofar as
> democracies are in question, at once both perversely primitive and advanced.
> In
> its totalitarian sweep over the political landscape, the one-party system,
> which
> through the fiction of two parties has swept all dissent " indeed, I
> should
> say
> all thought " under the rug, has shown itself utterly incapable of
> accommodating
> political views outside its fold; and precisely for this reason American
> democracy displays nearly all the visible signs of stability,
> accountability,
> and public engagement, retaining in its rudiments the same features it has
> had
> over the last two centuries.
>
> A New Obama after the Election?
>
> Obama's most ardent defenders have adopted the predictably disingenuous
> view
> that Candidate Obama has had to repress most of his liberal sentiments to
> appeal
> to a wide electorate, and that president Obama will be much less
> "centrist"
> in
> his execution of domestic and foreign policies. (The US is one country where
> most hawks, particularly if they are "distinguished"  senior
> statesmen, can
> easily pass themselves off as "centrists", the word "hawk"
> being reserved
> for
> certified lunatics such as Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, or blatantly
> aggressive policymakers such as Paul Wolfowitz. No one would describe Colin
> Powell, who shares as much responsibility as anyone else for waging a
> criminal
> war on Iraq, as a hawk.) Of course much the same view was advanced apropos
> Bill
> Clinton, who then went on to wreck the labour movement, cut food stamps,
> initiate welfare "reform" that further eroded the entitlements of the
> poor,
> and
> launch aggressive military strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Kosovo,
> and a
> host of other places. Moreover, unless one is to take the view that Obama
> thought of his candidacy overnight, it is equally reasonable to argue that,
> knowing how much he would have to appeal to the rank and file of not only
> Democrats but the large number of "undecided" voters as a candidate
> who
> would be
> markedly different from both the incumbent and the Republicans running for
> the
> presidency, Obama has been projecting himself as far more liberal than
> either
> his political record or views would give warrant to believe. Indeed, as a
> close
> perusal of his writings, speeches, and voting record suggests, Obama is as
> consummate a politician as any in the US, and he has been priming himself as
> a
> presidential candidate for many years.
>
> Entry to the Obama World View Obama's 2006 book,The Audacity of Hope (New
> York,
> Crown Publishers), furnishes as good an entry point into his world view as
> any.
> Its subtitle, "Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream", provides
> the link
> to
> Obama's memoir of 1995, Dreams of My Father (1995). People everywhere have
> dreams, no doubt, but there is nothing quite as magisterial as "the
> American
> dream": the precise substance of the American dream " a home with a
> backyard,
> mom's apple pie, kids riding their bikes without a care in the world, a
> cute
> dog
> running around in circles after the kids, ice tea, a Chevrolet or SUV "
> matters
> less than the fact that "the American dream" signifies something
> grand and
> unique in the affairs of humankind. A politician who does not profess belief
> in
> the American
> dream is doomed, but there is no insincerity on Obama's part in this
> respect.
> Leaving aside the question of how the American dream has been a nightmare to
> many of the most thoughtful Americans themselves, from Henry David Thoreau
> to
> James Baldwin, not to mention tens of millions of people elsewhere, Obama's
> fondness for what Americans call "feelgood" language is palpably
> evident.
> Just
> what does the audacity of hope mean? Need one be audacious to hope? Obama's
> pronouncements are littered with the language of hope, change, values,
> dreams,
> all only a slight improvement on chicken soup for dummies or chocolate for
> the
> soul. The chapter entitled ‘The World Beyond Our Borders', some will
> object,
> is illustrative of Obama's engagement with substantive issues, and in this
> case
> suggestive of his grasp over foreign affairs. One of the stories that
> circulated
> widely about Bush upon his election to the presidency in 2000 was that he
> carried an expired passport; a variant of the story says that Bush did not
> at
> that time own a US passport. It is immaterial whether the story is
> apocryphal:
> so colossal was Bush's ignorance of the world that it is entirely plausible
> that
> he had never travelled beyond Canada and Mexico, though I am tempted to say
> that
> illegal aliens and men born to power, transgressors of borders alike, share
> more
> than we commonly imagine. Obama, by contrast, came to know of the wider
> world in
> his childhood: his white American mother was married to a Kenyan before her
> second marriage to an Indonesian.
