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Although I sometimes fall short, I always try to be very accurate and careful in my writing, doing my best to avoid the mistakes that might be eagerly pounced upon by my legion of harsh critics. This is especially necessary when discussing the ultra-controversial topics that are so often the focus of my essays.
For example, a few weeks after Israel began its brutal military assault on Gaza in retaliation for the October 7th Hamas raid, one of my articles included the following passage:
Last Thursday, most of the world was still reeling from the televised devastation in Gaza, as a densely-populated portion of one of its largest refugee camps was demolished by multiple 2,000-pound Israeli bombs, apparently killing hundreds of helpless Palestinian civilians, most of them women and children.
Soon afterward on CNN, pro-Israel former AIPAC staffer Wolf Blitzer questioned an Israeli military spokesman about the horrific loss of human life and was told that the massive attack had been completely justified because the Israelis believed that a Hamas commander was in the vicinity.
These are blatant war crimes, probably the worst ever televised in the history of the world, or at least I can’t recall anything comparable. Admittedly there have been far larger modern massacres, such as in 1994 Rwanda where according to Wikipedia the Hutus butchered many hundreds of thousands of their Tutsi neighbors with machetes; but both the Hutu killers and their Tutsi victims were mostly primitive African villagers, so none of those dark deeds were ever broadcast live on global television.
In sharp contrast, the grim events of the last four weeks have been widely watched around the world on electronic and social media. In just one month some 10,000 civilians have been killed in Gaza, a total larger than the combined losses on both sides in the past twenty months of the Ukraine war. Despite the fulminations of Western media outlets, since early 2022 only about 550 children have been killed in Ukraine, while after just a few weeks the total in Gaza has passed 4,000. Moreover, while the Ukraine war was fought between powerful, well-equipped modern armies on both sides, the defenseless civilians of Gaza are being relentlessly pounded by one of the world’s most lavishly-armed military forces.
- American Pravda: War Crimes and Atrocity-Hoaxes in the Israel/Gaza Conflict
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • November 6, 2023 • 6,300 Words
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My point was that although the 1994 genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsis was obviously vastly larger in scale than anything the Israelis were doing in Gaza, the former had occurred out of sight, while the latter was currently being televised worldwide.
Since then, I’ve repeatedly described the ongoing attacks on Gaza as constituting “the greatest televised massacre of helpless civilians in the history of the world,” making sure that I always include the word “televised” to maintain the accuracy of my statement. When we read a few sentences in a history book explaining that Tamerlane built mountains of skulls during his 1387 conquest of Persia, the psychological impact is far less than when we see a photo-laden magazine story of the few hundred Vietnamese villagers killed in the 1969 My Lai massacre, let alone the ongoing annihilation of Gaza’s Palestinians live-streamed on social media.
For similar reasons, I’d been extremely reluctant to describe these ongoing events as a “genocide” even though that word is so widely used by other critics of Israel’s actions. I had preferred to reserve that momentous term for events such as those in Rwanda, during which militant Hutus spent 100 days slaughtering the bulk of their Tutsi compatriots, seeking to completely exterminate that ethnic group with bullets and machete-blows.
But in my quoted passage I was also careful to include one additional disclaimer. I stated that my description of the notorious Rwanda genocide, one of the largest in all human history, was “according to Wikipedia,” indicating that I was drawing my information from the 21,000 word article on that subject.
Until several years ago, I wouldn’t have bothered to include that clarification given that the general facts of the horrific 1994 slaughter seemed so well known and universally accepted. I’d read the stories in my newspapers at the time, and subsequently seen them cited and discussed in countless articles since then. Leading journalists had published numerous books on the subject, whose favorable reviews I’d read, while I’d also seen the Oscar-nominated 2004 film Hotel Rwanda dramatizing part of that story. I’d never had the slightest doubts about the reality and circumstances of those terrible events, nor had I realized that anyone else did. And if everyone agrees that a historical incident happened in a particular way, there’s no need for even the most careful writer to hedge himself when he cites it.
But back in 2021 I’d republished a lengthy article that claimed the entire story I’d always accepted was almost totally false and largely inverted, and it seemed sufficiently detailed and sober that afterwards I felt I needed to be much more circumspect whenever I mentioned it.
It’s probably worth briefly sketching out the background and history of what had happened in Rwanda, which I’d absorbed at the time from all my newspapers and magazines, later reinforced by the popular film and numerous subsequent references throughout the mainstream media.
Both Rwanda and neighboring Burundi were small African states, landlocked, impoverished, and densely-populated, each containing two distinct ethnic groups, the tall, slender Tutsis, who had traditionally been cattle herdsmen, and the shorter, stockier Hutu cultivators. For centuries prior to the appearance of the Europeans, both those countries had been feudal kingdoms, ruled by their 15% Tutsi minorities, and after the Germans assumed suzerainty in the late nineteenth century, the latter continued to exercise control through the Tutsis, as did the Belgians, who received the territory as spoils from the First World War. Although independence came in the wake of World War II, Tutsi rule continued, but in 1959 Rwanda’s 85% Hutu majority overthrew its Tutsi monarchy, and the waves of resulting ethnic bloodshed and massacres during the 1960s led large numbers of its Tutsis to flee elsewhere, mostly into neighboring Uganda. Meanwhile, Burundi was also wracked by similar ethnic conflict and massacres, mostly inflicted by the ruling Tutsis against its large and restive Hutu majority.
The Tutsi exiles in Uganda eventually became a very substantial component of the leading rebel army, which successfully overthrew the Ugandan government in 1986, and in 1990 they launched a military campaign to overthrow Rwanda’s Hutu government as well, gradually gaining ground over the next several years. Combined with international pressure in the aftermath of the Cold War, their efforts finally forced Rwanda’s Hutu president to sign a peace agreement, allowing the return of the Tutsi exiles, establishing power-sharing between the two groups, and arranging to hold democratic elections. A prominent local Tutsi was named prime minister and a couple of thousand UN peacekeepers were brought in to oversee the reconciliation process. However, on April 6, 1994, the plane carrying the returning Rwandan president together with his Burundian counterpart was shot down as it approached for landing, triggering a gigantic wave of ethnic bloodshed and massacres across that sharply divided society.
According to the conventional narrative, extremist Hutus unwilling to share power had been responsible for the assassination of the more accomodating Hutu president, and they quickly seized control, immediately unleashing a long-planned campaign of genocide against their hated Tutsi minority while also slaughtering any moderate Hutus. All prominent Tutsis were marked for death, with most of them killed, while the genocidal broadcasts of Hutu radio propaganda persuaded a large fraction of that population to join in those grisly massacres, even as the rest of the world stood by and did nothing, including the hugely outnumbered UN peacekeepers.
This massive killing rampage against Tutsis went on for several months, with a large majority of that population being annihilated, along with any Hutus deemed sympathetic to them. The bloodshed was only finally halted by the military victory of the Tutsi rebel army, which defeated the government forces and their genocidal militia allies and gained control of most of Rwanda. At that point, the Hutu leadership and many participants in the slaughter fled the country, along with ordinary Hutus fearful of Tutsi vengeance, so some 1.5 million Hutus became refugees in neighboring Congo. These Hutus and the larger number who remained behind now greatly suffered as well, with the victorious Tutsis committing some massacres of their own, but the Tutsi leader Paul Kagame did his best to restrain his men and try to restore ethnic coexistence between the two groups, while welcoming back many hundreds of thousands of Tutsi exiles who had been living for decades in Uganda and elsewhere.
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An enormously influential account of that story was provided by journalist Philip Gourevitch, a staff writer for the New Yorker who spent much of his time in Rwanda during the years 1995 to 1998, writing a series of articles on the aftermath of the massacre, while also producing important pieces for the New York Times Magazine and the New York Review of Books. This original reporting then furnished the basis for his 1998 New York Times bestseller, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, which won numerous critical awards and attracted tremendously positive reviews all across the elite and mainstream media. I finally read it last week to refresh my memory of those events of nearly thirty years ago.
His subtitle “Stories from Rwanda” was very descriptive, and the author interviewed hundreds of Rwandans during his extensive visits, seeming to do a very good job of reporting their individual experiences during that horrifying period and weaving them together into a comprehensive narrative of what had transpired. Indeed, the first half of his book dealt with the period of the genocide itself and his narrative seemed so detailed that I’d initially assumed that the author himself must have been present around the time the events unfolded, but I then noticed that he had only arrived the following year and was therefore relying upon his later interviews to describe the earlier sequence of events.
Most of the individuals with whom he spoke were Tutsi survivors, and some of these had seen nearly their entire families butchered by the Hutu death squads, which went house-to-house slaughtering their Tutsi neighbors while also setting up roadblocks, stopping and killing any Tutsis who crossed their path.
Although Hutus and Tutsis had had a long history of episodic bloody conflict and on average looked different enough that they could often be distinguished, they spoke the same language and prayed in the same Catholic churches, while intermarriage was hardly uncommon. Some of the most grisly stories involved the consequences of the latter situation, with a few of the Hutus most energetic in the death squads later claiming that they took that leadership role in order to protect their Tutsi wives from suffering the same fate, sometimes even killing the families of the latter to demonstrate their commitment. The offspring of such mixed marriages were usually considered sufficiently Tutsi to be worthy of death, and the author described how a Hutu mother watched in helpless horror as her half-Tutsi children were butchered by a mob.
I’ve never been to Rwanda and I’m not sure I’ve ever met a single Rwandan, so all I know about that country, its society and its people, has come from the words of Western journalists and researchers such as Gourevitch. But the mentality of the killers he interviewed struck me as rather strange and surprising.
Despite intermittent bloodshed, Hutus and Tutsis had lived together on reasonably friendly terms for decades, but then one day the former picked up their machetes and suddenly began chopping up the families of their next-door neighbors. When the author asked some of those imprisoned killers how they could have done such a monstrous thing, he was given answers such as “everyone else was doing it” or “the radio told us to kill all the Tutsis.” This hardly seemed a very satisfying explanation for the most rapid campaign of mass extermination in modern history, occasionally using guns or grenades, but more often relying upon machetes or simple farm implements. Catholic priests and nuns also sometimes joined in the slaughter, assisting in the massacre of their own parishioners.
The social aftermath of the genocide also seemed quite difficult for Westerners to comprehend. According to Gourevitch, a large majority of all the Tutsis had been killed and a very substantial fraction of all the adult male Hutus had been direct participants, so huge numbers of the brutal killers and the wretched survivors remained in close proximity. Many of those Tutsis were forced to live on the same street—or even share the same house!—with the Hutus whom they knew or suspected had slaughtered their families a few months earlier. Gourevitch described the anger and bitterness of some of those victims, but it still seemed just a small fraction of what one might expect, and although he mentioned some of the vigilante killings that occurred, I’m surprised that the number was not vastly greater.
One of the notable figures in Gourevitch’s book was the brave Hutu manager of the leading foreign-owned luxury hotel in Rwanda, whose Tutsi wife inspired him to offer refuge to many hundreds of her desperate co-ethnics, and by a mixture of bluff, bribery, and pure luck, he managed to keep the mobs of killers at bay, allowing them all to survive. His remarkable story became the basis of the Hollywood film Hotel Rwanda, which probably provides most of what Americans and others know about that enormous genocide.
But by far the most heroic individual portrayed by the author was Paul Kagame, a child of Tutsi exiles raised in Uganda, who became the military leader of the rebel army that overthrew Rwanda’s murderous Hutu regime and thereby stopped the ongoing slaughter in its tracks, achieving that success while America and every other powerful Western country merely dithered. Without him and his small but determined army of Tutsi exiles, the genocide would surely have been carried to completion, resulting in the deaths of virtually every Rwandan Tutsi, whether man, woman, or child.
Once Kagame established his new government, he installed a Hutu president as a symbol of ethnic reconciliation in a country that was 85% Hutu. But he exercised the real power as vice president and defense minister, and according to the author’s account, he did his best to minimize vengeance and retaliatory massacres in the aftermath of the genocide of his own people. Many of the ringleaders were killed and tens of thousands of their underlings were imprisoned under dreadful conditions, but compared to the hundreds of thousands of innocent Tutsis that they had so recently butchered, such retribution seemed remarkably mild.
Gourevitch’s interviews with Kagame portrayed him as a remarkable individual, not only far more thoughtful and intellectual than anyone would expect in an African military commander, but also someone with a sense of humility and self-deprecating humor, seeking to restore normal life in his blood-drenched country. As a consequence of Kagame’s very positive portrayal and the deep Western shame and guilt over permitting the Rwandan genocide, his regime became an important recipient of American aid. His efforts at ethnic reconciliation were widely portrayed in our media as sincere and surprisingly successful given the immense recent bloodshed, with Kagame presented as one of a new generation of enlightened African rulers, totally different than their corrupt, despotic, and bloodthirsty predecessors. Gourevitch praised Kagame as “the Abraham Lincoln” of Rwanda and most of the Western media took the same view.
As the author explained, many of the worst Hutu killers and their henchmen had fled across the border into neighboring Congo, accompanied by some 1.5 million ordinary Hutus, terrified of the vengeance that they expected to face in Rwanda at the hands of the newly victorious Tutsis. The Congo was a vast but very poorly governed country under the longtime misrule of its corrupt dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, who made little effort to enforce local order in the lands he controlled, a territory 90 times larger than Rwanda and having many times the population. As a consequence, the Hutu exiles established enclaves from which they regularly raided Rwanda, killing all the Tutsis they encountered, as well as massacring many of the Congo’s own ethnic Tutsi population.
Repeated warnings and threats by Kagame and small counter-raids failed to halt these Hutu attacks, so after a couple of years, Kagame formed a military alliance with several other African nations including Uganda, and launched an invasion of his huge Congo neighbor. His forces easily defeated that country’s ineffective army and he overthrew Mobutu’s regime, installing a different Congolese leader whom he had recruited for the post. Although it received very little attention in the American media, this First Congo War was sometimes nicknamed Africa’s First World War because it drew in more than a half-dozen different nations in confused and shifting alliances and replaced the government of a country as large as all of Western Europe. Although the death toll was considerable, with hundreds of thousands of civilians dead or “missing,” these events came near the very end of Gourevitch’s narrative and he marked it a triumph for Kagame, who destroyed the extremist Hutu forces while forcing the majority of the Hutu refugees to return to Rwanda, although many others died in massacres.
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According to our standard narrative, the 1994 events in Rwanda were almost a textbook-perfect example of genocide, with a ruthless government seeking to totally exterminate the local Tutsi population and successfully killing a large majority of them. All this took place at the absolute peak of America’s international power and prestige—our nation’s “unipolar moment”—yet in obvious violation of all our anti-genocide conventions, neither Washington nor any other major powers took any forceful steps to stop it.
Rwanda had an extremely feeble military and most of the killings were carried out by local Hutu militias, often armed with nothing more formidable than machetes. The military commander of the UN peace-keeping force stationed in that country declared that if he were merely given 5,000 well-equipped troops, he could have immediately ended the slaughter, but instead he was prohibited from taking any action and the best troops under his command were withdrawn. The Clinton Administration was terrified of suffering political damage if it got bogged down in an obscure African conflict so it looked the other way, hoping that the ongoing Rwanda massacre would be limited to a few tens of thousands of victims as had been the case in the past. The killings only stopped when Kagame’s rag-tag force of Tutsi exiles defeated the Rwandan army and seized control of the entire country.
Once the grim facts about the massive scale of the genocide became widely known, elite Western political and media circles felt tremendous shame that their governments had done nothing.
Samantha Power was then in her mid-20s, a naturalized Irish immigrant who had graduated from Yale and was working as an overseas war correspondent. She and many others were outraged that no American officials had resigned in protest over their government’s lack of action over Rwanda, a personal sacrifice that might have provoked enough media attention to pressure the West into taking action, thereby saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Returning to America to attend Harvard law school, that simmering righteous anger—heightened as she realized that lack of timely government action had also occurred in other such situations—inspired her to write a paper on the subject.
That paper eventually grew into her first book, “A Problem from Hell” running 600 pages and carrying the subtitle “America and the Age of Genocide.” Published in 2002 when Power was just 31, it quickly became an international sensation, glowingly reviewed almost everywhere, a huge bestseller that won her a Pulitzer Prize and launched her career as a leading figure in human rights doctrine, someone who had seemingly shifted American national policy on an important global issue.
Although I’d certainly been aware of her book when it first appeared, I only just recently read it as part of my Rwanda investigation and discovered that it had attracted even more accolades than I’d ever realized. My 2013 paperback edition devoted a full page to listing the awards it won and another page to the many major newspapers and other publications that had named it one of the best books of the year. Seven additional pages contained excerpts from 63 glowing reviews and endorsements by a very long list of prominent intellectual and political figures, a list so extremely long that I noticed the careless editor had accidentally duplicated at least one of those entries. I can’t recall the last time I’d seen a book that had attracted such seemingly near-universal praise.
As might be expected, the chapter on Rwanda was one of the longest, and the story it told seemed fully congruent with that of Gourevitch, though having a different focus. Power emphasized the top-level policy decision-making of the Clinton Administration and other international bodies rather than the grisly eyewitness accounts of the killers and their victims.
One important point that Power made was that just the previous year, Tutsi military officers in neighboring Burundi had assassinated that country’s first freely-elected Hutu president, leading to widespread communal violence that cost some 50,000 lives. As a consequence, Western leaders including those in the Clinton Administration had vaguely assumed that Rwanda was merely undergoing “another flare-up” that would result in a similar level of “acceptable” total casualties. But she explains that instead:
The Rwandan genocide would prove to be the fastest, most efficient killing spree of the twentieth century. In 100 days, some 800,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were murdered. The United States did almost nothing to try to stop it.
Power also emphasized some of the political background behind the total unwillingness of the Clinton Administration to become involved in Rwanda. In 1992, the preceding Bush Administration had deployed American military forces to Somalia as part of a UN humanitarian operation to manage and protect the delivery of food supplies amid a famine and an anarchic civil war. Then in 1993 Clinton had authorized American forces to capture one of the local warlords deemed responsible for attacking UN troops, resulting in the disastrous “Battle of Mogadishu” in which determined Somali militiamen shot down three Black Hawk helicopters. Hundreds of Somali fighters and civilians died in the fighting along with eighteen members of our elite special forces, while many dozens more American troops were wounded, and the body of one of our fallen soldiers was dragged through the streets of the city before cheering crowds. The images of that last embarrassing incident were broadcast worldwide, giving America a huge political black-eye and persuading Clinton to completely withdraw our military from Somalia. Therefore, no one in his administration was very eager to risk repeating the same sort of debacle the following year in a different African country, especially with midterm elections only a few months away.
Meanwhile, the DC elected officials and lobbyists most strongly supportive of black and African issues were entirely focused upon the political disorders in Haiti, furious that Clinton had denied refugee status to all migrants from that country and ordered them repatriated. Busy staging hunger strikes and denouncing our government for its anti-Haitian racism, none of those individuals paid any attention to the distant events in East Africa even as the massacres began, with more than 10,000 killed each week. Firebrand Rep. Maxine Waters later admitted she had no knowledge of the Tutsis and Hutus, whom she “didn’t know from crap.” TransAfrica and other activist organizations were equally disengaged so media pressure for American intervention in Rwanda was minimal.
During this entire period, numerous warnings and red-flags went completely ignored. For example, Power claimed that just a couple of months before the massacres began, an anonymous Hutu informant, supposedly high in the ranks of the Rwandan government, had explicitly warned the local UN commander that the Hutu militias were being armed and trained, and compiling lists of all the Tutsis in the capital city, leading him to suspect that an extermination campaign was being prepared. This important message was passed along to the UN leadership in New York City, but no action was taken.
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Power’s bibliographic section on Rwanda contained some two dozen books, including the one by Gourevitch, and although her account differed in emphasis and a few details, both were fully consistent with the long Wikipedia article on the subject. Both provided the standard narrative of those events, entirely similar to what I’d absorbed from all my newspaper and magazine articles at the time and afterwards, as well as the plot of the Hollywood film. Given such total agreement, I’d never seen fit to question that history from three decades ago, regarding the massacre of Rwanda’s Tutsis as about as clear-cut a case of genocide as I’d ever encountered in modern times.
But this settled picture was suddenly disturbed in 2021 when I was contacted by an independent Canadian journalist named Antony Black, who suggested that I consider republishing several of his long essays on controversial historical events, mostly in the form of book reviews, and after reading through them, I was very impressed and did so. One of these, originally published in 2014, shocked me by arguing that everything I had been sure I’d known about those 1994 events in Rwanda was entirely wrong and completely inverted. It seemed very solidly put together and when I featured it, most of the comments were strongly supportive.
According to the standard story, the massive killings had been organized by Rwanda’s Hutu Power extremists, who had spent months planning their genocidal project. Regarding their own Hutu president as overly moderate and compromising, they were livid when he had signed the 1993 peace agreement with the rebel army of Tutsi exiles from Uganda, agreeing to democratic elections and an ethnic power-sharing arrangement. Therefore, they shot down his plane and then immediately used the excuse of his death to unleash their campaign to completely exterminate the country’s Tutsis.
Black presented a very different history. He noted that in an 85% Hutu country with sharp ethnic divisions, the Tutsi rebels had no chance of gaining power via a democratic vote, so they were the ones with the strongest motive to overturn the agreement by assassinating the Hutu president and seizing power militarily. Indeed, a lengthy later investigation by a French judge found that Paul Kagame and his Tutsi army had been responsible for that killing, with former members of his rebel forces also making those accusations, and suppressed reports by official international investigators coming to that same conclusion. Black further claimed that Kagame’s army had abandoned the ceasefire and begun its march to the capital hours before the president had been killed, indicating the latter event was part of their plan, which amounted to a military assault and coup d’etat intended to seize the entire country. As part of this operation, they had infiltrated many thousands of rebel Tutsi fighters into the capital city, who quickly launched attacks on the Rwandan military.
The central element of the Rwanda genocide had been the near-total extermination of Rwanda’s Tutsis, but according to Black this was a complete falsehood. He claimed that American academics who carefully studied the evidence concluded that although many hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths occurred in Rwanda during those months, a large majority of these—at least two-thirds or more—were actually Hutus, killed by Kagame’s rebel Tutsi army, with the number of Hutu victims possibly reaching a million or even approaching two million. Everyone agreed that a huge wave of Hutu refugees fled into the Congo, but he argued that their flight had been due to those Tutsi massacres rather than any fears of some hypothetical retaliation.
Black certainly admitted that large numbers of Tutsi civilians also died during those months, most of them at the hands of outraged and terrified Hutus who were retaliating in disorganized fashion for the huge slaughter they were suffering across much of the country. A million Hutu refugees fled into the capital to avoid the massacres of Kagame’s advancing Tutsi army, and they participated in these attacks, but Black argued that the notion of any centrally-planned campaign of extermination was utterly false. The single strongest piece of evidence behind such a plan was the fax report forwarded in early 1994 to the UN, reporting the secrets provided by a high-ranking Hutu informant, and this was heavily emphasized in the books by Gourevitch and Power, but Black argued that it was an obvious forgery, a conclusion grudgingly admitted by the international tribunal organized to investigate and prosecute the Rwandan genocide.
So in the mainstream accounts, we had Hutu extremists killing the country’s president, plotting to seize power, and exterminating huge numbers of Tutsi civilians, while Black’s account was the mirror-image, with the Tutsi rebels responsible for the assassination, leading to their successful seizure of power in a military offensive, combined with their slaughter of Hutu civilians as part of that campaign. As an outsider with little knowledge of those events, I found it very difficult to judge between these polar-opposite accounts of what had really transpired during 1994 in that small African country. But I did see at least a point or two in favor of Black’s alternative version.
Wikipedia heavily supported the mainstream narrative, but it did mention some of the evidence that Kagame had actually been behind the presidential assassination that touched off the crisis, and indeed it noted that the supposed mastermind of that project was later acquitted by an international tribunal in 2008. But if Kagame had been responsible, that would severely undercut the theory of an extermination campaign long planned by Hutu extremists
My impression is that much of the standard media narrative of the genocide was formed by Gourevitch’s early reporting, which also became the basis of his huge bestseller, and if he had been on the scene at the time, I would certainly credit his account, but he only arrived in Rwanda the following year. He then interviewed many eyewitnesses who told him the details of the horrific killings of Tutsi civilians and I’m sure that all of those incidents had occurred. But by that point the country was under the total control of Kagame and his victorious Tutsis, while a substantial fraction of all the terrified, defeated Hutus had already fled into the Congo. So it seems very possible that equally true accounts of huge 1994 massacres of civilian Hutus simply never reached his ears.
As mentioned above, one of the leading individuals portrayed in Gourevitch’s story was Paul Rusesabagina, the Hutu hotel manager, who saved so many Tutsi lives and was glorified as the central hero in the subsequent big budget film. But as Black pointed out, he later became a leading opponent of Kagame and his Tutsi regime, blaming them for the bulk of the 1994 killings, and eventually was imprisoned for years before finally being freed. This hardly proved Black’s case, but it did suggest that the facts might be much more complex than those provided in a simple black-and-white morality play concocted by a Hollywood screenwriter.
Black’s long article unfortunately contained few links or citations for his underlying source material, but he sent me a personal addendum in which he explained that his brother Christopher had spent a decade in Africa serving on the international tribunal that investigated and adjudicated the genocide charges and had been the source of much of his information. I can only suggest that those interested should read his analysis with an open mind and decide for themselves.
