If Obama is like Hitler, does that mean the foolish image of the U.S. president with a Hilter-like moustache is being eagerly pinned up on the bedroom and meeting room walls of White Nationalists inside and outside the U.S.? Is Barack Obama now the #1 choice for guest speaker at Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi rallies?
The image below is another in a series, trying to make the same point: that the two men are, somehow, really one.
[image with obviously Photoshopped elements, is from here]
The beginning part of the title of this blogpost was liberally borrowed by me from a webpage at Counterpunch.org which is linked to at the end of this post.
Barack Obama, the liberally anti-racist U.S.-born President of his country, is now being compared to the infamous former chancellor and head of state of the National Socialist German Workers Party (aka: The Nazi Party). You might have heard of him: his name was Adolph Hitler and he ruled Germany mercilessly from 1933 to 1945, ECD (in the Era of Christian Domination).
President Obama is being compared to Hitler and his henchmen in large part for currently speaking out loud, with seriousness, about wanting a public option for the non-rich people in the U.S. without any health insurance, who are therefore unlikely to have access to the dominant culture's health care system. Gosh, his agenda sure sounds like that European fascist's uber-fanatical rhetoric to me. (NOT.) There is an awful, while lethally ignored, connection between any U.S. president and the on-going genocide against American Indians. And even with a new "Genocide Awareness Day" (August 5), we non-Native USers "don't get it". Like a horse and carriage once were tied together, so too is genocidal atrocity against the Indigenous people of Turtle Island bound up with the historical presidency of these "colored-blood"-thirsty United States.
I have no reason to think that President Obama will do anything especially good for American Indians, although maybe with that public health care option, a few more people will actually have some dominant-modeled access, or, well, insurance, for what is termed "health-care". I'd probably argue seven days of any week that it is better to have dominant-cultural health care coverage--and full access to it--rather than none. But in the next breath I'd also point out that the U.S.'s CRAP (I haven't used that term in a while: Corporate Racist Atrocious Patriarchy) is the following: atrociously anti-holistic, culturally biased, corporate-controlled, utterly racist, classist, heterosexist, and misogynistic, and grossly insensitive to children and adults who survive sexual violence.
It is also, quite specifically, a profoundly and irredeemably drug-pushing pharmacological industry. Yes, many of those drugs do extend life and sometimes also the quality of it. Many of my relatives would not have lived so long so well without them. And that in no ways makes the case that "this is the best we can do". It also doesn't make the case that this is the best humanity has ever done, all incessant cheerleading for "medical breakthroughs" aside.
The "health-care system" with its inhumane insurance wing is a part of U.S.'s CRAP; it is what contributes to the genocide of American Indians; it is not a remedy for that genocide. White conservative to liberal society is likely to pay no nevermind to the fact that A GENOCIDE IS HAPPENING HERE, and every U.S. president has contributed mightily to it, including the current one.
With that noted, President Obama wanting to offer something else, something possibly more accessible and less expensive than private health care insurance for the struggling uninsured citizens of this country doesn't, in the least, come under the category of pushing for a fascistic totalitarian regime--one marked by anti-Semitism, anti-intellectualism, homophobia, misogyny, and hideously grotesque expressions of racism including very, very dirty ethnic cleansing programs. This is to say, what Hitler preached and practiced, with a lot of help from a lot of Germans and other Europeans, and not a few white Gentile folks in the U.S., is not reflected or hinted at in Pres. Obama's public health insurance plan, however mischaracterised it is by the foolish while dangerous White Right.
We can safely assume this: amping up various genocides against African American people, Latin@s, U.S. Jews, Arab Americans, and Asian Americans is not on his "to do" list either under or beyond his plan for health insurance reform. We can, if we care to examine our past, note that white men inside the borders of the U.S. and beyond, have carried out systematic, and sometimes genocidal, assaults against every ethnic group mentioned above.
Three issues need to be separated out here--well, at least three!
