XI: Obama as Social Fascist 407Today’s Obama campaign may be considered as a vaguely left of center force to shore up US
imperialism and restore the lost prestige and power of the United States in the world. Obama, it
must be repeated, has successfully imposed the current US government policy of indiscriminate
bombing and killing of Pakistanis in the North West areas of that country. Obama’s demand for a
unilateral bombing of Pakistan makes him unquestionably the most aggressive warmonger in the
2007-2008 Democratic field, and also makes him a more extreme warmonger than Bush. Many
Obama supporters seem happy with imperialist efforts intervene in the internal affairs of Pakistan
for the purpose of overthrowing the Musharraf regime. Many Obama supporters are urgently
calling for the bombing Sudan for reasons connected with the situation in Darfur. Many of them
also support the Brzezinski plan of kicking the Chinese out of Africa. The rationale for this among
Obama’s supporters is their idea that the Chinese are carrying ethnocide or cultural genocide by
building the railroad and road infrastructure which Africa has always lacked. Needless to say, there
are also large numbers of Obama supporters who are demanding a US confrontation with the
People’s Republic of China in support of the demands of the Dalai Lama, a feudal monster and a
spokesman for one of the most hideously parasitical landlord classes to be found anywhere in the
world today. The Obama lemmings do not like the war in Iraq, but on Pakistan, Darfur, and Tibet
many Obama supporters are much more aggressive than Bush-Cheney. Once we recognize that the
Obama movement is in fact a vaguely left of center mobilization in support of a new set of
aggressive imperialist adventures, its similarity to the early phases of Mussolini’s fascism becomes
more evident.
FALLOWS: OBAMA IS LIKE MARSHAL PÉTAIN AND JIMMY CARTER
James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly, a Carter White House veteran who may have helped with
the malaise speech of July, 1979, and a keeper of the Obama flame, has published a remarkably
frank assessment of the Perfect Master, in which Fallows confesses that he sees Obama as similar in
many ways to Marshal Pétain of France, the leader of Vichy France, the Nazi puppet state in
southern France between 1940 and 1943. Pétain escaped execution as a Nazi collaborator (the Prime
Minister of Vichy, Pierre Laval, was in fact shot for treason) primarily because he was aged and had
been the hero of Verdun in World War I. Pétain was a puppet, a defeatist, and a pessimist, and his
Vichy regime is one of the variants which are generally used to make generalizations about fascism.
This makes it all the more notable that Fallows sees common ground among Pétain, Carter, and
Obama. Fallows writes: ‘I am very sensitive to the perils of this approach because the man I worked
for, Jimmy Carter, was elected in large part as a national savior—a good, religious, “never lie to
you” president to fill the moral void created by Richard Nixon, Watergate, and Vietnam. Charles
Peters, of The Washington Monthly, once compared Carter to the figurehead leader of Vichy France,
Marshal Pétain. Each man, in this view, offered to save the nation through his own personal
qualities. In Carter’s case, those turned out to be no match for the disasters of the late ’70s. For
instance: in the spring of 1980, as Carter ran for reelection, the prime interest rate was 20 percent.
The argument that Obama would be another Pétain-like Carter, offering his noble qualities only to
be overwhelmed by ignoble reality, is the deepest fear about him, or at least the one that most
resonates with me. The greatest hope is that before his brief time in the U.S. Senate, he absorbed
more practical skills and sensibilities than Carter did in Georgia. Michael Janeway, who as dean of
the Medill Journalism School at Northwestern knew the Chicago establishment figures who
nurtured Obama’s rise in the 1990s, speaks of “the Chicago way”—“getting all the parties together
and taking responsibility for finding a solution.” Under the Chicago way, the fact that Obama’s
most important speeches are short on eight-point action plans is a strength rather than a weakness:
it’s a sign that serious business will be done.’^221 Of course, the “Chicago way” in reality is nothing