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| Why O Doesn't Like Britian (and Seems Like He Hates America) |
| 2011-07-05 |
| Yesterday's Reagan editorial lead me to this, published in the UK Telegraph, last December. What has he got against us? The conventional answer is that he is bitter about the way his grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was interned during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. But this explanation doesn't fit with what Obama himself has written. Barack never knew his grandfather, but what he later found out repelled him. It seems O hates colonialism, and the part of America that he views as colonial. In The Roots of Obama's Rage, the American author Dinesh D'Souza advances the theory that Obama's world-view is based on his father's anti-colonialism. The mistake that every other analyst has made, argues D'Souza, is to try to fit Obama into America's racial narrative. But the battle for civil rights is only tangentially a part of his story. Indeed, he has infuriated many black political organisations by refusing to take up the issues that they care about, such as the minimum wage and affirmative action. His struggle was not that against desegregation in Mississippi but that of Southern colonies against Northern colonists, of expropriated peoples against those who had plundered them. Which means, I suppose, he's not a big friend of Russia? Only this explanation fits all the facts, argues D'Souza. For example, Obama's climate change policies make little sense either as an attempt to slow global warming or as a way to make the US more popular. But they make perfect sense as a mechanism for the redistribution of wealth from rich nations to poor. (D'Souza notes, as an instance, the way in which the Obama administration has banned offshore drilling in the US while sponsoring it in Brazil). The same is true of his enthusiasm for nuclear disarmament. It seems bizarre to be pursuing the elimination of atomic weapons in a forum that doesn't include Iran or North Korea. But, argues D'Souza, this isn't really about Iran or North Korea. It's about making America a less warlike, less intimidating, less -- in a word -- imperial nation. Now anti-colonialism is not the same thing as anti-Americanism. On the contrary, a measure of anti-colonialism was encoded in the DNA of the new republic. Obama does not, as his more hysterical critics allege, "hate America". As he sees it, making America more peacable, more internationalist and more engaged with global institutions is in the national interest. He may be wrong, but I don't doubt that, after his fashion, he loves his country. However ... Ours is a different matter. Britain created the greatest and most extensive empire the world has known. For Obama, Winston Churchill is not simply the man who defeated Nazism; he is also the man who defeated the Mau Mau insurrection. No wonder he didn't want to have the bust in his office. For Obama, the Falkland Islands are not a democratic society threatened by an autocratic aggressor, but a colonial relic. |
| Posted by:Bobby |
| #3 "Britian" > Whoa, the Bammer doesn't like Brit-A-I-n, Britanny, or Britney Spears??? Who knew??? * "Internationalist" = GLOBALIST? = TERRAN/PLANET-IST??? |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2011-07-05 19:56 |
| #2 Transference. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2011-07-05 17:26 |
| #1 Yeah, colonialism is all mean and evil and nasty and stuff. But it is funny how 60% of Jamaicans feel they were better off when they were a British colony. But that just might be a relative indication of Jamaica's recent socialist suckitude. |
| Posted by: SteveS 2011-07-05 14:04 |