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In the week Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, he ordered bombing attacks on Yemen, killing a reported 63 people, 28 of them children. When Obama recently announced he supported same-sex marriage, American planes had not long blown 14 Afghan civilians to bits. In both cases, the mass murder was barely news. What mattered were the cynical vacuities of a political celebrity, the product of a zeitgeist driven by the forces of consumerism and the media with the aim of diverting the struggle for social and economic justice.
The award of the Nobel Prize to the
first black president because he "offered hope" was both absurd and an
authentic expression of the lifestyle liberalism that controls much of
political debate in the west. Same-sex marriage is one such distraction.
No "issue" diverts attention as successfully as this: not the
free vote in Parliament on lowering the age of gay consent promoted by the
noted libertarian and war criminal Tony Blair: not the cracks in "glass
ceilings" that contribute nothing to women's liberation and merely amplify
the demands of bourgeois privilege.
Legal obstacles should not prevent
people marrying each other, regardless of gender. But this is a civil and
private matter; bourgeois acceptability is not yet a human right. The rights
historically associated with marriage are those of property: capitalism itself.
Elevating the "right" of marriage above the right to life and
real justice is as profane as seeking allies among those who deny life and
justice to so many, from Afghanistan to Palestine.
On 9 May, hours before his Damascene
declaration on same-sex marriage, Obama sent out messages to campaign donors
making his new position clear. He asked for money. In response, according to
the Washington Post, his campaign received a "massive surge of
contributions". The following evening, with the news now dominated by his
"conversion", he attended a fundraising party at the Los Angeles home
of the actor George Clooney. "Hollywood," reported the Associated
Press, "is home to some of the most high-profile backers of gay marriage,
and the 150 donors who are paying $40,000 to attend Clooney's dinner will no
doubt feel invigorated by Obama's watershed announcement the day before."
The Clooney party is expected to raise a record $15 million for Obama's
re-election and will be followed by "yet another fundraiser in New York
sponsored by gay and Latino Obama supporters".
The width of a cigarette paper
separates the Democratic and Republican parties on economic and foreign
policies. Both represent the super rich and the impoverishment of a nation from
which trillions of tax dollars have been transferred to a permanent war
industry and banks that are little more than criminal enterprises. Obama is as
reactionary and violent as George W. Bush, and in some ways he is worse. His
personal speciality is the use of Hellfire missile-armed drones against
defenceless people. Under cover of a partial withdrawal of troops from
Afghanistan, he has sent US special forces to 120 countries where death squads
are trained. He has revived the old cold war on two fronts: against China in
Asia and with a "shield" of missiles aimed at Russia. The first black
president has presided over the incarceration and surveillance of greater
numbers of black people than were enslaved in 1850. He has prosecuted
more whistleblowers - truth-tellers - than any of his predecessors. His
vice-president, Joe Biden, a zealous warmonger, has called WikiLeaks editor
Julian Assange a "hi-tech terrorist". Biden has also converted
to the cause of gay marriage.
One of America's true heroes is the
gay soldier Bradley Manning, the whistleblower alleged to have provided
WikiLeaks with the epic evidence of American carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It was the Obama administration that smeared his homosexuality as weird, and it
was Obama himself who declared a man convicted of no crime to be guilty.
Who among the fawners and luvvies at
Clooney's Hollywood moneyfest shouted, "Remember Bradley Manning"? To
my knowledge, no prominent spokesperson for gay rights has spoken against
Obama's and Biden's hypocrisy in claiming to support same-sex marriage while
terrorising a gay man whose courage should be an inspiration to all, regardless
of sexual preference.
Obama's historic achievement as
president of the United States has been to silence the anti-war and social
justice movement associated with the Democratic Party. Such deference to
an extremism disguised by and embodied in a clever, amoral operator, betrays
the rich tradition of popular protest in the US. Perhaps the Occupy movement is
said to be in this tradition; perhaps not.
The truth is that what matters to
those who aspire to control our lives is not skin pigment or gender, or whether
or not we are gay, but the class we serve. The goals are to ensure that we look
inward on ourselves, not outward to others and never comprehend the sheer scale
of undemocratic power, and to that we collaborate in isolating those who
resist. This attrition of criminalising, brutalising and banning protest can
too easily turn western democracies into states of fear.
On 12 May, in Sydney, Australia,
home of the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, a protest parade in support of gay
marriage filled the city centre. The police looked on benignly. It was a
showcase of liberalism. Three days later, there was to be a march to
commemorate the Nakba ("The Catastrophe'), the day of mourning when
Israel expelled Palestinians from their land. A police ban had to be
overturned by the Supreme Court.
That is why the people of Greece
ought to be our inspiration. By their own painful experience they know their freedom
can only be regained by standing up to the German Central Bank, the
International Monetary Fund and their own quislings in Athens. People across
Latin America have achieved this: the indignados of Bolivia who saw off
the water privateers and the Argentinians who told the IMF what to do with
their debt. The courage of disobedience was their weapon. Remember Bradley
Manning.
16
May 2012
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