Finally, we turn to Bill Ayers, Obama’s terrorist pal. With Ayers we don’t have an Obama mentor; rather, we have a case of two fellow travelers, a generation apart, who view the world in similar ways, although their strategies for dealing with the world differ considerably. Basically it was the press that covered for Obama when the Ayers connection surfaced. The Obama team said, to quote campaign manager David Axelrod, “Bill Ayers lived in his neighborhood. Their kids attend the same school. They’re certainly friendly, they know each other, as anyone whose kids go to schools together.” Obama himself said, “The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn’t make much sense.”
23
But in fact Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn—another Weather Underground terrorist—had held a fundraiser for Obama in their apartment as early as 1995, so their relationship with Obama was at least a decade old. Moreover, Obama and Ayers served together on the Woods Foundation board for three years, beginning in 1999. In 1995, Ayers founded the Chicago Annenberg Challenge with a $50 million grant, and he chose Obama to be the first chairman of the board, a position Obama held for eight years. Bottom line: Obama knew Ayers quite well; the two worked closely together for years; Axelrod was lying and hardly anyone called him on it.
In distancing himself from Ayers’s history as a terrorist, Obama neglected to mention that Ayers has never regretted committing those “detestable” acts. When Ayers published his memoir,
Fugitive Days
, in 2001,
Chicago
magazine ran a cover story with a color photo of Ayers standing atop an American flag. The headline was, “No Regrets.” Ayers told
New York Times
reporter Dinitia Smith, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Smith’s article, eerily enough, was published on September 11, 2001, the same date that Osama Bin Laden attempted what Ayers had tried to do earlier, the bombing of the Pentagon. Not only is Ayers unrepentant; he can even envision the chance of an encore performance. Ayers writes in his memoir, “I can’t quite imagine putting a bomb in a building today . . . but I can’t imagine entirely dismissing the possibility either.”
24
So Obama turns out to be friends with a man who even now has no compunction about being a terrorist.
Anti-colonial themes leap from Bill Ayers’s commentaries, which makes it all the more remarkable they have been totally ignored. Why did Ayers and his co-conspirators bomb the Pentagon? “The Pentagon was ground zero for war and conquest, organizing headquarters of a gang of murdering thieves, a colossal stain on the planet, a hated symbol everywhere around the world.” Why did they attack the Capitol? “We have attacked the Capitol because it is, along with the White House, the worldwide symbol of the government which is now attacking Indochina. To millions of people here and in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, it is a monument to U.S. domination over the planet.”
What single issue convinced Ayers of the evils of America? “The basic story line for us—a story I accepted instinctively and intuitively without knowing a lot—was that Vietnam was fundamentally united fighting an aggressive invader from the West.” What sources did Ayers read to develop his broader understanding? “We read Castro and Che Guevara, Lenin and Mao, Cabral and Nkrumah, but on any point of ideology we turned most often to Ho Chi Minh.” And what did Ayers learn from them? “Seen through one lens, the madness was the war in Vietnam, and the monster was the politics and policy of that war. Through another, the madness was an aggressive and acquisitive foreign policy, and the monster the military-industrial complex. And through a third lens, our lens, the madness was the export of war and fascism into the third world, racism and white supremacy at home, the inert, impoverished culture of greed and alienation: the monster would be capitalism itself, the system of imperialism.” In a volume he edited with his wife and fellow terrorist Bernardine Dohrn, Ayers writes, “U.S. imperialism is the greatest destroyer of human life on earth. It is a whole: an economic, political, and cultural system. It feeds on the piracy of the Third World . . . . Because of imperialism people live in shanty towns in Saigon and Rio de Janeiro . . . . Imperialism has its origin in the necessity for capitalism to expand or face stagnation. Imperialism is therefore the defining characteristic of modern capitalism as a whole.”
So what was Ayers’s solution?
