Why Dinesh D’Souza Is right about the source of Obama’s rage
There is a school of thought, ably represented by First Things editor R.R. Reno, that blames the leftward drift in American higher education for Barack Obama’s resentment of the United States, rather than his Third World upbringing. The estimable Dr. Reno, who is a friend and former colleague, called D’Souza’s film 2016 “misguided” in a recent post on the FT blog:
I was and remain unconvinced by the argument that Obama’s anti-colonialist father explains his governing mentality. By my reckoning, the emerging postmodern liberalism of Columbia University circa 1982 (where I was for a semester as a visiting student) explains Obama pretty well.
Not only do we not need to go to Kenya to find the sources of Obama’s worldview (the Ivy League will do just fine), but in fact the very realistic and at times cold-blooded sentiments of post-colonial Africans who wrested their futures out of the hands of their European masters cuts against the magical thinking that characterizes the sort of liberalism that the Obama White House represents.
Rusty’s got a point — I got a B.A. from Columbia a few years earlier at a time when you could read one book by Marx and one by Freud (as the joke went) and pass any course in the college. But D’Souza has a better point. My own reading has a minor difference with D’Souza’s (the key figure in Obama’s mind is his anthropologist mother rather than is absent Kenyan father), but we are on the same page: Obama is an alien intrusion into American political life, a Third-World anthropologist profiling us. D’Souza may not be not as smart as Rusty Reno (few people are) but he has an advantage: he grew up in the Third World and knows what it means to actually be there.
What’s the difference between growing up in the Third World, and taking an Ivy League course in neocolonial studies? It’s about the same as the difference between sex education, and sex. I’m an unabashed globalizer and modernizer (I wrote a book warning that the extinction of most of the world’s cultures was inevitable), but some awful things happen en route to modernity. I’ve spent a lot of time in poor countries of the Global South as an economist and banker, and there have been moments when I wished I was a Communist. One sees heart-wrenching poverty and humiliation, and there are days when it would do the heart good to put some people up against a wall.
I saw a three-year old girl caring for her one-year-old sister while her parents tried to sell chewing gum at a traffic light in Lima.
I saw a thousand elderly people gathered in an impromptu flea market in the dead of winter, selling pathetic pieces of used clothing for the price of a meal, a few hundred yards from the Kremlin.
I saw garbage pickers living atop toxic rubbish in half a dozen countries.
It’s one thing to read about this kind misery; it’s another to see it first-hand and frequently; and it’s still another thing to grow up with it. There are any number of good and decent people I know who hate the West for the misery it occasioned (although they know perfectly well that the local ruling class is more predatory than the worst Western colonialist). Some of them are friends and colleagues at Asia Times Online. Their point of view is understandable. The difference between them and President Obama is that they do not lie about what they believe.
David – Well said. Question: Each of your items ends, “That did … ” Is that some kind of idiom, or is something omitted? (What exactly did it do?)
Anyway – G’mar Chatimah Tovah to you and yours.
Jack,
The idiom means “on account of ‘that’, people died in the amount of . . . “. Mr. Goldman’s command of popular idiom is quite entertaining, especially when mixed with his wide command of multiple domains of knowledge.
David,
You are certainly a busy person, but this great item doesn’t feel “finished”, maybe another paragraph to tie back to the beginning? Or to extend the thought concerning the “horrible consequences”? I’m a long-time follower of your columns in various venues; I suspect I speak for at least some of your devoted readership when we would encourage you to “spell it out”, as they say . . .
JJ
Blogging has a deleterious effect on writing style — one is tempted to shoot things out half-baked. I prefer formal essays, but don’t have time to compose them in all cases. You’re right. I’ll try to make amends when time permits.
David,
The rawness of the feelings and the power of your intent come through loud and clear, as it is written. I feel privileged to see this in its first writing.
To paraphrase the quote attributed to Winston Churchill, not every conservative has both a heart and a brain. Thanks for sharing.
Oh. I figured it for an anglicism of which the American equivalent is “did in”. Darn those sneaky prepositions!
Isn’t it plausible that the truth is some combination of the two: the emotional (“pre-rational”) commitment married to the Ivy League post-colonialist narrative? If so the real disagreement is only about the depth of the commitment; is it primarily an intellectual stance as Reno seems to think, or is rooted in these childhood experiences as you and D’Souza postulate?
Ultimately, I’m not that interested in psychoanlyzing the president. I will grant that key difference is that you’re directly acusing him of treason (or at least a willingness towards it), while Reno seems to think it more an issue of his simply being misguided.
I will go a step further – Barack HUSSEIN Obama is doubly afflicted. He was breast fed on anti-colonialism, and lived in the third world too. Not only that, but he honed his skills at radically left universities, at the same time that he personally aligned with said fellow travelers.
In other words, there is not a snowball chance in hell that the Radical-in-Chief can be anything, but a resentful anti-American.
To be sure, the insidious morphing of the red/green alliance renders his positions that much more dangerous.
For example – http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/08/17/valerie-jarretts-communist-leanings-why-she-matters-serving-as-barack-hussein-obamas-alter-ego-cementing-the-redgreen-alliance-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki/
Trusting the POTUS is akin to placing ones faith in a (poisonous)snake, hoping not to be bitten in the process!
so who cares what a poisonous snake thinks when you know he wants to bite you?
IMO, I don’t think it’s that he hates America but rather he truly believes he can and *is* making it “better”. It appears our (the country’s) diminished status is better in his eyes. From asking for acceptance to powers we used to be above to working to lessen our nuclear weapons to or near zero, I truly think he believes he is working for the better good.
I too think his mother had more influence that ’2016′ gave her credit for.
Then, ma’am, why has he always surrounded himself with those who positively do despise America and everything it stands for? No, sorry, I look at that Martian face and remember Well’s “War of The Worlds” opening about the aliens examining our green Earth with “cool, unsympathetic eyes.” Otherwise, you don’t take your young daughters to the church of hate for white America, as Obama did for all those years when they were growing up. For this particular person of color, hatred is a family value.
I agree that it could be a combination of the two. I’m sure there are plenty of Mexican immigrants, who grew up dirt-poor in the Third World, yet regard America as a land of opportunity where they can get ahead by hard work.
Then their children go to American schools, where they are indoctrinated with leftist dogma and come to hate America.
” Spain’s entire capture of precious metals went to India and China to pay for luxury cloth and spices”
The wars in the low countries were a big cash sink as well.
Regarding Obama’s worldview and what shaped it, Spengler, what do you think of Angelo Codevilla’s claims that both Dunham grandparents were linked to the CIA? Do they strike you as credible?
Regarding the previous thread — there are two things I should add, as I don’t think it’s worth readers time to rebut the eternal Evil Empire claims. One, a Tadjik while perhaps having some Turkish blood is not a Turk or an Uzbek, and they are certainly not ‘mountain Turks’ like the Azeris consider themselves to be. They are basically Persian-speaking descendants of Ghenghis Khan (Tadjiki is simplified Farsi with a Cyrillic alphabet), who has something like 10 million direct Y chromosome haploid descendants and many millions more on top of that. In fact genetically the Armenians are the closest non-Arab cousins of the Ashkenazi Jews.
There are also fair skinned, blue eyed descendants of Ghenghis Khan in Russia’s regions like Chuvashia and Tuva. I am not sure if David is counting the one million Georgians that despite the alleged horrible Russian imperialism directed toward their country choose to live and work in Russia, with perhaps several hundred thousand in Moscow or Moscow region (Moscow itself is now the largest city in Europe and could soon be the largest in Eurasia outside of Korea, Japan and China).
Two, Russia is not quite as demographically doomed as long maintained by many Western ‘scholars’, including ‘Drunken Russia’ AEI author Nicholas Eberstadt who had a sort of coffee summit in San Francisco with the leading blogger pointing to Russia’s demographic resurgence, Anatoly Karlin. Immigration of course is the main reason but the overwhelming impression I get is that Moscow’s immigration patterns in particular are shifting from Central Asian migrants (imagine that, Russia actually deports illegals and I saw several round ups in my own year in Moscow) to more high end labor from China or India that might have previously gone to Canada or Australia instead. There’s also the potential for assimulating large numbers of Greeks, Italians and even Spaniards going forward if they have skills in engineering, middle management, or energy/technology. Many of the Chinese students I shared Russian class space with at MGU will likely be running Siberian farms in the not so distant future with Chinese migrant work forces as China’s economy cools.
Moscow is going to end up being a very cosmopolitan city indeed in the old Byzantine tradition of having emperors who were part Slavic, part Arab, and part Greek.
I would not call Putin a dictator. I would call him an authoritarian modernizer in the mold of Lee Yuan Kew. The Right if you recall had lotsa nice things to say about Augusto Pinochet, whose body count was vastly higher than all the unsolved deaths of journalists since Putin took office. In fact the body count was vastly higher for both journalists and biznismen under Yeltsin as David knows. If only the neocons could concern themselves more with the bloodbath on the U.S.-Mexico border than the problems of Pussy Riot maybe we could have a safer country. There is of course too much peer pressure in David’s circles to call PR what they are — performance art freaks whose schtick was likely funded from abroad to create a strategy of tension against the Russian Orthodox Church.
I have great regard for Angelo Codevilla. I see no reason to doubt his report. Stanley Ann Dunham was financed by the Ford Foundation, which often did favors for CIA. As Codevilla states, the CIA from the outset fought fire with fire, sending leftists to tangle with Russian-backed Communists. But it doesn’t change the story. The fact that a leftwinger accepted CIA help, directly or indirectly, doesn’t necessarily mean that he or she did not sincerely hold leftwing views.
As for Putin: I’m not going to parse words. I don’t like the way he does things, but he’s not the reincarnation of Stalin, or an existential threat to the West. As I’ve written in the past, I doubt that anyone could govern Russia except a secret service veteran, because the intelligence services were one of the few institutions in Russia that trained leaders as opposed to toadies. If I were Russian I’d vote for Kasparov rather than Putin. But I’m not, so what I think doesn’t matter much.
Your short essays or article are always very interesting and show you’re a very keen observer and highly read. Now, in this answer you gave, I’m adamantly disappointed with your appreciation, Russia (and China) is a tremendous threat to the West, because the power his hold by the ex-KGB and alike, and Russia is in the last analysis willing and ready to use nuclear bombs, even against the USA. Russia has built and is building huge bunkers everywhere and their new ICBMs are deadlier, quicker than anything the West has. Above all Russia doesn’t care if we bomb Moscow and St. Petersburg, they’ll have incinerated by that time a good dozen of US and a number of EU capitals. Their long term plan isn’t abrogated and I guess the final phase is approaching. Russia and China are working a scissors against the West. Deceit is their game, and patience they’ve plenty.
“Their long term plan isn’t abrogated and I guess the final phase is approaching.”
Um, their long term plan to dissolve into 15 constituent parts, have mild civil wars, go broke, shrink their population and armed forces and … should I go on? I’ve been to these countries: while they have corruption problems, their only real sin is they don’t let the American Civil Service run their countries. Basically, they’re not liberals. Frankly, I see that as a good thing: I need some place to escape to if it gets too bad here.
Good to see clear-headed thinking about Russia at this site. Fully agree with you. I have been saying for the past 10 years that one day we’d be happy to be granted political asylum status in Russia. At first it was a bit of a joke, a slight exageration… not anymore!
