In recent weeks, the people witnessed an assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the onset of “Kamalot,” and the Paris Olympics, with men beating the hell out of women in the boxing ring.  In all this excitement, the 20^th anniversary of Illinois state senator Barack Obama’s speech before the Democratic National Committee—in effect, his national introduction—got little if any notice other than at Chronicles.

Given the tremendous negative impact of Obama’s presidency, his introduction to the nation 20 years ago using a bogus life story was one of the most significant political events of this century. The fact that has been swept under the rug, to paraphrase Milan Kundera’s famous quote in reverse, is a triumph of forgetting over memory.

Obama, formerly known as Barry Soetoro, claimed his father was a Kenyan foreign student who grew up herding goats and went to school in a tin-roof shack. The sole source for this story was his 1995 book Dreams from My Father, in which we learn that the Kenyan “bequeaths his name” to the American. To all but the willfully blind, the book is an obvious novel, acknowledged long after others had done so, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Garrow in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. Yet there’s more to the story than Garrow let on.

In the style of a Communist Party hack job, the text of Obama’s book betrays multiple authors, and the Kenya section plagiarizes passages from I Dreamed of Africa and African Nights by Italian writer and Kenya resident Kuki Gallmann. The black poet “Frank” is the Communist activist Frank Marshall Davis, a supporter of the USSR’s Stalinist dictatorship, who earned a spot on the FBI’s security index.

When the lost Kenyan finally pays a visit to Hawaii, Obama wrote that he found him “much thinner than I expected,” propped up by “a cane with a blunt ivory head.” The Kenyan’s eyes are “slightly yellow, the eyes of someone who has had malaria more than once. There was a fragility about his frame.” Suddenly the Kenyan brandished some 45 rpm records. “Barry, look here. I forgot that I had brought these for you. The sounds of your continent.” He put the records on the old stereo:

“Come Barry,” my father said. “You will learn from the master.” And suddenly his slender body was swaying back and forth, the lush sound was rising, his arms were swinging as they cast an invisible net, his feet wove over the floor in off-beats, his bad leg stiff but his rump high, his head back, his hips moving in a tight circle.

The rickety “old man” suddenly became the host of “Soul Train.” Over at Occidental College, Obama reads James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and W.E.B. DuBois. They were all “exhausted, bitter men,” Obama wrote. “Only Malcolm X’s autobiography seemed to offer something different.” Obama encountered “Malik,” formerly of the Nation of Islam, who had a problem with Malcolm.

“You won’t see me moving to no African jungle anytime soon,” Malik said. “Or some goddamned desert somewhere, sitting on a carpet with a bunch of Arabs. And you won’t see me stop eating no ribs. And pussy too. Don’t Malcolm talk about no pussy?” It could have been a scene from the “Black Acting School,” in Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle.

Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, married Indonesian student Lolo Soetoro in 1965, and Obama spent much of his childhood in Lolo’s land. Except for a boxing scene lifted from Wright’s Invisible Man, this is the most authentic section of Dreams, based on Obama’s memories.

“Brown and green uninterrupted, villages falling back into forest, the smell of diesel and wood smoke … rice paddies, water buffalo,” read Obama’s stream-of-consciousness reminiscences. The streets “became more congested, small stores and markets and men pulling carts loaded with gravel and timber … Villagers bathing and washing clothes on the steep banks below.”  Obama learns the Indonesian language and customs and some history. In Indonesia, “power was indiscriminate, naked always fresh in the memory.” For the U.S. government, Indonesia’s President Sukarno was:

as bad as Lumumba, Nasser, only worse, given Indonesia’s strategic importance. Word was that the CIA had played a part in the coup, although nobody knew for sure. More certain was the fact that after the coup the military had swept the country for supposed Communist sympathizers. The death toll was anybody’s guess: a few hundred thousand, maybe half a million. Even the smart guys at the Agency had lost count.

