We all agree that Newt Gingrich is a lizard, ha-ha, and that he reached a new low in slamming the President with this.
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]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior."
Who were the Kenyan anti-colonialists? Well, there were two kinds, the political class, represented by Jomo Kenyatta, whom Gingrich would categorize as Socialists, even Communists, and, of course, the Mau Mau rebels, whose name was propagandized into a byword for savagery and slaughter. Were they authentic freedom fighters? Were both groups terrorists, as the British Empire claimed? Are those the only possibilities?
No, it turns out that actual history is, as usual, more complicated and more interesting than political propaganda. Whereas I find Newt Gingrich's naked, pandering, hopeless political opportunism interesting only when he thinks up a new insult, and new Dog Whistle Code to express it in, and then only briefly, until we see how to explain which Americans he and the rest of the Right are gratuitously insulting this time.
Gingrich continues
"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.
You lost me there, Newt. He is so out of touch that he can play the political game far, far better than you? By accident? You make me laugh, loser. We know what kind of historian you are, too.
HISTORY, n.
An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
Gingrich's source is this scurrilous, meaningless, article fantasy by Indian apologist for colonialism Dinesh D'Souza (Souza or Sousa is a Portuguese name, typical of former Portuguese colony Goa in India, where his parents came from.)
How Obama Thinks
Dinesh D'Souza, 09.09.10, 05:40 PM EDT
Forbes Magazine dated September 27, 2010 [pull date, not publication date]
The President isn't exactly a socialist. So what's driving his hostility to private enterprise? Look to his roots.
Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history…
Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called "Problems Facing Our Socialism." Obama Sr. wasn't a doctrinaire socialist; rather, he saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary means to achieve the anticolonial objective of taking resources away from the foreign looters and restoring them to the people of Africa. For Obama Sr. this was an issue of national autonomy. "Is it the African who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the economic means of growth in this country?"…
Clearly the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. goes a long way to explain the actions and policies of his son in the Oval Office.…
The climax of Obama's narrative [in Dreams from My Father] is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father's grave.…
In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that "I sat at my father's grave and spoke to him through Africa's red soil." In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father's spirit. Obama takes on his father's struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.'s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.'s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son's objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father's struggle becomes the son's birthright.
Dinesh D'Souza, the president of the King's College in New York City, is the author of the forthcoming book The Roots of Obama's Rage (Regnery Publishing).
D'Souza has also been prominent at the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution, and an adviser to President Ronald Reagan. He has dated Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter, poor fellow.
Regnery is a leading publisher of mindless Rightwing drivel, bragging that their books go "contrary to those of 'mainstream' publishers in New York."
Most of the article is pure Rightwing Echo Chamber propaganda. We don't have room for a point-by-point refutation, which you can find elsewhere. Suffice it to say that D'Souza recites many of the standard anti-Obama talking points about hating business and doing everything he can to destroy America, and takes many of them even further than usual with outright lies, capping everything with this fevered nightmare concocted out of nothing. The only people who could possibly take this seriously are the rich for whom Forbes proudly advertises itself as "Capitalist Tool", and their Useful Idiots in the Tea Parties and such. The same crowd that laps up the dreck from the American Enterprise Institute and so on.
When I say that they take it seriously, I don't necessarily mean that they believe it, just that they find it useful. As usual, it is difficult to distinguish incompetence and malice in such matters, although there are some hints if you simply follow the money right into their pockets.
As with Newt, I find that I cannot follow Dinesh's logic either. He appears to say that Obama is not really a Socialist, he is just following a pure anti-business, anti-colonial Socialist agenda of expropriation, class warfare, and economic revenge. If you can figure it out, please let me know in the comments.
Mau-Mauing Capitalism?
D'Souza and Gingrich do not mention the Mau Mau Rebellion, and will deny that they were thinking of it when they tossed their bombs, but it's far too late for that. The connection has been made, and they haven't said anything against it.
