90130_ Report This Comment Date: May 21, 2008 03:59PM
The Jihad Candidate
by Rich Carroll
Conspiracy theories make for interesting novels when the storyline is not so
absurd that it can grasp our attention. 'The Manchurian Candidate' and 'Seven
Days in May' are examples of plausible chains of events that captures the
reader's imagination at best-seller level. 'What if' has always been the solid
grist of fiction.
Get yourself something cool to drink, find a relaxing position, but before you
continue, visualize the television photos of two jet airliners smashing into the
Twin Towers in lower Manhattan and remind yourself this cowardly act of Muslim
terror was planned for eight years.
How long did it take Islam and their oil money to find a candidate for President
of the United States? As long as it took them to place a Senator from Illinois
and Minnesota? The same amount of time to create a large Muslim enclave in
Detroit? The time it took them to build over 2,000 mosques in America? The same
amount of time required to place radical wahabbist clerics in our military and
prisons as 'chaplains'?
Find a candidate who can get away with lying about their father being a 'freedom
fighter' when he was actually part of the most corrupt and violent government in
Kenya's history. Find a candidate with close ties to The Nation of Islam and the
violent Muslim overthrow in Africa, a candidate who is educated among white
infidel Americans but hides his bitterness and anger behind a superficial toothy
smile. Find a candidate who changes his American name of Barry to the Muslim
name of Barak Hussein Obama, and dares anyone to question his true ties under
the banner of 'racism'. Nurture this candidate in an atmosphere of anti-white
American teaching and surround him with Islamic teachers. Provide him with a
bitter, racist, anti-white, anti-American wife, and supply him with Muslim
middle east connections and Islamic monies. Allow him to be clever enough to
get away with his anti-white rhetoric and proclaim he will give $834 billion
taxpayer dollars to the Muslim controlled United Nations for use in Africa.
Install your candidate in an atmosphere of deception because questioning him on
any issue involving Africa or Islam would be seen as 'bigoted racism'; two words
too powerful to allow the citizenry to be informed of facts. Allow your
candidate to employ several black racist Nation of Islam Louis Farrakhan
followers as members of his Illinois Senatorial and campaign staffs.
Where is the bloodhound American 'free press' who doggedly overturned every
stone in the Watergate case? Where are our nation's reporters that have placed
every Presidential candidate under the microscope of detailed scrutiny; the same
press who pursue Bush's 'Skull and Bones' club or ran other candidates off with
persistent detective and research work? Why haven't 'newsmen' pursued the 65
blatant lies told by this candidate during the Presidential primaries? Where are
the stories about this candidate's cousin and the Muslim butchery in Africa?
Since when did our national press corps become weak, timid, and silent? Why
haven't they regaled us with the long list of socialists and communists who have
surrounded this 'out of nowhere' Democrat candidate or that his church
re-printed the Hamas Manifesto in their bulletin, and that his 'close pastor
friend and mentor' met with Middle East terrorist Moammar Gaddafi, (Guide of the
First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab
Jamahiriya)? Why isn't the American press telling us this candidate is supported
by every Muslim organization in the world?
As an ultimate slap in the face, be blatant in the fact your candidate has ZERO
interest in traditional American values and has the most liberal voting record
in U.S. Senate history. Why has the American main stream media clammed-up on any
negative reporting on Barak Hussein Obama? Why will they print Hillary Rodham
Clinton's name but never write his middle name? Is it not his name? Why,
suddenly, is ANY information about this candidate not coming from main stream
media, but from the blogosphere by citizens seeking facts and the truth? Why
isn't our media connecting the dots with Islam? Why do they focus on 'those bad
American soldiers' while Islam slaughters non Muslims daily in 44 countries
around the globe? Why does our media refer to Darfur as 'ethnic cleansing'
instead of what it really is; Muslims killing non Muslims! There is enough
strange, anti-American activity surrounding Barak Hussein Obama to peek the
curiosity of any reporter. WHERE IS OUR INVESTIGATIVE MEDIA!?
A formal plan for targeting America was devised three years after the Iranian
revolution in 1982. The plan was summarized in a 1991 memorandum by Mohamed
Akram, an operative of the global Muslim Brotherhood. 'The process of
settlement' of Muslims in America, Akram explained, 'is a civilization jihad
process.' This means that members of the Brotherhood must understand that their
work in 'America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the
Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their
hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion
is made victorious over all other religions.'
