Congo and the Global Tenement

Last of a Three Part Series on the Decivilization of Africa

1. Brief history of the Congo and the Congo Crisis 1960-6
   

It is believed the CIA scored a win for America in the Congo, and in a way it did. Here you have in 1960 a leftist-socialist-populist leader, Patrice Lumumba, aligned with the Soviets, who was deposed and assassinated. Later on, General Mobutu (full name: Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, changed in 1972 to follow his own decree that Congolese would no longer be allowed European names), an “anti-communist” leader supported by the CIA came to power and had Congo-Zaire under his control for more than thirty years, keeping the Soviets out. But closer attention to dates, years, and facts of what actually happened in the Congo from the late 1950’s to 1966 reveals something else.

It should be emphasized now at beginning that even if one could claim a dubious victory landed in the CIA's lap with the eventual ascent of Mobutu in Congo/Zaire, the broader record of those years shows Afro-Marxist regimes aligned with the Soviets installed in almost every other major African state, often with decisive American collusion. So the story of the Congo would be at most the exception. But what happened with America in the Congo itself is still largely unknown and misunderstood.

Congo is today and will be in the future of planet Earth an important region. I hate having to use “planet Earth” phrase, but geological language is appropriate. Congo’s political, social, cultural might is nonexistent and probably will remain so, but in natural and mineral resources it is a distinct and preeminent part of Earth. Estimates are vague, but as of 2009, its mineral wealth was guessed to be about $20-25 trillion worth of cobalt, copper, and other such. Congo in 1960, the year of its independence from Belgium, was one of the most developed parts of Africa. Most readers are likely to be acquainted only with the hysterical slander of the Belgians, of King Leopold II of Belgium, and of colonialism in the Congo by Adam Hochschild, a Communist activist and ex-“civil rights" agitator in both the American South in the 1960's and in South Africa. It was, by the way, precisely men like this, Leo Cherne and Jacob Liebstein (Jay Lovestone) and other Red seltzer labor leaders that the CIA empowered and delegated its international policy to starting in the late 1950's at the latest. A good rebuttal of Hochschild’s disingenuous PR and lies about the Congo and colonialism in general can be found on my friend Leo Caesaris’ recent substack article.

As an aside: it looks like the international left is seeking to replace the Holocaust as a foundational religious event for the modern age with various other plausible "acts of colonialism" that can function as a similar mythology of carnage-victimization at the hands of the European: in their minds the Holocaust is a remembrance of victims who are white and it is problematic to place white victimhood over black or brown. Furthermore, they are uneasy with the fact that the Holocaust has become a justification for Zionism (although it was not mentioned by Israel in this connection before the Eichmann trial), and Zionism is a foundational evil for the contemporary left, which leads to an uncomfortable situation. Indisputably nonwhite and preferably Black or deep brown replacements were necessary. Therefore the fantastical slanders in King Leopold's Ghost were fabricated. This accounts for the book’s “popularity,” and it's likely the only introduction even non-leftists have had to the Congo or its history in recent years. In 1960 through 1965 however, and especially in the crucial years 1960-1, with so many other momentous events taking place, the “Congo Crisis” nevertheless was often a top headline. Famed UN head the Swede Dag Hammarskjold died in a mysterious plane crash in September of 1961 on his way to attempt to negotiate a resolution to the Congo Crisis. This was also the date of the creation of USAIDs by executive order of JFK, more on which below.

Regardless of supposed past heart of darkness crimes at the end of the 19th Century, Congo was perhaps the most developed and prosperous country in Africa by 1960. It had the most extensive system of roads, the best hospital system in Africa, and most important, the only place in Africa that actually had local industry. The Belgians had developed not only mines in the southern parts of the Kasai and Katanga, but also industry to process the raw materials locally. The process of independence, like much during the decolonization period made little sense. Congo had and in fact has no sense and no being as a united entity apart from Belgium and the other colonial powers. Its borders are otherwise incomprehensible, and the tribes they bring together have no actual affinity, historically or otherwise. Over 100,000 whites lived at this time in the Congo, most of them in the rich and productive southern province of Katanga, where they worked mainly as experts running the entire economy of this vast country.

