By Nicolas Sanchez, PhD
AMC
Framingham 16 has been showing the movie, 2016: Obama’s America. For
some, this documentary is a misleading movie; for others, it is proof of
the evil intent that drives the President’s policies. I do not find
myself in either camp. If anything, it has forced me to read parts of
the President’s book, Dreams from My Father, which I found in line with
one of the two main arguments made by the movie. I found a gem of a
quote in the President’s book, which I will cover first.
Imagine,
just imagine, if any right wing nut had claimed what the President
relates on page 345 of his book, quoting his half sister, Auma: “I was
just thinking about how life is so strange. You know, as soon as the Old
Man [Obama’s and Auma’s father] died, the lawyers contacted all those
who might have a claim to the inheritance. Unlike my mum, Ruth, [Obama
Senior’s third wife] has all the documents needed to prove who Mark’s
father was. So of all of the Old Man’s kids, Mark’s claim is the only
one that’s uncontested.”
Wow! Does this allude to Obama’s
mother being three months pregnant when she married a man who left her
soon after the baby was born? The Old Man was in trouble with the U.S.
Immigration Service, and marrying an American girl was quite convenient.
When Obama’s father went to Harvard (from Hawaii) the father became
involved with another woman, Ruth Beatrice Baker, from Newton, MA. She
was Jewish, pursued him to Kenya, became his third wife and bore him
Mark; they later divorced. The paternity of the President has been
claimed by a black man named Francisco Cundo—a simple DNA test could
resolve this foolishness.
The reason I mention the above
quote is that understanding President Obama requires more than learning
about his politics. His autobiographical book, when it covers Kenya, is
full of the anti-colonial sentiments that “2016” claims motivate Obama’s
policies. But it should be clear to those who read the autobiography
that his African family is in desperate need of psychological healing,
and that Obama’s policies might reflect the need to help those who are
personally devastated by the lives they have led, whether in Africa or
in America.
Obama’s youngest half brother, a highly educated
man, almost makes that claim in the movie: He does not need the
financial support of his half-brother, but he is delighted that the
President has followed policies that make better the whole world. He
even disagrees with President Obama about colonialism, and feels that
South Africa is better off because it did not expel the white
minorities.
To many moviegoers, 2016 is a challenge because
it exposes the communist and socialist influences that the President
faced before becoming head of state. Five persons stand out. Frank
Marshal Davis, a communist party member (Card #47544) who Obama
repeatedly mentions in his autobiography—but only by the name of Frank;
Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn (both terrorists and leaders of the
Weathermen Underground who failed to be fully prosecuted due to
prosecutorial misconduct, and early supporters of Obama in Chicago);
Roberto Unger, Obama’s radical Harvard Law Professor who now claims that
Obama must be defeated because he is not radical enough; and Jeremiah
Wright, Obama’s mentor, pastor and follower of liberation theology, a
radical socialist theology.
A defender of the President and
critic of the movie (Bryan Henry in “Obama’s America: 2016 Review”)
makes the following statement: “Honestly, I do not doubt that President
Obama’s political views are somewhat informed by anti-colonialism or
that he was influenced by Marxist professors in college. Interestingly,
the film, and most of the audience, assumes that anti-colonialism and
Marxism are inherently anti-American…Leninism (revolutionary Marxism)
and Stalinism (totalitarianism) are certainly at odds with democracy but
Marxism, itself, is not."
For those of us who have lived
under Marxist regimes, we beg to differ: Marxism is inherently
anti-American. Yet, President Obama may be motivated by other concerns.
After all, his economic policies have not been too different from those
of the Bush II Administration, at least with regard to government
interventions and bailouts, as the movie makes quite clear towards the
very end.
The second main thesis of the movie is that the
people who voted for President Obama did so because they felt guilty
about their racial prejudice and were satisfied that he was not an angry
black man. This may or may not be true, but it is psychobabble, to say
the least. Personally, I find that people in some parts of the country
(such as Texas) admit to their prejudices and realize that they must
change their behavior. People in California are the least prejudiced;
while people in New England are extremely prejudiced but claim not to be
prejudiced at all! Yet, my personal experiences do not prove any facts,
and I believe that Dinesh D’Souza, the Indian writer and director of
the movie, and also President of King’s College in New York City, failed
to prove the movie’s second thesis.
Before I conclude, it is
important to address colonialism. First, there is no doubt that colonial
policies have been a scourge on mankind. Africa, possibly the most
diverse continent in the whole world, has been devastated by colonial
policies. President Obama misses a great opportunity to make this point
in his autobiography when he visits a national park in Kenya. Most of
the wild animal reserves in that part of the world were created by the
English after the animals had been eliminated by the pastoral people of
the region long ago, in the nineteenth century. These reserves were
truly a reversion to backwardness, promoted to satisfy the tourist
interests of Europeans. Regrettably, this is a story that is not well
known in America, where the liberal class (including President Obama)
adores these animal reserves.
But on the other hand, one has
to recognize that black Africa could hardly defend itself against the
colonial powers, because the population lacked sufficient numbers (yes,
black Africa has been historically way under-populated, despite popular
perceptions) and the technologies (including writing scripts) needed in
modern societies. It is really a pity that populations as different as
one finds in Kenya today have to live under a single and colonially
invented nation.
Hence, there is nothing wrong with
advocating anti-colonialism. What is remarkable, if we are to believe
the movie and the autobiography, is the possibility that an
anti-colonialists like our President, may be basing his economic
policies on something that is irrelevant to the modern society we live
in.
Over, and over we heard the Board of Selectmen say, "If only they could do something but the Assessor and Town Counsel said nothing could be done." Remember there were those who said we could help the Residential Taxpayers out in 2013FY billing, but they said no, now the CFO say’s yes we can but she doesn’t want to do all they can or should do.
