The Anti-Imperial Absolutism of Che Guevara versus the Shifting Moral Relativism of President Barack Obama

The Anti-Imperial Absolutism of Che Guevara

versus the Shifting Moral Relativism of President Barack Obama

By Anthony J. Hall

Professor of Globalization Studies

University of Lethbridge

an excerpt from the Introduction to Hall’s forthcoming

Earth into Property:

Colonization, Decolonization and Capitalism

(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press)

anticipated date of publication: 1 September, 2010

In the years since my motorcycle safari throughout Central Africa’s
Great Lakes region, I have come to associate the area with two
pivotal figures – each of whom embodies a different relationship to
the ongoing tension between imperial and anti-imperial globalization.
One of these figures is Barack Obama, the current president of the
United States; the other is Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Obama
epitomizes moral relativism and the constantly shifting perspectives
and orientations integral to postmodernism. Che was anchored in a
posture of unflinching moral certainty reflecting an unbending
interpretation of imperial capital as the major source of human
exploitation.

(Central Africa)

As Barack Obama emphasizes in the culminating chapters of his
autobiography, Dreams from My Father, he derives his paternal
line of ancestry from the Luo tribe. The Kenyan-based Luo dominate
the western shores of Lake Victoria. They are close ethnic and
linguistic cousins of the Lango and Acholi peoples of Uganda. Barack
Obama Sr visited his son only once, in 1971, when the boy was ten
years old – the same year I toured Africa’s Great Lakes region on
my motorcycle. He had courted and married Ann Dunham, the future
president’s mother, when they were both students at the University
of Hawaii.

Che’s connection to Central Africa was that of a self-declared
revolutionary freedom fighter who briefly entered the political and
military fractiousness in that troubled corner of the world. When I
crossed the river into eastern Congo, I had no idea that the
iconographic Che Guevara had been in the region only six years
before.

(Fidel Castro and his comrades in the Sierra Maestra, Cuba)

In the mid-1950s, Che and a handful of revolutionaries led by Fidel
Castro had built a base of support among the poor peasantry of the
Cuban countryside and, in 1959, they toppled the Mafia-backed regime
of Fulgencio Batista. Then, after a tour of some of the newly
independent countries in Africa, Che and a small group of Cuban
soldiers tried to extend the spirit of the Cuban revolution to this
strategic zone of Cold War conflict. As Che saw it, “neocolonialism
has bared its claws in the Congo,”ⁱ
to the point where “the Congo problem is a world problem.”ⁱⁱ

For several months Che’s Cuban brigade attempted to train and
inspire an indigenous opposition capable of pushing back the forces
of international capital, as channelled most tellingly into the
military actions of several hundred White mercenary soldiers from
South Africa and Rhodesia. These mercenaries had been hired to root
out the fighting forces of a number of factions, including Che’s
Cubans. All the opponents of the mercenaries and their backers
claimed that their objective was to create military conditions
conducive to bringing about various visions of African socialism.

The success of these well-financed mercenary forces in the air and on
the ground highlighted the corresponding failure of Che and his men
to replicate the success of the Cuban revolution in the biggest
country of equatorial Africa. This outcome helped clear the way for
the installation of the US-backed dictatorship of General Mobutu. Che
had entered the African theatre of conflict at a time when the Congo
was still reeling from the internal turmoil wrought by the
CIA-ordered assassination of Patrice Lumumba – the first elected
leader of the former Belgian Congo. He met his demise in 1960 after
he declared that he intended to extend the self-government of his
people to the nationalization of the country’s great wealth in
natural resources.