At the time of independence Congo was composed of countless tribes but was de facto divided into three parts: Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) was the capital and formally the center of the country’s government. The central government in Leopoldville was under President Kasa-Vubu who was leader of the Abako religio-political movement, and beholden to his own ethnic power base in the center of the country. Katanga in the south was de facto autonomous, along wih neighboring Kasai—dues and taxes were paid to the local government, not the country’s capital. The vast northeast of the country was also autonomous—it was the power base of one Patrice Lumumba, a Marxist- and Soviet-aligned African socialist who became the Congo’s first prime minister as winner of elections upon independence.

Lumumba was and is beloved by the Reds and international left today because he provided them with an enduring archetype adored by that lame generation, the image of the Cool Negro, the hemp-smoking crazy-eyed vindictive blackamoor. He was throughout his career supported by the Belgian Communist Party and by the Soviets. Katanga’s provincial assembly was aware that 14 billion Belgian francs had been transferred to Lumumba from a communist bank, laundered by the Soviets for his election campaign in the run-up to independence. If I tell stories about his vicious or murderous character, Reds will deny it in public while celebrating them as acts of resistance in other forums, just as they did at the time.

In October of 1959, the autumn before the election campaign, anti-white massacres had broken out in Stanleyville, repeating antiwhite (excuse me, “anticolonial”) violence from January of that year. The white population was assured in the independence and election year of 1960 that such violence would never again take place; part of the independence agreement from Belgium included allowing the officers of the Force Publique, a 25,000 strong security force composed of mainly four big Congolese ethnic groups, to remain European. Lumumba’s campaign was one long incitement to violence and brutality. A month before independence, “Our Africa,” the left’s main publication in Congo, declared that soon raping a white woman would no longer be considered a crime. Sporadic violence occurred throughout the “election campaign.” Throughout his campaign and after Lumumba entertained the conspiracytard style so favored by Third World despots and leftists in the West—in other words people looking for victimization-based excuses to indulge in stupid and often self-defeating sadism. Paranoid stories about imaginary plots, false reports of “subversion” by the hated whites or fellow black African traitors, accompanying pogroms, massacres and rapes.

Peace lasted for only five days after independence. Lumumba incited the thousands of soldiers of the Force Publique to rise up and murder their white officers. The country was from that point effectively divided into the three parts mentioned above, as regional governments attempted to opt out of the insanity. Lumumba proceeded to “Africanize” the government including parts of the economy, constantly calling on the UN to remove the Europeans and Belgians from the Congo—but in practice this meant that he replaced whatever Europeans he could get to leave under threats of violence with Russian and Czech “experts.” This replacement of Western with Soviet-bloc influence was accompanied by frightful violence against Western civilians. Parts of the native black population were also targeted. White refugees from Katanga flooded south into neighboring North Rhodesia. Jadotville, the center of uranium and other mineral production was assaulted, women raped as per usual, hostages taken, and thereafter for a time abandoned, with mining production stopped. Particularly brutal were the attacks on the Baluba tribe in the Bakwanga province, a violent genocide by any definition:

Meanwhile, in the Congo, troops of this [UN] World Body, which has discussed genocide for 15 years, stand idly by while Lumumba’s “Force Publique” wipes out the Balubas in Kasai Province—rescuers are refused even the right to bring youngsters, wounded in the indiscriminate Congolese bloodbath, through their tight cordon for medical attention. The Congolese Surete Chief, Omonobe (Lumumba’s cousin) personally directed the recent Bakwanga massacre. Up from Matadi, in 100 Russian trucks are Soviet-armed and -supplied troops of Lt. Gen. (previously sergeant) Lundula (also a Lumumba cousin) with 10 Ilyouchine 18s. Before the Belgians came the favorite pastime of 120 principal tribes in the Congo was exterminating each other—they have returned to that pastime. Russian propaganda blames the colonialists and capitalists.

Such was the progressive pan-Africanist rule of socialist Lumumba. According to disaffected Lumumba economic minister Joseph Yan:

In New York he told those who would listen to him that Lumumba made inciting speeches and sowed new disorders wherever they went, fanning the savagery instead of calming it down. ''He (Lumumba) is a disciple of Lenin," said Yan. "His plan was to plunge the Congo in chaos in order to establish a communist dictatorship, with the Europeans frightened into leaving of their own accord. That is why he tours the country instead of governing. When I saw what was going on, I quit and went back to Katanga."

