The great lie about the Rwandan bloodbath opened the door to a far larger genocide in Congo and helped justify U.S. military interventions in Libya and Syria, argues Ann Garrison.
By Ann Garrison
Black Agenda Report
During a recent campaign event, Florida Senator Bill Nelson said, “That story of Rwanda is very instructive to us because when a place gets so tribal that the two tribes won’t have anything to do with each other, and that jealousy turns into hate—we saw what happened to the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda, it turned into a genocide. A million people hacked to death within a few months. And we have got to watch what’s happening here.”
That got a lot of headlines even though U.S. ethnicity is binary only if seen as white vs. everybody else. Whatever Sen. Nelson meant, those who do see it that way have certainly gained prominence since Trump took the White House.
That was a newly minted reference to the Rwandan genocide in U.S. discourse, however. Rwanda is most often remembered in urgent calls for “humanitarian intervention,” a.k.a. war, to stop another genocide. We’re told that the U.S. failed to stop Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, so we’re now obliged to “intervene” anytime and anywhere another genocide is underway. That’s why, we’re falsely told, the U.S. and its NATO allies had to bomb Libya into ongoing chaos in 2011. That’s why Lockheed Martin had to step up production of cruise missiles to drop on Syria. That’s why Sens. Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren, both 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls, became initial co-sponsors of an Orwellian bill to “enhance” our government’s ability to “prevent genocide and mass atrocities” with military force: Senate Bill 1158, the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act of 2018.
Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda. (Chatham House / CC BY 2.0)
More soberly, given the lies we’ve all been told in order to start wars, doesn’t it seem likely that this story—that the U.S. failed to stop the Rwandan genocide—is one more? Not that the genocide didn’t happen and not that it wasn’t a terrible tragedy, but the story we were all told and Bill Clinton’s crocodile tears about his “worst mistake” are a lie. In fact, the U.S. and United Kingdom backed Gen. Paul Kagame’s invasion of Rwanda from Uganda on Oct. 1, 1990, and prevented a United Nations intervention until he and his army had massacred their way to Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, to seize power on July 4, 1994.
Just over three weeks later, on July 28, The New York Times reported that the “U.S. Is Considering a Base in Rwanda for Relief Teams.” Kagame has been a key U.S. ally and “military partner” ever since. He not only collaborated with the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) but also invaded the Democratic Republic of the Congo, left millions dead, and thus created new opportunities for U.S. mining corporations.
Professor Edward S. Herman and researcher and author David Peterson deconstructed the propaganda about Rwanda in “The Politics of Genocide“ and “Enduring Lies: The Rwandan Genocide 20 Years On.” In “Enduring Lies,” they wrote:
“The institutionalization of the ‘Rwandan genocide’ has been the remarkable achievement of a propaganda system sustained by both public and private power, with the crucial assistance of a related cadre of intellectual enforcers. The favorite weapons of these enforcers are reciting the institutionalized untruths as gospel while portraying critics of the standard model as ‘genocide deniers,’ dark figures who lurk at the same moral level as child molesters, to be condemned and even outlawed.”
Ed Herman and I had many conversations about this before his death in November 2017, including one on KPFA Radio’s “Project Censored Show” on New Year’s Day 2016. The transcript was published by the San Francisco Bay View, Black Agenda Report and Global Research.
More recently, former Agence France Presse and Radio France International journalist Judi Rever broke down the simple story of Tutsi victims, Hutu perpetrators in her book “In Praise of Blood: Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front.” Here’s some of what she told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation after the book’s publication:
Judi Rever: He [Kagame] did not stop the genocide because at the same time that ethnic Tutsis were being killed in Hutu-controlled zones, his Tutsi troops were killing with equal zeal and organization. And in every zone that the Rwandan Patriotic Front and its army entered, they killed massively and in an organized way.
CBC: Killed Hutus?
Judi Rever: Killed Hutus. They also fueled the genocide against the Tutsis. They infiltrated the Hutu militias very successfully, and they baited the violence. They egged on the violence, but they also—some of their commandos—participated in the slaughter of Tutsis at roadblocks.
