Glen Ford / Black Agenda Report & Bruce A. Dixon / Black Agenda Report – 2014-07-27 17:47:16
http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/obama%E2%80%99s-hot-war
Obama’s Hot War
Glen Ford / Black Agenda Report
(July 23, 2014) — The deeper the US slips into economic decline, the higher it ratchets up the pace and stakes of armed conflict. Washington appears to have crossed some kind of Rubicon, to embark “on a mad, scorched earth policy to terrorize the planet into submission through relentless escalation into a global state of war.”
The United States has set the world on fire. It is nonsense to talk of a “new” Cold War, when what the world is witnessing is multiple conflagrations as intense and horrifically destructive as at any period since World War Two.
Virtually every one of these armed conflicts has been methodically set in motion by the only power capable of perpetrating such massive, simultaneous mayhem: the United States, along with its underlings in London, Paris and Tel Aviv — the true Axis of Evil.
Washington is embarked on a mad, scorched earth policy to terrorize the planet into submission through relentless escalation into a global state of war. Unable to maintain its dominance through trade and competition, the US goes beyond the brink to plunge the whole planet into a cauldron of death.
As Russia is learning, it is extremely difficult to avoid war when a great power insists on imposing it. That was a lesson inflicted on the world 75 years ago, by Nazi Germany.
Whoever coined the phrase “No Drama Obama” should be sentenced to a lifetime of silence. The First Black US President systematically brought swastika-wearing fascists to power in Ukraine to start a war on Russia’s borders. The passengers of the Malaysian airliner are victims of Obama’s carefully crafted apocalypse, a pre-fabricated conflict that could consume us all.
Obama methodically and without provocation laid waste to Libya and Syria, and now the jihadists unleashed by the United States and its allies are destroying Iraq all over again and threatening to erase Lebanon and Jordan and even the oil kingdoms of the Gulf.
Obama has signed yet another blank check for Israel’s ghastly war of ethnic annihilation in Gaza — a crime against humanity for which the US is fully as culpable as the apartheid Jewish State, which could not exist if it were not part of the US superpower’s global war machine.
Wars “R” Us
Those who say the United States is adrift or has no coherent foreign policy are colossally wrong. Washington’s policy is the constant fomenting of war for the subjugation of the planet — or the world’s destruction, if the US cannot remain Number One.
The Americans have made Africa into a killing field. Somalia and its people have been smashed and dispersed, setting the whole Horn of Africa ablaze. Ethiopia commits multiple genocides under US sponsorship, while Washington’s mercenaries in Rwanda and Uganda grow fat on the bones of six million Congolese.
South Sudan thrashes in agony, the result of dismemberment by American, European and Israeli ghouls. The sounds of chaos and mass murder reverberate from the Magreb in the North, through the vast Sahel region, and now deep into West Africa, a direct result of criminal US aggressive war and regime change in Libya.
Obama “pivots” to East Asia with the goal of turning Japan into a militaristic state with an invitation to rejoin, after all these years, the game of global conquest. Poor Afghanistan and Pakistan have no future at all, unless the US leaves their region and allows them to develop an organic partnership with China. But a world based on mutually beneficial relations among peoples has no room for empire — which is why the empire wages war against the world.
Glen Ford is the Executive Editor for Black Agenda Radio BlackAgendaReport.com. Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
Why Our Black Political Class Is Paralyzed
And Silent on Gaza Massacres and Israeli Apartheid
Bruce A. Dixon / Black Agenda Report
(July 23, 2014) — How did the NAACP wrap up its national conference this weekend without saying a mumbling word about the genocidal bombing of Gaza? Why did Moral Monday’s Rev. Barber appear on HBO’s Real Time with notorious Islamaphobe Bill Maher and not speak to the morality of apartheid in Israel? Why are the black political class and the black church, invisible on the invasion of Gaza and the fact of Israeli ethnocracy in general?
Sometimes a silence can be the loudest sound in the room. The silence of our numerous and powerful US black political class, not just on the current massacres of civilians in Gaza but on the incontrovertible fact that Israel has become a full fledged racist ethnocracy is deafening.
As Israeli troops massed around Gaza this weekend, the NAACP wrapped up its 2014 annual convention in Las Vegas this weekend without a mumbling word of solidarity with bleeding Palestinians.
Moral Monday’s Rev. Barber was a guest on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher Sunday night as well, but could not spare a single breath to discuss the morality of occupation, house demolitions, or Israeli apartheid to his notoriously Islamaphobic host.
Al Sharpton is on MSNBC nightly, and can’t find time to cover the murderous assault on Gaza in any meaningful way. You don’t hear so much as a peep from the Congressional Black Caucus or the National Urban League, the National Action Network, Rainbow PUSH, big time black pastors and business people or the rest of that crowd.
Our black political class of preachers, politicians, big time academics, pundits and aspirants have not been silenced by threats or fears of economic retailiation. Maybe you can say that about entertainers and athletes, but not our so-called leaders.
People like black members of Congress, Al Sharpton and Rev. Barber are where they are because they don’t need to be told what their masters require. What they fear is something deeper, something that threatens the very foundations of their careers and legitimacy.
