The Roots of Obama�s Anticolonialism

The Trumpet (Link) - Stephen Flurry (September 17, 2010)

Dinesh D�Souza�s controversial Forbes article, �How Obama Thinks,� adds one more name to the president�s long list of disturbing associations�his own father. Over the course of his life, Barack Sr. fathered eight children by four different wives. The Harvard-educated Kenyan was a notorious womanizer and reckless reveler. He died in 1982 after getting drunk in a Nairobi bar and ramming his car into a tree.

One of his sons has since accused Barack Sr. of child abuse and wife beating. This charge is also implied in the president�s own memoir Dreams From My Father. As has been widely reported, Barack Sr. deserted America�s future president when he was a baby in Hawaii.

And yet, despite these many prodigious flaws, President Barack Obama has elevated the father he never knew to a larger-than-life mythical hero. President Obama�s dream, judging by his memoir, is his father�s dream. And his father�s dream, D�Souza says, was rooted in anticolonialism.

�Obama Sr. grew up during Africa�s struggle to be free of European rule, and he was one of the early generation of Africans chosen to study in America and then to shape his country�s future,� D�Souza wrote. Later, he wrote, �While the senior Obama called for Africa to free itself from the neocolonial influence of Europe and specifically Britain, he knew when he came to America in 1959 that the global balance of power was shifting. Even then, he recognized what has become a new tenet of anticolonialist ideology: Today�s neocolonial leader is not Europe but America� (emphasis mine throughout).

Clearly, D�Souza explains, this anticolonial ideology�which Barack Sr. aimed primarily at the United States and Britain��goes a long way to explain the actions and policies of his son in the Oval Office.�

It�s a theory that absolutely infuriates the left. The Columbia Journalism Review accused D�Souza of fact-twisting and paranoia. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson called the piece a �big gob of gibberish.�

Even the White House couldn�t resist firing back at D�Souza. �It�s a stunning thing to see a publication you would see in a dentist�s office so lacking in truth and fact,� said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs earlier this week. Yesterday, Gibbs met with Forbes�s bureau chief in Washington in order to discuss his protest.

D�Souza defends his article by saying that while the influence of Barack Sr. on his son might be a psychological theory, �the idea that Obama has roots that are foreign is not an allegation�it�s a statement of fact.�

Regarding the psychological theory, D�Souza�s critics may well have a point. In fact, we would argue that his father�s absence had a more profound impact on Barack Obama�s worldview than his father�s ideology. But as we wrote in 2008, growing up in a fatherless household is what prompted a young Barack to look to someone else to fill the void his father had left in his family.

Enter Jeremiah Wright. This association, discussed at length in Dreams From My Father, is much more disturbing than Obama�s quest to understand the father he never knew.

During a Sunday service in 1988, according to Obama�s memoir, Wright delivered a sermon decrying the evils of a world �where white folks� greed runs a world in need.� The message brought tears to Obama�s eyes. It marked the beginning of a father-son relationship that lasted for 20 years. According to a Chicago Sun-Times profile in 2004, the president attended Trinity�s Sunday service every week��or at least as many weeks as he is able.�

In 2008, after his anti-Semitic, anti-American, anticolonial hatred went viral over the Internet, Jeremiah Wright became a household name. At the time, on his own website, the radical reverend proudly explained that his religion was rooted in black liberation theology. He praised the foundational work of James Cone, who defined the movement this way: �Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in black power which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject His love.��

That these roots are foreign�and that they run deep within the thinking of President Obama�s many anticolonial mentors�is without dispute.

Consider another long-time associate and friend�William Ayers. To this day, Ayers has shown no remorse for his terrorist attacks on federal targets during the 1960s and 1970s. According to his book, Ayers had a hand in bombing the New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, the Capitol building in 1971 and the Pentagon in 1972. During a 2001 interview, Ayers said, �I don�t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn�t do enough.�

He said that in 2001. Seven years earlier, according to biographer Christopher Anderson, Ayers helped Barack Obama write Dreams From My Father. As Anderson tells it, after Obama came down with a serious case of writer�s block, his wife urged him to seek help from Ayers, his writer friend and neighbor. According to Anderson, the meeting resulted in Mr. Obama handing over a �trunkload of notes� and a �partial manuscript� to Ayers.

If Ayers was largely responsible for assembling the material in Obama�s memoir, as American Thinker suggested on Wednesday, then it may be Ayers�not Barack Sr.�who had a stronger hand in shaping the president�s worldview.

But this is irrelevant to the most significant point D�Souza makes, which is this: �From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America�s military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father�s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America�s power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe�s resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.�

It is this worldview, no matter its primary source, that helps explain why Mr. Obama has adopted so many radical positions since becoming president. Next week, we will examine some of these unprecedented acts and explain the significance from a prophetic standpoint�particularly for the two great enemies of the anticolonial bloc�the United States and Britain.