Anti-colonialist Obama
David Goldman takes a long, hard, and well-worth-reading look at anti-colonialist Obama:
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…
Like his senior counselor and Chicago mentor Valerie Jarrett, who spent her first five years in Iran, Obama did not merely study the colonial experience. He lived it.
For all its blemishes, the United States of America is mankind’s last, best hope. Americans are brands plucked out of the fire. We cannot save cultures that will not adapt to modernity. At best we can prevent their decline from hurting us. 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. He will accommodate its irrationality and self-destructiveness to the point of absurdity, no matter what the cost to American security. He is no Jimmy Carter, who belatedly took a hard line against the Soviets after the December 1979 Afghanistan invasion. He has done more to undermine America’s standing in the world than any president in history, and the consequences of his re-election are horrible to imagine.
Barky the Dog-Eater didn’t just grow up in the Third World. He spent all of his formative years being acculturated as a muslim in the largest muslim nation on Earth, a nation that was under a dictator who had just overthrown another dictator after a failed commie coup. Add to that Barky’s 84 IQ and you have a recipe for Western-hating disaster.
I’ve been making this point since early 2008, when it was obvious that, among other things, Barky wasn’t even Constitutionally eligible for the job, having been a dual citizen (and likely having taken on Indonesian citizenship, too). Barky has never had even an iota of American sensibilities about him. That’s been painfully obvious. You can tell not only from his demented view of the world and history but from his mangling of English and mistakes that no American would ever make.
But … it was “raaaacist” to even talk about any of these easily discernible facts and traits of the America-hater … so we end up with a guy who despises our nation, our institutions and us and who thinks that there is a good connotation to the phrase “on the precipice”. Ivy league? LOL. Jealous, retarded, Western-hating third world league. Barky sees himself as the Avenging Angel of the Third World, brought to rain pain and destruction on the America and the West for us having shamed his people with our intelligence, creativity, productivity, decency, and freedom. His every action since sliming into office has been based on this.
I suspect that even more than Obama’s personal experience in Indonesia, his mother’s interpretation of his experiences colored his view. After all, they lived rather well toward the end of his stay, with servants to take care of the family. I think his family dynamics left him so screwed up, that he survived by clinging to shopworn ideologies.
If he knew anything of his Kenyan father’s life, that too was filtered through his mother’s tales.
expat
If he knew anything of his Kenyan father’s life, that too was filtered through his mother’s tales.
Bullseye, expat. From Dreams:
Perhaps our POTUS so often lies to us because his mother fed him lies about his father.
Anti-colonialism has always struck me as a silly explanation of why Obama acts like a garden variety, upper class, American progressive. It also sounds oddly reminiscent of the way liberals used to try and explain everything Bush did by claiming he had daddy issues.
Anyway, I have to point out a very important fact that Goldman missed: Obama grew up rich. His Kenyan father and Indonesian step-father were both born into money. Obama may have seen poverty as a child, but it was something he saw from the outside. I’ve seen no evidence the man is/was proficient in any language other than English (and you know we’d hear about it if he was because it would make him look smart and cultured). How much interaction could he have really had with average Indonesians?
So I don’t think Obama could have experienced much about poverty as a boy, or gotten very mad at the British, Dutch or anyone else because of it.
I’m with Baltimoron on this: Obama led a sheltered and privileged life and the fact that it was in the Third World in no way means that he understands of appreciates what was going on around him.
A more important matter is authorship of his two books. If he wrote them himself it was with a lot of re-writing and editing by someone else. We know that by looking at anything we know to have been written by him: he is not a gifted writer. So if Bill Ayers or someone else ghost-wrote them, nothing in them has much real relevance to what he learned/felt/pondered growing up.
Here we have a kid of privilege growing up white (his African roots having no personal meaning to him except as communicated by his mother) in Hawaii and Indonesia, where he was certainly in the top 1% of society. He is no poor native growing up in the Third World. I know: I’ve lived in the Third World about 25 years. All of that is for voters to feel sorry about as they pull the lever on the voting machine.
and there are days when it would do the heart good to put some people up against a wall…
As a former Berkeley resident, I’m only too familiar with this sentiment.
But your brains, your character, you got from him.”
