Younger people can be easily forgiven for not understanding the significance of what happened in Berlin two decades ago, both because they have little personal memory of what it was like to live under the nuclear threat, and because the teaching of history in public schools is so appalling. But Walter Shapiro remembers. It’s well worth reading for those who don’t realize how close we came to Armageddon on multiple occasions through those decades.
The president, of course, has no such excuse. He was born at the height of the war. Unfortunately, he was raised by people on the other side.
Unfortunately, he was raised by people on the other side.
Half not-fair.
As near as I can tell, Obama was actually raised by people either in or sympathetic to the “non-aligned movement”, i.e. people in third-world countries like Kenya and Indonesia. It was only when he got to Columbia that the serious Marxist indoctrination started. And, unfortunately, his non-aligned background made his mind was fertile ground for the conspiratorial anti-Americanism of the lunatic fringe of American politics — the Ayers-lookalikes that infect the salons of Hyde Park and the faculty lounges at Columbia and Harvard.
BBB
His mother and father were both communists, and his mentor was one as well. And I never noticed that the “non-aligned” movement was really all that non aligned.
I think it’s more that he’s affectless, and his chief concern is being “cool.” Like too many people of my generation (he’s only a couple of years older than me) he has trouble forming attachments to abstract ideals, especially if they aren’t part of whatever was fashionable in his youth. Ideals like patriotism were rejected by the fashionable crowd in favor of one world all together under some sort of benignly socialist (yet not like the Soviet system — the “ostalgie” of aging Western commies notwithstanding, the USSR was deemed to be No Fun, and was rejected along with the White Christian Establishment Man government of the USA) world federation, kind of like the one in Star Trek. Since this was not by any means a realistic goal, you could believe in it safely and even get emotional about it. Obama’s taking it a little further, but that’s all. It’s not the concrete goals of Obamaco that will bring the whole think crashing down, but the fact that their goals aren’t concrete — they’re made of dreams and illusions. I almost wish they had actual fascistic aims — it would give us something to fight. Fighting the fog of Utopian nonsense the current administration is emitting is like fighting… fog.
Well, I have no love lost for the non-aligned movement. In terms of foreign policy, it was mainly a mechanism for corrupt leaders to position themselves for maximum leverage against both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In terms of domestic policy, most of the corrupt-ocrats found that socialism gave them more power and a greater opportunity to rape their countries than did free markets. But in terms of the actual struggle between communism and freedom, the average citizen had only a muddled ideological view.
Can you point to some evidence that Obama Sr. qualifies as a communist? I understand that he studied economics at Harvard, and that is a damning indictment, but is there something more substantial? A smoking gun?
BTW I do find it curious that Obama Jr’s intellectual heritage is not more discussed, even on the right. Obama Sr. went on to be an economic advisor to President Kenyatta. Obama has made no secret of it; he wrote a book about his relation to his father. But no one seems to talk about it. I can understand why the left wants to keep it quiet, but why the silence on the right?
Similarly, do you have any evidence that Ann Dunham was a communist? I gather she’s mainly known for pushing microcredit programs in the third world, which has a lefty aura but always seemed fundamentally capitalist to me.
So far I haven’t seen any evidence that BHO was a ‘red-diaper baby’ in the sense that David Horowitz was… Horowitz’s parents were literally members of the Communist Party.
BBB
Here’s the story on Obama Sr. And as for his mother, if she wasn’t card carrying, her friends said that she was certainly a fellow traveler. And Frank Marshall Davis was an admitted communist.
Actually, I read the article in question by Obama Sr. right before I submitted my last comment (it’s linked from the Wikipedia article about O Sr.). I didn’t find a smoking gun there, which is why I asked what you knew. All I found was a bunch of muddled “third way” “non-aligned” nonsense. I’m not sure I’d call anyone aiming to remake “African Socialism” a “moderate”, but it’s clearly not a Marxist document. Sweetness & Light must not have read much CPUSA literature over the years.
In re Mama Obama, my attitude is that I’d rather maintain the distinction between self-avowed communists, like Bill Ayers and Van Jones, and the merely confused fellow travelers, like Ann Dunham and Jon Stewart, than try to throw them all in the same pit. As the left itself discovered after the Vietnam war, the hard core of the party are rather few in numbers, and though they can get millions of people to rally in support of their causes — if they can convince them it’s in their self-interest — those millions can evaporate overnight as soon as their perception of self-interest shifts. We saw this with the anti-war movement, and we’re seeing it with Obamania.
BBB
bbb,
even IF his parents are “non-aligned”, which is fertilizer at best, it’s not like the area he grew up in is rolling with conservatives. IL / Chicago politics is well known for being dominated by (crooked) Democrats.
He was immersed in that thought process, long before he was old enough to vote. Of the hand full of lib Dems I encountered in the service, most were from IL. Weird but true.
Two of them boasted of the ability to serve the country, but vote their conscience. Whatever that means. It’s evidently from the IL Talking Points though. I worked with one of them in Norfolk, the other in San Diego.
Personally I never understood serving the country in uniform, and voting for Carter and Clinton. How is that a good thing for your “employer”? Maybe they were just more evolved than I.
It is awfully casual to equate “fellow traveler” with “communist”, and “communist” with “on the other side of the Cold War.” There were plenty of small-c communists on our side.
