Love him or hate him, you don’t know Barack Obama. Analyst Dinesh D’Souza, an immigrant from India and contemporary of the President, has taken the time to examine Obama as a person, his background and his ideology, in his new book, Obama’s America: Unmaking the American Dream. A documentary movie based on the book, 2016, is in theaters across the country.
This book, and the movie, may help folks understand WHY this President does what he does. It will not, however, change any minds. Folks who support Obama will continue to support him. Those of us opposed to Obama will not likely suddenly cast him our ballot this November. Hopefully more of us will see more clearly where the path he has chosen will lead us.
D’Souza begins at the beginning. Obama’s inner compass is his “anti-colonial” ideology—the Dreams from his Father—remaking America on a more-level global playing field. We learn more about that alcoholic father who abandoned Obama at his birth, and his mother who sent him away when he was just 10 years old. We learn about his family, in the United States and in Kenya, who Obama has left behind. We learn a bit about the radical activists and college professors who mentored Obama as a young man: the communist beach bum Frank Davis; at Columbia, Palestinian Edward Said; at Harvard, socialist Roberto Mangabeira Unger, and in Chicago preacher Jeremiah Wright and ’60s terrorist Bill Ayers. The second act examines this presidency through the lens of imperialism and anti-colonialism.
The term “anti-colonial” ideology is not mainstream in America, but is well known on most college campuses. “Anti-colonialism is the most powerful political force in the non-Western world in the past 100 years,” D’Souza writes. This worldview ascribes the success of Western Civilization to theft. “In other words, anti-colonialists believe that the wealth of the world has not been generated through work or effort or creativity. It has not been earned, but rather stolen.” Adherents believe colonialism continues in American economic exploitation of the Third World, and we must be made to pay.
I myself don’t quite know what to make of Obama. He’s not quite the bungling do-good liberal in the Jimmy Carter mold, nor the pragmatic do-whatever-it-takes FDR. He’s smarter than that. And I, myself, don’t care what color his skin is or where he was born, what he grades he got in college or if he leaves his brother behind in African poverty. Christian, Muslim, agnostic, it’s all backstory in a lifetime dedicated to reparations for the American dream. I agree with D’Souza that Obama does not hate America, only that his prescription for what ails us will kill the patient.
Take some time—check the book out of your library, or go see the movie. Don’t believe the media hype, left or right. Decide for yourself.
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