Obama, The Postmodern Coup -- Making of a Manchurian Candidate [EXCERPT]
by Webster Griffin Tarpley
Introduction: Obama: a CIA People Power Coup, U.S.A, 2008
Youth, youth, springtime of beauty.
-- "Giovinezza," Italian fascist song, 1921
The need for this book became evident to me between Sunday January 6 and Monday January 7, 2008, that is to say, during the interval between this year's January 3 Iowa caucus and the January 8 New Hampshire primary. From my vantage point in Washington, I was in communication with a group of friends who were making a programmatic intervention into the New Hampshire political and media circus around the idea of a five-year compulsory freeze on foreclosures of primary residences, farms, hospitals, public utilities, transportation companies, and factories. These friends were holding a press conference in Manchester, while actively buttonholing and lobbying the staffs of the various presidential campaigns then active in New Hampshire, urging them to adopt and support the five-year ban on foreclosures as the centerpiece of their own approach for dealing with the current George Bush economic depression. At the same time, I was in frequent contact with my old friend Franco Macchi, who has for many decades maintained an unparalleled overview of the world strategic situation, supplemented by extensive on-the-ground experience in Central Europe, in the Balkans, and in regard to Russia.
My friends in New Hampshire told me of the stunned disorientation, demoralization, and drift among members of the Hillary Clinton campaign as it straggled in from New Hampshire on Friday, January 4 and attempted to pivot into the urgent tasks of the New Hampshire primary. My friends learned that the internal polling of the Clinton campaign in Iowa had indicated that Hillary was on her way to winning the caucuses, and that this erroneous finding had been aggressively asserted by the marplot Mark Penn down to the moment when it was overwhelmed by caucus returns showing that Senator Clinton had in fact been defeated not just by Obama, but by Senator Edwards as well. As the weekend progressed, I supplemented these reports by monitoring CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News Channel. It quickly became evident that all the networks were in the grip of the most intense outburst of media hysteria observed since the aftermath of September 11, 2001. The target of their vituperation was Mrs. Clinton, whom they demanded must immediately cease her campaign and drop out of contention for the presidency. Hour by hour, Mrs. Clinton was submerged by a rising tide of the vilest verbal abuse. The object of their adulation was the leptic figure of a certain Barack Obama, a little-known Senator from Illinois with no known accomplishments or loyalties who was beginning to make a reputation for himself as a mob orator. For Obama, the television commentators were forecasting immediate transfiguration, ascension, and apotheosis. For Senator Edwards, the strongest economic populist in the Democratic field, the media had only indifference and oblivion.
I had tried to get Congressman Kucinich to address issues of 9/11 truth, as well as the colossal scandal of the rogue B-52, which had flown from North Dakota to Louisiana at the end of August with six nuclear cruise missiles on board, outside of the normal legal channels of the U.S. Air Force. Congressman Kucinich and Senator Gravel had been unable or unwilling to address the issue of the rogue B-52 in a series of Democratic candidates' debates carried on nationwide cable television, with the national press present and paying attention. I had gone from attempting to push Kucinich into some kind of meaningful action related to emerging events on the Iran war front, to attempting to push Edwards, at least on paper the best economic populist left in the race, into a more aggressive stance on stopping foreclosures as a prelude to other New Deal measures to address the economic crisis, which was becoming acute towards the end of 2007.
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI AND OBAMA
At the same time, I was talking to Franco Macchi about what appeared to us to be the most dangerous foreign policy tendency common to the Democratic candidates, namely their tendency to adopt a line of militant confrontation with Russia and with Russian President Vladimir Putin in particular. In this context, my friend drew my attention to the fact that Zbigniew Brzezinski, the notorious Dr. Strangelove hawk and warmonger of the Cold War and an inveterate Russia hater, had a few months before openly assumed a position of dominance inside the Obama campaign by accepting the role of Obama's chief foreign policy adviser. Brzezinski, of course, had long been infamous for his demonic role in the tragic foreign policy betrayals of the Carter administration between 1977 and 1981. A quick check revealed that Zbigniew Brzezinski and his son Mark Brzezinski were shaping Obama's entire public profile along the lines suggested by Zbigniew's most recent books. Zbig's daughter, Mika Brzezinski, was churning out the Obama line every morning on MSNBC. A pattern was emerging. However, I still believed that Sen. Clinton was the flagship candidate of the Wall Street finance establishment. That notion was about to be violently swept aside by emerging events.
Traditionally, the Ukraine was part of Russia, but by the end of 2004 the tide had turned.
The United States pumped millions of dollars into the opposition movements in favor of regime change. We are meeting with the two former leaders of the Ukraine revolution. ...
[Narrator] After the revolution in Ukraine, Dmytro Poteschin made a career from being a former activist. He now works as a revolution trainer. From his flat, he instructs the opposition movements in Iran, Russia, Belarus, and Egypt. Via Skype he's able to stay in touch with all his clients....