Che described his evolution as a soldier of revolutionary change in
his Motorcycle Dairies, a text that inspired my own narrative
of self-discovery in this introduction.ⁱⁱⁱ

Setting out from his Argentine home in 1953 on his 500-cc Norton to

discover the soul of South America, the young medical student
confronted the reality of his own position of privilege as a
middle-class Latino when he travelled among the poor but culturally
vibrant Indian populations of Peru. Throughout the remaining years of
his prematurely terminated life, this archetypal freedom fighter saw
few shades of grey in his stark identification of “Yankee
imperialism” as the epitome of capitalist evil to be defeated. With
the heavy involvement of the CIA, Che was martyred in Bolivia in 1967
during a failed revolutionary campaign similar to the one he had
attempted to lead in the eastern Congo.^iv

Although the Cuban military mission to the eastern Congo ended in
failure, the government of Fidel Castro used this debacle to learn
how to develop more effective and practical policies for constructive
intervention in the turmoil of Africa south of the Saharan Desert.
Cuba’s commitment of doctors, teachers, agricultural experts, and
soldiers to the liberation struggles of Africa’s peoples proved
more successful in Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and the other territories
that had been shaped by the rise and fall of the Portuguese Empire.

This trajectory of involvement reached a climax in 1988–89, when
the Cuban government committed more than 50,000 fully equipped
soldiers to protect its allied government in Angola and to join the
struggle for the political independence of Namibia. The decisive role
of Cuban troops in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale helped turn the
military tide against the White minority regime and its proxy armies
which were armed and financed to serve the US-led side of the Cold
War. The retreat of the forces of White supremacy from the
battlefields of the front-line states led to the release of Nelson
Mandela from prison in 1990 and then to the South African
government’s abandonment of the most savage instruments of racial
apartheid. With the now decriminalized African National Congress
taking the lead, the principles of majority rule were allowed to
prevail.“The Cuban role in Africa is unprecedented,” observed Piero
Gleijeses. “What other Third World country has ever projected its
power beyond its immediate neighborhood?”^v





Acting largely on their own, the Cuban people and their government
proved to be key agents in tipping the scale of power against
apartheid in its most notorious den.^vi

In 1995 Nelson Mandela, the first president of post-apartheid South
Africa and one of his continent’s most revered icons in the
struggle for human liberation, proclaimed, “Cubans came to our
region as doctors, teachers, soldiers, agricultural experts, but
never as colonizers.” And he concluded: “They have shared the
same trenches with us. We are deeply indebted to the Cuban people for
the selfless contribution they made to the anti-colonial and
antiapartheid struggle in our region.”^vii

As I motorcycled through the thick and verdant jungle on the
Congolese side of the Ruwenzori Mountains, Mandela had been
languishing inside South Africa’s jail for seven years. As a leader
of the military wing of the outlawed African National Congress, he
would spend almost two more decades in Robben Island penitentiary
before he was released to lead his country away from the era of White
minority rule. Many of the international forces that combined to keep
him criminalized and behind bars were the same ones that supported
the Congolese government headed by Che’s African nemesis, General
Mobutu.

Che’s foray into the eastern Congo acquired a different hue of
meaning in light of Cuba’s subsequent importance in disarming the
forces of African apartheid. Similarly, Che’s intervention in
Bolivia took on heightened significance after the election in 2005 of
Evo Morales as president of that country. Morales rose to power from
humble origins in the complex of Andean Indian societies whose
marginalized condition helped to radicalize Che during his motorcycle
tour of Latin America. Soon after coming to power, Morales allied his
left-leaning government with that of Cuba. By this time the Cuban
Revolution had long outlived the careers of its former patrons in the
defunct Soviet Union. The resilient determination of the Cuban
Revolution’s most committed cadres helped to inspire a new
generation of socialist idealists and agitators who used the ballot
box to gain a tenuous hold on political power in some South American
countries. The Venezuelan president and firebrand Hugo Chavez became
the leading figure in a more recent surge of anti-imperial activism
that took hold in some of the oldest informal colonies of the
American empire.