- Hotel Propaganda
Antony C. Black • Canadian Dimension • October 4, 2014 • 7,100 Words
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Although I’d been quite impressed by Black’s long article when I read it a couple of years ago, I only knew of him as an unknown Canadian writer and I hardly felt his lone contrarian analysis could outweigh absolutely everything else I’d read over the previous three decades, including the many glowing reviews of the award-winning books by Gourevitch and Power. I had little time or interest in undertaking a detailed investigation of those events of the mid-1990s, so until recently, I still tended to accept the conventional story of the Rwandan genocide, while cautiously adding the phrase “according to Wikipedia” when I mentioned it in my November article. However, just a couple of weeks ago, a casual comment led me to another book that substantially shifted my views.
For decades famed MIT professor Noam Chomsky had reigned as one of the world’s most prominent public intellectuals, totally blacklisted as a leftist by the American mainstream media, but greatly lionized almost everywhere else. One of his most influential works had been Manufacturing Consent, published in 1988, in which he argued that governments in America and other democratic societies regularly manipulated their national media in order to produce an artificial public consensus behind the policies they wished to pursue, thereby partially converting the approval of the electorate into a mere rubber-stamp. Some of those ideas may have influenced my own American Pravda series.
After having seen that book and its thesis mentioned countless times on the Internet, I finally decided to read it a couple of years ago and was quite surprised to discover that the lead author was actually the late Prof. Edward Herman of the University of Pennsylvania, a longtime friend and ally of Chomsky, but possessing only a sliver of the latter’s global fame. I’ve even seen some claims that Herman had been responsible for the bulk of the text.
I’d previously been unaware of Herman but henceforth took his views very seriously, and I recently discovered that in 2014 he had published Enduring Lies, a short work co-authored by independent journalist David Peterson that sharply challenged the standard Rwanda narrative, so I bought and read it.
Their slim volume carried a cover quote by the highly-regarded journalist John Pilger hailing their “landmark investigation,” and it also was praised by numerous others, including the authors of two different books on the Rwanda disaster, while my own verdict was the same. Herman was a serious scholar and their book provided a devastating and very convincing refutation of what the authors call “the standard model” of the events in Rwanda.
They had apparently read and carefully analyzed all the main primary and secondary sources and their verdict was similar to Black’s, but even a short book afforded them many times as much space to discuss and document the key issues, backing their analysis with more than 250 reference footnotes and a couple of appendices. As a rank outsider, who has spent little time or effort investigating this complex issue, I found their conclusions quite convincing. I was hardly surprised that the very lengthy Wikipedia article contained absolutely no mention of their important work.
For most reasonable people, any talk of “genocide” must focus on the numbers, and the authors argued that these had been completely obfuscated in the case of 1994 Rwanda. No one ever denied that huge numbers of innocent Tutsi civilians had been killed, often in very grisly ways, but drawing upon the quantitative research of a couple of University of Michigan academics, the authors argued that the figures and percentages casually mentioned by Gourevitch and so many others were wildly exaggerated. The latter had claimed that many hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were slain, representing a large majority of their total population, but instead probably only 100,000 to 200,000 had died while the number of Hutu victims was a multiple of that, perhaps even many, many times larger.
All the horrific individual stories told by Gourevitch were surely true and could even have been increased a thousand-fold; but he completely left out all the equally horrific stories of massacred Hutus, whose deaths had been vastly greater in number, and most other Western observers adopted the same technique. An ideological or narrative framework that features such selective omissions can promote total falsehoods just as easily as would outright lying.
One important point made by the authors is that the international tribunal later established to try those responsible for the Rwandan genocide deliberately avoided including any coverage of Hutu victims or Tutsi perpetrators, with Kagame and his fellows entirely protected from any legal investigation or sanction, thereby removing a very large majority of all the crimes from any consideration. Completely ignoring most of the killings and most of the victims might seem absurd, but it reflected the very strong political support that America, Britain, and other countries provided to the newly established Tutsi regime, and any prosecutors who tried to broaden that mandate were overruled or even removed from their positions.
An absolutely central theme of all the mainstream media coverage and books had been the planned nature of the genocide, but Herman and Peterson noted that all the Hutu leaders tried on those charges were either acquitted or had their convictions reversed on appeal, thereby demonstrating that this element of the story had little basis in evidence or reality. One of their appendices argued in detail that the key early warning fax allegedly sent to the UN several months before the killings began was a blatant forgery, and the verdicts of the tribunal seemed to strongly support that conclusion. They also summarized the very convincing evidence that Kagame rather than any shadowy extremist Hutu leaders had been responsible for the assassination of Rwanda’s Hutu president, the event that triggered the outbreak of violence.
According to their reckoning, the total number of Hutu civilians killed in Rwanda during 1994 was almost certainly in the hundreds of thousands and may have easily reached a million or more, while even larger numbers of Hutu refugees were slaughtered in the Congo during Kagame’s subsequent invasion, which he claimed had been launched to root out “genocidal war criminals.” That invasion led to the First and Second Congo Wars, which even the strictly establishmentarian Wikipedia admitted cost well over five million civilian lives, a body-count that utterly dwarfed the 1994 death toll in Rwanda.
Yet none of that horrendous bloodshed ever provoked any serious Western protests or even substantial media coverage, let alone outcries of “genocide” and international tribunals. Instead, Kagame, the central architect of those events, remained a great hero across most of our Western media. Herman and Peterson closed their last chapter by noting the extreme irony that although Kagame was widely celebrated as “the Abraham Lincoln” of Africa by Gourevitch and many of the journalists who followed his lead, the current Rwandan leader “is quite possibly the greatest mass murderer alive today.”
The authors argued that this total inversion of historical reality had been maintained since 1994 by extremely selective media access. They produced a list of the twenty leading advocates of “the standard model” and the twenty leading dissenters, and by checking the Factiva database determined that the former had almost totally monopolized media access, especially if small French-language publications were excluded. When only one side of a story is told, the public can easily be persuaded to accept almost anything. I can certainly endorse those findings since despite my very extensive readings until a couple of years ago, I’d never even realized that there existed any significant dissent from the standard Rwanda narrative, let alone that the dissenters included highly-credible scholars.
This sort of situation is hardly without precedent. These days all of us are well aware that during the 1930s, the terrible Ukraine famine that killed many millions of Soviet citizens was almost totally ignored and discounted by the American media so that few individuals in our country had any real awareness of it. Instead, Walter Duranty of the New York Times was awarded the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for his Soviet coverage that dishonestly refuted any such circulating rumors.
Although I found the analysis of Herman and Peterson together with that of Black quite compelling, I do not feel capable of rendering any solid verdict on events so far distant and about which I lack any expertise. To do so, I would need to undertake a much larger investigation, reading many more books on both sides, and perhaps some of these might shift me back towards the “standard model” that those authors denounce. But although everyone agrees that enormous numbers of African civilians were slaughtered in 1994 Rwanda, at the very least I would now be reluctant to casually refer to the genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsis, whose reality I had never questioned for nearly three decades.
If I’d come across the work of Herman, Peterson, and Black a dozen or more years ago, I might have been much less willing to consider the possibility that everything I’d always known about such an important historical event was false and actually inverted. But in recent years, a great deal of reading and investigation on my part has led me to render that same surprising verdict on the “standard model” of World War II and some of its central elements. So I was hardly surprised to discover that some of the foremost promoters of what Herman and Peterson might reasonably characterize as “the Tutsi Genocide Hoax” were Deborah Lipstadt and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, leading scholars of the Jewish Holocaust, and that the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum was heavily involved in promoting that same story of East African events.
While I do not believe that a week or two of investigation is sufficient for me to determine what really happened in 1994 Rwanda, if the accounts of Herman, Peterson, and Black are indeed correct, they would certainly closely match my own firm conclusions regarding the true history of World War II:
- Why Everything You Know About World War II Is Wrong
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 12, 2023 • 12,600 Words - More Falsehoods of World War II
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 19, 2023 • 7,500 Words - Hitler, Churchill, the Holocaust, and the War in Ukraine
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 17, 2023 • 9,700 Words
�
One broader claim made by Herman and Peterson seems particularly relevant given very recent events. They argued that the articles and books written by Gourevitch, Power, and many others were cynically used to “manufacture consent” for intended government policies, including the elevation of an American client such as Kagame and the overthrow of the government of the resource-rich Congo. They noted that although Gourevitch was always portrayed as a disinterested, independent-minded journalist, at the time his book came out in the late 1990s, he was the brother-in-law of James Rubin, a high-ranking Clinton State Department official, so he was obviously someone close to decision-making circles.
Or consider the case of Samantha Power, whose enormously influential book helped inspire the UN’s “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine. That ideological construct furnished America and its allies with the political justification for military interventions in other countries in order to supposedly protect their civilian populations from possible massacres or looming genocides. A few years later in 2011, NATO used that excuse to successfully overthrow the government of Libya, producing a gigantic humanitarian disaster, and then nearly achieved the same result in Syria, destroying most of that country and leading to many hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths.
Yet today Israel’s ongoing massacre of tens of thousands of helpless Palestinian civilians in Gaza while starving hundreds of thousands of others has been totally ignored by all those enlightened individuals, despite the explicitly genocidal language employed by most of Israel’s political and military leaders. Power had famously declared she was outraged that no American officials had resigned in protest for their government’s inaction during the 1994 slaughter in Rwanda, but a near-unanimous verdict of the International Court of Justice has declared that the population of Gaza is now facing a potential genocide at Israel’s hands, and instead of mere inaction, today’s American government is actually supplying the munitions used for that genocide. Despite these facts, Power still serves as head of USAID and she has expressed no public criticism of her own government’s policy let alone resigned in angry protest.
Obviously, none of these very shameful developments conclusively prove that Herman and Peterson were correct in their reconstruction of what happened in 1994 Rwanda, but I think they do greatly increase the credibility of those authors, while sharply diminishing that of some of the leading figures on the other side such as Gourevitch and Power.
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Ron Unz says:
Just to let you know… the vast majority of us LOVE you, Ron !
So forget the critics (who hate even themselves) and do your thing.
And always many thanks for providing this great website !
This is because the People of the Lie have arranged matters such that the entire American professional class and intelligentsia have their balls and their shriveled, circumcized dicks in a sheenie vice. The comfortable American intellectual class have blood on their hands and the Jew knows it. After all, when you’ve got a man’s balls in a torture device, his heart and mind tend to follow. This is Talmudic soft and hard power 101. These gutless, gonadally obliterated ass kissing sycophantic philosemites will never criticize God’s chosen people because they are too attached to the thirty pieces of silver they’ve earned polishing Jew knob.
Interesting find. It seems as if most of these military ops are a way of reducing undesired populations, and spinning the narrative to support the protection of some while culling the other.
It is wise and accurate description. However, the role of the European regimes in the Genocide, the French in particular, is absent. There are lots of credible and reliable evidence pointing to the role of the French regime in the Rwanda Genocide.
How many apologists were there in fashionable western circles in support of the massacres in Rwanda? And how many billions of dollars did we send to foot the bill? Approximately nil.
Compare now with the slaughter in Gaza. I know some jews object, probably several dozen in fact. But mostly I hear snickering and ridicule, because those 40,000 civilian women and children had it coming, right?
https://www.unz.com/kbarrett/a-genocide-complicit-global-hegemon/#comment-6429257
Not only do the jews not believe in Hell, it’s pretty clear by now that they really don’t believe in God either. They believe in doing whatever they can get away with.
Which, thanks to US sponsorship, is pretty much unlimited.
Ft Leavenworth, KS? Backstory. Provenance.
The absolute central problem for Westerners, Arabs – and indeed all of mankind – is Jewish media control.
Take just he topic of fertility, which Sailer recently wrote about. Western nations are apparently unwilling to do anything to boost native fertility, instead preferring to import their replacements from the third world. Why is this? Why would they resign themselves to effective wilful extinction? After all, fertility can be raised with the right policies, incentives and propaganda. Israel has been able to raise fertility. Hitler man raised fertility. There’s nothing magical about it.*
Western peoples, however, will never be allowed to effectuate the necessary changes to boost native fertility so long as Jewish power dominates. Jews prefer to create a diverse and balkanized West which they’ll feel more comfortable in – less vulnerable to another “Holocaust” even (or perhaps especially) if it means the effective cultural and biological extinction of their white Christian hosts. It’s also easier to divide and rule a balkanized nation, which they intend to do, even as they secure an exclusivist ethnostate for themselves in the Middle East with the financial and military aid of the host that they’re simultaneously in the process of killing. Nice, huh?
Westerners live under the delusion that they are “free” and that their governments are “democracies” when this is very far from the truth. They need to recognize that their “democracies” are fake and rigged and that their real rulers are a small ethnic cabal who reign through money and media. Even when they vote through referendum, to explicitly halt illegal immigration as they did in Prop 187, and as they effectively did through Brexit and the election of Trump, they never get what they vote for. One unelected judge like (((Mariana Pfaelzer))) overrules the votes of millions, and then another unelected character like (((Alejandro Mayorkas))) opens the border and floods the country with millions of illegals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Pfaelzer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposition_187
An oligarchic ethnic mafia is arranging your extinction and you were never consulted and if you were consulted your opinion was ignored. If they can’t condition you through their media to accept your own extinction then they ignore your will anyways.
They have found and exploited the bugs in your systems of government – exploits which all complex systems have, even the much vaunted “democracy.” They’ve hacked Western governments by bribing politicians, cartelizing media, gaining control of key posts in government and now implementing what they hope to be permanent demographic “facts on the ground” so as to cement their conquest through endless divide and rule tactics.
One method for the West to rescue itself would be if a populist president, like Trump, were to come to power and make it his concerted initiative to wrest control of the media away from the Jewish mafia monopolists. Indeed, this is how Trump should have begun his first administration, as it was this media which made it impossible for him to prosecute any of his populist promises and policies.
Trump couldn’t implement the Muslim ban or build the wall or deport illegals or execute any element of his populist agenda/mandate, because of parasite-controlled media opposition – because the moment DHS detained an illegal immigrant the media would go into paroxysms of rage and hysterical sobbing fits about “children being put into cages” and “it’s the Holocaust all over again.” (Unlike children being bombed and starved to death by the tens of thousands at the hands of the IDF in Gaza – “that’s nothing like the Holocaust at all.”)
Of course, a populist ruler breaking up the tyranny of the “free press” (and what could be more “free” than being monopolized by a half dozen Jewish billionaires, goy?) has been done before – in Germany – and thus the media monopolists have developed defense mechanisms against it happening again. One of those mechanisms is the conditioning of the public to believe that the Jews are not the powerful oligarchic class that they are – but that they’re actually poor powerless paupers and eternal victims – and if you dare say otherwise they’ll crush you. Thus the average gentile has been conditioned to have an almost allergic reaction to all mention of “Jews” in any tone other than reverence, pity or worship. Say “Jew” in a less than sycophantic tone in a public place and observe as eyes dart across the room.
One wonders: Are we sure we aren’t living in a science fiction dystopia where the great lord Voldemort (or Sauron) was ultimately victorious and all who dare utter the name of the sacred Lord Ruler (i.e., “Jew,” in our universe) are punished for irreverence? It would certainly explain this bizarre behavior of the brainwashed muggles/proles/NPCs. Upon victory, Sauron intended to replace the peoples of Middle Earth with Orcs and Easterlings. Now we witness the peoples of Europe being replaced by …
Orcs and EasterlingsAfricans and Pakistanis. Obviously Mordor actually won.The rat-faced media owners are the real rulers in Western “democracies.” They create public opinion, mold sentiment and “manufacture consent,” in Chomsky’s terminology. Modern Western “democracies” are institutions through which media owners launder their tyranny through “public opinion” – which they control. They exploit a fundamental weakness of modern centralized media channels like television – that it can be (and has been) captured by a motivated ethnic mafia. They’ve thereby created a 1984-esque dystopia. Kim Jong Un has done the same. Notably, both KJU and the hook-nosed parasites have conditioned their subjects to, not only falsely believe themselves “free” but to love the tyrant who misrules them.
I dare say that, until and unless the Nosferatu death grip over media is broken, the West can’t be saved. To combat it in any open and democratic way it is thus necessary that we speak openly and honestly about it, something which its defenders have pathologized. The suppression of speech and thought** is the lifeblood of their tyranny. Honest and open dialogue is its greatest threat.
* If the media-monopolists really didn’t believe it were possible to influence people’s decisions about having children – whether or not to have them and with whom – then why do they bother to make virtually every couple in every advertisement interracial? Why bother with such counterfactual social engineering?
** Speech is social thought. It’s group-level thought and disrupting it interferes with the ability of the group/nation to organize and defend itself. That’s why the rat-faced media monopolists have cartelized the media – to disrupt the ability of their host to organize against them and their tyrannical rule.
More:
https://www.unz.com/kbarrett/does-mainstream-media-deserve-its-extinction-level-event/#comment-6436580
You don’t really expect major events in sub-Saharan Africa like the Rwandan Genocide to be inverted in the American media, but that huge event was inverted, or at least greatly distorted. It appears that, roughly, the Hutus were the Germans and the Tutsis were the Jews. The number of murders by the Hutus of Tutsis was greatly exaggerated and a large fraction of the murders committed against Hutus by the Tutsis were not reported by the crafters of the official narrative in the United States. The inverted, pro-Tutsi narrative of the fighting in Rwanda and Democratic Republic of Congo in the 90s was used to supercharge the Holocaust narrative and give that WWII story more applicability in the 21st century. Thank you for providing an introduction to the counternarrative.
As a postscript, what could explain Rwanda under Kagame having a very sharply divergent population growth trajectory from neighboring Burundi? “The greatest mass murderer alive today” is apparently keeping births down in his country. However, this is assuming UN population projections for sub-Saharan African countries are based on reliable data.
What is the motive of the mainstream media for not correcting the story if the standard narrative is so wrong?
Kagame as “the Abraham Lincoln” of Rwanda
Maybe true as some consider Lincoln as a mass killer, warmonger, and tyrant.
Enduring Lies: The Rwandan Genocide in the Propaganda System, 20 Years Later
This was not an important book. My example from Amazon is the only one-star review, but the site had merely 30 in total. Google Scholar had no reviews, and I turned up none on regular Google Search. The Revision Mr. Unz is pushing here demands a rigorous list of primary sources, and those are missing!
Barely mentioned in this essay is the Roman Catholic Church’s deep involvement in the Rwanda Genocide. Bill Clinton’s allowing the murders to proceed is also hardly touched upon.
Hyping Samantha Powers simply rubbed me the wrong way, for I’d heard nothing good about the woman before seeing this piece. Examples:
Will Samantha Power Be the First US Official to Preside over Four Genocides?
https://www.aei.org/op-eds/will-samantha-power-be-the-first-us-official-to-preside-over-four-genocides/
AND
Samantha Power Calls on Samantha Power to Resign Over Gaza
If Power, the USAID administrator, would take her own genocide book seriously, she would step down over Israel’s assault on Palestinians.
https://theintercept.com/2023/12/15/samantha-power-israel-gaza-genocide/
Isn’t Samantha Power married to Cass Sunstein the propaganda-proponent?
I’m a little confused about this article.
I don’t know who is good and who is bad in Rwanda. But I simply think Paul Kagame should be doing well for his own people at the moment.
After all, our construction teams have been very helpful in the reconstruction of Rwanda.
It would have been better to add subheadings and use the form of an overall summary.
Chapter 10, which is entitled: “Malthus in Africa: Rwanda’s Genocide”
Tutsi vs Hutu… OK, All Right…
But Tutsi were killing other Tutsi and Hutu were killing other Hutu with gay abandon as well.
Why ?
Kill a fellow Tutsi – get his land !!! As simple as that.
Jared Diamond credits his insights to the article:
“Land relations under unbearable stress: Rwanda caught in the Malthusian trap”
by C Andre, J P Platteau
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12321893/
I wholeheartedly concur 😁
Black is right. Power is wrong.
Always was true. Glad to see you noticed.
Now. The Serbians were the good guys in the Bosnian War.
Try that one on.
Great Investigative Journalism Mr. Unz – Thanks.
I also like , at times, how you and your colleagues match your daily articles to the sme pattern of thinking, writing and similiar world events.
Should be investigation.
I fully believe the “inverted” story of the Rwandan genocide, with Paul Kagame and the RPF being the instigators and main villains, and not the heros, because those were my immediate conclusions while it was happening, mainly from listening to the BBC World Service on shortwave, and following foreign affairs generally.
I was primed to understand the events that way because of my close following of the breakup of Yugoslavia, starting in 1991. When the Soviet Union fell, the same harpies and reptilians at the US State Dept and the Western alliance, that are active now, got their start back then in Yugoslavia. They employed many of the same tactics there as in Rwanda: in particular, the selective concern, attention, or even acknowledgement of the existence of entire classes of victims (Serbs and Fikret Abdic’s Bosnian Muslims in Yugoslavia, and ordinary Hutus in Rwanda and later the Congo). And all sorts of code words like “systematic”. The designated good guys might, typically due to extraordinary evidence (unfortunate, that), be acknowledged to have committed some violence, but it was never “systematic”. Only the designated baddies ever get “systematic”. And a million other tells like that made me smell a rat from day one, listening to that smarmy BBC correspondent, Mark Doyle. (Uggh.)
Another obvious rat was Roméo Dallaire, the head of the UN military contingent in Rwanda. His actions then clearly enabled Kagame and the RPF. It’s odd, because the US’ active role (not passive, as claimed—among other things, they blocked real UN forces from being committed) in helping Kagame take power seemed to be part of an Anglo push out of Uganda and against Francophone Africa, so why would Dallaire, who sounded Quebecois, help in that? Anyway, he was clearly a liar and on Kagame’s side, whatever his motivations. He also seemed to glory in the limelight and self-aggrandize, but those are secondary flaws.
I noticed the horrible conditions and staggering death rates among the Hutus in refugees camps. I noticed Kagame/Rwanda’s invasion of the Congo, and the huge death tolls blithely ignored. I noted over the years all the former Kagame associates who turned on him and denounced him, and who fled or were killed. I also noticed he never left power. In addition, I’ve had more respect for Edward Herman than Noam Chomsky over the years, and was fortunate to be aware of and read the Peterson and Herman book on Rwanda, which further convinced me. I’d read another article or two in the same vein over the years.
Anyway, my own odd history made me instinctively believe in the inverted Rwanda story, and all the subsequent facts and analysis has seemed to bear this out. Thanks a lot, Ron, for bringing more attention to what I think is the correct view of those horrific events.
The story of Rwanda genocide is indeed strange. It is part of shocks of the early ’90 like Yugoslav wars, probably inspired by the same suspects. Typically for our oligarchy-infested world, the same name appears again and again: Kagame, the man to go here.
Contrary to the Yugoslav wars, during the event news were very scant. In terms of recording, it is a post-event, media event or simulacrum.
On a small scale, the event is now marketed as “They lived happily ever after” aka “successful reconciliation” or “total naturalization of ethics” since justice is mostly forsaken in the name of “Life must continue/Triumph of Life over Vengeance” (you could say that ethics was made round here, like a ball, starting from defending life, to forsake lives in the name of life).
However, it is done mostly through docu films from Africa only (I saw one of them, which still shocked me a bit through general expressed acceptance of “reconciliation”).
Interestingly, no attempt was done at marketing it more broadly as “general template for genocide-after reconciliation”, for Poles and Ukrainians or Armenians and Turks.
Because it is still something what only savages do..?!
This excellent article raises the question: To what extent were Power and Gourevitch witting or unwitting tools of a US regime change operation that, according to official figures, killed more than six million (TM) people?
Wayne Madsen’s book Jaded Tasks, as I recall, cites insiders/participants who say an American CIA team shot down the African presidents’ plane in order to set off the pre-planned ethnic strife that allowed CIA cut-out Kagame to seize power. The motive was CIA-backed US competition with France and the EU for Central Africa’s resources.
Ron Unz, total legend! Thanks to the European Digital Act and the total destruction of freedoms in Europe, your US website is now worth its content in Godcoin. I really mean it. There is no other website in the world that publishes on the true condition of mankind. Why Tucker and Elon have not yet boosted your site is beyond belief. Apart from the United States the entire world has fallen into darkness and despair. Over 60,000 individuals are currently prosecuted (fined or on probation, for now, because the prison systems are bursting at the seams) in the UK and France for political “hatespeech”. In Germany, the numbers are not known, but there are arrests everywhere; the tyrants are persecuting writers, lawyers, doctors, and even playwrights, and the entire opposition party with its 6 million members. Speech has died. The Euros killed it. Frightening stuff. America… is all alone. God bless America! While He can!
Mr Unz,
There is an additional book that one should read on Rwanda, by Michela Wrong. It paints Kagame as a ruthless politician and puts the genocide(s) in the context of the churn in the Great Lakes area. The Ugandas do not come out with clean hands either.
Edward Bernays
Not anymore. Bernays supposedly said that he could sell a case of tuberculosis to everybody in the US, but only once. Well, we all have metaphorical TB now. Dead relatives, dead cities, dead businesses, clowns for a bureaucracy, urban street fighters that destroy their areas of operation, obvious foreign replacements in the tens of millions for the current citizenry, physical systems visibly failing, and Trump’s election / Biden’s Presidency, analogies in Europe, shows that media dominance of the West is finally over, probably because the Enlightenment project and the West are finally over..
When everything you know turns out to be propaganda smoke . . .
And trust vanishes . . .
and suddenly the money doesn’t buy much . . .
Complex systems vanish with the smoke.
