Trebuie iar să trecem balta ca să auzim o evaluare din partea celor care ne-au condus din umbră. Charles Moore are calitatea unui bisturiu care disecă un cadavru politic. Trâim vremuri triste pentru America. (de aici)
America’s friends are left behind in Barack Obama’s new plans
The US president spoke of ‘oneness’ at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service, but he has been reduced to little more than a global preacher with a shrinking flock
By Charles Moore 8:04PM GMT 13 Dec 2013
In his oration at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service on Tuesday, Barack Obama asked himself “how well have I applied his lessons in my own life?”, and invited all of us to ask the same question of ourselves.
In his own case, President Obama offered no answer. But it was the fairly clear implication of his words that he didn’t think he was shaping up too badly. Madiba, he said, had been “the last great liberator of the 20th century”. Guess who looks like being the first great liberator of the 21st.
Today’s leaders needed to be filled, he went on, with the spirit of Ubuntu – a Nguni Bantu word meaning “the oneness of humanity” (Cameroon translation: “We’re all in this together”). They needed to stand up for justice and peace. His performance reminded me slightly of Tom Lehrer’s Folk Song Army: “We all hate poverty, war and injustice – unlike the rest of you squares.”
Such rhetoric is consistent with the tone that Mr Obama has used from the beginning of his presidency, notably when he reached out to Islam in his speech in Cairo in June 2009. It is by now not too early – in some respects, it may even be too late – to ask whether Mr Obama’s foreign policy has yet produced any great outbreak of global Ubuntu.
There is no doubt that billions of people – including your hard-bitten columnist – wanted to hear some such hopeful message when Mr Obama first came to global prominence in 2008. Even today, it is not only Left-wing Danish prime ministers and Mr Cameron who want to share a selfie with him: a large portion of humanity feels the same. The BBC News website still leads off each day with an elderly picture of Obama and Bill Clinton arm in arm. But what, in five years or so, has actually happened?
Broadly speaking, the governments and people which most closely identified with the United States have lost out. In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Gulf States, Turkey and Israel are feeling sore. Regimes, like Mubarak’s Egypt, which had put all their eggs in the American basket, then found them addled. Many fell. In the Far East, old US allies feel inadequately protected from the rising power of China, and in Africa that same rising power has been left free to buy the place up. The great Obama “pivot to Asia” seems to have pivoted away again. Even western Europe feels neglected.
As for Britain, the bust of Winston Churchill left the Oval Office as Mr Obama moved in, and we lost influence. Just now, we have been embarrassed by US security failures in the Edward Snowden affair, and it seems quite likely that US changes proposed as a result of it will amputate some of the intimate intelligence cooperation that has helped us so much since 1946.
So the rewards for doing the right thing by the United States seem to have diminished sharply. I am not saying that all the countries just listed are notable practitioners of Ubuntu. Saudi Arabia’s very name – referring as it does to one family – is a denial of the oneness of humanity. But the list looks pretty good compared with that of the anti-American countries on which Obama’s America is now smiling.
At the Mandela do, the president shook hands with Raul Castro of Cuba. Other big beneficiaries include Assad’s Syria (plus Hezbollah), Kim Jong-un’s uncle-slaying North Korea and, above all, the government – though not the people – of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Its newish President Rouhani is treated by America as if he were his country’s Gorbachev. But there is a difference: Gorbachev, Communist though he was, was actually trying to reverse the military and political aggression of his country. President Rouhani is trying to enhance that of his.
The least Ubuntic nations on earth are doing just fine in the Obama world order. Whenever, in response to international criticism, they have increased their arsenals, tested more missiles or set more nuclear centrifuges whirring (please forgive me if, in fact, centrifuges do not whir), America has bent over backwards not to be unkind. By not applying the Mandela lessons in their own lives, they have survived, even prospered.
It is extraordinary that the recent interim agreement with Iran in Geneva has not been subjected to proper scrutiny here. All that the Obama-led West secured was a delay in the implementation of Iran’s nuclear programme. In return, Iran won the unfreezing of its foreign assets, the freedom to keep roughly 19,000 nuclear centrifuges and the first effective recognition of its right to be a “threshold” nuclear power.
