Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire

Obama’s War Against Civilization
Glen Ford, BAR executive editor
27 Feb 2014
🖨️ Print Article

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

The U.S. is in a frenzy of regime-changing aggression, aimed at destabilizing or destroying sovereign states. Obama’s signature is written in blood around the world, as he pursues “full spectrum, no-holds-barred, war-without-boundaries against all potential resistance to U.S. imperial rule, anywhere on the planet.”

 

Obama’s War Against Civilization

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“National sovereignty has been replaced, in the Age of Obama, by an arbitrary “humanitarian” interventionist imperative that can only be exercised by the most powerful.”

The world is learning what U.S. senatorial candidate Barack Obama meant on October 2, 2002, when he told a Chicago crowd that he did not oppose all wars. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.” We now know that President Obama is committed to full spectrum, no-holds-barred, war-without-boundaries against all potential resistance to U.S. imperial rule, anywhere on the planet – a project he considers neither rash nor dumb. At stake is survival – not of the people and government of the United States, which face no existential threat from any quarter, but of an empire whose self-defined strategic interests encompass the entire globe. There is a terrifying logic to Washington’s frenzy: when the systemic structure is collapsing, it must be propped up everywhere.

President Obama’s contribution to the disintegration of the global order is awesome; he is a great innovator. Whereas other U.S. leaders were content to simply violate international law with regularity, Obama has rewritten the statutes. The very concept of national sovereignty has been discarded in favor of a kind of universal parole status overseen by a pyramidal “international community” with the United States at the top. National self-determination, the bedrock of international law – is now treated as a franchise, to be issued or withdrawn at the whim of any coalition the U.S. is able to assemble. For Haiti, a simple troika of the U.S., Canada and France constituted a quorum empowered to erase 200 years of independence. For Libya, the recognized government’s capital crime was its threat to quell a jihadist revolt in one of its cities. The Syrian state has been condemned for resisting tens of thousands of foreign-financed killers who recognize no earthly law whatsoever. The U.S. backs a coup against the lawfully elected government of Ukraine by the direct descendants of Nazis. Simultaneously, Obama threatens the democratically elected government of Venezuela with dire consequences if it harms a hair on the head of rioters bankrolled and directed by Washington.

“This is not law, but its opposite.”

It is almost moot to accuse the Obama administration of interfering with the internal affairs of other nations, since this president does not recognize the elementary rights of nation states. National sovereignty has been replaced, in the Age of Obama, by an arbitrary “humanitarian” interventionist imperative that can only be exercised by the most powerful. This is not law, but its opposite: “anti-law,” promulgated by a decaying, outlaw empire.

If nations have no sovereign rights, then their inhabitants have no right to self-determination – which is the point of Obama’s imperial project. Washington’s bid to render all the world’s peoples subject to its “humanitarian” veto of their self-determinationist rights represents a devolution of civilization.

In liquidating the fundamental tenets of international law, Obama normalizes the most diabolical crimes: crimes against peace. He has redefined war, for U.S. purposes, as limited to conflicts in which Americans are killed in action. Thus, he told Congress in 2011, the massive bombing of Libya did not constitute a war, or even “hostilities,” since no Americans were killed.

No rules of sovereignty, no rules of war, no individual or national rights that a superpower is bound to respect. The United States, under Obama’s leadership, is building an infrastructure for fascism on a planetary scale.

Now you know why the U.S. is spying on all the peoples of the Earth: it’s trying to put our species on lockdown. That’s Obama’s mode of war.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

Do you need and appreciate Black Agenda Report articles? Please click on the DONATE icon, and help us out, if you can.


More Stories


  • The Trump Administration’s Parting Outrage Against Cuba
    Medea Benjamin and Leonardo Flores
    The Trump Administration’s Parting Outrage Against Cuba
    13 Jan 2021
    Cuba’s placement on the state sponsors of terror list is meant to be a thorn in any plan by the Biden administration for rapprochement.
  • On the Anniversary of His Death, Theodore W. Allen’s Analysis Still Resonates
    Jeffrey B. Perry
    On the Anniversary of His Death, Theodore W. Allen’s Analysis Still Resonates
    13 Jan 2021
    “White supremacy” wrote Allen, is “both the keystone and the Achilles heel of U.S. bourgeois democracy.”
  •  Black Agenda Radio for Week of January 11, 2021
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    Black Agenda Radio for Week of January 11, 2021
    11 Jan 2021
    Cops Colluded  with Trump Mob at Capitol
  •  Black Feminism Informed by “Sensuous Knowledge”
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    Black Feminism Informed by “Sensuous Knowledge”
    11 Jan 2021
    Because of historical exclusion, “Black women’s social and political desires have always had to be shaped outside of the dogmatic and the normative – inside of the liminal, the fugitive and the ima
  •  Black Anarchists Prefer “Non-Hierarchical” Activism
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    Black Anarchists Prefer “Non-Hierarchical” Activism
    11 Jan 2021
    Ebony “Sima Lee” Outlaw, the activist and Marooncast host based in Baltimore, was inspired by “Black anarchists who very much wanted to end imperialism, but chose to do so through
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us