What has occurred in Sudan has caused me great personal sadness for the Sudanese people.
I spent a month in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in 1954.. Making a documentary film, SUDAN: LAND OF CONTRASTS, provided me an opportunity to visit much of this vast area and meet a diversity of people.
Sudan was comprised of the North, which was predominately Moslem including Black Nubians, and the South, diverse tribes existing under British rule and with scant ‘civilized’ amenities.
In the North there seemed a decent group that was achieving independence from the Egyptians and British in 1956. In February 1955, tribal fighting erupted in the South. The South has been a brutal hodgepodge ever since. At times Northerners ravaged huge areas of the South. Darfur has been a regular slaughter field.
The discovery of oil in the South further complicated northern-southern Sudanese relations. Ultimately an independent South Sudan was created. Its tribal leaders are still at loggerheads with the people suffering greatly.
Sudan (in the North) started shakily as a ‘country.’ It was a pass through country for radical leaders who sought to support Congolese Rebellions in the 1960s. Clashes between civilian tribal leaders escalated. A dreadful general seized power in the 1980s and ruled for a generation. He was deposed and, ultimately, two other generals, one more dreadful than the other, seized power.
Despite a ‘democratization’ agreement, they have launched what seems a civil war for personal power and loot.
Now there is total chaos and massive killings. As foreigners and Sudanese seek to flee, what I knew as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan is in tatters. I have scant hope that this poor and ravaged area, both Sudan and South Sudan, will become livable, viable nations in the foreseeable future.
Who remembers that the Nubians of Sudan ruled Egypt 700-600 BCE?
Keith I would love to see your film. Is it available anywhere...any way ? You may have already told me, but I've been so focused on my work around our Civil War of 160 years ago that I don't recall. My work seems trite compared to people in the midst of these on going hostilities...but I'm afraid of where we are headed...and much of it is because we have not come to grips, we have not reconciled our issues of race, of enslaver and enslaved.
I just attended an annual conference held by the Shenandoah Valley Battlefield Foundation in Winchester VA held in a ballroom in the very grand George Washington Hotel. It was attended by mostly older white men. At 70 I felt like one of the younger demographics...except for a 15 year old from California who is probably the next Bruce Caton/ JamesMcPherson, HCR...name your historian. There were no black folks in the room...none, zero....and very few women. I ended up recording Ron Maxwell's talk...because the event producers were not prepared to record anything....and Ron asked if it could be done. I intend to return next year with some black friends and women who are interested in the topics...and maybe suggest an appropriate presenter that breaks the color/gender barrier. Anyway I pray for sanity in Sudan and a quick peace...but I doubt that's likely.
Mike S, she should be a presenter at this conference...and if they won't do that I have a "history/art" event we are starting to create that she would be perfect for, not far from Winchester/DC/Baltimore/Gettysburg/Harpers Ferry/Antietam.
I don't have the power to make it happen for their event, but I can suggest it. For the event we want to do, consider her on the list...we will be reaching out, when we have some details together. Watch for "Crossroads of History" at the Hagerstown Aviation Museum Dome Hanger., sometime after September .. this is the first public, put the intention out there moment
Mike I am appalled by how few people get off their duff to support or learn about important history. Perhaps if it could be presented in a sports motif there would be better interest and attendance.
Thanks for asking about my Sudan documentary. It turned out be be historic. The Southern Sudan was cut off by the British and Prime Minister Ismail Azhari had to call a special cabinet meeting to vote me permission to film in the South. The southern tribal uprising in February, 1955 killed any further ‘Sudan documentaries.’With a. CBS editor I finished the film in October, 1954. He thought it was good.
Two months later my family disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle and I became occupied with other matters. I have the film on DVD but, frankly, am not inclined to have it copied to sent out. Apologies, but I now use my energy more sparingly.
For all who are reading Keith Wheelock's posts here with great interest, here is a capsule history of his life published in 2006 as part of the Princeton [University] Personalities series. I tried to include the complete text below, but Substack refused. Also go to the link for the handsome photo of Professor Wheelock, which Substack also refuses to post:
Mike I’m not a doctor, though if I were, it probably should be in phrenology. Though my book at U Penn was accepted as my dissertation and they offered me credits for courses I would teach and a special ‘book program’ for my PhD, I preferred the non-academic tranquility of the Congo 1960-1966.
But can you be certain that your film is preserved and/or that someone else can get it out? As you undoubtedly know, it could be invaluable in any kind of future negotiations.
Are you writing a long memoir? Your father’s story? Thank you again for sharing yours.
Virginia I had intended to give it to a friend of mine who had. Been named ambassador to Sudan in 1967. The the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 resulted in a break of diplomatic relations. Later I wrote the Sudan desk at State Department mentioning the documentary and offering to send copies that could be deposited in Sudanese government and university archives. Never got a response.
I have written five extensive booklets, including documents that encapsulate portions of my life. Few members of my family have bothered to read them. I do provide some personal insights on Heather’s blog and elsewhere.
My involvement in Eisenhower Fellowships and Edward R. Murrow’s THIS I BELIEVE commenced in the 1950s. I was instigator of a book that incorporated these two in 2016. General Colin Powell wrote the forward.
Keith, so many of us here would be eager to read your booklets! I read your comments with great interest, as your perspective and experience are fascinating. If it makes you feel any better, my great grandfather, grandfather, and father all wrote memoirs - and I’m the only one who has read them besides my dad’s secretary, who typed them. I don’t get it.
KR I don’t get it either! Personally, I was captivated by my dad’s diary of his experiences with the Army Signal Corps in WW I (pilot in Spad planes, which kept crashing). If you go on Amazon and click on Congo Mercenary, you will see my write up and an extensive commentary on my Foreign Service involvement in Congo. For some of it, it took me over 40 years to become ready to discuss this publicly.
Keith, your work—both your film and the booklets/short books—have important historical value. I hope you were able to extricate your family from the Bermuda Triangle.
David Thanks for picking up the typo. In fact Ed Murrow was a friend of the family. We went fishing over week end. I recorded a THIS I BELIEVE on CBS for him in 1954 and last saw him in 1960 with President Eisenhower and Eisenhower Fellows.
His son Casey and I spoke at a dinner with PBS execs some years later.
Keith as to history as "sports" battle re-enactments are sort of that. I used to use football terminology in setting up camera positions...50 yd line...end zone...if you trust sending me your DVD, I'll get it copied and back to you. I could arrange for Fed Ex or UPS to pick it up on my dime and get it back to you.
Three hours later, throughly awake, I read “family” instead of “father.” Bravo for continuing as you have.
As one of those who has lived on “lived” history, I remember the Bermuda Triangle stories but shall have to look up whether the mystery was ever resolved.
Virginia Obviously I’ve looked into the Bermuda Triangle stories. Nothing definitive. On occasion it appears that there are electronic oddities, one of which misdirected some Navy planes many years ago. Also, some tropical storms arise suddenly.
Actually, a number of boats and ships have vanished over the years, in the Caribbean, the Atlantic, the Pacific, and elsewhere. Especially before top level communications, there were no historical answers. The media has considerable responsibility for over blowing the Bermuda Triangle. Sailing is a risky sport, as is mountain climbing. I am thankful that I sailed through a hurricane with nothing untoward except a scary several hours. Some outcomes are far worse.
I once was married to a mountaineer and when I’d see him off on his adventure guiding trips I held in the back of my mind that it might be the last time I’d see him. It was a weird space to be in, but one I fully accepted. As to areas of the ocean that are problematic, for so long people didn’t give much credence to the “rouge wave” sinking ships seemingly out of nowhere. As I have read, but cannot cite, there is more current evidence for this phenomena and may be associated with certain areas of the world’s seas, currents & wind being a big factor. I have read/heard that just a few days ago search & rescue efforts for some folks sailing has been called off…no trace has been found.
Barbara I have witnessed many rogues in my life, including rouge waves. Fortunately, I have also encountered many comforting waves. On balance life indeed can be good, despite bumpy moments.
"the women who had led the uprising that got rid of al-Bashir were largely excluded from the government that followed; armed groups were at the table instead." We ought to learn more about peace making than war making.
Keith and Mike and others. When I see a comment stream from you all, I pick up my coffee and look forward to your discussion. As perhaps the 89-year old of the group, Keith, I hope there is a permanent archive for your writings and products, some of which you share here at LFAA. Does your university have a provision for submitting a personal archive for it's distinguished professors, which I suspect you must be? Some universities are asking this of retired figures in their field, hoping to get beyond the surface of individual's contributions to their discipline (e.g., published papers, correspondence, calendars, etc). The intent, as explained to me, is to go deeper in preserving the record of individual's, the context, their interactions, remembrances, their avocations, the person and professional. I think now that a lot of the records we used to rely up are not being maintained (e.g., death information, church records, family bibles) and budgets for going deep get cut, life stories of the typical, in some cases, broadens the historical record. Too, the electronic compilations, do disappear as we die without writing down passwords or the documentation software goes poof as updates make our favorites become obscure. In your case, not the typical, but the exceptional, deep and broad in recordable contributions, I would hope that they would welcome and give home to your experiences, films, public and person experiences, etc, for future generations. Yor life is a historical resource with notions, depth, idiosycracyies, and details no where otherwise available, unless of course a definitive autobiography has been written and made available. Arching, like this, can be a time-consuming effort, but also an opportunity to have the last word, so to speak, and finish your thoughts as to what was important, the So What did you learn in your 89 years? Much you share freely here. But like HCR, we are but a small priviledged Band of Strangers. A thought.
True of the department, but archivists are a different crowd. Lost my parking permit two years ago, only my former executive assistant knows me, and now annually I have to take training on internet security to keep email account and use of university licensed software. I wouldn't think you'd go quietly. One last dump into the archive, if I remember.
Fred After 23 years a last hurrah from my department and, within a few years, anyone trying to contact me at the college was told ‘no info on Wheelock.’ But some of my students still remember.
A while ago, when my wife and I were lunching out, a lady came up to effusively recall the impact of classes she took with me 20 years ago. She said that she had described the affect to a retired West Pointer who wanted to become a teacher. I offered syllabi and whatever.
My record was a call from a person I had helped in 1960 at a Middle East Institute reception for my NASSER’S NEW EGYPT: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS (NY, London, 1960). Sixty-three years later is a personal record.
Fred, thanks for the coffee cup compliment. I like your observation. Some of my historian friends, like Jay Wertz (Smithsonian Great Battles of the Civil War) are documenting interviews with WWII vets and more recent vets. Folks with Keith's experience would be a treasure trove. I did a DVD project with Helen Bentley 10 years ago focused on her TV series, the Port that Built a City. I have some of those DVDs available. With the right backing we could expand on that concept. We have footage of Helen talking about her political career, Nixon, Agnew that we didn't use for the Port DVD. She was the first female chair of the Maritime Commission...and it's a great story. It's easy to produce interviews today with zoom. Jared Frederick just interviewed me a few days ago about our behind the scenes work on Gods & Generals. It's been posted on his YouTube Channel "Reel History". We are up to 7600 views. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYGOYuoNABA
We lived in Winchester, VA about 40 years ago. We were displaced Californians who were there for 2 years for my husband’s job. Our son was in the 6th grade and learned about the civil war in a private country day school. Same outcome but a different slant on things. As we knew no one when we first arrived there we spent our weekends going to the Civil War battlefields, it was a sobering time for us. I wonder how the town has changed in those years gone by. There was certainly no grand George Washington Hotel!
Barbara I spent time there 30-40 years ago and shooting re-enactment video's at New Market & Cedar Creek and shooting Gods & Generals 20 years ago. It has not changed very much. I would be very interested to see the history text book your son learned from. I went to both the National Cemetery & the Confederate section of the old town cemetery while I was there. THAT was when it all became VERY real for me. I'll write about that on my page for tomorrow.
We no longer have the text books from so long ago, but I think the slant was more nuanced than written down. It was always about states rights, northern aggression . We did met many wonderful people there and continued friendships for years. We were lucky to be white, my husband is English and Northern Virginia is very Anglophile and Episcopalian.
Back in California we once had dinner with Ken Burns when the Civil War series came out on PBS. It was an evening to remember and the conversations were wonderful.
Hi Keith. I just saw this post. We had painters in here last week and we moved a lot of things into bins for safe keeping. We are just getting reorganized. I'll be on the lookout for your file. You've had quite a life experience. Thanks for sharing.
I'd like to point out that the elephant in the room, mentioned twice by HCR, is the failure in Sudan (and lots of other countries in Africa) to include women in the government, in negotiations, in calls for equity. Misogyny, which certainly existed before the imperialist programs of the west (and I include the medieval Muslim empires that took over the Roman Empire as part of the West, not just the 19th-century race for empire) but was emphasized as a positive good by the hyper-misogynist empire builders, has been a huge contributor to the kinds of militia-driven dictatorships that have been part of the situation in African countries for ages. When attacks on women and girls, refusal to give women full rights of citizenship, restriction of women's economic independence, and restrictions on the education of women and girls become the watchwords of a military/political movement, violent dictatorships inevitably follow.
I had done my first read through the Letter as my coffee brewed. As it finished, I got up to pour cup #1. As I walked into the kitchen, my thought was "And yet again, what women do is ignored and overrun by men."
"This pattern was especially problematic in Sudan, she wrote, where the women who had led the uprising that got rid of al-Bashir were largely excluded from the government that followed; armed groups were at the table instead."
The patriarchy strikes again. While I am regularly annoyed by patriarchy's local insults, when I think about its effects on global history, it begins to look a bit apocalyptic.
Or worse, that Burns comment " if we are going to stop the 'continued cycle of violence and human suffering,' negotiators must stop prioritizing the voices of “the armed and corrupt” over those actually interested in real political reform." applies to conditions in the US of A
War. Which I see as an extension of ball games. It will never end. That's the way the human animal is programmed. Damn shame. Evolution went too far. Or, not far enough, or we would be focusing on things that don't destroy the GD planet...like art.
Competition you mean? More often (not always) how the male human animal is programmed... is what i see. If women were running the world, in general... i believe that peace would often be negotiated first... and as win-win... not as zero sum. To me, we haven't evolved far enough yet.
I doubt there is enough time for the humans to evolve past their current behaviors. And, it's not that women aren't running the show; in humans, women are complicit, letting the men be the rulers and "have their fun". No other mammal has a set up where the females and the offspring have no safe places. How many millions of women are now in refugee camps with inadequate household products or even ways to take a bath while their children run wild.
I am 100% sure that the authoritarians in this country as well as Putin’s worst oligarchs are all in to support the worst options for that country. Chump and Bannon did way more than attack democracy here, they supported authoritarian evil around the world. With the stage set for another Biden/chump race, will the repubs have codified enough of their evil to win next time (sort of like Hitler did)? The world is waiting, but the authoritarians are on the March everywhere…
Robert Reich, here on Substack, has an excellent analysis today on the puzzle of why Trump, who has led a seditious, treasonous uprising against the USA is being allowed to "run" for President since, as Reich points out, and, some of us have pointed our here: Running for office as a known seditionist is illegal.
As I have long hypothesized, and now know for a fact watching Trump: It is simply impossible to arrest a rich white male in America. Even Jeffrey Epstein, who was first arrested in Florida when a 14 year old girl testified to a detective there, was let go by the Bush administration. (google it, it is true).
Thank you Keith for the valuable historical framing of Sudan wars. Per CNN & BBC News report, two (2) Fronts for the Wagner group are shipping Sudanese Gold off books & overland to the CAR, Central African Republic (sic).
Got a good source for current Wagner group operations in the CAR. Double thanks in advance. 🙏
Every time I see the words “Wagner Group” I feel a chill. It’s a private renegade army (or several). Am I correct that it is funded by oligarch money stolen when the USSR came apart?
This morning I hear that China has stated that the former USSR countries have no right to national sovereignty. Is there rebellion brewing in China?
Overpopulation and climate change are starting to boil
over.