There is terrorism we can see, smell and fear, but there is a new kind of terror
invading The United States in the form of Sharia law and finance. Condoning it
is civilization suicide. Middle East Muslims are coming to America in record
numbers and building hate infidel mosques, buying our corporations, suing us for
our traditions, but they and the whole subject of Islam is white noise leaving
uninformed Americans about who and what is really peaceful. Where is our
investigative press? Any criticism of Islam or their intentions, even though
Islamic leaders state their intentions daily around the globe, brings-forth a
volley of 'racist' from the left-wing Democrat crowd.
Lies and deception behind a master plan - the ingredients for 'The Manchurian
Candidate' or the placement of an anti-American President in our nation's White
House? Is it mere coincidence that an anti-capitalist run for President at the
same time Islamic sharia finance and law is trying to make advancing strides
into the United States? Is it mere coincidence this same candidate wants to
dis-arm our nuclear capability at a time when terrorist Muslim nations are
expanding their nuclear weapons capability? Is it mere coincidence this
candidate wants to reduce our military at a time of global jihad from Muslim
nations?
Change for America? What change? To become another 'nation of Islam'?
shaDEz Report This Comment Date: May 21, 2008 07:36PM
You're sounding even wackier(is that a word?) than some of these UFO and 911
conspiracy theorists.
Fuck Obama and all of the candidates(can't even say what I really wish would
happen to them!). Communists support Obama... phony communists maybe, well fuck
them too!
from
Revolution #130, May 25, 2008
The Sixties, the System, and the Real Solution
The emergence of Barack Obama as the likely Democratic candidate for the
presidency is an unprecedented event, and attracting—on different
levels—many people who see it as a vehicle of positive change. But the Obama
campaign is, by his own repeated acknowledgements, thoroughly rooted in
promoting and preserving this system. As such, we have argued that it cannot
bring about any substantial change for the better. For those who do want such
change, supporting and buying into the logic of the Barack Obama candidacy is
harmful.
To get to the bottom of what the Obama phenomenon is all about, we are examining
his March 18th “Speech on Race.” This was an extremely significant speech, a
defining speech from Obama on one of the foundational questions of U.S.
society—the history and present-day situation of Black people. In this third
and final installment of our response to that speech, we’ll examine Obama’s
core theme of “getting beyond” the “divisions” of the 1960s. But first,
let us briefly review the underlying theme of Obama’s speech—the invocation
of the U.S. Constitution, and its promise of “a more perfect union” for
“we the people” as the path to equality.
The U.S. Constitution—
A Flexible Framework for Exploitation and Inequality
Obama framed his “Speech on Race,” literally and figuratively, in the
American flag and the U.S. Constitution. He spoke in Philadelphia, across from
the hall where the U.S. Constitution was written. He opened his speech with the
famous words, “We the People…” and repeatedly invoked the U.S.
Constitution as “a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal
citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and
justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.”
In Part I of our response, we focused on Obama’s claim that “the answer to
the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution—a
Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the
law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union
that could be and should be perfected over time.” As we went into in some
depth in Part I of our response, in fact the U.S. Constitution upheld and
institutionalized slavery. It represented a compromise between the capitalist
wage-slave exploiters in the North, and the slave-owning class in the South; a
compromise that only fractured decades later when the conflicts between the two
systems led to a Civil War. Only after the Civil War was the U.S. Constitution
rewritten to outlaw slavery and supposedly mandate “equality” for Black
people.
In Part II of our response to Obama, we focused on a foundational period of U.S.
history almost completely ignored in Obama’s “Speech on Race,” the era of
sharecropping, Jim Crow (that is, the system of legally segregating Black people
into inferior schools and housing, and stigmatizing them as a people), and
lynching. Even with the amended U.S. Constitution, a pivotal Supreme Court
ruling (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896) enshrined the law of “separate but
[so-called] equal,” stamping the approval of the U.S. Constitution on all
this.
In short, from the foundation of this country up through and beyond the Second
World War, the Constitution of the United States—to which Obama adheres his
whole project—served as a flexible framework for exploiters to rule over the
majority of the people. And central to that, to enforce inequality and the
all-round oppression of Black people.
Obama and The Sixties
In his “Speech on Race,” Obama radically distorts the role of the
Constitution in upholding slavery. He “skips” a whole era of U.S. history
where the Constitution upheld overt segregation in the name of “separate but
equal.” But he “tunes back in” to the status of African-Americans in this
country with the period of the 1960s:
In the context of media attacks on his (now completely disowned) relationship
with his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, Obama used Wright as a vehicle to make
his case for this system as a source of “hope”: “The profound mistake of
Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society.