What was the American attitude toward Lumumba during this time and up to his assassination in January of 1961? Lumumba was received at the airport in the United States by Secretary of State Christian Herter to a salute of cannons and escorted to Blair House. He toured New York and Washington DC to press accolades. This was during a time when daily photographs and reports of massacres of whites and native Africans, as well as the killing of priests and mass raping of nuns were coming out of the Congo, atrocities which were ignored by the American press and political class. Instead Lumumba was legitimized by a public reception while his opponents in the Congo were ostracized. Carl T. Rowan, JFK's token black as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and a part of JFK’s team from before, had supported Lumumba throughout. Contrary to hysterical leftist claims that “the CIA” or America in some form led either to Lumumba’s removal from power or assassination, there’s no evidence of any American opposition to Lumumba before General Mobutu stepped in during September 1960 to stop the chaos and carnage developing in the Congo (this was not the event that brought Mobutu to power there—that came a few years later).

There is however plenty of evidence that America and all of its institutions went into overdrive to depose and destroy Moise Tshombe, the leader of Katanga, a Christian, pro-Western anticommunist and the only leader of a functioning African state at the time. In short, everything alleged about CIA activities against the pro-Communist, pro-Soviet antiwhite Lumumba is false—based on one or two offhand statements and hearsay from years later—but it is true regarding American activities against Africa’s most important anticommunist and pro-Western leader at the time.

2. America Attacks Tshombe

The story of what happened to Moise Tshombe is typical of the American foreign policy and security establishment’s activities in Africa during this decade and it’s worth telling this sad, insane story of decivilization in some detail. Tshombe, an urbane, polished, educated businessman in Katanga, known as Africa’s “Cash Register Man,” came from a long line of kings—that region of Congo had been its own separate kingdom some centuries back. Seeing the insanity that broke out upon independence under Lumumba, Katanga technically seceded from the Congo, although full independence was not demanded as a final condition. Tshombe, with wide support in Katanga, would have accepted some type of confederation appropriate to the African situation. The case for Katanga’s independence was quite strong: Katanga had its own separate history and identity as an independent kingdom, the Congo again being entirely a European construct that had no reason for existing outside of the nation of Belgium. Saving his territory and its various peoples from the rest of Congo’s dysfunction was also reason enough. Most in Katanga, whether white or black, felt that there was no reason their prosperous province should continue to pay in to a central government in Leopoldville that gave them nothing in return and to which they had no connection. The Lunda, Baluba, and other tribes of that part of the Congo didn't want to be subject to the tribe of President Kasavubu.

The international opposition America rallied against Tshombe and Katanga was maybe unprecedented. It’s hard to believe some of the measures that were taken at the time, including to turn the UN into an offensive force to keep the central Congolese tribal government in power and the other tribes subject to it. Some parts of the French establishment, such as its intelligence service SDECE, were for Tshombe and Katanga, but the foreign ministry even in France under Maurice Couve de Murville was very much opposed to him, and pursued the American line for American favor. Even in Belgium, which stood the most to gain from a Tshombe-led Katangan independence, the government was divided on the matter, with its principal parts opposed to Tshombe or silent, in order not to offend the Americans.

At the UN opening session in 1960 Belgian representatives refused to meet with the Katangan delegation, which was otherwise permitted only to listen but not speak. American officials repeatedly refused to meet or negotiate in any form with Tshombe or his delegates. The milder State Department internal notes from the time are amusing in their craven incoherence: “Meeting with Tshombe right now might go to counter his absolutely baseless claims that we won’t negotiate with him and might help to lessen his paranoia about us; on the other hand, in the final analysis, it’s not recommended to meet with him at this time.” During the shameful events of the UN session of 1960, French journalist Raymond Cartier—a peer of Raymon Aron, a liberal and anticolonialist himself—remarked on American ambassador Cabot Lodge’s statement on the Congo crisis, “We thought, since Suez, that the American technique of betraying her allies had reached its peak. We were wrong.”

