The 2009 Summer Edition of the Quarterly Review is out
Robert Henderson
email edi...@quarterly-review.org
website: www.quarterly-review.org
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Contents
Editorial - Derek Turner
The not-so-communist Communists - an interview with Kazuo Shii
G20; river gypsies and the art of persuasion - Horatio Morpurgo
Muslim captivity and the retreat of Pax Britannica - Roger Kershaw
Turkey in Europe - an aspiration too far Paul Weston
Hidden in full view - the racial obsessions of the post-racial
president- Robert Henderson
Futurism dissected - Leslie Jones
The last word on Hitler and Hitlerism? - Frank Ellis
Is the party over? - Allan Pond
Shuffling off this mortal coil - Patrick Keeney
Deconstructing a deconstructed discourse - Luise Hemmer Pihl
An Englishman abroad - William Cobbett on America - Barbara Biddell
Uncollected Folk - Roy Kerridge
Untitled - Keith Waldrop
Basque weaving - Bill Hartley
Second Reading: A dance to the music of time by Anthony Poweell - Derek
Turner
Repaly: Babettes Feast - Luise Hemmer Pihl
Taki's Universe - Taki Theodoracopolos
On Earth as it is - John Huffield
Sample article
AMERICA’S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE
BARACK OBAMA’S "STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE"
By Steve Sailer
Paperback $29.95
PDF download $10.00
Kindle version $7.99
Ordering details at http://www.vdare.com/half-blood_prince/
Robert Henderson
Steve Sailer is that great rarity in modern America, a white man
intellectual who publicly confronts political correctness. Most
courageously, he is willing to be forthright even when dealing with the
subject which intimidates educated American whites more than any
other, namely, race. This latter attribute allowed him to perform a
task in America’s Half-Blood Prince which should have been undertaken
by the American mainstream media and Obama’s political opponents long
before the late Presidential election was concluded
That task was the dissection of Obama’s pathological obsession
with race as evidenced by his own writings, primarily Dreams From My
Father (DFMF), and the crashing discord between this Obama and the one
put before the American people in 2008. . Sailer does this tellingly
whilst marvelling at the sociological phenomenon which caused the
entire American political and media mainstream to ignore this central
aspect of the new President’s mentality.
Sailer hits the nail on the head with his opening sentence: "The
fundamental irony of Sen. Barack Obama’s Presidential candidacy is
that no nominee in living memory has been so misunderstood by the press
and public, and yet no other candidate has ever written so intimately or
eloquently (or, to be frank, endlessly) about his "deepest commitments"
. (Bear in mind throughout that Sailer wrote the book before Obama was
elected President).
The deepest Obama commitment of all as Sailer sees it is to his race (or
more correctly to half of his racial heritage): "Obama’s primal need
for team triumph explains much about his life, both its dramatic
political ascent and its pervasive racialism. To Obama, the black race
was always his team, and he would do anything to see them win." (p92)
As someone who has trudged wearily through Obama’s DFMF and The
Audacity of Hope (AOH) in minute detail* I can vouch for the fact that
this goes to the heart of the Obama phenomenon. His act as the
post-racial unifying candidate during the presidential election is
comically implausible when compared with the personality who emerges
from DFMF, which is that of a race obsessed, deeply neurotic, very
insecure personality who is forever agonising about his place in the
racial and cultural hierarchy - his perpetual question is "Am I black
enough?" - and who displays a disturbing pathological paranoia about
whites.
