Trump’s
Fascism Versus Obama’s Fascism
By Eric
Zuesse
August
22, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- Barack Obama was the only U.S. President who
at the United Nations defended nazism — racist
fascism — and Holocaust-denial. It received
almost no reporting by the press at the time (or
subsequently). But his successor President
Donald Trump could end up being removed from
office because he said that racist fascists are
just the same as are people who demonstrate
publicly against them. Trump’s politically
stupid (not to say callous) remark became viral,
and apparently the press (which had ignored
Obama’s defense of nazism at the U.N.) just
won’t let go of Trump’s statement unless and
until he becomes replaced by his
even-more-far-right Vice President, Mike Pence.
Why is
there this intense press-coverage of Trump’s
support of racist fascism, when there wasn’t of
Obama’s (which was actually far more
meaningful)? The answer comes closer if we
ponder first a different question: How could the
Republican Party, which is right-wing at its
core, condemn a Democratic Party President who
goes out of his way at the U.N. to protect
today’s nazis? That wouldn’t be politically
practical for Republican politicians to complain
about (a Democrat’s being too far to
the right); so, they didn’t do it.
Similarly, no Democrat will criticize a
Republican for being too leftist. There may be a
few exceptions, but that’s the general rule:
Successful politicians don’t offend their base.
But
that still doesn’t fully answer why the press
ignored it when Obama defended nazism at the
U.N. The rest of the answer comes when we
recognize that America’s press gets its cues
from the two political Parties. If the ‘opposition’
(and not just the President’s own
Party) is hiding something egregious that a
President is doing or has done (such as happened
there with Obama, and with many other
conservative policies that Obama executed), then
the press will hide it, too.
Republicans weren’t calling attention to Obama’s
defense of nazism, because they’d then be
offending some of their own supporters.
(Democrats weren’t calling attention to it,
because a Democrat was doing
this, which didn’t fit the ‘progressive’
storyline.) And, if the ‘opposition’ isn’t
pointing it out, then neither will the press.
The matter will then just be ignored — which is
what happened. This was thus bipartisan
non-reporting, of what Obama did. There was a
lot of that while Obama was President.
In other words: America’s press are tools of,
and are led by, the same people
who actually, deep down, control both of
America’s political Parties — the billionaires.
They control both politics, and also the press.
Numerous social-science studies have shown that
the wealthier a person is, the likelier that
person is to be politically conservative — at
least to the extent that political conservatism
doesn’t threaten his or her particular business
and financial interests. As
America’s billionaires have come to control
America’s politics,
this country has been moving farther and farther
to the right, except on the relatively few
issues (such as immigration, gay rights, etc.)
where their own economic interests are served
better by a progressive position (or, at least,
by a position that seems to most people to be
progressive).
Trump’s
problem here is that he’s too obviously playing
to his Party’s base. Obama didn’t need to do
that, because he had massive support from
billionaires, and he was a much better liar than
Trump, good enough to keep many progressive
voters with him even after he had already
shafted them in his actual policies. For
example, when Obama dropped ‘the public option’
as soon as he became elected, he was excused for
it because most Americans thought he was simply
being practical and avoiding an ‘unnecessary’
conflict with the opposite Party in Congress.
This view ignored that he gave up on it even as
being a bargaining-chip to get concessions from
congressional Republicans to drive new
legislation to be more progressive. Obama had no
interest in progressivism. Actually, Obama
didn’t want to offend his mega-donors. He thus
handed the task of drafting the Obamacare law to
the conservative Democrat, and public-option
opponent, Max Baucus, instead of to the
progressive Democrat and public-option
supporter, Ted Kennedy, who desperately wanted
(and expected) to have the opportunity to draft
it.
Both Trump and Obama (in their actions, if not
also in their words) are proponents of what
Benito Mussolini called “Corporationism”
— big-corporate control of the government, which
Mussolini more-commonly referred to as
“fascism.” President Trump has been widely
condemned both here in the U.S. and around the
world (which his predecessor President Barack
Obama never was), for his recent blatant
statement equating the worst of fascists, which
are racist fascists, as being comparable to the
people who in Charlottesville Virginia had
marched and demonstrated against racist fascists
and who were violently attacked and one of them
killed by racist fascists, against whom they had
been protesting. Trump was equating
anti-fascists with fascists, and he even equated
racist fascists — ideological nazis — with the
people who were protesting specifically
against nazism. Apparently, the press won’t
let go of it. They treat this event as if
top-level U.S. nazism were unprecedented in
today’s post-WW-II America — as if this nation
were still anti-nazi (as it had
been in FDR’s White House), and as if this
incident with Trump says something only about
Trump, and not also, and far more meaningfully,
about today’s American government, including
Trump’s own immediate predecessor-in-office, and
also about America’s current press-institution,
and about what it has become.
