The Roots of Obama's Rage (5 page)

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Authors: Dinesh D'Souza

BOOK: The Roots of Obama's Rage
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I do not mean to suggest that all Obama’s supporters are borderline delusional. There are many thoughtful and rational people who support Obama. Even many of them, however, are baffled by the man they voted for. He seems to be coming from an entirely different place than they are. Some of them are even unnerved by him. Perhaps, these Obama backers say, it comes down to the man’s peculiar temperament. Maureen Dowd speculates in the
New York Times
that “Obama has a bit of Mr. Spock in him. . . . He has a Vulcan-like logic and detachment.” Writing in the online magazine
Slate
, Jacob Weisberg worries that this man is too withdrawn for a politician. “Obama’s relationship with the world is primarily rational and analytical rather than intuitive or emotional.”
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One explanation for this is that Obama is playing against type. He doesn’t want to be the stereotypical “angry black man,” so he holds back. But as we will see, Obama does not always hold back, and the instances when he explodes or lashes out are crucial to understanding what really matters to him. Moreover, Obama watchers have noticed something artificial and even contrived in the president’s public image. Appearing on the
Charlie Rose
show, Evan Thomas said he found himself curiously repelled by a man whose ideas he generally agreed with. Thomas called Obama “slightly creepy” and “deeply manipulative.” Thomas suggested that there was something fake and unreal about Obama’s public persona. “This creature he’s designed isn’t necessarily a real person.”
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Perhaps the most consistent liberal view of Obama is that he is the fulfillment of a civil rights tradition. This argument is presented in David Remnick’s book
The Bridge
. Remnick’s theme can be summarized in this way: Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, and now Obama. Reading Remnick’s book you get the distinct impression that he wrote it while wearing his “Yes We Can” button. The book is devoid of intellectual skepticism: somehow Remnick never pauses to wonder why Jesse Jackson, who ran twice for president, was never taken seriously as a candidate, while Obama, who was merely a state senator a few years ago, made it on his first try. Nor does Remnick ask why a privileged fellow like Obama, who by his own account never experienced any serious racism, can claim a genuine kinship with a former slave like Douglass or a man like King who faced down the dogs and hoses of segregation in the South. Remnick details Obama’s family history in Hawaii and Indonesia and Kenya without making a serious attempt to relate that history to the American civil rights movement. Like so many others who write about this president, Remnick is so eager to insert Obama into the American story that he entirely misses the significance of Obama’s story.
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To grasp Obama’s story, we have to put aside the multicultural mantras and the conservative boilerplate and enter Obama’s world. In a sense, we are in search of Obama III, an account that transcends and reconciles Obama I and Obama II. We need to discover Obama’s own narrative, one that makes psychological sense of the man, and that helps to explain his policies and his deepest beliefs. Where can we find this interpretive key that unlocks the mystery and helps us understand Obama? Remarkably, it is Obama himself who supplies it, and we can comprehend Obama if we are willing to take off our blinders and listen to his story as told in his own words.
Imagine a little boy growing up in the sunbathed beauty of Hawaii, soaking in the culture, hearing about how the innocent natives were crushed and overrun by horrible invaders and profiteers. Imagine a slightly older child on a bicycle on the crowded streets of Indonesia, learning from his stepfather the harsh code of a developing country, shaped out of the history of European colonialism. Now imagine a young man undertaking a journey to Kenya, for many people a journey to nowhere, but for him a journey to his own past, where through inner soul-searching and conversations with relatives he discovers who his father really was, and what he must do to make good on the dead man’s unfulfilled dreams. This is Barack Obama. But for him these aren’t imaginings; they are memories. These memories are formed out of the indelible ink of experience, and they have by his own account marked the man. By attentively examining his experience as he tells it himself, and as elaborated by others who have researched his background, we can understand Obama in a way that he has not been understood before.
I will outline Obama’s personal and political development over the next few chapters, but here I distill the essence of the man: he is his father’s son, and his dreams are derived from his father’s aspirations and failures. Everyone who knows Obama well says this about him. His “granny” Sarah Obama—not his actual grandmother but one of his grandfather’s other wives—told
Newsweek
, “I look at him and I see all the same things—he has taken everything from his father. The son is realizing everything the father wanted. The dreams of the father are still alive in the son.” Obama of course makes the same point in his title—
Dreams from My Father
—and his whole book is an elaboration of how he internalized his father’s dreams and goals. Obama calls his memoir “the record of a personal, interior journey—a boy’s search for his father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American.” And again, “It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself.”
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Obama even took his father’s name in order to cement his explicit identification with him, and the way he did so is even more revealing. Young Obama’s parents named him Barack, after his father. But from birth until his young adult years, he was known as Barry. Actually, Obama’s dad was also called Barry; Barry was the name he adopted when he came as a student from Kenya to America. While the father went from Barack to Barry, however, the son went in the opposite direction. As a young man, Obama asked people to stop calling him Barry and instead to call him Barack. For Obama’s father, the switch from Barack to Barry was no big deal; he was just doing what many immigrants do in order to fit in. For the son, by contrast, the move from Barry to Barack was a very big deal. He didn’t just take his father’s identity; he self-consciously rejected his father’s American name in favor of the senior Obama’s African identity.
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There is something deeply Freudian about this, and even Shakespearean. Obama never knew his father, who abandoned his mother and him shortly after he was born, and whom he met only once when he was a young boy. Even so, Obama identified more with his father than anyone else, and he undertook an intense psychological and ultimately actual journey to Africa in order to discover his dad and, in the process, to find himself. Unable to find his father, he did the next best thing: he embraced his father’s ideals and decided to live out the script of his father’s unfulfilled life. Obama ultimately recognized that his father was not the great romantic figure he had long envisioned him to be. But Obama concluded that, despite his flaws, his father had great vision, great ideals, a great plan of reform. Since Obama Sr. was unable to achieve those ideals, Obama Jr. figured he would undertake this heroic mission. In changing the world into the image of his father, he would complete the task that his father couldn’t, and thus he would become worthy of his father, a real African and a real man.
