Obama’s a Maoist!

One of the sillier efforts by the wingnuts has been to call Obama a “Maoist”. Their three or four minutes of research turned up the nugget that Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party were influenced by Maoist teaching decades ago, and like all wingnuts they have a great deal of trouble telling one scary brown person from another, so they have made the equation that Obama = Black Panther.

Which is silly, because if any group is pursuing Maoism, it’s…the teabaggers. Maoism involves a revolutionary struggle of the masses of the people against the exploiting classes and their state structures, focusing on rural folks and, when necessary, guerrilla-like tactics. That is the teabaggers in a nutshell – the struggle by Good White Folks in the fly-over states against Obama and Big Gummint. The tea-party tactics are straight out of Mao’s seminal book on guerrilla warfare. And they even split into rival “more-revolutionary-than-thou” factions just like the Maoists did, arguing over who really represents the true spirit of the movement.

China’s Maoists and America’s teabaggers have followed much the same path: they created a cult of personality around their founder (Reagan versus Mao), who led a group of allies who created economic disasters and committed many crimes. Today the die-hard Maoists and teabaggers both are firmly rooted in an extremism which is based on a complete divorce from the reality of the world around them, due, in the case of the teabaggers, to their reliance on Fox, Rush and their own tinfoil websites; in both cases they have become too extreme even for their own party leaders, who in turn are condemned as “revisionist” (or RINO’s in teabag-speak). The Maoists and the teabaggers have another thing in common: the Maoists roundly resisted the pragmatic reforms of Deng Xiaoping, and his ethos of following the facts wherever they lead, eschewing ideology, and judging state policies in accordance with whether or not they work; Obama has offered the same sort of “anti-Maoist” formula, and the teabaggers have rejected him too.

So the next time you hear Newt or Rush or one of the other brain-dead pseudo-intellectuals of the loony right bloviating about Obama’s Maoist program, try not to laugh at them too obviously. Because that’s another thing that Maoists and teabaggers have in common: they get nasty and violent when you ridicule their bullcrap arguments.