Holy koolaid or shock therapy?

 

Is this some kind of shock therapy? The YouTube channel "Holy Koolaid" attacks and exposes fake faith healers (that is, faith healers). Some of this stuff is *very* disturbing!

The only fun moment is when a guy who is being exorcised of demons gets a call on his mobile in the middle of the ritual. The pastor, quite understandably, gets really angry...or not so understandably, if he too is a shyster. 

Otherwise...I advise discretion from the point of the viewer.  

Mountains of the Moon

 

A Giant Potto (and it really is huge) and two scary mystery birds...don´t get me wrong, but is *this* the best the fabled Mountains of the Moon at Ruwenzori can offer us in terms of cryptids? Geezus, I had expected albino killer apes, dinosaurs, or at the very least some really nasty spider, but naah!

Some cryptozoological riddles from Ruwenzori

Saint John Coltrane

 

I´ve heard of the mysterious Kenyan Orthodox Church before (I think it´s mentioned in passing in Kallistos Ware´s book "The Orthodox Church"), but I never reflected over its pre-history. Until now...

Apparently, the Kenyan and Ugandan Orthodox Churches (which today are "officially" Eastern Orthodox) were originally connected to the so-called African Orthodox Church in the United States, a quasi-Orthodox Church body set up by Black nationalist Marcus Garvey.  

One of the AOC´s congregations is very exotic. It´s named after the jazz musician John Coltrane, who was worshipped as God (!) by a small cult. When the cultists wanted to join the AOC, they were told to demote Coltrane from divine status to that of an ordinary saint (yes, they have icons of him). Apparently, mass is still celebrated with a saxophone?!

I admit that I never heard of the AOC, or Saint John Coltrane for that matter, before. You learn new shit every day, LOL. 

Well, glad to have that sorted out

 

What level of irony is this guy on? Viewer (or listener) discretion strongly advised here!

African Gospel

"Jesus of Africa: Voices of Contemporary African Christology" (2004) is a book by Diane B Stinton, a Canadian scholar and theologian. She resided and taught in Kenya at the time her book was published. "Jesus of Africa" combines theology and anthropology. It´s not as interesting as I first imagined, and feels somewhat "in-house", but it´s not a complete waste of time either. People extremely interested in Christian missionary activity (and the theological conundrums surrounding it) will probably find it worthwhile. 

Stinton has carried out field work in Kenya, Uganda and Ghana, and also quotes authors from Cameroon and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa. She has mostly excluded southern Africa from consideration, however. The book comments on some theological developments within African Christian Churches since the abolition of European colonial rule. Both Protestants and Catholics are included. There are also "African Independent Churches", Christian denominations started by Black Africans outside the structures of the missionary Churches (which are ultimately controlled from Europe or the United States). Stinton describes various strategies used by African Christians to make Jesus and the Biblical message more relevant to African concerns, both traditional and modern. 

The author refers to these strategies as "inculturation" and "liberation". There is an obvious tension between them, not always explored in the book, since the former tries to adapt Christianity to traditional African cultures (including traditional African religions), while the latter is more modern and might therefore clash with tradition. For instance, feminist theology will come into conflict with patriarchal structures, while a more general liberation theology will clash with those of a less radical political bent. There are also attempts to bridge the gap between inculturation and liberation, however, for instance by claiming that traditional culture is really matriarchal, or by recasting traditional kings ("tribal chiefs" in Western parlance) as liberation fighters.

Much of the inculturation will strike more doctrinally purist Christians as syncretist and heretical. While Stinton paints African religion as monotheist, I think more traditional theologians will easily define it as pantheist and polytheist. The "life force" from "God" is mediated through spirit-beings, of which the ancestors of the tribe, clan and/or family are the most important. This makes ancestral cults central to many African cultures. Jesus is incorporated into this structure as the Ancestor par excellence, sometimes referred to as the Proto-Ancestor, who mediates between God and man. He can also be seen as the foremost manifestation of the vitalistic life force which permeats the entire cosmos and ultimately comes from God. Traditional African terms for the Divine are used when describing "God the Father" of the Bible, and likewise Jesus can be given names or titles associated with the Divine or some important divine figure in the traditional religion. Jesus can further be cast as a traditional African king, who is seen not only as an earthly ruler and mediator with the Divine, but also as a powerful warrior and "liberator" or "savior" of his people. The author once visited a Church compound where the chapel (i.e. the "house" of Jesus) was surrounded in circular fashion by the other buildings, in the same way as the house of a king is surrounded by the domiciles of his plural wives! 

Other inculturation attempts include seeing Jesus as a family member, obviously because the extended family is the central social unit in many African societies. Jesus can be seen as father, brother, husband, or even as "mother". While nobody interviewed in the book regards Jesus as literally feminine, many women did see Jesus as a motherly figure. He is said to give life (like a woman) and care for his flock in motherly fashion. Sometimes his suffering is interpreted as a motherly act. In one Kenyan culture, women have traditionally worked as shepherds, so obviously "the good shepherd" sounds like feminine symbolism there. However, women just as often see Jesus as a manly figure. For instance, widows might interpret him as a "husband". 

The author is "pro-African", which a critical reader might find mildly annoying. For instance, the already mentioned attempt to cast African paganism as "monotheist", obviously intended as praise, since monotheism is "good" in a Christian context. A more neutral observer might argue that it shouldn´t matter whether or not non-Christian religion is mono-, pan- or polytheist. Both the author and the African theologians she quote constantly use the terms "holistic" and "wholistic" when describing traditional African culture. But surely this term can´t be African? It smacks more of American New Age! It´s also obvious that the holistic "community" described by Stinton is really a tribal or clan society, something very problematic from a "liberation" perspective. 