The irony of Obama’s post-racial stance is that unless you can
believe that he has miraculously undergone a Damascene conversion in the
past few years - and his retention of the racially bombastic
anti-white Jeremiah Wright as his pastor until he became a political
embarrassment suggests otherwise - he is the exact opposite of a
racially blind person. Sailer sums up neatly the mentality Obama
projects in DFMF :
"Obama’s worldview is simplistically black and white. In Dreams’
conceptual framework, there are three races: Black, White, and
Miscellaneous. Despite all the years Obama spends in Indonesia and in
heavily Asian Hawaii, Asians just don’t play much of a role in
Obama’s turbulent emotions. " (P210)
Sailer judges AOH to be nothing more than a routine campaign book
designed to portray the new Oprah style Obama designed to appeal to
white voters and which hides his true self. That is underselling it. on
the racial obsession front. Obama certainly tones down his racial
angst, in AOH although he has a whole chapter devoted to racial issues,
but post-racial Obama still lets the old resentful racially paranoid
Obama surface from time to time:
‘I can recite the usual litany of petty slights that during my
forty-five years have been directed my way: security guards tailing me
as I shop in department stores, white couples who toss me their car keys
as I stand outside a restaurant waiting for the - valet, police cars
pulling me over for no apparent reason. I know what it’s like to have
people tell me I can’t do something because of my color, and I know
the bitter swill of swallowed-back anger. I know as well that Michelle
and I must be continually vigilant against some of the debilitating
story lines that our daughters may absorb—from TV and music and
friends and the streets— about who the world thinks they are, and what
the world imagines they should be.’ (AOH p233)
Such passages reinforce the view that Obama is still essentially the
character portrayed in DFMF. It is worth adding that Obama was 33 when
he wrote DMFM, so his views there were not those of a callow youth but
of a mature man and consequently much less susceptible to change. (The
best way to judge whether Obama is a racist is simply to imagine a white
politician making equivalent statements about blacks to those which
Obama makes about whites. ). Even Obama’s much lauded (by the
mainstream media) "Perfect Union " speech which he made after the storm
blew up over Jeremiah Wright is more of the same because it
concentrates on America‘s slave-owning past and brings the black
victim hood up to the present day with:
" We do not need to recite here the history f racial injustice in this
country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the
disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be
directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation
that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. "
The book’s title derives from what Sailer views as Obama’s
portrayal of himself as representing post-racial America being akin to
a dynastic marriage, the joined partners in Obama’s case being black
and white: "…Obama launched himself on the national stage at the 2004
convention by devoting the first 380 words of his speech to detailing
the two stocks, black and white, from which he was crossbred. He implied
that, like the mutual heir to a dynastic merger of yore—think of
England’s King Henry VIII, offspring of the Lancaster-York marriage
that ended the War of the Roses—he is the one we’ve been waiting for
to end the War of the Races.",(p31)
Obama repeated the message in his "Perfect Union" speech: "I am the son
of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas"
The post-racial/dynastic marriage guise undoubtedly had its effect, not
least because of the complicity of the mainstream media and politicians
in supporting the idea, but it was far from being a general success
because a majority of the whites who voted did not vote for Obama in the
Presidential election, the white voting being 55% for McCain and 43%
for Obama. Obama may have fooled many of the white electorate for most
of the time but he wasn’t able to fool even a majority of those
motivated to vote. He simply persuaded enough whites to vote for him get
him elected with the massively disproportionate help of ethnic
minorities, viz::
Black Americans voted 4% for McCain and 95% for Obama
Hispanics voted 31% for McCain and 66% for Obama
Asians voted 35% for McCain and 62% for Obama
Jews voted 22% for McCain and 77% for Obama
The figures are taken from Daily Telegraph article of 6 November 2008 -
"Power of the white voter is fading" -Gordon Rayner
Sailer brings out well Obama’s controlling tendency, a tendency
which is shown most clearly in his common practice of depicting himself
and his relations with others dishonestly in his writings and speeches
and in the efforts which have been made to stop nosy media folk poking
around in his past.
In his two books Obama adopts the very odd practice of presenting
detailed conversations from all periods of his life, including his young
childhood, as if they had been taken down verbatim. The implausibility
of this alone makes the reader cautious about their veracity . Not only
that, but Obama admits in the introduction to DFMF that the characters’
names have been changed and some characters conflated. The reader is
right to be cautious for Sailer catalogues a number of instances
where there is good evidence that Obama has fabricated his past.
Obama’s Hawaiian schoolmates remember him not as not as sullen
rebellious teenager of DFMF but as "a cheerful, popular boy" (p118), the
supposedly plum job in a "consulting house to international
corporations" Obama claimed he worked for before becoming a community
organiser turns out to be that of a "copy editor at a scruffy,
low-paying newsletter shop (P136) and "at least two individuals upon
whom Obama based thecharacters ("Ray" and ""Rafiq") claim that the
author distorted their own ethnic views, making them appear more
racialist than they were.( P117).
