Churchill viewed colonialism purely from the point of view of the colonizer, but colonialism was hard on the people who lived under it. My grandfather was routinely humiliated by his British superiors, and when, many years later, I wanted to come to America, he recommended that I not go: “It’s full of white people.” I can see why Obama’s own grandfather might feel this way; he was, after all, held in a detention camp by the British. Obama and I are the descendants of these colonial subjects. We have not suffered, but we have the knowledge of the suffering, and the scar can do the work of the wound. Yet I believe that if we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that while colonialism was bad for our grandfathers, it has been pretty good for their children and grandchildren.
Let’s pause to consider why this is so. Our authority for this inquiry is, of all people, Muhammad Ali. When Ali returned to America, having won the heavyweight title against George Foreman in Zaire, he was asked by a reporter, “Champ, what did you think of Africa?” Ali replied, “Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat!” Ali was being his usual outrageous self, but his point is a provocative one. Ali is saying that slavery was very hard for his ancestors but nevertheless it was the transmission belt that brought him into the orbit of Western civilization. Had there been no slavery, had Ali been born in Zaire instead of America, his life would be very different, much poorer, much less free.
The same is true of colonialism. It was the transmission belt that brought black and brown and yellow people into the orbit of Western prosperity and Western freedom. Actually, it brought them into the modern world. As Kishore Mahbubani puts it in
The New Asian Hemisphere
, “Modernity is a gift from the West to the rest of the world.”
5
When I survey my own life—my ability to speak English, my Western education, my moral commitments to democracy and civil liberty and human dignity and individual rights—I realize how much of this is the consequence of two and a half centuries of British rule in India. Paradoxically, Winston Churchill and what he represents have far more to do with what I most cherish than Gandhi and what he represents. If I had the chance, I’d move the Winston Churchill bust back into the Oval Office.
None of this is intended as a simple-minded defense of colonialism. The British didn’t come to India or Kenya to give the native people all these wonderful gifts. Colonialism was not based on philanthropy; it was a form of conquest and occupation. When the British came to India and Kenya, they came for selfish reasons: they came to rule and to benefit from that rule. Nevertheless, in order to rule effectively the British introduced Western ideas and Western institutions to the subject peoples. Eventually those people used British ideas of self-determination and freedom to combat British rule. As a native-born Indian, I have to say that even our freedom was a consequence of what we learned from our Western captors. And I came to America to study and work because I viewed it as the apex of Western civilization. So here is the paradox. I am a Third World guy who has embraced America, and Obama is an American who has embraced a Third World ideology.
Still, it is not enough to describe Obama as an anti-colonialist without specifying what kind of an anti-colonialist he is. Actually there are two types of anti-colonialism. One is anti-colonialism of the free market, pro-American type. The American revolution represented that type of anti-colonialism. India today represents the same desire to be free of foreign rule, and yet to adopt a pro-American, free market approach. Even in Kenya, the first president, Jomo Kenyatta, stressed that he wanted to get rid of British rule but he was pro-Western and wanted to preserve property rights and free markets.
This is clearly not the anti-colonialism of Obama. Rather, he adopted his father’s brand of anti-colonialism, which can be described as socialist in economics and anti-American in foreign policy. This is a particular type of anti-colonialism that developed in the twentieth century. Obama is not alone in this camp; a whole bunch of Third World rulers, from Idi Amin in Uganda to Julius Nyerere in Tanzania to Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, shared the same ideology. Not that it worked out in those countries; it hasn’t worked anywhere. Yet Obama seems to be relentlessly implementing it in America, perhaps in the expectation that it can work here for the first time.
So far I haven’t bothered to defend free markets and show that they are the best way to generate wealth. The world already knows this, and the Third World now knows it as well as the West. More than once Obama has raised the question: why is South Korea now forty times richer than Kenya, when both countries were at the same level at the time of Kenya’s independence in the early 1960s? We know the answer to that question: Kenya went the socialist road and South Korea went the capitalist road. Sure, there are important cultural differences between the Kenyans and South Koreans. We can, however, demonstrate the superiority of capitalism by comparing North Korea and South Korea. Same people, same culture. Yet North Korea remains desperately poor while South Korea is a comparatively rich country. Another example is my own native country of India. India tried socialism for nearly a half-century after independence, and now for the past two decades it has been trying free market capitalism. Once again, the results are in: capitalism is working and socialism failed miserably. The Indians didn’t figure this out by reading Adam Smith; they figured it out by watching what capitalism has done for living standards in China. Today in India and China there is no more debate between capitalism and socialism; the issue is settled. Ironically, Obama reviles the very free market capitalism that is helping the developing world overcome poverty and become rich.
Obama’s depreciation of Pax Americana—of America’s outsized influence—is equally delusional. Contrary to Obama’s view, America is not a colonizing nation. America is not like the British and the French. Nor are we like the Roman Empire. Sure, America has intervened in several countries over the last few decades. So here’s my question: if we invaded those countries, why don’t we own them? The reason is that America moved in and America moved out. Nor did we steal the resources of those countries. Iraq is a case in point. America did not benefit financially from its occupation of Iraq. On the contrary, the war in Iraq was a costly expedition. And from the beginning America encouraged free elections in Iraq, so the Iraqi people could choose their own government. America turned the keys to the oilfields over to the Iraqis, so that they could do what they want with their oil. Even when America has used massive force, as against Germany and Japan in World War II, that force was accompanied by a desire to put something better in place of what was destroyed. Thus America introduced democratic institutions to both countries, and invested huge amounts of money in rebuilding Europe after the war. What other empire would do these things? What would the twentieth century have been like if it were not for America? Far from being an empire of looting, America has proved to be an empire of ideals, an “empire of liberty.”