(Venezuelan president-elect Hugo Chavez, Ecuadorian president-elect Rafael Correa and Bolivian president-elect Evo Morales)

From 2004 to 2009, negotiations between the Castro brothers and Hugo
Chavez became the seed of a diplomatic process that led the
governments of Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua,
Ecuador, Dominica, Antigua, and Barbuda, as well as Saint Vincent and
the Grenadines, to form the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas
(ALBA). In Spanish, alba means “dawn.” In 2009 the ALBA
allies moved to create a common currency, the sucre. In the
course of these discussions, Honduras’s membership in ALBA became
problematic after Manuel Zelaya’s presidency was targeted in a
US-backed military coup, initiating a constitutional crisis.^viii
In all the ALBA countries, Che has been adopted as a kind of secular
patron saint. For many millions in Latin America and beyond, he
continues to embody the spirit of uncompromising revolt against the
corruption of ill-used power. Like Martin King Jr, Bobby Kennedy, and
John Lennon, Che was murdered when he was still young, handsome, and
extremely menacing to the most entrenched interests of the status
quo.

Even in capitalism’s most robust commercial metropolises, pictures
capturing the earnest defiance of the gregarious Che have been
replicated by the millions on T-shirtsand other bric-à-brac. Che’s stylish, avant-garde appeal continuesto defy the grey stereotypes of stiff conformity and austerity
colouring popular perceptions of Soviet-style communism. Like the
qualities of fixedness epitomized by light’s unchanging speed,
Che’s unbending hostility to the military force backing the
imperial privilege of crony capitalism continues to exercise
considerable allure across generations, ideologies, and cultures.

Those responsible for packaging Barack Obama drew unashamedly from
the pictographic heritage of Che’s legend as they mounted perhaps
the world’s most successful ever advertising campaign. As Naomi
Klein observed, “Obama beat out Nike, Coors, and Zappos to win the
Association of National Advertisers top annual award, Marketer of the
Year.” She goes on to cite Desirée Rogers, the White House’s
social secretary, that “We have the best brand on earth: the Obama
brand.”^ix As Webster Tarpley has written, “Obama has unquestionably been the
beneficiary of the biggest sustained effort of mass media
manipulation since the events of September11, 2001.”^x

The postmodern quality of brand Obama seems to go beyond the realm of
public perception to permeate the man’s inner life as well. The
rapidly shifting vantage points and perspectives available to Obama
is put on display in Dreams of My Father, the text he was
commissioned to write in 1990 shortly after becoming the first
African-American president of The Harvard Law Review. Like The
Biography of Malcolm X, Obama’s autobiography is at its core a
story about an individual’s quest for self-understanding and
purpose. He relates his experiences of growing up in Hawaii,
Indonesia, California, New York, Chicago, and Kenya, even as he muses
at length about the abundant ethnic complexities of his family tree.
He sees his youth and early manhood as a testament to the “fluid
state of identity – the leaps through time, the collisions of
culture – that mark our modern life.”^xi

In Dreams from My Father, Obama often shifts his gaze from
side to side of a lens of distorting stereotypes. He peers outward at
the prejudices of others, then looks inward to observe and analyze
his own foibles, blinkers, predispositions, potentials, and
limitations. Raised by White grandparents from Kansas, a
globetrotting mother with strong professional credentials in
anthropology, a Muslim stepfather in Indonesia, and a mostly absent
Luo father who nevertheless deeply affects his son’s imaginative
life, Obama is constantly marvelling at the dynamic quality of human
attachments to community. Behind his maternal grandmother’s façade
of Whiteness, Obama finds a Cherokee ancestor who comes to hold a
totemic importance in his American heritage. He confronts his own
tendency as a Black man to generalize about the attributes of White
people, even as he wonders what influence his own White ancestry
exerts on the estimations of his Black friends and acquaintances. In
Indonesia he adapts to the Islamic faith of his peers, whereas in
Kenya he must deal with issues of class, clan, and tribe as he
negotiates the complexities of an extended family derived from the
polygamous relationships of his Luo father.

In an era when, as Said has declared, no one is any longer one thing,
Barack Obama epitomizes the capacity of a single individual to
encompass many identities simultaneously. This chameleon quality
makes it possible for observers to see in him whatever they want. The
positive twist on the “humpbacked, ugly,” and even criminal
connotations that, not long ago, attached to the concept of
“miscegenation” has helped to give Obama’s many-faceted
political personae great popular currency.^xii

It has also made it extremely hard to pin Obama down and to hold him
accountable for the contradictions he regularly spins in weaving webs
of high expectations along with illusions, delusions, deniability,
and evasion. Often several different Obamas all seem to be residing
within the corporal being of the same man.

