January 17, 2017
On the day President Trump is inaugurated, thousands
of writers in the United States will express their indignation. “In order
for us to heal and move forward …,” say Writers Resist, “we wish to bypass
direct political discourse, in favour of an inspired focus on the future, and
how we, as writers, can be a unifying force for the protection of democracy.”
And: “We urge local organizers and speakers to
avoid using the names of politicians or adopting ‘anti’ language as the focus
for their Writers Resist event. It’s important to ensure that nonprofit
organizations, which are prohibited from political campaigning, will feel
confident participating in and sponsoring these events.”
Thus, real protest is to be avoided, for it is not
tax exempt.
Compare such drivel with the declarations of the
Congress of American Writers, held at Carnegie Hall, New York, in 1935, and
again two years later. They were electric events, with writers discussing how
they could confront ominous events in Abyssinia, China and Spain. Telegrams
from Thomas Mann, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Albert Einstein were read
out, reflecting the fear that great power was now rampant and that it had
become impossible to discuss art and literature without politics or, indeed,
direct political action.
“A writer,” the journalist Martha Gellhorn told the
second congress, “must be a man of action now . . . A man who has given a year
of his life to steel strikes, or to the unemployed, or to the problems of
racial prejudice, has not lost or wasted time. He is a man who has known where
he belonged. If you should survive such action, what you have to say about it
afterwards is the truth, is necessary and real, and it will last.”
Her words echo across the unction and violence of the
Obama era and the silence of those who colluded with his deceptions.
That the menace of rapacious power — rampant long
before the rise of Trump — has been accepted by writers, many of them
privileged and celebrated, and by those who guard the gates of literary
criticism, and culture, including popular culture, is uncontroversial. Not for
them the impossibility of writing and promoting literature bereft of politics.
Not for them the responsibility to speak out, regardless of who occupies the
White House.
Today, false symbolism is all. “Identity” is all. In
2016, Hillary Clinton stigmatised millions of voters as “a basket of
deplorables, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name
it”. Her abuse was handed out at an LGBT rally as part of her cynical campaign
to win over minorities by abusing a white mostly working-class majority. Divide
and rule, this is called; or identity politics in which race and gender conceal
class, and allow the waging of class war. Trump understood this.
“When the truth is replaced by silence,” said the
Soviet dissident poet Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”
This is not an American phenomenon. A few years ago,
Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University,
reckoned that “for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British
poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the
western way of life”.
No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake for utopian
dreams, no Byron damns the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle
and John Ruskin reveal the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar
Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw have no equivalents today. Harold Pinter
was the last to raise his voice. Among today’s insistent voices of
consumer-feminism, none echoes Virginia Woolf, who described “the arts of
dominating other people… of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital”.
There is something both venal and profoundly stupid
about famous writers as they venture outside their cosseted world and embrace
an “issue”. Across the Review section of the Guardian on 10 December was a
dreamy picture of Barack Obama looking up to the heavens and the words,
“Amazing Grace” and “Farewell the Chief”.
The sycophancy ran like a polluted babbling brook
through page after page. “He was a vulnerable figure in many ways …. But the
grace. The all-encompassing grace: in manner and form, in argument and
intellect, with humour and cool ….[He] is a blazing tribute to what has been,
and what can be again … He seems ready to keep fighting, and remains a
formidable champion to have on our side … … The grace … the almost surreal
levels of grace …”
I have conflated these quotes. There are others even
more hagiographic and bereft of mitigation. The Guardian’s chief
apologist for Obama, Gary Younge, has always been careful to mitigate, to say
that his hero “could have done more”: oh, but there were the “calm, measured
and consensual solutions …”
None of them, however, could surpass the American
writer, Ta-Nehisi Coates, the recipient of a “genius” grant worth $625,000 from
a liberal foundation. In an interminable essay for The Atlantic
entitled, “My President Was Black”, Coates brought new meaning to prostration.
The final “chapter”, entitled “When You Left, You Took All of Me With You”, a
line from a Marvin Gaye song, describes seeing the Obamas “rising out of the
limo, rising up from fear, smiling, waving, defying despair, defying history,
defying gravity”. The Ascension, no less.
One of the persistent strands in American political
life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. This was given expression
and reinforced during the two terms of Barack Obama. “I believe in
American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,” said Obama, who expanded
America’s favourite military pastime, bombing, and death squads (“special
operations”) as no other president has done since the Cold War.
According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey,
in 2016 alone Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He
bombed the poorest people on earth, in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia,
Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.
Every Tuesday — reported the New York Times —
he personally selected those who would be murdered by mostly hellfire missiles
fired from drones. Weddings, funerals, shepherds were attacked, along with
those attempting to collect the body parts festooning the “terrorist target”. A
leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that
Obama’s drones killed 4,700 people. “Sometimes you hit innocent people and I
hate that,” he said, but we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al Qaeda.”
Like the fascism of the 1930s, big lies are delivered
with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent media whose
description now fits that of the Nuremberg prosecutor: “Before each major
aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a
press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German
people psychologically … In the propaganda system … it was the daily press and
the radio that were the most important weapons.
Take the catastrophe in Libya. In 2011, Obama said
Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi was planning “genocide” against his own
people. “We knew… that if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city the size of
Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the
region and stained the conscience of the world.”
