Dinesh D’Souza’s America

Ellis Washington

Ellis Washington
June 20, 2015

Dinesh D’Souza has a new book out, America: Imagine a World Without Her, that will be the basis of a film of the same name that builds upon his highly successful, 2016 Obama’s America. D’Souza strives to challenge the progressive narrative that America is an evil, colonialist, plundering, immoral enterprise, by investigating their most significant historical allegations.At the beginning of the book D’Souza makes the startling claim that, “America is in the midst of committing national suicide” and further argues that “I intend to show in this book that the American era is ending in part because a powerful group of Americans wants it to end. The American dream is shrinking because some of our leaders want it to shrink. Decline, in other words, has become a policy objective. And if this decline continues at the current pace, America as we know it will cease to exist. In effect, we will have committed national suicide.”

D’Souza’s critique on America in numerous ways follows what many conservative commentators have warned for decades, that “the American dream is shrinking because some of our leaders want it to shrink.” This is due to the drive of progressives, whose ideology is premised on theft. This Progressive idea of theft is a reoccurring theme throughout the book. Evidently this is also the essential idea of anti-colonialism. D’Souza cites the writings of Franz Fanon (1925-61), a political radical and Marxist humanist who was also a prominent anti-colonialist whom Obama said he read devotedly in college. “The wealth of the imperial countries is our wealth too … The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians, and the yellow races …” Fanon writes. “Europe is literally a creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the under-developed peoples.” This awareness, Fanon writes, produces “a double realization: the realization by the colonized peoples that it is their due and the realization by the capitalist powers that they must pay.” D’Souza contends therefore that modern progressivism incorporates this theft narrative into a systematic critique explicitly to delegitimize America, the West and especially her Judeo-Christian traditions and institutions.

D’Souza further argues that “The progressive view, which conservatives have largely left unchallenged, relies on a distorted “history from below.” It is both interesting and morally commendable to look at the world from the point of view of the ordinary man, the little guy. How do the great events of the past and present affect him or her? Nations cannot be judged solely by how they make provision for the high and mighty. Rather, what matters is what kind of life a nation makes possible for the newcomer, the commoner, the low man on the totem pole,” D’Souza contends. The corollary argument according to the Progressive worldview is that if you are middle class or God forbid, wealthy, that your views or ideas about history is somehow tainted, due to your preconceived ‘theft’ of the world’s resources and thus, you are suspect, or even worse, your condemned as irrelevant. To progressives, the “below” justly deserve reparations for theft and President Obama believes that his presidency was ordained to redistribute America’s ‘theft’ wealth on a global scale.

What does Obama think about reparations? D’Souza cites what Barack Obama “…told us what he thought of reparations. But in practice he didn’t think it was really workable.” In order to have reparations, a society would have to settle such questions as “who is black, how far back do you go, what about recent immigrants,” and so on. Considering such complexities, Obama rejected the idea of reparations for slavery … But while Obama rejects race-based reparations….Obama’s approach is supported by a theme in philosophy that goes under the name of “stolen goods…” If you are in possession of stolen goods, you have to return them. If you have acquired wealth by stealing or if you inherit goods that your ancestors stole from others,” D’Souza writes, “it’s not enough to say sorry or to provide token compensation. No, you must return what isn’t yours, and if you’ve used the wealth to accumulate more, then you must return that too.”

Another overarching theme of the book besides the fabricated paradigm that America became the greatest nation in the world through theft of other countries resources, is that Progressives, in their existential self-righteous infantilism has judged society with the most heinous crimes and like the old Nazi and Stalinist show trials of the World War II era, has judged America Guilty before the world… before the trial has even commenced, therefore D’Souza writes that “Obama seems convinced that wealth is at best appropriated or at worst stolen rather than earned.” This is outrageous to all Progressives and demands a strong man arise, seize power and redistribute the wealth that was stolen to those who have been disenfranchised for generations in America. Who would be that man in modern times? President Obama thinks it is he.

Using Freudian concepts or defense mechanisms like Displacement and Psychological Projection, D’Souza writes that “America was written to turn the tables on the left…on their own terms. I intend to turn the progressive critique on its head.” He further writes, “I will demonstrate that the progressives are the real thieves, in that they use the power of the state to seize the property and possessions of people who have earned them. In the name of the ordinary citizen, progressives have declared war on the wealth creators.” D’Souza continues,

Yet they are not on the side of the ordinary citizen, because their policies lead to stagnation, impoverishment, indebtedness, and decline – all in evidence today. It is progressives who rely on government seizure and bureaucratic conquest to achieve all their goals and increase their power. We work, and they eat. As we shall see, the progressives have a comprehensive scheme – one that relies on deceit – to win political support for their wealth confiscation. Most recently, in order to quell dissent, the progressives are implementing a chilling policy of national surveillance and selective prosecution – using the power of the police to harass and subdue their opposition. Ultimately what the progressives seek is a suicide of national identity, a dissolution of the American era. This involves not merely a diminution of America but a diminution of Americans.

The concept of “becoming American” in and of itself is a unique rite, therefore, D’Souza writes, “America is defined not by blood or birth but by…[its] Constitution…laws…[and] shared way of life.” “In a manner your ancestors in the old country would have thought impossible, you resolve to stop thinking of yourself as Irish; instead, you “become American.” And to your amazement you realize that you can do this. If you thought about it, you would realize how strange it is. No one can move from some other country to Ireland and “become Irish,” any more than they can move to India and “become Indian.” To be Irish you need Irish ancestors and Irish blood. To be Indian you need brown skin and Indian parents. By contrast with Ireland, India, and other countries, America is defined not by blood or birth but by the adoption of the nation’s Constitution, its laws, and its shared way of life. That’s how the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews, and today the Koreans, the South Asians, and the West Indians, can all come to this country and in time ‘become American.'”

