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I. Obama’s Roots in Polygamy and the Ford Foundation 33

cultures against the encroaching metropolis. It was entitled, “Peasant blacksmithing in
Indonesia: surviving against all odds.
In this respect Dunham remained within the mainstream of her discipline. Anthropology broke
into popular awareness with Margaret Mead’s long-discredited Coming of Age in Samoa (1928),
which offered a falsified ideal of sexual liberation in the South Pacific as an alternative to the
supposedly repressive West. Mead’s work was one of the founding documents of the sexual
revolution of the 1960s, and anthropology faculties stood at the left-wing fringe of American
universities.’ (Spengler, Asia Times, Feb. 26, 2008) It might be more accurate to call this left-wing
fringe the postmodern fringe.


The specific brand of leftism in play here is once again Rousseau’s doctrine of the noble savage,
which unquestionably provides the foundation for the anthropology of the entire 20th century.
Rousseau’s argument was that the original sin of human civilization had been to develop beyond the
most primitive stage of Paleolithic hunting, gathering, and foraging. The fall from grace occurred
with the introduction of village life, metallurgy, and most of all the state, with accompanying
notions of property. Rousseau, who had lived in Venice as a secretary to the French ambassador,
asserted that it was civilization itself which made human individuals evil and corrupt. The healing
of civilization therefore required a return to the reign of the noble savage — meaning in practice the
retrogression of civilization back to the old stone age. Margaret Mead’s fake scholarship about the
sexual mores of the South Sea Islanders represented a part of this effort to put civilization into
reverse gear. Various modern day thinkers, from radical environmentalists to neocon theoreticians
like Leo Strauss have also endorsed this notion of turning back the clock of civilized progress: it is a
very, very reactionary notion, and would of course imply genocide on an unimaginable scale if ever
attempted.


Spengler goes on to note: “Barack Obama received at least some instruction in the Islamic faith
of his father and went with him to the mosque, but the importance of this experience is vastly
overstated by conservative commentators who seek to portray Obama as a Muslim of sorts. Radical
anti-Americanism, rather than Islam, was the reigning faith in the Dunham household. In the
Muslim world of the 1960s, nationalism rather than radical Islam was the ideology of choice among
the enraged. Radical Islam did not emerge as a major political force until the nationalism of a
Gamal Abdel Nasser or a Sukarno failed.” It might be more accurate to state that radical Islam was
one of several ideological counteroffensives launched by Anglo-American imperialism during the
1950s in order to undercut the vast appeal of Nasser, Sukarno, and the other militant nonaligned
leaders.


OBAMA: AN ANTHROPOLOGIST PROFILING


THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AS ETHNOGRAPHIC MATERIAL


Spengler comes to the following chilling conclusion: “Barack Obama is a clever fellow who
imbibed hatred of America with his mother’s milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of
education and career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American
culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives
with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at
emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is
practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.” (Spengler, Asia
Times, Feb. 26, 2008)

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