NRO:
Citing a recent Forbes article by Dinesh D'Souza, former House speaker Newt Gingrich tells National Review Online that President Obama may follow a "Kenyan, anti-colonial" worldview.
Gingrich says that D'Souza has made a "stunning insight" into Obama's behavior -- the "most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama."
"What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?" Gingrich asks. "That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior."
"This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president," Gingrich tells us.
The article by D'Souza states the following:
I know a great deal about anticolonialism, because I am a native of Mumbai, India. I am part of the first Indian generation to be born after my country's independence from the British. Anticolonialism was the rallying cry of Third World politics for much of the second half of the 20th century. To most Americans, however, anticolonialism is an unfamiliar idea, so let me explain it.
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. As one of Obama's acknowledged intellectual influences, Frantz Fanon, wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, "The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races."
Anticolonialists hold that even when countries secure political independence they remain economically dependent on their former captors. This dependence is called neocolonialism, a term defined by the African statesman Kwame Nkrumah (1909--72) in his book Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, writes that poor countries may be nominally free, but they continue to be manipulated from abroad by powerful corporate and plutocratic elites. These forces of neocolonialism oppress not only Third World people but also citizens in their own countries. Obviously the solution is to resist and overthrow the oppressors. This was the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. and many in his generation, including many of my own relatives in India.
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Rejecting the socialist formula, Obama has shown no intention to nationalize the investment banks or the health sector. Rather, he seeks to decolonize these institutions, and this means bringing them under the government's leash. That's why Obama retains the right to refuse bailout paybacks--so that he can maintain his control. For Obama, health insurance companies on their own are oppressive racketeers, but once they submitted to federal oversight he was happy to do business with them. He even promised them expanded business as a result of his law forcing every American to buy health insurance.
It seems that D'Souza's description of left-wing theories on "neocolonialism" are mostly accurate. It gets nonsensical when he tries to argue that Obama is implementing them--not just abroad--but in domestic policy as well. Even in foreign policy, Obama's actions and words after entering office have not matched those of a committed opponent of neocolonialism.
For example, here is an interview with Obama from 2009:
I think part of what's hampered advancement in Africa is that for many years we've made excuses about corruption or poor governance; that this was somehow the consequence of neo-colonialism, or the West has been oppressive, or racism. I'm not a believer in excuses.
I'd say I'm probably as knowledgeable about African history as anybody who's occupied my office. And I can give you chapter and verse on why the colonial maps that were drawn helped to spur on conflict, and the terms of trade that were uneven emerging out of colonialism.
And yet the fact is we're in 2009. The West and the United States has not been responsible for what's happened to Zimbabwe's economy over the last 15 or 20 years. It hasn't been responsible for some of the disastrous policies that we've seen elsewhere in Africa. I think that it's very important for African leadership to take responsibility and be held accountable.
Plus there's the fact that he still hasn't closed Gitmo, maintains indefinite detentions, authorized assassinations even in cases where the target is far from any battlefield, bombed civilians in Yemen, escalated the war in Afghanistan and is generally staying in line with neoliberal globalism.
To go on a rant: one could argue that his characterization of Zimbabwe is far off. The truth is that Mugabe was originally supported by certain Western powers after the collapse of the white supremacist regime of Rhodesia. He got arms shipments from the UK and "structural adjustment" packages from the IMF/World Banksters. In his first decades within office, he acted within the confines of the Washington Consensus as a "compromise" for ending the apartheid-like rule of white settlers. As a result, standards of living fell dramatically as the austerity packages and privatizations he imposed on the country took their toll. But that was never much of a problem to Anglo-American imperial alliance. Mugabe only became "the bad guy" when he started confiscating land from the large white land owners. Much like Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega, he went rogue and the US/UK alliance punished him for doing so. Here is Mahmood Mamdani on the matter:
Southern Rhodesia became Zimbabwe in 1980, but the social realities of the newly independent state remained embedded in an earlier historical period: some six thousand white farmers owned 15.5 million hectares of prime land, 39 per cent of the land in the country, while about 4.5 million farmers (a million households) in ‘communal areas’ were left to subsist on 16.4 million hectares of the most arid land, to which they’d been removed or confined by a century of colonial rule.
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The new regime in Harare, installed in 1980 and led by Mugabe and his party, Zanu, called for the purchase of eight million hectares to resettle 162,000 land-poor farming households from communal areas. But the ban on compulsory purchase drove up land prices and encouraged white farmers to sell only the worst land. As the decade drew to a close, only 58,000 families had been resettled on three million hectares of land. No more than 19 per cent of the land acquired between 1980 and 1992 was of prime agricultural value.
As the 1980s wore on, land transfers actually declined, dropping from 430,000 hectares per annum during the first half of the decade to 75,000 hectares during the second. The greater land hunger became, the more often invasions were mounted; in response, Mugabe created local ‘squatter control’ units in 1985, and they were soon evicting squatters in droves. At this point Zimbabwean law still defined a squatter in racial terms, as ‘an African whose house happens to be situated in an area which has been declared European or is set apart for some other reason’. By 1990, 40 per cent of the rural population was said to be landless or affected by the landlessness of dependent relations.
When the Lancaster House Agreement’s rules on land transfer expired in 1990, the pressure to take direct action was intensified by two very different developments: an IMF Structural Adjustment Programme and recurrent drought. Peasant production, which had been a meagre 8 per cent of marketed output at independence in 1980, and had shot up to 45 per cent by 1985, declined as a result of the programme. Trade-union analysts pointed out that employment growth also fell from 2.4 per cent in the late 1980s to 1.55 per cent in the period 1991-97. The percentage of households living in poverty throughout the country increased by 14 per cent in five years. There was now widespread squatting on all types of land, from communal areas to state land, commercial farms (mainly growing tobacco), resettlement areas and urban sites.
To make a long story short: the crisis in ZImbabwe is a case of neoliberal "compromise" gone haywire. Mugabe came to power with an agreement that kept his people's former white overlords still holding the reins of economic power. When the pressure from the rural peasantry became too much to bear, he opportunistically decided to allow for chaotic seizures of fertile white-owned farmland. He then used his newfound support base to (unfairly) demonize the more urban-based opposition as "puppets" of US/UK imperialism. Eventually, the US and the "international community" did put draconian sanctions on Mugabe's regime, but this was only after he impeded on the privileges of the wealthy settler class. Yes, he is a corrupt and brutal authoritarian asshole; but he was OUR brutal asshole before he enacted the confiscation of land from the oligarchy, which stole the land from the black natives in the first place anyways.
So you see, what I have just posted is an example of what a genuine anti-colonialist thinks. Obama may not look too fondly on old school direct colonialism as practiced by the British and French empires of a half-century to a century ago, but he sure doesn't seem to have a problem with the modern-day neocolonial relations between the first world and the third world.
In short: Obama is not an anti-colonialist. You already knew that but I thought I'd explain it in more complete terms.
On a final note: apart from the inaccuracy of D'Souza and Gingrich's claims, why on earth would anyone use "anti-colonial" as an insult rather than a compliment? I thought that the standard tactic for neocolonial apologists was to deny that it even existed. Often in the form of statements such as "WTF, we granted you your independence and your societies are still messed up!? Oh well. Not much we can do about it. Of course, we'll always give you some more of that handy IMF credit if you privatize some more of your assets and abandon your protections for domestic agriculture."
Sigh. If Obama was half the leftist these nutjobs said he was things would be so much better.