Jackals That The Jackals Would Despise -- by Mick Collins, CM/P
‘JACKALS THAT THE JACKALS WOULD DESPISE’ -- by Mick Collins, CM/P
Why is it that at the beginning of 2006, with perhaps the largest international consensus since Vietnam '69 on the illegality, immorality, and futility of the US’s ‘War on Terror’, especially that bus and truck company currently engaged in the Iraqi theatre—and soon to be (if not already) visiting venues in Syria and Iran—why is it that nearly all Leftish critiques remain morally free-floating, ungrounded in 20th Century history, or just, in idiotic ecstasy, untethered from the Reality Principle? From Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, and Ed Herman, to that apostate hic-cup Chris Hitchens and his addlepated strain of stillborn-again-Zionist Capitol Hillbillies—whether critics of or apologists for Israel—or just arful dodgers of any discussion at all of that little nuclear-armed settlers state whose continued existence as an Imperialist outpost in among the Arab oil emirates has been the defining concern behind the repackaged rationale for fear-driven Western war strategies from ‘anti-Communism’ to ‘anti-Terrorism’—none has been able to achieve sufficient critical remove from this unreflective dread of majoritarian domination over individual interests to fully appreciate that their intellectual passivity toward, even their acceptance of anti-Communism has been the chief enabler for Liberalism’s unspeakable collaboration with Fascism, and represents the seminal betrayal of popular faith in the late-Century’s fundamental struggles to create and sustain rational and decent mass societies.
The Left has had no trouble supporting the quadrennial cotillions, sponsored by the multinational financial, commercial, military and media aristocracies, in which the vigorously stoked feudal longings of the ‘general public’ are briefly requited by illusory spectacles in which the democratic franchise is turned into melodramatic computer-simulations of the electoral process—a kind of political karaoke. And in its anti-war-ness, which has prioritized certain individual and political human rights (e.g., the right to criticize or to be free from political tyranny) over certain other social and economic human rights (e.g., the rights to education, health care, a job, or a life safe and free from military aggression and violence), the Left has made certain wars more acceptable than others. (Iraq: Hell, no. Bosnia/Kosovo: Uh, yeah, well, now . . . maybe not. Rwanda/Congo: Nigger, what?) It has firmly locked itself into a minoritarian (elitist) class bias that effectively guarantees that the private sector’s sole surviving means for transferring and accumulating public wealth, a malignant obsession with the creation of a global free market which trades principally in global terror, global crime and global war, and which effectively turns human productive forces and other natural resources toward their own destruction, will make the wasting, socio-toxic, unregenerate impulses of criminal greed and militarily-maintained chaos the fixed and unalterable facts of what little future the world might have left.
A willful, even belligerent, ignorance of the fundamentality of the yet unresolved steel-cage death dialectic between Capitalism (political antecedent to Fascism) and its negation, Revolutionary Socialism (political antecedent to Communism), is nicely demonstrated by the rehabilitation of the once ridiculous state religion known as Christian Anti-Communism, passing through the socially corrosive ‘Neo-Liberalism’ of Reagan/Bush/Clinton that broke down and criminalized life in the Soviet Union, the Yugoslav Federation, and Central Africa (just off the top of my desk), with an as yet uncounted toll in immiseration and untimely death, into the now-trendy ‘Neo-conservatism’. With a Leo Straussian intellectual make-over, self-awarded ‘Nobel prizes’ in economics and other social sciences (disciplines not originally included in the Swedish dynamite guy’s will), but never breaking with their neo-feudal Judeo-Christian cosmogony of rugged individualism, a bunch of glassy-eyed Moonies and sweaty, snake-jerking Baptists (white with foam) have been refurbished into serious geopolitical players.
But, then, the campus cops have been too far off into their strawberry-glazed French cruller buzzes to file anything like anti-social behavior charges against these latter day saints: Anti-socialism being pretty much a bipartisan attitude, Professor Chomsky was once heard to speculate that Stalin was probably a creation, like Osama bin Laden, of the Western intelligence services; and Ed Herman, the Wharton Business School professor emeritus, joined his MIT writing partner and the over-rated stupid white filmmaker of faux Left documentaries, in frequently implying that the Socialist and intellectually prodigious Serbs (Belgrade has more PhDs per capita, by my count, than all of Boston and Berkeley combined), under the ‘thuggish’, ‘Stalinian’ dictatorship of thrice-democratically-elected President Slobodan Milosevic, were somehow genetically prone to violence, especially violence against women, and as guilty as, or, perhaps, just slightly less guilty for the Balkan carnage of the 90s than either the Croats or the Bosnian Muslims. Chomsky then, in a battle of wits with a morally-challenged The Guardian interviewer, where he attempted to deny her imputations that, by questioning their real existence, he’d actually told the truth about the alleged death camps and genocide in Bosnia, posited that innocent (Muslim) civilians were premeditatedly slaughtered after being forcefully removed from their homes by Bosnian Serb soldiers at Srebrenica, and that the Bosnian Muslims made up the majority of the victims in that war—and, thus, that the Serbs made up the majority of the ‘genocidaires’. None of this, of course, has any basis in the historical record and can be easily assigned to anti-communist demonology—or, what Chomsky and Herman warned us against in ‘Manufacturing Consent’, over-exposure to The New York Times.
—But wait, you say. Chomsky never said there was a ‘genocide at Srebrenica’.
—Yeah? But he never said there wasn’t, either. . . . Just hang on a second.
The Left’s betrayal of anti-Fascism for anti-Communism has some old and putrid roots. But to keep from losing a lot of the kids in the audience, let’s just look at the end of WWII: Check out how General Luther Silbert, General Omar Bradley’s head of intelligence, snuck German General Reinhard Gehlen, head of Nazi intelligence in the USSR, and about 10,000 of his war criminal compadres into the West to continue Hitler’s war against Soviet Communism; then take a look at how contemporary Military/Settler-State Zionism, once a proud member of the Socialist International, now a tight partner of the Fascist hegemon, has its current ideological head waters in the personage of that Spielbergian or Polanskian mythological hero comme Holocaust Industrialist/survivalist sans pair, Elie Weisel, and his flight outta Auschwitz—but toward the West, away from the liberating Red Army and fast on the Hugo Boss-shod heels of the retreating Nazis. For the true Christian anti-Communist, it has always been a far nobler fate to be crushed under the highly polished boot of a Chopin-loving SS trooper (while manufacturing munitions—however faulty—for the Wehrmacht), than to be liberated by some raggedy-assed, spud-sucking Red.
To see that the anti-Serb sentiments so subtly suggested by Chomsky and Herman, and so corrupting of the Left in general during the 1990s—strangely enough, anti-Slavism was more a Liberal than a Conservative prejudice—was a side-effect of Fascism’s essential anti-Communism, one need only look at the latest output of the Hollywood dream machine: George Clooney’s appeal to the nobler intentions of American narcissism, ‘Goodnight and Good Luck’. One of the victims of Senator Joe McCarthy’s Reds eradication—though Tail-gunner Joe, apparently, had nothing to do, personally, with this case—was a young Air Force Reserve Lieutenant, Milo Radulovich, who in 1953 was separated from the Air Force because of suspicions he might be a security risk (nice-speak for ‘lousy pinko commie rat’). These suspicions were based on Radulovich’s father’s subscription to some Serbian newspapers, one of which had been associated with the American Slav Congress, on the AG’s list as a Communist Organization. The film never specifies the Radulovichs’ national origins, but the Google entry from the Wikipedia stated that Radulovich père was a ‘Yugoslav’, whereas the journals he subscribed to, ‘to keep up with news from home’, were ‘Serb’. I wondered if any of those Croatian Ustashi war criminals, also Yugoslav ex-pats, living around Chicago, were ever called to answer questions about their partisan loyalties.
So in 1953 ‘anti-Communist’ meant ‘anti-Serb’. After the fall of The Wall in 1989, to be ‘anti-Serb’ was to be ‘anti war’, ‘anti genocide’ and ‘pro Human Rights’. Thus the seeds sown after WWII blossomed into the fully hegemonic Fascist world order that Leftists, both neo-Nazis and proto-Trotzis, bemoan and bemoan and . . . bemoan—until the Bundesbank checks from their publishers clear.
Most of today’s public intellectuals haven’t the courage to risk their public esteem by challenging their public’s sense of the obvious or allowing their imaginations to venture beyond the valley of what they coyly call ‘the realm of the probable’—as in: what’s the point of developing public policy vis à vis Israel/Palestine, if there is no probability that policy will be accepted, much less implemented (by Israel, of course)?
Only the probable is popular. Hollywood is all about popularity. Thus real history has become both unpopular and improbable. In the movies, McCarthy’s sin has always been that he falsely charged loyal Americans with being communist agents or fellow travelers. But what about all the real Communists whose real sacrifices in the struggle against racism, social injustice and Fascism are today ignored? The 26 million souls who gave their lives to defeat Hitler, and his Western waste capitalist sponsors, and to give hope back to the millions of living corpses imprisoned in the Nazis’ Central and Eastern European death camps, are minimized as slaves of a foreign, atheistic ideology and a mad tyrant, and their ultimate sacrifice is trivialized as being in the service of ‘re-occupation’ rather than ‘liberation’ in the Hannah Arendt conceit of conflating Communism and Fascism as the same ‘evil totalitarianism’. Is this discounting of such mass heroism not a crime far greater than anything either McCarthy or Ed Murrow—or George Clooney—would even dare consider, much less militate against? No, the only ‘ism’ for all these guys is ‘Americanism’—and, maybe, ‘narcissism’.
The fuck I’m on about? 'I’’s wow. Listen: Bin Laden didn’t blow up the projects. Tell the truth, nigger. It was your nigger. Bush knocked down the towers. Tell the truth, nigger.' (1)
OK, well, here. How can you tell if a scribbler’s got game—if he’s got his heart and soul in what he’s saying?
You heard this one?
“Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 100 days by the Habyarimana government and its Extremist ‘Hutu Power’ supporters.”
Sure you have. These days you read it everywhere, like the warning on a pack of ‘snouts’, and then you go ahead and light up, move on to the next story—right, Rwanda: been there, smoked that, done her—, the next report’s on Iraq or the Middle East or even Sudan (Rwanda-lite, right?). You move on to the next, fresher Genocide.
Now, I’m not trying to play the Left’s—or anybody else’s— concerns for today’s globalization wars cheap. These wars are being fronted by the US and UK, then the EU, and even, after some coy distress, by the UN, as the only salvation for suffering Humanity. And the other side—the enemy, the insurgents, the resistance, the terrorists, the mujahadeen, the Shiite rebels, the Sunnis rebels, the Baathist hold-overs, Hamas, Hezbollah—who’s paying them to blow each other up, level their mosques and take a few GIs, IDFs and Tommy’s with them? Who benefits from the ‘War on Terror’? Who profits—and profits big-time—from what has come to be known as ‘Terrorism’, ‘Arab Terrorism’? You see any real gains being made by ‘Expansionist Political Islam’? Any major Muslim military bases cropping up in your neighborhood? All the government checks, the big ones, seem to be made out to Bechtel and Haliburton/KBR, to the spinmeisters at the Rendon and Lincoln Groups who massage the golden truth into piss-stinking straw, to the death merchants’ best agents over at the Carlyle Group, to Boeing, to Raytheon and to DynCorps, Wackenhut and MPRI, and untold other Private Military Contractors. And the predominant interests being served by this all-out war against the poor are those of Western waste capitalism’s mafiocratic energy, armament and toxic pharmaceutical cabals—or, to use a very fresh-today handle, the ‘meta-group’ of US/Russian/Ukrainian/Israeli ‘God-conscious business men’. You looking to cop a solid Afghan nod right fucking now? Try the street dope in Baghdad.
But—
—“Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 100 days by the Habyarimana government and its Extremist ‘Hutu Power’ supporters.”—
is the unacknowledged model for modern haut couture genocides, like those alleged or stipulated to in slightly more ‘civilized’ (whiter) places like Kosovo, Bosnia, or even in Northern Iraq with Saddam’s supposed genocide of Israel's own White Kurds. See, Arabs still trump Africans. And, of course, the same people who brought you—
“Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 100 days by the Habyarimana government and its Extremist ‘Hutu Power’ supporters.”—
people like Canadian UN General Roméo Dallaire or The New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch or Samatha Power of Harvard or Human Rights Watch-Africa’s Alison Des Forges or Nickolas Kristof of the NY Times, were, until the recent ascension to the Sudanese government and subsequent death in a ‘mysterious (Ugandan) helicopter crash’ of US military proxy John Garang, using this Rwandan Genocide template of Man’s inhumanity to indigenous primitives as agitation and propaganda for even greater militarization of Southern and Western Sudan, Northern Uganda and The Horn of Africa. Why no more humanitarian concern for the bloody deals going down today in the African Great Lakes Region and Congo? Because Central Africa is militarized to the tits, and the natural resources, from gold, oil and diamonds, to coltan and uranium, not leaving out timber and Nile and Congo river water, are all being ruined, ripped and run off with at quite a cost-effective clip, thank you very much.
