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 National self-determination, the bedrock of international law – is now treated as a franchise, to be issued or withdrawn at the whim of any coalition the U.S. is able to assemble.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


  • Open Defecation Zones and the Shaming of Africa 3.0
    Zanga Chimombo
    Open Defecation Zones and the Shaming of Africa 3.0
    26 Aug 2020
     “Voluntourists” in Africa are actually jihadists for the West who defecate all over the continent in every way that defecation is possible.
  • Black Agenda Radio for Week of August 24, 2020
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    Black Agenda Radio for Week of August 24, 2020
    25 Aug 2020
    Creating Ownership, Equity and Income for College Athletes
  •  Getting Out the Word: #PrisonsKill
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    Getting Out the Word: #PrisonsKill
    25 Aug 2020
    The Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, IWOC, “is committed to the militant organizing of prisoners that takes its leadership and focus from those on the inside,” said Joergen Ostens
  • To Ignore Political Prisoners is Hypocrisy
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    To Ignore Political Prisoners is Hypocrisy
    25 Aug 2020
    “Any movement that seeks to bring radical changes to society that does not incorporate at the top of the list freedom for our freedom fighter that have gone before, is hypocritical,” said J
  •  Creating Ownership, Equity and Income for College Athletes
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    Creating Ownership, Equity and Income for College Athletes
    25 Aug 2020
    “College sports is a highly exploitive system where predominantly Black players in football and basketball generate all the income, but the only group that isn’t positively impacted is the families
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us