Google: Obama "Mau Mau"
About 43,100 results (0.30 seconds)
Search Results
1. Barack Obama's grandfather 'tortured by the British' during ...
Dec 3, 2008 ... Sarah Onyango, Barack Obama's grandmother has revealed Mr Obama's grandfather was tortured by the British during the Mau Mau rebellion ...
www.dailymail.co.uk/.../Barack-Obamas-grandfather-tortured-British-Kenas-Mau-Mau-rebellion.htm
l - Similar
2. Obama and the Mau Mau
Mar 22, 2009 ... Obama and the Mau Mau, the president who swore he would change the way the world looks at America is not a fan of the British, ...
www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/9547 - Cached - Similar
3. Columnist Says Barack Obama 'Lied To The American People;' Asks ...
Obama's father ran back to Kenya soon after the British left. It is likely Obama's father had Mau Mau sympathies or connections, or he would ...
www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1189687/posts - Cached
4. News for obama "mau mau"
5. CBS News Robert Gibbs On Newt Gingrich's 'Kenyan' Comments: He's Trying To ... - 1 day ago
"What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, ... Kenya's anti colonialist group is better known as the Mau-Mau's. ...
Huffington Post (blog) - 147 related articles »
6. Obama, Churchill & the Mau Mau. - Two Doctors
Obama, Churchill & the Mau Mau. By. James. on February 16, 2009 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) · churchillmohican.jpg Churchill remains the closest to ...
www.twodoctors.org/.../obama-churchill-the-mau-mau.html - Cached - Similar
7. Barack Obama is the Mau Mau candidate for president « Contrarian ...
Mar 22, 2008 ... I was not the only person impressed and influenced by the Mau Mau. Barack Obama Senior was a young Kenyan growing up in the thick of the ...
contrariancommentary.wordpress.com/.../barack-obama-is-the-mau-mau-candidate-for-president/ - Cached - Similar
8. New York Times "Obama is a living lie" Mau Mau Member? - Sherdog ...
10 posts - 6 authors - Last post: May 27, 2008
Here are some strong words from a New York Times columnist, also claims Obama's Democratic Convention Speech was filled with lies.
www.sherdog.net › ... › Off-Topic › The War Room - Cached - Similar
Get more discussion results
9. Beatings and abuse made Barack Obama's grandfather loathe the ...
Dec 3, 2008 ... The President-elect's relatives have told how the family was a victim of the Mau Mau revolt. Ben Macintyre and Paul Orengoh. Barack Obama's ...
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article5276010.ece - Similar
10. Mau-Mau and Irgun descendants head for the White House? | The Best ...
Jan 9, 2009 ... After the war, Obama's grandfather, back in Kenya, was suspected of being involved in an anti-British guerrilla movement, the Mau-Mau. ...
ricks.foreignpolicy.com/.../mau_mau_and_irgun_descendants_head_for_the_white_house - Cached - Similar
11. Why would Obama mau mau The New Yorker? [Karl]
Jul 14, 2008 ... Why would Obama mau mau The New Yorker? [Karl]. Ryan Lizza's in-depth look at Barack Obama's political career in Illinois for the New Yorker ...
proteinwisdom.com/?p=12846
12. American Thinker: Obama's Deadly Anti-British Agenda
Jul 20, 2010 ... Obama's anti-British views may go back to his childhood. His grandfather -- Hussein Onyango Obama -- was involved in the 1952 Mau Mau ...
www.americanthinker.com/.../obamas_deadly_antibritish_agen.html - Cached
Note how this combines with the hit on Rahm Emmanuel for his Irgun connection at foreignpolicy.com.
The same search at Google News gives
Robert Gibbs On Newt Gingrich's 'Kenyan' Comments: He's Trying To ...
Huffington Post (blog) - 1 day ago
"What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, ... Kenya's anti colonialist group is better known as the Mau-Mau's. ...