The Human Rights Left had front-loaded their Stop-the-Fucking-Genocide pitch for more Military Humanism with so many fluffed-up ‘mobile mass graves’, ‘babies roasting on an open fire and jacked-up militias hacking off your nose’, ‘refugees massacred in full flight’, ‘systematic rape and death by humiliation’ scenarios, like the ones that had actually played out in Rwanda between 1990 and 1994, and beyond, that before laying this gruesome mythology over events in Yugoslavia and Iraq, it was necessary to give these New Age Holocausts some Old World cachet by tagging on “Never Again”. But their basic solution is the same as it always has been: Such mass slaughter can be prevented by getting the natives to trade their incredible wealth in natural resources for more lawyers, guns and cyto-toxic pharmaceuticals.
The trouble with working off a faulty unto fallacious premise like—
“Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 100 days by the Habyarimana government and its Extremist ‘Hutu Power’ supporters.”—
is that if your analysis had any historical legs at all to begin with—be it about Iraq, 9/11, AIDS, Marxism or Yugoslavia—this bit of Mad Ave/Mad Albright torque will cut them right off at the knees. Like swinging at a slider with one foot in the bucket, those public intellectuals who flaunt their ignorance of recent events in Rwanda and the rest of Central Africa—like it was some advanced degree in Humanism—by citing this impossible premise, not only don’t get any wood on the ball, they don’t even see from what direction the pitch is coming.
The recent discovery of the body of Juvénal Uwilingiyimana, once the minister of parks in the murdered Habyarimana (Hutu) government of Rwanda, floating in the Charleroi canal in Brussels, when even discussed by the mainstream media, was described as either a suicide or a Hutu genocidaire-on-genocidaire murder meant to silence a potential snitch—all yearnings for credibility in these stories were sated by that threadbare homily—
“Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 100 days by the Habyarimana government and its Extremist ‘Hutu Power’ supporters.”—
A little knowledge may be a dangerous thing, but having a lot of knowledge and still founding a critique on unquestioned, though obvious, disinformation is like biting one’s own critical nuts off to demonstrate what a potent hard-ass critic one is.
For example: In its coverage of the Uwilingiyimana murder, which it calls either self-inflicted or (somewhat to their credit) an unattributed but professional hit, Britain’s The Guardian mentions that the badly decomposed body was made even more difficult to ID because it had had both its hands severed.(2) But given the ideational confinements imposed by—
“Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 100 days by the Habyarimana government and its Extremist ‘Hutu Power’ supporters.”—
The Guardian was forced to surmise that the hands, with wedding band, were removed post mortem by motor boats passing in the canal. How likely is that? Well, 19 young Arabs, armed only with box cutters, hijacked four airliners and flew three of them into major US landmarks without drawing the slightest defensive response from the US military or leaving much if any debris: how likely is that?
You know, Gorilla poachers have been known to cut off the hands of their prey as trophies. Now, gorilla poaching is a big deal in Uganda/Rwanda/Burundi. Maybe some Rwandan gorilla poachers, lost in Belgium, had a gorilla poaching flashback and . . . yeah. Never mind.
Maybe the murderers weren’t gorilla poachers (though I wouldn’t put it past them), but, after winning political power through armed terror and after fifteen years of the most effective population control since the Ice Age, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the putative ‘liberators’ and ‘terminators of the genocide’, who currently run Rwanda under the ruthless command of President ‘Pontius Pilate’ Kagame, the sultan of coltan, don’t seem to have been able to get themselves past what Lt. Abdul Joshua Ruzibiza, a former RPF cadre, describes in his book, Rwanda: L’histoire secrete, as ‘the task of systematically massacring the (Rwandan) population’.(3)
The RPF has a long sheet for killing everyone it encountered in-country. They really didn’t have time to check out ethnicity, tribal affiliations, stuff like that. If you were living in Rwanda when these ersatz ‘maquisards’ showed up in your village, you would most likely not be living there (or anywhere else) when they left. They figured everybody, Tutsi, Hutu or Twa, was either the enemy or a potential witness against them—and they needed to clear much of the land of its over-population to open it up to returning Tutsi ‘nobles’—so, the RPF policy from the jump was ‘waste ‘em all and let god check their IDs’.
Here’s how Ruzibiza describes some of this RPF ‘liberation’. And this happened right after the RPF was supposed to have put an end to the aforementioned trimestorial Rwandan genocide:
[This is all my translation from the French.]
—3 July 1994: The city of Butare fell to the RPF led by Lieutenant Colonel Éric Murokore.
As usual, the killer teams had received new orders. The team of the 157th mobile, that had been active in the cleansing of the populations of the Kibungo and Bugesera regions, had joined up with those units who had carried out the massacre of the populations of Nyabwishongwezi. Several members of this latter group had been scattered in different directions: some stayed in Gabiro to incinerate corpses, others took part with the DMI (RPF’s Directorate of Military Intelligence—big players in the real Rwandan genocide, and the best guess for the Uwilingiyimana murder in Belgium—nb) preparing for the forthcoming massacres in the City of Kigali [the Rwandan capital—nb] by setting up ‘human slaughter houses’ in Masaka, in Kami and in other places. . . . (p 315)—
And then—now, mind you, to Ruzibiza and his supporters in the Human Rights lobby, all these RPF war crimes, whenever and where ever they might have taken place, in Butare or Brussels, are, if not justified, or even ‘understood and forgiven’, at least, better left in 'the memory hole' when considered in the context of—
“Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 100 days by the Habyarimana government and its Extremist ‘Hutu Power’ supporters.”—
More ‘liberation’ from Ruzibiza’s Secret History of Rwanda:
—In Ndera:
There was a platoon of killers from the DMI under the direction of sub-lieutenant Edgard Kirenga. All visitors (to Ndera) became witnesses to the massacres that took place there and could not be allowed to get out. Even the innocent could not be released for fear they would tell someone what they had seen. . . . The only way to escape death was to be sent to some other reception center. . . .
In Ndera as in Masaka, when they had finished piling up the corpses, Lieutenant Colonel Jackson Rwahama and Lieutenant Colonel Karake Karnzi readied the incineration by sending for trucks loaded with barrels of gasoline from the military gas station in Kacyiru or the one in Kaubye near the old storage tanks of PetroRwanda. That happened twice a week. With the help of bulldozers they pushed the ashes into long trenches or into the Nyabarongo river.
During the first five months (after claiming victory over the Hutu government in July—nb), that is until December 1994, I counted more than fifty thousand people killed in Masaka, and that’s without including those killed in Kami-Ndera. (pp 342-43)—
But what about our late friend Juvénal Uwilingiyimana? He had refused to corroborate the RPF’s version of the genocide in Rwanda. He said as much to investigators from the prosecutor’s office of the ICTR, Rejean Tremblay and André Delvaux, during his final interrogations in October and November of 2005. The mainstream media would have us believe he killed himself or was killed by his fellow Hutu 'genocidaires'. Is there any precedent for the Hutu government’s killing its own? None that I know of. But what about the RPF? And would they reach outside the terrorized territory of Rwanda to enforce their savage domination of such a false history?
Here’s more Ruzibiza on RPF ‘excesses’:
—The years 1997 and 1998
The assassinations of Spanish volunteers
On the 18th of January 1997, Captain Justus Majyambere, in collaboration with sub-Lieutenants Kabalisa and Karenzi, as well as ten other soldiers commanded by Colonel Kayumba Nyamwasa, in the city of Ruhengeri, killed the Spanish volunteers working for the NGO, Medicus del Mundo (Doctors of the World). These murders were blamed on infiltrators (Hutus who were supposed to have slipped back into Rwanda from Congo or elsewhere to fight against the RPF government—nb), though it was the DMI that had ordered the killings. (pp 402-403)—
And in another episode in the real and on-going Rwandan genocide (i.e., the destruction of the Rwandan Revolution and its people), we are brought back into Belgium for some chilling parallels to the Uwilingiyimana murder:
—The assassination of Griet Bosmans by the RPA (the Army of the RPF—nb)
On the night of 27-28 April 1997, Mme Griet Bosmans, the Belgian directress of the secondary school of Muramba in the commune of Satintsyi, perished along with 17 or her students and 4 other people under the bullets of the soldiers of the 9th battalion who had been sent by Lieutenant John Cassius and commanded by Camille Zuba. This company of 15 soldiers was from the special platoon that had been formed in the sub-prefecture of Ngororero.
There were two companies of the 9th battalion there. One was commanded by Capt. Eugène Rukundo and the other by Capt. Christopher Twibogora. These two companies were located just two minutes walk from one another. There was even a third company not far from there, that of Capt. Steven Rukara. None of these soldiers lifted a finger to aid the directress and the group that accompanied her. The DMI suspected Griet Bosmans of furnishing information on APR atrocities to the [RPF] minister of the interior, Seth Sendashonga. On top of that, the DMI believed she was informing various movements within the Catholic Church of what was happening inside Rwanda. This is why she was killed. (p 403)—
So the RPF not only has a nasty record of killing those Belgian Catholics they suspected of being snitches for the Church, but they killed those they suspected of snitching off the ‘rebel forces’ to their own government. And, as in the case of interior minister Sendashonga, the RPF went so far (to Nairobi, in Kenya, this time) as to kill off their own ex-ministers when they took an AMA (against military advice) early retirement from the RPF’s program of sledge-hammer social engineering. And though Sendashonga was not the only RFP official to be wacked by Kagame and Co., his death is particularly sordid in the ruthlessness of its execution and aftermath. For the gory details see:
—Alleged murderers of Sendashonga mysteriously die one after another— [http://www.inshuti.org/sendash4.htm]
From all I’ve read, it seems the RPF, between 1 October 1990 when they invaded Rwanda from Uganda, and the present day when they are still conducting national security operations in Eastern Congo and throughout Africa, has, apparently, extended its Witness Destruction Program into Northern Europe. For the past 16 years they have been responsible for the violent deaths of literally millions upon millions of defenseless African civilians, and their cold reach is becoming global. Yet most Western Leftish intellectuals are quite content to confine the whole bloody mess to Rwanda and to mid-1994 when—
“Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 100 days by the Habyarimana government and its Extremist ‘Hutu Power’ supporters.”—
I guess it should not be surprising that Yugoslavia, or the ex- or former-Yugoslavia, as it instantly became known with the very first secession of the very first Republic, Slovenia, in 1991—being made up almost entirely of White folks—that Yugoslavia should now catch more attention than Rwanda. Today Western crimes in the The Balkans are sexier than those dans les Milles Collines, or all of Africa, really, from Angola to Zimbabwe.
And then there’s the Slobo Factor: Slobodan Milosevic has been demonstrating daily, to full-houses back home in Serbia, but empty-heads everywhere else, just what the history of his country and his people really is. The details of the Balkan wars as revealed by his defense witnesses have reduced the prosecution's charges to the blitherings of over-paid bureau-crackpots. The pride of might is not enough to invalidate the expressed will of a people to support its revolution and defend its history. So the thrice elected President of Serbia and Yugoslavia—criminally, violently removed from office in a US-backed coup that threatened Serbia with bloody civil war in October 2000 (and was a kind of dress-rehearsal for the coup in Florida later that same year)—the very existence of President Milosevic, a life that all the Cruise missile at the disposal of the visibly demented General Wesley Clark could not extinguish, has become such an insult and an almost quotidian humiliation to the West’s demo-toxic mass media and moribund public egg-head culture that even those who used to refer to him as a 'Stalinist strong-man' and to the Serbs as 'congenital brutes' have had to come around with a sort of limp-wristed support.
It wasn’t that long ago—back in the Spring of 1999 when NATO was terror-bombing Yugoslavia over Kosovo—that the ‘Liberal’ LA Times syndicated columnist, Wm Pfaff, suggested that the people of Serbia/Yugoslavia deserved to be slaughtered from altitude by NATO for nothing more than supporting with their votes the 'monster' Milosevic. I haven’t read much Pfaff since, but this rationale for mass murder is all too common today. It’s called the war on terrorism, and Milosevic has become Saddam and bin Laden and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Hugo Chavez and Robt Mugabe and Kim Jong Il.
And even before Slobodan Milosevic became a target for Western slander, the media and their Human Rights minders were treating President Juvénal Habyarimana and his Rwandan Revolution, in the sodden words of comrade Hitchens, as ‘filthy’ ‘racist’ ‘genocidaire’ ‘clients of French imperialism’.(4) Sad to say, unlike in the case of president Milosevic’s successful evasion of Nato’s WsMD, the Soviet-made SAM 16s that the RPF had been trained to aim and fire at Barry Goldwater Air Force base in Arizona as part of a US DoD program, the IMET (International Military Education and Training) and the Enhanced IMET, found their mark, killing the Hutu presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, their entourages (including the chief of staff of the Rwandan Army), and signaling the RPF’s finally offensive that brought about the deaths of millions of innocent Africans. So while the Left continues to demur that the US didn’t do enough to stop the Rwandan genocide, in historical fact, the US couldn’t have done more to bring it about, then cover it up.