Everyone, apologies for the both on-topic and digressions as I try to put together a coherent view of where we are as a world. Colonialism, exploitation, still rampant as climate change tears at humanity is a lot to absorb.
I think China’s reactions to what Russia is doing in Ukraine are completely colored by what China wants to do with Taiwan. They are carefully watching, learning, and seeing how the West reacts as they assess their own risks for their own misadventure. In my own very humble opinion, we (the West, not just the US) should be arming and training Ukraine with everything they need to win this war as quickly as possible, not only because it’s the right thing to do, but also to send a strong message to China.
This has been weighing on me. For certain we have the means to get this war done and over, so why aren't we? What benefit is there for the US to donate "only almost enough"?
Not that I'm an expert by any means, but each NATO nation needs to tread carefully so it does not appear it's at war and risk being attacked. They have to be careful not to entice a nuclear response, too. The appearance must be "a little help from friends" rather than a no-holds- barred proxy war. Sometimes I think Putin is goading Western nations, particularly the US, by his war crimes just so we bite the bullet so to speak, and he can retaliate full on. He already is forming alliances with nuclear capable nations---and no doubt speeding Iran's nuke capacity to completion.
Nancy, this is just in, from Diane Francis' column. It may offer good news for us both:
"As Ukraine prepares its counter-offensive... on April 21, the Ukraine Defense Contact Group met in Germany and revealed that 230 tanks and 1,500 armored vehicles were headed to Ukraine and that many had been already delivered. The scale of this armored deployment shocked Wagner Group head Evgeny Prigozhin who posted on Telegram that an armed force that size, with 100,000 Ukrainian troops and air defense systems, was bad news for Russia and a “concern” because it indicated “serious opposition”. He and others have criticized Russia’s military as well as Putin’s “maximalist” goals, and an uncharacteristic public dispute has broken out within Russia’s elite..."
Yes, whenever I see "Wagner Group" I get chills. Then I think, "Enbridge Group"? "ExxonMobil Group"? "Fox Group?" Are they "corporationizing" and evolving into their own private armies. Lucky for them they only have to pay senators and congresspeople and the NRA to legitimize and recruit civilian soldiers for insurgents and armies.
They've had some shadowy success by advocating individuals' self-arming for purposes of mayhem and undermining civilization, haven't they! Killing school children, minorities and women are just unfortunate incidents of warfare. The theme of arming for a revolution is very popular with the disaffected right wing whackos. I get chills, too.
Bryan The Wagner group has been a ‘cheap’ Russian asset in at least 8 SubSaharan African countries. On occasion they provide an authoritarian leader a. Praetorian Guard to do his killing. Roger Cohen had an excellent article in the NYT on Central African Republic in which the Wagner group figures.
This is a ‘cut rate’ way for the Russians to intrude in Africa. It was the first use of the Wagner group. Often they are paid locally as mercenaries and also carry off loot. The Chinese intrude with major infrastructure investments (and Chinese work crews) with pawn shop conditions. America has had Africa on the back burner for generations—since I served there for 6 years at the time of massive independents.
Thank you for this very informative summary, Keith. I share your anguish and view that neither Sudan or S. Sudan will have peace and viability for a long time to come; if ever.
I have mentored some former S. Sudanese refugees ("The Lost Boys of Sudan") for 20 years and we have shared many tears and pain regarding their homeland. Some have been able to get back to see family (one who returned several times to rescue kidnapped nieces-that's a whole other story!) Since they were attacked by those in the northern regions, Khartoum has never been a destination - Nairobi and Kampala (they don't remember the days of Idi Amin) are considered safe locations. However, getting family members there is a logistical nightmare. The father from one family is currently in Nairobi and another of my families is going to Kampala this summer-hoping family can get there from Juba. One of several reasons I'm forever sleepless!!
The region that eventually became the independent country of South Sudan in 2011 suffered decades of civil war (and the terror continues) from 1983 that torched the landscape, killed at least 2 million, and displaced 4 million effectively ending South Sudan's ability for "independence" and self reliance. China & Saudi Arabia are the current players in both countries due to large oil & gold reserves. As has been the operandi modus for centuries, wealthier countries exploit native people and land for power, natural resources, and money.
The misery never ceases, and it will never end as long as weapons are what the male of the human species chooses to use against one another. The U.S. is the largest exporter of weapons in the world so we always have a role although not every conflict is our fault nor can we resolve all (or even some!) Heck, we can't even stop the massacre of our own citizens these days.
Janet, I am in profound awe at your standing in the breech to lend a helping hand to our fellow earthlings in need, particularly of those youths who have been co-opted to fight. It’s like two sides of a coin…one causing battle and misery and the other trying to ameliorate it….what a weird species we are!
Russia has also been involved in a proxy war with France in western Africa, with impoverished Chad (neighbor of Sudan) formerly France's local source of militarized thug control. Sudan also neighbors the Central African Republic, which has long been friendly toward Russia.
John Russian (American) involvement in Africa was heavy in 1970s. Angola (Cubans), Ethiopia (Somalia) and elsewhere. Russia is simply tweaking in Africa, esp with Wagner Group. China more deeply involved with infrastructure loans under pawn shop conditions.
Kieth, I think that, in limited particular cases, Russian involvement is heavier than you might realize. Mali comes to mind. And Russia was talking to Sudan about establishing a naval base like the one they have in Syria.
Regarding CNN's suppositions about Wagner Group involvement in the current mess, I suspect that Wagner helped to airlift fleeing paramilitary troops that Wagner had helped train. (And then, if Russian foreign policy is par for the course, these trained paramilitaries will be brought back to Sudan and perhaps integrated into the army.)
John I believe that China has already ‘cashed in’ on a naval base in theHorn of Africa. My sense is that China is more deeply involved, while Russia is dealing on the periphery esp with Wagner.
Perhaps, with Wagner, Russia is providing military support to anti-western African countries as part of an organized division of labor with China in a shared campaign against the long-standing western hegemony over that continent. (George Orwell actually touched on this in a prescient geopolitical commentary in "1984.")
'The bombastic host received the largest audience on the conservative network'
'His last show was this past Friday, April 21. The network said that the 8 p.m. time slot, which Carlson has held since April 2017, will be filled on an interim basis by “rotating Fox News personalities until a new host is named.” It will be called “Fox News Tonight.”
'The announcement came less than a week after Fox News settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, which had sued the network for false claims about the 2020 election, for $787.5 million hours before opening arguments were to begin. Carlson was among several on-air personalities expected to testify.'
'Carlson did not immediately respond to a message asking for comment on his departure.' (WAPO) See gifted link below.
🐦 Happy as can be to deliver this one to you all! Like that headline!
Since I am always a little cynical, I bet it had more to do with his comment on hating Trump rather than exposing lies, if you know what I mean. Rupert has shown no evidence of being contrite so far. But hallelujah, they're starting to fall like flies! (Go E. Jean Carrol!)
Keith, thank you for this long insightful post. Since Africa is full of minerals, oil, etc. I fear the tribal warfare will continue with the help of various outsider groups looking to control those resources. In Sierra Leone where I was for three and half years, it was diamonds and rutile. The people at the top were busy getting as rich as they could while the ordinary people lived subsistence lives. Our local ferry only had a gas motor when it was election time. The rest of the time, it was pulled by hand using wooden implements that fit around the cable. And for a bit of colonial history, the only roads paved upcountry were those where the Queen travelled when she visited. And did we celebrate the country's freedom at Fourth Bay College...nope, it was the anniversary of the Queen's visit. During our time there, there was a war between Benin and the rest of Nigeria, so there were traders selling Benin bronzes to finance the war. The railroad in Sierra Leone was narrow gauge, so trains could not go over a certain speed or they would fall off the tracks. Why narrow gauge...Guinea next door (formerly French) had regular gauge and the colonial powers didn't want to the two to fit together. Outsider contributions to these continuing problems has a long and terrible history and add to the tribal conflicts.
Michelle Minerals have long been a major attraction of Africa. Uranium for the Manhattan Project came from Congo. The conflict between British and French colonies has been never ending. These days terrorists and other armed groups have rendered mineral hunting in Africa dangerous.
Indeed, everyone else seems to see (or has seen) Africa forever as a place to plunder in various ways including the slave trade. I did smile at your Nubian comment. When we were in Luxor on a tour of tombs with Mary Elizabeth (complete with boots and a pith helmet) and her mother, we were looking at wall paintings. There was the outsized pharaoh and underneath him, some very small figures who were black. Mary Elizabeth (from Texas on a grand tour financed by Daddy) proclaimed that things hadn't changed in 5000 years. Glad to know that Nubians did prevail for a while. Whenever I think of total chaos in the hunting of minerals, I always think of the Congo in particular. I find your sports comment interesting. We never watch professional sports. And the scene in college sports has become pretty chaotic also, so we are almost finished with that too.
Virginia The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in 1954 did not prepare me for the horrors of Congo (1960-1966) as a Foreign Service Officer. There I was deeply involved in the rescue of over 3,000 foreign hostages under death sentences by the Congolese rebels.
Countless millions of Africans have been killed—Biafra in Nigeria 1 million, perhaps 1 million in Mozambique, perhaps a million in Sudan—-and much more.
Busy with school, then marriage, job, and child, I only remember vaguely Africa in the early ‘50s (except for “The African Queen”), but the Congo was so brutal that it still resonates like the Holocaust.
Virginia Mumbo gumbo God of the Congo—Mister Kurtz, he dead. I remember the Casement Diaries, written by Roger Casement about the horror’s of King Leopoldo’s Congo—burning entire villages, amputations.
Casement, as Irishman, was involved in an espionage trip to Ireland in WW I. Originally there was great public concern for Casement. Then his personal diaries were circulated highlighting that he was gay. Zippo to public or government concern.
During my Congo time, Congolese were brutally executed in front of Lumumba monuments. Other killings were even more dreadful.
I loved The African Queen, although it was romantic about pre-WW I Congo.
Keith, your long lifetime of experience is very valuable. Based on the fact that you were making a documentary in Sudan in 1954/55, I can imagine that these days you need to be very choosy about where you bestow your energy. Have you considered using a speech-to-text application to record the experiences and insights that you may not have captured in your writings up to this point? This recent review in PC Magazine says that both Windows 10/11 and the Mac OS offer free voice-to-text apps that, per the reviewer, were shown in tests to be about as good as the speech-to-text software that have a price tag: https://www.pcmag.com/picks/best-speech-to-text-apps-and-tools
Elizabeth Thanks for your suggestions. I sprinkle some of my experiences on Heather and elsewhere. I wrote up my experiences in five, well-documented booklets. No one in my family has actually read them—one member read at least one booklet.
If you go on Amazon, my review of Congo Mercenary includes a fulsome commentary on some of my Congo experiences. As creator of international bond ratings, I had some ‘interesting’ experiences dealing with such sovereign credits as England, Iran, and Israel. This I have no published widely because of the sensitivity. I include this in my ‘booklet.’
I did a 15 minute ‘show and tell’ at my 60th high school reunion. If you’re interested, I could e-mail you a copy.
As the new young bride said on the first night of her honeymoon when she got out of bed to bake a cake, "I digress. . . ":
As a resident opera freak here, allow me to chime in: Verdi's Aïda isn't really that specific as to time period. Ghislanzoni, the librettist, set the story in the Old Kingdom of Egypt, roughly 2700-2200 BCE. The Khedive of Egypt originally had come up with the idea for a celebratory opera for the opera house in Cairo to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Verdi declined that offer. However, a bit later, Auguste Mariette, a French Egyptologist, proposed to the Khedive a plot for an opera set in ancient Egypt. The Khedive referred Mariette to theatre manager Camille du Locle, who then sent Mariette's story idea to Verdi. Long story short, Verdi liked the story and he and his librettist honed the plot and Verdi composed the music. The opera premiered in Cairo in 1871.
Aïda is referred to as an "Ethiopian Princess", having been made a slave for the daughter (Amneris) of the Egyptian King (aka a "Pharaoh", take your pick). Aïda's father, Amonasro, is the King of the Ethiopians and has been taken prisoner by the Egyptians. Aïda's identity as a Princess isn't revealed until later in the opera at a key moment. Radames (sometimes spelled "Rhadames") is the commanding General of the Egyptian army, is secretly in love with Aïda, though he is betrothed to Amneris, Princess of Egypt. Mayhem ensues. . . it's opera.
My guess is the opera is set much earlier than 700-600 BCE. There has been some discussion recently in productions of Aïda as to whether the character should be depicted as dark-skinned. In the past, many sopranos in the role did use make-up to darken their skin. This has begun to be frowned upon, especially with the stigma around "black-face" make-up and its connotations. (There have been LOTS of kerfuffles in opera lately about depicting the ethnicities of characters in operas, and in stage works in general. That's another discussion. . . ) The great soprano Leontyne Price was the first African-American to perform the rôle at the Met, which was seen as returning the rôle to a character more closely resembling the character's actual race. Opera houses in the US have eschewed the use of darker make-up for Aïda, but it can still be found in Europe and abroad.
Bruce I defer to you on the historical antecedents of Verdi’s Aida. Though an opera house was constructed for its performance at the opening of the Suez Canal, Verdi did not appear. I saw Aida in this opera house in 1958. The bugs in the cushioned seats may have come from Verdi’s time.
This was just after US Marines went into Lebanon after the coup in Iraq. It was amusing to watch the American naval officer wave an American flag in The Mikado.
How I love Opera music. I must say, as a social worker, the stories and plots are more drama than common sense! A little couples counseling would have spared many tragedies (Just kidding.) Speaking of Black opera singers, would any of us have wanted to miss the splendid voices? I keep hearing the late Jesse Norman...extraordinary. There is also an irony in her singing Wagnerian operas. May Wagner turn over in his supremacist grave! LBNL, there is a new young Black contralto whose voice is sterling, but I cannot think of her name at the moment.
Hope You might enjoy Robert Greenberg of GREAT COURSES on opera. He is a magical musical maestro. His introduction to great music is a master’s course. His recent MUSIC AS A MIRROR ON HISTORY is absolutely brilliant.
I am a Verdi, Puccini, Rossini, Mozart, and one or two others opera fan. I was just playing AIDA in my car. According to Greenberg opera began during the baroque period.
Thank you, Keith for all of your input today. You are a remarkable man! Thank you for all you have done for our country and others. I too would like a copy of the scenes description of your documentary! My address: Sharon Stearley 3285 W State Road 340, Brazil, IN 47834-7351
Why are not the African nations that have succeeded in building viable economies operating in a more or less democratic environment, despite ethnic problems, stepping in to work for a solution in the Sudan? It is in their interest to do so, since the Sudan's problems can be contagious, particularly in view of Russian meddling.
Jack Tribalism, corruption, and a wide difference between the rich and poor have been hallmarks in Africa since independence. Ethiopia was the first African ‘country.’ The Sudan next in 1956.
Nigeria was the first independence hope. The Biafra revolution in 1970 cost about 1 million lives.
South Africa was expected to be a success story after Mandela. In recent decades a Black mafia has emerged through the ANC. It’s a shambles now. I have difficulty identifying any African country as a sustained success story. Rwanda was The Economist’s ‘country of the year’ about 4 years ago. It has slumped since then.
Minerals are still a major African attraction. Personally, I would only return to Africa in an urn.
'Nationhood' requires certain pre-requisites such as economic viability, ethnic balance, reasonable natural borders, and some degree of skill in governance. Absence of even one of these leads to the failures that you describe. But were these places better off in the past as colonies where outsiders plundered their resources and called the shots (figuratively and literally)?
Not at all, Jack. Indeed those parental governments caused the vacuum by not being inclusive and instructive, and keeping the spoils to themselves. Sort of like handing the keys to the car to an adolescent who's never had a driving lesson.
When I read the part about the women of Sudan rising up in 2019 against brutal dictatorship, I immediately thought of the title and cover of your new book, especially the graphic of the hand of Lady Liberty. Earlier in the day when you shared it on fb, it really struck me. Now I’m imagining women all over this country and across the globe taking up that torch!