As this reporter had headlined on 24 November
2014,
“U.S. Among Only 3 Countries at U.N. Officially
Backing Nazism & Holocaust-Denial; Israel Parts
Company from Them; Germany Abstains”.
Obama and his friend and U.N. Ambassador
Samantha Power were unapologetic about having
done that at the U.N., and Obama’s U.N.
representative continued in that vein. As I
headlined a few months later, on 21 June 2015,
“America’s U.N. Ambassador Continues Standing Up
for Nazis”.
Both of those two news-articles were submitted
to all of the U.S. and also to much of the
European mainstream — and additionally to some
of the ‘alt-news’ — international-news media,
but each of the two articles was published only
in around a half-dozen of only alternative-news
sites. The ‘news’media (especially the
mainstream ones) weren’t nearly as concerned
about Obama’s blatantly racist-fascist, and
specifically anti-Russian, actions, as they are
concerned today, about the current U.S.
President’s bending-over-backwards to retain his
support from America’s racist-fascist or nazi
voters, whom he apparently considers an
essential part of his base. (Why else would he
even say such a thing?)
Whereas Obama was imposing an actual nazi
international campaign
(via a violent anti-democratic coup, followed by
an ethnic-cleansing campaign to cement it)
in which his U.N. Ambassador played her
necessary role, Trump was politically supporting
an important portion of his voting-base, but not
doing anything in actual policy-fact — at the
U.N. or anywhere else — such as Obama had done.
But the press focuses on Trump as if he were
initiating the acceptability of nazism in the
U.S. body-politic. Trump wasn’t.
Obama had done something truly remarkable: he
was the first U.S. President, since the
pre-Civil-War U.S. had ended and U.S. President
Abraham Lincoln courageously led this nation
clearly and explicitly away from its deeply
racist past, to support publicly, and to carry
out in policy a clearly racist
policy-initiative, a
blatant ethnic-cleansing military campaign.
It aimed to remove from Ukraine’s voter-rolls
the residents of the areas of Ukraine where from
75% to 90% of the voters had voted for the
democratically elected Ukrainian President whom
Obama in February 2014 had just overthrown by
hiring racist-facist gunmen to drive out of
power that man whom those people had so heavily
voted for, in what now turned out to have been
Ukraine’s final democratic nationwide election.
Unless Obama eliminated those voters — ethnic
Russians — the far-right politicians whom he had
placed into power after the U.S. coup wouldn’t
last through the first Ukrainian national
election after the coup.
Ethnic-cleansing was the only way to make
Obama’s coup-regime stick; so, that’s what he
wanted his Ukrainian stooges to do, and
they tried their utmost to do it
(and they’re
still trying).
|
No
Advertising
- No
Government
Grants
-
This
Is
Independent
Media
|
With
all of the decades that have passed after World
War II, not only Americans but also publics
elsewhere, including publics in nations that
America considers to be ‘allies’, such as
Israel, seem to have lost any consciousness they
might have had in the wake of Hitler’s defeat,
about what racist fascism — what the ideology
(and not just the German political party, where
it had an initial capital letter) nazism —
actually was, and what it meant. It wasn’t just
anti-Semitic fascism that had been defeated in
that war, but anti-Korean fascism, and
anti-Chinese fascism, and anti-Russian fascism,
and more forms of racist capitalistic
dictatorship, the nazi ideology, which were
defeated in WW II. During John F. Kennedy’s
Presidency, the U.S. federal government very
reluctantly started to deal with this country’s
deepseated residual institutional racism against
America’s Blacks; but, still, the
ethnocentrism in America — even among
Blacks and Jews — remained so pronounced, so
that President Obama on 28 May 2014 could,
without shame or any political embarrassment,
tell the graduating class of future U.S.
military leaders at West Point:
The
United States is and remains the one
indispensable nation. That has been true for
the century passed and it will be true for
the century to come.
But
the world is changing with accelerating
speed. This presents opportunity, but also
new dangers. We know all too well, after
9/11, just how technology and globalization
has put power once reserved for states in
the hands of individuals, raising the
capacity of terrorists to do harm. Russia’s
aggression toward former Soviet states
unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s
economic rise and military reach worries its
neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising
middle classes compete with us, and
governments seek a greater say in global
forums. And even as developing nations
embrace democracy and market economies,
24-hour news and social media makes it
impossible to ignore the continuation of
sectarian conflicts and failing states and
popular uprisings that might have received
only passing notice a generation ago.
