By Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, September 04, 2012
After I read Barack Obama’s book Dreams from My Father,
it became painfully clear to me that he has not been searching for the truth,
because he assumed from an early age that he had already found the truth — and
now it was just a question of filling in the details and deciding how to change
things.
Obama did not simply happen to encounter a lot of people
on the far-left fringe during his life. As he spells out in his book, he
actively sought out such people. There is no hint of the slightest curiosity on
his part about other visions of the world that might be weighed against the
vision he had seized upon.
As Professor Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago
Law School has pointed out, Obama made no effort to take part in the
marketplace of ideas with other faculty members when he was teaching a law
course there. What would be the point, if he already knew the truth and knew
that they were wrong?
This would be a remarkable position to take, even for a
learned scholar who had already spent decades canvassing a vast amount of
information and views on many subjects. But Obama was already doctrinaire at a
very early age — and ill-informed or misinformed on both history and economics.
His statement in Dreams from My Father about how white
men went to Africa to “drag away the conquered in chains” betrays his ignorance
of African history.
The era of the Atlantic slave trade and the era of
European conquests across the continent of Africa were different eras. During
the era of the Atlantic slave trade, most of Africa was ruled by Africans, who
sold some of their slaves to white men.
European conquests in Africa had to wait until Europeans
found some way to survive lethal African diseases, to which they lacked
resistance. Only after medical science learned to deal with these diseases
could the era of European conquests spread across sub-Saharan Africa. But the
Atlantic slave trade was over by then.
There was no reason why Barack Obama had to know this.
But there was also no reason for him to be shooting off his mouth without
knowing what he was talking about.
Similarly misinformed is Obama’s characterization of the
Nile as “the world’s greatest river.” The Nile is less than 10 percent longer
than the Amazon, but the Amazon delivers more than 50 times as much water into
the Atlantic as the Nile delivers into the Mediterranean. The Nile could not
accommodate the largest ships, even back in Roman times, much less the aircraft
carriers of today that sail up the Hudson River and dock in midtown Manhattan.
When Obama wrote that many people “had been enslaved only
because of the color of their skin,” he was repeating a common piece of gross
misinformation. For thousands of years, people enslaved other people of the
same race as themselves, whether in Europe, Asia, Africa, or the Western
Hemisphere.
Europeans enslaved other Europeans for centuries before
the first African was brought in bondage to the Western Hemisphere. The very
word “slave” is derived from the name of a European people, the Slavs, once
widely held in bondage.
As for economics, Obama thought that Indonesians would be
worse off after Europeans came in, used up their natural resources, and then
left them too poor to continue the modern way of life to which they had become
accustomed, or unable to resume their previous way of life after their previous
skills had atrophied.
This fear of European “exploitation” prevailed widely in
the Third World in the middle of the 20th century. But, by the late 20th
century, the falseness of that view had been demonstrated so plainly and so
often in countries around the world that even socialist and Communist
governments began opening their economies to foreign investments. This often
led to rising economic-growth rates that lifted millions of people out of
poverty.
Barack Obama is one of those people who are often wrong
but never in doubt. When he burst upon the national political scene as a
presidential candidate in 2008, even some conservatives were impressed by his
confidence.
But confident ignorance is one of the most dangerous
qualities in a leader of a nation. If he has the rhetorical skills to inspire
others to have the same confidence in him, then you have the ingredients for
national disaster.
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