CGNorena Weekly

Extremism: Causes and Effects

The rhetorical excesses of Reverend Wright in Chicago’s Trinity Church and the criminal excesses of “Islamic extremism” in Iraq are the painful effects of causes that need to be properly dealt with. Senator Obama understands that, but Senator McCain does not seem to. Here we deal with both kinds of extremism.

Obama understands very well that the obnoxious rhetoric of his pastor is only the Sunday morning expression of the anger of his black community, an anger accumulated through centuries of poverty, ignorance, domestic violence, unemployment, gang warfare, insulting discrimination by the police and by the courts. Black pastors’ of “America the beautiful” have a unique angle on this country of ours, an angle that no white person can fully share. When Reverend Wright says that one should say “damn America” rather than “God bless America” he was only repeating what the founder of the Moral Majority, Reverend Falwell, meant when he said that the disaster of 9/11 was a divine punishment not for American gays and lesbians, but a damnation of America for tolerating them in our midst. Many of American homophobics and Christian neo-cons who cringe in horror to Obama’s pastor sermon, accepted Falwell’s unchristian judgment without a word of reproach. Senator McCain, a presidential candidate at that time honored Falwell with a visit to Liberty University just to reinforce his highly questionable conservative credentials.

Reverend Wright’s anger is not the problem: the problem is what causes him and most black ministers in America very angry  Those who get angry at their words are most likely causes of that very  anger. Reverend Wright’s sermons are the painful effect of hundred of years of humiliating racial discrimination . Obama’s reaction to it – a reaction that “white America” finds difficult to condone and is utterly incapable of  understanding– was a masterpiece of political prudence, personal courage, and Christian humility. The relations between races in America will never be the same. Lincoln emancipated the slaves; Obama has begun to cleanse American society from racial tensions between whites and blacks. It is the poverty of our ghettoes rather than the enraged words of a pastor that truly stain the beauty of America.

McCain’s speech on foreign policy was a masterpiece of shallow thinking. To McCain, as to his mentor Bush, American national security is totally dependent on our victory in Iraq. A “reckless” withdrawal from Iraq would make America vulnerable to the “extremist“ suicide bombers of al-Qaeda.   This is a strange manner of thinking for the former prisoner of the Vietcong. American defeat in Vietnam (and it was a defeat!) has not confirmed the dire predictions of the domino theory then in vogue: “if we fail in Vietnam, communist China will be in southern California in a couple of weeks.” The opposite is now the case; China is now financing our typically Republican (?) national debt.

McCain has been saying that he is ready to maintain the presence of American troops in Iraq for hundred years more. He then adds that American garrisons in Germany and Japan are on their way to be kept that long there without any big problem. To compare Iraq to Japan and Germany is, to say the least, an evident proof of the Senator’s massive historical ignorance,

Contemporary “Islamic extremism”(the favorite expression of President Bush nowadays) has long roots in the centuries-long antagonism between Christian Europe and “pagan Asia.” The Huns, the Ostrogoths, the Avars, the Vandals, the Slavs erupted from the central steppes of Asia to bring devastation upon the Roman Empire. Attila, the Scourge of God, conquered Hungary and the Balkans and threatened Rome. Alaric, the Visigoth king,  stormed and sacked Rome.
With Islam, history took a new turn. Just hundred years after the Prophet’s death, Muslim minarets and mosques blossomed on the landscape of the Abbasid caliphate that stretched all the way from Cordoba to the Indus River, from Byzantine Constantinople to Vandal Carthage. Senator McCain has not given any evidence at all that he is familiar  with the invasion of Spain by Arab troops, with the “Christian counterattack” of the Crusades, with the conquest of Constantinople by the Saracens, with the earliest  warmongering of the American Navy in Tripoli under Jeffferson as Commander in Chief; with the bloody history of the Ottoman Empire on the European Balkans; with the birth of modern Turkey under Ataturk; with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I; with the ravages of European colonialism in Africa during the 19th century; with the replacement of European colonies by European “protectorates” in the Middle East; with the humiliating beginning of what today we call the “ nations” of Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Yemen, Oman,  and  Saudi Arabia; with the close links of modern Iran,  Afghanistan,and Pakistan with British colonialism.

