There was a curious story out of the Congo a
few days ago. The Culture Minister, Mr. Christopher Muzungo, explained
that he was personally responsible for the re-erection of a giant statue
of Belgium’s King Leopold II in the capital, Kinshasa. For nearly forty
years it had lain in a trash heap outside the city.
Just hours after the statue was put up
it was taken down again. There was no explanation.
In the 1885 Berlin carve-up of Africa, Leopold
II persuaded the Europeans and the Americans to give him free rein
in the Congo for a "civilizing project, rather like the Red
Cross," he said. In less than two decades he made
himself one of the world’s richest men.
Leopold was allowed by the great powers
to murder and maim millions of Congolese while he plundered Congo’s
resources. His subjects lost their hands, their feet and their
heads to Leopold’s sub-agents. One of them was described, under
the name of Captain Kurtz, in Joseph Conrad’s novel, The Heart
of Darkness. In
the novel, the narrator approaches Captain Kurtz’s jungle encampment
and sees round it a palisade with white knobs decorating the tops
of the posts. It is only when he comes close that he discovers
that the objects atop the posts are human skulls. Conrad’s Kurtz
was based on a real Belgian lieutenant who like his fellows, carried
out his monarch’s orders with fatal efficiency.
Conrad described the Congo’s Belgian experience
as “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the
history of human conscience”.
According to Congo’s Minister of Culture,
he replaced the statue of Leopold because it was part of Congolese
history. “A people without a history is a people without a soul,” he
said, and referred to the remembrance of the holocaust last week.
Perhaps no one had explained to him that the Jews had not felt
the need to erect a statue of Hitler to remind themselves
of their history.
Several years ago, at about the
time of the start of the Iraq misadventure, I wrote a column which
asked
the question: “What can they be smoking?” It was about the
strange behavior of the leaders of the western civilized world,
which then and now, seemed to me to be more than simply perverse.
I now realize that the reason for their aberrant behavior had nothing
to do with psychoactive substances, but was due to another factor
entirely – their inherent and ineffable “official blondness.”
When Hitler was busy turning Jews into
handbags, lampshades and black smoke, his reason was that the world
needed to be rid of them (and of blacks, homosexuals, Gypsies
and others) because they threatened the purity of the Aryan
master archetype. This archetype was a blue eyed, blond superman
with
no resemblance to Hitler himself or to most of his main assassins.
They, I now realize, were a new species, Geopolitically
Modified Humans – GMH – Officially Blond. Looking
at them you wouldn’t know it. Some people even said that Hitler
himself “looked Jewish” – whatever that meant, obviously
missing his essential blondness which gave him the right to talk
nonsense and murder as many people as he wished.
What I realized this week is that
the Congo’s Muzungo was not crazy, simply blond. And when this
thought occurred to me it cleared up a host of misconceptions in
my mind.
I had been asking myself how could Africans
like Kofi Annan and Afro-Americans like Colin Powell , Canadians
like Prime Minister Paul Martin, and Haitians like Gerard LaTortue
not understand the appalling wickedness which their policies have
created in Haiti? Or how did Tony Blair, George Bush and Malcolm
Fraser of Australia not understand the primeval wickedness they
had let loose in Iraq? The answer was simple.
Like Adolph Hitler, they are GMH-Blonds
and are therefore exempted from normal human feelings, duties and
responsibilities. They are expected to giggle helplessly
when confronted with murdered children and dismembered teenagers,
with tortured Arabs and raped Haitian women. Like the good Germans
in Tom Paxton’s 1960s song –”We didn’t know a thing.”
Anyone who has seen the movie Schindler’s
List or simply given thought to the logistical problem of
murdering six or seven million people will realize that the neighbors
must be aware when the people next to them are arrested and sent
in huge trains to extermination camps. Vast stretches of housing suddenly
become vacant, people vanish from schools, synagogues are closed;
something must be happening.
“We didn’t know” the blonds will tell
you, "we were born with built in rose-colored glasses and
a missing sense of community."
The G-7 group of First World countries
is having a finance ministers meeting in London this week. The
US representative has airily told the British chancellor that the
US has no time to consider his proposal to reduce or
abolish the debt obligations of the poorest countries. Gordon Brown,
the British chancellor, wants to write off the debts completely
and to construct an International Finance Facility which would
double aid to Africa to $100 billion US annually. The US Treasury
Undersecretary, John Taylor brushed Brown’s idea off: “Not only
does the IFF not work for the US, we don’t need the IFF.”
The Americans are in favor of debt relief
of course; their President regularly announces that
he will increase the amount of US aid to Africa and the Third World.
