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Problems With Our Socialism: A Paper By Barack H. Obama Sr.
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Report; Posted on: 2008-11-11 18:12:40 [ Printer friendly / Instant flyer ]
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There's a big mystery at the heart of (President-elect) Barack Obama's Dreams From 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 From 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 wrote 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. [UPDATE: I sent Politico a copy, and they've posted a PDF file of the paper here.]
Continue...
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News Source: presto pundit
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