| The audacity of empire: Some thoughts on Obama’s Kamp in the 21st century |
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| By: |
Anas Karzai, Ph.D
Department of Sociology,
Laurentian University,
Sudbury, Ontario, Canada |
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“I understood that there was and always has been, another tradition to
politics- a tradition based on the simple idea that we have a stake in
one another, and that what binds us together is greater than what drives
us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that
proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we
can get something meaningful done (Obama in The Audacity of Hope 2006).
"For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent
movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot
convince al-Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is
sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism; it is a recognition of
history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason." (Obama in
Oslo, Dec. 10. 2009).
December 10th 2009 was a very sad day for the world. In Oslo, Norway,
Barack Obama, a man who used to volunteer to deliver hot soup in
Chicago’s east side low-income neighborhoods, received the Noble
Peace Price. The commander and chief of the largest imperial force the
world has ever known, was awarded a peace prize.
Since January 2009, the world has not seen Obama doing anything remotely
related to Peace. The prize is not because he has delivered peace, or
soup for that matter, but because he has delivered the goods: a method
of allowing the industrial-military complex to operate in perpetuity
with its economy of carnage. Dec. 10th 2009 was Obama’s initiation
into Euro-American empire; an acknowledgement by the global elite for
his willingness to abandon hope and reason in favour of the imperial
worldview, one which divides humanity into good and evil. And on
Dec.10th , Obama pledged to use the old language of civilizational
divide to sell the new prospect of a future filled with more wars and
more military interventions.
Obama’s commitnent to use violence as a means to end violence—a
culturally specific logic which cements his membership in the
Euro-American empire—also compels him to conveniently ignore the role of
imperial powers in the formation of historical villians. Obama chose to
omit how American companies did business with Hitler throughout the
1930s and that the US-UK alliance held several talks and negotiation
meetings with him during his reign of terror. The return of then British
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain from his Appeasement meeting with
Hitler in Germany is another detail that was left out of Obama’s speech.
Chamberlain’s famous letter signed by Hitler did not stop the allies
from the possibility of a non-violent-negotiation with the architect of
Auschwitz.
One wonders if Obama’s historical cultural icons and spiritual leaders
(Nelson Mandela, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. & Mohandas Karamchand
Gandhi) would ever approve of his actions as a leader of a world that he
now leads towards a future of unfreedom, a world of cynicism and despair
where he is ready to show us the imperfection of man and the limits of
reason.
“To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism”,
Obama said, however, it can also be said that saying no to violence,
force and invasions is not a recipe for resignation to the challenges of
our times either. That is, Obama, the noble peace prize recipient can
put his reason to the test, or can ‘perfect man’ by first signing
America on to the International Criminal Court and by further stopping
the American Arms Sale to its international clients, and by further
refusing to supply dictatorships with military and economic aid around
the globe, especially in the middle east. Common sense dictates that
reason as a h“Reason doesn’t have to have limits”, Obama announced. Yet we see
reason’s limits everywhere: in how the global polity has been organized,
in how imperial nations fail to recognize others without cultural
prejudice and moral condemnation, in how wealthy nations have not
extended unconditional hospitality to those who do not have homes, in
their failure to mourn with those beyond their borders, national
interests, egos. Reason’s limits are also revealed in the imperial
inability to remember and outright reject the ways of the past.
Given Obama’s audience, it is easy to guess who the evil side of
humanity must be. The unspoken religion, geographical location, color,
and cultural symbols of Islam, Islamic countries and their western
backed leadership were conspicuously absent. In fact, the
contradictions of those who lead the world today are no longer concealed
and hidden, nor are they planned deep in bunkers or behind closed doors,
instead, they are openly celebrated, promoted and sold to the world as
modern democratic humanitarianism, hence the democratization of imperial
logic. For the Iraqi and Afghan people, resistance and perpetual
struggle against a foreign militaries and occupation is not something
new. It is something deep in their psyche, their dreams, their folk
music, and in their oral history, it is deeply embedded in the tales
that parents tell their children at night.
Those of us who watched the events of Dec. 10th with squinted eyes
remember Obama’s 2006 proclamation in his book, The Audacity of Hope, in
it he proposes another tradition of politics—one that does not divide
the world into good and evil but that binds it together in mutual hope.
It is within the limits of reason, that modern humans can come togethe
and overvome the Huntingtonian thesis of civilizational clash, that is,
to be able to go beyond the binaries of us and them, civilized and
barbaric, modern and traditional, religious and secular, developed and
underdeveloped. Instead of shaking our heads with disappointment at
Obama’s new trajectory, we should hold this leader to his word. His
old one, not his new one.
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