David – no further OT discussion on this thread, but this link is worth a read, considering an exchange in 2002 between heralded investor Jim Rogers and a young Russian student at Harvard Business School that became a news story (I personally think it’s poor email etiquette). And how things stand 9 years later, with Jim Rogers living in Singapore teaching his daughters Chinese and investing in VTB’s ag fund while that young Russian is now running his own venture fund at age 38, with Rogers’ money and this young chap’s venture management likely to cross paths again. (That’s of course one of the attractions of Moscow, things happen faster there for young people than they do now in London and New York with the finance boom grinding to a halt, the equivalent to your former position at BOA running their entire research department at Sberbank is a 35-year-old Western educated Russian lady, according to LinkedIn).
http://darussophile.com/2012/09/21/blast-from-the-past-what-jim-rogers-said-about-russia-in-2003/
For what it’s worth, I’m glad our exchanges on this site have been more respectful even in hot button areas like Ron Paul/foreign policy, Russia-Israel, etc. Have a nice weekend.
and more importantly (and perhaps hopefully) to all Spengler fans is this: the reason I bring up Russia so much is that it shows a nation left for dead in cultural and demographic terms can enjoy a respite, if not a lasting revival 9to put it in Biblical terms, see the famous Ezekiel ‘valley of bones’ passage). That bodes well for Japan, or even the even more alleged hopeless cases like Hungary (though Indo-or Chino-Hungarians might become more common), the Baltic countries, etc.
Shabbat shalom.
I am not a conspiracy theorist but – Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn and the Weather Underground hurt the less extreme left with their violence and crazy rhetoric. Bill Ayers did not spend a day in jail and Dohrn only did minimal time. Ther are those who have suggested they were agent provacateurs and it
is certainly within the realm of possibility.
“The Right if you recall had lotsa nice things to say about Augusto Pinochet, whose body count was vastly higher than all the unsolved deaths of journalists since Putin took office.”
I have no love for Pinochet but a few years back, I did some reading to see if he was really as awful as the Left claimed at the time. As far as I could determine, his bitterest Chilean enemies on the Far Left never claimed that he killed more than 300 (or maybe it was 3000?) people. Given the Left’s propensity to exaggerate, I’m assuming that their number is higher than the truth and I’d be astonished if the true number were higher than what they claim.
Even taking the higher number, 3000, and considering Pinochet was in power for roughly 20 years, that’s a pretty low body count compared to Leftist murderers like Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Some say that Mao killed 70 MILLION Chinese and 30 million died in the Great Leap Forward (1959-1962) alone.
Now, even one innocent killed unjustly is a moral crime; I recognize that. But surely 30 million people killed is still somehow dramatically worse than 3 thousand….
Yet to listen to the Leftists, Pinochet was worse than Hitler, Stalin and Mao all rolled into one. What a crock!
There is even a school of thought, with which I agree, that says Chile’s recent years of sound governance would not have been possible without the authoritarian (as opposed to totalitarian) interlude Pinochet represents.
Interlude is the key word.
Everybody knew that the military would turn the country back to democracy with all it’s institutions intact.
Chavez in Venezuela has corrupted each and every institution.
Pinochet’s counter-revolution ended killing about 3,000 people. By comparison, our own civil war (when our population was not all that different than Chile’s in the 1970s and ’80s) ended up killing about 700,000. Our Civil War has been viewed, in retrospect, as a heroic moment in our country’s evolution. Upon overthrowing a Leftwing dictator who has usurped control from the legitimately elected government of Chile, Pinochet instituted civil and economic reforms and, then, he resigned. It was Pinochet that brought the Chicago School of Economics reformers to revamp Chile’s economy and welfare system. They ended up moving Chile up from a third-world to a first-world country. While the same Leftist critics of Pinochet that worship human monsters such as Mao, Stalin or Pol Pot — people who slaughtered their countries’ populations and economies in pursuit of their utopian ideals —, they apparently have no problem wagging their fingers at the (by comparison) minor abuses of Pinochet that freed the country from both political and economic misery. Pinochet’s critics from the Left just cannot be taken seriously. Pinochet may not have been perfect, but he was a national hero.
Yes, and it is not enough to say that Pinochet killed 3000 people and leave it at that. The question remains how many would a leftist revolution have killed if Pinochet had not moved when he did.
I’d heard that those 3000 were responsible for the death of some 300,000.
Pinochet killed the killers. I wish that would happen regularly.
I dont think Pinochet’s up to it anymore.
But as an aside, one’s opinion of Pinochet is a marker of sorts for belonging to the Leftist club. The Decent Lefties are all anti-Pinochet. I guess the plausible deniability of the coming Communist Authoritarian client state and the attendant crimes against humanity gives them a space to operate where they can burnish their Leftwing credentials without embracing indencency themselves.
Once you throw in the towel on Allende and embrace Pinochet, you are kicked out of the Decent Left and are into Neo-Conservative territory.
This is a clear marker between Decent Left and Neo-Con.
Decent Leftists are particularly vocal and enthusiastic about their denunciations of Pinochet and support for Allende….else they would have no fig leaf of respectability on the broader Left.
I have said before that if Obama is re-elected, then we will need an American Pinochet. That’s the best-case scenario. Obama is our Allende.
“…bribes to pay and customs to observe…” Bribes, of course, are paid to government functionaries, community organizers and law enforcement. We have achieved that return to old world tradition. Political contributions in return for contracts (Solyndra et al) aren’t even subtle bribes.
I have more than a little experience in the third world. The ‘little taste’, so common in much of the world is a huge impediment to any kind of development. When I asked locals, both payers and payees, about the culture of corruption, they knew it was wrong and counter productive, but every one did it…the ‘get yours while you can’ attitude prevailed.
I remember reading, years ago, about a leading economics professor in, I believe Peru, who demonstrated this by having his Peruvian students fly to the United State and pull all the permits etc. needed to start up a business. Rarely took more than a few days and a few dollars, from a then helpful (pre- Obama) bureaucracy. They then had to do the same thing in Peru, or any other Latin country, including southern EU…the book was fascinating. Clearly not read in US universities.
If this book was read along with Fernan Braudel’s works on every day life over the centuries, an entirely new way of thinking is possible.
Nah…to easy…to anti-marxian
ta
from the wiki entry: “…Hernando de Soto (born 1941) is a Peruvian economist known for his work on the informal economy and on the importance of business and property rights. He is the president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD), located in Lima, Peru.
[and the book] …
2000, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else…”
and, regarding this post, there is more than one path to becoming a postmodern transnational multi-culturalist. In 2010, I read Harry S. Truman’s memoir shortly after I had read David McCullough’s biography of Truman. I was struck by Truman’s own words about his vision for the United Nations, and wonder what he would say today about the reality. Am certain he would be heartbroken.
Of course, I would rather have a realist in the Oval Office than an unrepentant postmodern transnational multi-culturalist!
Too bad we do not have that choice in 2012.
I see you gave up on TNR, K2K. Noga needs some more work though.
Cheers! Welcome to the Order of the Jedi!
“To be Jedi is to face the truth, and choose.” – Yoda
I totally agree with your support for Fernand Braudel’s monumental works on the rise of the market capitalist economy in the West.
THERE IS THE REPUBLIC…AMERICA…OUR LAND OF FREEDOM. Then, there are our enemies. I hope we can UNITE as AMERICANS to defeat our enemies–then we can “keep talking” about all those other things–social, economic, etc. which SHOULD NOT TAKE PRECEDENCE OVER OUR FREEDOMS.
“FELLOW AMERICANS, CAN WE TALK?”
You may think this a one-sided conversation,
But things are changing so FAST in this our nation
That I now “hear you” through your acts and speech
Perhaps as well or better than if each
Of you were sitting with me now,
Striving to be as cordial as our emotions might allow.
(But our deep feelings should not PREVENT our “talk”.)
To start, might we agree upon “ONE THING”
And that is, in America we may sing
A song of life and love and hope unique
From all other flesh that we may see or seek.
Differences in our births or the trials of our lives
Cannot negate a truth which enemies would disguise.
(We CAN TALK as “Fellow Americans”.)
Of all the times and lands who’ve gone before,
There are FEW, IF ANY who have been given more!
We, thus, are offspring of generations
Whose labors/sufferings created this great nation.
If we cannot admit we are such “heirs”
We will have lost outstretched hands and honest prayers—
(We will have lost the POWER to talk.)
But if honor compels us to concede WE SHARE A DEBT,
Then you and I can hold “discussion” yet,
And seek to find SOME OTHER THING to share,
If honoring each other’s view is something that we dare.
I will admit, I don’t possess superior heart or reason,
To find it easy to offer or accept an “Olive Leaf” this season.
(How hard it is TO TALK, PEACEFULLY!)
I strive to dig DEEP within my meager soul,
To hold back fear and bitterness and to CONTROL
That savage anger which now so threatens my life
That, if given free rein, might begin such sorry strife—
The likes of which were only seen before,
When forefathers CREATED AND KEPT OPEN freedom’s door.
(Self Control allows us to TALK.)
In nations far away which have labored less,
We see self-anointed “leaders” who possess
Only the arts of fraud, and jealousy, and strife—
They do not shrink to demand we give our life
Either as vassals of their own vengeful plans
Or victims, and “sacrifices” to their commands.
(Would we allow this, because we COULD NOT TALK?)
BUT IF WE HAVE “COMMON ORIGINS”, then the sounds
Of despots and warlords now heard all around
Should COMPEL US to join JUST AS OUR FOREBEARS did
THEY PUSHED ASIDE THE DIFFERENCES BY WHICH THEY LIVED,
AND SOUGHT, EVEN DEMANDED, THE FREEDOM TO DECIDE
HOW THEY, AS AMERICANS, WOULD LIVE OR DIE!
(Cannot we too, TALK AND ACT AS THEY DID?)
Renewed in hope I see the miracle may yet repeat again,
Out very different souls can yet agree to fight and win
Not the despot’s “privilege”, but NATURE’S RIGHT to choose
How we shall live our lives; and whether we will win or lose,
The liberties which cost such good blood before,
TO THIS END, I WILL “AGREE” WITH YOU ONCE MORE!
(And winning freedom, WE CAN TALK SOME MORE!)
BROTHER, SISTER AMERICANS, LET US TALK!
I’m scanning your rhyme to the melody of Atmosphere’s ‘Woman With the Tattooed Hands’ and it works surprisingly well:
http://www.metrolyrics.com/the-woman-with-the-tattooed-hands-lyrics-atmosphere.html
Caps lock is not cruise control to awesome.
You could have written something nice and witty but no one will ever know because everyone stops reading when they see the caps.
Not everyone by a long shot and the caps perform a vital function here above though in most situations you’re right. Is italic available here? Let’s try. But even if there is, the poet has his own ways. There are rarely good political poems. This one is surprisingly effective. It has a ring, like Whitman.
I’m impressed with the weight and urgency, the sense of speech here. It rings like Whitman, like Duncan. Rhyming poetry is so often forced and political poems almost invariably so. I haven’t read such a good political poem since Parnell’s sister’s work.
I particularly like the emphasis on the idea of rights existing by nature. I have too often heard it said the Constitution gives, guarantees or protects rights whereas in fact it prohibits Congress from making any law limiting those rights.
You almost hit the nail at the end. Obama’s irrelevant. He’s barely governing. But Valerie Jarrett is another matter. She’s the real acting president, and you’re right that her formative experience has made her all the things that D’Sousa said about Obama, and worse.
how does it help to get them both out of the white house?
By my reckoning, the emerging postmodern liberalism of Columbia University circa 1982 … explains Obama pretty well.
Yeah, but it didn’t stick 200% and permanently to every student who passed through then.
it’s an honest question, but you either don’t have an answer, or it’s beyond your ken, so ponder it in silence
who cares what he thinks, when you know he’s out to kill you
re: Item: The African slave trade instituted by the Portuguese and later the British
Question: Since neither the Portugese nor the British had large armies in Africa at the time of the slave trade, how did they manage to “get” the Africans? In other words: Who sold them into the hands of the Portugese and British?
