On what planet would the democratically elected president not be allowed to speak to school children out of fear that he would fill their minds and empty their hearts with poisonous propaganda? Why is Obama being called a fascist and compared to Mao and Stalin every single day? I have no clue, but I do believe it has to do with intellectual laziness and barbarism combined with a thin-skinned tendency to snivel on demand. As Martin Amis states, “Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of our culture.”
President Obama’s speech was aimed at revitalizing the perspectives of students who are starting a new school year. His intention was to give them a lightning flash of inspiration and encouragement while using his own humble background as an illustration of how success can come with hard work. He spoke about dreaming big and making a difference. He stated, “That's why today, I'm calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education - and to do everything you can to meet them. Your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention in class, or spending time each day reading a book. Maybe you'll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community.” With these words, he’s not exactly pushing the kids to read Das Kapital. There certainly was not any policy being sold to children during the speech.
Yet, mind-bogglingly, American parents and educators had trepidation about his bravado. They thought the president should not have an opportunity to speak to students during the school day, claiming it was a waste of precious time and could confuse them. The president, a former law professor and consistent advocate of education, merely wanted to connect directly with the future leaders of America and provide them with a positive message to start the year. Yet some schools did not allow the video to be shown while some parents kept their children home from school on that day. Almost unsurprisingly, the Arlington Independent School District, which did not allow Obama’s speech to be shown, is planning on bussing students off campus in a week to hear a speech on education made by former President George W. Bush (a man who was universally considered to be fascistic during several years of his presidency). Parents and the school district have no problem with that kind of “indoctrination.” It didn’t seem to be a problem for parents and schools when his father, George H.W. Bush, gave a speech to the nation’s students in October 1991. Democrats criticized the production for costing too much (over $20,000), but did not call Bush a socialist, fascist, or any other pejorative label. Why wasn’t George Bush Senior given the R Rating? Did he deserve one?
George Herbert Walker Bush engaged in the Gulf War during his presidency. In doing so, he did not even consider diplomatic settlements that were available to him. Instead, he summarily discarded them and orchestrated the press to not report on them. The only exception of the non-coverage was Knut Royce in the Long Island Newsday of January 3, 1991 reporting on an offer that was “immediately dismissed.” It is possible he knew something that we didn’t. After entering the war, Bush stated during a speech that Saddam Hussein “subjected the people of Kuwait to unspeakable atrocities, and among those maimed and murdered, innocent children.” So, in order to fight this monster and the terror he was inflicting on innocent people, Bush criminally ran the war and ended the lives of thousands of innocent civilians himself. International laws of war were outright broken by Bush’s tactics of attacking Iraqi infrastructure. If a country attacked New York City, but focused their attacks on the sewage and electrical systems of the city, that attack would amount to biological warfare which constitutes a war crime. According to the United Nations and other scholarship, half of all sewage treatment plants were made inoperable, and another fourth were flooding sewage into the Tigris, Euphrates, and other waterways. A growing number of Iraqi men, women and children were showing signs of severe protein deficiency that is usually only a symptom of famine. The “semi-starvation diet,” as the UN called it, caused infant mortality to double. That was how Bush swiftly got that incomplete victory. No parents or school districts called him a fascist or a modern day Stalin. No one minded him speaking to America’s children.
In recent weeks, a major moment of pulse was the Scottish release of the terrorist Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, who killed 270 people on Flight 103 in 1988. This has been a source of loathing and regret by Americans who feel he should have died in prison instead of being given a compassionate release. A similar incident happened in 1976 when the terrorist Orlando Bosch bombed a Cuban civilian airliner and killed 73 people. The Justice Department called him “a terrorist, unfettered by laws or human decency, threatening and inflicting violence without regard to the identity of his victims." The then US Attorney General said “The United States cannot tolerate the inherent inhumanity of terrorism as a way of settling disputes. Appeasement of those who would use force will only breed more terrorists. We must look on terrorism as a universal evil, even if it is directed toward those with whom we have no political sympathy." I think most would agree. He was reportedly pardoned by President Bush with all charges dropped. According to reports, Jeb Bush, governor of Florida, was pushed to have his father absolve him of charges. No one called Bush a friend and sympathizer of terrorists. No one insulated their children from this type of message.
Bush, while running for Congressman in 1964, campaigned against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Twenty-four years later, he utilized a racial story of the black murderer Willie Horton as a major focus of his television campaign ads. No schools or parents called him a bigot or a racist crack pot when he wanted to speak to students about the importance of education.
There are many other major blemishes on the elder Bush’s record. From the invasion of Panama to capture Noriega who was on the CIA payroll during most of his atrocities to the Iran Contra Scandal involvement, he has a grim record that never seemed to be palpable during the run up to his school speech. Yet, without fail, Obama is being blanketed with vitriol from citizens, schools and commentators. The fact that he has been called a fascist by men like Rush Limbaugh is morally corrupt to exceptional levels. The fact that citizens are shouting “no more czars” and calling Obama a modern-day Mao and Stalin is intellectually nauseating. If these people understood what fascism was they would immediately apologize to the president and their children.