Right now, as I type, Western governments associated with the American Empire have lost their legitimacy. While it is in its early stages, the top level US (Federal) government is actually facing legal armed resistance from many of the States. The European governments are supported by the EU and the US, but not by their own population.
Shades of the Holy Alliance of the 1800s, which ended when Russia decided to end Russian troop intervention in Europe’s attempted rebellions.
Non-Western governments? Since WW II we’ve heard nothing but stories about how the West knocked over governments world wide (using a few sail powered wooden ships!!!) and how this just wasn’t just, was it? And how the non-Western governments didn’t have a chance and were going to rise up and show their superiority any day now.
Well, Non-Western governments, as the IRA said, today’s the day and now’s the hour. See if you can’t do a bit better than the Rwandan massacres and the Congo wars and the decay of South Africa (and New York City) or the massive theft of Chinese real estate and its hysterical reversion to absolute government and military threats. For the rest, try to do better without Western food subsidies and Western trade. You will have to after the West goes away. Good luck, and write a letter after it’s over about how it all came out.
So, likely, we have a world wide failure, as most large scale governments fall. Happens from time to time, and sometimes something better arises. The US, for example, might end up speaking Spanglish and supporting a high tech sector that sells things like satellite based weather forecasts to the rest of the world, or an Eurasia with boundaries right out of 1984 might develop a “creative minority”, to use Toynbee’s phrase. Depends on who can achieve autarky. Or China/Japan might awaken from their reliance on ritual that enforces conformity (“horse/deer” anybody?) and start doing something more than relying on Western systems of thought and commerce.
But the Day of Bernays, saucy as it may have been, and the time of propaganda smoke is over.
And don’t blame Ron Unz. He’s done the equivalent of turning on the kitchen light and revealing the roaches, roaches that were there in the dark.
As for the “conspicuous” timing, in the mid-80s the price of tantal (previously
only used for surgical steels and specialized hard metals) jumped tenfold in
a single year (microcapacitors for consumer electronics); the near-inexhaustible
pandaite of Araxà/Brazil has a Nb/Ta ratio of 250 while the columbite-tantalite
(“coltan”) of Rwanda, Burundi and the North and South Kivu provinces of
Congo-Kinshasa has 0.3 (placer mineral bound to alkaligranite pegmatites
associated with the East African Rift); as a result an abject backwater
(the Germans did not really have time to build infrastructure) experienced the
sociological equivalent of a gold rush – every local deflorist fief with 30 Kalashnikows
and 200 shovels became a mining entrepreneur overnight, and it is safe to assume
the Tutsi did most of the initial fiefing; we can be certain of only one thing:
Ad: playing fast and loose with the term “genocide”, we can only go by the UN definition;
it was contrived after WWII, broad enough to criminalize each and every opposition
to the YKW; of course it was understood that only a certain geno could be cided
but they could not very well put that into writing; by that definition the Usurping
Entity has been a genocidal enterprise from the beginning – and the intent is undeniable
(I think it was K´ung-Tze who opined the first step to peace is “to give the words
their meaning back”).
Half a million people killed in a hundred days with machetes. Five thousand per day. Two hundred per hour. Three per minute. With machetes. Whatever, killing is the easiest part. Half a million people singled out for execution. Half a million bodies disposed of. That’s the official story. That justified the slaughter of the hundreds of thousands who fled when the USA’s bastard came into power? We’ll never know the truth. The evil that the West has perpetrated since the disappearance of the Soviet Union is beyond absurd.
Samantha Jane Power
On July 4, 2008, Power married law professor Cass Sunstein, whom she met while working on the Obama campaign.[97] They were married in the Church of Mary Immaculate, Lohar, Waterville, County Kerry, in Ireland.[98] On April 24, 2009, she gave birth to their first child, a son.[99] On June 1, 2012, she gave birth to their second child, a daughter.
Readers will be unsurprised to know that marrying this old Zionist c…..odger has now made Samantha completely Kosher. Halelu Adonai.
https://forward.com/israel/178608/for-samantha-power-support-for-israel-is-deeply-pe/
https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/17/how-michael-jacksons-rabbi-made-samantha-power-kosher/
Unz Readers can all sleep safely in their beds now.
I’ve no idea what happened. But I do have a young family member who travelled widely in south and east Africa a few years ago. He told me that the best-run country he visited was Rwanda.
Irony of ironies.
Every major claim of genocide-level mass murder, has notable counter-point literature.
Re the 1930s Ukraine famine Ron Unz mentions above – Canadian Douglas Tottle did a 1987 book denying the Ukraine starvation ‘Holodomor’, as based on a mish-mash of Hitler-Nazi propaganda plus Hearst media fanatic anti-Bolshevism; Tottle’s ‘Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth’, is free online here
http://www.rationalrevolution.net/special/library/famine.htm
Unz’s own Israel Shamir floored me with a remarkable essay arguing that the Cambodian Pol Pot Khmer Rouge genocide is a fake exaggerated narrative
https://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/18/pol-pot-revisited/
Shamir has published detailed material here on Unz, with sources saying the Soviet Stalin-gulag death & imprisonment figures are fake, with Soviet archives listing, e.g., about 10 million total arrested during thirty years of Stalin’s rule (The USA arrests 10 million people every single year these days!)
https://www.unz.com/ishamir/red-zog/
Here’s a rejection of the Armenian genocide narrative by the Turkish foreign ministry
http://www.mfa.gov.tr/the-armenian-allegation-of-genocide-the-issue-and-the-facts.en.mfa
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – openly a fan of Spain’s Franco – is seen by some as a deceiving opportunist with fascist leanings. Solzhenitsyn’s first ‘Stalin gulag’ book in 1962 was sponsored by Khrushchev himself … Solzhenitsyn tasted fame and glory thanks to this, and seeing the West full of ‘Stalin killed tens of millions’ stories, Solzhenitsyn got fabulously rich going along … leading some to argue he is not credible
http://www.mariosousa.se/LiesconcerningthehistoryoftheSovietUnion.html
And notably, at least 10 prominent Jews have added to Nazi Holocaust denial claims, including Ron Unz … the list below is in chronological order by birth year
(1) Joseph Ginzburg (1908-90) aka Joseph G. Burg, who personally interviewed Auschwitz survivors & had his books burned by postwar West Germany
https://www.henrymakow.com/2017/09/Josef-Burg.html
(2) Guy Dommergue (1924-2013), full name Roger Guy Dommergue Polacco de Menasce, French anti-circumcision activist
https://web.archive.org/web/20191120143859/https://www.henrymakow.com/2014/09/Circumcision-Explains-Jewish-Psyche.html
(3) Bobby Fischer (1943-2008), chess master & USA dissident
http://www.renegadetribune.com/bobby-fischer-speaks-jews/
(4) Jacob Cohen (born 1944), his earliest childhood in Morocco
Video Link
(5) Robert Litoff (born 1945), Connecticut-born Phi Beta Kappa in psychology
http://www.realjewnews.com/?p=943
(6) Gerard Menuhin (born 1948), son of the famous violinist
https://www.henrymakow.com/2019/11/does-holocaust-denier-book.html
(7) Nathanael Kapner (born 1950), convert to Orthodox Christianity & prominent web dissident
http://www.realjewnews.com/?p=943
(8) Norman Finkelstein (born 1954), Princeton PhD & author of ‘The Holocaust Industry’
https://web.archive.org/web/20161004125702/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPr8GYUK2EE
(9) Ron Keeva Unz (born 1961), running the successful, California-based, conservative Unz Review
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-holocaust-denial/
(10) David Christopher Cole (born 1968), who as ‘David Stein’ made a 1992 video saying Auschwitz was significantly fake
Video Link
Might this be because Ukraine children are spread out over a much larger territory compared to those in Gaza, where 2.5 million Palestinians are crammed into a 25 x 7 mile piece of land? Where people are crammed together, it is easier for a single bomb to affect many more people.
But every family in Gaza seems to have 4,5, 6,10 kids, so there are plenty more to go around.
Isn’t it amazing though that a place with 50%+ unemployment and an average per capita income of $13/day can afford to have so many kids? How do they manage to care and feed all these mouths?
Does the institutionalized aid provided by the UNRWA for the last 75 years have anything to do with this? I bet it does! Palestinians are like welfare mothers here in the US, living on the dole, popping out one kid after another and collecting more payments from Hamas for each new kid.
Hell, there was even some woman on the news yesterday who lost her two IVF kids and the rest of her family in an Israel bombing. I guess she felt left out with all her friends pregnant and she couldn’t produce any so she was forced to turn to artificial means. But how does a poor Palestinian woman afford the tens of thousands of $$ that IVF costs? Did UNRWA provide the treatments for free? Curious minds want to know!
On practically any subject Ron Unz can show that there is an argument – a fact-based argument – which is at deviance with accepted belief. It is helpful to recall the part of Nineteen Eighty-Four in which O’Brien calmly tells Winston that reality is entirely within the mind and the Party decides what reality is. It was the basis of State control in Orwell’s time just as it is in our time.
This brings up a question I’ve had for some time. Back at the dawn of the “Information Age” I had for work a LexisNexis subscription, among others. It was pretty sweet. On any subject you could think of, you could query a massive database of articles from a vast array of publications all over the world and filter the results however you liked, giving both enormously broad searches in parallel with very precise quantitative management of the results. It really felt like having all the world’s information at your fingertips, much more than was available to ordinary internet users, and with much finer and more consistent control of the results. The was more than two decades ago.
Given the pullulating development of the “Information Superhighway”, as it was called then, I naively assumed that his was exactly the sort of the service that would soon become commoditized and widely available to anyone at little or no cost. Instead the opposite seems to have happened. Offerings from services such as LexisNexis seem to have gotten more exclusive and more fractured, while ordinary internet searches produce ever more shallow results, and search engines restrict, curate and bias their products under the rubric of “safety” more and more. Even direct searches of news sites, such as the New York Times, face increasing obscurantism from their owners, whose stated motive is protecting against screenscrapers and other copyright dodgers, but who may be at least equally motivated by preventing intrepid readers from noticing their various hypocrisies in coverage by region or era. Finally in 2013, the Federal court decision Associated Press v. Meltwater seems to have essentially outlawed the “news clipping industry” altogether as a violation of copyright.
My question is does anyone still have these news clipping services? Do they still work? Is there any open source equivalent since search engines are getting so crappy?
Any users of LexisNexis, ProQuest, Factiva or similar services care to chime in?
———
[I put a similar comment on the iSteve threads.]
There’s probably no heroes with halos in that part of Africa. The winner has been the one the machete and the willingness to use it.
It’s interesting to note that during, and after, the Second Congo War, Hutu and Tutsi groups would often collaborate in eastern Congo to mine the local resources. Western money for Coltan etc for the latest iPhones can make strange bedfellows.
Not Antony but Christopher Black
Video Link
That looks like it. The public are supposed to recall the Holocaust™.
The elite MSM give Gourevitch and Power’s (distorted reality) books overwhelmingly positive reviews. Hollywood produces its “Schindler’s List” style hero (Hotel Rwanda) and Wikipedia provided the expected 21.000 word deceptive “authoritative” inverse reality account.
The litmus test is “Is it good for the Jews”.
I read Gourevich’s book at the time and also watched “Hotel Rwanda” (recommended to me) and was taken in by both of them.
Rwanda is an excellent starting point for coming to grips with the fact that:
1) things are very often not what they seem, &
2) they are very rarely the complete opposite either.
Ron’s discussion completely neglects the radio propaganda campaign dehumanizing Tutsis that preceded these events.
Did Kagame’s forces shoot down the plane? I suspect so.
Did Kagame’s forces slaughter many Hutu civilians, to the extent that they could justifiably be accused of genocide? I certainly believe so.
But how do those likely facts undermine the other facts about the slaughter of Tutsis and non-crazy Hutus by Hutu Power Hutus?
Compare with WW2 in Europe.
Did the Nazis intentionally slaughter many innocent Jews.
Of course they did, regardless of what Ron posts.
Did the Soviets subsequently brutalize Germans, raping many German women? Yes.
Did the Americans turn over many Eastern European anti-communists to be slaughtered by the Soviets? It seems that way.
Were ethnic Germans ethnically cleansed in rather brutal fashion? Yes.
A good starting point for looking into Rwanda is Romeo Dallaire’s book Shake Hands with the Devil.
Put aside any of his “public” positions on anything and just read the book.
HE KNOWS HE GOT FUCKED.
And it wasn’t just Hutu Power that fucked him.
Whodunnit and why?
That’s where things get interesting.
The so-called Western civilization was founded on stolen lands with the immense genocide of colonization for which there has never been an attempt to rectify and on the contrary the victims have been shown to be guilty. Therefore the same thing continued to be done for centuries and the pleasure of killing to steal was considered the white man’s burden.
And after centuries of history as ordinary murderers and bandits, because the history of white people has been nothing else although Hollywood has embellished it quite a bit, we must continue killing for racists to enjoy crimes and what has been stolen.
Genocide in Africa is a murky business. Who’s genociding whom? Of course the Western MSM would want you to side with one group, the Tutsis, for reasons best known to their masters.
https://www.hutugenocide.org/hutu-ethnic-group-as-the-targeted-group/
The spoils and the narratives belong to the winners; only the victims know what really happened!
Another great article on a topic many do not want to touch.
You have to wonder how long we have been believing lies? I mean, were there any dinosaurs? I did start to wonder about that when I learned that the first dinosaur was found in New Jersey in the backyard of an evolutionist.
Thanks for this informative article, Mr. Unz.
So, Kagame, earning accolades as an Abe Lincoln type for reconciliatory efforts, may on the contrary have been a villian due to his destructive ways, which is really what ought to earn him a Lincoln Trophy.
And Samantha Power, Wicked Witch of the West, won a Pulitzer for a book feeding a false narrative–gee, I’m shocked! Looks like we’ll never be rid of the bitch. How about stripping her of her naturalized U.S. citizenship and returning the unsightly lass back to Ireland?
At the UN’s website, un.org., genocide is defined. It doesn’t require killing–intent to cause serious physical or mental harm or to prevent births to part of a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group will suffice. If the Genocide Convention were truly enforced, the International Court of Justice would be busy 24/7 and there’d be a whole lot of hangin’ goin’ on.
The only war crime is that conflicts are not completed, ever. If you leave an enemy to regroup, rearm and repopulate, the conflict will never end and the deaths of untold hundreds of thousands if not millions will continue for decades. Roman rules must apply. No one has the stomach for pure victory anymore because of politics, optics and the loss of potential weapons contractor millions. Why end a war when you can drag it out making money? A news broadcast in the future, about 2100 to 2200 will STILL be reporting on Arab Israeli conflict.
I will only vote when the US representative to the UN will STOP the VETO action against war.
15% of the population sitting atop the other 85% is obviously a formula for disenchantment and conflict which has been going on periodically. It didn’t just start in the ’90’s and the vehemence with which things took place indicates there’s an entire backstory leading up to it. Being an obscure place with very little actual information coming out it was easy to spin things on the cheap in the West with an over reliance on just one person, Gourevitch, as the go-to expert although he started off knowing nothing about the place. Hotel Rwanda was obviously a propaganda movie. Power’s R2P has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and refugees, not what one might visualize when they think of humanitarian missions. Kagame is the US’s client and has gotten a fawning press buildup despite the reality of his bloody past. In America ask not what’s a lie but rather ask what isn’t.
Last week Patrick Bet David had Erik Prince on his podcast and Prince said that his motivation for starting Blackwater was the genocide of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda. And essentially that governments are too inefficient (bureaucratic) to quickly insert themselves and take action to stop a genocide like in Rwanda.
Our ruling class prefers minority rule in most countries. By having a small ethnic or religious group in charge, they become dependent on the imperial power to keep themselves in power against the majority population. This method has been used successfully at least since the Roman era. They lie about everything. Everything. And most people wouldn’t care, if they’d play their games and leave us alone, but they are so psychotic, they can’t even do that.
I’ve always considered Wikipedia a highly unreliable source for anything.
Nevertheless, this article is a poignant reminder that there is no such thing as a “definitive” history. As time goes on new evidence invariably surfaces–documents, letters, journals, witnesses–that continue to clarify and re-shape our perception of past events.
Thanks for this article.
Am I correct in my assessment that Cecil Rhodes was one of the first propagandists to use the media to turn public opinion? My understanding is that he wanted the British army to intervene in Africa to do what his private army could not, which was to defeat the locals in order to gain control and exploit the natural resources. Public sentiment was very much against using the military, so Rhodes bought up the main newspapers and began publishing articles to turn public opinion in his favor.
Vivid in my memory is watching on television as an untold number of bodies, identified only as “victims of the Rwanda genocide,” were bulldozed into a pit, while a voice narrated that they would be “covered with lime” .
I recall forcing myself to watch and remember, although my spouse left the room. I’d been pretty much a potato about world events until then, to the extent that when one of our children was assigned to research Haile Selassie, I mocked the notion: “Why should you care,” I recall saying. But that televised image made me start to think that I needed to pay attention. I bought somebody’s book on Rwanda — probably Gourevitch’s, but probably read it uncomprehendingly and uncritically.
The time, intellectual energy, and contrarian perspective — ever digging deeper– that you commit to these topics is greatly appreciated, Ron Unz, and serve as both a goad and a model for many of us. Thank you.
I so agree and want to thank Ron Unz for his 2022 book on David Irving.
That everything we’ve been schooled in is propaganda—read Flannery O’Conner on the effects of education, or better yet, Dostoevsky, who abhorred the “arrogance of knowledge” that we’ve developed in our epoch of “Humanism” — In fact, Ron Unz is quite like the great thinker Ivan Karamazov!
But back to history and murder: along with the David Irving book, I’d like to recommend Dagmar Barnouw’s book, “Germany 1945”— a gathering of photos taken by US Army photographers and international photojournalists (a picture speaks a thousand words) with her transcendent prose about the shaping/annihilating of memory and the control of blame, Orwellian misuse of guilt — Dagmar was a girl who escaped the Dresden Inferno with her mother and came to America and became a professor of literature in Southern California, dying not very long ago.
And then there is “Leopold’s Ghost” by Adam Hochschild, and the huge biography, “Roger Casement, Imperialist Rebel Revolutionary” by Seamus O’Siochain — to get a taste of African/European history of which we remain largely ignorant —
Just to throw in a quote from Dickens’ Christmas Carol, that the two skeletal, grasping children huddling under the robes of the Ghost of Christmas Present, were named Want and Ignorance: “Of the two, you should fear Ignorance the most,” because of what ignorance brings into the world—
So hearty thanks to Ron Unz in his indefatigable quest.
https://dailystormer.in/russia-asks-how-much-scholz-controls-the-situation-after-leaked-recording-confirmed-real/
No wonder, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
English wiki doesn’t even mention who his father was.
https://de.zxc.wiki/wiki/Otto_Graf_Lambsdorff
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/09/world/europe/09lambsdorff.html
“English must become our language of administration”
https://www-welt-de.translate.goog/debatte/kommentare/article135390461/Englisch-muss-unsere-Verwaltungssprache-werden.html?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en
O my good Lord, you have to go back to the beginnings of history for the “first user of propaganda”!!
Cecil Rhodes came out England, and the study of that history — for ease you could begin with Henry VIII/Elizabeth I. Maybe it could be said that Bad Queen Bess perfected the art of public/political lying, but Dante would take you farther back, and then there is what we call ancient history—try Greek drama.
Of course, most of what we call standard history is false. So good luck there—
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capoid
_______________
Coon divided human beings into five races. He called these races Capoid, Congoid, Mongoloid, Australoid, and Caucasoid. Today, scientists agree that there is only one human race. Modern genetic research has shown that the idea of five races was wrong.[2][3]:360
_____________
Modern genetic research shows that there are large time separations between the races, and that the out of Africa theory is bunk.
What probably happened is that Cro-Magnon emerged (how, nobody knows) somewhere on Western edge of the European continent about 50K years ago, and then spread east and west. Spreading down into north africa, he found African Erectus. There he did the dirty with Congoids, creating Nilotic Tutsis.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-tutsis-and-hutus-are-genetically-different-does-that-matter
The link above, is one individual doing some DNA research and finding out that YES!, Tutsi’s are genetically distinct, and that your eyes are not lying. There are “races” of humans.
Ugly hates beautiful. The ruled will hate their rulers, especially if the rulers are capricious and don’t look like them. If the rulers are beautiful, that will set up even more conflict. (The Jew hates beautiful Aryan types.) The Tutsi were always the rulers, especially if they had Cro-Magnon introgression. There is a close analogy, with the Brahmin’s (Aryan Cro-Magnon) ruling India over the lower castes which had more “darker” aboriginal introgression.
Hitler was right, it is best to separate nations into similar ethnic types, to then avoid racial conflict.
My thought, exactly.
Kigali´s murder rate is at 6 and falling 😆
Most large US cities would kill (d´uh!) for that; I guess an argument could
be made from that for The Purge or something.
You have to proofread this article, it contains numerous types and grammatical errors.
Not so much.
Consider the Moses foundation myth in Genesis. First thing he did after his power was challenged in the Exodus was to deputize the Levites to kill about 5% of the men in the Exodus. This got the attention of the rest of the Exodus, and they apparently accepted the leadership of Moses for the rest of Moses’ life, and held together even in the “desert” long enough for the next generation to conquer the land of another group.
Or consider the Bronze Age civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt, or for that matter the Myceneans. Both relied on an irrigation system that was kept running by engineer/priests with authority derivative of a God King. Actual workers, the peasants, worked under close supervision of the priests, who passed out seeds and labor assignments to peasants that had very little initiative or freedom. And it worked for a very long time, even being imitated (as the only available pattern of civilization) by the Myceneans. It wasn’t until the Bronze Age Collapse that the Greeks developed the Polis (not “police”, Polis) system in which there was no priestly control or God King because the society was too poor to use such an inefficient system and apparently because its population was no longer the beasts/peasants of the Bronze Age.
Something similar happened in the 1500s, when populations capable of running their own affairs revolted against Catholic Church supervision during the Reformation and the Wars of Religion. Or for that matter in the USA c.a. 1776, which had “always run its own affairs” until the British tried to recoup some of the costs of the French and Indian Wars by ending what had been de-facto colonial self-government.
So maybe Rwanda was divided into the two populations, and the Tootsies were the only population capable of organizing itself, hence dominant again even after foreigners put the Hootsies into power. The Tootsies simply pulled a Moses, killed some large fraction of the Hootsies ( in Rwanda and the Congo ), got their attention and obedience, and went on from there.
BTW, Genesis never mentions casualties among Moses’ Levites. I’d expect there to have been some, and expect the foundation myth not to mention that. Wonder how many of Levite casualties there were, and how much prep Moses put into organizing the Levites before the Golden Calf revolt?
No. Serious antisemitism starts at the point where you rather side with Sauron and live together with his Orcs rather than with the Hobbits the day you realize the latter are Jew-worshippers that practice a mixture of Keltic magic and Kabbalistic witchcraft. Tolkein is part and parcel of the Jewish spell. By the way the real hobbits of paleontology who used to live on the Island of Flores and are remembered to have lived up to not so long ago by today’s locals were little thieves preying upon the agriculturists and very little else. The fact is that there was an alliance between the Keltic druids and the Jews against Christianity at the time of early English kingdoms and that the peoples who chose to side with the Kelts always ended as losers and slaves to Jews and Jewish agents such as Cromwell : just see what Ireland has become today : their very Keltic nationalism has been driving them all the faster into globalist values. Tolkein’s message is a condemnation of any belief in technological progress as an expression of the rings’ powers, he owed his celebrity to Jewish interests pushing for deindustrialization in the Western World. Otherwise he wouldn’t have achieved such as instant post-mortem fame.
I’ve not read Chomsky’s book, and I don’t know if he mentions Edward Bernays, but every person should read Bernays disturbing 1928 book Propaganda (linked below with the first chapter excerpted) with it’s description of the ‘invisible governors’ who ‘control the public mind’. [IMO the book would more accurately be called Brainwashing, and a healthier society than our is would outlaw the tactics described and actively police against them.]
https://archive.org/details/BernaysPropaganda/page/n2/mode/1up
‘We are governed, our minds are molded, our
tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.’
‘As civilization has become more complex, and as the need for invisible government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have been invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented.’
It possibly was misrepresented, however I would imagine for different reasons.
Although Manufacturing Consent has tremendous value as a book and thesis, over time I’ve come to wonder if many of the specific examples Chomsky cites, while not wrong, are possibly inadequate and skewed heavily towards Chomsky’s own favored political positions. You know, the ones he inserts into his better work.
In this case the ambiguity here is because it’s blacks involved.
There isn’t a good side or bad side. It’s blacks doing what blacks do in another useless black backwards failed state and trying make some great sense out of it one way or the other is a waste of our time.
There’s no big mystery here.
There was no intervention because racism won. Thankfully. And what’s more it should have.
‘Y’all aint dying for a bunch of useless niggers.’ . Damn fucking right. Afterwards everyone can say ‘we should have done something’, but that’s a lie.
The idea of intervention in this was ridiculous. That, and Rwanda has little to offer, with low natural resources, there’s nothing much for the US to plunder. A few grains of rice and bags of jenkum.
A sane and moral US policy would be to encourage more of this in Africa and start getting the population down which is a ticking bomb about to go off there. But that’s not what they want. They want to sell iPhones to these blacks and import/export them for the globalized workforce.
China too should be discouraged from helping Africa.
You’ve provided nothing, zero, to refute the “inverted” narrative.
Bad Amazon.com reviews? For any controversial foreign policy issue, that’s par for the course. There are many people invested in the official narrative. You seem to be one of them.