Kenya Google Before You Speak? About Newt Gingrich's New Theory ... - Vanity Fair
In Defense of Newt Gingrich's 'Anti-Colonial' Comments - Politics Daily (blog)
Highbrow birtherism: Conservatives attack Obama as an "African ... - Media Matters for America
all 151 news articles
New York Daily News
(#pharyngula on irc.synirc.net)
ScienceBlogs (blog) - 2 hours ago
Please, fellow godless folk, stop trying to claim Obama as one of us. ... We don't have to postulate that he's a reincarnated Mau Mau chieftain or that he's ...
On Pro-Colonialism
The Atlantic - 1 day ago
But it's the unavoidable meaning of slurring Obama as a Kenyan anticolonialist. ... The other two Mickeys [Mau Mau] were standing there looking blank. ...
Obama is a Pragmatist, Not Anti-British
History News Network - Lee P. Ruddin - Sep 5, 2010
Myths about Obama are not confined to just one side of the Atlantic, however. ... as exhibit A with its thirty-five pages devoted to the Mau Mau rebellion. ...
The Republic of Youth
The Standard - Aug 26, 2010
... like Kalamashaka and Ukoo Fulani Mau Mau clan, the latter just fresh from a visit to Arusha where America's Black Panthers have/had an office (Obama, ...
Kenyans must learn from past experiences
The Standard - Gakuu Mathenge - Aug 28, 2010
The Mau Mau uprising was about inequalities. The surprise is, 10 years after ... Obama would never have become president had he relied on ethnic numbers. ...
Eine Vorliebe für politische Stinkbomben
Basler Zeitung - 18 hours ago
Barack Obama, sagt Gingrich, sei «der gefährlichste Präsident der ... da das Land vor die Hunde geht, weil der Präsident wie die Mau-Mau denkt. ...
Why has this remained under the radar? Because nobody who "matters" has said it publicly. At least Vanity Fair has made the connection.
Kenya Google Before You Speak? About Newt Gingrich’s New Theory ...
Most people have almost no information on the Mau Mau other than British propaganda, which painted them as utterly savage terrorists.
The Growth of Mau Mau
The Times (London) 1952
Politics and Terrorism in Kenya
[Secret society; atrocities; superstitious savages bound by initiation rites]
The aims of Mau Mau are clear enough. While the Kenya African Union conducts a campaign above ground for political power and authority, the purpose of Mau Mau is to step up the pace of political change by menacing the authority of the Government and fostering trouble at all levels and by all means. It is unhappily true that the Kikuyu are suffering from too large a dose of civilization and its freedoms administered too suddenly…
Thus a first essential in Kenya today is the restoration of respect for law and order…There must also be less loose talk about politics to people so manifestly immature in such affairs.
Or perhaps they might have read, or at least heard of, the Tom Wolfe article, "Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers", which has nothing to do with Kenya.
Going downtown to mau-mau the bureaucrats got to be the routine practice in San Francisco. The poverty program encouraged you to go in for mau-mauing. They wouldn't have known what to do without it.
The British tale of terror neglects to mention the acts of state terrorism taken against the Kikuyu and other peoples of Kenya, and the preceding acts of colonial depredation, even pillage, that put the greater part of the land into the hands of a tiny foreign minority and the greater part of the people into dire poverty. The locals were expected to function pretty much as slaves, though without official chattel ownership by the farmers. The ideology of the British colonials was of the same kind as the American South during slavery and sharecropping, and of South Africa, India, and the rest of the colonies. Or the British attitude to China's anti-opium laws during the Opium Wars and the Unequal Treaties period of the succeeding centuries. Or the official and unofficial US attitudes to Haiti.
The Real Mau Mau/KLFA
We don't have room to get into the sorry details, or the politics, or the kangaroo courts, but we can hit a few highlights.
"Mau Mau" is a derogatory British name, part of the propaganda. The rebels called themselves the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA). The KLFA were not nice people. The British authorities and settlers were not nice on the grand scale.
The starting point for the Mau Mau Uprising was a pattern of abuses typical of British colonies since the founding of the British East India Company, indeed since the Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland in the 12th century.