Yet as the lies that underpin the demonization of these leaders, more easily to rationalize the violent revocation of their nations’ sovereignty, the ghastly murder of their people, and the perpetual indenture of whatever is left of their so-called ‘rogue’ or ‘failed’ states, may have long since been exposed, this disinformation continues to be the daily bread of Leftish geopolitical discourse. Very few serious political thinkers or storytellers seem at all concerned about getting past—
“Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 100 days by the Habyarimana government and its Extremist ‘Hutu Power’ supporters.”—
So what about the Rwandan Revolution?
Having read and written a bit about Rwanda from here in Paris, I was astonished at the miserable ignorance that is so rigorously maintained on the Left with regard to the targeted assassination of this tiny, densely populated Central African revolution.(5) Even the term ‘revolution’ is seldom used in reference to the First and Second Rwandan Republics of Grégoire Kayibanda and Juvénal Habyarimana. Yet during the first seventeen years of Habyarimana’s majoritarian Hutu rule, from 1973 until the RPF invasion of 1990, Rwanda went from last to first in GNP for the countries of the Great Lakes region, Burundi, Zaire, Uganda and Tanzania.(6)
But the implications of the term ‘revolution’, that a government that once dictated to the special interests of tiny feudal and business elites now dictates to the general interests of the vast majority of its people, fraught as it is with communist overtones, just did not fit the post-Soviet lexicon which had ‘Communism’ replaced by ‘Terrorism’ as enemy du jour, and majoritarian national defenses invalidated as ‘Genocides’.
Yet ‘Communism’ was not a foreign term in Rwandan history. In 1930, the first Rwandan Bishop, Léon Classe, warned that
—. . . any effort to replace Tutsi chiefs with ‘uncouth’ Hutus ‘would lead the entire state directly into anarchy and to bitter anti-European communism,’ . . .—(7)
And, as if to make Bishop Classe seem prescient, President Habyarimana’s single party, the MRND (Mouvement révolutionaire national pour le développement—after 1989 and the beginning of ‘democratic reforms’, ‘révolutionaire’ was changed to ‘républicain’ and ‘démocratie’ was tagged on at the end), which came to power in 1973, based its constitution on the constitution of the Communist Party of North Korea.
So was Rwanda’s a real revolution—like Cuba’s or Nicaragua’s? Or was it just, as Hitchens and Kagame would have us believe, an authoritarian, ethnic-based dictatorship supported by on a 35 year old and on-going genocide against its former (devinely ordained) aristocratic rulers.
Hitchen’s 80 proof venom is hard to take seriously—after all, he once said that the same people who believe there are no WsMD in Iraq, believe there are no mass graves in Kosovo. He backed the KLA, the Bosnian mujahadeen, and Chalabi’s Iraqi Council—but Trotzis will be Trotzis, and Hitch’s always been about the perpetual (counter-) revolution, no matter how many indigenous lives it costs. But his fronting the blood-thirsty Kagame’s Rwandan nightmare is quite serious.
Dig what my friend Maitre Tiphaine Dickson, who served as a defense counsel before the ICTR in Arusha, had to say on this Fanonesque revolution:
—. . . everything the people of Rwanda built with their hands during ‘umuganda’—that's "work for the people"—every Saturday, everybody, including the President, for years, worked on farms, roads, schools. But now it's all about profits and weapons. And invading the Congo—South Lebanon style—sous pretexte qu'il faut arreter les Interahamwe et les "genocidaires"—3.5 million dead, and I don't see no award-winning books about them.—(8)
They used to say that Rwanda was the only African country where the roads, the education and public health systems, the postal service, electicity and telephones all worked all the time. Not today. Because the new revolution, Kagame’s version of Newt Gingrich’s New American Revolution, or the one in the New Compradors’ Serbia/Montenegro that replaced Socialist Serbia/Yugoslavia, is one where everything the people built has been sold off to private foreign investors. Here’s a view of the new Rwanda from atop a Michigan waste capitalist’s dumpster:
— (a sign reads) "Privatization: A Loss? No Way." Another one declares that privatization fights laziness, poverty, smuggling, and unemployment. This is the good news: Rwanda is engaged in Africa’s most ambitious privatization campaign. It may be the most ambitious and systematic of any country anywhere.—(9)
So why wasn’t the Rwandan revolution worth the Left’s salvation? After all, it predated the Nicaraguan revolution and was a contemporary of the Cuban Revolution. But then, it is in Black Africa, huh.
Why is it that the Left, especially the Trotzi and Libertarian Left in the US, continues to act as if American Fascism began with the current Bush Reich? Does Bush 43 really have the worst Human Rights record of any president in the nation’s history?
Worse than Truman/Eisenhower’s 2.5 million-victim Korean genocide?
Worse than the Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon multi-million-victim Vietnam/Cambodia/Loas genocide?
Worse than Carter’s HR record? The Nobel Peace Prize winner gave the world the bloody Nicaraguan Contras and the anti-Soviet Mujahadeen—these Frankensteinian creations of America’s state religion, Christian anti-Communism, then seamlessly transmogrified into CIA/Mossad narco-terrorist puppets like the Taliban and al Qaeda—and like the KLA and RPF.
Worse than Clinton’s? This great, smarmy humanitarian destroyed the welfare system that FDR and LBJ were so proud of while further lowering the capital gains tax, gave unlimited new surveillance powers to police agencies (relaxed wire tap restrictions, degraded rules of evidence, increased restrictions on criminal defense in the promotion of victims rights, etc.,), and reinstituted capital punishment on the federal level (though he gutlessly handed off his first victim, Mexican drug slanger Luis Garza, to the highly-experienced executioner, Bush 43), criminalized the USSR, dismembered Yugoslavia, regularly and consistently bombed Iraq, and personally sponsored the counter revolutionary slaughter of millions of Central Africans on the orders of his Aspen club drinking buddy, Paul Kagame, and in the mining interests of, among other homeboys, American Mining Fields (AMF) of Hope, Arkansas.
But, hey, this Rwanda story, in 2006, is just an old, cold bowl of chili, right? Today’s new rootless red/brown radicals don’t pitch their investigations of Western Imperialist aggression as far back as the early 90s, or even the mid-90s, and are all about Stop the Fucking War in Iraq/Stop the Fucking Genocide in Sudan—NOW!
Here’s something professor Chomsky said about Rwanda:
—. . . [W]e don't see, we prefer not to see the horrible crimes that are going on all the time, which we could do something about easily. So take say, we just passed the 10th anniversary of the Rwanda massacres, which were pretty horrible, maybe 8,000 people killed a day for a 100 days. Pretty awful massacre. And there's a lot of wringing of hands and lamentations about how we didn't do anything about it, we didn't intervene, we didn't send military forces, and so on, wasn't that terrible.—(10)
It should be noted that this is sampled from the same interview in Left Hook, ‘Civilization v Barbarism’, where, re the Serb ‘genocide’ of Muslims at Srebrenica almost exactly one year after the Rwandan G, Prof Chomsky suggests the Bosnian Serbs ‘trucked out’ the women and children who’d survived the Serbs’ genocidal ‘retaliation’ for the Bosnian Muslim Army’s merciless slaughter, over the previous three years, of more than 1200 innocent Yugoslav civilians around the UN ‘safe haven’ of Srebrenica—but let’s let the cunning linguist from MIT speak for himself:
—They trucked out all the women and children, they kept the men inside, and apparently slaughtered them. The estimates are thousands of people slaughtered.—(11)
Now, someone of Chomsky’s experience chooses his words carefully—both the words he uses and those he doesn’t use. If he’d known that the Serbs used dozens of buses to evacuation the civilians, regardless of age, ethnicity or gender, from this silver mining town that had days before been abandoned by most of the Bosnian Muslim military, would he still have used the term ‘trucked out’? And does his ignorance of the fact that ‘thousands of men’ and boys were not, in fact, killed in Srebrenica excuse his use of the term ‘slaughter’? Your call—but me, I don’t think so.
Trivialization is a common rhetorical ploy for hiding ignorance, and one should really appreciate that the term ‘genocide’, which is rarely applied to the US/UK/Israeli-backed Central African campaign of ‘population management’ for control of the vast resources of Congo, does not occur in Chomsky’s description of Rwanda or Bosnia.
So Rwanda was ‘massacres’, not a ‘genocide’. But the stat of 800,000 killed in 100 days still sticks with the Wizard of MIT. Why does he cheapen the Rwandan death toll, begun by a Western-backed invasion in October 1990, by comparing it to the number of children who are dying in Southern Africa as the result of curable illnesses and malnutrition? He compares, if not conflates, the two atrocities by stating that the West, the civilized world could ‘do something about [them] easily.’ Send more money, guns and pharmaceuticals, is what my Vietnam-era rabbi suggests here—as do most of the new humanists, like Nicholas Kristof, Samatha Power, and UN General Dallaire. But, in fact, it was the heavily armed Ugandan exile force, the RPF, equipped and trained by the US and its proxy, Uganda, that did the lion’s share of slaughtering the innocents in Rwanda; and it’s Big Pharma, with its insidious African drug experiments, like Pfizer’s camps where young people infected with strains of epidemic meningitis are kept sick unto death so they might be used to test the Viagra-maker’s latest high-end wonder cure for a disease rarely manifest in the developed world, and its publicly-financed dispersal of cyto-toxic medicines as palliatives for the chronic malnutrition, the desperate want of clean water and the absence of any effective public health infrastructures, as if a virus were responsible for the chronic poverty and other residual failures of neo-colonialism—it is Chomsky’s two ‘easy’ remedies that are responsible for the current iatrogenocide sweeping the resource-rich, yet abjectly miserable, African continent.
So here are two quite different thinkers from the Left: Chomsky (anti-Bush, pro ABB) and Hitchens (pro-Bush, anti-Clinton), and yet they’re creepily close on Rwanda. Strangely enough they seem to bicker like Oscar and Felix on details, while being all wet kisses on the essentials of such dossiers as Milosevic’s ‘plausible’ crimes in Kosovo (to Hitchens, Milosevic was a ‘socialist nationalist’ who became a 'National Socialist' over Bosnia and Kosovo with his dream of a 'Greater Serbia'; to Chomsky, Milosevic’s treatment of Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo Albanians was equivalent to Indonesia’s treatment of East Timor’s civilian population, and if it was appropriate for Nato to bomb Yugoslavia over Kosovo, then so too would it have been appropriate to bomb Jakarta, London and Washington, DC); and, though they disagreed on the attackers’ motives and the victims’ appropriate responses, they were unquestionably agreed on the essential responsibility of ‘Arab terrorism’ for the attacks of 911.
Are there other examples of this sort of narcissistic gullibility rotting out otherwise intelligent Leftish critiques? It’s too late in the day to run a lot of them by you, so I’ll just lay down a few here:
First, there’s my old friend Dr. Michael Parenti, who is a much harder leftist than the two above cited public thinkers. Some have even called Parenti a ‘Stalinist’, and he serves with me on the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic. So, on Yugoslavia at least, Dr P is a right guy—no matter what that fat Boston he-bitch and his covey of Zionist quislings have to say!
Using a Chomskyesque rhetorical model, Parenti weighed in on Rwanda and Yugoslavia back in 1999 like this:
— While showing themselves ready and willing to bomb Yugoslavia on behalf of an ostensibly oppressed minority in Kosovo, U.S. leaders have made no moves against . . . the Hutu for the mass murder of a half million Tutsi in Rwanda -- not to mention the French who were complicit in that massacre.—(12)
It was some time ago that Parenti wrote this—pre-911. Yet despite expressing to me, while on a visit to Paris in 2002, his sincere desire to learn more about what really happened in Rwanda, I have not read or heard of anything else by him on the subject. And his attempt to implicate France in the Rwandan genocide, which is all the fashion here on the Elysian Fields (‘Nous sommes tous les génocidaire’ is number one with a machete on the French Hit Parade), is very surprising coming from the cosmopolite I got to know while touring the bookstores around République.
My hunch is this genre of Franco-phobia, shared by many on the US Left even before the advent of the pro-Iraq interventionist Right’s ‘freedom fries’, ‘freedom toast’ and ‘freedom tongue-suck’, results more from Thierry Meyssan-envy than disagreement with any African policy enunciated by the late president François Mitterand or the current lame-frog embezzler Jack Chirac. Meyssan’s Reseau Voltaire’s posted a quick invalidation of the US government’s preposterous 911 cover story about 19 Arab hijackers—based on the brazen lie Don Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers tried so carelessly to fob off on a terrified US public about ‘a hijacked Boeing 757, AA flt 77, crashing into the Pentagon’ that was exposed in early February 2002 on their web site ‘Hunt the Boeing’. Later in two books, instant best-sellers in France, titled in their English editions ‘The Big Lie’ and ‘Pentagate’, Meyssan quite credibly purported that almost any explanation for the events of that dark September Tuesday, including assigning responsibility for the attacks to ET-generated holograms or The Creature from the Green Latrine, when taken in the context of US geopolitical ambitions in the Arab oil regions, is more probable, ever more possible than what has come to be seen as the ludicrously potted US government/Mossad version of those gruesome events. But Left critics from Tony Judt in the NYRB and Diana Johnstone in the European press jealously accused Meyssan of everything from opportunism to Holocaust-denying anti-Semitism to keeping pedophilic pornography—with typically French anti-Americanism a given.
