An Open Letter to Michelle Obama, October 13, 2016

WN: A friend reminded me, in response to that below, that none of us in the first world is untainted vis à vis violence. And with that taintedness is a bending at least towards hypocrisy and Pharisaism – which my friend also reminded me about.

So with that mea culpa, please read on.:

Dear Ms Obama:

Your speech October 13, 2016 in New Hampshire was powerful, direct, succinct, unequivocal–and so much more. Was it also the pot calling the kettle black?

You said:

• The measure of any society is its treatment of women and girls.

• Trump’s behaviour against women is predatory, cruel, frightening, representing terror and violation, violence and disrespect of women.
• You called for a standard of human decency in America that knows the difference between right and wrong.
• You appealed against Trump’s horrific modelling to America’s children.
• You said Trump’s attitude towards/treatment of women is directly opposite to how decent humans behave.
• You urged America’s leaders to lift others up, then unreservedly praised Hillary Clinton.
• You said bigotry and bullying are unacceptable.
• You juxtaposed Trump with America’s moral authority in the world – one you claimed is a beacon of freedom and justice for all.
• You admonished all people of conscience to call down Trump, invoking a kind of President who treats all people with respect.
• You posited the innate dignity and worth of all humans.

• You rejected greed, hatred and fear à la Trump.

There is no question about your passion and truth-telling! Trump by contrast is surely an inveterate liar, a rabid misogynist, and perhaps the most blatant megalomaniac ever to run for the US Presidency.

Can it be agreed though that he came by his abusive demeanour towards women “honestly”? That he exhibits ubiquitous delusional male privilege and bullying deportment since (so goes that narrative) men are central, superior and deserving? That Trump is utterly blind to this, not knowing better, though should?

And you, Ms Obama? Are you his mirror image, having come by honestly your pervasive unknowing blindness too?

• • what “the greatest country on earth” has been/is doing to the rest of the planet, particularly in the Greater Middle East?
  • that US military intervention there instigated to date an estimated death toll of between two and four million persons, and more than 20 million people in 37 “Victim Nations” since World War II, thereby creating conditions for the rise of Al Qaeda and ISIS, etc., and related international refugee crises, etc.?
  • that Hillary Clinton is a consummate war hawk, who has fully supported ongoing American barbarity in the Greater Middle East?
  • that your husband is widely known as “Assassin-in-Chief” in that region due to his use of ubiquitous reach killer drones that rain down terror and death on multiplied numbers of innocents each year, including (though not American) women and children?
  • that your husband is also known as “Deporter-in-Chief” to would-be US immigrants, who will go down in history as the US president under whom the highest number of deportations has occurred — more than under all of the presidents in the century before him, combined?
  • that your husband’s presidency has facilitated more arms sales annually throughout the world than all other countries’ arms sales combined – to make billions for voraciously greedy arms dealers in America?
  • that your husband’s calls for gun control therefore are utterly hypocritical?
  • that America’s foreign policy consistently pursues one overarching goal: keeping America the richest and most powerful nation on earth?
  • the truth in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s repeated assertion that your country is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”?Martin Luther King Jr.

• • on capitalism:

“Turns out I’m really good at killing people,”[Obama] quipped, “Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”—The War on Terror Is Still Alive and Well, by Robert L. Borosage, September 8, 2021 (How does America breed such monstrous leadership? Or is it indeed culturally, ubiquitously, endemic?¹

“There is something wrong with the economic system in this country… Something is wrong with capitalism.”

“The problems we are dealing with are not going to be solved until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power.”

“The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and racism.”

“All I have been doing in trying to correct this system in America has been in vain. The whole [system] will have to be done away with.”

• • On militarism:

“I knew I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.”

“The United States of America is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

“God didn’t call on America to engage in a senseless, unjust war in Vietnam. And we are criminals in that War. We’ve committed more war crimes almost than any other nation in the world, and I’m going to continue to say it. And we won’t stop it because of our pride and arrogance as a nation.”

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

“To pursue endless war is to worship the god of hate and bow before the altar of retaliation.”

“How can they [America’s enemies] trust us when we… charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions.”

“We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy…”

• • On racism:

“[Black Americans] ought to come to Washington, sit down if necessary in the middle of the street and say ‘We are here, we are poor, we don’t have any money. You have made us this way, you keep us down and we’ve come to stay until you do something about it.’”

“Many people would like to have a nation which is a democracy for white Americans but simultaneously a dictatorship over Black Americans.”

“Even though we’ve gained legislative and judicial victories, they did very little to improve the lot of millions of Negroes in the teeming ghettoes of the North. Changes were at best surface change.” (Source)

One Life: Martin Luther King Jr.: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution June 28, 2013 through June 1, 2014 through June 1, 2014

And little Parker we read about in this story could hopefully eventually be far more taken and inspired by these portraits (one of which is featured) — and the man behind them — than the hollow glamour of the wife of a hollow man filled indeed with ruling-class ideas — to the absolute disregard and far worse of the masses worldwide suffering under and immolated on the altar of American Empire hegemony.

For another juxtaposition — between Dr. King and Billy Graham — please see here and here.

A citation from the latter:

As the article highlighted in the earlier post indicates, Graham’s message seemed powerfully at odds with that of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The one enjoyed the favour of Presidents and went peacefully to the grave, the latter was murdered for his message, likely at the hands of the U.S. government.

And now Ms. Obama you are touting a “well-scrubbed” saccharine memoir according to this article. Born with a silver spoon in your mouth? Hitched to an Uncle Tom for sure who as this article shows, is a hollow man with visions of grandeur. Mary’s Song (which seems never to have been Michelle’s Song) each Christmas –ideally always–reminds us:

… he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate… (Luke 1:52)

Do you fail to see:

• that your “greatest nation on earth” is rather the greatest bully nation on earth as in Bully Nation: How the American Establishment Creates a Bullying Society (Charles Derber And Yale Magrass)?
• that there is an American exceptionalism for sure on display to the world: one of spewing out death and destruction against those opposing America’s full spectrum dominance?
• the irony in your Nobel Peace Prize-winning husband’s recent authorization of 1 trillion dollars over 30 years to revamp the US nuclear arsenal?
• that your husband’s administration has perpetuated America’s lead as the most carceral nation on earth, with rampant brutality towards prisoners throughout its federal, state, and private prison systems – including its CIA black sites and Guantanamo – treatment of whom, indicated Dostoyevsky, is also measure of civil society? Your nation in this is a beacon of justice and freedom?
• that America’s twin foundations are genocide as described in two studies entitled American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World(David E. Stannard), and An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (Benjamin Madley); and its original sin of slavery as in The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Edward E. Baptist)?
• that America is the most predatory nation on the planet, on many levels, an empire whose moral compass as with all empires is might is right informed by greed, fear, hatred and the unbridled drive to world domination, with massive worldwide lethal victimization, and facilitation worldwide of Grand Larceny of resources and goods its signature, in the face of all human decency and the innate dignity and worth of all people on the planet, of the Good Creation?

Is it possible, Ms Obama, that American (violent) exceptionalism to the world is Donald Trump (violent) exceptionalism towards women?

Sincerely

Wayne Northey

Please also click on: US Arms Business

1. See the commentary by brilliant cultural critic René Girard, for an answer.[↩]