Even if you grant that decolonization was a good thing—I think it was obviously terrible, and the results by now speak for themselves—it’s not clear why decolonization under leaders like Moise Tshombe was not as good or real or African as under Afromarxists like Lumumba, Toure, N’krumah or the later Mondlane in Mozambique (supported by America from beginning to end). It all becomes somewhat clear when you realize that in the case of French Cameroon, African leaders for the first time asked for a delay in independence because their preferred Red comrade, Russian- and Czech-armed Felix Moumie, was not yet in a position to seize power. Seeking to preempt another new African state falling into the lap of the Reds, France quickly effected Cameroon’s independence through Ahmadou Ahidjo instead. The rest of Africa’s new states bitterly complained, revealing that it wasn’t African independence as such that they sought from Europe, but leadership of the new countries for themselves and their comrades. Moumie had promised Moscow, which armed him, that Cameroon would be a socialist republic aligned with the Soviet bloc.

The plight of Katanga’s diplomats is a melancholy but somewhat romantic story; they were housed during their time in New York at the Beaux Arts apartments on E 44th street, which I think has some enduring value as a cinematic and dramatic location for delegates from Cold War-era postcolonial secessionist states that happened to be pro-European and pro-civilization and who fought for these lost causes against a suicidal American establishment opposed to both. Besides the Katangans, these apartments also housed among others the representatives of South Moluccas seeking to break away from Soekarno’s Soviet- and Red Chinese-supported fake Indonesia. As stupid and destructive as 19th Century European nationalism was, the 20th Century postcolonial variety was more retarded still. For example the “nation” of Indonesia, like the Congo, has no reality outside of European colonialism and should never have been recognized as a united entity. Indonesia as it exists now, like the Congo, is demonstrably an injustice to the many disparate tribes and nations forced to live under its central government. This is a question quite aside from what you may think of injustices done to the Europeans who had called these places home in some cases for centuries.

Regardless, the “international community” was moving to crush Katangan independence already in the summer of 1960. The excuse that it was important to keep the Congo together out of a desire to “prevent chaos,” which you can find in some State Department communiques of the time, is not plausible; the Red portion of Congo based around Stanleyville and loyal to Lumumba was also de facto independent from the central government and didn’t answer to it, but neither international nor United States ire was fixated on it at all…just on anticommunist and pro-Western Katanga. The public justification was that Tshombe and the Katangan leadership were “Belgian puppets.” In reality Lumumba and the UN were fighting simply to replace Belgian, French and other European experts with Russians, Czechs, and other operatives from the East Bloc. Tshombe wished for the Europeans to stay in his province not out of any desire for foreign domination, but because he realized their expertise and aid was for the moment necessary to keep Katangan mining alive. Lumumba called on the UN and on Russian help to remove “European colonialists” from the Congo, including in Katanga. On the insistence of both the Soviets and the Soviet-aligned governments in Guinea and Ghana, the UN began against all legality and its own charter to carry out offensive operations in order to subject Katanga to the central government in Leopoldville.

The American role was decisive in a few ways for the UN’s unprecedented entry into a civil war and its role as an army of conquest. And it was a war: it included the indiscriminate murder of civilians in Kasai and Katanga by Indian Gurkha and Irish UN troops. America to this end undertook the following measures: American officials isolated Tshombe and all Katangan diplomatic efforts. The United States government pressured European allies to abandon Katanga, which was also never allowed to speak at the UN or to negotiate directly with American officials. Press in both the United States and Europe was often prohibited from covering Katanga fairly, if at all. American officials were especially aggressive in trying to frame Tshombe and the Katangans for Lumumba’s January 1961 assassination. This murder was then used as a pretext for war on Tshombe and Katanga. American officials, most prominently Roger Tubby, the American representative to the UN office in Geneva, went on the campaign trail in a PR effort “to avenge Lumumba.” He managed to sell $100 million of UN bonds in the United States to finance the destruction of Tshombe on this pretext. From September 1960 to 1963 the United States, the Soviet bloc and the UN had an identical goal in Africa: the liquidation of the government of Katanga. The UN was to be used as the front army to achieve this. It was indeed a follow-up to the 1956 Suez crisis when America stepped in to save Soviet-supported Nasser from France, the United Kingdom and Israel. And this was the most blatant instance yet of the America-Soviet plan agreed upon by FDR and Stalin at Tehran to rid the world of European “imperialism.”

