By Paul Sperry
IBDEditorials.com
Now that a documentary warning that a re-elected Barack Obama would turn America into a Third World country is a box-office hit, the president's media surrogates are trying to discredit it.
The film, aptly named "2016," documents how Obama's Kenyan father had a greater influence on him than the public has been told. In fact, he shaped the president's intellectual development and world view.
So what? Barack Hussein Obama Sr., who died in 1982, was an African communist and anti-colonialist who hated the West. He wanted to see powers like Britain and what he viewed as its imperial successor, America, punished for oppressing peoples and exploiting their labor and resources.
Obama Jr. shares his father's animosity and is doing his bitter bidding, according to "2016," which is written and narrated by scholar Dinesh D'Souza and based on his book, "Roots of Obama's Rage."
The son, D'Souza warns, is on "a campaign of revenge" to bring down America as a "military and economic power."
While hard to accept, the film answers what the media refuse to even question. That is, why the president of the United States would:
• Hold corporate America, Wall Street and the wealthy in contempt.
• Run against capitalism in a country run by capitalism.
• Deny America's exceptionalism on the world stage and lead from behind.
• Apologize and bow, literally, to Third World leaders in a bizarre and unprecedented doctrine of mea culpa.
• Throw key Middle East ally Israel under the bus over Jewish settlements.
• Withdraw hastily from Afghanistan while refusing to talk about this key front in the War on Terror in terms of victory.
• Propose slashing the U.S. nuclear arsenal, while mothballing missile defense.
• Fail to guard national security secrets critical to protecting America from foreign threats.
• Curb domestic oil production and block the Keystone Pipeline, while underwriting exploration and drilling in South America.
• Compound America's debt crisis with even more federal spending, risking more U.S. credit downgrading.
D'Souza notes that the thrust of Obama policy aims to either redistribute wealth at home or U.S. power abroad. He argues it's strategic, designed to right past wrongs and delegitimize America as the world's richest superpower.
Predictably, the Associated Press slammed his film as "entirely subjective" and "thin" on evidence. It scoffs that about the only evidence he came up with to support the assertion that Obama's presidency is an expression of his father's political beliefs is the title of his 1995 memoir, "Dreams From My Father."
But this is the very least of the evidence D'Souza presents. AP leaves out key facts in its so-called "fact check." Or it parrots White House denials that are no longer even operative.
For instance, D'Souza points out that London had gifted a bust of Churchill to the Oval Office only to have Obama, in a slap, return it as soon as he took office. The Brits made it clear Obama could keep the small statue in the Oval Office. Problem is, Churchill happened to be prime minister when Britain ruled Kenya and allegedly mistreated Obama's grandfather. So Obama shipped it off.
AP claims there's no truth to the story, even though an Obama aide recently had to retract a statement denying Obama sent the bust back to the Brits.
Obama's father was so anti-West that British intelligence warned the U.S. not to grant him and a group of Kenyan students visas to study in the U.S. They were flagged in a 1959 diplomatic cable as radicals with an "anti-American and anti-white" political agenda.
When Obama Sr. returned to Kenya with a Harvard economics degree, he joined the newly independent Kenyan government as a Marxian economist. AP never mentions the July 1965 policy paper he wrote advising Nairobi to wring all vestiges of Western "neocolonialism" out of the Kenyan economy and replace them with Soviet-style communism, including industrial nationalization.
In the eight-page tract, he proposed economic tonics strikingly similar to ones now being pushed by his son, including: taxing the "rich" to "redistribute economic gains" and "economic power," funding public works projects and other government "investments," and forcing "people to do things they would not do otherwise," such as joining government-run cooperatives to discourage "individual" choices not in the "public interest." He railed against "free enterprise," arguing it creates wealth "disparities" and benefits "only a few individuals."
Though the Obama campaign has denied Obama Sr. was a communist, it has defended his paper's proposals by citing a Kenyan professor's recent opinion that they were "spot on."
In fact, Obama's father's ideas were even more radical than those proposed by Kenyan labor leader Tom Mboya, who wanted to develop a socialist system independent of the USSR. Obama Sr. sided instead with the leader of the pro-Soviet group, Oginga Odinga.
This is key, because in August 2006, then-Sen. Obama traveled to Kenya to campaign for Odinga's son, Raila Odinga, who was running for prime minister as a Marxist. Odinga, who studied in East Berlin during the Cold War and named his son Fidel, spent several years in jail for leading a bloody coup in 1982 against then-Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi—a close U.S. ally.
With Obama's help, Odinga became prime minister in 2008. The two sons of communists took power the same year, fulfilling their fathers' dreams.
IBD has learned that Obama's father adopted some of his ideas, namely nationalization of banking and other industries, from a Marxian economist from the University of Chicago. Obama Sr. was a fan of professor Martin Bronfenbrenner, a self-described "socialist," and closely studied his 1955 paper, "The Appeal of Confiscation in Economic Development," in which Bronfenbrenner argued for state control of banks.
"Confiscation of capital has not killed the goose that laid the golden eggs in the Soviet Union, in China, or in the other 'people's democracies.'" he said. "It seems rather to have been an important device permitting these countries to develop and industrialize rapidly."