Romeo Dallaire is a self-serving liar and tool of the Five Eyes. Keep that in mind.
Yes, my understanding was that it was a US move against France in Africa. And it was an active plan throughout—it was total disinformation to claim that he US was reluctant to commit UN forces, was caught off-guard, etc.
They also said that Lincoln was a rabid Yankee abolitionist who would free all the slaves by executive degree his first day in office. They used this blatant lie to reject the result of a free and fair presidential election they had done everything in their power to sabotage, then, encouraged by their trading partners in London, sought to break apart the world’s only republic. In General Sherman’s words,”War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our Country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.”
I have always wondered what really happened as I was personally almost involved. I was an army lieutenant stationed in Germany, and my company was ordered to prepare a detachment, with me in charge, to deploy to Rwanda to participate in a larger US Army operation. We sent a senior NCO to Kenya, which was being set up as the staging base, with a small team that included a senior general to establish the initial logistics. Long story short, after much preparation the whole thing was called off. When our NCO returned from Kenya, he said the general they were with was constantly in contact with “the pentagon” yelling that the true situation was confused and not a good place for the army to go. The excuse given for the stand-down was newly discovered epidemiological dangers that were too difficult to overcome on short notice.
Right again. Herman always was the brains of the outfit.
Tutsi extermination of Hutus was one episode in CIA’s Congo War for uranium reserves, actually a world war of a dozen countries not counting the USA, which has gone on for 70 years now. Along the way CIA used Jewy genocide whoppers as a pretext for so-called Responsibility to Protect, but it’s important to distinguish fake CIA R2P from the real thing.
Responsibility to Protect is directly derived from the UN Charter as set out in “Implementing the Responsibility to Protect.” CIA’s version of R2P is “We go in and blow shit up,” same as always, in manifest breach of absolute sanctified rule of law, A/RES/36/103 2§L:
“The duty of a State to refrain from the exploitation and the distortion of human rights issues as a means of interference in the internal affairs of States, of exerting pressure on other States or creating distrust and disorder within and among States or groups of States;”
“There is no greater example of abject cowardice that exceeds that of the majority of college professors.” – Prof. Allan Dershowitz
+
Not knowing much pertaining to either side, I would choose the tribe with better looking women who smell better and have superior hygiene.
By 1994 the total population of Rwanda was less than 6M. The number of Tutsis was less than 600K. The official narrative claims that around half a million Tutsis were killed in the so-called genocide. Yet the Tutsis (of whom allegedly only 100K should have survived) emerged victorious against more than 5M machete wielding murderous Hutus, and an anglophile Tutsi became president in a francophone country, and still is in that position. It just doesn’t add up. The official narrative is mathematically and logically impossible.
Fact is, during the alleged genocide of the Tutsi by the Hutu, the entire Hutu leadership including the president and the female prime minister were killed, the CIA-backed Tutsi front won the war, and their head became the leader of the country. If there ever was a genocide, it was that of the hapless Hutu elite. The mainstream narrative is impossible to believe in.
Well, I don’t pay much attention to Amazon reviews, but when I checked 72% of them were 5 Stars, hardly a negative sign. And the one critical review you cited was almost totally vacuous, mostly just insults.
Just as you say, the short book was released by a tiny, fringe press and received almost no attention. But the authors emphasized that exact media situation in their text. As I wrote:
Yeah, the inverted portrayal of overseas ethnic conflicts and cognitive infiltration via promotion of bogus conspiracy theories go hand in hand.
Actually, that doesn’t really surprise me. Whether or not he’s a mass-murderer, Kagame seems like a very competent and capable leader, so you’d expect him to run his country effectively. And in general, the Tutsis seem much more disciplined and better organized than the Hutus, helping to explain why their 15% minority had controlled both those small countries for many centuries.
So, in other words, a grand success?
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the media in general is always pushing a narrative that expands UN power and reach.
I’ve got a copy each of two books pushing this narrative centering on the belegeaured Canadian peacekeeper Romeo D’Allaire, in charge of the UN forces in Rwanda, and his calls for help:
Shake Hands with the Devil (by D’Allaire)
The Lion, the Fox and the Eagle (Carol Off)
I believe D’Allaire described Kagame as highly professional, and capable, but I don’t recall him mentioning involvement with the president’s plane going down (I read this 20+ years ago so I could be wrong here). In D’Allaire’s defense he wasn’t given serious resources to do or know anything, letalone prevent massacres. He was basically there as an observer with not enough forces for recon. He did have intelligence of weapons stockpiles and plans to murder apparently and faxed the Un constantly to zero response or acknowledgement.
Carol Off especially, argues for more command authority and larger forces for commanders such as D’Allaire.
The “Eagle” portion is about the railroading and court conviction of Milosevic.
By the way, there’s some interesting tidbits in that second book about the “Fox” – General Lewis Mackenzie. Apparently the Serbs refused to treat with him as they had evidence, photographs etc. of him with trafficked sex slaves!!!
As for the general intent of this article:
I have also over the years heard bits about this genocide being two-sided and not so one-sided, as well as accusations that Kagame himself directed the downing of the president’s plane. I believe this shows the legacy media complex’s ability to perpetrate its greatest crime, especially lately in regards to Russia / Ukraine: The crime of OMISSION. There were of course Hutu massacres of Tutsies, but if the media simply ignores the reverse happening, and accuses one side of preparations and de-humanization campaigns before, well then it has all the “tell tale signs” of premeditated mass murder – a la failed Austrian painters 50 years previous.
By the way the same preparations have been going on here in the west, mostly by the legacy media – dehumanization of half the populace, mentally priming the libtards and the people who go along to get along (the ones who don’t know they follow the minority opinion but are too afraid to figure it out). Interesting that they’re obviously and undeniably guilty, of what the Hutu Rwandans may not have been doing at all – preparations for genocide / democide.
Just some dead african dindoos, no big whoop…
Per your words – another of the many reasons that I despise the Clintons. Until those bastards go to their eternal rewards(?), America will continue its downwards trajectory. I am sure that they support the Zionist genocide of the Palestinians – probably even making a buck out of that support.
That’s perfectly true. My point was that Mr. Unz didn’t present a sound case for that “narrative”.
The Chinese have discovered that they can inexpensively pack the 5-star section of Amazon reviews, and I have found that zealots can do the same. I was burnt by those zealots when – on the basis of the praise by the Libertarian True Believers – purchased “The Collapse of Complex Societies”. The volume was pure crap, and I was out almost 50 bucks to discover the fact. FWIW, in the 1-star section I was “Indiana Reviewer”. That’s why I always go first to the 1-star reviews when I’m forced to buy something from Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B0B1P9N5JP/ref=acr_dpx_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar
Mr. Unz has a history of scraping together a bunch of fringe authors and using their output to throw together a brand new version of history. Now for a single sentence from that review I quoted:
You realize that notion is one which has actually been peddled here. That the “holocaust” didn’t happen at all, and the filthy Jews through their agents Stalin and Roosevelt truly did murder millions of innocent and helpless Germans. “Normal Statesman” Hitler was forced to attack the USSR in pure self defense. Of course Germany was also a victim in WW1. Poor Germany! And don’t get me started on his hyping of the idiot RFKjr.
But back to Rwanda. The Genocide there has had very little coverage in the US. I suspect that’s mostly on account of the deep involvement of both American Neocons and the Vatican.
What Mr. Unz wrote may in fact be what happened. One more time: I’m just saying is that this essay doesn’t cut the mustard so far as displaying genuine evidence for his case.
One final note. I’m still more than a little POed about his rehabilitation here of Samantha Powers. That action has the same stench as his recent similar ‘upgrading’ of Judith Miller – the innocent journalist.
I remember that Rwandan chimp out because it got a lot of press at the time, and there were a lot of funny jokes going around about it. No I won’t repeat any of them here.
Most of us should have known by the 1990’s that it is all lies. Even Rush Limbo was saying on the radio, everything they print or say, it is all lies. All of it.
So, never bought the lies on Rwanda, i assumed the opposite was the truth, because I had been taught that they purposely invert everything. So whatever they say, just assume that the opposite is true.
That is a good rule of thumb, and I suppose that after reading this Unz masterpiece, that is exactly what Zog did in its reporting on this huge African chimp out
Well said.
The comparison of Kagame with Lincoln is very apt. Lincoln set his country’s citizens to war with each other, killing hundreds of thousands of them and devastating the South while impoverishing the North, all for his political aggrandizement.
At least he got what he deserved.
Bernays was Freud’s (Fraud’s) nephew, both Jews, and close. The damage Freud has done to the West through academe and clinical practice and Big Pharma is immeasurable. Likewise Bernays.
People’s “expertise” now comes from advertising. There’s a place in Dante’s Hell for this. I had to read his work in high school in Italy. Americans are really missing out—
Tutsi are basically black Jews as I understand it. It is unfortunate this “genocide” was also not real.
I wrote “first propagandists to use the media”. I was thinking of more “modern” times and the use of mass media, which, at the time was newspapers.
Another great piece Mr. Unz!
And it relates to my current position on ALL “media reports”- Whatever “they” tell you, is probably not only wrong, but most likely a complete inversion of the truth!
That’s my starting position on everything now. I assume, first, that I am being lied too, and manipulated, and that whatever is first reported, is nothing but a ploy, to set the stage for later “details”, that will will help to shape, and fill in the blanks with whatever the useful narrative is.
Am I sometimes wrong? Sure, but it’s increasingly rare, and generally, only on small stories that never make any difference anyway.
Example: “They” intentionally hid all of the pre-arrest police body cam footage, of all his antics, until after they rage video had gone viral. They could have diffused that entire event, if they wanted to, but they didn’t.
Never believe anything, especially if it warrants immediate emotional reaction! Like Oct. 7th.
The deception was necessary to maintain the fiction that certain minorities are irrationally persecuted for no reason at all.
Wait. Does discipline and organization explain … Nah. Better not to think that.
{American professional class and intelligentsia have their balls and their shriveled, circumcized dicks in a sheenie vice.}
Samantha Power is a war criminal who was 100% responsible for the crimes against humanity in Sudan including the partition of the country which was a JEWISH PLOT. Her husband is one of those circumcised criminal where she goes to bed every night. Her circumcised DICK that she licks is far more important than millions of deaths that the Jewish mafia tribe is responsible for. The couple were viewed as ‘the most dangerous couple’ in the world. Fuck both. She is one of the war criminals where should be executed along the rest of the Jewish mafia tribe and their supporters.
What happened in Rwanda was a U.S. backed overthrow of the government of Juvénal Habyarimana, and replacing it with a U.S. backed Rwandan Patriotic Front. Paul Kagame is the Ahmen Chalabi of Rwanda. The overwhelming success of the Rwandan regime change operation, misnamed the “Rwandan Genocide”, I believe is the reason why the Clinton administration didn’t want to invade Iraq. They wanted to replicate what they had done in Rwanda, but by 2001 it was clear much stronger direct force was going to be needed to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Hence, you get some even bigger explosions domestically in 2001, much bigger than the first attempt on the WTC in 1993, to be used to justify the invasion.
They like killing vicariously?
Ron, I agree with your hesitation of freeing slinging around the term “genocide”. It’s has been shopworn and overused, with the sharp edges rounded off. Additionally, I would trash the terms neo-this or that, Left, Right, Conservative, Liberal, Socialist, etc. They are all loosey goosey.
Better I think is to use “mass murder” to describe the Israeli campaigns, ISIS, Ukrainian shelling and murder wholesale of civilians in Donbass, etc.
Thanks, Ron
The land grab is a common occurrence across Africa which is covered up with reports of tribes hatred for each other or religious hatred being the issue
In reality it is over Land and the ownership of that land.
en.m.wikipedia.org
/wiki/Herder–farmer_conflicts_in_NigeriaThe owners of the media who ultimately control what their “reporters” and “journalists” write don’t really take sides. Only apparently. Actually, when it comes down to it, they love for two sides to attack one another so they can gloat in more killing. The spoils aren’t the hidden motive. Destruction is. It’s called psychosis.
I think I mis-interpreted your question earlier.
Sometimes the media loves the UN / communism and sometimes they’re just war cheerleaders and stump for the “side of freedom” – in this case a 15% ruling Tutsi minority over the 85% Hutu majority. So to sell this arrangement, the media needs a one-sided massacre? Just an idea I have no extra info on that.
*See also:
https://thoughtmaybe.com/?s=John+Pilger
https://thoughtmaybe.com/?s=Rwanda
The only real reason the conflicts don’t end is the real instigators don’t get found out by the two sides fighting. There are people in power so psychotic, that are influencing the chessboard, that really only have destruction and death as their primary motive. We can see financial profits, land and resource acquisition. What we can’t and don’t see is their hidden terror that makes them consider that everyone needs to die so they can feel safe. We only see the result, the aftermath. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Yep. It is. It’s a crazy world.
From those monsters’ point of view, yes, a success. They got exactly what they wanted, with their guy in charge. Paul Kagame never changed.
You might take Hochschild’s work with a grain of salt…. Leopold may have done more good than he wants to include in his story. Check out
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/king-hochschilds-hoax/
Norman Finkelstein totally believes in the Holocaust.
He’s appalled by its exploitation by unscrupulous money-and-attention-grabbing Jews. He’s also appalled that a people who suffered the Holocaust are now so stridently nazi-like in their rhetoric and policy.
At any rate, history shouldn’t be judged by what people think or remember.
Consider this piece of the surreal.
There are Japanese who don’t know US and Japan fought in the Pacific War.
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2017-03-27/many-japanese-students-dont-know-the-us-and-japan-fought-in-world-world-ii-japanese-pol-says
I have proofread the article, and it does contain almost half a dozen typos. I noticed no grammatical errors.
Your own very brief comment itself contains one typo, by my count.
Maybe I’ve misunderstood, but in your comment above it seems to me you mentioned Adam Hochschild’s “King Leopold’s Ghost” — and all his deception about the Belgians having genocided 10 million (!) Congolese — approvingly.
What’s worse, Ron Unz also seems to cite the book acritically in another article:
Ron Unz: “…I’d been very impressed with [Hochschild’s] previous, award-winning bestseller King Leopold’s Ghost, which I’d read earlier this year. That latter work recounted the vivid history of the Belgian Congo and the horrific mistreatment of its inhabitants, which may have claimed the lives of up to ten million Africans…”. https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-lost-histories-of-the-great-war/
Unz has a great talent for bringing these historical deceptions to our consciousness — for which I am truly grateful. This is what he has done in the brilliant article above about the Rwandan genocide, which turns our view of this historical event on its head. It is rather puzzling to me, therefore, why he has chosen to cite Hochschild in the above quote acritically, without turning his impressive revisionist accumen onto the great Congo genocide hoax as well.
Lucky for us, then, that someone else has already debunked Hochschild: Bruce Gilley, author of “The Case for Colonialism” (originally an article, which he has recently turned into a book with the same title). Here below is a partial transcript of an interview in which Gilley basically calls Hochschild an academic swindler and pokes a bunch of holes into the false narrative of the “Ghost” book:
Peter Boghossian: “Wasn’t king Leopold like a real — I mean my conception is that he’s just a true nasty son of a bitch who used to like chop off…”
Bruce Gilley: “No. All wrong. In fact one of the chapters [of “The Case for Colonialism”] is called in defense of Leopold’s Congo. So most people’s understanding of the Congo Free State … comes from Adam Hochschild’s book “King Leopold’s Ghost”, which I’ve shown is a vast fabrication. … Hochschild had an incredibly deletarious impact on our understanding of the Congo Free State with his 1998 book…
“… All those pictures you see of severed limbs are either fake — meaning those are people who had their hands cut off because of gangrene or because they had their hands cut off in battles or … because it was tribal custom… The British Congo reformers realized that if they could show some pictures of people with severed hands and say this is King Leopold’s rubber minions that it would spark outrage. What they really wanted is for the Brits to colonize the Congo. And it did some create a a movement in support of this but with a vast amount of lies and propaganda which Adam Hochshild repeats in his book, says that 10 million people died… Complete nonsense.”
“If you try to go on Wikipedia and correct any of those fake facts on Wikipedia you’ll get immediately edited out…just imagine how pernicious a myth that is of because it often gets raised in this debate right? What about the Congo? Wasn’t the Congo terrible? No, it wasn’t! Actually it was amazingly positive! Black lives mattered to King Leopold and he did an amazing thing to support them! …”
“I caught Adam Hochschild actually doctoring a quotation in his book and he recognized he had doctored it. He apologized and said, “well I hope it gets corrected”. Basically he said “a is not a”, but it anchored his whole tale. So maybe he should cancel the book or give a speech? He basically took a Belgian official who had said, “I don’t think we should be going in and forcing coercive rubber harvesting, because otherwise we’ll just be like the Arabs who cut off hands and feet”, and he doctored that quotation to say, “if we’re going to do rubber harvesting we’re going to have to be cutting off hands and feet”. That’s significant. He completely inverted the meaning. And that’s how his book operates. In my view it’s a complete farce”.
Video Link
A college roommate of mine, very much CIA aligned , just so happened to be located in Rwanda in the months prior and during the massacres….hmmm
The staggering death tolls of Hutus, many times higher than that of the Tutsis, is one glaring piece of evidence. That forged fax: why was that forged? By whom? That’s just scratching the surface as far as evidence for the “inverted” case, that Paul Kagame and the RPF are the true villains, though working with the help of outside forces.
Also, how do you get that Unz was rehabilitating that odious hypocrite Samantha Powers? He first played up how she made a career about the need to stand up to genocide, and is now working for a government enabling one, as we speak! That would be like Al Sharpton working as an officer in the Klan, or Vladimir Lenin heading up a department at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
Ron I fully agree with your article but note one point: if you write „according to wikipedia“ many people won‘t see this as a disclaimer but as Ron still trusting Wikipedia, which actually makes it worse.
Whatever happened with the Holocaust, this thing in Canada is so strange.
NONE of it happened but there was an international panic about it and even the pope apologized.
There is a bbc documentary about what really happened in rwanda: https://vimeo.com/107867605. Covert action magazine also has a very detailed piece on the topic.
So, crocodile tears.
When convenient and useful would be use for the benefit of the US and US only.
In the mean time, lets help Israel commit a genocide.
Hochschild’s huge bestseller had been published 25 years earlier, receiving numerous prizes and widespread critical acclaim, while his very harsh portrayal of Leopold’s Congo was similar to what I’d originally seen in my textbooks decades earlier. Therefore, not being aware of any of the controversy, I vaguely assumed his account was generally correct and very briefly mentioned it in one of my 2022 articles.
Since I didn’t know anything about the history of the Congo and had never tried to investigate it, the approach I took was hardly surprising.
I remember about a year ago I happened to glance at a lengthy on-line debate between Hochschild and one of his fiercest critics, and it wasn’t clear to me who had the stronger argument. So I’m still not at all sure about the truth of the matter.
It gets worse. There’s a national holiday about it, with orange shirts, called, “Truth and Reconciliation Day.”
Because of the 80+ churches burnt down, what I should do is sell t-shirts once a year the same color with the message:
“LIES AND ETHNIC HATRED DAY”
Hey Ron, long-time reader first time commenting. Really enjoy your work and the Pravda series has been illuminating for me.
My main interest is finance / economics and while your article mentions subsequent events in the Congo in passing I wanted to highlight further developments that may be of interest.
First, some basics re background of Congo:
– Roughly 2/3 the size of western Europe
– One of the worlds richest tracts of minerals, a global supplier of metals for almost a century
– Congolese uranium was used for the Manhattan project
– Congolese copper was used to rebuild Europe and Japan post WWII
– Congo is also rich in cobalt for batteries in EVs and in tantalum used in smartphones
– Motubu Sese Seko comes to power in 1965, proceeds to nationalize mining production
– Collapsing world commodity prices in the 80s / 90s send country into chaos, finally leading to Motubu’s bloody ouster in 1997
Immediately after Motubu is deposed, an interesting character arrives on the scene, Israeli diamond merchant Dan Gertler. Heir to a family gem fortune, Gertler’s grandfather founded the Israeli Diamond Exchange.
The soon to be President of the DRC, Laurent-Desire Kabila, is fighting a bloody war to consolidate power when Gertler arrives and offers the regime a $20m payment in return for a monopoly on diamond sales from the country. Kabila becomes leader of Congo.
Then Kabila is assassinated and his son Joseph Kabila takes power, who proceeds to develop a very close relationship w Gertler, who is flying into Congo every 2 weeks to advise on economics and politics. Gertler develops a close bond w the younger Kabila, the two are the same age. To get a sense of Gertler’s influence, note that he even acts as a go between w the US government as he was in contact w security advisor Condoleezza Rice, helping to establish the new regime on the world stage.
Finally the China boom hits in the early 2000s and Gertler is perfectly set up in the tightest commodity market since the 1970s. He becomes the gatekeeper to Congo’s mineral riches. Soon he is operating beyond diamonds and has investments in copper, cobalt and oil.
In the ensuing years Gertler proceeds to rob the Congo out of billions. Whenever there is an election, he lavishly funds the Kabila regime in their desperate efforts to remain in power, receiving in kind payment in the form of mining deals that are linked to him via offshore vehicles. Quite the monopoly he was running.
It was only recently that he was finally added to the US financial sanctions list, according to the US treasury he had “amassed his fortune through hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of opaque and corrupt mining and oil deals” in Congo.
All this is to say that I’m sure the Clinton and subsequent Bush administration had several other good reasons to look the other way as events were unfolding in Africa. Gertler seems the typical Israeli sponsored actor who is always one step ahead and no doubt there was financial or other pressure brought to bear on US policy makers to look the other way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Gertler
“Curious minds” seem to have curiously forgotten who stole
the Palestinian land and crammed them into Gaza.
Am I allowed to not care at all about the massacre of the Tootsies by their fellow African primitives the Whootoos?
Yes. Yes I am. And I don’t.
I care no more about Africans having murdered their fellow Africans than I care about barbaric Semites currently murdering their fellow barbaric Semites in the Levant. Knock yourselves out boys.
Dean Donne was only referring to his fellow Englishmen when we wrote “no man is an island”. At least I hope he was.
Toot-Toot-Tutsi, good bye.
Source:
http://une-autre-histoire.org/leopold-ii-de-belgique-roi-du-congo/
That’s awful. My condolences. 😉
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53017188
Source:
The Genocide in Gaza and elsewhere have provided a market for human organ trafficking where the Jews have a share in this business.
The Jewish mafia Tribe has a big steak in this business, in Ukraine and Gaza. Read the following that shows there has been an agreement between Zelensky people and Turkey to transfer human organs to Turkey charging them lower price compare to the market:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/those-who-wonder-what-we-protecting-ukraine-igor-rivin
Yes. Democracy’s Achilles Heel is how it may be subverted by “a tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires” and intent upon controlling thought as well as speech.
Will you please select a moniker and join in the discussions here more regularly? This is one of the very few places online where the notion of free speech is more than just pretense.
Which is why, of course, it’s attacked hourly and blocked widely. Please join in.
Francis, you are an endless fount of foolishness but your interpretations
of history are creative. Irish nationalism was nurtured by harsh British
rule, and no doubt the Irish gene pool was enriched by the English nobles
poaching of the most attractive Colleens, but after the Brits gave up, Irish
nationalism went into a death spiral, except in Ulster.
And a reply to fin of cobra as well:
It’s your theme, Mr. Unz, that our histories are “a very tricky commodity” (to take a quote from Dr. Zhivago).
Two other excellent books which bear out Hochschild’s perhaps imperfect scholarship are:
Peter Forbath, “The River Congo”, 1977 —exhaustive research and beautiful to read;
Thomas Packenham, “The Scramble for Africa”, 1991 —also a great read, and the cartoon of Leopold’s feelings for the natives (p 583) is, well, quite telling.
If Leopold’s brand of colonialism was good for Africa, then Bill Gates has improved on him in manifold ways. May we all be so fortunate!
Thanks. The Herman/Peterson book actually discussed a few of those issues with the Congo, even arguing that gaining control of it had been Kagame’s main goal from the beginning, with his seizure of power in Rwanda merely being one of the necessary steps. And since Rwanda was so small and poor, the prize of the Congo may have been what drew the support of American and Britain for Kagame’s effort. I think Black argued the same thing, claiming that although Mobutu had long been a US client, he’d supposedly begun moving closer to the Chinese explaining why the Americans wanted him overthrown.
But since my focus was on Rwanda and my article was already much longer than I’d expected, I left out most of those issues, although I did describe the Congo as “resource-rich.” Similarly, the Congo claims of those authors seemed pretty speculative and not strongly documented since they also were focused so heavily upon Rwanda.
As for Gertler, he obviously came a few years later and I’d forgotten all about him, so thanks for reminding me.
One major reason is the number of truly kooky things which get published here. I’m talking “moon landing hoax” and “blood libel” and so on.
I don’t mind those one bit if that’s the price we pay here for free speech. (And who knows, maybe there is substance to the blood libel!)
Not really for me to say. I’m certainly no expert in most of the topics covered here. But it’s definitely one reason that luminaries of the sort you mention would be careful: just one reference and the (MSM) will tar-and-feather them with guilt by association.
PS: worth noting is that some commenters have speculated that this is actually a deliberate policy on Ron’s part, and part of the reason the site hasn’t yet been completely booted off the internet. The kooky stuff just makes it easier for our enemies to dismiss the serious stuff! Hmm.
