America: Imagine the World Without Her (2014)

Conservative author and political speaker Dinesh D'Souza struck gold with his last documentary, 2016: Obama's America. The 2012 film struck a chord with enough moviegoers to earn over $33 million at the box-office, and it earned my own hallowed award for Worst Film of 2012, a puerile character hit-piece that only served as agitprop. My in depth review even got picked up by other outlets and message boards and became something of an e-mail forward itself. So when D'Souza announced his follow-up, America: Imagine a World Without Her, I knew I would have plenty to write about. It's not as overtly risible as 2016 but its true intent is possibly even more sinister. Let me assure you, dear reader, that I go into every movie to objectively critique what works, what doesn't and why. I would welcome a conservative counterpart to Michael Moore, but Dinesh D'Souza is not that filmmaker, not by a long shot. The film begins with an interesting "what if" scenario questioning what might have happened in history if George Washington had fallen on the battlefield and America had lost its revolution for independence. American monuments are turned to dust and ominous music pervades. However, instead of following through on this slice of alternative history, D'Souza switches gears immediately and points toward a new goal. He wants to change what he sees as a "shame America" narrative, fostered by the likes of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky and the "blame America first" crowd of liberal and academic nogoodniks. To do so, D'Souza seeks out to reclaim America's past, which amounts to defending or mitigating the famous sins of America's past. D'Souza's demonstrably shaky logic disputing America's past ills only takes a modicum of critical thinking skills to see it for the intellectually facile, dishonest, disingenuous, morally bankrupt rhetoric of a charlatan. Allow me to examine D'Souza's rebuttal of the five reported thefts he examines in the film. 1) "Theft of land from Native Americans." This one seems pretty obvious. They were here first. American settlers, as well as other nations, came, conquered, and Manifest Destinied the continent. D'Souza tries to argue that the Native Americans themselves would engage in war and take over other tribes' territories; therefore their original claim to the land is nil. Also, the land is only valuable because of what the new owners built on that land. I guess America's national parks have no inherent value then. It almost ends up transforming into a rhetorical line that the Native Americans didn't know how best to use their own land, so they didn't deserve it. The worst part of this segment, besides breezing over the Trail of Tears and countless broken treaties, is that D'Souza has the temerity to dispute the semantics of "genocide." See, D'Souza opines that with genocide there has to be intent to do harm, and Europeans simply bringing along deadly infections the natives had no immunity for cannot count. Never mind the whole smallpox blankets episode, America's earliest form of biological warfare, which was intentional. D'Souza then compares the decimation of the Native Americans via disease to the Black Plague. "We don't call that genocide," he smugly asserts. Let me provide a more fitting analogy: if Turkey had invaded the European continent, bringing with it the Bubonic Plague, and then purposely spread it to the natives to eliminate them, while claiming the land as Turkey's own, establishing settlements, and forcing the weakened Europeans into small unobtrusive clusters, well maybe we would accurately call that by all accounts genocide. 2) "Theft of labor of Africans." First, re-read that sentence and really let D'Souza's slimy word choice sink in. "Theft of labor" is what we're calling slavery now? How about theft of life, theft of rights, theft of future, theft of family, theft of dignity, theft of their basic humanity? This rebuttal is curious because at the outset D'Souza admits, "Yes, slavery was theft." Everything referenced after this point cannot alter this declaration, meaning the rest of this segment is all about mitigating the terror of slavery. D'Souza says the United States didn't invent slavery, and that even Africans would enslave one another. He literally uses the "everybody else was doing it too" argument children use to get away with misdeeds. He even tries to turn it around as a positive, enthusiastically informing us that America is the only country to fight a war to end slavery and that makes us a special place. Well, that's one way of looking at it. Another way would be to celebrate other countries that didn't require bloody wars to come to a consensus that owning other people as property was morally repugnant. Then D'Souza flouts anomalous examples to try and muddy the disgraceful practice of