[Narrator] An activist from the opposition movement in Belarus is online. Dmytro is planning a workshop over there, which is not without its difficulties, as he is labeled persona non grata by the Belarus government.
[Dmytro Poteschin, Political Consultant] I got the feeling that actually it's like a concentration of a number of conflicts which cannot be resolved without mobilization. And it looks like it can happen the way it happened in Egypt. Some smaller country, like Belarus, for instance, or Ukraine. And then we can get Russia.
-- The Revolution Business, by Patrick A. Hafner, Alexander Steinbach -- Screenplay
By midday of Monday, January 7, the media pressure for Mrs. Clinton to terminate her campaign and abort the entire multi-month primary process of the Democratic Party had reached grotesque dimensions. The television networks were reporting public opinion polls that indicated that Obama was on his way to crushing Senator Clinton and Senator Edwards in an epic landslide in the New Hampshire primary scheduled for the following day, thus rendering their continuance in the campaign a futile gesture. At the same time, the networks were also filling their screens with the images of the large crowds waiting outside Obama's campaign rallies all over New Hampshire. The corporate media were hyping Obama's slogans of "hope" and of "change we can believe in." The most obscene media swoon of recent decades was reaching the point of paroxysm. Given the realities of the U.S. oligarchical system as I had studied them in connection with the events of September 11, 2001, it was clear that one of the great intelligence community mobilizations of the decade was in progress. What was being shown on television was no longer the standard coverage of a normal political campaign, but rather a propaganda exercise within the framework of a CIA covert operation.
The controlled corporate media wanted Obama nominated by accolade, by acclamation, by the mob of swarming adolescents. He was being offered not a public office but a crown -- better yet, an apotheosis. For the media whores, the reign of the new Messiah was beginning.
POSTMODERN COUP D'ETAT A LA KIEV 2004
A coup d'etat, in short, was in progress. But it was not the coup d'etat of the Greek colonels, nor of Pinochet in Chile. It was not a right-wing coup at all, and it was not violent -- at least, not initially. This was a coup d'etat with leftist and progressive overtones, carried out not by a junta of elderly reactionary generals, but rather by a slick young demagogue of the center-left who advanced surrounded by swarms of youthful and enthusiastic devotees. It resembled nothing so much as the so-called Orange Revolution which had taken place in Kiev, in the Ukraine, in the late fall and early winter of 2004. That Orange Revolution, as informed observers knew very well, had been the result of a cynical destabilization of Ukraine by U.S. and British intelligence -- especially by the National Endowment for Democracy, the various Soros foundations, Gene Sharp's Albert Einstein Institution, and other entities that we may refer to for the sake of brevity and clarity as the privatized or quasi-governmental left wing of the U.S. intelligence community or left CIA in the post-1982 era of President Reagan's Executive Order 12333.
The 2004 Orange Revolution was not a unique event, but had been preceded by similar exercises in destabilization and subversion, especially in the former Warsaw Pact and Soviet spaces. These have included the successful so-called Bulldozer Revolution in Belgrade, Serbia in 2000, and the Roses revolution in Tiflis, Georgia in 2003. There had been an attempt at a Cedars Revolution in Lebanon in 2006, but it had been blocked by the organized mass mobilization capacity of Hezbollah. Another attempted coup in Belarus in 2001 had also been defeated by that nation's government.
All of these coups had several features in common. They were always built around a telegenic demagogue. They always featured fake public opinion polling, often combined with outright vote fraud. They required huge sums of money and abundant supplies of narcotics to fuel them. They featured large mobs, composed especially of politically naive and suggestible young people, who would demonstrate and camp out in public squares to support the demands of the coup. They presupposed a significant control over television, radio, key Internet sites, and other media, which were used to project and portray the youthful mob of swarming adolescents as the authentic expression of the will of the whole people. They all arrived after a period of suffocating repression, which they opportunistically exploited to introduce a new order which was not much better, and which generally became radically worse, than the pre-coup status quo. They had trademarks, logos, slogans, and jingles straight from Madison Avenue: "It's enough!" chanted one. "He's finished!" screamed another. One was called Resistance. One was Orange. One was a red, red rose. Obama's color was blue, no doubt to reflect his cool detachment from the partisan fray. Another had the green of the cedar tree. All of them somehow ended up by installing into power NATO agents and greedy kleptocrats in the service of banks located in Wall Street and the City of London.
POSTMODERN FASCISM: THE SHOCK OF RECOGNITION, JANUARY 7, 2008
All of these thoughts came together in my mind as I viewed the images of an Obama rally on MSNBC. It was the early afternoon of Monday, January 7, 2008.
