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.
© V.Volsky