A word about Lumumba’s assassination, which was at the time widely blamed on Tshombe by American media and more relentlessly by figures like Malcolm X and Rowan, the JFK administration’s traveling negro minstrel show. His assassination has since then been blamed on the CIA. There is no evidence for either, but a lot of evidence that the central government in Leopoldville, under President Kasavubu and under Adoula, ordered Lumumba’s murder. Tshombe attempted to give his side of the story in 1964, but it was widely censored in the United States—the interview was printed only temporarily in a Belgian magazine. But the Belgian government seized all copies of this magazine the day after publication. Tshombe’s account, backed up at the time by some European intelligence agencies, was that Kasavubu and Adoula put Lumumba on a death flight in early 1961 commandeered by men who had every reason to want to kill him. Probably no direct order needed to be given. Aside from political and military men whose families or positions had been hurt by Lumumba, the flight included a contingent of Balubas, whose genocide Lumumba had ordered. Eight strapping Baluba cannibal tribesmen proceeded to smash their rifles into Lumumba and his associates’ faces.

The Lumumba murder flight was diverted from its original destination on rumors that friendlies to him from other African militaries were waiting to rescue. The plane landed in Elizabethville, the capital of Katanga, with Lumumba already dead and presented Tshombe with a fait accompli. The pilot would not take off with three corpses the next morning. Thus the myth of Tshombe as assassin of Lumumba was created. Tshombe himself likely had no reason to want Lumumba’s death because by this time (early 1961) Lumumba was already out of power in the central government and presented no direct threat to Katanga, while on the other hand his insane rhetoric and the disorder and chaos he caused, especially in his seats of eastern and northeastern Congo, publicly justified the Katangan secession every day. There is also no evidence of CIA involvement in this assassination, aside from trying to pin it on Tshombe. The central government in Congo had every motive and means to do it all itself. (In this as in likely quite a few other later events, the CIA was a passive partner. Some figures may have later tried to claim credit, again with the understanding that it's always preferable to appear Machiavellian and evil and with-it instead of stupid and weak).

The American-funded and -run UN war against Tshombe and Katanga that followed had its moments of romance. It took place in two phases, the first beginning in autumn of 1960, coming to a head in late summer and September of 1961 under the leadership of UN head Dag Hammarskjold and his Swedish mafia, and ending a few months later with a total defeat of the UN forces under crazed Irish libtard Connor Cruise O’Brien. Hammraskjold was apparently livid with rage and ranting at the failure of UN troops and his plans for a test run of the UN as a globalist army, all crashing in defeat at the hands of Katangan commandos trained by French veterans of the Indochina wars. The entire public relations apparatus of the Soviet Union’s propaganda, American media, and UN whining was during this time directed at the image of ultimate depravity: European mercenaries, “the dregs of society” in service to shady “international corporations” fighting against justice, human rights, and African liberation. Apparently African liberation was possible only under the black governments at Leopoldville and Stanleyville but not the black government in Elizabethville. If this propaganda of low-class “dregs,” shut-ins, rapists, etc., in service to dark pool “Nazi billionaire” corporations and conspiracies sounds familiar, this is because the left has never changed its violent paranoid fantasies: it always recycles its tropes.

Regardless, the men who fought for Tshombe and won the first phase of the Kantangan war for him in late 1961 were in my view some of the best specimens that humanity managed to still produce in the middle of the wretched 20th Century. For added local color and because it reads like an exciting movie, I quote at length from Berrier’s account of these adventurers:

THE FRENCH OFFICERS IN KATANGA. Mr. H[ammarskjold] described them as "Dregs of the Algerian war'', and our American press took up this description--but let us take a look at them. There is Captain Ives de la Bourdonnais, as impeccable a gentleman as Mr. H. He drew up and signed the over-all plan for Katanga resistance as advisor to Munungo, the Minister of the Interior whom Linner [the UN’s Swedish operations chief under H in the Congo] and Connor Cruise O'Brien were out to seize. UN Intelligence Chief [Pior Djorn] Egge learned the plan, embellished it, and passed it on to the Secretary-General; hence Mr. H's hatred of la Bourdonnais. Another is Commandant Roger Faulques, 36 years old and the recipient of 13 citations for valor. Son of a professor and a brilliant strategist he set up a school to train paratroopers and commandos, aided by Captain Heltzen, an officer of the Legion of Honor. They formed a general staff, took over the job of reorganizing an army in the grip of complete anarchy. Most of this army had already made trips to Rhodesia to sell their guns to rebels encouraged by UN agents.