>
> Obama lived in Jakarta as a young boy, and the chapter offers a discussion
> of
> the purges under Suharto that led to the extermination of close to a million
> communists and their sympathisers. Obama is brave enough to acknowledge that
> many of the Indonesian military leaders had been trained in the US, and that
> the
> Central Intelligence Agency provided "covert support" to the
> insurrectionists
> who sought to remove the nationalist Sukarno and place Indonesia squarely in
> the
> American camp (pp 272-73). He charts Indonesia's spectacular economic
> progress,
> but also concedes that "Suharto's rule was harshly repressive".
> The press
> was
> stifled, elections were a "mere formality", prisons were filled up
> with
> political dissidents, and in commentary november 1, 2008 EPW Economic & P
> 16
> olitical Weekly areas wracked by secessionist movements rebels and civilians
> alike faced swift and merciless retribution " "and all this was done
> with
> the
> knowledge, if not outright approval, of US administrations" (p 276). It is
> doubtful that most American politicians would have made even as mild an
> admission of American complicity in atrocities as has Obama. But a supremely
> realist framework allows for evasion as much as confession: thus Obama
> merely
> arrives at the reading that the American record overseas is a "mixed"
>  one
> "across the globe" , often characterised by far-sightedness and
> altruism
> even if
> American policies have at times been "misguided, based on false
> assumptions"
> that have undermined American credibility and the genuine aspirations of
> others
> (p 280). There is, in plain language, both good and bad in this world; and
> Obama
> avers that the US, with all its limitations, has largely been a force for
> good.
> And since America remains the standard by which phenomena are to be
> evaluated,
> Obama betrays his own parochialism.
>
> The war in Vietnam, writes Obama, bequeathed "disastrous
> consequences":
> American
> credibility and prestige took a dive, the armed forces experienced a loss of
> morale, the American soldier needlessly suffered, and above all "the bond
> of
> trust between the American people and their government" was broken. Though
> two
> million or more Vietnamese were killed, and fertile land was rendered toxic
> for
> generations, no mention is made of this genocide: always the focus is on
> what
> the war did to America (p 287). The war in Vietnam chastened Americans, who
> "began to realise that the best and the brightest in Washington didn't
> always
> know what they were doing " and didn't always tell the truth" (p
> 287). One
> wonders why, then, an overwhelming majority of Americans supported the Gulf
> war
> of 1991 and the attack on Afghanistan, and why even the invasion of Iraq in
> 2002
> had far more popular support in the US than it did in Europe or elsewhere
> around
> the world. The suggestion that the American people were once led astray but
> are
> fundamentally sound in their judgment ignores the consideration that elected
> officials are only as good as the people to whom they respond, besides
> hastening
> to exculpate ordinary Americans from their share of the responsibility for
> the
> egregious crimes that the US has committed overseas and against some of its
> own
> people.
>
> Good Wars, Bad Wars?
>
> Obama has on more than one occasion said, "I'm not against all wars,
> I'm
> just
> against dumb wars."  More elegant thinkers than Obama, living in perhaps
> more
> thoughtful times, have used different language to justify war: there is the
> Christian doctrine of a just war, and similarly 20th century politicians and
> theorists, watching Germany under Hitler rearm itself and set the stage for
> the
> extermination of the Jewish people, reasoned that one could make a
> legitimate
> distinction between "good" and "bad"  wars. Obama has
> something like the
> latter
> in mind: he was an early critic of the invasion of Iraq, though here again
> more
> on pragmatic grounds rather than from any sense of moral anguish, but like
> most
> liberals he gave his whole-hearted support to the bombing of Afghanistan in
> the
> hope, to use Bush's language, that Osama bin Laden could be smoked out and
> the
> Taliban reduced to smithereens.
>
> Obama is so far committed to the idea of Afghanistan as a "good" war
> that he
> has
> pledged that, if elected president, he would escalate the conflict there and
> also bomb Pakistan if it would help him prosecute the "war on
> terror". He
> has
> recently attacked McCain, who no one would mistake for a pacifist, with the
> observation that his opponent "won't even follow [bin Laden] to his
> cave in
> Afghanistan" , even as the US defence secretary has all but conceded that
> a
> political accommodation with the Taliban, whose support of bin Laden was the
> very justification for the bombing of Afghanistan, can no longer be avoided.