"My God!" I exclaimed. "It's a color revolution in the U.S.!"
It was indeed an attempted color revolution, organized in the form of a surprise attack. At this point, my entire political orientation began to change rapidly. As 2007 had come to an end, I had repeatedly told my weekly radio audiences on the Genesis Communications Network that the two most important goals in the upcoming primary season were first of all to defeat Mayor Giuliani as the most dangerous Republican candidate, surrounded as he was by the entire gaggle of discredited and demented neocon warmongers. My second goal had been to deny Mrs. Clinton the Democratic presidential nomination, based on her stubborn support for the lunatic military adventure in Iraq, and her hostile attitude towards Iran. She further appeared to be the consensus candidate of the Wall Street banking establishment.
The evidence available just after midday on January 7, 2008 clearly showed that this second point, however plausible it might have seemed during the course of 2007, was no longer applicable. It was now evident that Mrs. Clinton had become the object of the universal execration and obloquy of the controlled corporate media. The press whores were attempting to tear her to pieces. A massive mobilization of intelligence community assets against Mrs. Clinton was in progress. At the same time, it was now clear that the candidate of Wall Street and of the intelligence community was none other than the unknown outsider Obama, who was suddenly revealed as a typical photogenic demagogue from Brzezinski's central casting department. The mass hysteria generated by Obama's joint appearances with the New Age billionairess celebrity Oprah Winfrey now revealed its sinister purpose: it was in every way a coup d'etat.
All of this required me to reverse my political field immediately. My priorities had to be reordered, and radically. I needed to shift target at once. I needed to focus on the most dangerous oligarchical and imperialist threat. In a naval battle, it makes no sense to scatter one's fire haphazardly among the ships of the opposing fleet. It is far better to concentrate one's attacks on the enemy's flagship. There was now no doubt who this was.
OBAMA'S HANDLERS: THE BRZEZINSKI CLIQUE
I had been studying Obama's advisers, handlers, and controllers. In about 20 minutes I was able to assemble a rogue's gallery of these figures with a brief note about their main strategic obsession. First on the list was of course the unreconstructed cold warrior Zbigniew Brzezinski, with his fanatical commitment to promote confrontation with Russia, the greatest of all possible lunacies, worse than the neocon plans for mucking around in the Middle East. Then came Mark Brzezinski, in pursuit of the same goal. Then came Susan Rice, infamous for wanting to bomb Sudan. Then came Richard Clarke, the originator of the absurd myth of 9/11. Then came Dennis Ross, more effective in undermining the Arab world because of the vague left cover he enjoyed. People had seen George W. Bush burst onto the scene in 2000 with his mantra of being a uniter and not a divider, a compassionate conservative, and a supporter of a foreign policy based on humility. The horrors of Bush had been on display for almost 8 years. The lesson of 2000 had been that the reassuring promises of a candidate with no track record and no accomplishments were far less important than the careful study of the handlers, advisors, controllers, and backers, since these were destined to become the White House palace guard of the new regime. Surely the people who had been so cruelly deceived by Bush would have the sense to look beyond Obama's messianic and utopian verbiage to see the reality of the revanchist Brzezinski clique pulling the candidate's strings.
The resulting instant leaflet was distributed to the entire Edwards campaign bus, to some of Senator Clinton's most important advisors, and to a number of journalists and television commentators. That was the beginning of a campaign of mass political education about the urgent danger posed by the Obama campaign -- an educational campaign which this book hopes to continue.
FASCISM MUCH WORSE THAN MERE DICTATORSHIP
In order to understand the nature of the problem posed by Operation Obama, it is unavoidable to introduce a discussion of certain features of fascism. It is no coincidence that massive efforts are being undertaken in the current time to obfuscate and confuse popular understanding of what fascism was. One of the most absurd of these attempts is the book Liberal Fascism by the reactionary Republican and neocon Jonah Goldberg, the son of the old reactionary battle axe Lucianne Goldberg, the sponsor of military intelligence figure Linda Tripp during the impeachment campaign against Bill Clinton. Goldberg's doltish thesis is that whenever government intervenes in the economy, fascism results. This idiotic viewpoint would make both Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln into dyed in the wool goose-steppers. For Goldberg, the essence of fascism in our own time is naturally to be sought in the Franklin D. Roosevelt New Deal -- this despite the fact that the New Deal was a vital factor in the defeat of fascism back here in the real world. Goldberg's book is so grotesque a tissue of distortions that one is forced to conclude that such a hack job must have been ordered up by the intelligence community for the express purpose of disorienting public opinion on this very important question, precisely at the moment when Obama's ascendancy would begin to force many serious and intelligent people to begin rethinking the question of fascism.