But the shoddily cobbled explanation for this greatest terrorist attack on US soil—as mind-buggering as was the Timothy McVeigh lone truck rental theory for the Oklahoma City bombing (when there are live network news videos extant of a second and a third bomb being found INSIDE the Alfred Murrah Bldg—this video was shown live once and never again, and can now be found on the Power Hour’s ‘911 In Plane Site’—http://www.911inplanesite.com/). I’ve found it a handy indicator of critical acumen just where a thinker/scribbler accepts the government’s explanations and where he calls them: Most who buy the Clinton/Albright ‘What genocide? I thought Rwanda was one of the Charelles’ line on the on-going Central African holocaust, also swallow the Bush/Cheney/Sharon ‘Those irresponsible Ay-rab Muslims were responsible’ chum, hook, line, sinker and rod and reel. Whether it’s from the Right: ‘See? We DO need more military spending!’ Or from the Left: ‘Let’s hear it for the immiserated and colonized finally striking back against the truly miserable neo-colonialists!’: Gullibility knows neither political party nor intellectual bounds. And in his really quite informative book, ‘The Terrorism Trap’, Michael Parenti seems to indicate that he is a full subscriber to the mainstream narrative on how and why the September 11, 2001, attacks went down.
None of these American Leftists has sought to make the eerie comparison between the terrorist attacks on NYC and Washington DC and the 6 April 1994 double assassination of the Rwandan and Burundian presidents by terrorists of the RPF—though the two events are married by a continuing, iron-clad refusal to investigate what is every day becoming more obvious: that these were false-flag military strikes carried out by private contractors, who had profoundly infiltrated both nations’ governments and military establishments, as part of much larger aggressions in the wars to globalize the forces of waste capitalism.
Ed Herman of the U of Penn is another example of an American left liberal who, after being referred to some of the best sources of information on Africa, like Canadian defense attorneys Tiphaine Dickson and Christopher Black, continued to turn his back on the real Rwandan story—satisfied to rest his critique on the ‘800,000 Tutsis/100 day genocide’ scenario. In his recent critical piece on The Hague Tribunal and its current chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, Herman does not even once mention the intimate connections between the ICTY and the ICTR or that their shared prosecutor Del Ponte was recently replaced as chief prosecutor in Arusha for suggesting that the African ad hoc tribunal could gain some international creds by prosecuting members of Rwanda’s ruling RPF for war crimes—a gambit like her much touted but effetely symbolic arrest of Croatian mass murderer General Ante Gotovina, the neo-Ustashi who, along with a legion of MPRI advisers, led Croatia’s 'Operation Storm' in the Fall of 1995 to cleanse 200,000 Yugoslavs from the Bosnian/Croatian military border region, The Krajina—universally agreed to have been the largest single ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the war. Even in his genteel upbraiding of Del Ponte for diminishing Croatian war crimes, he gives her a total pass on her collaboration with the current Kagame dictatorship in Kigali and her suppression of Abdul Ruzibiza’s report to the ICTR on the RPF’s responsibility for the double-assassination of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi on 6 April 1994—an event all sides acknowledge as having set off the monstrous exactions that brought bloody regime change to that small country.
Then there’s the case of Linda Milvern and her champion Jon Pilger. Milvern is a British writer who was awarded prizes, just like her American counterparts, Philip Gourevitch, Samantha Power and Alison Des Forge, for her sensational, even lurid, but totally a-historical tales of the Rwandan Genocide. Here’s a taste of how hyperbole (one million in one month?) masks ignorance:
—In April 1994 up to a million people were slaughtered in Rwanda during a murderous campaign of horrifying efficiency. The ferocity of the killing and the cruelty inflicted on defenseless people has no comparison in modern times.
‘Conspiracy to Murder’ is the story of how that genocide was planned. It reveals how, from as early as 1990, the political, military and administrative leadership of Rwanda became involved in planning the complete extermination of the Tutsi population. A vicious race hate campaign filled the media, urging Hutu's to kill; a network of roadblocks was devised to prevent any escape; civil-defense groups were established throughout the country, with eventually every third Hutu being armed; half a million machetes and other agricultural tools, along with 85,000 tonnes' worth of AK47s and grenades, were imported into Rwanda and distributed country-wide in the year leading up to the genocide.—
James Frey’s ‘Million Little Pieces’ could take bullshitting leçons from this twisted sister’s ‘Million Little Machete Murders’. All of her sinister suggestions of this Hutu conspiracy to commit genocide against the Tutsi, when removed from the frame of the October 1990 and April 1994 US-backed RPF (Tutsi, to her) aggressions, allow for only one motivation for the Rwandan people’s national self-defense: the Hutu were pure evil. Why would an 85% majority, holding state power, want to exterminate a tiny, at most 14%, minority, while killing a large part of its own population, unless they were possessed by the devil?
Here’s how General Augusten Ndindiliyimana, in our ‘The General’s Book on Rwanda’, sees the irrationality of positions like Milvern’s,
— Since two opposing forces cannot plan the same operation at the same time, it seems obvious that the RPF, which initiated the events by attacking Rwanda in October 1990, by assassinating President Juvenal Habyarimana, and by pushing the war in Kigali and on all the other fronts, is the only ‘strategic planner’ of this tragedy. The atrocities reported were due directly to the insensate war they imposed, and to their determined desire to seize power at any cost; the extreme conditions caused by the chaotic situation that resulted from the decapitation of the Rwandan State with the assassination of President Habyarimana plunged the country into anarchy, panic and disorder. (from Chapter One, The Invasion—posted elsewhere on CM/P)—
Yet the darling of the Down-Under abo hunters (distant cousins to the Rwandan gorilla poachers, I’m sure) turned Greenish-Brownish Leftish-Trotzis, Jon Pilger, who, not unlike Chomsky or Hitchens, found Milosevic a ‘brute’ and a ‘vicious tyrant’, ‘finds Melvern’s anile and livid critique very much the cat’s ass:
—'Linda Melvern's work on Rwanda is in the finest traditions of investigative journalism. ‘Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide’ extends her previous book, ‘A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide’, a brilliant investigation into the tragedy for which the 'international community' was itself responsible. With testimony from witnesses and access to documents previously unseen, she tells an epic and shaming story of culpability and missed opportunities.'—(14)
So who are the real ‘jackals that the jackals would despise’?
In sampling Pablo Neruda’s poem, ‘I’m explaining a few things’, for his Nobel Prize acceptance lecture, Harold Pinter used these carrion-eating wild dogs to describe certain world leaders who make shocking and awful war against the poor and powerless for no better reason than to enrich those of their supporters who already control all the world’s wealth anyway. Could it be that Pinter didn’t see deeply enough into the illness that is wasting the world away? This moral tuberculosis, that is putrefying the human spirit in the name of Human Rights and consuming all life force for the sake of progress in the techniques of destruction, afflicts many more souls, and to a far greater degree, than just the perverted puppet heads, like Bush and Blair, who are paraded in front of a dazed and manic-depressive public as its leaders. Those regents of contemplation and models for creation and liberation, the artists and philosophers and scientists and religionists, they, too, seem to be greatly afflicted with a righteous blindness induced by craven compromise with the probable and the payable. Pinter, himself, more than once in his lecture, morally equates ‘Soviet crimes’ with the crimes of ‘Western corporate imperialism’. But only someone who has effectively removed himself from History and pretends to observe all human suffering from some Olympian corporate skybox, could strike such an unbalanced equation. Actions taken in the purely economic interest of a tiny over-privileged elite—and taken with the intention of giving that tiny oligarchy the appearance of being a great general democracy—can never have the same moral mass as those actions taken in the social and political interests of the great majority.
That is why any geopolitical analysis that does not consider the true history of the events in Central Africa in the last decade of the 20th Century—and not just that mawkish, ethno-mythological instrumentalized version that is flogged by the carney head-spinners of the Human (Victims’) Rights lobby—is incapable of bringing sufficient critical weight to bear on its subject to be truly and globally relevant.
In a recent article posted on CM/P (The Dallaire Genocide Fax: a Fabrication—http://cirqueminime.blogcollective.com/blog/_archives/2005/12/6/1437840.html) Canadian defense attorney before the ICTR, Christopher Black, revealed that there is yet more evidence of the cooked intelligence (in this instance from Britain’s MI6) that has, for the last ten years, had the ‘Habyarimana [called the ‘Hutu Power’] government of Rwanda and “extremist” Hutus’ planning for and carrying out the so-called ‘Tutsi Genocide of One Hundred Days’. This further debunking of the ubiquitous and emotionally manipulative notion of ‘the Rwandan Genocide’, which along with Osama’s al Qaeda perpetrating 9/11, Iraq’s WsMD, Zimbabwe’s ‘racist’ land reform, Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear threats, and Serbia’s ‘genocide of Muslims’ in Bosnia and Kosovo, has become an almost universal article of (bad) faith, has rendered the consideration of Rwandan political history—and who’d a thought that Africans were even capable of having a political history?—essential to any critical understanding of, or effective struggle against, the New Thousand Year Reich.
Those who continue to accept and diffuse the Human Rights/Victims’ Rights legend about how
—“Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 100 days by the Habyarimana government and its Extremist ‘Hutu Power’ supporters.”—
who continue to see the Hutus as 'Tropical Nazis' and the Tutsis as 'Central Africa’s Jews', not only defile the memories of the millions upon millions of innocent people sacrificed, then and now, as burnt offering to the gods of surplus value in the US/UK/Israeli/UN-engineered and executed holocaust for the global domination of strategic resources and the ruthless and unrelenting nuclear-armed control of all criminal advantage over the ‘untermenchen’ of the ‘developing world’; but they further doom, damn and undo themselves as the collaborator/victims (the shanked punk snitches) of those savage mongrels who live to dine on dead human flesh.
Mick Collins
CirqueMinime/Paris
Friday, 13 January, 2006
Notes:
1 From ‘Bin Laden’, by Immortal Technique/Mos Def.
2 The Guardian--
Body of genocide witness found in river--
· Accused former Rwanda minister feared for his life--
· War crimes tribunal would have heard key evidence--
Jeevan Vasagar in Nairobi--
Saturday December 24, 2005--
DNA tests have confirmed his identity but the cause of death has not yet been established because the body appears to have been mangled by passing boats. Mr Uwilingiyimana's hands were severed and his wedding ring is missing.--
"This is either because we are dealing with professional murderers or it's just by chance, that a boat cut off his hands," [his lawyer, Sven Mary, said.]--
His final interview took place on November 18 and he failed to appear for a scheduled session on the day he disappeared.
3 Ruzibiza, Abdul. ‘Rwanda: L’histoire secrete’. Éditions du PANAMA, 2005. Pp 334-335
4 Multilateralism and Unilateralism
A self-canceling complaint.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 18, 2002, at 2:48 PM ET
http://www.slate.com/id/2075659/
In another episode, Madeleine Albright was instructed to veto a Czech motion calling for strengthening U.N. forces in Rwanda to "pre-empt" the genocidal plan prepared by Rwanda's racist government.
A War to Be Proud Of
From the September 5 / September 12, 2005 issue: The case for overthrowing Saddam was unimpeachable. Why, then, is the administration tongue-tied?
by Christopher Hitchens
09/05/2005, Volume 010, Issue 47
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/995phqjw.asp?pg=1
and the génocidaire faction in Rwanda had decided that it could probably get away with putting its long-fantasized plan of mass murder into operation.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/995phqjw.asp?pg=2
French statecraft, for example, was uniformly hostile to any resistance to any aggression, and Paris even sent troops to rescue its filthy clientele in Rwanda. And some on the hard left and the brute right were also opposed to any exercise, for any reason, of American military force.
5 Though there seems to be some new hope in the recent publication of a book in French by Pierre Péan: Noire fureurs, blanc menteurs—Rwanda 1990-1994. Mille et une nuits, Paris, 2005.
6 Péan, op cit, p 45.
7 Cited in Philip Gourevitch, ‘We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families—Stories from Rwanda; Picador, USA, 1998. p56.
8 Cf a personal email dated 12 January 2004
9 http://www.gbri.org/thinkpiece/rwanda.htm
Rwanda: A Privatization Revolution - In a Most Unlikely Place, by Lawrence W. Reed
10 http://iraqmortality.org/civilization-versus-barbarism-an-interview-with-noam-chomsky
From : Civilization versus Barbarism? : An Interview with Noam Chomsky
Source: Left Hook, by M. Junaid Alam and Noam Chomsky, December 23, 2004.
11 Ibid.
12 http://www.michaelparenti.org/yugoslavia.html
Dr Michael Parenti, The Rational Destruction of Yugoslavia, Nov 1999
13 http://www.amahoro.nl/linda/bookctm.htm
Linda Melvern, Conspiracy to Murder – The Rwandan Genocide. Verso, 2004.
