The Last Empire: What is Left? by John Pilger

Video of the following (5:28 min.) at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C62KAmMzu0E

The Last Empire: What is Left?
War correspondent, journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger

http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?id=20114
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"The real tragedy is that Obama, the brand, appears to have crippled or absorbed much of the anti-war movement, the peace movement. Out of 256 Democrats in Congress, just 30 are willing stand up against Obama's and Nancy Pelosi's war party," adding, "On June 16th, they voted for $106 billion for more war. The 'out-of-Iraq caucus' is out of action."
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"The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
- Milan Kundera.

Legendary Australian-born investigative journalist John Pilger spoke at the 2009 Socialism Conference held at the Women's Building on July 4th. Kind of ironic that the organizers chose to host a left-wing event on the national independence day of the one country in the world most afraid of Socialism.

His subject was "Empire and Obama: Power, Illusion and America's Last Taboo," a wordy title whose length Pilger duly apologized for.

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America is an empire. There we go, I've said it. Shoot me, but it's true. It has followed in the footsteps of ancient European nations proclaiming the right to bring "liberty" to other nations in exchange for their natural resources.

"The difference", says Pilger, "is that America is trained to deny its imperialism."

"Americanism is an ideology that is unique because its main feature is its denial that it is an ideology," he said. "It's both conservative and its liberal, and it's right and it's left - and Barack Obama is its embodiment."

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"Here is the 45th President of United States, having stacked his government with war mongers, corporate fraudsters, and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, promising not only more of the same, but a whole new war in Pakistan," said Pilger, arguing that America's wars have been "justified by the enduring myth of 'exceptional America,' a myth the late Harold Pinter described as 'a brilliant, witty, highly successful, act of hypnosis.'"

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In fact the rise of Obama has coincided with a silencing of the Left. This silence is largely a result of new hope that things will change. The fascinating thing about this new hope that Obama has instilled in us is totally baseless. This supposed swing to the Left, this Socialist revival, is nothing but a smokescreen. Even those who stood to ask questions challenged Pilger's assertion that we should not cling to hope. No, for this is false hope perpetuated by the current regime.

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http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?id=20114

I hope you're right. But I haven't seen much evidence so far.

We sit around hoping that this party or that individual will save our bacon whereas we can only save ourselves. Putting our hope in a system which continually pisses on us, hoping that maybe they'll stop and act right, is self defeating, paralyzing.

Where hope ends action begins.

I might steal that for my new sig, with your kind permission.

Nice truffle, by the way.

...not surprisingly comes from someone I have on ignore. I'm not an organizer nor am I an activist leader. I use the word "hope" merely as a figure of speech. In fact I agree with the position of the o.p. and my observation is that momentum toward significant change from the status quo has been thwarted on most fronts in this country.

I would distinguish between the left and the liberal/progressive sector which for the most part has always supported the status quo with only some quibbles about how the "job gets done."

It will be interesting to see how the country breaks up.

Otherwise I am totally repulsed by what I see. Cars everywhere. Huge military spending. I am repulsed. I've spent nearly two decades moving from property to property in order to try and distance myself from it. All that I discovered was that the consuming masses have consumed all.

So now what? I know the answer. It's the complete opposite of everything Republicans and conservatives (which does include many liberals) propose/stand for.

Less, slower, smaller. That is the answer. It's simple, but it won't happen because of unconsciousness. Well, it will happen, but very slowly, and after grave damage to psyche and planet.

My experience has been a lot like yours. I've been repelled by the kind of tunnel vision the people in this country, as well as the politicians, seem to be hypnotized into. We need Obama or some leader with credibilty to stand up there and give the big picture of what's happening to us as a society. If we keep refusing to take the bigger social-historic view to what's taking place world-wide now - not just here in America - then the results will run their course. It's about our neglect and consumption of the environment; our lost sense of belonging to each other as community and our market-driven indoctrination into self-destructive beliefs and practices. All that enabled by lack of any serious policy to address it.

The result will be some kind of inevitable full-on confrontation with the facts. Our market-driven culture and our conventional wisdom dictate an ethos of relentless agression, aquisition, waste, fraud and abuse. It's been going on now for generations. If and when that tipping point hits (gradually or all at once) - that's the moment the so-called left has to prepare for. Responsible people have to be prepared to seize the moment socially, politically, and culturally - as a twenty-first century movement of some kind.

That's the only way I can think of to turn this around. But politicians (e.g. current leaders) are not likely to take the risks that strategy would call for. It's going to have to come from the ground up - from that mythical "we" people love to invoke.

So far though, the field of method and opinion on the left is just too incohesive and the communication too incoherent to be able to meet that challenge.

We have to start by taking back the corporate manufactured language and vernacular that frames the national debate. We need to control the language. That in itself would be a bloodless coup.

against the wishes, and to the detriment of the majority of Americans. We've kicked the can almost to the end of the road.

I also think that we will become global pariahs after the chaos our failure will cause.

As it stands, our national infrastructure is built around the assumption of oil continuing to be cheap. Those days are long over. Eventually, people will be priced out of cars and sprawling sub-divisions when gas becomes exhorbitant. There will be massive uprooting as a result, and shockwaves will be sent through an ailing American economy.

The US has become a nation of passive consumers instead of active citizens. It has become a nation no longer self-reliant upon its own resources for survival but of the resources of other nations that it takes away for granted. It really is an empire, and empires fall either through being crushed and conquered or through internal rot where the leadership simply turns on the population and sacks the public wealth. The robbery will leave people with an empty shell, while the rich lock themselves away in vast estates guarded by hired guns and security systems.