For our purposes here, we need to look at fascism most of all as a political phenomenon, and this means fascism as a mass movement. The average American thinks of fascism as a bureaucratic-authoritarian form of police-state dictatorship which becomes more and more oppressive and stifling until it reaches the point where it can be called fascist. The resulting notion of fascism as the extreme form of oppressive top-down dictatorship is a complete and total misconception of how fascism comes about, and one of the most dangerous delusions possible in the current situation. If fascism meant nothing more than tyranny, oppression, dictatorship, and police state, it would never have been necessary to introduce a special new term "fascism" in the years following World War I. Terms like police-state dictatorship would have been more than enough. But fascism was something very different.
FASCISM AS A GRASS-ROOTS MASS MOVEMENT RUN BY BANKERS
Fascism was not what most readers think. In its origins, fascism takes the form of a mass movement. Fascism started as a political protest movement at the grass-roots level, an anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian, and anti-parliamentary movement with radical cover and indeed with left cover. It started in the streets, or better yet, in the gutter. It did not start with bureaucrats issuing arrest warrants from government offices. It started with fervently idealistic young students, and then brutal thugs carrying truncheons, clubs, and firearms on their way to do battle with their political enemies, and quite often with the police. Fascism was an affair of hooligans, goons, gangsters, and fanatics. It was the specialty of ragtag storm troopers. It was the political theater of Mussolini's march on Rome in 1922. The bulk of fascism's forces came from parts of the middle class who had been driven insane by economic crisis and by military defeat, and many were disgruntled war veterans. The rebellious despair of these social groups was the soil from which fascism grew. Of course, after fascism took power it became more and more evident that this radical, grassroots, anti-establishment, anti-politician protest movement had not been spontaneous at all, but had been carefully and artificially orchestrated by the most prominent bankers and their political operatives. Fascism established itself by attacking, harassing, and crushing the main political institutions of society which opposed it, most especially the left wing political parties, trade unions, independent newspapers, and independent organizations of all types.
After it had seized power, fascism tended to eliminate its own radical and mass movement dimensions, sometimes with direct murderous violence, and then to solidify and consolidate itself into a top-down police state dictatorship. But it must not be forgotten that such a relatively stable police state dictatorship could never have been created without the ability of a fascist mass movement first to systematically destroy all forms of organized political resistance inside the society in a way that the police and the secret police simply could not do, in which the army could never have been trusted to undertake. While many scholars focus their attention on the ossified end product of fascism as an accomplished police state dictatorship, for us today it is imperative to understand it in statu nascenti, the beginnings of fascism, as a bottom-up mass movement fomented by bankers in order to mobilize society for economic sacrifice, for fanaticism, and for war.
FASCISM HAD LEFT RADICAL ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT COVER
The radical, anti-establishment, and leftist overtones of fascism may be the hardest for the present day American to grasp. Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and their ilk appear in retrospect as right wing extremists of the most exasperated type. But it should be recalled that Mussolini in his early career was a socialist, and that even Hitler insisted on calling his movement National Socialism. There was a reason for this, and it was to recruit any and all disaffected anti-establishment and anti-politician forces into the new movement, including those coming from leftist backgrounds, no matter how antithetical and contradictory they might be among themselves. Mussolini and Hitler both claimed to be the real revolution, not the fake revolution that had been manifested as betrayal of the workers by corrupt socialist party and union bosses.
The question of the fascist mass movement is the essential one. Anybody can become an individual fascist anytime they decide to do so. It is fair to say that Bush and Cheney have the mentality of fascists and are fascists, but this should not obscure the fact that they do not have a fascist mass movement and could almost never be capable of creating one. Fascist leaders have to be charismatic, energetic, feral, cunning, brutal, and eloquent. Bush is a class A war criminal, but he could hardly make it as the leader of a fascist mass movement. His shortcomings as an orator are alone sufficient to rule him out. So when Keith Olberman chose to denounce Bush as a fascist just as a number of commentators were beginning to notice the parallels between an Obama rally and a Mussolini balcony speech, we must suspect that this star of the Brzezinski network MSNBC was acting in bad faith, seeking not to educate his viewers about the essence of fascism, but rather seeking to confuse them on this score. The point is that Obama brings together more of the characteristic features of fascism than any other political figure on the U.S. scene, either now or in living memory. This need not mean that Obama represents the culmination or endpoint of fascist development in this country today. Obama may well be the John the Baptist of postmodern fascism, destined to fall by the wayside and be supplanted by a larger figure who may well build on the rage and bitterness of Obama's disappointed followers. It does mean that the Obama candidacy already represents a significant step in the direction of postmodern fascism.
