"Obama is still running
against George W. Bush,
as we knew he would. But Obama is also running as
George Bush."
The Two Faces of the Power Party
by Christopher Manion
Gary North’s insightful
piece last week
invites serious reflection. He refers briefly to Barack Obama’s twenty
year discipleship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose theological roots lie
in the shallows of the faux religion called "Liberation
Theology." That term signifies the variant of Marxism that presents
Jesus not as Savior, but as a materialist warlord and political
liberator. In other words, Liberation Theology hides Marx’s impersonal
and inexorable process of the Class Struggle behind a Christian, human
face to make it more palatable to the masses and more intimidating to its
clueless opponents – all without changing its methods or its
goals.
This is what ideology is all about – the deceptive assertion of falsehood
as the ground of truth and reality. It represents a perversion of
metaphysics and philosophical anthropology – that is, it denies what’s
true about reality and about us. But
the Devil knows Latin, as the saying goes, and the ideologues feel
free to pick and choose from among treasured, traditional language and
symbols that once meant something real, but have long been emptied of
their content and stuffed with tyrannical hemlock. Thus
"patriotism" now means love of government. "Freedom"
means bombing ornery foreigners into submission. And the "Two-Party
System" means the one-power charade.
And "Change" means the same old same-old.
Consider the neocons. We’ve long known that they are the proud
intellectual disciples of Trotsky. Well, they dread
pitchforks as
well as
pickaxes. They rise and fall on the dialectic -- they never
"lie," you see it’s just that the "correlation of
forces" keeps on shifting. For a neocon, there’s nothing that’s true
for long except the timeless fact that they’re always superior (after
all, Marx called the party "The Vanguard of the Proletariat"),
that they are always right (especially when they’re wrong), and that we
must all love Big Brother.
But here is the theoretical breakthrough: as Dr. North suggests, a glance
at Obama’s own campaign reveals that he too is relying on the dialectic,
and in a most original and innovative way:
Obama is still running against George W. Bush,
as we knew he would. But Obama is also running as
George Bush.
"The Obama Administration is the operational successor of the
Bush Administration. In Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Guantanamo, [and] on
Wall Street," North writes. All this, and so much more. But should
we be surprised? Consider: long ago the neocon altar boy at the pagan
power-shrine welcomed Obama into the ranks of the
Inner Party
as a "born-again neocon."
We might not ever find Obama’s birth certificate, but here’s Bill Kristol
issuing his
baptismal certificate.
"But Obama is such a liar," we are plaintively told. True
enough. Now, please examine George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign promises. Were
any of them true? Smaller government? A humble foreign policy? Less
federal spending? Blah Blah blah? Which is to say: Of course Obama lies.
Was Bush any different?
The elephant in the room has morphed into a donkey. No one will
acknowledge it, although everybody sees it. That, too, is a required
ingredient of the dialectic.
Admittedly, the GOP has an internal dialectic of its own. It claims it
wants to win, yet it has repeatedly acted as though it is possessed by a
death wish. Just last week several of my neighbors here in the Shenandoah
Valley
witnessed firsthand the slow-motion suicide of the GOP when they were
held in involuntary servitude in Tampa. Victims of an endearing prank
engineered by the party Hot-Tubbers, they were trapped for hours aboard a
"lost" bus supposedly sent to bring them to the convention
hall. This cute little ploy occasioned their convenient absence from the
convention floor, allowing the party elites to vote holy war on the grass
roots, whom they nonetheless expect to vote for them by the millions in
November because of course everybody knows that "Obama must be
defeated." occasioned
In ancient Rome, near today’s Forum of Nerva, there stood the Temple of
Janus, the two-faced god of beginnings, of war and peace, and (perhaps a
stretch) of outright duplicity. Our own imperial age should trot out this
good fellow, who symbolizes so much of the spirit of our own time. The
two parties are actually two faces of one power-cult. Our politicians are
not actually lying, they are only ignoring Confucius ("restore the
proper meaning of words"), preferring instead the scornful reprise
of Humpty Dumpty: "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it
to mean - neither more nor less."
We live in an age of
DoubleThink
– where "minds [are] trained to hold contradictory positions
simultaneously and unquestioningly." On examination, the campaign
promises of both parties thrill to the dialectic: Freedom is Slavery. War
Is Peace. And, especially in even-numbered years, Ignorance is Strength.
We’ve heard before of politicians who say that "I was for it before
I was against it." Now Obama has magically raised the dialectic to a
new high (Hegel called it die Aufhebung): he is governing
as George Bush while he is running against George Bush. It is indeed a
stunning specter to behold.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/manion/manion102.html
--
Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups.
For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum
* Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/
* It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls.
* Read the latest breaking news, and more.