She attributed Obama’s character to his father? There’s a left-handed compliment if I ever heard one. This would be the father who was bopping underaged girls while his wife was back home, the father who bigamously married said underaged girl (and I’ll presume that there was only one), then buggered off permanently after two weeks of domestic bliss with his blushing bride? The failed Red alcoholic who returned to Kenya and drank himself to death? That father?
Obama grew up rich. His Kenyan father and Indonesian step-father were both born into money.
Yep. And his maternal grandmother was a bank VP who put him through Punahou, which is not cheap (I went there too, and it was a heavy burden for my parents).
So this “up from poverty” stuff is rubbish, and indeed racist, because it presupposes that anyone who is even partly black must be poor.
Progressoverpeace: Excellent points. Your pointing out of O’s mangling of the English language is much appreciated. As an ESL teacher of international college students, I have noticed his misuse of English many times. Often, he just expresses himself in ways that a native English speaker would NOT use. I am referring here to his use of English, not his 57 states comment – another topic altogether.
Spengler (Goldman): “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).”
I doubt that I have traveled as extensively as Goldman, but I have seen a lot of misery in foreign countries. My earliest experience of such was in the Philippines. It shook me and made me wonder if there wasn’t something to the charge that Western countries had looted these Third World countries. I talked with as many Filip[inos as I could to get an idea of how their culture worked. It didn’t take long for me to understand that it was the deep rooted corruption in their government that was holding them back. Government jobs there were considered licenses to steal. I asked them why they put up with having to pay bribes and do favors for normal government services. Their answer, “That’s the way we have always done it.” I haven’t been back to the PI in years. I hope things may have changed but doubt that they have.
In Kenya, I learned from a furniture maker that he did not want to become too successful because that would attract the attention of the government. The governmment, he told me, would demand either a cut of his profits or, even worse, might just take the business away from him without compensation. Kenya was, in those days(1997), a kleptocracy. I doubt it has changed.
In the new, prosperous Russia (St. Petersberg – 2006), I saw desperately poor people trying to hawk trinkets on the streets and even a couple of beggars. Once again, it’s bad governance.
A Peruvian scholar, Hernando deSoto, has written a book, “THE MYSTERY OF CAPITAL,” that explains what it takes to create a prosperous country. Not surprisingly, they are:
1. Private property ownership.
2. Legal backing for property ownership by courts.
3. A system for freely buying/selling property and recording such sales/purchases.
4. A reasonably honest representative government.
Most countries that are not prosperous have failed to institute these rules. DeSoto has consulted to a number of Third World countries (Egypt is one that comes to mind.), but none have been able/willing to institute the necessary reforms.
These facts have made me deeply grateful that I was born in this country. They have also made me realize that we in the West are not responsible for all that poverty and misery. One reason I supported Bush’s war in Iraq was because I had hopes that it would lead to installation of the steps outlined by de Soto. Well, we gave it a try.
It amazes me that high-minded, deep-thinking, compassionate liberals have not looked at de Soto’s work or at least seen that it is bad governance, not Western collusion, that is keeping so many countries in misery.
I don’t know where Obama got his ideas. It was from his mother or his education or both. No matter, they are demonstrably wrong. Spengler is right.
BTW, the new Obama biography by Mariness points out that the story Obama gives of family suffering due to colonialism is a lie. It looks like he was trying to develop some sort of aura as an anti-capitalist messiah or something. Add that to the false story of a deprived youth and the Washington Examiner’s expose of his cruel conduct as a lawyer and a better, but not complete, picture of Obama starts to emerge. He seems better suited to becoming a leftist tyrant like Chavez or Castro than anything else.
It been four years and we still don’t know this guy’s biography. Interesting commentary on our time.
Jimmy, let me add some things from the wonderful observations made by De Soto in The Mystery of Capital. The author also stresses the absence of a debilitating bureaucracy in order t have a successful economy. He points out that in Latin America a large portion of the economy is unlicensed and therefore cannot obtain the capital necessary to expand. The reason it is unlicensed is due the incredible bureaucratic hurdles that governments put in place. A person has to go infinity of government offices time and time again to get permission to do business. And the rules change with the mood of the bureaucrat. Most people don’t have the time or money to run that gauntlet.
