"What can we expect from an Obama government?" is the question of the hour. To answer it, academicians and journalists invariably use a method that is renowned for its inaccuracy: they examine the general tone of campaign speeches and apply it to the objective problems – economic, military, diplomatic – the new head of state will have to face. This method fails for two reasons:
First: the method starts out with the assumption that the institutional framework will remain unaltered and that therefore the new president will carry out, in his own way, substantively the same tasks as his predecessor. Consequently, it does not envisage that in a revolutionary strategy, one of the basic functions of the leader is precisely to redefine these very tasks. Obama learned this lesson since his youth from his guru Saul Alinsky: "All change means disorganization of the old and organization of the new" (1).
Second: it always assumes that the head of state represents the national interest and will commit himself to safeguard it in all earnestness, according to the balance he manages to find between the demands of the militancy that elected him, the claims of happenstance allies and the pressures of the objective situation.
This assumption, however, loses all significance at a time that defines itself overall as that of the emergence and implementation of world government. Nowadays, the national interest of all countries is being subordinated to worldwide plans imposed by an economic, bureaucratic and intellectual elite whose power transcends that of any particular nation, including the United States.
Many presidents and prime-ministers are installed with the help or guidance of this elite, not to protect national interests, but to oppose them based on much broader goals, which, though described more than half a century ago by such first-rate authors as Arnold Toynbee (2) and Carroll Quigley (3), are scarcely taken into account by these academicians and journalists, and for a very simple reason: as David Rockefeller, one of the main leaders of globalism, publicly acknowledged, the fight for the implementation of world government would fail if prematurely disclosed.
Therefore, discretion, deceptiveness and disinformation are some of the essential jobs of the mainstream media during the intermediate period (4). The "anti-democratic means" that Toynbee found indispensable to the implementation of world government include, quite obviously, control of the flow of information sent to the general public.
The increasing uniformity of the world press – of which the campaign against the alleged human agents of global warming, the universal anti-Bush outcry or the waves of enthusiasm surging over Lula, Obama and the World Social Forum are eloquent examples – can be easily explained by the rising concentration of media ownership precisely in the hands of the economic groups most interested in world government.
The fact that part of the lesser agents in the process complain about this type of concentration, arguing that it is the spontaneous effect of pure mechanics of capitalism, is partly due to a residual ideological automatism, and partly to the cunning desire of these groups and individuals to conceal their own actions under the guise of supposed tendencies or anonymous historical laws, putting the blame for the most disagreeable changes on the previous situation which the current changes purport to suppress.
Since, on the other hand, the media also has the role of laying out "common sense" (in the sociological and Gramscian sense), giving the people a sense of purpose and reassurance as to what is happening, the cultured reader will be forced, sooner or later, to choose between buying into the mainstream opinion or trying to arrive at a more scientific and realistic understanding of the state of affairs.
In the first case, he will be rewarded with that comforting sense of confidence that comes with deceiving oneself together with the majority of the people. In the second, he will attain reasonable certainty enabling him to make correct predictions, while seeming weird or irrational to most people.
Because my choice was made long ago, the method I apply to answer the kind of questions posed at the outset of this article does not rest on the usual academic and journalistic conventions, but on elementary scientific precautions, which has allowed me to achieve a certain degree of success in anticipating the course of events, the price of which is, naturally, the hatred of those who have failed to do so.
One of these precautions is as follows: at times of swift change, imposed top-down by groups whose line of action remains elusive, it is almost impossible to predict the general course of action of a new government. All we can and must do is abandon general predictions and confine ourselves to those specific, scant but significant, points already determined by the course of the previous action, so that the new government must necessarily proceed with them.
Instead of deriving from the general picture the particular actions that the head of state must hypothetically accomplish to deal with it, it is convenient to start with the existing or practically inevitable specific actions and, if possible, to ascend laboriously to the general picture. I say "if possible" precisely because in most cases we can only achieve reasonable certainty regarding the specific lines of action, whereas the general meaning of things remains as far beyond our intellectual reach as it is from that of the head of state himself.