The world was on fire; masses of people throughout Africa and Asia and Latin America were standing up everywhere to demand independence and democracy and national liberation . . . the worldwide anti-imperialist struggle had a counterpart inside the borders of the U.S.—the black liberation movement; and the responsibility of mother country radicals here in the heartland of imperialism was to aid and abet the world struggle.... I threw my lot in with the rebels and resistors . . . . Our job is to drive a stake into the heart of the monster, we insisted, opening up a front behind enemy lines and fighting, then, side by side with black people and with the people of the world.
To what end? The way Ayers saw it, “I’m not so much against the war as I am for a Vietnamese victory. I’m not so much for peace as for a U.S. defeat.” But not just in Vietnam. “We meant to learn to fight through fighting, moving from small to large, developing skill and experience, growing in strength and power through the practice of revolution. We set about to found an American Red Army.”
25
So that’s why Ayers became a terrorist, to fight the monster of U.S. imperialism.
It says something about our media that none of this information, although widely available and easy to find, was even reported during the Obama-Ayers controversy. It also says something about academia and the education establishment in Chicago that Ayers is currently the Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Chicago in Illinois. But what is most troubling, even chilling, is that we have a man in the White House who has had longstanding associations with men like Frank Marshall Davis, Edward Said, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Jeremiah Wright, and Bill Ayers. This is a dangerous and radical group, and in at least one case the radicalism has led to terrorism against the United States. Obama has distanced himself from his founding fathers, but we cannot say they are gone, because their influence lives on in the mind of the president of the United States.
CHAPTER SIX
SELLOUTS
What Granny had told me scrambled that image completely, causing ugly words to flash across my mind. Uncle Tom. Collaborator. House nigger.
1
—Barack Obama on his grandfather,
Dreams from My Father
W
e were all set to interview “granny” Sarah Obama at the Obama Homestead in Kogelo, Kenya. But then granny decided that before she granted the interview, she had to make a phone call. She called Auma Obama, Obama’s half-sister, who lives in Nairobi. And Auma directed granny Sarah not to do the interview, not to allow us to film at the family grave, not even to accept our three goats! Granny was visibly distressed—she wanted the goats. Ultimately, however, she acceded to Auma’s wishes. No goats, no filming, and no interview. We packed up our gear. We packed up the goats. But before we left, we had to ask why. After all, granny Sarah seemed amenable to meeting us, and we had come well-introduced through a local tribal chief. One of our group got Auma on the phone. And Auma said that they would not grant the interview for a single reason: we had previously interviewed George Obama. Auma said the Obama family was following George; they had an informer who told them what George did and with whom he met. George, we learned, is the black sheep of the Obama family. “He even takes money for giving interviews,” Auma fumed. The family considers him a sellout.
But what is wrong with George giving interviews? Why is he forbidden from taking money? If he needs money, why doesn’t the Obama family help him; why instead do they go to the trouble of following him and spying on him? How has George Obama become the enemy?
This chapter is about sellouts. According to the anti-colonial guerilla fighter Amilcar Cabral, it is imperative for the cause that “in the face of destructive action by imperialist domination, the masses retain their identity, separate and distinct from that of the colonial power.”
2
Cabral’s point is that the world must be clearly divided between oppressor and oppressed, the bad guys and the good guys. Moreover, the good guys must stick together and never do anything that helps the cause of the bad guys. Cabral knows, of course, that there are many people in colonized countries who support the colonizers, who cooperate with the police, and so on. In anti-colonial revolutions these people were known as sellouts, and they were routinely targeted and killed. During the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, for instance, the rebels killed far more black sellouts than they killed British settlers. And ultimately it was the so-called sellouts who worked closely with the British to defeat the Mau Mau.