As we trace this remarkable story, we will see how Obama’s mother and maternal grandparents figure into his voyage of self-discovery. We will also discover how Obama found along the way a number of surrogate dads; these men helped to form his personality and outlook. Drawing on this ensemble of characters, Obama crafted an identity that is at once the product of his family history and yet distinctively his own. By an act of intellectual and willful striving, Obama defined himself in relation to his absent father and a host of paternal surrogates. Therefore, to discover Obama, we have to begin with his father because it is from his father, more than from anyone else, that Obama got the worldview that defines his presidency.
Who was Barack Obama Sr.? First and foremost, he was an anti-colonialist. He grew up under British rule in Kenya, and he came of age during the struggle for independence. He was considered one of his country’s bright young stars, one of an elite group of African scholars who came to study in the United States, and then returned to their home countries with a goal of helping them form their independent identities. This Obama was an economist, and as an economist he was influenced by socialism, but he was never a doctrinaire socialist; rather, his quasi-socialism sprang from and was integrated into an anti-colonial outlook that was shared by many of his generation, not only in Africa but also in Asia and South America. Here I want to outline the main themes of that anti-colonial ideology, which formed the core of the philosophy of Barack Obama Sr., and which is closely tied to what his son Barack Obama Jr. is doing in the White House today.
Empire is nothing new in world history. The Athenians, the Romans, the Mongols, and the Ottomans all established empires and ruled over subject peoples. We are concerned here with European empire, with the white man’s discovery, conquest, and settlement of Asia, Africa, and the Americas—a process that began with Columbus and Vasco da Gama in the fifteenth century and was largely completed by the end of the nineteenth century. Our specific focus here is the conquest of Africa. This conquest was preceded by the Scramble for Africa. In the mid-1880s, representatives of the leading European powers showed up at a Berlin conference to carve up Africa. The Europeans were bumping into each other all over Africa in their colonizing frenzy, and the Berlin conference was an attempt to amicably share the land and the loot. The usual suspects were all present—the English, the French, the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Germans—but there were also some surprise guests, including the conniving and avaricious King Leopold of Belgium.
12
Well, it was quite a picnic while it lasted. Once the bargains were struck in Berlin, the rest of Africa was taken by force and parceled out to various European occupiers. Except for a few outposts of freedom—such as Ethiopia and Liberia—virtually the entire continent came under European rule. The French controlled North Africa, notably Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. The Portuguese had Angola and Mozambique, and a few small holdings on the west coast. The Belgians secured the Congo. The Germans grabbed Southwest Africa, Tanganyika, Cameroon, Rwanda, Burundi, and Togo. And the British had pretty much everything else. In fact, by the end of the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria reigned over an empire that encompassed approximately half the real estate on the planet. No wonder it was said that the sun never sets on the British empire.
This situation lasted around half a century. Then, over the next few decades, Europe itself was convulsed by two disastrous world wars that virtually bankrupted the continent and almost ruined the greatest of the colonial powers, Britain. Around this time, fierce cries of resistance emanated from the ranks of the colonized. Sometimes these were peaceful, as in the case with Gandhi in India. But often they were not, and movements of guerilla resistance emerged to challenge and overthrow European rule. Despite the toll of the two world wars—which were actually European civil wars—Europe was not ready to relinquish its colonial possessions. The guerillas directly assaulted the European settlers in their countries, and the European powers brought all their remaining might against this armed opposition. These were the anti-colonial wars of the twentieth century. As we will see, they left deep scars on Obama’s father and grandfather.
Anti-colonialism is the movement of ideas that rallied opposition to European rule. It is also the outlook that guided many of the newly independent nations in the aftermath of the European retreat. This is the ideology that was espoused by Barack Obama Sr. and many of his generation. As a movement, anti-colonialism had its passionate advocates: among them were the Algerian physician Frantz Fanon, the Tunisian writer Albert Memmi, the Martiniquan poet Aimé Césaire, the African writer Chinweizu, the Ghanaian political leader Kwame Nkrumah, and the Palestinian scholar Edward Said. The anti-colonialists were anti-Western and oriented toward national self-determination, but their ideology also contained noticeable strains of Marxism and socialism. Let us identify the main tenets of anti-colonialism and also trace the connections between anti-colonialism, Marxism, and socialism.
The first tenet of anti-colonialism is that empires are produced by murderous conquest and sustained by unceasing terror and violence. As the African writer Chinweizu puts it, “White hordes have sallied forth from their western homelands to assault, loot, occupy, rule and exploit the world.” Fanon insists that torture and massacres are the modus operandi of all the imperial regimes in Africa. Césaire asserts that during World War II the British and the French hated Hitler not because he was a mass murderer, but because he was a mass murderer of Europeans. According to Césaire, Hitler’s real crime in the European view was “the inflicting on Europeans of European colonialist procedures which until now were reserved for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the Negroes of Africa.”
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A second tenet of anti-colonialism is that colonial regimes are racist—they systematically cause the dehumanization of the colonized. Said blames Western racism for the sufferings of “ravaged colonial peoples who for centuries endured summary injustice, unending economic oppression, distortion of their social and intimate lives, and a recourseless submission that was a function of unchanging European superiority.” In
The Colonizer and the Colonized
, Albert Memmi argues that racism dehumanizes the ruler no less than the native. Césaire writes that this is because the colonizer “gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal.”
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