As Paul Johnson noted in his history of the 20^th century, Modern Times, Sukarno was “devoid of administrative skills. But he had the gift of words. Faced with a problem, he solved it with a phrase. Then he turned the phrase into an acronym, to be chanted by crowds of well-drilled illiterates.” Sukarno also introduced Demokrasi Terpimpin, “guided democracy,” a concept the Obama would transfer to America.

In 2004, the year of his DNC speech, Obama rode the invented story of his Kenyan father into the U.S. Senate. In 2008, he ran for president, promising to “fundamentally transform” the United States of America. In 2016, he picked his successor and deployed the FBI, Justice Department, and CIA to help Hillary Clinton and to hinder Donald Trump, supposedly elected only through help from Putin. This was more akin to Sukarno’s “guided” democracy than anything in the American experience.

This time last year, in “The Obama Factor” published at Tablet, David Garrow revealed that Obama was furious that Garrow outed Dreams from My Father as a novel. Garrow called Obamacare a fraud, disagreed with Obama’s policy toward the Communist dictatorship of Cuba, and also looked askance at the Iran deal. For Tablet’s David Samuels, “there was something about this fictional character that [Obama] created actually becoming president that helped precipitate the disaster that we are living through now.”

Fronted by the dysfunctional Joe Biden and the incompetent Kamala Harris, the fictional character known as Barack Obama remains in Washington, running the country. For Samuels, this evokes “the problems that are inherent in having a person with no constitutional role or congressional oversight take an active role in executive decision-making.”

Aside from the economic and foreign policy problems, Obama’s woke-left politburo deploys the FBI against the political opposition, against parents who peacefully protest at school board meetings, against abortion protesters, and against conservative Catholics. The people witness Stalinist show-trials of the Jan. 6 protesters, predawn armed raids against political opponents, and imprisonment without trial. These developments are reminiscent of how things worked in Frank Marshall Davis’s beloved Soviet Union.

While he mused about the number of people Sukarno killed in Indonesia, Obama did not bother to think about the death toll under Stalin—in the range of 20 million, according to the Black Book of Communism. That never troubled Frank Marshall Davis, whose Soviet masters always knew best. As Sukarno and Stalin knew, it’s hard to fundamentally transform a country into a socialist gulag without mass killing. That hasn’t happened in the United States, but with the current correlation of forces it would be foolish to ignore the possibility that it could.

When politicians call people who value their constitutional rights “domestic terrorists” and “violent extremists,” they signal intent to inflict harm. Recall Biden’s “dark speech” of Sept. 1, 2022, which looked like something staged by Leni Riefenstahl, and don’t forget the “mostly peaceful” riots of 2020, with Antifa and Black Lives Matter, a descendant of the murderous Black Liberation Army.

Those events recall a scene from the film The Year of Living Dangerously, set in Sukarno’s Indonesia. Guy Hamilton (Mel Gibson) learns that his driver Kumar (Bembol Roco) is a member of the PKI, the Communist Party of Indonesia. “When the killing starts,” Hamilton asks him, “will you be part of it?” That is a question to ponder in America today.

“We have all seen too much, to take my parents’ brief union—a black man and white woman, and African and an American, at face value,” Obama said in his 2004 DNC speech. “As a result, people have a hard time taking me at face value.” This calls to mind Clinton Justice Department nominee Lani Guinier, who questioned the blackness of the economist Thomas Sowell, author of The Economics and Politics of Race: Intellectuals and Race, and many other books. Sowell responded, “I don’t need some half-white woman in Martha’s Vineyard telling me about being black.”

Americans don’t need some half-white former president in Martha’s Vineyard telling them anything, but the fictional character “Barack Obama” has already transformed America into the disaster we are living through now.  The Dreams author wants to keep his transformation going through the half-Indian, half-Jamaican Kamala Harris, of whom he once proclaimed: “she is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough” and “she also happens to be by far the best-looking attorney general in the country.”

As Howard Beale (Peter Finch) said in Network, “none of it is true.” As Trump likes to say, “we’ll have to see what happens.”