Kagame knowingly ordered and encouraged Tutsi massacres to build a storyline that would justify his Tutsi minority dictatorship after he’d seized power and control of the country’s electoral apparatus. Had he proceeded to real elections, as mandated by the Arusha Accords signed to end the war, the Hutu majority would have elected a Hutu president. Former Rwandan Foreign Minister Jean-Marie Ndagijimana tells the same story from a different standpoint in “How Paul Kagame Deliberately Sacrificed the Tutsi.” Most of these victims were poor Tutsis who had been left behind when the wealthy and aristocratic Tutsis fled to Uganda during the Hutu Peasant Revolution of 1959-1961.
Rever’s conclusions are based on years of research and interviews, many of them with RPF troops who were tormented by memories of what they had done and felt compelled to confess. Her book also includes accounts of how she, her husband, and even her children were threatened while she was researching it, and how Belgian security operatives accompanied her everywhere during a research trip to Brussels to interview political exiles and refugees.
In an email released by WikiLeaks, a Stratfor intelligence analyst said that “Rwandans are cold ass mofos“ and detailed Rwandan operatives’ transnational assassinations and assassination attempts. Their targets are almost always high-profile figures who, like Rever, challenge the story of Tutsi victims and Hutu perpetrators that is so essential to Kagame’s survival and international stature.
I myself haven’t feared for my life at the hands of Rwandan operatives, but I did file an assault complaint after a dustup with Kagame’s contingent at Sacramento State University’s 2011 Third International Genocide Conference.
Et Tu, RT?
Despite all this, the propaganda has been so effective that the standard story of Tutsi victims, Hutu perpetrators, and Bill Clinton’s failure remains all but unassailable in mainstream media. It’s in the Wikipedia, where a host of “edit alerts” assure that any attempt to change it starts a tireless “editing war” that Wikipedia moderators will finally shut down with no changes made. It’s at the heart of former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power’s interventionist bible, “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.” It’s in Obama’s 2011 Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities and “Mass Atrocities Response Operations: A Military Handbook,” which was produced by the Pentagon and Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights with help from Pierre Omidyar’s Humanity United Foundation. And it’s in the template of every Reuters and AP newswire that ever touches on the subject.
I was nevertheless surprised when RT repeated the standard propaganda as well. Mightn’t one expect RT to dig a little deeper into a narrative used to justify the U.S. war in Syria among others? RT asked me to comment on a news story about the recent appeal of a French court’s ruling that French soldiers were not criminally complicit for failing to protect Tutsis massacred at Bisisero, Rwanda, in 1994. I agreed, so they called me on Skype, but the host and I proceeded to frustrate one another, and most of what I said was left on the cutting room floor. CIUT 89.5 FM-Toronto host and former ICTR investigator Phil Taylor sent me a consolation note saying, “I felt for you, Ann. I saw the item in real time and slapped my forehead. The cutting was done with shears.”
Basic journalistic ethnics and not wanting to be misrepresented compelled me to write about why this interview turned into such a hot mess after beginning with the usual false recitation:
“The genocide in Rwanda lasted just over three months and left nearly a million people dead. . . . The genocide was committed mainly by the Hutu government and its backers against the ethnic minority Tutsi tribe. Allegations of the French government’s support for the Hutus, who carried out most of the slaughter in the genocide, have been rough on the French government’s relations with the Rwandan government for years. But the French, although they admit that they’ve made mistakes, they say they have no complicity in the genocide that took place there.”
I told RT that the context of the 1994 Bisesero massacre was a four-year war that began on Oct. 1, 1990, when a detachment of the Ugandan Army led by then General, now President, Paul Kagame invaded Rwanda from Uganda. I said that those Ugandan troops were Rwandan Tutsis or the children of Rwandan Tutsis who had fled to Uganda between 1959 and 1961, when the Hutu majority finally liberated themselves from centuries-long domination by the Tutsi minority.
I said that focusing on this single tragic incident, the Tutsi massacres at Bisesero, imposed the propaganda narrative about the Rwandan genocide on their story.
I said that France’s Operation Turquoise had created a humanitarian corridor for civilians fleeing to Congo in terror of Kagame’s advancing army, so it was a distortion to discredit the French troops over this one incident in which they were accused of failing to act even though it wasn’t clear they had a mandate. (UN Security Council Resolution 929 (1994) gave the operation the aim of “contributing, in an impartial way, to the security and protection of displaced persons, refugees, and civilians at risk in Rwanda.”)
I considered quoting Ed Herman, David Peterson, and Judi Rever, but ran out of time. That was more complexity than RT appeared to want added to their news story. They had already built it on the widely received account of what happened in Rwanda before calling me. Having produced radio news, I know the show must go on at the scheduled hour even if it could be improved. Had they nevertheless considered that there might be something wrong with their premises? I’m only encouraging them to review this Western narrative as they do so many others.