That sounds very damning for Hochschild, and the Brits. If true, the Western media greatly exaggerated the number of Congolese deaths under Belgian rule, but a few generations later gave little coverage to all the millions of deaths in the Congo during the wars there against Rwanda in the 90s and early 00s. It’s ok to kill people in the Congo if you’re Tutsi, apparently.
Yes, thanks: E. D. Morel and Roger Casement. Again, Seamus O’Siochain’s superb biography of Casement is indispensable.
Actually, I checked and I’d only mentioned that disputed Hochschild book in two sentences of my long 2022 article, which was entirely focused on the First World War. So even if I’d had major doubts at the time, I really couldn’t have diverted my entire discussion to describe them.
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-lost-histories-of-the-great-war/
Sure, I’d read the very long Pakenham book last year and noticed that his analysis of Leopold’s Congo enterprise was quite a bit different than Hochschild’s. But I just don’t have enough Africa expertise to probably evaluate the issues.
Lexis/Nexis was wonderful, way back in the early 90s when I had an account. At the time I enjoyed a side hustle of writing op-eds and it was especially gratifying to see my work “online” as it were.
No idea what’s still there, or available on the major news sites’ archives. For the most part, I can no longer be bothered to care.
The lies reported by Cobra are very damning indeed. For himself. Because they are nothing else than outright lies.
Colonialism is a crime against humanity. Period.
Source:
https://www.nouvelobs.com/monde/afrique/20181220.OBS7462/les-mains-coupees-du-congo-une-horreur-de-la-colonisation.html
CIA pick was given media backing. Yup.
Let’s give credit to Mearsheimer, Sachs and a few others with establishment
credentials for allowing TUR to publish their articles. Of course, their
reputations are unassailable and above the fray, but you can be sure the
Zionists and Russophobes took notice for future reference.
I have looked at pictures of the Tutsis and at pictures of the Hutus and there is a big difference; Tutsis are tall and in a way, good looking while the hutus are short and ugly.
The difference is exactly the same as in Jamaicans and Haitians.
I met the latter in New York, Jamaicans could be nice and generous while the Haitians were a terrible people, bad character, mean, cheap and very ugly. Good thing the Haitians are chicken and are scared of Colombians otherwise they are pushy.
I thought maybe these two were the grandchildren of the former but I realized Rwandans weren’t brought to America for slavery because Rwanda is in the easter part of Africa. daah.
(The Haitian gangs that just broke out of jail are threatening to kill the 12 Colombians who killed their president, they are in a Haiti prison).
That would be the lunatic John Brown.
The only quibble I have with your excellent comment, is that the coming devastation of Western/Eurotrash governments will not cause a reversal of technology (such as what happened locally in Cambodia under Pol Pot).
Everything will shrink, but it’s hard to see a global reversal of tech change; that sort of thing would require a global-reach, co-ordinated, political campaign of tech-vandalism of the type perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge – and global political co-ordination is going away for a while (in the best-case scenario, all that will happen is that its focus will move sharply East).
Most of the West could not support its current population under autarky, whereas China, Russia, and much of non-satrap Asia could do so and still have rising living standards at the median. Places like Japan and SKor have such adverse demography that they will be unable to support their retiree population, although Japan continues to amaze, because its elderly are in far better physical shape than the aged pretty much everywhere else… perhaps exoskeletons will enable Jap 90 year olds to do factory work but in autarky, where will they get steel?)
It’s not going to be a dark age in “surplus” flags, but nations that rely on persistent trade deficits will have a tough time for a bit – they will have to wean their flabby Deltas and Gammas off welfare.
Bu… bu.. but “civilising mission”, “White Man’s Burden”, “spreading democracy”!!! Surely they weren’t all just propaganda.
Just kidding, Of course they were – and are – and anyone who says otherwise is a fool or a liar (or both).
If you teach your slaves to read, you’re not doing them a favour relative to if you let them learn to read without enslaving them. Just sayin’.
“You”, “your” etc are meant in the impersonal form – I don’t mean you personally.
Thanks. I actually had a very difficult time finishing this article in time for its Monday release, so it contained far more typos and other problems than usual, and I was still catching and fixing them early this morning.
I’d missed those remaining ones, but fortunately a supportive reader sent me a list, so I’ve now fixed those as well, though perhaps there might still be one or two somewhere in the text.
Hutus have faces for radio.
Oops I forgot one tidbit about that Kamloops band:
There were reports for years that the Royal family kidnapped a few children in the 50s or 60s, that they were there for a visit and simply disappeared with children.
Not sure if this other more public, non-incident was intended to “wash out” the earlier reports – which are considered fact by some Natives in BC.
A colonel who flew the plane for the queen at least once, later did turn out to be a serial killer:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-11577048
I’ve always wondered how many more “inner circle” people cleared to be around the Queen, have a double-life we don’t know about…
Does Chanda Chisala have a take on Rwandan or Congolese history? Do Zambians generally take one side of the Hutu-Tutsi conflict and/or the Congo Wars? Chisala is the author of one of the Classics, but has been remarkably unproductive since last July.
They forced Sudan to “normalize” relations with the Zionists in exchange for that country’s removal from the list of sponsors of terrorism. Some years before that, America bombed the only pharmaceutical establishment that produced essential meds for one of the world’s poorest countries. The pretext: Sudan was using the factory to produce chemical weapons. A blatant lie.
The Hutu-driven genocide was an obvious CIA op. I would guess Gourevitch was a CIA hack tasked with disguising the fact that the CIA was trounced by some African cowherds.
No, not nearly as many Tutsi died as alleged. Bantu are incompetent – the CIA planned on total extermination, and it was barely worse than ncov. (Go look at their population pyramid.) Anyway, there’s the holocaust problem: where are all the bodies? Why are there so many left? “Wow like 14 of the 15% died in the holocaust, and also they’re 16% today.”
Sounds like Kagame got wind of their “”secret”” “”clandestine”” plans, same way Alex Jones gets wind of everything 10-15 years in advance, and decided on some proactive forward defence.
The genocide was driven by the same thing that always drives CIA/State/Founder/Democrat violence: the Tutsis have higher IQs than the Hutu. It’s Envy.
Today, Rwanda is very firmly ruled by Tutsi. If they were bloodthirsty genocidal maniacs, you would expect it to look like Baltimore or St. Louis or any bombed-out MLK boulevard you care to name. It doesn’t. You can go look at Kigali on youtube. Take a virtual walkabout. It’s clearly far more livable on average than any American city. They ($2000 per cap) can afford to hire Bantu to mop their gutters no joke six times a day, unlike an American ($60,000 per cap). It’s clean because they clean it.
Turns out it’s a good thing when the high-IQ win and then win more. If Europe supported the Kagame regime, that’s extremely bizarre, as they clearly booted the CIA right the fuck out of the country. Presumably Kagame invaded the Congo for the same reason Russia had to invade Ukraine: CIA terror bases just across the border. Kagame got to play XCom terror missions IRL.
Hilariously, La Wik’s population breakdown adds up to 96%. 10% Tutsi, 85% Hutu, 1% Pygmy, lol. I wonder what the narratively-inconvenient fact is? What could they possibly be trying to cover up?
—
It is not surprising that a herder peoples is making the farmers their bitch, once again. Outnumbered 7:1? Not even a challenge, lol farmers. The Somalian herders even came up with a version of English Common Law.
Though Democrats likely reverse the causation. Dumbass brain cancer survivors take up farming, whereas healthy populations think it’s retarded and take up herding instead. Herders can make farmers their bitch whenever they want. Unfortunately they do that very literally, boink the local farming women, get farming-retard genes, start thinking farming isn’t such a bad idea after all, and make themselves their own bitch.
Genocide is done correctly when there’s nobody left to mourn. There should be no traumatized survivors, as there are no survivors. That’s the intersection of compassion and responsibility.
Do you think the strong support Rwanda shows for Israel in international bodies such as the UNGA is a coincidence? To be sure, other African countries have been bribed into supporting Israel, even supporting Israel’s observer status in the African Union. That is no longer the case. Many of said African countries (29 known ones) host American military bases. Most citizens of such countries are ignorant of the existence of such military bases. Their presence became known only after American military personnel were killed, such as in Burkina Faso and Kenya.
See for instance: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-us-militarys-best-kept-secret/
Once a hierarchy has been established, most races are capable of letting bygones be bygones. It’s only Jews that can’t accept defeat. (Or victory, for that matter.)
Consider how almost everyone who whines about the Opium Wars is Occidental, not Oriental. “The Chinese are totes pissed about that!” Really? Because I asked a genuine Oriental, and…
“Let me be offended for you chinks because of the Jardines of the world providing cheaper Opium for your great great great great great grandfather’s leg amputation and dysentery treatment.”
Yep.
>Power had famously declared she was outraged that no American officials had resigned in protest for their government’s inaction during the 1994 slaughter in Rwanda, but a near-unanimous verdict of the International Court of Justice has declared that the population of Gaza is now facing a potential genocide at Israel’s hands, and instead of mere inaction, today’s American government is actually supplying the munitions used for that genocide. Despite these facts, Power still serves as head of USAID and she has expressed no public criticism of her own government’s policy let alone resigned in angry protest.”
Chris Hedges said recently in an interview that Power wants to be Sec. of State, so that may have something to do with it. With most Ivies, careers come first, after all. Still, she’s taking some heat:
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/01/31/samantha-power-usaid-confronted-gaza/)
Agree 100%.
Israel has bribed African countries for decades, extorting money from American gullible to bribe African regime in order to support Israel’s terrorism, genocide and crimes against humanity at the ‘international org.’ Look at the gullible Africans in Sudan who were manipulated by the criminal Jewish mafia to be partitioned, as SOUTH SUDAN, where it came under Jewish control, as businessmen, and their fingers are in South Sudan’s behinds and laugh at them.
I agree with you HammerJack….select a moniker Anonymous and join in……please.
Kagame the African Suharto, once the darling of the US?
Video Link
Dear Ron,
a rueful smile escaped my face when I saw that Dr. Ron, our “Fearless Leader” had at last Pravda’d Paul Kagame’s Rwanda!
Though as a side-note, Tutsism and Zionism are surprisingly close ideologies, so you may not be that far outside of your traditional stomping grounds.
As Slav at comment #82, said, “Tutsi are basically black Jews”. Kagame’s Tutsi ideology reminds one of Zionism:
— The same belief in extreme violence (murder/killings) as the ultimate political tool.
— The centrality of “race” or racial/ethnic superiority (a cloying, oppressive clannishness)
— The use of lies, manipulation, propaganda, ruthless and rank dishonesty as a normative operating principle. Epstein style sex honeypots, blackmail etc are commonly employed.
— Deployment of Zionist tactics like a Hasbara Corps (I honestly came here expecting the comments section to be flooded; perhaps like the ADL they’re wary of the Streisand Effect)
— Like a nervous tick or “Tell”, the strenuous specificity of how its officially described as Genocide against the Tutsi. Just as Zionists have appropriated the term Holocaust.
— Hounding and hunting down their enemies real or perceived (journalists/writers – not that they will attempt something rash — Like the Mossad, they pretend to be disciplined operators — but Ron is definitely on their radar). As but one example, see Judi Rever’s In Praise of Blood.
Otherwise,, the main thrust of your essay is correct: since it was (and still is) a fairly disciplined, therefore organized and systematic military force, Kagame’s then rebel (invading) army, the RPF, committed most of the massacres / killings. Did Hutu’s murder Tutsis? Of course, but on a scale that is dwarfed by that of the RPF. I believe it is a crime in Rwanda to even discuss this, just like “Holocaust denier” is an offense in some (European) countries.
Ron, at this rate, I may live to see a Pravda about Uganda’s Idi Amin. He annoyed some powerful Western interests and they tarred him real good. Its a tiny land, if he had killed that many Ugandans, the place would be teeming with mass graves.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-billionaire-ehud-arye-laniado-died-during-a-penis-enlargement
The HSBC leaks confirm it is a trade in which Israeli dealers are market dominant. The HSBC leaks also there are no shortage of banking expertise when it comes to the confidential looting of poor countries and the dodging of tax in wealthy ones.
Take, for instance, one Israeli-American HSBC account holder called Asher Gertler. He is considered close to Israeli government figures. Gertler’s activities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have generated a great deal of criticism over the years, with nongovernmental organizations accusing him of acquiring mining rights in that country based on his ties to President Joseph Kabila./…/
This suggestion that others were about to flee might refer to another Israeli-Belgian diamond company called Omega Diamonds run by Sylvain Goldberg, Robert Liling, and Ehud Arye Laniado. Again the three had to flee fled Belgium after a whistleblower tipped off authorities to a money laundering and tax fraud scheme.
Belgian tax authorities raided Omega’s offices, seizing $125 million worth of blood diamonds. While the company eventually reached an agreement to pay a $195 million settlement in that case in 2013, the largest ever involving a Belgian company, it is still under criminal investigation in the country for the multibillion-dollar import-fraud scheme. Belgium said Omega owes it an astonishing €4.6 billion.
“Neither Mr Laniado nor Mr Goldberg nor Omega Diamonds were prosecuted before a court of law for tax offences,” says a spokesperson for Laniado and Goldberg. “The tax dispute between Omega Diamonds and the Belgian tax authorities was settled in an amicable civil settlement.” Mr Liling could not be reached for comment by the Irish Times.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2015/02/26/hsbc-israel-and-blood-diamonds/
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/sep/12/americas-secret-role-in-the-rwandan-genocide#img-4
Everyone knows that TUR is a FBI/CIA/NSA honeypot designed to attract the people that these agencies are interested in following and perhaps making the occasional example of.
Ron is complicit with these agencies as the front man.
I read the book by Dallaire the Canadian general in charge of the UN forces in Rwanda. I don’t remember much of the book..
Noted for possible reading
Ron Unz: “I’m still not at all sure about the truth of the matter.”
Thank you for your responses. I appreciate and respect the fact that you will only pronounce yourself after you’ve researched a topic long enough in order to construct an informed opinion. That is just plain and simple intellectual honesty. In any case, I think Gilley’s analysis would be worth a look, one of the reasons being that it performs the same wizardry your own Rwanda article does above: it not only debunks but completely inverts the accepted historical narrative.
Simone Weil used to say that, when you come upon an insurmountable contradiction, you are approaching the truth. A corollary to that might be that, when you come up against an immutable historical consensus, invert it and you may be closer to the truth…
The rest of this comment is rather off-topic and maybe even a meta-topic, but I hope you will bear with me. I would be interested in learning more about the methodology you use when analyzing historical and even current events, such as you did writing your World War II, Holocaust, and COVID articles.
What is amazing to me is that you reach your conclusions without relying on primary sources. I don’t remember ever having read about you visiting any archives, even though I gather you live close enough to Stanford and thus the Hoover Institution, where a treasure trove of original documents are stored. So how would you define your methodology? Or do you just rely on sheer raw brain power? How can you see what others can’t, such as the Harvard admissions ratios based on ethnic background? It’s uncanny.
It would be really helpful if you could guide us in developing a methodology similar to your own. Is there an “Unz method”? Who are the authors that most influenced your approach to historical analysis? What I’m saying is that I would love to learn your “secret” and apply it to my own studies (I’m especially interested in the study of the history of my own country, Brazil). It might help other readers as well, and they eventually could establish what may be called the “Unz school of historical analysis”. Would it be asking too much if you could write an article on this (meta) topic?
Izzie kikebot meamjojo rolls out the go-to trick of That Old Cocksucker J. Edgar Hoover: smearing his apostate enemy Unz as a government informant.
But Unz is clearly the Spinoza of the 21st century, debunking Jew supremacist psychopathy. The Jew State is going the way of prior less virulent Apartheid regimes like the Afrikaners and Rhodies, and Unz will have helped end their atavistic death cult.
“The Jewish mafia have a big steak in the organ-trafficking biz.” Good one!
Interesting, thanks! I do see some parallels.
As it happens, I just got a note from Chanda, saying that he found my article very interesting, and it led him to question a standard historical narrative that he’d always assumed was true.
He mentioned that he’d found and was going to watch a BBC documentary banned in Rwanda that apparently raised some of the same issues.
I haven’t had a chance to look at it myself, but here’s the link:
“while America and every other powerful Western country merely dithered.”
I support dithering.
Britain signed an agreement with Rwanda to send asylum seekers there. Here’s the latest on this:
https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-61782866
100%. Unz has totally destroyed his credibility by publishing cranks and outright holocaust denial. If it’s a deliberate policy it’s very clever, otherwise it’s just plain stupid.
more likely an ADL operation. I suspect they deliberately let it grow for some years and finally take down the entire ecosystem of authors and columnists.
Most of us are quite familiar with the hideous treatment of the Congolese by Leopold’s Belgians a century ago. What I don’t understand is why our own countries are not only tolerating but financing and sponsoring the hideous treatment of the Palestinians, right here and right now.
Crowing about atrocities in faraway places and times sounds like virtue signaling, especially when pressure could be brought to bear against people committing atrocities right now. Even if (or especially because) those now committing the atrocities are so conspicuously privileged.
Typo: should say ‘expect.’
I doubt that’s much of a factor. There are many, many other alternative websites or writers that certainly stay away from any such “touchy” issues, and neither Carlson nor Musk “boost” any of them them either. Indeed, when Musk made some very casual remarks critical of Jews and Israel, he was forced to go on a desperate apology tour, and Carlson would never consider doing such a thing in the first place:
https://www.unz.com/runz/elon-musk-goes-to-canossa/
Let’s take a concrete example. With the possible exception of Arnold Toynbee, David Irving is probably the most internationally successful British historian of the last 100 years, yet I don’t see either of the individuals you mentioned “boosting” his seminal work:
https://www.unz.com/runz/the-remarkable-historiography-of-david-irving/
As for the particular examples you mentioned, this is an alternative website, and following the motto at the top of ever page, we publish a great deal of material with which I strongly disagree. Indeed, here’s an excerpt from the first FAQ:
https://www.unz.com/masthead/#frequently-asked-questions-faq
As an example, if you look at the very first comment of the quite popular Moon Hoax article we ran in 2019, you’ll see I criticized the piece as being totally absurd and ridiculous.
However, there’s well over a million words of my own articles on this website, many of them among the most controversial published either here or anywhere else on the Internet, and that’s an entirely different story. Obviously, all of us make mistakes and errors, but I’d still stand behind at least 99% of everything I’ve written over the last thirty years, notably including the “blood libel” item you mention:
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-oddities-of-the-jewish-religion/
. Good and evil moral story vs cynical, material, power interests
. Witnesses vs material evidence such as documents.
. Censorship, closed inquiry vs openesses, desire to debate.
. Establishment support vs no support or even persecution.
Quite unfortunately you are right.
And here you are completely wrong. The moon landing never happened. The technology to go to the moon directly from the Earth and return still does not exist.
Tucker and Musk have boosted many, many alternative voices, but obviously not holocaust deniers like Ron Unz or, previously, David Irving. And like any good FBI informant, Ron Unz is amplifying criminal stupidity on his website while simultaneously distancing himself from it. Smart.
I don’t care now and I didn’t care then about any of this. I don’t care if every last black African gets slaughtered by their fellows. Not my problem, and much better for the world at large.
Gourevitch is Jewish, so naturally his reporting will be full of lies, for whatever his reasons. Maybe just to get famous and make money. Though the worst part of the great Rwanda dustup was that it foisted the detestable Samantha Power on the world, who has gone on to sow discord and disaster everywhere she goes. A genuine lizard person, vile and disgusting. It’s no surprise she married a toxic Jew herself, even if she isn’t one.
As for Africa, it’s a pox on humanity. Africans are destined to destroy the earth, unless the Chinese stop them.
Thanks for the response. While my initial comment focused on the Congo and this specific pravda article your link to the Occidental Observer piece brings in the larger issue which I have some thoughts on as well.
In the 1960s / 70s there was a nearly universal wave of third world countries nationalizing commodity production. This meant that large commodity companies who had previously owned and integrated the entire supply chain now fractured, and this gave rise to the prominence of commodity trading firms. These firms can mint enormous profits in a matter of hours and sometimes never even interact with the underlying commodity they speculate in. The founders and current leaders of these firms (Glencore, Trafigura, Vitol) are the typical amoral swashbuckling capitalists who often leave these third world countries in worse shape ironically than they would have been under some sort of a profit share w established international commodity companies like Exxon, BP, etc.
While no one in Africa is splitting the atom anytime soon, hopefully, they don’t start noticing the pattern of who is running these trading firms, as a certain ethnic group has founded and run these organizations since their creation in the early 20th century.
There are some funny parallels here with some of the larger topics in Unz’s Pravda series. If these dots were to be connected, and backlash against that ethnic group ensued, would that be considered antisemitism? No doubt trading firms have impoverished and economically crippled the advance of the third world, making them politically unstable to boot. Hopefully, Africa does not catch the same antisemitism bug that the Palestinians have. In fact, the ADL might need to get boots on the ground and open some holocaust museums in that continent just in case such a phenomenon were to occur.
Not sure if this is any help, but here goes.
At around 2005 there was quite a stir in South African literary circles about an Afrikaans translation of a very frank French language book about African issues, with the usual cries of racism or Afro-pessimism triggered. The book, Négrologie : pourquoi l’Afrique meurt or Black Consciousness: Why Africa is Failing, was written by American journalist Stephen Smith and delved into issues just like the Rwandan genocide.
Smith was a traveling correspondent in West and Central Africa, and involved with French newspapers Le Monde and Liberation, so his bibliography is in French, but might be worth a go at machine translating as background to African issues. He wrote a number of books about Africa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Smith_(journalist)
The wiki link to the book Negrologie is in Afrikaans but google translate will take care of that.
https://af.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negrologie
Does Kagame use his stunning, 6’4 daughter as a honeypot? She’s probably the tallest daughter of a head of state in the world.
This is already known Unz what are you doing listing to peace revolution podcasts like cybernetics, technocracy and agenda 21 or the panopticon from Tragedy and Hope.com
I hope that one day Ron will devote his time to the events in the former Yugoslavia where many of the concepts applied to the events in Rwanda are reflected. We also have good texts about it by Edward Herman, such as the book Politics of Genocide (and also The Dismantling of Yugoslavia).
We have a case where the kangaroo court in The Hague declared the events in Srebrenica (now Bosnia) to be genocide, where the original 1,000 Muslim victims in one village were inflated to 8,000 after the conflict between Christian Serbs and Muslims, and the number increases every year in the media.
At the same time, the killing of around 5,000 civilians in the surrounding Serbian villages by Muslim units from Srebrenica, where Western troops were protecting a supposedly unarmed Muslim enclave, is ignored and silenced.
Later, the public statement of the Muslim president, who constantly asked for American intervention against the Serbs, was published, that Clinton told him that a real or fictitious massacre of at least 5,000 Muslim civilians must be organised, in order for the American and Western public to support the direct involvement of American troops in the civil war and the bombing of the Serbs.
Even a law was imposed by the West that criminalises the denial of the genocide in Srebrenica (which is forcibly being imposed in all the countries of the region), like similar laws for the denial of the Holocaust in Western countries. The UK even tried to push through the UN a resolution that the Serbs are a genocidal people, which was stopped by the Russian veto.
Noam Chomsky wrote in the preface of the book:
“Obviously, all of us make mistakes and errors, but I’d still stand behind at least 99% of everything I’ve written over the last thirty years”
followed by…
“Each reader must carefully weigh the logic and evidence backing the viewpoint of each author and decide for himself how much—or how little—of the material to accept”
There is a clear disconnect on your part with these two statements. Readers have called you out on your positions with evidence that clearly contradicts your conclusions, but there is a tendency for you to dismiss them, and in some cases use ad hominem as your cudgel.
Perhaps introspection is not your strong suit?
LOL.
The total collapse of credibility in the MSM has led to the creation of “fake alternative” media outlets, which say much the same thing but package it slightly differently. Since conservatives no longer watch FoxNews, they’re enticed to follow the views of that “rightwinger” Ben Shapiro. Shapiro was the one recently leading Elon Musk around during his global apology tour, much like a poodle on a leash. Those are the sort of “alternative voices” you’re describing.
But take people like Jared Taylor or Kevin MacDonald, who represent somewhat more of a real ideological alternative. Instead of being “boosted,” they’ve been banned by Twitter despite Musk’s free speech pretensions, presumably because the ADL or similar organizations demanded it. Many, many more voices on both the Left and the Right have been similarly banned.
As for the Jewish Holocaust, it’s obviously just a hoax as everyone who’s carefully investigated it has quickly concluded. I’ve pointed this out in numerous articles, including this recent one:
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-israel-and-the-holocaust-hoax/
Actually, I published a series of long articles regarding those events about a decade ago on the twentieth anniversary, totaling something like 30,000 words. Here’s the link to the main article that connects to the various others:
https://www.unz.com/tsaker/special-report-the-truth-about-srebrenica-20-years-later/
And let me add a plug for one of the best English language books on the breakup of Yugoslavia, Fools’ Crusade, by Unz.com author Diana Johnstone. I strongly recommend it.