In October, 1950 Faulques led a Foreign Legion Battalion against the full Vietminh army to save French units cut off at Langson and Cao-Bang, was brought back seriously wounded, with only 19 survivors of his command. Operations and bone-grafts followed. Though pronounced physically unfit, by sheer determination he got back into service to survive the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. His specialty: Communist psychological warfare, from Lenin to Mao. He found it being applied in Algeria. He was highly respected; his men were devoted to him, and he was consulted by deGaulle in September, 1959. In 1960 he resigned to become Tshombe's advisor.

"Sooner or later UN is going to attack you,'' he told Tshombe. "You must prepare for it. Disperse your forces, supplies, munitions in small villages. Get ready to fight in the bush with sudden commando raids and ambushes. You are not strong enough to risk open battle against their materiel.'' He taught his men, "Never operate without a cover of 30 or 40 commandos.'' While the covering forces immobilized UN trucks and armed cars, Faulques' freshly-trained specialists struck with terrific rapidity in a highly successful operation, while order was maintained in the interior by Faulques' friend Captain Egey, a paratroop hero of the French Resistance. Your correspondent is not irresponsible enough to write off as "dregs" such officers, the pride of an army that may be asked to hold up the Russian advance for us in a few months and who might be leading that army in an action on which the lives of thousands of Americans will depend.

The UN’s defeat in this first part of the Congo crisis was recently and fraudulently reinterpreted in the Irish movie The Siege of Jadotville. I haven’t and won’t watch this, but it appears to be marketed as a celebration of the bravery of a troop of Irish UN soldiers facing down the dark forces of “dreg of society” white rapist mercenaries in service to “international corporations” and Darth Vader, in other words the same line as the relentless Soviet-American propaganda on this period and on Katanga since 1960. While I have no doubt that individual Irish soldiers acted honorably and bravely, it is a lie to claim their service to the UN and the crazed liberal idiot Connor Cruise O’Brien had any broader noble meaning or justice as the movie implies.

If the matter of corruption and shady corporations is decisive for the reader in questions of justice: Hammarskjold’s own brother held considerable interests in the Congo and Swedish mining conglomerates stood to make a killing if the UN managed to destroy the government of Katanga and thereafter if operation or ownership of the mines and industry changed hands. It’s not easy on the face of mere facts to see why Irish filmmakers would take pride in this event and go so far as to put in the effort to make a movie about the use of Irish soldiers as Hessians for one set of international mining interests over another. Of course this has nothing to do with facts: it's a question of emotional symbols, and here the point is simply the image of fighting international Capital, presumably on behalf of poor people of color who couldn’t defend themselves. This movie reflects the enduring Western disease of the shitlib, where virtue and nobility can only be found in self-sacrifice on behalf of people of color, especially against other Evil White People. This is the ultimate image of The Good according to modern leftists and liberals. It may well be that some Irish are especially interested in indulging in all this because of their own self-conception as a victimized nation. It’s hard to judge who wins the competition in wallowing in this lurid fantasy: the Irish leftist or the Jewish leftist. Certainly the latter has had more media reach to tell this story, and represent these emotional symbols a thousand times over, but anyone who’s had extensive contact with Irish liberals and leftists knows they're second to no Susan Sontag in indignant moraline against the Colonial Man.

USAID was also founded at this same time by JFK’s executive order in September 1961. Its first head, Fowler Hamilton, was together with the former head of United States aid (Point Four Program) deeply embroiled in the same scheme that included the brother of UN Dag Hammarskjold (and United States senator and presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson): interlocking corporate boards between America and Sweden that stood to make enormous profits if the Kantangan government was overthrown, or fail if Tshombe stayed in power. I don’t really care about corruption either way; it’s a constant in history and politicians will always seek to make money on the side…they’re whores. At times, political greatness can mix with even petty self-interest and corruption. A famous example of this is Themistocles, the savior of Greece, and maybe of the idea of Europe, and also a huge crook. The problem is that the corrupt self-interest of these particular men in this case depended on the destruction of one of the remainders of white civilization on the African continent, and probably the only decent government in Africa at the time, led by one of Africa’s best men, Moise Tshombe, who employed some of Europe’s best and most gallant adventurers. Furthermore, and maybe more important, that the vast wealth of the Congo, as well as of other parts of the world where a similar process was and is taking place, would be used to further the destruction of European world order and the advancement of decivilization and stagnation, whether under Soviet or colored leadership.

