Why Is “Anti-Colonial” a Dirty Word?

Rudy Giuliani’s comments suggesting that President Obama doesn’t love the United States have, at this point, become a media circus. I sympathize with NBC anchor Chuck Todd, who lamented that the story encapsulates “why Americans are learning how to hate politics and the media.”

Still, the former mayor’s remarks saw the resurrection of one rhetorical tendency on the right that needs to be put to rest swiftly. While denying that his comments were racist, Giuliani uttered the following non sequitur: “This isn’t racism. This is socialism or possibly anti-colonialism.”

The confused antecedent notwithstanding, Giuliani’s unfortunate turn of phrase is a startling reversion to a dormant meme of the Republican intellectual universe. As Philip Bump explains on The Washington Post’s website, the idea that President Obama’s defining political ideology is “anti-colonialism” comes from a book by conservative thinker Dinesh D’Souza. D’Souza argues that the President’s Kenyan father was under the sway of a leftist anti-colonial ideology, and that Obama continues to draw inspiration from that mode of thinking.

This bizarre description of the President’s philosophical motivation found advocates before and during the 2012 presidential election in former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. Huckabee infamously picked up on D’Souza’s thread when he claimed that the President grew up in Kenya, saying on a talk show that such a childhood would produce a different “view of the Brits.”

The idea that having an “anti-colonial” President is a problem presents some prima facie issues for its exponents. As political science professor Laura Seay wrote several years ago for the Christian Science Monitor, the idea that colonial independence is a bad thing is puzzling coming from political figures whose country had to fight a colonial war of independence. All kinds of 18th century figures beloved of the modern right, from Washington and Jefferson to Adam Smith, were hardly fans of colonial empires as practiced in their time.

As Bump points out, however, the relationship of later anti-colonial movements in non-settlement colonies provides some support for the idea that anti-colonialism and American policy do not go together. He notes that famous third world leftists and sworn enemies of the United States like Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh were among the most prominent anti-colonial leaders.

But these examples still do not explain the negative tone with which too many modern Republicans deal with anti-colonialism. The term encompasses many movements, not all of which were destined to align with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Most crucially, some of the United States’ knee jerk opposition to anti-colonialism may have been responsible for some of our most morally questionable foreign policy decisions.

One of these interventions came in the current Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1960s, just after its independence from Belgium. There, the United States’ tacit support for Belgian machinations and its hostility towards the new, anti-colonial government of Patrice Lumumba led to Lumumba’s fall, serious civil unrest, the rise of a brutal dictator, and the slow-moving collapse of the country. The worst part of this sorry tale is that Lumumba had, in fact, asked for U.S. support, which was not forthcoming because of our sympathies for European colonialism.

Ironically, Newt Gingrich should know something about this instance of pro-colonialism gone wrong: He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on Belgian education policy in the Congo. But as Seay notes, this dissertation was sympathetic to the Belgian’s racist colonial education system, and does not appear to acknowledge that some form of “anti-colonialism” might be a legitimate reaction to living under such a regime.

Other foreign policy debacles from the Cold War should also be familiar to Gingrich. Perhaps the most astonishing of these missteps was the United States’ support for the government of apartheid South Africa and its allies in conflicts like the Angolan Civil War. Under the Reagan administration in particular, the U.S. even refused to support opposition groups like Nelson Mandela’s A.N.C., despite the pleas of activists like Desmond Tutu. When Congress did pass sanctions on South Africa in 1986, it did so over President Reagan’s veto. To the end, the Reagan administration feared that anti-colonial groups were simply too leftist to trust.

These experiences of Cold War policy in Africa seem to show that America has never suffered from a surfeit of anti-colonial sympathy in its foreign policy, and that it in fact needed more of that feeling at critical junctures.

So, the next time you hear Rudy Giuliani, or anyone else, claim that “anti-colonialism” is somehow “un-American,” remember two things: First, without a first wave of anti-colonialism, the United States might very well not exist, and second, a little more sympathy for later anti-colonialism may have gone a long way in helping the United States have a more effective foreign policy during the Cold War.

During his recent period of inexplicable statements, Mayor Giuliani accused the President of having “a dilettante’s knowledge of history.” Well, as the President might say: “Right back atcha, buddy!”

Nelson L. Barrette '17, a Crimson editorial executive, is a history concentrator in Winthrop House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.