Also the Obamas and leftists could care less if their are ideas are wrong. Remember one of Eric Hoffer’s dictum’s, “there is no social ill for these people that can’t be cured by giving them power” (my paraphrase). Somebody’s misfortune is a means to an end; to be exploited for personal political gain. The same old game routinely played by demagogues.
Bob from Virginia, thanks for reminding me of that. It’s been a number of years since I read the book. The old memory’s not what it was.
Yep, the burueacracy in most SA countries is set up to discourage small businesses from ever becoming anything more than shoestring micro businesses. When such corruption is so well established it is hard to change.
I guess I’m really naive. I have known a couple of people in my lifetime who were power seekers. But they were so crude I did not believe they could ever succeed. (And they didn’t except on a small level.) I always want to believe that most people have good intentions. But you’re probably correct, Obama and those around him are really after the power and care nothing about making things better. How do they sleep at night?
Character is destiny, Jimmy. Remember when character-building used to be part of the American way?
The decline of Christianity in the West is going to sink us. Who was it who said that our Constitution was fit for governing only a moral and religious people? John Adams, I believe.
the difference between the heart wrenching scenes you see in a soviet landscape and a free but poor ones are also very different if you can bet past the surface. the generosity of people in the latter make that a more hopeful one as anything can turn at any moment. take what happened to U Tin Ngwe… http://www.cigem.ca/426.html
such cant happen in the former. even if it does happen, they step in, so it cant happen. but anywhere there is even a bit of freedom, such can happen to any poor person. in fact, the more freedom, the more common that story on the street in some form.
From Miloš Forman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo%C5%A1_Forman to Chris Gardner
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Gardner…
the forbes list is always dominated by self made men over those who had big legs up…
Jimmy, you asked how Obama and company sleep at night. Spengler (Paul Goldman) in 2008 stated that he thought Obama was a psychopath. If the Washington Examiner story is correct that conclusion would be hard to avoid. The effort to build a cult of personality and his belief in his own divine powers certainly indicate he is not playing with a full deck.
Here we are again trying to diagnose the mental illnesses of the most powerful man in the world.
And here is a story about the a South American bureaucracy. My wife went back to Argentina to sell her late mother’s apartment. She had to run around to a half dozens bureaucracies proving that the husband she divorced over 20 years ago was no longer part of the picture, that so&so was paid, that tax A was not relevant, that she had permission from office B and office C to fill out forms at office D. And she never knew whether some bureaucrat was going to find some reason to stall the whole process. She was ready to forget the whole and desert the property.
J.J.’s comments take me way back to the one and only sociology course I took in college. I was pre-med, chemistry major and needed an eeasy course. It was largely a waste of time, and very easy for an A, but one item stuck with me:
The corn yields on a SW indian Rez were terrible, so the Feds set up a demonstration project, showed them how to farm with irrigation, employed the Indian farmers for 3 yrs to be sure they were experienced in every step. Corn yields tripled. The Feds left, returned 2 yrs later to find the Indians had gone back to their old, poorly productive farming because that was how it had always been done, “not the white man’s way”.
The corrupt, unproductive cultures all over the globe are the same as those Indians. The fault lies in themselves. Would that GWB had grasped that.
It has even occurred to me to wonder whether it is something in the DNA. For example, Black Americans in their majority seem to prefer a tribal chief, regardless of how corrupt he may be….see the American cities with big A-A populations and their governance by A-As, e.g. Marion Barry in DC. Show me exceptions to this observation if you disagree. My mere sociological thought….
Only one of my classmates at this small elite liberal arts college majored in Sociology. When I asked him why, he said that was the only major in which his grades would allow him to graduate.
Don Carlos, at the end your referring to “big man” theory
Great Man theory
The Great Man Theory is a 19th-century idea according to which history can be largely explained by the impact of “great men”, or heroes: highly influential individuals who, due to either their personal charisma, intelligence, wisdom, or political skill utilized their power in a way that had a decisive historical impact.
Big man (political science)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_man_%28political_science%29
A big man, big man syndrome, or bigmanism, within the context of political science, refers to corrupt, autocratic and often totalitarian rule of countries by a single person.