To reiterate;
1. African tribal wars invariably ended with the winners enslaving the losers.
2. The winners sold slaves who were “excess to requirements” to Muslim slave traders, who were themselves following customs they inherited from the “pagans” they now affect to despise, principally the Persians and original Egyptians. (NB; the latter were not Arabs, never mind Zahi Hawass’ claims.)
3. The Arabs, in their turn, sold slaves to the Europeans, who were themselves continuing Roman customs on the subject.
The “triangle trade” across the Atlantic consisted of trading textiles to Arab slave factors on the West African coast for black slaves obtained by black tribes in the interior. These slaves were taken to sugar plantations in the Caribbean, where they were exchanged for sugar. The sugar went home to Europe, to be sold, and part of the money went to buy textiles to… sell to Arab slave factors. (See “never-ending cycle of pointless activity”.)
When slaves were no longer available from Africa, mainly due to the United State Navy and Royal Navy from the 1830s on, the “triangle trade” collapsed. It was a one-trick pony system, that was made sustainable only by the availability of cheap (slave) labor.
My pet peeve is that modern day revisionist historians and “activists” blame the United States alone for black African slavery.
Ahem. The triangle trade had little to do with us; it was a European, Caribbean colonial system. It stopped when we extended our Navy’s responsibilities from wrecking the (Arab) Barbary pirate kingdoms, who enslaved Europeans and Americans whenever they got the chance, and demanded tribute besides, to cutting the slave trade off at its (Arab) source on the West African coast. Yes, the Royal Navy was involved, too, but we were the first to make it official policy backed up by naval guns.
Furthermore, we were the only country that fought a civil war to abolish slavery. Yes, there were other factors, but abolition was the primary one. If not for that one issue, there wouldn’t have been a bloody war. (“Bloody” is here used in both the British colloquial and concrete descriptive senses.)
“Activists” are conspicuously silent on both the self-destructive behaviors of African tribal cultures, as well as the culpability of the Arab Muslim culture, in the entire slavery issue. Which is why I give those who promote “white” or “colonial” guilt, and/or demand “reparation” for slavery, short shrift. They should start by presenting a bill to the Islamic world, at the very least.
Oh, and by the way, “cheap intoxicants” may have been the reason for sugar being popular in Europe, but it had little to do with them in England. The cheap tipple of the era was gin, and you don’t use sugar to make it in England;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gin
Sugar in England mainly went in tea, or the “black liquor” that by the 1600s had come to England from the Ottoman Empire. We call it “coffee”, and it, too, originated in Africa. The Great Rift Valley in what is now the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to be exact, although it was first actually cultivated a bit further north, by the Ethiopians.
clear ether
eon
Ironically, Barack Obama has no verifiable slave ancestors; yet both his paternal ancestry (African Muslim) and maternal ancestry (white Southerner) could easily have been associated with the commerce of slavery as traders or owners. To whom shall Barack owe “reparations”?
Re: The US Civil War. Not so long ago islamic apologists tried to convince America and the non-islamic world that Jihad was really about the ‘Internal War’ to rid oneself of evil/ sin. What is interesting about all of this is that the United States is the only nation to ever fight an internal war largely dealing with an internal sin. All other civil wars were about changing the power structures.
The only real national Jihad ever fought was in this country.
ta (hyperbole intended)
Thank! You!, eon……for writing that so concisely, and tersely.
I don’t know if I agree, but you do make an interesting argument. It’s sort of a freudian blame it on Obama’s Margaret Mead mother for his childhood’s, pre-rational, identification with the third world. I think he was identifying with his mother’s idea of the third world, which I suspect is just as problematic as Margaret’s treatment of girls Coming Of Age In Samoa while she was living the third world experience. But regardless of how his ideological or existential roots came about, you’re right about his future behavioral performance. Come to think of it, didn’t someone called Alex Haley do the getting back to your roots trip too?
the source of his rage, how will that knowledge help to vote him out of office
It helps predict what he will think, and do. That is always helpful.
cheers
eon
For what it is worth, there is a blogger at PJMedia, Richard Fernandez, who lived and spent time in one of those epic third world toxic trash heaps….he has occasionally written about them on his blog. Additionally, his excellent first book, “No Way In” (sorry don’t know how to get italics here), has some scenes based there – quite harrowing….Wretchard, incidentally, has a masters from Harvard in I think Public Policy…
Mr. Goldman, your writing is great – beautiful even, a pleasure to read and think upon. Thanks.
I have to agree with you, David.
I also believe that it was Obama’s early years, his bond with his mother and the longing for his father that formed and shaped the world-view we are witnessing today. His subsequent schooling and especially the people he worked and associated with were all by choice.
But I would submit that it was his father, even though absent for most of his life, who was the dominant force in the molding of who Obama is today. I believe that it’s no small accident that Obama chose to devote an entire book about the dreams from his father.
In parental relationships, it has also been observed and noted that quite a high number of atheists have had troubled relationships with their fathers which they were never able to reconcile, even while endlessly yearning for validation and acceptance which would never come.
Never in the history of our country have we elected a person so far removed from the vision, the values and the principles of our founding fathers.
What does atheism have to do with it? He’s either a Christian or a Muslim, not an atheist. In any case, I don’t buy this argument that “atheists have issues with their father”. It smells like Christian apologetic bullshit to me, trying to imply that anyone who rejects theism has some kind of mental illness.
Wasn’t the third world poor before capitalism and colonialism? Was it really better for most people 400 years ago? Do you look at the life of a peasant centuries ago through rose colored glasses?
Bill, spot on. My fraternal grandmother, a crusty old socialist, was frequently heard to say “Good old days like hell, did you ever spend 12 hours a day raising a garden and hoping the crop didn’t fail just to eat? I like grocery stores.”
For the record, as the wife of a US Navy sailor, she raised and canned vegetables all over the country (including Hawaii in the ’30s) until her final year at 89. Voted D just to ‘cancel’ grandpa’s R vote. Her work was always practical food supply, never, ever vanity veg always staples.
ta
Today’s Washington Examiner article points out that obama lived in luxury in Indonesia. He was hardly living on the economy. His interaction with it was approximately the same as his interaction with “Black folks” in Chicago, except much less intense.
Maybe anticolonialism is what drives him, but a lifetime of marxist mentors is more likely.
However, it doesn’t matter. It’s clear he doesn’t have an American bone in his body. Other than being a world class liar, and intricately related to it, his greatest skill may be disguising what he really believes. I’m waiting for the moment when his lip finally curls on camera when someone, hopefully Romney, praises this great country and the enormous good it has done for all of mankind. I’m praying it happns during the debates.
If this conniving, angry, obsessed American-hating megalomaniac slithers his way into 4 more years of power, America will never recover and the optimal case may then be centuries of Dark Ages. The more likly scenario is nuclear war.
If I read Spengler’s column correctly, Valerie Jarrett left Iran when
she was five. Just how much can an American who left a 3rd World country
when she was five remember enough of life in Iran when she’s much older
to adequately advise an American president about 3rd World affairs?
My guess is that Jarrett didn’t have a lot of contact with ordinary
Iranians her own age. She’s not a Middle East specialist, she’s a
Chicago hack. Obama values the judgment of a woman who left Iran
at the tender age of five? Let’s get real.
Yes, and didn’t Jarrett make a lot of money building public housing in Chicago
after she left the office of Mayor Daley?
Yup. The stench is arresting,
Idealist and crook aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact they often go together.
Boys ache for a dad.
He smokes a lot of high grade sticky icky.
He attended the most elite prep school in Hawaii.
His mother’s nickname in HS was “Anarchist Annie”.
Grandpa Dunham delivered young Barack to Frank Davis for Soul Brother lessons from the old school chicago commie.
He came from a family of cooky communists.
…and the commies of that day were steeped in anti-colonialist doctrines.
I saw 2016. I agree with Dinesh about the psychological effects of absentee paternalism on Obama regarding his father & the myth perpetuated by his mother. The myth was that Obama Sr was a great man who had great ideals to help the poor. In reality Sr was a 2-bit, drunken, bureaucratic, & polygamist hack from a 3rd world country who espoused ideas of wealth redistribution.
With a nutjob mother who divorced husband #2 because he was starting to embrace capitalism, (The man got a job w/an American oil company so his family, ie, nutjob mother, Obama, & daughter didn’t have to live in poverty.)Obama didn’t have a chance to have a normal American life.
And who says mothers don’t have the true authority in the family!
I too saw ’2016′. If anything, I think the movie may have helped assert just how influential parents truly are to their children throughout their entire life, whether present or not.
As usual, your articles show a very high level of intelligence, intellectual ability and political passion. Whether America is actually the last, best hope of mankind I am not sure. Surely it is the best of the large countries. I would actually argue, given the insanity around Israel and the current dangerous environment, that the Israeli experiment is just as impressive. [In no way does that make living here nearly as comfortable as a similar existence in the US, of course].
To the article itself, it feels like a new and interesting game of inside-baseball to find just the right prescription or psychoanalysis for Barack Obama. Marxist ideologue? Muslim Brother? Teed-off quasi-Third World Hawaiian of privilege who has spent his life getting back at his overbearing white grandmother? I am not sure that it matters. Analyzing him has turned into an intellectual hobby and pastime.
How many of the undecided or swing voters have heard of Dinesh D’Souza?
Should any of them, including those with academic degrees and intellectual yearnings, care about what happened at Columbia in 1982?
No, the man should be voted out of office, and then forgotten as quickly as possible, precisely so the United States can return to being close to the image of it that you envision.
Agreed.
[....Only Slightly Off-Topic.....I've often wondered when our Chameleon Obama returned that bust of Winston Churchill to the Brit Embassy......if he ever knew that Churchill had an American mother.......not that that would've changed anything, but I like to mention it from time to time to rag the Brit twits.
I got my own taste of ye colonialism while I lived in Kowloon Tong during the 1960's...the HK Brits really were stuffy there, so I can, with a clandestine wink, agree with Obama on that sole point.]
Mr. Goldman’s thumbnail sketch of early trade wars is why I wait with bated breath for his articles.
He is one of the very, very few who actually listens to the other side.
Mr (although I prefer Dr) Goldman, I read a lot of anger in this article. Why is that? The world is what it is. Do we have a responsibility to correct those misdeeds that occur in EVERY third world culture. I am one of those very lucky ones who happened to be born outside the US. Lucky because my mother as a widow moved heaven and earth to return to the US with five children (ages 4 through 14). My brothers and I sometimes wonder how things might have turned out had we stayed. I gotta tell you that regardless of how well it might have turned out, it would not have been as good as here.
To me, Obama is a classic example of the nature or nurture argument.
I believe that Obama’s influences (his mother, his grandparents, Frank Davis, etc.) were more responsible for his view of the world today than whatever National Geographic moments he might have had in Indonesia. You throw onto that pile of persuasion a few years of Occidental College and Columbia University and you have the perfect student that has all of the answers to the wrong test.
Had he stayed in Djakarta, he wouldn’t have been happy there either. Except that the risk of getting put up against a wall would have been greater. Obama should get down on his hands and knees and thank God that he was able to return to the US.
I recently watch an older series call “The Ascent of Man”. One of the fascinating aspects of it was for each of the major societal innovations, the host made a point of showing and describing a group of people who still lived that way.
One of the people he visited were nomadic herders. Every year they crossed a swollen river. For the boys about to become men, it was their coming of age herding the sheep across the ford. For the elderly or infirm, it was the end; they sat down on the bank and waited to die as the rest of the herd moved by.