Even the most formidable powers are only capable of determining a small fraction of the results of their own actions. Hence any serious statement about the direction of a new government must limit itself to the actions it must bring to bear merely to keep and to expand the power with which it has been invested, especially those actions that fit immediate commitments that were previously agreed upon with the political and economic forces that produced them.
A second equally obvious rule goes along with the first: whatever its proclaimed goals, any scheme of power will always safeguard its own continuity and expansion first and foremost. To act, St. Thomas Aquinas would say, you must first be. The existence and continuity of the scheme are a prior condition of its doing whatever it may want to do.
Thus, what we must consider before anything else is what the head of state will necessarily have to do, not to reach this or that goal, nor to face the objective problems that afflict the nation or part of it, but simply to keep – and, in the case of a revolutionary leader, to increase – the power of action it already possesses.
Consequently, I don't know what Obama will do in general terms. Nor does anyone else. But I do know what he's already doing and will have to keep doing, not to achieve predetermined goals, but just to hold and increase control of the means.
May I mention, by the way, that it was based on the above-described method that I announced, shortly after Lula's first election, that he would not take any effective measures against drug dealing, for the very simple reason that he was lifted to power – and could be dethroned – by the international scheme of the São Paulo Forum, whose interests are fundamentally akin to the FARC's, now and then the biggest supplier of cocaine to the Brazilian market (5). A head of state can do many things, but, barring insanity, can never destroy the means of doing things.
All Obama's career and his ascent to power were entirely subsidized by notoriously anti-American forces. To claim that they are only anti-Bush and not anti-US proves to be a mere rhetorical twist, unworthy of attention. The essential role the new president will play once in office does not differ much from that which Strobe Talbott recommended to Bill Clinton: "Sell multilateralism …as a means of preserving and enhancing American political leadership in the world" (6).
It purports, in short, to weaken and submit to supranational institutions the national power it pretends to enhance. In his campaign speeches, as well as in his aide's declarations, Obama promised to reduce the US military budget by up to 25%, to slow down nuclear research and – as amazing as it seems – "to demilitarize space".
This would allegedly make the United States more amicable in the eyes of mankind and would afford it enormous diplomatic leadership in the world. Only giddy schoolgirls – who not coincidentally made up the most critical segment of Obama's electorate – could believe in such stuff. The efficacy of diplomatic action is, by definition, proportionate to the military power that backs it.
In every political action – and this is the third methodological precaution I recommend – one must distinguish between the final announced goals and the substantiality of the acts performed to achieve them. The latter are a reality, the former a mere hypothesis, if not a smokescreen.
Therefore, the meaning of the action reveals itself to a greater extent in the nature of the means employed than in the stated nominal goals. To militarily weaken a nation is … to weaken it militarily. The notion that this could strengthen it diplomatically is a far-flung hypothesis which is much too contrived and contrary to all historical experience.
What is more, the supposed connection between the declared goals and the chosen means is based on an assumption that is uniformly that of mainstream anti-American discourse: the United States is hated because of its military force; if it agrees to become less powerful, it will be eternally loved by mankind.
It must be noted that, in this case, what the candidate emphasized in his campaign speech was not the materiality of the means, but the supposed beauty of the aims, under frantic applauses of a crowd of students to whom even the total destruction of the United States would not be an idea devoid of sex appeal. This idea has the exact same power of attraction to all those who have financed Obama's career since his teen years: Arab millionaires, pro-terrorist agitators, globalist corporations and, last but not least, George Soros.
If one thing is right it's that the purpose of militarily weakening the United States, already tenaciously pursued by the Clinton Administration, will be followed to the letter by Barack Obama, for the simple reason that accomplishing it constitutes one of the main reasons of his existence as a politician.
It's something that he cannot afford not to do, just as, by analogy, Lula could not help sacrificing Brazil's interests and sovereignty to the higher ends of the São Paulo Forum and the globalist scheme that backs it up, as we saw in the case of the Bolivian pressures against Petrobras, and even clearly in the Raposa Serra do Sol issue.