14 http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Militarization_America/Empire_MOW.html
--Carl Boggs, Empire and Globalization, 2003, ‘the counterinsurgency ethnic slaughter in Rwanda
Why is it that at the beginning of 2006, with perhaps the largest international consensus since Vietnam '69 on the illegality, immorality, and futility of the US’s ‘War on Terror’, especially that bus and truck company currently engaged in the Iraqi theatre—and soon to be (if not already) visiting venues in Syria and Iran—why is it that nearly all Leftish critiques remain morally free-floating, ungrounded in 20th Century history, or just, in idiotic ecstasy, untethered from the Reality Principle? From Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, and Ed Herman, to that apostate hic-cup Chris Hitchens and his addlepated strain of stillborn-again-Zionist Capitol Hillbillies—whether critics of or apologists for Israel—or just arful dodgers of any discussion at all of that little nuclear-armed settlers state whose continued existence as an Imperialist outpost in among the Arab oil emirates has been the defining concern behind the repackaged rationale for fear-driven Western war strategies from ‘anti-Communism’ to ‘anti-Terrorism’—none has been able to achieve sufficient critical remove from this unreflective dread of majoritarian domination over individual interests to fully appreciate that their intellectual passivity toward, even their acceptance of anti-Communism has been the chief enabler for Liberalism’s unspeakable collaboration with Fascism, and represents the seminal betrayal of popular faith in the late-Century’s fundamental struggles to create and sustain rational and decent mass societies.
The Left has had no trouble supporting the quadrennial cotillions, sponsored by the multinational financial, commercial, military and media aristocracies, in which the vigorously stoked feudal longings of the ‘general public’ are briefly requited by illusory spectacles in which the democratic franchise is turned into melodramatic computer-simulations of the electoral process—a kind of political karaoke. And in its anti-war-ness, which has prioritized certain individual and political human rights (e.g., the right to criticize or to be free from political tyranny) over certain other social and economic human rights (e.g., the rights to education, health care, a job, or a life safe and free from military aggression and violence), the Left has made certain wars more acceptable than others. (Iraq: Hell, no. Bosnia/Kosovo: Uh, yeah, well, now . . . maybe not. Rwanda/Congo: Nigger, what?) It has firmly locked itself into a minoritarian (elitist) class bias that effectively guarantees that the private sector’s sole surviving means for transferring and accumulating public wealth, a malignant obsession with the creation of a global free market which trades principally in global terror, global crime and global war, and which effectively turns human productive forces and other natural resources toward their own destruction, will make the wasting, socio-toxic, unregenerate impulses of criminal greed and militarily-maintained chaos the fixed and unalterable facts of what little future the world might have left.
A willful, even belligerent, ignorance of the fundamentality of the yet unresolved steel-cage death dialectic between Capitalism (political antecedent to Fascism) and its negation, Revolutionary Socialism (political antecedent to Communism), is nicely demonstrated by the rehabilitation of the once ridiculous state religion known as Christian Anti-Communism, passing through the socially corrosive ‘Neo-Liberalism’ of Reagan/Bush/Clinton that broke down and criminalized life in the Soviet Union, the Yugoslav Federation, and Central Africa (just off the top of my desk), with an as yet uncounted toll in immiseration and untimely death, into the now-trendy ‘Neo-conservatism’. With a Leo Straussian intellectual make-over, self-awarded ‘Nobel prizes’ in economics and other social sciences (disciplines not originally included in the Swedish dynamite guy’s will), but never breaking with their neo-feudal Judeo-Christian cosmogony of rugged individualism, a bunch of glassy-eyed Moonies and sweaty, snake-jerking Baptists (white with foam) have been refurbished into serious geopolitical players.
But, then, the campus cops have been too far off into their strawberry-glazed French cruller buzzes to file anything like anti-social behavior charges against these latter day saints: Anti-socialism being pretty much a bipartisan attitude, Professor Chomsky was once heard to speculate that Stalin was probably a creation, like Osama bin Laden, of the Western intelligence services; and Ed Herman, the Wharton Business School professor emeritus, joined his MIT writing partner and the over-rated stupid white filmmaker of faux Left documentaries, in frequently implying that the Socialist and intellectually prodigious Serbs (Belgrade has more PhDs per capita, by my count, than all of Boston and Berkeley combined), under the ‘thuggish’, ‘Stalinian’ dictatorship of thrice-democratically-elected President Slobodan Milosevic, were somehow genetically prone to violence, especially violence against women, and as guilty as, or, perhaps, just slightly less guilty for the Balkan carnage of the 90s than either the Croats or the Bosnian Muslims. Chomsky then, in a battle of wits with a morally-challenged The Guardian interviewer, where he attempted to deny her imputations that, by questioning their real existence, he’d actually told the truth about the alleged death camps and genocide in Bosnia, posited that innocent (Muslim) civilians were premeditatedly slaughtered after being forcefully removed from their homes by Bosnian Serb soldiers at Srebrenica, and that the Bosnian Muslims made up the majority of the victims in that war—and, thus, that the Serbs made up the majority of the ‘genocidaires’. None of this, of course, has any basis in the historical record and can be easily assigned to anti-communist demonology—or, what Chomsky and Herman warned us against in ‘Manufacturing Consent’, over-exposure to The New York Times.
—But wait, you say. Chomsky never said there was a ‘genocide at Srebrenica’.
—Yeah? But he never said there wasn’t, either. . . . Just hang on a second.
The Left’s betrayal of anti-Fascism for anti-Communism has some old and putrid roots. But to keep from losing a lot of the kids in the audience, let’s just look at the end of WWII: Check out how General Luther Silbert, General Omar Bradley’s head of intelligence, snuck German General Reinhard Gehlen, head of Nazi intelligence in the USSR, and about 10,000 of his war criminal compadres into the West to continue Hitler’s war against Soviet Communism; then take a look at how contemporary Military/Settler-State Zionism, once a proud member of the Socialist International, now a tight partner of the Fascist hegemon, has its current ideological head waters in the personage of that Spielbergian or Polanskian mythological hero comme Holocaust Industrialist/survivalist sans pair, Elie Weisel, and his flight outta Auschwitz—but toward the West, away from the liberating Red Army and fast on the Hugo Boss-shod heels of the retreating Nazis. For the true Christian anti-Communist, it has always been a far nobler fate to be crushed under the highly polished boot of a Chopin-loving SS trooper (while manufacturing munitions—however faulty—for the Wehrmacht), than to be liberated by some raggedy-assed, spud-sucking Red.
To see that the anti-Serb sentiments so subtly suggested by Chomsky and Herman, and so corrupting of the Left in general during the 1990s—strangely enough, anti-Slavism was more a Liberal than a Conservative prejudice—was a side-effect of Fascism’s essential anti-Communism, one need only look at the latest output of the Hollywood dream machine: George Clooney’s appeal to the nobler intentions of American narcissism, ‘Goodnight and Good Luck’. One of the victims of Senator Joe McCarthy’s Reds eradication—though Tail-gunner Joe, apparently, had nothing to do, personally, with this case—was a young Air Force Reserve Lieutenant, Milo Radulovich, who in 1953 was separated from the Air Force because of suspicions he might be a security risk (nice-speak for ‘lousy pinko commie rat’). These suspicions were based on Radulovich’s father’s subscription to some Serbian newspapers, one of which had been associated with the American Slav Congress, on the AG’s list as a Communist Organization. The film never specifies the Radulovichs’ national origins, but the Google entry from the Wikipedia stated that Radulovich père was a ‘Yugoslav’, whereas the journals he subscribed to, ‘to keep up with news from home’, were ‘Serb’. I wondered if any of those Croatian Ustashi war criminals, also Yugoslav ex-pats, living around Chicago, were ever called to answer questions about their partisan loyalties.
So in 1953 ‘anti-Communist’ meant ‘anti-Serb’. After the fall of The Wall in 1989, to be ‘anti-Serb’ was to be ‘anti war’, ‘anti genocide’ and ‘pro Human Rights’. Thus the seeds sown after WWII blossomed into the fully hegemonic Fascist world order that Leftists, both neo-Nazis and proto-Trotzis, bemoan and bemoan and . . . bemoan—until the Bundesbank checks from their publishers clear.
Most of today’s public intellectuals haven’t the courage to risk their public esteem by challenging their public’s sense of the obvious or allowing their imaginations to venture beyond the valley of what they coyly call ‘the realm of the probable’—as in: what’s the point of developing public policy vis à vis Israel/Palestine, if there is no probability that policy will be accepted, much less implemented (by Israel, of course)?
Only the probable is popular. Hollywood is all about popularity. Thus real history has become both unpopular and improbable. In the movies, McCarthy’s sin has always been that he falsely charged loyal Americans with being communist agents or fellow travelers. But what about all the real Communists whose real sacrifices in the struggle against racism, social injustice and Fascism are today ignored? The 26 million souls who gave their lives to defeat Hitler, and his Western waste capitalist sponsors, and to give hope back to the millions of living corpses imprisoned in the Nazis’ Central and Eastern European death camps, are minimized as slaves of a foreign, atheistic ideology and a mad tyrant, and their ultimate sacrifice is trivialized as being in the service of ‘re-occupation’ rather than ‘liberation’ in the Hannah Arendt conceit of conflating Communism and Fascism as the same ‘evil totalitarianism’. Is this discounting of such mass heroism not a crime far greater than anything either McCarthy or Ed Murrow—or George Clooney—would even dare consider, much less militate against? No, the only ‘ism’ for all these guys is ‘Americanism’—and, maybe, ‘narcissism’.
The fuck I’m on about? 'I’’s wow. Listen: Bin Laden didn’t blow up the projects. Tell the truth, nigger. It was your nigger. Bush knocked down the towers. Tell the truth, nigger.' (1)
OK, well, here. How can you tell if a scribbler’s got game—if he’s got his heart and soul in what he’s saying?
You heard this one?
“Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 100 days by the Habyarimana government and its Extremist ‘Hutu Power’ supporters.”
Sure you have. These days you read it everywhere, like the warning on a pack of ‘snouts’, and then you go ahead and light up, move on to the next story—right, Rwanda: been there, smoked that, done her—, the next report’s on Iraq or the Middle East or even Sudan (Rwanda-lite, right?). You move on to the next, fresher Genocide.
Now, I’m not trying to play the Left’s—or anybody else’s— concerns for today’s globalization wars cheap. These wars are being fronted by the US and UK, then the EU, and even, after some coy distress, by the UN, as the only salvation for suffering Humanity. And the other side—the enemy, the insurgents, the resistance, the terrorists, the mujahadeen, the Shiite rebels, the Sunnis rebels, the Baathist hold-overs, Hamas, Hezbollah—who’s paying them to blow each other up, level their mosques and take a few GIs, IDFs and Tommy’s with them? Who benefits from the ‘War on Terror’? Who profits—and profits big-time—from what has come to be known as ‘Terrorism’, ‘Arab Terrorism’? You see any real gains being made by ‘Expansionist Political Islam’? Any major Muslim military bases cropping up in your neighborhood? All the government checks, the big ones, seem to be made out to Bechtel and Haliburton/KBR, to the spinmeisters at the Rendon and Lincoln Groups who massage the golden truth into piss-stinking straw, to the death merchants’ best agents over at the Carlyle Group, to Boeing, to Raytheon and to DynCorps, Wackenhut and MPRI, and untold other Private Military Contractors. And the predominant interests being served by this all-out war against the poor are those of Western waste capitalism’s mafiocratic energy, armament and toxic pharmaceutical cabals—or, to use a very fresh-today handle, the ‘meta-group’ of US/Russian/Ukrainian/Israeli ‘God-conscious business men’. You looking to cop a solid Afghan nod right fucking now? Try the street dope in Baghdad.
But—
—“Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 100 days by the Habyarimana government and its Extremist ‘Hutu Power’ supporters.”—
is the unacknowledged model for modern haut couture genocides, like those alleged or stipulated to in slightly more ‘civilized’ (whiter) places like Kosovo, Bosnia, or even in Northern Iraq with Saddam’s supposed genocide of Israel's own White Kurds. See, Arabs still trump Africans. And, of course, the same people who brought you—
“Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 100 days by the Habyarimana government and its Extremist ‘Hutu Power’ supporters.”—
people like Canadian UN General Roméo Dallaire or The New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch or Samatha Power of Harvard or Human Rights Watch-Africa’s Alison Des Forges or Nickolas Kristof of the NY Times, were, until the recent ascension to the Sudanese government and subsequent death in a ‘mysterious (Ugandan) helicopter crash’ of US military proxy John Garang, using this Rwandan Genocide template of Man’s inhumanity to indigenous primitives as agitation and propaganda for even greater militarization of Southern and Western Sudan, Northern Uganda and The Horn of Africa. Why no more humanitarian concern for the bloody deals going down today in the African Great Lakes Region and Congo? Because Central Africa is militarized to the tits, and the natural resources, from gold, oil and diamonds, to coltan and uranium, not leaving out timber and Nile and Congo river water, are all being ruined, ripped and run off with at quite a cost-effective clip, thank you very much.
