A battle over American foreign policy is looming
such as this country has not seen since the penultimate days of the Vietnam War
nearly half a century ago. I can’t remember the last time that two
distinguished former Secretaries of State co-signed an article denouncing a
presidential initiative in terms as harsh as George Shultz and Henry Kissinger
applied to Obama’s proposed Iran deal. Kissinger was the great conciliator, the
architect of the opening to China and the advocate of detente with Russia.
Obama’s own party is split on the issue, and usually
supportive commentators in the press view the outcome of the Lausanne talks
with skepticism, if not out right hostility.
What explains the great gulf fixed between Obama’s perceptions and those
of a large part of the liberal establishment, not to mention the Republicans?
One has to see the world through the eyes of African-Americans in the
years after the Second World War to understand why Barack Obama and his inner
circle cling with such passion to the prospect of peace with Iran. More than
any other event, the war emancipated American blacks: more than a million migrated from the Deep
South to the North, mainly to the industrial Midwest, to take industrial jobs
vacated by white workers mobilized into the armed forces. Two million blacks
were employed in defense industries: Men whose farmers were impoverished,
marginalized sharecroppers became well-paid industrial workers. The first effective
anti-discrimination laws were enforced by the Roosevelt administration in
defense industries. Despite racial separation in the armed forces, 2.5 million
blacks registered for the draft and 125,000 fought overseas, many with great
distinction.
War buoyed the fortunes of black Americans, who had been freed from
slavery in 1865 and betrayed by the post-Civil War reconciliation with the
South. After black Americans proved in their millions that they would work and
fight as well as their white counterparts, they were betrayed once again.
President Harry Truman made desultory efforts to extend wartime
anti-discrimination laws to the postwar economy, but had little effect in
practice. To his credit, Truman ended segregation in the military in 1948, and
blacks fought in the same units as white soldiers during the Korean War.
Through African-American eyes, though, postwar America pretended that black
wartime accomplishments had never happened.
A small but highly significant number of black intellectuals emigrated in
disgust, including my namesake, Paul Robeson–my middle initial “P.” stands for
Paul, for my late parents belonged to the Communist Party in the late 1940s.
W.E.B Dubois (1868-1963), the distinguished sociologist and a late-in-life
convert to Communism, died in self-imposed exile in Ghana. The writers Richard
Wright and James Baldwin moved to France and remained there as expatriates. And
Dr. James E. Bowman, trained as a physician by the U.S. Army during World War
II, moved to Iran. According to his obituary:
“In those days,” he recalled in a 2006 interview for an oral-history
project, “there was complete segregation. … One could only go to theaters,
movies, restaurants in the black neighborhood.”
Still, Bowman said, he managed to get a “wonderful education” at
Washington’s all-black Dunbar High School, where many of his teachers had PhDs
from leading universities but were unable to secure college-level teaching
positions….During this period, he met Barbara Taylor, the daughter of Robert
Taylor, the first African American chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority.
They married in 1950, two weeks after she graduated from Sarah Lawrence College.
Barbara Bowman went on to become president of the Erikson Institute, a graduate
program in child development…When his military obligations ended, the Bowmans
decided to move overseas. “My wife and I decided that we were not going to go
back to anything that smacked of segregation,” he recalled. He was soon offered
a job as chairman of pathology at Nemazee Hospital, a new facility in Shiraz,
Iran. “We were recently married, so we took a chance,” he said. “It changed our
lives completely.”
In 1956, a year after moving to Iran, their daughter, Valerie, was born.
Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s mentor since his first days in Chicago
politics, is heiress to this life-changing experience. On the right-wing fringe
of American politics rumors abound that Jarrett is a Muslim. That is paranoid
nonsense. Jarrett’s family, including her parents and future in-laws, moved in
circles influenced by the American Communist Party. That should be no
surprise. In those days everyone did. But Jarrett also has roots in the black
Democratic establishment; a great-uncle was Vernon Jordan, the longtime head of
the Urban League. Betrayed by an American government that required their
services during the Second World War, and temporarily suppressed racial
discrimination when black workers were needed in war industries, but left them
at the mercy of Jim Crow when the war ended, a high proportion of black
intellectuals identified with America’s adversaries. The most important and
significant activity of the Communist Party during the 1940s and 1950s was in
the field of civil rights. My parents were in the middle of it. In 1950, my
father, then a PhD candidate in economics at Columbia, drove to Mississippi
with a small group of left-wingers to protest the forthcoming execution of
Willie McGee, a black man railroaded into a rape conviction. My first memory is
of looking up at a circle of white and black faces. It must have been a meeting
of the Edison Township, NJ chapter of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, which my parents helped to found. At the time
there weren’t a lot of white Americans outside the Stalinist left willing to
risk life and limb to fight racism.
