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    Lumumba

    Was murdered 60 years ago today

    https://twitter.com/ronanburtenshaw/status/1350811895297691649?s=21

    #2
    RFI ran an excellent series of articles on him all last week, including one with his daughter touching on pan-Africanism and his political philosophy.

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      #3
      That link doesn't work DR.

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        #4
        A great man. I remember having a conversation with my dad about his recalling of the events at the time.
        My old man would have been in his late 20's at the time (he was born in 1933) and when he heard about the killing of Lumumba, he realised that all this new, shiny independence thing that was sweeping through Africa might not be what it seems.
        There are some decent documentaries on Youtube on him and his contemporary African leaders.

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          #5
          Jesus, the belgians always found a way to go that extra mile.

          I didn't see this detail in their museum of "Oh jesus We're really sorry about the severed hands and the human zoos at the world fair." in the atomium.

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            #6
            DR's link, corrected (and get them using unicode in URL),

            Edit: Hmmm, I've corrected DR's error but the board is chewing up those unicode characters in the URL. It doesn't like accents in links either it would appear.

            Edit 2: Lets try THIS ONE
            Last edited by Levin; 18-01-2021, 14:02.

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              #7
              To be fair, he wrote his death warrant with his independence speech.
              The convention at the time would be the colonial representative would be telling the natives about how great they were civilising the unruly bunch of savages with the rod and the bible whilst the locals would roll their eyes whilst clapping politely.
              The local leader would then thank the colonialists for "assistance" whilst laying out a bright future going forward.

              Lumumba for some reason read a speech that appeared to have been written by Malcolm X on one of his angriest moments. Completely laying into the Belgians and was made in the precense of the King of Belgium who had flown out for the festivities.
              Needless to say, the speech went down very well in Africa and very very very badly in Europe and the USA. Cue plane loads of CIA, MI6 and their various western Counterparts to Kinshasa to forment political agitation and planeloads of weapons, logistics and mercenaries to their mineral rich regions to forment military agitation.

              The rest doesn't need any explanation.

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                #8
                The events around the speech here.
                https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congol...from%20Belgium.

                It would be considered comical if the after-events were not so tragic.

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                  #9
                  I think it helped educate US black activists that JFK was not their friend and could never be so. Malcolm X's "chickens coming home to roost" alludes to this political murder, among others, I think. You reap what you sow.

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                    #10
                    Originally posted by Satchmo Distel View Post
                    I think it helped educate US black activists that JFK was not their friend and could never be so. Malcolm X's "chickens coming home to roost" alludes to this political murder, among others, I think. You reap what you sow.
                    Correct. As a matter of fact, Malcolm X spoke very highly of Lumumba.
                    The apologists for Kennedy say, plans were afoot before he came to power and as this technically this took place a week before Kennedy came to power, he cannot be blamed.
                    A similar argument is made about the bay of Pigs invasion which came a couple of months into his tenure.

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                      #11
                      A former Agency official once told me that they had "contingency" plans on the assassination or overthrow of every "Third World" leader (and more than a few Second and First World types).

                      I have yet to have any reason to think he was being anything but truthful.

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                        #12
                        Yeah, the idea of Eisenhower as the last "good" Republican President ignores what the Dulles brothers were up to - which he surely was fully aware of. But there wasn't much obvious change in policy when Kennedy took office.

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                          #13
                          Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                          A former Agency official once told me that they had "contingency" plans on the assassination or overthrow of every "Third World" leader (and more than a few Second and First World types).

                          I have yet to have any reason to think he was being anything but truthful.
                          There was a massive fear in the early 60's that post colonial Africa was going to turn red. Many of the leaders were or had flirted with Marxism as students and there was alot of anti-western sentiment was going around.

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                            #14
                            There was a massive fear of Italy and France "going red"

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                              #15
                              Originally posted by Etienne View Post
                              Yeah, the idea of Eisenhower as the last "good" Republican President ignores what the Dulles brothers were up to - which he surely was fully aware of. But there wasn't much obvious change in policy when Kennedy took office.
                              Really, who says that and what is it based on?

                              Domestically, his tenure marked the violent final proper decade of Jim Crow. Internationally it was as much a disaster, Cuba, Korea and the proxy war in Vietnam spring to mind.

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                                #16
                                Oh, you can read any number of articles on how the Republicans ended up the party of Trump and it's all a straight line from Goldwater through Nixon and Reagan abandoning what ever the Republican equivalent of One Nation Conservatism is.

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                                  #17
                                  In the narrow sense of assassination policy, which was the original question, you can find evidence in both the 50s and 60s, and of course Chile in the 70s, which suggests continuity.

