PrintApril 23, 2009
American Imperialism, Obama Style
The thing about imperialism is that it never looks like imperialism to the well-intentioned imperialists themselves. Most Soviet Russians were convinced they were just spreading peace and love to Eastern Europe and China, even with all their massed artillery and tanks. They knew in their hearts that the KGB State was just a temporary thing, until all the subject peoples could be educated enough to bring true Communism to earth.
They had that belief in common with the Roman legions, who conquered the world around the Mediterranean, and with Victorian missionaries in the Africa and India, who were also convinced they were just spreading civilization to the backward peoples of the earth.
It's always that way.
The funny thing about Barack Obama's victory lap to his buds in Trinidad and Tobago is that they are all under the sway of one Karl Marx, who just happened to be a classical European Imperialist. Real Marxists don't make any bones about it. Nor did the Soviets.
(And Karl Marx was a raging racist to boot).
The breakdown of the USSR and Maoist China after 1989 turned out to be a stroke of luck for Western Marxists. It allowed them to dissociate themselves from visibly bloody Communist Imperialism. Traveling from West to East Berlin, and seeing Western luxury turn into Stalinist poverty was just a little bit too much. After Gorbachev and Reagan they could pretend they were never on the side of evil.
What we are seeing today with Barack Obama is a triumph of Leftist Faith over the brute facts of history. The Left has managed to swallow its own bloody past in a capacious Black Hole. Instead, college kids are brought up today on Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, a totally one-sided tale of all the bad things done in America in the last four hundred years. Zinn's very title tells us that traditional American history was never about the real people. When our airhead Hollywood celebrities slam the United States, it's because they've been brought up on reams and reams of such self-hating stuff. They think they know the truth, when in fact their brains are just on the rinse and spin cycle.
True Leftists collect other people's injustices, one after the other, and rehearse them in their minds for years. That's how they define themselves mentally as The Good People and those who disagree with them as The Evil Ones. That's why they are so ready to demonize those who disagree. Like Barack and Michelle, they are utterly convinced of their own righteousness. But they end up pushing Marxist Imperialism.
So... Barack Obama is turning out to be a Socialist Imperialist -- all for highly moral reasons, needless to say. Those loving encounters with Chavez and Ortega mean that they are now alike in spirit. Listening to their standard rantings is not news for BO, because he can recite their story from memory.
Which means that they are all the indoctrinated victims of an amazingly angry, white German ideologue of the early 19th century, whose idea of the perfect society was a world-conquering Bismarckian Reich, where everything was dictated top-down by the self-appointed Ruling Class.
(Note: The word "Reich" = "Empire," as in "Imperialism." Bismarck didn't care who knew it.)
And now the world is told that the election of a black man in America is a great victory for Progress -- which always means Marxist progress by those who use that word. That's what Obama keeps telling the whole world, time and time again. Look at me, world! I'm Progress!
Imperialism anybody?
Guess what all the post-colonial regimes did in the Third World when the European colonists finally went back home? Post-colonial rulers were mostly Marxists of one kind or another, because they went to elite schools in London, Paris and Moscow where Europe's Ruling Class receives its basic indoctrination.
So they tried Marxism back home.
Jawaharlal Nehru tried to impose British Fabian Imperialism on India, with disastrous results. Kwame Nkrumah tried it with Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya. In the Arab world, Gamal Abdel Nasser tried to impose secular Arab Nationalism with a socialist bent on Egypt, Syria and Libya. Robert Mugabe is still practicing post-colonial socialism in the former Zimbabwe, now locked in miserable regime-imposed racial scapegoating, poverty, and famine.
But all the post-colonial tyrants were beyond criticism by the Left, because they were black or brown, or just tanned. Even today the Left can't bring itself to denounce Mugabe and the Sudanese genociders, no matter what they do. That's why 100 nations in Durban this week denounced Israel for being racists. Africans, Arabs, Chinese, Indians can't be racists even if they are. That's why Obama can't even bring himself to denounce black slavery in Africa and the Middle East. Just the opposite. King Abdullah the desert camel raider received a deep and respectful bow from our President, an absolute first in American history.
So all over the world, post-colonial rulers took the European Imperialism of Marx and tried to slap it on top of the underdeveloped world. Pol Pot was trained in France by the French Communist Party, and decided to be really revolutionary back in Cambodia by killing a couple of million ordinary folk, especially the dangerous intellectuals -- those who wore glasses. Mao Zedong learned his craft in Moscow, the old Imperial capital of the Czars.
(Note: Czar = Emperor, as in Kaiser and Caesar. Imperialism.).
The star students of Europe's elite institutions spread their neo-Imperialist faith to the Third World. But none of it worked, except to keep the post-colonial tyrannies in luxury and power. That is why radical Islam has made a comeback -- because post-colonial socialism broke down. Islamist rage is a reaction to the secular Marxist Imperialism preached by post-colonial governments. But guess what? Radical Islam is just Imperialism under another color. The flags change, the slogans change, Imperialism doesn't.
Today's United Nations marches under the banner of Saving Planet Earth, a Green slogan pioneered in ... lily-white Europe. The global warming fraud is a classic imperialist propaganda campaign, designed to empower Green Imperialism. It's hardly a secret. Ask Maurice Strong and Gyorgyi Soros.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, some of the underdeveloped regions discovered their own free market dynamism -- since trade and individual initiative are pretty universal human traits. Eastern Europe, parts of China, and some Latin American and African countries began to rise from poverty. They discovered their own strengths.
And then the Marxist Imperialists regrouped and took one-party power again -- in Venezuela, in Nicaragua, maybe in Brazil.
Those are Barack Obama's good buds, because Obama is basically a post-colonial racial socialist. That's why Dreams from My Father celebrates his Kenyan Socialist dad, and not his white Kansas mother. President O is a Socialist Imperialist by ideology, but one who never quite grokked why Jomo Kenyatta's Socialism just brought misery to Kenya.
But we're not supposed to call their ideology Socialist Imperialism. According to Lenin, Socialists can't be Imperialists. On the Left, Lenin's opinion on that issue is considered to be final.
So ... the President of the United States is on an anti-Imperialist apology tour to Europe, Trinidad and Tobago, and soon, the Middle East. But since deep down he's a Marxist Imperialist, this is really an anti-Imperialist US Imperialist tour.
Got that?
The question is which countries have grown enough political wisdom to see through the layers and layers of bull. If they get suckered by the latest (racialist) version of Marxism, it will come back to haunt them. Ideology doesn't feed children, as even the Fidelistas now know. It ends up squeezing people dry.
Ultimately, decent government requires an involved and thinking population. That is, if we believe Lincoln's words that you can't fool all the people all of the time.
Come to think of it, that's the real question for American voters, too.
I wonder when they'll stop being fooled?
