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March 2014, #3       

By Victor Volsky           


OBAMA IS NOT A MOSLEM: HE IS A RADICAL PROGRESSIVE          
 
                                  
   

            I greatly admire J.R Dunn’s work and only rarely see any daylight between his views and mine. But I am not in total agreement with his latest contribution, Obama's Fate, published in this blog on February 12.
           Dunn avers that Obama’s political heritage is rooted in the postwar Islamic strongman role played by an assortment of third-world authoritarians, such as Nasser in Egypt or Sukarno and his antagonist and successor Suharto in Indonesia. The implication is that Obama’s worldview has been shaped by his four-year stay, as a child, in Indonesia. A further ramification of this hypothesis apparently is that otherwise the 44th President would be a creature of a different stripe.
            But is it really so? Let’s run a mental experiment. Suppose Obama’s mother, instead of hauling her six-year-old son to Indonesia, thereby exposing him to the local post- colonial and Islamic influences, left him behind to allow her offspring to be raised by his grandparents with a mighty assist from that black separatist-cum-communist-cum- pornographer, Frank Marshall Davis. Would that have made any difference in the future president’s psychological makeup and political philosophy?
            To my mind, not in the least.
Barack Obama is a product of the far-left radical culture with a hefty dose of separatism endemic in the black intellectual circles of Chicago, once the hotbed of communism and to this day the foremost center of black radicalism. Obama needed no exposure to third- world radicalism to form his views. Chicago, Frank Marshall Davis’s old stomping grounds, did the job efficiently enough.
            And what about the innumerable ultraradicals infesting the Obama Administration? Did Eric Holder grow up in the fever swamps of the third world? Did Michelle? How many of Obama’s ideological soul mates had the dubious benefits of an upbringing in an Islamic environment? Very few, I reckon, and yet there is (using the President’s favorite word) not a smidgen of difference between them and their leader. All of them have been formed in the same ideological mold, but it was a communist mold, not an Islamic one.
            I can understand the confusion leading some to conclude that the core of Obama’s beliefs stemmed from his Islamic upbringing, as J.R Dunn thinks, or from his loyalty to the anticolonialist rage and dreams of revenge against the West inherited from his putative father, Barack Obama Sr., as Dinesh D’Souza believes. Indeed, Obama evinces clear sympathy for Islam and there is a thinly disguised strain of animus for the West in his thinking and policies.
            But his worldview is firmly rooted in the home soil. The communist ideology in its latest embodiment has a heavy admixture of third-worldism. Once upon a time, American radicals followed the orthodox Marxist line, viewing the working class as the standard- bearer of the revolution and a grave-digger of capitalism. But the collapse of their attempt to foment a revolution in the 60’s forced progressive intellectuals to revise their thinking and look for another force, more befitting the role of torch-bearer of their revolution.
            They revised the Marxist dogma and chose a new weapon in their march to power: America’s racial guilt vis-a-vis its black minority, and, more broadly, the West’s racial guilt vis-a-vis the third world. The West, particularly the U.S., progressives preach, must expiate their guilt before the downtrodden masses; the nurturing and exploitation of that guilt have become the core of the radical agenda.
            According to the progressive precepts, the third world is without sin, all its denizens are noble sufferers, blameless victims who must be compensated for their trials and tribulations inflicted on them by the predatory colonialists. And since Moslems, including Islamofascists, are of the third world, they are viewed by progressives as pure and noble freedom fighters whose struggle is fully justified by the misdeeds of their oppressors.
            Hence the progressives’ incessant campaign to find excuses for the Islamic terrorists. Hence the left’s unshakeable solidarity with the Palestinians and its implacable hostility toward Israel.
           Certainly, part of it is good old anti-Semitism, but much of the animus stems from the progressives’ view of the Jewish state as a metaphor for the West, a bastion of colonialism in the third world.
            Small wonder that many people believe that Obama is a Moslem - so in tune with the goals of Islam are his policies and pronouncements, so patent is his affinity for all things Moslem. But actually he is just a dyed-in-the-wool progressive faithful to the important tenets of his radical ideology.