Consider this series of names: Nitti, Giolitti, Bonomi, and Facta. If you do not know who they are, then you should admit to yourself that you know almost nothing about the genesis of Italian fascism in the years following World War I. These are the names of the Italian prime ministers who were in power in the years of economic crisis and national convulsion preceding Mussolini's march on Rome in October 1922. Some of them, most notably Facta, were parliamentary cretins and nonentities. Giolitti, by contrast, was a politician of real substance and merit who had helped Italy develop modern railroads, modern industries, and a modern merchant marine, and who had fought to save his country from the incalculable folly of intervening in World War I on the side of the British and French. Whatever his faults, Giolitti can be considered at the very least as the lesser evil of the Old Order in Italy at that time, in something of the same way that the Clintons would have to be considered as a lesser evil in comparison with Bush the elder, Bob Dole, and Bush the younger. Several years went by after 1922 before most Italians realized that all the governments up to and including Facta had represented one thing, but that the country had gone off a cliff with Mussolini as far as political life and the rule of law were concerned. It was the fascist seizure of power of October 1922 which marked the great point of no return, the great watershed, even though this had not been obvious to many in real time.
BRUNING, VON PAPEN, VON SCHLEICHER...
Here is another series of names: Bruning, von Papen, von Schleicher. If you do not know who these people are, then you know absolutely nothing about the origins of the more extreme German form of fascism which built on the experience of the Italian original, and which is called Nazism. These are the names of the German chancellors in the period of acute economic depression in Germany leading up to Hitler's seizure of power in January 1933. Bruning ruled the longest, holding on to power for about two years, ruling by emergency decree with the help of President Hindenburg, and imposing a series of brutal austerity measures against the wages, the unemployment benefits, and the standard of living of Germany's working people. By now, people had been watching events in Italy long enough to know that there was such a thing as fascism, and many of Bruning's enemies claimed that his government was already fascist. It quickly became clear that this had been a very foolish exaggeration indeed.
After Bruning came von Papen, a reactionary scoundrel who helped open the door to Hitler. The best of the lot was von Schleicher, a maverick general with progressive ideas who wanted to start an ambitious program of public works and infrastructure building to fight the depression and put people back to work. But von Schleicher was ousted before his programs could take hold, and was later murdered by Hitler. It was only after Hitler's seizure of power that the German political world recognized that he represented a dramatic, acute, and qualitative deterioration of the political life of the country. A reign of terror began immediately. All opposition and worker's parties were outlawed, and members of the parliament belonging to them were expelled. Trade unions were also outlawed, and their offices and property seized or destroyed. The offices and printing plants of opposition newspapers were attacked and burned down, often by mobs of storm troopers acting outside of the law. Many of those who had been preaching that Bruning already represented fascism were now looking back fondly on Bruning's time in office as the good old days. Bruning appeared in retrospect as an authoritarian who had been overthrown by a fascist. These were not the same thing, and there was no doubt which was worse.
Some observers realized after the fact that there was indeed an immense qualitative difference between just another bourgeois regime, no matter how bellicose, no matter how reactionary, no matter how oppressive, no matter how corrupt, and a fascist regime that could act outside the law and use its mass movement to mobilize active enthusiastic public support, and which could deploy its brown-shirted goons and fanatics, to crush opposition without worrying about arrest warrants and death sentences.
The point of this brief overview is to show that for many of its victims, the real nature of fascism revealed itself as a very unpleasant surprise, and that this revelation occurred only after fascism had taken power. In its beginning phases, fascism often appeared to naive observers as a movement promising idealism, national unity, an end to political squabbling, parliamentary haggling, and class struggle, plus reform, moral renewal, and a decisive break with the corrupt and discredited practices of the existing political order. To some, it even appeared as a liberating force which appealed to young people and the best and most active parts of the nation.
In a somewhat later phase, when the fascist dictators had fully consolidated their power and they decided to take the path of military aggression, it was found that the institutions which might have served as focal points for resistance simply did not exist any more, because those old institutions had been demolished by the fascists, who had not allowed any forms of independent organization to survive in society. If a President Obama calls the American people to war with Pakistan, with China, with Russia, we may see his hysterical lemming legions mobilize to beat up congressmen and crush antiwar demonstrators who dare to oppose the decrees of the Perfect Master.
Those who have followed this far can perhaps see that distinct analogies are emerging between post-World War I Italy and the United States of today. These go beyond real or imagined military defeat and severe economic crisis and also include political phenomena, most notably Obamism.
For the more than two thirds of the American people who have spent a considerable part of the past eight years hating, disliking, or resenting Bush and Cheney, it may sound heretical and hard to digest that there could be anything worse than this bankrupt regime. But we can assure you that there are alternatives that are much worse, infinitely worse.