An ironic side effect of the inculturation efforts is that belief in magic, witches and traditional medicine has remained strong even in a Christian context, often supplemented by faith healing. Jesus can be seen as a powerful healer or medicine man. It struck me that the success of the prosperity gospel in Africa (mentioned in passing by the author as an anti-traditional reaction) can actually have a "traditional" explanation: maybe the Faith movement preachers are seen as powerful magicians? 

Some topics are not covered in the book at all, or only mentioned in passing, yet seems relevant to the context. Thus, Stinton mentions that African Christians often prefer the Old Testament to the Gospels. Why? This is never explained. Is it the tribal aspect? Or something more disturbing? In Rwanda, the Hutu extremists used OT imagery to rally the Hutu against the Tutsi. It seems Black Jesus can also be a genocidaire! I also noted that White Europeans get all the blame for the slave trade, when in reality the Muslim slave trade was just as extensive and older than the Christian. Kenya and Uganda would have been mostly hit by the Muslim slave trade, while Ghana was presumably hit by both. Is "liberation" only directed against Whites, or is there an anti-Muslim aspect we are not told about?

From a non-Christian perspective, "Jesus of Africa" also raises other questions. For instance, how far can Christianity be stretched without becoming something else entirely? *Is* Christianity relevant to Africa (or anyone really) if it has to be de-Judaized, de-Biblicized or de-NT-ized to fit the new cultural context? How would Christianity look like if it had used the same inculturation strategy during, say, the Early Middle Ages when it spread to northern Europe? And what exactly is the infallible divine revelation in all this?

Those are my reflections on the contemporary African Christologies. 

The COVID Consensus

I can´t stop linking to this rather obvious Communist front group...

Note the irony that Max Blumenthal (who seems to be pro-Chinese) is also anti-lockdown, while the dogmato-sectoid-Trotskyite World Socialist Web Site (linked to elsewhere) is anti-Chinese...except on lockdowns, where it recommends that all the world follows China´s so-called Zero COVID policy! 

OK, I admit I was a left-watcher in my sadly misspent youth. 

That being said, Blumenthal´s and Stavroula Pabst´s article *is* a good criticism of the lockdowns and the pro-lockdown "left". The lockdowns have hit the working class and the Global South particularly hard, while being used to "lockdown" democratic debate in the Western nations. Critics have been branded "Nazis" or "fascists". Blumenthal hints at the left´s middle class social composition as the explanation for their (indeed bizarre) support for what amounts to a bourgeois-imperialist (by their own definitions) global emergency. Note also that this supposedly "woke" left supports measures that increase domestic violence against women, mental health problems among youth and young adults, and more IMF control over "BIPOC" nations in the Third World. 

A quote from the essay:

>>>For many among the urban laptop class, including a large swath of the hyper-online Western left which still clamors for national school closures and demands lockdowns in the face of a handful of new cases (while crudely painting critics of official Covid policy as Nazis), quarantine orders merely enforced an already sedentary lifestyle that revolves around Zoom meetings, ordered food and Amazon deliveries. The restrictions further eliminated tedious commutes to work while providing those able to work remotely with the satisfying sense that staying home was a bold act of social solidarity.  

>>>Under this spectacular arrangement, which assumed individual behavior could slow down or contribute to the spread of a virus, isolation was framed as a moral choice that led many of those willingly confined to their homes to fear or vilify a working class that frequently provided them with vital services. And while non-pharmaceutical interventions have generally proven futile against COVID-19, the stentorian demands to socially distance and attendant shaming of those who fail to obey has done little more than generate hostility between friends, families, and communities.

>>>“Lockdowns are a luxury of the rich,” Bhattacharya said, “and affect a certain class of people at the expense of others. A lockdown doesn’t mean all of society stops and we all sit in cages alone while we wait for the fires to go away. The poor and working class, many of them vulnerable and older, are asked to risk themselves, while another class of people stays at home protected.”

>>>This was particularly true in the Global South, where class divisions are clearly drawn and most people live dangerously close to the poverty line.

I said this before: I expected the "new 1914" of the left to be something dramatic, say a "military bloc" with the US army as they bomb the hell out of rogue Trump supporters marching on some state capital. I couldn´t imagine in my wildest fantasy that it would be uncritical support for misguided lockdowns (and even more misguided vaccine mandates?) during a flu pandemic...

The dialectic works in mysterious ways.  

Flattening the curve or flattening the global poor?

The grizzly toll of lockdown capitalism

 

500 million more people, mostly in the Global South, has been forced into poverty by the COVID pandemic. Or perhaps because of the Global North *response* to the COVID pandemic? 

Leftist gadflies Jimmy Dore and Max Blumenthal argues that the lockdowns of the international economy, imposed by the globalist establishment in the rich Western nations, are collapsing the economies of the "Third World". Immunization campaigns against other diseases have been scrapped, many nations have become heavily indebted to the IMF (again), and poverty is spreading even in nations that are considered "Middle Income", where people who recently escaped poverty are falling back again. The education system in places like Uganda has been devastated by two years of lockdown, with the students being forced to work for a living (they can´t "chill in the metaverse", as Blumenthal puts it). 

All this was *predicted* by the UN already in April last year, yet nothing has been done to solve the situation. By our "woke" leftoid elites, I might add. 