"This note is not part of the Letters from an American series. It is instead an announcement— which comes from a bit of a place of surprise, to be honest— and a thank you to everyone who reads here.
"The announcement is that it appears my new book is a real thing.
"It has a cover now (which is what has prompted this note) and will come out in mid-September. It is 30 short chapters in three sections for a total of 250 pages of text, and I think it is… not bad, which is about as far as any writer will— or should— go on a new book.
The book is called Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, and it tries to explain how we got to this political moment… and how we get out. There is a lot of material in it you all will recognize— on the Trump years, for example, and how we got to them and how we got through them— but there is a lot that is new, too, reflecting how the last several years have made me reconceive the way I think about the meaning of history. In the end, this book makes an argument for a new understanding of U.S. history as an explicitly democratic history, kept alive primarily by marginalized Americans who have worked to expand our rights and bring the principles of the Declaration of Independence to life.
"Writing the book was a very odd experience. Because I was writing so much else, I could never focus on the book exclusively as I have for previous books. I would write in the mornings, but every afternoon I would have to pack up whatever was in front of me and start working on the nightly letter. When one chapter was done, I would throw it aside and ignore it while working on the next. It was almost as if I was seeing the project only in my peripheral vision while looking intently at what was in front of me.
"Then stuff happened (there was a wedding in there! 🙂 ) so I took a break from the manuscript before picking it up for the second draft.
"When I did turn back to it, I discovered something curious: it was almost as if the chapters had been chatting together while I ignored them, and they demanded an entire reworking. That reworking meant I rewrote close to 80% of the manuscript, and developed a much different thesis than I had set out to write two years ago. It was rather as if I had seen things more clearly out of the corner of my eye than if I had been looking directly at it.
"The manuscript turned into a voyage of discovery for me, and it ended up feeling very much like I didn’t have a lot of control over it: I was just bringing a definitive shape to the questions, comments, concerns, and hopes of so many people who have been part of the crazy journey of the past three and a half years.
"And that’s where the thank you comes in. This really is your book as much as it ever was mine.
"I hope you like it."
I look forward to reading "Democracy Awakening" soon!
"In the end, this book makes an argument for a new understanding of U.S. history as an explicitly democratic history, kept alive primarily by marginalized Americans who have worked to expand our rights and bring the principles of the Declaration of Independence to life."
Thanks for posting. I don't have facebook.
Perhaps this book will help support Nicole Hannah Jones book "The 1619 Book Project". In that book the first Chapter is: Democracy. That first chapter has, to my reading, the exact same theme as stated by HCR in her book announcement.
In that first Chapter of the 1619 Book Project, "Democracy" is an unwinding of a puzzle of a young Nicole, whose Dad, a black man, always flew the American flag. She came to her own personal understanding of why: He was hopeful for an all inclusive "American Democracy", one that had excluded black people for ALL of its history.
Jones book, along with "The Warmth of Other Suns" changed my entire thinking about America and permanently. Changed my life really.
Suddenly, for the first time, I understood why, in my 38 year career in three huge American Corporations, I saw two black professionals at my level (PhD engineer), both of whom were highly capable, but, eventually laid off.
Watching a sea of, to be honest, OFTEN incompetent white engineers stay employed and even be promoted, while the two black PhD's (who seemed reasonable and competent to me) were let go?
Helped move me to read the two books noted here in this comment.
Perhaps, since HCR is white and, now famous, her book will not be minimized/objected to by white male, southern historians, and even some other white male historians in the north, like Hannah-Jones book was.
I have reviewed many technical papers and am here to say: Hannah-Jones makes not one statement or observation without good references to back it up. Period.
I would also offer: The 1619 Book Project has more references, by hundreds and hundreds, than any history book or technical book I have ever read, and, I have read way too many technical books in my walk through my technology career.
I do believe HCR will be the first white historian to admit and then begin the walk up the same historical thematic view of America as Nicole Hannah-Jones has so bravely done for all of us.
My most hearty congratulations and thanks. I will buy the book.
Just added 1619 to my book list. Thanks Mike. I have been aware of it and read the controversies about it. Your full throated endorsement means I need to read it.
Might I herald all you say here, Mike, only to add that I have not read Nichole Hannah-Jones' book, but I did listen to the podcasts when they were first published in the NYT in 2019, the 400th anniversary of the first slaves to land on what would come to be American soil.
Dear Lynell, thank you for the podcast link…the waves, wow! An awesome uncle of mine — who also spends time here in Heather’s classroom — recently visited me on a “civil rights reckoning” tour of sorts (awesome activist, even as a teen in Alabama). He told me all about his experience a week before in Montgomery at The Legacy Museum and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. He too heard the sorrowful waves there.
I purchased two signed copies of the 1619 Project when it was first published, and boy, am I ever glad that I did!
I gave one of them to my youngest daughter, who is the mother of my grandson who was just starting high school at that point, and the other one to some very dear friends who live close by me. I still have yet to read it myself. I need to go over to "visit them" and peruse it.
looking forward to the book...I'm hoping it will illuminate what I'm working on. Launch it on Sept 17 at Antietam...the day that allowed the Emancipation Proclamation to be issued. I'll be there with a camera.
I left Facebook because I got swallowed by the torrents of insane statements by ant-vaxxers, bigots, haters, WMD lovers and all around Trumper nutcases. If I had disciplined myself to ignore them and just focus on key subjects - I would have found Heather's announcement.
Maybe someday I will venture back into the wilderness of FB. But it will take so much time to sort. And I would have to park my anger at Zuck. In the meantime, I am happily dwelling in substack land. And we have you to find a gem like this. Thanks again. I am very excited to read her next book!
I have kept Facebook, but stopped engaging with the former coworkers and their friends who were all of the negative things you mentioned (assuming that my WMD lovers you mean gun-lovers). My life has been much better since then, although occasionally I see their posts and get riled up--I am disciplined and don't say anything on their pages anymore. Some I "snooze" when they get too spun, but one of them posts funny cat stuff along side his Prager U and Fox garbage.
Lynell, thank you. It was very thoughtful and generous of you to share HCR's words about her new book with us. It comes at a time when we are trying to absorb what is happening in Sudan and, of course, here in the US.
'...new understanding of U.S. history as an explicitly democratic history, kept alive primarily by marginalized Americans who have worked to expand our rights and bring the principles of the Declaration of Independence to life.' (HCR)
It is called "Democracy Awakening", a beautiful reality; may it be so.
Chops wood ,s carry water by Jessica Craven has snippets of the positive directions the country is moving. The Missoulian is full of letters & an editorial protesting the silencing of the trans woman in the State legislature .
I set most of my FB posts to private (as my personal journal with articles and pictures) and periodically backup the account to a remote drive. I keep FB so I can get HCR’s biweekly videos in “real time” rather than delayed for weeks or months on YouTube. I keep encouraging non FB friends it is really easy to do that and not get dragged into the chaos of the site. I have taken to listening to HCR and Joanne Freeman’s “Now and Then” podcasts while on the elliptical at the gym. An hour goes by very quickly! This Substack group commentary also enhances the information and knowledge stream.
ditto. I like my life uncluttered. There are things on FB that are worthwhile. It doesn't take much to manage the settings so you see only what you want, and keep your own stuff private. I don't even get ads anymore.
This is exciting. Spent 10 years on a small boat in the canals and rivers of France, beginning 2001. Out in the countryside we were remembered often as the American “liberators.” I began to see US as “the bad teenagers on the block,” so reading Professor Richardson on American democracy is a wonderful prospect. Having started off poor in the South, the 1619 project is in my bones.
Hey, Marj. I preordered on Amazon. I just typed in "Democracy Awakening Heather Cox Richardson" and it popped up. I'm sure there are other booksellers out there as well, like:
Lynell, gratitude to you for sharing the Professor’s letter and news. It’s a challenge to keep up with so many Substacks and new books and this is one I want in my hand.
Lynell - thank you for sharing Heather's fb post about Democracy Awakening. Love this community!
I should have thought to add Heather's post to my comment, but it was 3am and brain not fully functioning. I do wish I could post a picture of the gorgeous cover here, but since it's already listed as the #1 Bestseller in the History category on Amazon, it appears folks have found it. I preordered there to add a tiny boost, but prefer to support my local bookstore. I was able to preorder there as well. I know I'll be gifting copies including one to my local library.
Along those lines, a fb commenter suggested recommending the book to your local public library. Libraries have budgets for adding new books to their collections and often have a means to make book purchase recommendations. Although we'll all have to wait until September for a copy, this would be a great way to boost its reach across the country.
Jen, my thanks to you for mentioning Heather's FB post about her book. I would not have known about it otherwise. Realizing there are many on Substack who do not subscribe to FB even to hear her chats, I was nonetheless sure they would appreciate what she had to say.
And thanks for the idea to gift a book to our libraries as well as recommending it for them to procure several copies.
Thank you, Heather for this lesson. I honestly had no idea this was going on. I don’t understand why it’s going on, but, as someone ask ahead of me on here.....
I am wondering who (country) is supplying the weapons to these groups?
Why is it that “radical groups” have to go into a country and attempt the overthrow of a government?
This reminds me a lot of our history not that very long ago. 2016-2020 as a matter of fact. And it exploded in January 2021. We had a ‘leader’ that couldn’t accept defeat. He still hasn’t, and it’s been 2 years later already. He attempted to turn our democracy into a dictatorship. He attempted to subvert our government process. He still has his ‘faction’ in our Congress attempting to do what he was, and has been, unsuccessful in doing.
Some thought the Dominion lawsuit would tame Fox Spews down, but by what i have read in the past day or two, they are still going strong with their lies, hatred, and disinformation. I have NEVER watched Fox Spews, i honestly don't think i could stand to watch it for 2 minutes without seething with rage at the BS they spew 24/7. I just wish they could be banned from broadcasting their continuous stream of blatant false rhetoric and arrogance.
They haven’t learned a thing, they are not embarrassed, they are the enemy of the people and the spokesmodel for the cult. And people still blather about why we are so divided.
Wow, i read Carlson Tucker is now gone from Fox Spews ( i know his goofy name is Tucker Carlson, but it's messed up just like he is... he has 2 last names) i don't know the details of his departure yet.. i wonder if he got fired or just resigned? Now i hope Sean Hannity, and that loudmouthed Laura Ingraham would leave or get fired. Carlson will probably end up at Spewsmax or OANN.... they lie and spew information nearly as bad as Fox Spews.
Once in a blue moon, I feel as if I should hear what the "other side" is saying and I have tuned into Fox. I turn it off in less than 5 minutes. I feel like my head is going to explode with indignation and rage. It's like watching something right out of the Kremlin. It is treason on steroids.
My husband occasionally listens to right-wing radio programs on his commute to work for the same reason: to hear what the "other side" is saying. I think I'd crash my car if I listened to that crap!
I KNOW i would crash my mini van if i listened to the right wing radio fascist broadcasts. They always accuse Dems of doing the horrible things that the Fascist/ NAZI GQP do.. Projection is their favorite tool to attack Democrats.
I have heard that Fox Spews has widespread coverage in Moscow and Russia. Putin's minions eat the garbage up Fox Spews broadcasts. It's probably broadcast at the Kremlin itself with TV's on Fox Spews in every office or department there.
The Court made 19 factual determinations against Fox & Murdoch who are now facing a SMARTMATIC Triial against FOX, fired Lou Dobbs & Bartiromo who has an ex-Tucker Producer who went over to the smart side coming soon on a cell phone screen in your hands.
Key SMARTMATIC Fact: The company's voting equipment was only in one (1) county in one (1) state, Los Angeles County, California where tfg was swamped even if LA County was still using chads.
At trial a Defendant is not permitted to throw pyschotic spaghetti on the courtroom walls.
Daniel, I tune in "Beau of the Fifth Column" Youtube daily.I was pretty upset by Fox, and his take help me quite a bit. If you are unaware of him, I think you'd be informed and enjoy his clips, lot of the LFAA watch him.
Thanks, Miselle. I’ll definitely check this out. Personally, I have nothing to do with FOX Network. They can take it off the airways and it wouldn’t upset me one bit.
No. As a matter of fact, I haven’t. But, having lost a lot of friends in Vietnam, I fully understand why the United States was there, even though at the time most people didn’t understand. Same reason we have helped Ukraine, and other countries.
The way I see it, somebody has to stand up for these countries trying to have democracy and a half decent way of life. If we don’t, this world will be all under the thumb of the likes of Russia or China. Total communism, total dictatorship.
I’m not ready to live under a dictatorship where we, the people, have absolutely no say about anything,
The people who began the protest against the Nam war were the returning vets who came home and told the truth about what was going on there. I can understand the sense of loyalty you feel for the people you fought with, but it was a pointless war that was not our business. South Viet Nam was corrupt. And we became complicit in the deaths not only of our young soldiers but of thousands of civilians as well. And them, finally understanding we could not win, we dumped out and left people who worked for us (they needed jobs), along with a good many half-American babies. Some of those babies' fathers fought the system to bring them and their mothers to America but a good many just went back home and took up the lives they'd left. Be angry that your friends died (I am), but please make sure you aren't confounding where your anger is placed with something else.
I understand you fully. Just as I’m aware we might not have had any business being there. But, I feel we were fighting the communists, communism, from trying to take over people, and a country. I also know that many of out soldiers died needlessly because they were not trained to fight in the conditions they were sent into. They were trained to fight as the soldiers in WWII, and Korea had fought. Vietnam was an entirely different place. Entirely different fighting. It was gorilla warfare. Our troops were not trained to fight gorilla warfare.
There is a special type of delusional kool-aid drinker, who smoothly convinces the rest that kool-aid is good for them.
Biden, as a U.S. Senator in the 1980s and 1990s, shares complicity in the most far-reaching genocide in history; we brutalized and oppressed countless darker-skinned countries.
"The blood is so much, you know, it runs in rivers..."
I am careful not to smear Biden out of respect for the office, but, one need only look at Clarence Thomas to see Biden's massive limitations of the past.
In the face of proven allegations about Thomas spending his workday reading Penthouse and Playboy, Biden minimized the woman who noted that fact, and?
We now have Clarence Thomas to deal with.
Imagine if Biden had listened to that Black woman instead of minimizing her?
I have yet to meet or hear of a perfect anybody. Biden has two big ones to be held accountable for. One is obviously Thomas. Hill's testimony if it had come from a white woman could have smashed Thomas.
The second is the "tough on crime" bill that imposed mandatory sentencing. It declared a war on people - not drugs.
That being said, I wake up every day so grateful that he has been our President. Except for the Willow boondoggle, he has been exemplary.
And now, if he were to set aside his ego and read the crowd, he would step aside and let the next generation take over. He is still very capable and if re-nominated, I will vote for him. But millions of younger voters may not vote at all if it is a match up between two old farts.
But that's only half the disaster. There are all the down ballot elections we could lose if we don't have a strong turnout. The Senate (and judges!), the House and all those state and local contests that are already gerrymandered.
Well John then you me and every one else is complicit as we were around for the brutalization you so well remember. Perhaps it is time to bury the dead, and out of respect for their sacrifice, and self respect, to make a more salient future contribution. Well I remember the dead, smell the rotting flesh, and taste the metallic blood. While I am unable to escape the anguish of the past I find the hope for a better future is stronger. Fury and anger are like manacles which hamper our better angels. Try and find enough compassion for all of us. Even Joe Biden. We all are trying. You should as well. Look ahead, think ahead, help us grow. It is springtime now. The winter is behind us. Plant something nice. Nurture it. The lilacs are budding now. Smile at the old fool who always beats you to the mirror.
Pat Cole, perhaps you would like to give a free pass to those Nazi concentration camp guards who get arrested from time to time (if any are still alive).
Perhaps you recall what a long-term issue it was to get the U.S. government to recognize the Turkish genocide of Armenians that happened over a century ago. I am appalled by your free-and-easy attitude toward genocudal brutality.
Joe Biden was a longstanding member of the Senat Foreign Relations Committee, eventually becoming its Chairman. Biden had to have known of the most far-reaching genocide in history, stretching to darker-skinned countries all around the world.
