George Neumayr: Neocolonial Dreams from Obama's Mother
[George Neumayr is editor of Catholic World Report and press critic for California Political Review.]
Newt Gingrich said to National Review Online recently, "What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?" Gingrich's comment sparked off Dinesh D'Souza's Forbes article, which argues that America is "governed by the ghost" of Obama's "Luo tribesman" father.
But let's not forget the white-liberal neocolonialism of his mother, which influenced him too. In Dreams from My Father, Obama reveals just as many or more dreams from his mother, the Ford Foundation anthropologist who introduced enlightened liberal ideology to the native tribes of Indonesia. There in that "land" of "fatalism," Obama writes, "she was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism."
The patronizing tone that Obama adopts in the book when discussing his father's failures makes him sound more like a neocolonialist cut from his mother's cloth than an anticolonialist. While he approves of the anticolonials' anti-western anger, he still thinks they could use some direction from western liberals. He expresses disappointment with his father for not swallowing the liberal faith whole. His father lacked "faith in people" and held too tightly to certain Luo ways -- "too much of its rigidness, its suspicions, its male cruelties." If only, he implies, the African anticolonials were less stubborn and let neocolonialists at the Ford Foundation guide them to Planned Parenthood clinics and schools bankrolled by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, all would have been well...
Read entire article at American Spectator
Newt Gingrich said to National Review Online recently, "What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?" Gingrich's comment sparked off Dinesh D'Souza's Forbes article, which argues that America is "governed by the ghost" of Obama's "Luo tribesman" father.
But let's not forget the white-liberal neocolonialism of his mother, which influenced him too. In Dreams from My Father, Obama reveals just as many or more dreams from his mother, the Ford Foundation anthropologist who introduced enlightened liberal ideology to the native tribes of Indonesia. There in that "land" of "fatalism," Obama writes, "she was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism."
The patronizing tone that Obama adopts in the book when discussing his father's failures makes him sound more like a neocolonialist cut from his mother's cloth than an anticolonialist. While he approves of the anticolonials' anti-western anger, he still thinks they could use some direction from western liberals. He expresses disappointment with his father for not swallowing the liberal faith whole. His father lacked "faith in people" and held too tightly to certain Luo ways -- "too much of its rigidness, its suspicions, its male cruelties." If only, he implies, the African anticolonials were less stubborn and let neocolonialists at the Ford Foundation guide them to Planned Parenthood clinics and schools bankrolled by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, all would have been well...