In the land of the killer clowns

The Indonesian orchid "Kimilsungia"

"Guns, Guerillas and the Great Leader: North Korea and the Third World" is a book written hy Benjamin R Young. It was recently published by Standford University Press as part of their "Cold War International History Project". While the book does contain interesting facts (and a lot of borderline factoids), it nevertheless comes across as a rough draft. The book tries to describe North Korea´s foreign policy from 1956 to 1989, but lacks a more detailed analysis of the entire period in question. There isn´t even a general summary chapter. To be honest, the book comes across as a kind of catalogue of every weird North Korean mishap in the Third World, but without any attemp at a real synthesis. There are also a number of strange errors: the author (or his editor?) confuses Mauritius with Mauritania, claims that Muhammad is a "deity", and insists on calling the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna "the People´s Liberation Front" - while that is what the name means, everyone else just calls it JVP. After reading the book, I still don´t understand *why* the DPRK did what they did (as in "why really"), although a few answers can be gleaned by reading the narrative carefully. 

Which doesn´t mean you shouldn´t read the book. If you love killer clowns on a Halloween rampage in the Third World, you gonna love "Guns, Guerillas and the Great Leader". 

A long time ago, I assumed that the DPRK were a super-isolationist Communist regime which really did have an independent line, and in contrast to Enver Hoxha´s Albania didn´t even try to create a "world movement" all their own. Later, I assumed that North Korea was really just a Soviet satellite, although a slightly idiosyncratic one. Judging by Young´s overview, the truth is more complex and also more sinister. North Korea was politically independent from both the Soviet Union and the People´s Republic of China, but also economically dependent on them - the "North Korean miracle" was really Made in Elsewhere. The solution seems to have been to play off the Soviets and the Chinese against each other, reaping dividends from both. When necessary, the DPRK carried out its own influence operations, economic deals and even terrorist attacks. There is a certain irony in this, since the "Democratic People´s Republic of Korea" was established by the Soviet Army and saved from USA/UN occupation by the People´s Liberation Army of China! Yet, since both the Soviets and the Chinese left early, the Kim family clan could remain firmly in control and pursue their own policies without direct supervision by Moscow or Beijing (both of which frequently complained about the North Korean attitude). So why were the North Koreans allowed to continue, year after year, even when they carried out crazy stuff worthy of a Gaddafi? I assume the reason is geopolitical: neither the Soviets nor the Chinese Communists can allow a "capitalist" or "pro-American" unification of Korea, and therefore need the DPRK as their buffer state in the north. This gives the Kims (including the present one) a certain leverage and ability to manoeuvre. They can go very far without risking more than some diplomatic reprimands backstage... 

I think the main, or even only, reason for DPRK´s "solidarity" with "the Third World" is the North-South conflict on the Korean peninsula. Judging by Young´s account, this is the case even when North Korea tries to get influence in Africa. It´s really a way to counter attempts by *South* Korea to gain such influence, or to move first. Sometimes, North Korea wants to test its weaponry, or even engage South Korean agents and military personnel abroad. During the Vietnam War, North Korea supported North Vietnam and the NLF, while South Korea did likewise with South Vietnam. The DPRK sent fighter pilots to Vietnam, and tried to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the South Korean troops active there. They also attempted to abduct South Korean military, spread Communist propaganda among them, etc. In Africa, the two Koreas were engaged in a decades-long propaganda war against each other, the purpose of which was to secure African support for the North Korean position within the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which North Korean diplomacy tried to use as a forum and a tool for DPRK interests. While the aid to various Third World nations was originally free of charge (the North Koreans even paid handsomely for propaganda in various foreign newspapers), during the 1980´s the relations became more business-like, with the DPRK demanding payment (in foreign currency) for services rendered. 

What struck me most was the intensely opportunist character of the North Korean foreign operations. Machiavelli would have liked these guys. In Uganda, North Korea supported both Idi Amin, Milton Obote and Yoveri Museveni! In southern Africa, North Korea originally had cozy relations with Zaire´s very own killer clown Mobutu Sese Seko, only to abandon him (and his Angolan FLNA proxies, and I suppose his avasuits), in favor of the Angolan MPLA. In the Middle East, Kim Il Sung secretly supported Egypt´s peace deal with Israel, while saying the opposite in public! And despite its support for North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, the DPRK pivoted to Pol Pot´s Cambodia after the war, even trying to get Vietnam expelled from the NAM. The bromance between Cambodia´s Sihanouk and Kim Il Sung must have been something to behold, with Sihanouk telling a high-ranking US official that the North Korean leaders don´t want war, since they are used to a life in complete comfort and luxury (something that must have impressed this truly precious prince who, alas, was no stranger to war). Sihanouk preferred having North Korean body guards, notorious for their brutality, being intensely suspicious of Cambodian royal palace guards... 

A fun fact is that North Korea weren´t the only opportunists in these transactions. Frequently, *they* were taken advantage of themselves, especially in the super-corrupted African theatre. Once, a pro-Western newspaper in Cameroon published pro-DPRK propaganda just for the money. Many "Korean friendship associations" in Africa paid people to become members, which all kinds of unscrupulous elements took advantage of. In Uganda, the "friendship association" supported Museveni, at a time when the North Korean regime was still aiding and abetting Obote. The Communist Dergue regime in Ethiopia cynically accepted aid from both Koreas! But then, the Dergue may also have been the only regime in the world which accepted aid from both Cuba and Israel...

