In
the week Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, he
ordered bombing attacks on Yemen, killing a reported 63 people, 28 of
them children. When Obama recently announced he supported same-sex
marriage, American planes had not long blown 14 Afghan civilians to
bits. In both cases, the mass murder was barely news. What mattered were
the cynical vacuities of a political celebrity, the product of a
zeitgeist driven by the forces of consumerism and the media with the aim
of diverting the struggle for social and economic justice.
The
award of the Nobel Prize to the first black president because he
“offered hope” was both absurd and an authentic expression of the
lifestyle liberalism that controls much of political debate in the west.
Same-sex marriage is one such distraction. No “issue” diverts attention
as successfully as this: not the free vote in Parliament on lowering
the age of gay consent promoted by the noted libertarian and war
criminal Tony Blair: not the cracks in “glass ceilings” that contribute
nothing to women’s liberation and merely amplify the demands of
bourgeois privilege.
Legal
obstacles should not prevent people marrying each other, regardless of
gender. But this is a civil and private matter; bourgeois acceptability
is not yet a human right. The rights historically associated with
marriage are those of property: capitalism itself. Elevating the “right”
of marriage above the right to life and real justice is as profane as
seeking allies among those who deny life and justice to so many, from
Afghanistan to Palestine.
On
9 May, hours before his Damascene declaration on same-sex marriage,
Obama sent out messages to campaign donors making his new position
clear. He asked for money. In response, according to the Washington Post,
his campaign received a “massive surge of contributions”. The following
evening, with the news now dominated by his “conversion”, he attended a
fundraising party at the Los Angeles home of the actor George Clooney.
“Hollywood,” reported the Associated Press, “is home to some of the most
high-profile backers of gay marriage, and the 150 donors who are paying
$40,000 to attend Clooney’s dinner will no doubt feel invigorated by
Obama’s watershed announcement the day before.” The Clooney party is
expected to raise a record $15 million for Obama’s re-election and will
be followed by “yet another fundraiser in New York sponsored by gay and
Latino Obama supporters”.
The
width of a cigarette paper separates the Democratic and Republican
parties on economic and foreign policies. Both represent the super rich
and the impoverishment of a nation from which trillions of tax dollars
have been transferred to a permanent war industry and banks that are
little more than criminal enterprises. Obama is as reactionary and
violent as George W. Bush, and in some ways he is worse. His personal
speciality is the use of Hellfire missile-armed drones against
defenceless people. Under cover of a partial withdrawal of troops from
Afghanistan, he has sent US special forces to 120 countries where death
squads are trained. He has revived the old cold war on two fronts:
against China in Asia and with a “shield” of missiles aimed at Russia.
The first black president has presided over the incarceration and
surveillance of greater numbers of black people than were enslaved in
1850. He has prosecuted more whistleblowers – truth-tellers – than any
of his predecessors. His vice-president, Joe Biden, a zealous warmonger,
has called WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange a “hi-tech terrorist”. Biden
has also converted to the cause of gay marriage.
One
of America’s true heroes is the gay soldier Bradley Manning, the
whistleblower alleged to have provided WikiLeaks with the epic evidence
of American carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was the Obama
administration that smeared his homosexuality as weird, and it was Obama
himself who declared a man convicted of no crime to be guilty.
Who
among the fawners and luvvies at Clooney’s Hollywood moneyfest shouted,
“Remember Bradley Manning”? To my knowledge, no prominent spokesperson
for gay rights has spoken against Obama’s and Biden’s hypocrisy in
claiming to support same-sex marriage while terrorising a gay man whose
courage should be an inspiration to all, regardless of sexual
preference.
Obama’s
historic achievement as president of the United States has been to
silence the anti-war and social justice movement associated with the
Democratic Party. Such deference to an extremism disguised by and
embodied in a clever, amoral operator, betrays the rich tradition of
popular protest in the US. Perhaps the Occupy movement is said to be in
this tradition; perhaps not.
The
truth is that what matters to those who aspire to control our lives is
not skin pigment or gender, or whether or not we are gay, but the class
we serve. The goals are to ensure that we look inward on ourselves, not
outward to others and never comprehend the sheer scale of undemocratic
power, and to that we collaborate in isolating those who resist. This
attrition of criminalising, brutalising and banning protest can too
easily turn western democracies into states of fear.
On
12 May, in Sydney, Australia, home of the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, a
protest parade in support of gay marriage filled the city centre. The
police looked on benignly. It was a showcase of liberalism. Three days
later, there was to be a march to commemorate the Nakba
(“The Catastrophe’), the day of mourning when Israel expelled
Palestinians from their land. A police ban had to be overturned by the
Supreme Court.
