FILM
REVIEW D'Souza's paranoid style in US
politics 2016: Obama's
America directed by Dinesh D'Souza
Reviewed by Dinesh Sharma
Paranoid
and delusional thinking is defined as the
generalized distrust and suspicion of others.
Individuals suffering from paranoid thinking may
sometimes have dreams that are characterized by
intuitions and feelings of grandeur bordering on
pure fantasy. In art or film, one might give
flight to such fantasies or daydreams without
disrupting everyday social reality, especially if
you can persuade others to assume your version of
an alternative social reality, albeit temporarily.
Dinesh D'Souza's film 2016: Obama's
America manages to do just this while craftily
walking the fine line between partial truths and
fiction about the early socialization, family life
and political philosophy of the 44th president of
the United States, Barack
Hussein Obama - who also
happens to be the first black president of the US
with a multiracial, multicultural and
multi-religious lineage and genealogy rooted in
America, Africa and Indonesia.
Airlift
to America (1959-63) There are many
historical firsts that President Obama has to his
credit, but D'Souza is overwhelmingly concerned
with establishing an apparent anti-colonial strain
in his world view acquired from his Kenyan father.
The fact that Obama's father was part of "the
airlift to America" sponsored by many civil-rights
leaders, non-profit organizations and the Kennedy
family simply misses D'Souza's purview: It does
not fit the anti-American or anti-colonial
narrative he imputes to Obama's father and to the
president.
This is a significant "sin of
omission" if you're trying to understand the
absentee father's anti-colonial sentiments that
shaped the first black US president. Obama's
father was the beneficiary of US goodwill and
philanthropy. How could his son think unwell of
the United States? "My story wouldn't be possible
in any other country," Obama has said repeatedly.
But this is all rhetorical speechmaking, the words
of an impostor, according to D'Souza.
Similarly, the fact that Obama's father
wrote news articles praising American society,
Hawaiian multiculturalism, and his white Hawaiian
hosts are also lost on D'Souza because this would
simply crack the colonial or anti-colonial
spectacles he wants the audience to try on in a
darkened theater.
Instead, D'Souza finds a
line in East Africa Journal in 1965 where Obama's
father suggested 100% taxation to build the newly
independent Kenyan economy. This is evidence for
the motive for America's US$16 trillion debt under
Obama, a large percentage of which was incurred by
his Republican predecessor? But the son has become
just like the father, according to D'Souza.
September 11 and Pearl Harbor
attacks In another blatantly biased claim,
D'Souza states that the annexation of Hawaii in
1959 was primarily driven by colonization of the
natives, which causes resentments even today,
while making not a single mention of the fact that
native Hawaiians, unlike in mainland America,
welcomed newcomers to the islands and married
them. Thus the interracial marriage rates in
Hawaii have always been high. The sacrifices of
Hawaiians in World War II in the aftermath of the
Pearl Harbor attacks and prior to the annexation
are completely missing from this jaded film.
Similarly, D'Souza fails to mention that
the service of Obama's maternal grandfather,
Stanley Armour Dunham, in the war also deeply ties
Obama to Hawaiian soil and to the memory of the
Pearl Harbor attacks, the only other instance when
US territory has been attacked at home before
September 11, 2011. Why does D'Souza not include
any suggestion of these important historical
turning points in American life that directly
intersect with Obama's biography? Because he wants
you to believe that Obama is not really cut from
the same American cloth as other presidents.
According to D'Souza, Obama's founding
father-figures are not George Washington, not
Thomas Jefferson and not even Abraham Lincoln,
whose career path Obama has imitated, but rather a
shady group of communist sympathizers such as,
Frank Marshall Davis, Bill Ayers, late Columbia
professor Edward Said, the Reverend Jeremiah
Wright, and Harvard law professor Robert Unger.
D'Souza tells us at the outset that he is
a new immigrant, whose pigmentation is not that
different from most African-Americans. He reveals
this to highlight his debating skills in civil
rights. He has questioned many civil-rights
leaders about the "real" hard evidence of racism,
he claims, including a debate with the Reverend
Jesse Jackson. Jackson issued a reply that "racism
has gone underground", to which D'Souza responded
with dismay.
Well, D'Souza has been trying
to unearth the hard evidence of racism in American
society ever since; his many books and films claim
that racism does not exist. It must be quite a
feat to invent a career on a revelation that
you've denied prima facie but continue to gain
from financially and politically.
The
Indonesia coup (1965-66) D'Souza peddles
Indonesian history from Obama's autobiography, but
curiously fails to reveal the central reason for
the disillusionment suffered by Obama's mother,
Stanley Ann Dunham, in Jakarta in the late 1960s,
namely the nexus of US oil companies and the
Central Intelligence Agency's deep involvement in
the remaking of the fledgling democracy in
Southeast Asia. When Ann Dunham landed in Jakarta,
thousands of Chinese had been slaughtered by the
Indonesian military in a bloody coup. The US had
decided to place its man, General Suharto, in
charge of the emerging Islamic democracy.
