From Hiroshima to Syria, the enemy whose name we dare not speak -- John Pilger

[struggle4progress]

1. What a mish-mash from Pilger. Mr Obama wasn't born until sixteen years

after the atomic bombing of Japan. He was barely nine years old at the time of the 1970 Senate report on Vietnam that Pilger cites. The catastrophic Indonesian occupation of East Timor began when Mr Obama was barely fourteen. Pilger apparently runs out of energy at this point, since he neglects to mention the genocide of the Amerindians, the institution of southern slavery, lynch law and Jim Crow, the Philippine-American war, the Ludlow massacre, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the mining of Nicaragua's harbors, or any number of other horrors for which Mr Obama bears no responsibility whatsoever, but that might have served to further work Mr Pilger into a self-righteous frenzy as he prepares to shriek "Under ..Obama, militarism has risen perhaps as never before"

PIlger, unfortunately, began calling Mr Obama an "Uncle Tom" long before he became President, and his ugly slurs have continued unabated ever since. Among his admirers, this perhaps qualifies as evidence of Pilger's Marxist credentials -- but, if so, that sadly shows just how much of the Marxian tradition has been effectively lost, because Marx himself suggested a method, not for noisy ideological denunciations, but for political-social analysis, based not only on a careful examination of economic conditions and material interests, but on attention to the actual political situation. Rambling over decades of US history, with no attention to details, is the antithesis of any useful analysis