THE BUSH NEOCONS: BEYOND THE POINT OF DIMINISHING RETURNS
The current setup featuring Bush, Cheney, and their gaggle of neocons has pretty much come to the end of the road, as far as functioning as an effective organizing center for Anglo-American imperialism is concerned. The neocon method has long since passed the point of diminishing returns. Their arguments and tricks are stale and predictable. The U.S. and British economies are collapsing. Their armies are defeated and demoralized. They are increasingly isolated in international affairs. They are objects of widespread hatred and suspicion in the world, and such allies as they have are thoroughly disaffected. Their vassals and satraps are in various stages of rebellion. Their adversaries are becoming more organized every day, most notably in such world alliances as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
The most immediate issue for the City of London and for Wall Street is to maintain Anglo-American world domination in the face of numerous challenges. They must maintain their monetary and financial hegemony, restore their diplomatic credibility, regroup and rebuild their military forces, refurbish their alliances, intimidate their satraps and vassals back into obedience, and prepare for a showdown with such recalcitrant superpowers as Russia and China. With Bush-Cheney or McCain, they have only a very limited chance of accomplishing any of this.
OBAMA AS A FACELIFT FOR A COLLAPSING EMPIRE
An Obama presidency, by contrast, would give Anglo-American imperialism a breathing spell, a second wind, a facelift, and a new lease on life. If Obama were not available, the elitist bankers would have had to invent him. And in fact, they did invent him, probably starting as much as a quarter of a century ago, when Obama and Zbigniew Brzezinski were both on the campus of Columbia University in New York City in 1981-1983.
Consider for a moment what might happen if a reinvigorated labor movement were to stage a series of militant strikes designed to win real increases in wages, benefits, and working conditions in a high profile confrontation with management, where success would soon prompt all kinds of working people to demand similar improvements in their situations as well. How effective could George Bush be as a strike breaker, given the fact that he is actively despised by a large minority and disliked by about two thirds of the U.S. population? It is quite possible that any strikebreaking efforts on the part of Bush would lead to an explosive general strike that would be totally beyond the control of the current hegemonic U.S. institutions. The moribund U.S. labor movement might well rise up and reassert itself after more than three decades of defeat and retreat. Contrast this with the ability of a possible Obama presidency to turn the majority of the population against the strikers by appealing to the higher need to bring all Americans together. It is clear that Obama would have a far greater chance of functioning as an effective strike breaker.
Or, take the case of the new false flag terror attack which the Anglo-American ruling elite wishes to blame on Russia, China, or some other formidable foreign power against whom they wish to inflame and incite the English-speaking world. Imagine a solemn television address to the nation delivered by Bush. It is likely that more than half of the U.S. population would not believe Bush's arguments and might reject his calls for mobilization and sacrifice, while a sizable minority would immediately and openly accuse Bush of being involved in the preparation and execution of the false flag attack. Since the fall of the neofascist Aznar regime in Spain in March of 2004, the Anglo-American ruling class has lived in fear of a potent Spanish-style reaction to their next false flag stunt, in which the target population, instead of blaming the scapegoats and bogeymen identified by the regime, prefer to concentrate their wrath on the incompetent politicians who have allowed the terrorism to take place, and who may even have artificially created it. Consider then, by contrast a similar televised address to the nation carried out by Obama in the wake of the same false flag attack. It is clear that Obama would succeed in duping a far higher percentage of the U.S. population than the despised, discredited Bush. These are the sorts of considerations which have impelled the Anglo-American ruling class to consider turning over a new leaf, in the form of a new demagogic profile for their entire worldwide political operations -- a policy shift aimed not at peace or real cooperation, but rather at the more effective waging of war, including economic and cultural warfare.
When an imperialist system faces an array of crises like the one which is presently enveloping the Anglo-American world system, even the short-term survival of that imperialism will tend to require forms of totalitarian mobilization which are exceedingly difficult to implement by means of top-down coercion alone, and which are much more efficient if they can be based on the voluntary assent and willing or even enthusiastic mobilization of the masses. This is the area where fascist methods provide a very obvious and substantial advantage in comparison with the crude dragooning which a mere top-down dictatorial police state can provide. Under fascism, an ideologized and self-mobilized population can be made to police itself, at least for a time. This begins perhaps to explain why a figure such as Obama can exercise such an appeal to a ruling elite in crisis like the Anglo-American bankers of today.
No ruling class begins to consider a fascist transformation except in moments of grave crisis. The ruling class must be desperate enough so as to be willing to jettison many of the traditional forms of their political domination and create something that will at least look like a mass movement, which always implies some risk that the movement will get out of hand. In addition, the ruling class will have to grant a measure of apparent political power to persons whom they consider gutter elements and whose presence they would tend not to tolerate, except for counterinsurgency purposes in extremis.
The level of understanding concerning the real nature of fascism on the part of the American public today is abysmally low, tending toward zero. Accordingly, it will be useful at this point to sample some recent scholarly writings which point out some of the features of historical fascist mass movements, especially during their initial, radical, anti-establishment mass movement phase.