Judging by Young´s account, the best aid rendered by the Kim regime to its "allies" in the Third World was the military one, which included both weapons, ammunition and frequently brutal instructors. He doesn´t have an opinion on the quality of the huge palaces and monuments built in Africa by North Koreans. Much other aid was substandard, including porcelain factories which made dishes of such bad quality that you could cut through them with a steak knife. I´m not surprised. One popular "export" were the Mass Games, a kind of political gymnastic exercises, which could be used for propaganda purposes in a variety of nations (although the locals preferred to enhance the Mass Games with references to their own cultures). This brings me to perhaps the most entertaining portion of North Korean foreign propaganda: its notoriously inept character. It´s not clear to me whether the Kim Il Sung leadership really didn´t get it, or whether they simply didn´t care, since the real deals between DPRK and its "allies" were negotiated off-stage. 

North Korea is notorious for its bizarre and hysterical personality cult of Kim Il Sung, and later also of Kim Jong Il, his son and heir-very-apparent. This personality cult was liberally diffused abroad (or in North Korea to visiting foreign delegations), often to the bemusement and slight consternation of the intended targets. After reading some of the Great Leader´s sage pronouncements myself, I have to say that most of them are basic bitch commonplaces. "We have to strengthen the people, weaken imperialism, and mobilize. This is very important". That kind of level. I assume that the statements *about* the Great Leader and the Dear Leader are more, shall we say, turgid. Even foreign diplomats, including from friendly socialist nations, where frequently forced to listen to long speeches extolling the virtues and excellencies of Kim Il Sung. One Spanish visitor, I think, was taken to the doctor for a check up before being allowed to visit Kim - the medic explained that the Leader is such a great man, that people frequently faint in his presence! An African delegation, when realizing that the next 40 rooms of a Kim Il Sung exhibition in Pyongyang were very similar to the 20 rooms they had already walked through, kindly asked to be taken elsewhere. The translations of books about Kim Il Sung to foreign languages were frequently pretty bizarre. One English translation had the headline "Kim Il Sung: The Divine Man", while an Arabic translation claimed that Kim Il Sung is God! (No less.) Ironically, the idea known as Juche, which the Korean Workers´ Party claims is Kim Il Sung´s foremost contribution to revolutionary theory, was succeful in the Third World mostly because it was interpreted as a commonplace. Thus, in India, Juche was associated with everything from Plato to Mahatma Gandhi, which seems correct - for what is Juche other than the idea of autarkic self-reliance from the Western-dominated world economy, the dream of many Third World nationalists? 

Unfortunately, the Communist fun house of North Korea also had a darker side. One thing that struck me was that the North Koreans sometimes attacked "progressive" governments they should logically have tried to lobby diplomatically instead, as when they supported the mad Maoists of the JVP against the left-nationalist SLFP government of Sri Lanka, or when they backed a small revolutionary foco against the Mexican PRI government. In both cases, the rebellions were adventurist and doomed from the start (the Mexicans hardly started theirs before the police arrested them). Notoriously, North Korea supported the Japanese Red Army, a kind of East Asian version of the Baader Meinhof gang. Further, there was the Rangoon bombing of 1983, during which North Korean agents tried to assassinate Chun Doo-hwan, the president of South Korea, during his official visit to Burma (at the time a socialist nation). Finally, there was the bombing of Korean Air Flight 858 in 1987, killing over 100 people, in retaliation for South Korea refusing to co-host the 1988 olympic summer games. After the Cold War, it´s been pretty much downhill from there, with the North Korean regime looking upon the Third World as a gigantic smorgasbord for smuggling, hacking and other ways to obtain hard currency (implicitly or explicitly threatening to nuke the US unless the West pays tribute is another sure method). 

North Korea has become a rogue state and international outlaw, and it seems the roots of the predicament go pretty deep. So does the geopolitical realities that seemlingly make the North Korean entity as viable as ever, at least for the Kim clan and its cronies. Today, the great benefactor of "self-reliant" Juche DPRK is, of course, China.  

Mucka inte med Museveni

Twitter är upprörda just nu och säger sig plötsligt stödja "ett fritt Internet" och jag vet inte vad. Detta bara några dagar efter att Twitter och Facebook bannat USA:s president från sina plattformar...

I en koordinerad aktion valde Twitter, Facebook och Instagram att stänga ner ett stort antal konton som tydligen frontade för Ugandas regering inför ett stundande val. 

Uganda svarade med att helt blockera Twitter, Facebook och Instagram... 

Och Twitter kvider nu om "yttrandefriheten" på nätet. Detta efter att ha krossat konkurrenten Parler och utrensat folk från sitt forum i omkring en veckas tid.

Skadeglädjen bland både Trump-fans och andra Big Tech-kritiker är total.

Nu är Museveni givetvis en auktoritär ledare, och han kanske faktiskt bröt mot någon regel om "falska konton". Det är ändå oerhört dråpligt att Twitter får på käften på det här sättet.

Det är också intressant att Twitter erkänner att de samordnade med FB och Instagram mot Museveni. 

Det är så framtiden ser ut, alltså. Privata företag ägda av multimiljonärer samordnar för att gynna den ena sidan i ett politiskt val. Och snart blir deras kille USA:s president... 

Museveni kanske ändå gjorde rätt. Om tech-trusten blockerar dina konton, banna dem från landet.

Nu väntar vi bara på nästa drag från, säg, Macron.

Men visst vore det trevligt om man faktiskt kunde få yttrandefrihet på nätet, istället för att bara ersätta den ena auktoritära regimen med en annan... 