This idea is reminiscent of President Theodore Roosevelt’s aphorism: “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. …The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English- Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian- Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic.” President Obama’s communist indoctrination during his formative years of his youth would demonstrate that he does not hold such a unified, exceptionalism view of America.

Regarding Obama’s childhood and formative influences which have been shrouded in secrecy, D’Souza writes, “Frank Marshall Davis, the former Communist who was Obama’s mentor in Hawaii, was so radical that he opposed President Truman’s Marshall Plan as a “device” for maintaining “white imperialism.” Truman and Marshall, he wrote, were using “billions of U.S. dollars to bolster the tottering empires of England, France, Belgium, Holland, and the other western exploiters of teeming millions.” Indeed the objective of America after World War II was “to re-enslave the yellow and brown and black peoples of the world.” While Davis spurned America he praised “Red Russia” as “my friend.” Young Obama – sitting in Davis’s hut in Hawaii week after week for several years – took it all in. This portrait of devoted young Obama imbibing the ravings of a pot-smoking former Communist is the progressive version of a Norman Rockwell painting.” Several years ago I wrote a two-part essay about Frank Marshall Davis, who many good sources believe was Obama’s real biological father.

D’Souza chronicles how America precipitated her own cultural collapse; a fall that can be largely attributed to the great generational split of the 1960s Counter-cultural Revolution. Recall that this is the first time that America truly had “a generation gap,” a great spiritual-intellectual divide between parents and children. In preceding generations, children modelled after their parents and scrupulous sought to be like them as adults. All of that changed in the 1960s, when an entire children called the Baby Boomer generation (1946-64) viewed themselves as self-righteous and morally greater to their parents, even while indulging in perverse, reckless and lawless acts including frying their brains on drugs, perverting their bodies with illicit sex and criminal behavior: acts that their parents could never have comprehended. So America is now divided into the group that is a product of the 1960s, and the group that never quite embraced the values of the 1960s. Over time, the generation gap has become an ideological gap. The parents, in a sense, represented the spirit of 1776 and their children the new spirit of 1968, D’Souza writes.

D’Souza continues his revelatory critique of the generation wars, particularly between those of the 1960s who repudiated the “greatest generation” versus the War War II Generation. The writer believed that “the greatest generation failed in one…respect: it could not produce another great generation.” “There was angst aplenty in the 1960s, and we must look for its deeper cause, the cause that can help explain the emergence of the spirit of 1968. We are looking for the origins of a new sensibility in America that approached issues like Vietnam, feminism, Civil Rights, and the sexual revolution in a way that no previous generation – certainly no the preceding generation – would have,” D’Souza wrote. “I got a valuable clue to the answer some years ago when I read Tom Brokaw’s book The Greatest Generation. This book celebrates the virtues of the generation that grew up between the two world wars. As I read Brokaw’s book, I asked myself: What made the “greatest generation” so great? The answer is twofold: the Depression and World War II,” he states. “The virtues of that generation were the product of scarcity and war. Hardship and need forged the admirable qualities of courage, sacrifice, and solidarity. But the greatest generation failed in one important respect: it could not produce another great generation.”

In conclusion, D’Souza asks the question of ultimate concern – Why didn’t the “greatest generation” produce another great generation? “The obvious answer is affluence. The parents of the greatest generation wanted their children to have the advantages they never had,” he writes. “And in giving their children everything they wanted, the frugal, self-disciplined, sacrificial generation of World War II produced the spoiled children of the 1960s – the Clinton generation.”

It seems that King Solomon had the arrogant, ignorant, self-righteous Baby Boomer generation in mind when he wrote in Proverbs 30:13-14:
There is a generation, O how lofty are their eyes! and their eyelids are lifted up.

There is a generation, whose teeth are as swords, and their jaw teeth as knives, to devour the poor from off the earth, and the needy from among men.”Ironically the generation that came to revile capitalism was produced by the largesse of capitalism. This outcome had been predicted a generation earlier by the economist Joseph Schumpeter. Schumpeter,” D’Souza writes, “warned that capitalism produces a ‘gale of creative destruction’ that topples traditional institutions and traditional mores. Specifically, Schumpeter predicted that the abundance of capitalism would erode the qualities of hard work, self-discipline, and deferred gratification that produced that abundance in the first place.”

In American history, what I call the Progressive Revolution can be understood within the overarching Leftist worldview of Cultural Marxism which since the publication of Karl Marx’s magnum opus, The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867), has affected virtually every nation’s constitution and economic policy in modern times. What is Cultural Marxism? It is the continuing progression of deconstructing and destroying all religions, traditions, governments, individuality, borders, languages, cultures, family, law and reality in order to reform society into a Communist utopia. Using tactics of multiculturalism and diversity, this atheist utopia created by Progressives will have no concept of God, morality, gender, traditions, or even family. The only reality allowed will be the omnipotent State in the same manner as Stalin, Hitler, and Mao did last century, but with even greater grotesqueries and genocide. In modern times Cultural Marxism is almost exclusive perpetrated by the Democrat Socialist Party.

Besides the diabolical intents cited above, what is the Machiavellian and historical purpose of Marxism, Socialism, Communism, and the Progressive Revolution according to Karl Marx. Marx would say, “The first battlefield is to rewrite history.” This in a word is another overarching theme of Dinesh D’Souza’s excellent book and upcoming movie, America: Imagine a World without Her – to pull back the curtain of Mass Delusions by the Left, to expose how the Democrat Socialist Party systemically destroyed Christianity, society and culture in America, and finally to judge these traitors within (not America) to be guilty as charged.