Obama's first public political speech, at Occidental College on February 18, 1981, was delivered in opposition to apartheid, and in support of the divestment movement. (The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama by David Remnick [pp 109-110].)
"There's a struggle going on!" he said, "A struggle that demands we choose sides. Not between black and white. Not between rich and poor. No--it's a harder choice than that. It's a choice between dignity and servitude. Between fairness and injustice. Between commitment and indifference. A choice between right and wrong."
As the divestment movement grew, Ronald Reagan developed a counter-strategy, known as "constructive engagement", which was overtly supposed to counter apartheid, but was actually intended to counter the divestment movement.
While Obama and Reagan were on opposite sides way back when, things have changed a lot since then. South African apartheid is long gone from the international scene, but something disturbingly similar has emerged in Israel, with illegal Israeli settlements and pass laws turning occupied Palestine into a near-perfect replica of apartheid-era South Africa--hardly a surprising outcome, given that Israel was long South Africa's leading supporter, even helping out with its nuclear program. And Egypt is Israel's prime enabler in the region, supported by $1.3 billion in US military aid, as the historic peace treaty brokered by Jimmy Carter has become a means for creating a condition of unspeakable evil--about which, of course, America says nothing. (Hence, unspeakable.) What's more, as WikiLeaks cables revealed, in UK Guardian coverage last Friday, the US was well aware of routine torture in Egypt ("US reported 'routine' police brutality in Egypt, WikiLeaks cables show"), but wanted to keep on Egypt's good side ("WikiLeaks cables show close US relationship with Egyptian president").
The sharp contrast of endless kind words in public, and stark assessments of brutality in the cables serves to underscore why the Obama Administrations "nuanced" public statements are far more popular with the conservative Versailles punditalkcrazy than they are with the Egyptian people in the street, who find Obama to be unconvincing in his role of would-be champion of democracy and human rights. Indeed, it's only a secret here in heavily-propagandized America that the entire Mideast order is based on coercion--military force, secret police, and intelligence agencies that routinely employ torture. Israel's "democracy" is free to drift farther and farther into delusional rightwing fantasies thanks to our support and the collusion of Arab dictatorships. Nothing there could be remotely similar if it needed democratic foundations and the consent of the governed--all of the governed--to survive.
1. (C) Summary and comment: Police brutality in Egypt against common criminals is routine and pervasive. Contacts describe the police using force to extract confessions from criminals as a daily event, resulting from poor training and understaffing. Brutality against Islamist detainees has reportedly decreased overall, but security forces still resort to torturing Muslim Brotherhood activists who are deemed to pose a political threat. Over the past five years, the government has stopped denying that torture exists, and since late 2007 courts have sentenced approximately 15 police officers to prison terms for torture and killings.
Independent NGOs have criticized GOE-led efforts to provide human rights training for the police as ineffective and lacking political will. The GOE has not yet made a serious effort to transform the police from an instrument of regime power into a public service institution. We want to continue a USG-funded police training program (ref F), and to look for other ways to help the GOE address police brutality.
That last bolded sentence is the very essence of "constructive engagement." As the main text of the cable makes clear, there is no real interest in actual reform, motivated by respect for human rights. Instead, to the extent there is any insterest at all in change, it is an interest in minimizing friction, and targeting torture victims more carefully. Thus, it's only when Muslim Brotherhood members get involved in political matters that they can expect to be tortured. The cable continues:
Torture and police brutality in Egypt are endemic and widespread. The police use brutal methods mostly against common criminals to extract confessions, but also against demonstrators, certain political prisoners and unfortunate bystanders. One human rights lawyer told us there is evidence of torture in Egypt dating back to the times of the Pharaohs. NGO contacts estimate there are literally hundreds of torture incidents every day in Cairo police stations alone.
None of this matters, of course, because of America's special relationship with Egypt, underwiting its "peace treaty" with Israel, and its active and passive support for Israel's Bantustanization of Palestine. Which is not to say that American elites give a rats ass about Arab democracy or human rights anyway. (Not that American democracy means anything, either. See the Senate filibuster as a prime example.*) The stability of "reliable allies" has always counted for much, much more, and in that respect, nothing has changed.
But they have to pretend to care--particularly for one another's sake. It's called "keeping up appearances", and it's the one thing they're very good at. Not really, of course, so far as the rest of the world is concerned. But they devote so much more attention to it than they do to, oh, say, basic fact-checking, that one has to find some way to acknowledge the effort.
And, of course, even though they screw things up in the short run, their ability to define reality by endless repitition in the long run means that Obama really has nothing to worry about, so long as he continues to basically hue to the neo-con "long war" policy line, with a few prettifying gestures here and there along the way, as he has so far chosen to do.
To underscore the long-term powers of official revisionism, consider this: After Reagan's death in 2004, amidst the chorus of hosannas that his cheerleaders orchestrated, Derrick Jackson wrote an oped that's currently Googleable only overseas:
The dark side of Ronald Reagan
June 12, 2004
President Bush proclaimed this week: "Ronald Reagan believed that God takes the side of justice and that America has a special calling to oppose tyranny and defend freedom." In the first three days of news reports on the death of the former US president, not a single major American newspaper, television station, or politician dared to exhume the following counterpoint to the Reagan's legacy: "Immoral, evil, and totally un-Christian."
These were the words of Bishop Desmond Tutu, spoken on Capitol Hill at a US committee hearing in late 1984. It was just after Reagan's easy re-election. Tutu had just been awarded the Nobel peace prize for his non-violent struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Throughout the United States, a rising number of Americans were calling for American companies to stop doing business there.
Reagan ignored them. The president of so-called sunny optimism attempted to blind Americans with his policy of "constructive engagement" with the white minority regime in Pretoria. All constructive engagement did was give the white minority more time to mow down the black majority in the streets and keep dreamers of democracy, such as Nelson Mandela, behind bars.
In the weeks leading up to his appearance on Capitol Hill, Tutu said in speeches that it seemed that the Reagan White House saw "blacks as expendable" in South Africa. The white government forced black people from prized lands and into horrid townships. Migratory labour laws split families for 11 months at a time. Education was gutted for black children. There was virtually no due process for black defendants. Tutu said it was "reminiscent of Hitler's Aryan madness". Tutu declared that "constructive engagement is an abomination, an unmitigated disaster".
On Capitol Hill, Tutu became a public relations disaster for Reagan. Tutu started off the hearing by saying apartheid itself "is evil, is immoral, is un-Christian . . ." I was there, and all breathing stopped.
Tutu continued: "In my view, the Reagan administration's support and collaboration with it is equally immoral, evil, and totally un-Christian . . . You are either for or against apartheid and not by rhetoric. You are either in favour of evil or you are in favour of good. You are either on the side of the oppressed or on the side of the oppressor. You can't be neutral."
Tutu received an unprecedented standing ovation by the committee. Even Reagan's Republican allies told the South African embassy they would reluctantly support sanctions if Pretoria did not move to end apartheid.
With no Tutu-like figure anywhere on the scene, what are the odds, 20 years from now, that even such a faint trace of objection will survive?
Human rights? Democracy? They are the last things that actually matter in Versailles.
* Here in America, our government is legislatively controlled by a Senate minority that can represent as few as 31,435,000 people (2009 figures, US Statistical Abstract, xls file), which is more than 5 1/2 million people less than California's population of 36,962,000. What kind of democracy is that?
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