"The blood is so much, you know, it runs in rivers...:
One deals with the present as well as one can. We didn’t recognize the Dulles who got US into Vietnam as we recognize the Steve Bannon who supported Russia/Trump.
Don't forget Iran. The US did the same thing in Iran under the auspices of histrionics around "communism". In 1953 we sponsored the assassination of a popular democratic leader because he might not be friendly to us.
Any bunch of low peasants, who were trying to take back their country from a strong man, were opposed by the United States for 80 years.
Ho Chi Minh? He beat us. I wonder how he felt at the end of his life having watched video of himself kicking the last US service man onto a US helicopter off of the roof of a building in Vietnam.
Look at Vietnam now?
Instead of being a house of prostitution for US troops it is now a garden spot for US vacationers. Of course, a bomb still goes off in a field killing a few kids, but, Vietnam is a fully functioning, live country now.
If the ground is thawed there get outside and go to work. Although I believe you I am going to snark with an I told you so when he Dons orange pajamas.
Don't forget about the state legislators who are hell bent on enacting a fascist Christian Nationalim agenda. I have at least 6 bill just today to object to & almost everyday there is at least 2-3.
Jacqueline Burns' astute comments reminded me of my favorite description of history:
"History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations."
Aren't we always at the raw, bleeding edge of history...carrying out and even documenting what will become what we call history, after an interval of fermentation, bottling, distribution and consumption?
I lived with my family in Khartoum and also in Juba in the early 1980s….a seemingly quiet backwater at the time. It felt quiet and gentle, my children were charmed and we look back on that time with a special feeling. We were buoyed by the popular uprising that attempted yi bring a civilian government to
Power. So it is terribly sad to read about the population being trampled upon by two greedy egocentric men ( like Putin) who have no regard for the people. What can our future be as human beings?
"Wagner’s founder, Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, made after his group’s recent losses in Ukraine, saying he planned to concentrate on Africa, where his forces have been propping up authoritarian governments now for a while. "
Something is very wrong when corporations behave like governments. There is a long history of this and it's not good. Radical corporate "deregulation" and anti-anti-trust is bat guano nutso. Ask India about the British East India Company. We are allowing similarly impactful concentrations of financial/political power to agglomerate.
"But talks dragged on, tensions rose, and now the two men are at war with each other for control of the country"
Can't they be sent somewhere else, where they can play without breaking things?
Everywhere, for many decades, international arms industries have been putting more and more vicious weapons in the hands of soldiers and terrorists, then stirring the witches cauldron thus created.
In Rwanda, firearms were not even necessary to set off mass killing.
Wherever a valuable commodity is found -- oil, gold, diamonds, rare earths, coca -- armed men, soldiers, death squads, marauders, bring death to the local population. A more vicious form of slash and burn, clearing the ground for exploitation, whether by great corporations or garimpeiros... or both.
Difficult to prevent this massacre of the unarmed innocent. It is built into our societies and even the UN's inter-national structure makes the protection of life in all its forms, very much including human, difficult or impossible.
Many tribal peoples living in remote places with strong natural defenses withstood western colonists for centuries but are now falling victim to corrupt governments in cahoots with major economic interests.
the machetes of Rwanda could be crafted out of old leaf-springs of commercial vehicles for, literally, pennies. If there WAS kool-aid in Rwanda, it was tribal and spiked with hallucinogens. Indeed, pickups with mounted machine guns can kill more people faster, but when many thousands of persons pick up weapons of any kind to use against their neighbors, death on a genocidal scale becomes a sudden reality. I can't think of a phenomenon in nature where a species can turn on itself in the way that humans do...
Looking again this evening, I see correspondences between my breakfast thoughts and conversation—which will be why they rang a bell for me—but I can’t find any connection between the question asked and the three sentence fragments in your answer. So I wonder what made me answer as I did. Looks as though I’d not fully woken up when I wrote… Senior moment?
When you wrote “You, Peter”, I assumed I was being taken as a representative human being and you'd chosen a direct way of bringing that home to me.
Plainly, I thought this because it was on a separate line, but even that was a misreading, it's part of your three sentence answer.
And the only words in those three sentences that resonate for me are “I want”. “I want” and the drive that results from it. “I want” expresses something essential about human nature. But you weren’t answering the question about human nature, and I don't see how HAVING has anything to do either with that or with the root causes of the massacre.
The question is not rhetorical. It is an invitation to dig deep in search of answers, in the knowledge that we may discover many elements, perhaps deepening our understanding; yet, even if we do gain insights into the deepest contributory causes, we shall still be left with questions but no answer that can be expressed in words.
Your three sentences do, however, betray a view of human nature…
What is human nature? In the natural law jurisprudence that informed the Declaration of Independence, the "perfection" (or mature development) of human nature is characterized by habitual active concern for the well-being of our fellow humans, and this is the source of happiness.
HCR, did you ever in your wildest think that you would be giving a history lesson on Sudan? And a truly powerful distillation it is. Thank you for educating us on what is going on in another part of the world few give a passing thought to. Actually, there is no long an ¨other part of the world.¨
Thank you, Heather, for this recent history about Sudan. Forgive me, but what really has pulled me into this story is the couple of commentors who have shared their firsthand experiences from having lived in the country. So thank you, Keith and d horner, for sharing your stories to all of us.
Checking in after having posted this, many more have joined in with their firsthand experiences with the continent of Africa. I am grateful for all of your submissions.
“... if we are going to stop the “continued cycle of violence and human suffering,” negotiators must stop prioritizing the voices of “the armed and corrupt” over those actually interested in real political reform.”
I wonder how much more difficult this becomes considering the Wagner Group’s role and agenda. It seems as if global destabilization is Putin and Russia’s oligarchs current play. Like a moving object, may they make the acquaintance of an immovable object.
The phenomenon has a long, long worldwide history.
During the Hundred Years War, France was ravaged by "companies", disbanded soldiers forming armed groups that lived off the land. Royal armies from Spain, France and the German-speaking Empire kept invading Italy while local condottieri used the disorder to build themselves small kingdoms. Warlords fought up and down China whenever dynasties fell. Kurosawa's great film, Seven Samurai, featuring the defense of a poor village against bandits, is set in a period of civil war in Japan, as are films like The Throne of Blood, Kagemusha and Ran...
What is new are the automatic weapons in the hands of bandits in and out of national uniform and the interactions of criminal networks that use war and national liberation struggles as cover for their activities, often surviving and prospering long after hostilities have ended. The Sicilian mafia is one example, crushed by the Fascist regime, freed by the US Army in a bid to win over locals and save soldiers' lives when invading Sicily and southern Italy...
Heather, heartrending reporting from Sudan. Thank you! I just wonder who is supplying the weapons to those “armed groups” you describe. The interconnectedness of all humans on Earth is always astounding to me.
Wagner is focusing on Africa because Putin needs its gold and other natural resources to help him evade Western sanctions imposed because of his unprovoked war in Ukraine. Destabilization is the name of the game because it draws focus away from Ukraine. It also sets up opportunities for Biden to publicly fail--imagine if the evacuation of the embassy had been as chaotic as in Afghanistan. That would provide an opportunity for the MAGA chaos monkeys to take their destruction to a whole new level.
Wagner is a major presence in many African countries providing training and security services to the more authoritarian regimes in exchange for control of mining and resources. I would not be surprised to see fighting break out in other countries on the continent. Much of Africa is suffering from food and water insecurity due to climate change and mass population migrations are bringing new ethnic rivalries and pressures into play. The destabilization is happening on many levels in society, for instance the extreme anti-LBTGQ+ policies and rhetoric in Uganda and the attribution of LBTGQ+ influences as coming from decadent Western societies. Putin is playing the culture war card in more than just the US and Hungary.
"There are signs that Russia’s Wagner group is supporting Hemedti, which would be in keeping with the statement Wagner’s founder, Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, made after his group’s recent losses in Ukraine, saying he planned to concentrate on Africa, where his forces have been propping up authoritarian governments now for a while."
My first thought upon reading this was imagining African mercenaries showing up in Ukraine. My immediate second thought was that was very unlikely, but, third thought, as the Russian situation in Ukraine deteriorates, anything is possible. Putin is capable of anything as support for his Ukraine invasion/quagmire wanes at home.
As to Wagner mercenaries already in Africa propping up dictators; paid by whom? I'd look at corporations involved in extractive mining and petroleum operations. Wagner forces In Sudan indicates someone is betting on Hemedti to emerge the winner. Who is footing that bill?
So, now we can split our attention and anxiety to two separate wars on two continents. This most recent conflict sounds more familiar; there have been similar conflicts between warlords, between tribes and ethnicities, between political parties in a series of African countries over many years in post-colonial Africa. Are there any greater implications for world power dynamics, beyond those vying for the raw materials resources in the region? I don't hear this being described as a proxy-war for bigger elements like east and west, democracy versus autocracy in world powers (however, locally it appears to be at least one principal backdrop for the conflict). It certainly has no naval or international airspace implications to the degree of the most recent preceding conflict in Ukraine. I seriously doubt we'll see anything even close to the kind of international interest that has led to blocs of countries lining up to contribute to the war effort in Ukraine. As usual, the casualties are at least partly civilian and internal disruption and dislocation is a significant component of the cost of conflict. I wouldn't be surprised at all if this devolved to zones of control by military forces in conflict, i.e. a more low level, long term conflict that increasingly looks like guerilla war such as in Yemen. It is heartbreaking as history more or less repeats it self yet again in a place that can ill afford destruction of its infrastructure and loss of life on a macroscopic scale. Is this a powder keg with imminent possibility of a regional/continental expansion? Is this a (how did he label it?) regional territorial dispute? Oh, Lord I(we) are weary. When can we start beating those swords into plowshares?
Don’t do what those Southern police departments are doing; auctioning off the confiscated and left-behind guns and putting them back out on the streets. Turning guns into plowshares...NOT.
"In the wake of the coup, foreign aid was halted, the economy collapsed"
The economy was already collapsing - that was an important factor in the revolt of the women in 2019. If you look at the World Bank figures, all the metrics were already down in 2021, quite dramatically so.
As for foreign aid, not all of it was halted. Global health organisations have continued to boost the health system and procure medicines for the Sudanese people and the WFP has continued distributions in regions in difficulty (primarily Darfur). Humanitarian organisations never left.
I'll raise you James Elroy Flecker: We are they who come faster than fate, We are they who ride early or late, We storm at your ivory gate, Pale kings of the sunset, beware!
Powerful Nubian Queens... My mind conjures up images from Marvel .... a victorious battle well fought. Brave warriors who want to live in a better world that has more love than hate.
I remember with vivid detail the Sudan pavillion at The 1965 Worlds Fair. It was colorful and exotic. But i don’t recall much more about Sudan since then. Thank you for these details HCR and reminders that power and greed are basically very destructive forces.
What has occurred in Sudan has caused me great personal sadness for the Sudanese people.
I spent a month in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in 1954.. Making a documentary film, SUDAN: LAND OF CONTRASTS, provided me an opportunity to visit much of this vast area and meet a diversity of people.
Sudan was comprised of the North, which was predominately Moslem including Black Nubians, and the South, diverse tribes existing under British rule and with scant ‘civilized’ amenities.
In the North there seemed a decent group that was achieving independence from the Egyptians and British in 1956. In February 1955, tribal fighting erupted in the South. The South has been a brutal hodgepodge ever since. At times Northerners ravaged huge areas of the South. Darfur has been a regular slaughter field.
The discovery of oil in the South further complicated northern-southern Sudanese relations. Ultimately an independent South Sudan was created. Its tribal leaders are still at loggerheads with the people suffering greatly.
Sudan (in the North) started shakily as a ‘country.’ It was a pass through country for radical leaders who sought to support Congolese Rebellions in the 1960s. Clashes between civilian tribal leaders escalated. A dreadful general seized power in the 1980s and ruled for a generation. He was deposed and, ultimately, two other generals, one more dreadful than the other, seized power.
Despite a ‘democratization’ agreement, they have launched what seems a civil war for personal power and loot.
Now there is total chaos and massive killings. As foreigners and Sudanese seek to flee, what I knew as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan is in tatters. I have scant hope that this poor and ravaged area, both Sudan and South Sudan, will become livable, viable nations in the foreseeable future.
Who remembers that the Nubians of Sudan ruled Egypt 700-600 BCE?
Keith I would love to see your film. Is it available anywhere...any way ? You may have already told me, but I've been so focused on my work around our Civil War of 160 years ago that I don't recall. My work seems trite compared to people in the midst of these on going hostilities...but I'm afraid of where we are headed...and much of it is because we have not come to grips, we have not reconciled our issues of race, of enslaver and enslaved.
I just attended an annual conference held by the Shenandoah Valley Battlefield Foundation in Winchester VA held in a ballroom in the very grand George Washington Hotel. It was attended by mostly older white men. At 70 I felt like one of the younger demographics...except for a 15 year old from California who is probably the next Bruce Caton/ JamesMcPherson, HCR...name your historian. There were no black folks in the room...none, zero....and very few women. I ended up recording Ron Maxwell's talk...because the event producers were not prepared to record anything....and Ron asked if it could be done. I intend to return next year with some black friends and women who are interested in the topics...and maybe suggest an appropriate presenter that breaks the color/gender barrier. Anyway I pray for sanity in Sudan and a quick peace...but I doubt that's likely.
Mike,
"I intend to return next year with some black friends and women who are interested in the topic"
Invite Nicole-Hannah Jones. Others will come if she does, and, she probably will if you give her a long lead heads up.
Thank you.
Mike S, she should be a presenter at this conference...and if they won't do that I have a "history/art" event we are starting to create that she would be perfect for, not far from Winchester/DC/Baltimore/Gettysburg/Harpers Ferry/Antietam.
Making her a presenter is an outstanding idea!
I don't have the power to make it happen for their event, but I can suggest it. For the event we want to do, consider her on the list...we will be reaching out, when we have some details together. Watch for "Crossroads of History" at the Hagerstown Aviation Museum Dome Hanger., sometime after September .. this is the first public, put the intention out there moment
Perhaps my wife and I will attend. It sounds like a great gathering Mike.
Mike I am appalled by how few people get off their duff to support or learn about important history. Perhaps if it could be presented in a sports motif there would be better interest and attendance.
Thanks for asking about my Sudan documentary. It turned out be be historic. The Southern Sudan was cut off by the British and Prime Minister Ismail Azhari had to call a special cabinet meeting to vote me permission to film in the South. The southern tribal uprising in February, 1955 killed any further ‘Sudan documentaries.’With a. CBS editor I finished the film in October, 1954. He thought it was good.
Two months later my family disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle and I became occupied with other matters. I have the film on DVD but, frankly, am not inclined to have it copied to sent out. Apologies, but I now use my energy more sparingly.
For all who are reading Keith Wheelock's posts here with great interest, here is a capsule history of his life published in 2006 as part of the Princeton [University] Personalities series. I tried to include the complete text below, but Substack refused. Also go to the link for the handsome photo of Professor Wheelock, which Substack also refuses to post:
https://www.towntopics.com/mar1809/stratton.php
Fascinating. Talk about a rich life!
Thank you.
Elizabeth, I just finished reading about Dr. Wheelock. A tremendous academic a fantastic walk.
Thanks for posting.
Mike I’m not a doctor, though if I were, it probably should be in phrenology. Though my book at U Penn was accepted as my dissertation and they offered me credits for courses I would teach and a special ‘book program’ for my PhD, I preferred the non-academic tranquility of the Congo 1960-1966.
Old habits Keith. I matriculated through PhD in engineering and was conditioned to call my professors “doctor” out of respect.
Phrenology! After reading your bio......You're kidding, right?
It is a pseudoscience that involves the measurement of bumps on the skull to predict mental traits...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology
Thank you Elizabeth. I'm grateful.
But can you be certain that your film is preserved and/or that someone else can get it out? As you undoubtedly know, it could be invaluable in any kind of future negotiations.