This article was originally published on Black Agenda Report.
Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at [email protected].
This is essentially EIR’s view on the matter. Good to bring it up again. Look up Paul Kagame on the EIR website, larouchepub.com
If memory serves me correctly, Kagame was the Chief of Intelligence in Uganda, before accepting an invitation to study at the School of the Generals in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. A finishing school for dictators who receive special training in war/genocide that they take back to their countries. US handlers put together detailed plans complete with strategies and contingencies that will guide them in the wholesale slaughter that they are being trained for. The US design for this region was access to the mineral wealth of the Congo. This had to be accomplished through violence so has to insure that these resources would be made available has cheaply as possible. Kagame would deliver for US corporations setting up mining operations that were illegal, worked by people in near slave-like conditions, with no concerns for the health and safety of said workers or the surrounding communities. Kagame and his associates have made a sizeable fortune for themselves has he continues to receive US support. The stolen wealth of the Congo has also made the capital of Rowanda, Kigali, a prosperous modern city.
I saw the uncut Ann Garrison interview on RT. The anchor repeatdly asked the same question concerning if the French Army was aware of the killings and did nothing, was that a war crime?
Ann Garrison repeatedly was slow to respond with an unintelligible historical context, but would not answer the question.
Later I saw the edited (such shortened) interview and it too contained nothing of value but RT continued to push the line that the French possibly were guilty of a war crime.
This probably got a lot of air time on RT France.
This was not an easy essay to read and understand. I had to read it twice. And I still don’t really know what happened and where the blame lies.
Pick up a copy of Ed Herman’s and David Peterson’s book “Enduring Lies.” It’s not long and you’ll have that to refer to when reading articles like this. Yep, Lots happened. I’m terrible with details myself. Essentially, What the corporate media, and those who they infect, say about Rwanda is the exact opposite of what happened.
The image of Paul Kagamé in Chatham House, TheRoyal Institute of International Affaires, Council on Foreign Relations, wall to wall Rothschild, the scourge of Africa tells you all you need to know about the slaughters inAfrica.
In a discussion of debunking allegations of genocide as supposed justification force “humanitarian” aggression, no mention of Kosovo 1999?
That’s another touchstone of humanitarian interventionist ideology.
RT News has been my only daily “news” venue for years. It has been dropped from local “over-the-air” TV broadcasting in SE Pennsylvania, where it was miraculously tolerated for a couple of years, but I still watch it online.
In a nutshell: it is uneven. And, at least on the “RT America” side, it has declined in recent months.
A comprehensive critique would be too long for this space, so I’ll just say that RT has certain editorial hobby-horses. For instance, it loves to showcase immigration/refugee and identity-politics “scandals” and “crises” in the EU and US.
It really hyped the dubious “mass sexual assault” in Cologne during the 2015/2016 New Year’s celebrations, and its coverage was long on hearsay and hysterical allegations and short on facts and corroboration. And if there is some inane “cultural” contretemps, e.g. a school imposing some inane new politically-correct policy, or any “War on Christianity” kerfuffle, RT will be all over it.
These stories are reported with palpable schadenfreude. The correspondents might as well roll their eyes and say, “See what kind of crazy nonsense decadent Western countries get themselves into?”
Also, RT America news has degenerated into a PBS News clone: very “centrist”, and lately clogged with the bogus “point/counterpoint” would-be “debates” perfected by MacNeil-Lehrer in the previous century. The participants are usually partisan hacks and flacks, and the “debates” and discussions are agonizingly predictable. They also choose banal centrist-types as “star” anchors, and they bring an unfortunate Western corporate-news banality to their programs.
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of why RT should promote the conventional propagandized perspective on Rwanda– except to guess that unless their producers and editors have reason to develop a critical, contrarian perspective, they just lapse into the “easy” habit of perfunctorily presenting the standard “received” narrative.
To RT’s credit, so far it still is the only US news venue that presents dissenting (“leftist”) and relatively radical reporting and analysis. Chris Hedges, John Pilger, Vanessa Beeley, various contrarian ex-spooks (including many “Consortium” luminaries) are regularly featured– they’ve all long been persona non grata to Western corporate mass-media consent-manufacturers.