That image, of the grandmothers and grandfathers simply waiting to die because there wasn’t enough to spare to get them across one river, or to even bother to build a bridge of the river that they have to cross every single year struck me. The only way out of that for them is to progress beyond the nomad life, to become settled farmers or ranchers who can keep the heavy equipment needed to deal with the obstacles that the world puts in our way.
The only way out of poverty is progress: form law abiding government, get education, build industry and free markets. Those problems have already been solved; nobody needs to live by herding sheep across swollen rivers anymore.
They’re nomads. Who’s going to stay behind for a year and build the bridge? Oh yeah, gotta quarry the stone for it somewhere and haul it to the site. Add a few more years. Meanwhile, how are the bridge builders going to get fed as they build that bridge? And then, when the bridge is complete and its builders return to their nomadic tribe and lifestyle, who will be guarding the bridge against vandals?
On the path of progress toward civilization, the first 50,000 years are the hardest.
Obama’s secret of staying above water: A mass media that inserts a breathing tube whenever he needs it. Of course, they’re traitors. And should be dealt with as such. But there’s a larger concern. Obama talks about mourning the dead Americans in Libya, then proceeds to run off to party with hip hop numbskulls in Las Vegas. Is that mourning? Is that what an American President does in a crisis? I don’t think so.
Then today Obama, peppered with questions on Univision, decides to again try to lie his way out of a tight situation by blaming the middle east on fire on a video; after his administration finally had admitted last weeks’ assaults on American soil were terrorist caused. Jay Carney, Obama’s Press Secretary, even said that fact is self evident; the attacks were premeditated and terrorist caused. Yet, the President disputed it, like he’s in his own little world. Made safe, of course by a main stream media that won’t report Obama’s lies. Or question the lack of security on Sept. 11.
Do we have a mole in the White House? Is Obama to the core an authentic American hating President of the United States? Or is the little man simply delusional? The country may be on the wrong track, but do we have a President whose off his rocker?
If Mitt McCain had a smart communications team, Obama would be toast.
But the way things look, with the traitorous media poisoning the well, and with Mitt seemingly afraid to attack or, more likely, without the people who know how to wage a campaign war, this imitation President who thinks nothing of desecrating the flag is in a good position to spend the night of the Nov. 6 election drinking champagne, which will give us more four years to chew on our fingernails down to the quick and pray the world doesn’t, in the meantime, come apart at the seams.
We have a lot of mortal enemies out there.
Here’s my take on things.
Obama is one of them.
is what he is. You know it, I know, and maybe even David Goldman knows it.
My question is, who cares what he thinks, when we know he’s out to kill us?
I don’t see Obama as being shaped by his parents at all. I think his biggest influence was Frank Marshall Davis. Something is wrong with a grandparent who would have let that hideous, evil man around his grandson as Mr. Dunham did by encouraging that relationship. Obama had quite the dysfunctional family from birth, but I see Obama as an opportunist. He never had to sacrifice or go to bed hungry. Look at those pics of him as a child – chubby, well dressed, nicely groomed. Maybe his heart ached from the abandonment by his parents, but he was never poor. He set out to perfect a way to get elected as the first black president. He’s chasing the adoration, the cheer of the crowd. He “communicated a story” as he likes to say, and he found a way to sell it. He’s in the history books and will have all the fame and fortune that buys. Now he can move on, live as a rock star and play golf in the oceanside villa being bought for him in Hawaii. If he really wanted to change the world he wouldn’t have married a woman who channels the spirit of Imelda Marcos. These Obamas are heartless shams and we all reap the destruction of their shallowness. My heart aches for our country.
You wish you “were a Communist”??! THEY CAUSED the miserable conditions, you imbecile.
Slavery “instituted” by the Portuguese and British?!? Umm…chump…the African barbarians had THAT market “instituted” for CENTURIES. The Portuguese and British were merely big customers for a time. It goes on to this day over there.
Ed, you miss the point. The desire to become a revolutionary, marxist or whatever, resides in the strong desire to right the wrongs causing so much misery. I hold that the motivation produced by so many -isms of terror and exploitation resides initially in the overwhelming desire to change it all. In the process of changing, the changers become the new oppressors. Marxism has had such an appeal because it seems to remedy “real” suffering and that appeals to young idealists. You must see such misery to believe it.
If so, then why wasn’t Mother Theresa a communist, rather than a Catholic nun?
She certainly wanted to right wrongs and lift up the poor and downtrodden. She chose to do it by Jesus’ methods, rather than, say, Lenin’s or Trotsky’s.
I believe you are both missing the point. People are attracted to totalitarian movements either because;
1. They see themselves as weak, and want to be part of a group that will protect them, and take what they want from others- and give it to them.
or
2. They are convinced of their own superiority, and see the movement as a way of forcing the world to bow to them and give them the power they are convinced they are entitled to, by virtue of their self-perceived superiority.
The former type are called “followers”, and/or “cannon fodder” when the shooting starts.
The latter type are called “commissars”, “zampolits” (“political officers” in Russian), “Party Secretaries”, and (in the other form of totalitarian socialism)”Il Duce” or “Mein Fuhrer”.
Or, you could call at least one “President Obama”.
It’s really just that simple, as per Occam’s Razor. Never mistake conceit and narcissism for any sort of concern for others. The first two named, which The One possesses in abundance, do not leave any room for the third.
To do so would require Him to acknowledge that there is another person who is at least almost as important as He is. And to a narcissist, that is flatly impossible.
It also means that no matter what others may believe, The One is not a Muslim. (Yes, he lied about that, too.) Nor is he a Christian. Both beliefs would require him to believe in a higher power than himself, and that simply does not fit into His mental universe.
The only thing He worships- is Himself. The best match for this is found farther back in history than the 20th Century. It can be found in the elitist mindsets of several rather unpleasant “classical” figures.
Namely, Darius the Great, Xerxes, and Plato, or (a bit later on) Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero.
Socialism is not a “belief” in this case, simply a tool.
The only belief The One holds, is in power. His.
clear ether
eon
Absolutely perfect analysis of Obama. A pathological narcissist.
Yet Goldman is still right.
How does a criminal sell himself to the crowd?
By promising to right the wrongs.
alzaebo;
Correct. Remember, the word “tyrant” come from a Greek root. In the original, it referred to a dictator who was raised to power by public acclaim- and then turned on the very public that put him there to begin with.
(I didn’t add the adjective “brutal” to “dictator” because I don’t believe any other kind has ever existed, or ever will. “Benign dictator” is an oxymoron.)
Or, as Adam Smith said,
cheers
eon
Some idealists acquire the POWER they need to establish CONTROL, which allows them to impose ORDER, which is maintained by FORCE.
spot on eon.
Great post.
Commu, marx, royal, social, stat…ists deserve no credit whatsoever. They are either pickpockets or power-mad tyrants. The tiny sliver of foolish librarian types who may actually believe the koolaid is so tiny that they are insignificant.
The problem with quoting “Dreams” is that you may be quoting Bill Ayers. We may as well quote Obama’s teleprompter. Sure he agrees with it, but we do not exactly know how sincerely.
Same can be said for assuming that BHO Sr. is his “real” father. “Dreams from my Real Father” makes a pretty compelling case that Frank Marshall Davis is Obama’s real father.
If FMD is BHO’s real father, then this entire anti-colonialist meme is bunk.
BHO is just a garden variety Black Communist…dangerous AND banal.
I am reading the comments with interest. In many cases I have the opinion that the intent of the article has not been fully grasped. In some ways I sense that D’Souza himself has not fully comprehended or, at least, adequately formulated his brilliant insight. It is precisely the importance of this “insight” that so many comments have failed to grasp, though Goldman has made a mighty effort to explain it with his own experience with the misery of the 3rd World. What is at stake with the D’Souza thesis? INSIGHT into the motivational deep-structure of Obama that explains globally his activities! Let me attempt an explication.
In 1943, the US military pulled in some 20+ psychologists and asked them to psychoanalyze Hitler, i.e., to construct, so-to-speak, a psychogramme. What makes Hitler tick per se, viz., what MOTIVATES him globally? The result was amazing, even some of his future activities, including suicide, were predicted. If only the German voters in 1932 had had access to this psychological analysis, if only Hindenburg (who not all too willingly appointed Hitler as Chancellor) had had access to such “insight”. If only!! There was no D’Szousa at that time! No normal German citizen in 1933 wanted another world war! NONE!! WW I was enough!!! But they elected a “Führer” whose psychological deep-structure that motivated him to seek war, indeed, a war of annihilation of whole peoples!!!! The value of D’Souza’s insight is that it reveals the underlying motivational deep-structure of Obama for us NOW and, ominously, for the FUTURE. (Note: I am not equating Obama morally with Hitler. But both were/are forceful and narcistic “leaders”, viz., “Führer” with enormous political power whose ego’s personalizes a style of leadership. [Obama is the Change!] Herein lies THE parallel.) What underlies the “anti-colonialism” that Obama absorbed FROM the dreams of his father and in what way is this “anti-colonialism” relevant for today? When one thinks about it, Obama is not overtly carrying out a crusade against colonialism. I shall dare to elaborate on what I derive from D’Souza’s nightmare-Obama. It will be of necessity superficial.
What D’Souza has revealed is a neo-gnostic form of manichaenism. Mani was a religious “leader” in the 3rd Century AD who held that there is an absolute antithesis (viz., war) between good and evil relative to which he, Mani, proferred the “gnosis” (knowledge or coGNition) of salvation, one leading to a conflictual victory (as in a war) over evil. What D’Souza, stemming from the 3rd World, and Goldman with his telling of his experiences there have done is to describe for us the quite REAL misery upon which a manichaen structure can be grafted and, thereby, given contemporary relevance. What are some of the features of a world of suffering interpreted manichaenly?
In anti-colonianism, the bearer (singlar) of evil (= the colonial power) simply extracts from the bearers (plural) of good (= the masses of the colonialized) their wealth which, in turn, becomes the wealth, wickedly acquired, that supplies to the bearers their well-being. “Liberation” of a colony is not achieved just by the obtainment of political independence. No, “liberation” as justice demands, so to speak, a return of said wealth. In other words, the colonizing power must have wealth extracted and returned to the many from which it was taken. Here is where, if I understand D’Souza, Obama wants to right wrongs by reducing the wrong doer to what s/he would be without the wickedly obtained wealth from the many. Obama’s anti-Americanism arises from his father’s vision of reducing the colonializer (or its surrogate called America) to a lower level of existence–a matter of “the right thing to do”. This manichaen structure informs Obama’s motivational pychogramme. But there is more.
Mani viewed human history as a “(hi)story of salvation” in which its dynamics begin with an original oneness that has been divided, leading to a conflictual and hostile interaction between good vs evil, all of which leads “salvationally” to a reuniting of the antithetically divided into a new wholeness or collectivity. I have introduced “collectivity” (a modern term) because I found the EXACT same manichaen deep-structure in Karl Marx’s theorizing (which I have examined from his youthful poetry to his mature “Kapital” in two books). Individuality is subsumed into and has being only as a function of the restored collectivity, viz., oneness. Conflictually irreconcialable duality is restored as salvational oneness. What Marx accomplished was to translate the manichaen deep-structure into socio-ECONOMIC terms and with, alas, enormous effects–>to this very day. The economic aspects of Marx were “theologically” taken up, particularly in Catholic countries of So. America, in the form of “Liberation Theology” and reached America as “BLACK Liberation Theology”. Anti-colonialism fuses conceptually with a marxist analysis and thus finds an expression in America in the very church attended by Obama for so many years. I recall that Obama’s mentor for some 9 years was Frank Davis, literally a card-carrying communist. I supect that the manichaen deep-structure of the “anti-colonialism” from Obama’s father became transformed conceptually for him into a marx-ified thought process and underpinned his avid Marxism as a young student and his seeking out marxist professors. — At his point I have gone beyond D’Souza, without rejecting his thesis. What I find inadequate in D’Souza’s insight is a transition from an anti-colonialism-dream into conceptual terms relevant to a non-colonial country and to a non-colonial period. (This lack of transition underlies some respectable criticism of D’Souza.) The immersion of Obama into marxism, and by a communist, affords me with the interpretative tool to understand the grand translation. In no way does marxism contradict the neo-manichaenism underlying the dreams FROM Obama’s father, rather marxism adapts it to a modern framework of analysis.
