Debate: The Hopes For Obama and Revolutionary Solutions

The following thread contains an unfolding discussion about revolutionary politics and the electoral moment.

Suggestion: click to where that discussion TAKES OFF.

Obama: Truth and Denial in Modern Amerikkka

by Mike Ely

Let’s start with some truths:

How rare it is to turn on TV and see someone state the simple truth that the U.S. is a racist country run by rich white men. It has been remarkable to hear the suddenly-famous Rev. Jeremiah Wright describe how leaders in the U.S. have no sense of the lives of the oppressed, especially African American people. To hear passionate denunciation of the import of drugs with high-level complicity, of the Three-Strikes law and of the prison warehousing of young Black men. It was startling to hear someone say that we can’t understand 9/11 and the reaction of the world without looking deeply at U.S. mass murder at Hiroshima, Nagasaki and a hundred places since. It was a rare moment where very basic truths were powerfully expressed in public view, on TV, in a way that saturates national discussion for a week.

But it all comes with enforced denial:

It is the method of this system (its media, its official commentators, the minders of its official politics) to only allow such truths into public to demonize them — to mock them as absurd, extremist, even racist.

Rev. Wright’s Black Liberation Theology views were allowed into the spotlight – just this once – in order to command a massive denunciation.

How dare anyone make the U.S. the moral equivalent of its enemies, they said?

How dare anyone talk of U.S. killings, killers, and war crimes in the same breath as 9/11?

How dare anyone connect Israel’s oppression of Palestinians with the acts of attack on the U.S.?

How dare anyone point to the racist experiments in Tuskegee that allowed Black men to die of syphilis, and then wonder publicly if the spread and neglect of the AIDS epidemic included a conscious genocidal edge?

How dare a state senator, a U.S. senator, or a Presidential contender even sit in the pews while such things are hinted? How dare Obama remain friends with a man who could say and believe such things?

And none of this denunciation was done with any respect or integrity: Did anyone investigate the theology of James Cone? Did anyone explain to the public what happened at Tuskegee, or what “killers” the U.S. had sent into the world?

And that brings us to the second set of truth and denial:

The truth is that elections are not held mainly to hear “what the voters think.” Let’s be clear: These ruthless monsters of empire, profit and war don’t suddenly stop (for a few months every four years) and turn over all their power and disputes for “millions of ordinary voters” to decide. That isn’t what happens. That isn’t what elections are for.

The truth is that elections are mainly held as a process of indoctrination and legitimization. This is when the usually-tuned-out broad population is instructed in how to think about major issues. This is a time for defining and enforcing the official limits of political thought. This is how the ruling establishment tests and picks a contending set of new rulers. And then the winning clique is legitimized by the ritual of popular approval.

In U.S. elections, those outside the confines of “responsible thought” are in for a public whupping. Nader was crushed and then blamed for Bush – and millions were instructed to never stray from the Democratic Party again (however reactionary, warlike, and semi-Republican those Democrats get). Kucinich was portrayed as a silly gnome, as a joke, as someone ridiculously outside the realm of the possible (because he was actually against all of these wars, because he supported nationalized health care, because he supported gay marriage etc.)

It is now widely said that the Democrats are self-destructing – in today’s New York Times one oped piece compared them to the Donner Party (the pioneers who ate each other in a snowstorm).

But the reality is that they are being skewered on their defining contradiction: Their party, leadership and candidates want to rule an empire, while their own base thinks that is wrong. Their party, leadership and candidates want to service the drug and insurance companies, while their own core base wants generalized affordable health care.

And so, the price of admission into the White House itself becomes (for Democratic contenders) the tortured repudiation of many things that are actually popular and true. In particular, the Democratic plans for “ending the war” must be “responsible” – that means protracted withdrawal, leaving troops behind (or just “over the horizon). And it generally means planning to end the U.S. occupation while still controlling Iraq through a “Iraqi army” made up of vicious mercenaries and committed religious sectarians (led by puppet generals who imagine themselves the next U.S.-backed Saddam Hussein).

The “discussion of race” has now been “broached”… and framed as a discussion over the essential goodness of the U.S.! Wright is portrayed as an America-hater who must be repudiated by all — especially those close to him. The bitterness, suspicion, anger and alienation felt by many Black people is portrayed as something malignant, repulsive, dangerous, and perverse. (Just watch John Stewart’s shout of “Yikes” after running a Wright clip.)

That is the starting point for a official “discussion of race.” The discussion of the actual truth is treated like the “third rail”: you insist that this is a profoundly racist country where the oppression of Black people has been built in as a structural defining dynamic of society, then you are (by official proclamation) far outside disqualified from holding power (or even speaking in the official media spotlights).

Deep truth runs into harshly enforced denial.

I will not analyse Obama’s speech responding to this challenge here. He has been twisting in the wind, while pretending to be rising above the fray. He tried to remain personally loyal to his friend Wright, while joining the political repudiation of Wright’s views. And even that hint of holding back (of seeming to tolerate the views of Rev. Wright) may yet end Obama’s political life – either before or after the nomination.

And that is a truth about America and its elections laid bare here: The price of admission is the denial of the truth. It is an upholding of the empire and the basic structures of this society – even while promises of change and transcendence are written into the scripts.

This country was founded on slavery, genocide and conquest. And the continued enforcement of caste-like oppression of millions of Black and immigrant peoples is central to how the U.S. functions and thrives (as a capitalist power). And that is why people in the 60s (and people like Wright from the 60s) sometimes write Amerikkka with three Ks (connecting the country itself with white supremacy). The KKK itself may be gone with the particular system of Jim Crow. But the modern forms and morphings of white supremacy demand to be exposed and overturned — while the official approach is to defend them by denying their existance.

This needs to be is a simple, basic starting point for understanding this place, and grappling with what it will take to really change it.

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Because Wright’s sermons are taken so out-of-context, here is a longer section of his 9/11 discussion, thanks to Winslie Gomez.