So RT has become a bit of a muddle. FWIW, its “hobby horses” are so distinct and recognizable that I now watch RT “cafeteria-style”; I just switch off the tendentious reports and stick around, or return, for the worthwhile segments. As the saying goes: when it is good, it is very, very good– and when it is bad, it is horrid.
Dear Sir I wholly sympathize with your sceptical attitude towards the mass media. You don´t know me and why should you trust me. But please regard that these things in Cologne really happened. I am German and first I read about Cologne on PI-news. That is a German site that tends to exaggerate any wrong doings by migrants. But then local Cologne media started to corrobarate PI-NEWS and then finally national news had no choice but to admit what happened. It really shook my belief in the media.Apart from that you are absolutely right to mistrust official narratives. But people do have antennas. They seem to understand despite official lies if something is completely awry. Seems to me that is how Sanders almost made it. So no critique just a little correction.
Over the last 2-3 years I have developed a confidence in RT’s reporting. They alone (and often Al Jazeera) had seemed to restrict themselves to facts and leave opinion to commentators. Now this Black Agenda report suggests RT have erred in their Rwanda reporting. I expect a response from the editorial level of the paper, either apology or justification, and I hope to see it very soon.
March 19, 2017 The CIA’s 60-Year History of Fake News How the Deep State Corrupted Many American Writers
Whitney’s new book, “Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World’s Best Writers,” explores how the CIA influenced acclaimed writers and publications during the Cold War to produce subtly anti-communist material. During the interview, Scheer and Whitney discuss these manipulations and how the CIA controlled major news agencies and respected literary publications (such as the Paris Review).
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46688.htm
Here is another point of view of the causes of the Rwanda events, from John Smith’s fascinating book, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century (pages 32-33):
“…the International Coffee Agreement, established in 1962… attempted to protect both producers and consumers from wild fluctuations in coffee prices through a complex system of quotas and the use of buffer stocks. Driven by ideological opposition to interference in free markets, the coffee-swilling nations torpedoed the agreement in 1989…
“The destruction of the International Coffee Agreement in 1989 played a crucial but almost completely unacknowledged role in the creation of the conditions for genocide in Rwanda. This poor African nation relied almost exclusively on coffee for its export earnings. As the world market price of coffee plummeted so did the Rwandan economy, bringing famine, hyperinflation, and government collapse down on the heads of the Rwandan people. When the Rwandan government begged the IMF for emergency assistance, the latter duly responded with a stingy loan and a savage structural adjustment program that only intensified the misery and insecurity of the Rwandan people. Isaac Kamola, in the aptly named The Global Coffee Economy and the Production of Genocide in Rwanda, adds that ‘these economic stresses created the conditions in which state-owned enterprises went bankrupt, health and education services collapsed, child malnutrition surged and malaria cases increased by 21 percent.’ Michael Chossudovsky, in The Globalization of Poverty, comments that ‘no sensitivity or concern was expressed [by the IMF] as to the likely political and social repercussions of economic shock therapy applied to a country on the brink of civil war… The deliberate manipulation of market forces destroyed economic activity and people’s livelihood, fuelled unemployment and creation a situation of generalized famine and social despair.’ Apart from these and a few other exceptions, it is shocking the degree to which the casual role played by the destruction of the International Coffee Agreement and the IMF’s imposition of brutal austerity in Rwanda’s genocide has been ignored…”
Do you recall how “the International Coffee Agreement and the IMF’s imposition of brutal austerity” were decided? Was the UN involved, was this US-led, or broad policy of consumer nations? It appears to be a very irresponsible decision indeed. Did this affect Colombian and other coffee producer states similarly?
Information about the history of the International Coffee Agreement can be found on the website of the International Coffee Organization, http://www.ico.org/icohistory_e.asp?section=About_Us.
According to Wikipedia, “The precursor to the ICA was the Inter-American Coffee Agreement (IACA) established during the Second World War. The war had created the conditions for a Latin American coffee agreement: European markets were closed off, the price of coffee was in decline and the United States feared that the declining price could drive Latin American countries—especially Brazil—towards Nazi or Communist sympathies.” Wikipedia cites “Fair Trade Coffee: The Prospects and Pitfalls of Market-Driven Social Justice,” by Gavin Fridell, as its source for this statement.
After the failure of the 1989 agreement, new agreements were negotiated in 1994, 2001 and 2007.
The United States, under President Trump, withdrew from the current agreement in 2018, following an order signed by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson just before he was fired.