The Wizard of the Nile

”Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda and the War on Terror” by Helen C Epstein is a shocking book about the regime of Yoweri Museveni in Uganda, with some excursions to neighboring Rwanda, governed by Paul Kagame, an old associate of Museveni. Both Museveni and Kagame are backed by the United States and “the international community”. The book was published in 2017.

According to the propaganda still touted by many Western media outlets, Museveni´s administration in Uganda, while of course not perfect, is nevertheless better than the African average. It´s less corrupted, less repressive, more free market oriented, even slightly feminist. Museveni is pictured as the savior of Uganda from the brutal dictatorships of Idi Amin and Milton Obote. Above all, Museveni is fighting Hutu genocidaires in Rwanda and the mysterious cult “the Lord´s Resistance Army” (LRA) in northern Uganda. In the same vein, Museveni´s allies in Rwanda, the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) are always pictured as the good liberal or slightly leftist guys fighting the already mentioned Hutu extremists. I readily admit that I used to believe all this myself once. Well, almost. It *was* difficult to believe that Paul Kagame in Rwanda did not rig the elections which gave him essentially all votes, especially since his tribe (the Tutsi) is a small minority hated by the majority Hutu…

Clearly, I didn´t know half of it.

Judging by this book and its scholarly sources, Museveni is not much better than Amin and Obote, only smarter at rising “democratic” Potemkin villages and promoting them to a gullible Western audience. Uganda is really a one-party state with rigged elections and widespread repression against the political opposition. The ruling party, the NRM, is civilian in name only, actual power in the state being in the hands of the military and the secret service. As for being less corrupted than other African nations…well, no, not really. Museveni and his cronies systematically steal millions of dollars in aid money, take hefty bribes from foreign companies, and loot the national treasury (most of Uganda´s civil service is financed by the World Bank and other foreign donors). While the NRM is officially anti-tribalist, most political conflicts in Uganda seem to revolve around ethnic affiliation. Museveni comes from the southern Hima tribe, which is related to the Tutsi in Rwanda, thus explaining why the Ugandan leader is so adamant in his support for Kagame and the RPF. He is simply aiding his ethnic cousins across the ex-colonial borders. Museveni´s two main domestic targets are the Baganda, the erstwhile dominant ethnic group in Uganda, and the northern tribes, who backed Amin and Obote (both northerners themselves). The northern Acholi have been subjected to repression of near genocidal proportions by the NRA or UPDF (the Ugandan army). Sorting out who´s who in the many-sided Ugandan conflict isn´t always easy, one reason being the propensity of the NRA to carry out false flag operations by attacking civilians dressed in the uniforms of their enemies…

Museveni was originally a Marxist firebrand, but seems to have flip-flopped even before the Cold War properly ended. Shortly after taking power in 1986, Museveni became a prime US asset in Central and East Africa, even being invited to Ronald Reagan´s private ranch in California. The Tutsi RPF, then still in exile in Uganda, were also trained in the United States. Interestingly, RPF leader Paul Kagame was trained in the art of “psy-ops” (propaganda), something he has put to good use after becoming acting Rwandese leader in 1994. Museveni has intervened militarily in Rwanda (through his RPF proxies), the Congo (alongside the RPF), South Sudan (through the SPLA of John Garang, an old friend from his Marxist days) and even Somalia, always with the full knowledge and backing of the United States. In Somalia and Sudan the fight was against Islamists, making Museveni´s Uganda part of the US-led War on Terror (in the Ugandan-Sudanese border regions, the NRA also fought Joseph Kony´s bizarre cult LRA). 

In Rwanda, the Ugandan-backed RPF supposedly stopped the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were brutally murdered in a matter of months by extremist Hutu militias. Epstein believes that the RPF killed almost as many Hutus in “revenge”, many of them innocent civilians, and that the Hutu had good reasons to fear the return of the Tutsi to power, the Tutsi being the traditional aristocracy of Rwanda which for centuries treated the Hutu as virtual slaves. Most sensationally, Epstein claims that the airplane of Rwandese Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down, not by Hutu extremists critical of the president´s concessions to the RPF, but by the RPF themselves. If so, the RPF had no intention of sharing power with Habyarimana – note also that it was this assassination which triggered the genocidal violence in the country. 

Uganda and the RPF then invaded the Congo, overthrowing Mobutu Sese Seko, an old US ally who had become a nuisance after the end of the Cold War, replacing him with ex-Marxist and ex-petty warlord Laurent Kabila, destroying the democratic opposition to Mobutu in the process. Uganda and the RPF looted the mineral riches of eastern Congo, hotly coveted in the West, while supporting various marauding militias with a taste for murder, rape and plunder. Literally millions of people have been killed in the Congolese war, a war originally triggered by the Ugandan-RPF invasion of the country in 1996-97.

