Who Taught You To Hate Yourself?

Obama will soon be disciplined…

My father used to quote: “politics is the art of solving problems”. I don’t know who said that first but it’s anyway true. The dilemma is that the problems politicians nowadays create are far more than those they solve.
Paraphrasing Malcolm X, we can today say in most places around the world: we are living in a society that is by and large controlled by people who believe in segregation and racism.
Barack Obama can certainly speak loudly and magnificently about racism but he is not the guy with the guts needed to solve that problem.
I believe in human kind. Yes, we can! I say too because I believe changes still are possible. But I doubt Barack Obama’s values and visions will remain unassailable under the pressure of Corporate America and of all the hegemonic interest groups and networks controlling the economy and the nation’s foreign policy.
He will be disciplined. Barack Obama will be trained to understand how power is constructed and how it works in the global order to serve not the oppressed masses but the oppressors in command.
And he will reinforce that power because his nature is more that of a street-smart survivor participating in the TV-show Robinson, than that of a straight revolutionary leader ready to struggle on the world stage.

Pro-Israeli spin doctors kill too…

Dilsa Demirbag Sten, the dark-haired assimilation advocate and newspaper columnist favoured by the liberal power elites in Sweden, has once again used her intellectual capability and twisted logic to deliver an attack on several Swedes who recently dared to denounce the brutal killing of civilians in Gaza.

She tries to emerge like delivering an objective analysis by saying, without delay, that one can both criticise Israel and Hamas. But after reading her column in today’s issue of the daily Göteborgs Posten, it is clear her main purpose is to endorse Israel’s arbitrary war on a 1.5 million defenceless refugees.

Using well articulated oratory she tries to shift the Swedish public attention away from the violations of international law inherent in the Gaza assault: collective punishment, disproportionate military force and attacks on civilian targets, including homes, mosques, universities and schools - all of them well documented, as told by Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, the president of the UN General Assembly, during an emergency session in New York on Thursday.

Dilsa Demirbag Sten wants us to stop thinking about the slaughter in Gaza and to focus instead on the question about how vulnerable the Jew communities around the world are in a time of war like this.

Recently I read the Israeli scientist Haim Harari’s book “A view from the eye of the storm”. Just like him and many other pro-Israeli opinion makers around the world, Dilsa Demirbag Sten worries about the nasty attacks coming from the European Left and from Muslim high-profile individuals who try to delegitimize the state of Israel and dehumanize the Jews.

I agree it is right to worry when you have to deal with people who are both fools, naïve and anti-Semitic; people who “need their steady diet of hatred to survive”. Like Harari and Demirbag Sten, I do also worry about the vast industry of lies which feeds the industry of hatred. But contrary to them, I can worry as much when pro-Israeli opinion makers deliberately spread dangerous, vicious lies – because those are lies which also kill.

Dilsa Demirbag Sten ends the column stating that the ”people of Gaza need leaders who want peace, not to wipe out their neighbours”. I think the people of Israel need just the same and, of course, I believe they also would be better helped without the work of disingenuous, power-avid spin doctors. And I hope, one day she too will understand that.

 

 

Chameleon fight at the Swedish parlament

Luciano Astudillo, the Social Democratic Party’s Member of Parliament in Sweden and Member of the Committee on the Labour Market, got the Minister for Employment Mr. Sven Otto Littorin to lose his temper and run out during a parliamentary debate about what needs to be done in order to secure that Swedes temporarily working in Danmark do not miss their right to unemployment benefit fund.

Minister Sven Otto Littorin is a conservative man of intellectual pedigree and with a distilled smile, a calculating politician who always seems to be in control at any situation. His outburst today can therefore easily be read as an unwritten but clear sign of the Government’s desperation about the worsening state of affairs in Sweden.

Luciano Astudillo, born in 1972 and raised in a home of Chilean immigrants, can still do even better. I met him first in the late 1990s when he lived in Malmoe and enthusiastically fought against racism and really wanted all citizens to have equal access to, as well as sharing, the gifts of Sweden.

Luciano Astudillo can still inspire a generation of young immigrants that will follow in his footsteps. But he needs to stop playing the actual deceptive role that, even if it guarantees him a triumphant chameleon-like career within the Social Democratic Party, it will drain him of political vitality.

Astudillo’s discourse needs to go back to its roots and bring racism back to the forefront of the Swedish national consciousness. Otherwise the legatee of Victor Jara will begin to sound like Rage Against the Machine, it means with a political stance that best can be described as “righteous indignation with minimal introspection”.