Barack Obama’s most recent attempt to prove his Harvard-certified safety to the doctrinal gatekeepers of the U.S. foreign policy establishment ought to make it clear once and for all that he is what the Maoists used to call a “running dog lackey of United States imperialism.”

 

 

WHITEWASHING PAST IMPERIAL CRIMINALITY

 

I am referring to Obama’s July/August Foreign Affairs essay, titled “Renewing America’s Leadership” (Obama 2007).

 

Reading as much like a campaign speech as an academic or policy document, this 5000-word article begins by praising Franklin Delano Roosevelt for “buil[ding] the most formidable military the world had ever known” and for giving “purpose to our struggle against fascism” with his “Four Freedoms.”

 

It praises Harry Truman for “champion[ing] a bold new architecture to respond to the Soviet threat — one that paired military strength with the Marshall Plan and helped secure the peace and well-being of nations around the world.”

 

It commends Obama’s special historical role model John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) for “moderniz[ing] our military doctrine, strengthen[ing] our conventional forces, and creat[ing] the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress” to “to show people everywhere America at its best” while “colonialism crumbled and the Soviet Union achieved effective nuclear parity.”

 

“Our Struggle Against Fascism”

 

Funny how Obama didn’t actually break-out the “Four Freedoms”: freedom of speech and expression, freedom from want, freedom from fear and freedom of worship.  Maybe that’s because the United States policymakers from Roosevelt II through Kennedy (and beyond) regularly violated most of them in the enforcement of their particular imperial concept of the “national interest.” During the middle and late 1930s, US policymakers helped enable the rise of European fascism that culminated in Hitler’s march of terror. The US watched with approval as Fascist darkness set over Europe during the inter-war years. American policymakers saw Italian, Spanish, German and other strains of the European fascist disease as a welcome counters to “the Soviet threat” – essentially the demonstration Russia made of the possibilities for national outside the capitalist world system – and to Left movements, parties and related social-democratic policy drifts within <

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