Obama also portrayed both" as black when "Ray" - or at least the main
inspiration for "Ray" Keith Kaukauna - was half black, half Japanese
and hence not black enough for Obama‘s purposes. . .
Such details hint that Obama was determined to write his life story as
he wanted it to be not as it was. He also massages the record by acts
of omission such as failing to record instances of Asian racism towards
him - Sailer records two particular instances ; the regular racism he
experienced as a child in Indonesia (P 53) and the behaviour of the
mother of a Pakistani he roomed with while at university in New York.
(P130). Sailer attributes this, I think rightly, to Obama’s black and
white world view in which only whites can be racist.
Sailer adroitly explains how Obama managed to get away without the
mainstream media and his white political opponents treating him as they
would have treated a white candidate :
"The New Obama is the candidate who is half-white when whites think
about voting for him. Yet, he remains all black, and thus off-limits to
polite public skepticism, when anyone tries to get up the courage to
criticize him more harshly than by merely saying he is inexperienced."
The potency of this mentality can be seen in the failure of McCain to
use Obama’s own race-obsessed past against him but to actively prevent
other Republicans from doing so - McCain’s .response to a local
Republican ad which had the bad taste to denounce Jeremiah Wright for
what he is was ""There’s no place for that kind of campaigning, the
American people don’t want it, period." (189)
There is a great deal more the book than Obama’s racial obsession and
its consequences, including the background to Obama‘s family and the
racial politics of East Africa. . In particular in describing Obama’s
life it provides a primer on the immense edifice that has been built on
affirmative action and Obama‘s place within it. Sailer goes into some
detail on how affirmative action has benefited both Obama and his wife.
To take just one (to me) astonishing fact about Obama’s career,
Sailer points out that the supposedly supremely bright Constitutional
Law specialist Obama " has never published under his own name in any
academic journal, not even when he was president of the Harvard Law
Review. (Yet, the U. of Chicago Law School offered him a tenured
professorship after the frustration of his political hopes in 2000.) "
(P113). Sailer also gives the reader a trip around the racial politics
of East Africa,
If the book has a weakness it is Sailer’s tendency to build
intellectual castles in the air to explain Obama’s motivation and
development. For example, Sailer explains Obama’s obsession with the
multiculturalist creed by attributing this to his parents:
"The terrible irony of Barack Obama’s life is that he was taught the
new multiculturalist ideology by his parents, who were so representative
of the egotistical Save the World Sixties People who now preside over
our Education-Media Industrial Complex.There was never a truer believer
in this propaganda than young Barack. Yet, what he truly wanted deep
down, even though he could never quite admit it to himself, was for his
parents to stop saving the world, come home, and just be his mom and
dad" (p96).
I find this implausible. The father could have had little effect simply
because he was absent, while the mother, as Sailer notes himself, apart
from being absent for long periods, was held in no little contempt by
Obama if we are to believe DFMF.
Obama’s account of his mother is of a Margaret Mead type of
anthropological naif who constantly fed him with the anti-American and
pro-black propaganda. Even if true, and we have already seen that
Obama’s veracity is uncertain, it is difficult to see why someone
Obama did not respect at best and was angry with for deserting him at
worst should have such a profound and lasting effect on him. A much more
likely response would be rejection of the mother’s views. Add in the
testimony of his schoolmates already given that he was not the sullen,
unhappy, rebellious boy depicted in DFMF and it is a reasonable guess
that Obama’s racial resentment was something which developed in late
adolescence or early adulthood., not during the four years in Indonesia
which Sailer views as seminal in this development. As for why it
developed, I suspect that the banal truth is that it simply seemed a
more exciting way of living to the young Obama than following a
middleclass career path.
But this is a small quibble. This is a book which is essential reading
for those wanting to understand Obama. .It does not really matter why
Obama is what he is but what he is that is what the book indubitably
tells you, probably better than anything else on the market. .
*Robert Henderson‘s " The character of Barack Obama in his own words"
is published by American Renaissance in three parts:
http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2009/03/barack_obama_in_1.php
http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2009/04/barack_obama_in_2.php
http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2009/04/barack_obama_in_3.php
--
Robert Henderson
Blair Scandal website: http://www.geocities.com/ blairscandal/
Personal website: http://www.anywhere.demon.co.uk