Barack Obama

by Howard S. Katz
4-28-08

“It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

---Barack Obama, speech in California to wealthy donators,
April 11, 2008.

For most of the Democratic campaign, hardly anyone has had any idea what Barack Omama is all about. He introduced himself to the nation by saying that he was in favor of change. But he never made it clear what kind of change. For month after month, every speech out of his mouth was full of vapid clichés.

But there is something about an American Presidential campaign. It is too intense. There is too much at stake. A candidate may start with an intent to deceive. He may have a carefully planned program of lies. But somewhere along the way the truth breaks through.

Let us examine Obama’s views on the white Pennsylvanians whose votes he was seeking. There is a half truth in his words; it is the half truth of over-generalization, the half truth which represents every member of a group by its worst elements; it is the half truth we call racism.

There are some white men who are bitter, who are excessively religious and prone to violence. But if you talk to such people, then this is exactly what Negroes appear as to them: violent, religious, angry.

In short, Barack Obama is a racist. He sees white people through the prism of hate. He sees them in clichés. His perception is so distorted that he missed the fact that Pennsylvania was on the side of the North in the Civil War and fought against slavery. The ancestors of those Pennsylvanians he condemned gave their lives so that Negroes could be free. And he has been keeping a lid on his views because he does not dare to let people know what he really thinks.

So now we know what the election of 2008 is really about. The Democrats may nominate a racial bigot who hates the large majority of the people in the country he is trying to lead. The campaign will be very simple. The Democrats probably won’t come right out and say it, but their position will be, “We hate America.”

I first met these people at Harvard in the late 1950s. The issue has nothing to do with black or white. They hate America because America is the country based on freedom. They are not liberals. Neither are they democrats (with either a lower or upper case “D”).

The formal name of these people is Social Democrat. This was a movement founded in 1875 in Germany to prevent the ideas of freedom and democracy from advancing across the continent of Europe. In 1912, the Social Democrats took control of Germany and fomented W.W.I. Then another Social Democrat, named Adolph Hitler, fomented W.W. II.

The history of human societies up to approximately the 17th century is, with only rare exceptions, one unmitigated horror story after another. We never had sheer mass murders like that of the Holocaust for the simple reason that there just weren’t that many human beings alive.

But then in one human society, in one small corner of the earth, human beings found the way to live with each other. The answer was the concept of rights. Respect the rights of others, and insist that they respect yours. This idea was born in 17th century England. It gradually became stronger and infused the entire society. By 1689, England declared a Bill of Right (the ancestor of the American Bill of Rights of 1789). And through the 18th and 19th centuries the concept of rights spread through the world.

For example, if you study what is today incorrectly called colonialism, you find that its motivating force was the desire of (what are today called) third world peoples to live under (something approximating) British law.

The study of how England acquired India is amazing. England did not try to conquer India. It did not appropriate any money to conquer India. Neither did it send an army to India. A tiny minority of Englishmen went to India for the purpose of importing tea. An Indian rajah attacked them with his professional army, and 2000 (untrained) tea company clerks defeated the rajah’s army of 40,000 men. In another case, the tea company clerks were lined up against another professional army of similar size. The Indian army began to melt away, and the British general ordered his men to let them go. They disobeyed and won a stunning victory. So it went. The directors of the tea company would admonish their employees for their victories.

The Indians wanted to be “conquered” by the British. They wanted to be ruled by British law. And that was the dominant motive for the expansion of the British Empire. You can pretty much date the British Empire from shortly after 1689, the date of the Bill of Right. There was never such a wonderful period of human history as the 18th and 19th centuries.

And here in the 21st century we are rushing as rapidly as we can to throw all of this away. At this moment down on the banks of the great grey-green, grassy Limpopo River, Africans are streaming out of Zimbabwe into South Africa at the rate of a thousand a week because the country is heading for Civil War. Soon these people will be killing each other. And with the world short of food, it is not difficult to pick the next point in the crisis. If there is not enough food to keep everyone alive, then the incentive to be decent and humane suffers quite a setback.

The fact that Barack Obama is an Negro merely highlights the tragedy of what is happening. The concept of rights knows no race. It applies to all human beings at all times and all places. Those who live by it succeed and prosper. Those who do not fail. Because of historical circumstance pretty much the entire continent of Africa remains ignorant of rights, and that is why the Limpopo River (made famous by Kipling) is playing a crucial role today.

Barack Obama does not care about rights. With his wife and his pastor, assuming he wins the Democratic nomination, we can look forward to a very sorry few months in which the media repeat every current (academic) lie intended to discredit America. As this issue plays itself out, do not fall into the trap of thinking that it has anything to do with Negroes. It was born in Germany in 1875, and its motive was hate for America.

This will be the Presidential campaign of 2008. The Democratic position will be, “We hate America.” The Republican position will be mealy-mouthed compromise. And the people of the world run around killing each other over the food which does not exist because nobody is respecting anybody’s rights.

Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.
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