To the editor:
The results of the recent presidential primaries in Indiana and North Carolina revealed not just how badly the recent media storm over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright hurt presidential aspirant Barack Obama, but also why.
Wright, as nearly everyone knows, served as Sen. Obama's minister for 17 years. But the fiery Chicago-based preacher caused such a backlash on the campaign trail that Obama found it necessary to denounce his longtime spiritual mentor, calling his views "abhorrent."
I suppose that's what is called politics. It seems any time a politician trips up — as Hillary Clinton did in supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq — he or she attempts to wiggle out of it by claiming they were either lied to or misinformed.
Obama sat through hundreds of his pastor's sermons. Had he found those teachings "abhorrent," I'm sure he would have quickly relocated to another church elsewhere in town. But that didn't happen, which makes Obama's denunciation of Wright seem disingenuous, if not something of a betrayal.
The junior senator from Illinois had other options. He could have stood up to the news media's demonizing of his former pastor by simply stating the obvious: that even in the most "incendiary" of the minister's many controversial remarks can be found more than a kernel of truth.
Wright's "chickens coming home to roost" comment, for example, echoed that of the late Malcolm X, whose poorly timed but painfully truthful remark came hot on the heels of President John F. Kennedy's approval of a plan that led to the assassination of South Vietnamese head of state Ngo Dinh Diem on Nov. 2, 1963.
The comment also referenced other questionable Washington activities, such as the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, enlistment of the Mafia in a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, and the forced outing of the democratically elected Iranian government of Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953.
All Malcolm X and Jeremiah Wright were saying was what goes around comes around. Twenty days after the murder of Diem, Kennedy, himself, would die at the hands of an assassin or assassins.
Meanwhile, 25 years would pass before the U.S. Embassy in Tehran would be taken over by radical Iranian students for its having served as the nerve center for the American-British backed coup.
But besides representing a clear-cut case of political expediency, Obama's denunciation of his former pastor points to a regrettable manifestation of the least-discussed yet most divisive aspect of the current presidential campaign: race. While Obama is frequently described as either "mixed-race" or "African-American," such labels are never applied to Democratic rival Clinton or Republican challenger John McCain.
How odd that the latter two are never referred to as "European-Americans." Could it be that the practice of affixing "minority" designation to candidates of other-than-European ancestry arises from the need to convey some lingering sense of genetic unworthiness or inferiority to "mixed-race" or "non-Aryan" candidates, such as Obama?
Whatever the case, my regard for the junior senator from Illinois plummeted when he chose to disassociate himself from his former minister. If to defend not only the Rev. Wright, but also the likes of Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass and yes, even Red Cloud and Sitting Bull, is to hurt Obama at the polls, then that is America's great loss and not the young senator's.
Unfortunately, Obama's yielding to the winds of political convenience means that much of what those champions of freedom had to say about the struggle to make the American ideal a reality for all will continue to fall on deaf ears. And that is truly a shame, for we citizens have for too long been victimized by a small but powerful and increasingly corrupt minority that has ruthlessly pursued its own imperialistic agenda at the expense of the long-term interests of the nation as a whole.
It is for this reason that outspoken critics like Wright and Congressman Ron Paul are ridiculed and vociferously attacked, for in proclaiming that the reckless policies Washington has advanced abroad over the years "is now brought back into our own front yards," both men have done the unpardonable.
Little known to the American people, Wright and Paul's real targets are individuals like Leo Strauss, one of the chief architects of the neoconservative Washington collective for which George W. Bush was so carefully recruited and groomed to serve as its door-to-door pitchman.
Regarding religion to be "a fraud," Strauss claims the "wise elite" is the only group fit to govern the country. It is "the right of the superior to rule over the inferior," he states. And as far as we the people are concerned, it is Strauss' contention that the general population be told "what they need to know and nothing else," and that "deception and manipulation" are necessary in politics so that the "vulgar masses" can be done with as the "wise elite" see fit.
No wonder the Bush White House employed lies and deceit to fan the flames of fear and hatred in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Also little known to most Americans, it was a year earlier that Saddam Hussein obtained U.N. permission to sell his nation's oil for Euro dollars instead of U.S. dollars.
The threat was obvious: were other OPEC nations to follow the Iraqi lead, the consequences would be catastrophic to the global ambitions of America's entire military-industrial-banking-petroleum complex.
But to invade Iraq and take out Saddam Hussein, the neocons' No. 1 priority, the "wise elite" would first have to gain the support of the "vulgar masses," which with the aid and assistance of "European-American" senators Clinton and McCain, they were able to do.
All of which brings us to the 2008 presidential campaign, a 21st century contest that may still have everything to do with race.
JIM MUNN
Gloucester