The previously agreed international position that Iran should not become a nuclear power, full stop, has now been smashed by the very country that established it. Last weekend, President Obama said that “the idea that Iran… would just continue to get more and more nervous about sanctions and military threats, and ultimately just say, OK, we give in – I think that does not reflect an honest understanding of the Iranian people and the Iranian regime.” Thus are 35 years of an anti-Western world view rewarded by the “Great Satan”. Supporting it all, William Hague, our Foreign Secretary, told the House of Commons that the agreement was the triumph of “sheer persistence”. Hansard surely wrote that down wrong: he must have said “Shia persistence”.
This American policy is not, of course, the result of mere inadvertence. The Obamists have a position. Their broad argument for what the president is doing is that, by taking the heat out of so many antagonisms, it creates the space for dialogue and reconciliation.
I doubt if it looks like that in the Muslim world. Far from working hard for democracy, human rights etc, Mr Obama has discouraged most local movements towards such things, including the serious possibility in 2009 that the Islamist regime in Iran could fall. When the Arab Spring came along, he dumped the old lot without knowing which of the new to embrace. Which Syrian liberal or Egyptian democrat or Western-leaning Afghan has much cause to thank him today?
At the same time, he has not abandoned organised violence. This great advocate of soft power often prefers the hard stuff. His main policy towards Pakistan is drone attacks. As a result, al-Qaeda has moved into politically vacant spaces, such as Syria, Yemen and bits of the Maghreb, its limbs becoming more powerful than its head. It is achieving new authenticity as a popular insurgency. Mr Obama told his Cairo audience more than four years ago that Guantanamo Bay would close in 2010. It is still open. A good deal of Muslim opinion sees the man with peace on his lips as even more of a stinking hypocrite than George W Bush.
We in the non-American West are still a bit dazed by what is happening. We liked President Obama so much that we wanted to agree with whatever he wanted to do. But such agreement was based, of course, on the premise that he wielded power. Today, with Obamacare turning into his poll tax at home, and Russia, China and Iran all pushing forward into the spaces he has vacated, this has become harder to believe. Which leaves Barack Obama as little more than an eloquent, narcissistic global preacher, expounding Ubuntu to gradually dwindling congregations.
On the Great Seal of the United States is – to use the correct heraldic term – “A Bald Eagle proper displayed”. It symbolises its country’s soaring power. Time to modernise it, I fear, and replace it with a selfie.
Probabil că cea mai mare ironie a sorții a fost că discursul unui om fals, Obama, a fost tradus pentru cei surdomuți de un interpret fals. În felul acesta am asistat la un veritabil teatru al absurdului:
Theater of the absurd: Deaf translator at Mandela funeral a fraud
Rick Moran
This is easily one of the most bizarre stories of the year. In fact, I’ve never heard anything like it.
The man who translated the words of speakers at the Mandela memorial service into sign language is apparently a fraud. Immediately after the service was over, a huge controversey erupted when South Africa’s deaf community angrily informed the press that the “translator” was signing gibberish: …
Ironia britanică la lucru …
Translated: what the Mandela signer was really saying
Sign language experts have tried to make sense of the signer at the memorial service to Nelson Mandela.
It was, they say, nonsense.
We asked around, but they all insisted there was no sense whatsoever to be drawn from his hands, much like decoding unreadable doctors’ handwriting.
The only gesture which remotely made sense was this…
…which means child, according to the experts.
But where the experts failed, the amateur sign linguists triumphed. And now the mysterious hand signals can be decoded in full.
Translation: “I’m just a random chancer! Shhh! Don’t let on!”
Translation: “Look, I’m not *completely* talentless. I can pat my head and rub my tummy at the same time.”
Translation: “Blimey, this speech isn’t half dragging on. Anyone got a fag?”
Translation: “Come on, let’s get this party started! Big fish, little fish, cardboard box!”
Translation: “I know these speeches are dull, but never mind, apparently Kiss are coming on in a minute.”
Translation: “Dear God, please don’t let anyone find out I’m a fake”
Translation: “Still, at least I didn’t take a selfie”
Experts say even those who cannot read sign language could see he was a faker.
His movements are not synced with the words, appear exaggerated and child-like, and he appears to nervously look round several times. Which raises the question: how did he ever get on stage?
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Categories: Articole de interes general
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