Meet the hard-core Communist who mentored the future 44th President of the United States.
Paul Kengor
The American Spectator
10/12/2012
…FRANK MARSHALL DAVIS WAS BORN in December 1905 in Kansas, where he would endure serious racism that spawned justified resentment. No matter conservatives’ horror at the man’s politics, they ought to hold sympathy for the very real racism that young Frank endured. Here was a little boy who was literally nearly lynched one day walking home from school.
Davis’ politics developed slowly and unevenly. Like most black Americans at the time, he initially considered himself loyal to the party of Lincoln—the Republican Party. His evolution to the left was a long, winding road. Ultimately, however, he moved toward “progressivism” and, by World War II, to the farthest extreme of the left: the Communist Party. This development took place during his time in the 1930s and 1940s in Chicago, where, not unlike Barack Obama decades later, he would find himself politically and professionally.
Davis joined the Party during World War II—notably, after the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact that precipitated not only the war but the Holocaust. Many American Communists (especially Jewish– American Communists) bolted the Party after the signing of the pact; to the contrary, Davis joined up. And from then on, he toed the Soviet/Stalinist line unflinchingly, unerringly, flawlessly. He was the prototype of the dedicated CPUSA foot soldier and loyal Soviet patriot who dutifully served the Motherland.
Davis’ unflagging support of Stalin’s Soviet Union is apparent in a poem he wrote, lovingly titled “To the Red Army.” In this ode to Stalin’s tanks, Comrade Davis exhorted the Soviets to show the West’s “rich industrialists” and political “experts” what Communism could do…
…Davis harbored a special hatred for Winston Churchill, who, like Truman, opposed Stalin’s Soviet Union—the country to which Davis dedicated his heart, his mind, his soul, and his pen. His assessment of Churchill was out of sync not only with Americans at the time but through the ages, as most still consider Churchill a great hero, a national treasure to the United States as well as to the United Kingdom, and even “the man of the century.” And yet, Davis charged that “the only people Churchill gives a rap about are the white people of the British Empire,” and that Churchill wanted America to join him in bludgeoning “all other countries into submission.” He bemoaned that Churchill envisioned a postwar U.S.-UK alliance that excluded the USSR. Churchill desired a two-nation alliance because of “a pattern for Anglo-American world domination, for super-imperialism.” He foresaw that America and Britain would greedily “divide up Asia and the Pacific islands as they see fit” and establish “semi-fascist governments all over Europe.” He warned not of a Soviet menace but “Anglo-American imperialist domination.” Davis portrayed the Marshall Plan as a form of “racism,” “slavery,” and “colonial imperialism”—again, the Kremlin line—and as part of this Anglo-American conspiracy.
When Churchill came to Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946 to warn the world that an “Iron Curtain” was closing across Europe, Davis was livid. He and his CPUSA comrades mocked Churchill’s claims; to the contrary, they maintained that the only “Iron Curtains” were those being erected by anti-Communists in the American press and General Motors. The problem was not Stalin’s Iron Curtain, Davis scoffed, but “G.M.’s iron curtain,” being raised by “General Motors’ Hitlers.”…
…My general conclusion is that Frank Marshall Davis’ far-left extremism may help explain how and why America’s current president is further to the left than any president of our generation. I think Davis is factor in understanding Obama’s political, ideological, and intellectual development. More than that, Davis likely helps explain how and why our president, as a young man at Occidental College circa 1980, was probably once on the Marxist left.
In my book, I include a series of lengthy, exclusive interviews with Dr. John Drew, who knew Obama at Occidental, and knew him (at the time) as a fellow Marxist. Drew was a leading campus Marxist, and, remarkably, knew Barack Obama as a fellow believer. Obama was introduced to him as “one of us.” “Obama was already an ardent Marxist when I met him in the fall of 1980,” Drew told me.
“I know it’s incendiary to say this,” he cautioned, before explaining that Obama “was definitely a Marxist,” and that “it was very unusual for a sophomore at Occidental to be as radical or as ideologically attuned as young Barack Obama was.” Drew said Obama was preparing for “imminent revolution,” which Drew described as a “Frank Marshall Davis fantasy of revolution.”…
The entire article is at The American Spectator.
Update: Read a similar compilation of Obama connections, Just Happened…
