The Most Blistering Destruction of Obama’s Imperial Legacy

January 18, 2017

Isaac Davis, Staff Writer
Waking Times

Some are saying we now live in the post-fact era, where truth is subjective and facts mean nothing unless they can be used to support one’s subjective views. Perhaps nowhere is this more clear than in the sycophantic treatment of President Barak Obama’s legacy by journalists and committed liberals who absolutely refuse to heed the truth of what the Obama years have meant to the American people and to the world at large.

The pen is mightier than the sword. So true, but if those armed with pens and pulpits are nothing more than fawning backslappers for their chosen team, concerned only with appeasing members of their echo-chambers, then what do we have left to protect us from the sword?

Journalism and the destructive legacy of the Obama administration are the subjects of a recent Counter Punch article by renowned anti-war journalist John Pilger. Entitled, The Issue is Not Trump, It is Us, is worth a read for anyone hoping to see the rebirth of courage-based journalism as the world slips further into decay and turmoil.

Most notably, however, Pilger lays out the troubling geo-political history of the last eight years of American imperialism. All of the information is factual, it is truth. This cannot be denied, for the record is the record. Furthermore, all of it is of such gravity that it needs to be repeated and shared, for behind the so-called grace and poise of a man who earned the Nobel Peace Prize, there is a dark, yet obvious truth which so many seem willing to ignore.

READ: A Real Journalist Warns us WWIII with Russia, China is Already Underway

Read the entire article for yourself, here. What follows below is a lengthy excerpt, including only the portion which runs down the history of Obama’s most destructive deeds while President of the United States.

“According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 alone Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people on earth, in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.
Every Tuesday — reported the New York Times — he personally selected those who would be murdered by mostly hellfire missiles fired from drones. Weddings, funerals, shepherds were attacked, along with those attempting to collect the body parts festooning the “terrorist target”. A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that Obama’s drones killed 4,700 people. “Sometimes you hit innocent people and I hate that,” he said, but we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al Qaeda.”
Like the fascism of the 1930s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent media whose description now fits that of the Nuremberg prosecutor: “Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically … In the propaganda system … it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.
Take the catastrophe in Libya. In 2011, Obama said Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi was planning “genocide” against his own people. “We knew… that if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”
This was the known lie of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. It became the media story; and Nato – led by Obama and Hillary Clinton – launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that “most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten”.
Under Obama, the US has extended secret “special forces” operations to 138 countries, or 70 per cent of the world’s population. The first African-American president launched what amounted to a full-scale invasion of Africa. Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the late 19th century, the US African Command (Africom) has built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Africom’s “soldier to soldier” doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.
It is as if Africa’s proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, is consigned to oblivion by a new master’s black colonial elite whose “historic mission”, warned Frantz Fanon half a century ago, is the promotion of “a capitalism rampant though camouflaged”.
It was Obama who, in 2011, announced what became known as the “pivot to Asia”, in which almost two-thirds of US naval forces would be transferred to the Asia-Pacific to “confront China”, in the words of his Defence Secretary. There was no threat from China; the entire enterprise was unnecessary. It was an extreme provocation to keep the Pentagon and its demented brass happy.
In 2014, the Obama’s administration oversaw and paid for a fascist-led coup in Ukraine against the democratically-elected government, threatening Russia in the western borderland through Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, with a loss of 27 million lives. It was Obama who placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia, and it was the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who increased spending on nuclear warheads to a level higher than that of any administration since the cold war — having promised, in an emotional speech in Prague, to “help rid the world of nuclear weapons”.
Obama, the constitutional lawyer, prosecuted more whistleblowers than any other president in history, even though the US constitution protects them. He declared Chelsea Manning guilty before the end of a trial that was a travesty. He has refused to pardon Manning who has suffered years of inhumane treatment which the UN says amounts to torture. He has pursued an entirely bogus case against Julian Assange. He promised to close the Guantanamo concentration camp and didn’t.
Following the public relations disaster of George W. Bush, Obama, the smooth operator from Chicago via Harvard, was enlisted to restore what he calls “leadership” throughout the world. The Nobel Prize committee’s decision was part of this: the kind of cloying reverse racism that beatified the man for no reason other than he was attractive to liberal sensibilities and, of course, American power, if not to the children he kills in impoverished, mostly Muslim countries.” ~John Pilger

In a time of such overwhelming hypocrisy, willful ignorance and petty drama over national politics, few are able to rise above the partisan noise and divisive rancor to acknowledge the truth about U.S. military imperialism.

And as the clock winds down on the Obama administration while the world braces itself for a Trump presidency, agitators and persistent ‘see-no-evil’ bootlickers would do a tremendous service to truth by acknowledging the very real fact that Obama’s legacy is anything but graceful or peaceful, for it is, in fact, quite gruesome and troubling.

Read John Pilger’s full article, The Issue is Not Trump, It is Us, at Counter Punch.

The Most Blistering Destruction of Obama’s Imperial Legacy

READ: A Real Journalist Warns us WWIII with Russia, China is Already Underway

Read more articles by Isaac Davis.

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