A few features of neo-manicheanism: ONE>many, COLLECTIVE>individuals, STATE CAPITALISM>free market production, MASSIVE WELFARE-ISM>individual responsiblity, REDISTRIBUTING WEALTH>individual producing it, COLLECTIVE ORGANIZATION>spontaneous groupings in civil society and more. The same manichaen antithesis, resolved by returning to the ONE, resides in the motivational deep-structure of Obama. (As Obama said theologically, there is no individual salvation but within the collective.) To test my analysis, I suggest reading Stanley Kurtz’s “Spreading Wealth. How Obama Is Robbing The Suburbs To Pay For The Cities”. In 2009, even with a D’Souza interpreation, one could not have predicted the subsumption of the suburbs into the cities during a second term. Nevertheless, Kurtz’s telling analysis can be seen as a prediction of said coming undertaking, a prediction grounded in Obama’s “anti-colonial” dreams from his father. Even if the psychogramme of 1943 had been available in 1932, no one in the Germany of 1933 could have predicted a massive attack upon Poland in 1939 (not even Hitler himself). However, after Hitler’s absorption of the Sudenten-Germans in 1937 and then swallowing the whole country by force, one could have predicted a war against Poland if Hitler had seriously indicated (as he did) his intent to return German speaking Danzig in 1937 on. The GLOBAL motivational structure was there. Similarly, the anti-colonial impulse (as I have interpreted it) behind Obama’s motivatinal deep-structure renders Kurtz’s prediction of re-urbanizing by a second term Obama to be plausible. Whatever else Obama might do will, I PREDICT, be plausibly derived from the neo-manichaenism of the “dreams from” his father.
Well, you certainly justified your “Professor” title with your piece. I mean, who writes stuff like “Conflictually irreconcialable duality is restored as salvational oneness.”?
Anyway, I beg to diverge. Obama’s anti-colonialism exists, but it is an affectation similar to his “negro dialect”, which he most certainly did not learn in Indonesia or Hawaii and whose adoption was a concsious political decision on his part. But Obama’s anti-colonialism is merely an extension of his underlyng psychopathology, to whit, self-loathing.
Obama, as most liberals, suffers one of the commonest of human psychic ills (hatred of self), only more severely than most. His chaotic, fatherless, biracial childhood, squirrelly and promiscuous mother, dislocation to Indonesia with a foreign stepfather, and eventual rejection by his mother and banishment to be raised by his grandparents created a festering, oozing wound on his soul. His mentoring and likely sexual abuse by Frank Marshall Davis sealed the deal. Self loathing degrades the importance of the individual and celebrates the “other” (collective). The self-loather thus rejects not only himself but, in ever expanding spheres, his own culture, religion, and nation. This explains the leftist’s hatred of Christianity but (otherwise) inexplicable fondness for Islam, a religion of “others”.
The glaring gap in D’Souza’s theory is that if it explains Obama at all (it does, but only tangentially) it fails entirely to explain the myriad other statists that infest our government. They all share Obama’s collectivist ideology but not his anti-colonial “story”. Obama never knew his father and learned nothing from him. Obama’s adopted anti-colonialism was created by he, himself as a young man (and given literary voice by Bill Ayers) to further his political ambitions.
You hesitate to compare Obama with Hitler, but you shouldn’t. Their “psychogramme” is shockingly similar. Their troubled childhoods resulted in narcissistic but insecure megalomaniacal adults, aching for the power that would be the antidote to their inner feelings of worthlessness and powerlessness. Hitler’s socialist utopia, the Third Reich, is analogous to Obama’s yet-unnamed post-American dream world. Obama is every bit as dangerous as Hiter.
WWwwoooooooooooOO! Gasp!
re:…..”“Conflictually irreconcialable duality is restored as salvational oneness.”?
Thank goodness somebody mentioned the likely sexual abuse by Davis.
I rather believe Grampa was selling the kids as ‘honeypots’.
Happens to be the root of rage in the buggery-prone Muslim world as well.
Most of the many lesbians I’ve known are that way because of molestation by mom’s welfare boyfriend.
And they hire their own, dominating our increasingly hostile and alienated bureaucracies.
15. scottK’s comment about atheist’s difficulty with fathers is quite so; my dad was shot down in front of me by police when I was 2, and I can’t imagine a ‘heavenly father’. Never could, not even as a child.
The structues of modernity are shattering a very great deal of the old world.
Hard to predict what will come- all of our models are for a different physical environment.
From farm villages to factory cities to decentralized Web. Toffler’s ‘Third Wave was so prescient- he predicted the effects of the Internet a decade before it was realized.
between the two WW, the Nazis had time to refine Berneys’ doctrine on monitoring the mobs opinion for their own agenda? A spirit of revenge was cultivated among the army, and scapegoats were designed to the people vindicte, the Jews and the French.
http://open.salon.com/blog/rw005g/2010/08/24/propaganda_part_i_bernays_and_goebbels
Buckeyman, thank you for your thoughtful remarks. First a note about my “professorial” mode of expression. Any discussion of a GLOBAL nature requires abstractions. When space is short, said abstractions can be dauntingly compressed–particularly to those who do not play the game. The offending sentence was, I hope, grammatically correct. It would take a few pages to explain it beyond the context in which it is to be found. So, forgive me, but daunting formulations were demanded at times. Also, I have spent30+ years of my life in Germany and the German language has subverted the simplicity (ha!)of English as German can well deal with such entangled formlations. But there is a lesson here for those daunted by my words. Do not underestimate the motivational power that such abstract thinking with contorted grammar can generate. Try reading Hegel who begat Marx who has inspired endless leftists and you might get a feel for what compressed grammar can provoke. Obama spent a good deal of his life in universities hanging around with prof. types. At times I have the impression that Obama’s procrastinations stem from “professorial” thinking. He has trouble making up his mind. So do many professors. It is a professional hazard.
A for you weirdly abstraction prone sentence does not justify a reply. (My first six words just written evince German syntax so that you may experience my linguistic problem. It sounds natural to me.) Your criticism of D’Souza is understandable, indeed, shared by me. What I have sought to do is to focus upon the neo-gnostic manichaen deep-structure implied in the anti-colonialism of Obama’s father FROM whom he derives his dreams, viz. global vision. This vision is shared, willy/nilly, by those on the left whose thinking is tainted by marxistic thought, directly by reading or trickle-down-like during the process of education. There is a transition between the neo-manichaen structure in papa Obama’s anti-colonialism and a marxistic conceptualization of said manichaenism, one that allows the “dream” to be applied to problems beyond colonianism. By utilizing–and only in an abbreviated manner–Mani and his “-ism” of the day (with influence for centuries) I sought to bring out the thought pattern, viz., conceptual deep-structure that underlies also Marxism. If I am correct, Obama has such leftists as his political cronies because he finds in them thought patterns congenial with his father’s dreams. So, what is of importance about D’Souza’s anylsis?
D’Souza has sought to undercover, using Obama’s OWN words and voice, just what the anti-colonial manichaenism of Obama Sr. came to mean for Obama, supplying Obama with THE vision for his life. D’Souza has constructed a pychogramme which offers a GLOBAL explanation of the motivational structures underlying the way Obama thinks and what he does and whom he selects for his administration. It, no more than the Hitler psychogramme of 1943, predicts concrete acts. (The pychological development of Hitler was not that of Obama, though the meglomania of both are similar results.) D’Souza’s thesis does allow one to understand the direction in which Obama has taken us and to estimate what this direction will mean for a second term. In this context, I suggested Kurtz’s book as the re-urbanization plans of Obama evidence his preference for collective over individual organization. Your criticism of D’Souza has its value, alas, it misses the point of the explansion of said thesis that I undertook–be it with such compression of grammar.
Manichaen/Marxist “Individuality is subsumed into and has being only as a function of the restored collectivity, viz., oneness. Conflictually irreconcialable duality is restored as salvational oneness.”
Therefore, either individuality does not exist or it needs to be exterminated. Whichever and regardless, Obama does not have it: he does not have a free thought [or "free will"] capacity, endowed with the power to look at and evaluate itself – its own thoughts – and ask, “What’s wrong with what I’m thinking?” Obama is the Charismatic Leader of many others with the same defect. As usual, the result is a homicidal-suicidal “Religion” or Cult.
Great column, David. Just yesterday, on PJ Media’s other current D’Souza oriented thread, I said that Obama’s book should have been titled “Dreams From My Mother.” His mother was clearly the source of his early indoctrination, even if she promoted the heroic nature of his biological father’s ideals in his mind. Obama’s strong negative feelings about his mother as an adult (shunning her at the time of her death) does not change the fact that she had a lasting influence. The African “story” is just part of Obama’s uniqueness, but is in no way a requirement for anti-American attitudes found in innumerable college leftists. But being fatherless and motherless in Hawaii, with Frank Marshall Davis as a primary male role model also reinforces. Obama may be (or have been) more amenable to pure Stalinist Communism than a “typical” Marxist American idiot. For those who had mothers less committed, and no Uncle Frank, well, Alinsky, Chompsky, Zinn and Marx and all the credulous college professors who admire them, are still enough to do the trick.
Well, I guess. The thing is I was at Columbia at the same time, when Said came and they almost brought in Stanley Fish, and to say the environment had no influence on his thinking is strange. Also, to understand how Obama thinks about America and the Third World, you have to read Howard Zinn and you have to read “Empire.” These are theories of being, not experiences. Yes, Obama saw the poverty first-hand, and it must of affected him–he’s not made of stone–but his concept of how it came into being is pure faculty lounge.
We all get struck by different things as we read. I for one have never read the Obama auto hiagraphies, but this quote interested me (from above)
” And yet for all that poverty, there remained in their lives a discernible order, a tapestry of trading routes and middlemen, bribes to pay and customs to observe, the habits of a generation played out every day beneath the bargaining and the noise and the swirling dust. It was the absence of such coherence that made a place like Altgeld so desperate, I thought to myself.”
Basically what he has described in the ‘tapestry of trading routes and middlemen’ with bribes(taxes?) and customs (common law?) is a regulated nominally free market. AND then says that an area of Chicago is despirate because it lacks that. Words beyond these written to describ my observation fail me.
He’s not talking about a market, but about the way traditional society provides order to life. That is not a trivial point. No-one can live without tradition and invent a life ex nihilo. How many of us succeed in integrating traditional and modernity? For us Modern Orthodox Jews, it’s a challenge, but not impossible. Islam never has succeeded nor in my view will succeed. Globalization disrupts traditional society. The materialistic West does not provide an alternative. So the anti-colonial view blames the West.