In fact although ownership of mines changed hands after the Belgians left and Katanga was destroyed, it’s important to remember that mere desire for profit or for ownership of mining wasn’t the primary motivation here for America. It certainly was not for someone like Hammarskjold, his brother’s interests aside. I wish it had been. This was Belgium’s primary interest in the Congo, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The Congo could have turned out well, or at least much better, if extracting its mineral wealth had been the primary concern of its patrons and of the interested parties over the decades following independence. It was the primary concern for Tshombe, but he was destroyed. If this had been what determined Congo’s future, the country may well have turned out like Botswana; a kind of mining-colony-as-country with high GDP and a relatively stable and well-run oasis in Africa. In fact this is what Katanga was in 1960-65, and what Tshombe was offering. It was the typical mix of naivete and leftist ideological commitments on the part of American officials that prevented this other, better path for the Congo.

Eventually Katanga was not able to stand up to the combined might of America, the Soviets, and the “international community.” For support it had only its native wealth, the brains of Tshombe and one or two good associates, and only portions of this or that European government that might covertly help them. It’s the same problem Rhodesia eventually faced, where a record of consistent and often miraculous military success against far larger armies wasn’t enough to overcome international isolation and essentially an English-American oil embargo. The second phase of the Katanga-Congo crisis began after Dag Hammarskjold’s mysterious death (also in September 1961). U Thant, a boring, gray, inscrutable Burmese bureaucrat with dead insect eyes became UN head. He accelerated UN military operations in Katanga culminating in Operation Grandslam, now forgotten. It should be emphasized that prior to UN operations against Katanga, there was not actually a state of war existing between the different parts of the Congo, just an uneasy truce. The “Congo crisis" was therefore a civil war between Africans that was initiated by the UN (under Soviet and American directive, funding, and arming). The legality of Operation Grandslam rested simply on the might of America and the Soviets who backed it. It was an offensive UN campaign to remove a sitting government. The United States provided the UN army with military airplanes and heavy artillery against which Tshombe and the Katangans had no countermeasures, French mercenaries or no. Indian Gurkha UN troops at the time admitted to BBC and other correspondents to atrocities against civilians: “we shot at every Katangan that we saw.” This campaign ended the bid for Katangan independence and the possibility of a well-run, prosperous, pro-Western and nonracist state in subsaharan Africa.

What happened next also doesn’t support the claim of wily far-seeing anticommunism on the part of America’s security and foreign affairs establishment in Africa. Moise Tshombe made a comeback and was called from exile to be appointed prime minister, leading the whole of the Congo from 1964-5 in response to a crisis that the ever-incompetent Leopoldville central government could not address. His return was welcomed because he was the only man who could stop the Simba rebellion—savage Lumumbist terrorists centered around Stanleyville, where the Congolese government had lost all control by July of 1964. This is the episode where, in 1965 white mercenaries crushed the Simbas under the legendary Col. “Mad Mike” Hoare and Bob Denard, immortalized in a famous documentary.

In 1965 Tshombe was convinced by Frank Devlin, a CIA agent in Congo (Berrier calls him Frank, but his name appears to be Larry—I’m not sure if this is a typo or intentional) to step down under the guarantee that Mobutu would then hold free elections. Tshombe was then sentenced to death in absentia and he fled to Madrid. There is circumstantial but strong evidence that left wing CIA networks were responsible for Tshombe’s subsequent abduction from Madrid and assassination in a jail in Algeria. In 1967 Tshombe was lured on an airplane by a French underworld figure, Francois Bodenan. Bodenan, for all purposes the assassin subcontracted to eliminate Tshombe, was tied in multiple ways to American socialist actors in France and the CIA in Lichtenstein from where he had just arrived with unclear funding (Lichtenstein was a well-known base of CIA operations in Europe at the time). Alfred E. Davidson, a teacher of political science in the American College in Paris and organizer of “Artists and Writers for Johnson” in 1964 was implicated as one of Bodenan's associates in Paris in the English press. “Mr. Frank Capell has named him in his HERALD OF FREEDOM as rejected at one time by the State Department because of the communist record of his father.” Other reports of European intelligence services at the time suggest Tshombe was under American surveillance at his Madrid apartment—where he received African and other world leaders in a mini-embassy for Katanga in exile—for weeks leading up to his kidnapping. Tshombe’s plane, supposed to land in Ibiza for a real estate deal, was diverted to Algeria where he soon died in custody. Some newspapers at least at the time recognized American culpability:

The Belgian newspaper LA CITE reported that CIA had organized the plot to spirit Tshombe into Algeria, against the advice of the State Department. The Sunday Express (London) of July 23 called it "An act of total barbarism,” adding "America has the moral responsibility of seeing that Tshombe not be assassinated. America is directly implicated in the Congo. It is well known that the government there is America's puppet. They transport troops here and there in American planes. Without America's support Mobutu could not last a day. Can they really permit him to extend his activities across the world, to exterminate his political rivals?"

And so in the Congo the public mythology is the opposite of what happened. America didn't work to remove a socialist Red-aligned politician and replace him with an American-supported dictator. In fact multiple elements of American society, government and media supported Lumumba during his rise to prominence and supported the perpetuation of his mythology as a symbol of anticolonial aspiration afterward. Lumumba was removed by rival factions in the Congo in response to the chaos and crimes of his brief rule. By contrast, America did everything it could to remove Tshombe from power and have him assassinated, crushing even Katangan independence with a repeat of the 1956 Suez crisis with the UN as its front army to block European, pro-Western, anticommunist interests. Here as in Vietnam and Algeria it was the European world order and pro-Western factions and leaders, as well as local traditionalists and monarchs, not socialists or communists, who were America’s primary target for destruction.

3. America’s International Racial Marxism

A close look at the Congo crisis, arguably the sole example of the CIA and America’s success in keeping the Soviets out of Africa, reveals I think instead the sickness in spirit that animated American meddling around the world after World War 2. This turn in spirit hurt blacks as well. Moise Tshombe getting attacked by JFK, his entire administration, the American security establishment, Malcolm X and so forth essentially for "acting white” is a typical result of this change in mores. Africa hasn’t profited. In the Congo, over 100,000 whites who were keeping that country on a relatively good path of progress have now left and the region itself is wrecked after decades of American and Soviet meddling (the latest round of genocidal wars started in the 1990’s when America’s retarded pet Mobutu thought it was a good idea to attack Kagame’s Rwanda). The same thing happened in Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and in north Africa in Algeria, Tunisia and elsewhere: what will be remembered centuries from now is the ethnic cleansing of Europeans from that continent, not so much the ideological constructs of the Soviet Union or America or the UN in effecting or justifying this. The systematic destruction of local leaders who could provide some version of good government or progress is part of the same process. Everywhere the long night of the stagnant, fetid global village, or what I've called “the longhouse” is the inheritor of the modern turn…the promise of technology, liberty and progress hijacked by the inertia of numbers and the regressive, reactionary international left.

America’s activities in Africa in the Cold War are alike to what the CIA, State Department, their subsidiary NGO’s, its media conglomerates, etc., this entire complex of ferment of the international left effected also in Asia, Europe and to a lesser extent in Latin America also. The story of Africa since 1950 is, absent an alternative, the future of mankind as a whole. As the last continent brought under European civilization, and the first to leave it, it’s for this reason a leading indicator of the direction of the world under the left, the bastard distortion of European civilization. Recent critics of liberalism, globalism, and so on, self-styled “Dissidents,” many of who are leftists by conviction or sentiment, falsely present nationalism as an alternative to this process. But the reactionary nationalisms of the Third World and the assertion of often-made up group identities in our time are themselves a crucial part of this story of leftist global spiritual disintegration. Only a total overturning at the root of all this, in the spirit, in morality and therefore in the aesthetic, prerational and aspirational basis of morality, only an entirely new morality and a new type of human being can arrest and reverse the drifting of mankind toward perpetual existence in the darkness of a “global tenement.”

As in this entire series I am indebted to Hilaire du Berrier’s commentary especially in his newsletter 1957-2002, and whatever quotations I have used here without links or citations are from his work: https://sorenbh.dk/page22.html