Say Anything Blog

By Andrew Walden

American voters must make up their minds about what Barack Obama really believes in, if anything. His recent rhetorical concessions to the center further muddy the waters. So we must look to his past teachers and associates for help in understanding the inner Obama.

In his first series of national campaign commercials since securing the delegates needed to win the Democratic presidential campaign, Barack Obama struggles to re-introduce himself.  Images focus on the story of lessons learned from his grandparents and his mother, described in his book Dreams from my Father as “a girl from Kansas.... dab-smack, landlocked center of the country,” in towns “too small to warrant boldface on a roadmap.” Speaking in Independence, Missouri, Obama tells his audience: “patriotism can never be defined as loyalty to any particular leader or government or policy.”

First Mentor

But there is another story to be told about loyalties and about Obama’s education.  A story told by Gerald Horne, contributing editor of Political Affairs, a magazine published by the Communist Party, USA.  Speaking March 28, 2007 at the dedication of the Communist Party, USA archive at New York University Tamiment Library, Horne traces the downward spiral of fortune for Communists in the latter half of the twentieth century.  But in the closing paragraphs of his speech, Horne suddenly becomes hopeful, pointing to the arrival of what Obama might describe as “the ones we have been waiting for.”

“...in Hawaii was an African-American poet and journalist by the name of Frank Marshall Davis, who was certainly in the orbit of the CP (Communist Party)—if not a member—and who was born in Kansas and spent a good deal of his adult life in Chicago, before decamping to Honolulu in 1948 at the suggestion of his good friend (and Communist Party member) Paul Robeson. Eventually, he befriended another family—a Euro-American family—that had migrated to Honolulu from Kansas and a young woman from this family eventually had a child with a young student from Kenya East Africa who goes by the name of Barack Obama, who retracing the steps of Davis eventually decamped to Chicago. In his best selling memoir ‘Dreams of my Father’, the author speaks warmly of an older black poet, he identifies simply as “Frank” as being a decisive influence in helping him to find his present identity as an African-American....”

[...]

Certainly, socialists and leftists have flocked to embrace Obama’s candidacy. His campaign even hosts a page for Marxists/socialists/communists for Obama, albeit with a disclaimer at the bottom. And the Communist Party USA backs Obama’s candidacy.

What remains from Marxism in America is a desire to appropriate the wealth of some and distribute it to those who did not earn it in the name of “fairness,” and the arrogant belief that politically correct ideology denotes superiority and the right to wield political power.

Marx theorized a broad uprising of the proletarian masses to create a socialist society. Later American theorists like Frank Marshall Davis saw blacks as a revolutionary vanguard. In advanced countries, followers of Marx have devolved into Gramscian propagandists.  Arrogant nihilists, they seek not to lead, but to confirm their false sense of superiority to themselves by spreading confusion and doubt.

They may await a new leader who fancies himself Nietzsche’s Übermensch—and tells them “we are the ones we have been waiting for.”

Read the whole thing; it is quite lengthy, and gives lots of details about the influence of Communist ideas on Obama’s parents and grandparents, as well as his own words on the subject.  Scary stuff, if you care about America.