slavery. There were black slave owners, yes, because these people still exist in a crooked system. What does the existence of black slave owners prove? D'Souza's unsourced claim that there were as many black slave owners as white slave owners is so obviously dishonest that it takes your breath away. But even if it were true, which it is most assuredly not, what does it prove? Is D'Souza trying to say blacks are just as complicit in slavery? Then he adds that white indentured servants worked alongside many slaves and they had it rough too. Indentured servants were still seen as people with human rights. There is no comparison to slavery. The end. 3) "Theft of land from Mexico." This one is given even shorter shrift, mostly boiling down to a simplistic analysis of how lousy life is in Mexico. The United States gained much of the western states after annexing them from Mexico. D'Souza reasons that after the war we had all of Mexico and we only took half, so that should be acceptable. "I wonder how many of those in Mexico wish we had kept all of their country," he intones. 4) "Theft of independence with foreign policy." I forget the exact wording on this one, but really it just amounts to the American wars and conflicts in the last 50 years. Tackling Vietnam, D'Souza offers a straw man that has never existed in mainstream thought: that we went to war in Vietnam to take over their land as imperialists. The war in Vietnam was a result of the domino theory in thwarting the spread of communism, not to take over Asia. On top of this, let's ignore the Gulf of Tonkin incident that was manufactured as a rationale to escalate a war in South Vietnam. All D'Souza does is interview one P.O.W. veteran who says he went to war to spread democracy. That's fine, but one man's experience is anecdotal and not indicative of the whole, let alone of the military command. D'Souza then says we gave back Iraq to the Iraqis and didn't ask for anything in return, except, you know, permanent military bases that they objected to. Wars aren't just fought for territory, they can be fought for profit by powerful interests; just look at the military industrial complex run amok. And yet, weirdly, D'Souza never combats Noam Chomsky's listing of all the American-assisted coups across the globe, from Iran (1953) to Chile (1973) to Brazil (1964) to Guatemala (1954) and others. In 2011, documents over the Iran coup were declassified and admitted CIA involvement as "an act of U.S. foreign policy conceived and approved by the highest levels of government." 5) "Theft of wealth by capitalism." D'Souza actually comes to the defense of Wall Street, lamenting that America's wealthy are under unfair attack from the unwashed masses. First, D'Souza conflates a critique of unregulated, Laissez-faire capitalism with capitalism itself. There are socialists and communists and others of similar ideology out there, but the mainstream left is not arguing for the wholesale destruction of the economic system of this country. A lack of oversight and unchecked greed and fraternal collusion lead to the financial meltdown of 2008, bringing the world to the brink of economic ruin because of the bad bets of Wall Street. Instead, D'Souza stages a silly example of himself running a fast food restaurant, complete with himself playing all of the workers and with a comical (?) Indian accent. He flatly contends that it costs the consumer more money to make a hamburger at home than to buy one from his restaurant, ipso facto "the American people are not being ripped off." This is D'Souza's insufficient summary of capitalism, ignoring the 2008 financial crises, ignoring the robber barons, ignoring strike-busting, ignoring the reasons the unions had to be formed in the first place because of dangerous, unfit working conditions that would still exist without intervention. Thomas Piketty wrote a 700-page book on the history of capitalism that has become an unexpected runaway bestseller. He studied hundreds of years of documents of all sorts and concluded that return on capital is higher than the growth rate of the economy, meaning the rich get a bigger part of the pie as time goes on. Economic inequality is hitting record rates not seen since the Great Depression, but somehow for D'Souza this is Obama's failings and not those of the enshrined 1%, a.k.a. the "job creators." Each of these segments runs less than 10 minutes and D'Souza seems to brush through them with little effort as if the man can't be bothered to knock down his own poorly reasoned straw men. Every claim that D'Souza makes is lacking in substantive facts. He has little evidence to support his slanted and mischaracterized claims. I only recall him ever once citing a source as he worked through his rebuttal of America's past transgressions. That's because D'Souza's assertions don't hold up under any trace amount of intellectual