When people get offended by calling the president “Comrade Obama” (since reading LIBERAL FASCISM and being struck by the similarities in Mussolini’s rhetoric and Obama’s, I prefer “Il Dufe”), or referring to him as a small-c “communist,” what precisely are they objecting to? I mean, if you’re going to show that it’s unfair to label Obama with the “c” word, shouldn’t they show some individualist, anti-communistic tendencies in his words or deeds that would put the lie to “Comrade Obama”? And if so, what would that evidence be?
His father believed in “central planning”, redistribution and wanted to wait on individual ownership of farm land. What part of communism don’t you understand?
Do throw-away lines in speeches count? /sarc
I was born in 1980, so I probably qualify (barely) as one of the “younger people.” I vaguely remember what it was like to live under a nuclear umbrella, but I very vividly remember the events of 1989. My grandparents, who were world travelers, kept a piece of the Wall under their coffee table (or a piece of concrete ostensibly taken from the Wall, it’s difficult to verify this stuff). It still brings chills. I remember I had to write a report about the most significant event of my life when I was maybe 12 or 13. Most of the kids wrote about the first day of school, or when they made the basketball team. I wrote about witnessing Tiananmen Square live on television, but it was a toss-up with the Wall coming down. I hope there is some child out there who will write a similar report in a couple years about the Green uprising in Iran.
Today, we are learning more and more about the atrocities committed by Big Government behind the Iron Curtain and in other authoritarian regimes of the second half of the last century, while we witness the same atrocities and the same sorry excuses in Africa, the Middle East, and right here at home (drug warriors, I’m looking at you). Generation is no excuse. The face of the tyrant changes, but tyranny and the enablers of tyranny remain the same. It is each person’s responsibility to either learn the lesson from the examples he is given, or become the enabler for the next round.
I think Roga has a point. I was only 7 when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, but I sure understood its significance.
It’s true I needed to be reminded before then, after having watched so many of the 1960s sci-fi TV shows and the (even then) old movies about people zooming through the galaxy, that man really did have yet to walk on the Moon, but once I had that down…
it’s not like the area he grew up in is rolling with conservatives. IL / Chicago politics is well known for being dominated by (crooked) Democrats.
He grew up in Hawaii, not Illinois. Hawaii was Republican when Obama was very young, and flipped to being mostly Democratic in the 70s.
Obama was mostly raised by his grandparents, who seem to have been fairly apolitical. His grandfather was a WWII vet.
Personally I never understood serving the country in uniform, and voting for Carter and Clinton.
So Carter shouldn’t have voted for himself?
So Carter shouldn’t have voted for himself?
Well, if he really cared about the country, he wouldn’t have… 😉
Carter always struck me as the embodiment of the Peter Principle. He seems to be (or have once been) a good and decent man, a real Christian, but he should never have become President. Not only was he temperamentally unsuited to the job, but it seems to have embittered and twisted him, so that in his old age he embarasses his younger self.
Jim: Hawaii was Republican when Obama was very young, and flipped to being mostly Democratic in the 70s.
What the heck are you talking about? Hawaii flipped from Republican to Democrat in 1954. The state has gone for the Democrat Presidential candidate in every election since statehood save for the two GOP landslides: Nixon in ’72 and Reagan in ’84 — 2 out of 13 elections. The governor has been a Democrat since statehood. With the exception of Hiram Fong, every Senator and Rep from 1960 to 1986 was a Democrat, and the only other Republican to serve in Congress from Hawaii was Pat Saiki, who served two terms in the 100th and 101st Congress.
Regardless, Obama was absent from Hawaii from 1967 to 1971. I think of him as being raised in Indonesia.
BBB
Allow me to apologize for Jim with the same prevaricating zealotry for which he apologizes for Obama: When Jim said that Hawaii was “Republican”, he was looking at this map of the US, which clearly shows that Hawaii is due south of Texas. Thus, being part of the Deep South and filled with racist Republican rednecks (redundant, I know!), he assumed that it was “Republican.”
I know one shouldn’t look for logical argument in anything “Jim” posts; but maybe I’m missing something here. Even if Obama did grow up in Hawaii (and I’m with “bbb” here in being under the impression it would be more accurate to say he was raised in Indonesia), before or after it went Democratic–what exactly is the point? That Hawaii is so full of Republicans that their mere abundance would have neutralized the brainwashing he would have gotten from Uncle Frank and the folks? If that’s the argument, it seems pretty thin, even from Jim.
Where he was raised or by whom and under whatever ideological influences is equivalent to the reading of entrails. What matters is what he does (and to a lesser extent what he says, and whether that matches what he does).
How’s that hopey-changey thing working out for America? Only three more years to the next election…
Titus said, “Thus, being part of the Deep South and filled with racist Republican rednecks …”
As a non-redneck, conservative, southerner allow me to shed some light on this misconception.
Most “redneck” southerners are Democrats. Especially those in the Deep South. Look it up. AND the most vocal redneck racists were DEM…O…CRATS. During the Civil Rights Movement, those dreaded Rebel Flags were added, or put up, by those Democrats. An item, might I add, that as a southerner and conservative I love pointing out. I especially like telling that to young African-Americans.
Ah, the look of shock. Usually I throw in the old, “…and Lincoln was a Republican too…” line. Of course I’ve argued these points with white folks too.
Also, my own experiences show that there are more racial separatists in the (Democrat) north not the south. Not just black and white mind you, but nationality wise.
Germans don’t like Italians, Italians don’t like Puerto Ricans, Puerto Ricans don’t like Cubans, Cubans don’t like Jamaicans, on and on, and on… It’s much more pronounced and agreed upon than race as an issue in the south now. I’ve lived in both places, so don’t tell me it’s not so.