Africa and the Mainstream Media

An example of how and why the media lies

I always thought that Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman were at their best when describing the USA’s imperial behavior and how the media lied about it. Ed developed his Propaganda Model to explain media behavior, and it grew from his analysis of corporate power structures. Ed’s first political books were about the USA in Vietnam, but he didn’t really critique the media in them. The first time that he did, to my knowledge, was in his first book with Noam, which was subjected to an outrageous act of censorship. In that book, they began critiquing the media, and the New York Times in particular. Ed made media critiques the central feature of his work for the rest of his life. Noam and Ed noted Tutsi slaughters of Hutus in Burundi (perhaps 250,000 were killed) in their first book together, and they noted that Senators Ted Kennedy and John Tunney were about the only American politicians to remark on the Tutsi slaughter of Hutus in Burundi, which the USA’s State Department called a “genocide.” But the USA bought 80% of Burundi’s coffee crop, and the media was silent. Although the USA bought coffee from Burundi, it was not a vital commercial relationship, and Noam and Ed provided the Burundi slaughters as an example of a “benign bloodbath.” The mainstream media ignores benign bloodbaths.

That Ted Kennedy called out the slaughter was significant, as the Kennedys always had a close relationship to Africa, which Noam failed to point out in his book that argued that the CIA would not have been motivated to kill JFK. I think that Noam’s efforts were misguided on the subject of JFK’s murder. The CIA was right in the middle of JFK’s murder and subsequent cover-up.

In JFK’s first out-of-the-loop moment, the CIA helped murder Patrice Lumumba, only three days before JFK’s inauguration, and JFK did not find out for weeks afterward. A famous photo shows his agony when he got the news. JFK’s last out-of-the-loop moment was in the operation that got him killed. The CIA and military constantly deceived JFK, and he never trusted them again after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. But the CIA and MIC prevailed, and all American presidents since then have been puppets and knew it.

As I noted in a recent post, I am no expert on Africa, but it has been a prominent subject of study for me. I have relatives and friends who lived there, working for the Peace Corps and studying gorillas in the wild, for instance (and also serving the American Empire, rather unwittingly). Monkeys evolved into apes in Africa, and as Darwin suspected, Africa is the evolutionary home of humanity. I could, and someday I might, write posts on the USA’s imperial behavior across the world, such as East Asia, West Asia, and Latin America, and this post will be about what I have learned about Africa in my studies. Ed and Chris Black had something to do with that, as will become clear.

The rise of humanity meant the extinction of Earth’s easy meat, and the elephant family arguably suffered the most. That holocaust began in Africa, and eventually happened globally, as behaviorally modern humans conquered Earth. Although our closest evolutionary cousins live in the African rainforests, humans were slow to colonize Earth’s rainforests, which may be why chimps and gorillas are not extinct. The Sahara Desert was quite a barrier at times, and Africa has long been divided by it. The first African civilizations were along the Mediterranean, especially Egypt’s. Civilizations also dotted Africa’s periphery, but the Sub-Saharan interior rarely had what we might call civilization. The Bantu Expansion, which began about 3,000 years ago, spread agriculture and iron-making throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, and Hutus and Tutsis are both Bantu-language speakers.

Slavery accompanied the first sedentary societies, but the roots of slavery I think were when hunter-gatherer men stole women from neighboring societies, often while slaughtering the men. Slavery long predated the African versions of it, and the earliest African example that I read about was mining gold for Egypt’s pharaohs, and the slaves were uniformly worked to death. It was long thought that slaves built Egypt’s pyramids, but today, it is thought that those builders worked for a wage and executed religious duties in those construction projects. Elite-aggrandizing architecture never really exceeded the necropolis at Giza, which scientists think took all of Egypt’s surplus energy for a century to build. Egypt’s civilizations rose and fell, largely based on the Nile’s floods. The Nile valley and delta had the Old World’s most reliable food supply, it was fought over from the beginning, and it eventually fed Rome.

Arabs began Africa’s slave trade, but it reached gigantic, intercontinental levels with Europe’s conquest of the world, and the peoples of Africa have greatly suffered ever since. Where the climate was conducive to it, Europeans invaded and stayed, such as in southern Africa, but for many centuries, Africa’s primary utility to Eurasians was in supplying slaves. The transatlantic slave trade, to replace the natives of the Americas that quickly died off, was one of the greatest demographic catastrophes in the human journey.

But just as slavery ended (because of industrialization), Europe colonized Africa, in its infamous “Scramble.” King Leopold of Belgium sought to have someplace to conquer, to come to the imperial table, and the Congo was the about only place on Earth where he could. His “philanthropic” reign killed about half of the Congo’s residents in the “rubber boom,” and his imperial rivals in the region performed similarly. Far more than ten million Africans died in that mayhem. Lumumba was Congo’s first elected leader, and although JFK encouraged it, Africa was not going to get meaningful independence, and it still does not enjoy it.

I grew up with that legacy, in history’s most racist nation. If I had not been radicalized by my free-energy days, I wonder if I would have ever really woken up. I was steeped in racism, imperial narratives, I drank the Kool-Aid of capitalism (although I began questioning its taste after college graduation), and I was on the way to becoming another American bigot.

Ed had a lot to do with my education on Africa, and his exposure of the situation in Rwanda and Congo was just part of it. Ed wrote about Libya for many years, such as when it was falsely accused of bombing an airliner (it was likely vengeance by Iran), and when the USA led the overthrow and murder of Gadaffi, Ed wrote about what a disaster it was for Libya and Africa. Ed wrote about the surreal double standard of “justice” with the kangaroo court tribunals that the USA continually mounted, and especially their impact on Africa. Last month, I read this article by Gadaffi’s last spokesperson, at RT (which many Western nations have blocked), which would never be published in the West’s mainstream media.

To the West, Africa is still largely a mine and plantation, with some pockets where white people could “settle.” I recently noted that sub-Saharan Africans are considered Big Pharma guinea pigs, and vaccine campaigns kill them by the millions and even surreptitiously sterilize them. Africa has the world’s greatest infant mortality rate, by far (while another American punching bag, Afghanistan, leads the list).

Try to find any substantial discussion of that reality in the mainstream media. Arguably the world’s greatest living mass murderer is feted in the West as an Abe Lincoln figure who pals around with the likes of Bill Gates and wins “elections” with over 99% of the “vote.”

Ed and Chris helped me understand those realities that nearly all white Americans are oblivious to. It serves various capitalist interests to depict Africa as the media does, and that is the main reason for it.