On June 19, 2013, US President Obama, hoping to raise himself above the developing National Security Agency (NSA) spy scandals, sought to associate himself with two iconic speeches made at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.<\/p>\n
Fifty years ago, President John F. Kennedy pledged: \u201cIch bin ein Berliner\u201d. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan challenged: \u201cMr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.\u201d<\/p>\n
Obama\u2019s speech was delivered to a relatively small, specially selected audience of invitees.\u00a0 Even so, Obama spoke from behind bullet proof glass.<\/p>\n
Obama\u2019s speech will go down in history as the most hypocritical of all time. Little wonder\u00a0that the audience was there by invitation only. A real audience would have hooted Obama out of Berlin.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the most hypocritical of all of Obama\u2019s statements was his proposal that the US and Russia reduce their nuclear weapons by one-third.\u00a0 The entire world, and certainly the Russians, saw through this ploy. The US is currently surrounding Russia with anti-ballistic missiles on Russia\u2019s borders and hopes to leverage this advantage by talking Russia into reducing its weapons, thereby making it easier for Washington to target them.\u00a0 Obama\u2019s proposal is clearly intended to weaken Russia\u2019s nuclear deterrent and ability to resist US hegemony.<\/p>\n
Obama spoke lofty words of peace, while beating the drums of war in Syria and Iran. Witness Obama\u2019s aggressive policies of surrounding Russia with missile bases and establishing new military bases in the Pacific Ocean with which to confront China.<\/p>\n
This is the same Obama who promised to close the Guantanamo Torture Prison, but did not;\u00a0 the same Obama who promised to tell us the purpose for Washington\u2019s decade-long war in Afghanistan, but did not;\u00a0 the same Obama who promised to end the wars, but started new ones;\u00a0 the same Obama who said he stood for the US Constitution, but shredded it;\u00a0 the same Obama who refused to hold the Bush regime accountable for its crimes against law and humanity;\u00a0 the same Obama who unleashed drones against civilian populations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen;\u00a0 the same Obama who claimed and exercised power to murder US citizens without due process and who continues the Bush regime\u2019s unconstitutional practice of violating habeas corpus and detaining US citizens indefinitely; the same Obama who promised transparency but runs the most secretive government in US history.<\/p>\n
The tyrant\u2019s speech of spectacular hypocrisy elicited from the invited audience applause on 36 occasions.\u00a0 Like so many others, Germans proved themselves willing to be used for Washington\u2019s propaganda purposes.<\/p>\n
Here was Obama, who consistently lies, speaking of \u201ceternal truth.\u201d<\/p>\n
Here was Obama, who enabled Wall Street to rob the American and European peoples and who destroyed Americans\u2019 civil liberties and the lives of vast numbers of Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis, Libyans, Pakistanis, Syrians, and others, speaking of \u201cthe yearnings of justice.\u201d Obama equates demands for justice with \u201cterrorism.\u201d<\/p>\n
Here was Obama, who has constructed an international spy network and a domestic police state, speaking of \u201cthe yearnings for freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n
Here was Obama, president of a country that has initiated wars or military action against six countries since 2001 and has three more Muslim countries\u2013Syria, Lebanon, and Iran\u2013in its crosshairs and perhaps several more in Africa, speaking of \u201cthe yearnings of peace that burns in the human heart,\u201d but clearly not in Obama\u2019s heart.<\/p>\n
Obama has turned America into a surveillance state that has far more in common with Stasi East Germany than with the America of the Kennedy and Reagan eras. Strange, isn\u2019t it, that freedom was gained in East Germany and lost in America.<\/p>\n
At the Brandenburg Gate, Obama invoked the pledge of nations to \u201ca Universal Declaration of Human Rights,\u201d but Obama continues to violate human rights both at home and abroad.<\/p>\n
Obama has taken hypocrisy to new heights. He has destroyed US civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.\u00a0 In place of a government accountable to law, he has turned law into a weapon in the hands of the government.\u00a0 He has intimidated a free press and prosecutes whistleblowers who reveal his government\u2019s crimes. He makes no objection when American police brutalize peacefully protesting citizens. His government intercepts and stores in National Security Agency computers every communication of every American and also the private communications of Europeans and Canadians, including the communications of the members of the governments, the better to blackmail those with secrets.\u00a0 Obama sends in drones or assassins to murder people in countries with which the US is not at war, and his victims on most occasions turn out to be women, children, farmers, and village elders. Obama kept Bradley Manning in solitary confinement for nearly a year assaulting his human dignity in an effort to break him and obtain a false confession. In defiance of the US Constitution, Obama denied Manning a trial for three years. On Obama\u2019s instructions, London denies Julian Assange free passage to his political asylum in Ecuador.\u00a0 Assange has become a modern-day Cardinal Mindszenty.\u00a0 [Jozsef Mindszenty was the leader of the Hungarian Catholic Church who sought refuge from Soviet oppression in the US Embassy in Budapest. Denied free passage by the Soviets, the Cardinal lived in the US Embassy for 15 years as a symbol of Soviet oppression.]<\/p>\n
This is the Obama who asked at the orchestrated event at the Brandenburg Gate: \u201cWill we live free or in chains? Under governments that uphold our universal rights, or regimes that suppress them? In open societies that respect the sanctity of the individual and our free will, or in closed societies that suffocate the soul?\u201d<\/p>\n
When the Berlin Wall came down, the Stasi Spy State that suffocates the soul moved to Washington. The Stasi is alive and well in the Obama regime.<\/p>\n
Obama\u2019s speech at the Brandenburg Gate: http:\/\/www.whitehouse.gov\/the-press-office\/2013\/06\/19\/remarks-president-obama-brandenburg-gate-berlin-germany<\/a><\/p>\n _____________________________<\/p>\n Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. His latest book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West<\/a> is now available. <\/i><\/p>\n