Finally, some observations of my own. During the 1990´s, even radical leftists swallowed the Museveni-Kagame psy-ops. Many Trotskyists supported the RPF when it invaded Rwanda and overthrew the “pro-Western” Hutu regime and its extremist militias. Well, the Hutu regime was pro-French and pro-Belgian, but since the RPF were pro-American, I have to say that the “anti-imperialist” angle feels somewhat moot. Another leftist argument in favor of the RPF was that they were multi-ethnic and tried to stop the anti-Tutsi genocide. One particularly dogmatic Trotskyist group in the UK argued that the RPF had both Tutsi, Hutu and Twa in its leadership. Since the Twa were Pygmies living in the rain forests, that would indeed be sensational – I would love to shake the hand of this Pygmy commander of the “Revolutionary” Patriotic Front! Even more leftists supported Kabila, apparently in the belief that they were witnessing a genuine socialist revolution (led by an old comrade of Che Guevara, to boot), rather than a CIA-Uganda-Tutsi psy-op/black-op of *major* proportions. To give the devil his due, Kabila later broke with his Ugandan and Tutsi patrons, instead accepting aid from “leftist” regimes in Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa, so I suppose the local anti-imperialistas were on somewhat firmer ground here…

As for myself, I used to believe all the above (except the “Twa” and “socialist revolution” stuff – I argued it was a democratic revolution), so reading “Another Fine Mess” wasn´t a very pleasant experience. I probably won´t take leftists seriously ever again after this! That being said, I have to say that Epstein sounds awfully naïve in some parts of her book. I happen to think the old fox (or was it hare) Museveni is right about Western-style democracy not working in Africa due to the fissiparous nature of tribalism. That may be a self-serving truth, but it´s a truth nevertheless (it´s also a truth honored only in the breach by Museveni, whose political party is just as tribalist as those of his mostly banned opponents). Also, Epstein´s criticism of the War on Terror is absurd – should the West simply accept that Sudan or Egypt falls to the Muslim Brotherhood and even worse groups? The only alternative to using proxies such as Museveni (or some altogether nicer guys, say the YPG in northern Syria) is to send hundreds of thousands of American troops to the Middle East or darkest Africa for an indefinite time…

“Another Fine Mess” isn´t a pretty story, and unfortunately I don´t think the future of Africa will be any better. In fact, I strongly suspect that we´ve only seen the dress rehearsal for the *really* brutal conflicts of the future. Let´s just hope we don´t have to take sides in those ones…

In God´s country

“In the Name of God” is a Swedish-produced pro-Tutsi documentary about the 1994 Rwandan Genocide and its aftermath. It was released in 2004 and has been shown 12 times on Rwandan national television, suggesting it´s approved by the Tutsi-dominated administration of Paul Kagame. This is the English-narrated version.

Rwanda is a small nation in Central Africa ethnically (or perhaps quasi-ethnically) divided between two groups, known as Tutsi and Hutu. When Rwanda was a Belgian colony, the traditional Tutsi elite were favored over the majority Hutu population. This changed when educated Tutsis began demanding independence and express support for socialism. Belgium quickly switched its sympathies to the Hutu, and permitted them to carry out a bloody “social revolution” against the Tutsi, many of whom fled to neighboring Uganda. Note the irony: the traditional landed and pastoral elite embraced socialism, while the plebeians had the backing of the colonial power!

After independence, Hutu-dominated Rwanda was transformed into a weird mixture of military dictatorship, one party state and Catholic theocracy, backed by the Belgian Christian Democrats and the Christian Democratic International (CDI). The regime was seen as a firm Cold War ally against international Communism. By this logic, the Tutsi RPF guerillas were seen as Communists, not entirely incorrectly, since they supported Yoweri Museveni´s NRA in Uganda, which originally claimed to be a leftist movement. For some reason, the documentary doesn´t point out that Uganda and the RPF became pro-American after the end of the Cold War, instead implying that the RPF may still have been socialist when attacking Rwanda in 1990. I assume this means the producers are leftists (many naïve leftists actually supported the RPF). On the level of great power politics, this was the United States trying to extend its sphere of influence at the expense of other Western nations such as Belgium and France. (The later overthrow of Mobutu in the Congo also fits this pattern.) We can discuss whether this was good, bad or simply BAU, but it should be pointed out.

“In the Name of God” accuses the Catholic hierarchy in Rwanda and their Christian Democratic backers in Belgium of complicity in the genocide. The CDI called upon the Hutu leadership not to sign the Arusha peace accords with the RPF. They supported the Hutu government throughout the genocide, during which an estimated 1 million people were killed, most of them Tutsi. One of the radio presenters in Rwanda calling for genocidal violence was Italian national Georges Ruggiu, who was sent to the country by Christian Democratic interests in Belgium. After the victory of the RPF, the CDI sent a delegation to the Hutu refugee camps in southern Rwanda, still expressing their support for the Hutu leaders. Some of the Christian Democrats interviewed admit that they acted wrongly, while others seem unapologetic.

The documentary concentrates on the role of religion as a propaganda tool in the conflict. Hutu Rwanda was supposed to become God´s kingdom on Earth and a model Christian state. Catholic hierarchs were integrated into the state apparatus. The military held regular prayer sessions when training. The Old Testament was used to deadly effect during the genocide, as several OT passages talk about the Holy Land being threatened by invaders “from the north”. In context, presumably the Assyrians or perhaps Gog and Magog, but in Rwanda, this was seen as a reference to the RPF, which was based in Rwanda´s northern neighbor Uganda. Thus, killing Tutsis and resisting the advance of the RPF were seen as Biblical injunctions. (It would be interesting to know if the Hutu militants also used the Book of Joshua!) A curious fact never explained is that several of the hard-line Christians interviewed are Pentecostals, not Catholics, yet the narrator constantly attacks the Catholic Church. The most sensational part of this production features interviews with the Army of Jesus, an extremist Hutu militia based in eastern Congo from which it makes incursions into Rwandan territory. We get to see the militia as they try to recruit a lonely farmer to its cause. The heavily armed militia men sound like Christian missionaries and end their session with the farmer in joint prayer! The whole thing does look...weird. (Apparently, the Army of Jesus is officially known as the FDLR.)

