After reading Barack Obama’s book Dreams from My
Father, it became painfully clear that he has not been
searching for the truth, because he assumed from an early age that
he had already found the truth — and now it was just a question of
filling in the details and deciding how to change things.
Obama did not simply happen to encounter a lot of people on the
far left fringe during his life. As he spells out in his book, he
actively sought out such people. There is no hint of the slightest
curiosity on his part about other visions of the world that might
be weighed against the vision he had seized upon.
As Professor Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago Law
School has pointed out, Obama made no effort to take part in the
marketplace of ideas with other faculty members when he was
teaching a law course there. What would be the point, if he already
knew the truth and knew that they were wrong?
This would be a remarkable position to take, even for a learned
scholar who had already spent decades canvassing a vast amount of
information and views on many subjects. But Obama was already
doctrinaire at a very early age — and ill-informed or misinformed
on both history and economics.
His statement in Dreams from My Father about how white
men went to Africa to “drag away the conquered in chains” betrays
his ignorance of African history.
The era of the Atlantic slave trade and the era of European
conquests across the continent of Africa were different eras.
During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, most of Africa was
ruled by Africans, who sold some of their slaves to white men.
European conquests in Africa had to wait until Europeans found
some way to survive lethal African diseases, to which they lacked
resistance. Only after medical science learned to deal with these
diseases could the era of European conquests spread across
sub-Saharan Africa. But the Atlantic slave trade was over by
then.
There was no reason why Barack Obama had to know this. But there
was also no reason for him to be shooting off his mouth without
knowing what he was talking about.
Similarly with Obama’s characterization of the Nile as “the
world’s greatest river.” The Nile is less than 10 percent longer
than the Amazon, but the Amazon delivers more than 50 times as much
water into the Atlantic as the Nile delivers into the
Mediterranean. The Nile could not accommodate the largest ships,
even back in Roman times, much less the aircraft carriers of today
that can sail up the Hudson River and dock in midtown
Manhattan.
When Obama wrote that many people “had been enslaved only
because of the color of their skin,” he was repeating a common
piece of gross misinformation. For thousands of years, people
enslaved other people of the same race as themselves, whether in
Europe, Asia, Africa or the Western Hemisphere.
Europeans enslaved other Europeans for centuries before the
first African was brought in bondage to the Western Hemisphere. The
very word “slave” is derived from the name of a European people
once widely held in bondage, the Slavs.
As for economics, Obama thought that Indonesians would be worse
off after Europeans came in, used up their natural resources and
then left them too poor to continue the modern way of life to which
they had become accustomed, or to resume their previous way of
life, after their previous skills had atrophied.
This fear of European “exploitation” prevailed widely in the
Third World in the middle of the 20th century. But, by the late
20th century, the falseness of that view had been demonstrated so
plainly and so often, in countries around the world, that even
socialist and communist governments began opening their economies
to foreign investments. This often led to rising economic growth
rates that lifted millions of people out of poverty.
Barack Obama is one of those people who are often wrong but
never in doubt. When he burst upon the national political scene as
a presidential candidate in 2008, even some conservatives were
impressed by his confidence.
But confident ignorance is one of the most dangerous qualities
in a leader of a nation. If he has the rhetorical skills to inspire
the same confidence in himself by others, then you have the
ingredients for national disaster.
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