It is indeed curious – and depressing – to find that, at a time when national sovereignties are overtly opposed in the upper spheres of world politics, and their limitation or progressive suppression is even proclaimed as a basic condition for the survival of the human species, analysts claiming to be scientific still hold as an at least implicit premise of their predictions the assumption that leaders always behave according to the national interest, as if they were Renaissance princes committed to breaking down the empire's integrity and to establish new sovereign unities.
Today a leader can stand against the most vital interests of his nation and be granted, for this very reason, so much support from international opinion that his own people, judging by the most visible appearance rather than the substantiality of the actions involved, end up viewing him as a kind of national hero.
Talbott's formula was followed to the letter by Bill Clinton, who was consequently one of the world media's most endorsed American presidents. He reduced the American atomic weapons arsenal knowing that China was enhancing hers; he encouraged American investments in China, while hampering American industry with taxes and restrictive legislation; he blocked probes into Chinese espionage at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory and, in the last days of his government, when the chief Chinese spy involved in the operation was already in prison, pardoned him without any sound justification.
Needless to say he was acting all the time against American national interest and conforming to the strictest "multilateralism" by stimulating the transformation of China into a military and economic power, one that intends to become the dominant center in the coming decades. Needless to say as well that the applause thus received from the international media created a huge impression in raising American prestige, making decline seem like an improvement in the eyes of the American people.
He was even more enthusiastically cheered for his "humanitarian" intervention in Kosovo, which, under the pretext of punishing a genocide we now know did not exist at all, had the only effective result of turning a Christian region into an Islamic stronghold, and at the further price of the actual genocide perpetrated by Muslim troops trained and subsidized by Bin Laden himself (7).
Once again, the sympathy of the international media was sold to the American people as proof of the great success of the anti-American actions ordered by the president.
When Obama promises to enhance the international "image" of the United States, in exchange for the decrease of its military power, he's again applying Talbott's formula: to substitute an image for reality and then to sell that image as reality itself.
That he's going to do this is something that cannot be seriously questioned, because this proposal is the fundamental or even sole explanation for the worldwide support he received, a support that only a perfect idiot would see as stemming from the spontaneous preferences of the people and not from a coordinated effort of the globalist elite who dominates the media organizations all over the planet. If he steps back from this commitment, his political career won't last one more day.
But Obama wasn't elected just to repeat what Clinton has already done. In addition to shrinking American power in the international arena, he'll push for an enormous increase in the American State's power to control the lives of its citizens and to shape public opinion.
I'm not saying that he "can" do this or either that he "tends" to do this. I'm saying that he will necessarily do this, if he's not stopped, because it is essential to boost the power of the forces who elected him and also to block, as of now, a potential return of Republicans to both houses of Congress by 2010.
To hold and enhance its power is the most basic condition of the very existence of political forces, and these conditions become ever more vital and urgent when a political force has the aim of bringing about profound changes in society. Whatever the substance of these changes, the first one is – and must be – the consolidation of the power of action necessary to enforce them.
It was for disregarding this fact that George W. Bush completely failed. Instead of consolidating Republican hegemony by debilitating his opponent, he chose to improvise a suicidal alliance with the latter, forging a semblance of national unity against the external enemy. This unity, when it crashed and smashed into pieces at a speed greater than anticipated (except as seen by the geniuses at the Department of State), carried away the prestige of the presidency and the Republican control over both Houses of Congress (8).
The Democrats do not ordinarily make this mistake. Even now before Obama is sworn in, they're preparing the revival of the restrictive legislation, ironically termed Fairness Doctrine, whose sole object is to destroy the already poor balance of the American media, by transferring to the Democrats half of the time that republicans hold on the radio, without granting to the latter even the smallest amount of the Democrats' hegemony in newspapers and TV stations.
Some Republican commentators, and by no means the worst of them, have been wrongly reasoning, in accordance with the second of the above premises, that the rules of the game will remain the same, and thus even believe that Obama's victory was good for their party, because it will throw onto the new president the responsibility of handling the economic crisis and, since he will most likely fail, it will pave the way for the triumphant comeback of the Republicans in the 2010 legislative elections.