Thank you. Perhaps the problem was that the ICAs were negotiated without concern for the economies or populations of producer states, unless their rebellion was feared. Had the price been sufficient, the economies would not have been damaged and the discontent leading to genocide avoided.
So a sufficient price can be defined and guaranteed. The international price might have been controlled with price supports, or with a wholesale import tax fed back to producer states as humanitarian and development aid.
Marc – really interesting information that is new to me. Thanks for sharing it.
Whenever there’s an unwinding of state intervention in the marketplace, the price must be paid for the distortions. It’s never pretty. Of course, it would have been better to never have interfered with the marketplace to begin with. Thus, the narrative you present, “this problem goes back to capitalism”, is exactly the opposite of the truth, “this problem goes back to statism”.
Unregulated markets are jungles, that have the desirable property that they measure value very well and reinforce the supply chain accordingly. They also reward fraud and other crime at all levels and have dangerous instabilities. So any efficient and just economic system should have a substantial market economy, regulated to prevent fraud and instability.
The International Coffee Agreement appears to have established price stabilization and perhaps quality regulation, as do agricultural subsidies. Where there are infelicities the solution is to improve the regulation, not eliminate it. Those who oppose regulation usually intend to cheat, or in some cases do not understand the problems to be avoided by regulation.
Price controls never work. Agricultural subsidies … are you serious? I can’t argue with someone who doesn’t know their history.
You must have missed my statement “Where there are infelicities the solution is to improve the regulation, not eliminate it.” Examples of improper regulation are not arguments against regulation, but excuses: we do not cease breathing because there was once a problem.
Where inefficient regulations (like farm subsidies) were not corrected, business scammers in politics had seized the regulatory agencies and prevented reforms. The fundamental problem is money controlling democracy. Get the money out of elections and mass media, and regulation works fine.
It is you who must study the history of regulation.
Do you reject breathing because there was once a problem?
Wow! That’s bad. If you can’t trust the Russians, who can you trust??
RT in general has really decayed in quality in recent months. It is almost like they are now playing the role the certain US forces accuse them of.
I disagree that RT has in any not shown the Syrian war for what it really is; a calculated plan to start a civil war in that country with a specific intention to invade on the pretext of saving the people from a phoney massacre.
RT and the internet didn’t exist when the Rawanda affair was going on as it does now, so governments could get away with anything unfettered by investigative journalists. The MSM as ever, was completely on side. RT has produced absolutely first class journalism in Syria.
RT still has Lee Camp & Chris Hedges so it’s not totally full of $#!+, yet.
Such as this one?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykhfxP3b6UY
I’m not a regular reader/watcher of RT, so I can’t really say. I’ll let anyone else judge the quality of this report by Max Kaiser.
Well, One thing that RT has in common with Consortium News is that they both disappear my (civilized, polite, on topic) comments.
Isn’t it “just wonderful” knowing the sitting president of Rwanda Paul Kagame is respected and praised by like-minded world “leaders” – while most of the people on Earth are totally unaware Kagame is (still) guilty of genocide. Were the atrocities re-examined in a new corrective investigation, one might not become surprised if co-conspirators of Kagame were revealed, and some very well-known, highest-level, powerful individuals at that. There are mass murderers walking freely on planet Earth. It might be best to arrest them.
Samuel Clemens (“Mark Twain”) 1835-1910, in “Advice to Youth” published in 1923, wrote: “The history of the race, and each individual’s experience, are thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.”
Thank you, Ann Garrison.
The situation becomes even more complex when you consider the fact that the Belgian colonialists deliberately exacerbated, some would even go as far as to say created the racial divide and fomented animosity for their own ends.
Stopping genocides is sloppy, but taking care not to cause or support them requires great concern, skill, and investigation before action, which the US never does. All such situations worldwide should be intensively studied with plans in place for prevention of all kinds, intervention, and mitigation. Instead US politicians and secret agencies just choose sides for bribes or groupthink, and send arms until they feel glorified by causing deaths, then hide everything and propagandize everyone.
The US policymaking process is nothing but gangsterism in government, whose destruction of our former democracy has left the US an empty suit of armor blundering around the globe, swinging its sword madly.
