The Roots of Obama's Rage (28 page)
Read The Roots of Obama's Rage Online
Authors: Dinesh D'Souza
Here’s a second example to test our theory’s predictive power. On August 13, 2010, just as I was reviewing the final galleys for this book, President Obama held a White House dinner celebrating the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. At the event, he praised the plan to construct a mosque and Islamic community center two blocks from Ground Zero—the site of the 9/11 attacks in lower Manhattan. “This is America,” Obama solemnly declared, “and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable. . . . The writ of our founders must endure.” This is Obama in full translation mode, blurring the issue with his usual agility. The issue raised by the Ground Zero mosque is not one of religious freedom: of course Muslims have a right to build mosques and worship in them. Rather, the issue is whether it is right to have a mosque and Islamic center in virtually the exact spot where so many Americans were killed in the name of Islamic holy war. I don’t think it is right, any more than I would support the idea of a neo-Nazi recruiting center at Auschwitz. My sympathies in this case are not with religiously deprived Muslims, but rather with Debra Burlingame, a spokesperson for a 9/11 victims group. “Barack Obama has abandoned America at the place where America’s heart was broken nine years ago,” she said.
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Some supporters of the mosque, such as New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, clearly missed the distinction being made here between the right to worship and how and where that right is exercised. Fareed Zakaria, writer and CNN host, recognizes the distinction; even so, he argues in favor of the mosque on the grounds that the folks building it are traditional Muslims who have condemned terrorism.
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Still, it’s not clear why these moderate Muslims disregarded the sentiments of the 9/11 victims’ families and decided on a site so close to Ground Zero. Undoubtedly radical Muslims around the world will view the mosque as a kind of triumphal monument. There is historical precedent for this. Muslims have a long tradition of building monuments to commemorate triumphs over adversaries, as when they built the Dome of the Rock on the site of Solomon’s Temple, or when Mehmet the Conqueror rode his horse into the Byzantine church Hagia Sophia and declared that it would be turned into a mosque. Many Americans may not know this history, but the radical Muslims do, and Obama does as well. The radical Muslims would like the Ground Zero mosque built so it can stand as an enduring symbol of resistance to American power, and President Obama evidently agrees with them.
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Still, it’s not clear why these moderate Muslims disregarded the sentiments of the 9/11 victims’ families and decided on a site so close to Ground Zero. Undoubtedly radical Muslims around the world will view the mosque as a kind of triumphal monument. There is historical precedent for this. Muslims have a long tradition of building monuments to commemorate triumphs over adversaries, as when they built the Dome of the Rock on the site of Solomon’s Temple, or when Mehmet the Conqueror rode his horse into the Byzantine church Hagia Sophia and declared that it would be turned into a mosque. Many Americans may not know this history, but the radical Muslims do, and Obama does as well. The radical Muslims would like the Ground Zero mosque built so it can stand as an enduring symbol of resistance to American power, and President Obama evidently agrees with them.
My confidence in the anti-colonial model emboldens me to make three specific predictions about Obama’s future conduct. The first prediction concerns deficit reduction. Obama’s position has been that we need to spend trillions right now, but once the economy recovers it will be time to get serious about deficit reduction. Now there is one kind of deficit reduction that Obama clearly likes: tax increases on the rich. Already he has announced that he is going to let the Bush tax cuts lapse, at least for the higher brackets. But of course deficits can also be reduced through spending cuts. Since I don’t think Obama cares about deficits per se, only about reducing concentrations of power and wealth in America, I do not expect to see any significant spending reductions during an Obama administration. Cutting spending is simply not a priority for the anti-colonial agenda.
Second, I predict that even as Iran develops the full capacity to build nuclear weapons, Obama will do little or nothing to stop it. My theory holds that Obama has no serious interest in preventing Iran from having a bomb; his main concern is with reducing the American arsenal. Therefore I believe that the Obama administration will huff and puff and take all kinds of meaningless steps but no effective action to actually prevent Iran from reaching its nuclear objective. Of course it is possible that Israel will launch airstrikes to disable the Iranian nuclear facilities, but in this case I predict the Obama administration will do its best to prevent Israel from taking any such action. From the anti-colonial point of view, an Israeli strike would be an unconscionable act of aggression against a country that is only seeking something that Israel and the West already possess.
