:: Tuesday, June 10, 2008 ::
The Year of the Long Knives: Part II
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Posted by Edward Cline at 10:38 PM
Discussing Adolf Hitler's rise from a "provincial hot-head and rabble-rouser" in the 1920's to his electrifying effect on "disaffected" Germans in Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris, Ian Kershaw poses the paradox of how, among countless other "hot-heads" and "rabble-rousers" of the time, Hitler was so successful in establishing a rapport of anger and hatred, and then solves it at the same time:
"This in itself suggests that what had changed above all was the milieu and context in which Hitler operated; that we should look in the first instance less to his own personality than to the motives and actions of those who came to be Hitler's supporters, admirers, and devotees - and not least his powerful backers - to explain his first breakthrough on the political scene. For what becomes clear - without falling into the mistake of presuming that he was no more than the puppet of the 'ruling classes' - is that Hitler would have remained a political nonentity without the patronage and support he obtained from influential circles in Bavaria. During this period, Hitler was seldom, if ever, master of his own destiny. The key decisions - to take over the party leadership in 1921, to engage the putsch adventure in 1923 - were not carefully conceived actions, but desperate forward moves to save face - behavior characteristic of Hitler to the end." (pp. 132-133) Senator Barack Obama, former Illinois state senator, former senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, and junior doyen of the Chicago welfare and community services machine, is also such a political nonentity - one of among dozens in the political spectrum who hanker for the limelight and the power - who could not have risen to the top of the Democratic Party establishment without the patronage, endorsement and support of influential circles within and outside the Party. It is because he is such a zero - a zero willing to be anything to all - that he was picked, groomed and promoted to run for the office of President of the United States. Regardless of the image Obama projects, that of an independent force master of his own destiny - and it is a manufactured image, to be sure - it is the nature of modern American politics that he could not have moved a single square on that chessboard without being covered by more powerful pieces.
Why would he among all those others be chosen to become the point man for the collectivist movements that wish to take full control of the country? Because he is malleable, chimerical, and can be virtually anything to anyone who claims to be a victim of something. Also, he has demonstrated his ability to overcome his many liabilities with the cooperation of a fawning news media.
For one thing, he is deceitful. He has denied being a Muslim and has emphasized his Christian background, or has alternately downplayed his youthful Muslim studies. Well, according to Islam, once a Muslim, always a Muslim, even in a state of apostasy, even if one converts to another faith but retains the full name of Barack Hussein Mohammed Obama. But, this is not important. What is important is that he thinks it is enough of a liability that he is willing to fudge on the truth. Daniel Pipes discusses in detail Obama's religious background in a FrontPage article of April 29, "Barack Obama's Muslim Childhood."
Another liability is his family history. He is obviously of mixed racial parentage, but that is neither here nor there. Also irrelevant is whether or not his mother, "Stanley" Ann Dunham, and his father, Barack Obama Sr., were ever married in Hawaii or elsewhere. There is a record of their divorce (Obama Sr. left Ann and Barack to pursue a degree at Harvard, and then returned to Kenya) but no record of their marriage. Barack Junior's mother later married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian oil manager and practicing Muslim, which accounts for Obama's time in Jakarta. They were divorced in the late 1970s. Obama has a half-sister, Maya, of whom nothing has ever been said by him, but he has "advertised" his relatives in Kenya.
Obama has claimed that his mother was the daughter of a conservative Methodist or Baptist family from Kansas. However, her parents were left-wingers whose Unitarian church near Seattle was so sympathetic to communism that it was nicknamed "the little red church."
Obama's mother also attended a high school near Seattle that was notorious enough to be investigated by the House Un-American Activities Subcommittee for its connections to the American Communist Party. Here Ann Dunham absorbed literature-destroying "critical theory" and Karl Marx, and was so influenced by the leftist curriculum that she became and remained a radical leftist. Doubtless young Barack was exposed at home to nothing but his mother's political opinions, in addition to "black" history and "black" literature. It would account for his knee-jerk collectivist rhetoric. And, it would not be much of a stretch of the imagination to suppose that, had Ann Dunham ever attended stateside universities, she might have become a member of the Students for a Democratic Society or the Weather Underground. But, see her "public service" career here.
She would have been old enough and "revolutionary" enough to join the likes of Mark Rudd, the SDS or Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn of the Weather Underground. Doubtless she cheered them on from afar as they protested the Vietnam War, brought anarchy to America's streets with demonstrations, and eventually turned to terrorist bombings of the Capitol building, the Pentagon, and the State Department. She did not get to meet Ayers and Dohrn, two of the Weathermen terrorists yet to be charged with the bombing murder of a San Francisco policeman, but her son "Barry" did. They are friends of his and pillars of Chicago's left-liberal establishment, Ayers a "distinguished professor" of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and sometime education advisor to Mayor Richard Daley, Dohrn associate professor of law at Northwestern University School of Law and director of Northwestern's Children and Family Justice Center.
Ayers still serves on the board of the Woods Fund, a Chicago-based charity that develops community groups to help the poor (echoes of Saul Alinsky again), as had Obama for nine years until 2002. Ayers, however, claims Obama, is just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood." Ayers promoted Obama in a 1995 fundraiser when he ran for the state senate. Nice neighbors if you can get them.
Obama complained when someone brought up his close association with Ayers that "the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn't make much sense." Well, yes, it does make sense. Ayers and Dohrn should have served hard time for their actions, just as Ted Kennedy, now the patriarch of the American Borgias, should have served hard time for manslaughter. Both Obama and Hillary Clinton have a penchant for having close "associations" with lawbreakers who later teach law and justice or become lawmakers.
Obama was a close friend and political crony of Alice Palmer, a black Illinois state senator from 1990 to 1995, and an open admirer of the Soviet Union who served on the board of the World Peace Council, a Soviet front. Obama, Ayers, and Dohrn often attended political meetings at Palmer's Chicago home. Just neighbors.
(Hillary Clinton also has radical terrorist skeletons rattling in one of her many scandal-stuffed closets, the ones whose criminal sentences her husband commuted in his last days of office, before they both made off with the White House silverware and other public valuables - but that's another story. Click here for that episode.)
After he had unofficially won the Democratic race for the nomination, on June 4 Obama broadcast a message of triumph to his supporters, which said, among other things:
"It's going to take hard work, but thanks to you and millions of other donors and volunteers, no one has ever been more prepared for such a challenge." Prepared, that is, "to turn the page on the policies of the past and bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face...This is our moment. This is our time." Obama's chief deceit is that he is just a clean-cut knock-off of John F. Kennedy of yore, loaded with good intentions and plausible-sounding solutions to everything.
Prepared? Michelle Malkin cites some instances of just how ill-prepared Obama is. Click here for a measure of his wisdom and respect for the truth. Did you know there were fifty-seven states in the union?
One of British playwright Terence Rattigan's early plays was a satire on Hitler, Follow My Leader. Unfortunately, what is happening in America today is not satire. Barack Obama wishes the country to follow his lead. Regrettably, there are too many Americans ready and willing to.
Part Three of this commentary will delve into Obama's political "angels." The fourth and final part of this commentary will focus on the capitalist "big money" behind Obama.
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