I think the best way to promote peaceful coexistence is rein in our MIC and Intelligence Agencies. If we controlled our government to the point where we only made bi-lateral trade agreements with countries that respected fundamental Human Rights, and left others to their own devices (including manufacturing their own arms), the number of lives saved and the advancement of all of humanity would be greatly enhanced. As someone just recently stated in another comment stream here, there is a big difference between Isolationism and Non-Interventionism. I would offer up the civilized world’s response to South African apartheid and Gandhi’s strategy for ending British Colonialism in India as examples of what is possible.
Yes, oversight and 80% repurposing of the MIC and secret agencies is essential. The US should export arms only to stable uncorrupted democracies, if at all. If interventions were only under UN auspices, genocide prevention and humanitarian aid would sometimes require military stabilization, which can worsen problems or become quagmires, and some factions are too extreme for any very acceptable government.
The US could have raised the poorest half of humanity from poverty after WWII, and could have devised with the UN real solutions for the Mideast. The fall of the US government and mass media to money, MIC, and zionists has been a global disaster. No doubt you know that the rich feared the USSR and supported Mideast extremism, and subversion of the progressive governments we should have supported.
The first step is to take MSM and government from money power, purge the corrupt, and reform the Constitution to exclude those influences. Then control of the MIC and interventions may become more civilized.
This is one of those stories that has a mountain of disinformation to sift through.
I can only say that if RT has gotten it wrong, they will catch up to that fact soon enough. They’re not one to parrot the MSM.
I agree that it was probably due to time constraints that RT didn’t follow through & report the full story as you described it in greater detail? RT has to distill complex issues down to sound bites that their audience can understand in simple terms & when you are dealing with massive propaganda & brainwashing that the ordinary US & World citizens have been subjected to, that’s biggest problem?
I disagree in this matter. RT is a state broadcaster. Russia seeks normal consular relations with many countries. A more likely outcome is that they may publish such information if Kagame’s regime were to end, or if the little banyaRwanda (Kabila) were to be replaced by a Congolese, and the Congo Kinshasa government were to develop substantial Russian relations.
While Russia is having a very healthy effect internationally at the moment, and hopefully will into the future, diplomacy, including the use of media, is like making bread or sausage—scrutiny may lead to loss of appetite.
It is not Russia’s job to set matters right in Rwanda, or the world. Russia’s interest is stability, which is usually but not always a netto good thing. One likely outcome of a Russia Rwanda arrangement would be something similar to Turkey in Syria (Rwanda in Congo Kinshasa)—maintain relations, while strengthening Kinshasa.
“In fact, the U.S. and United Kingdom backed Gen. Paul Kagame’s invasion of Rwanda from Uganda on Oct. 1, 1990, and prevented a United Nations intervention until he and his army had massacred their way to Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, to seize power on July 4, 1994.”
“Just over three weeks later, on July 28, The New York Times reported that the “U.S. Is Considering a Base in Rwanda for Relief Teams.” Kagame has been a key U.S. ally and “military partner” ever since. He not only collaborated with the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) but also invaded the Democratic Republic of the Congo, left millions dead, and thus created new opportunities for U.S. mining corporations.”
– Thank you Ann Garrison. The role of not just MSM, but of Western NGO’s, human rights organizations, and of a disturbing number of so called “progressive or alternative media,” acting to repeat and amplify false narratives in support of Western empire deserves much wider exposure and discussion in these matters.
The whole Clinton administration revealed their racism and brutality in this affair. Samantha Powers is truly despicable. I spent about 12 hours on the internet and realized the ‘usual Narrative” is total BS. It is not that hard to research, if one wants to know the truth. The head of the UN at the time said the genocide was “made in America”.
John – “the ‘usual Narrative” is total BS. It is not that hard to research, ((if one wants to know the truth.”))
I’m reminded of De Gaulle’s comment to one of his ministers after returning from JFK’s funeral. De Gaulle knew the CIA & military were the real assassins, but he also knew that the American people had no stomach for the truth.
He told his minister that regarding the true assassins the American people: “don’t want to know, don’t want to find out, they won’t let themselves find out.” – These words appear as to be just as true today for most Americans when it comes to our endless crimes of empire. Sadly most of us “don’t want to find out,” it would appear.
Most people don’t care about the truth. That should be exceedingly obvious by now.
“I considered quoting Ed Herman, David Peterson, and Judi Rever, but ran out of time. That was more complexity than RT appeared to want added to their news story. They had already built it on the widely received account of what happened in Rwanda before calling me”.