It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been
made; as if this country—a country that has made it possible for one of his
own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of
white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old—is still
irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know—what we have seen —is
that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have
already achieved gives us hope—the audacity to hope—for what we can and must
achieve tomorrow.”
And Obama’s “punchline,” so to speak, is that now everyone needs to rally
around this system, get beyond the legacy of the Sixties, that is—to quote
from this same speech, “divisive at a time when we need unity; racially
charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental
problems....”
As with his characterization of earlier periods in U.S. history, Obama’s
version of the Sixties is profoundly distorted. Yes, America did change in the
1960s. But here we will make the case that:
1. Openings for those changes came about in the context of economic changes
in U.S. society and international pressures facing U.S. imperialism.
2. The concessions that were made were mainly the product of heroic struggles
of the masses of people that were in the main viciously and violently opposed by
the system.
3. Even as the rulers of this country made concessions to the struggle
against the oppression of Black people during this period, they did so in ways
that were part of maneuvering to smother the struggle against the subjugation of
African-Americans.
4. Today, as a result of the “natural” workings of capitalism and
conscious government policies, the situation is, for many Black people, in many
ways worse than it was at the beginning of the 1960s.
And finally, that rather than being a vehicle through which the struggle against
exploitation and oppression can be advanced, the real “true genius” of the
U.S. Constitution, and the electoral process, and Obama’s role in particular
today, is to cover over, while facilitating exploitation and, in that context,
the subjugation of Black people and others.
Concessions Wrenched Through Struggle
Up to, through, and then in the aftermath of World War 2, momentous and
unprecedented changes took place in U.S. society. The country underwent massive
industrialization, and as a result, between 1910 and 1970, between five and six
million Black people were driven from the poverty and vicious repression in the
South into the factories and cities of the North and West.
This migration of Black people to the cities created new conditions for Black
people’s struggle, and strengthened a mood of rebellion. After World War 2, a
million African-Americans returned from segregated units of the U.S military
with new experiences, new expectations, and new demands. In factories, in the
streets, in the schools, in culture, sports and other realms, different forms of
struggle erupted.
At this same time, the condition of Black people was an international
embarrassment to U.S. imperialism, an impediment to the U.S. grabbing up spheres
of exploitation from earlier colonial powers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
In doing so, the U.S. was trying to pose as the “champion of democracy” as
it contended with old-style colonial powers Britain and France.
Under these conditions the rulers of this country made some initial concessions
to the struggle of Black people against discrimination and segregation. In a
series of court rulings and official policies that pivoted on the 1954 Brown v.
Board of Education case (where the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the “separate
but equal standard” that had been in effect for over fifty years), official
segregation was outlawed.
The struggle of Black people had been developing through the 1930s (including
the sharecroppers union movement in the South and the battle to free the
Scottsboro Boys), and this picked up in intensity after World War 2. While the
overturning of legal segregation barely scratched the surface of U.S. society,
it did open cracks through which an era of tremendous struggle erupted. Black
students courageously fought to integrate schools in the face of racist mobs and
governors who blocked their path. Black people in the South fought poll taxes,
“literacy tests,” death threats, and murder to register to vote. Freedom
Riders—groups of courageous Black and white activists—integrated public
transportation facilities, refusing to back down in spite of vicious beatings by
local police and KKK thugs—beatings that were often orchestrated by the FBI.
Marches in the North and South demanded that Black people have the right to live
in what were segregated neighborhoods, and these marches too had to go up
against vicious attacks.
As this civil rights movement spread, it also came up against the fact that the
system was unwilling to grant the kind of changes that would really transform
the situation of Black people in the U.S. As this happened, people began to see
that discrimination and oppression of Black people was systemic. In part
inspired and influenced by socialist China and Mao, along with revolutionary
upsurges in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, sections of the movement took up
more radical and revolutionary politics, especially students and youth. By the
mid- and late Sixties, a Black Liberation struggle emerged with a revolutionary
edge.
This Black Liberation struggle was met with vicious repression. Malcolm X was
assassinated under circumstances that bore the fingerprints of a government
operation. Hundreds of members of the Black Panther Party were arrested,
including top leaders like Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver. Many
of their members and leaders, including Fred Hampton, were killed by police or
government operatives.
It was through great sacrifice and struggle that significant concessions to the
fight for equality were won in this period. In the mid- and late Sixties
rebellions swept the major cities of the U.S. In Detroit, where the largest and
most sustained and determined rebellion broke out in 1967, President Lyndon B.
Johnson sent in National Guard and U.S. Army troops, and 43 people gave their
lives in that uprising.
