Jeremy Scahill and Rick Rowley’ were interviewed on the All in with Chris Hayes Show last night and on the Morning Joe Show this morning. Democracy Now interviewed the journalists at a special showing at Sundance Film Festival 2013 recently on their soon to be released documentary Dirty Wars: Hidden Truths of Covert U.S. Warfare.
After watching these interviews one comes to realize that President Obama’s is leading a most dark & dirty war against terrorism that is killing Americas without trials. This is a dark & dirty war that his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize stands in stark contrast to and now more than ever seems to justify the Nobel Committee asking Obama to return the Peace Prize. Thorbjorn Jagland, chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, said
today that President Obama ‘really ought to consider’ returning his Nobel Peace Prize Medal immediately, including the ‘really nice’ case it came in. Jagland, flanked by the other four members of the Committee, said they’d never before asked for the return of a Peace Prize, ‘even from a damnable war-criminal like Kissinger,’ but that the 10% drawdown in US troops in Afghanistan the President announced last week capped a period of ‘non-Peace-Prize-winner-type behavior’ in 2011. ‘Guantanamo’s still open. There’s bombing Libya. There’s blowing bin Laden away rather than putting him on trial. Now a few US troops go home, but the US will be occupying Afghanistan until 2014 and beyond. Don’t even get me started on Yemen!’ HA!
In studying Transformational leadership & The Way of Individuation (Blog entry below), I had been planning to present Obama as an example of a transformational leader along the lines that Aziz (2008) develops in his book The change of which Barak Obama speaks. In fact, two weeks ago there was considerable chatter that after his health care legislation, the Iraq war ending, and if gun and immigration legislation is passed – his legacy will be set. However, now with his leading the U.S.’s dirty war, one has to pause to consider the impact this will have on his legacy.
Then this morning after experiencing and reflecting on the above, I re-watched Jung and Leadership and was stuck to realize that it is not Obama consciously leading the American people in this war, it is the unconsciousness of America that has selected a president that is fulfilling their dark & dirty shadow side. Steve Myers explains Jung’s idea on this different way of looking at leadership.
To summarize Myers main points he is saying that “the traditional view is of a leader enlisting the support of others, a leader creates a following through his own conscious action. However, Jung’s position is that it is the followers who create the leadership unconsciously; it is the group’s collective unconscious that creates the demand for leadership and then draws someone into the position who fulfills the unconscious need. It is an illusion for the leader to think she creates a following when those leaders are more likely to be slaves to their own fiction. It is not life that must be check but unconsciousness.”
What this suggests is that Obama is leading dark & dirty because America’s unconsciousness is dark & dirty. Obama is leading how America unconsciously wants and expects him to lead. To qualify as a depth transformational leader, Obama would have to accept that it is unconsciousness that must be checked. So much for the Nobel Committee’s logic in awarding Obama the Peace Prize: “creating a new climate of…multilateral diplomacy…an emphasis on the role of the United Nations…of dialogue and negotiations as instruments for resolving international conflicts…and a vision of world free of nuclear arms.”