In the 1950s, Mao Zedong mobilized millions of Chinese peasants to join his revolution. He gave the Chinese people what he called the Iron Rice Bowl, which was the promise of financial security in return for submission. He controlled everything from the books they read to the people they married to the number of children they had. He organized the Great Leap Forward that grouped the country’s labor pool of peasants into manufacturing and agricultural communes where impossible quotas were forced upon the workers. When manufacturing and agriculture did not yield the desired results, the half billion workers were forced to work longer and harder with barely any food to survive. An estimated 30-40 million peasants were killed from starvation and disease through this utopian idea. This was not even a reflection of socialism. This is not Obama.
To call Obama a modern-day Stalin is a transgression that is incalculably vulgar. Americans and pundits are more insulting than they could possibly intend to be when they conjure up this kind of reflection. Stalin murdered more of his own countrymen than were killed in all of Russia’s wars combined. Over 40 million Russian citizens were killed by this butcher, and this is not as casualties of outside aggression or war of any kind. This was a result of Stalin’s policy which eviscerated what would be one-eighth of America’s population. In 1928 he ripped peasants from their small farms and assigned them to huge soviet mechanized farms in order to move the country into a rapid moment of industrial growth (The Five Year Plan). All the peasants and rich citizens (Kulaks) had to turn over their grain to the state. When some Kulaks refused, he deported them to hard labor gulag camps and then liquidated them one by one. By forcing citizens to give up their grain, Stalin engineered the greatest man made famine in history. The Terror, as it was called, had started.
Stalin wanted total control and he would have it. He would execute anyone and everyone that he thought might not be 100 percent loyal or who would stop clapping first during his introductions (a bell to stop clapping had to be installed because the applause would sometimes go on for an exhaustive fifteen minutes out of fear). He developed the NKVD secret police to be his heavy hand. If Stalin thought you were suspicious or a potential problem, he had his police kill you, then your family, your neighbors, and your neighbor’s family. He killed the chiefs of his secret police periodically just to purge the position so that no one felt too empowered.
Stalin created a Cult of Personality which literally controlled people’s expressions, what they read and who they were. In school, children were taught what they can and cannot say and that Stalin was supreme. Stalin pushed people to become informants so that anyone thinking independent thoughts could be liquefied. During a short span, two million people were randomly shipped to Gulags to work hard labor. The reason? The Soviet Union lacked capital for industrialization in its infrastructure projects. Stalin trumped up imprisonment charges in order to get free labor, which then led to the gross revenue from labor camps to rise up to a level second only to the defense industry complex. This hard labor eventually produced what he called The People’s Paradise. According to a declassified order from 1937, one million socially dangerous children were imprisoned and raised in orphanages. Yet, because of Stalin’s monopoly on public speech that didn’t allow independent thoughts to enter or exit a citizen’s mind, people still considered Stalin to be a hero.
Stalin initiated The Great Purge in 1937 that effectively killed of thousands of people in politics in order to secure his power. He would torture false confessions out of people and then handwrite what he wanted in the written confessions. This was for people he specifically wanted liquidated during The Great Purge. He would also send orders from Moscow to towns where, for example, he would state that 7,000 people had to be charged with treason and, of that group, 3,000 would have to be executed. No names or charges were given. Just numbers. The wives of condemned traitors were then forced to be confined to camps for 5-8 years. What is even more shockingly insane is that some towns would write back that they have achieved success, fulfilled their quota, and would like to request an increase in their quota in order to additionally satisfy the great leader. This is the degradation and amputation of humanity that is caused by an iron fisted jackal who uses endless and boundless terror against his people. The bodies that fill the ground tell a narrative about fascism. This is not Obama.
Obama is not a socialist or fascist. He wanted to talk to America’s children because he knows they are the pulse of tomorrow. Bush knew that, and no one said a word about fascism when he went on screen. Obama wants to provide universal health care because the United States and South Africa are the only two developed countries on the planet that don’t have it. Bill and Hillary Clinton knew that, yet no one uttered a word about their isms when the pushed with unbound vigor for universal health care in 1993. Obama cares about national well being not because he’s a socialist or a fascist but because he’s an American, and because he’s a humanist.
Yet he’s not given the benefit of the doubt. Many like Maureen Dowd have bought into the perimeter of this debate the idea that racism, and not potential socialism/fascism, is causing this rage and fright of Obama. There may be a germ of truth in that, although I’d rather not battle flame with flame. The simple explanation is that Americans are uninformed and extremely susceptible to suggestion. Most people do not even know what socialism is but they’ve been taught through a monotony of rhetoric it’s a bad word. As Noam Chomsky has said, the term socialism “has been so evacuated of content over the last century that it’s hard even to use.“ If you’re interested, Albert Einstein, a strong and passionate proponent of socialism, sums it up in his own terms here. Please do, because to remain actively uninformed is to become an individual terrorist of blind anger, and as Orwell put it, one then allows those in possession of the facts to control “not only the future but the past.“
American citizens and critics have been wholly unreasonable in their diatribes against Obama, and as Goya stated, “the sleep of reason brings forth monsters.“ The monster brought forth is a poltergeist of fascism on the part of the American people. We are building walls around our children so that their president’s educational message to them cannot be absorbed. We are indoctrinating them with a subliminal hatred when ours is born from nothing but fear and our own repression. We are harvesting a Cult of Personality similar to that of Stalin, and we can guess what road this path leads to. Let’s become aware for ourselves and our children. Let’s unfold and not crumple their opportunities for knowledge and choice. Let’s not sell them into a slavery of ignorance and blind hatred. If we do so, we become what we most fear.