Are you writing a long memoir? Your father’s story? Thank you again for sharing yours.
Virginia I had intended to give it to a friend of mine who had. Been named ambassador to Sudan in 1967. The the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 resulted in a break of diplomatic relations. Later I wrote the Sudan desk at State Department mentioning the documentary and offering to send copies that could be deposited in Sudanese government and university archives. Never got a response.
I have written five extensive booklets, including documents that encapsulate portions of my life. Few members of my family have bothered to read them. I do provide some personal insights on Heather’s blog and elsewhere.
My involvement in Eisenhower Fellowships and Edward R. Murrow’s THIS I BELIEVE commenced in the 1950s. I was instigator of a book that incorporated these two in 2016. General Colin Powell wrote the forward.
Keith, so many of us here would be eager to read your booklets! I read your comments with great interest, as your perspective and experience are fascinating. If it makes you feel any better, my great grandfather, grandfather, and father all wrote memoirs - and I’m the only one who has read them besides my dad’s secretary, who typed them. I don’t get it.
KR I don’t get it either! Personally, I was captivated by my dad’s diary of his experiences with the Army Signal Corps in WW I (pilot in Spad planes, which kept crashing). If you go on Amazon and click on Congo Mercenary, you will see my write up and an extensive commentary on my Foreign Service involvement in Congo. For some of it, it took me over 40 years to become ready to discuss this publicly.
Dear KR, I couldn’t agree more — it’s about time we got to celebrate and learn even from “our Not Doc Wheelock!”
Keith, your work—both your film and the booklets/short books—have important historical value. I hope you were able to extricate your family from the Bermuda Triangle.
Elizabeth My dad, brother, and lovely stepmother disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle.
I think you mean Edward R. MUrrow.
David Thanks for picking up the typo. In fact Ed Murrow was a friend of the family. We went fishing over week end. I recorded a THIS I BELIEVE on CBS for him in 1954 and last saw him in 1960 with President Eisenhower and Eisenhower Fellows.
His son Casey and I spoke at a dinner with PBS execs some years later.
Keith as to history as "sports" battle re-enactments are sort of that. I used to use football terminology in setting up camera positions...50 yd line...end zone...if you trust sending me your DVD, I'll get it copied and back to you. I could arrange for Fed Ex or UPS to pick it up on my dime and get it back to you.
Mike My documentary is historical—I have a typed description of the scenes. If you are truly eager, send me your mailing address.
Keith I'd love to see this and work with you. I'm plugged into some pretty serious history types. I'll elaborate later. Address:
Mike Wicklein
5805 Clearspring Rd
Baltimore MD 21212
please send with some form of tracking.
Your last paragraph, Keith! What in the world? Tell us more.
NYTimes article on the tragedy involving Keith Wheelock's family, 1/31/1955:
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1955/01/31/92844762.html?pageNumber=21
Thank you. Yikes, what a bad thing to have happened.
Three hours later, throughly awake, I read “family” instead of “father.” Bravo for continuing as you have.
As one of those who has lived on “lived” history, I remember the Bermuda Triangle stories but shall have to look up whether the mystery was ever resolved.
Virginia Obviously I’ve looked into the Bermuda Triangle stories. Nothing definitive. On occasion it appears that there are electronic oddities, one of which misdirected some Navy planes many years ago. Also, some tropical storms arise suddenly.
Actually, a number of boats and ships have vanished over the years, in the Caribbean, the Atlantic, the Pacific, and elsewhere. Especially before top level communications, there were no historical answers. The media has considerable responsibility for over blowing the Bermuda Triangle. Sailing is a risky sport, as is mountain climbing. I am thankful that I sailed through a hurricane with nothing untoward except a scary several hours. Some outcomes are far worse.
I once was married to a mountaineer and when I’d see him off on his adventure guiding trips I held in the back of my mind that it might be the last time I’d see him. It was a weird space to be in, but one I fully accepted. As to areas of the ocean that are problematic, for so long people didn’t give much credence to the “rouge wave” sinking ships seemingly out of nowhere. As I have read, but cannot cite, there is more current evidence for this phenomena and may be associated with certain areas of the world’s seas, currents & wind being a big factor. I have read/heard that just a few days ago search & rescue efforts for some folks sailing has been called off…no trace has been found.
Barbara I have witnessed many rogues in my life, including rouge waves. Fortunately, I have also encountered many comforting waves. On balance life indeed can be good, despite bumpy moments.
"the women who had led the uprising that got rid of al-Bashir were largely excluded from the government that followed; armed groups were at the table instead." We ought to learn more about peace making than war making.
Keith and Mike and others. When I see a comment stream from you all, I pick up my coffee and look forward to your discussion. As perhaps the 89-year old of the group, Keith, I hope there is a permanent archive for your writings and products, some of which you share here at LFAA. Does your university have a provision for submitting a personal archive for it's distinguished professors, which I suspect you must be? Some universities are asking this of retired figures in their field, hoping to get beyond the surface of individual's contributions to their discipline (e.g., published papers, correspondence, calendars, etc). The intent, as explained to me, is to go deeper in preserving the record of individual's, the context, their interactions, remembrances, their avocations, the person and professional. I think now that a lot of the records we used to rely up are not being maintained (e.g., death information, church records, family bibles) and budgets for going deep get cut, life stories of the typical, in some cases, broadens the historical record. Too, the electronic compilations, do disappear as we die without writing down passwords or the documentation software goes poof as updates make our favorites become obscure. In your case, not the typical, but the exceptional, deep and broad in recordable contributions, I would hope that they would welcome and give home to your experiences, films, public and person experiences, etc, for future generations. Yor life is a historical resource with notions, depth, idiosycracyies, and details no where otherwise available, unless of course a definitive autobiography has been written and made available. Arching, like this, can be a time-consuming effort, but also an opportunity to have the last word, so to speak, and finish your thoughts as to what was important, the So What did you learn in your 89 years? Much you share freely here. But like HCR, we are but a small priviledged Band of Strangers. A thought.
Fred The trip from distinguished professor to extinguished is swift.
indeed ... still an incredible treasure you are, Distinguished Professor Keith.
True of the department, but archivists are a different crowd. Lost my parking permit two years ago, only my former executive assistant knows me, and now annually I have to take training on internet security to keep email account and use of university licensed software. I wouldn't think you'd go quietly. One last dump into the archive, if I remember.
Fred After 23 years a last hurrah from my department and, within a few years, anyone trying to contact me at the college was told ‘no info on Wheelock.’ But some of my students still remember.
A while ago, when my wife and I were lunching out, a lady came up to effusively recall the impact of classes she took with me 20 years ago. She said that she had described the affect to a retired West Pointer who wanted to become a teacher. I offered syllabi and whatever.
My record was a call from a person I had helped in 1960 at a Middle East Institute reception for my NASSER’S NEW EGYPT: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS (NY, London, 1960). Sixty-three years later is a personal record.
Fred, thanks for the coffee cup compliment. I like your observation. Some of my historian friends, like Jay Wertz (Smithsonian Great Battles of the Civil War) are documenting interviews with WWII vets and more recent vets. Folks with Keith's experience would be a treasure trove. I did a DVD project with Helen Bentley 10 years ago focused on her TV series, the Port that Built a City. I have some of those DVDs available. With the right backing we could expand on that concept. We have footage of Helen talking about her political career, Nixon, Agnew that we didn't use for the Port DVD. She was the first female chair of the Maritime Commission...and it's a great story. It's easy to produce interviews today with zoom. Jared Frederick just interviewed me a few days ago about our behind the scenes work on Gods & Generals. It's been posted on his YouTube Channel "Reel History". We are up to 7600 views. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYGOYuoNABA
Really interesting effort, Mike. Thanks for link to God's and Generals.
Yes! What Fred just wrote….totally agree.
Yes, Barbara!! Professor Wheelock is a spoil of shared treasures, with quite a fan club, I’m certain.
We lived in Winchester, VA about 40 years ago. We were displaced Californians who were there for 2 years for my husband’s job. Our son was in the 6th grade and learned about the civil war in a private country day school. Same outcome but a different slant on things. As we knew no one when we first arrived there we spent our weekends going to the Civil War battlefields, it was a sobering time for us. I wonder how the town has changed in those years gone by. There was certainly no grand George Washington Hotel!
Barbara I spent time there 30-40 years ago and shooting re-enactment video's at New Market & Cedar Creek and shooting Gods & Generals 20 years ago. It has not changed very much. I would be very interested to see the history text book your son learned from. I went to both the National Cemetery & the Confederate section of the old town cemetery while I was there. THAT was when it all became VERY real for me. I'll write about that on my page for tomorrow.
We no longer have the text books from so long ago, but I think the slant was more nuanced than written down. It was always about states rights, northern aggression . We did met many wonderful people there and continued friendships for years. We were lucky to be white, my husband is English and Northern Virginia is very Anglophile and Episcopalian.
Back in California we once had dinner with Ken Burns when the Civil War series came out on PBS. It was an evening to remember and the conversations were wonderful.
I'm applying for a Ken Burns/Library of Congress documentary grant that's due on May 15. Check out my page for more info on "Monumental Struggle".
Mike I would appreciate your mailing me my Egypt and Sudan films that I lent you, even if you haven’t screened them.
My mail address is Keith Wheelock
48 Constitution Hill West
Princeton, NJ 08540
Thanks,’Keith
Hi Keith. I just saw this post. We had painters in here last week and we moved a lot of things into bins for safe keeping. We are just getting reorganized. I'll be on the lookout for your file. You've had quite a life experience. Thanks for sharing.
I'd like to point out that the elephant in the room, mentioned twice by HCR, is the failure in Sudan (and lots of other countries in Africa) to include women in the government, in negotiations, in calls for equity. Misogyny, which certainly existed before the imperialist programs of the west (and I include the medieval Muslim empires that took over the Roman Empire as part of the West, not just the 19th-century race for empire) but was emphasized as a positive good by the hyper-misogynist empire builders, has been a huge contributor to the kinds of militia-driven dictatorships that have been part of the situation in African countries for ages. When attacks on women and girls, refusal to give women full rights of citizenship, restriction of women's economic independence, and restrictions on the education of women and girls become the watchwords of a military/political movement, violent dictatorships inevitably follow.
I had done my first read through the Letter as my coffee brewed. As it finished, I got up to pour cup #1. As I walked into the kitchen, my thought was "And yet again, what women do is ignored and overrun by men."
My thoughts exactly.
"This pattern was especially problematic in Sudan, she wrote, where the women who had led the uprising that got rid of al-Bashir were largely excluded from the government that followed; armed groups were at the table instead."
The patriarchy strikes again. While I am regularly annoyed by patriarchy's local insults, when I think about its effects on global history, it begins to look a bit apocalyptic.
Or worse, that Burns comment " if we are going to stop the 'continued cycle of violence and human suffering,' negotiators must stop prioritizing the voices of “the armed and corrupt” over those actually interested in real political reform." applies to conditions in the US of A
Same.
History of the human race, no? Women tend the house; men go out and "play".
and fight
War. Which I see as an extension of ball games. It will never end. That's the way the human animal is programmed. Damn shame. Evolution went too far. Or, not far enough, or we would be focusing on things that don't destroy the GD planet...like art.
Competition you mean? More often (not always) how the male human animal is programmed... is what i see. If women were running the world, in general... i believe that peace would often be negotiated first... and as win-win... not as zero sum. To me, we haven't evolved far enough yet.
I doubt there is enough time for the humans to evolve past their current behaviors. And, it's not that women aren't running the show; in humans, women are complicit, letting the men be the rulers and "have their fun". No other mammal has a set up where the females and the offspring have no safe places. How many millions of women are now in refugee camps with inadequate household products or even ways to take a bath while their children run wild.
Thank you for presenting this valuable background information.
I am 100% sure that the authoritarians in this country as well as Putin’s worst oligarchs are all in to support the worst options for that country. Chump and Bannon did way more than attack democracy here, they supported authoritarian evil around the world. With the stage set for another Biden/chump race, will the repubs have codified enough of their evil to win next time (sort of like Hitler did)? The world is waiting, but the authoritarians are on the March everywhere…
Jeri,
Robert Reich, here on Substack, has an excellent analysis today on the puzzle of why Trump, who has led a seditious, treasonous uprising against the USA is being allowed to "run" for President since, as Reich points out, and, some of us have pointed our here: Running for office as a known seditionist is illegal.
As I have long hypothesized, and now know for a fact watching Trump: It is simply impossible to arrest a rich white male in America. Even Jeffrey Epstein, who was first arrested in Florida when a 14 year old girl testified to a detective there, was let go by the Bush administration. (google it, it is true).
Trump knows what America he lives in.
No. Go here:
https://roberthubbell.substack.com/p/ignore-the-polls-a77
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-23-2023/comment/15175428
Thank you Keith for the valuable historical framing of Sudan wars. Per CNN & BBC News report, two (2) Fronts for the Wagner group are shipping Sudanese Gold off books & overland to the CAR, Central African Republic (sic).
Got a good source for current Wagner group operations in the CAR. Double thanks in advance. 🙏
Every time I see the words “Wagner Group” I feel a chill. It’s a private renegade army (or several). Am I correct that it is funded by oligarch money stolen when the USSR came apart?
This morning I hear that China has stated that the former USSR countries have no right to national sovereignty. Is there rebellion brewing in China?
Overpopulation and climate change are starting to boil
over.
Everyone, apologies for the both on-topic and digressions as I try to put together a coherent view of where we are as a world. Colonialism, exploitation, still rampant as climate change tears at humanity is a lot to absorb.
I think China’s reactions to what Russia is doing in Ukraine are completely colored by what China wants to do with Taiwan. They are carefully watching, learning, and seeing how the West reacts as they assess their own risks for their own misadventure. In my own very humble opinion, we (the West, not just the US) should be arming and training Ukraine with everything they need to win this war as quickly as possible, not only because it’s the right thing to do, but also to send a strong message to China.
This has been weighing on me. For certain we have the means to get this war done and over, so why aren't we? What benefit is there for the US to donate "only almost enough"?
Not that I'm an expert by any means, but each NATO nation needs to tread carefully so it does not appear it's at war and risk being attacked. They have to be careful not to entice a nuclear response, too. The appearance must be "a little help from friends" rather than a no-holds- barred proxy war. Sometimes I think Putin is goading Western nations, particularly the US, by his war crimes just so we bite the bullet so to speak, and he can retaliate full on. He already is forming alliances with nuclear capable nations---and no doubt speeding Iran's nuke capacity to completion.
Nancy, this is just in, from Diane Francis' column. It may offer good news for us both:
"As Ukraine prepares its counter-offensive... on April 21, the Ukraine Defense Contact Group met in Germany and revealed that 230 tanks and 1,500 armored vehicles were headed to Ukraine and that many had been already delivered. The scale of this armored deployment shocked Wagner Group head Evgeny Prigozhin who posted on Telegram that an armed force that size, with 100,000 Ukrainian troops and air defense systems, was bad news for Russia and a “concern” because it indicated “serious opposition”. He and others have criticized Russia’s military as well as Putin’s “maximalist” goals, and an uncharacteristic public dispute has broken out within Russia’s elite..."
Thank you, Hope! This is excellent news. ❤️
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-23-2023/comment/15175428
Yes, whenever I see "Wagner Group" I get chills. Then I think, "Enbridge Group"? "ExxonMobil Group"? "Fox Group?" Are they "corporationizing" and evolving into their own private armies. Lucky for them they only have to pay senators and congresspeople and the NRA to legitimize and recruit civilian soldiers for insurgents and armies.
They've had some shadowy success by advocating individuals' self-arming for purposes of mayhem and undermining civilization, haven't they! Killing school children, minorities and women are just unfortunate incidents of warfare. The theme of arming for a revolution is very popular with the disaffected right wing whackos. I get chills, too.
Are you worried about overpopulation in the US? IF so, I can suggest some activism on that.
