Review of America: Imagine the World Without Her (2014) by Oliver E — 14 Jul 2014

What does Dinesh set out to prove? That we're not only a better country than people like Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn think we are, but that we're a great country, the best in the world, in fact.

Dinesh does a fine job of laying out the arguments by people like Zinn and Chomsky who argue that America was predominately founded on things like genocide, slavery and theft. He then tries to dismantle these arguments by equating America to to way other countries were at that time in history.

That everyone owned slaves, even former slaves, that other tribes of Indians stole the lands from each other that we ultimately stole from them and so on and so fourth. Dinesh basically just falls on his own sword by trying to say "We're not bad, we were just doing what everyone else was doing" but isn't his point you're trying to make that we're fundamentally better than everyone else? Then he throws in some straw man arguments against atheism, liberalism, socialism and some quintessentially D'Souza anti-Obama conspiracy theories and calls it a day.

Here's my opinion: people like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky are delusionally pessimistic and people like Dinesh D'Souza are delusionally optimistic. Has America made some terrible mistakes? Yes.

Don't deny them, don't brush them aside, accept them. But has America done some great and uniquely good things? Yes. Don't deny them, don't brush them aside, accept them. In Dinesh's mind, we should all be capitalistic, conservative, republican Christians because everyone else isn't as generous or moral or American.

Dinesh, however, is not an honest intellectual. He will do whatever he deems necessary to get others to support his beliefs, as he made abundantly clear with his recent arrest. Additionally, if you watch some of his debates, he uses the straw man argument constantly and does it poorly most of the time.

His main weapon of persuasion is misrepresentation of the counter-arguments. This is not a good documentary, not an important documentary and ultimately an irresponsible and disrespectful one.