Noam Chomsky explained this syndrome succinctly:
“There was once an interview with Jeff Greenfield in which he was asked why I was never asked onto Nightline. He gave a good answer. He said the main reason was that I lacked concision. I had never heard that word before. You have to have concision. You have to say something brief between two commercials.
“What can you say that’s brief between two commercials? I can say Iran is a terrible state. I don’t need any evidence. I can say Ghaddaffi carries out terror. Suppose I try to say the US carries out terror, in fact it’s one of the leading terrorist states in the world. You can’t say that between commercials. People rightly want to know what do you mean. They’ve never heard that before. Then you have to explain. You have to give background. That’s exactly what’s cut out. Concision is a technique of propaganda. It ensures you cannot do anything except repeat clichés, the standard doctrine, or sound like a lunatic”.
– Noam Chomsky (interview with Laura Flanders, 24/4/2012). http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/30/talking-with-chomsky/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlL2Jj-kCNU
What he lacks in consicion he makes up for in succinctness
Where you get your history really matters if you are concerned for the truth.
Thanks for republishing this. I would like to comment on Thomas Mountain’s comments, published in BAR, regarding the interahamwe.
Christopher Black’s comments on the matter deserves some discussion. The link is to a play, which contains verbatim his closing argument in the Military II trial. It also mentions video footage of UNAMIR handing weapons and bullet proof vests to the Interahamwe, and mass RPF infiltration of the Interahamwe.
https://christopher-black.com/deep-delusions-bitter-truth/
Also, the purpose of the RPF’s invasion of Rwanda was specifically to invade Congo Kinshasa:
https://christopher-black.com/the-rwandan-patriotic-fronts-bloody-record-and-the-history-of-un-cover-ups/
Also the sheer fraudulence, including outright NATO terrorism (kidnapping, murder and dismemberment):
https://christopher-black.com/the-criminilisation-of-international-justice-anatomy-of-a-war-crimes-trial/
So much for the Khashoggi tempest in a tea pot.
Putting the onus of the genocide against Tutsi on the victims’ saviors has been a standard theme in Hutu Power propaganda since the 1994 .
the Genocide of the Tutsi of Rwanda did not start a few hours after the attack of April 6, 1994, but thirty five years earlier, on November 1, 1959, to be exact.
Still butt hurt that you lost your feudal privileges? Want to tell us with whose testes (six) the Kalinga drum was adorned? Or why the feudal monarchical terrorists, who called themselves the Inyenzi (other readers, see Lemarchande’s Rwanda and Burundi, 1970), were murdering elected baHutu bourgomastres?
Or why Rwanda’s baTuutsi begged Buganda intelligence chief Kagame to stop his invasion (with Somali and Eritrean mercs in service of the bUgandan army)? The unity government that took over in 1992 was overrun with pro-RPF western sponsored parties, yet Kagame continued his now ICTR demonstrated plan to take over, so as to invade Congo Kinshasa.
Six should be sic—google auto error insert FTW.
Denialism: an ideological approach aimed at erasing genocidal specificity through work of “constructing a falsified and falsifying narrative” 1. The negationist discourse, if it encounters the impossibility of denying frontally the massacre of the social group concerned, will resort to “a set of attitudes and strategies” of language: “negation of the will of extermination”, “occultation certain aspects “,” trivialization of facts “,” minimization “,” relativisation “,” requalification “,” sweetening “,” reversal of responsibilities “,” victim inversion “,” instillation of doubt “2, etc. to hide the genocidal reality.
Speak for yourself. The bulk of the dead were baHutu, murdered by Kagame’s forces. Even IBUKA cannot maintain the farce of more than 200,000 baTuutsi killed. And such nice methods—throwing grenades into people’s homes, as one of many examples.
Thank you! This lie has lasted too long. It will be necessary that the truth is released from the yoke of this monster of Kagame who mischievously uses the word genocide to hide crimes he committed in Rwanda and DRC. Until when the world supposedly “civilized” will continue to play this ugly game? What will we say to our children in the next 30 to 50 years? That the truth was suffocated to satisfy an agenda of a group of individuals? One thing is true: Kagame will leave; like his dictator peers, and it will without honour; for the truth will free itself from darkness.
I recall Susan Rice running interference for Kagame to suppress publication of his human rights abuses while she was in the Obama Administration, but her connection to Rwanda and support of the Rwandan, Ugandan, AFDL and Angolan invasion of Zaire occurred during Clinton Administration when she was Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs under Madeleine Albright.