In 1964, a year before Obama's father wrote his communist tract, Bronfenbrenner publicly complained that Japan was "foolhardy" to lower surtaxes on the rich, arguing that high tax rates and redistribution of income foster rapid economic growth.
The press insists Obama Sr. abandoned his son when he was two years old and remained absent from his life thereafter. In fact, he visited adolescent Obama in Hawaii, one time staying with him for a full month during which he spoke at his school.
It's plain from Obama's memoir that he worshipped his father. Obama devotes more than 130 pages, or roughly a third, of "Dreams" to covering his father's life and his colonized ancestry in Kenya. This is purposeful. Obama sympathizes with the idea that "neocolonial wealth," held even by Asian business owners in Nairobi, should be "redistributed to the people." (Neocolonialism is the alleged economic exploitation that remains even after political independence.)
Obama says he realized who he is and what he really cares about when he visited his father's grave. He describes breaking down and weeping, whereupon he reflects: "The pain that I felt was my father's pain."
D'Souza says Obama sought out paternal surrogates who shared his father's anti-colonial, anti-capitalist beliefs, including:
Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party member investigated by the FBI for un-American activities. As a teenager, Obama sat at Davis' knee in his Waikiki bungalow, where he was brainwashed into hating America while romanticizing Soviet Russia. Interestingly, Davis put Churchill at the center of Anglo-American "imperialism."
Rev. Jeremiah Wright, moreover, baptized Obama into "liberation theology," which emerged from the communist movement in Central America. Wright's church "stood in solidarity" with the Sandinista dictators of Nicaragua while Obama attended there.
Not surprisingly, Obama protested U.S. support for the Contra rebels. Wright also lionized Hamas and called for divestment in Israel, which he accused of having "illegally occupied Palestinian territories" for decades.
Derrick Bell, the late Harvard law professor, taught Obama "critical race theory" and "postcolonial theory," which argues that Western imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism. Obama remained close to Bell until his death last year.
All three of these surrogate fathers of Obama, along with Obama Sr. himself, were heavily influenced by Frantz Fanon, a Marxist revolutionary who didn't look or sound like one. Rarely seen without a suit and tie, the handsome and cerebral Fanon nonetheless described capitalists as "wretched" and the United States as "a monster."
He called for "a planned economy, for outlawing profiteers," and for wringing neocolonialism and capitalism out of every institution of society. In "The Wretched of the Earth," the late Fanon wrote, "What matters today is the need for a redistribution of wealth," adding "humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be."
Fanon, who died in the 1960s, viewed Kenya through the same angry lens as Obama Sr., railing against "the British colonial authorities" and "their intimidation tactics" against the Mau-Mau rebels. He scolded America for its indifference to the "200,000 victims of repression in Kenya." Later, he argued decolonized African governments had been "bought off" by imperialist profits.
Obama also idolized Fanon, devouring his works in college. "I distinctly remember Obama surprising me by bringing up Frantz Fanon and colonialism," said John C. Drew, a Ph.D. political scientist who was a fellow "angry Marxist" and friend of Obama when he attended Occidental College. "He impressed me with his knowledge of these two topics, topics which were not among my strong points."
Fanon's anti-Western diatribes, including those contained in an earlier book, "Black Skin, White Masks," influenced not only Obama's intellectual development but his political aspirations.
"Fanon is the man who helped pave (his) transition" from community organizer to politician, D'Souza said. "He is the one who helped Obama to put on his mask," he added, "the mask that would enable Obama to translate his anti-colonial ideas into the language and imagery of modern American politics."
Americans might be surprised to know that Obama, like Fanon, believes much of America and its territories were illegally colonized. Obama wrote in 2006 that settling Indian lands and the Southwest, annexing Hawaii, and bringing Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines under U.S. control were "racist" conquests and "an exercise in raw power."
Echoing Wright's post-9/11 sermon that "America's chickens have come home to roost," Obama wrote in the preface to the 2004 edition of "Dreams" that "history returned that day with a vengeance."
Obama also thinks that "blacks were forced into ghettos" after slavery by a founding capitalist system that favors whites. He sees a kind of apartheid existing in America today, in spite of civil-rights laws and affirmative action programs. "He sees capitalism as a form of neocolonialism," D'Souza said, and Republicans as the neocolonial party.
Obama revealed in "Dreams" that more needs to be done to free people from "the white man's empire," and that this is why he went to law school — "to learn things that would help me bring about real change."
In 2006, Obama wrote that soaking the rich will "restore some balance to the distribution of the nation's wealth." He is less concerned with how such surtaxes solve the budget crisis than how they bring about "economic justice." For example, he thinks the capital-gains tax rate should be raised expressly "for the purposes of fairness."
"Obama cannot bring himself to abandon his father's anti-colonial ideology," D'Souza explained. "That ideology calls for transfers of wealth from the colonizers to the colonized."
Obama doesn't just have a hidden ideological agenda, the filmmaker says. He's also hiding a personal agenda — and using the power of the presidency to settle old scores.
America in 2008 had no idea it was electing a leader with such baggage. Now thanks to this compelling documentary, it knows better.
• Sperry is an IBD editorial writer.