In retrospect, one marvels at the motivation of the Oxford intellectuals
who spied for Russia against their own country–Kim Philby and his fellow
traitors. The African-Americans who abandoned America during the 1940s and
1950s hardly felt that it was their country to begin with. James E. Bowman got
his medical education from the US armed forces, but he and his wife “decided
that we were not going to to back to anything that smacked of segregation.”
White Americans chose this country; black Americans were brought here in
chains. The Civil War freed the slaves at staggering sacrifice, including
400,000 Union dead, but postwar politics consigned the freedmen to another
century of fear, poverty and humiliation. The Second World War mobilized black
Americans, brought them out of the rural south, and allowed them to prove their
worth, and the postwar government abandoned them again. Exactly a century after
the Civil War, black Americans gained equal status under the law in the Voting
Rights Act of 1965, and a new black political class arose in proportion to
black voting power. By that point US manufacturing employment already had
peaked. Opportunities for economic advanced moved out of the manufacturing
sphere into work that required university degrees, and black Americans were
again left behind.
Black Americans felt betrayed again–if not by the oppression of law or
custom, by the tides of economic change.
To Valerie Jarrett, Persia is a land of wonders, the kind country that
offered hospitality to her parents after race hatred drove them out of America,
the wellspring of a life-changing experience. Newsweek wrote in 2009:
The fact that Valerie Jarrett spent her early childhood in Iran made it
easier to bond with Barack Obama. The subject came up the first time the two
met, at a restaurant in the Loop area of downtown Chicago in 1991. Obama had
grown up overseas—spending four years in Indonesia as a boy—and Jarrett was
born in the ancient city of Shiraz, where her American father, a medical
doctor, helped found the city’s first modern hospital. Valerie’s early
languages were Farsi, French and “a little bit of English.” To this day, her
favorite foods include lamb and rice with Persian spices. “If I walk into a
house and I smell saffron, I’m happy,” she says.
In that first encounter, Jarrett recalls discussing with Obama how their
years overseas helped shape their world views. “I guess the most basic way is
by being around people who have such a broad diversity of backgrounds,” she
says.
President Obama went much further than Ms. Jarrett in praising the
culture of Muslim countries at the expense of the United States. He (or Bill
Ayers) wrote in his autobiography Dreams of My Father, “And yet for all
that poverty [in the Indonesian marketplace], there remained in their lives a
discernible order, a tapestry of trading routes and middlemen, bribes to pay
and customs to observe, the habits of a generation played out every day beneath
the bargaining and the noise and the swirling dust. It was the absence of such
coherence that made a place like [the Chicago housing projects] so desperate.”
One has to have been there, back during the death throes of American
racism, to appreciate the residual rancor that views America as a malefactor,
and views its “post-colonial” adversaries through rose-colored glasses. Iran,
to be sure, is not a victim of imperialism, but the rump of an empire with irredentist ambitions
that redefine megalomania.
I was there, albeit as a small child, and imbibed these intoxicants
through my parents and the radical circles they moved in. America is the worst
country in the world, except for all the others, I came to believe as an adult;
with no illusions about America’s deficiencies, I believe America embodies the
world’s hopes. When Chinese speak of the “Chinese dream,” they know they are
paraphrasing the expression, “the American dream” — for we are the country
where the right to dream first took root. Today’s Iran is not the fairyland of
Valerie Jarrett’s childhood recollection, but a fey, fading remnant of a flawed
empire, a case study in cultural necrosis. One can understand, and even
empathize, with the emotional impulses that drive Obama’s camarilla. But there
is no haggling with this current in American politics. One has to put a stake
through its heart. Author: David P. Goldman
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