One is to highlight the (non-existent) ways Pres. Obama's push for health care and insurance reform echoes the shrieks of Adolph Hitler calling for the extermination of all Jews, and many other groups as well. (Consider that done.)
The second is to identify what's really going on when a policy-blocking campaign kicks into high geer, funded by the White Publicly Heterosexual Male Supremacist Right, trying to link a moderate to liberal President Barack Obama with the fascistically Right-wing Mass Murdering Sociopathic Chancellor Adolph Hitler.
The third matter, and for me the most important one, is the U.S. government's involvement in genocide, here, on stolen "U.S." soil.
Let's remind ourselves of a few things.
In the U.S. and in other white male supremacist countries, oppressed people, without systemic power, without the means to commit genocide, are often targeted and systematically called "Nazis" by those who are structurally (at least) positioned to commit genocide. Whites and men, in particular, are structurally positioned to commit genocide and gynocide, and have an unrelentingly determined history of doing so. This is to say, white men have organised, led, and committed genocide and gynocide in these United States, while no other raced or gendered political group has.
We can note that with perverse regularity various white men historically and currently call radical feminists "feminazis". Lesbian and gay people, and our seemingly unified agenda--according to the All-Too-Often Closeted White Male Right, have been blamed for bringing down the pillars and foundation of U.S. civilisation, causing an end to "America" as we know it. (That "America" as we know it needs to br brought down is obviously a point they don't accept.) And people of color, from American Indians to African Americans to Asians and Arabs (and Muslims) across the globe, have been and often continue to be indentified by white people as "the" perpetrators of race-extermination. When they speak of this what they mean is that those groups oppressed by white men globally are the most dangerous people on Earth, the most genocidal, and that they seek the eradication of various groups of white people, if not all of us. This is but one portion of the post where the reading audience is invited to yell out loud: "What's wrong with this picture?"
We can also note that while a white man in Colorado, that state's governor, Bill Ritter, speaks out on "Genocide Awareness Day" he does so by focusing primarily about the problems in Darfur; he somehow neglects to mention his and all white USers own unabating complicity in the genocide against American Indians.
If a white USer, especially one with political clout, such as it is, decides to announce the formation of a new holiday, Genocide Awareness Day, and he neglects to mention he is part of an all-too-proud pseudo-ethnic political group (whites) who practice genocide through various actions and inactions, daily, we have to ask (get ready to yell again): What's wrong with this picture?
As for the other matters in need of interrogation identified earlier in this post, please click on the following two links for more on the Obama-Hitler comparison and what is so fucked up about it.
http://hanlonsrazor.wordpress.com/2008/02/14/obamas-like-hitler-what/
and also that Counterpunch.org page here, for Tim Wise's cool piece of sanity called Sick Heil!
END OF POST.
Thanks for this refreshing bit of healthy attitude and ranting.
ReplyDeleteI just wondered whether CRAP might stand for Corporate Racist AUTHORITARIAN Patriarchy.
in solidarity
Hi paul,
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your response. There were many choices in my mind for what the "A" in CRAP could stand for. Authoritarian is a damn good choice.
I landed on "Atrocious" because I kept returning to the fact that too many people don't realise that for corporate capitalism, racism/white supremacy, and patriarchy/male supremacy/misogyny to exist, atrocities necessarily must be committed both interpersonally and institutionally.
I also wanted to underscore--in four little if capitalised letters--if possible, that rape and the many other atrocities (including forced sterilisation) against women as a group are just that: atrocities. Those I know among "the Left", tend to think the gross exploitation and violation of women-as-women is somehow not as important an agenda item for focused political resistance and confrontation (of other men) as those atrocities which necessarily and directly impact men.
Perhaps there should be an asterisk after the A, and then a list of all the suitable A words that could fit: authoritarian, atrocious, abysmal, appalling, anti-humanitarian, etc.
Again, thanks for your comment.