Obama was heavily influenced by his father -- a Kenyan socialist who was obsessed with "anticolonialism." D'Souza explains:
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."Colonialism has faded into the mists of history and is no longer a force in the world. However, now we have neocolonialism -- and that is what Obama is sworn to fight to the last. D'Souza explains neocolonialism:
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.Leftists say that "Neo-Colonialism is the Last Stage of Imperialism." What it all boils down to is this: if anyone, anywhere, at any time, is making money, it is only because they are somehow "exploiting" some poor victim. One cannot create wealth; one can only steal it from others. The Third-World critics of capitalism will never be satisfied until every last penny produced by industrialized nations is transferred to them. Like most leftists, all political argument and economic analysis can be distilled as follows: Gimme, gimme, gimme. The world owes me a living. Hand it over.
Barack Obama believes the United States is one of these "neocolonial" powers, and Obama seeks to reduce the American footprint on the world by redistributing its economic power and production to third world countries. As D'Souza points out, this is the major difference between Obama and prior Democrat presidents like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Whereas the latter wanted to redistribute American wealth within the country, among Americans, Obama wants to redistribute American wealth outside the country, among other nations. He wants to "return" the "stolen wealth" to America's victims.
Obama's carbon trading scheme, thankfully never implemented, would have achieved this goal by a massive transfer of wealth from the producers to the nonproducers, from the so-called rich to the poor. This is why the global warming hoax has such appeal to leftists: if true, it would prove the perfect rationalization for massive wealth transfer. To produce, manufacturers would have to "buy" the unused carbon credits assigned to non-producing nations and individuals, thus keeping carbon dioxide production within specified limits -- and at the same time, effecting a massive transfer of wealth.
Further, the far left believes that, in order to compensate our victims in other countries, we must "de-industrialize" the United States, export whole industries, factories and production facilities from the US to the Third World. We must give the Third-World our investments, our productive capacity, our jobs and our standard of living. After all, we stole it from them in the first place. I wrote about this nonsense two years ago, in "Democrats Want You to Suffer: Plan to De-Develop the United States."
This overall leftist attitude explains why they do everything they can to discourage American drilling and investment in energy production. Keeping the cost of energy high results in greater wealth transfers to the energy-producing nations, which are outside of the United States. High energy costs are another form of wealth redistribution. D'Souza further explains:
Why support oil drilling off the coast of Brazil but not in America? Obama believes that the West uses a disproportionate share of the world's energy resources, so he wants neocolonial America to have less and the former colonized countries to have more. More broadly, his proposal for carbon taxes has little to do with whether the planet is getting warmer or colder; it is simply a way to penalize, and therefore reduce, America's carbon consumption. Both as a U.S. Senator and in his speech, as President, to the United Nations, Obama has proposed that the West massively subsidize energy production in the developing world.At the heart of the left/right political disagreement is the nature of wealth, how it is produced and distributed. The left seems incapable of connecting productivity with consumption -- those who produce more get to consume more. Instead, they see that those who consume more only do so by taking more than their "fair share" (as determined by them).
Whatever the error in leftist thought, it is clear that, if implemented, the American standard of living will continue to decline, ultimately resulting in widespread poverty, less opportunity, and a lot more misery among the American people. To defeat these neo-anticolonialists, we must first understand their mindset. D'Souza's new film is a great help in doing that.
Read D'Souza's article on the film here.