6
I know that many Americans are weary of war and ready to get out of faraway places like Afghanistan. During the second half of the nineteenth century, there was a lively debate between two British politicians, Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone, over the future of the British Empire. Disraeli was the champion of empire, and he defended the British Empire in terms of national greatness. England had to choose, he said, between “a comfortable England,” isolated and ordinary, or being “a great country, an imperial country, a country where your sons, when they rise . . . obtain not merely the esteem of their countrymen, but command the respect of the world.”
Gladstone took up Disraeli’s challenge, and defended what he was not ashamed to call Little England. He said, in effect: Let’s forget about empire. Let’s forget about the world. Let’s just live on our little island, and tend to our vegetable gardens, and grow our petunias. Let’s not try to be special, because we aren’t. Let’s just enjoy what we have over here.
7
I don’t want to directly compare Gladstone and Obama—there are too many cultural and historical differences to take into account. I do think that Obama’s philosophy can be neatly summed up as: Little America. He wants to shrink America, to diminish America, to downsize America. What makes Gladstone different from Obama is that even as prime minister, Gladstone did not actually liquidate the British Empire. Ultimately the British Empire was destroyed by two world wars. By contrast, Obama is diminishing American prosperity and influence. Little America is a realizable goal for Obama in a way that Little England was not for Gladstone.
We cannot hope or wait for Obama to change course; he cannot change course. If he could have, he would have. Look at it this way. Obama could have assured his re-election this year by moving to the center, as Bill Clinton did after the 1994 midterm debacle. Obama faced a similar debacle in 2010, so why has he refused to do what any other politician would have done under the circumstances? For most people this question is unanswerable, but we know the answer. He simply can’t bring himself to do it, because if he did, the Great One would be disappointed. His mentors would be disappointed. Obama would become a sellout, like Lolo and Onyango and George. His mom sent him home from Indonesia to avoid this. This is who he became and this is the Obama we are stuck with.
I realize that our problem may be bigger than Obama. There may be some Americans who share Gladstone’s outlook: they are tired of America being a world power; they too would like to go back to their vegetable gardens. First Lady Michelle Obama has already planted her vegetable garden, and she’s urging other Americans to do likewise.
8
Between these people and Obama there is a secret: he is pursuing decline, and they want decline. How much decline has Obama achieved in four years? I would estimate that he has achieved about 40 percent decline. I get this number from the 40 percent wealth decline that Americans have seen over the past five years.
9
If Obama gets a second term, and can achieve a further 40 percent reduction in the net worth of Americans, he would have presided over a stunning two-thirds decline in the wealth of America. Basically America at that point would cease to be a first world country, and its wealth would be comparable to that of the rest of the world. Similarly, Obama has moved America from the world’s sole superpower to a world increasingly shaped by other countries: China, Russia, Brazil, India, and the Islamic countries. In another four years, Obama can complete the transition from an America-dominated world to the kind of multi-polar world that preceded the age of European discovery and conquest.
For me, this is a strategy of national suicide. For me to see America shrunk, downsized, and diminished would be to see my childhood ambitions crushed, my decision to come to America invalidated, my lifelong love for America bitterly disappointed. I don’t want to see this happen. I have faith in the good sense of Americans, and believe that if most people realize who Obama really is, they will not give him a second term. Earlier we didn’t know him; now we do. Whether he realizes his agenda is ultimately not up to him—it’s up to us. Still, Obama is hoping that he can once again cajole a majority of Americans into voting for their own decline and impoverishment. He needs them to keep him in office, although ultimately he isn’t concerned about what they think of him. Ultimately he answers to the verdict of his own conscience. How gratifying it would be for Obama to have accomplished his permanent remaking of America by 2016, and to hear as he leaves office, from a voice inside his head: Well done, good and faithful servant.
NOTES
CHAPTER 1
2
Brett Arenda, “IMF Bombshell: Age of America nears end,” April 25, 2011,
http://articles.marketwatch.com/2011-04-25/commentary/30714377_1_imf-chinese-economy-international-monetary-fund
; Arvind Subramanian, “The Inevitable Superpower,”
Foreign Affairs
, September/October 2011,
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/68205/arvind-subramanian/the-inevitable-superpower
; Stephen M. Walt, “The End of the American Era,”
National Interest
, October 25, 2011,
http://nationalinterest.org/article/the-end-the-american-era-6037
.
3
Federal Reserve Board, “Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2007 to 2010,”
Federal Reserve Bulletin
, June 2012,
http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/bulletin/
; Robert Frank, “America Lost 129,000 Millionaires in 2011,” CNBC, May 31, 2012,
http://www.cnbc.com/id/47631154/America_Lost_129_000_Millionaires_in_2011
; James Surowiecki, “No End in Sight,”
The New Yorker
, April 30, 2012, p. 23; Jeff Bergner, “What a Difference Four Years Makes,”
Weekly Standard
, June 18, 2012, p. 18.
4
“Nuclear Summit: Barack Obama Tells Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev More Flexibility After Election,” Reuters, March 26, 2012.
5
Frantz Fanon,
The Wretched of the Earth
(Grove Press, 1963), pp. 102–3.
6
Kwame Nkrumah,
Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism
(International Publishers, 1965).
7
Chinweizu,
The West and the Rest of Us
(Vintage Books, 1975), p. 406.
8
Ali Mazrui,
Cultural Forces in World Politics
(James Currey, 1990), p. 106; Edward Said,
Culture and Imperialism
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), pp. xxii–xxiii; Aimé Césaire,
Discourse on Colonialism
(Monthly Review Press, 2000), p. 77.