There are many who want to label President Obama as a Marxist and a Muslim. And to be sure, the president himself has provided plenty of examples in word and deed to support their hypothesis; it is certainly not unreasonable for people to paint him as either one or both of these things, based on his own actions.
His takeovers of GM and Chrysler, his nationalization of student loans and a line, often quoted from his book Dreams From My Father, “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets,” could definitely lead one to believe he’s a Marxist (or at the very least, a poser).
His utlra-apologetic “Cairo” speech, his instruction to his NASA director, Charles Broden, to mainly focus on Muslim outreach, his support for the Palestinians- at the expense of our ally Israel, and his tacit support for the “Ground Zero Mosque” could also lead one to the conclusion that the president is a Muslim.
However, I think there are other factors at work here that better explain Obama, his actions and why even his political allies on the left are often confused by his policies and deeds.
In a recent Forbes article, Dinesh D’Souza delves into the formative years of Barry Soetoro (Barack Obama), his relationship to his father, Barack Obama, Sr. and – in my opinion – where the current President of the United States really gets his political ideology.
As D’Souza illustrates very well, the elder Obama, “was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard”. He goes on to point out that Obama, Sr. “was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents, killing a man in one and causing his own legs to be amputated due to injury in another. In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself”. This is certainly not the kind of person most would elevate to the level of inspirational role-model, someone to be emulated and revered.
However, President Obama spent the first 17 years of his life away from the Continental United States, living in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan; he also traveled to Africa, where his father was born. He saw firsthand the effects of European colonialism and its aftermath, as these former colonies gained their political freedom.
Due to his early life experiences Obama came to view the United States as what D’Souza calls a “neocolonialist” nation. Anticolonialism is “the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America”. You could probably say that with his view of America, Obama became an anti-neocolonialist.
With President Obama’s exposure as an adolescent to communist mentor Frank Marshall Davis, and subsequent introduction as an adult to Black Liberation Theology by Reverend Jeremiah Wright – an ideology that teaches there are oppressors and victims in most relationships – he was able to combine his political and religious beliefs to paint the United States as the perpetual oppressor, with the poor, the Muslim world and others as its perpetual victims.
This explains why the President doesn’t believe in American Exceptionalism, why he is constantly apologizing for imagined American offenses against everyone from Muslims to Palestinians and from Japan to Europe. It also explains why he’s simultaneously imposed a moratorium on American offshore oil drilling in the Gulf and guaranteed loans to Mexico to expand its offshore drilling; and why -in apparent contradiction to his “green agenda”- he provided Brazil’s oil giant, Petrobras, with billions of taxpayer dollars to exploit its offshore oil fields. Neither of these projects will benefit the U.S. or American companies, but they will help two countries that are “victims” of former European colonialism.
The President didn’t nationalize American industries because he’s a Marxist; he did it because it gives him the ability to redistribute wealth from the corporate oppressors to the oppressed workers and the poor.
Obama’s general view of the world and particular view of the United States is deeply flawed. As a man who has never held a real job or run even the smallest company, he is economically illiterate and ideologically driven by the failed Keynesian model. He has been indoctrinated by a false history of the United States that colors everything he does.
He does not view our nation as one that has brought freedom and prosperity to those who are willing to work hard, or as one that believes in the value of the individual. Instead he views the U.S. as an oppressor, as a villain, and believes that only through redistributive justice can the U.S. achieve collective salvation for its past offenses against the world.
There is no doubt that our nation is far from perfect, and over the past two centuries we’ve certainly made mistakes. The treatment of Native Americans by the U.S. Government during the period of Western expansion was shameful, but cannot be undone. Slavery is a blight on the history of the United States, but one we’ve atoned for through Lincoln’s freeing of the slaves and subsequent reparations. Segregation and Jim Crow laws were wrong but have been corrected. The internment of Japanese, German and Italian-Americans during World War II was a horrible mistake, borne of fear, one that we have hopefully learned from and will never repeat.
But for the most part the United States has been a force for good in the world. The “Greatest Generation” freed the World from the Axis Powers in World War II. Our armed forces and our allies defended the freedom-loving people of South Korea. We rebuilt Europe and defended them from the threat of Soviet-Communism during the Cold War. And despite what some have said we gave the people of Afghanistan the tools they needed to rid themselves of the Soviet invaders that threatened them and then we left.
The United States has not colonized any nation, nor have we occupied any nation after being asked to leave. Our military presence in Germany, Japan, South Korea and even Saudi Arabia is at the request of the governments of these nations, not as occupiers but as defenders of their sovereignty. The problem isn’t that we shouldn’t be there; it’s that we shouldn’t be footing the bill for our continued defense of these foreign nations. But that is a topic for another article.
The point is that President Barack Obama is neither a Marxist, nor is he a Muslim. He is a misguided anti-neocolonialist and follower of a distorted form of Christianity, known as Liberation Theology, which teaches that the United States is an evil, oppressive nation and that only through redistributive justice can its citizens achieve collective salvation for historic crimes, both real and imagined. He has elevated his father, an alcoholic and drunk driver-who killed others and himself due to his disease- to the level of an inspirational hero. He has also taken his father’s outdated philosophy and applied it to the United States, a nation that is nothing like the European countries his father opposed.
