Operation America and the Good Slave of the Hour! - Represent Our Resistance - By Dr. Lenore J. Daniels, PhD

When an event places the most extreme demands on us, one ought not speak of banality. For at this point there is no longer any abstraction and never an imaginative power that could even approach its reality.

-Jean Amery, At the Mind’s Limits

Tomahawk missiles. F-15s. F-16s.

Here we go again.

Dark skies filled with flashing lights and explosions heard and seen on CNN around the world

We have seen this before.

No troops on the ground there, but there are troops on the ground here, telling us there is no money. Few billion here and there, but they ain’t got no money, except for prisons, or prisons here, they have money.

A headline at Methaba.net reads: “America’s 1st Black President Invades Africa” (March 20, 2011). At 1.5 million apiece, 110 missiles in a matter of minutes announce the U.S. presence near Africa. Civilians died. Only the most depraved (of mind and spirit) Black American could applaud this historical first. A man of Kenyan decent on his father’s side invades Africa. Civilians die. A man with Hussein for a middle name continues wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, a Black man pursues “terrorists” around the world and at home.

I bet it never crossed John Kennedy’s mind to invade Ireland. After the U.S. Civil War, presidents of Anglo-Saxon decent never thought to implement Manifest Destiny by invading a European nation. Here in the U.S., habits are hard to break. Patterns set in…

Trinkets proved fruitful when offered to the discovered indigenous. Practitioners of that Peculiar Institution from which all other American institutions derive their influence and power, established a system of substantial rewards. A good slave is always a loyal slave. Barack Obama, if nothing else is a good and therefore loyal slave. Change you can believe in. The legacy of Frederick Douglass was never his cup of tea. Good slaves indebted to Master denounce freedom movements or remain silent while freedom fighters are interrogated, tortured, and murdered.

And now, the unthinkable has happened again.

Saturday, March 20, 2011, without waking the peoples’ representatives, most, who themselves are chained hand and foot and branded Property of Corporate, Inc. U.S.A., exercising unconstitutional use of executive powers, Obama announced the beginning of Odyssey Dawn to support European and Arab allies in the liberation of Libyan freedom fighters. Masters stand above the U.S. Constitution - and so does the good slave, the well-trained “constitutional scholar,” and Masters always determined who is deemed a good freedom fighter. Channel Reagan.

Change you cannot believe in?

Only a few days before the announcement, Obama channels Bush in response to criticism that the U.S. treatment of whistleblower Pvt. Bradley Manning amounts to torture:

And with respect to Pvt. Manning and torture -

With respect to Private Manning I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not .... ahh .... ahh .... the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assured me that they are. I can’t go into details about some of their concerns but some of this has to do with Private Manning’s safety as well.

I actually asked Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, and all the oil interests I could gather in a conference call, in between calls to South African President Zuma to forestall the return to Haiti of that troublesome Aristide…

Just as any good slave and all slaves as well as their Masters are de-humanized beings, Obama asked Master what is next on the agenda and Master, ever the master at deflecting attention from corporate capitalist’s distain for humanity, spoke: HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION IN LIBYA!

Libya!

Of all the gin joints in all the world…of all the despots reigning so benevolently - as crusaders of justice, rooting out “terrorists,” it is Muammar Gaddafi. His number has come up - not Saleh of Yemen, not Al Khalifa of Bahrain, not Gbagbo of Cote d’Ivoire. How quiet Obama has been for a long while. Tunisian and Egyptian freedom fighters met with Obama looking the other way at perhaps some portrait of Nixon or Ronald Reagan. The leader of the Free World is MIA with ally states of Behrain and Yemen. Or is he?

According to author and political analyst, Kevin Ovenden, interviewed by Press TV, March 23, 2011, Yemeni President Saleh is losing the support of Saudi Arabia and the Western powers that back him. It is Saleh’s job “to suppress anti-government protests… [and] to keep him afloat until a favorable replacement is found” - by the U.S.

Was Obama in consultation , perhaps just listening to his corporate Masters, watching them choreograph the appearances and statements of the Secretary of State, the French President Sarkozy, and the British Prime Minister David Cameron while the Arab League, mostly loyal to the U.S./British imperialists, confers with the African Union, mostly loyal imperialist subjects to the newest “terrorist,” Muammar Gaddafi? (“The parasitic sheikhdoms of the Emirates, including Dubai and Abu Dhabi and in Qatar - these are country-selling regimes. They preside over their own subjugations and for at least six weeks the Saudis and Sheikhdoms have been mobilized by the US to prepare shock troops to invade” Behrain, where those freedom fighters are being tortured and brutalized, reports Ralph Shoenman, author and political commentator from Berkeley. Interview, Press TV, March 23, 2011). But play no attention to the business of corporate capitalist’s allies.

