XI: Obama as Social Fascist 409National Socialism. People are responsible for their own actions, and not for the actions of others.
The theory of German collective guilt is a deliberate mystification, first of all because it places
helpless little people on the same level of responsibility with powerful individuals who could have
and should have influenced the course of events in another way. German collective guilt also masks
the responsibility of important foreigners. Americans like Prescott Bush and John Foster Dulles
were important backers of Hitler’s seizure of power in January 1933. The most active support for
Hitler came from Lady Astor, and their Cliveden Set, where we find Lord Brand, Lord Lothian,
Lord Halifax, and Sir Neville Chamberlain. Another key British backer of Hitler was Lord Montagu
Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England, who made possible the financial stabilization of the
Nazi regime during its first months in power. Henry Deterding, the boss of Royal Dutch Shell, was
another prominent backer of National Socialism. German collective guilt is therefore a cover story
for the main culprits.
By the same token, we must formally and categorically reject any idea of the collective guilt of
the American people. The crimes of the Bush regime, for example, are the crimes of the Bush
regime. They are the crimes of the individuals who actually carried them out, and not of the
American people as a whole, who actually voted twice to defeat Bush, but were overruled by a very
effective vote fraud machine, with the help of the same controlled corporate media who are
swooning for Barky today. The American people who are alive today are not responsible for
slavery, or other crimes and abuses of the nineteenth century. The slave system was maintained by a
three-cornered cooperation among southern planter oligarchs, New York City bankers and cotton
brokers, and City of London interests. This is who was responsible for slavery, and not some
poverty-stricken southern sharecropper or northern “mudsill,” as they used to be called. Individuals
have free will, and they are responsible for what they do and do not do, but they are not responsible
for the actions of others, and certainly not for actions carried out long before they were born.
Anyone who attempts to impose a theory of collective guilt on the American people is fabricating a
big lie, very likely with the goal of provoking some irrational backlash of ill-considered reaction,
quite possibly in the form of some subsequent phase of fascism. Those who preach collective guilt
are, in short, provocateurs.
A DISTANT MIRROR FOR OBAMA: SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS, ROMAN EMPEROR
A distant mirror for these questions may well be provided by the history of the Roman empire.^222
The reign of the Emperor Commodus (180–192 AD), who was the son of the famous Stoic Marcus
Aurelius and who survived one assassination attempt before succumbing to another, brought the
Antonine dynasty to an end, and marked the transition from a period of stagnation and slow decline
into a time of more acute crisis. The murder of Commodus is associated with the end of the Pax
Romani, or “Roman Peace,” and the onset of the long decline of the Roman Empire. The end of
Commodus began the Year of the Five Emperors in 193, when there were five contenders for title
of Roman Emperor. The five were the City Prefect Pertinax, Didius Julianus, Pescennius Niger in
Syria, Clodius Albinus in Britain, and Septimius Severus in Pannonia.
Septimius Severus was by most accounts a dark-skinned native of Libya in North Africa; some
Afrocentric historians have identified him and celebrated him as the first black emperor of Rome.
But being black or nearly black did not prevent him from representing a catastrophic turning point
in Roman history. Septimius Severus had allied himself with a prominent Syrian family by his
marriage to Julia Domna. In the same way, Obama’s marriage to Michelle allied him with the Daley
machine, her family business. Septimius Severus may not have been the only dark-skinned
contender at this point, as suggested by the name of his rival Pescennius Niger, since “niger” means