FASCISM: THE LEADER AS THE GENERAL WILL
In his essay entitled "Towards a General Theory of Fascism," George L. Mosse noted that both communism and fascism "were based on the ideal, however distorted, of popular sovereignty. This meant rejection of parliamentary government and representative institutions on behalf of the democracy of the masses in which the people directly governed themselves. The leader symbolized the people, he expressed the 'general will' -- but such a democracy meant that, instead of representative assemblies, a new secular religion mediated between people and leaders, providing, at the same time, an instrument of social control over the masses. It was expressed on the public level through official ceremonies, festivals, and not least, imagery, and other private level control over all aspects of life by the dictates of the single political party." [Mosse in Roger Griffin, ed., International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus (London: Arnold, 1998), 138]
Fascism exalted the spirit of wartime camaraderie which had reigned among the troops in the trenches of World War I, where class divisions and class conflicts were supposedly submerged in dedication to the survival of the nation and its defense. Whatever their material circumstances, the brutalized victims of the war desperately sought for comradeship and leadership, "also to counteract their sense of isolation within a nation which had not lived up to their expectations." (Mosse in Griffin 142) Mosse's writings on Nazism focus on fascism's attempt to prolong the wartime idea of communitarianism based on affinity rather than external coercion. This is the kind of togetherness which we hear so much of today on the part of a candidate whose central pledge is to bring the people together.
THE DIALECTIC OF HOPE AND DESPAIR IN FASCISM
If Obama talks of hope, we must assume that the Trilateral-Ford Foundation focus groups have shown the prevalence of despair among the American people, a despair that must be related to feelings of loneliness and isolation on the part of many Americans. Fascism may be thought of as an expression of pervasive cultural-historical as well as personal despair, with the individual deciding to seek a way out of the despair by a flight forward into fanatical and mindless activism.
Fascism also placed much stress on "the national past and the mystical community of the nation, emphasis upon that middle-class respectability which proved essential for political success. The 'cult element' ... gave direction by channeling attention towards the eternal verities which must never be forgotten. Activism there must be, activism was essential, but it had to focus upon the leader who would direct it into the proper 'eternal' channels. The liturgical element must be mentioned ... for the 'eternal verities' were purveyed and reinforced through the endless repetition of slogans, choruses, symbols and participation in mass ceremony. These are the techniques which went into the taming of the revolution and which made Fascism a new religion with rites long familiar through centuries of religious observance. Fascist mass meetings seemed something new, but in reality contained predominantly traditional elements in technique as well as in ideology."
Fascism boasted that by using these means, it was waging a "war on alienation." (Mosse in Griffin 142) Alienation can be thought of as the widespread sense that one's life is so dominated, controlled, and manipulated by outside forces that it is no longer one's own. The irony of fascism's claims to assuage this sense of alienation is that when a person joins a political movement for the purpose of attaining immediate emotional relief and satisfaction, the level of subjective alienation experienced may indeed become less painful but at the same time, the objective alienation of the person is maximized, since he or she is now a dupe and pawn, mere cannon fodder, for the fascist demagogue, and above all for the cynical financiers who have concocted the fascist movement in the first place. As Mosse wrote in his book on Nazism, all fascism promised an end to alienation, and indeed "Hitler had a very startling passage in Mein Kampf where he says that when a man comes out of his factory and into a mass movement he becomes a part of a community and ends his alienation." (Tarchi in Griffin 267-68) Members of fascist mass movements are seeking emotional satisfactions in the midst of a bleak, desperate, and collapsing world. Can 2008 be compared with 1931 in this regard?
"Fascism was everywhere an 'attitude towards life,' based upon the national mystique which might vary from nation to nation. It [sought] to escape concrete economic and social change by a retreat into ideology: the 'revolution of the spirit' of which Mussolini spoke. ... it encouraged activism, the fight against the existing order of things." (Mosse in Griffin 145)
FASCISM AND THE YEARNING FOR COMMUNITY AND TOGETHERNESS
Over all of its constituent elements fascism threw "the mantle of a community conceived as sharing a national past, present, and future -- a community which was not enforced but 'natural,' 'genuine,' and with its own organic strength and life, analogous to nature. The tree became the favorite symbol, but the native landscape or the ruins of the past were also singled out as exemplifying on one level the national community, a human collectivity represented by the Fascist party." (Mosse in Griffin 145) The supporters of fascist movements wanted someone who could bring them together, and that turned out to be Mussolini and his imitators.
Other commentators have seen in fascism an attempted answer to a crisis in the mechanisms by which society imbues and endows life and its components with meaning. Gerald Platt writes: "... the most significant analytic point presented here is that through an empirical investigation of ideology we may develop a set of language rules that act as orienting principles for ideological adherents in constructing a viable world in the face of a sense-making crisis." (Platt in Griffin 212) In other words, fascism is an abortive attempt to provide sense and meaning to a meaningless world through an arbitrary and usually irrational act of the will.