This was the known lie of Islamist militias facing
defeat by Libyan government forces. It became the media story; and Nato – led
by Obama and Hillary Clinton – launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya,
of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads
were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross
identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that “most [of the children killed]
were under the age of ten”.
Under Obama, the US has extended secret “special
forces” operations to 138 countries, or 70 per cent of the world’s population.
The first African-American president launched what amounted to a full-scale
invasion of Africa. Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the late 19th
century, the US African Command (Africom) has built a network of supplicants
among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and
armaments. Africom’s “soldier to soldier” doctrine embeds US officers at
every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are
missing.
It is as if Africa’s proud history of liberation,
from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, is consigned to oblivion by a new
master’s black colonial elite whose “historic mission”, warned Frantz Fanon
half a century ago, is the promotion of “a capitalism rampant though
camouflaged”.
It was Obama who, in 2011, announced what became
known as the “pivot to Asia”, in which almost two-thirds of US naval forces
would be transferred to the Asia-Pacific to “confront China”, in the words of
his Defence Secretary. There was no threat from China; the entire enterprise
was unnecessary. It was an extreme provocation to keep the Pentagon and its
demented brass happy.
In 2014, the Obama’s administration oversaw and paid
for a fascist-led coup in Ukraine against the democratically-elected
government, threatening Russia in the western borderland through Hitler invaded
the Soviet Union, with a loss of 27 million lives. It was Obama who placed
missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia, and it was the winner of the Nobel
Peace Prize who increased spending on nuclear warheads to a level higher than
that of any administration since the cold war — having promised, in an
emotional speech in Prague, to “help rid the world of nuclear weapons”.
Obama, the constitutional lawyer, prosecuted more
whistleblowers than any other president in history, even though the US
constitution protects them. He declared Chelsea Manning guilty before the end
of a trial that was a travesty. He has refused to pardon Manning who has
suffered years of inhumane treatment which the UN says amounts to torture. He
has pursued an entirely bogus case against Julian Assange. He promised to close
the Guantanamo concentration camp and didn’t.
Following the public relations disaster of George W.
Bush, Obama, the smooth operator from Chicago via Harvard, was enlisted to
restore what he calls “leadership” throughout the world. The Nobel Prize
committee’s decision was part of this: the kind of cloying reverse racism that
beatified the man for no reason other than he was attractive to liberal
sensibilities and, of course, American power, if not to the children he kills
in impoverished, mostly Muslim countries.
This is the Call of Obama. It is not unlike a dog
whistle: inaudible to most, irresistible to the besotted and boneheaded,
especially “liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics,”
as Luciana Bohne put it. “When Obama walks into a room,” gushed George Clooney,
“you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere.”
William I. Robinson, professor at the University of
California, and one of an uncontaminated group of American strategic thinkers
who have retained their independence during the years of intellectual
dog-whistling since 9/11, wrote this last week:
“President Barack Obama … may have done more than
anyone to assure [Donald] Trump’s victory. While Trump’s election has triggered
a rapid expansion of fascist currents in US civil society, a fascist outcome
for the political system is far from inevitable …. But that fight back requires
clarity as to how we got to such a dangerous precipice. The seeds of 21st
century fascism were planted, fertilized and watered by the Obama
administration and the politically bankrupt liberal elite.”
Robinson points out that “whether in its 20th or its
emerging 21st century variants, fascism is, above all, a response to deep
structural crises of capitalism, such as that of the 1930s and the one that
began with the financial meltdown in 2008 …. There is a near-straight line here
from Obama to Trump … The liberal elite’s refusal to challenge the
rapaciousness of transnational capital and its brand of identity politics
served to eclipse the language of the working and popular classes … pushing
white workers into an ‘identity’ of white nationalism and helping the neo-fascists
to organise them”..
The seedbed is Obama’s Weimar Republic, a landscape
of endemic poverty, militarised police and barbaric prisons: the consequence of
a “market” extremism which, under his presidency, prompted the transfer of $14
trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street.
Perhaps his greatest “legacy” is the co-option and
disorientation of any real opposition. Bernie Sanders’ specious “revolution”
does not apply. Propaganda is his triumph.
The lies about Russia — in whose elections the US has
openly intervened — have made the world’s most self-important journalists
laughing stocks. In the country with constitutionally the freest press in the
world, free journalism now exists only in its honourable exceptions.
The obsession with Trump is a cover for many of those
calling themselves “left/liberal”, as if to claim political decency. They are
not “left”, neither are they especially “liberal”. Much of America’s
aggression towards the rest of humanity has come from so-called liberal Democratic
administrations — such as Obama’s. America’s political spectrum extends from
the mythical centre to the lunar right. The “left” are homeless renegades
Martha Gellhorn described as “a rare and wholly admirable fraternity”. She
excluded those who confuse politics with a fixation on their navels.
While they “heal” and “move forward”, will the
Writers Resist campaigners and other anti-Trumpists reflect upon this? More to
the point: when will a genuine movement of opposition arise? Angry, eloquent,
all-for-one-and-one-for all. Until real politics return to people’s lives, the
enemy is not Trump, it is ourselves.
