Breaking news from PrestoPundit, via Gateway Pundit:
The "Dreams From My Father" (Barack Obama's father, to be precise) were communist in nature, featuring:
— 100% taxation
— communal farms / the elimination of private farming
— the nationalization of businesses owned by “Europeans” and “Asians”.
— “active” measures to bring about a classless societyFrom PrestoPundit:
There's a big mystery at the heart of Barack Obama's Dreams For My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. What was Barack Obama doing seeking out Marxist professors in college? Why did Obama choose a Communist Party USA member as his socio- political counselor in high school? Why was he spending his time studying neocolonialism and the writings of Frantz Fanon, the pro-violence author of "the Communist Manifesto of neocolonialsm", in college? Why did he take time out from his studies at Columbia to attend socialist conferences at Cooper Union?
And there is more mystery in the book. Why does Obama consider working in a consulting house for international business like being "a spy behind enemy lines?" Why does he repeatedly find it so hard to explain his political views to others? Why was he driven to become a left-aligned political organizer? It's a question Obama again and again can't seem to answer to the satisfaction of the interlocutors in his own memoir.
If there is a mystery at the heart of Barack Obama's Dreams For My Father, one thing is not left a mystery, the fact that Barack Obama organized his life on the ideals given to him by his Kenyan father. Obama tells us, "All of my life, I carried a single image of my father, one that I .. tried to take as my own." (p. 220) And what was that image? It was "the father of my dreams, the man in my mother's stories, full of high-blown ideals .." (p. 278) What is more, Obama tells us that, "It was into my father's image .. that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself." And also that, "I did feel that there was something to prove .. to my father" in his efforts at political organizing. (p. 230)
So we know that his father's ideals were a driving force in his life, but the one thing that Obama does not give us are the contents of those ideals. The closest he comes is when he tells us that his father lost his position in the government when he came into conflict with Jomo Kenyatte, the President of Kenya sometime in the mid 1960s; when he tells us that his father was imprisoned for his political views by the government just prior to the end of colonial rule; and when he tells us that the attributes of W. E. B. DuBois, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela were the ones he associated with his father and also the ones that he sought to instill in himself. (p. 220) This last group is a hodge podge, perhaps concealing as much as it reveals, in that it contains a socialist black nationalist, a Muslim black nationalist, a civil rights leader, and (at the time indicated in the memoir) an imprisoned armed revolutionary.
A bit of research at the library reveals the answers about Barack Obama's father and his father's convictions which Obama withholds from his readers. A first hint comes from authors E. S. Atieno Odhiambo and David William Cohen in their book The Risks of Knowledge (Ohio U. Press, 2004). On page 182 of their book they describe how Barack Obama's father, a Harvard trained economist, attacked the economic proposals of pro-Western 'third way" leader Tom Mboya from the socialist left, siding with communist-allied leader Oginga Odinga, in a paper Barack Obama's father worte for the East Africa Journal. As Odhiambo and Cohen write, "The debates [over economic policy] pitted .. Mboya against .. Oginga Odinga and radical economists Dharam Ghai and Barrack Obama, who critiqued the document for being neither African nor socialist enough."
I have a copy of Barack Obama's paper here in my hand, obtained from the stacks at UCLA (see the picture above). The paper is as describe by Odhiambo and Cohen, a cutting attack from the left on Tom Mboya's historically important policy paper "African Socialism and Its Applicability to Planning in Kenya." The author is given as "Barak H. Obama" and his paper is titled "Problems Facing Our Socialism", published July, 1965 in the East African Journal, pp. 26-33.
Obama stakes out the following positions in his attacks on the white paper produced by Mboya's Ministry of Economic Planning and Development:
1. Obama advocated the communal ownership of land and the forced confiscation of privately controlled land, as part of a forced "development plan", an important element of his attack on the government's advocacy of private ownership, land titles, and property registration. (p. 29)
2. Obama advocated the nationalization of "European" and "Asian" owned enterprises, including hotels, with the control of these operations handed over to the "indigenous" black population. (pp. 32 -33) [Note from Gina Cobb: We see how "well" nationalizing assets of whites is working in Zimbabwe]
3. Obama advocated dramatically increasing taxation on "the rich" even up to the 100% level, arguing that, "there is no limit to taxation if the benefits derived from public services by society measure up to the cost in taxation which they have to pay" (p. 30) and that, "Theoretically, there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed." (p. 31)
4. Obama contrasts the ill-defined and weak-tea notion of "African Socialism" negatively with the well-defined ideology of "scientific socialism", i.e. communism. Obama views "African Socialism" pioneers like Nkrumah, Nyerere, and Toure as having diverted only "a little" from the capitalist system. (p. 26)
5. Obama advocates an "active" rather than a "passive" program to achieve a classless society through the removal of economic disparities between black Africans and Asian and Europeans. (p. 28) "While we welcome the idea of a prevention [of class problems], we should try to cure what has slipped in .. we .. need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now .. so long as we maintain free enterprise one cannot deny that some will accumulate more than others .. " (pp. 29-30) . . . .