Klaus Theweleit discusses "the basis on which the typically fascist relation between desire and politics arises: politics is made subject to direct libidinal investment, with no detours, no imprints of mama papa, no encodings through conventions, institutions, or the historical situation. Under fascism the most common form of the 'I' is as a component within a larger totality-ego -- the 'I' as 'we,' pitted in opposition to the rest of the world, the whole starry galaxy This, then, is 'megalomania' -- the desire of men to shake off what they consider to be meaningless parental origins -- 'history will absolve me.' These men desire to execute a hidden design of history from a position of dominance within the largest of all imaginable symbiotic unities: 'I/We' and History. 'Freedom."' (Theweleit in Griffin 223 224) Dr. Justin Fran correctly diagnosed Bush as a megalomaniac, but Bush has no monopoly on this disorder. What are the implications of a mass movement infected with collective megalomania which succeeds in taking power?
Gene Sharp, Soros, and Brzezinski have organized people power coups tinted in orange, red, and many other colors, but the original fascists were way ahead of them. After World War I, there existed Mussolini's blackshirts, the German brownshirts, the Romanian green shirts, and the Irish blue shirts, not to mention the Silver shirts here in the U.S. In an essay entitled "Between Festival and Revolution," the Italian Marco Tarchi, a writer initially sympathetic to fascism, writes: "The profound sense of spiritual, human community fostered by the experiences of camaraderie pervades the anti-Marxist and anti-democratic movements of the immediate postwar [i.e., post-1918] period to the point of forming a distinctive feature of the ideology, one expressed in a whole series of external signs which bring the militants together, unify their style, and try to win the attention, and then the active support, of sympathizers. The whole symbology which typifies Fascism conforms to this logic. The shirts of various colors which movements, akin but originating in different national and cultural contexts, adopt as an external uniform epitomize this discourse ... the problem of alienation caused by the uprooting of individuals and families from their natural, traditional environment, the consequence of a progressive process of urbanization, commercialization, and industrialization, is resolved in the new community, no longer taken for granted as something hereditary, but achieved through an act of the will." (Tarchi in Griffin 268)
"The fascination of the ideal community envisaged by the nascent fascist movements is twofold: on the one hand, it presents itself as the agent of dissolution for social bonds judged to be anachronistic, such as those of profession or 'class;' on the other, it is to act as a binding force in the name of reality which is no longer and not only material. The result of this mixture the shattering ... the fascist parties, typical movement-parties, thus came into being as ... 'community parties,' in other words parties whose membership was not motivated by material interests, but by spiritual motives, by instinctive impulses, by demands of idealism." The community which the fascists sought was "generated by the irrational, non-utilitarian, organic will, the motor of every act and source of every creation ... The modern world, by stressing its own technical and utilitarian character, tends to reduce the sphere of the organic, qualitative, spontaneous, pluralist, 'natural' will " (Tarchi in Griffin 269-270)
Obama supporters constantly cite their desire to restore admiration and respect for the United States in the eyes of the world community. Such concern for restoring the fullest possible great power status for one's own country is a typical, primordial theme of Italian and German fascism. These older fascisms were responding to military defeat, the denied fruits of victory, and generally to the poor treatment they felt their countries had received at the great world summit conference of the age, the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919. Today's Obama supporters seem to regard restoring the U.S. position in the world as a purely cosmetic exercise in foreign relations; they do not for example propose to abandon the practice of constant meddling and interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states which has characterized Bush-Cheney-neocon practice. If anything, the Obamakins want to increase such meddling. Obama's base enthusiastically supports U.S. aggression against Sudan, under the pretext of protecting the southern Sudanese from alleged Chinese "ethnocide." In reality, such an attack would aim at cutting off Chinese access to Sudanese oil in the framework of Brzezinski's strategy of isolating and encircling the Middle Kingdom.
Obama's base strongly supports the Tibetan insurrection of the feudal monster and CIA/MI-6/NATO provocateur calling himself the Dalai Lama. Once again, the issue is alleged ethnocide by tampering with traditional Tibetan feudalism, which kept 90% of the population as serfs, 5% as slaves, and 4% as parasitical monks who did not teach or maintain hospitals but who demanded economic and sexual feudal dues from the serfs. We should also take into account Obama's successful demand for U.S. state sponsored terrorism in the form of unilateral killing of Pakistanis in the northwest frontier area, where CIA Predator drones have now declared open season on the local population, killing dozens in January, February, and March 2008 without permission from the government in Islamabad. Obama's striking ability to transform anti-war left liberals into ferocious backers of war with Sudan, with Pakistan, and with China gives some idea of why Obama has been chosen by the Trilaterals to mobilize the United States for total war.