Like Father, Like Son: Why Obama Dissed Churchill

 

The Obama Record: Lost in all the back-and-forth over the removal of Winston Churchill's bust from the Oval Office is why the president would snub the Brits. The answer is his father and his Kenyan roots.

The man sitting in the Oval Office views the Anglo-American alliance through the same anticolonial lens as his late father and their shared hero — Frantz Fanon — who argued that America and Britain were the great oppressors of the world.

From 1920 to 1963, Britain colonized Kenya, and according to Obama, mistreated his grandfather in the process.

He also claims his father was detained briefly during the emergency declared by the British to put down the savage Mau-Mau uprising there.

Winston Churchill, you see, was prime minister at the time, and as such became the object of their scorn.

As Britain was putting down the rebellion, its embassy in the U.S. warned that Kenyans seeking to study in the U.S. shared a dangerous antipathy toward both Britain and America. The exchange students happened to include Obama's father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr., whom our current president worshipped.

A 1959 British cable said the group of students had radical ties and a reputation for "both anti-American and anti-white" views.

Still, Obama Sr. obtained a student visa to attend Harvard University and study economics.

This goes a long way to explaining his son's contempt for — and repeated snubs of — America's top ally.

And why — despite White House denials — he would rudely send the Oval Office statue of Churchill back to the British embassy within days of taking office in 2009.

The White House last week claimed Obama never shipped back the gift after GOP foe Mitt Romney declared while traveling in London that he would return the bust to the Oval Office.

Yesterday, however, the White House issued an embarrassing retraction and apology for the lie.

Recall that Obama also refused to follow our decades-old policy supporting the United Kingdom's control of the Falkland Islands during a recent visit with the Argentinian president.

He opted instead for a position of "neutrality."

Anti-colonial hatred, in fact, also explains why this president goes around the world apologizing for America and why he seeks to end its global dominance and exceptionalism. It also answers why he wants to unilaterally cut America's military and nuclear power.

He views economic policy through this lens as well, believing Americans of African descent still suffer under the "neocolonial" system of white capitalism and must be liberated — and compensated.

This is how he justifies his redistributive policies, both at home and abroad.

In this he borrows a page from his unspoken hero Fanon, a handsome, well-spoken black Marxist revolutionary whose socialist works he devoured in college.

In "The Wretched of the Earth," the late Fanon wrote, "What matters today is the need for a redistribution of wealth," adding that "humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be."

Comrade Fanon, who died in the 1960s, described capitalists as "wretched" and the United States as "a monster." He called for "a planned economy, for outlawing profiteers."

When Obama's father returned to Kenya in the '60s with a Harvard economics degree in hand, he joined the newly independent Kenyan government as a Marxian economist. He justified taxes as high as 100% on those deemed rich.

And he argued for wringing all vestiges of Western "neocolonialism" out of the Kenyan economy, as Fanon had argued, and replacing it with socialism.

Like father, like son.