Bryan The Wagner group has been a ‘cheap’ Russian asset in at least 8 SubSaharan African countries. On occasion they provide an authoritarian leader a. Praetorian Guard to do his killing. Roger Cohen had an excellent article in the NYT on Central African Republic in which the Wagner group figures.
This is a ‘cut rate’ way for the Russians to intrude in Africa. It was the first use of the Wagner group. Often they are paid locally as mercenaries and also carry off loot. The Chinese intrude with major infrastructure investments (and Chinese work crews) with pawn shop conditions. America has had Africa on the back burner for generations—since I served there for 6 years at the time of massive independents.
Got it: "Putin Wants Fealty & He's found It in Africa", Roger Cohen at NYT on 12/24/22 --updated 12/27 with photo by Mauricio Lima.
Bryan I had admired Roger Cohen for years. He wrote a fascinating autobiography. I met him when he spoke to Eisenhower Fellows.
Thank you for this very informative summary, Keith. I share your anguish and view that neither Sudan or S. Sudan will have peace and viability for a long time to come; if ever.
I have mentored some former S. Sudanese refugees ("The Lost Boys of Sudan") for 20 years and we have shared many tears and pain regarding their homeland. Some have been able to get back to see family (one who returned several times to rescue kidnapped nieces-that's a whole other story!) Since they were attacked by those in the northern regions, Khartoum has never been a destination - Nairobi and Kampala (they don't remember the days of Idi Amin) are considered safe locations. However, getting family members there is a logistical nightmare. The father from one family is currently in Nairobi and another of my families is going to Kampala this summer-hoping family can get there from Juba. One of several reasons I'm forever sleepless!!
The region that eventually became the independent country of South Sudan in 2011 suffered decades of civil war (and the terror continues) from 1983 that torched the landscape, killed at least 2 million, and displaced 4 million effectively ending South Sudan's ability for "independence" and self reliance. China & Saudi Arabia are the current players in both countries due to large oil & gold reserves. As has been the operandi modus for centuries, wealthier countries exploit native people and land for power, natural resources, and money.
The misery never ceases, and it will never end as long as weapons are what the male of the human species chooses to use against one another. The U.S. is the largest exporter of weapons in the world so we always have a role although not every conflict is our fault nor can we resolve all (or even some!) Heck, we can't even stop the massacre of our own citizens these days.
NRA group
Janet, I am in profound awe at your standing in the breech to lend a helping hand to our fellow earthlings in need, particularly of those youths who have been co-opted to fight. It’s like two sides of a coin…one causing battle and misery and the other trying to ameliorate it….what a weird species we are!
Sudan could become, together with Libya, Syria and Ukraine, another battlefield in the evolving proxy war between Russia and the United States. See
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/20/africa/wagner-sudan-russia-libya-intl/index.html
Russia has also been involved in a proxy war with France in western Africa, with impoverished Chad (neighbor of Sudan) formerly France's local source of militarized thug control. Sudan also neighbors the Central African Republic, which has long been friendly toward Russia.
John Russian (American) involvement in Africa was heavy in 1970s. Angola (Cubans), Ethiopia (Somalia) and elsewhere. Russia is simply tweaking in Africa, esp with Wagner Group. China more deeply involved with infrastructure loans under pawn shop conditions.
Kieth, I think that, in limited particular cases, Russian involvement is heavier than you might realize. Mali comes to mind. And Russia was talking to Sudan about establishing a naval base like the one they have in Syria.
Regarding CNN's suppositions about Wagner Group involvement in the current mess, I suspect that Wagner helped to airlift fleeing paramilitary troops that Wagner had helped train. (And then, if Russian foreign policy is par for the course, these trained paramilitaries will be brought back to Sudan and perhaps integrated into the army.)
John I believe that China has already ‘cashed in’ on a naval base in theHorn of Africa. My sense is that China is more deeply involved, while Russia is dealing on the periphery esp with Wagner.
Perhaps, with Wagner, Russia is providing military support to anti-western African countries as part of an organized division of labor with China in a shared campaign against the long-standing western hegemony over that continent. (George Orwell actually touched on this in a prescient geopolitical commentary in "1984.")
'Tucker Carlson is leaving Fox News'
'The bombastic host received the largest audience on the conservative network'
'His last show was this past Friday, April 21. The network said that the 8 p.m. time slot, which Carlson has held since April 2017, will be filled on an interim basis by “rotating Fox News personalities until a new host is named.” It will be called “Fox News Tonight.”
'The announcement came less than a week after Fox News settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, which had sued the network for false claims about the 2020 election, for $787.5 million hours before opening arguments were to begin. Carlson was among several on-air personalities expected to testify.'
'Carlson did not immediately respond to a message asking for comment on his departure.' (WAPO) See gifted link below.
🐦 Happy as can be to deliver this one to you all! Like that headline!
https://wapo.st/41y59D5
Since I am always a little cynical, I bet it had more to do with his comment on hating Trump rather than exposing lies, if you know what I mean. Rupert has shown no evidence of being contrite so far. But hallelujah, they're starting to fall like flies! (Go E. Jean Carrol!)
thank you for info and insight
Keith, thank you for this long insightful post. Since Africa is full of minerals, oil, etc. I fear the tribal warfare will continue with the help of various outsider groups looking to control those resources. In Sierra Leone where I was for three and half years, it was diamonds and rutile. The people at the top were busy getting as rich as they could while the ordinary people lived subsistence lives. Our local ferry only had a gas motor when it was election time. The rest of the time, it was pulled by hand using wooden implements that fit around the cable. And for a bit of colonial history, the only roads paved upcountry were those where the Queen travelled when she visited. And did we celebrate the country's freedom at Fourth Bay College...nope, it was the anniversary of the Queen's visit. During our time there, there was a war between Benin and the rest of Nigeria, so there were traders selling Benin bronzes to finance the war. The railroad in Sierra Leone was narrow gauge, so trains could not go over a certain speed or they would fall off the tracks. Why narrow gauge...Guinea next door (formerly French) had regular gauge and the colonial powers didn't want to the two to fit together. Outsider contributions to these continuing problems has a long and terrible history and add to the tribal conflicts.
Michelle Minerals have long been a major attraction of Africa. Uranium for the Manhattan Project came from Congo. The conflict between British and French colonies has been never ending. These days terrorists and other armed groups have rendered mineral hunting in Africa dangerous.
Indeed, everyone else seems to see (or has seen) Africa forever as a place to plunder in various ways including the slave trade. I did smile at your Nubian comment. When we were in Luxor on a tour of tombs with Mary Elizabeth (complete with boots and a pith helmet) and her mother, we were looking at wall paintings. There was the outsized pharaoh and underneath him, some very small figures who were black. Mary Elizabeth (from Texas on a grand tour financed by Daddy) proclaimed that things hadn't changed in 5000 years. Glad to know that Nubians did prevail for a while. Whenever I think of total chaos in the hunting of minerals, I always think of the Congo in particular. I find your sports comment interesting. We never watch professional sports. And the scene in college sports has become pretty chaotic also, so we are almost finished with that too.
Ken Wheelock please continue to inform us about this colonialism on steroids. There are probably few Americans with your experience left standing.
Are the Nubians (700-600 BCE) the subject of Verdi’s “Aida”?
Virginia The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in 1954 did not prepare me for the horrors of Congo (1960-1966) as a Foreign Service Officer. There I was deeply involved in the rescue of over 3,000 foreign hostages under death sentences by the Congolese rebels.
Countless millions of Africans have been killed—Biafra in Nigeria 1 million, perhaps 1 million in Mozambique, perhaps a million in Sudan—-and much more.
Yes, Nubians/Verdi. Otello was North African.
Busy with school, then marriage, job, and child, I only remember vaguely Africa in the early ‘50s (except for “The African Queen”), but the Congo was so brutal that it still resonates like the Holocaust.
Virginia Mumbo gumbo God of the Congo—Mister Kurtz, he dead. I remember the Casement Diaries, written by Roger Casement about the horror’s of King Leopoldo’s Congo—burning entire villages, amputations.
Casement, as Irishman, was involved in an espionage trip to Ireland in WW I. Originally there was great public concern for Casement. Then his personal diaries were circulated highlighting that he was gay. Zippo to public or government concern.
During my Congo time, Congolese were brutally executed in front of Lumumba monuments. Other killings were even more dreadful.
I loved The African Queen, although it was romantic about pre-WW I Congo.
Keith, your long lifetime of experience is very valuable. Based on the fact that you were making a documentary in Sudan in 1954/55, I can imagine that these days you need to be very choosy about where you bestow your energy. Have you considered using a speech-to-text application to record the experiences and insights that you may not have captured in your writings up to this point? This recent review in PC Magazine says that both Windows 10/11 and the Mac OS offer free voice-to-text apps that, per the reviewer, were shown in tests to be about as good as the speech-to-text software that have a price tag: https://www.pcmag.com/picks/best-speech-to-text-apps-and-tools
Elizabeth Thanks for your suggestions. I sprinkle some of my experiences on Heather and elsewhere. I wrote up my experiences in five, well-documented booklets. No one in my family has actually read them—one member read at least one booklet.
If you go on Amazon, my review of Congo Mercenary includes a fulsome commentary on some of my Congo experiences. As creator of international bond ratings, I had some ‘interesting’ experiences dealing with such sovereign credits as England, Iran, and Israel. This I have no published widely because of the sensitivity. I include this in my ‘booklet.’
I did a 15 minute ‘show and tell’ at my 60th high school reunion. If you’re interested, I could e-mail you a copy.
As the new young bride said on the first night of her honeymoon when she got out of bed to bake a cake, "I digress. . . ":
As a resident opera freak here, allow me to chime in: Verdi's Aïda isn't really that specific as to time period. Ghislanzoni, the librettist, set the story in the Old Kingdom of Egypt, roughly 2700-2200 BCE. The Khedive of Egypt originally had come up with the idea for a celebratory opera for the opera house in Cairo to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Verdi declined that offer. However, a bit later, Auguste Mariette, a French Egyptologist, proposed to the Khedive a plot for an opera set in ancient Egypt. The Khedive referred Mariette to theatre manager Camille du Locle, who then sent Mariette's story idea to Verdi. Long story short, Verdi liked the story and he and his librettist honed the plot and Verdi composed the music. The opera premiered in Cairo in 1871.
Aïda is referred to as an "Ethiopian Princess", having been made a slave for the daughter (Amneris) of the Egyptian King (aka a "Pharaoh", take your pick). Aïda's father, Amonasro, is the King of the Ethiopians and has been taken prisoner by the Egyptians. Aïda's identity as a Princess isn't revealed until later in the opera at a key moment. Radames (sometimes spelled "Rhadames") is the commanding General of the Egyptian army, is secretly in love with Aïda, though he is betrothed to Amneris, Princess of Egypt. Mayhem ensues. . . it's opera.
My guess is the opera is set much earlier than 700-600 BCE. There has been some discussion recently in productions of Aïda as to whether the character should be depicted as dark-skinned. In the past, many sopranos in the role did use make-up to darken their skin. This has begun to be frowned upon, especially with the stigma around "black-face" make-up and its connotations. (There have been LOTS of kerfuffles in opera lately about depicting the ethnicities of characters in operas, and in stage works in general. That's another discussion. . . ) The great soprano Leontyne Price was the first African-American to perform the rôle at the Met, which was seen as returning the rôle to a character more closely resembling the character's actual race. Opera houses in the US have eschewed the use of darker make-up for Aïda, but it can still be found in Europe and abroad.
Bruce I defer to you on the historical antecedents of Verdi’s Aida. Though an opera house was constructed for its performance at the opening of the Suez Canal, Verdi did not appear. I saw Aida in this opera house in 1958. The bugs in the cushioned seats may have come from Verdi’s time.
This was just after US Marines went into Lebanon after the coup in Iraq. It was amusing to watch the American naval officer wave an American flag in The Mikado.
How I love Opera music. I must say, as a social worker, the stories and plots are more drama than common sense! A little couples counseling would have spared many tragedies (Just kidding.) Speaking of Black opera singers, would any of us have wanted to miss the splendid voices? I keep hearing the late Jesse Norman...extraordinary. There is also an irony in her singing Wagnerian operas. May Wagner turn over in his supremacist grave! LBNL, there is a new young Black contralto whose voice is sterling, but I cannot think of her name at the moment.
Hope You might enjoy Robert Greenberg of GREAT COURSES on opera. He is a magical musical maestro. His introduction to great music is a master’s course. His recent MUSIC AS A MIRROR ON HISTORY is absolutely brilliant.
I am a Verdi, Puccini, Rossini, Mozart, and one or two others opera fan. I was just playing AIDA in my car. According to Greenberg opera began during the baroque period.
Many "hearts" to you, Keith. You are a very fine person. Yes to your choices, though I am a little weak on Rossini.
Hope Rossini is NOT in my first tier of Operas.
I always love reading your dives into things based on your experience and background schema.
Salud, Fab Keith!
🗽
Thank you, Keith for all of your input today. You are a remarkable man! Thank you for all you have done for our country and others. I too would like a copy of the scenes description of your documentary! My address: Sharon Stearley 3285 W State Road 340, Brazil, IN 47834-7351
Why are not the African nations that have succeeded in building viable economies operating in a more or less democratic environment, despite ethnic problems, stepping in to work for a solution in the Sudan? It is in their interest to do so, since the Sudan's problems can be contagious, particularly in view of Russian meddling.
Jack Tribalism, corruption, and a wide difference between the rich and poor have been hallmarks in Africa since independence. Ethiopia was the first African ‘country.’ The Sudan next in 1956.
Nigeria was the first independence hope. The Biafra revolution in 1970 cost about 1 million lives.
South Africa was expected to be a success story after Mandela. In recent decades a Black mafia has emerged through the ANC. It’s a shambles now. I have difficulty identifying any African country as a sustained success story. Rwanda was The Economist’s ‘country of the year’ about 4 years ago. It has slumped since then.
Minerals are still a major African attraction. Personally, I would only return to Africa in an urn.
'Nationhood' requires certain pre-requisites such as economic viability, ethnic balance, reasonable natural borders, and some degree of skill in governance. Absence of even one of these leads to the failures that you describe. But were these places better off in the past as colonies where outsiders plundered their resources and called the shots (figuratively and literally)?
Not at all, Jack. Indeed those parental governments caused the vacuum by not being inclusive and instructive, and keeping the spoils to themselves. Sort of like handing the keys to the car to an adolescent who's never had a driving lesson.
Thank you for your informative comment. The Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston had a wonderful exhibition on Ancient Nubia in 2020.
Potter Thanks! I relished The Museum of Fine Arts when I was a MIT Sloan Fellow eons ago.
When I read the part about the women of Sudan rising up in 2019 against brutal dictatorship, I immediately thought of the title and cover of your new book, especially the graphic of the hand of Lady Liberty. Earlier in the day when you shared it on fb, it really struck me. Now I’m imagining women all over this country and across the globe taking up that torch!
Here are Heather's comments on Facebook:
"This note is not part of the Letters from an American series. It is instead an announcement— which comes from a bit of a place of surprise, to be honest— and a thank you to everyone who reads here.
"The announcement is that it appears my new book is a real thing.
"It has a cover now (which is what has prompted this note) and will come out in mid-September. It is 30 short chapters in three sections for a total of 250 pages of text, and I think it is… not bad, which is about as far as any writer will— or should— go on a new book.
The book is called Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, and it tries to explain how we got to this political moment… and how we get out. There is a lot of material in it you all will recognize— on the Trump years, for example, and how we got to them and how we got through them— but there is a lot that is new, too, reflecting how the last several years have made me reconceive the way I think about the meaning of history. In the end, this book makes an argument for a new understanding of U.S. history as an explicitly democratic history, kept alive primarily by marginalized Americans who have worked to expand our rights and bring the principles of the Declaration of Independence to life.
"Writing the book was a very odd experience. Because I was writing so much else, I could never focus on the book exclusively as I have for previous books. I would write in the mornings, but every afternoon I would have to pack up whatever was in front of me and start working on the nightly letter. When one chapter was done, I would throw it aside and ignore it while working on the next. It was almost as if I was seeing the project only in my peripheral vision while looking intently at what was in front of me.