Clearly, D'Souza commits another
significant "sin of omission". He wants you to
believe that Ann Dunham was somehow genetically
predisposed to "not think well of America" as a
liberal and passed this trait on to her son by
idealizing his anti-colonial African father.
D'Souza gets Daniel Pipes, a Middle East
expert, to state explicitly at the end of the
film: "This president does think well of the
United States." Pipes was part of the rumor mill
in 2007 during the primaries that Obama had
attended a madrassa (seminary) while living
in Indonesia, suggesting that he was a closet
Muslim. We don't get any images of Koranic schools
in this film, but there are plenty of fringe
theories about Muslim or Islamic nations floating
around in the film, such as that the Middle
Eastern region might turn into the "United States
of Islam".
It can be argued that Obama's
landmark election in 2008 was partly a reflection
of several macro and secular trends:
Emerging multipolar world as suggested by many
internationalists and foreign relations experts;
Correlation with globalization speeded up by
the onset of Internet technology fostered by US
firms;
Direct effect of US decline brought on by the
two long wars in Iraq and the Afghanistan-Pakistan
region, as argued by many historians; and
Obama's global biography resonating remarkably
well with all of the above challenges Americans
are facing as they move ahead in the 21st century.
Instead, D'Souza seems intent on targeting the
anti-colonial shades of the president inherited
from the ghost of his father through some
mysterious cultural transmission, which is highly
suspect given his father abandoned him at the age
of two years and met him only once afterward, in
the winter of 1971.
This fundamental
misattribution in the film and many others
littered throughout this bald election-year
propaganda make this a baffling achievement from
reportedly a serious conservative thinker who
worked in the White House under Ronald Reagan. It
is packaged very slickly, however, to persuade an
audience who may not be aware of the biographical
and historical details or are unable to detect the
inaccuracies.
Based on the majority of the
published reviews of the film, only D'Souza's
right-wing supporters seem really to get how this
anti-colonial virus may have been passed on from
the father to the son, eventually driving an
improbable rise to the US presidency to level it
once and for all or to make the United States a
dethroned superpower. This is what D'Souza
interprets as the real meaning of
"transformational change" in the Obama world,
where the slogan of "Hope and Change" really means
"Bankrupt and Destroy".
D'Souza's film
further obscures the "narrative truth" with many
outright factual errors or "sins of commission",
as reported by The Associated Press:
Blaming Obama for the national debt of $16
trillion but never explaining the doubling of the
debt under Republicans in 2008;
Failing to mention the killing of Osama bin
Laden and the escalation of drone strikes in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, while accusing Obama of
harboring Muslim sympathies; ignoring the
non-partisan polling data that repeatedly indicate
Obama has the lowest approval ratings in the
Muslim-majority nations because of his tough
policies;
Despite the severe trade and economic
sanctions against Iran accusing Obama of inaction
against the Iranian regime to challenge Israel;
Removal of Winston Churchill's lent bust from
the Oval Office was scheduled for a return, not
because of Obama's anti-colonial sentiment;
Completely unsubstantiated claim that Hawaii's
Punahou Academy, which Obama attended, teaches
"oppression studies" without any interviews or
written documentation. Despite these mind-numbing
fallacies, there is a perfectly rational way to
understand D'Souza's wild interpretations in
filmmaking. He represents for our times what the
late historian Richard Hofstadter called a
generation ago "the paranoid style of American
politics":
American politics has often been an
arena for angry minds. In recent years, we have
seen angry minds at work, mainly among extreme
right-wingers, who have now demonstrated, in the
Goldwater movement, how much political leverage
can be got out of the animosities and passions
of a small minority. But, behind this, I
believe, there is a style of mind that is far
from new, and that is not necessarily
right-wing. I call it the paranoid style, simply
because no other word adequately evokes the
sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness,
and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in
mind.
As a new immigrant who could
have expanded the circle of knowledge, D'Souza
disappointingly has hitched his wagon to a
regressive trend in US politics, which produces
more irrational heat and noise than a reasoned
judgment. He has taken one of the more hopeful and
inspiring American stories in many generations and
turned it into a dark and sinister documentary for
political gains.
D'Souza's paranoid dreams
fail to inspire the American ideals and are not
good for the country or the world.
Dinesh Sharma is the author of
Barack Obama in Hawaii and Indonesia: The
Making of a Global President, which was rated
as one of the top 10 black history books for 2012.
His next book on Obama, Crossroads of
Leadership: Globalization and American
Exceptionalism in the Obama Presidency, is due
to be published with Routledge
Press.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