            There is a reason why the communist fuehrers look and behave so much like third-world dictators: They are people of the same ilk. Communism is about power, pure and simple. None other than the supreme authority on the issue, the head honcho of the Russian revolution himself attested to that (quoth Lenin, “The only question of the revolution is the question of power”). Consequently all communist revolutionaries are votaries at the shrine of the Goddess of Power.
             And so have the third-world dictators. The difference between the vulgar goons like Idi Amin or Emperor Bokassa and the Bolshevik leaders, refined intellectuals all (a couple of token proletarians aside), is skin-deep. Dig a little deeper, and beneath the revolutionaries’ veneer of culture and sophistication you will find not a dime’s worth of difference from the uncouth third-world gorillas. All of them are driven by a naked lust for power, power for the sake of power. They may seem to be poles apart, but it’s just the outward shell; the inner stuffing, the substance, is the same.
             Communists and third-world demagogues promise the sun and the moon in the drive for power. But once they reach their goal, all their good intentions instantly evaporate; they just don’t care for all that demagogic foolishness they used to spout for tactical reasons. They are too absorbed in consolidating their power and then relishing it.
             No sooner had they ensconced themselves in power, than the Bolshevik leaders hastened to grab the most magnificent of the “liberated” palaces, complete with the monogrammed silver and the servants who only had to adapt to the changed circumstances by substituting “comrade” for “sir” when addressing their new masters. The sumptuousness of the lucullan feasts thrown by the communist “servants of the people” is the stuff of legend - just as the hospitality of the assorted African presidents- for-life never fails to win the admiration and gratitude of their Western guests.
             So why is Obama’s profligacy, his lust for the presidential perks, his wife’s slavish devotion to the extraordinary pricey haute couture, the ostentatiously frequent, almost gleeful vacationing of the presidential couple in luxury resorts, the President’s incessant partying at the White House - why should it surprise? He is merely doing what a communist or third-world dictator is expected to do. Small wonder that Obama’s behavior and attitudes literally reek of a third-world or a communist dictator. They are two sides of the same coin, birds of a feather.
             It would not be so bad if they confined themselves to the joys of power and left the economy alone, but in their hubris they believe in their omnipotence and infinite ability. And so they roll up their sleeves and in a very short time mess up the economy beyond repair. Thus Idi Amin kicked out the Indian and Pakistani merchants, destroying Uganda’s distribution network and causing a devastating famine. Thus Fidel Castro ran the second most prosperous economy of the Western Hemisphere into the ground, and today Cuba is vying with Haiti for the dubious honor or being considered the most hellish of the hellholes of the Americas.
            It takes a genius to leave without bread a country such as Russia, once the breadbasket of Europe, quipped Winston Churchill. He is wrong - all it takes is a communist regime. Works every time like a charm. By the way, has anyone failed to notice how the mighty American economy has been sputtering under the progressive rule of Obama and his co-conspirators?
              In short, Barack Obama is a chip off the old progressive block, and everything he is doing is textbook radicalism. To be sure, he has not yet completely succeeded in his designs, but the speed with which he has been transforming America in keeping with his explicit promise during the 2008 election campaign is staggering.
             It might seem that the contradiction between my contention and J.R. Dunn’s is a distinction without a difference. Yet it is important because ascribing Obama’s ideological leanings to third-world influences obfuscates the issue, blocking clear-eyed understanding of the source and inner springs of his progressive ideology.
              To fight a disease, you need to start by correctly diagnosing it. We need to understand that Obama’s policies and predilections are those of a far-left radical, guided by the latter-day version of the communist ideology to which most of the third-world authoritarians also subscribe.
                If viewed in this light, the problem gets a lot clearer.
 

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