Barack Obama: Anticolonialist or Neo-Communist?
10/2/12
By Victor Volsky
Kudos to Dinesh D'Souza. He's made a much-needed splash with his brilliant film 2016: Obama's America, now the second-highest-grossing political documentary of all time. D'Souza has developed a plausible theory to explain the original wellsprings of Barack Obama's worldview and amassed plenty of supporting evidence. For people who have been totally at the mercy of the liberal propaganda machine, aka mainstream media, his film is an earth-shattering revelation. But even those few who have been aware of Obama's antecedents can't fail to be profoundly impressed. Mr. D'Souza, an immigrant from India, is a true American patriot who has done an extremely valuable service to his adopted country.
That said, I have to disagree with the basic premise of the documentary, which is that the centerpiece of Barack Obama's worldview is anti-colonialism inherited from his Kenyan father and that his disastrous foreign policy can be fully explained in terms of colonials' rage against their former masters. While acknowledging the cogency and consistency of D'Souza's theory, I think an equally strong case can be made that the worldview and policies of the 44th president of the United States have a different provenance much closer to home -- that they are animated by a neo-communist ideology with a liberal admixture of black nationalism.
From early childhood, Obama was raised in an intensely anti-American environment. His anthropologist mother hated her country with a passion -- so much so that when her second husband, Indonesian Lolo Soetoro, lost some of his anti-American zeal, she sent her son to Hawaii to save him from his stepfather's pernicious influence and instructed her father to enlist his friend, Frank Marshall Davis, in the cause of mentoring young Barack. Davis, a card-carrying communist of a rabid Stalinist variety but also a black nationalist, did his job remarkably well, infusing his ward with a Marxist-cum-black separatist worldview.
In college, Obama blended eagerly into the far-left scene, as he freely attests in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father (page 101, emphasis added): "To avoid being mistaken for a sell-out, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structured feminists and punk-rock performance poets[.] ... We were alienated." It is a nearly complete catechism of a callow revolutionary.
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But what about Obama's colorful official biography? I believe that it is a contrivance created to further his political ambitions and make him look more interesting. Why else would his literary agent, Acton & Dystel, advertize him as a Kenyan-born author from 1991 until that time in 2007 when he began preparing for a presidential run and needed to sanitize his biography and tone down its foreign elements? As a twofer, a black and an African, he was doubly appealing to the romantic leftists who willingly climbed into bed with this con man artfully playing them for suckers. But once he set his sights on the presidency, it was time to discard his old multicultural skin as a cosmopolitan bestriding continents and emerge as a homespun politician of the neo-communist persuasion.
Read more: Articles: Barack Obama: Anticolonialist or Neo-Communist?
10/2/12
By Victor Volsky
Kudos to Dinesh D'Souza. He's made a much-needed splash with his brilliant film 2016: Obama's America, now the second-highest-grossing political documentary of all time. D'Souza has developed a plausible theory to explain the original wellsprings of Barack Obama's worldview and amassed plenty of supporting evidence. For people who have been totally at the mercy of the liberal propaganda machine, aka mainstream media, his film is an earth-shattering revelation. But even those few who have been aware of Obama's antecedents can't fail to be profoundly impressed. Mr. D'Souza, an immigrant from India, is a true American patriot who has done an extremely valuable service to his adopted country.
That said, I have to disagree with the basic premise of the documentary, which is that the centerpiece of Barack Obama's worldview is anti-colonialism inherited from his Kenyan father and that his disastrous foreign policy can be fully explained in terms of colonials' rage against their former masters. While acknowledging the cogency and consistency of D'Souza's theory, I think an equally strong case can be made that the worldview and policies of the 44th president of the United States have a different provenance much closer to home -- that they are animated by a neo-communist ideology with a liberal admixture of black nationalism.
From early childhood, Obama was raised in an intensely anti-American environment. His anthropologist mother hated her country with a passion -- so much so that when her second husband, Indonesian Lolo Soetoro, lost some of his anti-American zeal, she sent her son to Hawaii to save him from his stepfather's pernicious influence and instructed her father to enlist his friend, Frank Marshall Davis, in the cause of mentoring young Barack. Davis, a card-carrying communist of a rabid Stalinist variety but also a black nationalist, did his job remarkably well, infusing his ward with a Marxist-cum-black separatist worldview.
In college, Obama blended eagerly into the far-left scene, as he freely attests in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father (page 101, emphasis added): "To avoid being mistaken for a sell-out, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structured feminists and punk-rock performance poets[.] ... We were alienated." It is a nearly complete catechism of a callow revolutionary.
---
But what about Obama's colorful official biography? I believe that it is a contrivance created to further his political ambitions and make him look more interesting. Why else would his literary agent, Acton & Dystel, advertize him as a Kenyan-born author from 1991 until that time in 2007 when he began preparing for a presidential run and needed to sanitize his biography and tone down its foreign elements? As a twofer, a black and an African, he was doubly appealing to the romantic leftists who willingly climbed into bed with this con man artfully playing them for suckers. But once he set his sights on the presidency, it was time to discard his old multicultural skin as a cosmopolitan bestriding continents and emerge as a homespun politician of the neo-communist persuasion.
Read more: Articles: Barack Obama: Anticolonialist or Neo-Communist?
