Reproduced from The Greanville Journal @ Cyrano’s Journal Online
One more warning on Obama and the Dems. Don’t say we didn’t tell you.
July 20th, 2008
Let’s Get Real / Guest editor: Morris Berman
Dear Friends,
I thought this article by John Pilger, the British journalist, on Barack Obama was too important to pass up, especially in view of the fact that most Americans have not read “Dark Ages America” and would hate it if they did. (I encourage you to cut, paste, and circulate this essay.) For those of you who did read it, you may remember I said that it was virtually impossible to get elected president if you did not support corporate America’s agenda and the national security state. The following essay strikes me as being an important antidote to the naive belief that Mr. Obama somehow represents a radical alternative to the status quo, or that the November election represents some sort of watershed in American history. -MB.
Published on Saturday, May 31, 2008 by The New Statesman (UK)
After Bobby Kennedy (There Was Barack Obama)
by John Pilger
In this season of 1968 nostalgia, one anniversary illuminates today. It is the rise and fall of Robert Kennedy, who would have been elected president of the United States had he not been assassinated in June 1968. Having travelled with Kennedy up to the moment of his shooting at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on 5 June, I heard The Speech many times. He would “return government to the people” and bestow “dignity and justice” on the oppressed. “As Bernard Shaw once said,” he would say, “‘Most men look at things as they are and wonder why. I dream of things that never were and ask: Why not?'” That was the signal to run back to the bus. It was fun until a hail of bullets passed over our shoulders.
Kennedy’s campaign is a model for Barack Obama. Like Obama, he was a senator with no achievements to his name. Like Obama, he raised the expectations of young people and minorities. Like Obama, he promised to end an unpopular war, not because he opposed the war’s conquest of other people’s land and resources, but because it was “unwinnable”.
Should Obama beat John McCain to the White House in November, it will be liberalism’s last fling. In the United States and Britain, liberalism as a war-making, divisive ideology is once again being used to destroy liberalism as a reality. A great many people understand this, as the hatred of Blair and new Labour attest, but many are disoriented and eager for “leadership” and basic social democracy. In the US, where unrelenting propaganda about American democratic uniqueness disguises a corporate system based on extremes of wealth and privilege, liberalism as expressed through the Democratic Party has played a crucial, compliant role.
There is no precedent for this kind of massive ego fest on DocuDharma. budhydharma, the owner of this site had the following contention-