It
will be your generation’s task to respond to
this new world. The question we face, the
question each of you will face, is not
whether America will lead, but how we will
lead — not just to secure our peace and
prosperity, but also extend peace and
prosperity around the globe.
Now,
this question isn’t new. At least since
George Washington served as
Commander-in-Chief, there have been those
who warned against, foreign entanglements
that do not touch directly on our security
or economic wellbeing. Today, according to
self-described realists, conflicts in Syria
or Ukraine or the Central African Republic
are not ours to solve. And not surprisingly,
after costly wars and continuing challenges
here at home, that view is shared by many
Americans.
A
different view from interventionists from
the left and right says that we ignore these
conflicts at our own peril; that America’s
willingness to apply force around the world
is the ultimate safeguard against chaos.
He said
that all nations other than the U.S. are
“dispensable.” He said that the BRICS countries
and “rising middle classes compete with us, and
governments seek a greater say in global
forums,” and that “It will be your generation’s
task to respond to this new world. The question
we face, the question each of you will face, is
not whether America will lead, but how we will
lead — not just to secure our peace and
prosperity, but also extend peace and prosperity
around the globe.” He said that “conflicts in
Syria or Ukraine or the Central African Republic
are … ours to solve.” He derided “self-described
realists” who didn’t share his international
idealism, of his own nation’s seeking out,
instead of warning “against, foreign
entanglements that do not touch directly on our
security or economic wellbeing.” He said that
“America’s willingness to apply force around the
world is the ultimate safeguard against chaos,”
and that George Washington was wrong.
He was
saying that Hitler and Hirohito were right; that
they had merely led the ‘wrong’ countries.
This man, who had just
led the bloody coup and instigated the
ethnic-cleansing campaign that forced two
regions of the former Ukraine to secede from
Ukraine and to seek instead Russia’s protection
(and he then instituted sanctions against Russia
for providing that protection to them),
was there and then lecturing America’s future
military leaders, to instruct them that they
would have the right to invade “dispensable”
countries, and to “apply force around the
world,” in order to deal with the BRICS
countries and “rising middle classes [that]
compete with us, and governments [that] seek a
greater say in global forums.” (He wanted none
of that freedom for them.) He said that ignoring
George Washington is “the ultimate safeguard
against chaos,” and is somehow in accord with
America’s values, even if not of George
Washington’s values.
The
ultimate insult was that this was coming from a
man who considered himslef to be a Black — as if
he were in the tradition of Martin Luther King,
who had urged America to quit its invasion of
Vietnam. Instead, Obama invaded and wrecked
Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen.
Well,
that wasn’t actually quite the ultimate insult:
the ultimate insult was that Blacks continued to
believe in him, and never turned against that
nazi. They evidently keep what some of them call
(as if it were a racial trait) ‘White
man’s values’.
Values
are not a racial trait, but stupidity and
small-mindedness are the human norm everywhere,
and no nation is ‘indispensable’ — far less, is
any ‘the one indispensable nation’: not ancient
Rome, not Germany, not Japan, not the U.S. —
none, at all.
Trump’s
foreign policies seem to be mainly aiming to
out-do his predecessor’s. But, in no way is
Trump yet the nazi that Obama proved himself to
be. Trump could turn out to be that bad, if the
people who are urging him to intensify America’s
war against Russia and/or against Iran have
their way. The “neoconservatives” (the
foreign-policy ideology that’s sponsored by
America’s billionaires of both the Republican
and the Democratic Parties) seem still to be
basically in control. Trump nonetheless could
turn out to be the idealist that Obama, Hitler,
and Hirohito, were, but there’s at least the
possibility that he will instead turn out to be
one of “the self-described realists” whom Obama
had derided. Trump hasn’t yet exposed his true
self, to the extent that Obama did during his
eight years. But the ‘news’media are already
calling Trump a “White racist.” It seems that
the people who cheered-on Obama’s nazism (except
when they said that Obama was being ‘too
cautious’ about it) don’t like Trump, at all.
But,
are America’s billionaires really that eager to
replace Trump by Pence? One might wonder how far
this campaign will go.
Investigative
historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most
recently, of
They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs.
Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010,
and of CHRIST’S
VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created
Christianity.
