April 10, 2008 - Issue 272
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Rogue Ideology: They Love You If You’re Dead!
Represent Our Resistance
By Dr. Lenore J. Daniels, PhD
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lackCommentator.com Editorial Board

But, you know, they say they’re not soldiers, they’re just there as escorts…some advisers… ‘in the name of freedom,’ ‘in the name of liberty’…All kinds of high-sounding slogans, but its cold-blooded murder, mass murder.

-Malcolm X, (“Not Just An American Problem”)

“The U.S. economy…is a rogue economy. All Western economies at the moment are rogue economies, for the simple reason that politics has lost control of the economy” (my emphasis). Loretta Napoleoni, author of Rogue Economics: Capitalism's New Reality, added that “large multinational” corporations have worked to defeat the idea of democracy and decolonization in that they control the status of the worker, many of whom are now enslaved by their “bosses,” and they control the production of goods, material resources of people, particularly women, who were at least employed in countries such as Soviet Union and the Ivory Coast for example. Politics has lost control of the economy.

GOP Presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, said he doesn’t know much about the economy, and from the camps of the two Democratic candidates, Senators Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the general public is treated to these functionaries in the regime of Empire whose tasks is to turn the public’s attention away from true rulers - corporate capitalists.

Then there was another speech by Obama in Philadelphia at a town hall event. While Hillary Clinton’s corporate owners know where she stands, Obama makes sure the rulers know where he stands. Catch the wink to corporate rulers: “The truth is that my foreign policy is actually a return to the traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush’s father, of John F. Kennedy, of, in some ways, Ronald Reagan…” Oh, change! Take us back to Bush, Sr., Kennedy, and Reagan!

According to Chris Floyd, “Hope Abandoned: Obama Stands Up for Murder and Plunder,” Obama’s aside to the corporate owners assures them of his understanding of “the trick” - that, no doubt, he arrogantly believes he can do better than Clinton and McCain - anybody! As Floyd writes,

Obama is also signaling to the real masters of the United States, the military-corporate complex, that he is a “safe pair of hands” - a competent technocrat who won’t upset the imperial applecart but will faithfully follow the 60-year-post-war paradigm of leaving “all options on the table” and doing “whatever it takes” to keep the great game of geopolitical dominance going strong.

In other words, Obama will faithfully play the game of Empire and maintain the convergence of a rogue economy with a rogue ideology of white supremacy.

Happy days are here again…

With Obama and this “traditional” foreign policy of Bush, Sr., Kennedy, and Reagan (hey - why not Clinton I and Bush II??), Amerikkka could roll on right on down the mountain with more atrocities: invasions, assassinations, “gates” and more weapons for food, weapons for money, weapons profitable-chaos scandals, segregating people according to race or ethnicity or religious sect and the ensuring civil battles, massacres and more funerals and memorials, and still revealing torture memos from Amerikkka’s functionaries.

Going with the lesser evil is so fresh and new!

Like the politicians handpicked by corporate mouthpiece-media, Amerikkka’s imperialism and racism equals fascism. Only the capitulating willing to serve as functionaries by their corporate masters is eligible to play this game. Others are not invited!

America of the fighters for social justice is not Obama’s country. He’s denounced and rejected this America even before he distanced himself from the prophecy of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Obama distanced himself from the Black Left in his autobiography.

So progressive is this Obama that he will return to the “traditional” geopolitics (have we left them?) of, as Floyd writes, “murder and plunder!” The progression is astonishing!

The corporate capitalists own the very ideology which is the bedrock of their political and economical ideas. Think of how much more fun they will have with Obama, who, as Floyd points out, has “the ability to massage his message and ‘become all things to all men’” - specifically, the white men of corporate imperialism.

Politics has long lost control of the economy because it long ago lost control of the rogue ideology of white supremacy.

The duly elected President Lumumba rose with his fellow Congolese to revolutionize the way Congo interacted with neighboring African nations and within the world among the Western imperialists. Amerikkka’s imperialists couldn’t tolerate the audacity of a Lumumba and fellow Congolese to stand for the liberation narrative and democratize the country for all its citizens.

Is it possible to think that Allende and his fellow Chileans, seeking liberation from imperialists, had the nerve to be democratic without the aid of Amerikkka - the only, self-appointed bringer of democracy?

