Our Obama Problem

A View From Europe

By JEAN BRICMONT
CounterPunch

".....What Obama wants to do is not totally clear, but it is certain that he will not oppose the powers that be (Wall Street, big corporations, the pro-Israel lobby, etc.) that allowed him to win. He has at least demonstrated that much during the campaign.....

In other words, the Obama problem is his extreme popularity in Europe, which is based both on his skin colour and on his “image”. Because people don’t understand how much race relations in the United States have actually changed, they see Obama’s election as a sort of absolute miracle and, since the media present him as a strong alternative to Bush, and hardly report, for example, his plans to send more troops to Afghanistan, they think that he is far more progressive than he actually is.

Of course, given the disastrous state of the Left worldwide, people desperately want to believe in something positive happening somewhere, and that only reinforces the illusions about Obama.....

.....But now, everything changes -- by shifting the attention from social issues to ‘’race’’ , they can turn the tables around and make the United States look like THE progressive country of the West. The very pro-American, “New Left”, French daily Libération has already suggested that the election of Obama is a lesson in democracy for France....

But the deepest problem is that, sixty years after the end of WW2, Europeans still see themselves as somehow dependent on the United States. For their elites, the reasons are clear and understandable, but the rest of us, including a big part of the Left, still put too much of our hopes in expecting the US population to elect a “good prince”, as they have just done with Obama.....

The US population elects its president, not the Master of the Universe. This seems to be understood nowadays in Russia, Asia, Latin America and the Muslim world. Only in Europe do we still need to decolonize our minds."