The Human Rights Left had front-loaded their Stop-the-Fucking-Genocide pitch for more Military Humanism with so many fluffed-up ‘mobile mass graves’, ‘babies roasting on an open fire and jacked-up militias hacking off your nose’, ‘refugees massacred in full flight’, ‘systematic rape and death by humiliation’ scenarios, like the ones that had actually played out in Rwanda between 1990 and 1994, and beyond, that before laying this gruesome mythology over events in Yugoslavia and Iraq, it was necessary to give these New Age Holocausts some Old World cachet by tagging on “Never Again”. But their basic solution is the same as it always has been: Such mass slaughter can be prevented by getting the natives to trade their incredible wealth in natural resources for more lawyers, guns and cyto-toxic pharmaceuticals.
The trouble with working off a faulty unto fallacious premise like—
“Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 100 days by the Habyarimana government and its Extremist ‘Hutu Power’ supporters.”—
is that if your analysis had any historical legs at all to begin with—be it about Iraq, 9/11, AIDS, Marxism or Yugoslavia—this bit of Mad Ave/Mad Albright torque will cut them right off at the knees. Like swinging at a slider with one foot in the bucket, those public intellectuals who flaunt their ignorance of recent events in Rwanda and the rest of Central Africa—like it was some advanced degree in Humanism—by citing this impossible premise, not only don’t get any wood on the ball, they don’t even see from what direction the pitch is coming.
The recent discovery of the body of Juvénal Uwilingiyimana, once the minister of parks in the murdered Habyarimana (Hutu) government of Rwanda, floating in the Charleroi canal in Brussels, when even discussed by the mainstream media, was described as either a suicide or a Hutu genocidaire-on-genocidaire murder meant to silence a potential snitch—all yearnings for credibility in these stories were sated by that threadbare homily—
“Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 100 days by the Habyarimana government and its Extremist ‘Hutu Power’ supporters.”—
A little knowledge may be a dangerous thing, but having a lot of knowledge and still founding a critique on unquestioned, though obvious, disinformation is like biting one’s own critical nuts off to demonstrate what a potent hard-ass critic one is.
For example: In its coverage of the Uwilingiyimana murder, which it calls either self-inflicted or (somewhat to their credit) an unattributed but professional hit, Britain’s The Guardian mentions that the badly decomposed body was made even more difficult to ID because it had had both its hands severed.(2) But given the ideational confinements imposed by—
“Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 100 days by the Habyarimana government and its Extremist ‘Hutu Power’ supporters.”—
The Guardian was forced to surmise that the hands, with wedding band, were removed post mortem by motor boats passing in the canal. How likely is that? Well, 19 young Arabs, armed only with box cutters, hijacked four airliners and flew three of them into major US landmarks without drawing the slightest defensive response from the US military or leaving much if any debris: how likely is that?
You know, Gorilla poachers have been known to cut off the hands of their prey as trophies. Now, gorilla poaching is a big deal in Uganda/Rwanda/Burundi. Maybe some Rwandan gorilla poachers, lost in Belgium, had a gorilla poaching flashback and . . . yeah. Never mind.
Maybe the murderers weren’t gorilla poachers (though I wouldn’t put it past them), but, after winning political power through armed terror and after fifteen years of the most effective population control since the Ice Age, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the putative ‘liberators’ and ‘terminators of the genocide’, who currently run Rwanda under the ruthless command of President ‘Pontius Pilate’ Kagame, the sultan of coltan, don’t seem to have been able to get themselves past what Lt. Abdul Joshua Ruzibiza, a former RPF cadre, describes in his book, Rwanda: L’histoire secrete, as ‘the task of systematically massacring the (Rwandan) population’.(3)
The RPF has a long sheet for killing everyone it encountered in-country. They really didn’t have time to check out ethnicity, tribal affiliations, stuff like that. If you were living in Rwanda when these ersatz ‘maquisards’ showed up in your village, you would most likely not be living there (or anywhere else) when they left. They figured everybody, Tutsi, Hutu or Twa, was either the enemy or a potential witness against them—and they needed to clear much of the land of its over-population to open it up to returning Tutsi ‘nobles’—so, the RPF policy from the jump was ‘waste ‘em all and let god check their IDs’.
Here’s how Ruzibiza describes some of this RPF ‘liberation’. And this happened right after the RPF was supposed to have put an end to the aforementioned trimestorial Rwandan genocide:
[This is all my translation from the French.]
—3 July 1994: The city of Butare fell to the RPF led by Lieutenant Colonel Éric Murokore.
As usual, the killer teams had received new orders. The team of the 157th mobile, that had been active in the cleansing of the populations of the Kibungo and Bugesera regions, had joined up with those units who had carried out the massacre of the populations of Nyabwishongwezi. Several members of this latter group had been scattered in different directions: some stayed in Gabiro to incinerate corpses, others took part with the DMI (RPF’s Directorate of Military Intelligence—big players in the real Rwandan genocide, and the best guess for the Uwilingiyimana murder in Belgium—nb) preparing for the forthcoming massacres in the City of Kigali [the Rwandan capital—nb] by setting up ‘human slaughter houses’ in Masaka, in Kami and in other places. . . . (p 315)—
And then—now, mind you, to Ruzibiza and his supporters in the Human Rights lobby, all these RPF war crimes, whenever and where ever they might have taken place, in Butare or Brussels, are, if not justified, or even ‘understood and forgiven’, at least, better left in 'the memory hole' when considered in the context of—
“Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 100 days by the Habyarimana government and its Extremist ‘Hutu Power’ supporters.”—
More ‘liberation’ from Ruzibiza’s Secret History of Rwanda:
—In Ndera:
There was a platoon of killers from the DMI under the direction of sub-lieutenant Edgard Kirenga. All visitors (to Ndera) became witnesses to the massacres that took place there and could not be allowed to get out. Even the innocent could not be released for fear they would tell someone what they had seen. . . . The only way to escape death was to be sent to some other reception center. . . .
In Ndera as in Masaka, when they had finished piling up the corpses, Lieutenant Colonel Jackson Rwahama and Lieutenant Colonel Karake Karnzi readied the incineration by sending for trucks loaded with barrels of gasoline from the military gas station in Kacyiru or the one in Kaubye near the old storage tanks of PetroRwanda. That happened twice a week. With the help of bulldozers they pushed the ashes into long trenches or into the Nyabarongo river.
During the first five months (after claiming victory over the Hutu government in July—nb), that is until December 1994, I counted more than fifty thousand people killed in Masaka, and that’s without including those killed in Kami-Ndera. (pp 342-43)—
But what about our late friend Juvénal Uwilingiyimana? He had refused to corroborate the RPF’s version of the genocide in Rwanda. He said as much to investigators from the prosecutor’s office of the ICTR, Rejean Tremblay and André Delvaux, during his final interrogations in October and November of 2005. The mainstream media would have us believe he killed himself or was killed by his fellow Hutu 'genocidaires'. Is there any precedent for the Hutu government’s killing its own? None that I know of. But what about the RPF? And would they reach outside the terrorized territory of Rwanda to enforce their savage domination of such a false history?
Here’s more Ruzibiza on RPF ‘excesses’:
—The years 1997 and 1998
The assassinations of Spanish volunteers
On the 18th of January 1997, Captain Justus Majyambere, in collaboration with sub-Lieutenants Kabalisa and Karenzi, as well as ten other soldiers commanded by Colonel Kayumba Nyamwasa, in the city of Ruhengeri, killed the Spanish volunteers working for the NGO, Medicus del Mundo (Doctors of the World). These murders were blamed on infiltrators (Hutus who were supposed to have slipped back into Rwanda from Congo or elsewhere to fight against the RPF government—nb), though it was the DMI that had ordered the killings. (pp 402-403)—
And in another episode in the real and on-going Rwandan genocide (i.e., the destruction of the Rwandan Revolution and its people), we are brought back into Belgium for some chilling parallels to the Uwilingiyimana murder:
—The assassination of Griet Bosmans by the RPA (the Army of the RPF—nb)
On the night of 27-28 April 1997, Mme Griet Bosmans, the Belgian directress of the secondary school of Muramba in the commune of Satintsyi, perished along with 17 or her students and 4 other people under the bullets of the soldiers of the 9th battalion who had been sent by Lieutenant John Cassius and commanded by Camille Zuba. This company of 15 soldiers was from the special platoon that had been formed in the sub-prefecture of Ngororero.
There were two companies of the 9th battalion there. One was commanded by Capt. Eugène Rukundo and the other by Capt. Christopher Twibogora. These two companies were located just two minutes walk from one another. There was even a third company not far from there, that of Capt. Steven Rukara. None of these soldiers lifted a finger to aid the directress and the group that accompanied her. The DMI suspected Griet Bosmans of furnishing information on APR atrocities to the [RPF] minister of the interior, Seth Sendashonga. On top of that, the DMI believed she was informing various movements within the Catholic Church of what was happening inside Rwanda. This is why she was killed. (p 403)—
So the RPF not only has a nasty record of killing those Belgian Catholics they suspected of being snitches for the Church, but they killed those they suspected of snitching off the ‘rebel forces’ to their own government. And, as in the case of interior minister Sendashonga, the RPF went so far (to Nairobi, in Kenya, this time) as to kill off their own ex-ministers when they took an AMA (against military advice) early retirement from the RPF’s program of sledge-hammer social engineering. And though Sendashonga was not the only RFP official to be wacked by Kagame and Co., his death is particularly sordid in the ruthlessness of its execution and aftermath. For the gory details see:
—Alleged murderers of Sendashonga mysteriously die one after another— [http://www.inshuti.org/sendash4.htm]
From all I’ve read, it seems the RPF, between 1 October 1990 when they invaded Rwanda from Uganda, and the present day when they are still conducting national security operations in Eastern Congo and throughout Africa, has, apparently, extended its Witness Destruction Program into Northern Europe. For the past 16 years they have been responsible for the violent deaths of literally millions upon millions of defenseless African civilians, and their cold reach is becoming global. Yet most Western Leftish intellectuals are quite content to confine the whole bloody mess to Rwanda and to mid-1994 when—
“Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 100 days by the Habyarimana government and its Extremist ‘Hutu Power’ supporters.”—
I guess it should not be surprising that Yugoslavia, or the ex- or former-Yugoslavia, as it instantly became known with the very first secession of the very first Republic, Slovenia, in 1991—being made up almost entirely of White folks—that Yugoslavia should now catch more attention than Rwanda. Today Western crimes in the The Balkans are sexier than those dans les Milles Collines, or all of Africa, really, from Angola to Zimbabwe.
And then there’s the Slobo Factor: Slobodan Milosevic has been demonstrating daily, to full-houses back home in Serbia, but empty-heads everywhere else, just what the history of his country and his people really is. The details of the Balkan wars as revealed by his defense witnesses have reduced the prosecution's charges to the blitherings of over-paid bureau-crackpots. The pride of might is not enough to invalidate the expressed will of a people to support its revolution and defend its history. So the thrice elected President of Serbia and Yugoslavia—criminally, violently removed from office in a US-backed coup that threatened Serbia with bloody civil war in October 2000 (and was a kind of dress-rehearsal for the coup in Florida later that same year)—the very existence of President Milosevic, a life that all the Cruise missile at the disposal of the visibly demented General Wesley Clark could not extinguish, has become such an insult and an almost quotidian humiliation to the West’s demo-toxic mass media and moribund public egg-head culture that even those who used to refer to him as a 'Stalinist strong-man' and to the Serbs as 'congenital brutes' have had to come around with a sort of limp-wristed support.
It wasn’t that long ago—back in the Spring of 1999 when NATO was terror-bombing Yugoslavia over Kosovo—that the ‘Liberal’ LA Times syndicated columnist, Wm Pfaff, suggested that the people of Serbia/Yugoslavia deserved to be slaughtered from altitude by NATO for nothing more than supporting with their votes the 'monster' Milosevic. I haven’t read much Pfaff since, but this rationale for mass murder is all too common today. It’s called the war on terrorism, and Milosevic has become Saddam and bin Laden and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Hugo Chavez and Robt Mugabe and Kim Jong Il.
And even before Slobodan Milosevic became a target for Western slander, the media and their Human Rights minders were treating President Juvénal Habyarimana and his Rwandan Revolution, in the sodden words of comrade Hitchens, as ‘filthy’ ‘racist’ ‘genocidaire’ ‘clients of French imperialism’.(4) Sad to say, unlike in the case of president Milosevic’s successful evasion of Nato’s WsMD, the Soviet-made SAM 16s that the RPF had been trained to aim and fire at Barry Goldwater Air Force base in Arizona as part of a US DoD program, the IMET (International Military Education and Training) and the Enhanced IMET, found their mark, killing the Hutu presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, their entourages (including the chief of staff of the Rwandan Army), and signaling the RPF’s finally offensive that brought about the deaths of millions of innocent Africans. So while the Left continues to demur that the US didn’t do enough to stop the Rwandan genocide, in historical fact, the US couldn’t have done more to bring it about, then cover it up.