This is one of the methodological mistakes I referred to above. In 2010, the rules of the game will be so radically altered that Republicans in general, and conservatives in particular, will hardly be capable of making themselves heard by the public. The "change" promised by Obama could begin even before his oath of office: inspired by the victory at the presidential election, democratic senators and representatives can't wait to rubber stamp the return of the catastrophic and anti-democratic Fairness Doctrine (9).
To this fundamental change, which will give the leftist establishment almost total control of the mass media, Obama intends to add a more complicated one, whose implementation represents an explicit commitment he made with the enragée faction of his militancy, whose support he'll continue to seek unless he wishes to draw against him the most bold and outspoken part of the American nation, and he won't fail to do it, short of being insane.
I'm referring to the "Civilian National Security Force" (10). Obama has been working on this idea for many years, in the framework of the "Public Allies" non-profit. The goal is, plainly, to arm the radical militancy and transform it, according to the words of the new president himself, into such a powerful and well subsidized force as the Army, the Navy and the Air Force.
The resources that will be allocated to this mission have already been calculated by Obamist planners and amount to US$ 500 billion annually. Every enlisted volunteer will be paid US$ 1,800 per month, and will be granted scholarships and places at the best universities as well as many other social advantages that, together with the weapons and the military training, will quickly turn those fanatical mobs into a privileged class with a fearful power.
Whom will that power turn against? Is the "civilian force" meant to replace the military in repressing and controlling terrorism? Impossible. The Bush Administration already reduced to zero the number of terrorist attacks in US territory. And it doesn't make sense to go below zero.
Is the new force meant to combat criminality, to restore public safety and thus promote social peace, the so-long awaited "reconciliation" among the races? Equally impossible. If, on the one hand, 80% of the Public Allies militants already comprise black young people, the same proportion will likely prevail in the "civil force," for where else, if not among his own militancy, would the Obamism recruit the volunteers for this task?
It's true, on the other hand, that of all interracial crimes perpetrated in the United States, 85% – almost the same proportion of the Public Allies members – are committed by blacks against whites (11), notwithstanding the politically correct detail that official statistics refuse to treat Hispanics as a separate group and include them among "whites," thus attributing to white people those crimes committed by illegal Hispanic immigrants against blacks. An immense work of repression of interracial crimes would throw even more blacks into prisons they already overcrowd.
This would be dreadful political suicide, which would send Obama against the community whose skin color is one of the strongest reasons for his occupying the presidential seat. (By the way, it is worthy remembering that the usual "racism" explanation for the bigger proportion of black inmates is a complete fraud, for the states where jailed blacks proportionally outnumber jailed whites aren't in the South, but rather in the North, and they're not governed by Republicans but, rather by Democrats (12)).
It is equally impossible that the new security force would be meant to control illegal immigration. Obama is already formally committed to the total amnesty project and soon the very concept of "illegal immigrant" will be abolished. Leaving out those three ends, what task remains for a portentous force the same size of the Army, the Navy and the Air Force, apart from policing and intimidating religious and political groups the Left views as "suspect"?
This goal has already represented the democratic agenda since Madeline Albright, who saw a great threat to national security in the groups made up of religious, conservative and – like half of the American population – armed people. Except that, to repress these groups, the Clinton Administration relied solely on the FBI and the state police forces, where many agents and chief officers would naturally abhor a drastic and comprehensive action against innocent people. The young Obamist militancy comes pre-inoculated against that kind of ethical misgivings thanks to massive propaganda.
To weaken the American State abroad and to strengthen it internally are the two pillars of Obama's politics. He cannot relinquish either of them, not only because they complement themselves, but because they are the chief justifications of his existence as a politician. His entire career has been supported and subsidized by forces that strongly desire both things.
When I single them out as fundamental goals to which the Obama government will attach its best talents, I'm just drawing attention to two already ongoing lines of action, that are strongly rooted in the Democrats' agenda once they come to power, and that have been previously coordinated through the broadest effort of militancy formation ever seen in the United States (for his Internet campaigns alone Obama has in place a network of nothing less than four million people, formally committed to continue doing for his government what they did for the candidate).
