The Hierophant's Hiroshima: Obama's Narcissistic Necromancy

"I Hear Dead People Telling Me To Think About My Potential"

For those trying to understand the American establishment's oikophobic intellect, the rhetoric of President Obama's Hiroshima speech epitomizes its religion-replacement cosmopolitanism.

First, we have the occasion's Necromancer, the Hearer of the Dead, the Left's High Priest, the only man ever to win a Nobel Peace Prize for sheer potential, the Messianic Obama, the self-proclaimed answer to America's "greatest hopes and highest aspirations," by the rise of whose star, as he himself announced, "our planet began to heal" and through whose mere nomination America "restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth."

Second, we have the ritual orgy of oikophobia, the complete celebration of cosmopolitanism in ceremony: the U.S. President in foreign lands laying wreaths at foreigners' shrines instead of at home honoring his own dead just before Memorial Day.



Third, we have the black mass itself by which our Pontifex Maximus Victimizati, this Hierophant of Hiroshima, transubstantiates the base element -- America's military victory over the Japanese empire -- into the real presence of the left's god, the divine body of universal victimization. Here's a sample of how Obama's hocus pocus works:

Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.

[In any active voice, one would have to say that America bombed a Japanese military target, the Japanese 5th Division and 2nd Army Headquarters, or even let Obama say what he implies, America committed a culpable criminal attack on civilians, but decency before death demands acknowledging an actor not an impersonal and agentless, unmotivated occurrence.]  

Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima? We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not-so-distant past. We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children, thousands of Koreans, a dozen Americans held prisoner.

Ex opere operato, the final turning point in our war with the Axis, between free and totalitarian, becomes an anonymous and agentless "death falling from the sky." Ex opere operantis, by trusting in the abstractness of Obama's words and his soothing sympathy, we become mindless of the reasons for the American struggle with a bloody Japanese empire and forgetful of the specific goals motivating the American bombing -- to force that empire to surrender without bloody invasion.

Instead, under Obama's spell, we join ourselves in the great communion of victimology; all of us become victims of the "terrible force unleashed ... the demonstration that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself." We all know "we" do not come to mourn the dead [for surely it would have been better if that were to goal to go to Tokyo or Dresden where America killed far more], but to participate in mankind's universal victimization by their death, to convert a status that was uniquely the Japanese dead's own into a possession of the world. All of us are threatened by the terrible force unleashed; all of us died in potentia with them. Ite, missa est.

Fourth, there is Obama's narcissistic necromancy:

Their souls [those killed in the bombing] speak to us. They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are and what we might become.

No, King Saul, the souls of the dead do not speak to us, and it would be profane to seek out their words if they were willing to speak. But, surely if the dead could speak truthfully, they would say to you as Samuel: "Why do you consult me, now that the LORD has turned away from you and become your enemy?" (1 Sa 28:16) They would certainly not tell us to think about our identity and potential, unless to warn us about our imminent loss of power and death by defying the will of God.

But for Obama, even necromancy is narcissistic. The dead, whom he channels, tell us only to regard ourselves and our potential. It's not about them; it's about us. If Obama were Odysseus, he would take a mirror into the underworld and stop up his ears with beeswax.

Obama closes with the Great Litany of the new global institutions. All the old nations that contended in World War II are equally evil and petty; there were no right causes, just tribalism and death:

The world war that reached its brutal end in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fought among the wealthiest and most powerful of nations. Their civilizations had given the world great cities and magnificent art. Their thinkers had advanced ideas of justice and harmony and truth. And yet the war grew out of the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes, an old pattern amplified by new capabilities and without new constraints. [China and Russia were the wealthiest and strongest? Were the Swiss, Swedes and Spanish then less base and tribal for sitting the war out?] 

