The Real Obama Scandal Is That He Destroyed Multiple Nations

Caitlin Johnstone
5 min readSep 8, 2023

--

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Holy shit did you guys hear the news about Obama? Turns out this nasty freak destroyed Libya, signed off on the destruction of Yemen, armed terrorists with the goal of destroying Syria, set the stage for the Ukraine war, and jailed more whistleblowers than any other president!

I oppose the death penalty but if the US is going to execute people it needs to execute mass murderers like Bush, Cheney, Obama, Trump, Biden, John Bolton, Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland before it executes any normal member of the public for far lesser criminality.

Obama AND Trump AND Biden played major roles in paving the way to the war in Ukraine. If you have a problem with any of those three names being on this list, it’s because you’re a mindless partisan NPC who lets party politics do your thinking for you.

I don’t hate Americans. Hell I married one; everything you read here is co-authored by an American. What I hate is a murderous globe-spanning empire which feeds on a continuous river of human blood and is increasingly tempting nuclear armageddon with its quest for planetary rule.

There is no Ordinary People Lobby. There are no heavily funded think tanks placing arguments for normal human interests at key points of influence in Washington. The scales are forcefully tilted against what normal members of the public want and need, because what the rich and powerful want and need differs so sharply from the interests of the public. Society is a mess because we have systems in place which allow a small number of people to dictate government policy and decision making against the interests of everyone else.

A big part of the problem is the fact that our rulers are always thinking in terms of mass-scale psychological manipulation and normal people almost never are. There’s all this work and research pointed at how to manipulate human minds at mass scale, and nothing comparable exists that’s pointed at countering that influence. There is no anti-Bernays. This is an entirely one-sided fight that most people don’t even know they’re on the receiving end of.

It’s not divisive to say the left must oppose racial injustice as well as economic injustice, it’s divisive to say the left must ignore racial injustice and focus solely on economic injustice. You can’t just tell marginalized groups to suck it up and put the injustices they face on the back burner because some white leftists experience cognitive dissonance when you talk about institutional racism or whatever; that’s just saying the working class must remain divided along racial lines in addition to all the other ways it’s already divided against itself. You don’t get class solidarity by telling racial minorities and other disempowered groups that their unique problems aren’t important, you get it by coming together and supporting each other.

Those who say you need to ignore race and focus solely on class are just the flip side of those who say you need to ignore class and focus solely on race. They’re both power-serving attitudes in different ways — the former because it divides the working class against itself, and the latter because it corrals the left into innocuous political pursuits which don’t threaten the powerful. The problem was never talking about race and social justice issues, it was talking about race and social justice issues to the exclusion of class issues.

There will never be a meaningful working class movement against the ruling class which doesn’t include black and brown and LGBTQ people, and no meaningful working class movement which includes those marginalized groups can ever exist without class solidarity taking the form of resolving to fix the injustices they face. Standing together means lifting up the most disempowered among us, not pushing them down to stand on their backs and demanding they act like that’s fine.

Divisiveness doesn’t look like marginalized groups demanding their struggles be honored and supported, it looks like people outside those groups demanding those groups sit down and shut up about their struggles. If there are white people who want to hold onto their racist views or who experience cognitive dissonance when hearing about racial injustice, then that is the divisiveness which needs to be addressed, because that’s the only direction that has any wiggle room on this path toward justice for everyone.

You’re going to have a lot more luck teaching the white working class that racial injustice hurts their own interests in the long run and that talking about it doesn’t mean white workers aren’t struggling too than you’ll have trying to tell non-white people to just ignore racial injustice. It’s not just the morally correct thing to do, it’s also the only viable path toward success. Racism has always served the powerful by keeping workers divided against each other, and we’ll never be able to fight the powerful until we fix it. We just won’t.

___________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Rawpixel (CC0 1.0)

--

--

Responses (6)