My third prediction is more risky, because it relies on the political atmosphere being favorable to Obama and unfavorable to the military. If that becomes the case, then I predict that Obama will go beyond his attempt to try terrorists and foreign captives in civilian courts. He will initiate procedures to try U.S. military officers and soldiers for war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Right now this is politically impossible, but the atmosphere can change quickly if there are more Abu Ghraib type scandals that provoke public outrage. I suspect that Obama is looking for something like this to launch an all-out campaign against the military. So if the circumstances permit him to do it, I believe that Obama will do it. This would be his way to call the colonial occupation forces to account.
Throughout this book, I have been outlining the formulation of Obama’s anti-colonial ideology and showing the harmful impact of that ideology on America’s economy and America’s position in the world. But this is to judge Obama on terms that he would not accept. In this final chapter I intend to assess Obama’s anti-colonialism on its own terms. How effectively does it meet its goals of bringing down the rich and powerful and raising up the wretched of the earth? I intend to argue that in the one place that it has been tried—namely, Africa—Obama’s anti-colonialism has been a complete failure. Moreover, there is now a new ideology on the scene that is antithetical to Obama’s and yet delivers precisely the goods that Obama claims to have been seeking all along.
That ideology is globalization or, to spell it out more clearly, global free trade. Apart from a tariff here and a tariff there, Obama hasn’t done much to stop global free trade, but he isn’t really a supporter of it, either. While previous presidents—Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush—all promoted agreements that expanded free trade, Obama does not even seem to be seeking one. In fact, the Obama administration has raised so many labor and environmental objections to free trade treaties that not one is likely to pass its muster. When Obama was in the Senate he voted against the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).
How strange this is, because free trade has done more for the wretched of the earth than all the UN programs and foreign aid schemes ever implemented. Consider this: in the past few decades, two of the poorest countries in the world, India and China, have raised hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and tens of millions of people into the comforts of middle-class life. Fareed Zakaria notes that largely as a consequence of China and India’s growth rates, “the share of people living on a dollar a day or less plummeted from 40 percent in 1981 to 18 percent in 2004 and it is estimated to fall to 12 percent by 2015.”
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No foreign assistance program comes close to achieving results like this.
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No foreign assistance program comes close to achieving results like this.
How did the Chinese and the Indians do it? They exploited what economist Thorstein Veblen once termed “the advantages of backwardness.” Poorer countries have lower labor costs, so if they figure out how to export their goods and services to richer countries, they have a competitive advantage. Think of all the Chinese-made goods you can now buy at Walmart, or of Mumbai call centers staffed by Indians. As these examples illustrate, the Chinese initially focused on producing manufacturing goods more cheaply than Western manufacturers could. India focused on information technology, telecommunications services, and data processing. Still, it was presumed by most observers that the West was driving globalization, as Western corporations looked to cut their costs and increase their profits. But now it seems that countries like India and China are not merely benefiting from Western “outsourcing”; rather, as
The Economist
reports, they are driving the process by becoming juggernauts of innovation.
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The Economist
reports, they are driving the process by becoming juggernauts of innovation.
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India and China have together refuted the anti-colonial economics of the 1950s, the economics that shaped the mind of a whole generation of Asian, South American, and African thinkers, including Obama’s father. In Chinweizu’s
The West and the Rest of Us
, we find the erroneous premise of that economics: “The poor have no way of influencing or changing the world market prices to their benefit.”
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Chinweizu’s assumption was that the poor countries have the raw materials and the rich countries have the manufacturing capacity. Since the rich countries are powerful, they can set the world price, and the poor countries have no choice but to go along. Chinweizu could think of nothing better than to rage against this unjust system. Never did it occur to him, or for that matter to Barack Obama Sr., that poor countries could use their low labor costs to their advantage, making themselves wealthier in the process. Indeed, they would probably have dismissed such a prospect as neocolonial thinking at its worst.
The West and the Rest of Us
, we find the erroneous premise of that economics: “The poor have no way of influencing or changing the world market prices to their benefit.”
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Chinweizu’s assumption was that the poor countries have the raw materials and the rich countries have the manufacturing capacity. Since the rich countries are powerful, they can set the world price, and the poor countries have no choice but to go along. Chinweizu could think of nothing better than to rage against this unjust system. Never did it occur to him, or for that matter to Barack Obama Sr., that poor countries could use their low labor costs to their advantage, making themselves wealthier in the process. Indeed, they would probably have dismissed such a prospect as neocolonial thinking at its worst.
