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Debellare diabolicos

By Michael J. Smith on Friday June 5, 2009 06:10 PM

It's kind of amazing, really, how much fatuous dribble Obama's Cairo speech has evoked. People, it seems, are very easily satisfied.

Taken pretty much at random, here's one that landed in my inbox today:

In Cairo, Obama Knocks it Out of the Park

By Craig Crawford

There's nothing like an Obama speech high. Thankfully, I was up early this morning to hear the live broadcast of our President's 6:10 AM ET address to the Muslim world in Cairo. It was a moment that made good on the promise of this man to begin the process of transforming relations and undermining terrorists.

"You have the ability to reimagine the world," Obama to young Muslims at Cairo University.

For the first time since Jimmy Carter's Camp David accords we have a president with the skills, understanding and commitment to make peace in a region that has bedeviled the world for generations.

Hold it. "A region that has bedeviled the world for generations"? What is this fool thinking of? The siege of Vienna? The battle of Manzikert? Would it not be more true to say, "a region that the world has bedevilled for generations"?

What do you do about these bedevilling regions? I guess you've got to civilize 'em somehow. As old Augustus' publicist eloquently wrote,

Hae tibi erunt artes: pacisque imponere morem,
Parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.
"This is your job: To get people used to submission; allow the grovellers to live; and kill everybody else." (My slightly tendentious translation.)

Comments (7)

Michael Hureaux:

Hunh. I actually thought I was listening to something Nixon wrote. Same western arrogance demanding that the resistance of its victim fit the criteria of the empire. Screw that noise. The world looks the way it does because of the ascent of imperial capital and its banks, and for no other reason. The system murders or coopts every non violent movement that attempts to create a real democratic and secular movement. Let God Almighty Obama acknowledge that truth, and he'll have said something worth shouting about. His acknowledgement of the interference of the west doesn't mean squat when he continues to defend and glorify such policy.

Peter Ward:

I hardly meet people (outside the professional/managerial class liberals, predictably) who express satisfaction with Obama--I think one has to be careful not to mistake propaganda as an image of public opinion.

The main problem I see of my peers is overcoming the unwillingness, do to ideological pressure and other factors--to try to improve things. People are hungup on needed validation from a leader or other authority (which is not to say they are "satisfied" with their leaders and authorities). Incidently, it is its emphasis on rejecting arbitrary authority, with implicit recognition that for practical purposes there are more than two classes,* that IMO distinguishes anarchism from other political dogmas (which is not to say I endorse anarchist scripture globally).

*Bakunin and others who address the class system explicitly usually identify three: an executive class, a middle class (re: empowerment as well as income/property) and the proles. Obviously this is still an oversimplification, but a significant improvement over orthodox Marxism.

I think Craig Crawford's cat walked around on his keyboard last night. No other explanation for such hilarious twaddle.

Ajit:

True enough. I mean what else one can expect a politician , any politician, to say. He will say what the audience wants to hear. And so many people fall for it so quickly. When anyone points out we should look at what politician does and not what he says , he will be tagged a cynic, a sectarian and other such epithets.

The silly spectacle over this obama speech reminds me of a saying I heard some time ago.

"No form of life is lower than the sucker who falls for the same con again and again, and then again and again. "

For your gratification I offer another ejaculation by another Obamamaniac, This is Al Giordano of Narco News.

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/anti-politician-cairo

Giordano compares Obama to Gandhi. Next thing you know, he would be comparing his hero to Jesus. If he hasn't already done it.

Man, my bullshit alarm really got to clangin' on this one. Long ago, I established a personal principle -- somewhat related to Murphy's Laws -- regarding what I see in the Boss Media: basically, the more and louder they rave about something, the greater the chance that its complete bullshit, starting around the mid/late '80s, when I started seeing more and more ads for brand-new, just-released movies as "the biggest hit of the summer!". Remember Bush's surprise Thanksgiving trip to Iraq, where they showed him serving up the fake turkey on TV? When I heard the anchor on NBC Today referring to this trip as "stunning", I knew for sure it was a crock.

As I've mentioned here before, my DW likes to start her day bright and early with Morning Joe on MSNBC (I honestly don't think she watches any actual reporting of actual news on TV anymore, just overpaid windbags talking about it); as if waking up to Scarborough's fascist blustering isn't bad enough, that morning had me waking up to yet another goddamn' empty-assed, fluffy Barack Obama speech. I couldn't leap out of bed and into my clothes and bolt the room fast enough to escape that suffocating self-serious, pompous, arrogant, my-shit-don't-stink vibe oozing out of the DW's TV set.

I knew right away it was a load of crap when yesterday's Warshington Post hit my front stoop with fotos of happy Muslims all over the Arab world getting all breathless and joyful as they watched The One on their TVs belching his six thousand, count 'em, six thousand words of empty blather from Cairo.

@ Ajit:
Too bad about Giordano; I read his reports regularly during the Oaxaca teachers' uprising and thought Narconews was quite good. Somebody needs to tell him that Obama-is-Gandhi shit is totally played. The Obama-is-Jesus thing is pretty done, too; Alice Walker did that shit to death during the primaries last year:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/01/barackobama.uselections2008

(Ok, she doesn't actually compare him to Jesus here, but she might as well; she's already invoked King and Mandela.)

MF, it's not even "played." It's a swear-in-your-face-while-flipping-you-off insult to Gandhi, the many millions of Indians who struggled to throw off the British, and every single hearer of this massively Orwellian speech.

"Violent resistance is wrong and doesn't work." These words from the chief overseer of the seventh year of an illegal occupation that killed hundreds of thousands. The issuer of war-criminal orders to launch remote-control bombs into yet another nation-state with which we are not legitimately at war. I won't even mention the multi-millions of corpses our "greatness" has stacked all over the rest of the planet.

And how many new policies on our side did this disaster-on-stilts announce? One, if you're naive enough to think the timid "must" message to Israel will become an actual policy, rather than a prefernce. Zero, if you have a brain and have paid any attention to reality.

hce:

I pondered over the Latin for awhile, since I once "knew" it in graduate school, and I decided that the phrase "allow the grovellers to live" is meant to apply to writers like Crawford.

Re: Peter's preference for the descriptive categories of anarchism to orthodox Marxism -- in the context of the present thread, I would divide "executive class" into "owners" and "agents of" (eg Obama), or, in Swift's words, knaves and fools.

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