UW Obama is no US Grant- 'Unconditional Withdrawl Obama' is no 'Unconditional Surrender Grant'

by Yervand Kochar

Every time I catch Obama giving a speech on TV, I wonder why they broadcast it live.
Every speech sounds exactly like the one given a day before. After all, how many different messages of hope and change can you bring from Monday through Thursday?

Obama hammers the abstracts of change and hope so consistently that even he believes that once he becomes the Wizard of the United States of OZ, he will cease being a man from Kansas anymore. His demagogue repetition of the same magic words of hope and change is amplified by the machinery of the media hidden behind the curtain of fascination that hopes so much with Obama that as a result of a prolonged journey into the OZ Hillary got heart, Edwards got courage and Kucinich got brains.
The only problem that Dorothy may not be sent back home to Kansas but may stay around, get on welfare and listen to Deepak Chopra as she tries to empower herself for the rest of her life as a single mom.

What is really troubling about Obama is not the fact that his presidential platform sounds increasingly like a user profile on MySpace but the fact that he is the only black man in the American politics that is not linked to the heritage of the black slavery. This alone is not basis for equating the man with a gramophone, but it is odd for a half white guy to come across as the ultimate reparation for the plight of the descendants of the Western African chattel slaves. After all, slavery was not about just skin color but a repression of a specific group of people who happened to have a different skin color.

But even this is not enough for dismissing Obama as an African-American candidate.
He is more African in heritage than most of the black Americans and this alone gives him basis of identification with the issues of slavery.
I mean, you don’t even have to be black to understand the trauma of slavery and the plight of the civil rights. So the question is, ‘Does he really understand what slavery meant and means to the African-Americans who have a direct generational link to it?’

What makes me doubt this is his indifference to the destiny of another oppressed and formerly enslaved people, the people of Iraq. If the hope and change are the nails on which his candidacy hangs on the shaky wall of the American political interest, the immediate withdrawal of the US forces from Iraq is the frame that embraces the image of his candidacy. Obama’s insistence on withdrawal is based on the fact that Iraqi people have to take responsibility for their own future and stop depending on the US help.

Now, let’s rewind to year 1877 when the Northerners, worn out by the not so distant Civil War and continuous occupation of the South, were calling upon the withdrawal of the Union army from the defeated South.
People got tired of fighting with the former slave owners who just could not accept the fact that their former slaves were put into positions of power. Under the pressure and constant unrest in the South by the Democrats, the Republican political establishment in the North began to give in and got weary of supporting the effort of elevating the former slaves to a position of a normal citizenry. The Democrats in the South threatened the second secession and an electoral deadlock over the presidency of the Republican Rutherford Hayes if Northern Republicans continued the Reconstruction process and the empowerment of the blacks.

A radical wing of the Democratic party formed a terrorist organization known as KKK which was dedicated to undoing the Reconstruction process by brutally and demonstratively murdering blacks and the Republican operatives in the South.

Under the ferocious pressure from the Democratic political establishment in the South and the public opinion in the North, Republicans had to withdraw the armed forces from the South leaving the blacks alone with their former tormentors. This unfinished process resulted in violence, segregation and had disastrous consequences for the post war reconstruction and racial harmony.

Therefore, not only Obama but any Black-American who does not understand how a premature withdrawal of the US forces will affect the people of Iraq has no right to represent the issue of slavery.
Obama simply uses the wound of slavery when he needs to hurt people who feel guilty about it and drops it when the people he needs don’t care about the wound at all.

The tragedy of history may very well be in its ruthless irony; when a race that rose out of the ashes of human slavery and a monumental struggle against it, chooses a leader that may cause a chain of events that will make the slavery happen all over again.

And this, my friends, is no change. This is history repeating itself over and over to people who always hope that they can learn from repetition but always make the same mistakes out of habit.