What I Loved about Obama’s Berlin Speech

[Time for change]

I have criticized Barack Obama more than a lot of people. But his July 24th speech in Berlin was one of the best I’ve ever seen. It moved me to tears. In that speech Obama promised a presidency that will make a 180 degree turn from our present imperial course and will transition our nation from one of the world’s greatest pariahs to one that works in concert with the other nations of the world to address our mutual problems.



He did all that and much more without using divisive language such as that which I just used here.


Commitment to rejoin the community of nations

This is an issue that I have long felt is crucial for the survival of our nation and of world civilization. I wrote about this with respect to the Bush administration in a previous post:

No human community, large or small, can function under a law based system when the most powerful members of the community refuse to abide under the rule of law… Thus, the consistent contempt for international law shown by the leaders of the most powerful country in the world puts in serious jeopardy the law based international system built up so carefully during the 20th Century. It tends to create what Philippe Sands calls a “Lawless World”…

As long as the Bush administration or people like them retain power in the United States they will either wreak death and destruction on the rest of the world in their attempt to get what they want, or else the law abiding nations of the world will succeed in restraining them from doing so, probably relegating them to second class power status in the process. The former has been an unmitigated catastrophe…

Obama liberally sprinkled statements throughout his speech that left little doubt as to where he stands on this crucial issue:

Tonight, I speak to you as… a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world… There is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one… No one nation, no matter how large or powerful, can defeat such challenges alone…

While the 20th century taught us that we share a common destiny, the 21st has revealed a world more intertwined than at any time in human history… The burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together. Partnership and cooperation among nations is not a choice; it is the one way, the only way, to protect our common security and advance our common humanity… Now is the time to join together, through constant cooperation, strong institutions, shared sacrifice, and a global commitment to progress, to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

Philippe Sands, in “Lawless World – The Whistle-Blowing Account of How Bush and Blair Are Taking the Law into Their Own Hands”, discusses in great detail how our whole system of international law has been put in great jeopardy in recent years. Among the many international treaties rejected by the Bush administration, perhaps its most destructive rejection is that of the International Criminal Court, which George Bush said would undermine “the independence and flexibility that America needs to defend our national interests around the world”. Sands posed the following pertinent rhetorical question to that excuse:

The flexibility to do what? The flexibility to commit war crimes? The flexibility to provide assistance to others in perpetrating crimes against humanity? The flexibility to turn a blind eye when your allies commit genocide?

When Obama rhetorically asked his audience “Will we reject torture and stand for the rule of law?” he thereby made it quite clear that he has no inclination whatsoever to continue to maintain the “flexibility” to commit war crimes.


Commitment to environmental preservation

Global warming has been said to pose the biggest international challenge of the 21st Century. As Al Gore clearly described in his book and movie, “An Inconvenient Truth”, there is virtually total scientific consensus that the emission of greenhouse gases due to industrial activities causes global warming, that the mean temperature of the Earth has been steadily rising with the advent of the industrial age, and that continuation of this trend is highly likely to result in rising sea levels with catastrophic effects for much of the world’s population.

And drought may very well cause even greater catastrophes than rising sea levels. Brian Fagan addresses this issue in detail in his new book, “The Great Warming – Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilization”:

When one realizes that droughts in the sparsely inhabited Saharan Sahel claimed over 600,000 lives in the droughts of 1972-75 and again in 1984-85, one can only imagine what the magnitudes of these disasters would have been had farming populations been at today’s levels… Today, the number of people in the world who are highly vulnerable to drought is enormous and growing rapidly, not only in the developing world but also in densely populated areas such as Arizona, California and southwestern Asia… The droughts of the future will become more prolonged and harsher… Today, we are experiencing sustained warming of a kind unknown since the Ice Age. And this warming is certain to bring drought – sustained drought and water shortages on a scale that will challenge even small cities, to say nothing of thirsty metropolises like Los Angeles… Now we confront a future in which most of us live in large and rapidly growing cities, many of them adjacent to rising oceans and waters where Category 5 hurricanes or massive El Ninos can cause billions of dollars of damage within a few hours. We’re now at a point where there are too many of us to evacuate… beyond the capacity of even the wealthiest governments to handle.