Off the Free World Leader flies to Latin American to discuss “strengthening ties” - i.e. strengthening chains - to further politically and economically ensnare Brazil and El Salvador, both once infiltrated with CIA tricksters and assassins.

Ever a busy man for his Masters, Obama clears brush in Latin America.

The U.S. humanitarian intervention mission, he tells reporters, will assure that changes occurring in North Africa and the Arab world are done in a “peaceful” and “non-violent fashion.” Turn on your television because obviously Obama has not, nor does he need to do so. Obama believes in the decisions and the actions his Masters pursue. Listen to the tally of deaths, injuries, and disappearances each day in Libya, Yemen, Behrain, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. For Obama, these deaths, injuries, disappearances are necessary for the maintenance of democracy (similar to the U.S.’s democracy) built on the subjugation of enslaved Africans.

How can the de-humanized understand humanitarian intervention?

Obama does not seem to be aware of the protesters in the streets here in the U.S., protesters in cities throughout the country, desperately demanding the end of draconian laws that drain workers of their rights, children, poor, and elderly of health care, and young people of educational and employment opportunities. In July, the corporate capitalists will break more records in profit earnings and bonuses for CEOs - as Obama hopes they will allow him another term to play Big Man of the free world.

Protesters in the U.S. are in need of humanitarian intervention - and not the kind of intervention defined by corporate capitalists, but, of course, the good slave Obama remains silent, except in the decrees which maintain the Pentagon expenditures at nearly 50 percent and stores up of prisons facilities and law enforcement personnel. How many freedom fighters do we have here in the United States serving 30 and 40 years in the land of Liberty’s dungeons? We are fighting skirmishes with representatives of corporate capitalists determined to wipe from our minds any memory of our human rights!

Who are the freedom fighters the U.S. is liberating now in Libya? Who are these rebels in Benghazi calling for the intervention of one tyrant to ouster another tyrant? Revolutionaries, are they? What are their demands (freedom from the oppressive capitalist regime as those protesters demanded in the Egyptian Revolution)? What are the motives of the opposition, which includes former Ministers of Justice and Interior no less? Does anyone remember the planes of “terrorists” rendered to Egypt for torture? (The U.S. loves a good slave anywhere and everywhere these days - except when they say no more!). What was exchanged in the whispering between the Western coalition and this collection of freedom fighters?

The lover of the free market is busy establishing more business for the corporate capitalist.

Obama told of his mother forcing him to wake up early in the mornings to attend school in Indonesia. I hate it too, she said, but we have to. Could such a mother have thought that a child of hers would end up a man committed to the greedy and heartless, to the cold and indifferent murders? Could such a mother have thought that a child of hers would end up a man dangerous not only because he proves willing to say and do anything necessary to cling to power, but also because he stifles the truth of a Pastor Jeremiah Wright, a State Department Spokesperson J.P. Crowley, and a Julian Assange, and the thousands upon thousands of freedom fighters here in the U.S.?

But his mother is no longer among us. But for some of us, there is nothing banal in the evil we have witnessed longer than two years, 30 years, but well over 400 years. We find ourselves witnesses to moments of disbelief, then anger, and then disbelief again, even though we have known there were always good slaves. The first Black American president invades Africa, history’s record will read, although many of us know better. But history looks at the blood and the face. “Plain, ordinary faces,” Jean Amery remembers. “And the enormous perception at a later stage, one that destroys all abstractive imagination, makes clear to us how the plain, ordinary faces finally become Gestapo faces after all, and how evil overlays and exceeds banality” (At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. Some will say, but no, it is not so serious. Who remembers a Jewish citizen in Germany saying the same thing? Some on the west coast of Africa, those hundreds of years ago, hearing of kidnappings by strangers, might have thought the same.

Obama, “appropriate” and well within the “basic standards” of Operation America, is the good slave of that Peculiar Institution, slaveholders, cavalrymen, generals, and cowboys, aside. Fascism here in the United States already has its unique foundation in the Peculiar Institution. It weaves in and out, masquerades as Reconstruction or the War on Drugs, as neo-conservatism or neo-liberalism, as free market entrepreneurship or humanitarian intervention, and even as democracy itself with the rise of the good slave in this post racial era: “Events happen around the world in which the United States, with our unique capabilities, has to respond as a leader in the world community” (Obama, Los Angeles Times, March 22, 2011). Our…Our Unique capabilities…Right! We got it cold, Master!

First Black American president invades Africa! Whatever the U.S. Empire thinks up next, Obama is ready to serve!

Old habits must come to an end!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.

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