The US president displayed one of his wise and conciliatory
personalities at the Fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and
Tobago in April 2009. There he alluded to the high quality of the
Cuban health-care system and its positive impact throughout Latin
America. He referred to “the thousands of doctors from Cuba that
are dispersed all throughout the region, and upon which many of these
countries are heavily dependent.” He spoke of the overdependence of
his own government on military force and the importance of the Cuban
example in highlighting the need to direct “development aid in more
intelligent ways so that people can see practical, concrete
improvements in their lives.”^xiii

President Obama’s seemingly sensible approach to foreign policy was
again on display in September 2009, when he addressed the General
Assembly of the United Nations. One of the key passages in that
speech could have been drawn from the ideals of the Fourth World and
their expression in some of the principles and policies of the
Non-aligned Movement: “Democracy cannot be imposed on any nation
from the outside,” he said. “Each society must search for its own
path, and no path is perfect. Each country must search for its own
path rooted in the culture of its people and in its own past
traditions.”^xiv

The Obama who spoke of his commitment to reconcile US power with the
sovereign rights of the world’s culturally diverse peoples was,
however, sharply contradicted by the Obama who addressed an audience
at the West Point Military Academy on December 1, 2009. This Obama
revealed himself to be the servant of Wall Street’s dominant
clique, whose corporate extensions in the military-industrial complex
form the great nexus of wealth and global influence in the American
empire of monopoly capitalism.

The continuities linking the military policies of President George W.
Bush to those of Barack Obama demonstrate persuasively the enormous
power base of the axis of influence linking Wall Street, the
Pentagon, and the worldwide networks of crony capitalists whose
concentrated privileges flow from these centres of intertwined
power.^xv Although subject to some internal jockeying among competing factions,
this complex of interconnected insiders maintains sufficient
coherence to control the financial nerve centre of the world’s most
well-equipped and massively mobilized military leviathan. The Obama
administration gave this unaccountable plutocracy of bankers, war
profiteers, and propagandists a green light to continue raiding the
public treasury. He provided cover and support for the continued
expansion of the national security apparatus of the US executive
branch as the core agency in the emerging global police state of
corporatist authoritarianism.

To keep sufficient public acquiescence for continuing this agenda of
elite control, the substance or façade of a credible global enemy is
essential if the ailing superpower is to justify and maintain the
global operations of its permanent war economy. When he dutifully
repeated the mythological mantra essential to the continued backing
by taxpayers of the September 11 wars, President Obama renewed the
psychology of fear that keeps viable and alive the reigning
demonology of the military-industrial complex.

In announcing the addition of tens of thousands of extra US troops
and mercenary forces to be deployed in Afghanistan and Pakistan,
President Obama lent the weight of his electoral mandate to a set of
objectives only slightly revised from those introduced by the Project
for the New American Century.^xvi

In 2000, the think tank and war lobby PNAC proposed a massive
augmentation in US military power. In laying out this program, PNAC’s
leadership recognized that the costly implementation of its
far-reaching proposals to confirm, extend, and consolidate the
coercive machinery of US global dominance would depend on a massive
transformation in public opinion – through something akin to the
surprise attacks on Pearl Harbor in 1941.^xvii

In explaining the background of his government’s decision,
President Obama repeated President George W. Bush’s core
justifications for the Global War on Terror. He said:

“On September 11, 2001, 19 men hijacked four airplanes and used
them to murder nearly 3,000 people. They struck at our military and
economic nerve centers. They took the lives of innocent men, women,
and children without regard to their faith or race or station. Were
it not for the heroic actions of passengers onboard one of those
flights, they could have also struck at one of the great symbols of
our democracy in Washington, and killed many more.

As we know, these men belonged to al Qaeda – a group of extremists
who have distorted and defiled Islam, one of the world’s great
religions, to justify the slaughter of innocents. Al Qaeda’s base
of operations was in Afghanistan, where they were harbored by the
Taliban – a ruthless, repressive and radical movement that seized
control of that country after it was ravaged by years of Soviet
occupation and civil war, and after the attention of America and our
friends had turned elsewhere.