                                  On race, JFK was too concerned about keeping the Jim Crow states happy, which was cowardly. Same as FDR. Did that mean secret sympathy for racists? Not explicitly, but probably unconsciously, he probably felt that keeping Jim Crow in place was a price worth paying. Moreover when he spoke to Jim Crow governors on the phone, he spoke to them as political and racial brethren in a way that he would never speak to MLK.

                                  Another JFK trait was tolerating Hoover's unconstitutional racist harassment of MLK and others. But that's true also of Eisenhower.

                                  Eisenhower probably gets whitewashed retrospectively because the South was Democrat so he could make token liberal gestures like sending troops to Little Rock which made him look good to liberals without risking losing a southern racist base.
                                  Last edited by Satchmo Distel; 18-01-2021, 22:06.

                                  Comment


                                    #18
                                    Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                                    There was a massive fear of Italy and France "going red"
                                    Add Turkey to that list, hence the three coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980.

                                    Comment


                                      #19
                                      Originally posted by Antepli Ejderha View Post

                                      Add Turkey to that list, hence the three coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980.
                                      Japan and Korea too, although they never had to resort to a coup.

                                      But African movements I guess we're more obvious as independence movements would have only got support from the 2nd world.

                                      Comment


                                        #20
                                        Originally posted by Satchmo Distel View Post
                                        In the narrow sense of assassination policy, which was the original question, you can find evidence in both the 50s and 60s, and of course Chile in the 70s, which suggests continuity.
                                        I think Assassinations were kinda going out of fashion by the late 60's as the west started to realising that Martyring these leaders was bad for business and tend to lead to issues further down the line. The best thing to do is to politically discredit their policies and ideology by crashing their economy and let the locals overthrow them. That way there will never be a return to that ideology for at least a generation as the consensus would be that it had failed.


                                        On race, JFK was too concerned about keeping the Jim Crow states happy, which was cowardly.
                                        That's the excuse given, but a cursory look at US politics knows no president has been kept the Jim Crow states happy since around 1820. Linking to the other thread, Lincoln tried to appease the South and ended up taking a bullet to the head as they tried to to kill him, the vice President and the chief of staff.
                                        Everyone knew Jim Crow was over by the time JFK became president, the question was what would a fully integrated society would look like.

                                        Same as FDR. Did that mean secret sympathy for racists? Not explicitly, but probably unconsciously, he probably felt that keeping Jim Crow in place was a price worth paying. Moreover when he spoke to Jim Crow governors on the phone, he spoke to them as political and racial brethren in a way that he would never speak to MLK.
                                        FDR was a bigot too. a few of his:
                                        • Treatment of Owens in 1936, Owens went on to say he was treated much better than the Nazi's tha he was by his own fellow Americans
                                        • Lack of assistance to the Jews during the Holocaust
                                        • Opposition to anti-lynching laws

                                        [quote] Another JFK trait was tolerating Hoover's unconstitutional racist harassment of MLK and others. But that's true also of Eisenhower. {/quote]

                                        To be fair, none of the American presidents did anything to reign him in. Hoover had been doing this from the days of Marcus Garvey in the 1920's.

                                        Eisenhower probably gets whitewashed retrospectively because the South was Democrat so he could make token liberal gestures like sending troops to Little Rock which made him look good to liberals without risking losing a southern racist base.
                                        He had to do something, America was at a racial boiling point in the mid 50's and you had a very high percentage of adult black men with military training milling around. this in itself should be a long post as this does not get discussed as part of the civil rights narrative.

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                                          #21
                                          Originally posted by Levin View Post

                                          Japan and Korea too, although they never had to resort to a coup.

                                          But African movements I guess we're more obvious as independence movements would have only got support from the 2nd world.
                                          I think the biggest fear was not that these African countries would become soviet satellites, but get together and form some kind of EU type continental super state. That would tie up about 75% of the planets natural resources. The west (and east for that matter) would be permanently fucked.

                                          Comment


                                            #22
                                            Originally posted by Tactical Genius View Post
                                            FDR was a bigot too. a few of his:
                                            • Treatment of Owens in 1936, Owens went on to say he was treated much better than the Nazi's tha he was by his own fellow Americans
                                            • Lack of assistance to the Jews during the Holocaust
                                            • Opposition to anti-lynching laws
                                            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_Daniels

                                            Roosevelt was under-secretary for the navy under this lad. He seems to have been quite the progressive, er, but only when it came to white people. Though this sort of things seems to have been very common in the govt of woodrow wilson.

                                            Comment


                                              #23
                                              FBI collusion in murder of Malcolm X.

                                              https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...etter-nypd-fbi

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