scrutiny, which is why he often defers to emotional appeals and anomalous anecdotes (Hey, a black woman became the first female millionaire selling hair products, therefore all ex-slaves could have prospered in this country if they only worked hard, never mind Jim Crow and all that). We watch re-enactments of the P.O.W. being tortured in Vietnam, and obviously our empathy goes out to this man, but that doesn't erase a million dead Vietnamese and 55,000 fallen Americans. There is an absurd amount of historical re-enactments in America, to pad out its running time given the paucity of its argument, but mostly to fall back upon unfettered emotional appeals. D'Souza relies on the symbols of patriotism and actors portraying great figures from history, notably Abe Lincoln, to persuade his audience about the unimpeachable history of America rather than the integrity of his unsubstantiated and spurious claims. D'Souza doesn't even bother to cover his obvious biases with his interview subjects. He asks Michael Eric Dyson why the re-election of Obama doesn't mean "the end of racism" (forgetting that half of the country did not vote for the man, and no, this does not mean every non-Obama vote was a racist). He props extremist Ward Churchill as the face of modern liberalism, referencing his comparison of 9/11 victims to Eichmann, and prompting him to justify dropping an atomic bomb on American soil as retribution. D'Souza then spends the duration of an interview with a Mexican-American student by asking him what the American Dream means to him. His interview subjects are also rarely identified onscreen, nor does D'Souza disclose such pertinent facts like the talking heads belonging to prominent conservative think tanks, ones that have lined his own pockets. There's also a noticeable lack of follow-up questions. D'Souza's interview style is also haltingly slow and modulated, as if speaking slower is the same as being reflective. But my favorite interview by far begins with these magical words: "Senator Ted Cruz, why did the Mexican-American War take place?" Oh my. America lacks a general workable thesis to hold its claims and counter-claims together, which is something at least 2016 had going for it. This may be because the film's possible real intent is only revealed in the closing twenty minutes, and it amounts to a plea not elect Hilary Clinton to the White House. D'Souza's last effort to stop Obama's re-election didn't work out, even though he claims his ridiculous assertions have come true (the debt hasn't doubled since 2012 and Israel has yet to become the "United States of Islam" as well). D'Souza enjoys reasserting conservative bogeymen, which is why we get more references to Bill Ayers, Reverend Wright, and especially Saul Alinsky. Until a few years ago, I doubt anyone even knew who this man was but now D'Souza, and others, have pinned him as the ultimate political bogeyman, contorting America from beyond the grave. That's because his disciples are living out Alinsky's anti-capitalist dogma, chief among them Obama and Hilary Clinton. There is a goofy re-enactment where a young Clinton is introduced to Alinsky in a high school cafeteria, and the scene is played with such ominous music and lighting that it's meant to convey a sit-down with none other than the devil (Alinksy is quoted as taking organizational tips from Lucifer, so you make the connection, audience). Hilary wrote her college thesis on the guy even. However, when she graduated she turned down working for the guy and instead became a lawyer, so... I don't know what. Hilariously, the Alinsky re-enactments are bursting with overwrought menace including one incomprehensible scene of Alinsky sitting in his car and scoping out school children for likely nefarious purposes. "Alinksy would love Obamacare," D'Souza notes, which makes little sense considering the ACA is all about providing new clients to private industry. As a socialist, I imagine Alsinky would have preferred the public option found in every other Western nation. It's these kind of broad generalizations, armchair psychological projection, and guilt-by-association pleas that typify D'Souza's documentaries. Last time he said Obama's "anti-colonialist" views were all because he wanted to appeal to an absent father he saw a couple of times in his life. Now D'Souza is warning us that Hilary Clinton is doing the same but trying to appease the ghost of Alinsky, a man she turned down working for way back when. The real question is WHY would anyone even posing arguments to mitigate the horrors of slavery and genocide? What morally charitable rationale can even be created to try and argue that these horrors were not as bad as history has thoroughly documented? D'Souza says he wants to take control of the "shame America" narrative, but in doing so he's whitewashing and mitigating this country's mistakes just to