Yet as the lies that underpin the demonization of these leaders, more easily to rationalize the violent revocation of their nations’ sovereignty, the ghastly murder of their people, and the perpetual indenture of whatever is left of their so-called ‘rogue’ or ‘failed’ states, may have long since been exposed, this disinformation continues to be the daily bread of Leftish geopolitical discourse. Very few serious political thinkers or storytellers seem at all concerned about getting past—
“Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 100 days by the Habyarimana government and its Extremist ‘Hutu Power’ supporters.”—
So what about the Rwandan Revolution?
Having read and written a bit about Rwanda from here in Paris, I was astonished at the miserable ignorance that is so rigorously maintained on the Left with regard to the targeted assassination of this tiny, densely populated Central African revolution.(5) Even the term ‘revolution’ is seldom used in reference to the First and Second Rwandan Republics of Grégoire Kayibanda and Juvénal Habyarimana. Yet during the first seventeen years of Habyarimana’s majoritarian Hutu rule, from 1973 until the RPF invasion of 1990, Rwanda went from last to first in GNP for the countries of the Great Lakes region, Burundi, Zaire, Uganda and Tanzania.(6)
But the implications of the term ‘revolution’, that a government that once dictated to the special interests of tiny feudal and business elites now dictates to the general interests of the vast majority of its people, fraught as it is with communist overtones, just did not fit the post-Soviet lexicon which had ‘Communism’ replaced by ‘Terrorism’ as enemy du jour, and majoritarian national defenses invalidated as ‘Genocides’.
Yet ‘Communism’ was not a foreign term in Rwandan history. In 1930, the first Rwandan Bishop, Léon Classe, warned that
—. . . any effort to replace Tutsi chiefs with ‘uncouth’ Hutus ‘would lead the entire state directly into anarchy and to bitter anti-European communism,’ . . .—(7)
And, as if to make Bishop Classe seem prescient, President Habyarimana’s single party, the MRND (Mouvement révolutionaire national pour le développement—after 1989 and the beginning of ‘democratic reforms’, ‘révolutionaire’ was changed to ‘républicain’ and ‘démocratie’ was tagged on at the end), which came to power in 1973, based its constitution on the constitution of the Communist Party of North Korea.
So was Rwanda’s a real revolution—like Cuba’s or Nicaragua’s? Or was it just, as Hitchens and Kagame would have us believe, an authoritarian, ethnic-based dictatorship supported by on a 35 year old and on-going genocide against its former (devinely ordained) aristocratic rulers.
Hitchen’s 80 proof venom is hard to take seriously—after all, he once said that the same people who believe there are no WsMD in Iraq, believe there are no mass graves in Kosovo. He backed the KLA, the Bosnian mujahadeen, and Chalabi’s Iraqi Council—but Trotzis will be Trotzis, and Hitch’s always been about the perpetual (counter-) revolution, no matter how many indigenous lives it costs. But his fronting the blood-thirsty Kagame’s Rwandan nightmare is quite serious.
Dig what my friend Maitre Tiphaine Dickson, who served as a defense counsel before the ICTR in Arusha, had to say on this Fanonesque revolution:
—. . . everything the people of Rwanda built with their hands during ‘umuganda’—that's "work for the people"—every Saturday, everybody, including the President, for years, worked on farms, roads, schools. But now it's all about profits and weapons. And invading the Congo—South Lebanon style—sous pretexte qu'il faut arreter les Interahamwe et les "genocidaires"—3.5 million dead, and I don't see no award-winning books about them.—(8)
They used to say that Rwanda was the only African country where the roads, the education and public health systems, the postal service, electicity and telephones all worked all the time. Not today. Because the new revolution, Kagame’s version of Newt Gingrich’s New American Revolution, or the one in the New Compradors’ Serbia/Montenegro that replaced Socialist Serbia/Yugoslavia, is one where everything the people built has been sold off to private foreign investors. Here’s a view of the new Rwanda from atop a Michigan waste capitalist’s dumpster:
— (a sign reads) "Privatization: A Loss? No Way." Another one declares that privatization fights laziness, poverty, smuggling, and unemployment. This is the good news: Rwanda is engaged in Africa’s most ambitious privatization campaign. It may be the most ambitious and systematic of any country anywhere.—(9)
So why wasn’t the Rwandan revolution worth the Left’s salvation? After all, it predated the Nicaraguan revolution and was a contemporary of the Cuban Revolution. But then, it is in Black Africa, huh.
Why is it that the Left, especially the Trotzi and Libertarian Left in the US, continues to act as if American Fascism began with the current Bush Reich? Does Bush 43 really have the worst Human Rights record of any president in the nation’s history?
Worse than Truman/Eisenhower’s 2.5 million-victim Korean genocide?
Worse than the Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon multi-million-victim Vietnam/Cambodia/Loas genocide?
Worse than Carter’s HR record? The Nobel Peace Prize winner gave the world the bloody Nicaraguan Contras and the anti-Soviet Mujahadeen—these Frankensteinian creations of America’s state religion, Christian anti-Communism, then seamlessly transmogrified into CIA/Mossad narco-terrorist puppets like the Taliban and al Qaeda—and like the KLA and RPF.
Worse than Clinton’s? This great, smarmy humanitarian destroyed the welfare system that FDR and LBJ were so proud of while further lowering the capital gains tax, gave unlimited new surveillance powers to police agencies (relaxed wire tap restrictions, degraded rules of evidence, increased restrictions on criminal defense in the promotion of victims rights, etc.,), and reinstituted capital punishment on the federal level (though he gutlessly handed off his first victim, Mexican drug slanger Luis Garza, to the highly-experienced executioner, Bush 43), criminalized the USSR, dismembered Yugoslavia, regularly and consistently bombed Iraq, and personally sponsored the counter revolutionary slaughter of millions of Central Africans on the orders of his Aspen club drinking buddy, Paul Kagame, and in the mining interests of, among other homeboys, American Mining Fields (AMF) of Hope, Arkansas.
But, hey, this Rwanda story, in 2006, is just an old, cold bowl of chili, right? Today’s new rootless red/brown radicals don’t pitch their investigations of Western Imperialist aggression as far back as the early 90s, or even the mid-90s, and are all about Stop the Fucking War in Iraq/Stop the Fucking Genocide in Sudan—NOW!
Here’s something professor Chomsky said about Rwanda:
—. . . [W]e don't see, we prefer not to see the horrible crimes that are going on all the time, which we could do something about easily. So take say, we just passed the 10th anniversary of the Rwanda massacres, which were pretty horrible, maybe 8,000 people killed a day for a 100 days. Pretty awful massacre. And there's a lot of wringing of hands and lamentations about how we didn't do anything about it, we didn't intervene, we didn't send military forces, and so on, wasn't that terrible.—(10)
It should be noted that this is sampled from the same interview in Left Hook, ‘Civilization v Barbarism’, where, re the Serb ‘genocide’ of Muslims at Srebrenica almost exactly one year after the Rwandan G, Prof Chomsky suggests the Bosnian Serbs ‘trucked out’ the women and children who’d survived the Serbs’ genocidal ‘retaliation’ for the Bosnian Muslim Army’s merciless slaughter, over the previous three years, of more than 1200 innocent Yugoslav civilians around the UN ‘safe haven’ of Srebrenica—but let’s let the cunning linguist from MIT speak for himself:
—They trucked out all the women and children, they kept the men inside, and apparently slaughtered them. The estimates are thousands of people slaughtered.—(11)
Now, someone of Chomsky’s experience chooses his words carefully—both the words he uses and those he doesn’t use. If he’d known that the Serbs used dozens of buses to evacuation the civilians, regardless of age, ethnicity or gender, from this silver mining town that had days before been abandoned by most of the Bosnian Muslim military, would he still have used the term ‘trucked out’? And does his ignorance of the fact that ‘thousands of men’ and boys were not, in fact, killed in Srebrenica excuse his use of the term ‘slaughter’? Your call—but me, I don’t think so.
Trivialization is a common rhetorical ploy for hiding ignorance, and one should really appreciate that the term ‘genocide’, which is rarely applied to the US/UK/Israeli-backed Central African campaign of ‘population management’ for control of the vast resources of Congo, does not occur in Chomsky’s description of Rwanda or Bosnia.
So Rwanda was ‘massacres’, not a ‘genocide’. But the stat of 800,000 killed in 100 days still sticks with the Wizard of MIT. Why does he cheapen the Rwandan death toll, begun by a Western-backed invasion in October 1990, by comparing it to the number of children who are dying in Southern Africa as the result of curable illnesses and malnutrition? He compares, if not conflates, the two atrocities by stating that the West, the civilized world could ‘do something about [them] easily.’ Send more money, guns and pharmaceuticals, is what my Vietnam-era rabbi suggests here—as do most of the new humanists, like Nicholas Kristof, Samatha Power, and UN General Dallaire. But, in fact, it was the heavily armed Ugandan exile force, the RPF, equipped and trained by the US and its proxy, Uganda, that did the lion’s share of slaughtering the innocents in Rwanda; and it’s Big Pharma, with its insidious African drug experiments, like Pfizer’s camps where young people infected with strains of epidemic meningitis are kept sick unto death so they might be used to test the Viagra-maker’s latest high-end wonder cure for a disease rarely manifest in the developed world, and its publicly-financed dispersal of cyto-toxic medicines as palliatives for the chronic malnutrition, the desperate want of clean water and the absence of any effective public health infrastructures, as if a virus were responsible for the chronic poverty and other residual failures of neo-colonialism—it is Chomsky’s two ‘easy’ remedies that are responsible for the current iatrogenocide sweeping the resource-rich, yet abjectly miserable, African continent.
So here are two quite different thinkers from the Left: Chomsky (anti-Bush, pro ABB) and Hitchens (pro-Bush, anti-Clinton), and yet they’re creepily close on Rwanda. Strangely enough they seem to bicker like Oscar and Felix on details, while being all wet kisses on the essentials of such dossiers as Milosevic’s ‘plausible’ crimes in Kosovo (to Hitchens, Milosevic was a ‘socialist nationalist’ who became a 'National Socialist' over Bosnia and Kosovo with his dream of a 'Greater Serbia'; to Chomsky, Milosevic’s treatment of Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo Albanians was equivalent to Indonesia’s treatment of East Timor’s civilian population, and if it was appropriate for Nato to bomb Yugoslavia over Kosovo, then so too would it have been appropriate to bomb Jakarta, London and Washington, DC); and, though they disagreed on the attackers’ motives and the victims’ appropriate responses, they were unquestionably agreed on the essential responsibility of ‘Arab terrorism’ for the attacks of 911.
Are there other examples of this sort of narcissistic gullibility rotting out otherwise intelligent Leftish critiques? It’s too late in the day to run a lot of them by you, so I’ll just lay down a few here:
First, there’s my old friend Dr. Michael Parenti, who is a much harder leftist than the two above cited public thinkers. Some have even called Parenti a ‘Stalinist’, and he serves with me on the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic. So, on Yugoslavia at least, Dr P is a right guy—no matter what that fat Boston he-bitch and his covey of Zionist quislings have to say!
Using a Chomskyesque rhetorical model, Parenti weighed in on Rwanda and Yugoslavia back in 1999 like this:
— While showing themselves ready and willing to bomb Yugoslavia on behalf of an ostensibly oppressed minority in Kosovo, U.S. leaders have made no moves against . . . the Hutu for the mass murder of a half million Tutsi in Rwanda -- not to mention the French who were complicit in that massacre.—(12)
It was some time ago that Parenti wrote this—pre-911. Yet despite expressing to me, while on a visit to Paris in 2002, his sincere desire to learn more about what really happened in Rwanda, I have not read or heard of anything else by him on the subject. And his attempt to implicate France in the Rwandan genocide, which is all the fashion here on the Elysian Fields (‘Nous sommes tous les génocidaire’ is number one with a machete on the French Hit Parade), is very surprising coming from the cosmopolite I got to know while touring the bookstores around République.
My hunch is this genre of Franco-phobia, shared by many on the US Left even before the advent of the pro-Iraq interventionist Right’s ‘freedom fries’, ‘freedom toast’ and ‘freedom tongue-suck’, results more from Thierry Meyssan-envy than disagreement with any African policy enunciated by the late president François Mitterand or the current lame-frog embezzler Jack Chirac. Meyssan’s Reseau Voltaire’s posted a quick invalidation of the US government’s preposterous 911 cover story about 19 Arab hijackers—based on the brazen lie Don Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers tried so carelessly to fob off on a terrified US public about ‘a hijacked Boeing 757, AA flt 77, crashing into the Pentagon’ that was exposed in early February 2002 on their web site ‘Hunt the Boeing’. Later in two books, instant best-sellers in France, titled in their English editions ‘The Big Lie’ and ‘Pentagate’, Meyssan quite credibly purported that almost any explanation for the events of that dark September Tuesday, including assigning responsibility for the attacks to ET-generated holograms or The Creature from the Green Latrine, when taken in the context of US geopolitical ambitions in the Arab oil regions, is more probable, ever more possible than what has come to be seen as the ludicrously potted US government/Mossad version of those gruesome events. But Left critics from Tony Judt in the NYRB and Diana Johnstone in the European press jealously accused Meyssan of everything from opportunism to Holocaust-denying anti-Semitism to keeping pedophilic pornography—with typically French anti-Americanism a given.