Despite its rather obvious anti-Christian and anti-Catholic slant, and the annoying naïve leftism (compounded by the heavy Swedish accent of the female narrator), “In the Name of God” is nevertheless worth watching and pondering. Also available on YouTube!

A brilliant genocide...or the lesser evil?

“Rwanda´s Untold Story” is a controversial 2014 BBC documentary which questions the standard narrative about the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. According to that narrative, one million innocent Tutsi were massacred by Hutu extremists in full view of the UN and the world community. Fortunately, the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) intervened and put a stop to the genocide. Under the presidency of RPF leader Paul Kagame, Rwanda has become an African success story with economic growth, clean streets and no ethnic divides (indeed the ethno-designations “Tutsi” and “Hutu” have been banned). And presumably some kind of democracy, too, since Kagame is the elected president of the country. Most people still believe this narrative and its corollary: that president Yoveri Museveni of Uganda (RPF´s main backer) is also one of the good guys. To question the official story is tantamount to “Holocaust revisionism” or “genocide denial” in the eyes of many. Indeed, in Rwanda itself, such wrong-think can land you in prison for considerable time.

Perhaps the Kagame faction of the Tutsi is right. And then, perhaps not. Either way, “Rwanda: The Untold Story” is worth watching.

The BBC reporter Jane Corbin has interviewed two US scholars, Allan Stam and Christian Davenport, who after doing research “on the ground” in Rwanda drew the disturbing conclusion that most people killed during the Rwandan genocide were Hutu, not Tutsi. There weren´t one million Tutsi in the country at the time. 200,000 of the victims were Tutsi while 800,000 were Hutu massacred by the RPF in revenge killings. Also, the RPF didn´t stop the genocide – it stopped by itself before the RPF troops reached the areas in question. Unfortunately, I haven´t seen the material these conclusions are based on. Two possible objections: the standard Western narrative at the time was that Hutu extremists killed *both* Tutsi and moderate Hutus, so on that reading of the events, Hutu victims would be no surprise (although hardly as many as 800,000). Second, that RPF didn´t literally stop the Tutsi genocide-in-progress is hardly an argument against the RPF, unless you believe that they deliberately avoided doing so, and even that can have reasonable explanations (such as logistical problems, etc – the Allies never bombed Auschwitz during World War II). More disturbing, of course, is the conclusion that the RPF´s revenge killings were *worse* than the Tutsi genocide.

The 1994 genocide was triggered by the murder of Rwandan Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana, who had signed peace accords with the RPF (which had began to invade Rwanda four years *before* the genocide). Habyarimana was killed when his plane was shot down over Rwanda´s capital Kigali. Hutu extremists were widely believed to be responsible, but according to “Rwanda: The Untold Story”, the RPF downed the plane. If so, the RPF never had any intention of sharing power with the old Hutu leadership. The killing of the president was in reality a coup d´etat, a coup the Hutu radicals tried to botch by unleashing a wave of indiscriminate anti-Tutsi terror, met with equally brutal counter-measures by the RPF. 

The counter-killings continued after Paul Kagame and the RPF had firmly installed themselves as the new government, now directed at Hutu refugee camps in southern Rwanda and eastern Congo. The RPF claimed that the camps harbored Hutu genocidaires (which is, of course, true) but independent observers regard the RPF attacks on the camps as indiscriminate. The documentary features an interview with a Hutu girl who survived the slaughter by hiding for several years in the Congolese jungle. As noted, the RPF didn´t rest content with controlling Rwanda. Backed by Uganda, they soon extended their reach into the Congo, charging the regime of Mobutu Sese Seko with genocidal designs against the Banyamulenge, a Tutsi tribe. Mobutu´s support for the Hutu was another point of contention. The RPF and Uganda essentially invaded the Congo, toppling Mobutu and installing the government of Laurent Kabila in its place, thereby triggering a decades-long conflict which may have killed up to five million people.

Jane Corbin interviews Carla Del Ponte, the UN-appointed special prosecutor at the ICTR, the international court charged with prosecuting suspects involved in the Rwandan Genocide. When Del Ponte wanted to investigate RPF war crimes (which she suspected had taken place), Kagame made sure the UN removed her. According to Del Ponte, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had told her. “I agree with you, Carla, but it´s all politics, you know”.

“Rwanda: The Untold Story” argues that Western support for Kagame´s presidency (former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is one of his chief advisors and promoters) has convinced the regime that it can act with impunity, including on foreign territory. Several high-ranking defectors from Kagame´s government have been killed abroad, and the BBC had to interview other defectors in secret. They used to have high positions in the government or military, and clearly fear for their safety. Their exact reasons for “turning” are never explained. All of them are Tutsi, interestingly enough. (I´m a bit too cynical to believe that they favor “democracy” in Rwanda. Perhaps they simply had personal fallouts with Kagame.) The easiest part of the documentary to believe is that Kagame is really a dictator. Of course he is – it´s *very* hard to believe that a Tutsi (the Tutsi only being 15% of the population) can get 95% of the votes in a Hutu-majority country. Sounds like election-rigging to me…

Even this anti-Kagame documentary admits that Rwanda has made progress under Paul Kagame´s (authoritarian) rule. Foreign investment and economic growth is part of the picture, the country is stable, and the capital of Kigali actually does look neat and tidy. Health care is free (sic) and there is free Wi-Fi on the buses. Of course, this raises a question “Rwanda: The Untold Story” can´t raise, with its “liberal” perspective on things. What if Paul Kagame, despite everything, is the lesser evil in Rwanda? Democracy doesn´t work everywhere and at all times, despite what woke Westerners like to believe (I used to believe it myself).