"Then stuff happened (there was a wedding in there! 🙂 ) so I took a break from the manuscript before picking it up for the second draft.
"When I did turn back to it, I discovered something curious: it was almost as if the chapters had been chatting together while I ignored them, and they demanded an entire reworking. That reworking meant I rewrote close to 80% of the manuscript, and developed a much different thesis than I had set out to write two years ago. It was rather as if I had seen things more clearly out of the corner of my eye than if I had been looking directly at it.
"The manuscript turned into a voyage of discovery for me, and it ended up feeling very much like I didn’t have a lot of control over it: I was just bringing a definitive shape to the questions, comments, concerns, and hopes of so many people who have been part of the crazy journey of the past three and a half years.
"And that’s where the thank you comes in. This really is your book as much as it ever was mine.
"I hope you like it."
I look forward to reading "Democracy Awakening" soon!
"In the end, this book makes an argument for a new understanding of U.S. history as an explicitly democratic history, kept alive primarily by marginalized Americans who have worked to expand our rights and bring the principles of the Declaration of Independence to life."
Thanks for posting. I don't have facebook.
Perhaps this book will help support Nicole Hannah Jones book "The 1619 Book Project". In that book the first Chapter is: Democracy. That first chapter has, to my reading, the exact same theme as stated by HCR in her book announcement.
In that first Chapter of the 1619 Book Project, "Democracy" is an unwinding of a puzzle of a young Nicole, whose Dad, a black man, always flew the American flag. She came to her own personal understanding of why: He was hopeful for an all inclusive "American Democracy", one that had excluded black people for ALL of its history.
Jones book, along with "The Warmth of Other Suns" changed my entire thinking about America and permanently. Changed my life really.
Suddenly, for the first time, I understood why, in my 38 year career in three huge American Corporations, I saw two black professionals at my level (PhD engineer), both of whom were highly capable, but, eventually laid off.
Watching a sea of, to be honest, OFTEN incompetent white engineers stay employed and even be promoted, while the two black PhD's (who seemed reasonable and competent to me) were let go?
Helped move me to read the two books noted here in this comment.
Perhaps, since HCR is white and, now famous, her book will not be minimized/objected to by white male, southern historians, and even some other white male historians in the north, like Hannah-Jones book was.
I have reviewed many technical papers and am here to say: Hannah-Jones makes not one statement or observation without good references to back it up. Period.
I would also offer: The 1619 Book Project has more references, by hundreds and hundreds, than any history book or technical book I have ever read, and, I have read way too many technical books in my walk through my technology career.
I do believe HCR will be the first white historian to admit and then begin the walk up the same historical thematic view of America as Nicole Hannah-Jones has so bravely done for all of us.
My most hearty congratulations and thanks. I will buy the book.
Just added 1619 to my book list. Thanks Mike. I have been aware of it and read the controversies about it. Your full throated endorsement means I need to read it.
Life changing book Bill.
Might I herald all you say here, Mike, only to add that I have not read Nichole Hannah-Jones' book, but I did listen to the podcasts when they were first published in the NYT in 2019, the 400th anniversary of the first slaves to land on what would come to be American soil.
Here are the 7 episodes of the podcast:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1619/id1476928106
Thanks to the pointer to the podcasts.
I usually read but recently do listen at the gym to podcasts.
At the beginning, when you listen, you'll hear the waves slapping against the Virginia shore. It gave me chills.
Dear Lynell, thank you for the podcast link…the waves, wow! An awesome uncle of mine — who also spends time here in Heather’s classroom — recently visited me on a “civil rights reckoning” tour of sorts (awesome activist, even as a teen in Alabama). He told me all about his experience a week before in Montgomery at The Legacy Museum and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. He too heard the sorrowful waves there.
http://museumandmemorial.eji.org/
Mike S, you can read Letters (and comment) thru email. It does require a paid subscription to comment that way.
Sara. I am a paid subscriber here. But. Don’t have Facebook.
I purchased two signed copies of the 1619 Project when it was first published, and boy, am I ever glad that I did!
I gave one of them to my youngest daughter, who is the mother of my grandson who was just starting high school at that point, and the other one to some very dear friends who live close by me. I still have yet to read it myself. I need to go over to "visit them" and peruse it.
Thanks Lynell, from those of us who are not on fecebook or twits.
“... explicitly democratic history, kept alive primarily by marginalized Americans....”
That phrase just leaps off the page at me. Blacks, people of color, women, LGBTQ, low income.
Check your your privilege at the door Republicans and come join us.
We the People. All of us this time! (Thank you Lynell and thank you HCR.)
Agree, Sheila. That phrase!
looking forward to the book...I'm hoping it will illuminate what I'm working on. Launch it on Sept 17 at Antietam...the day that allowed the Emancipation Proclamation to be issued. I'll be there with a camera.
Great idea, Mike - September 17.
Thank you Lynell !
I left Facebook because I got swallowed by the torrents of insane statements by ant-vaxxers, bigots, haters, WMD lovers and all around Trumper nutcases. If I had disciplined myself to ignore them and just focus on key subjects - I would have found Heather's announcement.
Maybe someday I will venture back into the wilderness of FB. But it will take so much time to sort. And I would have to park my anger at Zuck. In the meantime, I am happily dwelling in substack land. And we have you to find a gem like this. Thanks again. I am very excited to read her next book!
I have kept Facebook, but stopped engaging with the former coworkers and their friends who were all of the negative things you mentioned (assuming that my WMD lovers you mean gun-lovers). My life has been much better since then, although occasionally I see their posts and get riled up--I am disciplined and don't say anything on their pages anymore. Some I "snooze" when they get too spun, but one of them posts funny cat stuff along side his Prager U and Fox garbage.
This, too, applies to Twitter! Best to just say "Bless your heart" if tempted to say something!
I don’t use Facebook because it encroaches on my chess play time. 😊
Smart move. Whacka. Whacka.
So glad to have posted HCR's remarks from FB to our Substack page. We all know Heather never toots her own horn. It's up to us to toot it for her!
Lynell, thank you. It was very thoughtful and generous of you to share HCR's words about her new book with us. It comes at a time when we are trying to absorb what is happening in Sudan and, of course, here in the US.
'...new understanding of U.S. history as an explicitly democratic history, kept alive primarily by marginalized Americans who have worked to expand our rights and bring the principles of the Declaration of Independence to life.' (HCR)
It is called "Democracy Awakening", a beautiful reality; may it be so.
Chops wood ,s carry water by Jessica Craven has snippets of the positive directions the country is moving. The Missoulian is full of letters & an editorial protesting the silencing of the trans woman in the State legislature .
Love that Jessica woman! Good to know about the Missoulian, Carole. Thanks!
Dare I say it, Fern? Yay for being woke!
You are the friend to all of us, Lynell. 🌻
Takes one to know one, friend.
Together. Hand to heart.
I set most of my FB posts to private (as my personal journal with articles and pictures) and periodically backup the account to a remote drive. I keep FB so I can get HCR’s biweekly videos in “real time” rather than delayed for weeks or months on YouTube. I keep encouraging non FB friends it is really easy to do that and not get dragged into the chaos of the site. I have taken to listening to HCR and Joanne Freeman’s “Now and Then” podcasts while on the elliptical at the gym. An hour goes by very quickly! This Substack group commentary also enhances the information and knowledge stream.
I do the same thing, Janet!
ditto. I like my life uncluttered. There are things on FB that are worthwhile. It doesn't take much to manage the settings so you see only what you want, and keep your own stuff private. I don't even get ads anymore.
Thank you! Where do we preorder Democracy Awakening?
I just pre-ordered it at bn.com. It will publish on September 26. Hardcover $30.00. I read e-books so it was $14.99
This is exciting. Spent 10 years on a small boat in the canals and rivers of France, beginning 2001. Out in the countryside we were remembered often as the American “liberators.” I began to see US as “the bad teenagers on the block,” so reading Professor Richardson on American democracy is a wonderful prospect. Having started off poor in the South, the 1619 project is in my bones.
Yowsa; thanks for this comment, Virginia. Love it.
Thanks Bill! I just pre-ordered too!!!
I just preordered on Amazon. Can’t wait!😊
I was able to preorder through my local bookstore on their website.
I just preordered it on Amazon.
Hey, Marj. I preordered on Amazon. I just typed in "Democracy Awakening Heather Cox Richardson" and it popped up. I'm sure there are other booksellers out there as well, like:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/
I'd like to mention bookshop.org. You order through local bookstores who are members. Shipping is not as fast... prices are close, I think.
Lynell, gratitude to you for sharing the Professor’s letter and news. It’s a challenge to keep up with so many Substacks and new books and this is one I want in my hand.
Fab, Lynell. I love when writers share their experience of writing a book so I can read that as a prologue.
Salud, my friend.
🗽
Happy to oblige, Christine!
Lynell - thank you for sharing Heather's fb post about Democracy Awakening. Love this community!
I should have thought to add Heather's post to my comment, but it was 3am and brain not fully functioning. I do wish I could post a picture of the gorgeous cover here, but since it's already listed as the #1 Bestseller in the History category on Amazon, it appears folks have found it. I preordered there to add a tiny boost, but prefer to support my local bookstore. I was able to preorder there as well. I know I'll be gifting copies including one to my local library.
Along those lines, a fb commenter suggested recommending the book to your local public library. Libraries have budgets for adding new books to their collections and often have a means to make book purchase recommendations. Although we'll all have to wait until September for a copy, this would be a great way to boost its reach across the country.
Jen, my thanks to you for mentioning Heather's FB post about her book. I would not have known about it otherwise. Realizing there are many on Substack who do not subscribe to FB even to hear her chats, I was nonetheless sure they would appreciate what she had to say.
And thanks for the idea to gift a book to our libraries as well as recommending it for them to procure several copies.
I, too, love this community!
Thanks, Lynell. I don't have FB and appreciate your posting this.
You're welcome, Ruth!
Thx for sharing this! WOW!!!!
If only
It is my favorite torch. I’ve used Lady Liberty in my comments for months and months. To me, it is an “everything” image.
Salud, JenG!
🗽
Thank you, Heather for this lesson. I honestly had no idea this was going on. I don’t understand why it’s going on, but, as someone ask ahead of me on here.....
I am wondering who (country) is supplying the weapons to these groups?
Why is it that “radical groups” have to go into a country and attempt the overthrow of a government?
This reminds me a lot of our history not that very long ago. 2016-2020 as a matter of fact. And it exploded in January 2021. We had a ‘leader’ that couldn’t accept defeat. He still hasn’t, and it’s been 2 years later already. He attempted to turn our democracy into a dictatorship. He attempted to subvert our government process. He still has his ‘faction’ in our Congress attempting to do what he was, and has been, unsuccessful in doing.
And his Fox News and such are still spreading hatred and white supremacy.
Some thought the Dominion lawsuit would tame Fox Spews down, but by what i have read in the past day or two, they are still going strong with their lies, hatred, and disinformation. I have NEVER watched Fox Spews, i honestly don't think i could stand to watch it for 2 minutes without seething with rage at the BS they spew 24/7. I just wish they could be banned from broadcasting their continuous stream of blatant false rhetoric and arrogance.
They haven’t learned a thing, they are not embarrassed, they are the enemy of the people and the spokesmodel for the cult. And people still blather about why we are so divided.
Wow, i read Carlson Tucker is now gone from Fox Spews ( i know his goofy name is Tucker Carlson, but it's messed up just like he is... he has 2 last names) i don't know the details of his departure yet.. i wonder if he got fired or just resigned? Now i hope Sean Hannity, and that loudmouthed Laura Ingraham would leave or get fired. Carlson will probably end up at Spewsmax or OANN.... they lie and spew information nearly as bad as Fox Spews.
Once in a blue moon, I feel as if I should hear what the "other side" is saying and I have tuned into Fox. I turn it off in less than 5 minutes. I feel like my head is going to explode with indignation and rage. It's like watching something right out of the Kremlin. It is treason on steroids.
My husband occasionally listens to right-wing radio programs on his commute to work for the same reason: to hear what the "other side" is saying. I think I'd crash my car if I listened to that crap!
I KNOW i would crash my mini van if i listened to the right wing radio fascist broadcasts. They always accuse Dems of doing the horrible things that the Fascist/ NAZI GQP do.. Projection is their favorite tool to attack Democrats.
I have heard that Fox Spews has widespread coverage in Moscow and Russia. Putin's minions eat the garbage up Fox Spews broadcasts. It's probably broadcast at the Kremlin itself with TV's on Fox Spews in every office or department there.
Exactly. The 787M lawsuit settlement did nothing but lighten their pocketbook.
A line item deduction, cost of doing business. Nothing else. Sad.
The Court made 19 factual determinations against Fox & Murdoch who are now facing a SMARTMATIC Triial against FOX, fired Lou Dobbs & Bartiromo who has an ex-Tucker Producer who went over to the smart side coming soon on a cell phone screen in your hands.
Key SMARTMATIC Fact: The company's voting equipment was only in one (1) county in one (1) state, Los Angeles County, California where tfg was swamped even if LA County was still using chads.
At trial a Defendant is not permitted to throw pyschotic spaghetti on the courtroom walls.
Just another business expense. The rich get richer.
Daniel, I tune in "Beau of the Fifth Column" Youtube daily.I was pretty upset by Fox, and his take help me quite a bit. If you are unaware of him, I think you'd be informed and enjoy his clips, lot of the LFAA watch him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0DwlABAeVs
And also, posted earlier in the week:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20-iqziOPCI
Just like HCR, Beau is so busy, I wonder when he finds time to sleep!
Thanks, Miselle. I’ll definitely check this out. Personally, I have nothing to do with FOX Network. They can take it off the airways and it wouldn’t upset me one bit.
The U.S. has been one of those ¨radical groups¨ for decades. Look at South American. Vietnam, and others. Did you ever watch Lord of War? https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHBF_esES920ES920&cs=0&q=Lord+of+War&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgFuLSz9U3MCwrSzLJVeIEsc1LyotMtSSyk630C1LzC3JSgVRRcX6eVW5-WWZq8SJWbp_8ohSF_DSF8MQiACEBL71BAAAA&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjAh530h8L-AhUyaqQEHe7qAtwQ9OUBegQIDxAV&biw=1229&bih=571&dpr=1.56#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:d9f16c9e,vid:AXgyoER0aRc
No. As a matter of fact, I haven’t. But, having lost a lot of friends in Vietnam, I fully understand why the United States was there, even though at the time most people didn’t understand. Same reason we have helped Ukraine, and other countries.
The way I see it, somebody has to stand up for these countries trying to have democracy and a half decent way of life. If we don’t, this world will be all under the thumb of the likes of Russia or China. Total communism, total dictatorship.
I’m not ready to live under a dictatorship where we, the people, have absolutely no say about anything,
Thank you for sharing your belief.
The people who began the protest against the Nam war were the returning vets who came home and told the truth about what was going on there. I can understand the sense of loyalty you feel for the people you fought with, but it was a pointless war that was not our business. South Viet Nam was corrupt. And we became complicit in the deaths not only of our young soldiers but of thousands of civilians as well. And them, finally understanding we could not win, we dumped out and left people who worked for us (they needed jobs), along with a good many half-American babies. Some of those babies' fathers fought the system to bring them and their mothers to America but a good many just went back home and took up the lives they'd left. Be angry that your friends died (I am), but please make sure you aren't confounding where your anger is placed with something else.
I understand you fully. Just as I’m aware we might not have had any business being there. But, I feel we were fighting the communists, communism, from trying to take over people, and a country. I also know that many of out soldiers died needlessly because they were not trained to fight in the conditions they were sent into. They were trained to fight as the soldiers in WWII, and Korea had fought. Vietnam was an entirely different place. Entirely different fighting. It was gorilla warfare. Our troops were not trained to fight gorilla warfare.