> The
> casually held assumption that by birthright an American president can bomb
> other
> countries into abject submission, or that the US can never be stripped of
> its
> prerogative to chastise nations that fail to do its bidding, takes one's
> breath
> away. No one should suppose that Obama, blinded by the sharp rhetoric of the
> "war on terror" , has positions on Iraq and
> Afghanistan that are not characteristic of his view of the world as a whole.
> "We
> need to maintain a strategic force posture", he writes, "that allows
> us to
> manage threats posed by rogue nations like North Korea and Iran and to meet
> the
> challenges presented by potential rivals like China" (p 307). This could
> have
> been the voice of Reagan, the Clintons, Bush, McCain, and countless others:
> there is such overwhelming unanimity about "rogue states" that almost
> no
> politician in the US can be expected to display even an iota of independent
> thinking.
>
> No Change from Staus Quo
>
> On the question of Palestine, Obama has similarly displayed belligerence and
> moral turpitude. At the annual meeting in June 2008 of the American Israel
> Political Action Committee, a self-avowedly Zionist organisation that
> commands
> unstinting support from across the entire American political spectrum, Obama
> was
> unambiguous in declaring that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel
> and
> it must remain undivided". It would only be belabouring the obvi.ous to
> state
> that, on nearly every foreign policy issue that one can think of, with the
> exception of a timetable for withdrawal of American troops from Iraq,
> Obama's
> position can scarcely be distinguished from all the other advocates of the
> national security state. There can be no gainsaying the fact that Obama's
> election as president of the US will appreciably alter American debates on
> race.
> African-Americans make up 12
> per cent of the population but constitute nearly half of the US prison
> population; one of three black males will, in his lifetime, have gone
> through
> the criminal justice system. African-Americans are, alongside Puerto Ricans,
> two
> ethnic groups among whom poverty is endemic, and repeated studies have shown
> that in every critical sector of life, such as access to jobs, housing, and
> healthcare, blacks face persistent racism and discrimination. Obama is fully
> cognisant of these problems and is likely to address them to a greater
> extent
> than any other candidate. But one can also argue, with equal plausibility,
> that
> his ascendancy will strengthen the hands of those who want to think of
> American
> democracy as a post-race society, and whose instant inclination is to
> jettison
> affirmative action and reduce the already narrow space for discussions of
> race
> in civil society.
>
> It is immaterial, even if fascinating to some, whether numerous white people
> will vote for Obama to prove their credentials as non-racists, while others
> will
> give him their vote because he is not all that black " just as some black
> people
> will surely cast their ballot for Obama precisely because he is black. By
> far
> the most critical consideration is that the US requires a radical
> redistribution
> of economic and political power: Martin Luther King Jr had come to an
> awareness
> of this in the last years of his life, but there is little to suggest that
> Obama, a professional politician to the core, has similarly seen the light.
> Establishment Candidate In these deeply troubled times, when there is much
> casual talk of the American ship sinking, the white ruling class is
> preparing to
> turn over the keys of the kingdom to a black man. Imperial powers had a
> knack
> for doing this, but let us leave that history aside. Here, at least, Obama
> appears to have displayed audacity, taking on a challenge that many others
> might
> have forsworn.
>
> However, nothing is as it seems to be: with the passage of time, Obama has
> increasingly justified the confidence reposed in him as an establishment
> candidate. A man with some degree of moral conscience would not only have
> shrugged off the endorsements of Colin Powell and Scott McClellan, until
> recently among Bush's grandstanding cheerleaders and apparatchiks, but
> would
> have insisted that Powell and others of his ilk be brought to justice for
> crimes
> against the Iraqi people. But Obama will do no such thing, for after all
> Powell
> and the master he served, like Kissinger and Nixon before them, only made
> "tactical" errors. Obama prides himself, moreover, on being a healer
> not
> divider: he will even rejoice in the support for him among previously
> hardcore
> Republicans (www.republicansforobama.org).
>
> When Obama is not speaking about values, hope, and change, he presents
> himself
> as a manager, representing brutal American adventurism in Iraq and
> Afghanistan
> as illustrations of policies that went wrong. He comes forward as a
> technician
> who is best equipped to fix broken policies, repair the system, and get
> America
> working once again. One can only hope that an America that is once again
> working
> does not mean for a good portion of the rest of the world what it has meant
> for
> a long time, namely, an America that is more efficient in its exercise of
> military domination and even more successful in projecting its own vision of
> human affairs as the only road to the good life. To believe in Obama, one
> needs
> to hope against hope.
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