Perhaps the real choices in Rwanda are between mono-ethnic authoritarian regimes or a bi-national authoritarian regime…

Interview with the vampire

This is a short documentary from 2006, “Meeting Joseph Kony”. Yes, it does feature an interview with Joseph Kony, the leader of the weird and cultic Lord´s Resistance Army (LRA). At the time, Kony was one of the world´s most wanted war criminals. This could be the only interview of its kind. LRA, which fights the Ugandan government of Yoveri Museveni, are notorious for kidnapping children, turning them into boy soldiers or sex slaves. The conflict in northern Uganda has been extremely brutal, and in all fairness, Museveni is hardly an angel himself!

A group of British reporters were allowed to meet Kony at one of his hide-outs in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They are followed by none other than Riek Machar, who at the time was Vice President of Southern Sudan, then still an autonomous region within Sudan. 

Machar was in the process of brokering a peace agreement between Uganda and the LRA. At the time, the LRA were based in Southern Sudan, its fighters quite openly partying in the local capital of Juba. Under the terms of the agreement, LRA apparently evacuated all its soldiers to the Congo, where many of them were massacred three years later when fighting had resumed. Kony has never been apprehended however, and presumably still lives with a dwindling band of supporters somewhere in the Congo.

The interview itself is less interesting. Kony, who looks like a perfectly ordinary guy, simply denies all allegations of war crimes and genocide, claims to fight for democracy in Uganda, and says he wants to restore the Ten Commandments of God. He also claims that “spirits” talk to him, but denies direct contact with God himself. More disturbing is the conduct of his soldiers – some of them admit that they have been abducted by the LRA?! 

Also available directly on YouTube.

Close one

This was a close call. I almost choked when I saw this and similar buttons being sold by Amazon, since I assumed they were *pro* Joseph Kony. The man in question is probably the worst war criminal in Africa. Kony, the commander of the so-called Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda, is also a cult leader of sorts. He would make Jim Jones look like a fairly nice guy!

Fortunately, it turned out that "Kony 2012" was a campaign directed against said Kony, sponsored by a group called Invisible Children. That's fairly obvious on this button, where Kony is compared to Bin Laden and Hitler.

Good, because I almost contemplated filing a complaint with the retailer...

Surprisingly lucid

This book is a collection of writings and speeches by Carl Gustav Jung, the well known and controversial Swiss psychiatrist, dealing with his views on modern civilization, technology and nature. Although the book to a large extent consists of excerpts rather than whole texts, they are nevertheless quite lucid and even interesting. And no, I don't say I agree with them. In fact, I have more or less the opposite opinions on most issues!

Previous to this book I've only read one of Jung's works, "Psychology and religion", which is more difficult to digest. "The Earth has a soul" could probably be read even by somebody completely new to Jung's ideas, although a working knowledge of his thinking obviously helps. In my opinion, Jung was a philosopher, critic of civilization and perhaps even a kind of spiritual teacher, rather than a psychoanalyst in the strict sense of that term. Many have pointed out the affinity between his ideas and those of the New Age. Some have even accused him of being a closet neo-pagan and Gnostic. To others, that's a commendation!

"The Earth has a soul" speaks for itself, but I will nevertheless mention the contents briefly.

Jung spends considerable time talking about his experiences at Mount Elgon in East Africa, where he socialized with a tribal people he calls the Elgonyi. He also mentions meetings with Pueblo Indians in the United States. Jung defends the "primitive" and "superstitious" worldview of these peoples, arguing that it's rational in its own context. Closer to home, Jung retells various episodes from his childhood showing his close (and sometimes zany) relation to nature. Our author also talks about the stone tower at Bollingen in Switzerland which he built himself and used as a kind of spiritual retreat.

It's not always clear whether Jung really believed in the existence of spirits "out there". He sometimes writes as if he did. Apparently, the spirits were present in the kitchen section at Bollingen! At other times, he says that spirits and gods are "in here", a kind of psychological phenomena who are projected onto the outside world. To Jung, this projection isn't negative. Quite the contrary: modern man, by pretending that gods and spirits don't exist, have actually made them a hidden part of his psyche, leading to all kinds of irrationalism and madness, including the madness of Nazism and the Holocaust.

Jung criticizes our disconnectedness from nature, our dependence on modern technology, the stress and consumerism of our civilization. Occasionally, he waxes apocalyptic, saying that the greatest danger to man is man himself, that an overpopulation crisis might destroy the world, etc. Jung has no collective solutions to offer, however. The solutions are strictly individual. Each individual must face his own self and experience an inner transformation. Jung feared what he considered to be authoritarian and collectivist tendencies of the modern age. The exact character of the spiritual transformation is less clear to me, but Jung does mention the ancient mystery religions as offering a kind of synthesis between the human spirit and Nature.

Since "The Earth has a soul" consists to a large extent of excerpts from longer articles, Jung sounds contradictory at times. But then, who knows, maybe he was contradictory? There seems to be a tension in his writings between individualism/anti-collectivism and communitarianism. There is also a tension between statements which sound "pro-animal" and other statements, where humans are considered to be the conscious expression of the universe. At bottom, Jung seems to regard man as a contradictory or paradoxical being, both god and devil simultaneously.

"The Earth has a soul" doesn't untie all the knots of the Jung complex, but it could be a place to start for those interested in this lone philosopher of Switzerland...