I had intended to take the day off from blogging. But, I found a passage in Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream that simply astounded me. Â I felt I just had to write about it:
But there are few examples in history in which the freedom men and women crave is delivered through outside intervention. In almost every successful social movement of the last century from Gandhi’s campaign against British rule to the Solidarity movement in Poland to the antiapartheid movement in South Africa, democracy was the result of a social awakening.
Um, what about the liberation of Western Europe from Nazism and the restoration of freedom and democracy to France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway (to name just a “few examples”). These all happened in the last century, thanks to armed American intervention.
America’s “outside intervention” also brought democracy to Italy, Germany (its western half at first) and Japan. Just a “few” more examples. Guess Obama qualified himself with that word “almost.”
Still it’s striking he didn’t mention them in his book. Nor did he address the armed intervention of the last Democrat to serve in the White House, Bill Clinton. His efforts (supported by John McCain) helped bring freedom and democracy to the various nations that were once part of Yugoslavia.
Guess for Obama if facts don’t your theory, just ignore them.
UPDATE: Â Just realized I left out two nations which owe their freedom and democracy to armed intervention, Austria and South Korea. Â And unlike Obama, I didn’t have foreign policy “experts” reading this post and alerting me to errors or omissions.
Good catch.
Now, to complete a thought: Obama doesn’t tip his hand (and you’re probably not versed in it), but what’s at work in that passage is his attempt to give “postcolonial” cultural theory prominence, or dominance, in our understanding of history.
Remember how Obama wrote about taking courses taught by Marxists, feminists, etc.? (E.g., At Harvard, one of his law profs was Derrick Bell.) I followed a similar academic path. One breathtaking discovery was reading Aime Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism.
DoC is an anticolonial manifesto on the state of Europe vis-a-vis its colonies at the conclusion of World War II. In it Cesaire makes only passing comment on World War II: As far as Cesaire was concerned, Hitler was colonialism landed in Europe. The violence and injustice in which Europe had trafficked had arrived on its shores. Voila, c’est tout. Malcolm X did something similar with his pitiless “chickens coming home to roost” comment re JFK.
So Obama’s doing his progressive thing, but now jihad, not anticolonialism, is the ascendant force defying the West. In Obama critical theory runs up against jihad overlap. Remember: to Bin Laden, the Cold War was just a quarrel among infidels; regardless of the outcome, OBL made sure to live to fight another day; he did, and still does.
Obama lives, writes, leads in the enormous, ambiguous abyss that lies between (what remains of) Western Civilization and its 21st Century enemies.
Besides, WWII was woefully unsuccessful. The Jews were left to be slaughtered. The West was ground down further (geopolitically, morally). Within a few years totalitarian enemies of freedom were spread wider and entrenched deeper than ever (Eastern Europe, China, etc.). We know too that Said Qutb and others were biding their time, laying the grounds for jihad. By comparison, WWII’s “succes” was meager.
By liberal standard, World War II was a complete failure. Admiral Yamamoto, the man responsible for carrying out the attack on Pearl Harbor was not arrested and brought to trial.
And Hitler was never a threat to us. He was in a box.
Also, I am pretty sure a lot of Nazi POW’s were mistreated, not to mention the civilian deaths, which made the United States equally as bad as the Nazis.
Also, the USA had no business fighting the Nazis when we were still practicing racism at home.
All in all, World War II was just another exercise in evil American Imperialism.
So sayeth the left.
Then there was Guam, Saipan, Singapore, Malaya, the Philipines etc.
V, I have no doubt that liberals would blame America for the Bataan Death March, the Rape of Nanking, Sook Ching etc.
On the other hand, many legitimate democratic movements were snuffed out due to lack of outside help – or intervention: early attempts by Hungary and Czechoslovakia come to mind and most recently in Burma where monks following Gandhi-like actions were slaughtered.
then, there was the anti-slavery movement: not in Africa, not in the Caribbean, not in India or China; but in London, England. Led by Quakers and religious people like Wilberforce. Who worked for some half a century to bring about changes in BRITISH Law, and then have the BRITISH navy force the WORLD to respect its laws against the transport of humans to slave markets.
And then, there was the American Civil War: a North propelled by the moral outrage at Slavery within its national borders, forced the slave owning south to live within Washington’s laws. Not Virginia’s laws. Yep I know that there was a lot of economic differences there, but no less a person than Ulysses S Grant said that the prime reason for the Civil War, the reason it could not be avoided, was SLAVERY.
That post colonial stuff is so stupid.
Point of order: Apartheid would still be enforced, absent a whole lot of foreign intervention (everything from the ‘Divest from South Africa’ movement to monetary and direct political aid from most of the west and, in the case of some of the ANC parties, the Soviet Union as well).
The Solidarity movement got a lot of political support from the West (and, probably, financial support- but I have no hard evidence on that); it didn’t occur in a vacuum- and Poland was always pretty singular as a SovBloc country; the Soviets never could do business there like they could in Hungary or Romania.
As even Ghandi pointed out: Ghandiism would have failed miserably (and messily) against any nation other than the British. It required a nation “civilized” enough and distracted enough by other affairs to not simply meet nonviolence with mass repression.
And, finally, without massive foreign intervention- including weapons, money, a major naval engagement, the risk of total war with a traditional enemy, and men of war from overseas willing to fight and die on our behalf- the American Colonies itself would never have achieved independance.
That is not the failure of WWII, thats the failure of appeasement and pacifism. You can hardly fault the allies for not defeating Germany quickly enough.
Are you serious? WWII cemented America’s status as superpower, was britains finest hour, and the years following the war for both perhaps the most promising and optimistic ever
again, that’s hardly the failure of WWII. If anything its the failure to adequaltely confront communist expansion, or in the case of Vietnam, liberals insistance on surrendering to it.
All of Eastern Europe owes their freedom and democracy to intervention by the United States and Ronald Reagan, and they damn well know and appreciate it.
And lets not forget Iran, where Jimmy Carter turned his back on the Shah and the subsequent democratic movement, approving the mullahs rise to power because, afterall, “they’re religious,” he said.
THANKS JIMMY #@%^&*#!!!
Peace through strength baby
It may be striking in one sense, but not in another. Obama seems like a typical product of the movement that believed that wars were not worthy of study–unless, like Vietnam, those wars could be spun or presented in a way to make the U.S.A. seem as evil as possible. So it would hardly surprise me if he’d be clueless about WWII, among many others.
Well said, Kurt, very well said.
Did you all know that WW2 had evidence behind it? That our going into WW2 had nothing to do with any sort of “Bush Doctrine” tactics?
God of Biscuits: I’m sure Saddam nuking NYC would have been evidence too.
The Lesson of WWII was.. take down Hitler before 1939.