Very useful article. I would like to add a few books related to the subject, written by French authors :
A – Charles Onana (French-cameroonese author / researcher)
1 – Les secrets du génocide rwandais. Enquête sur les mystères
d’un président, (2002)
2 – Les secrets de la justice internationale. Enquêtes truquées
sur le génocide rwandais, (2005)
3 – Ces tueurs tutsi. Au cœur de la tragédie congolaise, (2009)
4 – La France dans la terreur rwandaise, (2014)
5 – Holocauste au Congo: L’Omerta de la communauté internationale, (2023)
6 – Recent interview (2024-03-04),
B – Pierre Péan (Journalist)
1 – Noires fureurs, blancs menteurs: Rwanda 1990/1994, (2005)
2 – Le monde selon K., (2009)
(K. stands for Bernard Kouchner)
C – Bernard Lugan (Historian of Africa)
1 – Rwanda, Le génocide, L’Église et la Démocratie, (2004)
2 – François Mitterrand, l’armée française et le Rwanda, (2005)
3 – Rwanda : un génocide en questions, (2014)
I owe the late Ed Herman a debt of gratitude for exposing me to the revisionist (and probably truer) story of the Rwandan Genocide. It was around 10 years ago when I first read an article by him over at CounterPunch (where I used to be a regular). It’s positively scary how much power the MSM had over me back in those days. And thank God for the Unz Review!
University libraries have subscriptions to many electronic databases, often hundreds of them. ProQuest is standard for newspapers with the selection depending on what the school/library has paid for. A good university library will usually have NYT plus some selection of other major papers (e.g., WaPo, Boston Globe, LA Times, Chicago Tribune), plus state and regional papers. Other databases will have popular periodicals as well as academic publications.
In addition to the digitized material, there are also “periodical stacks” which are physical copies in bound volumes. Some things might be on microfilm. Our host Ron has compiled a useful collection of periodical collection. The full text is often not available due to copyright but at least you can find something of interest and then figure out how to track it down.
ProQuest, EBSCO, etc all charge (presumably hefty) licensing fees to these institutions. And as far as I know they deal with institutions only. Full-time students or faculty usually have access with their university login, but the licenses don’t cover alumni or the general public unless they are onsite. For an individual, your best bet is probably to visit a library with the access you need (if they offer public computer access). Or for publications that are still active you can just subscribe and archive access is usually included. NYT has their Times Machine tool for example which is available to subscribers.
LexisNexis I’ve never used, but I believe that was favored by journalists. Not sure if that’s still the case or how it differs from the library databases. I would guess that LexisNexis had broad coverage of fairly recent publications.
FWIW, it occurs to me that a number of the “kooks” purveying “9/11 Truther Stories” and “Fake Moon Landing” stories are likely hasbara agents doing a good job of keeping this site marginalized. Or should I just say marginal.
And to be sure, they get a lot of help. Though I hesitate to wade in, I should probably add that I have no trouble believing that Israel (and her partisans) were fully aware of the 9/11 plans in advance, and maybe even helped it along.
Aye, ’tis a slippery slope indeed.
First of all, it was TGL (not me) who mentioned those two individuals. But that’s a trivial point. More substantially, the great works of Toynbee and Irving (as well as of A.J.P. Taylor, who comes to my mind) are relatively far away in place and time, and neither of the “individuals” in question is a scholar by any stretch.
Even more to the point, Irving is now complete kryptonite (however unjustly) and neither of them would be likely to say or do something so suicidal as to associate themselves with him. Even Taylor was marginalized because of “disapproved” conclusions w.r.t. WWII.
Either that’s a truly astonishing track record of being right, or you may be disinclined to revisit your own conclusions with a dispassionate focus. For my own part I wouldn’t want anything much more than 90%, because I consider it an intellectual virtue to change one’s mind when new information comes along. As it will always do.
Meanwhile, I take your point about publishing things you vehemently disagree with, and commend you for it.
It’s much less difficult than you make it out to be. Remember, almost all my articles are about broader trends or historical issues, not who’s going to win the next election. And I tend to be ultra-cautious in my statements and my analysis, generally hedging myself very carefully.
All I can say is that over the years I’ve reread many, many, many of my articles from five or ten or twenty-five years ago, and scarcely ever found a single sentence or paragraph that I wished I hadn’t written or would desperately like to change. So that 99% estimate is merely an empirical one.
Here’s a link to my big American Pravda series, which goes back 15-odd years and totals around 650,000 words. Feel free to go through it if you’d like and find a few Gotchas! that you can hit me with:
https://www.unz.com/page/american-pravda-series/
Suppose for a moment that this was just Britain manoeuvring the smaller Belgian Empire into position for takeover? It’s not far fetched.
So called Rwandan Genocide may well have been a pretext for CIA plot.
The guff spread about Serbia certainly appears to have been international relations fought out at a high level. Why not in Africa?
Thanks for the article Ron,
What are your impressions of General Dallaire from your research? In Canada he was lionized and awarded virtually every accolade and honour our country bestows upon anyone.
Despite that I know the Belgian government sought to convict him for his conduct during the UN mission due to a platoon of Belgians being massacred under his command and him doing little in response.
If Ron were operating a honey pot, would a goofy clown like you
be a reliable source of information? By the way, your unsavory
accusation is libelous since Ron’s reputation is vital to his
business enterprise, and he might sue if you can be extradited
from Crown Heights or its Israeli suburbs.
The documentary highlighted the estimates of Davenport and Stam that a couple hundred thousand Tutsis were killed in 1994 in Rwanda, and that several times more Hutus were killed in the same period. Like the book by Gourevitch did with Tutsi victims and Kagame, the documentary portrayed Hutu victims of RPF violence well as former top RPF officers opposed to Kagame very sympathetically.
It was released in 2014 and identified Tony Blair as the top Western proponent of Kagame and his regime – could that support from Blair have been due to neoconservative influence? Rabbi Shmuley Boteach was shown giving a passionate speech about the Genocide at a twenty year anniversary event in Kigali.
In a 2016 article, we have:
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-kkk-and-mass-racial-killings/
Then, in one from 2018, there is this:
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-adl-in-american-society/
Is it reasonable to assume that many of the Southerners who orchestrated those thousands of lynchings in the late 1800s and early 1900s were members of the KKK, and that many of the lynchees were innocent? If so, that would bump up the KKK’s total body count quite a bit higher than the 15 from the 50s and 60s, but still much, much lower than that of Communists.
I also am just curious about something based on these sections from two of your articles:
https://www.unz.com/runz/white-racialism-in-america-then-and-now/#iq-researchers-and-racial-differences
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-authorized-political-history-of-two-decades/#the-edward-gibbon-of-the-conservative-movement
Did the genteel Louise Day Hicks ever cite the work of hereditarian Arthur Jensen to justify her opposition to the integration of Boston public schools? That would make sense if she did, but did psychological research actually ever make its way into the political debates about race in the 60s?
That may be so but how did Izetbegovic carry that out? By phoning Mladic and asking him to do him and Clinton a favour? There is no evidence that Srebrenica was a false flag in which Muslims killed other Muslims to blame the Serbs, although there were such events elsewhere.
The UN was also supposed to protect the Serbs in Krajina but it allowed the Croats to carry out their ethnic cleansing of the Serbs from enclaves supposedly protected by the UN.
So in 2019 you were totally certain the moon landings weren’t a hoax but you provided only two very weak arguments: the Russians didn’t expose the hoax (they didn’t expose many other US hoaxes either) and “1000s of people were involved” (nope, only very few people were involved beyond Earth orbit). Not very convincing.
Always with gratitude to Ron Unz for the immeasurably valuable service he provides with his site to what might be called “freedom” to become aware, to think, and to discuss — no matter how late we come to the table.
I respectfully beg to disagree about Thomas Packenham, whose “Scramble for Africa”, from my point of view, did actually reinforce much of what Hochschild was trying to do in “Leopold’s Ghost”, which ghost haunts us to this day, in the chaos and bloodshed we’ve become so used to in our western politics and education. We have a linear and hegemonic way of thinking, brought to us by our cartesian scientism and sense of entitlement. Not to mention the dogmatic teaching on how we are supposed to remember our own history, which leads to grave distortion of outlook regarding everything else. Ecco, a punto, David Irving.
Hochschild’s larger goal may well have been the waking up of the grotesquely lazy American reader. There is a multiplicity (multipolarity, if you will) to points of view out there, or ways of reading, that seems somehow lost to even the best educated of American minds. And I think this must be owing somehow to an ideological stranglehold placed on American education early in the 20th c. when public school became mandatory and literacy rates subsequently plummeted and even speaking was strictly censored. Though maybe that got ushered in with Lincoln.
I myself am a Harvard dropout—a very shaming thing in my youth (my grades were A’s), and my great mentor was a Jewish physics professor who was among the first to be cancelled for writing a book called “Physics as Metaphor”. His heroes were Goethe, Joan of Arc, and Owen Barfield. I mention him because his mentorship confirmed in me a wholly other way of reading.
I’m just trying to say that we don’t even recognize the impoverishment of culture that has come to us through the knowledge we think we’re getting through how we read and interpret what we read.
“Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad. Perhaps the greatest history of Africa we westerners might ever have.
Thank you Ron Unz for always encouraging difficult reading and discussion.
Sorry, my phrasing may not have been sufficiently clear.
There were actually three different KKKs, having almost no connection with each other.
The first, post-Civil War KKK was a secret underground army, a little like the IRA, organized to drive out the federal occupation forces and overthrow the Republican governments they’d established throughout the South. I’ve never studied that era, but I assume they killed many thousands of their enemies in assassinations and sometimes pitched military battles. After the Southern states regained self-government, it was disbanded.
The second KKK of the 1920s was more of an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic political movement, and although it had been inspired by the film Birth of a Nation, it was actually strongest in northern states such as Indiana. I think it killed relatively few people, but collapsed due to corruption and infighting.
The third KKK of the 1950s and afterward was a violent Southern anti-black activist organization, formed to oppose the end of legal segregation and black voting rights. That’s the one that David Duke was involved in and the one to which I was referring, with a total of 15 named victims according to Wikipedia, and it continues on in greatly reduced form even today.
That’s why I said I used the word “modern” in describing that Klan, to distinguish it from those previous organizations of the 1870s and 1920s.
I’m virtually certain that she didn’t, and if she had, it would have been a gigantic scandal and probably destroyed her movement. The doctrine of “anti-racism” was very powerful during that period and almost no one would challenge it. For example, the Nixon tapes revealed that he privately discussed the Jensen/Shockley theories on one occasion and believed they were true, but never dared say anything publicly.
What’s even more interesting is that although they were vilified as racists, the white Southern segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s also never dared raise the possibility of racial differences in ability, and northern author Carleton Putnam sharply criticized them for foregoing their strongest argument. I covered that interesting subject in the same article you linked:
https://www.unz.com/runz/white-racialism-in-america-then-and-now/#carleton-putnam-and-the-battle-over-school-desegration
Thank you – I didn’t know that the Klans of those three eras were independent of one another. However, I’d say Indiana is more of a tweener and not fully Northern.
Interesting article. Generally when the ruling class returns, they take revenge. Seeing that today in Ethiopia.
“From wikipedia” the population of Rwanda was 8 million before the genocide, 6 million after (counted emigration as well?) but quickly rebounded within four years. Losing 25% of their population must be one of the greatest genocides (or civil war) in modern times.
Israel would have to kill 500,000 Palestinians for a 25% fall in population in Gaza. Likely they will kill 100,000, and possibly cholera and starvation might kill a similar or higher amount. The Saudi/ Obama war in Yemen led to about 350,000 deaths (war, starvation, cholera) by 2020, but of 30 million people, but only about 1% of their population. Still a genocide?
It presumably would have been less awkward for Northeastern or California conservatives to bring up those theories than it would have been for Southern ones, but they probably would have been called Nazis by progressives if they did that.
Some things are too small to see, and those require little perception and primary sources. Example: determining the original text of historical documents that have been copied through several generations.
Some things are too big to see, and those require much perception and simple observation of daily reality. Example: the death of the large urban area during in the Big MAC ( Municipal Assistance Corporation ) era, 1975-2000, and the long rot from 1975 onward. Much earlier example: the fall of the Roman Empire, not admitted by contemporaries.
Wasn’t it Julius Caesar who invented propaganda?
I was cultivating donors for a project and as a consequence was invited to a small dinner party in a tasteful beachside house. As the red sun sank in the Pacific, the mining-school graduate and entrepreneur sitting next to me told us of his success of obtaining a “lease” in the Andes. The natives, who held formal and informal title refused to negotiate. He boasted that he had hired a military unit to come in and “persuade” the natives to cooperate.
I felt cold.
There are such people.
He called himself a libertarian.
Says an agent provocateur.
I firmly concluded that Tulsi Gabbard is sincere, is the real thing, is antiwar, because whether on leftwing or rightwing blogs there are always multiple brief comments saying that she is sinister and fake.
Like those similarly brief comments that Tucker Carlson is a CIA op. Do those come from cranks, or from saboteurs?
https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/not-so-remote-anymore-2875179.php
I am not sure about Tulsi. She attended Davos a few years ago, the home of the WEF!
I did not say that Muslims killed Muslims. Srebrenica was one of the three enclaves in Serbian territory, deliberately left in order to create provocations with the help of Western troops. Serbs held about 70% of the territory of Bosnia (this is also the percentage of their cadastral ownership of the land, since Muslims as converts mostly lived in cities, while Sarajevo was fifty-fifty)
During three years, the Muslims from Srebrenica (which is on the border with Serbia and was majority Serbian), who were not disarmed, attacked the surrounding Serbian villages, committed terrible crimes (the commander of the Muslims in The Hague described them, he even described how he personally slaughtered a Serbian judge after previously gouged out his eyes and cut off his ears with a knife, but was acquitted (!!!) of all charges) and then fled back to the enclave.
Apparently, the enclaves were created to provoke the Serbs. After three years, the Serbian army decided to conquer those enclaves militarily. It is an area on the border with Serbia and earlier Muslims from other places were evacuated to Serbia where many remained as refugees, and many went to Sweden and other countries. The first enclave (the village of Zepa) was conquered and Muslims were allowed free passage to the largest city under Muslim control (nearby Tuzla).
There were well-armed units in Srebrenica (although they were supposed to be only civilians) and the fighting lasted. The Muslims tried to break through and some succeeded (e.g. the aforementioned commander), while many were killed in the forests in battle and many were captured. The place was conquered and was under the control of the Dutch soldiers. The Dutch evacuated all the women and children in hundreds of buses in Tuzla.
A group of captured Muslims attacked Serbian guards and killed several. In retaliation about 300 (I think) were shot. There were individual revenges by local residents whose families were killed by Muslims, by often crucifying them on crosses or doors and throwing them into the Drina River. There were also rogue units outside the central military command that fought for themselves. One was under the command of the French intelligence service, and they executed some prisoners.
It is believed that around 1000 Muslims were killed, by shooting and in battle. One of those who shot the most was a Croat, Drazen Erdemovic, who confessed to hundreds of shootings in The Hague, but as a Croat he was acquitted of all charges and received asylum in Sweden.
Otherwise, there were also some Croatian and Muslim enclaves in Serbian territory that were loyal, armed, regularly supplied with food throughout the war, and their safety was guaranteed. The number of victims was immediately inflated in the Western press, it was hidden that they were fighters and not women and children, and US public opinion called for the bombing of the Serbs (one of the main roles during the war was played by the NYT led by Chris Hedges).
Muslims were buried in Srebrenica, but people who died a few years before were also brought from cemeteries from other places. The cemetery has become a memorial centre and a venue for performances held every year. The number of alleged victims increased every year, so that it is now around 8,000, and hidden pits are allegedly discovered every year. Many from the list of victims are actually refugees that Sweden received, and they came forward after a couple of years. The director of the Centre even brought his father there, who died a few years earlier in a different town.
The Hague declared Srebrenica a genocide and the West introduced a law on the criminal responsibility of those who deny that it was a genocide. Every year, Western statesmen and thousands of Muslims come to Srebrenica and perform a propaganda performance (otherwise, the Muslim custom, unlike Christians, is not to go to the cemetery after a funeral).
In the same month, commemorations are also held for thousands of Serbian civilians, women and children, in neighbouring towns who were massacred by the Muslims of Srebrenica. No one individual, not a single delegation, has come to the commemoration of the Serbian victims in the last 30 years, nor to the commemoration of the 6,000 killed Serbian civilians in Sarajevo who were prisoners of Muslims.
Reminds me of Paul Singer of Elliott Capital and the Argentinian debt crisis circa 2010-2012.
Having scooped up distressed sovereign notes of the Argentinian government for pennies on the dollar, Singer refused to accept their restructuring deal.
Rather than licking his wounds and dumping the poor investment, he proceeded to contract pirates and steal Argentian shipping assets, strong-arming the financially desperate country into buying him out at 100 cents on the dollar.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/10/some-hedge-funds-only-seem-like-pirates-this-one-actually-stole-a-ship/263266/
For more wild stories of emerging market intrigue, I would highly recommend the book “The World for Sale” by Farchy and Blas.
In the wreckage of the aftermath of the Civil War, there was a near-total lack of southern civilian authority, and in most places no military authority either. The cohort of fighting-age men had been decimated and worse.
The original KKK was formed to address that void. Many homesteads had only women and children on them. They were sitting ducks for all manner of miscreants, not just ex-slaves.
One need hold no brief for the KKK to understand the need for it, at least in the original circumstance. It surely dealt out some rough justice here and there, but I daresay many decent people were thankful for it.
On the non-Holodomor, see https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/vv.html
Mr Unz,
I very much appreciate your work on both this and the holocaust, but isn’t it obvious that both of them are hoaxes?
Rwanda — played out over 100 days, and after the 1st day it would be clear that the Hutus were doing something. Surely the Tutsis would take basic measures like trenches, barricades, boiling water/oil, caltrops, projectiles etc that would turn the ‘genocide’ into a ‘civil war’! The Tutsis might lose a war of attrition, but they’d give as good as they got, no? In fact, the numbers in this civil war would mirror those purported in your article…
Holocaust: Central to the mythology of Auschwitz is filling up a 2000-person room — standing room only — via one small door. This is impossible. Once about 100 jews were in the room, there would be no way to apply pressure. If one mother collapses at the doorway from despair… you have an almost insurmountable bottleneck.
Another interesting article, thanks. It fits with the usual inversion of reality in mainstream Western media for many decades at least that it was the victorious Tutsis who were doing the large majority of the massacring.
All I was asking is how was Clinton able to realise this on the ground. Or he had nothing to do with the Srebrenica massacre whatsoever?
I’ve been commenting for some time that the US and the West is in serious trouble, which will manifest itself in food shortages, abandonment of the cities, breakup of the US, and a few other events, both in the West and in the rest of the world.
So, here’s ZeroHedge and a few other sources as of 2024-03:
* Food: https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/europe-alarmed-enough-begin-wargaming-food-crisis
* Cities: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/terror-threat-nyc-mobilizing-1000-national-guard-troops-subways
Search https://straightlinelogic.com/2023/06/18/ants-at-the-picnic-part-two-by-robert-gore/ for “The urban criminal class” to see what the NYC Subway National Guard is up against.
* breakup of the US:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/what-could-go-wrong-basel-endgame-stress-sparks-rebirth-synthetic-credit-risk-sharing
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/bonds/us-debt-deficit-bond-market-yields-drop-interest-rates-fed-2023-12?op=1
https://www.wnd.com/2024/03/can-america-win-major-war-today-u-s-military-say/
https://www.newsweek.com/texas-border-illegal-immigrants-national-guard-troops-1875622
https://www.newsweek.com/greg-abbott-touts-huge-news-about-texas-border-1875738
My point? The fall of the US is obvious now, but was not obvious from 1946-2008. The fall was so big that it was hard to see, even in the most active areas of the downfall (where I’ve spent much of my time after about age 13 or so). SOME THINGS ARE SO BIG THEY ARE HARD TO SEE. [1]
And that’s what Ron Unz does with his American Pravda series.
My current “too big to see” is the consequence of trade interruption, globally. You commenters who confuse “de-platforming” with “winning” and who confuse “capitalism” with “trade” and regard every exchange as oppressions and regard both as a threat to humanity are now starting to see what happens when trade is stopped.
That’s nonsense. The Tutsis were unarmed, they were outnumbered 7-to-1 by the Hutus, and many of the latter were armed and organized.
There seems very solid evidence that something like 100,000 to 200,000 Tutsis were massacred during that 100 day period, while the remainder fled and escaped. Probably relatively few Hutus died in the fighting. Is it really so implausible that 1000 or 2000 Tutsis were killed each day across the entire country?
But as the heavily-armed rebel Tutsi army moved forward, it began massacring the Hutus, who were much less well organized and armed. Probably at least several hundred thousand Hutus were killed in this process.
Chanda had a chance to watch that BBC documentary he’d located and I’ll take the liberty of passing along the comment he sent me:
I’ve now watched it as well and I fully concur. It seems excellent and fully supports the Herman/Peterson/Black version of what probably happened in Rwanda. I’d strongly recommend it to everyone else:
But here’s what really shocks me. The BBC is as mainstream and establishmentarian a media outlet as anyone could imagine and almost a decade ago they released that long documentary totally demolishing the standard narrative of the Rwanda Genocide. It showed that the truth was probably the exact opposite, exactly what Herman and the others claimed.
Yet it had ZERO impact on the rest of the media and I’d never had the slightest suspicions about the Rwanda Genocide story until Black sent me his article a couple of years ago.
I think this demonstrates that “established narratives” are usually almost totally impervious to even the strongest and most mainstream refutations.
Thank you Mr Unz for this
Your revelations on this subject do not surprise me one bit
Although I hadn’t given the subject much thought over the years
Now it is obvious to me
That any narrative promoted by the mainstream media (Jewish Press) is suspect
The proof is in the pudding with regard to Rwanda and Kagame
It’s is now obvious that Kagame is and was a tool of the West
“But here’s what really shocks me. The BBC is as mainstream and establishmentarian a media outlet as anyone could imagine and almost a decade ago they released that long documentary totally demolishing the standard narrative of the Rwanda Genocide”.
The BBC used to and less occasionally these days make some excellent Investigative Documentaries”
The below is an excellent example.
THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES
The Power of Nightmares is a BBC documentary 3-part film series. The films compare the rise of the Neo-Conservative movement in the United States and the radical Islamist movement, making comparisons on their origins and claiming similarities between the two. More controversially, it argues that the threat of radical Islamism as a massive, sinister organised force of destruction, specifically in the form of al-Qaeda, is a myth perpetrated by politicians in many countries—and particularly American Neo-Conservatives—in an attempt to unite and inspire their people following the failure of earlier, more utopian ideologies.
Part 1 “The Rise of the Politics of Fear”
The first part of the series explains the origin of Islamism and Neo-Conservatism. It shows Egyptian civil servant Sayyid Qutb, depicted as the founder of modern Islamist thought, visiting the U.S. to learn about the education system, but becoming disgusted with what he saw as a corruption of morals and virtues in western society through individualism. When he returns to Egypt, he is disturbed by westernisation under Gamal Abdel Nasser and becomes convinced that in order to save society it must be completely restructured along the lines of Islamic law while still using western technology. He also becomes convinced that this can only be accomplished through the use of an elite “vanguard” to lead a revolution against the established order. Qutb becomes a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and, after being tortured in one of Nasser’s jails, comes to believe that western-influenced leaders can justly be killed for the sake of removing their corruption. Qutb is executed in 1966, but he inspires the future mentor of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to start his own secret Islamist group. Inspired by the 1979 Iranian revolution, Zawahiri and his allies assassinate Egyptian president Anwar Al Sadat, in 1981, in hopes of starting their own revolution. The revolution does not materialise, and Zawahiri comes to believe that the majority of Muslims have been corrupted by their western-inspired leaders and thus may be legitimate targets of violence if they do not join him.
At the same time in the United States, a group of disillusioned liberals, including Irving Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz, look to the political thinking of Leo Strauss after the general failure of President Johnson’s “Great Society”. They come to the conclusion that the emphasis on individual liberty was the undoing of the plan. They envisioned restructuring America by uniting the American people against a common evil, and set about creating a mythical enemy. These factions, the Neo-Conservatives, came to power under the Reagan administration, with their allies Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and work to unite the United States in fear of the Soviet Union. The Neo-Conservatives allege the Soviet Union is not following the terms of disarmament between the two countries, and, with the investigation of “Team B”, they accumulate a case to prove this with dubious evidence and methods. President Reagan is convinced nonetheless.
However, the Islamists see it quite differently, and in their triumph believe that they had the power to create ‘pure’ Islamic states in Egypt and Algeria. However, attempts to create perpetual Islamic states are blocked by force. The Islamists then try to create revolutions in Egypt and Algeria by the use of terrorism to scare the people into rising up. However, the people are terrified by the violence and the Algerian government uses their fear as a way to maintain power. In the end, the Islamists declare the entire populations of the countries as inherently contaminated by western values, and finally in Algeria turn on each other, each believing that other terrorist groups are not pure enough Muslims either.
In America, the Neo-Conservatives’ aspirations to use the United States military power for further destruction of evil are thrown off track by the ascent of George HW Bush to the presidency, followed by the 1992 election of Bill Clinton leaving them out of power. The Neo-Conservatives, with their conservative Christian allies, attempt to demonise Clinton throughout his presidency with various real and fabricated stories of corruption and immorality. To their disappointment, however, the American people do not turn against Clinton. The Islamist attempts at revolution end in massive bloodshed, leaving the Islamists without popular support. Zawahiri and bin Laden flee to the sufficiently safe Afghanistan and declare a new strategy; to fight Western-inspired moral decay they must deal a blow to its source: the United States.