Generally associated with neopatrimonial states, where there is a framework of formal law and administration but the state is informally captured by patronage networks. The distribution of the spoils of office takes precedence over the formal functions of the state, severely limiting the ability of public officials to make policies in the general interest. While neopatrimonialism may be considered the norm where a modern state is constructed in a preindustrial context, however, the African variants often result in bigmanism in the form of a strongly presidentialist political system.[1]
Art: My point is they brought their chief-worship/allegiance from Africa 200-250 yrs ago and it remains ever so. The Frederic Douglases, Thomas Sowells, and Clarence Thomases are so rare as to be mutants.
I saw a young A-A woman yesterday wearing an Obama 2012 T shirt. The back showed a posterior view of Hussein’s head, all in black, with the protruding ears very prominent. I guess that makes him recognizable.
Obama is not an anti-colonialist but a pro-colonialist. That is because so-called anti-colonialism is actually pro-colonialism. And that is because the colonialism the Marxists still harp on about, that of the West, has been dead for at the very least three decades; the true colonialism now ravaging the free world is the Islamic type, with zones urbanes sensitifs in Paris and Christians hounded out of Dearbornistan–colonial shariah enclaves.
ObaMarx is pro-colonialist, pro-imperialist: For Islamic colonialism and for Islamic imperialism. As are all adherents of the 1960s New Left. Getting one’s terminology straight is key. Anybody who talks of Western instead of Islamic colonialism and imperialism is part of the problem, an upholder of a treasonous anachronistic lie.
I posted this comment at the bottom of Goldman’s essay, and I reiterate it here. It concerns my childhood friend and playmate, Valerie Jarrett, whose name came up in the comments over there.
To wit: 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.
J.J. formerly Jimmy J. Says:
September 21st, 2012 at 10:53 pm
I haven’t read de Soto’s book, but I’ve read about it. Unfortunately, it appears that the United States is losing ground in every respect.
1. Property taxes. We don’t own property; we merely rent it from the government. Stop paying your property taxes and see what happens.
2. The Kelo decision. The government is now free to seize your property and give it to someone with better political connections.
3. Banks reselling mortgages and bundling them into mortgage-backed securities. I’ve heard of cases where the chain is so complex and convoluted that it’s uncertain who actually holds the mortgage.
4. TARP passed despite letters and phone calls from the public running 300-1 against it. Just recently an attempt by Senator Rand Paul to cut off foreign aid to several Middle Eastern countries lost 81-10, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans would support such a move.
Add to that the burgeoning bureaucracy which feels empowered to regulate and control every single aspect of our lives, and elected officials who recognize no constitutional constraint whatsoever to their power.
No question about it, we are becoming a Third World country. It’s frightening how fast it is happening.
Regarding “Big Man” government (also known as “head man”:
At the time of Bill Clinton’s impeachment, I will never forget a TV interview with a black woman on the street. She said:
“He de head man! Why dey be runnin’ down de head man?”
That is exactly what she said and how she said it. Don’t call me racist; you’ll have to take that up with her.
That woman clearly had no conception of government above a tribal level. Why do we allow her to vote in a Constitutional Republic?
Your points are well taken, rickl. Those and many others are why we are trying to turn the ship of big government around.
De Soto is correct. However, we are slowly abandoning those principles. All in the name of FAIRNESS. Or so Obama tells us.
In Indonesia, Stanley Ann worked for Peter Geithner, Turbo Tax Timmy’s daddy. Geithner was Eastern banking money. Timmy and Barry probably played together, which makes Timmy ‘just another guy in the neighborhood’. Never heard about that connection from the media.
Supposedly, the elder Geithner knew some people who helped Barry with his access to two Ivy League Schools. Old Eastern money, Ivy League. Poor? Deprived? No, absolutely not. Depraved, yes, but not deprived.
Owebama’s like any good and committed communist: You have to be wealthy enough to appreciate its joys.
The funniest part of D’Souza’s absurd formulation is that nothing is more American than anti-colonialism. The country was founded first and foremost in opposition to colonialism and the founding fathers based their political thinking on the importance of preventing the exercise of colonial power.
The Founding Fathers disagreed widely on matters of religion and ideology, but not on this point. Every single one of them was violently anti-colonialist.
How perfectly fitting that D’Souza and his fans would believe that a defense of colonialism would be a plausible source of a critique of a sitting American president.
Bill Clinton & Barack Obama defined: what IS is & what ISLAM is !