In response to these grave threats, George W. Bush pulled the United States out of its international commitment to the Kyoto protocol, leaving us and Australia as the only two industrialized countries uncommitted to the international effort to respond to this great threat.

Obama left no doubt in his speech that he intends to take the lead in redressing the abrogation of this critical responsibility by the Bush administration:

This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands. Let us resolve that all nations – including my own – will act with the same seriousness of purpose as has your nation, and reduce the carbon we send into our atmosphere. This is the moment to give our children back their future. This is the moment to stand as one.

Commitment to social justice

The effects of resource inequality in today’s world are tragic. 25,000 people in the world die every day as a result of hunger or hunger-related disease, despite the fact that there is plenty of food in the world for everyone. The death rate of children under 5 years of age in the developing world is 14.2 % – more than 20 times the rate in the industrialized world.

There are also severe repercussions from income inequality within the United States. Barbara Ehrenreich discusses the effects of this in “This Land is their Land”:

Once they’ve made (or inherited) their fortunes, the rich can bid up the price of goods that ordinary people also need – housing, for example… dispersing the urban poor into overcrowded ranch houses, while billionaires’ horse farms displace rural Americans into trailer homes. Similarly, the rich can easily fork over annual tuitions of $50,000 and up, which has helped make college education a privilege of the upper classes…. Going out to a ballgame has become prohibitively expensive… The more expensive a resort town gets, the farther its workers have to commute to keep it functioning.

Obama’s speech expressed a deeply felt commitment to address issues of social injustice in the world. He noted how poverty breeds violence and terrorism. He proclaimed the need to help the people of Afghanistan and Iraq rebuild their country. And he discussed how global commerce must be re-shaped so as to provide benefits for everyone, not just the few:

This is the moment when we must build on the wealth that open markets have created, and share its benefits more equitably. Trade has been a cornerstone of our growth and global development. But we will not be able to sustain this growth if it favors the few, and not the many. Together, we must forge trade that truly rewards the work that creates wealth, with meaningful protections for our people and our planet. This is the moment for trade that is free and fair for all. And this is the moment when we must give hope to those left behind in a globalized world.

He expressed his commitment to world-wide human rights:

Will we stand for the human rights of the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran, or the voter in Zimbabwe? Will we give meaning to the words “never again” in Darfur? Will we welcome immigrants from different lands, and shun discrimination against those who don't look like us or worship like we do, and keep the promise of equality and opportunity for all of our people?

And he expressed a general commitment to world wide social justice:

Will we extend our hand to the people in the forgotten corners of this world who yearn for lives marked by dignity and opportunity; by security and justice? Will we lift the child in Bangladesh from poverty, shelter the refugee in Chad, and banish the scourge of AIDS in our time? ... What has always united us – what has always driven our people; what drew my father to America's shores – is a set of ideals that speak to aspirations shared by all people: that we can live free from fear and free from want

Humility

In my opinion, one of our nation’s biggest problems is institutionalized arrogance. Our failure to question ourselves as a nation means that we have an extremely distorted view of ourselves. Arrogance breeds arrogance, which is accompanied by blindness.

And that means that, unless we somehow adopt a different attitude we will continue on this path until it destroys us, and world civilization along with us. Noam Chomsky, Commenting on our imperialistic tendencies in his book “What we Say Goes”, explains that this is likely to lead to World War III unless we somehow develop the ability to look into our own eyes and see what we have become:

It entrenches the fundamental principle that we have a right to use violence anywhere we like and nobody has a right to deter it…The presupposition is that the United States owns the world. If that’s not the case, if you reject that, then you can’t debate whether Iran is interfering in Iraq… Only if you accept the assumption that the United States rules the world by right can you then ask whether someone else is interfering in a country that we invaded and occupied… One corollary is that the only thing that matters is the costs to us.

