Obama's America 2016 (Non-Fiction)(2012) by Dinesh D'Souza Read Free Book Online Page B

advantage:
    Whatever happens, we have got
the Maxim Gun, and they have not. 2
     
    Once the Europeans established their domination, they did not hesitate to use force in order to maintain it. Sometimes the gun was used on pretexts that were whimsical, even recreational. The British explorer Henry Morgan Stanley, for instance, reported that as he piloted his boat Lady Alice across Lake Tanganyika, “the beach was crowded by infuriates and mockers . . . . We perceived we were followed by several canoes in some of which we saw spears shaken at us.” So Stanley got to work: “I opened on them with the Winchester Repeating Rifle. Six shots and four deaths were sufficient to quiet the mocking.” Another British explorer, Richard Burton, once remarked that Stanley “shoots Negroes as if they were monkeys.” 3
    One of Obama’s first acts as president was to remove a Winston Churchill bust from the White House. Churchill was a lifelong colonialist. He was a cavalry officer with the Malakand Field Force fighting on the northwest frontier of India. He rode with Lord Kitchener at the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan. He championed British rule in India and scorned Gandhi as a troublemaker and a fraud. And when Churchill was re-elected in the 1950s, he suppressed the Mau Mau insurrection in Kenya, which resulted in the arrest of Obama’s father Barack Sr., and the detention and torture of his grandfather Onyango Obama. 4 So President Obama has good reason to hate Winston Churchill.
    Churchill viewed colonialism purely from the point of view of the colonizer, but colonialism was hard on the people who lived under it. My grandfather was routinely humiliated by his British superiors, and when, many years later, I wanted to come to America, he recommended that I not go: “It’s full of white people.” I can see why Obama’s own grandfather might feel this way; he was, after all, held in a detention camp by the British. Obama and I are the descendants of these colonial subjects. We have not suffered, but we have the knowledge of the suffering, and the scar can do the work of the wound. Yet I believe that if we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that while colonialism was bad for our grandfathers, it has been pretty good for their children and grandchildren.
    Let’s pause to consider why this is so. Our authority for this inquiry is, of all people, Muhammad Ali. When Ali returned to America, having won the heavyweight title against George Foreman in Zaire, he was asked by a reporter, “Champ, what did you think of Africa?” Ali replied, “Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat!” Ali was being his usual outrageous self, but his point is a provocative one. Ali is saying that slavery was very hard for his ancestors but nevertheless it was the transmission belt that brought him into the orbit of Western civilization. Had there been no slavery, had Ali been born in Zaire instead of America, his life would be very different, much poorer, much less free.
    The same is true of colonialism. It was the transmission belt that brought black and brown and yellow people into the orbit of Western prosperity and Western freedom. Actually, it brought them into the modern world. As Kishore Mahbubani puts it in The New Asian Hemisphere , “Modernity is a gift from the West to the rest of the world.” 5 When I survey my own life—my ability to speak English, my Western education, my moral commitments to democracy and civil liberty and human dignity and individual rights—I realize how much of this is the consequence of two and a half centuries of British rule in India. Paradoxically, Winston Churchill and what he represents have far more to do with what I most cherish than Gandhi and what he represents. If I had the chance, I’d move the Winston Churchill bust back into the Oval Office.
    None of this is intended as a simple-minded defense of colonialism. The British didn’t come to India or Kenya to give the native people all these