It is an odd fact that some of the poorest
countries in the world are responsible for creating much of the
First World’s riches. I won’t speak of slavery and the contribution
that made to accelerating the progress of Europe and America. That
is old hat. But a few days ago, the Shell oil company announced
that it had made a profit of £9 billion, nearly US$ 20 billion
from oil. We don’t know how much of Shell’s profit was made from
Nigeria, from which it gets ten percent of its oil, what they call
in the business “sweet” crude, low sulphur and extremely profitable.
Shell, which is indefatigably blond,
is only one of several predators in Africa and the Third World. In
Nigeria it has destroyed whole environments and rendered thousands
homeless and suffering. BP – British Petroleum – is about to announce
a similar quantum of profit and the five biggest British banks
between them are about to announce total profits exceeding £30
billion (US 56 billion).
None of this appears to excite the North
American press, but why should it? TIME magazine a few issues
ago distinguished itself in blondness by publishing a whole column
of statistics about the Iraq war without even an estimate of the
number of Iraqis killed – surely the most significant statistic.
It is astonishing how many of the crucial
interventions which have not been made could have been made by
people whose appearance, at least, might have suggested that they
recognize some sort of ties to the underdog. Like Powell, the head
of the TIME conglomerate is an African American, a
man called Richard Parsons. Unfortunately, like Powell, he is hopelessly “Officially
blond." His company, Time-Warner, made a net profit of nearly
$4 billion. The revenues of the world’s largest companies
outstrip the Gross Domestic Product of most countries. In fact,
the giant retailer Wal-Mart’s revenues – $165 billion – are larger
than the combined GDP of all the lesser Developed Countries – $156.5
billion.
The uncomfortable fact is that most of
these large transnational corporations derive much, if not most
of their revenue from the exploitation of Third World resources
such as oil, aluminum, gold and other metals or raw materials such
as cacao, coffee, sugar and so on.
The unfair distribution is, according
to the blonds, a matter of historical accident, incompetence of
the natives or just bad luck.
One of the factors driving the poverty
is the simple fact that there are groups in the Lesser Developed
countries who realize that they are being encouraged to destroy
the local culture and national self-reliance and self-government
by carrying out plots which are not officially ordered by their
metropolitan masters. Such a case occurred in Ghana in 1966,
when, after destroying the government of Kwame Nkrumah, the new
dictator General Ankrah, wrote personally to President Lyndon
Johnson stating his willingness to prostitute Ghana for American
moolah. In the case of Haiti, as the Griffin
report makes
plain, the subversion was planned and executed by conscious and
paid agents of the United States.
The
situation today is one of bloody chaos, unremarked by the diligent,
freedom-loving, upright American press
which, in its blondness, cannot see injustice or understand
that their own democracy is in danger as the poison from evil foreign
adventures seeps back into the American soul.
Last week an American general who is clearly,
exquisitely, “blond” had
his say in the press. This character, due to be played in a movie
by Harrison Ford, is a US Marine general named James Mattis.
Lt. Gen. Mattis had a news conference
on Tuesday in San Diego, California, after the announcement of
his scheduled immortalization in the movie.
"Actually it's quite fun to fight
'em, you know. It's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people.
I'll be right up front with you, I like brawling," Mattis
said.
"You go into Afghanistan, you got
guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear
a veil," Mattis said during a panel discussion. "You
know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's
a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."
According to Reuters Marine Corps Commandant
Gen. Michael Hagee praised Mattis as "one of this country's
bravest and most experienced military leaders."
"While I understand that some people
may take issue with the comments made by him, I also know he intended
to reflect the unfortunate and harsh realities of war," Hagee
said.
Of course we could also remember the comments
of another US general who is in a crucial position of power at
the Pentagon. Senior Pentagon Intelligence official Lt. Gen. William
Boykin referred in 2003 to the struggle against Islamic extremists
as a battle with Satan. In a speech, Boykin referred to a Muslim
fighter in Somalia, and said, "Well, you know what I knew,
that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real
God, and his was an idol."
I remember when I was about 15, reading an article in the Saturday
Evening Post about the Congo, then completely controlled by
Belgium. The place was portrayed as a demi-paradise except that
nowhere was there any mention of the Africans who presumably lived
there. Later, I discovered some of the real facts about the Congo,
such as, that as the Belgians fled in 1960 they left in the Congo
the priceless bequest of four trained doctors in a population of
about 20 million. It was much later that I heard about the unspeakable blondness
of King Leopold and his campaign of dismemberment and murder.
John Maxwell of the University of the West Indies (UWI) is the
veteran Jamaican journalist who in 1999 single-handedly thwarted
the Jamaican government's efforts to build houses at Hope, the
nation's oldest and best known botanical gardens. His campaigning
earned him first prize in the 2000 Sandals Resort's annual Environmental
Journalism Competition, the region's richest journalism prize.
He is also the author of How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for
Environmentalists and Journalists. Jamaica, 2000. Mr. Maxwell can
be reached at [email protected]
Copyright©2000 by John Maxwell