Since its inception before 1895, Britain's presence in Kenya was marked by dispossession and violence: "There is only one way to improve the Wakikuyu [and] that is to wipe them out," asserted one British officer. This onslaught led Churchill, in 1908, to remark that "surely it cannot be necessary to go on killing these defenceless people on such an enormous scale."
A feature of all settler societies during the colonial period was the ability of European settlers to obtain for themselves a disproportionate share in landownership.
In addition to land, White farmers wanted cheap labor, so the colonial government introduced measures to effectively force many Kenyans to become low-paid, waged laborers on White-settler farms: reserves were established for each ethnic group, serving to divide them and to exacerbate overcrowding; hut and poll taxes were enacted (equivalent to two months' African wages); a pass, or kipande, was introduced to keep track of the migratory laborers and their employment histories; and growing of cash-crops by Africans was forbidden (later, even the amount of permissible crops grown was limited).
By 1948, 1,250,000 Kikuyu were restricted to 2000 square miles (5,200 km²), while 30,000 British settlers occupied 12,000 square miles (31,000 km²). The most desirable agricultural land was almost entirely in the hands of European settlers.
In May 1951, the British Colonial Secretary, James Griffiths, visited Kenya, where the Kenya African Union (KAU) presented him with a list of demands ranging from the removal of discriminatory legislation to the inclusion of 12 elected black representatives on the Legislative Council that governed the colony's affairs. It appears that the settlers were not willing to give in completely, but expected Westminster to force some concessions. Instead, Griffith ignored the KAU's demands and proposed a Legislative Council in which the 30,000 white settlers received 14 representatives, the 100,000 Asians (mostly from South Asia) got six, the 24,000 Arabs one, and the 5,000,000 Africans five representatives to be nominated by the government. This proposal removed the last African hopes that a fair and peaceful solution to their grievances was possible.
We have to skip over the military escalation that followed, except to note that the barbarity and savagery imputed by the British to the Kikuyu, when not merely propaganda, were often learned from the British example, much like scalping in America, introduced to regulate British colonial bounty hunters. In Kenya, the British instituted a five shilling bounty for each severed hand brought in. Many civilians were killed as a result of this and other policies. Torture of suspected KLFA was also commonplace. Conditions in prison camps were generally appalling. In spite of all the claims, only 32 White civilians died of KLFA violence. Much of the KLFA killing was of Kikuyu who did not want to fight the British. Definitely worse than the Patriot/Tory violence during the American Revolution that drove many Tory loyalists out of the colonies.
The Rebellion died down as the British gradually made necessary concessions, eventually arriving at One Man One Vote, and ultimately independence. The military costs of Kenya during the uprising were far greater than its economic contribution to the Empire, an unsustainable situation of a type still familiar to us.
Insults for all
Whom does all of the D'Souza/Gingrich propaganda insult? Not just its intended target, the President. Not just all Liberal/Progressives, indeed all Democrats in the US and our counterparts all over the world.
No, not just us, and not just today. America's anti-colonialist Founding Fathers from the great and glorious George Washington down to the much-despised Thomas Paine. Every American who has any regard for the Declaration of Independence, or any later Declaration of Human Rights, or the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, or any human rights treaty signed by a President and ratified by a Senate. Every citizen of every country that has had to struggle against oppression, domestic or foreign, Fascist or Communist or royalist or kleptocratic, religious or secular, in order to achieve any sort of responsible government and any level of personal freedom. And every citizen or resident of any country where such things have not been achieved.
The Daughters of the American Revolution, even. Certainly the Tea Parties, unless of course they don't mean what they say.
So, Newt, um, who's left?
Newt?
If you would like to know more
Don't believe all of the numbers you read in any of these narratives. We don't have records for a lot of the deaths.
Mau Mau and Kenya: An Analysis of a Peasant Revolt (Blacks in the Diaspora) by Wunyabari O. Maloba, Univ. of Delaware
Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire by David Anderson
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins
Facing Mount Kenya by Jomo Kenyatta