David, you have touched upon a theme dear to my brain and ultimately to my heart. How does one (individually and socially, e.g., a religious group) come to terms with “modernity” which gives all appearance of being secular to the exclusion of religiosity. I am not writing abot laws (though the circumcision problem in Germany evinces a possible legal curtailment of the practices of “Modern Orthodox Judaism”, a movement deriving from MODERN secular views demanding social realization), rather about the “modern” social ambient in which we all find ourselves and without which we cannot live. I am being quite Burkean here. The sociologist Peter Berger (evidently a Protestant of sorts) has dedicated much insightful theory to the problem of modernity and its secularizing pressures. Berger’s analysis does not leave me with excessive hope. At times I think that the self-proclaimed “reactionary” aphorisms of Nicolás Gómez Dávila (a deceased Columbian aristocrat, with some fans in Germany) hit the mark. His ultimate hope: “That ‘civilizations are mortal’ is the greatest consolation that is alive today”. This was said by a man who watched the onging surrender of the “his” Catholic Church to modernity, seen particularly in the casting aside of some 1500 years of Latin liturgical TRADITION. Dávila felt that he was being deprived of the social context for his religious life. Outside of a monastery here in Germany or Europe, I do not feel at home in the “modern” world. I request ernestly that you write some articles on the theme, namely modernity and coming to terms with it for persons of religion, i.e., one with transcendence. Does not even Israel have its secularizers? I must admit I am becoming a Dávila-ian “reactionary”. Oh, woe!
I don’t think that Modern Orthodox Judaism derives from secular views about social realization. Rather it starts with R. Samson Raphael Hirsch’s concept of Torah u-Madda, or Torah and secular knowledge in the “Derekh eretz” (the way of the land) which recognizes that some secular culture has value.
Thank you for the suggestion of S.R. Hirsch. I will look him up. Alas, I misled you with the trendy “social realization”. I earnestly hope that Jewish Orthodoxy, as well as any religion, finds its raison d’être in more than just realizing some ideal within a social framework, namely in the acknowledgement of and contact with the Holy (ontologically as actual infinity). Relating (or relegating) oneself to the Holy means acknowledging the Sacred and ultimately worshipping IT. One ACT of directly contacting the Holy is a liturgical one, one expressing a community’s worship (and as you have repeatedly pointed out, an act within a “covenant”–>the inportance of circumcision as a seal for entering into said Jewish community). I will illustrate my problem with an invented silly example.
Let us say that some seriously believing Jews enter into a synagogue in order to realize a social (communal) act of worship. They enter the building and find themselves in a “supermodern” one-night-stand bar blaring heavy metal music with machos and easy women teasing (often strip-teasing) one another. Such Jews (or “religious” personalities such as I) might, indeed, carry out sacred worship DESPITE the atmosphere of the ambient sociality being REALIZED around them. The “despite” is, however, my point! The “social realization” penetrating and inFORMing the “supermodern” environment realizes a FORM that affronts, distracts and, even attacks the consciousness of the Holy and, I with trepitude say, makes covenantaly consciousness impossible or, at best, problematic as a “FORM of awareness.
I find “modern” society in Europe and America to be like the rock-and-roll synagoge writ large. This is a crude exemplification, indeed, an overkill comparison. Nevertheless, I am trying to pin point vividly the Dávila-ian contradiction I experience. Modern society is not just a bar of one-night-standers. However, it is highly sexualized wherein sex is removed from sacrality. This is, indeed, behind the Catholic Church’s reaction to abortions (seen as ridding sexual pleasure from failed contraception). A current article in PJ Media stresses the “hook-up” nature of sex for many college women. Well, “hook-up” sex, realized in society, works antagonistically against a “sacred” view of sexuality. I would bet that even so-called Catholic colleges evince the same “social realization” of sexuality. A Comment does not allow enough space to explain myself. I can only hope that my silly comparison has been sufficient to comprehend my problematic.
Dávila was, in effect, a sort of ontological “reactionary”. He wanted NO return to a “Golden Age” (which never was) nor believed in progress to a utopian age (which will never be). Dávila REACTED against his contemporary experience of secularization in the light of Eternity. There is a non-Hegelian “dialectical” tension between the secular and the Holy (and I hold that it is structurally permanent). You yourself mentioned above the “challenge” facing Judaism to integrate the traditional and the modern. From my point of view, your expression of “challenge” is willy/nilly a confirmation of my non-Hegelian “dialectical tension”. I would, indeed, hope that you expand, and in more than one article, upon the way you see for religion (not just Modern Orthodox Judaism alone, though that interests me) to meet the “challenge”. To do this, you must delineate what is “modernity” and why it is a challenge. –Heck, perhaps too much for PJ Media.
A final exemplification of my Dávila-ian reaction to modernity. This year’s “Catholic Day” in Germany ended one day with, perhaps, thousands of “believers” (including many clerics) watching a final act of worship (?). Some German played a sitar (?), not too well, while ca. 30 Germans snaked danced (I guess Indian style) back and forth on a stage. NOT one single word about Jesus was mentioned. There was no awareness of Christian TRADITIONAL sacrality (not to mention Christianity’s roots in Judaism). Indian music can be integrated into Catholic liturgical form — in India. What “catholics” heard was not the “social realization” of their tradition, rather that of gurus. Heck, I thought cynically, the message is clear. One should forget “priests” of the tradition, and seek out a guru where one can get the real “thing” as expressed in Indian music. Dávila writess: “The weight of this world can only be born if one kneels down upon his knees”. Snake dancing Indian style is not kneeling. It does show Christianity’s slow dissolution into a “modern” secularism. If Modern Orthodox Judaism can master the challenge, I would deeply appreciate learning something about this “way”.
While we can debate the relative weight to assign to the bad formative influences on Obama, we’d all be challenged to identify a good influence!
I think the piece is interesting, and may have something to do woth the views of the current occupant of the Oval Office. However, I think the following may better explain what we have:
Profile of the Sociopath
This website summarizes some of the common features of descriptions of the behavior of sociopaths (http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html).
Glibness and Superficial Charm
Manipulative and Conning
They never recognize the rights of others and see their self-serving behaviors as permissible. They appear to be charming, yet are covertly hostile and domineering, seeing their victim as merely an instrument to be used. They may dominate and humiliate their victims.
Grandiose Sense of Self
Feels entitled to certain things as “their right.”
Pathological Lying
Has no problem lying coolly and easily and it is almost impossible for them to be truthful on a consistent basis. Can create, and get caught up in, a complex belief about their own powers and abilities. Extremely convincing and even able to pass lie detector tests.
Lack of Remorse, Shame or Guilt
A deep seated rage, which is split off and repressed, is at their core. Does not see others around them as people, but only as targets and opportunities. Instead of friends, they have victims and accomplices who end up as victims. The end always justifies the means and they let nothing stand in their way.
Shallow Emotions
When they show what seems to be warmth, joy, love and compassion it is more feigned than experienced and serves an ulterior motive. Outraged by insignificant matters, yet remaining unmoved and cold by what would upset a normal person. Since they are not genuine, neither are their promises.
Incapacity for Love
Need for Stimulation
Living on the edge. Verbal outbursts and physical punishments are normal. Promiscuity and gambling are common.
Callousness/Lack of Empathy
Unable to empathize with the pain of their victims, having only contempt for others’ feelings of distress and readily taking advantage of them.
Poor Behavioral Controls/Impulsive Nature
Rage and abuse, alternating with small expressions of love and approval produce an addictive cycle for abuser and abused, as well as creating hopelessness in the victim. Believe they are all-powerful, all-knowing, entitled to every wish, no sense of personal boundaries, no concern for their impact on others.
Early Behavior Problems/Juvenile Delinquency
Usually has a history of behavioral and academic difficulties, yet “gets by” by conning others. Problems in making and keeping friends; aberrant behaviors such as cruelty to people or animals, stealing, etc.
Irresponsibility/Unreliability
Not concerned about wrecking others’ lives and dreams. Oblivious or indifferent to the devastation they cause. Does not accept blame themselves, but blames others, even for acts they obviously committed.
Promiscuous Sexual Behavior/Infidelity
Promiscuity, child sexual abuse, rape and sexual acting out of all sorts.
Lack of Realistic Life Plan/Parasitic Lifestyle
Tends to move around a lot or makes all encompassing promises for the future, poor work ethic but exploits others effectively.
Criminal or Entrepreneurial Versatility
Changes their image as needed to avoid prosecution. Changes life story readily.
Other Related Qualities:
Contemptuous of those who seek to understand them
Does not perceive that anything is wrong with them
Authoritarian
Secretive
Paranoid
Only rarely in difficulty with the law, but seeks out situations where their tyrannical behavior will be tolerated, condoned, or admired
Conventional appearance
Goal of enslavement of their victim(s)
Exercises despotic control over every aspect of the victim’s life
Has an emotional need to justify their crimes and therefore needs their victim’s affirmation (respect, gratitude and love)
Ultimate goal is the creation of a willing victim
Incapable of real human attachment to another
Unable to feel remorse or guilt
Extreme narcissism and grandiose
May state readily that their goal is to rule the world
(The above traits are based on the psychopathy checklists of H. Cleckley and R. Hare.)
You just accurately described not only The One, but several of my relatives. Whom I have taken pains to avoid for over two decades.
I suspect this may be why I saw Obama for what he really is from the start. When you’ve seen it before up close and personal, you learn the hard way what to look for.
As the old saying goes, “Been There, Done That, Got the F**kin’ T-Shirt”.
cheers
eon
Respectfully, I would like to counter.
Obama had the chance to change the course of this country by organizing a cabinet filled with homies and other people the likes of Valerie Jarrett. But he didn’t because he was terrified that with homies in charge a financial collapse was almost certain.
The Clintons and Biden’s buddies have taken ownership of much of what has transpired over the past 3.5 years. Add to that cast Gates, Bernanke and Holder. Even if Obama is more un-American than Kissinger and Brzezinski, how is Obama’s un-Americanism going to become a top issue in this campaign when the top brass in the Democratic party has not abandoned him? It’s not. And Russia will not become a top issue either. The voters Romney needs to reach don’t fear Russia right now.
If at any point durning the rest of this campaign Romney’s strategists decide that the probabilities to losing are increasing versus decreasing then Bill Kristol should praise Obama’s drone strikes, Obama’s orders for citizen assassinations and Obama’s blind eye to past tortures. In other words, make a mockery of Obama’s supporters. Why? Because Romney took the simple message that it is the “Economy, stupid.” and turned into “It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s you.”.
Many who intend to vote Obama, would love to submit a protest vote instead. Romney should veer way left and the top GOP brass should tell the rank and file to remain calm. Politicians are expected to lie. Those who don’t have little value. I would bet that Romney is more like what he has been over the past 6 weeks rather than what he will be like over the next 6 weeks. Even if I am wrong, then a moderate Romney is better than re-electing the worst President in the history of America. Lie, and then lie some more and then go to confession.
And who cares if Obama is a Muslim when the fact that he is a raging liberal is a much bigger turn off. Tell the Mexican voters that Obama is an affront to the Abrahamic religions, not that he is a member of one of the religions.
Yeah, sure. “Fall in line” is Hillary Clinton’s command to her party’s rank and file. Doesn’t work in the GOP.
Putin does not rule Russia in any meaningful sense, he simply gave it to his thugs to plunder and seeing they can do it without fear of any legal consequences. KGB did not produce leaders, it produced bandits. The whole culture of government in Russia in the result degenerated into culture of career criminals of the sort that populate every US prison.
Very interesting column (and discussion in the comments).
I just have to say that anyone (“marxist”, “anti-colonialist” or any other ideological label…) who does not understand that capitalism has been and is the only system in history that creates the possibility of the take off that leads the society away from poverty is a total and absolute moron.
It may be a morn because of ideological brainwashing or because of hard experiences in the Thirld World, but it remains a moron.