So what does all this tell us about Barack Obama, the father, and how does it help us fill in the gaps and decipher Barack Obama's Dreams For My Father? We know from Obama's memoir that his father is an "uncompromising" man whose ideals and principles gets him in trouble with the "big man" who ran Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, leading to a dramatic scene in which Kenyatta personally confronts Obama the father and in one fell swoop destroys not only his government career but ultimately his life. Working with Obama's book alone it is hard to know what is going on. We get only an inkling when Obama quotes his "Granny" (one of Obama the elder's wives) as saying the following, "I would tell him he was too stubborn in his dealings with the government. He would talk to me of his principle .. " (p. 424)
Now if we fill in the missing information we have now learned about Barack Obama the elder -- that he held uncompromising socialist and anti-Western views in line with Kenyatta's principle political rival Oginga Odinga -- we can understand why he had conflicts of "principle" with Kenyatta and government. And the timeline begins to make sense. TIME magazine reports the open conflict between the anti-communist, pro-Western Kenyatta and the communist-allied, anti-Western Odinga in a story from June, 1965, a story in which Odinga declares "communism is like food to me."
By the way, if you think Hillary Clinton is any better, maybe not. Check out my earlier post, The Coverup of Hillary Clinton's Admiration for Communists and Socialists. Hillary Clinton's senior thesis was about "radical organizer" and Communist Party member Saul Alinsky. Hillary closed her college thesis by emphasizing that "she reserved a place for Alinsky in the pantheon of social action" — seated next to Martin Luther King, the poet-humanist Walt Whitman, and Eugene Debs, the labor leader now best remembered as the five-time Socialist Party candidate for president.
So we have Obama drawing political inspiration from his communist-sympathizing father, while Hillary swooned over another Communist Party member, making him the focal point of her college thesis.
It quite literally true, therefore, that the two current Democratic Party candidates for president are both Communist Party sympathizers.
There's nothing high-minded, idealistic, or excusable about this. Communism is totalitarianism. Ask anyone whose relatives have lived under Communism, as mine have.
The two leading lights of the Democratic Party are naive enough to applaud and idealize communist totalitarianism, and foolish and uneducated enough to ignore all the human misery and suffering it brings.
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Posted by: Mike | May 16, 2008 at 12:47 PM
You miss the most important point from 'Dreams From My Father' - the title is a fraud. Obama Jr. in fact did not even know his father (much less know what his father's dreams were), because Obama Sr. abandoned Obama Jr. & his mother when Obama Jr. was 2, and Obama Jr. only saw Sr. again once, briefly when Jr. was 10. Further, Sr. did not tell Jr.'s mother, he was already married in Kenya and already had a child. Clearly Obama, Sr. is no hero, and some might say a despicable husband, father and man. The book more appropriately should be titled 'Dreams from My Mother' or 'Nightmares From My Father'. Similarly, is his book 'Audacity of Hope', which features much of what Obama learned from the hatred spewing Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the DOCTRINE of black values, afro-centric values - who Obama himself said was his mentor - whom he now has disowned, in several BS increments. Thus, another fraud, and from what we have learned since publishing, more appropriately titled 'Audacity of Hate'. Recall Dr. ML King's famous quote, to be judged by the content of one's character, instead of the color of their skin? When are people going to wake up and examnine and judge Obama's character?
Posted by: Gary L. Zerman | June 06, 2008 at 03:00 PM
I just stumbled across your website today. I've been concerned with the lack of info on Obama's parents or anyone else who knows his true background. I found this site to be very helpful. His meteoric rise in politics and the ambiguity of the info on his past are quite suspicious. I look forward to learning more.
Posted by: Joe Nowak | January 15, 2009 at 12:35 AM
The book 'The Communist Manifesto of Neocolonialism' doesn't exist.
Posted by: Rhoderick Gates | October 24, 2010 at 09:02 PM
This is very persuasive. If we had access to Obama's college papers, transcripts, associates - no doubt the picture
would be ever plainer.
Posted by: Keith | September 17, 2011 at 02:33 PM