The American illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the occupation of Palestine by Israel remain right now two daggers of hated occupiers in the heart of Moslem lands, occupiers that keep suicide bombers proliferating in the world of Islam. The greatest threat to American national security is the lingering presence of Petreaus and his troops in the lands of Iraq. To kill, bomb, and  devastate are nowhere the ideal means to promote democracy, much less in the Middle East.  Democracies do not blossom among ruins and graves, they grow slowly from the bottom up, far from automatic weapons, tanks, and checkpoints.

The centuries-long conflict between the more or less Christian West and  the Islamic nations of the Middle east, Asia, and Africa has to come  to a final and decisive end. I hope that when Obama talks about change in foreign policy he  means that kind of historical change. Of all the politicians on the stage today he is the only one who is young enough and  educated enough to envision an America who abdicates for ever her arrogant claim to build nations, to solve international disputes in unilateral ways, to abuse American firepower as a   means of promoting democracies. I hope Obama has the vision of a new America eager to help solving global poverty, bent on seeking the global abolition of nuclear weapons  while helping other nations to build their peaceful nuclear plants to  solve part of the huge challenges the world is going to face in the next decades of climate change, the rise of the sea levels, the droughts and the floods.  Hillary seems proud of her “experience,” but many Americans think that she is too miredin it, an experience of a political style which deserves to be dead. McCain would only prolong forever the miscalculations, the deceptions, the Guantanamos, and the surges of American troops in Iraq to witness from the sides the sectarian and fratricide battles going on today around Basra and Baghdad.

Florida/Michigan: The Irreparable Mess

The disenfranchisement of Florida and Michigan was a terrible mistake that might be very difficult to repair. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) established a rule for the duration of the game, not a rule to be changed toward the end of the game, much less at the insistent request of the team that is, according to many experts, clearly behind on the score board. The very phrase re-doing the Florida and Michigan primaries is not fair to Obama, simply because no primary ever took place in either state since there was no campaign and therefore no contest. It would mean that the same DNC that established the rules is now ready to change them. To say, as some networks say, that Hillary WON Florida and Michigan is a typical Clintonian deception that smells not much better than Bush’s spinning games.

Why is it that no participant in the game objected to the rules before the game started? The Clintons did not object just because they were convinced that Hillary was the inevitable nominee. After Hillary began to lose eleven primaries in a row, even Bill Clinton began to have nightmares. The result of those nightmares were the gutter politics of the last ten days and, again, the attempt to bring back the voters of Florida and Michigan.

I am in principle opposed to the disenfranchisement of any voter for any reason whatsoever. But I am also opposed to re-enfranchising the disenfranchised toward the end of the game. The reason is very simple. Primary campaigns have a dynamic of their own: a vote in Michigan or Florida in May or June is not the same as a vote toward the end of the primary season. Each primary now has a history that was not there in January. Each primary in January was a preamble to the primaries in February. According to political observers, the Hillary campaign has been a monument to internal strife, unexpected resignations, lack of organization, and poor financial management (the truth is that she has no experience whatsoever in managing anything). To ‘re-do’ (?) the democratic primaries in Florida and Michigan (where they were never done) represents a desperate gesture to make us forget the partial setbacks of South Carolina, Wyoming, Missouri, Illinois, etc. The Clintons are telling the voters: ”Vote now as if we never had any bad experience in our campaign, as if Obama did not have the momentum he has achieved.” I just hope that Obama does not fall for it. Let us go straight back to Pennsylvania, Oregon, North Carolina, and let the voters decide.

Although neither team will have the clinching number of delegates by the time of the convention, it is only fair to give the nomination to the candidate who is closer to that number, whether the delegates are from Rhode Island or from New York. They all were created equal with exactly the same inalienable rights. Hillary’s insistence on the importance of large states ignores the irrefutable fact that some large states (like California, Massachusetts, and New York) would vote democratic in the general election regardless of who the state nominee is. She also underestimates Obama’s capacity to attract independents, unhappy republicans, young idealists (both men and young women), and, why not, African-Americans. As a new group of voters they represent not the old established apparatus of the Democratic party, but the future of America politics. If Obama’s traction among black voters in Mississippi would also take place in Pennsylvania or Indiana. the Clintons’s dreams would probably be shattered in those and other states, like North Carolina or Kentucky, opening the gates for the final victory of Obama both at the Democratic Convention and in the general elections on in November.