Part 3 “The Shadows in the Cave”
The final episode addresses the actual rise of al-Qaeda. Curtis argues that, after their failed revolutions, bin Laden and Zawahiri had little or no popular support, let alone a serious complex organisation of terrorists, and were dependent upon independent operatives to carry out their new call for jihad. The film instead argues that in order to prosecute bin Laden in absentia for the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, US prosecutors had to prove he was the head of a criminal organisation responsible for the bombings. They find a former associate of bin Laden, Jamal al-Fadl, and pay him to testify that bin Laden was the head of a massive terrorist organisation called “al-Qaeda”. With the September 11th attacks, Neo-Conservatives in the new Republican government of George W. Bush use this created concept of an organisation to justify another crusade against a new evil enemy, leading to the launch of the War on Terrorism.
https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the-power-of-nightmares-13-the-rise-of-the-politics-of-fear/
I agreed with you before I saw your last sentence
10/7 was a true game-changing, squatter colony ending surprise attack
The idea that the Israelis did 10/7 to themselves is beyond absurd.
[Quoting large portions of text from articles rather than just a link is very bad behavior, especially if it’s totally off-topic. Such comments may get trashed and too many of those may lead to your other comments getting trashed.]
Antony Black’s narrative entirely ignores most of the most remarkable data points about Rwanda’s story:
1. An overwhelming majority of Rwanda’s population are Hutus, most of whom were either present in the country in 1994, or whose parents were. This demographic shows near-unanimous support for Kagame’s regime.
2. Rwanda achieved racial reconciliation between Hutus and Tutsis after the events of 1994, to a degree that is almost without historical precedent.
3. The Gourevitch narrative of the events of 94 is supported almost unanimously by both the Rwandan population and by the entire east african region. Meanwhile, the C. Black narrative is popular among the majority of western elites as well as certain groups in Congo.
4. There is a veritable mountain of published eyewitness accounts of mass murder against Tutsis, which, when investigated, tend to be consistent with each other and with observable evidence. Compare this to the near-total lack of eyewintess accounts of mass murder against Hutus, and the fact that the few accounts that do exist are far less consistent with observable evidence or with each other.
All four of these observations are basically the polar opposite of what Black’s narrative would predict.
It mentioned that the former military officers who turned on Kagame and provided valuable information contradicting the standard narrative were hiding out in South Africa and Europe. The standard narrative is so strong in the U.S. that we won’t let prominent Rwandan officials wanted by Kagame’s government hide out here. Maybe we’d extradite them if they came over.
Thanks, I will bear that in mind 👍🏼👍🏼
I laughed out loud at this point. These two grifters would have to be involved at some point.
Wonderful article as always, Mr Unz.
LOL. One wonders if the holo is somehow associated with the homo.
Just as many people, even Jews, didn’t hear much about the Holocaust in the 50s, many people didn’t even know homosexuality existed. If it existed at all, it was a sickness or perversion that respectable people preferred NOT to talk about. So, even people born homos were unsure of their desires because such simply didn’t exist according to the norms of society.
Could Jews have somehow associated silence about homosexuality with silence about the holocaust?
Does it explain the future Jewish agenda of Holo-Homo promotion, not least because the two groups most named as victims of the Nazis are Jews and homos. Never mind the 27 million dead Soviets(and the fact that the Nazi SA was once rife with homos).
In Atom Egoyan’s REMEMBER, one of the most laughably stupid movies ever made, Christopher Plummer hunts down Nazis. In one scene, he comes upon an apparent former Nazi criminal on a deathbed in a hospital and is about to kill him, but the dying man says, “I’m a fruitcake”, and the two men embrace one another most tenderly.
Watch 32:40 in the video below:
https://ok.ru/video/4098342193742
Weimar was certainly associated with Jews and Homos. Maybe Jews after WWII didn’t want to talk about Holocaust and Homosexuality because of its association to the failed Weimer experiment that gave rise to the Nazis that led to the Holocaust.
But later Jews figured bring them out of the closet, first the holocaust and then the neo-Weimerian homosexuality.
So the genocide was against the Hutus.
Wokechoke,
I think this is the real take-away message from the story. The Hutus were being genocided, then fought back, and then were victimized via the press for the last 30 years.
I don’t know if you have heard the rumour in your environment that the Rothschilds have decided that the British monarchy will end its time and that Great Britain will become a republic. They said 1000 years was more than enough. It is also said that Charles and William agreed, but Kate is against it, and her absence (which may be permanent) from the public is connected with this.
Listen Charlie, I have some news for you:
https://www.gettyimages.com.au/detail/news-photo/prince-charles-prince-of-wales-speaks-with-with-sir-evelyn-news-photo/467631086?adppopup=true
There is a good and concise text by Edward Herman about the events surrounding Srebrenica where you can see some details.
EDWARD S. HERMAN – THE APPROVED NARRATIVE OF THE SREBRENICA MASSACRE*
Here is an excerpt from the text:
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11196-006-9031-z.pdf
Another excerpt:
He may be objectively a tool of malevolent others, and he probably is.
This does not entail that he is a self-serving liar, and I see no evidence of that. If you do, what is it?
He seems like an earnest and basically good guy who trusted the system and knows something went very wrong,
At the core of his whole “public story” is that he got sent to Rwanda to do one righteous thing, tried to do it, and got FUCKED by the globalist orgs.
I suspect that is exactly what happened, even if his personal trauma seems to have been subsequently co-opted by the very forces that fucked him.
To Westerners, most African people may look similar, but Africans are acutely aware racial and tribal differences among themselves. Yet absent Western influence, it is doubtful that these differences would erupt into civil war or genocide(TM). American Indians, in contrast, seemed to be constantly at war with each other.
The worst thing that ever happened to some African countries was the discovery of mineral resources. Most African wars that we hear about in the West are primarily resource wars, presented as ethnic strife. To varying degrees, all African wars are misrepresented and the West hears a fictional account, as R. Unz has shown in this article.
The recently-created country of South Sudan, for instance, is the oil-rich part of Sudan, but the world was hearing about ethnic violence in Darfur, a different part of Sudan.
Whatever actually happened in Rwanda, it served as a pretext for this country to permanently station troops in resource-rich DRC (Congo). Presently, a rebel group known as M-23 has forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes in the eastern part of DRC. While some people accuse Rwanda of arming this rebel group, others claim that the group doesn’t even exist and it is a cover for other interests. See: https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/why-rwanda-supports-m23-rebels-in-dr-congos-conflict/ar-BB1iIkEL
The Rwanda situation may be an extreme example, where the victims of the crime are blamed as its perpetrators, but whenever you hear news from Africa, you should assume that you are hearing half the story, and that half is distorted
Congratulations Ron Unz. Your in-depth analysis of the “Tutsi Genocide”, from a real politik perspective contrast sharply with the usual narratives, which often portray Africans political thoughts and actions as merely the result of the “White Mans” oppression and burden or, conversely as, savage massacre is just something Africans do.
Ron Unz, I hope that you will one day apply the same surgical, unbiased analysis to the Israel-Palestinian issue. Specifically, I hope you will take a broader, historical “longue durée” look at the issue. You might discover that the “Palestinian” or the “Israeli” as political actors are not the core of the real political conflict but merely symptoms of a larger resurgence of an Ottoman (Caliphate)-Persian (Follower of Ali) war for hegemony in the Levant-Mesopotamia, and Israel is a nuisance in the way. It’s essential to recognize that there are no Western liberal democracies in the Middle East, including the two reemerging superpowers.
The fact is, if the Arabs had won in ’48, ’67, ’73 (regardless of who initiated the conflicts – this is not an analysis of who struck first or a moral judgment), all Jews would have been wiped out or as many as possible killed, for the main victors (Egypt, Syria, Iraq, etc.) to maintain some sense of international legitimacy. Get any Arab comfortable enough, and they might express this desire without hesitation.
This is not to excuse Israel (as again, this is not a moral analysis), but to emphasize that the conflict with Hamas and Palestinians in general is not about achieving a Western liberal dream of a democratic nation-state for the colonized Palestinian people – this dream adhered to like a religion by the dispossessed former elites of the Palestinian Ottoman province – e.g., Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi – and their naive allies in the Western world.
Instead, it has more to do with the fact that Arabs (including Palestinians), Turks, and Persians share the same drive that compelled Kagame and his gang – and that’s okay, not because its rights, but because its real, because it’s honestly how the real world operates outside our Western Liberal bubble of good non-White colonized and bad White colonizer. And while we’re at it, let’s continue to pretend that the majority population of Israelis “settler state today, and the politicians who determine the state’s Arab and Palestinian policies, are not actually descendants of Arab Jews – but I digress.
Kagame, like only a true cold and calculating political psychopath would, lobbied the UN to change the name from Rwandan Genocide to Tutsi Genocide. He knew all too well that, in fact, most of the millions of Rwandans killed were Hutu, and his soldiers did all of the killing, then continued to kill millions more directly and indirectly after his invasion of the Congo.
There are numerous accounts of his troops during this time also killing Tutsi soldiers who came to fight in Rwanda from Congo, Burundi, and the local Rwandan community (all native French speakers). When your position in power stands on weak ideology grounds and the massacre of so many people, you never want to have too much diversity of experience, language, culture, and upbringing within your own ruling class and military.
To the US, Kagame’s chief sponsor, this gratuitous name changes by his Tutsi and Western spin-masters to further tighten his narrative of just war and rule was a step too far. Even though the America shared the same interest of pushing France out of the Great Lakes region of Africa and making Kagame, their trusted friend, the King of Coltan (and other precious and rare earth minerals), up until today it has refused to comply with the name change and still calls it the Rwandan Genocide – even Susan Rice has the capacity to blush.
Professor Allan Stam and his colleague at the University of Michigan have all but debunked Kagame’s Tutsi genocide narrative as nothing more than a masterclass example of the coldest, most sinister deployment of political and propaganda tactics by an unwelcome and ideologically ethnic supremacist conqueror. Kagame hails from Tutsi royal elites through his mother, who is a first cousin to the last Queen of the Tutsi/Rwanda Kingdom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi0h-EASsSU&t=1990s&pp=ygUvdW5pdmVyc2l0eSBvZiBtaWNoaWdhbiByd2FuZGEgZ2Vub2NpZGUgcmVzZWFyY2g%3D
But to be clear, Kagame’s false narrative was not constructed to convince Rwandans or African observers, as anyone intimately familiar with the Great Lakes region of Africa, from any random shopkeepers in a city in that region to international relations experts, knows what happened. Instead, like any true conqueror, the narrative behind your conquest is crafted not to convince the people but to provide cover and flattery to those who rule and control the moral order of the world.
So, while Hernan Cortes conquered Mexico for God and the Pope and to save the Mexicans from the evils of head-chopping human sacrifice, Kagame invaded Rwanda in the name of the duty to protect, human rights, and to end that most wicked of modern political actions – the genocide of a people. The West’s failure to come to his aid, leaving Kagame to act alone, only serves to elevate him to the status of the holiest of holy warriors in the rules-based order – so long as we forget how he threatened Canadian peacekeepers that his troops would attack them if they intervened to stop the massacre.
In simple terms, this means the majority, if not all, of the over 50,000 skulls on display at the Rwandan Genocide Museum, a site where all dignitaries to Rwanda must visit to pay their solemn respects to the Tutsi victims, are actually skulls of Hutu victims killed by Kagame’s Ugandan-born and raised Tutsi clan-based Rwandan Patriotic Force. This was not only out of hatred for the Hutus but as part of a plan for ethnic cleansing of those regions for future Tutsi habitation, and to eliminate as many future opponents of his ethnic totalitarian regime as possible.
Prof. Stam clearly shows that the path of massacres conveniently followed the line of Kagame’s military conquest, with little to no deviation. When Kagame’s troops finally reached points on the map where Tutsis were slaughtered, their march suddenly and conveniently paused for quite some time before proceeding. Nowhere in the records are there reports of soldiers stopping to administer first aid or take any kind of emergency action to save victims. So one wonders why soldiers in the heat of war would stop at such locations.
If the Hutu’s believed that their local Tutsi neighbors where worthy of death, surely this is because they believed that once and if Kagame’s military took over, the soldiers, and their Tutsi neighbor would put them all Tutsi’s to the machete’s edge. That is to say, if the Hutu’s killed Tutsi’s, they primary motivation was fear of death itself at the hands of either the soldiers or their neighbors of both.
This begs the question – Why would people who are aware that a murderous military is march towards their town with the intention of killing all of them, stick around and engage in the exhausting slog of chopping through the raw human flesh of their neighbors with the use of crude machetes?
And unless one has some experience with such dissection of human flesh, it would presumably be both mentally and physically quite tiring and inexplicable, especially when your sympathetic nervous system is clearly indicating that you should be running for your life.
Well thank you Ron Unz for giving a longer durée and more rational breakdown of the “Tutsi Genocide. Long durée in that, the history of the Rwandan kingdom does go back to at least 1500ad and though you do indicate they lived harmonizes, my guess is that they where no more or no less harmonize than any other ethnic based ruling elite in other parts of the world, and likely worst – so this issue does go back quite some time and so does the arrogance of the Tutsi royalty and the hatred towards them on part of the Hutu masses – But I digress.
Both Antony Black and Herman got all their information from me. I have written extensively on the Rwanda War. The problem with every journalist covering this issue is their refusal to talk to he defence counsel who defended the accused at the Rwanda tribunal and brought out the truth years ago. We are studiously ignored. My client General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, Chief of Staff of the Rwanda Gerndarmerie, was acquitted of 45 counts of genocide, crimes against humanity and he was acquitted because the charges were all fabricated by the US, UK, Canada prosecution and intelligence people that run the tribunal. Ss Boutros-Ghali said in 2004″The Americans are one hundre per cent responsble for what happened in Rwanda.” That is true. That is the big lie -that the US stood by and did nothing when they were ones that instigated everything, There was no genocide against the Tutsis, even Alison DesFroges stated that in testimony in our trial in 2006-she stated the Rwandan government did not commit genocide and it was an impossibilyt since it was a multiethnic government composed of Hutus and Tutsis. The army was also multiethnic, as was the gendarmerie (national Police). In fact my client’s close protection team was composed entirely of Tutsi officers.
It was Kagame and hiis thugs that did most of the killing beginning in 1990 and continuing for 4 years until he launched his final offensive in 1994 -most of the dead are Hutus and Tutsi officers of the RPF told the UN that they killed 2 million Hutus and then claimed they were Tutsis killed by the government. Gourvetch, Power, and all the rest are outright liars. They were no misinformed. They created propaganda to cover their crimes and the crimes of their muderous allies the RPF and Kagame.
But I do not expect anyine here to do any research into the trials and what the evidence was at the trials-. No one is interested in facts, only emotions and propaganda.
Christopher Black
International Criminal Lawyer,
Toronto, Camada
Lead Counsel, General Ndidniliyimana,
International Criminal Tribunal For Rwanda
Counsel to President Milosevic, ICTY
Lisr of Counsel, ICC
I was wondering why Ron published this at all during the Gaza War. I asked myself what does Rwanda have to do with current events and did NOT read this when it was published. I also said to myself, what is there to know–we all know what happened. I was bored today and had time to read and I said if Ron published then maybe I should read this.
Well, I was blown away. Everything I thought I knew–now, I don’t!!!! Never would have thunk that any thing askew but, shiver me timbers, even the Rwanda Huti/Tutsi thing is not what it should be. My hat off to Ron for another stunner. Thank you Ron for your hard work.
This may come as a surprise, even a shock, to you, but the hegemonic narrative promotion agencies (and their oligarch owners) are not primarily motivated by a deep desire to discover and publicize objective truth. Narratives are tools, even weapons — and they want to promote the narratives that best serve their interests.
To reframe your question:
Why would the hegemonic “news” media agencies want to publicize a version of events that portrays Kagame as the protagonist; the “good guy”; the “savior”?
Some might argue that they did so because he was a useful tool of the Empire. See:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=kagame+cia+asset&ia=web
More specifically, as “question” mentioned in comment #6:
When the RPF launched its [1990] invasion, Kagame, then a senior officer in both the Ugandan army and the RPF, was in Kansas at the United States Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, studying field tactics and psyops, propaganda techniques to win hearts and minds. But after four RPF commanders were killed, he told his American instructors that he was dropping out to join the Rwandan invasion. The Americans apparently supported this decision and Kagame flew into Entebbe airport, travelled to the Rwandan border by road, and crossed over to take command of the rebels.
(https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/sep/12/americas-secret-role-in-the-rwandan-genocide ]
Others might point out that Kagame has always been deeply embedded in the structures of systemic tribalism:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170331094233/https://www.timesofisrael.com/kagame-hails-rwanda-israel-bond-at-aipac/
https://forward.com/israel/195368/rwanda-leader-paul-kagame-gets-jewish-embrace-bu/
https://web.archive.org/web/20170714184720/https://www.timesofisrael.com/rwandas-kagame-visiting-as-israel-looks-to-boost-africa-ties/
To an extent that is almost comical at times:
A few minutes into the first game of the Western Conference semifinals, between the Golden State Warriors and the Houston Rockets… President Paul Kagame of Rwanda arrived with an entourage of about a dozen people…
The league had provided Kagame with tickets in thanks for his efforts developing the game of basketball in Africa. “President Kagame and his family are very knowledgeable N.B.A. fans,” league commissioner Adam Silver noted
But if you insist on framing the question as “Why don’t the so-called ‘news’ media publicize the most truthful version of events? That’s what they’re ‘supposed’ to do!”… you’re never gonna get there.
Some might see a parallel here:
Kagame and his lieutenants have succeeded in framing any acknowledgment of their own crimes as a further martyring of their ethnic community, equating the denunciation of crimes against humanity with the denial of a genocide. Whenever they are challenged, Kagame, his lieutenants, and many international supporters brandish the accusations of “racism” and “denialism.”
When prominent French investigative journalist Pierre Péan published Noires fureurs, blancs menteurs, his pioneering 2005 book on the R.P.F.’s crimes, the French association SOS Racisme filed a lawsuit, accusing him of “inciting racial hatred.” Testifying in court, Dominique Sopo, president of the association, solemnly declared, “To evoke Hutu blood is to defile the blood of the Tutsis.”
> Walter Duranty of the New York Times was awarded the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for his Soviet coverage that dishonestly refuted any such circulating rumors.
That’s certainly untrue. Although Duranty later in the decade did a cover-up job over the Moscow Show Trials, the accusations about his reporting in the early part of the decade are false.
One of the more notable Cold War tracts of the 1960s, Dana Dalrymple, “The Soviet Famine of 1932-4,” Soviet Studies, Volume 15, Number 3, 1964, carries the table on p. 259 entitled “Table 1: Estimated Russian Famine Deaths, 1933” and in the second line contains “Estimate made or reported by … Walter Duranty … Estimated number of deaths … 2,000,000+”. When we look on the next page we see listed as the second note: “Walter Duranty, ‘Famine Toll Heavy in Southern Russia,’ New York Times, August 24, 1933, p. 1 (computed from figures given by Duranty).”
Later scholarship from the archives has shown that 2.6 million Ukrainians died in excess because of the famine: Jacque Vallin, France Mesle, Serguei Adamets & Serhii Pyrozhkov, “A New Estimate of Ukrainian Population Losses During the Crises of the 1930s and 1940s,” Population Studies, Volume 56, Number 3, November 2002. So, the figure of “2,000,000+” implied by Duranty’s original report is not drastically out of line with later research.
What is true is that while the media of Joseph Goebbels and William Hearst kept pushing stories of an ongoing famine in the USSR all the way through 1935, Duranty correctly noted that the harvest of 1933 had brought an abundant crop and the famine ended with the summer of 1933. It was the Hearst press which claimed in 1935 that someone named “Thomas Walker” had conducted trips all across the USSR throughout 1934 and had brought back photos of an ongoing famine. The photos were traced back to 1921-2 during the Russian Civil War and it was established that “Thomas Walker” was an invention of Robert Green who had not taken any such trips through the USSR in 1934 and never saw such a famine.
People in the 1930s who debunked these phony stories about a famine going on past the summer of 1933 were quite right in doing so. Douglas Tottle’s book, Fraud, Famine and Fascism, covers a lot of details of not just the phony stories spread by the Hearst press in 1934-5, but also the way that such stories were later picked up and used uncritically by Cold Warriors like Dana Dalrymple, Robert Conquest and James Mace. Today, Mark Tauger is the leading expert on the famines of 1931-3.
Thanks for your note and I’m very glad that you somehow became aware of my article.
I consider myself a well-informed individual, and yet I’d never once suspected that there was anything “fishy” in the story of the Rwandan genocide that that been so widely covered in all my newspapers and other mainstream media sources. That’s why I was so surprised by the material contained in your brother’s article when he contacted me a couple of years ago and suggested that I consider republishing it.
But the biggest shock has been my discovery in the last couple of days that in 2014 the BBC had broadcast an hour-long documentary on the subject, interviewing many of the key figures and fully taking your position on those 1994 events. There are few global media outlets as mainstream and respectable as the BBC, yet none of those powerful conclusions were ever covered in the media outlets I relied upon.
If the BBC essentially declares that the “Tutsi Genocide” was a hoax and the rest of the media ignores it, that’s really quite remarkable.
The documentary was only shown on BBC2 and only once, but did create a stir in Britain and Rwanda: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/oct/24/bbc-rwandan-genocide-documentary. Nevertheless, without the copy on Vimeo the documentary would no doubt have disappeared completely.
Dear Christopher Black, many thanks for your important and impressive work. I have seen several of your presentations and interviews and they are all very powerful.
I don’t know if he found out because of me, but I was watching a live stream on YouTube today in which Chris Black was appearing, and I chatted a link to your article. I don’t know if it was allowed through, or if he had heard about it another way, but maybe he learned about it that way.
Self-serving, because he presents himself as a caring man who tried to do the right thing. But he wasn’t. He covered for the US: to this day, he claims it was US “inaction” that was to blame. No, the whole thing was a plot, not an accident, and the US was behind it.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for everything you did to make the truth about the events during the break-up of the former Yugoslavia known to the public, as well as for your participation in the committee for the defence of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, who was killed in The Hague, as one of the first victims of the New World Order, because he fought against aggression against his country.
I am sure you are in contact with another Canadian, General Lewis MacKenzie, the commander of the UN contingent in Bosnia in 1990, who was one of the few bright spots of the Western presence in the events of that time and who also did a lot to make the truth heard in the sea of lies and unprecedented propaganda of the Western media about the events in Bosnia, so please convey our greetings and our gratitude to him as well.
For other readers, just a few items from the agenda of the aforementioned international committee, whose members are people of impeccable reputations and various professions, who share integrity and the fight for justice and freedom, which continued its work even after the assassination of President Milosevic:
1. Defence and promotion of International Law, equality of nations and people
2. Exposing the imperialist crimes, especially aggressions, occupation and the policy of Neo-colonialism
3. Exposing the imperialist propaganda to demonize people, countries and their leadership in preparing to wage wars
4. Exposing the deceptive ideas of “Humanitarian intervention”, “Responsibility to Protect”, “Pre-emptive War” and other euphemisms of aggressive wars
5. Exposing the concepts of “Free Trade”, “Free Movement of Capital”, “Free Financial Speculation” and all racist and chauvinist ideologies as criminal tools of suppression with genocidal consequences
6. Promotion of struggles for national sovereignty, liberation and independence
7. Promotion of struggles for social justice and progress
8. Promotion of resistance to US/NATO/EU aggression and the “New World Order”
9. Demanding the abolition of NATO as an aggressive, criminal and terrorist organization
10. Demanding an end to the occupation of Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans and to imperialist warfare in Middle-East and Africa
11. Exposing the misuse of judicial means to legitimize aggressions, economical and political suppression
I quite agree. The events were clearly not black and white and we will never get a full picture of what happened.
What is more important is what Kagame did since he took power. Did he work to improve the lives of Hutu and Tutsi alike?
Did he favour one over the other?
These are the more important questions.
Perhaps my own biases (and I presume yours) betray an eastern view of such events. Where we care more about whether a government performs to serve the people, rather than how it got into power in the first place.
Oct 7th Hamas “raid”? nuff said
Acutally, he pretty directly blames the UN department headed by subsequent Nobel Peace Prize winner Kofi Annan.
I actually agree that the “US inaction” story is a subterfuge used to subsequently justify disastrous adventurism (Iraq, etc).
And yes the whole thing was very likely a plot fostered with the connivance of bad actors in the US intel/security apparatus.
It’s quite possible to see the Rwanda case as an example of the CIA retooling ways to explain their savage little wars. Rwanda strikes me an an excellent place to figure out a way to test doing a genocide on some settled group of people no one else cares about or can even access.
Sam Power might well have used the genocide story as a cover for a backed CIA coup in the region. The case became a model for later wars. Stir up massacres and blame the other side for what you call a genocide. Reap the rare Earth metals and other resources at cheaper prices. It’s not like anyone outside the region understands anything about Central Africa. Perfect test site.
“If the BBC essentially declares that the “Tutsi Genocide” was a hoax”
Let’s be more precise.
Rwanda’s Untold Story, broadcast on BBC2 in 2015 and produced by a current affairs team, investigated a claim that the Tutsi Genocide was a hoax.
The BBC , as an entire news organization, did not “essentially declare” the event as a hoax. It simply provided an alternative perspective.
Rather than post in ignorance, why not instead read ‘Shake Hands With The Devil’ by Ground force Commander Lt. General Romeo Dalliare? In it you’ll find the sadistic failures of the UN, Slick Willy Clinton, Susan Rice, Madeleine Albright and several others.
After weeks of begging the UN to supply adequate forces to deter the impending genocide, they instead scheduled a ‘meeting’ for at least another month away.
Slick’s input was his issuance of a directive to US diplomats NOT to refer to the machete deaths of 800,000 Rwandans as a ‘GENOCIDE’…Read the book and stop your nonsense, ‘Hotel Rwanda’ was fiction…but it was obviously easier than actual research.