Sure, capitalism is not a sweet way out of poverty. But it has been and is the ONLY way.
Obama is trying to destroy our economic might and in this way, if he succeeds, he will condemn to poverty all the Americans and large part of the world.
A moron, and a dangerous moron.
At Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds has been repeating a famous (if possibly apocryphal) quote attributed to Robert Heinlein for many years now. I thought of it when I watched 2016 and saw the imagery of the third world: Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
It’s not apocryphal. It’s from Time Enough for Love.
Thanks for the reference. I tried figuring out the source after first seeing the quote, but various quote websites listed different books or none at all, so I wasn’t sure where it came from.
It’s the only form that creates a surplus; unfortunately, a surplus of grifters as well.
I wish economists and political scientists would consider managed decreases, instead of waiting for ‘inevitable’ collapses.
Obama lived the colonial experience? Are you out of your mind? Those aren’t Obama’s words you quote. Don’t you know that Bill Ayers wrote Obama’s book for him? While in Indonesia, Obama lived in what is still the poshest part of town. I don’t understand what you are getting at in half your paragraphs.
It’s important to call things what they are. Obama is a Cainite Marxist elitist who has enchanted the Malleable Marxist Media (MMM). The Obama Regime and the MMM are two of the six pillars of the ruling Cainite Moronocracy. The others: Oprah (representing Hollywood and the pop culture), Academia (miseducated morons), the National Academy of Sciences (a hierarchy of morons), and Apostate Christendom (religious morons). It’s all detailed in “Outing the Moronocracy.”
David,
With respect to slavery and the self-flagellating guilt that the Left does on our behalf, I should like to make the following points:
* Muslim slavery predated any slavery that the West indulged in, and while the West not only stopped it out of common decency, but forced its abolition in most of the world. The major exception being, or course, the Muslim world, where, based on the “sacred” practice and doctrine of Mohammed, it continues: officially in Mali and Mauritania, and unofficially in most of the Gulf states.
Ask yourself why there are descendants of slaves in the Americas and none in Arab or post Ottoman states and the answer is both grisly and horrifying – the men were castrated (with only 10% surviving it to the slave markets) and the bastards of the women were killed at birth. Whenever a Leftist or journalist raises our culpability in “the” slave trade, make sure he knows about the Hideous Trade and never let him forget it. This can never be sufficiently rammed home whenever Leftists and Muslims mention our crimes.
Our apology for our involvement contrasts dramatically with the professed divine right of Muslims to practice it, and their at best denial and at worst outright refusal to admit any shame it its regard – and the craven reluctance of our intellectuals to hold their feet to the fire. Perhaps if we were more brazen and less shamed, the commentariat might bring it up less often.
Only if you don’t include any of the classical Western cultures prior to c.600 AD. Greece, Rome, Carthage (technically a North African/Iberian culture), and even the Scandinavians all practiced slavery, in some fairly reprehensible forms, too.
In Scandinavia, for instance, it was customary to bury a slave with his or her master when the master died. Give them credit, though, they did kill the slave before throwing dirt in their face.
You probably don’t want to know how Roman emperors treated their sex slaves. Especially the preadolescent male ones. (And I’m not sure it would get past PJM’s “broadcast standards”, anyway.)
Islamic slavery, like practically everything else about the culture, is a Persian system they simply continued. In a very real sense, Islam is ancient Persia with a monotheistic theocracy instead of a polytheistic one.
What makes this that much more amusing is that to this day, in the Arab world, Iranians are generally referred to as “Farsi”, which is as close as you can get to “Parsi” (Persian) in most Arabic dialects due to the lack of an initial “P” sound in the language. (“Palestinian” is actually pronounced “Falestinian” in … Palestinian.)
And Arabs, as a rule, don’t like “Persians” very much at all. On the evolutionary scale, they put them just above Americans, Kurds, and Jews.
And you know how they feel about those three categories of “infidel”.
Which makes Iran’s attempts to become a “leader” in the Arab world laughable on the face of it. Except, of course, that the Iranian theocracy is run by eschatological maniacs who believe that a nuke or two going off in places like Tel Aviv, New York, etc., will convince the Twelfth Imam to come out of his well, and led them to victory and a New Caliphate.
I keep trying to come up with something good to say about the Islamic world after about the time of the Arabian Nights stories, and the stories of Sind-ba-ahdh, the renowned early (and possibly mythical) seafarer. You probably know him better as “Sinbad the Sailor”, aka Kerwin Mathews, John Philip Law, and/or Patrick Wayne.
Unfortunately, there just isn’t much good that can be said.
And BTW, Sinbad wasn’t even “Islamic”; his stories predate Islam. He probably wasn’t even an Arab; more likely a Phoenician or Indian. Later portrayals of him as a noble Islamic hero are Arab/Islamic “borrowing” of him from his own culture, to provide Islam with something it could claim credit for. That it had nothing to do with.
Which seems to be about par for the course with the Islamic culture.
cheers
eon
I’m no pop psychologist, but I do not need to be to properly evaluate and measure Obama’s influences. What I’ve heard of Dreams of My Father on audio, I would certainly side with the conclusions of Dinesh D’Souza over Mr. Reno – a man I’m not familiar.
Obama’s most basic precepts were formed during the formative years of 10-18, before he entered Columbia University. Every influence in Obama’s formative years a character of some ill repute, the adult bookend further reinforced with the twenty year Sunday message of black liberal theology – leftist politic, white hatred and Jew loathing, branded with a thin veneer of religiosity.
Columbia and Harvard assisted in molding the message and perfected the dialogue. The influence of the white grandmother, the supposed substitute for the flake of a mother, not even profound enough for Obama to be in attendance at her funeral. I suspect the grandmother, no shining example of character in her own right, provided fuel for the fire and not some biracial understanding as we were led to believe from Obama’s Trinity Church excuses. In fact, the grandmother hated the absent biological father and loathed black men in general, if memory serves.
I’m not Jewish, but I am white and I am Christian. There is no way possible for one to sit in the pews of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Church and respect Judaism – politically expedience most definitely; but multicultural? Only if it excludes a white audience, useful idiots like Michael Pfleger just puppets for the cause.
Obama may tolerate his lackeys like Axelrod and Emmanuel – he’ll smile with the boot lickers and thank them for their help. But the influence of a spiritual mentor – that is well beyond friendship. That’s real influence to a practicing Christian.
You scratch Rev. Jeremiah Wright deep enough, and you will find an adult Barack Obama, mature in the faith of resentment. And I suspect very much Rev. Jeremiah Wright more than just a spiritual mentor – Wright a substitute for a father Obama never knew.
Wright also just happens to be a ‘former’ imam in Elijah Muhummed’s faux Nation of Islam;
the whole Black Muslim movement is a created Soviet front.
Wright’s taqquiya simply adapted fiery Koranic sermons with Biblical phrases.
In regard to Obama’s years at Columbia: I was there 1980-1984, and I took the course with Edward Said on the modern novel that Obama reportedly attended. I was fairly apolitical at the time, but I cannot recall Said ever saying anything that could be construed as political during the entire length of the course. Just very insightful comments about the works of Conrad, Kafka, et al., and I say that as someone who in later life profoundly disagrees with Said’s political writings.
Cant wait to have a president that doesnt fundamentally despise America or European Christendom again as president.
Obama, in my opinion, is a rather pathetic figure. His religious upbringing was a mixture of Unitarianism, Islamic fundamentalism, and Black Liberation Theology. His political philosophies came from his mother and Frank Marshall Davis, where she was schooled in Marxism and Davis in Communism. As in biological imprinting these teachings and associated experiences were deposited into his inner being. Like it or not these are guiding principles that are now at odds with each other. And, apply these to being the POTUS and one can easily predict the outcome. Obama is feverishly searching for an identity. D’Souza posits that Obama is trying to please his father, who in actuality might not be his real biological father, by adopting a global anti-colonialism approach to governing. I saw and enjoyed the film and do not take issue with D’Souza. But, Obama has a lot of complexties banging around in his soul. A lot of individuals have indicated that Obama is a very bright individual. I do not share that view. I do believe, however, that he is a pathological narcissist, he is very dangerous, and he is not good for this country.
…”A lot of individuals have indicated that Obama is a very bright individual. I do not share that view. I do believe, however, that he is a pathological narcissist, he is very dangerous, and he is not good for this country.”…
Please, see my post above. I believe Barack Obama is a sociopath; I also believe he is not intelligent enought to have gained entrance to colulmbia and Harvard Law without Affirmative Action preferences. He fits the sociopath criteria, at least based on observations of him made over a number of years. Narcissism fits right into the definition.
When Obama ran the first time, the Czech press, among many asked how the US could elect someone with no track record no accomplishments to the highest office in the land.
I would also note that the third world does not have villages where any sensible child would choose to be, despite what SecSta has said on the subject. Junior Seau commented on how envious Samoan society is, and that is common in many other societies. You make it and you then have a thousand relatives around with their hands in your pocket. In Haiti, if you don’t fork-over, you get to be a real zombie, as the price for your cruel selfishness.
It is that narrative which the Left has bought.
David – The dispute about Obama’s motives is interesting but the most immediate crisis is the failure to stop Iranian nuclear weapon acquisition for reasons you have often enumerated. Respectfully suggest you post at PJM a summary of and link to your excellent current AT article. It’s getting some positive notice in other outlets (deserves more).
Here’s the URL to “All-out Middle East war as good as it gets (http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/NI18Aa01.html)”.
As far as Mr Obama is concerned, I can only comment that he is an avowed Communist/socialist/Marxist and far left revolutionary that wants to bring down America to the level of the third world nations around the world. He hates white people as he believes that they are the enemy. His mother and father’s were both communists and did not make any pretense about it. He wants to give his boss, George Soros his New World Order so they can both run it through the UN. Just remember that the first steps in their plan have already been taken and the next step is to remove all guns from the people. That’s how they take over. As long as people own guns and can resist tyranny they cannot do anything. That is what they are trying to do behind our backs through the UN. Beware of the media not reporting the news as they are in Obama,s pocket. They may as well be in Obama,s election campaign as they never report anything negative about their man. Go to the internet and find out the news for yourselves. Go find conservative news organizations on the internet and read about the truth. May God Bless America
Having lived all over the world — after having already spent far more years in Third World countries while growing up than either Obama or Jarrett (I regard the significance of their respective claims of relevant “experience” as mere affectations, like almost everything else about both of them) — I have a few questions and observations, Mr Goldman:
1. What do you mean that this, that and the other “did for” X number of people on four continents? Is there evidence to back it up if you mean death? If we are talking about germs and so forth isn’t that what survival of the fittest has always been about?
2. Were these “ruined four continents” utopias occupied by noble savages before these venal Westerners showed up?
3. Was there anything particularly unusual about any of those events compared with all the rest of human history back to our beginnings? Is pigment what counts? I have around 50% Irish genes going back a few centuries. Should I hate the Brits because of what happened there in the middle of the eighteenth century like your colleagues at the Asia Times who hate the West for things that happened long before they were born? Shouldn’t they just get over it?
4. What were the good sides of these colonial and other interventions? For example, how about the beginning and ending total populations and life expectancies?
5. What were they doing with most of the raw materials allegedly “stolen” by Europeans before the latter arrived? Did they even have any economic value?
6. In many cases, especially in Africa and the Middle East, how has the lot of the average person fared since the imperialists left? (I fully agree with your point about the predatory local ruling class in so many places and from personal experience can answer my question with a huge thumbs down.)
