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War Is Peace. Ignorance Is Strength
 John PilgerLew Rockwell.comFriday, Oct 16th, 2009Barack Obama, winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, is planning anotherwar to add to his impressive record. In Afghanistan, his agents routinelyextinguish wedding parties, farmers and construction workers withweapons such as the innovative Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of your lungs. According to the UN, 338,000 Afghan infants are dying underthe Obama-led alliance, which permits only $29 per head annually to bespent on medical care.Within weeks of his inauguration, Obama started a new war in Pakistan,causing more than a million people to flee their homes. In threatening Iran– which his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said she was prepared to“obliterate” – Obama lied that the Iranians were covering up a “secretnuclear facility,” knowing that it had already been reported to theInternational Atomic Energy Authority. In colluding with the only nuclear-armed power in the Middle East, he bribed the Palestinian Authority tosuppress a UN judgment that Israel had committed crimes againsthumanity in its assault on Gaza – crimes made possible with US weaponswhose shipment Obama secretly approved before his inauguration.At home, the man of peace has approved a military budget exceedingthat of any year since the end of the Second World War while presidingover a new kind of domestic repression. During the recent G20 meeting inPittsburgh, hosted by Obama, militarized police attacked peacefulprotesters with something called the Long-Range Acoustic Device, notseen before on US streets. Mounted in the turret of a small tank, it blasteda piercing noise as tear gas and pepper gas were fired indiscriminately. Itis part of a new arsenal of “crowd-control munitions” supplied by militarycontractors such as Raytheon. In Obama’s Pentagon-controlled “nationalsecurity state,” the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, which hepromised to close, remains open, and “rendition,” secret assassinationsand torture continue. The Nobel Peace Prize–winner’s latest war is largely secret. On 15 July,Washington finalized a deal with Colombia that gives the US seven giantmilitary bases. “The idea,” reported the Associated Press, “is to makeColombia a regional hub for Pentagon operations . . . nearly half thecontinent can be covered by a C-17 [military transport] without refueling,”which “helps achieve the regional engagement strategy.” Translated, this means Obama is planning a “rollback” of theindependence and democracy that the people of Bolivia, Venezuela,Ecuador and Paraguay have achieved against the odds, along with ahistoric regional cooperation that rejects the notion of a US “sphere of 
 
influence.” The Colombian regime, which backs death squads and has thecontinent’s worst human rights record, has received US military supportsecond in scale only to Israel. Britain provides military training. Guided byUS military satellites, Colombian paramilitaries now infiltrate Venezuelawith the goal of overthrowing the democratic government of HugoChávez, which George W Bush failed to do in 2002.Obama’s war on peace and democracy in Latin America follows a style hehas demonstrated since the coup against the democratic president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, in June. Zelaya had increased the minimumwage, granted subsidies to small farmers, cut back interest rates andreduced poverty. He planned to break a US pharmaceutical monopoly andmanufacture cheap generic drugs. Although Obama has called forZelaya’s reinstatement, he refuses to condemn the coup-makers and torecall the US ambassador or the US troops who train the Honduran forcesdetermined to crush a popular resistance. Zelaya has been repeatedlyrefused a meeting with Obama, who has approved an IMF loan of $164mto the illegal regime. The message is clear and familiar: thugs can act withimpunity on behalf of the US.Obama, the smooth operator from Chicago via Harvard, was enlisted torestore what he calls “leadership” throughout the world. The Nobel Prizecommittee’s decision is the kind of cloying reverse racism that hasbeatified the man for no reason other than he is a member of a minorityand attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he kills. This is the Call of Obama. It is not unlike a dog whistle: inaudible to most,irresistible to the besotted and boneheaded. “When Obama walks into aroom,” gushed George Clooney, “you want to follow him somewhere,anywhere.” The great voice of black liberation Frantz Fanon understood this. In TheWretched of the Earth, he described the “intermediary [whose] missionhas nothing to do with transforming the nation: it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampantthough camouflaged.” Because political debate has become so debased inour media monoculture – Blair or Brown; Brown or Cameron – race, genderand class can be used as seductive tools of propaganda and diversion. InObama’s case, what matters, as Fanon pointed out in an earlier era, is notthe intermediary’s “historic” elevation, but the class he serves. After all,Bush’s inner circle was probably the most multiracial in presidentialhistory. There was Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, alldutifully serving an extreme and dangerous power.Britain has seen its own Obama-like mysticism. The day after Blair waselected in 1997, the Observer predicted that he would create “newworldwide rules on human rights” while the Guardian rejoiced at the“breathless pace [as] the floodgates of change burst open.” When Obamawas elected last November, Denis MacShane MP, a devotee of Blair’sbloodbaths, unwittingly warned us: “I shut my eyes when I listen to thisguy and it could be Tony. He is doing the same thing that we did in 1997.”
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