Just days after 9/11, Congress authorized the use of force against al
Qaeda and those who harbored them – an authorization that continues
to this day.”^xviii

(Obama's speech at the West Point Military Academy on December 1, 2009)

One of my tasks in the chapters ahead is to expose the contrived distortions, omissions, and
outright lies in this short but extremely consequential interpretation of
recent history. President Obama’s presentation of this Bushite fable as fact
signalled the emptiness of his promise that a partisan change of executive
power in the United States would lead away from the imperial obsessions of the
Republican Party’s leadership. The speech and the many global responses it
triggered revealed that the axis of influence between Wall Street and the
Pentagon would continue to augment its unaccountable power – but faster, on a
larger scale, and in a more devious and dishonest fashion.

(Obama and Bush - the two leaders of the 9/11 Wars)

What lay behind President Obama’s commitment of increased high-tech killing power
into those Eurasian territories where imperial conflicts between
warring civilizations have been under way for millennia? The decision
was mostly about the geopolitics of oil and gas extraction, pipeline
construction, and the global distribution of commodified energy. It
had much to do with a looming showdown between Euro-America, Russia,
and China for control of huge reserves of the world’s most
strategic resource, one that has fuelled the ongoing Industrial
Revolution ever since the oil magnate John David Rockefeller and the
car maker Henry Ford altered the course of imperial globalization by
creating new prototypes of corporate empire. It also had much to with
the strategy of Anglo-American power brokers seeking to balkanize yet
further the world’s oil-producing and -exporting heartland by
inciting, funding, arming, and exploiting religious and ethnic civil
wars in a part of the world where many of the international borders
are inherited from earlier eras of imperial rule.ⁱ

Alternatively, President Obama’s decision to send 30,000 more fighting forces into the
Af-Pak battle zone had little to do with protection from
international terrorism of those citizens who were obliged to pay for
this military build-up with tax dollars. Indeed, much information is
already in the public domain documenting in detail the role of key
operatives of the national security state in helping to organize,
augment, direct, and exploit the armed militance of hand-picked
Islamic theocrats as proxy forces on the capitalist side of the Cold
War, especially in Afghanistan and in the southern republics of the
former Soviet Union. The overt and covert encouragement of the more
aggressive branches of political Islam continued after the demise of
the Soviet Empire and became a factor in the Balkan wars, the 9/11
attacks, and the 7/7 subway bombings in London in 2005.ⁱⁱ

(Ronald Reagan meeting with the Mujahideen who have been US proxies since the 1980s under various guises)

The transition from the Cold War to the 9/11 Wars has given rise to a reversion to some of
the same rationales that were used to justify the Indian wars – the
wars by which the territorial outlines of the US Homeland were
initially carved out. President Obama’s reference in his West Point
speech to an enemy that acts “without regard to
the faith or race or station” of its victims is similar to the
condemnation in the American Declaration of Independence of the
“merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is an
undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
In 1776, 2001, and again in 2009, whole populations whose indigenous
lands, polities, and persons were about to be hit by intensified
attack were dehumanized and essentially criminalized in order to
misrepresent wars of expansion as self-defence from terrorists.

Where the US cavalry and the vigilantism of settler populations did much of the ethnic
cleansing of Indigenous peoples in the transcontinental expansion of
the United States, in Pakistan much of the murder is being delivered
with the robotic anonymity of unmanned drones. The cold methodology
of this impersonal style of high-tech murder introduced heightened
levels of bureaucratization into the command structure of crimes
against humanity. The deployment of preprogrammed drones to do the
industrial dirty work of ethnic cleansing gave new expression to what
Hannah Arendt once labelled “the banality of evil.”ⁱⁱⁱ

In seeking the power of the presidency, Barack Obama appealed to the hopes of the US
electorate. In his decision to continue the 9/11 Wars as a central
plank of his presidency, the commander-in-chief of the world’s
pre-eminent military-industrial complex fell back on the resort to
fear. Hope and fear are the emotional twins most often stimulated and
drawn on in the effort to manipulate and control masses of people in
the task of governing them. Of the two emotions, hope is by far the
more fragile sentiment. It can easily be trumped and extinguished
when the stronger impetus of fear is invoked to mobilize public
opinion against genuine, imagined, or manufactured enemies.