America's war did not "grow" out of a base, tribal instinct for domination and conquest. In the case of Japan, America declared war in response to a sneak attack on our soil, or as Obama would probably have it more cynically, out of a desire to maintain dominance in the Pacific [which Mr. "Asian Pivot" Obama, who came to Hiroshima cynically calling for "moral revolution" and "ending the logic of fear" fresh from lifting a fifty-year U.S. arms embargo on Vietnam should understand. China certainly doesn't think arming Vietnam is a fearless moral revolution.] It "grew" out of a national culture that saw and still sees war as a justifiable practice in extremis. But Obama warns us that neither religion nor the nation provide answers today:

How easily we learn to justify violence in the name of some higher cause.

[And, Obama should know given the bombs he's dropped and the drone attacks he's authorized (per the Washington Times, apparently 90% affecting civilian targets) in the name of democracy and human rights.]

Every great religion promises a pathway to love and peace and righteousness, and yet no religion has been spared from believers who have claimed their faith as a license to kill. Nations arise telling a story that binds people together in sacrifice and cooperation, allowing for remarkable feats. But those same stories have so often been used to oppress and dehumanize those who are different.

I've never heard of a Christian believer who claims that Christian faith gives a "license to kill." Obama perhaps is thinking of Islam. But, no, Obama says we don't need nations or religion now; we need a "moral revolution." A revolution which is powered by the rise of the internationalist and cosmopolitan institutions. Nations just tell a "story" and faith just leads to licenses to kill.

But the memory of the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, must never fade. That memory allows us to fight complacency. It fuels our moral imagination. It allows us to change. And since that fateful day, we have made choices that give us hope.

The United States and Japan have forged not only an alliance but a friendship that has won far more for our people [not peoples, "our people" and who exactly is the "our"? Are Japan and America one people now?] than we could ever claim through war. The nations of Europe built a union that replaced battlefields with bonds of commerce and democracy. Oppressed people and nations won liberation. 

The notion that the alliance between the U.S. and Japan created more hope than the military destruction of the Japanese empire certainly wouldn't sound very convincing in China and Korea. If Obama had "listened to the voices" of the 14 million Chinese who died during their war with the Japanese, would they have found hope in the U.S. friendship with their regional adversary? The silliness of the idea that the U.S. and Japan forged an alliance and friendship -- America commenced a military occupation from 1945 to 1952, the military presence of which continues to this day, that shifted in purpose with the rise of the Cold War -- is exceeded only by the conceit that the European Union was built on democracy or that it's rise in 1992 marked the end of war on the European continent. The European Union didn't put an end to the battles; American bombings and tanks did. Maybe, Obama should try channeling the American war dead on that score and see what they have to say about his identity and potential.

The West's successful struggle against international communism completely disappears in Obama's tale of hope-making choices into the phrase "nations won liberation"; of course, he had just been telling the Argentinians that:

...in the past there’s been a sharp division between left and right, between capitalist and communist or socialist... Oh, you know, you’re a capitalist Yankee dog, and oh, you know, you’re some crazy communist that’s going to take away everybody’s property.., but I think for your generation, you should be practical and just choose from what works. 

Yeah, ask Venezuela what works. Obama can't talk about the Cold War. It wouldn't help his call for American nuclear disarmament to recognize that America was only able to pass through the Cold War without a world-wide conventional military conflagration because of its possession of nuclear weapons.

Despite the wonders of hope-making choices, Obama admits even the powers of internationalism are limited:

We may not be able to eliminate man’s capacity to do evil, [may not? the Necromancer is so modest!] so nations and the alliances that we form must possess the means to defend ourselves. But among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them.

Maybe, Obama could set an example and disarm his secret-service agents, take down the fence around the White House and "escape the logic of fear" himself. After he's disarmed personally, then maybe the rest of the world should consider it.

Obama mercifully concludes by calling for universal nuclear disarmament, the eradication of nations, the erection of more global institutions. Only once we have escaped from the nation state, self defense and sex-specific restrooms, will we have "the start of our own moral awakening."

Moses did not start the "moral awakening"; the Prophets did not initiate it. Christ did not commence our "moral awakening." We will awaken only when international organizations eliminate nuclear weapons and the nations in the name of a "family of man." It turns out that Obama's moral awakening is just a reprise of the radical religious cosmopolitanism the Left has been preaching all along.