Their legitimacy depends on the hollow pretense that their black faces in high places somehow constitute the continuation of the struggle of our people against racism, Jim Crow and injustice in general. We’ve all heard it summed up with phrases like “Rosa Parks sat and Dr. King walked, so Barack Obama could run….”
The name for hollow pretenses like this, when selling the pretense is a serious project, is branding. Their problem is the frank, vicious racism of Israeli apartheid which the black political class feels obliged to support, at least as long as a black president does so as well, is a threat to the black political class’s brand as tribunes of the oppressed.
For the most part, our black political class are not abject fools. They absolutely know that the Israeli state has become a full-fledged ethnocracy, the 21st century’s premiere apartheid state complete with Jewish-only roads and towns, frequent lynch mobs for Africans and Arabs, laws against recognizing mixed marriages, and completely different judicial systems, housing regulations, voting and property rights, depending on whether, as Max Blumenthal puts it, you’ve got J-positive blood.
They know that for this and the last two Gaza invasions, Israeli civilians and grandmothers gathered on hillsides to eat ice cream, watch the fireworks of white phosphorus and shellfire, and cheer on the death of defenseless Palestinian civilians.
They know the internet makes it trivially easy to find the words of prominent Israeli politicians in the Knesset and in government openly declaring that Palestinians ought to be moved or massacred, or justifying hundreds of atrocities from house demolitions and torture to acts of dispossession, mob and state terror. They know that more and more of their own constituents are learning these things every day.
Our black political class knows that Israel is, to paraphrase Noam Chomsky, America’s landlocked aircraft carrier, weapons research test bed and nuclear armed military base in the middle of a couple hundred million brown people and a good fraction of the world’s most easily accessible oil.
They know that unwavering support for whatever Israel does is part of the bipartisan zombie consensus, something that ruling Republicans and Democrats agree on, like privatizations, charter schools and bailing out the banksters.
And by now, black leadership is deep in the slavish habit not just of agreeing with whatever the White House says, but of not speaking at all on policy matters till after the will of the Great Man and his administration have been made clear.
If Bush and Cheney were still in the White House, some of the bravest among them might speak out just a little to remind us that Palestinians are human too. They might even say that occupation and dispossession are the real crimes. But a member of their own class, a black politician is in the Oval Office, a president who openly insulted and humiliated Muslim Americans at a White House Iftar dinner only last week. They don’t need to be silenced, they silence themselves, not out of fear but out of craven opportunism.
Still, daily occurrences like the shelling of 10 and 11 year old boys on a beach kicking a soccer ball make open support of Israel difficult more difficult for them than it used to be. So they do nothing, and they say nothing. Nothing on Al Sharpton’s show. Nothing in their Moral Monday communiques and marches. Nothing from the Urban League, nothing from the black church, which is pretty much an appendage of the black political class these days.
Apart from Cornel West, the sole recognizable black figure to a national TV audience, not a black face in a prominent face, not one, has stood up for the humanity of Palestinians and denounced the crimes of dispossession, occupation and invasion.
To a man and a woman, it seems the rest of our glittering black leaders hope the stench of white phosphorus and genocide won’t stick to them and tarnish their precious brand, even as they support it with their silence.
There was a time, to hear them tell it at least, when our black political class opposed apartheid. That was here, and in South Africa. As US Palestinian activist Ali Abunimah, the editor at Electrnic Intifada reminds us:
“…Throughout the 1970s and 80s, when black Americans were leading the struggle against apartheid in this country, when they were the conscience of this country in terms of putting apartheid South Africa on the American political agenda, Israel was one of the key supporters of apartheid South Africa. Israel is the country that systematically violated the international arms embargo on South Africa.
The weapons used to beat and kill black demonstrators and freedom fighters in South African townships were made in Israel, right down to the water cannon used in the townships… the fighter jets, the gunboats, all the heavy armament of the South African military used were in large part supplied by Israel.
It’s less well known, there is less hard evidence about it, although some information is in the public domain regarding Israeili-South African cooperation in their nuclear weapons programs.”
Evidently apartheid and ethnocracy in back-in-the-day South Africa were bad things, but in today’s Israel not so much. Our black political class has long forgotten a couple things called international solidarity and empathy, without which we are, well, a lot less human.
When our people were struggling against Jim Crow and US apartheid fifty years ago, those suffering under colonialism in Asia and Africa looked to us for their inspiration. African governments, Cuba, and China too welcomed, educated and sheltered Malcolm X, Kwame Toure, and many others when they toured the African continent and the world.
When the Vietnamese were under savage attack they used to call to US black soldiers in the night to ask and remind them, “Black man why are you here? Your fight is at home.” It was their official policy until 66 or 67 to spare black soldiers they could have killed in close encounters when possible.
Those brothers came back to inform youngsters like me who would have been drafted the next year so we could help organize in our black communities against the imperial war.
When a nuclear armed South Africa invaded Angola repeatedly in the 70s and 80s, Cuba sent 60,000 troops, the majority of them of African descent and its entire air force to fight across the Atlantic to fight, and turned the South Africans around.
In the global struggles against colonialism, capitalism, and injustice we are all inextricably connected. We’re all obligated to carry a bit of each other’s burden, to stand up for each other when required. It’s a tradition. It’s international solidarity. That’s how this thing works.
But our black misleadership class are not players. They are being played and playing themselves.
Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor of the Black Agenda Report.
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