Was Dag Hammarskjöld assassinated in 1961? His DC-6 went down
over Northern Rhodesia under suspicious circumstances and his death proved
convenient to some who opposed his mission.
It's been a longstanding question and yet to some there's
little question at all. There's a long history of South African, Rhodesian, Francophone
and Portuguese African mercenary figures directly or loosely connected to the
military and intelligence agencies of their respected 'fatherlands', whether
Belgium, France, Portugal, the UK or the United States.
In many cases these mercenary groups have been on the distant
fringe of the Right-wing and in other instances they've been more or less
apolitical, connected to particular ventures, sometimes economic and directly
corporate. For many on the inside these military, political and economic
concerns all blend together and those that see them in unified terms certainly
have a point. There is a danger in overemphasizing the unity but the more
common tendency is to deny or ignore it. Those that do so fundamentally
misunderstand the nature of the Western Establishment and are the first to be
led astray by it.
Dag Hammarskjöld was deeply opposed by some within the
Anglo-American Establishment. The conflict that engendered great bitterness and
is associated with Hammarskjöld's death is the Congo Crisis and in particular
the clash in mineral rich Katanga, a land still contested to this day.
Hammarskjöld flew into Africa to investigate and mediate but this came to an
abrupt end when his plane mysteriously crashed. And yet many have always
believed that his plane was shot down or perhaps exploded in mid-air.
Almost sixty years later voices are finally confirming what
many have long known and suspected... he was murdered. In some ways it's easy
for the truth to come out because the trigger men were white African
mercenaries, the proverbial 'bad guys' in many books and movies. And yet these
'bad guys' were (and are) often connected with Western interests. In the latter
half of the 20th century they were an arm of Neo-Colonialism. When
the politicians, bankers and diplomats can't implement the policies they want,
that's when the black ops people and the mercenaries step in. And all too often
organisations like MI6, the CIA and France's DGSE have turned to disaffected
colonials and ex-members (and supposed ex-members) of the special forces to
accomplish these missions. In other cases they have their local proxies and
there's a long record of Anglo-American (and Israeli) cooperation with the
apartheid regime of South Africa.
This is a chapter of history that has been largely
whitewashed and forgotten. While praise for Mandela is ubiquitous in our day, there
was a time in which he was reviled by large sections of the West. One need not
be that old to remember the 1980's when both Reagan and Thatcher spoke despairingly
of the 'terrorist' Mandela and there was still a degree of support for the
apartheid regime. The tide was turning to be sure but the historical narrative
had not yet been re-written and spun.
Indeed Thatcher's own son Mark was arrested (along with
former South African apartheid era forces) in connection with the 2004 attempt
to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea. Who was behind it? The very
people you would suspect, people connected to big business and the oil industry,
a group of figures who blur the lines between the corporate world, military and
politics.
The history plays like a broken record and even the Guardian
article, as much as it reveals, functions as something of a 'whitewash'.
Sometimes these stories and investigations present existential threats to the
system and as a consequence even the supposedly 'opposition' media will back
off and fail to follow through. They call it 'responsibility'. The story is
already out, so they run it but they tactically soften, suppress and omit the
salient facts that would allow the informed reader to ask the next series of
questions.... questions those atop the system would rather see not asked.
These latest revelations regarding Hammarskjöld aren't all
that surprising but they confirm a larger set of facts and provide a reasonably
solid basis to expand one's knowledge of the vast labyrinth of real and pseudo-history,
whitewash and the nature of our political system and its media.
Today we live in a soup of fog and conspiracy and once again
I contend that only the students of history have a hope in attempting to
untangle it because despite the surprises and twists and turns that history
often presents, there are recurring and near constant patterns that allow one
to penetrate the mist and develop not only a sharp intuition but the ability to
ask the right questions in order to approximate the truth. And that's something
else that must be begrudgingly admitted. Until the Day of Judgment there are
many things we can never fully know. People lie and for lots of different
reasons. Sometimes they lie to cover up other things they were doing or
involved in .They lie because of petty personal animosities or hopes for
recognition. Others are sincerely motivated but sometimes their understanding
of a situation is deficient and they may understand events in framework that is
completely erroneous. And yet this does not detract from their sincerity. They're
telling it like they saw it. Journalists, investigators and increasingly
historians are selective in what they reveal and in their analysis. They
protect people, they have their own biases. It's complicated beyond reckoning
but in an age of Twitter, Facebook and mass media there's little hope that most
of the public will discover the truth. They don't even know what questions to
ask nor do they have the tools to ask them.
And that's just how many would like things to stay.
Cold War Africa was a cauldron of intrigue and deceit and its
subsequent history has not changed this one iota. In fact it's probably more
complicated today as what was once an East-West rivalry with a few odd players
thrown in the mix (such as France), is now an impossibly complicated chess game
of nations, business, tribal and religious interests. The only possible analogy
in the West would be something like the Balkans but with Africa it's far more
complicated and ten times as vast.
What continues to startle me is that the two Congo Wars
fought in the 1990's and early 2000's were the most deadly conflicts since
WWII... and one is hard pressed to find someone on the street that can tell you
anything about them. Why has the international media been focusing so intently
on the situation in Congo? Because the implications are profound and the
potential for death is too horrific to contemplate.
But in the West, people just don't care and thus while their
smartphones and other gadgets depend on the resources from the region, they are
unwilling to wrestle with such questions. They are distracted by their own
politics and their own petty interests.
This story should upset people but it won't. Additionally
when one looks at the mass migration of people from Sub-Saharan Africa as well
as Latin America there's a context for it. These societies have been decimated,
raped and rent asunder. The West is not solely responsible but it has played a
considerable and sometimes decisive role. These people fleeing to the borders
of the EU and USA are looking for security and stability, the bare hope of
making some money to help their families escape. It only adds to the crime when
the refugees are subsequently criminalised and despised. These migrants come as
supplicants. I'm surprised they don't come in a spirit of vengeance but often
the morass from which they wish to escape is so complicated that even they can
only see a few pieces of the puzzle. Others are angry but have realised the
road of bitterness is one of dead end and defeat. And rather than embrace the cross-bearing
martyr ethos of Christianity they have adapted the ever-pragmatic but equally
bankrupt ethic of 'if you can't beat them, then join them'.
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