Therefore I was very happy to hear Obama acknowledge in his speech that that our nation has in fact done some things that it shouldn’t have over the course of its history:

I know my country has not perfected itself. At times, we've struggled to keep the promise of liberty and equality for all of our people. We've made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions.

One could make the point that that admission doesn’t go far enough. But for a U.S. politician running for President, serious criticism of our country, no matter how valid, especially on foreign soil, can be political suicide. I think it took a lot of political courage for Obama to say even this much. But it needed to be said, and I’m very grateful to him for saying it.


Human dignity

It’s very easy to talk about human dignity. Anyone can do that, at no political cost – Even George Bush and Dick Cheney. But it’s quite another thing to demonstrate it by speaking up for a despised minority, thereby potentially incurring significant political cost. That’s what Obama did, in my opinion, when he said:

The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down… If we could win a battle of ideas against the communists, we can stand with the vast majority of Muslims who reject the extremism that leads to hate instead of hope.

These statements more than anything else are why I so much admire his July 24th speech in Berlin. Some, perhaps most people may not think much about this. Superficially, these do not sound like controversial statements. We are, after all, a nation where “all men are created equal”.

But the ugly truth is that Muslims in the United States today have a great deal in common with the American Communists of the Cold War period. They are both despised minorities whose civil rights have been widely and severely trampled upon. Even being associated with these people can do great damage to one’s political career.

Some may say point out that there is no formal discrimination against Muslims in our country today. That may be true, but in some ways the plight of Muslims in our country today is even worse than the plight of American Communists during the Cold War. At least those Communists didn’t have to worry about being kidnapped or arrested, thrown into secret prisons, detained indefinitely without charge, and routinely tortured. This problem is far more common than most Americans realize, and it constitutes an ugly moral stain on our country.

Nor is prejudice against Muslims in our country by any means limited to those who are in any way connected with terrorism. A mountain of evidence indicates that the vast majority of Muslims who have lost their freedom to our “War on terrorism” are innocent of any connection to terrorism. And right-wing fanatics continue to fan the flames of hatred against all Muslims. As a subscriber to an online “conservative” electronic newsletter, I receive on a weekly basis all sorts of screeds against Muslims, along with claims that Obama is a Muslim.

I believe that it was especially courageous of Obama to defend Muslims in an international speech, given that he is likely to lose millions of votes this November simply because people mistakenly believe that he is a Muslim, as a result of the campaign to paint him as one.


It was a brave speech. If it is any indication of what an Obama Presidency will be like – and I believe it is – I think we can look forward to a very exciting eight years that thoroughly changes the direction of our country.

[mopinko]

1. toward a more perfect union.

that is where we are headed.

[Time for change]

7. God knows we need to be headed in that direction

[Misskittycat]

2. Agree wholeheartedly. It was a speech that was astonishing in its

breadth. As I listened to it live, and then later read the text, I also thought it was a brave and transformational speech that very much needed to be made.

[Time for change]

3. If he wins the election, this will go down as one of the greatest speeches in our history

And there will be plenty more to follow.

But if he loses, sadly, it will be forgotten.

[Time for change]

4. Obama also talked about nuclear disarmament

This is the moment when we must renew the goal of a world without nuclear weapons. The two superpowers that faced each other across the wall of this city came too close too often to destroying all we have built and all that we love. With that wall gone, we need not stand idly by and watch the further spread of the deadly atom. It is time to secure all loose nuclear materials; to stop the spread of nuclear weapons; and to reduce the arsenals from another era. This is the moment to begin the work of seeking the peace of a world without nuclear weapons.

[Torn_Scorned_Ignored]

5. Time for change

I felt it was a very powerful speech as well.
Thanks for posting this.

:kick:

[Time for change]

6. My pleasure

It got me more excited about the campaign.