3
In Obama’s world, too, there are role models and there are sellouts. The sellouts are ideological betrayers of Obama’s father and his anti-colonial cause. Most of the sellouts come from Obama’s own family. By seeing what their offenses were, and how Obama turned on them, we can better understand how he thinks. The original sellout, in a sense, was Lolo Soetoro. Obama was too young to recognize Lolo’s apostasy—his anti-Communism, his pro-Western sentiments—but his mother certainly did, and she conveyed her sentiments to young Obama. As Obama grew older, however, he developed his own capacity to identify ideological traitors and treat them with appropriate scorn and neglect.
For Obama, the first traitor was, oddly enough, his own grandfather, Onyango Obama. As we see from the quotation at the beginning of this chapter, Obama goes so far as to entertain the thought that his grandfather was a “house nigger.” We have a striking phenomenon here: the first African-American president using the word “nigger,” and to refer to his own grandfather! Ordinarily this would be occasion for extensive comment and analysis, but if there has been any, I am not aware of it. Once again, I find myself in the peculiar position of breaking new ground in asking: What could possibly cause the president to describe his own grandfather in this appalling way?
Onyango is an odd candidate for such abuse, because he was himself a victim of colonialism. In fact, he suffered far more under colonialism than did Barack Obama Sr. Onyango Obama was born around 1895, the very year the British established Kenya as a “protectorate.” By the time Onyango was twenty-five, Kenya was an official British colony. Onyango was a house servant in Nairobi. He had to carry around identity papers that included evaluations of his previous domestic work. During World War I Onyango enlisted to help the British who were fighting the Germans in East Africa. He worked for several years with road crews in the former German protectorate of Tanganyika, which was taken over by the British. Onyango also served during World War II in a British regiment called the King’s African Rifles; in this capacity he traveled to Europe and Asia. During the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s, he was detained in an internment camp, along with tens of thousands of other Kenyan males. He was there for approximately six months and, according to his wife Sarah, endured torture at the hands of British soldiers. Eventually he was released, lice-ridden and looking aged. Obama biographer David Maraniss questions Sarah Obama’s reliability here; he doesn’t think Onyango was detained and tortured. Maraniss notes that “there are no remaining records of any detention, imprisonment or trial,” but that is hardly surprising, since many of the Mau Mau records were destroyed. Maraniss also quotes a handful of local Kenyans, including a local police chief, saying if Onyango was in prison, they would have known it.
4
I cannot settle this dispute between Maraniss and Sarah Obama, but I don’t have to. What we are concerned about here is Barack Obama’s state of mind. Sarah Obama told him about Onyango’s harsh treatment at the hands of the British, and Obama believed her. Clearly we would expect Obama to react with sympathy for his grandfather, and indeed he did.
It is what followed in Onyango’s life that got Barack Obama thinking very differently about him. His grandfather, Obama learned, was an Anglophile. No, he did not consider the British to be inherently superior to the Africans, and he did not approve of British mistreatment of Africans. But at the same time, he performed admirable service for the British, as the evaluations on his identity card showed. One employer said Onyango “performed his duties as personal boy with admirable diligence.” Another commented, “He can read and write English and follows any recipes . . . . Apart from other things his pastries are excellent.”
5
Throughout his life, Onyango identified the British with civilization and progress. He had grown up in an Iron Age society. He saw what British rule meant in Kenya and around the world. Onyango had the good fortune to study English at an English mission school, and consequently was one of the first in his tribe to learn to read and write in a Western language, something in which he took great pride. He grew skeptical of shamans and witch doctors at a time when such figures were highly revered in his village. He took regular baths and became obsessed with cleanliness, not permitting cows to come near his hut because they brought insects with them. Obama’s brother Roy told him that their grandfather “would make you sit at the table for dinner, and served the food on china, like an Englishman.” Onyango was considered the first Luo tribesman to discard traditional garb and wear Western clothing, not just pants and a shirt but, more controversially, shoes. One of Onyango’s prize possessions was an RCA gramophone. Onyango permitted only his closest friends to come and listen, but they had to sit outside the gate of his compound, and no one was permitted to touch the gramophone.
6