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Racism and the 2008 Election

The closer we get to the moment of truth in the primary season of the presidential election, the more somber and threatening the political landscape appears to the observer. Everybody knew from the beginning that the choice between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the Democratic party could easily degenerate into a confrontation between women and blacks. Unfortunately, in the last two weeks of February, the “bad angels” of our society have proliferated in increasingly nefarious and ominous ways.

The very possibility that, for the first time in history, a black man could become the president of the United States, has brought to the surface all the traces of a latent but still harmful racism poorly hidden and disguised in the deep recesses of our national soul. One of the most alarming indications of such poison was the intensity and pervasiveness of negative campaigning against Senator Obama in the week preceding the pivotal primaries in Ohio and Texas.

By comparing such merciless scrutiny with Bill Clinton’s brazen injection of race politics into the South Carolina primary, one feels compelled to blame the Clintons for the tone of the unwarranted attack on the character of the black candidate to the presidency, Barack Obama. I say ‘unwarranted’ because this time for sure Obama was above reproach. Unlike Hillary – who has repeatedly played the feminist card and gloated of possibly being the first woman in the Oval Office etc, etc.– Obama has had the wisdom and the self-control of totally ignoring color identity politics, even when addressing predominantly black audiences. By doing that, Obama has already given the nation a historically powerful therapy in the way we think of ourselves as individuals and as members of the community we call the United States of America. At the risk of sounding exaggerated, I would dare to say that Obama has significantly advanced the process painfully started by Lincoln when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Lincoln put an end to the ‘pecu;iar’ institution of slavery; Obama has taken a further historical step by making all of us transcend any thought of ourselves as either white or black. Unfortunately, not every American is like Barack Obama.

Bill Clinton has been whining for weeks about the unfair treatment of his wife by the American media. To prove the former president wrong, American television and newspapers (not to speak about ultraconservative radio) have gone to the opposite extreme. Suddenly, Hillary’s foreign policy experience –whatever that means — has made her the only person capable of answering emergency calls of the red phone in the Oval Office at 3 am,, an almost Sesame Street way of saying that Obama is just not prepared to be “the Commander in Chief.” His only foreign policy experience, Hillary inacurately claimed, was just “one speech in 2002” denouncing and rejecyng the invasion of Iraq, an invasion that. she fatally supported. Bill Clinton, on the other hand, kept saying that the talk of Obama’s opposition to the war (which he never denounced nor rejected in his filial conversations with Bush senior!) was simply a “fairy tale.”

To prove Obama’s sloppy handling of problems with foreign powers, Hillary criticized the answer of one of Obama’s staff members to the Canadian inquiry about the planned rejection of the Nafta treaty. Speeches in an election political campaign are not precisely the footprint of future policy decisions, he said. That answer — which was not spoken by Obama and was correct and harmless — could be misunderstood. It was totally misunderstood: an elderly black lady on television said almost in tears: ”I knew I could not trust that man (Obama).” Hillary commented: “This is a typical example of Obama’s cynicism and duplicity. What he conveys to the Canadian government is radically different from his message to the crowd of the unemployed in Ohio.” Thirty-five years of “experience” have obviously made her a perfect match for her husband.

To make clear how these black gentlemen from Chicago can be, Hillary mentioned in most of her speeches the case of Mr. Rezko, an old acquaintance of Obama who was on trial for alleged corruption charges. She forgot to mention, however. that Obama had not been in any way connected with any of the alleged wrong doing. But the Clintons were able to find a picture of Obama as a teenager dressed with Somali native garb in Kenya; to remind her audiences that Obama’s middle name was Hussein; that he had attended a madrasa (in Indonesian: a school) as a child; and so on and so on.

This mean, insistent and malicious talk proved, unfortunately, to be highly effective. Almost 70% of the undecided voters in Texas changed their mind in the last three days of the campaign, and voted for Hillary Clinton. Only Senator McCain was smiling. Obama’s aides have urged him to respond to the Clintons in the same tone, but he firmly responded “I will not go there.” To go negative for political advantage is the typical brand of establishment politics. Obama’s mission is to change that.

I hope the leaders of the Democratic party understand that unless the Clintons begin to behave rationally and in a civilized manner, the American Democratic party will not only loose the election in November but will loose the enthusiasm and idealism of millions
of young Obama supporters for the foreseeable future. Not to say anything about the attempt to count the non-voters in the non-campaigns of Michigan and Florida…