Depends on how you define “competitive.” When the colonies were colonies, they were used by their colonizers mainly for extraction of raw materials and agricultural produce. Now the ex-colonies are used by the developed countries, especially the U.S., for cheap manufacturing labor. That relationship makes a lot of U.S. corporations competitive, but it has systematically damaged the domestic job market.
I think the title “Obama is Anticolonist” is hilarious. It sounds so 19th-century; I almost expect someone to respond “and yet he was seen at Napoleon III’s grand ball last season, the hypocrite.”
Do you not know what the word colony means? I’m living in South Korea right now, one of those countries with US military bases. Guess how much of the country the United States is governing. Go ahead. Make me laugh. Tell me it’s more than zero.
So I was supposed to learn from that article that my understanding of Western Colonialism is incomplete and, more importantly, that the our president is black? Yeah, no wonder I missed it. I was looking for something I didn’t already know.
I think Dick Dastardly is using “anti-colonialism” the same way that the D’Souza article we’re discussing does. As seen in here, for example:
For the sake of argument, why don’t we just say “Obama is anti-neocolonist.” Surely our presence in the DMZ isn’t purely ideological.
One minor problem:
[QUOTE=Eugene Robinson]
Gingrich, unhinged on Obama
…In fairness to Gingrich, he wasn’t being original. He was speaking in praise of a big gob of gibberish in Forbes by conservative “intellectual” Dinesh D’Souza. In the piece – much of it strikingly lazy – D’Souza argues that Obama somehow absorbed a fully elaborated, frozen-in-time, anti-colonial worldview from his Kenyan father. Who left the family when the future president was 2.
Well, we knew Obama was precocious. But if he was so absorbed with the study of colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism and all the other isms, when did he have time to learn to go potty?..
[/QUOTE]
He never knew his father. He never knew his sfather. He never knew his father. Is that sinking in yet? That is not a belief. His father abandoned him when he was two, and he only talked to him one other time in his life after that (when he was11. His father gave him a basketball. Barck says in his book that he found the meeting very duisappointing and his father very unimpressive). No, he was not influenced by his father. At all. His book is largely about not having a father.
Yes, they are denied by Obama himself. He specifically rejected Alinsky (not that Alinsky was any kind of evil demon anyway), Wright was never a mentor (but when all else fails wave the nigger boogeyman, Reverend Wright stick. It’s worth a try I guess), and Fratz Fanon? Are you fucking kidding me? You pretty much just believe every single single email forward and WND article you ever read, don’t you?
It’s interesting how D’Souza is willing to extropolate all kinds of asinine conclusions from thingls like Obabama saying he discussed Fratz Fanon in his college dorm, yet completely and totally ignores the fact that Obama himself claims consistently, repeatedly and passionately in both his books and his speeches that (aside from his mother) his most important influences were his (whitebread American) maternal grandparents, a WWII veteran and a banker to whom he attributes virtually all of his learned values – values like fairness, hard work, persistence service to others and acceptance. Those are the values he constantly trumpets. These kinds of paranoid attempts to find motivations like “anti-colonialism,” and then claim them as proven fact are not only utterly baseless (and comnveniently unfalsifiable because how do you prove someone does NOT have secret thoughts or motivations?), but are obviously just coded ways to say that Obama hates white people and hates America – this despite the fact that Obama expresses his warmest praise and gratitude to his white American family in his book.
The racism on the right is getting more and more overt all the time. It’s only a matter of time before they just start screaming nigger. I still have my money on Bill O’Reilly as being the first one who’ll break and say it. The right wing media narrative will then become about how O’Reilly (or whoever) is being victimized by “politically correct” forces and how it isn’t really racist to call black people niggers because they call themselves that all the time.
It’s interesting to see right wingers embrace deconstructionist thinking. I could be wrong about that, but isn’t that what it’s called when you conjure up hidden meanings about a person’s writing based on socio-political constructs?
(Appropriate sequence.) Well, I’d say to deconstruct is not so much to “conjure” what’s “hidden” rather than to readjust the frame of perspective, to see how the socio-political context shapes the discourse, and vice versa. D’Souza is just analyzing and compiling a set of–what are (in my opinion) sketchy–premises.
However, it doesn’t take much deconstruction to perceive some validity in Dio’s observation about the general discourse:
Anti-colonialist => black (or at least, not white)=> naive
With everything from “tea parties” (i.e., “The nation has suddenly gone to pot.”) to “Obama is a socialist,” we’ve seen some pretty imaginative ways of expressing discontent with an administration that is mostly doing business as usual.
Do you not know it can mean more than one thing? Cuba was a U.S. colony from 1898 through 1959; it makes no difference that there was no U.S. governor.