India and China aren’t the only poor countries that are on the upswing. Today we see impressive growth rates in a wide swath of emerging market economies, from Chile to Indonesia to Romania. Recently World Bank president Bob Zoellick remarked that given these trends the term “third world” is already obsolete.
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The new term is “emerging markets.” Remarkably it is these emerging markets that are now the main source of growth in the world economy. In a startling reversal, the economies of the old colonial powers are stagnant or growing at a very slow pace, while their former territories are racing to catch up.
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The new term is “emerging markets.” Remarkably it is these emerging markets that are now the main source of growth in the world economy. In a startling reversal, the economies of the old colonial powers are stagnant or growing at a very slow pace, while their former territories are racing to catch up.
One might expect a supposed advocate for the developing world like Obama to celebrate these trends, but he doesn’t. Why not? Recall his father’s rejection of the consumer capitalism that Jomo Kenyatta wanted for Kenya. The Kenyatta model is the forerunner of the global capitalism of today, in which the whole world becomes a single interconnected market. Barack Obama Sr. rejected the Kenyatta model in favor of African socialism. He wanted Kenya, and more broadly Africa, to control its own economic destiny through state supervision and regulation. For him, submitting to economic interdependence was another form of neocolonialism—a prospect to be feared and avoided. President Obama has adopted his father’s model, and consequently, as his own writings and speeches confirm, he views global, entrepreneurial capitalism and free trade as a threat and an embarrassment.
Obama would be even more chagrined if he knew that the legacy of colonialism itself is now being reconsidered in several developing nations. India is a perfect example. The Indians are super-excited about their turbo-charged economy; one Indian entrepreneur was quoted saying that the technological revolution in India would realize Gandhi’s dream of wiping a tear from every Indian face. But how have the Indians managed to do so well in the global economy? Well, one reason is that so many of them speak English. Another is that the Indians have a very good education system that places a high emphasis on mathematics and science. A third is that India has a system of laws, contracts, and property rights. When you ask the simple question, “How did the Indians get all these things?” the unavoidable answer is, “Colonialism.”
No one is suggesting that the British came to India to provide the Indians with a universal language or scientific education or anything like that. The British, like previous conquerors before them, came to rule for their own benefit. In order to administer the empire, however, the British had to educate a native class of Indians. This required teaching them English. Education exposed the Indians to new ideas that were largely alien in traditional Indian culture: democracy, rule of law, human rights, self-determination, individualism, and so on. Ultimately the Indians learned the very language of political liberation from their captors. Several of the leaders of Indian independence were educated in Britain, including Gandhi and India’s first prime minister, Nehru.
Remarkably this development was predicted by Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay in the nineteenth century. In his famous Minute on Education, Macaulay said the English sought to create an English-speaking native middle class “who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” Macaulay foresaw that over time this group would challenge and replace their rulers. In 1833, Macaulay told the British parliament, “It may be that the public mind of India may expand under our system until it has outgrown that system, that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government; that, having become instructed in European knowledge, they may in some future age demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever come I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history.”
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Macaulay has been proven right. Even so, for several decades after independence, it was politically impossible for the colonized to say anything good about their former colonizers. All that has now changed. Recently India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, gave a talk at Oxford University in which he did something that no Indian politician dared do when I was growing up. He openly praised the British legacy in India. “Today with the balance and perspective offered by the passage of time and the benefit of hindsight, it is possible for an Indian prime minister to assert that India’s experience with Britain had its beneficial consequences. Our notions of the rule of law, of a Constitutional government, of a free press, of a professional civil service, of modern universities and research laboratories have all been fashioned in the crucible where an age-old civilization met the dominant Empire of the day.”
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When Singh attributed Indian success to the groundwork laid by British institutions, he wasn’t just talking about the Indian nation being able to stand on its own—which was the original meaning of independence—but also of India becoming fully integrated and competing effectively in the global economy. Now political independence operates in conjunction with economic interdependence. Obama may not join me, but as an Indian myself who has greatly benefited from this colonial legacy, I am quite willing to give two cheers for colonialism. I say “two” and not “three” in deference to my ancestors, who had a hard time under colonialism. But while colonialism was bad for them, it has been good for me. Hey, it’s thanks to the Brits that English is my first language and that’s how I was able to write this book. So while Obama fumes, I am happy to raise my glass and toast that curmudgeonly old defender of the British empire, Winston Churchill.
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