In this atmosphere, jobs, including union factory jobs and jobs in government,
opened up to Black people. Welfare programs provided some relief from poverty.
Head Start programs allowed kids to get breakfast and have a place to go after
school. Community organizing programs were funded. And significant numbers of
Black people were admitted to colleges and universities. Some positions in the
middle class that had been denied to Black people opened up, and even in high
places in government, Black faces appeared.
Affirmative action programs were important. They broke down some barriers in
society that had prevented all but a few African Americans from admission to law
school and medical school, for example. And in the face of societal upheaval,
with millions of people of all nationalities feeling strongly that white
supremacy was systemic, affirmative action programs represented—for a
time—something of an official acknowledgement that inequality was a social
problem, not simply a matter of declaring equality for individuals out of the
context of the whole history of the oppression of Black people. In 1965, for
example, the same President Lyndon Johnson who sent the army into Detroit to
kill people was compelled to say that “You do not take a person who, for
years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting
line of a race and say ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and
still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”
These concessions were not some kind of product of “the path of a more perfect
union” charted in the U.S. Constitution, as Obama claims, but were wrenched
from this system in this period.
In this period of U.S. history, people were being pulled into political life. In
the inner cities and the suburbs, in barber shops and on college campuses, they
watched TV coverage of dogs and firehoses being unleashed on civil rights
protesters in Birmingham, “shoot to kill” orders against those participating
in urban uprisings, and napalm being dropped onto the Vietnamese people. And as
people were pulled into protest and rebellion, they were also coming into
contact with revolutionary politics, both globally and within the U.S.
In that context, unprecedented unity was built among the people.
Counter-intuitive as this might seem to those who were not part of it all (or
who might have forgotten what they knew back then), and completely in
contradiction to Obama’s branding of this era and its legacy as
“divisive,” the reality was that the more radical and revolutionary the
struggle, the more it was aimed at the system, the greater the “division” in
society between the ruling class and the people—the greater the unity that was
built among the people. The Black Panther Party, for example, was admired and
supported by millions of white people, from high school youth to prominent
literary and cultural figures, and many people of all nationalities rallied to
its defense when it was under assault from the government, including prominent
people in the arts like Leonard Bernstein and Marlon Brando.
Concessions, Maneuvers, and Betrayal
In the Sixties, it appeared that there was a possibility of real equality for
Black people under this system. But that did not happen and could not have
happened. It could not have happened because the superexploitation of Black
people was (and is) critical to the functioning of U.S. capitalism and its place
in the world; and because the social glue of white supremacy is essential to the
stability of U.S. society in the form of imbuing white people who are not part
of the ruling class with a sense of entitlement, superiority, and identification
of their interests with those of the system.
Concessions made in the face of fierce struggle did not come close to bringing
full equality for Black people. And those concessions that were made, were made
in ways that set the stage for reversing some of them. Plus, the “normal”
workings of capitalism—like the deindustrialization of the cities (with jobs
moving to sweatshops around the world)—also undercut advances made by
African-Americans.
Part of what emerged from the Sixties was much greater polarization among
African-Americans. Today, the existence of a more substantial Black middle
class, and the presence of Black people in the ruling class—on the Supreme
Court, in the military, in the cabinet—contribute to obscuring the nature of
this system. Obama himself serves as centerpiece of this, invoking the fact that
he can “run for the highest office in the land.”
The fact that some space has been opened in the middle class for Black people
has a certain conservatizing impact. But the position of the Black middle class
was always tenuous. Many of the economic sectors they have been admitted to
(like civil service jobs in local, state, and federal governments, for example)
have been hit hardest by economic changes in the U.S. over the past several
decades. And African-Americans have also been among those hardest hit by the
current credit crisis. Each week it seems a different Black athlete or performer
is pilloried in the media and hit with criminal charges for activities that, if
not completely fabricated, are often business-as-usual for wealthy white people.
Affirmative action programs, and the rationale behind them, are under vicious
attack. Even the historic Supreme Court ruling that officially outlawed school
segregation has been severely gutted by recent court rulings (see “U.S.
Supreme Court Fortifies the Savage Inequalities,” Revolution, 7/15/07,
available at revcom.us).