But the shoddily cobbled explanation for this greatest terrorist attack on US soil—as mind-buggering as was the Timothy McVeigh lone truck rental theory for the Oklahoma City bombing (when there are live network news videos extant of a second and a third bomb being found INSIDE the Alfred Murrah Bldg—this video was shown live once and never again, and can now be found on the Power Hour’s ‘911 In Plane Site’—http://www.911inplanesite.com/). I’ve found it a handy indicator of critical acumen just where a thinker/scribbler accepts the government’s explanations and where he calls them: Most who buy the Clinton/Albright ‘What genocide? I thought Rwanda was one of the Charelles’ line on the on-going Central African holocaust, also swallow the Bush/Cheney/Sharon ‘Those irresponsible Ay-rab Muslims were responsible’ chum, hook, line, sinker and rod and reel. Whether it’s from the Right: ‘See? We DO need more military spending!’ Or from the Left: ‘Let’s hear it for the immiserated and colonized finally striking back against the truly miserable neo-colonialists!’: Gullibility knows neither political party nor intellectual bounds. And in his really quite informative book, ‘The Terrorism Trap’, Michael Parenti seems to indicate that he is a full subscriber to the mainstream narrative on how and why the September 11, 2001, attacks went down.
None of these American Leftists has sought to make the eerie comparison between the terrorist attacks on NYC and Washington DC and the 6 April 1994 double assassination of the Rwandan and Burundian presidents by terrorists of the RPF—though the two events are married by a continuing, iron-clad refusal to investigate what is every day becoming more obvious: that these were false-flag military strikes carried out by private contractors, who had profoundly infiltrated both nations’ governments and military establishments, as part of much larger aggressions in the wars to globalize the forces of waste capitalism.
Ed Herman of the U of Penn is another example of an American left liberal who, after being referred to some of the best sources of information on Africa, like Canadian defense attorneys Tiphaine Dickson and Christopher Black, continued to turn his back on the real Rwandan story—satisfied to rest his critique on the ‘800,000 Tutsis/100 day genocide’ scenario. In his recent critical piece on The Hague Tribunal and its current chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, Herman does not even once mention the intimate connections between the ICTY and the ICTR or that their shared prosecutor Del Ponte was recently replaced as chief prosecutor in Arusha for suggesting that the African ad hoc tribunal could gain some international creds by prosecuting members of Rwanda’s ruling RPF for war crimes—a gambit like her much touted but effetely symbolic arrest of Croatian mass murderer General Ante Gotovina, the neo-Ustashi who, along with a legion of MPRI advisers, led Croatia’s 'Operation Storm' in the Fall of 1995 to cleanse 200,000 Yugoslavs from the Bosnian/Croatian military border region, The Krajina—universally agreed to have been the largest single ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the war. Even in his genteel upbraiding of Del Ponte for diminishing Croatian war crimes, he gives her a total pass on her collaboration with the current Kagame dictatorship in Kigali and her suppression of Abdul Ruzibiza’s report to the ICTR on the RPF’s responsibility for the double-assassination of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi on 6 April 1994—an event all sides acknowledge as having set off the monstrous exactions that brought bloody regime change to that small country.
Then there’s the case of Linda Milvern and her champion Jon Pilger. Milvern is a British writer who was awarded prizes, just like her American counterparts, Philip Gourevitch, Samantha Power and Alison Des Forge, for her sensational, even lurid, but totally a-historical tales of the Rwandan Genocide. Here’s a taste of how hyperbole (one million in one month?) masks ignorance:
—In April 1994 up to a million people were slaughtered in Rwanda during a murderous campaign of horrifying efficiency. The ferocity of the killing and the cruelty inflicted on defenseless people has no comparison in modern times.
‘Conspiracy to Murder’ is the story of how that genocide was planned. It reveals how, from as early as 1990, the political, military and administrative leadership of Rwanda became involved in planning the complete extermination of the Tutsi population. A vicious race hate campaign filled the media, urging Hutu's to kill; a network of roadblocks was devised to prevent any escape; civil-defense groups were established throughout the country, with eventually every third Hutu being armed; half a million machetes and other agricultural tools, along with 85,000 tonnes' worth of AK47s and grenades, were imported into Rwanda and distributed country-wide in the year leading up to the genocide.—
James Frey’s ‘Million Little Pieces’ could take bullshitting leçons from this twisted sister’s ‘Million Little Machete Murders’. All of her sinister suggestions of this Hutu conspiracy to commit genocide against the Tutsi, when removed from the frame of the October 1990 and April 1994 US-backed RPF (Tutsi, to her) aggressions, allow for only one motivation for the Rwandan people’s national self-defense: the Hutu were pure evil. Why would an 85% majority, holding state power, want to exterminate a tiny, at most 14%, minority, while killing a large part of its own population, unless they were possessed by the devil?
Here’s how General Augusten Ndindiliyimana, in our ‘The General’s Book on Rwanda’, sees the irrationality of positions like Milvern’s,
— Since two opposing forces cannot plan the same operation at the same time, it seems obvious that the RPF, which initiated the events by attacking Rwanda in October 1990, by assassinating President Juvenal Habyarimana, and by pushing the war in Kigali and on all the other fronts, is the only ‘strategic planner’ of this tragedy. The atrocities reported were due directly to the insensate war they imposed, and to their determined desire to seize power at any cost; the extreme conditions caused by the chaotic situation that resulted from the decapitation of the Rwandan State with the assassination of President Habyarimana plunged the country into anarchy, panic and disorder. (from Chapter One, The Invasion—posted elsewhere on CM/P)—
Yet the darling of the Down-Under abo hunters (distant cousins to the Rwandan gorilla poachers, I’m sure) turned Greenish-Brownish Leftish-Trotzis, Jon Pilger, who, not unlike Chomsky or Hitchens, found Milosevic a ‘brute’ and a ‘vicious tyrant’, ‘finds Melvern’s anile and livid critique very much the cat’s ass:
—'Linda Melvern's work on Rwanda is in the finest traditions of investigative journalism. ‘Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide’ extends her previous book, ‘A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide’, a brilliant investigation into the tragedy for which the 'international community' was itself responsible. With testimony from witnesses and access to documents previously unseen, she tells an epic and shaming story of culpability and missed opportunities.'—(14)
So who are the real ‘jackals that the jackals would despise’?
In sampling Pablo Neruda’s poem, ‘I’m explaining a few things’, for his Nobel Prize acceptance lecture, Harold Pinter used these carrion-eating wild dogs to describe certain world leaders who make shocking and awful war against the poor and powerless for no better reason than to enrich those of their supporters who already control all the world’s wealth anyway. Could it be that Pinter didn’t see deeply enough into the illness that is wasting the world away? This moral tuberculosis, that is putrefying the human spirit in the name of Human Rights and consuming all life force for the sake of progress in the techniques of destruction, afflicts many more souls, and to a far greater degree, than just the perverted puppet heads, like Bush and Blair, who are paraded in front of a dazed and manic-depressive public as its leaders. Those regents of contemplation and models for creation and liberation, the artists and philosophers and scientists and religionists, they, too, seem to be greatly afflicted with a righteous blindness induced by craven compromise with the probable and the payable. Pinter, himself, more than once in his lecture, morally equates ‘Soviet crimes’ with the crimes of ‘Western corporate imperialism’. But only someone who has effectively removed himself from History and pretends to observe all human suffering from some Olympian corporate skybox, could strike such an unbalanced equation. Actions taken in the purely economic interest of a tiny over-privileged elite—and taken with the intention of giving that tiny oligarchy the appearance of being a great general democracy—can never have the same moral mass as those actions taken in the social and political interests of the great majority.
That is why any geopolitical analysis that does not consider the true history of the events in Central Africa in the last decade of the 20th Century—and not just that mawkish, ethno-mythological instrumentalized version that is flogged by the carney head-spinners of the Human (Victims’) Rights lobby—is incapable of bringing sufficient critical weight to bear on its subject to be truly and globally relevant.
In a recent article posted on CM/P (The Dallaire Genocide Fax: a Fabrication—http://cirqueminime.blogcollective.com/blog/_archives/2005/12/6/1437840.html) Canadian defense attorney before the ICTR, Christopher Black, revealed that there is yet more evidence of the cooked intelligence (in this instance from Britain’s MI6) that has, for the last ten years, had the ‘Habyarimana [called the ‘Hutu Power’] government of Rwanda and “extremist” Hutus’ planning for and carrying out the so-called ‘Tutsi Genocide of One Hundred Days’. This further debunking of the ubiquitous and emotionally manipulative notion of ‘the Rwandan Genocide’, which along with Osama’s al Qaeda perpetrating 9/11, Iraq’s WsMD, Zimbabwe’s ‘racist’ land reform, Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear threats, and Serbia’s ‘genocide of Muslims’ in Bosnia and Kosovo, has become an almost universal article of (bad) faith, has rendered the consideration of Rwandan political history—and who’d a thought that Africans were even capable of having a political history?—essential to any critical understanding of, or effective struggle against, the New Thousand Year Reich.
Those who continue to accept and diffuse the Human Rights/Victims’ Rights legend about how
—“Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 100 days by the Habyarimana government and its Extremist ‘Hutu Power’ supporters.”—
who continue to see the Hutus as 'Tropical Nazis' and the Tutsis as 'Central Africa’s Jews', not only defile the memories of the millions upon millions of innocent people sacrificed, then and now, as burnt offering to the gods of surplus value in the US/UK/Israeli/UN-engineered and executed holocaust for the global domination of strategic resources and the ruthless and unrelenting nuclear-armed control of all criminal advantage over the ‘untermenchen’ of the ‘developing world’; but they further doom, damn and undo themselves as the collaborator/victims (the shanked punk snitches) of those savage mongrels who live to dine on dead human flesh.
Mick Collins
CirqueMinime/Paris
Friday, 13 January, 2006
Notes:
1 From ‘Bin Laden’, by Immortal Technique/Mos Def.
2 The Guardian--
Body of genocide witness found in river--
· Accused former Rwanda minister feared for his life--
· War crimes tribunal would have heard key evidence--
Jeevan Vasagar in Nairobi--
Saturday December 24, 2005--
DNA tests have confirmed his identity but the cause of death has not yet been established because the body appears to have been mangled by passing boats. Mr Uwilingiyimana's hands were severed and his wedding ring is missing.--
"This is either because we are dealing with professional murderers or it's just by chance, that a boat cut off his hands," [his lawyer, Sven Mary, said.]--
His final interview took place on November 18 and he failed to appear for a scheduled session on the day he disappeared.
3 Ruzibiza, Abdul. ‘Rwanda: L’histoire secrete’. Éditions du PANAMA, 2005. Pp 334-335
4 Multilateralism and Unilateralism
A self-canceling complaint.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 18, 2002, at 2:48 PM ET
http://www.slate.com/id/2075659/
In another episode, Madeleine Albright was instructed to veto a Czech motion calling for strengthening U.N. forces in Rwanda to "pre-empt" the genocidal plan prepared by Rwanda's racist government.
A War to Be Proud Of
From the September 5 / September 12, 2005 issue: The case for overthrowing Saddam was unimpeachable. Why, then, is the administration tongue-tied?
by Christopher Hitchens
09/05/2005, Volume 010, Issue 47
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/995phqjw.asp?pg=1
and the génocidaire faction in Rwanda had decided that it could probably get away with putting its long-fantasized plan of mass murder into operation.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/995phqjw.asp?pg=2
French statecraft, for example, was uniformly hostile to any resistance to any aggression, and Paris even sent troops to rescue its filthy clientele in Rwanda. And some on the hard left and the brute right were also opposed to any exercise, for any reason, of American military force.
5 Though there seems to be some new hope in the recent publication of a book in French by Pierre Péan: Noire fureurs, blanc menteurs—Rwanda 1990-1994. Mille et une nuits, Paris, 2005.
6 Péan, op cit, p 45.
7 Cited in Philip Gourevitch, ‘We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families—Stories from Rwanda; Picador, USA, 1998. p56.
8 Cf a personal email dated 12 January 2004
9 http://www.gbri.org/thinkpiece/rwanda.htm
Rwanda: A Privatization Revolution - In a Most Unlikely Place, by Lawrence W. Reed
10 http://iraqmortality.org/civilization-versus-barbarism-an-interview-with-noam-chomsky
From : Civilization versus Barbarism? : An Interview with Noam Chomsky
Source: Left Hook, by M. Junaid Alam and Noam Chomsky, December 23, 2004.
11 Ibid.
12 http://www.michaelparenti.org/yugoslavia.html
Dr Michael Parenti, The Rational Destruction of Yugoslavia, Nov 1999
13 http://www.amahoro.nl/linda/bookctm.htm
Linda Melvern, Conspiracy to Murder – The Rwandan Genocide. Verso, 2004.
14 http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Militarization_America/Empire_MOW.html
--Carl Boggs, Empire and Globalization, 2003, ‘the counterinsurgency ethnic slaughter in Rwanda
posted by CirqueMinime/Paris at 9:47 AM
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