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October 15, 2008
Exclusive: Obama – The One They’ve Been Waiting For (Part Two of Two)
Every city has a unique culture, socially, artistically and politically. Chicago has a small but considerable community of the radical Left. In that community, America is the predator. It is the aggressor in world affairs. It is the seat of imperialism. It is the oppressor. It is an irredeemably racist nation. If it is attacked, it is because it deserves it. It is an evil system that beats down the little guy and must be overcome. That radical culture is the community into which Obama friends Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers emerged after surfacing from their terrorist underground and in which they play a leadership role; the intersection of black militancy, academic radicalism and socialist community organizing. As a distinct community with significant activism, it can, in the grand tradition of Chicago ward politics, deliver votes and has, therefore, political power.
It is a discrete, insular community with a definable political culture. It is a culture in which the ravings of people like Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger are considered mainstream. It is the milieu in which Barack Obama immersed himself for 20 years and which formed his political thought. It is the community out of which he emerged as a viable candidate for United States Senate. It is a culture that welcomes Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn in spite of their treason and in which they play a leading role. Obama is of this community and it defines him.
Many of the actual connections between Ayers, Dohrn and Obama, insofar as they can be uncovered, have been chronicled by others, but the greater connection is in their interconnected influence in their insular and radical community. It is impossible to determine the extent of their formal and informal contacts, but it does not really matter. They are of the same small community. They are members of the same ideological club. That is why Ayers/Dohrn sponsored his political coming out at their home.
What does that community stand for?
In that community, America’s reaction to the attack of September 11th was to implement an “agenda of repression at home, as well as [an] expanded imperial project abroad.” The mainstream plan for action in that community is a call for “resistance” to United States “imperialism” and a celebration of the thought that ten million people throughout the world rose up a short year after the September 11th attacks “to cry out against U.S. imperialism.”
“This robust and unified resistance to imperialism is indeed new, but in the United States and elsewhere, it did not come from thin air. On the local level, on the person-to-person level, incredible [community] organizing work has been underway focused on prisons, women’s health and safety, labor, the environment, reparations, anti-globalization, solidarity with Latin American and African countries, and human rights movements. Anti-death-penalty struggles have, notably in my home state of Illinois, begun to achieve great things.”
These are the writings of Bernardine Dohrn today. If they sound familiar, it is because they are of a piece with the ravings of Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor, and Michael Pfleger, the unhinged white wannabe black padre who sometimes serves as a surrogate in Wright’s church. It is a community in which Wright is mainstream; where Pfleger, strutting as if in a bad minstrel show, is normal.
“The scope of the current repression is vast, and as separate resistances are created it is our task to unite them… The heart of today’s repression is the American addiction to caging African-American people, especially young men. This is the model for the cage in which they now seek to place the entire world. The mass incarceration of people of color took place through a very deliberate cultivation of fear, the legend of a crime wave, and the invention of the super-predator myth during a decade when crime rates plummeted… The target of this Jihad ‘against terrorism’ is the population here at home; and so this notion of ‘taking to task’ means menacing and disciplining, threatening, and silencing people like Susan Sontag, Bill Maher, Danny Glover, and university faculty in places all over the country.”
The “silence” of Maher and Glover is not something anyone has noticed. But this is mainstream thought in Obama’s community. Ask Rev. Wright of whose church Obama was a member. It is the writing of Bernardine Dohrn. This is what passes for “truth” in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. It was written on the eve of Obama’s run for the United States Senate. Dohrn did not write these things when Obama was eight years old. She wrote them when he was in the Illinois State Senate, as her neighborhood’s representative having launched his campaign from her living room.
Dohrn goes on to obligatorily invoke the name of Sen. Joe McCarthy and darkly assert that there is a wholesale roundup in process of well-meaning community activists guilty only of the crime of expressing their opinions. “So the long and short is that our task is to keep on organizing politically. The structures of opposition are there. We need to make the connections between these issues so that people better understand state power, and don’t see imperialism as only an optional foreign policy.” She goes on to invoke the radical image of her past. She describes, approvingly, a picture circulating in the radical departments of the University of Illinois, of menacing armed men that suggests that violent action should be taken against that establishment against which she struggles to this day but whose help she is always willing to accept.
Is it any wonder, then, that when the Wright tapes surfaced, Obama seemed so confused by their impact? Is it surprising that Michelle Obama would say that for the first time in her life she is proud of the United States? It should not be. In their microcosm, it never occurred to them that a black man could be a viable candidate for president, racism being so endemic in what they see as a fundamentally mean and oppressive nation. In their world the United States is the oppressor to be resisted, not foreign Jihadis. In their world it is considered mainstream to believe that we are an imperialist nation, subjugating others for our economic interests. This is the world of Barak Obama. The world created for him by such as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.
Also of that world, indeed of that city and neighborhood, was Saul Alinsky, the Leftist activist who modernized the art of community organizing in service of the socialist project. Perhaps the only thing Leftists and conservatives agreed on in the ‘60s is that socialism could not be imposed on the United States, a nation of rugged individualists, either by violent revolution or by the dramatic act of the nationalization of industries. Alinsky, particularly, understood and taught that the only way to accomplish the implementation of a socialist system was to drop the rhetoric of revolution. He knew that exhortations to “resistance” and references to the proletariat would do nothing but alienate the objects of his argument.
He taught, therefore, that radicals who would succeed in the socialist mission must, first, clean themselves up and, second, adopt the vocabulary of patriotism. His premise was that Americans can be convinced to work for wealth redistribution, national healthcare, industrial regulation and other socialist initiatives if the projects are cast as beneficial change that will improve the lives of the targets of persuasion. Organizers are urged to speak of love of country and a desire for making it still better rather than in the language of the traditional left invoked in the stilted style of soviet communism. Alinsky, in short, taught the art of effective lying.
In his organizing days, Obama taught other organizers from Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals; something that has been extensively chronicled elsewhere. It is unsurprising, then, that the tone of his campaign is one of upward striving and country-love at the same time as it seeks to change the fundamental nature of the citizens’ relationship to their government. It promotes the idea of patriotism as a love of the land rather than as a devotion to the idea that is the United States.
That is why it is critical to understand the community from which Obama springs. It is not just that he has a personal relationship to Ayers and Dohrn. Their connection is as intellectual as it is personal. He is part of the same intellectual community. He shares the same world view. He has the same ideas. It is unsurprising that the statement of positions on his website, otherwise exhaustive, makes no mention of the war on terror and the need for domestic vigilance to prevent it on our shores. He is the one they have been waiting for. The one who can appear to be what they cannot. The radical with a winning smile. The clean and articulate black man of Sen. Biden’s description whose academic credentials place him squarely in the establishment. The Leftist agent of change who casts his ideas as a patriotic yearning to improve his nation rather than as an effort to overthrow its very idea. The one whose mask is so effective that Americans are ready to vote for him not knowing what he really stands for. He is the culmination of Alinsky’s project.
It is not that he is capable of the remorseless violence that characterizes Dohrn and Ayers. It is that he agrees with their ideas and is working to achieve through politics what they could not through revolution.
Family Security Matters Contributing Editor John W. Howard is a lawyer, specializing in corporate and business litigation who also founded a non-profit, public interest law firm specializing in First, Second and Tenth Amendment issues. Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org.
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