make, what, his core audience of conservatives feels better about themselves? In this, I must quote my critical colleague Ben Bailey, himself paraphrasing a quote from Al Franken: "Franken once observed that, while liberals and conservatives both love America, they love it in different ways. Liberals love America like an adult loves their parents, seeing them not just as mom and dad but as complex individuals with strengths and flaws. Conservatives love America like a baby loves his mommy, who in the child's eyes can do no wrong, and anyone who says so is a lying bastard." Patriotism does not mean turning a blind eye toward your country's mistakes, past and current, nor does it make the ignorant more patriotic than the educated that accept their country's past, warts and all, and pledge to ensure that those same mistakes are never repeated. Now, slavery isn't exactly likely to return any time soon to this country, but the core tenets that enshrined slavery were looking at others as subhuman, as undeserving of equality, rigging a system to deny people fair opportunities, a true lack of empathy for the hardships of others. These traits still exist today and can still be found in modern domestic and foreign legislation. As a movie, America: Imagine a World Without Her is also a failure. It's a political polemic that preaches to the faithful, assuaging any feelings of guilt they may have had over the past sins of our country, and yet D'Souza doesn't even offer a vigorous or even competent attempt to do just that. Unless you are already converted to D'Souza's worldview, you are unlikely to be persuaded by this crackpot expose. The film lacks corroborating evidence for its outrageous claims and rebuttals, conveniently ignoring a larger context in many cases because it would disprove D'Souza's disingenuous claims, that is, when D'Souza isn't inadvertently disproving his own claims. History is written by the winners and Zinn wanted to show history from the point of view of the oppressed, the disadvantaged, and the lower classes that typically get lost amidst the resuscitation of kings, generals, and Great Men of Industry. D'Souza's view seems to be, yeah history is written by the winners, so stop whining minorities and suck it up. After all, the Native Americans get to open casinos, so how bad off can they be? Here's the thing: most people, liberals and conservative and everyone else, don't feel guilt per se about Native American genocide or slavery, mostly because we were not alive and responsible. I feel no more guilt over these issues than I do over the other numerous acts of genocide, slavery, and general horror that populate the far-away past. But civilization is a constant work in progress and the responsibility of every citizen is to try and make this world better than it was before. The past informs our actions and our understanding of the world and us. Nobody except the fringe thinks America is a pit of unrepentant evil that has done the world nothing but harm. It has been a force for good but it's also made mistakes, but to quote Stannis Baratheon, "The bad does not wash out the good, nor does the good wash out the bad." We all love our country but just because some recognize certain inconvenient historical facts don't make them any less patriotic. With all of this exhaustively analyzed, allow me one more moment of examination, borrowing some of the armchair psychological speculation that D'Souza likes to primarily trade in. It appears that D'Souza has a healthy opinion of himself bordering on obsessive narcissism. He cheerily lets us know his past film ranks as the number two highest-grossing political documentary of all time, omitting who owns the number one spot and by a large margin. His name is listed SIX times in the opening credits, including credits for having written the source book, writing the screenplay, and "creating and narrating" the film. Much of the film involves D'Souza in his turtlenecks strolling along national monuments and looking forlorn. He is the star of the film. But there's also the problem that D'Souza pleaded guilty to federal campaign finance fraud, posing as third parties to continue making campaign donations in 2012. D'Souza admits, "I made a mistake. No man is above the law," but he frames his guilt as martyrdom. D'Souza makes himself seem like the "latest victim to be targeted by the White House," instead of, you know, a man who broke the law and got caught. He argues the White House, using the NSA and the (debunked) IRS scandal, are out to silence dissent, abusing whatever measures they have at their disposal (never mind that Bush began the wiretap surveillance program). I propose that America is nothing more than a cover for D'Souza's conviction and to save face amidst impending jail time. It's a 90-minute excuse not for America's misdeeds but for D'Souza's. Nate's Grade: F