Whatever the general outlook the Obama government may eventually show to the world, these two lines of action will be there and will deeply affect the whole ensemble. That numerous Republicans, Democrats or independent analysts foresee a "moderate" or "centrist" government, is due to the fact that they do not have the analytical tools to understand the situation.
"Radical" and "moderate", are usually terms that better fit the description of rhetorical styles than substantive actions. The leftist "radical" Hugo Chavez was unable to dismantle Venezuelan opposition, while the "moderate" Lula disassembled one by one every pocket of right-wing resistance in Brazil, to the point that nowadays only leftwing opposition remains.
Obama could well keep a "moderate" profile at those more visible areas, and, at the same time, discretely undertake these two measures that, per se, can not only irreversibly modify the American political system but also "change the world" as we know it.
It is obvious that Obama can be prevented from carrying out these plans, either by uncontrollable factors, or by the organized action of his opponents. What is certain is that the effort to accomplish them, whether in a spectacular or in a more subtle way, will be one of the unchanging features of his government, and any success he achieves, no matter how incomplete or minimum, will leave a scar on the historical face of the United States and on humankind.
Notes:
(1) Brad O'Leary, "For Obama, All Roads Lead to ACORN and Saul Alinsky", at http://www.modernconservative.com/metablog_single.php?p=2319.
(2) In America and the World Revolution, cit. in Olavo de Carvalho, "Travessia perigosa", Diário do Comércio, São Paulo, May 12th, 2008 (http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/080512dc.html; English translation at http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/english/articles/080601lf_en.html).
(3) V. Carrol Quigley, Tragedy and Hope. A History of the World in Our Time, New York, Macmillan, 1966.
(4) V. Will Banyan, "The proud internationalist", in http://www.scribd.com/doc/296854/Will-Banyan–
The-Proud-Internationalist-The-Globalist-Vision-of-
David-Rockefeller#document_metadata.
(5) V. Olavo de Carvalho, "Lula e Lulas", in O Globo, November 2nd, 2002 (http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/02112002globo.htm; v. also http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/16112002globo.htm and http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/030308globo.htm).
(6) Cit. in John Fonte, "Global Governance vs. the Liberal Democratic Nation-State: What Is the Best Regime?", Bradley Symposium 2008, Hudson Institute, Washington D.C. (http://pcr.hudson.org/files/publications/
2008_Bradley_Symposium_Fonte_Essay.pdf).
(7) V. Joseph Farah, "Bill Clinton's other genocide", WorldNetDaily, July 26th. 2005, http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?pageId=31471.
(8) V. Olavo de Carvalho, "Avaliando George W. Bush", Diário do Comércio, São Paulo, June 18th, 2008, http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/080618dce.html; English translation at http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/english/articles/080618dc_en.html.
(9) Obama personally denies that he intends to apply the Fairness Doctrine, but he knows he won't need to get his pretty hands dirty, because Congress will do that for him. Besides, his team has a reputable history of intents to silence opponents (v. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=79273). Finally, at the Obamist circles the name being more considered to head his transition team is that of Henry Rivera, who, during his presidency of the Federal Committee on Communications, was a forceful adept of the Fairness Doctrine (v. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?pageId=80424).
(10) V. http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=305420655186700.
(11) V. http://www.colorofcrime.com/colorofcrime2005.html.
(12) V. Steve Sailer, "Mapping the unmentionable: Race and crime", in http://www.vdare.com/Sailer/050213_mapping.htm.
Olavo de Carvalho is a Brazilian writer and philosopher presently living in the U. S. as a correspondent for Brazilian newspapers. He is the author of several books, including O Imbecil Coletivo: Atualidades Inculturais Brasileiras (1996) and O Futuro do Pensamento Brasileiro – Estudos sobre o Nosso Lugar no Mundo (1997). His articles can be found at www.olavodecarvalho.org and www.midiasemmascara.org. The author welcomes comments at olavo@olavodecarvalho.org.
Translated from the Portuguese by Donald Hank.