Having raised these questions, however: a) Yes, as a proud naturalized citizen, I agree that America is mankind’s last, best (maybe only!) hope. And b)yes, it doesn’t matter if Dinesh correctly identified the main source of Obama’s worldview. The intellectual dishonesty and cultural decay fostered by American higher education in recent decades would have sufficed and Obama admits to having especially sought out misfits and zealots during those years — and both before and after!
Finally, however c) no, Obama and Jarrett didn’t “live it”. They merely observed it as youngsters from pretty comfortable inoculated perches. I feel so sorry for that Indonesian step-father who had to put up with Obama’s spoiled and whining mother!
Africans must’ve been shaking their heads in disbelief- “These white blokes are paying us for dirt!”
DaOne is a BLT Marxist. What do they worship? A god that does not favor the white demon.
What does Islam worship? The god of the Kaabba. One of 360 gods Muhammad made everyone worship or elce. It is not a god the white demon is known for worshiping. There are some pagan gods that are like, or maybe Sin, aka the god of the Kaabba, aka the moon god, aka Tammuz, aka the son of the Sun god or Lucifer.
The global government crowd worship themselves as gods, and hate the unwashed mostly white Americans clinging to their guns, and Bibles. Just like Old Knob.
It is a perfect storm to support the Arab nationalists who want what Brition destroyed after WW1. The globalist call it region 4. The actions of DaOne are just one part of a larger agenda, and helps understand his hate for America, or white America.
Unfortunately this pseudo-psychoanalysis (however heartfelt and sincere)will not save the Romney campaign from its gaffes Spengler. It may boost the morale of the rank and file though…
If we wanna win , we’ll have to try harder.
Romney’s gaffes:
Observe that if you don’t pay taxes you don’t care how much the tax rate is raised.
Observe that it is disgusting to apologize for free speech to try to lick the rectum of violent, bigoted mobs bent on the murder of loyal Americans.
The only reason that this is suddenly panned as ‘gaffes’ in the press, and faulty polls suddenly pushed so hard is that there is no logical refutation to Romney’s position. So, it is necessary to make these obviously correct statements thought crimes.
the source of Valerie Jarrett, Michelle Obama’s, Rev Jeremia Wright and Barry’s rage?
their mirror
as the Rev Wright so shockingly said:
” “Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He didn’t put me in chains, he did not put me in slavery, and he didn’t make me this color.”
His and their enemy…
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2307
…….made them THIS COLOR…
Job 38
“Then Jehovah answered Job out of the whirlwind..”
For some reason I wondered if God also said to Job: Now left your hands up high , Job, and I will put into yuur hand the power to strike down these three who blamed your suffering on your own evil doings but I do not think God says this because that is added test to wounded man who may not have the ability to resist his whirlwind rage from all that suffering as Jesus resist:” Father forgive them for they know not what they do”
But the Father the Lord of Heaven who can bring heaven to even the whirlwind then leave the whirlwind and look back on the lost in the whirlwind what does he see?
Perhaps Satan The devil seem to have more mercy on man and his suffering end it it know Jehovah and Bring them all back to us ” Satan sees his brothers and sisters his peers but The Father sees his children that need far more time to grow up instead of instantly brought back
So to the older story when God The Father say to the first Lucifer , I want you to be recreated by way of the monkey. Lucifer look down at the whirlwind and with horror in his eyes say to the Father Why would you do this , Father ? The Father say: “Because you have no memory before I created you.”
Then this story of the serpent in the Garden perhaps this serpent was was so convincing to Eve because the serpent was a true believer and no animal had ever had the hold on the spirit world and Eve would then go back to where she had the memory instead she became as atrue believer the Mother of all the fallen…
If I may analyze Spengler, instead,
here is what beat in his breast as he witnessed the poor world,
beating like a drum until all other senses were overwhelmed:
“That could be me. That could be me. That could be me.
She is me. He IS me. They are all of them, me”
Obama left Indonesia after 4th grade- no one is so precocious at age 9 to understand a street scene in the way presented in the paragraph quoted by Mr.Goldman. The paragraph is completely phony, exactly like Obama. Nostalgia for pre-western authentic ways of life is a common theme in literature, Hollywood, tv movies, afternoon school specials, little children’s books etc. By the time Obama, or whomever, wrote that paragraph, the idea was already hackneyed. This is not to say that a slum in Chicago was not in need of something spiritual, instead of material, but you don’t have to travel to Jakarta to understand that and moreover the urban mess that is Jakarta is not age old, but a relatively recent phenomenon, a product of the Dutch. Obama is a garden variety Ivy League leftist who knows how to write for a sociology professor. Indonesia is nothing but a Javanese Empire – they are true colonialists. The true traditional life was found on the outer islands, which the Islamic Javanese have brutally colonized. But that paragraph would absolutely get you an A in the sociology department of Columbia.
Now THAT’S gonna leave a mark
Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected Salvador Allende in a coup.
The “crime” of many of the people he killed was their membership in leftist parties. I personally met young refugees in New York who were jailed, raped and tortured and who had never committed a violent act.
Of course Pinochet’s crimes are not on the scale of those of Stalin and Mao,
but they were crimes none the less and all those who believe in democracy and the rule of law (whether liberals or conservatives) need to recognize this.
What if the modern world runs out of “progress” , the middle class is made to look into the abyss beneath them as their ownership identity is overthrown ? What I saw visiting All the housing projects in 5 cities over 10 years is they are all ripe for CONVERSION but as Jesus say they are made twice as subject to hell when converted to FALSE RELIGION and we see this when they bring about the total destruction of the housing market when they face ownership issues
The Middle Class are far worse when the face ownership issues they worship STalin , Mao Hitler or The Pinochets not as true belivers but to get back what they lost or close to losing
so this is why the China role model will be so tempting for the modern world, no democracy but take away the freedoms to create a middle class then have some of the middle class be WORTHY of rubbing elbows with the ELITE then stealing the organs of the “monkey” beneath them as Atheist rule and no one is allowed to talk about torture and the atheist modern world have the tools to keep “the rebel” from rebellion by controlling their thoughts and feelings
Only the uniting of the Three Abraham faiths could their be a front to prevent such a global reaching short term profits Atheist China role model from taking over this world I believe
when push comes to shove democracy is too messy and the tyrants win so it seems
Pray for the 2nd coming of Jesus Christ the Lord
Characteristically brilliant piece.
Good but doesn’t explain the purchase he’s caught with the voters. For that you have to look to the dissolution of the family.
If Valerie Jarrett is trying to pass herself off as someone who experienced the misery of Third World colonial existence, then she is completely full of sh*t. I happen to know Val. To me she is Valerie Bowman. Val lived in a neighborhood of Shiraz near the Namazi Hospital. Far from being a squalid slum, it was a very comfortable middle class neighborhood. The house we lived in easily accommodated the five of us in my family, plus a maidservant. The Bowmans and my family were well-acquainted and we socialized on numerous occasions. Val was one of my closest childhood playmates. I spent time in her house. It was a house similar to the one we lived in: clean, comfortable, middle class. Nothing “Third World” about it. Although there were people in Shiraz who were desperately poor – beggars literally dressed in filthy rags – the general feeling of the town was not one of squalor and misery. Iran was a country rapidly modernizing under the Shah. Whatever “colonial” experience Val thinks she underwent when living there we experienced as well. I remember it as a very pleasant time in my life, and materially quite comfortable. Val’s experience could not have been all that different, because I saw the house she lived in.
Fascinating. Thanks for the anecdote. Obama also had a privileged life in Indonesia. That doesn’t obviate the point. Really oppressed people don’t come up with anti-colonialist theories. They don’t have time.
I read a good book back in the mid-90s: “Guilt, Blame, and Politics” by Allen Levite. Basically, he said that people born into poverty who work themselves up from it don’t tend to be anti-capitalist, but those born into wealth who see squalor around them often do.
In Spain I met quite a few students, intellectuals, even priests who go to Latin America, see the squalor, blame it all on American capitalism and become radical. Most such do-gooders are not rich, but come from a modern “rich” country. They have what I might call the “squalor-shock”, feel pity, ideologicalize and turn radical. This is not, or course, universally true as I visit some “Redemptoris Mater” priests in Brasil–and there is archetypical squalor thre–who sought moral and spiritual improvement along with economic betterment, not system change. — Goldman has caught an essential factor re those from rich countries who theorize radically about real thrid world poverty.
Both Obama and Jarrett identified with the Third World after they returned to America, where they discovered a majority European society.
In America they were no longer the elite, expat American, but rather came face to face with the shocking realization that they were merely mixed race Americans.
That is the root of their rage-and Rev Wright also-and of course the racist Michelle.
To them, it is all about race.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=2hwELsSesvE
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us [required of us] mirth, [saying], Sing us [one] of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the LORD’S song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget [her cunning].
Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth. Psalms 137:1-6
from the Moscow Sretensky Monastery Choir
“На реках Вавилонских” (By the waters of Babylon).
I was never very curious about Ms. Jarret until this thread, but just looked her up on Wiki. The wiki bio indicates that her dad was an American M.D. specialist doing a relatively short mission to Iran so I expect they lived well.
It’s amusing to read her claims that she went to work at the Chicago City Hall to make her daughter “proud”, when one considers that she made buckets of money in Chicago real estate development just after leaving Mayor Washington’s service.
She reminds me of some of the politically connected fraudsters I knew in Detroit.
David Goldman,
But Obama’s identification with the Third World, and the Muslim world in particular, is pre-rational; it is not an idea he learned in school, but an existential commitment.
Indeed, I think that it’s less important to figure whatever or whoever made the decisive influence on Obama, and far more important to note the messianic dimension that leads to a behavior closer to a Tikkun Olam rather than concentrate on the role he was elected for: serve the American people’s interests.
Making the world a better place for the Human kind is not what the POTUS is elected for. It can happen as a side effect in the exercise of his presidency, the main task being ensuring that the US continues being the great place his predecessors and his fellow citizens built.
Shana and Hatima Tovah!
You realize Mr. Goldman; War is inevitable, if not Iran, then some other event will happen.
It does not make any difference whether ‘O’ or “R” sit in the chair.
Neither can stop the coming conflagration. Forces were let lose after 1945 that were and still are out of the control of the political classes of the west or east for that matter.
“US” attempted and still attempts to do the right moral purpose as world & national events unfold. I don’t think we are tired, I think we are just about out of patience, or at least a large segment of our population is?
Its been 68 years since the A-bomb was used to end a war, I wonder if we will make 69? I wonder if the next A-bomb starts a war or ends a war?
Mr. Goldman…I recommend the following to add to your reading list…
http://napoleonsbuttons.blogspot.ca/
eon, I would hardly call the triangular trade a “never-ending cycle of pointless activity” as the manufacture of the textiles in Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 17th Century birthed the industrial revolution. The rest, as they say, is history.
Doh! Eighteenth Century. Typo
Pretty silly and uninformed post. I went to Columbia 8 years before Obama and it was the best education anyone could get anywhere. The reason being that every Columbia undergrad had to take the Contemporary Civilizations and Humanities core Curriculum. The author doesn’t have a clue what he is talking about.
Conceived in the in 1919 it was the original Great Books curriculum. By the early 1980′s the critique would have been that it was too Anglo/Euro-centric and heavily weighted towards the work of dead white men. Hardly an overly “liberal” curriculum.
Very old school and Liberal only in the classical sense of the world. Columbia was one of the only colleges that never jettisoned the classical “great books” curriculum as being outdated. We did read Marx and Freud but also Plato, The Bible, Hobbes, Locke, Dante, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Martin Luther and the entire cannon of western civilization chronologically beginning with The Illiad. That is a real education and any fool who tried to denigrate it does it at the expense of their own credibility.