In Dreams from My Father, Obama refers to his
understanding of the psychology of fear in describing his study of
literature when he was a student at Occidental College in Los
Angeles. He comments at some length on his impressions of Joseph
Conrad’s classic novel Heart of Darkness
– a work of fiction based on a real voyage that brought the author
up the Congo River in the late nineteenth century to witness the
ruthlessness of King Leopold’s reign of terror in his African
proprietorship.^iv
My own reading of Heart of Darkness
so dumbfounded me when I first encountered the book in high school
that the questions it aroused became a significant factor in the
series of decisions that put me in 1971 at the controls of my
motorcycle as I sped through the rain forest on my way to the
Congolese community of Beni.

In his account of his remarks to a college girlfriend, Obama agreed that, “the way Conrad
sees it, Africa’s a cesspool of the world, black folks are savages,
and any contact with them breeds infection.” The future US
president then underlines what he sees as the novel’s real
importance:

… the book teaches me things … about white people, I mean. See the book’s not really
about Africa. Or black people. It’s about the man who wrote it. The
European. The American. A particular way of looking at the world …
So I read the book to help me understand just what it is that makes
white people so afraid. Their demons. The way things get twisted
around. It helps me to understand how people learn to hate.^v

As the new Promoter-In-Chief of the 9/11 Wars, the US president seems to have
drawn on his college studies of the mythological structures
underlying the mass production of fear and hatred. In every era and
every society, the ability of leaders to invoke and direct these most
potent of emotions holds an essential key to political power. Like
most imperial wars, the primary purpose of the augmented invasions in
Eurasia is to seize, hold, and consolidate power through taking
control of territory, resources, and people. The infusion of more US
armed forces into Eurasia is part of the effort to prevent the
emerging imperiums of China, Russia, Europe, and possibly India from
asserting more power in the region. In seeking to avoid public
understanding of his imperial goals, President Obama repeated the
lies of his predecessor with his spurious claims about the capacity
of armed forces in Afghanistan to quash the all-purpose demon of
terrorism through a massive resort to campaigns of high-tech
violence. War is
terror, not its antidote.

From the era of US wars to disarm and eliminate “merciless Indian savages,” to the era of
capitalist wars to contain and then vanquish red communism, to the
current era of global police and military operations mounted in the
name of opposing the largely manufactured demon of al-Qaeda, the
American empire of material aggrandizement has always required an
external enemy to give military support to the expansionary
enterprises of its biggest engines of corporate profit. It has
required pretexts to present wars of aggression as self-defence. No
matter what identifying label is attached to the imperial campaigns
of the twenty-first century, the 9/11 Wars have more to do with
favouring a regime of proprietary privilege for elites than with
protecting civilians from arbitrary acts of violence.

Ernesto “Che” Guevaro was one of those killed because of his genuine attempt to
block the expansionary course of an imperial juggernaut whose most
extended frontiers now reside in the privatized terror economy.
Because of the murder of Che and the maiming of the anti-capitalist
forces he embodied, the operatives of the national security state had
to conspire to help build up and publicize the real or imagined
machinations of Osama bin Laden and his Islamic brotherhood of
imperial theocrats.^vi

Without al-Qaeda, old Cold Warriors such as former vice president Richard Cheney and former
defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld would have faced professional
obsolescence rather than a vast augmentation in the powers of
patronage available to them as strategists, generals, and paymasters
of the Global War on Terror. They took charge of the switchover from
engagement with the communist threat to engagement with the terrorist
threat. Apparently the immense continuities of elite power held in
place through this switchover from one enemy to the next escaped
serious notice, let alone sustained study and debate, in the process
of passing the torch of leadership to President Obama and his
generation.

Endnotes of Che versus Obama