At its core, fundamentalism is an uncontrollable quest for political power. Fundamentalists are individuals who are highly offended when the rights they themselves enjoy are extended to others. To be able to deny others their fundamental human rights, the fundamentalist needs power, lots and lots of it. Most fundamentalists really prefer a dictatorship because it presents them with greater opportunity to practice oppression. In a democracy, because the practice of universal adult suffrage where the rich and poor have only one vote makes it almost impossible to be blatantly oppressive, oppression is carried out in a more nuanced manner and the effort to manipulate and marginalize others requires a lot of creativity. The fundamentalists’ most creative approach is to engage in a lot of religious moralizing to give the appearance of seeking the common good. This façade of morality confuses the unwary and makes them believe the fundamentalist is fighting their cause, when in reality the fundamentalist is their worst enemy. This is the deceptive manner by which fundamentalists gain the political power they need to carry out their acts of oppression. Dinesh D’Souza, who just wrote a hate piece in Forbes Magazine titled "How Obama Thinks," which is about President Obama’s supposed “anti-colonial roots,” is one such fundamentalist, but with a different and darker side.
Dinesh D’Souza is a fundamentalist of a different and more vicious persuasion, and he makes no effort to be nuanced in his promotion of oppression. He is one who is not ashamed to be an oppressor and he makes no effort to hide his love of oppression of those he considers as “lesser” or “other.” He loves oppression of others and is proud to admit it. How else does one explain his defense of colonialism which not only victimized Third World countries, but even the great America has been a victim of colonialism, or has Dinesh D’souza forgotten the Revolutionary War? Has he forgotten America’s Declaration of Independence? Does he not understand that the Declaration of Independence means independence from British oppression and colonialism? So in Dinesh D’Souza’s universe, anything anti-colonial is bad, and anything that is African anti-colonialism is even worse. He certainly doesn’t think that Africans deserve any freedom. So in one fell swoop he smears everyone who has ever fought for their freedom from colonialism and oppression, and the list includes America, and manages to denigrate Africa and Africans at the same time.
He accuses Obama of not having the American dream; that his vision does not square with that of the founding fathers. But it is he Dinesh Dsouza who does not subscribe to the American dream of freedom to become all that you can be. It is he who holds to the sick ideal that the colonialism is the greatest good. Has he never heard of Patrick Henry who said, concerning the fight for independence from colonial England, “Give me liberty, or give me death!?” He was a founding father. For an American who is originally a native of India, a nation which experienced some of the worst evils under British colonialism, where Indians were routinely subjected to murders and massacres bordering on genocide, it is extremely difficult to understand his romance with colonialism. As an oppressor, he appears to be of the mindset that his native country’s independence and by implication America’s independence from Britain is a bad thing. It’s a sad day indeed when the oppressed turns oppressor, but oppressors and fundamentalists exist everywhere. They are in all cultures and in every country. Dinesh D’souza ia a third world, third rate oppressor who is eager to demonstrate his love of oppression to his current masters by sanitizing and revising their history of oppression. He obviously has found one such master in Newt Gingrich, who surprise, surprise, happens to wholeheartedly agree with the inane vituperations of Dinesh D’Souza.
In his Forbes article, which took sleaze to a new low, Dinesh D’Souza digs deep into the gutter to “expose” phony connections between President’s Obama’s views on colonialism and those of his (Obama’s) father, whom he hardly knew. He then runs with his phony connections and weaves a mind-bending plot thick with innuendo, untruths and downright lies. Talking about the article on her show, Diane Rehm of NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show said in her Friday News Roundup of September 17, 2010 that, “Nothing has turned my stomach so much in recent years as reading that article.” Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post described the article as “scurrilous.” The dictionary defines scurrilous as “grossly or obscenely abusive or defamatory,” and “using such language as only the license of a buffoon can warrant.” Dinesh D’souza is a big buffoon and he has demonstrated his buffoonery by his scurrilous article.
Like his fellow travelers in the fundamentalist circuit, freedom is anathema, especially when sought by those they consider lesser creatures. That is why after the Haiti earthquake, Pat Robertson declared that it was tantamount to making a pact with the Devil for the Haitians to rid themselves of enslavement by the French. It is the very reason why a hate group like the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) is filing a lawsuit to deny peace-loving Muslims the right to build an interfaith center near ground zero. Only a fundamentalist organization like the ACLJ would subject the judicial process to the peculiar abuse of using the law to deny fellow Americans their fundamental human rights of freedom of association and worship, which includes the freedom to have a center that has already been approved by all relevant and appropriate authorities. What do the fundamentalists really want? If they had the power to do it right now they would intern all peace-loving American Muslims the same way they interned peace-loving Japanese Americans during the Second World War, and the reason they are so angry is because they are unable to carry out their acts of oppression. Their actions prove this fact, and this is the very reason that fundamentalists crave power at all costs.
When these conservatives perpetrate their acts of foolishness, it would be nice if the administration could call them out directly once in a while, because when they don’t and instead embark on a campaign to assign blame to the peripheral actors in the dram, it presents an appearance of weakness and fear which emboldens the evildoers. As it was in the case of Shirley Sherrod, when this administration curiously blamed the media for the deeds of Andrew Breitbart, so it is in this case where the administration, once again, is blaming the media, this time Forbes Magazine for the evils of Dinesh D’Souza’s article. Why is Dinesh D’Souza not taken to task for his own article? Why was Andrew Breitbart not take to task for the malicious editing that produced the distorted Shirley Sherrod video? And why have Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich not been called out directly for the evils they have done and continue to do.
It is not the responsibility of the media to fight the administration’s battles. The media cannot be the opponents of any political party. They simply serve as an echo chamber to promote the views that are in the market place. The reason we have two political parties it so that each can promote its own ideas of governance and show the electorate why its own ideas are superior. When one side is assiduously unwilling to do its part, we get the exasperating scenario that currently exists where all we hear is one lone, unopposed viewpoint. That’s the reason the Republicans are running away with victory while remaining the most unattractive political group in the minds of voters. When a president cannot call a spade a spade, something’s wrong. When a president’s instinctive response to the antics of an oppressor is to immediately go into appeasement mode, then something is desperately wrong.
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