Most Black people have remained chained to the lowest rungs in the economy. In
the factories, they were last hired, first fired, and stuck in the worst paying,
most dangerous jobs. Even concessions like welfare and Head Start programs
operated to keep Black people in segregated neighborhoods, or to prepare
them—in most cases—for minimum-wage jobs. And the masses of Black people
continued to be subject to segregation in housing and education; systematically
ridiculed or demonized by white supremacist culture; and subject to ever-present
police brutality and murder to keep them “in their place.” The explosion of
the prison population, which began with the “war on drugs” in the early
1970s, consciously designed by President Nixon as a war on Black people, was
carried forward by all his successors including Carter and Clinton, and is not
opposed by Obama.
For large sections of Black people, conditions are desperate and extreme. As
early as the 1950s, the inner-city factories began moving to Asia and Latin
America in search of fresh blood to exploit under even more brutal and
repressive conditions. In other cases, immigrants have been brought in to work
on the killing floors and construction sites for less money and under more
dangerous conditions (and through this process, Blacks and Latinos have been
pitted against each other by the workings of the system, and by conscious
efforts to whip up antagonisms between them—even while the masses of Black and
Latino people face a common enemy).
Between 1980, when the inner cities were being systematically emptied of jobs
and social services, and 1997, Black people in the millions were criminalized by
the system. Under conditions where for many, the drug trade was the only option
for survival, the number of people imprisoned in the U.S. for drug offenses
increased elevenfold, and this was concentrated in the extreme for Black people,
who are eight times as likely to be in jail as whites. “A black male resident
of the state of California is more likely to go to a state prison than a state
college.” (“Why Are So Many Americans in Prison? Race and the Transformation
of Criminal Justice,” Boston Review, July/August 2007.)
What is demonstrated by all this is that capitalism cannot end inequality and
the subjugation of Black people and other oppressed peoples. But revolution, and
communism, can and will. Communist revolution is aimed at bringing to an end all
forms of oppression and exploitation, and uprooting, through a process, all
ideas and relations between people that serve or reinforce exploitation and
oppression. Instead of feeding on inequality—as capitalism does—a lifeblood
of socialism, as a transition to communism, will be the unleashing of struggle
against all oppressive social relations.
What Kind of Unity Do We Need?
In his “Speech on Race,” Obama proclaims—in the course of attacking the
“divisive” legacy of the Sixties—that, “I have asserted a firm
conviction—a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American
people—that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds,
and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more
perfect union.”
First, it must be said that faith in “god” and faith in the people are two
fundamentally different things. There is no god, and the “god” of the Bible
is a god who, including through his supposed “son,” takes slavery for
granted, from Genesis to Revelation.
Further, there are no common interests of the “American people.” Central to
Obama’s role and mission is confounding—mixing together as if they were the
same thing—two fundamentally different kinds of contradictions: contradictions
among the people (like between ordinary white people on the one hand, and Blacks
and Latinos on the other; or between Blacks and Latinos), with contradictions
between the people and the system. With his calls to “move beyond our old
wounds,” Obama appeals to the desire of many people of all races to overcome
racism and divisions among the people. But in doing so, he perverts that desire
into channeling people to support the system that is the cause of racism and the
oppression of Black people, Latinos, and others who are oppressed as peoples in
this country; and to ignoring the real scars and open, running wounds of racism
today—which will only get worse until they are confronted and uprooted.
Obama’s message is being delivered, and he is being brought forward, at a time
when this system faces tremendous stresses and strains. Obama himself situates
his mission in a context of a need for unity (with the unspoken but central
point that this is unity behind the ruling class) “at a time when we need to
come together to solve a set of monumental problems — two wars, a terrorist
threat, a falling economy” and other challenges to this system (which he mixes
in with a list of challenges to the ability of people to survive).
This is a time of great challenges for this system and this ruling class. But
the unity the people need, to bring about fundamental change through revolution,
and even short of that to resist the whole direction of society, is not unity
with the class of global oppressors and exploiters who rule this society.
Throughout this series, we have shown how the subjugation of Black people is
embedded in the economic, political, and ideological operation of this system.
Black people have historically been viciously superexploited, in the fields and
in the sweatshops of America. And their subjugation as a people has been
justified by a whole racist culture. The whole “genius” of “we the
people” is the illusion of a society that can serve the interests of
“everyone,” built on the appearance of including whites in the system,
contrasted with the exclusion of Black people, Latinos, and Native Americans. In
short, the subjugation of Black people is a product of this capitalist system,
serves this capitalist system, and this system could not go on without it.
That is why the Constitution of the United States that Obama wraps himself in
is, and has always been, a framework for exploitation, and an enforcer of
profound inequality. The U.S. Constitution may promise formal, surface equality
(a promise rarely kept), but it can never be a vehicle for ending exploitation
and the real inequality that produces.