Noted for reading!
Congratulations on digging up the possible truth about 1994 Rwanda where I confess to having shared the genocide of the Tutsis version and extrapolated too much from the Canadian general having apparently, and indeed actually, made justified pleas to the cynical Pres Clinton to do something serious to stop the slaughter.
Before I return to tell you whom you should have started listening to on Russia and Ukraine before you leapt in with complete ignorance to give credit to what are now clearly enpugh paid Russian agents like MacGregor and Ritter I pause to take you up on that amazing – delusional – 99%. (I am amazed that you can’t see your mature intellectual self scoffing at anyone claiming 99% certainty on any empirical – non mathematical – judgment on anything at all complex).
So…. you have hardly got off ground zero.on at least these important mstters
1. 9/11
2. US rogue actors started the Covid 19 pandemic
1. You slipped out of making any seriously argued case on 9/11 by the slick assertion that there were at least 20 flaws in the official story of “how” – and presumably what happened – so the key question was “why” and (therefore who was motivated by the reason why).
Accordingly you got nowhere near establishing that the twin towers were brought down by demolition rather than the weakening of structures by fire, let alone the lunatic idea that the plane aimed at the Pentagon and flown by a professional pilot didn’t hit the Pentagon though a missile did. The fact that bringing down WTC 7 was contrary to any plan to blame fanatic Arabs you failed even yo comment on.
Sure you publicised the justified suspicion that Mossad knew more than was reliably conveyed in detail to George W. Bush but didn’t show that you recognised that the official inquiries had many cover up motives other than any involvement by Israel. I habe no problem in agreeing that many Zionists /Israelis would have been quick to see advantage for Israel in what had to be presumed to be an Arab terrorist act. But you completely failed to asess what Mossad’s calculated risk taking would have extended to. Rubbing their hands at seeing the prospect of America suffering a major attack by Saudi terrorists is one thing, and they might have even given some deniable help, but taking even a small risk that something could go wrong and Israel be blamed for killing thousands of Americans is at least 95% improbable.
2. On Covid 19 your rogue actors theory has clearly run out of steam. That is not surprising when you made the key to it your “smoking gun” which you have implicitly conceded didn’t exist because you have not responded at all to repeated promptings to use FOIA (or questions asked in Congressional committees for example).
“Established narratives” indeed. There are so many and they slide from the time saving repetition which might be explained by “I had always believed that splendid romantic story of grandpa and grandmas wooung ending as one would have expected of such devout Christians in their marrying long before mother was born”. And then the same time saving applies mor widely – sensible enough for most people acting in a way they think is good for them or, like most if the people they know, good for their country or identity group.
In short most people don’t have time, interest or energy to examine many of the truths they are quietly assuming.
I’m sorry to say my approbation of your digging up the possible truth about the origins and facts of Rwanda’s “genocide” was premature. You really should have done more homework. Googlewould have led you to
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_about_the_Rwandan_genocide#:~:text=The%20Land%20of%20Skulls%20(2021,genocide%2C%20Directed%20by%20Felicia%20Middlebrooks.
The long list of documentaries does not even mention the BBC’s “Rwanda’s Untold Story”. Nor does another list of the “best documentaries on Rwanda”. Google does show its Vimeo version but it surdly must prompt some thought about why it is not even mentioned in Wikipedia. You are facile at drawing conclusions from what you thought was a strange absence of mention of the Holocaust by war leaders in their memoirs/histories. No doubt you can find distinguishing features but not of course if you haven’t even discovered the problem. I shall myself inquire of a close family member who knew Fergal Keane very well during the time they were both making films for BBC Panorama
about what he learned on the spot in Rwanda in 1994 which was the basis for his first Rwanda documentary mentioned in Wikipedia. Apparently he now suffers PTSD and includes 1994 Rwanda in the blame. Not that I am accusing you of denying the possibility of that)
I have tagged MacGregor and Ritter as pretty obvious paid Russian shlls – now if not always. I rely on what they say and in what media.
You have repeatedly branded Patrick J. MCNally as an ADSL or similar paid shill and I grant you that the volume and quality of his comments on TIR does allow questions to be raised. However, has it not occurred to you that he may be using the research he has been doing and the formulation of arguments to prepare for some relatively novel publishing venture or maybe higher degree thesis which would as much as anything else be an attack on you and TUR, or just some of your bad history? He has declared himself to be the son of an Irish father and Polish mother – almost certainly true even if “Polish” is the common euphemism **. I think that requires at least that you drop the inverted commas you sometimes place around his name.
** Yes, I know, I know; “euphemism” implies that it is insulting to call someone a Jew.
Mr Unz should further read ‘In Praise of Blood’ by Judy Rever and ‘America’s war on Democracy in Rwanda & DR Congo’ by Justin Podur as well as watch the BBC documentary ‘Rwanda’s Untold Story’ which though a limited hangout features professor Allan Stam
In the Preface of ‘Enduring Lies’, 2014, Prof. Edward S. Herman and David Peterson mention you and others who were essential in their research into the matter:
I’m glad you enjoyed the book I had mentioned, i had thought it very convincing back when I read it and am glad to see you felt the same way.
A newer book, from 2018, ‘In Praise of Blood’ by Canadian journalist Judi Rever, appears to make much the same case. Ain’t read it yet, but here are a few snippets from the introduction, aptly titled ‘AGAINST THE GRAIN’:
Back to trying just to be helpful by drawing attention to something in the MSM you would have missed but is at least relevant to the discussion of how “established narratives” fare.
Have a look at this.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-11/israel-insiders-gaza-war-four-corners/103554014?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=other
I didn’t see the program but my Google symbol on the left of its search bar led me to it.
Kensington Palace is facing serious questions for releasing a photograph of the Princess of Wales and her three children that appears to be manipulated. The image was supposed to quell rampant speculation about Catherine’s wellbeing, but it has sparked a fresh frenzy with global news agencies retracting the picture.
(2 min)
And now I do return to
Without listening to it all I am pretty sure it is the same address to a private club audience I head last Friday where I found myself sitting nect to my friend of Ukrainian refugee lineage who after being a full professor [of finance from memory] in his 30s taught sn MBA course briefly in the Soviet Union and was/has been an investment banker and consultant for decades. He has been studying Ukrainian history and general affsirs for 60 years he tells me and I sent him the link above to see whether he had reservations I should pass on to you.
His reply was
This is his article.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/historical-myths-caused-the-russianukrainian-war-not-nato/news-story/cf9ec88aa3c0d38047e76bce77d3af32
He was less enthusiastic about even the latest address by Professor Paul Dibb who had a most impressive career in intelligence and defence policy before retirement to academe. As Dibb freely admitted he had been confined to Russia [when still allowed into what is now the Russian Federation from which he was I think banned] never visited Ukraine and was very csreful in what he claimed knowledge of. Still I suggest that the idea of starting your learning process with people like your Russisn paid shills is very damaging to your credibility.
Dibb can be listened to at
And…. Wow! I have only just found this commentary on it that my friend sent me:
What a SORDID mess of Banderite lies. What is it about the Banderites that attracts your allegiance so strongly?
Some of the lies are quite impudent. The USA DID promise NOT to extend NATO eastward-that is undeniable, but where would the Atlanticists be without their lies? Russia is as much a democracy as any NATO member, but the West doesn’t like the results ie Putin elected, so they lie, as ever.
There is NO ‘genocide’ in Ukraine, just as there is none in Xinjiang, but where would you be without your lurid lies, Ooze? There WAS a peace agreement arranged in Turkey very early on, but it was nixed by Johnson as Washington’s messenger boy. As for negotiations, Russia is in a quandary, because, as we know from Minsk I and II, the West cannot be trusted at all.
What ‘war crimes’? We KNOW that Bucha was the Banderites killing Russia-supporters, and blaming it on Russia. We know that the ICC sewer sank to its lowest ebb, so far, with the ludicrous lie that rescuing children from a war-zone was ‘kidnapping’. Otherwise Russia has been pretty careful not to target civilians, and some, at least, were Banderite false-flags.
Your claim that almost entirely Russian Crimea did NOT welcome liberation from the Banderite fascists is total bull-dust, and the assertion that they were ‘violent’ seems a total invention from a rapidly decaying mind. Further proof for terminal dementia, or worse, is your denial of Nazism and fascism in the Banderite regime. The pictures of Banderites replete with Nazi salutes, swastikas and Wolfsangel inscriptions, and celebrating, EVERY year, the genocide of Poles by their predecessors in Galicia in 1943-4, are numerous, but poor old Gauleiter Ooze denies it all.
In fact, Russia, NOT ‘Putin’, tried for years to find a peaceful accommodation, but the West was ALWAYS intent on using The Ukraine as a forward base for the destruction of Russia. Finally, as Banderite shelling of the Donbass rapidly increased, preparatory to a final ethnic cleansing of the ‘Moskali cockroaches’ as your Banderite idols call Russian and Russophones, Russia struck. A quick victory would have been a blessing but thugs like you have preferred to sacrifice 500,000 young Ukrainians, SO FAR, and yet you want MORE blood. Insatiable doesn’t do it justice. The Ooze will fight to the last Ukrainian.
Ha, ha, Ooze. The Zionazis so COMPLETELY control the USA that Bibi could stand in Times Square and spray the locals with an Uzi, and the Congress invertebrates would still give him twenty standing, ten kneeling and six fully prostrate and ululating ovations. The MOSSAD, Jewish sayanim, and US elements did 9/11, and the Saudis were nothing but the patsies, the Lee Oswalds of the show.
And the Jewish billionaires now have their stooge, Milei, the wannabe Jew, wrecking the economy, whereupon they’ll get the return on their investment in massively financing his election, by buying up the country wholesale, just like they did in the Soviet Union. Nowhere is safe from the predators
You strike mecas both a fantasist and as credulous and that nothing you write can be accepted as true. And I found a good preliminary test when my eye lit upon this, in your comment
Total BS is it not? Csn you give itany substance at all? Of course it is nonsensical to say that “the West” makes any laws but set that aside for the moment.
Interesting comparison. Can you give actual evidence of the amont of support he got from Jews?
BTW what do you make of the – to me – bizarre coversion of Evan Thornley to Orthodox Judaism? I nrver met him but seem to remember that his becoming CEO of Better Place in lieu of Shai Agassi caused me to invest and lose the lot. Just checking on that last name brought to my attention the Palo Alto origin of the Israeli company!
There is one thing to enjoy in all that harangue and that is the additional evidence that at least one MM must be a clever Ron Unz created bot.
I really don’t like insulting people for being exceptionally gullible and dim-witted, but individuals such as yourself sometimes give me little choice. You wrote:
The BBC documentary on Rwanda exists. I watched it a week ago. It’s up on the Vimeo platform and I linked it upthread in one of my comments, so that you and anyone else can watch it as well.
Your response is that since it’s not mentioned in Wikipedia, it can’t possibly exist, or at any rate it can’t have any value so we should ignore it.
Have you ever considered that perhaps it’s not mentioned in Wikipedia because “certain people” don’t want anyone to become aware of it? After all, it totally destroys the reputation of an important African leader strongly supported by America and also a vast number of very influential journalists and policy makers who’ve spent thirty years promoting a gigantic genocide-hoax.
I always find it difficult to believe that anyone could possibly be as dim-witted as you regularly pretend to be, so perhaps you’re just playing a joke on all of us.
Maybe I shouldn’t answer you since you have no intention of reading my comments because ‘nothing you write can be accepted as true’.
But still, because of your tender age, because you were the last to see PM Holt before his Portsea diving, and because you always find a way to to make Ron laugh, I will write few words. Btw, if you find even one mistake in my comments, I’ll take you to the Flower Drum for lunch as soon as I get there, or maybe I delegate that to mulga. What key piece of evidence did you find? Let’s see:
What is incorrect here? Is it incorrect that the Kangaroo Tribunal in The Hague declared Srebrenica to be genocide and that it explained this with the judgements of Ratko Mladić and other Serbian officers sentenced to life imprisonment?
Is it true that there is a so-called Quinta consisting of 5 western ambassadors (US, UK, Germany, France) which is a de facto colonial administration in Bosnia which nominally has three co-presidents (Muslim, Croat and Serb) with insignificant powers and two almost independent entities (Serbian Republic and Muslim-Croat Federation) with separate presidents and governments.
That Quinta illegally appointed a representative, a German, without a UN mandate, who acts like the colonial governor of Bosnia, illegally establishes and annuls laws, tries to replace the president of the (Serbian) entity, interferes in all affairs.
Since the end of the war 30 years ago, they all support the Muslims, although they are officially neutral, because the Muslims are carrying out the Western agenda, while there is a lot of pressure on the Serbian Republic due to close ties with the Russians and Putin, with whom their president meets 2-3 times a year.
Now they are trying to transfer the entity’s property to the central Bosnian government, which has little authority, which would deprive the Serbs of forests, roads, mines and the entire infrastructure. Due to resistance to this and cooperation with the Russians, Quinta is trying to take the Serbian president to a (Muslim) court and sentence him to prison and eliminate him from politics (similar to Trump).
Under the influence of Quinta, the Muslim parliament introduced a law on the denial of the genocide in Srebrenica, so that those who deny it are sent to prison. They also want to use it to put the president of SR in prison. They impose the law on the neighbouring countries of the region (for example, the Montenegrin puppet government adopted it), including Serbia, about which there is a big fight.
Because of the global agenda, the US is trying in every way to provoke a conflict in Bosnia, they support Muslims and announce their (and Kosovo Albanian) arming, they fight against “malign” Russian influence. I wouldn’t be surprised if they try to kidnap the Serbian president (a plan was revealed to do it on an uninhabited open road while travelling between cities as the Americans and the UK still have troops in Bosnia).
A month ago during the anniversary celebrations of the Serbian Republic and a parade of police and others service which was attended by a large number of people, the American F16 flew low over the heads of thousands of observers in the centre of the Serbian capital. The international public is not well acquainted with the earlier and current events in Bosnia, where America is trying to start a new conflict and divert attention from Ukraine and Gaza but after all, these people can add 2+2, and no one is as such moron as you, although you can justify that with your dementia.
If I remember right, Jared Diamond, in his book on the collapse of civilizations, made the argument that the Rwanda genocide was due to overpopulation at the same time as a crop failure. Diamond’s book had extensive footnotes, so I don’t think it can be dismissed. Diamond’s book is the only alternative explanation to the Rwanda events I have seen.
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
Of course you completely fail to deal with my specific objection to your sloppiness but I read what you had to say with interest. I know very little about it all and, as I hae three bright Serbians working for me, one from Serbia, I shall ask them what they think.
You arw so patbetically obtuse in your ill considered insults. Itcis simply false for you to say
FALSE FALSE FALSE and from a smart person like you wilfully false.
After I had praised your article I owed it to intellectual honesty to retreat a little when I discovered that you had obviously got excited by something that suited your prejudices and not done much homework.
The par beginning “Have you ever condidered” is so obvious and predictable – and maybe substantially true, but an extended analysis along those lines belonged in your article
What is your specific objection or question? I think you know very little and you simply don’t know what question to ask.
Again your intellectual limitation or sheer bloody minded pugnacity is showing because I did make it clear that I knew little about what you claimed to know and may indeed know quite a lot. So I will ask my Serbs to evaluate what you say for truth and weight. The question could be “do you see it as mostly right or mostly bullshit?” if you want to know what question I might finally formulate
Perhaps I misunderstood you, but I don’t think so.
The reason my article didn’t mention that Wikipedia had ignored that documentary was obviously because I’d been totally unaware of the documentary when I wrote my article. Indeed, I specifically explained that a reader had afterwards brought the documentary it to my attention. So it sounds like you didn’t actually bother reading my article or even the text of my comment.
Aren’t you aware of the evidence from silence? An hour-long 2014 BBC documentary that totally demolishes the “official narrative” of the Rwanda genocide is a very big deal, yet it’s never mentioned anywhere in the 21,000 word Wikipedia article on those events or in the Wikipedia listing of 37 Rwanda films and documentaries. Most of those latter were by obscure film-makers and the only ones by BBC Panorama were produced just after the genocide, long before the true facts came out in 2014 during the international war crime trials and with the defection of Kagame’s senior collaborators.
So on the face of it, the BBC documentary I watched was vastly more credible than any of the ones on the list, yet it’s completely missing.
Everyone knows that Wikipedia is completely under the control of PR firms, Intelligence agencies, and activist lobbies. The fact that Wikipedia omits any mention of that BBC documentary demonstrates how powerful and explosive it was.
It’s not a problem that you know little about it, especially since it’s the most censored thing in the last 30 years. Even if it wasn’t censored, you still wouldn’t have to know, nor would I think that you are intellectually limited, but then that’s how you should position yourself and not patronisingly think that ‘it is nonsensical to say that “the West” makes any laws’.
By coincidence, I had the opportunity to independently meet and spend some time with Scomo the Shark (and his wife) and Bill Shorten, but I don’t think I know better how Holt disappeared while diving. I’m really interested in what those bright guys will tell you (optionally, what is their profession)?
I shall see if I can find time to watch the BBC documentary carefully and see if it is potent enough to have justifiably swallowed it without further sceptical assessment. Prima facie we have both fired off prematurely and both have the excuse that that Rwanda isn’t important enough to us to labour over it too much.
No partulicularly relevant profession but all professional people whose sympathies are those of intelligent Orthodox Serbs and prefer to keep out of arguments about Ukraine and Russia.
Thanks for this piece I had no idea of the facts.
I was a bit taken aback when, in a couple of places you seemed to feel America had a duty to “act”.
It was grim reading but this piece toward the end made me smile:
Wasn’t Abraham Lincoln the greatest mass murderer of Americans?
Perhaps the comparison is apt.
“An hour-long 2014 BBC documentary that totally demolishes”
In your opinion.
“the “official narrative” of the Rwanda genocide is a very big deal, yet it’s never mentioned anywhere in the 21,000 word Wikipedia article on those events or in the Wikipedia listing of 37 Rwanda films and documentaries”
Perhaps you didn’t read my past comment on this or you glossed over it or , just as likely, you may even outright ignored it because it doesn’t fit your narrative.
—Rwanda’s Untold Story, broadcast on BBC2 in 2015 and produced by a current affairs team, investigated a claim that the Tutsi Genocide was a hoax. The BBC, as an entire news organization, did not “essentially declare” the event as a hoax. It simply provided an alternative perspective.—
“So on the face of it, the BBC documentary I watched was vastly more credible than any of the ones on the list”
Which, again, is your opinion.
“A newer book, from 2018, ‘In Praise of Blood’ by Canadian journalist Judi Rever, appears to make much the same case.”
About that book. Looks like it has serious flaws in research.
https://francegenocidetutsi.org/ReviewInPraiseOfBlood.pdf
For example, the author contends that the RPF employed Nazi style death camps. That would appear to be a dilemma for you, as she is acknowledging an event that you claim didn’t happen. Does she lose credibility as a result?
Then again, it’s a female author. You’re not convinced that they possess the intellectual chops to handle such a meaty topic.
“Wasn’t Abraham Lincoln the greatest mass murderer of Americans?”
No, Jefferson Davis.
You endanger your credit and poential influence by spreading youeself too thin and then blustering when even someone glad to be given new information about the Rwandan genocide and its sequelae in the media and official stories can’t help seeing some problems.
I am glad to have been given a headsup on Rwanda’s President Kagame whose real peronality and deeds are relevant to what the government of the UK where a number of my family members live has been trying on.
But, as too often I have detected you getting excited and promoting exaggerated confidence of something that has excited your prejudices and you have wasted my time as I begin to see problems which I need to follow up, since you haven’t.
I couldn’t get your link to the BBC 2014 documentary to work properly but found another source. Sure it is interesting to know that Kagame and his Uganda based rebel army may have been responsible for shooting down the Hutu President’s plane (though not apparently for murdering the Hutu female PM, as you don’t say) but a little research which didn’t disdain the despised Wikipedia which you only quote when it suits your case would have found this:
True you have told off some ignoramus who didn’t show sufficient awareness of the brutal slaughter of tens of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus but you fail tobacknowledge, and acknowledge the importance of, the savage genocidal attacks on Tutsi being encoursged and actually organised by the Hutu led government of Rwanda for which many military and other leaders were eventually convicted. You, however, choose to make a big deal of the case of one of the rare acquittals after a defense led by Christopher Black which, BTW, was on appeal, and still leaves questions in the case of even his relatively civilised client if one tries to follow up online and can’t resolve the rather obvious problem of where the Wikipedia article takes it. I divert here to a UN News piece of 2011 where it is said
So Christopher Black got the lastmentioned off, sort of. I haven’t been able to find out what he was convicted of that gave him that retrospective sentence of over 10 years!! I think the Wikipedia page I have lost track of mentioned Kansi something which left me with an impression that he might have been convicted of failing to use the gendarmerie under his command to defend some Tutsi. But if he was one of the good guys it looks as though we don’t find much against Kagame except not takingrisks when he had a force under his command which was vastly inferior in numbers. Perhaps I’m wrong but I think I’ve had enough of my time wasted on your latest discovery, however stimulating in some ways.
It is already broken. No one watches TV or reads newspapers anymore, certainly anyone young. The Chinese now own western thought via TikTok.
My previous post was dated March 4, and I found it interesting that less than two weeks later I got this email from Amazon.
Since the start of January of 2023 I’ve made precisely 3 reviews of products sold at Amazon. One was a 5 Star rating of a flashlight bulb which garnered 16 “helpful” ratings. Another 1- Star was to caution people to be careful with chopped dandelion leaves as they might cause a person’s blood pressure to spike – it got 8 “helpful” clicks. The third was a neutral comment about lawn mower blades which has been completely ignored.
*** So the “first warning” from Amazon involves something else. *** I’m guessing that a devout Zionist contacted a co-religionist at Amazon to learn the real identity of “Zachary Smith”, and then one or the other of them sent out the Amazon message as intimidation. Somebody in the shithole state for whom English is not his first language – or a poorly educated “religious studies” person in the US – might not appreciate the difference between blog “posts” and a brief Customer Reviews of a product.
The Zionists must love their mirrors more than anything else in the world – for their perfection as God’s Favorites is surely a most satisfying thing to behold. They also wallow in self pity because all the Lesser Creatures don’t recognize their status as the peak of Creation. People willing to slaughter tens of thousands of Palestinian subhumans wouldn’t bat an eye at making threats – or doing even worse than that.
Watch yourself around the murderous swine. Personally, I’ll be stashing away documentation of this event in assorted places. Starting with here.
Alas, the West stopped thinking a long time ago.
How else would 4% of the population get the 96% to do exactly as they wish?
The silly Chinese bought 350 + 450 million lemons.
Oh dear, if only we could get them to do even part of what we wish reliably!
I’m afraid you’ve overlooked the fact that the 4% don’t even agree on what they want the others to do. Also that the problem may be less that they’ve stopped thinking than that, since most of them stopped tugging their forelock to their betters they’ve gone to what is passed off as tertiary education and begun to do what they think is thinking, the fruits of which they are too ready to give us.
Shhhh, not so loud. There are lots of Jew haters around here.
But seriously tho. I don’t even subscribe to the “Jews are the source of all evil” narrative.
Are they disproportionately powerful? Yes
Are they exceptionally self serving? Yes
Can they be cruel? Yes
Do they help each other as co-ethnics? Yes
Do I think that there is some world Jewish organisation manipulating every aspect of our lives? No.
Are there good Jews as there are bad Jews? Of course.
And the bad aspects of lots of Jews can be traced back to Kaiser Wilhelm failing to prevent the outbreak of WW1 (not wicked like Putin, but seriously stupid). Enough Jews would have become assimilated civilised carriers and promoters of the best of Western civilisation, not least in Germany, and Israel would not come to exist in a form and in circumstances which distorts the world we live in quite disproportionately to its size.
Yes. I do not think it is useful to distinguish between Jews and European civilisation anymore. They have long ago become an integral part of it.
It might be unpopular on these pages for me to say it, but Europe has benefited from the association. It is unfortunate that they have become a convenient whipping boy.
Of course that is not to say I agree with everything that Jews have been up to. What is going on in Gaza is testament to the fact that the current form of Zionism is hideous and rotten beyond repair.
No doubt you have read this.
Three decades after Rwanda’s genocide, the past is ever-present
https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2024/03/25/three-decades-after-rwandas-genocide-the-past-is-ever-present
from The Economist
Actually, I hadn’t read it, so thanks for bringing it to my attention.
It seemed a pretty good MSM article overall, sticking closely to the “official narrative” but including some important points that probably would have been lacking in most other such publications.
Regarding The Economist, you might remember my discussion from about a year ago:
https://www.unz.com/runz/china-america-and-the-economist/
I’m afraid this reflects less well on your judgment in relation to anything to do with Ukraine om which you seem to have infallibly chosen to listen to the shonks.
https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/oa_edited_volume/chapter/3881915
I particularly enjoyed this demolition job
There’s plenty more on that.
The personal responsibility is well argued too.
The absolute central problem for all mankind is dysgenic breeding, i.e., each generation is worse than the previous one due to the West’s Industrial Revolution and advances in sanitation, medicine, etc., which enable our current less-than-1% youth mortality.
Saying that hostile jews control the West is accurate of course, but it distracts from the most important point by far, which is that the West and the world are declining because the quality of our people is declining – and those are two, mostly separate, issues.
For further information on the ongoing, centuries-long decline of Western people, see the work of Woodley of Menie and Professor Edward Dutton, among others.