The Black Left now, in these days of new wows can be envious of these efforts on the part of the people who want freedom from Amerikkka’s hegemonic dominance. But at last the work of the imperialist is to have order: Empire, functionaries here and functionary heads-of-Empire business is the traditional domestic and foreign policy of Amerikkka.

In the history that Obama seems determined to excise from the American public’s collective memory is the little business of one group, the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC). Founded in 1919, by white Southerners, the CIC recruited “middle class black and white people,” Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore writes (Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950), to work for “legal and economic justice” and “better educational and living conditions” for Black Southerners without intent to “over turn Jim Crow.” The CIC didn’t support the idea of Black American participation as full citizens in the U.S.

“Its black white members,” Gilmore writes, “devoted themselves to understanding each other, improving community structure that would deter racial violence.” That is, “it meant to make Jim Crow work more smoothly” for the ultimate benefit of white supremacist. Furthermore, in 1921, President Warren G. Harding, speaking to white Alabamians also winked for his audience. According to Gilmore, Harding said that “the problem [the Negro Problem/ the Southern Problem] of the races is…becoming a problem of the north…the problem of Africa, of South America, of the Pacific, of the South seas,” (cited in Gilmore).

With Woodrow Wilson, the Southern Solution expanded to the sovereign Black nation of Haiti in the person of the secretary of the Navy (chief functionary in Haiti) who implemented Jim Crow in Haiti from 1915 to 1934, in an occupation that witnessed a “reign of terror” by military personnel and an attempt to suppress its liberation narrative and resisters. From the functionary John Yoo ‘s torture memo, 2003:

Soldiers regularly in the service have the license of the government to deprive men, the active enemies of the government, of their liberty and lives; their commission so to act is as perfect and legal as that of a judge to adjudicate .... Wars never have been and never can be conducted upon the principle that an army is but a posse comitatis of a civil magistrate… [1]

The federal government extended Jim Crow, writes Gilmore, by “military occupation” and the “Ku Klux Klan extended white supremacy by ideological conversions.”

This is an example of the manifestations of racist policies expanded to serve the interests of the Amerikkkan Empire. As Gilmore writes, “throughout the occupation of Haiti, the Southern Solution becomes U.S. foreign policy, much as it had become domestic policy in the early days of the Wilson administration.”

Oh, this sort of business can’t happen again.

It rained yesterday, but it won’t rain again!

Corporate imperialists do what they know best, and they haven’t bothered to learn anything else. U.S. foreign policy imports white supremacy not democracy. Corporate capitalists who own the Republicrats of Amerikkka are making sure that liberation of the people is not an option. The work of these Republicrats is to abide by the will of their masters. All power to Halliburton, KBR, Exxon, General Electric, Telecommunication companies, Blackwater, and all other aspiring multinationals everywhere! And yet, this crucial moment of crisis finds the people asleep at the wheel.

Amerikkka will not stop until the heads of foreign governments are under its control, just as Black Americans, for example, are controlled and have been with slavery, white affirmative action, and now ethnic cleansing. Those lacking water, food, housing, health care, employment should recognize their own responsibility as a manifestation of the “self-inflected” torture.

I’ve learned that it’s hard to point out the imperialist agenda of ideology and economic and political dominance within the confines of an institutional environment that engages in the practice of upholding the imperialist agenda.

The same applies for those who truly are the Black Left concerned as we are with human rights, social justice, and revolutionary change that brings an end to imperialism. There’s no room at the inn. Work outside the Republicrat trap that denounces and rejects dissent, and opposition to the “murder and plunder” is the only option. Those who swing their heads from one candidate to the other, ohh-ing and ahh-ing believe they are in motion, going somewhere with the Republicrats.

This is an example of loss of mind, loss of cultural memory particularly among Black Americans, for as Gilmore reminds us, the most success campaign of imperialism is cultural imperialism. Blackface was popular at a moment of crisis for a reason. The representation of the “absent” or “dead Negro,” the less threatening Negro and more profitable for white supremacy Negro, was to outshine the 1920s and 1930s radical movement of the Black Left.

Are we the Black Left made to witness this farce again - only now with the gleeful participation of those “victims” of the imperialists’ domestic and foreign policies?

Stand up!


[1] Yoo, John. Torture Memo. From U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel, March 14, 2003

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer, for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.

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