There is a special type of delusional kool-aid drinker, who smoothly convinces the rest that kool-aid is good for them.
Biden, as a U.S. Senator in the 1980s and 1990s, shares complicity in the most far-reaching genocide in history; we brutalized and oppressed countless darker-skinned countries.
"The blood is so much, you know, it runs in rivers..."
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-15-2023/comment/11967315
"The
Damn, you never miss a chance to smear Biden. Not perfect, but beats the hell out of any Repub since Everett Dirksen died.
Jeri,
I am careful not to smear Biden out of respect for the office, but, one need only look at Clarence Thomas to see Biden's massive limitations of the past.
In the face of proven allegations about Thomas spending his workday reading Penthouse and Playboy, Biden minimized the woman who noted that fact, and?
We now have Clarence Thomas to deal with.
Imagine if Biden had listened to that Black woman instead of minimizing her?
I have yet to meet or hear of a perfect anybody. Biden has two big ones to be held accountable for. One is obviously Thomas. Hill's testimony if it had come from a white woman could have smashed Thomas.
The second is the "tough on crime" bill that imposed mandatory sentencing. It declared a war on people - not drugs.
That being said, I wake up every day so grateful that he has been our President. Except for the Willow boondoggle, he has been exemplary.
And now, if he were to set aside his ego and read the crowd, he would step aside and let the next generation take over. He is still very capable and if re-nominated, I will vote for him. But millions of younger voters may not vote at all if it is a match up between two old farts.
But that's only half the disaster. There are all the down ballot elections we could lose if we don't have a strong turnout. The Senate (and judges!), the House and all those state and local contests that are already gerrymandered.
I reported him for his reply to you, Jeri. I know that he's been reported by others in the past and hopefully, they will do so again.
...said the I.M.F Holocaust denier, Jeri Chilcutt.
Well John then you me and every one else is complicit as we were around for the brutalization you so well remember. Perhaps it is time to bury the dead, and out of respect for their sacrifice, and self respect, to make a more salient future contribution. Well I remember the dead, smell the rotting flesh, and taste the metallic blood. While I am unable to escape the anguish of the past I find the hope for a better future is stronger. Fury and anger are like manacles which hamper our better angels. Try and find enough compassion for all of us. Even Joe Biden. We all are trying. You should as well. Look ahead, think ahead, help us grow. It is springtime now. The winter is behind us. Plant something nice. Nurture it. The lilacs are budding now. Smile at the old fool who always beats you to the mirror.
Pat Cole, perhaps you would like to give a free pass to those Nazi concentration camp guards who get arrested from time to time (if any are still alive).
Perhaps you recall what a long-term issue it was to get the U.S. government to recognize the Turkish genocide of Armenians that happened over a century ago. I am appalled by your free-and-easy attitude toward genocudal brutality.
Joe Biden was a longstanding member of the Senat Foreign Relations Committee, eventually becoming its Chairman. Biden had to have known of the most far-reaching genocide in history, stretching to darker-skinned countries all around the world.
"The blood is so much, you know, it runs in rivers...:
One deals with the present as well as one can. We didn’t recognize the Dulles who got US into Vietnam as we recognize the Steve Bannon who supported Russia/Trump.
Regarding Biden's complicity, see also
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-23-2023/comment/15155271
and
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-23-2023/comment/15175428
Amen.
Don't forget Iran. The US did the same thing in Iran under the auspices of histrionics around "communism". In 1953 we sponsored the assassination of a popular democratic leader because he might not be friendly to us.
Any bunch of low peasants, who were trying to take back their country from a strong man, were opposed by the United States for 80 years.
Ho Chi Minh? He beat us. I wonder how he felt at the end of his life having watched video of himself kicking the last US service man onto a US helicopter off of the roof of a building in Vietnam.
Look at Vietnam now?
Instead of being a house of prostitution for US troops it is now a garden spot for US vacationers. Of course, a bomb still goes off in a field killing a few kids, but, Vietnam is a fully functioning, live country now.
Trump knows what country he is in.
He knows he can get by with anything, because, he has done so his entire life, outside the law.
Nothing can stop him in America.
Nothing. He is rich. He is white.
Nuff said.
If the ground is thawed there get outside and go to work. Although I believe you I am going to snark with an I told you so when he Dons orange pajamas.
But states have been working to codify the evil of the cult so that next time, they are “the law.”
Don't forget about the state legislators who are hell bent on enacting a fascist Christian Nationalim agenda. I have at least 6 bill just today to object to & almost everyday there is at least 2-3.
Thank you Carole.
MT LWV does have male members. The focus is mainly on voting rights
Jacqueline Burns' astute comments reminded me of my favorite description of history:
"History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations."
--James Baldwin
Aren't we always at the raw, bleeding edge of history...carrying out and even documenting what will become what we call history, after an interval of fermentation, bottling, distribution and consumption?
I lived with my family in Khartoum and also in Juba in the early 1980s….a seemingly quiet backwater at the time. It felt quiet and gentle, my children were charmed and we look back on that time with a special feeling. We were buoyed by the popular uprising that attempted yi bring a civilian government to
Power. So it is terribly sad to read about the population being trampled upon by two greedy egocentric men ( like Putin) who have no regard for the people. What can our future be as human beings?
"Wagner’s founder, Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, made after his group’s recent losses in Ukraine, saying he planned to concentrate on Africa, where his forces have been propping up authoritarian governments now for a while. "
Something is very wrong when corporations behave like governments. There is a long history of this and it's not good. Radical corporate "deregulation" and anti-anti-trust is bat guano nutso. Ask India about the British East India Company. We are allowing similarly impactful concentrations of financial/political power to agglomerate.
"But talks dragged on, tensions rose, and now the two men are at war with each other for control of the country"
Can't they be sent somewhere else, where they can play without breaking things?
Everywhere, for many decades, international arms industries have been putting more and more vicious weapons in the hands of soldiers and terrorists, then stirring the witches cauldron thus created.
In Rwanda, firearms were not even necessary to set off mass killing.
Wherever a valuable commodity is found -- oil, gold, diamonds, rare earths, coca -- armed men, soldiers, death squads, marauders, bring death to the local population. A more vicious form of slash and burn, clearing the ground for exploitation, whether by great corporations or garimpeiros... or both.
Difficult to prevent this massacre of the unarmed innocent. It is built into our societies and even the UN's inter-national structure makes the protection of life in all its forms, very much including human, difficult or impossible.
Many tribal peoples living in remote places with strong natural defenses withstood western colonists for centuries but are now falling victim to corrupt governments in cahoots with major economic interests.
the machetes of Rwanda could be crafted out of old leaf-springs of commercial vehicles for, literally, pennies. If there WAS kool-aid in Rwanda, it was tribal and spiked with hallucinogens. Indeed, pickups with mounted machine guns can kill more people faster, but when many thousands of persons pick up weapons of any kind to use against their neighbors, death on a genocidal scale becomes a sudden reality. I can't think of a phenomenon in nature where a species can turn on itself in the way that humans do...
What lay behind the Rwandan massacres? What root causes? -- as opposed to the combination of immediate trigger events.
From that question follows one about your closing sentence, Just Sayin':
What is "human nature"?
I don't regard this as some vain academic sophist's question, since the answer we give it will condition our behavior, our beliefs... our politics...
Hobbes' "Man is a wolf to man" is blatantly unfair to wolves...
"What lay behind the Rwandan massacres? What root causes?"
Peter, I think this one is not too difficult:
You, Peter,
you have what I want. I deserve it. I am coming to get it.
That's it Peter. All I have to do is convince myself of the above three sentence fragments.
Wow, Mike!
Sharpshooter. Grazing the edge of the bull's eye.
Striking, too, how close this comes to the conversation at just the same time between me and my wife, the woman who puts up with me.
If we can keep this up we'll be far from wasting our time with these group conversations.
I'm not wearing a hat at this moment, so I tug at the forelock I don't have.
And thank you.
Strange, Mike.
Looking again this evening, I see correspondences between my breakfast thoughts and conversation—which will be why they rang a bell for me—but I can’t find any connection between the question asked and the three sentence fragments in your answer. So I wonder what made me answer as I did. Looks as though I’d not fully woken up when I wrote… Senior moment?
When you wrote “You, Peter”, I assumed I was being taken as a representative human being and you'd chosen a direct way of bringing that home to me.
Plainly, I thought this because it was on a separate line, but even that was a misreading, it's part of your three sentence answer.
And the only words in those three sentences that resonate for me are “I want”. “I want” and the drive that results from it. “I want” expresses something essential about human nature. But you weren’t answering the question about human nature, and I don't see how HAVING has anything to do either with that or with the root causes of the massacre.
The question is not rhetorical. It is an invitation to dig deep in search of answers, in the knowledge that we may discover many elements, perhaps deepening our understanding; yet, even if we do gain insights into the deepest contributory causes, we shall still be left with questions but no answer that can be expressed in words.
Your three sentences do, however, betray a view of human nature…
What is human nature? In the natural law jurisprudence that informed the Declaration of Independence, the "perfection" (or mature development) of human nature is characterized by habitual active concern for the well-being of our fellow humans, and this is the source of happiness.
HCR, did you ever in your wildest think that you would be giving a history lesson on Sudan? And a truly powerful distillation it is. Thank you for educating us on what is going on in another part of the world few give a passing thought to. Actually, there is no long an ¨other part of the world.¨
Very true, Gailee. And millions upon millions of people live there.
Sudan has the 3rd largest population in Africa.
Which have the first and second?
Thank you, Heather, for this recent history about Sudan. Forgive me, but what really has pulled me into this story is the couple of commentors who have shared their firsthand experiences from having lived in the country. So thank you, Keith and d horner, for sharing your stories to all of us.
One of the best things about LFAAU is the breadth and depth of experiences and expertise that other readers have and share with the rest of us.
Yes, indeed, morning, Ally! I feel so fortunate to be a part of this community.
Morning, Lynell!! So do I!
Checking in after having posted this, many more have joined in with their firsthand experiences with the continent of Africa. I am grateful for all of your submissions.
Thank you Heather.
“... if we are going to stop the “continued cycle of violence and human suffering,” negotiators must stop prioritizing the voices of “the armed and corrupt” over those actually interested in real political reform.”
I wonder how much more difficult this becomes considering the Wagner Group’s role and agenda. It seems as if global destabilization is Putin and Russia’s oligarchs current play. Like a moving object, may they make the acquaintance of an immovable object.
The phenomenon has a long, long worldwide history.
During the Hundred Years War, France was ravaged by "companies", disbanded soldiers forming armed groups that lived off the land. Royal armies from Spain, France and the German-speaking Empire kept invading Italy while local condottieri used the disorder to build themselves small kingdoms. Warlords fought up and down China whenever dynasties fell. Kurosawa's great film, Seven Samurai, featuring the defense of a poor village against bandits, is set in a period of civil war in Japan, as are films like The Throne of Blood, Kagemusha and Ran...
What is new are the automatic weapons in the hands of bandits in and out of national uniform and the interactions of criminal networks that use war and national liberation struggles as cover for their activities, often surviving and prospering long after hostilities have ended. The Sicilian mafia is one example, crushed by the Fascist regime, freed by the US Army in a bid to win over locals and save soldiers' lives when invading Sicily and southern Italy...
Heather, heartrending reporting from Sudan. Thank you! I just wonder who is supplying the weapons to those “armed groups” you describe. The interconnectedness of all humans on Earth is always astounding to me.
Wagner is focusing on Africa because Putin needs its gold and other natural resources to help him evade Western sanctions imposed because of his unprovoked war in Ukraine. Destabilization is the name of the game because it draws focus away from Ukraine. It also sets up opportunities for Biden to publicly fail--imagine if the evacuation of the embassy had been as chaotic as in Afghanistan. That would provide an opportunity for the MAGA chaos monkeys to take their destruction to a whole new level.
Wagner is a major presence in many African countries providing training and security services to the more authoritarian regimes in exchange for control of mining and resources. I would not be surprised to see fighting break out in other countries on the continent. Much of Africa is suffering from food and water insecurity due to climate change and mass population migrations are bringing new ethnic rivalries and pressures into play. The destabilization is happening on many levels in society, for instance the extreme anti-LBTGQ+ policies and rhetoric in Uganda and the attribution of LBTGQ+ influences as coming from decadent Western societies. Putin is playing the culture war card in more than just the US and Hungary.
Fascinating, what you have written Georgia. Thank you for your enlightening input.
"There are signs that Russia’s Wagner group is supporting Hemedti, which would be in keeping with the statement Wagner’s founder, Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, made after his group’s recent losses in Ukraine, saying he planned to concentrate on Africa, where his forces have been propping up authoritarian governments now for a while."
My first thought upon reading this was imagining African mercenaries showing up in Ukraine. My immediate second thought was that was very unlikely, but, third thought, as the Russian situation in Ukraine deteriorates, anything is possible. Putin is capable of anything as support for his Ukraine invasion/quagmire wanes at home.
As to Wagner mercenaries already in Africa propping up dictators; paid by whom? I'd look at corporations involved in extractive mining and petroleum operations. Wagner forces In Sudan indicates someone is betting on Hemedti to emerge the winner. Who is footing that bill?
And where is Erik Prince?
That was my first thought last week when reading about what is going on in Africa!
As always, follow the money answers a lot...
So, now we can split our attention and anxiety to two separate wars on two continents. This most recent conflict sounds more familiar; there have been similar conflicts between warlords, between tribes and ethnicities, between political parties in a series of African countries over many years in post-colonial Africa. Are there any greater implications for world power dynamics, beyond those vying for the raw materials resources in the region? I don't hear this being described as a proxy-war for bigger elements like east and west, democracy versus autocracy in world powers (however, locally it appears to be at least one principal backdrop for the conflict). It certainly has no naval or international airspace implications to the degree of the most recent preceding conflict in Ukraine. I seriously doubt we'll see anything even close to the kind of international interest that has led to blocs of countries lining up to contribute to the war effort in Ukraine. As usual, the casualties are at least partly civilian and internal disruption and dislocation is a significant component of the cost of conflict. I wouldn't be surprised at all if this devolved to zones of control by military forces in conflict, i.e. a more low level, long term conflict that increasingly looks like guerilla war such as in Yemen. It is heartbreaking as history more or less repeats it self yet again in a place that can ill afford destruction of its infrastructure and loss of life on a macroscopic scale. Is this a powder keg with imminent possibility of a regional/continental expansion? Is this a (how did he label it?) regional territorial dispute? Oh, Lord I(we) are weary. When can we start beating those swords into plowshares?
Melt those auto/semi-auto weapons into shovels, plowshares, and other helpful tools.
Bells Ally. Let freedom ring.
Don’t do what those Southern police departments are doing; auctioning off the confiscated and left-behind guns and putting them back out on the streets. Turning guns into plowshares...NOT.
"In the wake of the coup, foreign aid was halted, the economy collapsed"
The economy was already collapsing - that was an important factor in the revolt of the women in 2019. If you look at the World Bank figures, all the metrics were already down in 2021, quite dramatically so.
As for foreign aid, not all of it was halted. Global health organisations have continued to boost the health system and procure medicines for the Sudanese people and the WFP has continued distributions in regions in difficulty (primarily Darfur). Humanitarian organisations never left.
How the Nubian mighty and the Kingdom of Kush are fallen!
We are far from the days of building pyramids, of ruling Egypt and saving the Isrealites from disaster in their fight with the Assyrians.
(with apologies to the Old Testament, 2 Samuel 1:19.)
I'll raise you James Elroy Flecker: We are they who come faster than fate, We are they who ride early or late, We storm at your ivory gate, Pale kings of the sunset, beware!
I call😂
Powerful Nubian Queens... My mind conjures up images from Marvel .... a victorious battle well fought. Brave warriors who want to live in a better world that has more love than hate.
I remember with vivid detail the Sudan pavillion at The 1965 Worlds Fair. It was colorful and exotic. But i don’t recall much more about Sudan since then. Thank you for these details HCR and reminders that power and greed are basically very destructive forces.